Essential Stories (15 page)

“Shoes!” she said, with excitement. “Do you want any shoes?” A large number of shoes of all kinds, little worn or not worn at all, were rowed in pairs on the bed and some had been thrown into a box as well.

“Fifty-one pairs I counted,” she said. “She never went out but she went on ordering them. There’s a piece of paper in each pair. Have a look. Read it. What does it say?”

He took a piece of paper out of a shoe.

“ ‘Comfortable for the evening,’ ” he read out. He took another. “ ‘For wet weather.’ Did it rain indoors?”

She took one and read out:

“ ‘With my blue dress!’ Can you imagine? ‘Sound walking pair,’ ” she laughed but he interrupted her.

“In Wales they lacked them,” he said. “In the bad times they were going barefoot. My sisters shared a pair for dances.”

“What shall I do with them?” she asked. “Someone could wear them.”

“There are good times now. They have the money,” he said, snubbing her. “They buy new.”

“I mean—anyone,” she said. “They are too big for me. I’ll show you.”

She sat down on a packing case and slipped her foot into a silver evening shoe.

“You can see, my feet are lost in them,” she said.

“You have small feet,” he said. “In Wales the men would be chasing you.”

“After chapel, I’ve no doubt,” she said. “Up the mountain—what was the name of it? You told me.”

“It has the best view in Wales. But those who go up it never see it,” he laughed. “Try this pair,” he said, kneeling down and lifting her foot. “Ah no, I see. But look at those legs, boy!”

Miss Freshwater’s niece got up.

“What size does your wife take?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, very pleased with himself. “Where is this trunk you said we had to move?”

“Out in the landing cupboard. I’ll show you. I can’t move it.”

She led the way to the landing and bent down to tug at it.

“You must not do that,” he said, putting his hands on her waist and moving her out of the way. He heaved at the trunk and tipped it on end. She wanted it, she said, in the light, where she could see.

“Here on the chest,” she said.

He lifted it up and planked it down on the chest.

“Phew!” he said. “You have a small waist for a married woman. Soft. My wife is a giantess, she weighs thirteen stone. And yet, you’re big, too, oh yes, you are. But you have light bones. With her, now, it is the bones that weigh. Shall we open it?”

She sat down on a chair and felt in her pocket for a mirror.

“Why didn’t you tell me I looked such a sight?” she said, wiping her face. “Yes, open it.”

The trunk was made of black leather: it was cracked, peeling, stained and squashed by use. Dimly printed on it was her father’s fading name in white large letters. The trunk had been pitched and bumped and slithered out of ships’ holds and trains, all over the world. Its lid, now out of the true, no longer met the lock and it was closed by a strap. It had lain ripening and decaying in attics and lofts for half a lifetime.

“What is in it?” she called, without looking from her mirror.

“Clothes,” he said. “Books. A pair of skates. Did the old lady go skating?”

He pulled out a Chinese hat. There was a pigtail attached to it and he held it up.

“Ah,” he called. “This is the job.” He put the hat on his head and pulled out a mandarin coat.

Miss Freshwater’s niece stared and then she flushed.

“Where did you get that?” she cried jumping up, taking the hat from his head and snatching the coat. “They’re mine! Where were they?”

She pushed him aside and pulled one or two things from the trunk.

“They’re mine!” she accused him. “All mine.”

She aged as she looked at him. A photograph fell to the floor as she lifted up a book. “To darling Laura,” she read out. “Tennyson.”

“Who is this?” he said, picking up the photograph.

She did not hear. She was pulling out a cold, sequined evening dress that shrank almost to nothing as she picked it up.

“Good God,” she said and dropped it with horror. For under the dress was an album. “Where,” she said, sharply possessive, “did you put the skates?” She opened the album. She looked at a road deep in snow leading to an hotel with eaves a yard wide. She had spent her honeymoon there.

“Kitzbühel,” she said. “Oh, no!”

She looked fiercely at him to drive him away. The house, so anonymous, so absurd, so meaningless and ghostless, had suddenly got her. There was a choke of cold wonder in her throat.

She turned on him: “Can’t you clear up all that paper in the room?” She did not want to be seen by him.

Evans went to the door of the bedroom and, after a glance inside, came back. He was not going to leave her. He picked up the book of poems, glanced at a page or two and then dropped it back in the trunk.

“Everyone knows,” he said scornfully, “that the Welsh are the founders of all the poetry of Europe.”

She did not hear him. Her face had drained of waking light. She had entered blindly into a dream in which she could hardly drag herself along. She was looking painfully through the album, rocking her head slowly from side to side, her mouth opening a little and closing on the point of speech, a shoulder rising as if she had been hurt, and her back moving and swaying as she felt the clasp of the past like hands on her. She was looking at ten forgotten years of her life, her own life, not her family’s, and she did not laugh when she saw the skirts too long, the top-heavy hats hiding the eyes, her face too full and fat, her plainness so sullen, her prettiness too open-mouthed and loud, her look too grossly sly. In this one, sitting at the café table by the lake when she was nineteen, she looked masterful and at least forty. In this garden picture she was theatrically fancying herself as an ancient Greek in what looked like a nightgown! One of her big toes, she noticed, turned up comically in the sandal she was wearing. Here on a rock by the sea, in a bathing dress, she had got thin again—that was her marriage—and look at her hair! This picture of the girl on skis, sharp-faced, the eyes narrowed—who was that? Herself—yet how could she have looked like that! But she smiled a little at last at the people she had forgotten. This man with the crinkled fair hair, a German—how mad she had been about him. But what pierced her was that in each picture of herself she was just out of reach, flashing and yet dead; and that really it was the things that burned in the light of permanence—the chairs, the tables, the trees, the car outside the café, the motor launch on the lake. These blinked and glittered. They had lasted and were ageless, untouched by time, and she was not. She put the album back into the trunk and pulled out an old tweed coat and skirt. Under it was an exercise book with the word “Diary” written on it in a hand more weakly rounded than the hand she wrote today. Part of a letter fell out of the diary, the second page, it seemed, of a letter of her own. She read it.

“. . . the job at any rate,” she read. “For a whole week he’s forgotten his chest, his foot, his stomach. He’s not dying any more!!! He conde (crossed out) congratulates himself and says it just shows how doctors are all fools. Inner self-confidence is what I need, he tells me!! It means giving up the flat and that’s what I keep thinking—Oxford will be much more difficult for you and me. Women, he says, aren’t happy unless they’re sacrificing themselves. Darling, he doesn’t know; it’s the thought of You that keeps . . .”

She turned over the page. Nothing. She looked through the diary. Nothing. She felt sick and then saw Evans had not gone and was watching her. She quickly put the letter back into the diary.

“Ah,” she said nervously. “I didn’t know you were here. I’ll show you something.” She laughed unnaturally and opened the album until she found the most ludicrous and abashing picture in the book, one that would humiliate her entirely. “Here, look at this.”

There was a see-saw in the foreground surrounded by raucously laughing people wearing paper hats and looking as though they had been dipped in glycerine: she was astride at the higher end of the see-saw, kicking her legs, and on the lower end was a fat young man in a pierrot costume. On her short, fuzzy fair hair was a paper hat. She showed the picture to Evans and picked out the terrible sequin dress from the trunk.

“That’s the dress!” she said, pointing to the picture. “I was engaged to him. Isn’t it terrible?” And she dropped the dress back again. It felt cold and slippery, almost wet. “I didn’t marry him.”

Evans scowled.

“You were naked,” he said with disgust.

“I remember now. I left it all here. I kept that dress for years. I’ll have to go through it all.” And she pulled down the lid.

“This photograph fell out,” he said.

It was the picture of another young man.

“Is this your husband?” Evans asked, studying the man.

“My husband is dead,” she said sharply. “That is a friend.” And she threw the picture back into the trunk. She realised now that Evans had been holding her arm a long time. She stepped away from him abruptly. The careless friendliness, the sense of conspiracy she had felt while they worked together, had all gone. She drew away and said, in the hostile voice of unnecessary explanation:

“I mean,” she said, “my husband died a few years ago. We were divorced. I mustn’t waste any more time.”

“My wife would not condescend to that,” he said.

“She has no reason, I am sure,” said Miss Freshwater’s niece, severely, and returned to the bedroom.

“Now! We can’t waste time like this. You’d better begin with what is on the bed. And when you’ve cleared it you can put the kettle on.”

When Evans had gone downstairs with his load, she went to the landing and glared at the trunk. Her fists were clenched; she wished it was alive and that she could hit it. Glancing over the banisters to be sure she was alone, she opened it again, took out the photograph and the letter from her diary and put them in her handbag. She thought she was going to be sick or faint for the past was drumming, like a train coming nearer and nearer, in her head.

“My God!” she said. And when she saw her head in its turban and her face hardened by shock and grief in her absurd aunt’s dressing-table mirror, she exclaimed with real horror. She was crying. “What a mess,” she said and pulled the scarf off her head. Her fair, thick hair hung round her face untidily. Not once, in all those photographs, had a face so wolfish with bitterness and without laughter looked back at her.

“I’m taking the tea out,” Evans called from below.

“I’m just coming,” she called back and hurriedly tried to arrange her hair and then, because she had cried a little, she put on her glasses. Evans gave a keen look at the change in her when she got downstairs and walked through the hall to the door.

He had put the tray on the grass near a yew hedge in the hot corner at the side of the house and was standing a few yards away drinking his tea. In the last two days he had never drunk his tea near her but had chatted from a distance.

In her glasses and with her hair girlishly brushed back, Miss Freshwater’s niece looked cold, tall and grand, like a headmistress.

“I hope we shan’t get any more smoke here,” she said. “Sit down. You look too restless.”

She was very firm, nodding to the exact place on the lawn on which she required him to sit. Taken aback, Evans sat precisely in that place. She sat on the grass and poured herself a cup of tea.

“How many souls came to Jesus last night?” she asked in her lady-like voice. Evans got up and squatted cheerfully, but watchfully, on his heels.

“Seventeen,” he said.

“That’s not very good,” she said. “Do you think you could save mine?”

“Oh, yes,” he said keenly.

“You look like a frog,” she said mocking. He had told her miners always squat in this way after work. “It’s too late,” she went on. “Twenty years too late. Have you always been with the Mission?”

“No,” he said.

“What was it? Were you converted, did you see the light?” she mocked, like a teacher.

“I had a vision,” he said seriously.

“A vision!” she laughed. She waved her hand. “What do you mean— you mean, you—well, where? Up in the sky or something?”

“No,” he said. “It was down the mine.”

“What happened?”

He put down his cup and he moved it away to give himself more room. He squatted there, she thought, not like a frog at all, but like an imp or a devil, very grave and carven-faced. She noticed now how wide his mouth was and how widely it opened and how far the lips drew back when he spoke in his declamatory voice. He stared a long time waiting for her to stop fidgeting. Then he began:

“I was a drunkard,” he declaimed, relishing each syllable separately. “I was a liar. I was a hypocrite. I went with women. And married women too!” His voice rose. “I was a fornicator. I was an adulterer. Always at the races, too, gambling, it was senseless. There was no sin the Devil did not lead me into, I was like a fool. I was the most noteworthy sinner in the valley, everyone spoke of it. But I did not know the Lord was lying in wait for me.”

“Yes, but what happened?” she said.

He got to his feet and gazed down at her and she was compelled to look up at him.

“I will tell you,” he said. “It was a miracle.” He changed his manner and after looking round the garden, he said in a hushing and secretive voice:

“There was a disaster in the mine,” he said. “It was in June. I was twenty-three and I was down working and I was thinking of the sunlight and the hills and the evening. There was a young girl called Alys Davies, you know, two or three had been after her and I was thinking I would take her up the rock, that is a quiet place, only an old mountain ram would see you . . .”

“You were in the mine,” she said. “You are getting too excited about this Alys Jones . . .”

“Davies,” he said with a quick grin. “Don’t worry about her. She is married now.” He went back to his solemn voice.

“And suddenly,” he said, “there was a fall, a terrible fall of rock like thunder and all the men shouting. It was at eleven in the morning when we stopped work for our tea. There were three men in there working with me and they had just gone off. I was trapped alone.”