Let the curve of an uncrossable river hug me; let the high wooded cliffs wrap me around. Give me no views, no prospects, no bloody sunsets staining the dark sea, no rolling hills, no spires or distant cattle in morning mist, no challenging, far-off peaks, no perspective. I am up against it, walled in, caught in the river’s slowly tightening noose. Lancaut, Lancaut, only one way out. And that involves back-tracking, never a good idea, up the lane, through the woods, past the church and the expensive cluster of houses to the big road, a real road, with Tescos five minutes up and the horses ten minutes down. Not that I will be needing them again. The horses, that is.
Our house, our home, is more or less the last one standing in what was never quite a village on a comma of land by the Wye. I did, briefly, toy with the idea of buying Piercefield itself in the interests of poetic justice; money from the racecourse in the grounds recovering the wreck. But then we found this, more our size, and had it beautifully renovated, mostly eighteenth-century, goldish stone. Two fields slope down to the loop of the river, we are almost islanded, what a place to find, my love, what a place. And what a place to leave me, what were you thinking of? All winter long we worked closely with the heritage people, employed the architects they recommended, employed the builder they recommended: dark, broadshouldered, with dancing eyes and a feel for stone and women. And what a fantastic job he did.
So I see no one much except the postman, and occasionally the people from the Nature Reserve, very keen they are, plying me with leaflets. And weekends it gets quite busy with walkers; I must get a sign made to point them back to the path, I don’t like their nervous circlings around the house. During the day I go through all the legal stuff as carefully as I can, a page at a time, because almost the only thing I care about now is that she should not get her hands on the money. I start drinking around four, and spend the evenings crying and watching television.
Sometimes I walk. Down through the fields to pick up the path along the riverbank; left towards the ruins of St James’ chapel; right round to Ban-y-Gor woods. A circular walk would no doubt be more satisfying, but appears to involve scrambling up a mud path to the ridge and cutting down through the trees on the other side and I have no energy for that, so I tend to just turn round after a bit and retrace my steps. Which could feel like defeat, but I always feel less bitter after a walk. Sometimes, then, I cook.
Yesterday I went left. It drizzled a bit, but the sun kept getting through, lighting clumps of celandine and bright green moss. I felt muffled with my hood up and pulled it down to find that light rain, properly approached, can be rather pleasant. It was a Wednesday and there was no one at all around until I got level with the chapel, where I caught sight of a figure inside the walls and decided to carry along the river path to avoid a conversation. About twenty minutes upriver I reached the point marked on the leaflet as the site of an old Roman bridge. Not uncrossable after all, I thought, not to them. I stood and looked at the low-tide stretches of grey-brown mud and thought about damp Romans tramping back and forth until I felt exhausted. I turned back; the weather was closing in.
Bastard still there, I thought morosely, seeing the figure again apparently inspecting the wall nearest the path. I put my hood back up, my hands in my pockets, and braced myself to return a cheery hello with a terminal sideways nod.
Disconcertingly, the man is sitting on the wall dressed like a monk.
He raises a hand in blessing as I attempt to stride by and calls my name out very softly. Which pulls me up short, of course.
I’m sorry? I say, with just a quiver of threat in my voice.
Don’t be, says the man.
I stop and face him now, and pull my hood down again for a better look. It is raining with some conviction, and the effect is to make him look oddly blurred. I must, I think, have heard him wrong.
And you are – I wave a sarcastic hand at the ruined chapel – St James, I presume?
He looks annoyed. Of course not, he says, James never came near the place. It’s always been me here, since the beginning.
Right, I say, the light dawning. Well, it’s a dreadful day for it. There’ll be more around at the weekend; families and dogwalkers and ramblers and all sorts. Didn’t they give you a brolly?
Poor sod, I think, and start to move on. Bet they pay him eff-all as well.
I don’t need one, he calls after me, and blesses me again.
At the stile I look back to see if he is still sitting on the wall. He isn’t.
A few days later I saw him again. The valley was a different place, all cleansed and radiant with March sunshine and birdsong and I had just had a brainwave and was putting it into action. The bedroom, where I rarely sleep, preferring to pass out painlessly on the sofa, was, I decided, a poisoned well at the heart of my house. Clean it, I thought. Purge it. Keep nothing. Oxfam the lot. So I skinned the duvet of its creamy lace cover, and stripped the pillows and cushions of all their frills and stuffed them into black bin bags. And there I was balanced on a chintzy stool awkwardly unhooking chintzy curtains in the big bay window when I saw him, still in his monk’s costume, down on the riverpath at the bottom of the field, head bent, hands clasped behind his back, tonsure shining in the sun. I left the curtain hanging on for dear life and went out through the back door, picking up a leaflet as I left. I wave it briskly as I catch him up.
It’s Kiw-id , isn’t it? I say.
No. No it isn’t, he says, wincing visibly.
But it says here, I say. It says here that the early Welsh saint Kiw-id gives his name to the valley: Lan-Caut. Though how that works I admit I have no idea. Look. I flash the leaflet under his thin nose.
I know. It is me, yes, but you’re saying it wrong, it’s Cewydd.
?
Try Qué
Qué
Now with, as in with.
With.
Cewydd
Qué-with. I’m no good at languages, I say, I could always call you Caut.
You could not, he says. Try again.
Qué-with.
Better.
Thanks. Nicer day for working, isn’t it? Do you really have to wear sandals in this mud?
I wasn’t working, particularly, he says.
No? Well. Nice anyway. I gesture proprietorially at the pale cliff face opposite. Even this looks different today, and God knows I’ve done enough looking.
It’s different every day, he says, you’d be surprised at how much changes in a year, never mind a thousand.
A thousand and a half, I correct him, checking my leaflet. AD 625 you’re supposed to be first recorded, remember.
No supposed about it, he says, with just a flicker of wounded pride.
I grin. I rather like this man.
You’ve really found your vocation, haven’t you?
I have. Indeed.
He courteously turns down the offer of a cup of coffee, wishes me well with the purging, and continues along the tight inside curve of the river to the woods behind. Today, I think, he looks not so much blurred as translucent. Wye valley light, the despair of generations of watercolourists, is a marvellous thing.
That bright interlude was the last for a while. Rain set in, the wind came whipping irritably around the house and flinging hail in rough fistfuls at the windows. I succumbed to a stinking head-cold, lost my energy and all will to move. I drank more than ever, kept the television on all the time, and felt foul and stupid. I craved fresh orange juice but knew I was too drunk and too weak to face the drive to Tescos. I wasn’t even sure I had enough petrol to get there.
One evening as I was feeding bits of the neatly chopped-up bed into my state-of-the-art wood-burner there came an unmistakable tapping on the living-room window. I tugged the curtain back slightly to find Cewydd’s pale face peering grotesquely in at me. I gestured him round to the back door and went to unlock it. He was dripping wet and shivering. I looked hard at the kitchen clock and out into the dark to make sure.
It’s night, I said, with some confidence.
It is.
And it’s pissing down.
It is.
Right. I looked at him. He was still in his monk’s costume, but now, at least, he had added a grey woollen cloak with a hood. I gradually, fuzzily, realised that my friend probably didn’t work for the Lancaut Trust after all. An obsessive, then, an enthusiast. A loony in my living room. Oh what the hell, I thought. Who am I to judge. I like him.
Um, I said. You’d better come and warm up then.
Thank you, John. You don’t look too well.
You and me both, I said. Let me get you a cup of tea.
Don’t worry, he said, I don’t need anything. I came to see how you were, really.
Tea, I said firmly. Or whisky. Sit down: you can watch the bed burn for me.
I’ll do that, he said, and gladly.
When I come in with the tray he has taken his cloak off and is just poking another bit of headboard into the stove.The firelight does strange things to his face, making it glow as if from the inside. He looks up with a big smile and I see for the first time what a curious grey-green his eyes are.
Excellent. He rubs thin fingers. I haven’t seen a proper fire for ages.
Where do you live? I ask him, putting the stuff down with a clank. Did you really walk through this or have you left the car at the top?
Walked up from the chapel, he says simply. You know I did.
Tea?
No.
Whisky?
I don’t think so. It smells nice, though.
What do you eat?
Oh not much. Cress. Spring water. I don’t need a lot.
At this point I give up asking questions and sink back into the sofa, where I drink all the tea and most of the whisky and tell him the sorry details of my life to date.
Sex and money, I say grimly. Nothing but trouble.
Cewydd nods sympathetically. They are inherently sinful, he says. They draw the mind away from its true object of contemplation.
Which is? I say stupidly.
God, says Cewydd smugly, and smiles into the fire.
Having no god, nor any inclination to acquire one, I drag the subject away from my own misery. Tell me about the good old days, I say, back in the sixth century. You didn’t come here alone? No Mrs Cewydd then?
Monastic order, he says. Don’t be daft.
And he sketches for me an idyll of monks fishing and farming peacefully on the little peninsula, and though chunks of it sound as though they have floated wholesale out of the Lancaut leaflet I am too tired to check up and let him go on.
I do miss the salmon, he says, sadly. Thirty-seven years since I caught a salmon here.
Nuts and berries, I say, sleepily.
Plenty, he says. And herbs, we cultivated all kinds of things. If you’re still a mess come June I’ll prepare you some St John’s wort, if I can still find it.
Elecampane, I say, even more sleepily. Leaflet says found up top, very rare, import.
Planted it myself, says Cewydd. Up on the Spital Meend. Good for lepers.
At some point he gets up to see to the fire, and I’m sure I can see the glow of it right through him.
When I woke the next morning with a clear head and no sore throat and a fine spring day nudging its way through the crack in the curtains I knew it was a miracle. I had a shower, changed my clothes, and stood tall. Then I drove to Tescos on a thimbleful of petrol and sliced my way through the Saturday crowds like a hot knife through butter, like a spear singing in the blue air. I stocked up on honeyed ham, French-style bread and litres of freshly squeezed orange juice. I also bought a packet of organic watercress and a bottle of Tyˆ Nant.
For the next two or three walks, when I was actively out looking for him, he didn’t show. I even did the strenuous circular, and found myself admiring the white haze of wood anemones and actively looking forward to the blue haze of bluebells. But I am still as tidal as the river, and so it was inevitable that he should turn up on a bad day, a day full of lawyers’ wranglings and angry flashbacks, a cliff-face, mudflats, hopeless day. I was sitting at the big kitchen table with a beer and a packet of crisps and a pile of solicitors’ letters when he walked in.
Even revenge is depressing, I say, not looking up. And complicated. There must be simpler ways.
He says nothing, but sits down at the table opposite me.
I bet it wasn’t like this in the sixth century.
Legal stuff doesn’t change, he says. It’s all about how many cows and the length of silver rods, no one understands it really.
But saints are above all that, aren’t they? There are quicker ways of punishing people, surely? What did you do?
About what?
You know, enemies; people out to get you. Infidels. Landgrabbers. People nicking your salmon.
Oh. Curse them.
I’ve done that, I say. What else?
He looks thoughtful.
Melt them.
I look up. What do you…? Oh. You mean metaphorically? As in soften their anger, dissolve their rage?
No. Metaphors are inherently sinful. They draw the mind away from its rightful object of contemplation.
Bollocks.
Precisely.
He reaches for a crisp but thinks better of it. I remember the cress and go to the fridge. The bag opens with a pop and releases a fetid slimy smell.
I’m sorry, I say. There’s water somewhere for you.
I’m fine.
I back-track. But you melted them. Your enemies. Really?
Mm-mm.
He is trying very hard to sound casual, I think. I allow myself a minute or two to picture her melted on the spot, in various settings, with and without her man, but begin to have some difficulty with the details.
Do they turn into a pool? I ask. A pool of flesh? Or water? Or do they soak into the ground? How does it work?
He stares impenetrably into the middle distance; then shrugs.
I can’t remember, he says. That part isn’t important.
I don’t think you’ve ever done it, I say unkindly. You’re such a fraud. You can’t remember anything that isn’t on the leaflet, why’s that, I wonder?
It’s the dark ages, he says defensively. They’re shrouded in mystery. I honestly can’t remember everything, it was a long time ago.
But I’m still needling, still wanting to hurt.
You’re pathetic. I bet you forgive your enemies at the last minute every time, like a true Christian. Proper saint, you are.
Lord, I sound like my Gran.
Proper saint I am, says Cewydd stiffly, and gets up from the table and strides out of the back door and down the field, thinning as he goes. I watch through the window. By the time he reaches the path there is nothing, no one there. I fetch myself another beer to prove that I won, and sit back down with my cursed letters.
But it has been such a long time since I last raised my voice in anger at another human being that even a tiff with a touchy dark-age saint upsets my pitiful concentration beyond all recall and it is not long before I am down by the river looking for him, clutching the blue bottle of Tyˆ Nant.
I clear my throat and glance around for dog walkers.
Cewydd!!
The river has filled again with the tide from the sea and a rich harvest of rain from up in the Welsh hills. I don’t know if it’s best to go upstream or down.
Cewydd!!
The curved white cliff looms. My small voice bounces off it.
Cewydd, I’m sorry!
This is ridiculous. I feel like weeping. And then my little call is answered by another voice, a huge voice, metallic, nasal, rhythmical, familiar, coming over the cliff above me from the grounds at Piercefield, filling the theatre of Lancaut. I am awestruck. It is the three-thirty from Chepstow carried on the rainwashed air. Magnified. Liturgical. The words are completely unintelligible but I know their rhythms like the Lord’s Prayer. I close my eyes and feel them galloping in my blood. And then there is Cewydd standing beside me, as rapt as I am. I ceremoniously hand him the spring-water and watch with a smile as he holds the unbelievable blue glass bottle reverently and incredulously up to the light, overwhelmed by its blueness, reaching out towards the voice of god.