She bought an ice cream from the Lorne Dairy cart to keep the pangs of hunger at bay and enjoyed the contentment it gave her to do such a simple thing. Branwen would not approve, she knew, and was careful to brush any evidence from her blouse and the folds of her skirt before arriving at the house.
Branwen is in the garden at the back, entertaining friends with an al-fresco luncheon that would have delighted Catherine Davies, although – and here Non feels a soupçon of guilt – there is only the debris of lunch left apart from the pristine place-setting laid for the one person who had not been there.
Branwen does not mention the untouched plate, nor Non’s lateness, and introduces her to her friends, dust and all. Non bobs and smiles and shakes hands as the ladies leave, and follows them back through the house to run upstairs to change her skirt and shoes.
When Non comes downstairs, Branwen has cleared the table in the garden and laid out the cups and saucers for them, and bara brith on a plate. Non is partial to Branwen’s bara brith and her stomach rumbles at the sight of it.
‘I’ve made a fresh pot of tea,’ Branwen says. She pours milk, then the tea, into their cups. ‘Where did you get to, Non? I was expecting you to come back to have lunch, not after we’d finished eating it. You embarrassed me.’
‘I walked further than I intended to,’ Non says. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back in time.’ And she is sorry to disappoint and upset Branwen yet again, although she had completely forgotten that Branwen was having a luncheon party. Luncheon! She pushes the thought of Catherine Davies outside the boundary of her newly acquired equilibrium. ‘But this is nice,’ she says, ‘sitting here with you.’ She looks at the long garden, with its roses blooming and tumbling in every direction, their scent filling the air with a heavy sweetness that she can almost see. She fingers the velvet of a rose petal that has dropped onto the tablecloth and rubs it on her cheek. ‘It reminds me of playing here when I lived with you.’
‘It’s overgrown,’ Branwen says. ‘Everything needs cutting back, but this is how Prys likes it. He says it’s like a bower – a bower, for goodness’ sake – and relaxes him. I suppose all the greenery keeps us cool in this dreadful heat.’ Branwen fidgets her cup around on its saucer and the saucer on the tablecloth. She shifts the milk jug and the sugar bowl and shifts them back again. ‘My friend Eluned Bowen-Pugh came here especially to meet you. You have no idea of how difficult it was to persuade her to come to lunch – no idea, Non – she’s an important woman, very busy.’ She slides a calling card across the tablecloth to Non. ‘She left this for you. You’d better put it in your bag, or you might lose it.’
‘I didn’t know you’d asked anyone to come to meet me especially,’ Non says, ignoring the card and Branwen’s instructions.
Branwen carries on speaking as if Non has said nothing. ‘You see, Non, you could get Osian into this place her husband runs for boys like him.’
Non sits perfectly still; she feels her calmness dissipate a little. She has had fruitless arguments with Branwen about Osian since the War. ‘What place?’ she says.
‘A hospital or something. Well, an asylum, I suppose, for boys that aren’t . . . well, that aren’t quite, you know, right. Come on Non, even you can’t pretend Osian’s right in the head.’
‘He’s different, that’s all, Branwen. He’s not wrong in the head, or whatever you want to call him. He’s . . . he’s gifted.’ The word comes to her from nowhere. Gifted, she thinks, is exactly right.
Branwen snorts then turns the noise into a cough. ‘Head in the clouds as usual,’ she says when she has finished spluttering. ‘Well, you pretend all you want, Non, but the only thing to do with a boy like that is to have him put away. He’s not even yours, for goodness’ sake.’
He is mine, Non thinks, not of my flesh, perhaps, but mine all the same. She is not going to argue this time. Branwen has told her what to do – and what not to do – since the day Non went to live with her. Saying nothing is the best defence against Branwen’s hectoring, Non has discovered, as it is with Maggie Ellis’s questioning, and Branwen will think she has won the day, when in fact she has not. Non has forgotten how single-minded Branwen can be. She wonders from which parent her sister inherited that trait. She sips her tea and nibbles at the bara brith, her hunger vanished again. A blackbird rustles the leaves of the lilac tree above the table and more petals rain down from the rose that rambles through the branches. When Non thinks enough time has elapsed for Branwen to feel pleased with what she will see as a victory, she says, ‘I’ve been thinking, Branwen, about how little I know about Mother, except what Father told me – and I don’t know what to make of that any more. What was she really like? How did she come to marry Father?’
‘Oh, how would I know?’ Branwen says. She sweeps the rose petals off the tablecloth with her hands. Non wonders if her question will be ignored, but the floodgates, it seems, remain open. ‘She was head in the clouds, too. I expect he bullied her into it. She was . . . she was just there, somehow, like his shadow or something. Everything was always about him, about what he wanted.’ She brushes some more petals to the ground. ‘You see? Everything needs cutting back!’
Non pours more tea into her sister’s cup and pushes it towards her. ‘What were her parents like, Branwen? Our grandparents. I never heard Father mention them.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Branwen says. ‘I was the only child I knew who had never met her grandparents. I don’t know what happened exactly, but Mother’s parents were so disgusted with her marriage to Father that they cut her off. And that was that. It was lucky for her that she had some money left for her by her grandmother. And that ring – she would never sell it you know, no matter how much Father wheedled and bullied. She said her grandmother told her the money and ring were to go to her youngest child.’ She draws her cup and saucer towards her and picks a rose petal out of the tea and flicks it onto the grass with a grimace.
‘She must have loved Father a great deal to cut herself off from her family,’ Non says.
‘Love!’ Branwen snorts again, and does not bother to disguise it. She jumps up from her chair and marches into the house. ‘I’ll show you,’ she calls back over her shoulder. ‘You’ll see!’
Non knows her father loved her mother from the stories he has told her, and that her mother loved him in return. The stories may not have been true, she thinks, but the truth was in them.
Branwen returns into a flurry of petals as the blackbird takes flight from the lilac. ‘Here,’ she says, and holds out an opened envelope to Non. ‘You read that. She sent it to me when Prys and I married. She couldn’t come to the wedding – can you believe that? And why? Because she’d just had another miscarriage! Father again!’
Non draws the letter out of the envelope. The paper is a pale cream and carries a faint scent that she thinks she recognises. Maybe Non the baby had captured a memory, after all. She unfolds the letter and reads it.
It is clear to Non what the letter is saying: that her mother had seen in Osian Rhys what others could not see, and that she had always, all her married life, loved him, even when she was not happy with some of the things he did. And she hoped Branwen would know the same love.
Non closes her eyes. She is thankful to have read her mother’s own words, to know for certain that the truth was present within her father’s web of stories.
‘She loved him.’ She smiles at Branwen.
‘What are you talking about? She says she hated the things he did. She says it there in black and white, Non. How can you be so . . . so blind?’
Non sighs. She gazes at the letter with its roughly cut edges and fading ink. She folds it and puts it back inside its envelope. She and Branwen will never agree. They look upon life too differently.
‘You weren’t there, Non, the way I was.’ Branwen pushes her cup and saucer away from her so violently that the tea splashes onto the tablecloth, but she does not notice. ‘You weren’t there watching those little girls die, and the miscar
riages Mother had. She was too delicate to have all those children. But did he care? And you know why he insisted on keeping you when Mother died?’ Branwen’s voice has risen until she is shouting. ‘All that nonsense he used to bore everyone with about Mother seeing things, seeing what was wrong with people – he was convinced you’d be the same, wasn’t he?’
Non is surprised to feel relief at this information, she had no inkling of it, but it explains the way she is. ‘But I was, wasn’t I?’ she says. ‘I am, Branwen.’
Branwen screams. She picks up the cup from her saucer and smashes it into the nearest rose bush and runs into the house.
So who is Branwen like? A grandparent, maybe. Non can see that she herself is a mix of both her parents. From her father she has inherited a way of seeing the world that is different to the way most other people she knows view it. And her mother’s bequest to Non was her gift. She wishes she did not find it a burden, she wishes she could thank her mother for it; she wishes she did not hope the gift was the result of hallucinations brought on by the May Lily. She shivers to think it is a curse she may hand down to a child of her own flesh. Then her heart lightens when she thinks of another inheritance from her mother: her spontaneity. She had married Davey – in a haste of which Branwen had disapproved – for the same reasons her mother had married her father. She had seen in Davey those qualities she admired – steadfastness, quietude, loyalty. Qualities he still possesses. She has, unlike her mother, forgotten why she married her husband, but she will not forget again.
31
A moment ago Non had been fast asleep and dreaming, though the dream has already escaped through the open window, and now she is awake and alert. Something must have woken her but when she lies still to listen she can hear only the hush of a Sunday morning.
Without thinking she stretches her hand out to the cool sheet and empty place beside her and finds Davey still there. She rests the back of her hand on his bare skin and feels the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath it. He must be exhausted to be sleeping this late in the morning. She should not have left him for all those days to carry everything, to look after them all. Especially Osian. She has been worrying about this since Gwydion told her yesterday that when she was away in London, and then in Aberystwyth, he had risen early to help Davey with some of her tasks and had found him one morning aiming an imaginary rifle at an imaginary enemy in uncanny silence, and another time crying and shivering under the table. Gwydion had not known what to do, and so had done nothing, and Non assured him that he had done the right thing, that there was nothing to be done, Davey had to be left to return to normality by himself. It had been frightening, Gwydion had told her, and he had thought it best not to mention it to Wil or Meg.
After her conversation with Gwydion, when she had the house to herself during the afternoon, Non had decided to look through all the letters Davey had written to her over the years he had been away. She would read them differently now, she reasoned, she would read them with the benefit of hindsight, she would know what to look out for. The small travel case they were stored in under the bed was dusty, and the letters inside had already taken on a look of age and fragility, their envelopes brittle, their ink fading. In those bundles she could see the playing out of her distancing from Davey. The first few bundles, the oldest, were bound by a ribbon tied in a bow to hold them together. The last of the letters she had received had been thrown on top carelessly. She could remember doing that, just lifting the lid and throwing them in, resenting Davey for writing so impersonally, so infrequently, and she felt the tears gather in her throat as she looked through them.
At first, Davey’s letters had to be written in English to get past the censor, and she remembered her disappointment as she read them. But the content was, she knew, much as other women of her acquaintance had received, the ones who had asked her to read their letters to them – jokey comments about the food and the weather, a longing for the recipient of the letter, a report of meeting with somebody’s brother or cousin. They were letters written by rote in a foreign language, not real feelings and thoughts. She picked through them in the hope of finding some nugget of information that she had missed at the time, anything that would help explain Davey’s distress. But she could see no connection in his words to anything that she had learnt since she had first read them about the ordeals men had endured during the fighting. She kissed each letter, in an apology to Davey, before she replaced it in the box.
Davey’s voice had surprised her. It wasn’t like that at all, Non.
She had not heard him coming home or walking upstairs and had no idea how long he had been standing in the doorway, watching her. He had come into the bedroom and she had looked up at him as he said that everyone wrote letters that would not worry or demoralise the people they had left behind; those had been the instructions they were given.
Non was astonished. This was the first time Davey had voluntarily spoken about the War since he had confessed his – false – infidelity to her. It was the first time since his confession that he had spoken to her without avoiding her gaze. She had risen to her feet and held her hand out to him in delight.
That had been too much for him. He had backed away from her. Burn them, Non, he had said, and returned downstairs. But she could not. She had finished packing the letters and pushed the case back under the bed.
I wish I had known, she thinks, lying next to Davey, listening to the silence. I do not know what I could have done, but I wish I had known then what I know now.
She turns on her side to look at him. He is awake, watching her. She smiles at him.
‘I’m glad you’re home, Non,’ he says.
Something has happened. Something has changed while she was away in Aberystwyth. She had sensed it yesterday. Davey has not lain with her like this since he told her he was not fit to be her husband. She is almost afraid to speak in case the moment vanishes like one of the perfect little worlds inside Osian’s soap bubbles. She is filled with gladness. She does not want to be anywhere else. This is where she belongs. This is her place.
‘This business of your medicine . . . Are you sure it’s safe? Cutting your drops down like that after taking them all your life? Are you sure you wouldn’t like to see another doctor?’
She rests her hand on his shoulder as he talks to her, and he puts his own hand over hers, the callouses scraping her skin, his palm like the sandpaper he uses every day. And she feels as she did the very first time he touched her.
‘I feel better already, I’m sure of it. I’m cutting down on them very slowly, Davey.’
‘But, this doctor . . . He will write to you, will he? He will think about it all and say that what he told you was right?’
‘He said he would, and he seemed the kind of man to keep his word. I expect it takes him a while to do these tests in his laboratory that he was talking about.’
Davey shakes his head, ‘Sounds like magic, doesn’t it?’
‘I think it was Father who dealt in magic. Mr O’Neill seemed very . . . scientific.’
Davey squeezes her hand. ‘It’s difficult when the things we’ve been so certain about get knocked away.’
She wonders which certainties he is talking about: her father, Wil, Osian, old William Davies? Is it Angela? Or is there something she does not even know about yet? She waits in silence. The Sunday hush is broken by the sound of birdsong, the squeal of a door opening and shutting, somebody softly singing a hymn as the morning brightens.
‘What did you sell to get to London?’ Davey says. ‘I hope it wasn’t something you didn’t want to part with.’
He would know that she had no money unless she sold something. She should have realised that he would be anxious about how she had funded the trip when they were only just managing because of the money he gave to his mother every week. ‘Mother’s ring,’ she says. ‘To the pawn shop in Port. So I had a chance of getting it back.’
‘I thought it might be the ring,’ Davey says. ‘You shouldn�
�t have had to do that. I have managed to put a bit of money by, Non – in case of an emergency, you know, though I don’t know what sort of emergency . . .’ He pauses, as if it is a wonder to him.
As it is to Non. She is sure they never used to think there might be emergencies. She supposes it is the War that has made these changes in him, in them all. Davey saving! She moves her hand slightly under his. She can feel his pulse, the beat of his heart in his wrist, and feels tears threatening to overwhelm her. And I never used to be a cry baby, she thinks.
Davey tightens his hand over hers. ‘But we can use it to buy the ring back, Non. This counts as an emergency. And then . . . Do you think it would be as if I gave you the ring?’
Non nods. She does not know, she cannot imagine, what all this means. She listens to the comforting sounds of the day beginning outside their window.
‘And I’ve remembered . . . well, you know, Non, I don’t know why I thought I had all that nonsense with that nurse. I just can’t understand it. These last few days I’ve known more and more that it never happened. And it is such a relief, Non, to know that it didn’t – but why did I think it had?’
Non does not think Davey is expecting her to answer him. She waits for him to go on. The morning is rapidly becoming noisier. The crows roosting in the copse beside the farm across the road have started calling one another, their cries raucous and demanding.
‘See, Non . . .’ Davey shifts his position so that her arm is uncomfortable where it is and she slips it around his waist. And he does not pull away and pretend it is not there. ‘See, I’ve been trying to puzzle it out. She looked a bit like Grace, the nurse. But I don’t think that was what gave me these . . . well, these false certainties. Because – and I never said this to you before, Non, and I don’t really know if I should now – but I knew even before Wil was born that I’d made a mistake marrying Grace. So did I dream this nurse thing? Or was it the gas – the gas was bad, Non – or, there was an attack on our trench. Maybe I got a knock on the head or something. I don’t know, I can’t remember. I think I’ve forgotten a lot of things, Non. But it has upset me so much, thinking I had been untrue to you.’
Dead Man's Embers Page 18