The Owl Service (11 page)

This is where the light always goes on, thought Gwyn, but nothing happened, and his fingers gripped a flat metal box.

Back in the kitchen Gwyn put the ten cigarettes in a drawer. One was bent, but he had not time to straighten it. He opened the kitchen door to the outside passage, took the lids off the dustbins, and began to turn the contents over.

Then Gwyn finished washing up. He came down from his bedroom a quarter of an hour later. Nancy sat by the stove, drinking the remains of the coffee.

“Where you been, boy?” she said. “You was clumping about no end.”

“Upstairs, Mam.” Gwyn pulled a chair to the stove. “Mam,” he said. “I'm sorry about last night. That was a rotten trick with your purse. I bought you a present, see.” He held out a cigarette packet. “I couldn't get your usual. Will these do?”

Nancy took the packet. Unless she noticed the wet stains from the tea leaves in the dustbin; if he had managed to fold the silver paper tightly; if the bent cigarette was not the first she picked—

“Mm,” said Nancy. “All right, boy.” She twisted a spill of newspaper and lit it from the stove. “Mm. They'll do. Where you find the money?”

“I've been saving a bit,” said Gwyn.

“I thought you was coming it yesterday,” said Nancy.

“Mam, if I'd belted Roger what would have happened? Would we have been sacked?”

“Depends how hard, doesn't it?”

“You wouldn't mind if I belted him?”

“Him? Ha! ‘Oh,' he says. ‘Where's my photos?' he says. ‘Who's moved them off the table? You got no right,' he says. ‘Don't you touch anything without permission,' he says. And there was all that sticky on my table I just polished. And then he comes in and thinks he can flash his pound notes around.”

“Who?”

“Him. Lord Muck.”

“Mr Bradley?”

“‘Mr Bradley'! When I think of the titled heads I've seen in that dining-room—! He's not even a gentleman!”

“How do you know he isn't?” said Gwyn.

“There's ways of catching them,” said Nancy. “And when he was flashing his pound notes, I thought, right, I thought, if there was justice in Heaven there'd be others with cheque books. I'll lay knife and fork, and we'll see how you manages a pear, my laddo.”

“A pear, Mam?”

“It takes a gentleman to eat a pear proper,” said Nancy. “He had it on the floor in no time – oh, I made him look a fool!” Nancy coughed at her cigarette.

“What happened then?”

“That Alison covered for him. She picked hers up and ate it in her hand, but she knew. She knew. She's a twicer, that one.”

Nancy pulled on her cigarette, and her eyes narrowed. Gwyn said nothing. When his mother did this she was living in her memories: it was her x-ray look. “Yes,” she said. “If we all had our rights there'd be others with cheque books. My Bertram could eat a pear lovely.”

Gwyn held his breath and tried not to move, but his mother continued to focus on a point six feet through the stove and the wall behind it.

“Yes, Mam?”

“What, boy?”

“Oh – sorry, Mam.”

“You done that job yet?” said Nancy.

“What job?”

“That trap door.”

“Yes, Mam, after breakfast, soon as Alison got up.”

“Show me,” said Nancy.

They went upstairs to Alison's room, knocked, and went in.

“I done it properly, see, Mam,” said Gwyn. “Brass screws. That all right now?”

“Yes, you done that.” Nancy sat on the bed and put her head on the rail. “Brass screws for coffins,” she said.

“Yes, Mam.”

“You don't know, boy. Them plates was for my bottom drawer. Not that I needed no bottom drawer, but he says, ‘You have them for your bottom drawer,' he says, ‘and let them think what they like.' My Bertram didn't care that much.” Nancy tried to snap her fingers. “We'd be married, he said: he didn't care. ‘Hang the lot of them,' he says. ‘If they don't like it they know what they can do.' But he didn't know what they could do, boy.”

“What, Mam?”

“If there was justice in Heaven,” said Nancy, “I should be sitting at that table today saying potatoes was cold, not them. But he didn't know what they could do.”

“What, Mam?”

“That jealous idiot outside,” said Nancy. “That mad fool. Oh, it was accident, of course. They said.” She went to the window and threw her cigarette out of the fanlight. “But there isn't the pound notes in London to pay me for losing my Mr Bertram, just when I had him landed, high and dry.”

R
oger was setting up his tripod again on the bank. Alison sat in the shade of the Stone of Gronw among the meadowsweet. Clive stood in the river.

“You're wrong,” said Alison. “Gwyn wouldn't do it. I know he has a temper, but he wouldn't deliberately spoil that painting out of spite.”

“Wouldn't he? You've not seen him when he's vicious,” said Roger. “He'd do anything. I could tell you—”

“Don't bother,” said Alison. “Are you really going to spend all day clicking that thing? I want to go up the mountain.”

“You're not interested in my prints, so why worry?”

“It's stifling here: and these flowers are going to make me sneeze if I stay. There'll be some wind at the top.”

“As long as you don't melt on the way up.”

“Cut out the bickering, you two,” said Clive. “No wonder I'm not catching any fish.”

“I want to go up the mountain, Clive,” said Alison, “and Roger just wants to waste his film.”

“You know what they say – one man's whatsit.”

“I want to go up the peat road,” said Alison. “You can't see much of it from here, but it's the snaky line on the side of the mountain. They used to cut peat on the top and bring it down with sledges.”

“Did they, now?” said Clive.

“Yes. They used horses. It took four days every year.”

“How do you know?” said Roger.

“This isn't my first visit, even if it's yours,” said Alison. “I've been coming here all my life.”

“Then you can find your own way up the fascinating peat road, can't you?”

“For crying out loud!” said Clive. “Look, Ali, if you want to go, go: but stay on this road thing of yours, won't you? Mountains can be tricky.”

“Will you come, Clive?”

“Not after Nancy's spuds, thanks. And I know the fish don't seem to be around, but I doubt if they've taken to the hills yet.”

Alison went along the river bank to a track that led up the mountain from the ford. The track followed the line of a stream between hedgerows to a stone barn and a sheep dip, then it rose above the stream, and Alison was on the mountain. The fields lay below her, and she was among bracken fronds, and boulders of white quartz, and flowering thorn.

The track was the peat road, now a sunken line on the mountain, and she climbed the bend that she had seen from the river. Already Roger and Clive were no more than spots of colour, and soon she was round the shoulder and the house was hidden.

Alison rested on a slate outcrop. The peat road went up a fold in the mountain made by the stream, but led away from the water. She was very hot.

Now that the house was out of sight there was nothing to tell her where she was, and her fear brushed against her.

Cold kippers.

It works! Cold, cold, cold kippers! Still: nothing changes here. Rocks and bracken. It could be a thousand years ago. Cold kippers.

Alison thought of turning back. Don't be silly. It's only this bit. Higher up I'll be able to see the whole valley. And the sheep are all right, with patches of dye on their fleece. That's modern.

Is it?

Is it?

Alison looked at the cliffs above her, each with its trail of frost-broken slate down the hillside. Something moved: dark: not a sheep.

Alison screamed, but there was a clatter of stones across her path and the way was blocked by a figure standing against the sun.

“It's OK, girl.”

“Oh, Gwyn!”

He was panting. “What's up? Expecting bows and arrows and two coats of quick non-drying woad, were you?”

“Yes! Almost!”Alison laughed. “I am stupid!”

“You can say that again. By, but you're a fast climber.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I was listening to your idyll back there. All I had to do was get to the ford and race you along the stream, then hide here before you. That's all.” Gwyn dragged up a length of moss and squeezed it on his brow. “I do it every morning before breakfast, and twice on Sundays.”

“Gwyn, we mustn't.”

“Mustn't what?”

“Talk like this.”

“Like what?”

“We mustn't talk at all.”

Gwyn stuffed the moss between his teeth, and crossed his eyes.

“Gwyn, please don't fool about. Oh, you know we mustn't see each other.”

“Why not? You in quarantine for smallpox, are you?”

“You know Mummy says I mustn't talk to you.”

Gwyn gazed at the crags, and slowly followed them to the next hillside, and down to the valley, to the mountain on the other side of the valley, and straight up to the sky.

“I can't see her,” he said.

“Gwyn,” said Alison, “I'm going home.”

“Right,” said Gwyn, “I'll come with you.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Don't! Please! What do you want?”

“I want you to be yourself, for a change,” said Gwyn. “That's what I want. Let's climb this metamorphic Welsh mountain.”

“Mummy'll be so angry if she finds out, and I hate upsetting her.”

“That's the all-year-round cultural pursuit in your family,” said Gwyn. “Not Upsetting Mummy.”

“Don't talk like that.”

“You're not having much luck with it, though, are you? Mummy was upset yesterday, and Mummy was upset the day before, and I bet you anything Mummy will be upset today. I wonder what pleasures tomorrow will bring.– And your stepfather's in trouble with my Mam, isn't he? He'll find it tough going there. She's the blue on armour plating.”

“Why are you so horrid about people?” said Alison.

“My Mam, you mean? She hates my guts.”

“She doesn't!”

“A lot you know,” said Gwyn. “What are you wanting to do when you leave school, Alison?”

“Mummy wants me to go abroad for a year.”

“But what do you want to do?”

“I've not thought. I expect I'll go abroad.”

“Then what? Sit at home and arrange flowers for Mummy?”

“Probably.”

“And Roger?”

“He'll join Clive in his business, I expect.”

“Real fireballs, aren't you?” said Gwyn. “Straining like greyhounds at the slips.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I don't blame you, girl.”

“What are you going to do, then, that's so marvellous?”

Gwyn was silent.

“Gwyn?”

“What?”

“I'm not laughing at you.”

“At Aber,” said Gwyn, “they want me to go on.”

“On what?”

“With school.”

“I can see you in about thirty years,” said Alison. “You'll be Professor of Welsh!”

“Not me. I've got to get out of this place. There's nothing here but sheep.”

“I thought it meant a lot to you,” said Alison.

“It does. But you can't eat a feeling.”

“What will you do?”

“At the moment the likely chance is I'll be behind a shop counter in a couple of months.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes!”

“Why?”

“My Mam thinks it's a good idea.”

“But she must have worked to see you through school,” said Alison. “Why throw it away?”

“Mam's ambitious,” said Gwyn. “But her horizon's about three inches high. As long as I leave the house in a suit every morning, that's Mam happy. The other lads in our street wear overalls.”

“Oh, the stupid woman!”

“Now who's being horrid?” said Gwyn.

They climbed for a while without talking.

“I didn't know this could happen,” said Alison. “Everything with me has been easy—”

“Well, don't start feeling guilty about it,” said Gwyn. “It's not your fault.”

“What will you do if she makes you leave?”

“I've got plans,” said Gwyn.

They were on top of the mountain. Before them stretched a plateau slashed with colour, reds and blacks and blues and browns and greens rolling into the heat. Gwyn and Alison made for a cairn on a hillock, which was the only point in all the landscape. It was farther away than it looked.

“If it was a clear day,” said Alison, “how far could we see?”

“I don't know that one,” said Gwyn. “But this cairn is the county boundary.”

“The valley's disappeared,” said Alison.

“It's the plateau. That's what does it. It's the same height either side, so you can't tell what's a valley and what's a dip in the grass until you're there.”

They sat with their backs against the cairn. In front of them at the foot of the hillock was a dark level of water in a peat bed.

“When you were by the tank before lunch,” said Alison, “could you see me in the water?”

“No.”

“From where I sat it was as if we were right next to each other, like we are now, and you were watching me.”

“I didn't think you were anywhere near until I saw you in the window.”

“You put your hand in the water and touched my hair, and then the ripples broke it up.”

“Fancy that,” said Gwyn. “—Yes: fancy that! Alison? How far would you say it is from the tank to the window?”