by Tom Bullough
“Have you done your homework, Olly?”
“I done it on the train, Mam.”
“Get you round the lambs!” Idris barked.
“Hop back on your bike if you would, please, Olly. You know the doctor’s number, don’t you? There’s pennies in the pot on the mantelpiece.”
As Oliver hung the fountain from the swye, Molly sank into a chair by the fire and took the bottle in a thin, crabbed hand to feed one of the tiddlers wailing in the basket.
“Lambs!” Idris repeated, and started to cough.
“Idris!” Etty dropped the flannel in the steaming bowl. Among the shivering shadows of the washing, her hair was loose, her cheeks were pale. “If you do not let me wash you I shall just go off round the lambs myself. I have quite enough to be getting along with until I have found us a boy—”
“Boy?” said Idris. “Boy?”
“You heard me.”
“Has you lost your mind, woman? It is lambing, if you had not noticed! In any case, there is a larp of a boy right here!”
“Oliver has his O-levels in a month, as you very well know.”
“You squeeze your ears against your head now, woman. This is my farm! I shanna waste one single shilling on no blasted boy, so you can rid yourself of that idea for starters.”
“Idris.” Etty had still not moved. “The situation is quite simple. I do the books. I know what’s what. There is a little money put by for an emergency, and that I shall spend on a boy to work with Albert until you are back on your feet. If you think you’re going to wreck my son’s education because you cannot be bothered to look where you’re going—”
“Are you listening to me, are you?”
“It is that or I sell something.”
“Oh! Well! What you going to sell, then?”
“Well, the Welfrey is no blasted use—”
“The Welfrey is mine! That money is mine! You canna do nothing without my say-so!”
“Oliver is going to school. That’s my final word.”
“And mine and all,” said Molly.
“The day I hears your final word, Mrs. Evans—”
“Don’t you dare talk to my mother like that!”
Oliver stood uncertainly at the fireplace, still in his school clothes, the penny beginning to sweat in his hand. He watched his grandmother set down the bottle, fixing Idris with her sharp blue eyes.
“Now look you here, Mr. Hamer,” she said.
“Mother, I am handling this!”
“That boy goes to school—”
“Or what?”
“Mother!”
“Do you want for me to spell it out, do you? I should like to see you manage without us, I should! You and your broken leg!”
“Oh!” Idris pulled himself almost upright, moaning as his foot dragged over the flagstones. He wiped one hand on the tail of his shirt, pushed the hairs back onto his head and opened his lips on his brown-white teeth, which tapered back to the root. “Well. Where you going to go then, Mrs. Evans? You answer me that, can you?”
—
IT WAS NORMALLY the geese that heralded a visitor: the geese then the dogs, which refined their cries with calls of greeting or warning. Through the chaos of voices that Wednesday evening, Etty heard the popping and the clatter of a car. She turned down the volume on her little plastic wireless, listening closely, and although the dogs did not seem to know the driver she filled the kettle at the butt in the larder and hung it from its notch above the fire. She emptied the last of the loaves onto the table, piled the next week’s sticks in the bread oven, then closed the latch and removed her apron—brushing the flour from her spare, red hands.
“Well,” said Idris, through the boards of the ceiling. “If it’s not Michael Evans.”
Etty froze near the end of the hall, on the mat between the thin, grey windows.
“Good evening, Idris.” Her father’s voice was low and hesitant. “I didn’t…Well—”
“What are you upon, boy?”
“I was…hoping to see my wife, I was.”
“In your cups, is it?”
“I have stopped all that, Idris.”
“Oh?”
“Six year now. I’ve not had a drop.”
Second cousins as the two of them were, Etty could see some trace of her husband in her father’s face—in his shelving eyebrows, in the verticality of his flushed, heavy cheeks, which had fallen into jowls in the seventeen years since she had last seen him close to. In her old, patched skirt and the lumpish cardigan she had knitted in the winter, she stood on the step beneath the open window where Idris was keeping his invalid’s vigil, his electric torch on her father’s head. His hair had retreated to a red-grey arch.
“Hello, Etty girl…” he said.
He approached the bridge through the darkening drizzle, carrying a pair of cardboard boxes.
“And what do you want?”
“I…wanted to see you, girl. You and your mother. I brung presents for the both of you.”
“You’ll get from here if you know what’s good for you!”
“Please, Etty.” He held one of the boxes between his knees, opened the other and held up a dress—low-cut, red with a black polka dot. It spread from the belt and shone in the cone of the torchlight. “I did ask Oliver what he thought you would like. I…I seen him at the station, down in Aberedw. It was me found him. It is not his fault…It is your size, I think, but I can always have it changed?”
“And just what the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
Etty’s voice had cracked in spite of her efforts. She turned her head to conceal her eyes, and at the top of the yard she saw her mother: her face like tallow even in the twilight, her walking sticks like additional legs. She was staring back down the slope towards them, tiny-looking beside her grandson and the towering trees that surrounded the churchyard—the knots of their rookery black against the louring sky.
—
CROSSING THE TACK field on Saturday morning, three days later, Oliver could see a line beside him, extending through the dew all the way to the riverbank: a seam in the air where the light was thin and rainbows blinked and went out of being. It stopped when he stopped, lying motionless as the dogs at his feet, forty-five degrees precisely off his shadow, but the moment he moved it was dancing again—teeming at the far edge of his vision.
It had occurred to Oliver more than once that if Philip was looking for his grand, golden land he had no need to travel further than Llyswen: the tack, where the yearlings had their winter grazing. The house at the Dderw was palatial, pink enough to be bejewelled. The earth was, indeed, red where it was ploughed, and in places, in the banks of the Wye’s first meander, you could see its depths, the layers that made the place: not the frail grey shale of Rhyscog but half-inch on half-inch of glorious soil with, far beneath, a firm red sandstone, like the bridge across the flem at the Funnon: the long, old stone which Idris had unearthed once on Llanbedr Hill. Oliver had been to his Geography lessons. He knew about flooding and silt deposition, about river cliffs and slip-off slopes, but the farming he knew was the farming of the hills and this abundance made his eyes swim.
“Get away by, Jess!” he called. “Go round, Blackie! Bring them on now! Bring them on!”
The grass in the valley was greener, brighter. Already the trees were embracing spring: the wych elms were matted with red-purple blossom and the sallies were so thick with yellow-green pussies that from a distance they seemed to be leaves. As he closed the gate and followed the sheep out of their field, back over the railway embankment, he saw cowslips, sheep’s sorrel and, among the blackened patches where the sparks from the train had caught, a bulbous flower with sprawling yellow petals, which he did not know and picked and stowed in his pocket.
The railway bridge was grand and ancient: a box of girders that stretched across the river to the bramble-tied cliff and the sun-glinting windows of the school and the houses of Boughrood. Pausing again at the top of the embankment, Oliver
watched the sheep crowding into the next field, then whistled at the dogs to lie down. He trod carefully from tie to tie, above the few loose plates not stolen by the wind, and once he could see the water beneath him he straddled one of the glistening rails and let his legs swing loose in the air. His grandfather, by now, would have taken his grandmother off on her day-trip. Where that might lead, what it all might mean, he could hardly bear to think. Its uncertainty hung in him, cold and tremulous. He had three Navy Cut left in his packet. He balanced with his boots as he struck a match, smoking, watching the rocks and the currents until the blood in his ears became so loud that he was forced to close his eyes.
—
“LLANGODEE,” SAID IDRIS. “Black House. Gwarallt. Gilfach. Blaenhow…Cloggau?” He lifted his hand. “Cloggau.”
He turned to yet another list of farms, with their earmarks cut from the page beside them so that its edge resembled lace. Many of the places he had never even seen—farms out for Eardisley, Rhayader and Kington—but for decades he had been watching their stock, recording here and in the books on the counterpane these hundreds of minutely different slits and notches, the names of sales, buyers and lot numbers. This was the knowledge that allowed you to survive, not the doddle you were told in a classroom. Had he wished, he could have traced the bloodline of almost any sheep within fifteen miles, as like as not through forty generations.
“Fforest Farm. Graig-yr-onen…Vron.”
With his right leg in plaster, sloping to the ceiling, Idris had to struggle to twist himself sideways, to open the window with the hook of his crook and peer down into the yard. Albert he could see quite plainly from his pillow, sowing the oats in the Sideland Field now that the frost and the old moon were gone, but to see Ethel in the pen by the barn took all of the muscles in his stomach. There she was with a drooling ewe, making an incision in the short head wool, holding the syringe with a nurse’s care to draw out the tapeworm and its bladder of eggs.
He had warned her against that beethy hay.
With a sigh Idris fell back onto the bed and looked at the wall above him, its flower-tangled paper, the verse from Galatians embroidered by his mother—fruit trees following its wandering border. In the yard his wife was singing softly; she must have completed the operation. It was a song he remembered clearly from the wireless, back in the war when he still lived alone: something about swallows and choirs and mission bells, which was, in truth, better suited to her voice than the stridency of hymns. Perhaps, he found himself admitting, it would have suited him better as well. The recording he remembered was performed by a quartet, with the lead a fine, slightly quavering tenor, and although Ethel was singing almost to herself she gave the song that same precision and restraint—the delicacy and lightness she brought to the piano and the organ. As she passed beneath the window he murmured himself the long, minor notes of the backing chorus, pausing when she paused, following her timing, until she faded with the corner of the barn and he picked up the book and turned another page.
“Stowe,” he said. “Ton Farm. Brilley Court.”
—
THERE WERE SKYLARKS, invisible in the bare, blue air, their wild songs tumbling in conflicting time. There were buzzards flirting, spiralling in the sunlight, and humming cars on the striped main road, which Oliver had been annoying for the long two miles between the bridges at Llanstephan and Erwood. From Glannau Pool, the sheep pressed on through the heather of Llanbedr Hill and, crossing the track from Troesyglowty to Llanbwchllyn Lake, passed the grave of Twm Tobacco: a highwayman, so the story went, who had been hung, drawn and quartered for murdering a farmer, then buried at these crossroads, since none of the local churches would have him. If Oliver had learnt from his mother the birds and animals, the plants and trees, then Idris had at least taught him the places—if only with a word or phrase. He had shown him, by example, that you should always leave a pebble here. Oliver dug one out of his pocket, and stood by the grave for a moment or two, his hand on his chest, while the dogs coused on towards the crumbling cliffs—Garreg Lwyd and Craig-y-Fuddal—where a cousin for Maureen showed his belly to the sky and righted with a satisfied honk.
Yearlings as they were, the sheep knew their patch of the common. They had been here as lambs, the previous summer, and they started to hurry as they sensed its proximity—spilling over the wether-shorn contours, past occasional wind-shaped hawthorns, until they came to the fences for the Island and began to disperse among the quarries.
“Go back! Go back! Go back!” called a grouse, rising red out of the heather.
Oliver sat against the fence of the New Field and ate his bait, flicking a crust or two to the dogs, which returned, low and wagging, seeking out his hand with their noses. There were Funnon sheep grazing the new grass at the Welfrey. In the valley Albert was working his way across the Sideland Field, the hopper on his shoulder, throwing out arc after arc of grain—as ragged as the bwgan in its old hat and coat, which did nothing discernible to scare off the crows. At Cwmpiban a brown Ford Popular was parked in the yard, by the front door of the house. Mervyn was ploughing a field that, to Oliver’s knowledge, he and his father had never ploughed before—the sunlight bright on his big, bald head and the long green bonnet of his tractor. He remembered Griffin’s clecking at the chapel. As he watched, he saw Ruth appear with a basket and follow the grass around the lines of the hedgerows until the two of them met among the furrows.
—
ONCE, AT THE age of five or six, Etty had crept to the privy at Erwood School. The rules among the children were as rigid as the hierarchy. To use the cabs, as they called them, for more than a wee was unthinkable, and yet, without any particular need, she had sat herself on that chill wooden seat—so tense, so alert to voices or footsteps, that she barely allowed herself to breathe. She had that feeling now as she stood in the kitchen, pulled down her skirt, unbuttoned her blouse then peeled off her slip and even her bra and her drawers. The draught from the larder passed over her shoulders, the ingress of her back, her buttocks and close-held legs. The fire mapped her downturned face, her breasts, her stomach rounded only by children, the red hair at the join of her thighs. Although her mother and her son were away, she was trembling as she opened the box—counting to ten once, and again, before she pulled the dress over her head and felt its cool silk arrange itself around her.
“Ethel!” Idris called from the bedroom. “Ethel! How about some dinner, woman?”
Etty heard the rustle as she moved her hips. She looked at the straps on her thin, freckled shoulders and was pleased to see a groove just emerging from the neckline, which, by closing the belt, she was able almost to double in length. She thought about fetching her Sunday heels, which Idris had bought her along with her dress, one improbable day in Builth Wells, but better bare feet than to make any sound. Opening her drawer in the bread-and-cheese cupboard, she dug beneath the books and the photographs, took out the dog tag and tied it round her neck. Then, noiselessly, she glided down the hall to the parlour and stood before the panes of the tall sash window. In the yard there were goslings and filing kittens. Chicks were scurrying after their mothers, yellow in the full, warm sunshine. Etty felt the hardness of her feet and her fingers, the scrawling, uncomfortable veins in her calves, but still, in the reflection, it was a girl she saw: full-haired, straight-backed, with the name of a soldier hanging at her throat as if the father of her son might suddenly appear, begging pardon for these seventeen years.
—
THE VW BEETLE had not long returned when a candle appeared in the window of the church—squeezed between the trunks of the sycamores, faint beneath the waxing moon. In the kitchen Oliver completed a long-division exercise, checked his calculations and added it to the pile to be sent to his teachers. He set the next one in the space on the table, but the meaning of the numbers was gone. Years must have passed since his grandmother had last used this signal. There had been a time, when the two of them were allies, when it was usual for him to creep out of the back door an
d huddle together with her in a blanket. Now, he had been working since six that morning. He was too worn out to go hiding from Idris, and he waited only for Maureen to scale his arm, clicking her beak when she reached his shoulder, before he clumped his way down the hall to the yard and climbed towards the Bryngwyn track—the torch in the window throwing a shadow in front of them.
“How do, Nana?” he said. “Grandad?”
With only the candle, deep in the socket of the window, the half-ruined church was almost as dark as the churchyard. The cross made an elongated shape on the altar, but the bulk of the pews showed only their backs, and the door of the vestry where the bats went to roost was lost in the blackness of its wall.
His grandparents were hunched at the front—each confirming the age of the other.
“How are you, Oliver?” asked his grandfather.
“Where’d you two go, then?” Oliver sat down across the aisle, trying to force some cheer into his voice.
“Llangorse Lake,” said Molly.
“Is it?”
“We hired a boat…We’d go there a lot, see? Me and Michael.”
“I’ll have seen you from the hill.”
“Keeping up a fair old pace, we were. Blink and you’d miss us!” She smiled momentarily.
“We was wanting to talk to you, boy,” said his grandfather.
“What’s going on, Olly? Are you working here again next week?”
“Well. I expect.”
“What does Etty say?”
“Not a lot she can say, is there?”
“Olly…” Molly looked past the collars of her new fur coat at the bats’ lozenge droppings and the grass and nettles that were sprouting between the flagstones. She watched Maureen pace on the back of Oliver’s pew, then lifted her eyes to his face. “Things has changed, they have. The two of us, we’ve been talking today and, well, the way I sees it it’s been a good long while since I was any sort of use round here. A burden I’ve become, that’s the honest truth—”
Suddenly the two of them were talking at once.
“I’ve been bad on you, boy,” said his grandfather. “I know I have. You and your mother and your grandmother, all of you—”