The Woman at the Window (3 page)

‘Those two old donkeys…'

Doctor Gronw chewed faster on his toast. ‘Someone ought to knock their heads together.'

‘It's worse than that. She's had a letter from her ex- husband. She showed it to me after class. Poor thing must have been desperate to do that. Didn't know who to turn to. Terrified her father might see it.'

‘What did it say? The letter?' 

‘Basically he's demanding money.'

‘Of course. What else. Don't they all. That sort.'

‘He says he has a son from his marriage in Thailand and wants to educate him. He wants six thousand right away to pay the boy's fees. He says he part owns the orchard bungalow. Helped to build it he claims. She says it isn't true. I said why don't you show the letter to your uncle? He's a distinguished lawyer. She's much too scared to do so. The poor thing is like a rabbit in a trap.'

Contemplating the depth of Rhian Mai's misery reduced them both to silence. The doctor could escape to his appointments in the surgery but for Catrin that misery invaded the comfortable house like a mist that refused to clear. She attempted some preparation for the Tuesday evening class but the dire warnings made by minor prophets seemed to apply even more to individuals than to nations, chosen or otherwise. Could it be that Rhian Mai was being made to pay for her innocence. Was youthful folly so culpable? And how youthful and how innocent? How are such shortcomings quantified. She concluded that Rhian Mai was the victim of the rampaging selfishness and egomania of untamed males. Satan's willing accomplices. Could the coefficient of woe in the human condition remain constant down the centuries? Rhian Mai's distress was here and now.

Catrin Dodd lost patience with speculation. Theory without practice was useless. She had to do something. To act. She would confront the monster in his lair, interfering or not. She set off in her little car, her heart thudding in her breast. The lane to the orchard bungalow was narrow and her heart beat even faster when she was confronted with an ambulance with its blue lights already flashing. In her anxiety to get out of the way she reversed her on-side rear wheel into the ditch. The ambulance driver waved an angry fist and it was quite clear he was swearing at her. Then one of the paramedics recognised the doctor's wife. She was relieved to get out of the car while they lifted the rear wheel out. She found Rhian Mai sitting in the ambulance and trembling from head to foot. Her father was the casualty. He lay on the stretcher bed with a drip in his arm and an oxygen mask on his face. She whispered down to Catrin standing in the lane: ‘I thought he was going to kill me. I really did. He was raving and raging and smashing ornaments with his stick. And then he fell over and couldn't get up. Couldn't speak.'

Catrin drove behind the ambulance the twelve-mile journey to the general hospital. While they tried to keep up with the trolley down the long corridor from Emergency to Intensive Care, Rhian Mai clung to her arm and could not stop shivering. Catrin commandeered a red blanket, led her to the canteen and made her drink a cup of hot, sweet tea. Bit by bit she was able to put together a coherent account of what had happened.

‘I wasn't out of the house an hour…When I came back he was waving Claus' letter in my face and calling me all sorts of things I can't repeat. He said I had been in touch with him all these years and when I denied it he called me a liar and a two-faced whore. It was awful. The way he worked himself up. What made it all worse in a way was that building the bungalow in the orchard was Claus' idea in the first place. He was full of ideas…'

A blush on her cheeks betrayed a lingering admiration for her ex-husband that had to be corrected.

‘He never paid for anything. Never. He had this way of handling my father. He drew a plan of the bungalow and marked out where it should stand to give the best view of the mountains. “A proper dwelling for a major poet,” he said. My father loved listening to him. He pretended to take so much interest in poetry. Maybe he did, of course. There was no telling with Claus. He could get round anybody. My father always blamed me for his disappointment. And now this is my fault.'

‘It is not. And it never was. And you mustn't ever think that.' Catrin concluded it was time to exert a little authority. Rhian Mai stared at her so gratefully, welcoming any reproof. This was a woman who had never taken charge of her own life, never exercised her duty to herself. There were things to do and Catrin Dodd would show her how they were done. Back at the orchard bungalow, once the broken ornaments were cleared up, she took possession of the offending letter.

‘Lord Parry must see this,' she said. ‘He's a lawyer. He will know exactly what to do.'

Rhian Mai sat in an armchair sipping more tea and mumbling her thanks. She had no idea what she would have done without Mrs Dodd's help.

At the hospital, Gwilym Hesgyn's condition was stabilised sufficiently for him to be shunted into a side ward. He was conscious but unable to speak. His gaze followed the nurses with relentless suspicion. He did not appear to recognise anyone. Not even his own daughter. He stared at her as if she were a dangerous intruder. Squashing his bulk into a corner of the cramped side ward, Doctor Dodd studied the patient's reactions with great interest. Outside, when Rhian Mai in desperation sought explanations, he shook his head wisely and declared strokes were a mystery.

‘He'll need a brain scan of course,' he said. ‘But that won't explain everything. How could it? It's like consciousness really. Whoever defined that? All we can do is give it time and hope for the best.'

Sitting alone in her father's study and staring at the view that she believed belonged to him, Rhian Mai was visited by her own flash of inspiration. She would take a copy of her father's first book,
Hesgyn Harvest
, on her next visit. He would be sure to recognise his own verses. They were so memorable. Catrin Dodd was delighted at the idea. It was a sign that henceforward Rhian Mai would be capable of initiative. She arrived at the hospital clutching the book in one hand and Catrin Dodd's arm in the other. When the stiff door of the side ward opened they discovered Gwilym Hesgyn already had a visitor. Lord Parry of Penhesgyn had been provided with a chair and sat holding the patient's emaciated hand in both his own. A rigid diagonal smile was fixed on Gwilym Hesgyn's face. They could see Lord Parry's eyes were watering.

‘He recognised me,' Lord Parry said. ‘Straight away. No trouble at all.'

The Woman at the Window

THE woman in black stood at the drawing-room window of the Old Rectory, contemplating the landscape. What she saw, as far as she knew, could not think or feel but it endured the passage of the seasons more successfully than she did. Spring would arrive with renewed strength, disturbing the soil. She raised a hand to her neck and smoothed her cheek as if to disperse a pressure on her skin. In the middle-distance she could see the white sails of a windmill, recently refurbished to attract tourists, show above the undulating hedges and, further to the north, four turbines of the wind farm to which her late husband had taken such exception. ‘Damn them,' he said. ‘Ruining my skyline.' Now they were as much part of the view from the drawing-room window as the thin glimpse of the Irish Sea beyond them.

Even as she stared a stranger appeared, opening the road gate. He walked silently along the sweep of gravel drive towards the house. He wore a black coat and hat and walked with a seemly hesitation in his step, like a man about to attend a funeral. His solemn figure contrasted with the rows of daffodils in full bloom that glistened in the fitful sunlight. She could see her husband's cat, Bella, padding down the drive to greet the visitor. She had been lost in thought for so long she had forgotten to feed her. The stranger was pleased to kneel and stroke the luxurious fur of the appealing creature. Before she could issue any warning the man had been scratched and bitten for his pains.

When she opened the door she was confronted by a middle-aged visitor with a craggy face and a row of ingratiating small teeth. He was nursing a small wound on his left hand before raising his hat.

‘That frightful cat,' she said. ‘She can be so vicious when she's not fed. My fault I suppose. I forget to feed her.'

He bowed awkwardly and hung on to the hat he was not used to wearing.

‘Mrs Picton?'

There could have been some doubt. She nodded.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘Of course. I know it's a fortnight late. But I heard nothing you see. I was out of touch in the middle of nowhere. In Sicily actually. But I felt I had to pay my respects. Please accept my deepest sympathy.'

She murmured her thanks but as he spoke it was clear she had no idea who her visitor might be. Perhaps because of his dark clothes and sparse grey hair he could have been an old- fashioned bank manager or a headmaster who had taken early retirement.

‘Anwyl,' he said. ‘Elwyn Anwyl.You could say I was Huw's oldest friend. One of them anyway. He was always very popular. I was his first partner anyway. It feels awful to have missed his funeral. So I had to come.'

The widow pointed to the wounds on his hand.

‘Better put something on them,' she said. ‘You never know where that blessed cat has been. She spends most of the time in the churchyard.'

Through the skeletal row of leafless trees he could glimpse the crumbling stone wall that separated the rectory garden from a churchyard on a lower elevation. An easy wall to climb over. The old parish church looked far smaller than the forbidding grey stone rectory. They were both isolated buildings at the centre of a rambling rural parish.

‘Huw used to call me El Al. Does that ring a bell I wonder?'

It did not. A nickname seemed a poor proof of identity. He looked flustered as though he were rummaging through his mind for more convincing credentials. She was the widow, clearly on home ground. He was no more than a strange man calling at the front door.

‘If you come in I could put some TCP on your hand.' 

He breathed deeply with the relief of gratitude. 

The 
interior, as much as he could see of it, was dim and sparsely furnished. The kitchen on the other hand, when they reached it, was surprisingly new. It gleamed in the slanting light like an illustration from a brochure.

‘What a marvellous kitchen.'

He spoke with polite enthusiasm.

‘Well appointed and virtually unused,' she said, ‘and still to be paid for. You've come a long way?'

‘Well yes. I have. From Ravenna. So shocked when I read the obit. The newspaper from home is a week old when I get it. And you could call me computer illiterate. And as I said I'd been in Sicily. Not just shock. Remorse. Regret. We'd been close you see, all those years ago. He was always so fit and so full of life. I had no idea he was ill.'

‘Neither had I,' she said. ‘A massive stroke. They could do nothing. One minute he was here. The next he was gone.'

‘Here.'

Elwyn Anwyl repeated the word as though to make it echo in the space the friend of his younger days had vacated.

‘For so long I'd been meaning to get in touch, I wanted him to know how much our friendship had meant to me, in spite of everything. And now it's too late.'

He became absorbed in regretful silence. She stood with her arms folded contemplating a complete stranger replete with a chapter of her husband's life of which she apparently knew nothing.

‘I saw him first at the Debates Union. Reddish-yellow hair. He had a radiance about him. A figure of envy. A brilliant speaker with a wonderful self-effacing style that made you envy him even more. I admired him from a distance. We didn't actually connect up until a comic incident in the BBC Club in Langham Place. I don't know whether it's still there. A fine day outside and for some reason everyone inside slightly drunk. Huw was engaged in a furious argument with a beanpole of a man with a small head and a permanent sneer who maintained there was nothing worth knowing in Welsh literature otherwise the whole world would know about it. I joined in and we floored him to our own satisfaction. After that we were friends for life. Or at least we were until we fell out.'

She listened with detached interest, until she heard the cat meowing outside the door.

‘I must feed that beastly cat. Otherwise who knows what she'll get up to.'

He was left in the glow of his own recollections. She was more concerned with the cat than a stranger's memories of her husband. Bereavement had left her in shock perhaps: an arrested state, certainly aware of the surface of existence but not able to react to her own awareness. She had been listening closely enough. The passage of years left such yawning gaps. No accumulation of the past could relieve the exigencies of the present; feeding the cat could loom as a major operation. That seemed true enough. She had fed the cat and now she could attend to him.

‘Would you like a coffee? I'm afraid I've only got Nescafe.' She gave him further information as she discovered some biscuits and slipped them on a plate. 

They settled at either end of the kitchen table.

‘My name is Valerie, by the way. I'm Huw's third wife. Or possibly his fourth. We were never quite sure. We only got married three months ago. But we lived together for ages before that.'