by Tom Bullough
His mobile churred as he came into reception.
“Whazzup (-;” wrote Griffin.
“Whazzup, Meggy?” said Oliver to his dog, which whined and wiggled against his leg.
There were hawthorns here, where the head of the wood dwindled into the fields for the Welfrey, whose cottage Cefin, with his modern views, had stripped back to stone a year or two earlier. Mistletoe, so Oliver had heard, would grow on the hawthorn only in the Wye valley and a few of its tributaries—nowhere else in the world—and while he had hardly checked if this were true he took these green-gold clouds with their pearl-like berries to be a kind of tribute to the place. Reaching his brumhook through the spiny branches, he cut down a sprig, which he tucked like a cigarette behind his ear, then turned from his shadow and the shadow of his son to the blazing light on Llanbedr Hill. The sun had yet to arrive in the Cae Blaidd, and the valley beneath was still half-dark. The wood smoke drifting from the kitchen chimney made pools and levels in the yard; it straggled in the churchyard, round the snow-tipped stone they had stood on the top of the mound. In the Plock the chickens were scratting for grain by the open door of the big new shed. In the Panneys Philip’s great Case tractor was driving a canyon through the snowdrifts, delivering silage to the trailing ewes, which the Pant had owned these past three months. He had cut a way to the pond, in passing, smashing open the hole for the circling ducks with a single tap of his loader.
Cefin did something with his own phone, perhaps took a photograph, then sat down on one of the fertilizer bags.
“Right then, Dad,” he said.
“I shall see you down the bottom,” said Oliver.
“You mind what you wish for.” He squinted up at his plastic trousers. “Slip in them and you’ll be down before me.”
“I am not going sledging, boy. What if one of the neighbours was to see me?”
“What if they saw you chickening out?”
“Yes. Well.”
The boy lay the second bag on the snow beside him. “Get on there or I’ll give you a shove.”
Oliver grunted. He looked at the slope and back at his son in his daft woollen hat with bobbles on the ear-flaps, his hands on the ground as if planning to stand, then he slid the brumhook back into its sheath and lowered himself onto his backside. At once Meg began to lick his face. He grimaced as he kicked and paddled with his hands, his weight coming backwards as he started to slide. Well, that was one good thing for the frame of a giant and a belly that hardly let him lift his knees. The dog sprang wildly down the field behind him, spinning and yelping in alarm. The boy was following, coming headfirst. He dug in a boot to steer for the gate and skirt the frozen wnty tumps, while the dust-like snow boiled into his eyes—momentarily blue and red as the sun set again among the golden larches, lines of light forked out of the hilltop, and he dropped into the previous night.
—
IT BROUGHT ETTY a warm, enveloping pleasure to think that, after everywhere he had been, Cefin should choose to come and live here. It made her feel as if, after all, she had not lived so little, as if the God to whom she had prayed every night of her life had been listening to her and was listening still. The Welfrey, well, the place might have done for his grandfather’s weekends, in the days when he was still able to get up there. It might have done for the boy for a year or two, but it had never been a long-term option. Lamb prices could rally as much as they liked; they could have sold their whole flock at a hundred a head, and sold the chickens, and they would still not have managed the thirty thousand pounds they needed just to put in the electric. And then there was the phone. These computer people, they needed such things. What it was that her grandson actually did remained as mysterious to Etty as ever, for all of the emails she had written with Nancy, for all of the times he had attempted to explain. She was just too old now; that was the size of it. She was content simply that this Internet worked, that his was a respectable job requiring education, that it was something like the future she had wished for.
—
OLIVER HEARD THE telephone from down on the bridge and he hurried up the side of the slike, swept path, kicking the snow from his insulated gumboots on the wall beside the front door. He had jarred his back on the ruts in the Cae Blaidd, but he was blasted if he would let Cefin see it, and he stood erect as he arrived in the hall, where his mother was approaching with her eyes on her walker and her shoes slow and careful on the carpet. She had, as usual, removed her apron, as if the caller would know or care. At the sudden cold and the outside light she lifted her face to see through her spectacles, nodded to him and waited for her grandson to weight down his bags with a stone on the step, pull off his wellies and help her back into the kitchen.
“Panty,” said Oliver, putting the receiver to his good left ear.
“Oh…” said Griffin. “I did think I called your landline, boy.”
“And I did think you was on holiday.”
“Oh, I am, boy, I am…Is there a baby, is there?”
“None as I’ve noticed.”
“How’s the weather?”
“Bloody starving. Twenty below up Llangodee last night, if you would believe it? Diesel was froze, look. They couldna start the tractor!”
“Never!”
“How’s it there?”
“Oh. Hot. Too hot for my liking…Afternoon it is, see?”
“Is it, by golly?” Oliver peered through the ice-webbed window, raising his voice against the thundering in the yard.
“Boy get up the fields all right, did he?” Griffin asked.
“That’s him coming back now, it is. He’s been round Cwmpiban and all. Hell, but that is a machine he’s got.”
“Heated seat, look. She’ll keep you balmy downstairs, I’m telling you now!”
With a clack of the latch on the sitting-room door, Ada appeared on the doormat beside him: her top half, make-up and enough cleavage behind her dangling silver necklaces to swallow a small child; her bottom half, pyjamas and an old pair of tartan slippers. In the middle her belly was a perfect bubble. Since she had that set to her scarlet lips, Oliver passed the phone without another word and set to peeling off levels of plastic—the jeans and jacket he wore underneath as dry as they had been that morning.
In the kitchen Cefin was standing in his socks among a bundle of ash plants, a three-wheeled drinks trolley and a breach of journals from the Ministry of Agriculture.
“Is that Griffin, is it?” asked Etty from the table.
“It is, Mam, yes. Do you want I should help you with that, do you?”
She fiddled with the dial in her ear, so Oliver repeated his question, turning his hands like slices of toast above the hotplates of the Rayburn.
“Just sharpen up the fire if you would, love, please?”
“Can’t I just burn this bloody lot, Dad?” asked Cefin.
“Burn it?” said Oliver. “Bloody antiques them, boy.”
It would, it seemed, be another day of waiting. Dropping a few more bruns into the furnace, Oliver looked instinctively at the tall, pale space by the larder door, and then at Idris’s grandfather clock, which was once more tocking out the seconds. There had been a time, with the Christmas markets, when his mother could gut and pluck the geese almost as fast he was able to catch them—her fingers sprite among the sharp little pugs, the fern on the floor and the lice in her petticoats. These past two weeks there had always been something getting in the way of them moving out: all of their things to be taken to Erwood, the boiler in the bungalow, the coming of the snow and Griffin jetting off on yet another holiday. And meanwhile Ada was two days due, and four days past the full moon to boot—although you couldn’t go listening to that old doddle or you’d be worrying over half of the people on the planet. Had Oliver’s word meant a damn with the girl, he would have had her in Hereford a good week since—he couldn’t believe anyone required her prognostications all that urgently—but Ada was Ada. She could have gone into labour this very moment, on the phone to her father or bac
k on her webcam, and he would not have moved without her instruction.
The old bunch of mistletoe was so frail and dusty that its few remaining leaves went fluttering to the carpet as Oliver worked the tack out of the beam. There was a pain in his spine as he went to pick them up; he grunted despite himself, but pinned up the new one and took a step back—glancing at his mother, who had, in fairness, stripped the better part of the bird’s plump breast.
“There’s lovely.” She smiled.
“You’re not kissing me, I’ll tell you that much,” said Cefin, who had started work on the bread-and-cheese cupboard.
“Don’t be shy, boy. Come along now.”
The sun had arrived in the kitchen window; it was working its way down the snow-dressed apple trees, resolving them into molten light. As casually as he could manage, Oliver eased himself into his chair and watched his son kneel to unload the drawers—the window bright on the skin and the stubble of his head. With ink-stained fingers and bitten nails, he piled in a box a nursing qualification from the St. John’s Ambulance and a lopsided owl that Oliver had painted at school, an album of earmarks and an ellern whistle that Albert had whittled one winter’s evening. Then he found a dog tag: a fibre disk on an old leather bootlace, which Oliver bent to retrieve from the box. He held it at arm’s length so he could read the name pressed into its face, then dropped it in a pocket of his jacket.
—
IT WAS UNUSUAL for the doorbell to ring at the chapel. Nigel did not know many people locally—there were not that many people to know—and its sudden peals made him start and spill redcurrant juice across the slate worktop. Since he was alone in the little galley kitchen, he wiped his hands on the drying-up cloth. He closed the lid of the laptop on the recipe and made his way into the lounge, where Miriam was settled with her first glass of wine and her daily fix of Australian soap operas. Above her a cavity in the upstairs floor allowed a brass chandelier with frilly glass shades to hang all the way from a latticed pine ceiling, which had once been the ceiling of a single room. These features, these intimations of the past; they did bring him pleasure, whatever qualms he had had about retiring to a graveyard. The way that the plaster stopped short of the doors to reveal the original stonework. The way that the windows straddled the floors so that, from the outside, the building might not have changed at all.
He flicked the switch at the end of the bookcase and the lamp shone over its neat lace doily and twice in the double-glazed door to the extension.
“Oh,” he said. “Good evening, Mrs. Hamer. Mr. Hamer.”
“Good night, Mr. Wilbraham.”
The estate agent had warned them that the garden would remain consecrated ground, that they would have to mow around the headstones and admit the occasional visitor. The inconvenience was reflected in the price. In practice, though, the only visitors the graves ever received were this ancient lady and her crag of a son, whom stories followed in such dizzying multitudes that, in Hay or Builth, Nigel had only to mention that he lived in Rhyscog before he was apprised of another. It was said he had pulled up a cattle grid by hand to keep the police from disrupting a fight. It was said he had flattened the face of the butcher everybody called Nosey Powell. He was, supposedly, one of the old type, which made Nigel wonder distantly if the former height of the chapel might have been a matter of necessity. All he could say was that if this vast, grizzled man with his sovereign rings, his garish waistcoat peeping from his coat and a raven on his shoulder like some pagan sentinel had ever been typical, then the valley’s population had changed beyond recognition.
“Will you come in?” he asked, since the cold had already penetrated his cardigan. He could feel the hairs rising on his arms and his chest. “Have a glass of wine.”
“No no,” said Mrs. Hamer. “You’re very kind. We’ll just go round the back, if we may?”
“Of course, Mrs. Hamer…There’s really no need to ask.”
“Thank you. Well. We should slip on, then.”
“Happy Christmas,” he added.
“And to you, Mr. Wilbraham.”
Nigel watched them continue along the face of the chapel—their torchlight glancing from the untrodden path, the shadows of the headstones turning beside them, the moon’s quieter light on the snow. Mrs. Hamer walked cautiously, planting her sticks, her son not so much holding her arm as taking her entire weight. What was it Bridget had said, at the garage? She’d like a pair of shoes made out of her skin. Nigel did not know much about the woman. She must have been married, to judge by the name. She must have had at least one other child or she would not have come here, every Sunday of the entire year, to that lonely stone tucked against the blank north wall. Whether she actually had been raped as a girl he had no idea, but frankly, in these vigilant hills, he did not think it likely.
He cupped and blew on his smooth, hairy hands, then went to finish the redcurrant jelly before their grandchildren arrived.
—
IN THE PLOCK the flames boiled into the darkness, acrid with feathers and green-burning paint. The two old mattresses were holding their shapes, but their inwards were open and looked red hot and, as Cefin watched, the bonfire sank beneath them and they folded slowly and merged. The sparks rose high on the pluming heat, out of the moon shadow cast by the chicken shed, drifting only at the height of its roof like stars unfixed from the gaping sky. A few fell again into the fire-coloured snow. Climbing the gate back into the yard, Cefin lugged the diesel drum into the barn and left it by the wooden steps leading to his office. He took the fir he had cut from the Pant plantation and returned across the hard-frozen ruts to the house, which seemed in the moonlight as pale as the tall, sheer fields.
“Tree coming in!” he announced, pushing through the front door, scattering needles on the beige fitted carpet he really would have to pull up. “You all right, are you?”
There was a sign on the door of the sitting room that read A. HAMER: ANIMAL COMMUNICATOR.
“Hmm,” said Ada, from his grandmother’s chair.
Had Cefin stopped moving he would, he was sure, have been left almost paralysed, as bare as he had felt when they were living at the Welfrey and had climbed onto the great, hunched hill to lie with nothing between themselves and the stars but the tips of their cigarettes. Nine generations of people named Hamer—ten, perhaps at any moment—and now all this was on his shoulders. The house was silent, ancient, leaden. In the kitchen, where he could no longer hear the bonfire, the only sounds were the hiss of the Rayburn, the tick of the remaining grandfather clock and the turning page of Ada’s book. He removed his hat, which was rigid with cold, shivered briefly and wiped his misting glasses. He stood the tree in its plastic holder, where the other grandfather clock had stood, and began to untangle the lights in the box—humming to stifle his need for a smoke, or a drink, or anything at all that would share just a bit of the weight.
“Cefin?” said Ada.
“Yeah.”
“Would you please sit down?”
“Hang on…” He wove the lights round the tree’s spreading branches and pushed the plug into the socket for the television. “You don’t want the telly on, do you?”
“Sit!” she said.
Cefin perched reluctantly on his father’s chair, the heat of the Rayburn ringing from his scalp. The arms of his glasses were still like ice. He picked with his teeth at the skin round a nail while his wife set down her book and stood—one hand supporting the bell of her belly as she waddled towards him over the hearthrug.
“Now then,” she said, revolving, lowering herself onto his lap.
She still wore her make-up from the day’s consultations. Her unpinned fringe hung into her eyes.
“I was just…” he said.
“I know. And there’s plenty of time.”
“Do you like the tree?”
“I love the tree.” She twisted to kiss him, her full bulk pressing on the bones in his thighs.
“I think I’m going to have to move the bathroom. I m
ean, it’s no good downstairs, is it?”
“You’d have thought.” Ada remained at her sideways angle. She ran a hand across his chest. “All of them books. You’d have thought one would mention as pregnancy makes you so bloody randy all the time.”
Cefin hesitated. “Do you…want to go upstairs, do you? I put the new mattress on the bed.”
“It’s cold upstairs.”
Her hand continued to the buttons of his jeans, which she opened in turn, slipping her fingers into his boxer shorts and stroking the soft skin of his thigh. She held the bar of the Rayburn, got back to her feet and lay in stages on the old rag hearthrug—the coloured lights on her long pale hair and the label protruding from the back of her pyjamas.
“What if it gets things moving?” Cefin asked.
“Then you shall have to drive.”
“Well…What if they come back?”
“Cefin. They’re not coming back tonight.” She waited for him to lie down behind her, wriggling pleasurably as he curled to her shape. “Anyway, it’s not their house, is it?”
—
DEATH, ETTY THOUGHT, might look like this: this non-day, this anti-day. For all her decades of Methodism, she had never quite bought the hell of the chapel, nor the tame and sunlit pastures of its heaven. This snowy cast of hills and valley, these snow-cloaked trees with their long black shadows; they seemed altogether more like lifelessness. She heard her son grunt as he picked her up—an arm round her shoulders, another in her knees, as he would lift her into and out of the bath—and arrived on her seat with her two sticks hanging. Thankfully there was warmth in the truck. It dissolved the clouds of her breath on her spectacles. She shivered and buried her hands in her pockets, watching through the arches of the windscreen wipers the high moon over Llanbedr Hill—its face askance, as if its gaze were on some other planet.