A Small Country (10 page)

She had asked that there should be no farewell party. Two heavy brass candlesticks were presented to her, though, on the last day; a former pupil had made a door-to-door collection and found a ready response. The children brought her snowdrops and catkins and birds’ eggs. By the end of the day, most of the girls were in tears; one of the big boys cried too, though he said it was because a piece of chalk had got stuck in his nose.

She moved to Llanfryn where her aunt, her father’s only surviving sister, lived in a small terraced house. After three or four months of sickness and anxiety it seemed the only place she could go to, she hadn’t the energy or the spirit to make any other arrangements.

Hetty Lewis, who had nursed her willingly and cheerfully enough through the attack of measles six years earlier, was almost eighty by this time and didn’t take kindly to the irregularity of the situation. ‘It isn’t right for you to go to strangers, I suppose,’ she’d said. ‘All the same, I can’t say that you’re welcome. No, I don’t like it a bit, not a bit.’

Though she had not been capable of turning her niece away, she often refused to talk to her for days at a time. She wouldn’t let her go out except late at night, and made her rush upstairs if anyone came to call. ‘This is a respectable house, this is,’ she would say, if Miriam dared to grumble at the way she was treated.

And when Josi came to her door, bold as brass and determined to see Miriam, it seemed the last straw. ‘This isn’t right, Mr Evans, no indeed. What will my neighbours think.’ He had almost to force his way into the house. She wouldn’t allow him to be on his own with Miriam however much he would argue that it was bolting the stable door too late. ‘This is my house, this is, and I won’t have any goings-on. There’s been too many goings-on between you and my niece if you ask me, and a pretty pass it’s brought her to and what can you do about it? Nothing.’

She never believed that Josi intended to leave Hendre Ddu when his son returned from Oxford for the summer, indeed would have thought no more of him if she had, marriage being sacrosanct in her eyes.

Every Sunday, morning and evening, after she had been to chapel she would insist on going over the sermon so that Miriam should not be entirely cut off from the chance of salvation. She would often stray from the kindly precepts of her present minister to the sterner teachings of her earliest mentors, their insistence on the flaming tortures of hell. And finally, realizing that Miriam didn’t show the right degree of concern about the wailing and gnashing of teeth, almost every sermon she relayed would contain reference to David’s adulterous love for Bathsheba and God’s punishment in the death of their son.

This always roused Miriam. Hadn’t Christ come to teach a different morality? she would ask. Hadn’t he said that hypocrisy was the worst sin? Hadn’t he forgiven the prostitute and the woman taken in adultery?

At which Hetty, bewildered and angry at Miriam’s daring to cross such thorny ground, would point to her and shout, ‘Go thou and sin no more.’ And Miriam, in spite of her fury would be left shaken and close to tears. It was a miserable time.

Only when the baby was almost due did Hetty relent a little and suggest that Miriam should go out for a bit of a walk.

‘You’d better see the midwife while you’re out. She’ll be needed before too long if I’m any judge. Mrs Howells, 3 Cothi Crescent. She’ll tell the whole town, but what can we do.’

It was a May afternoon, sunny, after a morning of rain. Miriam had to walk to the outskirts of the town – a distance of about half a mile. Her freedom after long confinement dazed her, the air was so aqueous it seemed to swirl round her, leaves had never been so green, blackbirds had never sung so riotously. But it was the smell of the lilac that she remembered afterwards whenever she thought of that afternoon. Impossible to describe, the clean, fresh beauty of it; its hint of sorrow. Lilies of the valley were for a first love, too sickly sweet, even the old moss roses in the garden at home, which her mother called Mary’s roses, not after the virgin, but after the friend who had given her the cuttings, even the old roses had a cloying quality, you smelled them and it was suddenly too much. But not lilac. You could smell it for ever. She broke off a branch and took great breaths of its scent and walked on as though drugged.

She must have walked for well over an hour. Without realizing it, she was just outside Rhydfelen, had covered a distance of almost five miles. And there was nothing for it but to retrace her steps. She dared not call anywhere to ask for a cup of tea, dared not even rest in the high cow parsley at the roadside in case someone passed and noticed her condition.

She had walked back only a short way when Doctor Andrews overtook her in his car. He had almost to carry her to the passenger seat.

She gave him her aunt’s address and he drove her there and remained with her to deliver her premature baby.

‘Is there anyone I can contact for you, Miss Lewis?’ he asked her before he left. ‘In my profession I’ve learnt to be as silent as the hills.’

But Miriam would only smile and say nothing. She suspected that he already knew her secret. She held her little girl in her arms, marvelling at her. She looked so like Josi; how could the doctor fail to know whose baby she was. She lay back on her pillow and the afternoon air seemed to be lapping round her still; like ribbons of water.

Doctor Andrews left, promising to contact the midwife before he went home.

Hetty came in then, and cried over her great-niece and kissed Miriam for the first time since she had arrived. And the next evening when Josi came, she tip-toed out of the room and left them together.

EIGHT

His father was already at The Sheaf when Tom arrived there on Saturday night.

He had resolved not to begin with recriminations; he intended to talk calmly and reasonably about his decision to leave Oxford, the possibility of Catrin’s going to Art School, the day-to-day running of the farm. All the same, when he caught sight of his father and went to join him at the corner table of the lounge bar, his composure quite deserted him. ‘You’ve left us, then,’ he said.

Josi was intolerably moved by Tom’s voice and expression. He pushed a mug of beer towards him. ‘None of that nonsense. We’re father and son, aren’t we. Nothing can alter that. Drink up now.’

Tom raised his tankard and almost emptied it in one smooth swallow.

‘Oh, steady on,’ his father said. Due to his strict Methodist upbringing, Josi’s drinking was usually restricted to a moderate half-pint on market days. ‘If your grandfather could see you, my boy, he’d turn in his grave.’

‘Teetotaller, was he? The old man?’

The danger was over; they both felt it.

‘A hundred per cent. A miser too.’

‘And a criminal, according to you.’

‘No, no, that was his father, Thomas, the one you’re named after, he was the crook. Old Thomas Morgan, Hendre Ddu, was the one that smiled and spoke fair and cheated and robbed and throve like the green bay tree. You know what he’d do, don’t you. I’ve told you before, he’d lend some poor little dabs a hundred pounds when the harvest was bad; no interest, only a little clause in the contract that if they couldn’t pay it back by such-and-such – and it seemed such a long way ahead – he’d have their bit of a farm instead. Done. Signed. Wait. Grab. Esger Gog. Ffynnon Fair, Garth Lwyd, Ffos-y-ffin. Do you know how I know? My grand-father, Amos Evans, Cefn Hebog, was one of the fools, see, that signed away his little inheritance. A small farm it was, less than twenty acres, but it had been in the family for close on four centuries, what’s that, about sixteen generations. I’ve got reason to know, I have.’

‘You should have steered clear of the Morgans, then, shouldn’t you? Touch pitch and be defiled.’

‘Aye, I should have steered clear of them, indeed I should. But if I had, you wouldn’t be here for a start, and I’m glad you are, somehow, drunkard or not. Anyway, old Thomas Morgan wasn’t all bad, I don’t say that. He did a lot for the area one way or another. For instance he gave three acres of good land in the middle of Henblas for a cemetery, so that the people he squeezed to death could have a decent burial in the dry. He probably did something quite substantial for the workhouse in Llanfryn too. I don’t want you to think he was all bad.’

‘We’re imperfect, all of us,’ Tom said, significantly.

‘Yes indeed. We are indeed. Though your mother is less imperfect than most of us, I admit it. She was sent away to a Christian school and taught to be charitable and virtuous to atone for the sins of her fathers and she is a good woman, I mean it, but difficult to live up to. She’s kind and gracious and quickly moved to pity and once she had something more but that dried up years ago. But she’s a good woman, I’ve said so, and I hope you’ll never let her down as I have.’

‘I hope not to,’ Tom said. A lofty silence settled on them. Tom got his pipe out and Josi sat back in his chair and started to hum. He looked about him and nodded at various people.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ Tom asked. At last.

‘A girl,’ Josi said. He sighed as he thought of her. A little creature she was, not much bigger than a leveret, but she’d caused a good deal of trouble one way or another. Mari-Elen they’d called her, after his mother and Miriam’s, two women who’d died young from poverty and over-work. ‘Hard work never killed anyone is the greatest lie since God shall provide.’ He could hear Miriam’s voice in his head. If Miriam died, his life would be over. Even thinking about it made him feel cold. He took a draught of beer and saw that Tom was still looking at him.

‘A girl,’ he said again. ‘Boys are too much trouble altogether; they go their own ways and they drink like fish. A girl. So big.’ He held his large hands out in front of him, about a foot apart. ‘She looks a cross little thing at the moment, not unlike you round the eyes.’

Tom felt a heaviness in his chest, as though he’d swallowed a stone with his beer. He remembered having the same sort of feeling as a boy, whenever his father had cuffed him; the pain of the blow had been nothing.

‘I hear you’re going away,’ he said.

‘That’s right. It’s best, isn’t it, all in all. I’ve been offered the job I went for and it’s as good as I’ll get. Llwyn Cadno Farm, South Cardiganshire. The owner of the place, Isaac Lloyd his name is, knows how I’m placed and doesn’t seem to mind. I told him straight out and he said “You’re a bloody fool, then, but it’s none of my business. I want an experienced man, so your loss is my gain.” Thinking about it since, I’ve wondered if that’s why he offered me such a poor wage; because he knew I couldn’t turn it down. Imperfect beings all of us. Never mind. I dare say we’ll survive, won’t we, all of us, what do you say?’

‘About that twenty pounds, Dad, you can forget about that.’

‘Did your mother tell you to say that?’

‘I’m saying it.’

‘No, no, I’ll pay it back. If she’d said it, it would be different.’

‘She hasn’t said anything, one way or another.’

‘I’ll wait till she does then, and abide with that.’

Josi refused another drink and left within the hour.

As soon as he’d gone, Tom realized that they hadn’t talked of any of the things he’d had on his mind, he was no wiser even about what clothes his father wanted, all he knew was the name of the farm he was going to.

His father had left without any ceremony, as though he’d be seeing him again later that night. There was little ceremony about his father; no fuss, no show. He suddenly saw him resting at the side of a hedge, his whole body completely relaxed so that he seemed almost a part of the landscape. He seemed extraordinarily at peace with himself; even at the present time, with his life completely disrupted, that was the impression he gave. Whereas he, Tom, felt an alien wherever he was, both in Oxford and back in Wales. He called for his third pint of beer. What could alter his life, he wondered, give him a sense of purpose, a place in the world? Love? Religion? Neither seemed to have the power to move him. He dreaded the empty Sunday ahead. He’d go to chapel, of course. He probably didn’t get more out of it than Catrin did, but it didn’t seem worth making a fuss about; grieving his mother. If only Edward was still with them. He could talk to Edward. Even about his father.

Josi walked quickly towards Hetty Lewis’s house in Cambrian
Street. It was the first time he’d ever lived in a town, and though it was a small one, surrounded on all sides by hills and fields, he felt hemmed in. In three days, he and Miriam were leaving for the farm on the other side of the mountain; it would be a hard life, but not impossible like living in the middle of bricks and chimney pots.

Hetty had already had her bowl of gruel and gone to bed and Miriam was suckling the baby in front of the fire.

The best kitchen was small and cosy as a burrow. Josi sat in the large fireside chair, an old chair of elm and oak, shaped and polished by years of human contact like the handle of his scythe. He ran his hands along the curved arms; feeling the proximity of others comforted him always.

He and Miriam didn’t speak; the baby was easily distracted, interested in everything except feeding. When at last she would take no more, Josi took her from Miriam.

Her dark plum-coloured eyes were wide open but unseeing; she seemed knocked out by milk. ‘Elen,’ he said. She tried to focus on him, but yawned instead; a brief, pink yawn. Afterwards she resumed her blind gazing.

He handed her back to Miriam.