23

The bread was finished. She had dumped the cake in the bin; she’d gone off it. She decided not to drive to Waunfawr, she wanted to see if she was able to follow one of those dotted green lines, converting symbols on a two-dimensional map into real paths, hills, houses and fields. She pulled on her hiking boots, grabbed a rucksack and locked the front door. On the path in front of the house her heart sank. The cord she had strung was still there, the bamboo posts too. She’d have to move a lot of slate. She turned the corner of the house and walked down the drive past the goose field. Five were standing at the gate. She acted as if she hadn’t seen them. The inquisitive faces, the quiet gaggling, the expectant shuffling. Five.

Map in hand, she walked through the oiled kissing gate. The green dotted line had told her not to follow her own drive, but the long grass hid every trace of a path. Shoulders hunched, she crossed the field at random and came out at a fence with a stile. She climbed over it and wanted to turn left. There was the neighbour’s house; by the looks of things she’d have to walk right past it. A door seemed to be open. She hesitated and studied the map carefully before turning back, as if she were just a walker who had taken a wrong turning. Quickly she climbed up onto the stile and down again, crossed the field with the long grass and followed the drive to the narrow road. She picked up the green dotted line again a few hundred metres further along, indicated in the real world by the sign with the hiker. When she stepped into the bakery after a walk that felt like it would never end, she saw that it was quarter to one.

‘On foot?’ the baker asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered, out of breath.

‘No distance at all, huh?’

‘No, here in no time.’

‘We close at one. Just so you know next time. Awen!’

The baker’s wife emerged from the back. ‘Oh, hello, love,’ she said. ‘How was the cake?’

‘Good. Rhys Jones was enthusiastic about it too.’

‘Rhys Jones,’ the baker said.

‘He loves our cakes,’ Awen said. ‘Are you settling here permanently, love?’

‘Where does he actually live?’

‘Near the mountain. That way.’ The baker gestured through the wall. ‘In late October he moves his sheep to the old Evans farm.’

‘Do you get enough customers here?’ She was starting to feel hot and took a step to one side under the pretext of looking at something in the glass case under the counter.

‘His wife died,’ Awen continued. ‘All very tragic, and if she was still alive she would never let him eat so much cake.’

‘We get by.’ The baker gave his wife a sideways glance. ‘As long as people don’t buy their bread at Tesco’s . . .’

‘Is there enough heating in that house?’ Awen asked.

‘It’s fine,’ she said.

‘It’s not too lonely and isolated for you?’

‘No, that’s not a problem. There are geese. And a lot of sheep now.’

‘You’re alone? No husband?’

‘Mrs Evans came here to buy her bread right up to the end,’ the baker said loudly, as if trying to drown out his wife.

‘You should get a dog,’ Awen said.

‘What would you like?’ the baker asked.

She wanted to ask what Mrs Evans had died of and how long ago, but the couple on the other side of the counter looked at her so expectantly and so inquisitively that she stuck to ordering two loaves of bread and two packets of biscuits.

‘See you later,’ she said, putting her purchases in her rucksack.

‘When you run out of bread,’ the baker said. ‘And soon we’ll have Christmas pudding.’

‘A dog,’ the baker’s wife called after her. ‘That’s a true friend.’

She pulled the shop door shut and studied the sky. It was grey. Grey and drab, but it wasn’t raining. She looked towards Mount Snowdon and remembered that she needed to keep the mountain on her left. She glanced back as she stepped off the pavement. The baker who didn’t have a name and his wife Awen were standing there motionless, watching her. They didn’t wave, they watched.

The route she took back wasn’t exactly the same; almost everywhere she had gone wrong on the way there, she went right on the way back. Almost. But somewhere she made another mistake after all and it took her a long time to realise she had branched off on a different dotted line. It was all so indistinguishable: the thorny hedges, the squat oaks, the pastures, the metal drinking troughs, the manic birdsong. She found that strange: it was late November, why were the birds acting like it was spring? Without planning to, she came out at the T-junction where she had first seen the mountain and suddenly knew where she was; she didn’t even need the map any more. She sat down with her back against a wooden gate, pulled a packet of biscuits out of her rucksack and ate half of them, giving herself plenty of time to study the mountain. Despite the grey weather it was covered with different colours: brown, ochre, green, even a shade of purple. It didn’t look difficult, she thought.

When she carried on to the drive, it was as if it were already twilight. She had to bend over and grab a tree. When she stood up straight, the pain had nowhere to go; crouched over, the dull twinges seemed to spread out a little, becoming more bearable. She couldn’t tell where precisely it was coming from: even in her arms and legs, it stabbed and nagged. She rubbed her belly and her upper arms, pressed a hand against her forehead and thought of her uncle. A little later, when she was picking her steps forward again, she saw Emily Dickinson before her, walking through her autumn garden, a first line in her head – The murmuring of bees has ceased – and trying to think how to help the poem along. No, never stung by a bee, our Emily.