by Tom Bullough
“Oh?” Idris came to the hind leg, went easy on a scratch and stood back, checking for flaws in the gloss.
“So I do hear.” His brother cleared his throat and waited. “Well, boy, I know you shanna part with the Welfrey, and that’s fair enough, like. She is your place. I shanna say no more about it, but…Fact is, boy, the two of us, we is neither of us getting no younger, and I did come to thinking we should talk about the future.”
“Oh?” Idris repeated. He picked the hairs from the comb and turned to Blaze. “Well. It is dinner time for me, it is. I’ll have my food on the table, I expect.”
“Fact is, boy,” Ivor persisted, “the old world is changing. Them old places like the Welfrey—you canna live on them no more. In’t no farmer as can live on thirty acre, not on this ground, and Cwmpiban, well, she is seventy-six and that’s no size of farm neither, let’s be honest. Now, I dunna mean to call young Oliver. He is a regular lushington from what I hears, but fair’s fair, my own boys has done their bit of boying, and we done our bit and all—”
“Drinking,” said Idris, “is no joking matter.”
“Nor it is, nor it is. Don’t get me wrong. What you done, taking in the boy, it was an act of charity, I sees that now. Michael Evans’s father was a cousin for Mam, and if your own family goes throwing its girls on the blasted state, well, it is a sorry business, it is indeed. Young Oliver, he is a fair larper—you done the boy proud, like—but let’s face it now, he binna no Hamer. And the Funnon, she is a Hamer farm. She’s been a Hamer farm these seven generations, and more besides I shouldna wonder. You and I, well…I dunna like to get the law involved, no more than you do. You’ll say you’re the oldest—you’ve told me that plenty—and I’ll say by rights as a half of her is mine—”
“So you do think.”
“I hanna come to go back there, Idris.” Ivor lifted his hands. “It do hardly matter now, in any case. Fact is, one of these days, you and I, we shall be slipping along and the Funnon, she’ll be coming to one of my lads—that’s just the way of things, in’t it? And the way it seems to me, it would be a sight easier on all of us if we was rubbing along. Mervyn here, like, he is a good strong boy. With Oliver off on the railway and so forth, it would be no trouble on him to lend the odd hand, do a bit of work with the tractor perhaps, get to know the old place. Old Albert, he’ll be tight on seventy I doubt, and it has been an unkind winter. He’d be thankful for the help, I should imagine. And Mervyn, well, he is just next-door with Ruth and their two little girls…”
Beyond the watching dogs and the quarrelling rooks, the valley was quiet, as it had been for weeks. A ewe in the Bottom Field called to her lamb and at once fell silent, as if daunted by the noise. A dog at Cwmpiban was barking at its echo. Idris went easy on Blaze’s hock, inspected his work, then hung up the comb. He slung the harness over his shoulder and turned towards the door and the house, trying to ward off another bout of coughing, dragging the thick stable air between his lips. In the yard a drizzle was beginning to fall, shimmering in the miniature puddles of the hoof marks. As he passed the two men, one of the hens gave a sudden squawk, her chicks running to hide in her feathers, and Mervyn lifted his great, bald head, screwing up his eyes to scan the sky for the sparrowhawk.
—
IF THE RAILS had gone and no more than the impressions of the ties still jarred beneath the wheels of Oliver’s bicycle, then Erwood Station did not appear to have noticed. It sat as ever between the gaping river and the nose of the hill where the electric poles stood in silhouette. The flowerbeds were bright with geraniums and wallflowers. The pond in the down-platform sparkled with the drizzle, distorting the circling goldfish. Dismounting by the white gate for the car park, he dragged himself limping past the ticket office, with its rain-streaked advertisements for Van Houten’s Cocoa and seaside resorts where the sun seemed always to shine. He moved from the gas lamp to the station sign to the fence around the grand new plot of dahlias his grandmother had planted to supplement her pension, and knobbled at the door of the small, square house whose gutter ran level with his eyes.
“Olly…” Molly appeared on the doormat.
“It’s not what it looks, Nana.”
“Michael! Michael, get you here!”
His grandfather propped himself beneath his arm, wheezing as they stumbled down the hall to the sitting room, where the fire was glowing in its arch of tiles, between the scuttle and the stand of tools, and the wireless was chattering on the windowsill.
“Get the kettle on, Michael, don’t just stand there!”
“Edward Hughes,” said Oliver. He fell into an armchair.
“What’s that?”
“Edward Hughes. He’s dead, he is.”
His grandmother knew the boy, of course. She knew everybody, as she must have in the past: Edward’s parents and grandparents, their friends and neighbours. She even knew the demolition gang, who had come through here a fortnight earlier, Oliver among them, hoisting the rails aboard the train with displays of efficiency normally reserved for the management. She had had them sat in a line along the platform, drinking her tea and eating her cake.
Oliver saw the blood on his swaddled hands, then the patchwork upholstery, and attempted to rise.
“Covers’ll wash, boy…”
“We been up and down the bank the entire morning.” His voice sounded thin, almost child-like. “Right down to Glanwye. He never come up!”
“Whatever’s happened, love.” Molly sat down beside him with white, gathered eyebrows and started to unwrap the bandage round his head. “Whatever’s happened I’m sure it’s not your fault. I’m sure you were just doing what you were told.”
It all seemed so simple, life at the station. There were no fields, no animals, no hostile neighbours. There were net curtains patterning the view of the river. There were daffodils in a vase on the piano. There was a photograph on the mantelpiece of Oliver’s mother—a girl in a swimsuit on a sun-bleached beach—and another of himself on yellowing paper with his fists held tight to his chest.
Molly inhaled sharply, peering at his temple. “That is some kind of gash, boy,” she said. “Do you want for me to call an ambulance, do you?”
“There was one at the bridge, Nana. It was them patched me up.”
“I’ll say it wants stitches.”
“And they did…Can you do it, can you?”
“Olly, it in’t exactly embroidery.”
“I shall find you some clothes, lad,” said his grandfather, returning from the kitchen with a cup on the ledge of his belly.
Oliver waited for the iodine whose metal stink was filling the room. He clamped his teeth and closed his eyes until his grandmother tied a fresh dressing round his forehead, and he did not resist as, with thin, bent fingers, she worked on the buttons of his sodden shirt.
She glanced from his face to the chaos of his chest: the overlaid bruises in the shadowing hair, violet fading to yellowish green.
“Jesus, boy…” she said. “What the hell have you been doing to yourself?”
“I’m all bruises today, I am, Nana,” he said, and felt himself starting to cry.
—
AS ETTY LEFT the landing the door’s wedge of shadow gave way in front of her, sending the candle flame ducking and spitting. The door frame spread until the bedroom was lit—the shape of the four-poster shivering on the walls where the damp paper rippled and, in one place, looped back to the floor. She set the tray on the bedside chair, although she could see that Oliver was asleep, and she stood looking down at the extent of his body, his ankles protruding from the railway overalls beyond the end of the mattress. As the candle settled, the lip of the pillowcase made a shadow across the bruises in his cheek and the crown of a bandage round his pollard-like hair. He was at once a man who smelt of antiseptic and cigarettes, and her baby, afflicted by his size, by forces she had tried to control and could not. Had she the strength, she would have gathered him up and held him all night in her arms.
Kee
ping to the rug, where her footsteps were softer, Etty untied the knots on his steel-toed boots and set them together on the floorboards. She opened the chest in the cupboard above the stairs and, peeling off the newspaper, shook out a couple of mothball-stinking blankets, which she wrapped round his feet and lay over his shoulders. She hesitated in the moving light, the shadows alive again on the wallpaper. She watched him breathe, his one hand clenching inside its dressings, then she kissed him lightly on his unbruised cheek, picked up the cup and went to close the curtains.
There was condensation on the window: a dingle of drops at the foot of each pane. Etty pushed back the skin of the cocoa, which itself made a few pale streaks on the glass, and drank and looked past the white-peeling bars at the black-roofed barn, the hills and the retreating valley. The drizzle had passed. The clouds had parted and dwindled into scraps. A narrow moon stood almost overhead. The stars decked the sky with their ploughs, bulls and gods—shapes, as a girl, she had defined herself as a friend doing a cartwheel, a kite with a tail of glittering bows—then, all of a sudden, there were stars on the ground. There it was at last, the electric. With envy, with wonder, she watched the bare white lights, which multiplied as the minutes progressed and the car horns called like dogs between the farms, until every contour the length of the valley had a constellation of its own.
MARTIN UNPICKED THE knots in the tobacco and pressed it into the bowl of his pipe, holding the stem with his teeth as he searched for matches among the nails, the bits of string and straw in the pockets of his old wax jacket. In the sun against the wall a lean young collie named Turk uncurled, got to its feet and looked down the deep, even furrows in the common, past the gulls and peewits hopping and squalling, to the place where the hill dropped out of sight. At a far-off roar, its ears became pyramids. It turned in a circle and lay back down, while the other dog, Nell, raised a half-interested eyelid to the sunlight splaying from the variegated clouds, to the luminous pools that slipped down the valley, across the green shoots of oats on the opposite hillside and the hedgerows white with hawthorn blossom.
There was smoke beyond his own, then a chimney and a pair of close-set headlamps. As the wheels appeared in the bracken, Martin saw for a moment clean beneath the tractor.
“How do, Prof?” called the farmer, turning on the unploughed stretch at his feet. “I didna know you was back.”
Oliver Hamer was something to see. Five years earlier, when Martin first wound up the A470, following the advert, up the River Edw to this corner in the hills where the road ran out, he had wondered how such a man could possibly have sprouted from so unforgiving a place. He was tall like himself, but where Martin was wide-hipped, his pale hair fine and thinning at the crown, Oliver was grand and swarthy—and swarthier still as the spring progressed. He liked to think that he was some ancestral throwback, some peat-soaked relic of the settlers of this forgotten valley.
“We came down last night, Oliver,” he said.
“Friend’s with you, is he?”
“Jonathan? Yes.”
Oliver dropped from his seat to the ground, frowning at some flaw in his work that Martin was unable to perceive. He came across the bank with the dogs at his feet and his raven on his shoulder—his big chest trying the buttons of his shirt, long veins scrolling from his rolled-up sleeves. His smells were earth and oil and animals.
“Well,” he said, considering the sky. “You picked a fair old week for it.”
“Such was my thinking.”
“Holidays already, is it?”
“I did a bit of juggling, that’s all.” Martin wiped his glasses, positioning them again on his nose. “I have to say, Oliver, it never ceases to amaze me how the Welfrey catches the sun. And the wind goes right over. The bees can’t get enough of it. I was thinking I might put up a small greenhouse, with your permission—see if I can’t grow some grapes.”
“Them old boys knew where to put a house.”
“Indeed they did.”
“What am I moithering about?” Oliver laughed. “If they’d known a damn thing they’d have stuck him down the bottom!”
“So, you’re ploughing the bank, then?”
“I’m spoiling the scenery, I’m sorry to say, but it spares us the forestry. I cannot abide them bloody plantations. Full up of foxes besides anything else.”
“This would all have been forested, of course, once upon a time.”
“Not with bloody larches, it wouldn’t.”
“True.”
“Elms, I do believe.”
“Elms,” Martin agreed. “And oaks and birches. They were cut down, for the most part, in the late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age. Many of the other species were planted. That’s why you tend to see certain trees near old houses. Beeches were supposed to protect against lightning. Elders were supposed to ward off witches.”
“You wanna have a word with Albert, you do.” The farmer cupped a few oats in his hand, a dome of muscle in the crook of his arm. “Right one for that old squit, he is. And he seen the roots of the old trees. They’d rise them up the mawn pools when he was a boy.”
“Is that a fact?”
The birds were clearing from the last of the furrows, returning to the ground they had already perused. Through the mumbling of the tractor, the breeze brought the momentary tacking of a whinchat, the calls of the lambs in the fields above them and the fields three hundred feet below. At a noise that Martin had not noticed, Oliver dipped his eyes to Turley Wood—its oaks tinged golden, as if foreshadowing autumn—and a small blue van, climbing the track to the Funnon. Only once or twice had Martin seen the change that could come over his landlord’s son. For a year at least he had been convinced that the stories he heard in the post office and the Awlman’s Arms were nothing more than malicious gossip—despite the deep crescent scar in his temple, his two absent teeth and the kink in the bridge of his nose. But now again he saw the man’s face close, his eyebrows fall, his jaw come forwards like the chinpiece of a suit of armour.
—
THE SUNLIGHT CUT Builth High Street on the diagonal, casting the shapes of chimney pots and television aerials across the Fountain Inn, where Griffin the Pant was installed on the pavement with Tom Llanowen and George Gilfach. He lifted his cap in a jovial greeting. Beyond the cars and the Land Rovers stood along the north side, a man was harrying his cattle away from the Smithfield—trailed by flies and a couple of tractors, whose drivers paused by the clecking men between the Lamb and the barbers. Weaving among them, Etty and Nancy Llanedw held their willow baskets to their chests, heavy with sugar, currants and raisins, Typhoo tea and yeast for the baking. They passed beneath the awnings of the shops and the tea rooms, and the May Fair bunting—their long skirts jangling with the coins they had earned from the sale of their eggs and bright yellow butter at the table they shared in the market hall.
“Spain!” said Nancy.
“Never!”
“Alice, she is all about in her head. You never seen a girl so excited! Well, I did say, and John said too, we said they should spend their money on getting themselves started, but everyone else gets a honeymoon, they say, and, well, it is Spain, in’t it?”
“Spain…” Etty echoed.
“I’m only sorry as they canna get married in the chapel. It were always so handy for Llanedw, like. When Bridget married Harry, oh, that were lovely, but Trevaughan are church in any case, and Llanbadarn Church is a fine little place.”
“Give us the lend of a grandchild, will you?”
“We shall have them to spare, I cannot deny it…” Nancy hesitated. “That Annette Mills in’t a keeper, then?”
They followed a gang of Cregrina women through the kissing-gate into a field of a graveyard where the great, squat tower of St. Mary’s Church stood red-hued over the circling yew trees. The grass had not been cut since the fair, and the ground between the headstones was white with daisies.
Etty stopped in the path.
“Oh!” said Nancy. “There’s lovely!
”
The organ reached them across an angle of paving stones: a music so rich that, for all her Sundays in the corner of the chapel, Etty could not remember the like. It seemed as grand as the church itself, whose walls here seemed suddenly, giddyingly tall, with their windows alight in the warm, full sunshine and a cross on every gable.
“Come on!” Nancy grinned and turned from the path.
“Oh…No.”
“Well, you can stop here if you likes.”
“There is the bus, Nance.”
“She’ll wait a while yet, girl! Get along with me now. What’s gonna happen, eh? It’s not like Idris is even in town.”
Etty followed her uncertainly through the tall, pointed door at the foot of the tower into the cool church air, where Nancy set down her basket and walked boldly across the long red carpet that led around the back of the pews. Except for the organist, who must have been concealed somewhere beyond the pulpit, the wrought-iron screen and the plumes of peonies and sunflowers, the building was empty. The music here surrounded her, so that it might not have come from an instrument at all but have emanated somehow from the sheer white walls and the dark beams arching at the height of the barn and perhaps that height again. It spilled and unfurled, with moments when the right hand alone darted forwards, moments when the left jumped out and went playing around it until the tune was remade and the two hands spun over the deep notes of the pedalboard, as if dancing together across the flagstones. Etty waited for the verse to repeat, but instead the music found fresh ways to build, to ascend, to renew itself. Slowly, her basket clutched against her shawl, she joined her friend in the aisle and peered around the column at the mouth of the chancel at a skein of pipes reaching almost to the roof and an ancient, lop-eared man, who sat hunched above three banks of keys, between stops more numerous than she could count.
—
IDRIS WAS IN the pond when the van arrived, straddling Hanoch, dragging a post through the brown, milling water and the shadows of the overhanging elms. He knew the note of the engine, and the date, and he gave no heed to the geese on the banks nor old Jess yawping from the shade of the whilcar, which had lost its snout and gained a coupling and was now no better than a trailer. He rode a steady circle, keeping the reins short, and as the water purled down the troughing towards the chain-harrowed, manure-skithed slope of the Banky Piece he spoke soothingly to the tare young cob and barked instructions to Albert, who was hobbling between the sluices at the top of the field.