by Jenny Nimmo
They began to walk towards the church, their feet making no sound on the damp yew needles.
‘My dad’s secretive,’ Gwyn murmured, ‘he’s deep, but he always has a reason. Where did he take Emlyn’s mam then?’
‘Emlyn says she’s in the moon.’
Gwyn didn’t laugh, he just said, ‘She was my Auntie Elinor. She was beautiful and very special to Bethan.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes; she went . . .’
Nia thought he was going to tell her where, but he continued, ‘. . . nearly five years ago. Disappeared. And then my Auntie Elinor,’ Gwyn was almost speaking to himself. ‘They’d just come back from somewhere, the Llewelyns; France, I think it was. Emlyn was born out there, I didn’t know him. Bethan really took to Elinor, they used to plant seeds together, and pick wild flowers and press them in a book. Then, in November, Bethan went, just after Halloween. We didn’t see much of the Llewelyns after that. Dad was, well, sick or something. And soon after, Auntie Elinor went away and Dad told me my Uncle Idris was wicked and I was never to speak to him or Emlyn again, they weren’t relations any more.’
‘Emlyn isn’t wicked!’ Nia said.
Gwyn shrugged. ‘I’ve gone to the same school,’ he said, ‘and I’ve sat in the same room, and since then I’ve never spoken to him till today.’
‘Did you speak today?’
Gwyn frowned. ‘No,’ he said, surprised by his answer. ‘But we fought and that’s like speaking, in a way.’
‘It was my fault, all of it!’ Nia said.
‘No it wasn’t. I had to defend you, and myself. I had to pay him back for being mad, he expected it.’
They were on the path now, and leaving the trees. The playground was near but unusually quiet. They had almost reached the churchyard gate when Nia found the courage to ask, ‘Gwyn, you told us once that you were a magician. Are you one?’
He sighed, thrust his hands deep into his pockets and looked up at the sky. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but don’t talk about it. It’s not always an advantage, being a magician! I have to hide it. It’s getting stronger in me, and sometimes I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong; do something, in a moment, without thinking, and then . . .!’
Fearing he had said too much, Gwyn waited for a scornful response. None came. Remembering what had happened beneath the yew, Nia was overawed, and did not know what to say. But instinct told her that Gwyn’s power would never hurt Emlyn again.
Beside the gate they saw the dog’s lead, where Gwyn had dropped it. He picked it up. ‘What shall I do with this?’ he muttered.
‘Keep it,’ Nia said. ‘Perhaps you can give it back one day.’
Gwyn put the lead in his pocket. ‘Fly might have pups,’ he said thoughtfully.
They emerged into sunlight and Nia saw clearly the red stripe across Gwyn’s cheek where the leather had lashed it.
‘Does your face hurt?’ she asked.
‘Not much!’
‘What are you going to say about the mark?’
‘I’ll say I had a fight with Nia Lloyd and she beat me!’ He laughed and then he ran down the lane away from her.
They soon discovered why the playground was so quiet. In spite of Miss Powell’s vigilance, the climbing frame had claimed a victim: one of the Lloyd twins, Gareth, lay moaning on the ground.
Iolo rushed to Nia, when he saw her. ‘Where’ve you been? I wanted you. Gareth’s hurt!’ he cried.
Before Nia could reply, Siôn was pulling at her skirt and yelling, ‘Where’ve you been? Gareth’s had an accident!’
‘I can see that,’ Nia said sharply. ‘I wasn’t far away – I’m here now. What happened?’
‘He was balancing,’ Siôn said proudly. ‘It was great. Right on top he was! Miss Powell yelled at him to come down. He’d have been all right if she hadn’t yelled.’
Miss Powell was in a bit of a state. She seemed unable to decide whether to scold, comfort or assist the stricken boy. Then Mr James arrived and took control of the situation. He gently felt all Gareth’s limbs, picked him up and carried him into the school.
A crowd of children respectfully made way for the patient’s relatives. Alun, Nia, Siôn and Iolo, wearing suitably funereal expressions, followed Mr James and their brother. Nia wished that Nerys and Catrin were with them, and not half a mile away at the High School.
Doctor Vaughan arrived and only minutes later, Mrs Lloyd. Gareth was whisked off to hospital, accompanied by his mother. The other Lloyds returned to their separate classrooms, amid sympathetic murmurs from their friends.
‘Is it fatal?’ Gwyneth inquired in a solemn whisper.
Nia did not deign to reply.
The anxiety that she betrayed when she returned home was misinterpreted by her mother.
Mrs Lloyd had left the hospital, reassured that broken limbs were all the rage for eight-year-old boys.
‘Don’t fret, cariad. It’s only a broken leg. It’ll soon mend,’ she said when Nia, tears springing to her eyes, had misplaced a glass and let it smash on to the tiled kitchen floor.
Nia felt guilty. Her thoughts were not with Gareth. Emlyn hadn’t returned to school that afternoon. Where had he gone and why? He had won a fight, but she could not forget the desolate look on his face when he had passed her, and she could not forget the way Gwyn Griffiths had frozen life in the dim space under the yews, or the red mark on his cheek that should have been on hers.
When she took her canvas to the bathroom that night, there was no moon. The street lamp was bright enough but her picture looked somehow dead in artificial light. She found green corduroy for the yew trees, but couldn’t remember their shape, and there was not enough of Alun’s old grey socks to make a church.
‘I can’t do it! I can’t do it!’ she muttered angrily at the canvas. Nia-can’t-do-nothing, who had been absent for a week, was peering over her shoulder, clutching at her hands. She needed to see Emlyn and his father, to ask for their advice and encouragement. Would they ever speak to her again?
When she replaced the canvas under her bed she had not added one stitch to it. Nor did she add any the following night. Emlyn had not been in school.
On the third evening after Gareth’s accident, Nia slipped into the boys’ bedroom when it was empty, and took a new grey sock from Gareth’s drawer.
‘He’ll only need one now,’ she told herself.
That night she tried to cut it into the shape of a church. The frayed pieces stretched and fell apart. Nia sat in the bathroom, glaring at her unfinished collage, remembering that Gareth had not lost a leg but merely broken one. She snipped the grey sock into tiny shreds and flushed them down the lavatory.
‘There’s something in the toilet,’ Nerys complained next morning at breakfast. ‘It’s grey and it won’t flush away.’
‘Worms!’ said Siôn with relish.
‘You’re a worm, worm!’ Nerys retorted.
‘It’s a rag – just a rag,’ Nia said quickly. ‘All cut up.’
‘Oh, Nia!’ Mrs Lloyd, distracted from scraping burnt toast into the pedal bin, let her foot slip and sooty crumbs flew everywhere. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do. I’ve told you not to throw things down the toilet.’
Nia wondered if there’d be a hole in the toast after her mother’s attack. ‘I thought it would go down if I cut it up,’ she said meekly.
‘Now then, girl. You know better than that. We don’t want trouble with the drains again,’ said Mr Lloyd, scrubbing his butcher’s fingers extra hygienically in the sink.
Emlyn was in school for the first time since the fight. He wouldn’t even look in Nia’s direction.
She decided to postpone making the church and concentrate on trees, but she didn’t know how to make blossom. And then she remembered something.
Catrin had a music lesson after school that evening, with Miss Olwen Oliver, always called Olwen to distinguish her from her sister Enid Oliver who ran the bakery and took boarders.
‘Can I come with you to Miss Olwen Oliver?’ Nia ask
ed her sister.
‘Whatever for?’
‘I like listening to you play.’
Nia had tried music lessons but had proved unmusical, as Miss Oliver put it.
‘What a good idea!’ Mrs Lloyd said brightly. Perhaps they had started Nia on a musical career too early. Perhaps, after all, she had talent. ‘I’m sure Miss Olwen Oliver wouldn’t mind. Nia could sit quietly at the back of the room: it’s such a big room, you wouldn’t even notice her.’
‘Well . . .’ Catrin’s blue eyes widened uncertainly.
‘Please?’ Nia begged.
Gentle Catrin was persuaded.
Ten minutes later Nia found herself sitting exactly where she wanted: at the end of Miss Oliver’s long chairlined music room. The chairs were all of a different size and age, acquired on separate occasions as Miss Oliver’s fame and fortune progressed; very few were comfortable. The faded, floral wallpaper was bare except for black-framed certificates and photographs of successful music students at local Eisteddfodau. Apart from the two black pianos and a smell of fish, that was it.
The fish smell was a mystery. Miss Oliver was not even a Roman Catholic and, as far as anyone knew, did hardly enough shopping to keep a bird alive. She was a tiny woman, her face a triangle of carved ivory, with pointed nose and chin, and deep-set black eyes. Her hair, plaited and coiled neatly into the nape of her neck, had been white for so long even she could barely remember what colour it had been. All these features paled into insignificance behind Miss Olwen Oliver’s truly magnificent eyebrows; long, black and shaggy, they dominated her every expression, controlled every situation, disciplined every six-foot chorister. No one crossed swords with Miss Oliver’s eyebrows, if they could help it.
Nia had no intention of taking up piano lessons again; the experience had been far too painful.
Miss Oliver had welcomed her in with a rather predatory gleam, and allowed her to choose a chair. ‘Not too close to the piano, now, or it’ll be a distraction for Catrin, who is to take an examination soon, isn’t she?’
So Nia chose a chair beside the window, as far from the piano as possible. There was a lace curtain in the window, real lace, a beautiful creamy white, like plum blossom. The scalloped hem of the curtain hung a good ten centimetres below the window!
Nia took a pair of tiny sewing scissors out of her skirt pocket. Catrin and her teacher were concentrating on Mozart. It was a very beautiful sonata; it reminded Nia of the music Catrin had played at T Llr. Nia had made her dolls dance under the window where the plum trees made green patches on the thick white wall.
Snip! Snip! Snip! She had severed half the hem of the lace curtain. It was all she needed but the other half looked odd now. She cut to the end of the hem, taking her time and carefully following the curves in the lace. How beautifully the patterns parted, how prettily the scalloped hem brushed the window-sill. She’d done Miss Oliver a favour. Nia slipped the strip of deliciously soft lace into her pocket.
Catrin’s music lessons always ended with a small display by Miss Oliver, just to show that, whatever level of excellence her pupils had attained, there was still a long way to go before perfection was achieved.
Almost on cue, Catrin’s friend, Mary McGoohan rang the bell on the last note of Miss Oliver’s final flourish.
‘Shall I open the door for you?’ Nia offered.
‘There’s a kind girl,’ tiny Miss Oliver turned and gave a neat smile. ‘Perhaps you’d like to have lessons again, Nia?’
‘Perhaps.’ Nia didn’t linger. She was out of the music room and opening the front door before Miss Oliver had closed her trim lips.
‘I thought you’d given up the piano, Nia?’ said Mary McGoohan.
‘I have!’ Nia leapt past her and would have run to number six but, remembering to appear calm, waited for Catrin and walked sedately beside her.
Catrin always sang after her music lesson; her voice was very sweet and soothing. There was no one Nia would rather be with. Catrin was restful and undemanding. One day she would be a star, Nia was sure of that; she was tall and golden, like the girl in a picture on the library wall, painted by a fifteenth-century Italian. Catrin was understanding, she never asked questions. Today, however, she did.
‘Are you sleeping better now, Nia?’
‘Oh yes!’ They had reached number six. ‘That is, more or less,’ Nia said cautiously. She opened the black and private door, rushed across the hall and up the stairs to her room.
Iolo’s cars were coming for her in single file across the floor, Iolo behind them, making appropriate revving noises. ‘Where’ve you been?’ he muttered through the revs.
‘Music lesson!’ Nia replied. She had expected him to be watching television. Now she couldn’t hide the lace in her scrap bags. She stood as close as she could to the chest of drawers, opened the top drawer a fraction and took the lace from her pocket.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘Getting a hanky,’ Nia said irritably. She had never known Iolo to be so interested in her movements.
From the bottom of the stairs, Nerys called, ‘Tea!’ and Iolo, always eager to have first choice of whatever was on the table, leapt up and ran out of the room.
Nia tucked the stolen lace under a pile of white socks and followed him.
It was cold roast beef for tea: Sunday left-overs. Mrs Lloyd put a slice on Nia’s plate. The meat stared up at Nia; it was pink in the middle and Nia found herself saying, ‘No thanks!’
‘What?’ her mother didn’t seem to understand.
‘I don’t want any meat, thank you,’ Nia said.
‘Are you ill, cariad ?’ Mrs Lloyd’s children had never turned down cold roast beef before.
‘No, I’m not ill, I’m a vegetarian!’ Nia pushed her plate away.
‘What?’ Her mother stared at her stupidly, her mouth hanging open like a fish.
‘I’m a vegetarian,’ Nia repeated. ‘I don’t like meat !’
The silence that followed reminded her of the time Uncle Maldwyn and Auntie Ann had died, he under his tractor and she an hour later of heart failure. They were nearly eighty but it had still been a shock. Being a vegetarian was surely not so shocking?
The boys began to giggle; Catrin looked embarrassed; Nerys had a sort of ‘I told you so’ expression on her face. And then the atmosphere dissolved abruptly as a menacing rumble crescendoed from the end of the table and Mr Lloyd leapt up roaring, ‘By God . . . By God, girl. We’ll have no vegetarians here. Meat’s my trade!’ Here his voice accidentally slipped into a higher register and he had to bang the table to emphasise his words. ‘Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat!’ he squeaked.
Alun’s restrained giggle went inwards and he snorted, piggily. Siôn choked on his orange juice and Iolo laughed out loud.
Nia hunched herself over the table, too close to the pink- tinged slice of meat. She couldn’t foresee how it would all end, and then the doorbell rang, precipitating her into an even worse situation.
Somehow she knew the identity of their visitor even before her mother opened the front door, and when she heard Miss Oliver’s shrill accusations her heart sank.
Mrs Lloyd called Nia into the hall. Her nose was twitching uncontrollably when she left the table and went to face the music.
‘Why?’
‘Why? Why? Why?’ That was all the two women seemed capable of uttering.
And Nia couldn’t reply. She couldn’t explain why she had severed the beautiful creamy hem from the lace curtain.
The music teacher was in the hall now, her words coming fast and hysterical. Her tight figure, a tiny rod of pent-up fury. She was literally hopping.
Mr Lloyd came out of the kitchen and the boys filled the open doorway behind him. Nerys spread her arms and blocked their passage. Catrin, anxious and bewildered, appeared beside her sister.
Nia backed to the stairs. Someone had told her to fetch the lace. Invisible mending had been mentioned. Punishments were suggested. Abject apologies were made. Nia knew all this though
she scarcely heard the words through the dull ache in her head. And then she remembered something. She stood on the second stair and said, ‘It was like trees!’
The three adults stared at her.
‘What?’ said Mr Lloyd at last. ‘What did you say, girl?’
‘Trees!’ Nia repeated in a small voice. ‘It was like blossom, you see. And I needed it!’
‘Needed it?’ Her father was roaring now.
More words, loud and angry, were coming at her like bullets and she fled up to her room. She took the lovely lace from her drawer and brushed it against her cheek. Even now, even when it was the cause of all the wrathful sounds beneath, she was reluctant to part with it. But she took it downstairs and held it out to Miss Oliver.
‘What do you say, girl?’ her father muttered.
‘I say I’m sorry,’ Nia said.
‘And are you? Are you?’ Miss Oliver’s beetle eyebrows closed above her nose.
‘Yes!’ Nia murmured dutifully, and abandoned her parents to a task that was beyond her.
A phrase of her father’s rose distinctly above the apologetic noises that she left behind; a description of herself. ‘She’s always been a problem but, I don’t know she seems to be getting worse . . . going up to that chapel . . . cutting up new socks, we think . . .’
Nia closed her bedroom door and went to the window. She watched the sparks in Morgan-the-Smithy’s window. She listened to his sons singing as though there was nothing in the whole wide world to worry about.
She was not sorry for herself and regretted nothing but the trouble she might have caused Catrin. She had forgotten Catrin when she had cut Miss Oliver’s lace, forgotten that poor Catrin would have to face Miss Oliver every week, remembering Nia’s crime.
Nia opened her drawer and took out the tiny packet of seeds: honesty, campion and poppy. She let them roll over her palm while she remembered the garden at T Llr: the brilliance of the poppies and the soft whiteness of the plum trees in spring.
Later, when her mother came into the room, Nia was still sitting on her bed, clasping the seeds.
Mrs Lloyd sat on Iolo’s bed, facing her daughter. She picked up Iolo’s woolly blue monster and smoothed its hair. She seemed to be waiting for a word to come from somewhere to bring them closer but when that did not happen, she got up and sat beside Nia on her bed. She was breathing rather fast and the baby under her smock looked very round and almost unreal. Nia was just wondering if the baby would come soon when her mother asked, ‘Is it the baby, my love?’