by Siân James
‘I have to go back at the end of the week.’
‘What then?’
‘France probably.’
‘Are you pleased?’
‘No. Does that shock you?’
‘Shock me? No. But I wish you were an idiot like the rest of them, it would be easier that way.’
‘I suppose so. Turncliffe now. He can’t wait to be on the front line. He thinks this war is the most glorious opportunity a young man ever had, the modern version of fighting the dragon; winning one’s spurs. He thinks death for one’s country is a privilege and an honour.’
‘It’s a good way to feel, if you can.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Nor can I, indeed. That Turncliffe; I always thought him a bit fanciful.’
‘Oh?’
‘Talked a lot without saying much. You know what I mean.’
‘I liked to hear him talk.’
‘So did Catrin, I’m told.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Josi didn’t answer. After all, what was the point in making trouble between friends? Poor little Catrin, though. Turncliffe had led her on, according to Nano. Pretty words; no more, perhaps. Young girls were too ready to fall in love. Wanted to kill herself, Nano said, when she knew he’d got married. Sadness everywhere. Everywhere.
They fell silent, listening to the ticking of the old clock.
‘We need to talk about the farm,’ Tom said, after a minute or two had ticked away.
‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘It’ll be mine, I suppose.’
‘Yes. Her father’s will.’
‘You’ll see to everything while I’m away?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you might live in Garth Ifan. You won’t want to live here with...’
‘With Miriam? No. But I can’t go into that. It’s impossible for me to think of any of that at the moment. I’ll look after the farm. Just leave it at that.’
‘I don’t want to be morbid, Father, but what if I’m killed? What would happen then.’
‘You’ve got time to make a will. Go to see Charles tomorrow. Only I don’t want any of it, remember. Nothing but Cefn Hebog. Your mother wants me to have Cefn Hebog and that’s right and proper. It should be mine. It was my grandfather’s. Your great-grandfather, old Thomas Morgan...’
‘Don’t bring that up again, for God’s sake. Cefn Hebog is yours. That’s the one thing I’m sure of.’
‘Good.’
‘Who’s living there now? Old Twm Price?’
‘And his son.’
‘They would move to Garth Ifan like a shot; it’s a better farm, a much better house.’
‘I know. But I don’t want to plan anything now. It seems all wrong. I can’t do it. I can’t think of it.’
‘All right. I won’t mention it again.’
In bed that night, Tom couldn’t sleep for thinking about his father and Miriam. He had a feeling that they would never live together again and felt the responsibility of having parted them. In a way, he’d been perfectly justified in telling his father of his mother’s imminent death, but he couldn’t discount his chief motive; that of abdicating his own responsibility; he had wanted to get away.
His mother would soon be dead, he felt rather as though she was already dead, and he feared what her death would do to his father, he seemed half-crazy with guilt.
There was the baby to think about. In six weeks with the army he had heard and thought so much about death. Twenty-five thousand Germans were said to have been killed in the last battle alone, and only a fool would believe that the English casualties could be as low as the newspapers pretended. Among so many deaths, a baby seemed important. What could he do? What could he say to his father?
He didn’t see his father in the morning, he was already out when he got down. Lowri told him that his mother had had a fairly restful night and that Miss Rees wanted him to go upstairs after he’d had his breakfast.
Lowri’s sister brought him breakfast. She was not yet fourteen, had only recently left school, and looked, in her blue, too-large dress and white apron, like a workhouse child. She told him her name was Megan.
‘Are you happy here, Megan?’
‘No, sir.’
Her answer took him aback so that he could think of nothing further to say. How could he expect her to be happy, he asked himself, as he ate his ham and eggs, in a house where the mistress was dying and no one had time to talk to her? Who was happy? He didn’t look at her again, keeping his eyes on his paper. Her red hair and small red hands tormented him, though, for many days.
At first he thought his mother was already dead; she lay so flat and still and white on her bed.
‘She’ll wake soon,’ Miss Rees whispered. ‘And it’s her best time. You’ll really be able to talk to her.’
He sat at the bedside and looked at his mother’s poor wasted body, her pale blue eyelids, her colourless lips.
As he looked at his mother, Miss Rees seemed to be studying him, as though she wanted to satisfy herself that his grief was sufficiently deep and tender. He wished for her sake that he could squeeze out a few tears. ‘She’s beautiful,’ he said.
‘Beautiful,’ Miss Rees echoed. ‘A saintly woman. Her soul is with God.’
‘When does Doctor Andrews come?’
‘About half past ten. You can stay until he comes.’
Two hours seemed like eternity. He wanted to walk over the fields and talk to the men.
‘Being here upsets me too much,’ he said, ‘I’ll come back later.’
As he stood up, his mother woke. ‘Josi,’ she said, her heart in her eyes.
‘Mrs Evans bach, it’s Mr Tom, look. Grown so big.’
‘Tom. Yes of course it’s Tom.’
She was too ill to hide her disappointment. She wanted only her husband.
‘Have you shown your mother the picture of your young lady Mr Tom?’
‘It’s in my army tunic, I’m afraid.’
‘Go and fetch it then, do, to show your mother.’
He went out obediently. ‘The Colonel’s step-daughter, if you please,’ the old lady was saying. ‘And a very pretty girl, too. He’ll be bringing her to see you on his next holiday, you shall see.’
When he got back, Miss Rees had his mother propped up on pillows. She was chaffing her hands.
‘What’s her name?’ his mother asked. ‘She looks very nice. Pretty eyes.’
‘May. May Malcom.’
‘After the Queen, I expect,’ Miss Rees said, ‘May of Teck she was before she was married. Why didn’t they call her Queen May? Such a nice name.’
‘How old is she, Tom?’
Tom had no idea.
‘Twenty-one,’ Miss Rees said, ‘six months younger than him. Just right.’
In a minute or two, his mother’s voice and looks changed abruptly; the pain had come back. Miss Rees gave her some white powder in a glass of water, took away her pillows and sent Tom away.
SIXTEEN
‘I have done no wickedness,’ Miriam said aloud as she walked along the narrow tree-lined road with her baby.
‘Such is the way of an adulterous woman, she eateth and wipeth her mouth and saith I have done no wickedness.’
Miriam knew vast tracts of the Bible; the Psalms, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah. The words had always stuck to her like burrs. ‘So she caught him and kissed him and said unto him, I have peace offerings with me.’
It was a fine day but Miriam shivered in her despair. There was still no letter from Josi. Only one she’d had from him since his return to Hendre Ddu and that written in the first week. Wait for me. Please wait for me. I love you. She had worn out the scrap of paper by looking at it too often; she needed another letter, but he didn’t write.
She knew what he must be suffering with his dying wife and his troubled conscience; she sympathized with him. But nagging at her was the thought that he should also be thinking of her in her loneliness and loss.
The acrid smell of autumn was in the air, a bonfire somewhere in the distance, chrysanthemums in cottage gardens. Leaves, though still on the trees, russet and gold, already smelled of the earth, the bracken and the few hedgerow flowers, campion and ragged robin, had the same wet, decaying smell. Seagulls circled above her, crying desolately; the sea was no longer a novelty, but a grey emptiness, a scar on the edge of the land.
Mrs Thomas had managed to get Miriam an old baby carriage from the house where she had been in service as a girl, and Miriam had spent hours pushing the baby along the quiet lanes, gathering blackberries and crab apples. But blackberries became devil’s fruit in October and Mrs Thomas wouldn’t have them. Hips and haws weren’t worth the picking, though as a child she had eaten plenty of haws, ‘bread and cheese and beer’, on her hungry way from school.
‘You have your baby,’ Mrs Thomas would say whenever she saw that Miriam was miserable. ‘A lovely child. Perfect in every way.’
‘She is. I know it.’ Miriam would gaze at Mari-Elen for hours, as she waved her small fists about, or pursed her lips as though to begin a long dissertation. She was lovely. All the same, Miriam was disappointed in her – or in herself. The first day she had caught a glimpse of Josi on the tiny face; by this time there seemed no trace of him. Even her fingernails are like mine, she thought, her toenails, the shape of her ears. Loving her seemed only an extension of loving herself.
She wanted Josi. Loved him, only him. She had got used to his loving her. At first it had seemed a dream, his love, something too rare and glorious to be real. But she had got used to it, had learned to accept it; as Christians, though unworthy, accept the love of God.
If he had cooled towards her when he had first known about the baby, she might have got used to that, too, by this time. But he had never wavered, had insisted on taking her away, defying society. Oh, he had loved her.
The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down.
‘You have your baby,’ Mrs Thomas always said, as though that made up for everything.
Miriam liked Mrs Thomas well enough, what she knew of her. She was a secret, solitary woman, though, disclosing little of herself in the seven or eight weeks they had lived together. She was poor, it was obvious that her sons had all but forgotten her; that’s all Miriam knew. She made a little money by dressmaking.
In the evening, Miriam would do some hand-sewing for her while she was busy with the sewing machine which was her most treasured possession.
At first Miriam had been trusted only with the hemming, but had recently graduated to button-holes and fancy stitches; Mrs Thomas scrutinizing everything she did and occasionally rewarding her with a small, tight smile. She had mentioned paying for her help, but Miriam – receiving twenty-five shillings a week from Rachel Evans’s solicitor – had refused to let her.
As well as helping with dressmaking, Miriam also did most of the housework. Partly because it passed the time, partly because she felt grateful to Mrs Thomas for giving her a home. She knew it wasn’t easy for her; her neighbours talked, and she was dependent on the neighbours for work.
Mrs Thomas would volunteer no information about herself; neither about her childhood nor her married life, and wanted to hear nothing of Miriam’s life. Miriam had once told her about her mother’s poverty and early death, only to be cut short as though such personal details embarrassed her.
The previous week, though, they had been making a wedding dress together. The bride’s mother had bought the material, a bright blue satin, six years earlier, after getting a particularly good price for the annual calf. ‘The only time in my life for me to have any money I didn’t already owe,’ she’d told Mrs Thomas and Miriam. ‘Twenty-three and sixpence it cost me, six yards at three and eleven, and Leyshon and the boys all needing boots, but they had to wait. Make it up pretty, won’t you.’
The bride-to-be was a fat girl with a round, vacant face, but Miriam had taken the greatest trouble, whipping the neck and cuffs with a paler blue thread and smocking the yoke and shoulders.
‘A wedding isn’t everything,’ Mrs Thomas had said, fearing that she was being carried away. ‘It’s not all roses.’
‘Oh it is,’ Miriam had said. ‘A fine wedding is every girl’s dream.’
‘One they soon wake from, you believe me. Many girls get married and spend the rest of their lives wishing they hadn’t. You think everyone is happy but you, but there’s plenty of married women would leap at the chance to change places with you, I can tell you.’
It was the first time Mrs Thomas had spoken so freely to her.
‘But what about the disgrace?’
‘Disgrace? Oh, you’re trying to trick me into saying there’s no disgrace in doing what you’ve done. I won’t do that. But I’ll tell you this; there’s plenty of disgrace inside marriage as well as outside it. I lived in Swansea for a few years while my husband was on the railway there, and I saw plenty of disgrace and heard it too, every Saturday night, especially among those priest-ridden Mary’s children.’
‘But among the Welsh, chapel-going people?’ Miriam had persisted.
‘You won’t get me to say a word against the chapel; I know what you’re after. But I’m not so narrow-minded not to realize that there’s goodness and decency outside chapel as well as inside, outside marriage and inside it.’
It was the nearest they had got to intimacy; the only time when Miriam had felt that Mrs Thomas was on her side, and that her initial reluctance to have her as a lodger was that it might have an adverse effect on her livelihood, not that she herself had any real qualms about Miriam’s character.
But the letter Mrs Thomas had received that morning had shown otherwise.
It was from her youngest son, Ifor. He had enlisted, he told her, and, finding himself stationed at Wrexham, intended coming home for a few days.
The letter seemed to have thrown Mrs Thomas into a state of near panic. She hadn’t said much; had read the short letter to Miriam, that was all; but had spent the morning staring out of the window, then walking about clutching her side as though in pain. She had done no sewing, though the mourning dresses she had cut out the previous evening were urgently needed.
Mrs Thomas, Miriam felt sure, was agitated at the thought of her young son being under the same roof as a fallen woman. She felt she ought to leave, for a time at least. She felt she should return to Llanfryn to her Aunt Hetty, but couldn’t face the questions and sermons she would have to endure. ‘You’ll be back, my girl,’ the old woman had told her when she had left in June, ‘Oh yes, you’ll be back for sure. That man of yours won’t stay away when he begins to feel the shoe pinching. He’ll be back in his good farm before winter, you mark my words.’ How could she return, to prove her right? How could she stay where she was, when her presence was so unwelcome?
In her anxiety, she had walked much further than usual and found herself, for the first time, in the neighbouring village; outside the little school.
Nostalgia overcame her as she drew up by the gate and heard the familiar sounds of children at work and at play; the older ones chanting a poem whilst the little ones clapped and sang to a tinkling piano. She seemed to smell the familiar smells; charcoal stove, chalk, dusty books, carbolic soap. She stood there listening and remembering until afternoon school ended with the Lord’s Prayer and the clanging of desks and chairs. She rushed away then, conscious of what she had lost, She had enjoyed teaching, the children had liked her, she had liked them. And the schoolhouse, only a small four-roomed cottage, was clean and cosy. She had been respected and independent. Now she was an outcast. For the first time, having nothing to uphold her, she felt it bitterly. Instead of retracing her steps, she walked on and on, weeping inside herself.
It was almost dark when she returned. (‘Where have you been?’ Mrs Thomas would say. ‘You’ve kept that baby out too long. The days are drawing in.’)
As she got near the cottage, Miriam could see a young man sitting on the low wall, looking out to sea
. He was in khaki uniform, the first Miriam had seen. She thought it must be Mrs Thomas’s son, home earlier than expected, but as she got nearer she realized it was Tom; Josi’s son, Tom. Her heart started to pound. She hurried towards him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I’m home for a week’s leave,’ he told her. ‘Returning tomorrow.’ She had no idea that he had joined the army. It seemed a strange thing to have done when his mother was so ill.
Uneasy, unable to make small talk, she waited for him to continue. But he didn’t seem to have anything to tell her.
‘I’m sorry I can’t ask you in,’ she said at last.
‘That’s all right. I have to get back anyway. I’ve got to get the seven o’clock train to Llanfryn. I’m going back to my regiment tomorrow.’
‘I must feed the baby,’ Miriam said. Elen had begun to whimper and shake her fists.
‘I’d like to see her. May I?’
Miriam picked her out of the perambulator, turning her towards the sea and the setting sun. She blinked and stopped crying.
Tom examined her gravely. She was the first baby he had ever really looked at.
Why had he come? Miriam wondered. What news had he for her? He couldn’t have come merely to see the baby.
‘It’s my mother,’ he said at last. ‘That’s what I’ve come about; my mother. Even in the last few days I’ve been home there’s been quite a change in her condition; she’s sinking fast. She’s in considerable pain most of the time.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Miriam said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I just wanted you to know how it is,’ Tom said. ‘So that you understand.’
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘So that you know how things are. How my father is.’
‘I do understand. I really do.’
At any other time Mari-Elen would have appreciated being held up close to look at the blazing sky, but not now. She was hungry and cold and she began to cry hard and insistently. Her lower lip shook with indignation.