Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  —

  NAOMI WATCHED OLIVER in the ring of the binoculars standing on a ladder in the sheer green bracken—his scale unarguable even at this distance. He peered down the hill in his garish shades until, at a signal she could not see, he reached again for the top of the pole and turned the aerial another degree. Beneath him, his raven was fidgeting on the tractor: an ancient machine of once-blue bodywork, which, to all appearances, might itself have been unearthed. His dogs were spread in the evening sunlight, one of them wagging each time he shouted.

  “Mam?”

  It was a good ten miles to the nearest town. It was half an hour’s walk to the nearest phone box, which was as close to a centre as Rhyscog possessed, and, in any case, had a resident goose and was all but impossible to use. The village, it seemed, was rather a space. The nearest pub was five miles distant, and the nearest shop. It had a primary school, but its only church was the ruin at the Funnon, which was a place on the edges by any definition.

  Along the hillside, the farmer climbed back into his seat and turned the tractor in a long, slow arc, revealing a tank roped onto the back. Naomi looked past him, at the valley that billowed from this crevice in the hills. On the hilltop opposite there was a yellow digger on the bank of a scar of a track. Despite the sunlight glancing from the end panes of the conservatory, she felt the chill of the rock in the flagstones—the stubble was trying to rise on her shins—and, returning the binoculars to their marks on the windowsill, she pulled on a shirt she had found in the wardrobe and settled in an armchair next to the fireplace. In this air tainted faintly by pipe smoke, this silence so total that she could hear a man’s voice quite clearly some quarter of a mile away, without a phone, without electricity, without so much as a serviceable spring, she seemed to begin to understand her father. This house was a den, she could see that much. Little wonder it had taken her a year of wheedling and him every excuse from loneliness to the condition of the track before he had allowed her the key. There were varnished stamps in rows on the ceiling. There were landscapes in between the bookshelves. There was a single photograph of herself: ten years old on a plump bay pony, on a birthday he had remembered.

  She tucked her legs beneath her, opened her notebook and waited for the tractor to arrive.

  —

  THERE WAS A vertical line to the left of the screen, which bulged, like a spoon, so that Oliver’s nose pushed out of the reflection and his forehead resembled an egg. The speaker fizzed through the rasp of Etty’s brush on the plates, their clinking on the rough stone sink. As he twisted the dial, there came a sudden hush, then the voice of a man who might have been talking in a blizzard. She glanced again at the television. Perhaps that was a head she saw, or a gesturing hand, but then all trace of the picture dissolved and the man became a half-heard murmur.

  “Bloody thing!” said Oliver.

  Etty said nothing. She would have liked, of course, to know what the man was saying, but she had spent an hour now traipsing between the set and the yard to wave at her son up his pole on the common. There were better things to do with her Sunday evening. She scrubbed the cutlery in the bare inch of water she had already used twice that day, wiped it dry and returned it to the drawer in the bread-and-cheese cupboard. She chased a fly from the left-over mutton to the open window, where it prospected the pane between freedom and the flypaper. She carried the bowl into the larder and set it on a shelf in the grumbling refrigerator.

  “I shall take the bugger back!”

  He prodded the button so that the blizzard retracted to a point of light, and disappeared into his bellying image. Collecting his cider, he went to lean on the bar of the Rayburn, which she had not lit since the previous afternoon—his hair black and tumbling among the hooks in the beams, the gnarled white berries and droplet leaves of the mistletoe.

  “Fetch a bit of water up the Welfrey, did you?” Etty asked.

  “Well, we canna leave her up there without.”

  “No no.”

  The mood seemed to lift a little from his shoulders. “A daughter for the prof, mind!”

  “I know.”

  “I didna think I’d heard her right.”

  “You’d have thought he’d have mentioned her.”

  “You would!”

  Removing her apron, Etty opened the long drawer, took out a jigsaw and emptied the box on the table. She propped up the picture of the carthorse on the lid and sat in her chair to turn the pieces face upwards. Whatever Oliver said, she had never believed that the professor was a queer—he was a professor, after all. Surprised as she was to find he had a daughter, she was hardly less surprised to find her stopping alone up the Welfrey: a girl no more than twenty, with her legs bare for everyone to see. Of course, she saw half-clothed girls every time she went to town—there had been more than one in the church that morning—but Builth was one thing and Rhyscog another.

  A curlew passed over on its way to the Rhos, crooning more sun for the following day.

  “Up there for a spell then, is she?”

  “All summer, she reckons.”

  “All summer!”

  Oliver pulled up his chair, which was a little too small for him. He lit a cigarette with the scratch of a match and assembled the pieces for the horse’s jaw. “I did say Nana might find her a job,” he said. “Down the café, like. Student she is, see? Nothing better to do, in’t it?”

  —

  IN THE FIERY dawn that following Saturday, the burning heather on the distant mountains appeared to be a fissure: an eye in the horizon revealing the approaching sun. Llanbedr Hill itself was dark. The valley they had left showed a couple of night-time lights. Beyond the sharp-tipped, red-trimmed ears of Naomi’s cob, the three other riders stirred and turned against the sky: Harry Llanedw, hunched in the lee of his cap; Griffin the Pant, alert and looking around; Oliver, erect on his tall black hunter, surveying the silhouettes of the firs or larches, the extent of the open hilltop.

  “Well,” he said, “it shanna rain.”

  “As is best, boy.”

  “Nettle to it, then, shall we, Funnon?” Harry spat in his hand and doused his cigarette.

  “All right, girl?”

  “Not so bad, Oliver.”

  “Not so bad! That’s the way!” Oliver barked at the quarrelling dogs. “You mind them lambs in the quarries now, Panty. We had a couple of legs broke last year, and it was my fault. They’ll be uncommon vigorous, I expect.”

  “I expect,” Griffin agreed.

  “You come along with me now, Naomi.”

  The trench of the lane where the digger had been working stretched the whole way over the common, framed by piles of dried hard earth. Their horseshoes sparked as they stepped through its shadow. To the right, a tree marked the corner of the farm’s furthest field—the fence dissolving into its bark. At Oliver’s lead, Naomi gave a flick to the reins, her arms absorbing the nod of the cob, the jeans she had taken to wearing round the valley beginning to slip on the saddle. She watched his gaze shift quickly between sheep she saw and sheep she supposed. She watched the dawn on a pond and the other men fanning away into the bracken, stark on the contours, vanishing again and then altogether.

  “Well,” he said. “At least we know why they dug them quarries.”

  “Why’s that, then?”

  “Some old stone road in the lane there, in’t there? Best tell your dad, now I do come to think of it. They’ll be laying the tarmac in the week, I doubt.”

  The hill here was narrow, no wider than a mile, squashed between Penbedw ground and the standing walls of Pant-y-Ffynnon, which, like most of the old, remote houses, had gone down between the wars. The Island alone remained of those places, and that had housed no more than the beasts since they had bought it off Dick and Dilys. Oliver took stock without particular distinction—noting the families of ewes and lambs as he noted the creatures for Cwmpiban bolting back to their territory, the ponies in a hollow, a barn owl floating pink across the heather, the piercing notes of a p
ipit in a hawthorn. The low light picked out the old copps and reens, which Idris had told him were cut by the Denes, or the Danes, as the professor would have it. As they came to the ridge where the ground bowled west towards Garreg Lwyd and Craig-y-Fuddal, the dew-settled track opened in front of them and the breeze cleaned the last sleep from Oliver’s mind like some benign cousin for the lazy winter winds. Almost without realizing, he rose on his stirrups, brought his hands and his balance forwards and released Devil with a kick of his heels. He gave a yawp, which was taken by the air. To the drumming of hooves beneath him and behind him, he felt the flying mane of the horse on his neck and fled for the cliffs as if running from the sun.

  “You done your bit of riding, then!” he said, grinning, turning on the summit to watch the girl guide the cob towards him up the scree—the grey stone crumbling and rolling from his feet.

  “It’s been a while,” she said, breathlessly. “Comes back, it seems!”

  They sat together on Garreg Lwyd: the highest point on the whole, long hill, where the sidelands and the hiding places were best exposed by the coming light. Naomi had lost the band in her hair, which now fell sun-streaked over her shoulders. She was quite a girl, it had to be said. Her eyes were large. Her lips were full. There was a childishness to the freckles on her nose, but she carried herself so effortlessly, so confidently, that he was reminded less of other girls he had known than of the first proper thoroughbreds to arrive on the farms down in the Wye Valley, five or six years before.

  He kept that to himself.

  “Not such a bad spot, is it, really?”

  Naomi smiled and nodded in agreement.

  “Right, then.” He took a breath to steady his thoughts. “There’ll be one or two past the edge there, down towards Cwmoel, but the dogs’ll find them, I expect. The finding’s not the problem so much as the keeping.” He levelled a crooked finger at the yearlings tight round a mawn pool to their left—aware of their presence, calling in concern. “That hog there, off to the side, look—she’ll be a dodger. Her mother was a dodger and she’ll have picked it up, sure to. You cannot be expected to know that manner of thing, of course, but I tell you now, she’ll be running off ahead of the others and the first hole she spies—whoosh—she’ll be squirrelled away in him, waiting for us to go on home. Cunning buggers, sheep. Some of them, in any case. A sight more cunning than folks gives them credit. Keep your eyes about you, basically. Keep to the high ground, keep checking behind you and Nell’ll do the rest. She’ll gather in her sleep, that dog. Turk, she is a bit more tare.”

  “Tare?”

  “Tare…Excitable, like. Sorry, I was forgetting.”

  “No, I like it.”

  The farmer hesitated, briefly uncertain, his dark eyes moving in his high, carved face. Suddenly Naomi could imagine him as a boy: his will not yet in tune with his body, his size an encumbrance rather than a strength.

  “Do you know all of them, do you?” she asked.

  “The creatures? Yes, I expect.”

  “How the hell do you tell them apart?”

  “How do you tell people apart?” He shrugged, looking back along the common to the far-away conifers and the sun, which was rising from a seeming plain: liquid, trembling, throwing its light across the jumbling hills. “That ewe there, she loves her swedes. It’s an obsession, almost. She’ll hop a fence for them, if you give her the chance. That one, she’s got black on her nose and eyes: touch of Beulah in the bloodline somewhere. That one, she is touchy as hell. Burnskin, you call it. Let a dog close and you cannot handle her at all. Some I know well, some more, like, in passing. Same thing, in’t it?”

  —

  EVEN WITH THE windows and the back door open, the ancient cold in the walls and the flagstones, the kitchen was as stifling as the oven in the Rayburn. The hands of the grandfather clocks were hidden by mist. Droplets fell from the boards of the ceiling to make little circles on the floor. The faces of the women were bright with sweat: Etty, Nancy Llanedw and her daughter Bridget, and Ada, who was the wife for Griffin and a daughter for Lewis, the landlord at the Awlman’s Arms, which told you a thing or two about her. The professor’s daughter was washing up steadily, and if she was wearing bell-bottomed trousers then she was at least not exhibiting herself and was enough of a novelty to distract the children and keep them out from under their feet.

  “Well,” Naomi was saying, “I’m a girl and I wear jeans.”

  “I wear a skirt!”

  “Do I look like a boy to you?”

  “No…How come you went gathering, then?”

  “Because Oliver asked me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said I wanted to.”

  “Mam?” Faith turned to Ada. “Mam, can I go gathering, can I?”

  “Ask your father.”

  “That means no,” she told Naomi, sourly.

  “How come she can go gathering and we can’t?” Lucy demanded.

  “It’s different, that’s why.” Bridget set down the rolling pin and began to chop the pastry. “Anyway, she’s a grown-up. Now why don’t you stop pothering the poor girl and rise me the spuds?”

  Whatever the costs of this long, hot spell, it did look for once as if they might shear on time. It was six years now since they had last been able to stick to the calendar: two days for the Pant, two for the Funnon and two for Llanedw—one for the hill sheep and one for the valley. Normally the rain would not be so kind. Since there was no shearing a sodden ewe, they would either waste hours with the creatures pressed into every available bit of shelter or abandon the work for days on end and cut into weather they needed for the hay. The trouble this year was that everyone had lambed well. With the pasture parched and the hayfields wilting, the prices at market had gone through the floor. With luck the wool clip would pay for itself—if the Wool Board’s assessment was halfway reasonable—but once again they would be struggling for the mortgage, and the big new shed with its fine zinc roof would remain in the realm of Etty’s dreams.

  “You know what I reckon, Naomi?”

  “What do you reckon, Lucy?”

  “I reckon Oliver’s soft on you. I reckon that’s why he wanted you to come gathering!”

  “Lucy!”

  “You think so, do you?”

  “Is that true, Naomi? Does Oliver fancy you?”

  “Oliver’s old!”

  “Do you fancy Oliver?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “She does! Look, she does!”

  “Faith!” Bridget snapped. “Lucy! You are overstepping the traces, you are! You say sorry to Naomi right now or you are going home, the both of you, do you understand?”

  “Cider time, Ets,” said Nancy, wiping the condensation from the window of the clock. “Ten it is.”

  Etty slid the gravy to the warming hob and headed for the larder, almost waddling in the tight brown stockings she wore for her varicose veins. She collected the tumblers from the shelf above the salting stone and set them together on the tray. She stirred the cider jugs, whose rotten-apple smell rose into the steamy air. Naomi, she saw when she turned, was standing in the door—her face a little pink, her hair tied back in a baler-twine bow. Etty dropped her eyes; she hardly knew why. It was not as if gathering was much of a romantic gesture, and besides, how many names had she had to digest over the years? Amy and Megan, Annette and Angharad. To be fair to the girl, she was trying to help. She was wearing a shirt as long as a smock, which all but disguised her young woman’s body. There was nothing she could do about the smoothness of her hands or the poise of her shoulders: her education, her life she could choose.

  The racket redoubled as Etty opened the front door and arrived in the stench of the crowded sheep. Half or more of the flock remained shut up in the Bryngwyn track, but still she and Naomi had to wind across the yard. Inside the tall, open doors of the barn, Albert was folded round his tally stick. Most of the men were hard at the shearing—the good, sprally animals kicking between their legs. In the catchi
ng pen, Oliver took a ewe by the wool to replace a yearling that sprang away naked—his muscles oaken in his filthy vest.

  “Now then, Ethel,” said Griffin, “that in’t Llanedw cider now, is it?”

  “And what the hell’s wrong with it?” asked John Llanedw.

  “You got to be held down to drink the bloody stuff, that’s what!”

  “It’ll make a man of you, Panty.” Oliver rolled the fleece, tucking the neck wool back into the rope.

  “If I got any more manly, boy—”

  “Cut!” called Harry.

  Griffin’s boy, Philip, shot forwards with the tar.

  John looked sideways at his son-in-law, his pinioned sheep nicked just by the shoulder. “Someone bring the poor thing some grass,” he said.

  “And you’re the one to call me slow!”

  “Well, then, Panty,” said Oliver, “I shall have yours gladly.”

  “I didna say I didna want it,” said Griffin. “I’d drink my own piss, I’m that thirsty!”

  As the women reached the hurdle with the fly-plagued jugs, the apparent chaos began to resolve itself. Harry daubed the cut on the ewe, which leapt, with Turk a pace behind, to join the others in the pitching pen. Albert added her notch to the stick. Philip rose the broom to start sweeping up the pell wool while, one by one, the machines fell silent until the soundbox walls of the yard had only the sheep to repeat.

  —

  OLIVER DUCKED FOR the branches of the sycamores, riding home between Pentre Wood and the shaley wall around the hump of the churchyard, which they rarely grazed at this time of year to spare the twayblades and spotted orchids. The evening air smelt strongly of garlic. He kept his eyes on the track before them. He did not like to look at the bank. Of all the flowers that grew in their valley—and in these days of herbicides and reversible ploughs there were many he rarely saw anywhere else—it was the bluebells that seemed to him most like hope. To see them fading, shading to brown, served somehow to remind him of his broken bones, his broken nose, the scars and sprains that littered his body. Swinging from the saddle, he opened the gate and led Devil into the long, dusty yard.