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The Claude Glass

Page 13

by Tom Bullough


  Perhaps, Andrew thought, this was why Philip and Dora never came into this part of the house, why they had sealed up the door from the lounge and had left it to the rain and the wind. Quickly, he shoved his hand into his pocket and slid his fingers between the cushion and the little mirror. He looked at the shadows near the top of the stairs, the drifts of the dirt, but he was much too scared now to look back at the picture – in case the man was no longer in his frame, or his eyes were no longer dark and kind, but narrowed, horrible, yellow with cruel thoughts.

  * * *

  For some minutes, Andrew lay on the doorstep, shivering, while Di whined and nuzzled him and occasionally returned to scratching herself. He stroked her sides like they were still covered with hair – not bald and pink with scabs and groups of red, bloody lines – and he talked to her in a language of his own, inhaling the smells of sunlight and the sheep-dip behind the barns, the reek that leached from her skin.

  Although Andrew knew by now that his puppy had mange, he pretended to himself that she had been shorn along with the sheep, her coat taken to the huge, sheep-smelling warehouse where he had gone one day with his father instead of going to school, where there were giant stacks of wool that touched the roof and their whole farm’s contribution had been lost in moments among the fork-lift trucks and the shrinking aisles of lights. It was a happy time of year to be hairless, after all, when even his father went outside from time to time without his jacket.

  Around the doorstep, there were many sounds Andrew began gradually to notice. Above him, a pair of swallows were swooping in and out of a broken window, chattering, delivering insects to their squeaking offspring. Across the yard, a crowd of bantams and chicks were pecking at the dry earth, while a thrush was singing in a nearby beech, and behind the barns Philip and Stuart were driving several dozen ewes into a long, deep trough full of noxious chemicals – dunking them so that everything apart from the sheep itself was exterminated, before pulling out the bung and allowing the poisonous activity to continue in the fields and the streams the whole way down the valley.

  Stuart was the son of John the Glyn, and although Philip cursed him continually whenever he was working at Werndunvan, he was one of the very few people who spent more than half a day on the farm at a stretch. Stuart was eighteen years old, kept his hair slicked back like something off the television, drove a scrambler motorbike and wore a ripped leather jacket which

  Andrew admired and his father mocked mercilessly. Andrew slunk around the bottom of the barns and sat down against the weatherboarding, among the dogs, on the edge of the area where Philip had once decided to build the new shed. He kept his eyes beneath the peak of his cap, stroking the sole patch of hair that remained on the back of Di’s neck, letting his mind drift over thoughts about Robin and Martin, about Tara and the big, clean house. There were only a couple of sheep left in the first of the two pens, wild-eyed and shivering in spite of the constant heat, and he didn’t like to watch them struggling to keep their heads above the filthy liquid, scrambling half-drowned onto the earth at the far end.

  “Alright, Andy?” said Stuart, when they were finished, wiping his hands on his vest. “How’s school, eh? Learning your numbers, are you?”

  “Ar,” said Andrew, nodding.

  Andrew liked Stuart. He liked the way that he smiled and asked him how he was, the way that he wandered about the place as if he was hardly scared of Philip at all, whistling tunes and smoking cigarettes from a smart black packet. Sometimes Stuart would even bring him a present – a chocolate bar or an old toy car – and Andrew treasured these things, hiding them in a hole in the barn, taking them out occasionally to nibble a piece of chocolate or to drive the car around a patch of the hard earth floor.

  “Got some mates there, have you?” Stuart continued.

  “Ar,” Andrew nodded again.

  “Who’s your best mate, then?” asked Stuart.

  “Robin,” said Andrew, without hesitation.

  Philip closed the gate on the massed ewes, sat on a nearby hurdle and lit his pipe, shaking his head with disappointment.

  “Yeah,” said Stuart, “and what the fuck’s wrong with that? Robin’s a nice kid. His dad’s alright and all. Ain’t done you no bloody harm, has he?”

  Philip continued to shake his head, watching one of the swallows as it swept around the nose of the barns, down the fields towards the pond, the pine wood, the big dark hills and the small light clouds that were speckled across the sky. “Can’t trust him,” he said eventually. “Can’t bloody trust him, can you?”

  “I’d trust him before I’d bloody trust you!” said Stuart.

  “Well, more fool bloody you!” said Philip. “More fool bloody you! Just you try and do bit of business with him, and you’ll see… You try and sell him a cottage, look, see what happens then! You won’t get your bloody money, I’ll tell you that much!”

  “And you owe me a few quid when it comes to that.”

  “And I’ll give it you,” said Philip. “I’ll give it you, don’t you worry. Wouldn’t want to keep you from getting a nice new jacket, would I? Seeing as how you went and chopped up that one with your mother’s fucking nail scissors…”

  Andrew had retreated now back beneath the peak of his cap, watching the bits of straw on the earth in front of him, rubbing his fingernails over the mirror in his pocket. The heat and the smell of the sheep-dip made him feel giddy, and the voices of Stuart and his father circled his head like angry flies.

  “The fact is,” Philip went on, in measured tones, “you come from off, sooner or later you’ll be back off again, and that’s the truth…” He puffed on his pipe and let the smoke out slowly, obviously beginning to enjoy himself. “Sooner, from what I’ve heard.”

  Stuart took a breath like he was about to reply, but Andrew heard nothing further beside the protests of the sheep, the click of Stuart’s cigarette lighter.

  “Alright, then,” he said. “What the bloody hell are you on about?”

  “The news,” said Philip. “What I’ve heard is that they’re off again, back to wherever the bloody hell they come from… Not good enough, our school, is it? Not bloody good enough! They’ve got to go and find somewhere else for their precious children!”

  “That right?” said Stuart, without great conviction. “And where did you hear that, then?”

  “Joe,” said Philip, perfectly composed. “And Joe got it off Margaret Hughes, and Margaret got it off her boy, Oliver, who got it off one of Adam’s boys, so…” He turned to look at Andrew. “You’d best fucking watch yourself, hadn’t you, boy? Your mate Robin ain’t going to be around an ’ole lot longer, is he, eh?”

  Stuart flicked his cigarette disgustedly into the carcass of a thresher in the weeds, and swaggered down the hill towards his motorbike. When Andrew peeped out from beneath his cap again, there were thin lines of triumph around Philip’s eyes and mouth. He tipped his pipe upside down and tapped it on the bar beside him, scanning the dogs until his eyes arrived on Di, sitting on Andrew’s lap, scratching at her thin, torn sides.

  “I’ll tell you another thing,” he said, climbing down from his hurdle. “That is the most mangiest fucking dog I have ever seen in my fucking life!”

  He picked up Di by the tuft of hair on her neck and swung her out above the sheep-dip, letting her go so that she vanished with a splash beneath the surface. A moment later, she was paddling back towards the nearest end, but Philip took the stick and prodded her around so that she swam towards the second pen, where the sheep began milling and panicking. She swam instinctively, her nose above the chemicals, gasping at the stinking air until her paws touched the slope at the end, where she crawled up pitifully onto the bare earth, pink and shining, and crept off into the shade to lick herself clean.

  * * *

  Half an hour before they all went home, Mr Gwynne would sit on his desk, swinging his legs, and read the class a story, and that day it was all about King Arthur and his hunt for a boar named the Twrch Trwyth. The
Twrch Trwyth had once been king of Ireland, but it had been transformed by God on account of its appalling crimes and, together with its seven wild piglets, had taken to charging round the country, laying waste to towns and villages with its scything tusks and poisonous bristles.

  Mr Gwynne had a map of Wales which covered most of the blackboard, and once the Twrch Trwyth had crossed the sea to Pembrokeshire, he began to follow its progress with a length of bamboo and a series of little coloured markers, jabbing excitedly at towns like Milford Haven and Lampester Velfrey. Wales, he explained, had once been a very different place to the way it was today: a wilderness of fathomless forests, of talking beasts and birds that pecked at the stars. The only civilised spot in the whole country had been King Arthur’s palace at Caerleon – the finest man had ever seen – and no sooner had news of the marauding boar arrived here than Arthur and his knights were saddling their horses, readying themselves for the chase.

  Perhaps the Twrch Trwyth’s most peculiar quality was that it had a comb, a razor and a pair of scissors, which it kept between its ears and treasured with such passion that, for all of its wickedness, Robin found himself beginning to like it. Arthur, on the other hand, was always trying to steal them, which didn’t quite seem fair. By the time that the two sides met in the Prescelly Mountains, Robin hardly knew which he wanted to win.

  “And what do you think the Twrch Trwyth said”, asked Mr Gwynne, swinging his legs and inspecting the class over his glasses, “when King Arthur asked it to give him the comb, the scissors and the razor, so they wouldn’t have to fight each other any more?”

  “‘It’s bad enough being a huge hairy pig,’” the children chorused, “‘without having to talk to you, too!’”

  “That’s right,” said Mr Gwynne. He smiled at Andrew, who had shouted along for the first time. “The Twrch Trwyth really didn’t like King Arthur at all. So it waved its snout and it stamped its trotters, and when it charged it was like there was an earthquake, and it scattered his soldiers all the way down the valley…”

  There were cars arriving now on the hill outside the school. Parents were gossiping at the gates and the Juniors went pouring through the hall, giggling and shouting. But Mr Gwynne kept on with his story, seeming not to hear the younger children as they started to stir, following only the armies of Britain, Ireland and France as together they pursued the Twrch Trwyth out of Wales and all the way down into Cornwall – scattering bodies and placenames behind them – until, at Land’s End, the Twrch Trwyth plunged into the sea and King Arthur seized the comb between its ears at the very last instant, ridding Britain of its wildness once and for all.

  * * *

  “But I don’t want to be the Twrch Trwyth!” Martin complained, as they were sitting in their shorts in the sandpit outside the school. “Why can’t I be King Arthur?”

  “Because I’m King Arthur,” said Robin.

  “And I’m King Arthur next,” said Nigel.

  “So you’ve got to be the Twrch Trwyth,” said Robin. “Or else there’s no one to chase.”

  “I don’t… I don’t want to be him!” Martin looked like he was about to cry. “I want to be Sir Kay! I’m telling Tara! It’s not fair!”

  Beyond the sandpit, which had been reshaped into the Prescelly Mountains, the playground stretched away across hopscotch patterns, improvised goalposts and a large, spiralling snail which nobody had ever quite known what to do with. Through the window of the classroom, Mr Gwynne was reading his book of Welsh mythology, selecting the next day’s story, and from time to time he would glance up, checking first the road and then the three boys quarrelling in the sunlight beneath him.

  “Come on, Mart,” said Nigel. “The Twrch Trwyth won millions of battles, and he did used to be the king of the whole of Ireland!”

  Robin looked up at once when he heard the big blue truck, and he watched as it rumbled round the corner of Offa’s Bank – fat and filthy through the heat that was shimmering off the road. Turning a tight circle in the junction beside the bungalows, it roared and came to a halt against the pavement outside the school gate, where it idled noisily to itself while Tara tried to open the driver’s door and, eventually, climbed out of the window, jumping neatly to the ground.

  On the passenger side, Robin could just make out what appeared to be the top of someone’s head – the line of a centre parting, the hair shiny and black to either side – and the only person he knew who looked like that was Cloud, so he scrambled to his feet, stretching so he could see if it was her.

  “Sorry I’m late, boys,” said Tara, wiping her hands on her dungarees as she arrived in the playground. “Hi, Nigel. Everything okay? Hey, guess what, boys! Cloud’s here! Mike and Layla have gone on holiday, so she’s come to stay for a whole week!”

  She picked up Martin’s satchel and brushed off some sand, while Robin stared at Cloud, hunched on the seat, her dark eyes focused on her lap and some bits of her hair stuffed into her mouth.

  “Hi, Tara,” said Mr Gwynne, leaning from the window, removing his glasses. “Everything alright?”

  “Fine.” Tara picked up Martin from the sandpit. “Thanks for keeping an eye on them… Sorry I’m late. I just… I just got a bit held up.”

  “No trouble.” Mr Gwynne climbed up and sat on the sill, his legs remaining in the classroom. “I was sticking around anyway, and they seemed quite immersed in the exploits of King Arthur.”

  “And the Twrch Trwyth,” said Martin.

  “And the Twrch Trwyth,” Mr Gwynne agreed.

  “Well,” said Tara. “Thankyou, anyway…”

  She gestured for Robin to collect his bag.

  “By the way,” said Mr Gwynne, “I meant to tell you. You’ll never guess what Andrew’s taken to carrying around with him!”

  Tara hesitated. She had Martin’s satchel held to her chest and she looked oddly uncomfortable, even embarrassed.

  “What?” she asked.

  “A Claude glass!” said Mr Gwynne.

  “A what?”

  “A Claude glass!” Mr Gwynne repeated. “One of those little mirrors that tourists used to carry about with them at the end of the eighteenth century, to look at the view?” He paused, as if unsure she was listening, but Tara was watching him with obvious surprise. “They’re kind of black and convex. The reflection shrinks the landscape, you see, and washes out the colour, so everything’s put tidily in a frame. It’s proper picturesque weirdness. People would actually turn their backs to the view and inspect it in their Claude glasses instead…”

  “But where on earth did he get it?” Tara asked.

  “He said it was just lying about the house.” Mr Gwynne shuffled round on the windowsill. His voice was becoming almost tuneful with enthusiasm. “I have to say, Werndunvan is an extraordinary place. You know that bit that they’ve abandoned. Well, that’s an extension built by Thomas Hutchinson, William Wordsworth‘s brother-in-law! It’s an amazing thought, isn’t it? All those people staying up there. Dorothy Wordsworth, Sara Hutchinson…”

  “What, Asra stayed there?” Tara frowned. “Coleridge’s muse?”

  “Asra! Exactly!” said Mr Gwynne. “You know about them, then?”

  “Well…” Tara slid one of her boots across the tarmac. “Yeah. They were a bit of a passion of mine at one time. Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft… The major influence, you might say…” She smiled at the dark ground. “But, I can’t quite see the Romantics using a thing like Andrew’s mirror. I thought they liked their nature untamed.”

  “That’s true,” Mr Gwynne nodded. “But, well, a lot of people would have stayed at Werndunvan, I suppose, and they were pretty common things at the time…”

  Glancing behind him, Robin noticed that Cloud was peering surreptitiously over the truck door, watching Tara and Mr Gwynne up in the window, so he began to drive his police car furiously up and down the slopes of the sandpit, crashing into Nigel so that he joined in as well.

  “You know there’s an arboretum at t
he back?” asked Mr Gwynne. “Thomas Hutchinson built it. I did go up there one time to have a bit of a look around, but…”

  “Philip told you to…”

  “Yes, Philip told me to…”

  The two of them laughed, and Tara released the satchel and allowed it to swing from her hand, inspecting the lines of the playground in front of her.

  “Tara?” said Martin. “When are we going home?”

  “Just a minute, Mart,” Tara said distractedly.

  “Can I come back and play, Tara?” asked Nigel.

  “Not today, Nigel. There’s a friend of the boys who’s come to stay, so I’m afraid we’re all going to be a bit busy. How about next week, eh?”

  There was a pause in which Robin looked from Tara leaning on the school wall to Mr Gwynne perched inside the window frame. The two of them, he realised, were really quite alike. They took the same pleasure in choosing the right word, and they both had a way of telling a story as if they had been possessed by it.

  “I don’t know if you’d mind,” asked Mr Gwynne, “but I would love to see some of your poems…”

  “Tara!” Martin repeated.

  “Yes, Mart,” said Tara. “Okay… Yeah. Um, sorry, Huw, we should really get back. Perhaps we could talk about it some other time. We’re in the middle of baling. You know how it is…”

  She was looking uncomfortable again, sad even, as the three of them were walking up the playground. She lifted the two boys through the window of the oil-smelling truck, where Cloud was sitting in the middle of the seat, clutching a purple dinosaur on her lap, her hair still buried in her mouth.

  “Hi, Cloud!” Robin and Martin greeted her, keenly.

  “Sorry you had to wait, Cloud,” said Tara. “I got a bit sidetracked. We’ll get back up home now, okay?”

  “Where’s Klaus?” asked Robin. “Is he here, too?”

 

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