A Small Country (9 page)

‘Who’d have believed it,’ Lisi Jenkins had said after he had gone. ‘Such an eligible young man.’

‘How can you tell how eligible he is?’ old Jenkins had asked sourly, ‘and you only clapped eyes on him for five minutes.’

‘Such a lovely suit and such good manners. And when I think what a little...’ Lisi Jenkins halted. She was a tactless woman, not very bright, and Ifan was getting more hot-tempered than ever in old age.

‘Go on,’ said Miriam, always amused by Lisi’s indiscretions.

‘A poor little thing you were, indeed, no more flesh on your bones than a gipsy child. Hair cut off because of the nits. Dressed in shreds and patches. Never mind. People can rise these days, and that’s not such a bad thing, surely. The lady’s maid in Gwynant married Mr Edmund, and her ladyship visits her, they say, though Gladys Pugh who told me isn’t the world’s most reliable....’

Ifan Jenkins got to his feet as though to rise above his wife’s chatter.

‘Are you marrying this man, then?’ he asked.

‘I’m considering it,’ Miriam said.

‘If you have to consider it, don’t,’ Jenkins said, ‘that’s my opinion.’

‘I’m all right as I am,’ Miriam agreed.

‘I should think you are. As right as anyone can be. Your own boss, very near. Someone will come along, no doubt, and you’ll marry him because you can’t help yourself, but until that time comes, rejoice in your freedom; that’s my advice.’

‘I think perhaps you’re right.’

‘Have you ever known me wrong?’

‘I’m not going to marry you, Gareth,’ she had told him again, the following Sunday. He went on coming to see her, though, went on proposing from time to time, but without much hope. He was not what she wanted; they both knew it.

When Josi came into her life, she realized that he was the someone Ifan Jenkins had warned her about, the one against whom she would have no defences. But he was already married, so what was the good of that?

SEVEN

The married man rode past Miriam’s garden often that summer. He and she would usually talk together for a short time under the rowan trees that overhung the path, but he was never again invited into the house; there seemed no excuse for it. I’m a respectable schoolmistress, Miriam told herself. I’m not for him.

The affair languished during autumn and winter, she saw him once at a Christmas concert; a curt nod, that was all.

Gareth continued faithful, and though he made no headway with her, seemed fairly contented.

Miriam put heart and soul into her work. The Inspector of Schools gave her a glowing report. ‘The mistress, Miss Miriam Lewis, is a young woman of rare perception and application. Her pupils have responded well to her love of the written word, displaying a mature knowledge of both English and Welsh literature. Arithmetic is taught systematically and thoroughly, the pupils having a commendable grasp of the processes they employ. In Nature Study and Art, a particular measure of excellence has been achieved by the method of taking the children out of doors whenever possible, enabling them to see the wonders surrounding them. They sing harmoniously and joyfully. I have no hesitation in stating that the pupils of Rhydfelen School are being educated in the fullest sense of the word.’

Miriam was gratified by the report, fairly satisfied with the way her life was going.

Yet, when she caught a glimpse of Josi in Llanfryn one Saturday morning in early spring, she waved and rushed to catch up with him; was at his side before she realized what she had done.

I’ll ride over to see you one of these days,’ he said, confidence in his voice, entreaty in his dark eyes. He didn’t understand her, had been trying to put her out of his mind.

They stood together for a minute or more, and in that time, each accepted his fate. Neither of them smiled. The sun shone in the pale sky above them. It was a cold day, glittering like a jewel.

The following Monday, he rode up to the school as he had done almost exactly a year before. Once again he waited outside for all the children to leave.

When he went in, Miriam was at her desk writing. She didn’t seem surprised to see him, perhaps she had heard his horse, perhaps she had been expecting him for the past year.

He stood against the door looking at her. Neither of them spoke.

The distance between them. Neither of them moved. Why doesn’t she say something, Josi asked himself, why doesn’t she help me, why doesn’t she smile? The distance between them seemed like distance in a dream.

Then at last Miriam put down her pen, wiping the nib carefully, and Josi took a deep breath and bridged the distance between them, arrived at her side and drew her to her feet. He felt as though he had swum through a river to save a drowning man; that he was the drowning man. For several moments he held her, held on to her. Then he took off his top-coat and spread it on the floor by the little stove and they lay down together.

‘Someone will come,’ Miriam said.

‘I locked the door.’

They lay together in the cold schoolroom until it was quite dark, until, through the narrow windows, built high in the walls to prevent the children catching sight of the lovely world outside, they could see the first white stars.

‘I came to this school when I was a boy.’

‘I know. I found your name in an old register. Joshua Matthew Evans.’

‘You look for my name then, do you?’

‘No. You were on the list when the school opened. I noticed it.’

‘You happened to notice it?’ Josi’s voice had a laugh in it and a hint of danger, too. She was aware of both.

‘Why is that? Because you love me? You do love me, don’t you? I know you do.’

‘I saw your photograph, too, in the first log book. About twelve, I think. Such a great, scowling boy. Joshua Matthew Evans.’

‘Have you ever been in love before, Miriam?’

‘Not before, not now either.’

The moon rose and the sky lightened.

‘I must go home. They’ll be out looking for me.’

‘Who will?’

‘Someone. Neli Morris, Nant Eithin, will notice there’s no light.’ ‘You shall go home when you’ve told me you love me.’

‘Is that important? After what’s happened?’

‘It’s more important after what’s happened. I know you love me. Say it, Miriam.’

‘I don’t love anyone else, that’s all I can say.’

‘You mustn’t see that bank clerk any more, that’s one thing. It’s not fair on him.’

‘I shall decide that. In my own good time.’

There was silence between them again for a minute or two. An owl hooted in the clear, frosty night.

‘Oh Miriam, it isn’t fair on me,’ Josi said at last. ‘I love you, Miriam. You mustn’t see him again, you mustn’t. I love you. I can’t bear it. Come, I’ll take you home.’

‘I love you,’ he said again when they reached the cottage. As they kissed, Miriam could feel the tears on his face. She tried to see his face in the dark.

Josi adored her; her lively mind, her toughness, her complete acceptance of the situation which he found so difficult to accept.

‘This isn’t the life for you,’ he would say as he held her in his arms on the classroom floor, on the hillside bracken in summer, eventually in her little cottage, in spite of the danger of it.

‘You gave me enough time to think it over,’ she would say, ‘I’d decided to have you long before you’d come round to it.’

‘Oh, it’s me they’ll all blame,’ she would say. ‘The shameless hussy. Lusting after his body and her only a little bit of a thing, wouldn’t you think she could have been satisfied with less, Gareth Vaughan’s, say.’

To Josi with his strict chapel upbringing, to hear a girl talking openly and delightedly about the joys of sex, using a fair sprinkling of the words he’d been thrashed for knowing as a boy, went to his head. He would never have enough of her, he knew it. She was as important to him as the weather.

Every time he went to the cottage – late, so as to avoid any likelihood of other callers – it was like the first time; his heart racing. When they met by accident, in a concert or singing festival or public meeting, he would address only a few words to her, but his eyes would return to her for the rest of the evening. If another man talked to her or hung about her, he was tormented; not with jealousy; he knew now that she loved him; but because he, himself, was not able to be at her side.

However careful they might be in public, there were the few occasions when someone saw them together and naturally there was a certain amount of talk. Once, they had bumped into Lowri, at that time the second maid at Hendre Ddu. She lived in a hillside hamlet about a mile outside Rhydfelen, and Josi, having forgotten that it was her day off, was taking Miriam for an evening walk that way. When they met, Lowri had blushed and Miriam, on his arm, had grown pale. Josi had made some remark about a lily and a rose and tried to laugh. It was weeks after that before Lowri could look at him without blushing; Josi felt sorry and a little ashamed at the extent of her embarrassment. Somehow, though, he knew that she would never breathe a word about the encounter and he was right; she was a good girl.

In fact no one was malicious enough to let Rachel hear even a whisper of the affair. Josi was a popular figure, a hero to many; the poor boy who had got himself the best farm in the district, how could he be expected to behave like anyone else? Had they heard that he was compromising Lady Harris’s elegant daughter, the Honourable Priscilla, it would have surprised no one; the fact that he had chosen such an ordinary, homespun girl, hardly pretty, let alone beautiful, seemed to display a most commendable modesty. ‘Good old Josi,’ they said.

‘Good old Josi. He rides over to see the little schoolmistress now and again. Well, nobody’s too old for a bit of extra schooling. One and one makes three, that will be the end of it, though, mark my words.’

They were proved right.

When Josi discovered that Miriam was pregnant he felt utterly happy; liberated from the bonds which had kept him tied to Rachel for so long. He was still conscious of his sin – he believed implicitly in the ten commandments – but as a sinner he could now allow that his clearest duty lay with Miriam.

Miriam was not much concerned with sin or the ten commandments. Although as a teacher she had to pay it lip service, she had rejected the religion of her youth and could see no reason to search for another. She acknowledged the beauty of psalms and gospels, but didn’t care to be comforted by empty words; she had seen ‘God is Love’ displayed in homes filled with hate, ‘God shall provide’ above bare boards, while the most popular text, ‘Death is profit’, seemed a shameful denial of the value and beauty of life.

She had no desire either to feel washed from sin or immortal. She acknowledged that there were many ‘saints’ whose enlightenment in the dark ages of superstition and cruelty had shone forth before men, but believed their vision to be a manifestation of their humanity rather than their divinity. As for herself, she was a most imperfect human being, she knew it, and could not do without Josi. And the price she had to pay was the knowledge that she was harming Rachel, when her most ardent wish was to harm no one; man, child nor beast.

She had to have Josi. Sometimes she dreamed that she had given him up and woke up sweating and trembling.

Miriam’s attitude to her pregnancy altered from day to day, almost from hour to hour. She was sad that she would have to give up teaching which she enjoyed, and leave the cottage which had been her home for six years; the only comfortable home she had ever had. She knew that she would also have to leave the village where she had been happy – even if she had been able to get lodgings there and been capable of holding up her head as an unmarried mother, her presence would affect Josi’s standing in the commun-ity; to be reputedly engaged in an affair was one thing, having a mistress and child quite another – she knew she had to leave.

But while she would be struggling with the problem of where to go, how long her savings would last, how to bring up an illegitimate child, happiness would break in like a shaft of sunlight; Josi’s child and hers was there deep inside her, the act made flesh, she wasn’t
barren as she had often thought: the miracle of procreation filled her.

She remembered – she was quite a small child at the time – her mother taking hold of one of her hands and putting an egg into it, a large white egg. She had felt the mysterious pulsing inside the thin, smooth warmth of the shell. ‘That’s the chick,’ her mother had said, replacing the egg under the hen. The wonder of that moment had remained with Miriam through a quarter of a century.

She gave in her notice before the Christmas holidays. She told everyone she was leaving because she had to return to her family. Many, though, while pretending to believe her, formed other conjectures which were nearer the truth.

The deputy director of education came to the school a week before she left at the end of February, and after thanking her for her years of loyal service, looked her full in the face and asked her whether there was a chance of her getting married. ‘There’s no chance of it,’ she said.

He shook hands with her sadly.

‘You’ll all remember Miss Lewis,’ he told the children. ‘No need for me to say anything. You’ll all remember her. For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful, isn’t it.’