The Travellers and Other Stories (7 page)

For a long time I lay on our bed staring at the ridges in the ceiling where one piece of wallpaper overlapped the next. I tried to remember the name of the decorator my father had used for the work and couldn't. All I could remember was how he'd yelled at the poor man afterwards for doing such a terrible job. He shouted so loudly and so furiously that the little decorator had cowered behind his ladder while Daddy told him how useless he was and he wasn't going to pay him a penny. I can see that some people would think my father was quite an unpleasant man.

I couldn't sleep.

I got up and crossed the landing into my father's bedroom at the front of the house. I went to the window and looked out at the clump of astilbes now flourishing in their new position under the cherry tree. After a while I turned to look back at his room.

There was the usual chaos. The bedcovers askew. Mismatched shoes lined up next to his wardrobe. A jumble of assorted items next to the lamp on his bed-side table—a comb and a few biscuits, a sock, his hand. Roy Jenkins' biography of Churchill.
Lieutenant Hornblower
. Peter's copy of
Titus Andronicus
in its red linen box.

I picked up the
Titus.

It made me sad, holding it, thinking of the afternoon Peter stepped into the shop for the first time, before any of this business with my father began. I slipped the book out of its red box and took it back with me to my room. I lay down on our bed and began to read. It struck me now as rather a bad play, absurdly violent and full of moments of unintended comedy. I wondered, as others have, if Shakespeare could really have written it; if there was any way you could ever play it other than for the laughs.

I'd forgotten quite how gruesome the ending is, what a grisly, over-the-top finale Act Five serves up: the old man slaughtering his daughter's seducers and baking them in a pie.

Oh honestly.

For goodness sake.

From out in the hall I could hear the radio on the other side of the kitchen door. I could hear the pulsing hum of the Vent-Axia, the spitting of the joint in the oven. There was a rich, meaty smell. I went in.

Daddy was crimping the pastry edge of his tart with a fork, very slowly and carefully, like someone learning to do it for the first time. The pie itself looked like a sort of strange hat with a raised brim, collapsed and squashy in the middle and made of a kind of thick wet lace, decorated with glossy, purplish fruit.

There was no sign anywhere of Peter. I stared at the pie. At my father. A long elastic thread of pendulous drool hung over the pie from his open mouth, rising and falling slowly with his breathing.

‘Daddy?' I said, but he did not look up.

‘Lucy?'

I turned round. It was Peter. Just stepping out from inside the pantry, a bag of potatoes in his hand. He gave me a cheery smile, went over to the counter and began pouring the coffee.

‘There you go,' he said, passing me a cup.

My father didn't seem to be aware that I had come into the room.

I touched his arm and he looked at me and he didn't appear to know who on earth I was.

‘Daddy,' I said. ‘It's me. Lou-Lou.'

He mouthed the word several times. He seemed distressed and muttered it aloud, over and over again, this name that no one but him has ever called me in my entire life.

Then at last he seemed to drift off into a sort of empty daydream and after another minute or so, he went back to his pie.

All through lunch I could feel Peter watching me. Daddy ate like a baby, dribbling bits of food on his shirt and on his chin.

He's faking it. I know he's faking it.

I look at Peter now, and for a long time we hold each other's gaze. I look from Peter to my father and I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do; his mean, miserly love breaks my heart.

PIED PIPER

M
ARY
O
WEN FOUND
the baby in the sand on the afternoon of her forty-sixth birthday, a Tuesday. She stepped off the bus in the usual place and walked slowly towards the dunes—very slowly, Mary Owen being by this time a vast and sluggish woman. She left her shoes where she always left them, in the shadow of the wooden turnstile, and continued down towards the beach beyond, the blue plastic bucket for the cockles swinging off the crook of her elbow.

She always came on Tuesdays to look for cockles. She'd developed a yen for them, dressed in vinegar and eaten with a spoon. (We used to say she was gobbling up her own bitterness with each sour bowl.) Sometimes, the local boys came up from Ogmore to watch the fat lady with her blue bucket, her cotton dress tucked up around her great thighs, bent over the wet sand in search of the little creatures. But today no one had come to watch. Even by Ogmore standards, the grey sea was uninviting. The occupants of a green car were already too far away to observe Mary, and in another moment, their car had disappeared altogether along the curving road to the east, in the direction of Southerndown. Which only left the gulls, and the sheep, nibbling the tarmac in the car park up above the big flat rocks. Mary walked unseen between the clumps of bloomless thistles, crunching the coarse grass under her soft, fat feet, until she came to the edge of the dunes and the beginning of the hard strand where the cockles would be. She was, in spite of the cool of the day, red-faced and perspiring. She stopped to fan herself with the lip of the blue plastic bucket, and there, almost at her feet, where the wind had blown a hollow in the sand, was the baby, waiting for her.

Waiting for her—that's how she thought of it. She'd always believed (in spite of everything her mother had told her) that life should be fair, and it hadn't been fair to her. She was sad and disappointed, and we all said it was disappointment that had made her fat. At twenty, she'd been a slip of a girl, but then she'd married Will, who loved her but couldn't seem to give her a baby, and slowly she began blowing up. Every year, thick new layers of herself settling around her resentful heart like the rings of an ageing tree. Her face hadn't changed so much—it was much the same face Will had fallen in love with twenty-six years before. It was recognisably the face of the girl in the photo on the gate-legged table in the Owens' front room. It was only, now, slightly overwhelmed by its surroundings, and there was a look of shock in the round blue eyes, shock at the way life had turned out. The look Mary had was not unlike the small face you see on a coconut, full of sadness and surprise.

Later, watching the Tuesday sun sink behind the mountain, Will would wonder how his wife could go off on the number 12 bus with only cockles on her mind and come back with a baby. But he was wrong, of course, about his wife's mind. Childlessness had ferried Mary into another world. She was ill, wasn't she? Ill with craving.

The baby, a boy, was still mucky from its birth and daubed all over with sand. His skin darkish under its redness, his hair fair in the places where it had been dried by the wind. He was quiet—only his arms flailed in the salted air, as if he thought he were falling and was trying to hold onto something. He was wrapped in a length of clean, white linen which the breeze from the distant water had blown into loose coils around him. More sand blew in gentle gusts off the sloping dune, and had begun to drift softly against him in the hollow. It occurred to Mary that with a little more wind, he might have been quite buried in the sand if she hadn't come. It occurred to her that she'd been guided to this place.

Even so, crouching uncomfortably over the infant, she hesitated. She caught the sour scent of her own anxiety in the air. Grains of sand clung to her warm cheeks. Smooth and unlined in spite of what she'd had to put up with, they had grown slick in the cool sunshine. It was a long time since she'd taken anything that didn't belong to her and tried to keep it as her own. As a girl, she'd taken things. She had a longing for the nice things other people had in their houses, like Ruth Pritchard's mum's jewellery (a jet necklace and a gold ring set with a huge, milky opal). The Pendelphin rabbits Mrs. Bessant had sitting on doilies in her front window. Daffodils from the Gaynors' garden. But Mary's mother had always discovered her daughter's crimes. She'd reminded Mary of the Commandments.
Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not steal.
Even the daffodils had to go back, laid on the flowerbed in the Gaynors' small garden with a note of apology tucked into the wet soil. The only stolen thing Mary had ever managed to keep was the chocolate she took once from the Co-op at the bottom of the hill, and that was because she ate it straightaway, wolfing it down in gulps behind her hand, right outside the shop on the pavement before anyone could come and make her take it back.

It plagued her now, the idea that she'd only be allowed to borrow the baby, that one day she'd have to give him back. While she continued to stoop, and to hesitate, a gust of wind tugged at the length of white linen around the baby and it unfurled like an escaping kite until only a corner remained secured beneath the boy's tiny, flat feet. Mary saw then that the piece of linen resembled a tablecloth, embroidered along one edge. Where it was hoisted high into the air by the wind, she saw there was a half-embroidered flower, one blue petal and the toothed edge of a leaf. A needle, and a length of blue silk thread, fluttering from the spot where a second petal had been begun next to the first. She'd rather this had not been the case. She would rather the linen had been a piece of rag, or an old sheet, because she was no fool. She knew, as she stood there in the cool sunshine, that there's a tendency among babies abandoned at birth—babies tucked into bull rushes, babies cast upon the barren flanks of mountains—to come swaddled in invisible complications. And the cloth, with its piece of interrupted sewing, struck her then as a possible complication.

But there was nothing in the whole world she'd ever wanted as much as she wanted this half-buried boy. In the chilly, rising wind, he pursed his blue-brown lips against the dry whipping of the sand. His wrinkled face, not much bigger than an orange, puckered and prepared to cry. He repeated the frantic flailing with his arms in the air. She couldn't help herself. Her hot, swollen heart was pushing up into her throat, telling her that this baby was a thing she was meant to find and to keep. Quickly, she gathered him into her large hands, and carried him, bound warmly now in the tablecloth, back up over the dunes. At the turnstile she slipped her shoes back on and walked carefully up the road to the bus stop.

It takes about an hour on the bus from the beach at Ogmore to our town in the valleys—one bus to Bridgend, then another to bring you the rest of the way. The bus still carries you in the same way it brought Mary that day—past the Co-op at the bottom of the hill, then up between the two matching rows of terraced houses that face each other along the steep slope of the narrow street. The bus comes slowly, it lolls and staggers between the changing of the gears, and looks as if it might start rolling backwards all the way down to the sea. The children said it went extra slowly on a Tuesday with Mary Owen inside it. God, they were noisy weren't they, our children? We had to clamp our hands over their mouths in case she heard.

Half way up, through a gap in the terrace, Mary could see over to the coal mine and, off to the side, the slag heap. The slag—the dark mound of coal waste spat out by the pit—rose up against the green and purple mountain behind our town. All her life, Mary had watched it get bigger every year, up there on the hillside above the school. By the summer of her forty-sixth birthday the slag had grown to be practically a mountain by itself, which some people said they could hear groaning and shifting in the night, as if it were trying to get comfortable.

Our town hasn't changed much to look at since that day. There is the Co-op, and the mine, and the bus stop still in the same place between the Blue Lady and Jerusalem chapel. Only the slag is gone, and the school is in a different place. There is a quiet too, which is new. It is quiet as Hamelin in our little town.

At the stop, between the pub and the chapel, Mary climbed slowly down onto the pavement. Her big hands shook as she walked, she hardly trusted herself to keep the baby safe now she'd got him almost to the maroon door of her own house. She'd been considering, on the bus, how one day she would tell her little boy the secret of his birth. Present him with the mysterious cloth, like a birth certificate. The thought was still there as she stood by the fire in the front room (they always had a fire, even in summer), the piece of linen with its half-done pattern of leaves and flowers lying across her open hands. It was still there when she mounted the narrow stairs to her bedroom, and when she lifted the big, bowing mattress of the old bed, and placed the folded cloth underneath. But by the time she'd gone back into the kitchen, the thought had slipped quietly away. He was hers now.

She stood for a while, looking at the boy where he lay in her own front room, warm and clean and wrapped in a fresh pillowcase and sleeping in the lap of Will's chair. His hair was very fair now she had washed him in the green Fairy soap. She walked back over to the sink where she'd bathed him, and pushed the sandy water down into the plug-hole with the palms of her hands. She wiped the deep sink all round with a dishcloth until there was no trace of the beach left. From the folds of her wrists and her elbows, and the moist spaces between her fingers, she picked away the last grains of sand. When it was all done, she took up the baby again in her arms and sat down in Will's chair by the fire, exhausted from her labours.

There were parties, that evening, when we were told that Mary Owen had given birth to a baby boy on the beach at Ogmore-by-Sea. In the lounge bar of the Blue Lady, the men began toasting the sudden baby before they even noticed Will was there, sitting quietly in the corner, sipping his pint. Talk of a new baby had drifted towards him from the bar, and he'd wondered whose it might be, and then they were dragging him up to the bar, ribbing him about the lead in his little pencil and calling him an old bugger. ‘You dark horse. You old dog,' growled Frank Gaynor, the colliery manager, thumping Will's thin back inside its soft brown jacket. His eyes watered and the air seemed to catch inside his narrow throat so that he couldn't speak. When the others were too drunk to notice, he slipped back into his corner and sat there, pressed hard against the bench seat, like a folded shadow. He stared into his pint. He took small, ferrety sips of it, and blushed like a bridegroom. He knew his wife was lying.