by Wendy Jones
She looked at Madoc, hard and smart in his light brown uniform, his gold buttons catching the sunlight. There was one more thing to do. She glanced down at herself. She was wearing her nightdress. She was not wearing jujitsu clothes. She had not ever even practised any jujutsu moves, but she could still practice suffragette self defence.
Grace turned and gave her child to Flora, went to the kitchen table around which they all stood silently, intently, opened the cutlery drawer and took out a small sharp knife. The baby began to cry. She walked up to Madoc and he stepped back, hitting the wall again.
Grace!’ he exclaimed. Despite his greater size, Grace saw he was frightened. Grace walked right up to him, the knife hanging loosely in her hand. He gasped. She could feel his breath on her face, see the individual bristles of his moustache. Would someone stop her? But no one did. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Wilfred put his hand out to tell his da and Flora to stand back. Wilfred wasn’t going to stop her. Madoc pushed himself right back against the wall. His throat clicked. Grace looked at the blade of the knife and at Madoc’s neck. She felt within herself a powerful instinct to live, to stay alive, to fight, now she had a child. She felt the dignity in that instinct.
‘I want to hurt you back.’
Grace stood, quivering. She had used her voice; she had found her tongue. Madoc rushed to leave.
‘Wait,’ she said. She gave the knife to Wilfred. Madoc waited. Grace went to the crying child, unwrapped a fold of the blanket and took out the photograph Flora had taken. She turned it over and put it on the table. Wilfred handed her his pen, anticipating her need.
‘To Father,’ she wrote, ‘from Grace and Abel. Narberth 1926.’ She waved the photograph to dry the ink. ‘Give this to Father,’ she said to Madoc. ‘Does he know I’m here?’
‘I think so,’ Madoc replied, his throat dry, his voice crackling. She would not go to her father; she would leave him to his cowardice. She would care for herself and her child, and when she was much stronger would seek him out.
Madoc looked at the floor shamefaced, nodded a cursory goodbye and went.
There! He’d done it. Wilfred hadn’t thought of Stanley Baldwin once.
They had come back from Bethesda Chapel and found that Wilfred’s da had gone to visit Auntie Blodwen and Grace and the baby were in bed sleeping deeply after the strain of the morning. Flora had left the washing up—the dirty teacup on the table, the dishcloth hanging easily and unfolded over the sink, the newspaper ruffled on the armchair, the blade of the butter-knife yellowed with butter, and dropped her coat over the chair, and Wilfred had led his dear and beautiful wife up to their small bedroom, full of hope and excitement. Please don’t let her say, ‘I’m too tired,’ he thought. Please don’t let her be too tired. And then in their bedroom they crumpled the clean sheets and had conjugal relations until the bolster fell from the mattress, their clothes were strewn in the blankets and Wilfred’s socks had been jigged to the bottom of the sheet and found their resting place. And so, to Wilfred’s great delight, Flora, who these last few months had seemed like a sodden rag doll, regained her musculature, coming back to him with a new strength, bringing fresh facets of herself to those hot, humid minutes. Yes, minutes, Wilfred thought to himself. This was minute after minute of pleasure, held back from its conclusion.
When the events had reached their—almost long-awaited—conclusion, Flora looked up and smiled at him. He smiled back and put his forehead against her forehead and they rested there together, Wilfred lying like a collapsed heavy lump. Then Wilfred rolled off Flora and silently, wordlessly, pulled her to him and, holding her, they fell asleep enveloped in a peace of their own making.
‘Flora!’ Wilfred called. Flora came out of the scullery in her green pinny; she was doing the washing up she’d willingly abandoned earlier. Wilfred beckoned to her; he was standing stooped by the wall and looking at the flagstones in the yard.
‘Look what I’ve found.’
Flora came up to him. There in the corner, its head pushed into the wall, was a fat-bellied toad. It was trying to get down a crack between the flagstones and the wall but it was too fat to allow any more of itself to disappear down the gap. Still, it tried: fear propelled it.
‘It’s frightened,’ Flora observed.
‘It’s a long way from a pond,’ Wilfred stated. ‘It’s lost on these flagstones and it’s very dry.’
‘Oh,’ Flora said, and a moment later came out with a teacup of water.
‘Is it taking tea with us, dear?’ Wilfred asked. Flora smiled. She crouched down and poured the cold water on the toad, which moved flatly to the left and to the right, aware of Wilfred’s shadow.
‘Well, it won’t find a pond outside an undertaker’s workshop,’ Wilfred said. He picked up the toad, plopped it in the teacup and put his large hand over the delicate bone china with its intricate border of gold flowers.
‘That’s from the tea set my mother gave us for our wedding present.’
‘I don’t think she expected we’d put a toad in it,’ Wilfred replied. ‘It’s like a witch’s brew. Would you care to take a walk with me, dear?’ Flora glanced upstairs to where Grace was. ‘It will only take a moment.’ He held out his arm and Flora took it, while Wilfred walked ceremoniously through the High Street with the teacup held out in front of him.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Bell Evans.’
‘What have you got there, Wilfred?’
‘A toad, Mrs. Bell Evans.’
‘Is that your best bone china, Mrs. Price?’ Mrs. Evans asked, scandalised.
‘Yes,’ Flora admitted.
‘By damn, you can never trust a man with a tea set,’ Mrs. Evans proclaimed, shaking her head regretfully. ‘Mind you wash it out properly.’
At the town moor they turned down the gentle lane that led from Narberth, where the sycamores spread their crinkly branches out over the stream. It was late winter, almost spring. They walked past a bank of croci, with flowers like purple pixie hats; Wilfred picked one and gave it to Flora. The birds sang overhead. Some late snowdrops scattered among the blackberry brambles were drooping, as if weighted down by their beauty. Even the nettles looked noble with their upright stems and broadly spread leaves. Wilfred stopped before the kissing gate.
‘I’m going to bob my hair,’ Flora Myffanwy said. Wilfred swallowed. His wife’s beautiful hair.
‘Yes, dear,’ he replied. When they reached the stream, he stood at its babbling edge, then took a few steps towards the clear, clean water and lifted his hand from the delicate teacup. ‘Here you are, toad; you’re moving to a new residence on the outskirts of Narberth.’ He shook the teacup. ‘Bugger won’t come out now! Come on, toad, you have to do better than that.’ He waited but the toad clung to the teacup even when the pure water swirled around it.
‘It prefers the teacup to the pond,’ Wilfred commented.
‘You’ve found something really spiffing,’ said a small child, who had suddenly appeared. ‘Is it dead?’
‘I was hoping it wasn’t.’
Suddenly the toad jumped out, plopped into the stream and swam, as if startled by the cold, then held onto a twig. The little boy crouched on his haunches, peering closely into the water.
‘It’s like a swimming pool and the toad’s holding on to the side,’ he observed. Wilfred held the teacup out to Flora, who was listening bemusedly to the child’s chatter now about a grass snake he had found. ‘And I don’t even want to tell you what happened next!’ the child exclaimed.
Wilfred walked a short way up the path and looked through a small oval gap between the fence and the moss-hugged branches. On the green hill two sheep were eating grass, their heads bowed in humility. Beyond the swathe of green grass there was the faint blue sky. A sheep bleated. Wilfred bleated back; the sheep bleated again. Flora and the child looked up.
‘Talking to a sheep,’ Wilfred told them, while t
he sheep continued chewing, its face to the earth.
The air and the trees were still and Wilfred felt at one with his surroundings. Sometimes as a child he had wondered what it would be like to have the mighty hand of God, written about in the Bible, a gigantic hand with which he could reach out to touch the fields of barley and feel them swaying, or ruffle the top of a tree as if it was the hair of a small child. If he had the hand of God he would stretch out to the stars and pick them up as if they were marbles. Mercury would be a hot ball-bearing, Mars, a big India rubber ball, Saturn, a dust-covered ball like one found months after it had rolled under the furniture. Then he would reach beyond the solar system and feel the emptiness between the stars. He didn’t know what filled that enormous incalculable space: he hoped it was God and he felt it was love.
Wilfred looked up the valley at Narberth. Narberth was a green, living world that—happily, contentedly—saw only itself: this was a blessed circle of a small town that looked inwards. Narberth was his world and it was a world in itself. And in Narberth, as far as he could see, there was everything. It was all here in this town of nine hundred years: the funerals and the babies, the dead and the living, the pure and the ill-intentioned, the sick and the well, the contented and the grieving, the winners in the dog competition and the losers, the rotting and the neatly buried, the happily married and the violently married, the beautiful and the bruised, the humble and the arrogant, the guilty and the forgiven, all joined together like the dovetail joints on a carefully made cabinet, or a coffin. It was wedded, all of it—everything was wedded in the world and to the world, and there was no escaping any of it.
Wilfred threw his head back, stared upwards and sighed. So instead of wrestling, like Jacob struggling with the angel, he would attempt to accept what came his way with a little more grace, because this was the way it was, the violence and the love, the living and the dead, the good and the weak . . . and there was no escaping any of it. No, there was no escaping any of it.
Wilfred looked back into the stars where he hoped his child rested and then to the field, where his wife stood. Only the dead didn’t hold hands, only the dead weren’t wedded. The living were intermingled and knotted like the roots of trees in the earth. Only the dead let go fully. Everything living was knitted and wedded to the world. This was the wedding of the world.
‘I’ve got a dog beetle on me,’ the child said, coming up to him. ‘It’s a fur-male,’—he pointed to its waist. ‘It’s very fat downwards. That’s where it keeps its wings.’ The iridescent beetle crawled across the child’s chubby knuckles, unaware of the fascination and learning it was inspiring. ‘Even when it goes upside down, it can still walk. You can have it after me,’ he said to Wilfred.
Wilfred saw Flora Myffanwy approach him in that quiet way she had.
‘The toad has gone,’ she said.
‘Into the river,’ Wilfred replied. He looked at his wife. Then he bent down and whispered to her, ‘You are as beautiful as the day.’
Wilfred held the translucent teacup up to the sun and the light streamed through it. ‘Right, let’s go home. Fancy a cup of tea?’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Jenny Hewson, James Gurbutt and Sam Evans, who make a bright, valuable and strong team. I would also like to thank the early readers, in particular, Sally Furnival, Jacqueline Wilson, Laura Edwards, Helen Fox, Helen Cleary, Gaelle Lemoine, Anita Patel, Kristen Palazzo, Rachel Stegall, Hilary Duggan, Jacqueline McCann, John Cribb, Beth Rees, John Perkins, Livia Franchini, Joanne Hislop, Dee Benham, Paula Nightingale and Adrian Cross.
Thank you to Julie and Colin, and Austin Price.
My thanks again to Gwyn and friends, to Isabel Clementine Evans, and to Solly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy Jones was the first person to complete an MA in Life Writing at the University of East Anglia and is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, where she teaches. She is the author of the biography Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl and hosts Interesting Conversations, a literary program aired on Resonance FM. She lives in London.