The Coward’s Tale

by Vanessa Gebbie

  But she did not listen to the stones. Instead, she pushed open the heavy doors and in she went. There was her chapel filled with people, all in their places, waiting, hushed, and Edward in his place with the minister. And her da come up special from Swansea. With his fancy woman Bessie, and her mam with a hat, all fine and smiling. Eve started her walk, blushing, her head low, watched only by the windows, and the dust on the chairs, and the ghosts.

  Stood in the chapel by there, right where the minister stands, and she looked the ghosts in the eye, and gave her vows to Edward Bartholomew just as if he was standing there beside her. “For richer or poorer,” she said, clear as anything, and “until death us do part” as if that had not already happened. Ignoring the darkness of the chapel. The empty chairs. The black books and sheets set out all ready for that funeral tomorrow. Hearing his voice and the voice of the minister, and the choir singing and the hymns belling about her head.

  And that singing only stopped when the doors opened again to let in someone setting the chairs out for tomorrow’s funeral . . . who asked what she thought she was doing and there came no answer from Eve except a smile.

  Then she came out of the doors into the dark, as Eve Bartholomew, for that was her name now, was it not, if she had just married Edward Bartholomew? Waited for a while in the porch, smiling and bowing a little, one hand at her side as if she was holding the fingers of someone beside her. Then she walked, slowly, mind, for there were people watching and waving, and she heard them, didn’t she? Back up the hill towards the room they were to have tonight, the room up The Cat Public House, over the bar, rented for one night.

  Past the dressmaker’s where there was not enough light to see herself reflected now, and on up the hill. Where her man must have gone on ahead, as she always knew he would. Making things ready for her, turning back the bed and laughing at his friends down there on the pavement shouting up, “Got the instruction book, Eddie?”

  Still carrying her two roses. Eve’s veil torn where it caught on the flagstones, and again on the kerbs, dirt on the hem of her skirt, and a shoe lost a heel. All ready for her wedding night.

  She found him not far away, in an alley, her soft-tongued man, tasting of drink, leaning against the wall, the same wall where Edward pressed her against the stones for her to feel his hardness through her dress. Waiting for her, and smiling, and saying nice things, and she went to him and lifted her skirts.

  It was Edward who pressed her against the wall again, only rougher, like that, still in her wedding dress, his fingers on her and in her and telling her, when she asked, that he loved her. And he showed her. Wasn’t that what Edward Bartholomew was going to do? Lift her dress and put his hands on her and tell her she was beautiful? It was Edward she heard, his voice like it always was going to be. Edward she felt, his hands, his fingers, his hair, his mouth, his body.

  It was not as she imagined. But she was new to this. It would get better.

  And it did not stop there, oh no. All a man had to do was tell Eve Bartholomew that she was beautiful, and she would let him lift her skirt. And after a while he did not even have to tell her she was beautiful, just give her money. And after another while she did not feel the roughness of men’s hands and the lack in their kisses, but instead she heard the soft voice of her man telling her again that he would be touching her soon. Here. Like that. And he did, then, see? Over and over, in her head. Every man she went with was her Edward, and no one else, and there was no shame in that now was there?

  But the townsfolk do not know what happens in the heads of others, now do they? They saw Evie who slept with men for money, and they called her shameless to her face as well as behind her back.

  “Dirty it is. Ych y fi.”

  And when she had a child coming, the words did not get softer. “Look at that Evie now, expecting. Shameless.”

  “Whose is it I wonder?”

  “Expect she doesn’t know herself.”

  “Aww, maybe it’s Tom’s.”

  “Or Harry’s.”

  “Or Dick’s . . . bound to be.”

  But of course she knew whose baby it was. Her Edward’s, of course, as natural as anything and when her boy was born she would call him Edward Bartholomew for his father. And when the women shook their heads at her in the street, she told those who would listen not to worry. For all will be well.

  But then all was not well, see, for the men she went with had given their Evie more than just their money. That gift was called syphilis. The child was born dead.

  Eve asked if she might hold him, and if she might call the small dead thing Edward Bartholomew. But the woman just wiped her hands on her apron and took the little body away in her bag for it to be buried with no marker, no kind words said.

  Eve did not stop then. She found her Edward Bartholomew down every alley, and then she found him in the little upstairs room in the old house just here, where she lived in a few rooms with her mother, strange always, after the money stopped coming from Swansea. She had more children, children who died at birth one after the other. All boys, and all called Edward after their father, until finally, one lived. Another boy, another Edward Bartholomew, born weak and sickly but who thrived after a fashion, never to be a healthy child at all. His eyes were soon filled with clouds and he was only able to see for a short time before the darkness fell absolutely and he was blind for the rest of his life. But those early years of sight he remembered.’

  The cinemagoers nod, and mutter, ‘Dreadful thing. Dreadful,’ and one will ask, ‘That boy, the young Edward Bartholomew – that would be Nathan Bartholomew’s father then?’

  And Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins nods.

  ‘When her mother died, Eve took her blind boy away from the town and no one knew where they went. Maybe no one cared. But then, many years later, someone heard that Evie Bartholomew had gone properly herself now, died of her disease, and that her blind son was working as a piano tuner in England. A successful one too, by all accounts, at all the great houses. Told always by Eve his mother, that he must use the name Bartholomew and nothing else. And he had married a woman who was also blind, and they had one son. And that son is called Nathan.’

  ‘Aww, that is a good ending after all then,’ someone will say.

  ‘But look, look what happened. That Edward Bartholomew, Nathan’s father, he worked with sounds, always sounds, pianos, voices, and with touch, feeling words, faces, all things. But he was not blind from birth and he remembered seeing.

  He remembered a yellow dog running down a wet street, and he told his son. He remembered the thrashing of trees in the wind and washing on the lines and he told his son. He remembered an old dress, dirty, hanging on a hook in a small room where he played on the floor, in a small house where his mam sent him to play in the back when a man friend called for her with his hand in his pocket and a grin on his mouth, and he told all this to his son. And he remembered an old woman with no hair who sat her life away in front of a mirror, light shining on her head like a halo.

  But Edward Bartholomew and his wife, they knew, didn’t they, what it was made him blind. And that was love and madness, both the same thing, perhaps? So, their son Nathan was taught, perhaps knowingly, perhaps not – that love is an unclean thing, and that good is to be found in sounds, for only they can be perfect. And Nathan too becomes a piano tuner, searching to make pianos sing just right, and hearing sounds in his head sometimes, as though touch and sound are muddled and mixed in him, and come from everywhere.

  Eve’s son Edward Bartholomew never returned to the town where he saw the yellow dog run down a golden street. But his own son, Nathan, now a man in middle age who has never married, nor been with anyone, he has come back. And he searches the faces of people he meets in this town, to find something to recognise. The shape of a nose, a hairline, a smile.’

  The Piano Tuner’s Tale iii

  Today, this very day, the piano in the school assembly hall is being tuned. The books and papers are gone from the lid, and the
dust dusted away, the surface polished, the scratches not as clear. The broken leg of the piano limping in its metal brace was noted, and a message sent from the headmaster to the Woodwork Teacher Icarus Evans in the workshop, to come and see. And he came to the hall and saw the piano, its lid raised up like a great wooden wing, and he took measurements, nodding at Nathan Bartholomew, who was tapping the keys with one hand, the other in its cotton glove reaching for the strings inside the piano’s body.

  And later, as the piano is almost making the sounds it was made to make, and as the school day is ending, the Piano Tuner sees, waiting in the shadows in the corner of the hall, a boy in glasses.

  ‘Laddy Merridew?’

  ‘Oh Mr Bartholomew, the drum. I came to tell you. It is a beautiful sound now.’

  Nathan Bartholomew packs his bag. ‘I am glad. I am very glad.’

  ‘I wish you could hear it.’

  ‘I will have to imagine. So, play it well.’

  There is a pause, the boy chewing his lip. ‘Shall I show you where I play? Will you tell my gran?’

  The Piano Tuner maybe remembers what it was like to be a boy with a secret, and he smiles. ‘No, it might make her headaches worse. Show me where you play?’

  And it is then that the Piano Tuner and the boy walk together through the school yard, across the playground and down to the High Street and on down to the river, and they turn onto the footpath and follow the river out of the town and past the railway, the factories, the rubbish dumps, and on towards the next village, passing close to the old Kindly Light workings all overgrown with brambles and barbed wire, the gates rusted and padlocked for twenty years or more now, buildings closed up and their doors nailed shut, windows barred.

  Laddy Merridew stops, turns, and smiles, ‘In here.’ He crosses to the wire, rusted and loose. ‘In here,’ and he ducks underneath, then lifts it high as it will go for Nathan Bartholomew to thread himself beneath, through the gap, past the sign that says, Danger, no entry.

  ‘Here,’ the boy says, running across cracked concrete towards the buildings, closed, blank-windowed and dark. More signs saying, Lamp room and Baths.

  ‘Here,’ the boy says pushing aside a corrugated iron sheet that swings on its fixings, brushing the rust off his fingers onto his school trousers. Ducking under and in through a low doorway, where planks are hanging from their nails.

  Through other doorways, deeper and deeper into the maze, away from the wire, pushing through more brambles then standing on a fall of bricks to climb through a broken window that catches hold of Nathan’s sleeve and says stop. But he does not stop, he climbs through after the boy and stands there, his sleeve still caught by the glass, deep among the Kindly Light buildings where the dust in the air and stones in the walls still hold the rush of the winding gear and the shouts of men. Listening to the boy’s footfall echoing and fading among the darknesses of long-gone machinery that rise over Nathan’s head as his eyes magnify what light there is and conjure dead metal fingers playing the shadows.

  Then, out of the darkness comes the sound of a drum. Slow beats, even, soft and gentle. Then becoming stronger, stronger, but never harsh. Round sounds that echo off the walls. Rounder and rounder grow the beats, deeper and deeper, each within its own echo. Simple, the sound, as though the whole place was only a chamber in a great heart, and the old mine buildings and the tunnels beneath them nothing but the workings of a vast body.

  And the boy does not stop, and the drum plays. ‘Do you hear it, Mr Bartholomew?’ Laddy Merridew’s voice, high above the drum, away over there among the stones, the machinery ghosts. ‘Do you hear them, the sounds?’

  Nathan hears everything. He hears every touch of the boy’s hand on that drum, the scurry of mice in the corners, the scrabble of sparrows. He hears the drumbeats playing on the staleness in the air, on the chill of the fallen stone walls and on their own echoes. He hears the hum of the earth below him.

  It is as though each sound has slipped into the gaps in the rubble poured decades ago into the old mine shafts. It is as though they are swallowed by an earth parched of sound. As though they then find their way over older and deeper falls of stone into the forgotten tunnels as water will, reverberating against each surface until the ground beneath them is singing with the sound made by a boy’s hand meeting the skin of a goat from a farm on the hills above Brecon, stretched tight over the body of an old drum.

  And when he can, Nathan Bartholomew, still standing by the broken window, says, ‘Yes, I hear it.’

  Later, the Piano Tuner leaves young Laddy playing his drum to Kindly Light in the short hour left between school and night and he walks slowly back along the river to the town. Along the riverbank where his grandfather, whosoever he be, may have played, once. Stopping at a broken bridge that grandfather may have crossed, reaching out over the river, the stones of its stanchions square and solid. Listening to the wind in the alders, their branches bending to the water and playing in the current, wondering if it is this tree or that his own father remembers seeing before his blindness fell.

  Past the old factories then, and the lorry parks on the edge of the town, the dark shapes of old coal tips with their covering of thin grass, along the High Street past the turning to the school, the chapel and its sleeping beggar, past Tommo Price the Bank Clerk as he leaves for home, ‘Nathan Bartholomew, your piano’s waiting . . .’ Past the cinema, the library and on up the hill to The Cat.

  But he does not sit at the piano when he gets back to The Cat on the corner of Maerdy Street. He goes through the bar where the tables are half-empty, a few drinkers playing with Icarus Evans’s dominoes, a couple leaning at the bar and talking, and behind the bar, her hair backlit against the gold and green and silver of bottles and labels and glasses, Maggie the publican’s wife, who raises a hand and a smile for him as she puts down a pint.

  Up the stairs to the landing, and past the publican’s bedroom to his own, where Nathan kicks off his shoes and lies on his bed in his clothes to think about the sound of an old drum played over mine shafts. About this town where his father was born, and maybe his grandfather before him, and certainly the man for whom his father was named. And he falls asleep like that, on his bed in his shirt and trousers, and dreams about the earth singing. He does not hear the last orders, and the voices raised, ‘Aww, time for one more, surely?’

  Nor does he hear the drinkers leaving, the singing in the street, nor The Cat closing up for the night, the door of the bar closing. Nor the publican leaving a little later to play cards for money on a Wednesday in a room above the Savings Bank, for Nathan Bartholomew is too busy making dreams of a yellow dog running down a wet street.

  Later, the Piano Tuner wakes thinking of the boy and his drum and the mine and the trees moving over the water, and he cannot sleep any more. He gets up and goes softly down the stairs to the bar, stepping over the third stair. He draws up a chair to the piano and lifts the lid. He touches the keys, one by one, light as anything, not even pressing them down, just running his fingertips over the ivory chipped and pitted where cigarettes were left to burn. And in his head there are sounds, the notes of the piano as they should have always been, round and perfect, singing to him through his fingers, and he plays scales and arpeggios, hearing the notes, the runs and rills, sometimes hearing the wrong note when his fingers miss a key, going back to play it right. Then he stretches his fingers, leans back in the chair, shuts his eyes and pretends to play. Brahms. A Bach sonata. Schubert. Mendelssohn. Songs without words.

  His head is bowed over the keys, and he is wondering how this piano would sound if he took it to the mine and played it in that space where Laddy Merridew played his drum. Wondering if he could wheel it all the way there, through these streets and along the river. All the while the notes in his ears, the perfect pitch of a concert piano, and the only other sounds his own breathing, his heartbeat, the dripping of the tap behind the bar.

  A hand on his shoulder, ‘I thought I heard something.’ Maggie the publican�
��s wife standing barefoot on the old carpet beside the piano, a nightdress only, ‘Play it again?’

  Nathan Bartholomew just shakes his head, ‘I was playing nothing.’ He does not look at her straight, but shows her how he was only running his fingers over the keys, not playing the notes at all. And she keeps her hand on his shoulder, her warmth through his shirt. ‘But I hear it, Nathan. Don’t stop.’

  So Nathan continues to touch the keys, and as he does, she moves her fingers on his shoulder in time to the tune his fingers do not play. And as her fingers move, the notes echo, double, in Nathan’s head while she stands behind him and plays his shoulders through the thin cotton of his shirt. Her fingers find the skin of his neck and they play on, running round and under his hair as he leans back into her, her fingers moving round to find the skin at his throat where they rest, and her breath is warm against his ear. She strokes his Adam’s apple and down until her fingers are playing along his collar bone, moving slowly, and on down his chest as he touches the piano keys, listening to the sounds in his head, ‘You really hear it?’

  And she laughs and does not answer and leans against him, moving her hands down his body, her skin against his, playing him. Telling him not to move, to carry on playing his piano as she moves round him, her hair brushing his face, she breathing into his mouth, opening his shirt and his skin singing with it all, and the sound of the Lieder in his head. Maggie the publican’s wife leans against the old piano in the bar of The Cat with its air full of old beer and cigarettes, her hair against his face smelling of smoke and of spice, her skin of soap and of sugar, and her hands moving here, and there.

  Finding him then, and holding him then, her fingers as warm and as soft as the lapping of a tongue.