The Line Between Us (16 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I remembered the first ever weekly meeting that I had with you. You commandeered the downstairs parlour with views over the copper beech on Dancing Green, facing north so that the light seemed business-like. You set up a gate-leg table on a Persian carpet in the centre of the room. There was a partner’s desk under the window and next to it a filing cabinet with a lock. On the opposite wall were two one-inch ordnance survey maps pinned up side by side showing the bounds of all your land, too big for a single sheet. You started calling it the Estate Office and I was tempted to smile, but I think I under-estimated you.

I stood there waiting for you that first week, staring at the maps, taken aback by how many of the cottages in Morwithy you owned, including ours. Ma was always going on about setting enough money aside to pay the rent, but it never occurred to me she was paying it to you. As I stood there I became conscious of my boots on the carpet and stepped fastidiously on to the polished floorboards instead, then after a beat I stepped back onto the carpet: “Start how you mean to go on, Ifor,” Ma said to me, one of her sayings at the ready, as she waved me off that morning. I studied the map, examining the contours around Withy End which tightened like a noose as they ascended, and I took some small delight at the thought of coming to see you in your office each Thursday, a limited tenancy which allowed me an hour or two every week, of every month, of every year for as long as I dared to contemplate, in this place, with you. It was a room that offered little, with its austere maroon décor and its polished oak furniture dark with the patina of mourning, but to me on that day of our first meeting, it seemed to promise everything.

I shifted my attention to a large oil painting that showed a brace of inert pheasants, some grapes and oranges and a long clay pipe lying on a sideboard. I studied the faint cracks in the varnish and thought
Still Life
was a strange name for a picture so redolent of death and dying and that Juan Bautista de Espinosa had somehow missed the point, whoever he may be.

“It’s ugly, isn’t it?” you said, closing the door behind you. “I ought to get rid of it, really.”

“Well …” I began, beyond my depth in the field of art appreciation, conscious that you had shut the door and that we were on our own together, in the kind of privacy that was untasted and untested between us.

You were saying something about hanging the picture in one of the bedrooms, “Though it would be unkind to inflict it on some poor guest …” but you tailed off as I ventured a glance in your direction. You looked thinner, dressed in black, your hair slicked close to your head and held in place by a tortoiseshell slide, so that even its golden colour was dulled. “Won’t you sit?” you asked, waiting for me to help you into your chair first, which I did, happily, but I couldn’t help marvelling that great wealth didn’t confer strength upon the privileged; it seemed to make them weaker than the rest of us, it made them oddly dependent. We sat opposite one another; you leaned your elbow on the table and cupped your chin in your hand, covering your mouth. For a moment we regarded each other in silence, as though working out how we had arrived at this point and now that we were here, what we should do.

“I’m going to need a lad to assist me,” I began, for the sake of something to say.

“A gardener’s boy? Of course. Do you have anyone in mind?” you answered, and we were safely launched on our way.

“I’ll need some extra hands for clearing the hillside, too. Can’t do it on my own,” I added. “I thought I’d advertise. For the lad. If that’s all right with you. Then I can take my pick of all the old men and boys in the county.”

“The lost generation,” you said with a sigh. I knew what you meant; it was a fact that all of us still lived with after so many years: the war had taken the best of us and the rest of us had to make do. On the table in front of you was a notepad and pencil. You picked the pencil up and fiddled with it for a moment, then you wrote the date at the top of the page and put it down again. “Well,” you said. There was a catch in your voice. Your mother had been dead for less than a fortnight and the grief appeared to come at you like slanting rain from a clear sky. You stared at the sheet of paper, trying to steady yourself.

“Are you alright, Miss Ella?”

This was a question that made your lip tremble until you folded it tight. It was a question you didn’t care to answer.

“Miss Ella …?”

I slid my arm across the table, my fingers closed across my palm as though I had captured something small and alive inside. I opened my hand and offered it to you and keeping your head bowed, without looking at me, you took it and held it for a minute. I could have done anything: pressed your fingers to my mouth, touched my lips to the inside of your wrist, or knelt beside you and rested my head in obeisance in your lap. For sixty seconds we sat in silence, holding hands. You traced the tip of one of your nails across my skin, and then you let me go. I felt the kindle and spark of intimacy still between us and without thinking I reached to capture your hand again, but you lowered your eyes, shaking your head imperceptibly.

“Should we talk … about the replanting of the beech wood?” you said in the end, staring out at Dancing Green, the partial light from the north shining down on you.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I answered, the static in the air making me prickle all over, “It’s the chance to plant a proper arboretum. I was wondering …”

You turned your head and regarded me and it put me completely off my stroke, your gaze saying one thing and your words and actions something else. I swallowed.

“I was wondering if you might discuss it with your father? If you might visit him at the … clinic? He may have some advice to give. No one knows the estate as well as him …” It was the only way I could think of to people your world for you, to make you feel less alone.

“I think he’s gone beyond …” you tailed off. “Unless, perhaps, if you came with me …?” you murmured, artlessly studying the sheet of paper with the date of our meeting written at the top. “You might be able to get some sense out of him. I’m not sure that I can.”

Afterwards, I told my conscience that all we did was to hold hands for the length of a single minute. I told my heart that it was something more.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I remembered the day we moved into our new home, Jenny and I. The job of head gardener came with one of the tied cottages in the courtyard at the side of Nanagalan, where our neighbours consisted of you and Mr and Mrs Brown. Samuelson vacated the property leaving behind him sediments we didn’t try to identify: limescale, nicotine and tannin were the least of our worries; the privy in the little yard out at the back defied description and I cleaned it myself; I didn’t want Jenny to have to face it, I didn’t want our life together to start on that particular note. There were two bedrooms upstairs divided by a partition made of faded blond wood, the front one overlooking the courtyard with its clock which chimed, we discovered, on the quarter all through the night, so we moved our things into the back room with views across the kitchen garden and the fields beyond, swerving off down the valley as far as the eye could see.

We spent a week cleaning out the grease and grime and scum. Ma, her eyes watering with distaste, removed the curtains and returned them three days later cleaned, starched and pressed and an entirely different colour: primrose yellow instead of tobacco brown. Jenny washed down the paintwork and I put a coat of fresh distemper on the walls and we kept the windows open all day long, filling the house with November mist, the first damp breath of winter’s icy exhalation. Once the chimneys were swept, we lit fires in all the grates and when Jenny went to pack two suitcases with all our things from home, I put a milk bottle full of frail lisianthus twined about with ivy on every windowsill, to show her – as I made a small adjustment to the arrangement in the front room, tucking a frond of ivy behind the modest little flowers, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to show her: that I meant things to be right between us, that I loved her as well as I could.

I hurried back to Morwithy. Iwan the Milk had brought his cart to help with our removal. He had a weather-beaten, seafarer’s face from all those mornings in the cold and he stood holding his pony’s head while we loaded our possessions: the suitcases, the blanket box full of our linen, three tea chests containing an assortment of cast-off crockery and the two rag rugs that Ma had made us as a house-warming present.

Delyth was busy at one of her meetings, a convenience I suspect, because she didn’t want to see us leaving, even though she and Ted were getting married in only a few months’ time – it was weeks before she came to visit and then she only stayed for twenty minutes. So Ma stood on the doorstep on her own. She had both hands in the pocket of her apron, and I could see the clench of them under the material, her face a mask of neutrality that was a work of art, carefully constructed and maintained.

Jenny kissed her formally on one cheek. “There’ll always be a welcome for you, at the cottage,” she said, her words hinting at the shifting status between the two of them, although my valiant old mother didn’t falter, but hugged her impulsively, “And a welcome for you here as well, my dear. Whenever you want it.”

Ma opened her arms to me and I was conscious that, as a grown man, I no longer had need of the refuge, that other havens now took precedent, but I craved it all the same. I didn’t quite fit the mould of her embrace, but she clasped me to her with her large, reddened hands as she had when I was small, “My boy …”

I understood what she was saying and held her to me, “It’s only two miles, Ma.” I breathed in the smell of her, the fresh air scent of washing brought in straight from the line, of folded sheets, of carbolic. Whatever else, she’d done her best to make my existence simple for me – that was the protection she’d afforded me – and it felt anything but simple now, at the point of my departure.

“Be a kind man,” she said quietly, “If ever there’s a choice –”

I nodded and full of the unassuageable love I’d had for her since I was hip high, I stooped and kissed the top of her head, “Right, Ma …”

“Go on, off you go,” she said, holding me at arm’s length. “And remember,” she added, “Don’t –” Catching herself at the mothering she broke off, biting her lip, then with a slight shudder from the cold, she gave that snatch of a wave I knew so well and released me into my own life.

Jenny and I sat at the back of the milk cart with our legs dangling over the end, listening to the whistle of breath drawn through missing teeth as Iwan the Milk kept up a soft but impenetrable dialogue with his pony: a whole philosophy was expounded between them in a series of chirrups and snorts as we bumped along Front Street and then wound our way down through the valley to Nanagalan, past the big house and under the clock tower into the courtyard, and home.

Iwan stayed sitting up at the front staring at the façade of the building with a look of faint mistrust on his face, while I jumped down and unloaded our stuff. It didn’t take long – we didn’t have that much. I handed him two bob which he pocketed in spite of himself, and Jenny and I stood side by side watching as the pony and trap did a circuit of the courtyard and then disappeared beneath the stone arch. I could feel the old sensation of being left behind. We turned to face each other, my wife and I, strangers in a foreign land, newly disembarked. I found the key in my pocket and inserted it into the lock, then turned it, conscious of Jenny’s eyes upon me. There was no mediation between us any more, just the two of us and what we could make of ourselves, together. I pushed the door open and stood aside with a wary smile of deference, for her to enter first.

“Aren’t you going to carry me over the threshold?”

I wiped my hands on my trousers, “Of course.” I scooped her up and gripping her workaday frame – no sapling body, light as an armful of clippings – I carried her into the house, careful not to knock her shoulder on the door jamb as I went. I set her down and she glanced about her, following the line of the cornice around the room and back with her head on one side; she seemed almost as uncertain as I was. Her attentive gaze took in the fittings for the gas light, then the fire surround, lingering on the cast iron acanthus leaves. She reached out and touched one with her fingers, then shook herself and in doing so noticed the flowers I’d placed upon the windowsill. The lisianthus looked like exhausted rosebuds, their white petals tinged with pink, their delicate heads too heavy to support themselves. The same pink tinge flooded her face and she made an abrupt sound that was half of a laugh snapped off. She struggled for a moment with a number of abridged impulses: she took a breath to say something, she laced her fingers together and unlaced them, twisting her hands, then she hurried across to me with her arms outstretched and we fenced awkwardly: arm to shoulder? Hand to waist? Who goes where, and how? We blundered into an embrace and she broke away only to kiss me on the mouth; my mouth, opening to demur, caught up unwittingly. When she pulled away, I found that I was burning. She held my face in her hands, subjecting it to the same cautious survey that she had the room.

“You – are – mine –” she said, with breathless emphasis, “And this is our house –” Her words came out on a sob and I saw in a flash that it was Ma whom she was jealous of, my old Ma, and I gave the same half laugh, gone ragged at the end, at the misapprehension of it, a laugh that had the unbridling of her and she kissed me again. Locked together, the two of us clambered up the unfamiliar stairs, stumbling and tripping against each other and we went flailing down onto the unmade bed, where my wife took time to teach me how close passion is to grief.