Ten White Geese (16 page)

The ease with which Bradwen once again used the hotplates and the oven made her realise that he must have been familiar with the cooker for a long time. He had slid a leg of lamb into it – with garlic and anchovies, as promised – but he could eat it himself. The thought alone made her feel sick. Where had he got that tin of anchovies? Had he bought it earlier? She lit a cigarette. He must have seen the present under the Christmas tree. Maybe he was looking
forward to it, just as she had always stared greedily at the St Nicholas presents in the old days but had to wait until someone told her that she could take one and unwrap it. She used to kill time by staring out of the window with feigned indifference. She smacked her lips, there was something strange about the taste of the cigarette. As long as she kept quiet, he couldn’t do anything.

‘Plant the roses tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Yes, fine.’

He sat down at the table, a bit lost.

‘Or maybe wait a little longer,’ she said.

‘It must have been Sam,’ the boy said. He had clasped his hands loosely and was rubbing one thumb with the other in turn.

‘What?’

‘Foxes smell a dog.’

She tried to cast her mind back. Ten geese, eight geese, seven geese. She saw herself kneeling in the dark, chips of slate pressing into her flesh. There were four or five around then, but the boy and the dog hadn’t arrived yet. Or had they? ‘Do you know the baker and his wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘Don’t they have a baker in Llanberis?’

‘Sure. My father used to say he danced to the pipes of the tourists. Making rolls nobody else wanted. Fancy stuff.’

‘So you don’t have a mother any more.’

The boy bowed his head and looked down at his thumbs, dragging a nail through the wrinkles on his knuckle.

I didn’t want to know a thing about him, she thought. He was just supposed to be here. But he had to leave too. And now I know he’s a motherless son. That he left home and took his father’s dog. She felt exhausted. She didn’t want to know or hear any of the ins and outs. ‘Pour a drink,’ she said loudly.

The boy picked up the bottle she could have picked up herself and poured two full glasses. She raised hers, the boy raised his. She looked at him, he looked back. The kitchen smelt of meat. She raised her eyebrows.

‘To the lamb,’ Bradwen said.

‘No.’

‘To the roses?’

‘Yes.’ She drank.

The smell of lamb wasn’t as bad as she’d expected; one and a half glasses of wine were enough to drown her slight sense of nausea. During the meal they hardly spoke. The boy ate a lot of meat. She watched him shovel it in and imagined a lamb with muscular buttocks, a bundle of vigour and vitality, gambolling over a hilly field. She understood why Bradwen was so wiry, strong and wiry, as robust as the meat he ate and had probably eaten throughout his childhood. Now and then she saw him glance at the Christmas tree, looking at the present he suspected to be socks. He no longer urged her to eat. He ate and drank. Once, he forgot that the dog wasn’t there any more and whistled under his breath.

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. She was very tired. ‘He’s gone.’

*

When Bradwen had finished eating, he stood up to clear the table.

‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it in a minute. Look under the Christmas tree first.’

Without feigning surprise, he walked straight to the present, picked it up and came back to the table. ‘Socks,’ he said softly. It sounded reproachful, as if he was thinking of the encounter with his father. He laid the present on the table and pulled off the Sellotape before folding back the wrapping paper. He took the hat in his hands, looked up – his squint a bit more pronounced than usual – then pulled it down over his black hair.

She took a mouthful of wine and watched as the boy stood up and came round the table to kneel down next to her. She knew what he was going to do even before he, like Sam, began licking her free hand. She stared at his neck and the pastel-blue hat with the curls sticking out from under it, and from there her gaze moved to the candles on the windowsill, which had almost burnt down. There was still a large piece of lamb in the earthenware dish. She tried to think whether she knew any commands in English. What was she supposed to say? ‘Down!’ perhaps?

She woke in the night. The rushing of the stream was fairly loud, she’d slid the window up before going to bed. Was that
what had woken her? Had the wind turned? She felt bloated, as if she’d eaten half a saucepan of potatoes and a whole plate of parsnips. There were noises from the bathroom. Bradwen was on the toilet. She struggled over onto her side and listened to the stream, imagining water flowing to the sea day after day, seawater evaporating, fresh water being drawn up from the salt, clouds floating to the land, rain falling on the mountain, water feeding the stream. A little later she realised that the boy wasn’t
on
the toilet. He was probably kneeling in front of it. Retching. She sat up, throwing the covers aside. The bedroom was cold. She didn’t just feel bloated, she felt terrible. So terrible she could hardly drag herself up onto her feet. The landing light was on, the bathroom door wide open. She walked there using the railing for support. Bradwen hadn’t turned on the light in the bathroom itself and he wasn’t kneeling, he was standing bent over and clutching the sides of the toilet bowl. His naked back was like a sick animal’s, hunched but powerful, curved but taut. A gymnast. She had never seen him like this. She laid her right hand on his upper back and, without applying any pressure, moved it back and forth from shoulder to shoulder. ‘There, there,’ she said. She felt a wave forming under her hand, put her left hand on his stomach, imagining it more tanned than usual, the muscles tense, her little finger on the elastic of his underpants. It was as if she were the one who made sure he got rid of what needed to come up. He gagged and spewed, she felt his body relax. Never before had she felt this close to him. At the same time, holding him like this helped her stay upright.

‘To think that your father’s meat would make you this sick,’ she said.

He coughed and spewed again. ‘The meat?’ he said.

‘I didn’t eat any.’

‘Who’s to say it wasn’t your hand?’

She looked at the hand on his shoulder. No, she thought, it was the other one, the left hand that was now on his stomach. An infected hand? The boy stood up and wiped his mouth, shaking her off in the process. He stepped to one side, turned on the tap and began to brush his teeth. The light from the landing wasn’t strong enough to see his face properly in the mirror.

‘Just kidding,’ he said after he’d rinsed his mouth.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said.

They were standing opposite each other, or more side to side. He took her hand and lifted it to his mouth. ‘Just kidding,’ he said again and kissed it. ‘See you tomorrow.’ He walked out of the bathroom and closed the study door behind him.

*

She couldn’t see her own face properly in the mirror either. She licked the back of her left hand; it tasted like her. She took a tablet. Later, back in bed, the stream sounded more syrupy and when she imagined the water cycle again it was infinitely bigger, bluer, whiter and wetter. She laid her hands on her belly to have the boy with her, somehow, after all and even thought she could feel his tension radiating into her skin. How easy it would have been for her to let one hand descend a little, laying her other on his chest, pulling him back against her, his head on her shoulder, his throat defenceless, his smell mixed with a sour tang. Give and take, she thought, in the part of the imagined cycle
where a cloud was about to rain on the mountain. Him behind me, me behind him. He has to go, but not entirely. ‘There, there’, and ‘
ach
’, that’s about all there is.

She drifted away on the syrupy flow of the stream, her thoughts stretching out, she was almost asleep. She had just enough time to think how pleasant that was, sleep. How separate from everything else. How free from the things that worry people when they’re not sleeping, the things that scare them, the things that loom before them like a mountain.

‘It must have been the anchovies,’ Bradwen said, leaning on the rusty, broken-handled rake he was using to even out the soil he’d turned. He looked a little paler than usual, perhaps because of the hat. His own, old hat was dark green. Earlier in the morning, drinking a coffee, he hadn’t taken the new one off. ‘It was a tin I found in a kitchen cupboard. Who knows, it could have been there thirty years.’

She was leaning against the wall of the old pigsty. The sun was shining, there was hardly any wind. There was no longer any trace of snow or winter. Like before, she felt the warmth radiating from the light-coloured bricks. Like before, the smoke rose vertically from her cigarette.

‘With her buying it long before I was born. That’s a weird thought.’

She turned her head. There were no cows on the other
side of the garden wall. It felt lonely. A flock of raucous black birds – she didn’t even try to name them, there were too many possibilities: crows, jackdaws, ravens or rooks – flew from one tree to the next. It was as if it only took them a minute to realise that a particular tree was unsuitable.

‘Or is it impossible for something like that, in oil, to go off?’

He’d started to rake the second rectangle. The soil was light brown, it didn’t look very rich. There wasn’t a single ominous cloud. The geese, out of sight from where she was standing, clucked softly. Contented, not frightened. She
was
listening to him, but not everything he said was getting through. Maybe he was glad to be feeling better, relieved that he’d just managed a biscuit with his coffee. She felt no desire to answer. He was working, sweating, feeling healthy and alive. She drew on her cigarette, which she was holding between the fingers of her left hand, the hand which he – before coming up with the anchovy theory – had blamed, in jest or otherwise, for his vomiting. The old-woman smell was lingering around her again, or rather, still, even out here in the fresh air, despite the cigarette smoke. She threw away the butt and pulled open the door of the sty. There wasn’t much wood left; the pile had shrunk without her noticing. For a while now the boy had been taking care of the stove and the fireplaces, along with going to Tesco’s and the Waunfawr bakery. Apart from the doctor’s visit, she had stuck close to the house. She’d come here and kept her world small, then she’d gone out – feeling homesick in the refrigerated aisle at Tesco’s, walking to the bakery, having her hair cut short and standing in the reservoir – and now
the world was limited again. The homesickness had subsided, almost unnoticed. The garden, the goose field, the house, her bed, the shelf under the mirror in the bathroom, the boxes of tablets. A whole life in a matter of months. Until the New Year. Because this house and garden weren’t hers. It wasn’t her shelf under the mirror. She was a tourist, a passer-by. A foreigner, a German according to most people here.

‘I’m going to plant them,’ Bradwen called.

She stared at the greenish tiles of the cellar floor. For a moment she imagined that, instead of Sam, it had been Bradwen sitting in the oafish sheep farmer’s big black pickup. And that the dog was snuffling around here now.

*

‘I want another arch,’ she said. Now that the rose bushes were in the ground there was hardly anything to them. They’d looked a lot larger in the pots. ‘Here, along the edge of the path, as a gateway to the side path. And then you have to buy two special roses. Roses that want to climb.’

‘Ramblers,’ the boy said.

‘Is that what they’re called? Take the car and drive to Dickson’s Garden Centre.’

‘Now?’

‘Why not? I’ll give you money.’

‘OK.’

She pulled a hundred pounds out of her wallet and gave him the notes.

*

When he was gone, she took the lid off the bin, fished around inside and found the empty, greasy anchovy tin. She
walked over to the window above the sink and, without too much difficulty, read
Best before: June 1984
on the bottom. The boy had even been right.

She looked up. From an invisible chimney, hidden between oak trees, smoke was rising as on a listless day in June – smoke from cooking, not heating – bees waltzed past the kitchen window, butterflies flitted from a red rose to a yellow rose; the garden wall was two stones higher, a farmer on a dull red tractor was tedding the grass and the alders along the stream were full and round. She had her hair up and she was wearing an apron. Maybe she was already widowed, maybe the man on the dull red tractor was Mr Evans and she was about to take him something. In a basket. She pressed up against the sink and considered adding some cold beer to the basket, two bottles, enough to make Evans feel drowsy, ready to let the grass be for a while and lie down under an oak. Stretching out in the shadows with her. Warm. Clothes off.

She threw the tin back into the bin and washed her hands with icy water. She pulled on her boots without tightening the laces. Then she went upstairs.

The portrait of Dickinson was facing the wall again. With a sigh she turned it round. For weeks the boy had been sleeping in the most beautiful room in the house, the only room with windows on two sides. ‘Dual aspect,’ the
house-hunters on
Escape to the Country
would say contentedly. ‘So light and bright and airy in here!’ For weeks now the open volume of poetry had lain on the oak table with the blank sheets of paper next to it, pen and pencil waiting. Habegger’s much-too-thick book didn’t even mention the poem, let alone discuss it. Suddenly she was furious, not just at the biographer – the old gossip – but at Dickinson too. A puling woman who hid herself away in her house and garden, wordlessly insisting with everything she did and did not do that people should just ignore her, yet fishing for validation like a whimpering child, scared to death that the affection she showed others, mostly in letters, would remain unanswered. A bird of a woman who made herself small and can only have been fearful, signing letters ‘Your Gnome’, and staying timorously in her room during the memorial service in the entrance hall for her dead father, but keeping the door ostentatiously ajar to demand the lion’s share of the attention for herself. ‘I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her,’ wrote one of the men with whom she corresponded. A woman who took to wearing the white of a virgin. Only now did she realise that it had been this anger that had motivated her to write a thesis, subjecting what she saw as the many overrated poems to a critical investigation. Almost as a day of reckoning. ‘Not good,’ she said softly. ‘Not good at all.’