50

‘It must have been the anchovies,’ Bradwen said, leaning on the rusty, broken-handled rake he was using to even out the soil he’d turned. He looked a little paler than usual, perhaps because of the hat. His own, old hat was dark green. Earlier in the morning, drinking a coffee, he hadn’t taken the new one off. ‘It was a tin I found in a kitchen cupboard. Who knows, it could have been there thirty years.’

She was leaning against the wall of the old pigsty. The sun was shining, there was hardly any wind. There was no longer any trace of snow or winter. Like before, she felt the warmth radiating from the light-coloured bricks. Like before, the smoke rose vertically from her cigarette.

‘With her buying it long before I was born. That’s a weird thought.’

She turned her head. There were no cows on the other side of the garden wall. It felt lonely. A flock of raucous black birds – she didn’t even try to name them, there were too many possibilities: crows, jackdaws, ravens or rooks – flew from one tree to the next. It was as if it only took them a minute to realise that a particular tree was unsuitable.

‘Or is it impossible for something like that, in oil, to go off?’

He’d started to rake the second rectangle. The soil was light brown, it didn’t look very rich. There wasn’t a single ominous cloud. The geese, out of sight from where she was standing, clucked softly. Contented, not frightened. She was listening to him, but not everything he said was getting through. Maybe he was glad to be feeling better, relieved that he’d just managed a biscuit with his coffee. She felt no desire to answer. He was working, sweating, feeling healthy and alive. She drew on her cigarette, which she was holding between the fingers of her left hand, the hand which he – before coming up with the anchovy theory – had blamed, in jest or otherwise, for his vomiting. The old-woman smell was lingering around her again, or rather, still, even out here in the fresh air, despite the cigarette smoke. She threw away the butt and pulled open the door of the sty. There wasn’t much wood left; the pile had shrunk without her noticing. For a while now the boy had been taking care of the stove and the fireplaces, along with going to Tesco’s and the Waunfawr bakery. Apart from the doctor’s visit, she had stuck close to the house. She’d come here and kept her world small, then she’d gone out – feeling homesick in the refrigerated aisle at Tesco’s, walking to the bakery, having her hair cut short and standing in the reservoir – and now the world was limited again. The homesickness had subsided, almost unnoticed. The garden, the goose field, the house, her bed, the shelf under the mirror in the bathroom, the boxes of tablets. A whole life in a matter of months. Until the New Year. Because this house and garden weren’t hers. It wasn’t her shelf under the mirror. She was a tourist, a passer-by. A foreigner, a German according to most people here.

‘I’m going to plant them,’ Bradwen called.

She stared at the greenish tiles of the cellar floor. For a moment she imagined that, instead of Sam, it had been Bradwen sitting in the oafish sheep farmer’s big black pickup. And that the dog was snuffling around here now.

‘I want another arch,’ she said. Now that the rose bushes were in the ground there was hardly anything to them. They’d looked a lot larger in the pots. ‘Here, along the edge of the path, as a gateway to the side path. And then you have to buy two special roses. Roses that want to climb.’

‘Ramblers,’ the boy said.

‘Is that what they’re called? Take the car and drive to Dickson’s Garden Centre.’

‘Now?’

‘Why not? I’ll give you money.’

‘OK.’

She pulled a hundred pounds out of her wallet and gave him the notes.

When he was gone, she took the lid off the bin, fished around inside and found the empty, greasy anchovy tin. She walked over to the window above the sink and, without too much difficulty, read Best before: June 1984 on the bottom. The boy had even been right.

She looked up. From an invisible chimney, hidden between oak trees, smoke was rising as on a listless day in June – smoke from cooking, not heating – bees waltzed past the kitchen window, butterflies flitted from a red rose to a yellow rose; the garden wall was two stones higher, a farmer on a dull red tractor was tedding the grass and the alders along the stream were full and round. She had her hair up and she was wearing an apron. Maybe she was already widowed, maybe the man on the dull red tractor was Mr Evans and she was about to take him something. In a basket. She pressed up against the sink and considered adding some cold beer to the basket, two bottles, enough to make Evans feel drowsy, ready to let the grass be for a while and lie down under an oak. Stretching out in the shadows with her. Warm. Clothes off.

She threw the tin back into the bin and washed her hands with icy water. She pulled on her boots without tightening the laces. Then she went upstairs.