The Claude Glass

by Tom Bullough

  Dropped in boiling water, the eggs began to shed their colours instantly – green, blue, yellow, red, rising in plumes, fanning as they came to the surface, remaining beautiful for a moment or two as the colours swirled together. Then the saucepan turned to a brownish murk and you couldn’t see anything at all, until, five minutes later, Tara sat regular eggs on the table and cracked the tops with a teaspoon.

  The ordinariness of the eggs, Tara explained as she chopped up their toast into soldiers, was entirely to be expected. Coloured eggs were, of course, magic – deposited in the barns during the night by the egg fairy, who was the tooth fairy for the rest of the year. Her eggs were entirely harmless, just so long as you could make them vanish again by noon of the next day. This meant, first, that you had to boil off the colour, then you had to eat them, making sure that you didn’t leave even the tiniest scrap, then you had to throw the shells on the compost heap with a particular incantation.

  If you did all of these things correctly, then you were allowed to eat some chocolate: the only time that you were allowed to eat chocolate in the entire year. And if you didn’t, then the egg would hatch and grow into a chicken the same colour as its egg all over, very angry and larger than the house.

  * * *

  After breakfast, Tara and the two boys set off towards the ruined cottage, holding hands until they had to climb the gate beneath the chestnut tree, where it became a bit too complicated. Tara had a number of thin metal stakes beneath one arm and a tape measure clipped to her jeans. As they were crossing the field, she sang them a nursery rhyme in French – all about standing in the moonlight – but when she tried to teach it to them they all started giggling and the boys had still only managed to learn the first line by the time that they arrived.

  Fine threads of grass were growing from the scar of the old track to Werndunvan, the earth dark from the recent rain. Down the hill, beside the water trough in the boundary hedge, there were the twisted remains of a giant bonfire whose diesel-ridden smoke had made Penllan all but uninhabitable a few nights earlier.

  “Okay,” said Tara, and consulted a piece of paper. “We need to measure out the garden, okay? So, Robbo, if you could stand next to the gatepost a moment, and Mart, you come with me and stop where I tell you.”

  “Why are we measuring Andrew’s cottage?” asked Robin.

  “Robbo,” said Tara. She positioned Martin at the end of a piece of string, just beyond the damson trees. “Robbo, I’ve been trying to explain to you. This isn’t Andrew’s cottage any more. We’ve bought it.”

  “Why?” Robin asked.

  “We’re going to rebuild it,” Tara explained. “So that people can come here for their holidays.”

  “Oh,” said Robin, frowning.

  Robin had never been particularly interested in the ruined cottage before – strangely, considering that he had, at various times, been fascinated by everything from an old water tank up on Cold Winter to the slits in the walls of the haylofts, which were obviously arrow slits, which meant that the barn had obviously once been a castle, and had dungeons still beneath it, piled high with treasure. It was something to do with the cottage’s missing front wall. It defused its mystery – the same way that even Martin found it hard to get excited about a skull without a face. You needed features to get your thoughts started, details, things for your mind to lock onto.

  But, looking again at the cottage, Robin was pleased to find that he owned it. At least, if they found treasure there, then he would be able to keep it. And it did have a bread oven, which he had once managed to squeeze himself into. And then there was the fireplace with the metal grille, whose chimney you could look up and see the sky in a fat black frame.

  “What would you think about going round to play at Andrew’s sometime?” said Tara, writing down a number in her notebook.

  “When?” asked Robin.

  “Whenever you like,” said Tara.

  Martin looked suspicious.

  “Well, you have a think about it,” said Tara. “Andrew’s a nice boy, and he’s got that new puppy, hasn’t he? Di… You might have fun.”

  She tapped one of the stakes into the ground, next to Martin’s feet, and let the tape measure suck back into itself.

  “Tara?” said Martin, after a moment, still holding his piece of string. “Tara, can we have a story now?”

  “A story about when you were at school!” said Robin.

  “Yeah!” Martin agreed.

  Tara scribbled down two more numbers in her notebook, which she then turned into a complicated-looking sum, murmuring under her breath. She took the end of the piece of string from Martin, tied it to the stake, and rubbed her forehead.

  “School?” she said. “Wouldn’t you rather hear about something happy?”

  “Like what?” asked Martin.

  “Like…”

  “Like, when you found Ty’n-y-coed!” said Robin. “Ty’n-y-coed!”

  “Ty’n-y-coed!” Martin echoed.

  “Okay, okay!” Tara laughed and sat down on one of the pieces of rubble that the cottage had instead of a front wall. She leant forward and peered through the gate towards the house to see if anyone was coming, then wrinkled her forehead in the way that she always did when she was about to begin a story. “Now, then. Well… Not long after Layla and I got back from India, I had nowhere to live. So,” she rolled her eyes, “I had to go and live with my father…”

  “Why did you just do that with your eyes?” asked Robin.

  “Robin!” said Martin. “You’re stopping the story!”

  “Oh, your grandfather,” said Tara. “You know what he’s like.”

  Robin did know what their grandfather was like: a kind old man who looked extraordinarily like Tara, and who supplied them with chocolate from time to time when she wasn’t looking. There was a portrait of him in the hall in which he looked rather different – in fact, he looked strict and horrible, like he was about to shout at you – but the portrait and their grandfather were not at all the same thing. Their grandfather played cricket with them and told them stories about when he used to fly an aeroplane, and Robin loved it when he came to visit – even if it always made Tara cross.

  The two boys watched as she tapped her feet against a stone. “If your grandfather had his way,” she continued, “I would probably be a scientist in a city somewhere. Or rather, I would probably be married to a scientist…”

  “What about us?” asked Martin.

  “You two would probably get packed off to boarding school,” said Tara.

  “You were packed off to boarding school,” said Robin.

  “Exactly,” said Tara. She paused. “You see, to your grandfather, the world is in black and white. If he had his way, you two would be learning reading, writing and arithmetic. Nothing else. No castles, no astronomy. He wouldn’t like Mr Gwynne at all.”

  “You like Mr Gwynne, don’t you, Tara?” asked Robin.

  “Of course,” said Tara. Her feet paused, then resumed their tapping on the stone. “I think Mr Gwynne is wonderful. He’s an excellent teacher.”

  “I like Mr Gwynne,” said Robin.

  “Good,” said Tara, and breathed deeply. “I’m very glad you do. You see, the thing about your grandfather is that he only thinks, he doesn’t feel… Do you understand what I mean?”

  Robin nodded, not because he did, but because he could always tell when his mother was getting upset and he always did whatever he thought might make her feel better again.

  Tara became upset whenever she talked about their grandfather, and Robin always burnt with questions on the subject, if only because the whole thing was such a mystery. His mother was right, of course – that went without saying – but then surely his grandfather ought to have been right as well. Sometimes Robin had a feeling like there was some great obstacle in between them – like the black empty space between two planets. Whichever way he looked at it, you were never allowed to be friends with them both at the same time.

  * * *<
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  The story was all about Ty’n-y-coed, the cottage where Tara and Adam had lived when they first arrived in Radnorshire, where they had learnt to farm, years and years into the past. Robin didn’t like to think of his parents as living in a cottage – they lived in a house – but a cottage it had been, and a humble one at that: without a track or running water, a telephone or even any electricity until Adam had exchanged their Volkswagen for the old Ferguson tractor and had connected it to a plug so that the record player worked when their friends came to visit and they could put coloured lights on the tree on Christmas Day.

  The cottage had consisted of five small rooms, with a couple of deteriorating barns across the yard. Nobody had lived there since the days of old Miss Powell, who had been no further than the nearest village in sixty years. As a girl, Miss Powell had been a maid in the house of Lord Powys, but she had fallen pregnant not long after her sixteenth birthday and been sent away in disgrace. Lord Powys had scoured his maps for the most obscure piece of property in his possession, and here he had built her a cottage and a couple of neat little barns, where she had been left to get on with it.

  Robin already knew almost everything there was to know about Ty’n-y-coed, but he still loved to hear about it more than anything. Tara told them about how she and Adam had turned off the road to Llanddewi-Brefi, where they had been going to see Layla, because it had been such a beautiful day that they hadn’t been able to sit in the car another minute. She told them about how they had wound up a lane between the auburn hillsides and then set off up through the heather, stopping occasionally to look back across the parallel waves of the hills, towards the wall of the Black Mountains that marked the edge of Breconshire.

  Ty’n-y-coed they had found quite by chance, as they were dropping back down from the hilltop, following a path around an outburst of rock into a crowd of ragged trees. Suddenly they were standing at a gate between a cottage and a pair of old barns, between the cultivated farmland and the open hills. Beneath them, the ground fell away into a deep, steep valley, where a red-leaved wood surrounded a stream and tiny fields spilt upwards from a squat-looking farmhouse – a farmer crossing the yard between the barns, his sheepdog padding behind him.

  Tara and Adam set out to explore the cottage at once, scattering sheep in the scullery, climbing the stairs to poke around the bedrooms, fiddling with the range to see if it could be persuaded back into life, disturbing a barn owl in the barns and sending it flapping away into the nearby trees. This was the time when Tara had just stormed out of her father’s house and was planning to find a place of her own near Layla’s, when Adam had a beard and was dreaming of becoming a farmer. The two of them had scarcely been at Ty’n-y-coed for ten minutes before they were marching down the hill towards the farmhouse, holding hands, watching the farmer who was now in one of the nearby fields, whistling and shouting, directing his dog around the sheep.

  As Tara had explained on several occasions, this was Radnorshire proper – poor, poor ground, so thin and stony that several of the fields bordering onto the common land had been all but abandoned, the hedges having unravelled themselves into individual trees and the bracken having spilt through the holes into the wiry, sheep-trimmed grass. In the surrounding hills, there were people who saw omens in the approaching clouds, who refused to cut the hay around standing stones, who insisted that the wood of any tree struck by lightning would never burn, and that the hills were thick with the ghosts of the unfortunate souls who had drowned up in the mawn pools – the old peat cuttings, whose banks floated treacherously on the deep, brown water.

  Owen, the farmer, however, was not of this type. He turned his head as they approached, his body stooped over his stick like it was still intent on the sheep that his dog was shuffling through a gateway. He was a small, wiry figure, with mismatched wellies and a magnificent pair of white sideburns that obscured most of his face. As it turned out, he had been champion of the Radnorshire sheepdog trials on three separate occasions – he had even competed in America and Australia – but on this occasion he seemed strange and suspicious, his eyes moving from Tara’s hair, to the colourful print on Adam’s T-shirt, to the mud on their wide-bottomed trousers.

  “Been up Ty’n-y-coed, have you?” he asked.

  “Er…” said Tara. “The cottage?”

  “Ar,” Owen nodded.

  “Yes,” said Adam. “Um… We’re sorry to bother you, but do you happen to know who owns it?”

  “That’d be me,” said Owen, glancing back at his sheep, which the collie had now trapped against the hedge, awaiting further instructions.

  “Oh,” said Tara. “It’s just that, it didn’t look as if there’s anybody living up there, and we were thinking that, well… perhaps you might be prepared to rent it out?”

  “Rent?” Owen frowned. “Oh… No, no, I couldn’t rent him out. No… No, if you two wants to go and live up there, that’s your own business, but I ain’t getting no money from him as he is, look, so I can’t very well just go and take it off you now, can I?”

  “Oh,” said Tara. “Great.”

  “Thank you,” said Adam.

  “Don’t thank me,” said Owen, warming slightly. “I ain’t done nothing. It’d be good to have someone up there, anyhow, put a bit of life back in the old place…”

  “Perhaps,” Adam suggested tentatively. “If you won’t accept any rent, perhaps we might be able to, you know, give you a bit of a hand about the place instead, from time to time…”

  Owen took a pipe from his pocket, blew down it sharply and nodded a few times.

  “Ar,” he said eventually. “That ain’t such a bad idea. Just while I’m off at the trials, look, or if I’m doing a bit of fencing… Come to that, it never hurts round lambing time neither.” He stroked his sideburns, then smiled to himself and whistled to his dog. “Well… I ’spect I’d best show you round, then, hadn’t I?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE PRINCES

  Werndunvan wasn’t a tidy farm like Penllan. The hedges and fences were full of holes, and the sheep were thin and seemed to look at Robin sideways as he swung open the gate at the end of the track, pretending not to swing on it. To the left was the forestry, which enclosed a whole side of the farm like a pair of jaws. It flickered as the car moved off again, the dark lines of pines revealing endless, lifeless tunnels between them, vanishing away towards the stream.

  But there were lambs in the fields, too, hurtling in packs amongst the scars of the bulldozer. There were hawthorns coming into blossom up on the hillside. There were swallows who had been all the way to Africa and were now swooping out above the valley, intercepting insects, working furiously at nests in the eaves of some barn or another, shuffling at the edges of puddles, gathering up the mud.

  “Okay, Mart?” said Tara, as they rolled up into the yard. “There’s nothing to worry about, okay? I’ll stay and drink tea in the kitchen. We’ll be here for an hour or so, that’s all…”

  She stopped the car and pulled on the handbrake, while Robin looked back over his shoulder, past the bottom of the yard, through the frame of a new shed, at the great bare hills of Wales, bulging into the sky as the black-grey clouds bulged down towards the earth. The farmhouse was imposing in the way of a particularly good skull. Its walls were more or less intact, but there were patches of corrugated iron on its face and its roof, cracks and holes, and the empty window sockets had been repaired only with fertiliser bags which were now in tatters, their writing and original colours all but bleached away.

  Not that any of this was exceptional. At Llanoley, one of the barns had fallen down altogether and the cattle waded belly-deep in manure. At the Allt – up towards Ty’n-y-coed – there wasn’t a piece of glass left in the place, and the Hughes boys hadn’t spoken a word to one another in twenty-five years.

  Tara had to knock three times on the kitchen door before there was any sign of movement inside. Robin and Martin stood behind her, Martin clinging to the leg of her trousers while Robin re
mained near the gate, trying to look independent. He watched the dark shape growing through the frosted glass, the handle as it flopped up and down before the door came open.

  “Morning, Dora,” said Tara, brightly. “How are things? I’ve just brought the boys round to play…”

  Dora’s eyes turned slowly from them to the barns, while Tara tapped her hands on the hips of her jeans – her back pockets embroidered with birds whose tails were long and glorious.

  “Is Andrew about?” Tara smiled, without much success. “Perhaps we could shout for him? He’s not in the kitchen, is he?”

  Abruptly, Dora lumbered past them and set off into the yard, stepping through the mud and the puddles. Robin glanced at Martin, who was still hanging onto Tara’s leg, sucking his thumb, apparently beginning to panic. He looked at the barns, and was cheered to find that they had arrow-slits of their own in the haylofts, which meant that they probably had dungeons, too, with treasure in aisles and piles.

  “Andrew!” called Dora in her low, expressionless voice. “Andrew!” Across the valley, there was a shower coming on. The black clouds were sliding across the hills, the grey blear beneath them enveloping first the rust-coloured common land, then the fields with their miniature sheep, the Glyn and Llanshiver, ponds and orchards, woods and hedges.

  “Andrew!” called Dora. “Andrew!”

  “Hello, Andrew!” said Tara, as Andrew crept finally around the post of the barn door, his puppy bounding ahead of him and his left hand sunk into the pocket of his jacket.

  Andrew glanced at her, then at Robin, who was still trying to maintain his independence, and for a moment it looked as if he was about to smile. But then he appeared to remember himself, and he turned his eyes back down to the dogs and the ground.

  “I thought, perhaps,” said Tara to Dora, her hand resting on Martin’s head, “that I could come in for a cup of tea, let the boys get on with it for a while?”