Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  “I don’t know. Might do. You’re not supposed to look at him first, that’s the only thing. My grandad, he is a charmer, see? And my great-grandmother was. He’s got her book. That tells you everything. He’s going to give it me when I grow up.”

  Out across the hills there was another glimpse of lightning, and the rain turned white momentarily. It was some miles closer to judge by the thunder, which might have been a tremor in the earth and brought to Cefin a feeling of giddiness that made him want to run outside and stand with the rain falling full on his face. He could feel somehow the relief of the ground, which seemed to be breathing this fresh, new air—opening itself, even to him.

  Blackie still did not so much as twitch.

  “When I was a kid,” Ada remarked. She wrapped her arms around a sun-brown knee and watched the water spilling past the doorstep, creeping along a crack between the flagstones. “When I was a kid my mam used to tell me as thunder was just Olly Funnon making a racket. I believed her too. I always thought your dad was a giant.”

  —

  OLIVER MIGHT GRUMBLE that if she wouldn’t take her test then she ought at least to take the 4000, but Etty knew where she was with the Fordson, which she always kept in the exact same gear and controlled with the lever by the steering wheel, and even that she preferred not to touch. She liked the feel of the air on her face. She liked her red, white-spotted umbrella, which Cefin was holding, squeezed against the toolbox on the mudguard, like the bearer for some visiting queen. To the throb of the engine, they followed the course of the long-gone railway between the sodden fern on the spur of the hill and the fat lambs grazing the lattermath in the fields. At times the Wye wove almost beside them, frothing through the ashes and hazels on the bank. With the harvest and the ploughing, the broad Wye Valley was flowering in its way. It was green, red-brown and luminous yellow—and every combination where the grass or the earth pushed through.

  There was old man’s beard in a Tir-celyn hedgerow.

  There was light on the silage clamp at Coed-yr-Aber.

  Had the road not veered to the left, they would have driven straight into the garden of the café but, as it was, Etty turned with the line of its fence and, waving past a lorry in a wash of tyres, guided the tractor round the big SOLD sign and came to a halt among the cars and puddles.

  She tugged the black button, and the lid on the chimney tabbered and fell.

  “Where’s the river path, Nana?” asked Cefin.

  “Just by there, look.” She pointed. “You come and get yourself a cup of tea and I’ll show you.”

  It was astonishing, really, the transformation her mother had wrought. The station looked much the same as ever, except that everything was new: the smart white fences that ran along the platforms, the panes of the gas lamps, which now contained bulbs, even the glass-faced posters for seaside resorts, “K” Boots and GWR Summer Extras. The beds and hanging baskets were alight with geraniums. Goldfish shimmered in the rain-pitted pond. For the restored siding she had found from somewhere a pair of green-and-gold carriages, which she had turned into a shop selling tea towels, paintings and books of local interest. Where the rails had lain there was now a lawn—its dribbling umbrellas dwarfing their own.

  “So,” said Molly, admiring the rod and jar across the table in the café, “you’re a fisherman, are you?”

  “Dad’s been teaching me,” said Cefin.

  “Where’d you get all those worms, then?”

  “Well, Nana Molly, what you do is you wriggle a crowbar in the ground. Then the worms all think an wnt is coming and they head for the top to escape him.”

  “An wnt, eh?”

  “An wnt…A mole.”

  “I know what an wnt is, bless you.” She stroked his cheek with her bird-like hand, which made him shrink minutely backwards. “Your mam OK, is she?”

  “Yeah. Well. She was OK last week.”

  Molly lowered her voice. “Best waitress I ever had, your mother.”

  “Mum was?”

  “Talk about an advert! You never seen so many boys wanting tea in your life!”

  Cefin smiled, a little politely. He drained his Coke.

  “It is no wonder you’re so blasted handsome.” She beckoned to Lucy, who was collecting plates from a table near the counter. “Now then, what else will you have? The millionaire’s cake’s very good, I’m told, though my old teeth won’t take it, I’m sorry to say.”

  For the time being, it seemed, Molly remained in charge at the station. Twenty-five years or more had passed since she had bought the bungalow near Erwood Bridge—Etty’s father had given up waiting to retire and died—and even now, with the tenants gone, she had not left the station cottage. Still, three times a day, she would hump her frame the length of the platform to preside at the till, to scrutinize the takings and keep an eye on the customers inside and the customers out in the garden. She sat across the table, old and alert, watching her great-grandson through her owlish spectacles and the close white bars of the ticket-office window as he vanished down the steps among the long, serrated leaves of a sweet chestnut.

  “An wnt?” Molly repeated. “How long’s he been here? Six days?”

  “The professor dropped him…Saturday.”

  She sipped her tea and dabbed her lips, considering the timetable beside them on the wall, which offered services to Moat Lane and Three Cocks Junction. “I did speak to Miles the Solicitor, Etty,” she said. “He told me he’d help, though he is retired or near enough.”

  “I…don’t know as Olly’ll go for it, Mam.”

  “Then you tell him to come and talk to me.”

  Etty turned her headscarf in her hands, flattened it again on the vinyl tablecloth. Although the two of them were speaking again, their words still came out forced and hesitant.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It is your money, it is. You ought to…You ought to enjoy it.”

  “I’m eighty-eight years old, girl. What am I going to do? Go on a cruise?”

  “It is my problem.”

  “It’s our problem, Etty.” She met her look with the sparks of her eyes. “You’re my daughter, aren’t you? It was me as made you go up there in the first place—”

  “Mam, you know that’s not true.”

  “You were just a girl, Ets. You were no kind of age. I…I know I came back here, and I did say I wouldn’t, and there’s nothing more I can say about that. But it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what happened. I knew you was seeing someone, or I guessed in any case, like in how you was dressing and how you was acting, and I could have told you about the dangers, and I didn’t—I was too bound up in the work and your father—”

  “It was my decision,” said Etty.

  “But I pushed him, see? I did. When I told him about you, well, of course he was always going to go crazy, but I rose to it too. I was so bloody sick of him. I all but told him it was his own fault. I called him a drunkard, and a lazy bugger, and no kind of man when there was soldiers dying, and no kind of father when it came to that. So, is it any wonder he come on so hard? I never gave you a chance, Etty. That’s the truth of it. By the time I was done we was both of us leaving and you’d not even got to say your piece…”

  “Dad was never going to let me stop here,” Etty said, in the silence. “I knew that. I told Idris even before I told you…That same Wednesday, there he was, hanging round the market like normal, using up coupons to buy our eggs like he hadn’t got none of his own. I knew he liked me. I could hardly have missed it. I knew he was a good man, in his own way. So I told him everything. I told him I would be having a baby. I said I would marry him if he would have me.”

  “It’s…” Molly swallowed, dropping her eyes. “It’s just money, love. Money for Olly. Money for Cefin. That’s all I ever wanted for it. Give Miles a call. Please. He’ll speak to Ivor, if Ivor can be spoken to. He’ll speak to Mervyn. There’s got to be a price as’ll buy them out the Funnon, get everything square. He’ll sort something out for you, you’l
l see.”

  Beyond the lip of the bank, Cefin was standing on the exposed rock: a crink of a boy in an old green anorak and plastic trousers, his gumboots together, his black hair erupting from his baseball cap. With a flick of the rod, he sent a worm through the rain into the teeming current, watching it sink with a fierce concentration.

  “He looks like him,” Molly added, more softly.

  “He looks like them both,” said Etty.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, I suppose he must.”

  —

  THERE WAS A third pool at the Gleision, on the Edw, between Martha’s Pool and the old wash-pool for the neighbouring farms. The Middle Pool it was called. It was an eddy on the north side, almost still, with a little spring trickling down the bank into an arch of ripples. On Friday evening with the rain long past and the sunlight falling skute from the trees, it sparkled clean—so perfectly transparent that it might hardly have been there at all. Oliver sat with his son on the still-damp grass, watching the pair of coachman flies they had tied out of newspaper that afternoon. They had yet to catch anything but it didn’t seem to matter. There were, surprisingly, a few trout about, mooching in the shadows. One of them would come to the lure in the end.

  “What’s that tree, Dad?” asked Cefin, after a time.

  “That one? That’s a hazel, that is. See the nuts?” He pointed to their heads, peeping out of the dense veined leaves.

  “Can you eat them, can you?”

  “Eat them?” He laid down his rod and got to his feet, picking a bunch that he peeled with the nails of the three fingers on his right hand.

  Cefin flicked his fly upstream to save the lines from getting tangled. He chewed on the nuts, which were soft, almost creamy, and watched a trout flexing slowly under the opposite bank—the water so clear that he could see its open mouth, its eyes like the spots that patterned its sides, its fins like vertical wings. He was not so bothered about catching the fish. He was happy to watch it. He was happy just to be sitting here with his father while the water turned and wandered past them. From the tousled grass that hung around the spring, a spider appeared on the surface of the pool: a minute creature, which scampered at speed across the drowsy eddy, pursuing some invisible insect. It seemed for a moment to consider their flies, then darted back to the dark, muddy shelter of the bank.

  —

  WITH THE RED light extinguished on the corner of the Walkman, the dark grey window stood apart from the wall: a frame for the chamomile flowers on the sill. In his dressing-gown and Batman pyjamas, Cefin sat on the counterpane his grandmother had embroidered, on the bed he realized now was hers. At home he might have switched on the television and given a few minutes to Super Mario Bros., but here he just sat with his fishing rod, scraping a nail between his teeth and watching the hill above the ridge of the barn, which seemed in the night-time to look back at him.

  His father crossed the yard with a creaking bucket: a man a little stooped, but powerful and purposeful as he always appeared in the day. The dogs in the kennel greeted him rapturously. They burst upon him in a formless mass.

  Cefin sipped his cup of hot chocolate, which normally he was not allowed, but then normally he was not allowed meat—Adrian wouldn’t have it in the house—and he had eaten little else all week. He fiddled with the handle of the reel. It was bad enough, he thought, to have left their flat, where he could creep from his bed in the never-dark nights and curl up in his mother’s warmth. It was bad enough that she was now his teacher, in the high school where he would once more have to go on Monday—and a teacher too who got whistled by the older boys and used in taunts that followed him in the corridors. There were bats in the yard: scraps of the blackness come suddenly to life. There were stars among the ruptured clouds. As his father retraced his path to the house, he imagined the three of them together, here—as they would have been when he was a baby.

  Once the radio was talking in the kitchen, Cefin set down the rod, turned on the light and retrieved the penknife from his fishing bag. He had already examined the cupboard in the corner: a narrow space above the hall, crammed with magazines and linen that smelt of his grandmother. It was only by squeezing round the sheet-laden shelves then stretching over an old leather trunk that he was able to reach the stones at the top of the front door. Leaning on his side to allow in the light, he scooped away the bodies of cobwebs and used the knife to bore a hole in the mortar. He pushed the roll of paper deep into the wall, then knelt on the rug on the floor of the bedroom with his hands joined flat in prayer.

  —

  THE PARLOUR AT the Funnon was like a hole in time. Its piano might have been exchanged for an organ, bought perhaps from some defunct chapel, but its walls were whitewashed, as Naomi remembered them, heavy with samplers, a photograph of the coronation and even a dusty portrait of John Wesley—a Bible in one hand and the other held open to a sepia sky. There still was the stiff black dresser, unsanded, unpolished, with empty spaces for the floral plates that lay across the white lace tablecloth. As she worked her way back around the wall to the window, Oliver loomed in his chair at the head and Cefin looked pale as she had ever known him, for all of his week in the air. The formality she found almost unbearable. She was afraid she might start laughing or crying, just to crack it all open and breathe.

  “I…like your loo,” she said.

  “It is an improvement,” Etty agreed.

  “It’s a mercy in the winter,” said Oliver.

  “Are you…all right, Mam?” asked Cefin, his accent torn between his father’s drawling vowels and his vagabond version of hers.

  Naomi did not feel all right. She did not like driving at the best of times, and as if the vomiting that morning had not been enough she had been forced to stop three times on the way. These smells of her past, this stone and damp; they worked on her darkly. Perhaps they were working on her son as well. Although she was sure that she must look ill she could not understand the alarm she saw, half-hidden by the frames of his glasses.

  “I’m fine, love.” She touched his arm.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Course I am…” She pulled on a smile.

  “And the teaching was a success, I hope?” Etty asked.

  “It was fine, thanks, yes.”

  “That’s good.”

  “These residential courses, they can be very intense.”

  “I can imagine.” Etty set down the book of poems Naomi had given them and reached for the teapot: a horrible thing in the shape of an acorn. “Will you…Will anyone have another cup? Cefin?”

  The boy at least was picking at his cake.

  “Well,” said Oliver. He set a hand on the table, its second finger gone beneath the knuckle. He appeared to be trying to hold in his belly. “I shall have to go round the sheep before the show. I am sorry we cannot tempt you along for an hour, Naomi. We could find you some manner of fancy dress, I expect?”

  “Thank you, Oliver, but it is quite a long way…”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes on the door. “Last go round the fields, boy?” he asked.

  The shapes of the sash window fell across the table. Its light revealed cracks in the handles of the polished silver cutlery, a trace of copper in the bowls of the spoons, distortions in the tines of the forks. In the yard there was the slap of wellies, the murmur of voices and the cackle of chickens retreating from the tailing dogs.

  “Well,” said Etty, when the two of them were alone. “You have my congratulations.”

  Naomi flinched. “Is it that obvious?”

  “I know it’s none of my business, girl, but if…if you did feel you could talk to him about it?”

  “Etty…I really don’t feel I owe him anything.”

  “No no…”

  “It’s only his business if he makes it his business, and he doesn’t, does he? When has he ever been to visit his son? Never. Not once. It is the sheep this, the cattle that, it is best to come here—like none of the rest of us has anything better to do.”

>   “I…I don’t think that’s what it’s about.” Etty’s voice had died almost to a whisper.

  “Then he needs to grow the…hell up. It was years ago, for God’s sake! Years! There’s only so much I can do, Etty, you must see that? God knows I’ve tried to make things work, but, what can I say?” She put a hand through her hair and looked at her cake, which she had still not brought herself to touch. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s been such a hard week and I’m…I’m missing my cigarettes like you wouldn’t believe. It’s not fair to take it out on you. I only found out on Sunday myself. Nobody is supposed to know. I’ve told Adrian and that’s it. I haven’t even told Cefin.”

  “He looked…He did look worried.”

  “I’ll tell him in the car.”

  “Well,” said Etty, quietly. “I do mean it very sincerely. It has not been easy on you, I am sure.”

  “Nothing you don’t know about, I imagine.”

  “Well…”

  “Did…Oliver ever see his father, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  The effort in Naomi’s eyes had collapsed, become a weariness, an emptiness that Etty had not suspected. A cloud moved over the valley around them. The shadow leaning from the barn grew faint, the swallows bright only in their bellies. The window’s pattern dwindled, vanished, and with the shadow gone from the face of the girl the table seemed less like a barrier, more like the connection perhaps once intended.

  “No. No, he never did.” Etty looked at the spots on her hands where there had once been freckles. “It was all so different in them days, girl. Back then there was the shame of it, see? It was a mortal sin, everybody thought so. There was only the one other woman I knew who had got herself in the family way, outside of wedlock, like. Glenda her name was. I stopped with her for a while, I did. I mean, there was nobody else. She, well…When she told her parents, they packed up her things in a brown paper parcel, gave her a ten-shilling note and said they never wished to see her again. Well, there was no maternity money in them days, see? Nothing of the kind. So off she went to the Mission of Hope, as they did call it, to repent of her ways and get marched off to church with all the other naughty girls through some town where she did not know a soul. I forget its name now. Somewhere away. She came back, of course, a year or so on, but her baby was adopted. She never did find out where she went.” She looked up at Naomi, who was watching her in silence, sucking her lips so the pinkness disappeared. She was so young, she thought, not thirty-four. Perhaps, for her, all this would still be an episode. “Me,” she said, “I was not going to lose my baby. Not for anything. But I had this other option, see? I was fortunate, really—that’s how I look at it. You might not believe me, but I do.”