by Tom Bullough
“I didna see you in court,” Ivor began.
Idris ignored him.
“Do you wanna know what come of it?”
With the turning horse, his brother appeared among the ruts by the gate—Mervyn behind him like a grotesque shadow.
“Well,” said Ivor, “I shall tell you what come of it, and I has no obligation in law so I shall deem it a favour. This farm is ours, mine and yours. Half the ground is mine and half of the house and all. So, I shall be taking a half of the mortgage, and I could be quibbling about that, so says the solicitor. We has drawn up an agreement as you will be signing. Since I have no plans to be sharing your roof, and I dunna suppose as you’ll be wanting to move, I shall be taking on the greater portion of the fields. If you wanna sell the house we shall make the arrangements, but as things stand we shall be cutting gates to the Long Field and the Crooked Slang and boodging yours in the Tumpy Field, the Bog Field and the Sideland. Them in between, them is ours.”
“Far sluice, Albert!” Idris called.
“You has the right to appeal, you do, but I’ll tell you now, them fees is no bargain and it shanna make no difference in any case. All I can say is you wanna be thankful I in’t putting you over the door and the whole place up for auction, which would, I imagine, put a fair penny back in the pocket of the bank and not very much in yours.”
Finally, Idris drew on the reins. He rounded the cob and glowered across the settling water, the beast-trodden mud and the marsh marigolds tucked among the roots of the trees. The sun was glancing from the surface of the pond; its rippling light ascended the trunks. His brother, he saw, had cropped his hair. Keen-eyed, he was smewling back at him—his thin lips arching over spare brown teeth.
“Now, look you here,” he said.
“You canna say as I give you no chances!”
“If one of your creatures sets foot on my farm—”
“You can think what you likes, boy.”
“I shall shoot the dankering thing where it stands!”
“I has the law, I do! The boss died intestate, so—”
“You parasite bugger! You shame on the name!” Fighting his breath, Idris kicked on the stirrups and tushed the post up onto the bank. “I is counting to ten, you stop-at-home sod, and if you hanna—”
“Oh! Rowsel all that up, would you?” Ivor seized the bridle to hold the cob, which was snorting, pawing, trying to turn. “I wasna old enough to serve, as you very well know—”
“And that’s too good for you! Stop at home and make your prayers as neither of us comes back! I knows you!”
“By God, I’s a good mind—”
“I’s counting to ten, and if you dunna leave go of my horse and get from my yard, I swears to God—”
“Leave go the horse, boss!” said Mervyn.
Idris felt the blood in his face, the air once more draining out of his chest.
“I shall buy the bloody place outright!” Ivor shouted.
“Boss!”
There might have been a tourniquet round Idris’s body, crushing him until the pain itself was driven out of his chest, into an arm, his neck, his rising jaw. As Hanoch reared and he lost the saddle, he saw the hayfield beneath him, fertilizing nicely, the leaves of the elm trees—pointed, serrated, perfectly scored among the clusters of their disc-like fruits.
—
“BOSS?” SAID OLIVER.
“Dunna move him,” said Albert.
“Boss? You all right, boss?”
He had a fine voice, Oliver: low, almost bass, with none of the tendency to shrill of Idris’s own. It had long been his sorrow that the boy was unable to master a tune. Idris could not number the Sunday evenings when they had sat in the parlour with Ethel, her voice as pure, as lovely as she had seemed to him those first few times he had seen her at her market stall in Erwood, and the longing had come to him for one further harmony. He had always loved trios, their heady complexity, their intimation of infinity. It had been his ambition, he seemed to remember: a group to perform in the larger halls, perhaps with Oliver, his older brother, whose voice had been as deep as his namesake’s, perhaps with Phyllis Jones, who would have been his brother’s wife, had the world been just. His own Oliver had simply listened, turning the page at a nod from his mother. It was not his passion, but he had not complained. He was glad at least that he had been there. He would not have had it elsewise.
—
ETTY LEFT THE bus at Rhosei Cottage, where the driver turned west towards Aberedw, and Mrs. Price’s gander was hissing from the phone box—his tongue spearing orange from his beak. She lifted a hand to the vanishing women, took her basket in her arms and started up the pitch towards the Pant, between pink-speckled walls of hawthorn blossom and leaves almost emerald, promising summer. The sunlight parted over Aberedw Hill like the sun was hanging, kite-like, just above the clouds. The puffing, cycling call of a pigeon followed the plod of her old studded boots among the Clun-cross lambs as big as their mothers, the cowslips, buttercups and red bird’s eye that flooded the ditches with colour.
She was one bend short of the Cwmpiban turn when she heard the sound of an engine and moved to stand on the sloping verge—looking up to see a big yellow car only when she knew that it was not Mervyn’s van.
“Can I offer you a lift, Mrs. Hamer?” asked Dr. Tyler.
“What’s happened?” asked Etty, sharply.
“Your husband’s had a fall. I had a call from your son…He’s with us, don’t worry.” He leant to open the passenger door.
“Yes, Doctor. Thank you, Doctor.”
Etty had ridden in a car or two, thirty years earlier, but never in one with such commodious seats, an orchestra playing softly on the wireless and a bank of dials with little red needles to indicate who knew what. She sat very upright with her basket on her lap, rolling her aching shoulders discreetly while the doctor blew cigarette smoke from his beard and guided the long bonnet around the potholes, through Cwmberllan Ford, where the floor of the wood was radiant with bluebells.
“And have you noticed anything particular lately?” he asked.
“Not that I can think of, Doctor.” Etty tried to mimic his bettermost accent. “But, well, he is over seventy now, and he will work himself…”
There were house martins in the yard, darting and flickering among the insects in the rising air, diving on the puddles and creeping in the mud. They had a nest above her bedroom window, which some held to be good luck and others bad. The post and rope were abandoned by the pond. Hanoch was tethered loosely by the Plock, where the Fordson stood among the castrated lambs, its plough pointing back towards the orchard. After a moment of trying the handle, Etty allowed the doctor to open the passenger door and she led the way across the narrow bridge, waiting for him to rub his shoes on the doormat and then advance into the hall.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Hamer,” he said, brightly. “Albert. Oliver.”
“Good evening, Doctor,” Idris muttered.
“What can I do for you, then?”
“Well. I’m not the one to say.”
“Lungs been troubling you again, have they?”
“I expect.”
Idris, of course, was sitting in his chair, his hands on the arms, his eyes some degrees to their left. His breath was a croak in the stony darkness. When, at a glance and a nod from the doctor, Etty pressed the little plastic switch by the door and the bare, clean glare of the bulb filled the kitchen, she saw his face, which was pale as the hawthorns—sparks of sweat sliding down his forehead to gather in his white horn eyebrows. His trembling lips were pink with Gaviscon. Opening his case, Dr. Tyler pushed the cuff up his arm, worked the bulb and considered the reading on the sphygmometer. He uncoiled the stethoscope and knelt for some moments, but Etty had had her year of training; she knew the symptoms well enough.
“Well, Mr. Hamer.” Dr. Tyler returned to his feet. He spoke gently, precisely. “I’ll say you’ve had a heart attack. I’d like to get you to Hereford, soon as we can, just to k
eep an eye on things. I’ll take you there myself, if you like.”
There were cobwebs in the corners, marks and stains on the bald white walls that the oil lamp would never have revealed. There were the rings of cups on the tablecloth and pockets of dust between the flagstones and in the crevices of the pot dogs on the mantelpiece.
“Well,” said Idris. He blinked as the sweat ran into his eyes. “Thank you for coming, Doctor. Ethel, would you make the man a cup of tea, please?”
—
THERE WAS A laciness to that final furrow, an imprecision to its line that made Oliver grimace and blow the smoke from the side of his mouth into the reddening light of the Monday evening. He might, in fairness, have been ploughing a cliff, and in full view of the entire valley. Even riding up empty, climbing the bank back towards the Welfrey with the diff lock down and the plough held high, the big back wheels would spin the sun-dried ground. He could not stop himself leaning forwards, as he had in the trap—as if his weight might keep the Fordson from flipping onto its back.
The addlands at least were reasonably level. Lurching past the top of the reen, Oliver turned the tractor side-on to the slope, waiting for Maureen to hop from the mudguard to his shoulder before he collected the jug and the butter in its dock leaves from the cardboard box behind the handbrake. He waded to the gate through the crisp brown fern and the bowing heads of the new year’s crop. It had been his mother’s idea to put an advertisement in The Times. How she had known that there would be some quist who was willing to pay fifteen pound a month for this old place with its dubious spring, he struggled to imagine. It did not so much as have the electric, which Idris had finally allowed at the Funnon a couple of years before. Professor Chance was a comical sort, but his notes arrived with his every appearance and the Welfrey cottage had never looked so tidy—even in the days before Sarah died. Its face was painted a fresh, rich cream and its green-framed windows looked down upon rows of cabbages, carrots and potatoes as orderly as their own. Oliver passed the red MGB GT the professor somehow always wrestled up the track and, climbing the steps, looked back past the barn and his tractor at the long shadow leaning from Llanfraith Hill, the mountains tending faintly to the south and the clouds erupting pink at their edges. Whether it was the peace of the evening, or the whole bloody business with Ivor and the doctor, it took a word from behind him before he noticed that the door had already come open.
“Oh,” he said. “How do?”
“Hello, Oliver,” said Jonathan: a gangling youth whose relationship with the professor he thought it better not to explore. “I didn’t hear you knock.”
“I…dunno as I did, to be honest with you. I brung you your milk.”
“That’s very kind. Come in. Please.”
The changes wrought on the outside of the cottage were nothing to the changes in the kitchen. That chill March morning when Oliver and his mother had come up the hill to see if John wanted his horses back, there would have been more cause to wear boots inside than in the yard—what with the mud and the rat shit and the shotgun lying among the maggoty shreds of John’s brain on the flagstones. On the ceiling the stamps remained in their rows—the heads of Edward VII and the Georges, facing to the west: one for every letter John and Sarah had ever received. But now there were bookshelves to the height of the beams, and gold-framed paintings of forests and waterfalls in all of the intervening spaces. There were large, sagging armchairs arranged around the fire and a low table piled with newspapers and magazines. There was a typewriter on a desk at the window—a plump cat dozing among the geraniums and the binoculars on the sill.
“How are you, Sophocles?” said Oliver.
“Martin!” called Jonathan, turning for the stairs. “Do sit down, Oliver, won’t you?”
Oliver inspected the photographs hung around the mantelshelf, some of them in colour—the two men together in shorts in a city, a big-eyed, foal-legged girl on an overweight pony—then he selected an armchair and picked up that week’s paper while his raven made her way down his chest, stood on his knee and yawned.
“YOU TOO CAN RENT TV.”
“HOSPITAL CARNIVAL QUEEN.”
He admired the beaming girl, her neat white teeth and curtains of long, dark hair.
“Miss Annette Mills of Llanelwedd was chosen at a dance held at the Builth Wells Hospital—”
“Oliver! I do apologize…”
Oliver got quickly to his feet. Even dressed in a coat made out of a towel, his bare feet leaving prints on the floor, the professor reminded him of his old headmaster at the grammar school. In repose his face was a studious frown and, animated as he would often become, he always made Oliver feel that he should stand up straight.
“I didna mean to rise you from your bath, Prof.”
“No trouble. No trouble. Will you have a drink?”
“Well…”
“Everything’s all right at the Funnon, I hope? You set off rather briskly this afternoon.” He took two glasses and a bottle of his homemade cider from the corner cupboard.
“Well. I might take a drop.”
The professor waited for him to expand, but then retrieved his spectacles and turned to the window, gazing down towards Llanbadarn-y-Garreg, his pale hair wet and haloed by the sunset.
“I cannot tell you, Oliver,” he said, “what a relief it is to be back here. I tell my students about it, you know? That silence!”
—
IT WAS THE edge of night. The darkening light of the flaming clouds fell over the floorboards of the bedroom and the ridge of Idris’s legs beneath the counterpane, his head and shoulders hoisted up against the pillows, with his hands and Bible on his slowly lifting chest. Perhaps it was just some quality of the sunset, but as Etty sat the soup, the matches and the unlit candle on the bedside chair, it seemed to her that the furrows of her husband’s face had dwindled almost into invisibility—as if they had not, after all, been cut by time but had been the symptoms of a tension now suddenly released. Despite the band of hair he would insist on training over his scalp, he looked young, younger than she had ever known him. The light entered the caves of his eyes, revealing them to be not so much black as brown, with rays like a cross-cut oak.
“May,” he murmured.
“She’s the only month,” said Etty. “How…how are you feeling?”
“Pretty ordinary, girl, to be honest with you.”
“I brung you some dinner.”
“So I do smell.”
“Do you want me to help you?”
“Might be for the best.”
Etty perched on the side of the bed. She filled the spoon, the pork fat glistening on the meniscus, and emptied it carefully into his mouth. He swallowed with an effort and his breath became hesitant—the lines returning briefly to his cheeks.
“I dunno…” he said.
“It will keep. I can bring it up again later.” She replaced the spoon on the tray, but felt for once that it would be wrong to leave and followed his eyes to the bedroom window: the shadow-flooded valley, a martin still busying over the yard. “It must have been terrible,” she ventured, eventually. “To be gassed.”
He nodded slowly. She did not move.
“The gas was the least of it, girl, to be honest. I dunno. You thinks on times as you’s made it all up. The bombs and the aeroplanes and the shells and the bullets. You canna think as there could have been so many. Why would they trouble, like?” He paused to breathe, a tremor in his jaw. “Me and Oliver, we was there. And Albert. We was with our own, like. Better for morale, I suppose it were, that manner of thing, though Oliver, he’d volunteered a year before me. Two year perhaps it were? Two year older than me, my brother…” He paused again. “The rain, mind. I tell you. Never stopped, it did. Just raining pouring, all day, all night. With the mud and all, it was all you could do to blasted walk, and there we was, trying to get back to the line. Then there were this pillbox, see? He opens up with his blasted machine gun. Like hail it were, all spitting from the puddles. Well, t
wo of the lads, they was goners for starters. Me, I made the trench just, but this one bullet comes and clips my helmet and round I goes and another, she comes clean through my shoulder. Clean through him! You never felt the like, girl, I’m telling you now. Fire in’t a half of it. So, there was this barbed wire had my gas mask. Barbed wire everywhere, there was. I’s always hated the damned stuff since. There was gas in the trench and I had me a lungful…Lucky I was, to be honest with you. Most of the lads as was gassed, they gone blind and burns all over them—once the stuff took effect, like. Took a day or so, it did. That bit wasna so concentrate, perhaps. I dunno. Any road, Albert, he had me back on my feet, after a fashion. Oliver, he sticks his gas mask on me. I dunno if it got to him or not. We hanna gone no distance when a shell come down and a nub of shrapnel goes in his eye.”
He coughed for a moment, almost retched.
“I canna remember so much after that. Albert, he dragged me up the first-aid station. The both of us stopped there a day or two. Mostly you only gone home if you had yourself a head wound, but what with the gas and all—the shell shock, like—I were sent up to hospital in Epsom a few month. Terrible place. In’t nothing much to be said about that. By then, anyway, it were the Armistice, so I come back here and mooched about a year or two till the boss had me doing him pictures of trees. Water colours. Mam used to do them, see? That’s where he had the idea, I expect. We still had the kit. Done them by the hundred, I did. There weren’t no scrap of paper as didna have an oak on him, or an elm, or a hawthorn. Not so bad, some of them, though I do say so myself. That sorted me out some in the end.”
The room had grown dark. The martin was gone. The clouds above the black line of the barn were swollen, bloody, ripe with night-time. Idris took another slow breath, feeling the levelling weight of his chest. On the edge of the bed Etty waited; then, not knowing what else to do, she turned and bent and kissed him on the forehead. She hesitated, then brushed out her skirts and returned her eyes to the window.