Chapter Three

For the next few mornings, Harry Clewe worked in the hotel garden.

The wall refused to take shape. Somehow, there seemed to be less stone available in his pile of rubble than there’d been when he’d brought it all crashing down. He’d finally removed the remains of the rhododendron bush; there was a great twisted mass of it at the top of the garden. He’d arranged the biggest stones into the soft earth and packed them tightly with more soil, placing the boulders on top of one another until there was none left. The result was unimpressive. Where there had once been a bulging face of stone and rhododendron roots some eight feet high retaining the terrace above, now there was Harry’s wall: it came up to his waist. Behind that, there was an ugly scree of earth and smaller stones.

Burning the roots and branches of the rhododendron was an easier and more enjoyable task. He stuffed a bundle of old news­papers into the core of the heap, and, as soon as he lit the paper, aromatic smoke began to drift between the layers of leaves and twigs; there was the whistle and pop of warming wood. The leaves smouldered before exploding into an ill-tempered flame. Bubbles of oil sprang up and hissed with steam. The branches turned black, too thick and damp to burn quickly, but soon they were running with fire, shuddering with heat. The woodland was filled with crack­ling and smoke. The jackdaws moved to the trees of the next-door garden, continuing their clucking conversation. Ashes rose like moths, with the same jerky, aimless flight, settled on the ground and on Harry’s clothes in a monochrome confetti.

Shifting from time to time to keep out of the smoke as it changed direction with the wind, he picked up a newspaper and began to read. February 1966; it was six months out of date. He crushed the paper and jammed it into the flames, where the pages erupted into a ball of brilliant yellow, like a giant chrysanthemum.

He stayed at the top of the garden all morning. Anxious about the flames spreading to the woodland, which was very dry after a hot summer, he raked away the leaves until there was a fire break about six feet wide, dropped his rake, unzipped his trousers and urinated into the bare soil. A haze of pungent steam rose into the air. He was filthy. There were ashes and leaves in his ginger hair. The sweat had dried on his face, with all the dust of the bonfire, and his glasses were filmed with dirt. There was dried blood around the nails of his right hand from a gash on his thumb, clotted with soil from his efforts with the wall. When he ran his tongue across his lips, he could taste the smoke and sweat and the ammoniac tang of urine. At one o’clock he left the hotel and walked through the village, to see Sarah.

Very carefully, he pushed open the restaurant door. Apart from a family in one corner, the place was empty. Harry sat down near the window. Sarah appeared. She must have heard the door open and close. When she saw Harry, she frowned at first, worked her face into a smile and walked to his table.

‘Well, Harry Clewe,’ she said, ‘you managed to come in a bit more quietly this time, didn’t you?’ She looked him up and down. ‘What on earth have you been doing, you dirty boy? I’ve a good mind to call the manager and have you thrown out!’

‘I just thought I’d let you get me a cup of tea before I go home and get cleaned up,’ he said. ‘I’ve been gardening at the hotel. I work there every morning.’

The girl raised her eyebrows so high that they disappeared into her hair. She was wearing the same clothes as the last time he’d seen her.

‘Gardening? I was wrong, then,’ she said. ‘You’re a bit hard to figure out, aren’t you? The car, the cottage . . . and gardening! You don’t seem to fit into any of them. What are you doing here?’

Before Harry could reply, before he’d decided whether the girl was asking him what he was doing in Wales or what he was doing in the restaurant, more customers came in and she had to see what they wanted. She was too busy to talk to Harry, although she smiled dazzlingly when she put a cup of tea on his table. Two young men, sitting by the window, looked her up and down and winked at one another; they whispered together and then laughed very noisily, feigning solemnity when Sarah went to take their order. One of them said something which Harry didn’t catch, but Sarah giggled and blushed and slapped the man on the top of his head with her notebook. Harry felt a surge of jealousy, swallowing it with a gulp of tea.

The manager appeared, big, burly and bearded, red-faced from the heat of the kitchen, and looked around to see that all was well in the restaurant. He stared at Harry, pursing his lips as he recog­nised the gingery hair and the glasses, frowning as he saw the dirt on Harry’s boots and trousers. Sarah pushed past him, going into the kitchen with the young men’s order, and the manager disappeared too.

Harry finished his tea and went to the counter to pay. He wasn’t going to say anything about her coming to his garden. But, taking his money, she leaned towards him and whispered, ‘It’s my half-day, Harry. I’d love to see your little jungle again and have another look at the natterjack. Can I? I should get out in twenty minutes or so.’

Something fine and powerful swelled in Harry’s chest. His throat ached. Unable to speak, he grinned and nodded and walked out of the restaurant.

But, an hour later, there was still no sign of her. Harry sat in his car with a copy of the Caernarfon & Denbigh Herald and read it from end to end. Then he reread it: the personal columns, the parish notices, the classified advertisements. He got out of the car, dropped the newspaper into a bin so that a swarm of wasps rose from a matted heap of banana skins; then, with nothing else to do, he opened the car boot, took out the oil and water he always kept there, opened the bonnet and topped up the levels. The engine was black, the whole compartment was sooted with oil smoke. Wondering how much longer the Wabenzi power would be with him, he slammed down the bonnet and the boot, wiped his hands on his shirt and went back to the restaurant.

Every table was taken. The windows were steamed up. Harry’s glasses blurred as soon as he stepped inside, so he took them off and smeared them on his trousers as he stepped carefully over out­stretched legs, over handbags and cameras, towards the counter. It was very noisy and suffocatingly hot, smelling of vinegar and cigarette smoke. Before he’d put his glasses back on, the manager loomed in front of him.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said. ‘We’re a bit full up at the moment.’

Harry fitted his glasses onto his face. When he licked his lips, he could still taste the smoke of the bonfire.

‘Can I have a word with Sarah, please?’ he said. ‘I know she’s very busy. Just for half a minute?’

‘I’ll give her a shout,’ the man said. ‘But she’s stopping here for the rest of the day. She’s not running off this time. Hang on a minute and I’ll get her.’ He turned to the kitchen, adding over his shoulder, ‘Stay there, stand still, and don’t bloody break anything while you’re waiting.’

Harry stood still and broke nothing. The customers ignored him, in spite of his dirty clothes and boots and his oily hands; they were all too busy with their children and chips and their postcards to notice the red-headed gardener who leaned on the counter. He looked forward to escaping the restaurant. A tremor of electricity went through him at the simple idea of the sunshine outside and a rapid acceleration from the village . . . to sit in the bird-bright tangle of the garden for ten minutes while the bath was running, to soak away the sweat and the smoke and the urine while the wren and the dunnock moved secretly in the bracken and the blackbird sang in the ash tree; while the toad was feeling with its fingers in the cool undergrowth, blinking its huge, golden eyes from a crevice in the rockery . . .

The toad! Harry had never heard of the natterjack before. He didn’t know that toads were supposed to be lucky, until the girl had said something about the toadstone . . . Neither he nor the garden could be the same again, now that the girl had been there.

She came out of the kitchen. Her hair was lank, her face was red and shiny.

‘Hello again, Harry,’ she said. She took a pink tissue from the sleeve of her blouse and dabbed her nose. ‘I’m going to be stuck here all afternoon, I’m afraid, now that we’re so busy. No escape this time! You met my uncle?’

Harry told her what the man had said, that he’d been recognised as a breaker of crockery and a kidnapper of waitresses. As Sarah put away her tissue, pushing the paper into her sleeve, he saw the soft whiteness under her arm.

‘What about tomorrow?’ he said. ‘Can I pick you up tomorrow?’

She frowned, so that Harry wished he hadn’t asked her.

‘I’m going climbing with a friend tomorrow,’ she said. ‘On the cliffs at Tremadog. I suppose you could come if you like. I don’t think Patrick will mind. You’d better say one way or the other, because I’ve got to get back to work now.’ She turned to a man who was waiting to pay, who was brandishing his bill and a pound note, whose wife and children were at the door and ready to go outside.

‘I’ll come,’ Harry said. ‘Where shall I meet you?’

‘Outside the restaurant at two. All right? See you then.’ Too busy to look at Harry, taking the customer’s money, checking the bill, giving the change, she whirled back into the kitchen.

Harry drove slowly out of Beddgelert, into the open, high country­side to Rhyd-ddu, the next village, where he was renting a cottage for a few pounds a week. He’d negotiated the use of a corrugated-iron shed in a nearby farmyard, so that he could park the hoodless car under cover; and now he left it there, walked to his front door and let himself in. It was a little stone-built cottage in a terrace of half a dozen other cottages: two up and two down, with a tiny bathroom and kitchen more recently added to the back of it. Pausing to switch on the immersion heater, he continued through the back door and into the garden. In half an hour the water would be lukewarm, good enough for a bath on a summer’s afternoon.

He sat on the stones of the rockery, closed his eyes and leaned back, tipping his face to the sun. After a minute, keeping his eyes closed, he bent down, took off his boots and peeled off his damp, hot socks. All the time, he had in his mind a picture of the girl, Sarah, who’d done the same thing in the same place; it helped him to focus the picture, repeating her actions as exactly as possible. It was the best he could do, since the girl herself hadn’t come to the garden that afternoon. He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed the ribbings on his feet and ankles that his boots had made, leaned back again and hitched up his trousers to have the sun on his shins . . . As he did all this, he could see the girl sitting on the rockery, with the sun on her throat and her arms and her little white toes. He even felt the ant on his foot, the same ant that had walked on Sarah’s foot, on her calf and her knee and the soft shadow on the inside of her thigh. It was tickling the hair on his instep; but he left it there instead of flicking it off, because it might be the same ant he’d seen on Sarah’s leg. The ant was the tiniest, most exquisite detail that made the picture perfect.

Harry felt giddy. The sun was heavy on his mop of ginger hair. He reeled, swaying on the loose boulders of the rockery, with the heat on his head and the vividness with which he’d conjured the presence of the girl. At last he could no longer bear the prickling on his foot. He blinked his eyes open and looked down to see what the ant was doing.

It wasn’t an ant; it was the natterjack toad. It had stopped on the path, confronted by a strange object near the entrance to its crevice in the rocks. The object, Harry’s foot, was long, bony and white, soiled and sweaty. It was warm, with a strong animal scent. So the natterjack paused to inspect it, instead of manoeuvring past. It reached its fingers into the springy red hair on Harry’s instep and gently pulled. And Harry, confronted by such warty, pre­historic ugliness after his vision of the golden girl, cried out and instinctively flipped the toad away with a sudden straightening of his leg, feeling it horribly soft on his bare foot, like a wrinkled, deflated party balloon. He saw the toad rowing its arms and legs in the long grass, struggling on its back, unable to right itself, and he knelt down and lowered his face to examine it, as Sarah had done. He put his face so close to the toad that he could almost have touched it with his nose or slipped out his tongue and licked the soft, white skin on its belly.

Then, overcoming his squeamishness with an enormous effort, he picked up the toad . . . as Sarah had done. To be like her, simply to touch and hold something that she had touched and held, he picked up the toad. It squirmed in his hands. It could feel that he loathed it, and it reacted as the girl had said it would. It began to swell, puffing itself up, so that, having been so flaccid and dull, the skin tightened and gleamed like the leather of a boxing glove. Inflating in Harry’s hands, as he knelt and watched the remarkable transformation, it brewed the poison in the glands on the sides of its head. An acrid fluid oozed to the surface of its skin, until Harry’s hands were stinging as though he’d torn up a tall green nettle. He bundled the toad into the bracken. Straight away, tiny white blebs stood up on his palms and fingers. Seeing that the toad had deflated, scurried and vanished, mouselike, into a hole in the rockery, he picked up his boots and socks and went inside. His hands were itching furiously. His picture of Sarah had entirely gone.

He dropped the boots and socks, flung off his shirt and trousers and pants in the kitchen, put down his glasses and went into the bathroom. For a minute, he stared at his face in the mirror. It was a nice face, a face that women found oddly appealing, a smooth, freckled face with clear eyes, a head of thick, red curls: a nice face but a puzzled face, which looked as though it had been punched a few times and was half expecting a few more punches. Even the toad had stung him, the toad that the girl had been so thrilled to find, that she’d nuzzled and stroked, that she’d described as lovely and wonderful. When Harry Clewe had picked it up, it had stung him. So the eyes in the mirror were apprehensive.

Harry reached for both the washbasin taps and gripped, intending to bathe his tingling hands. A powerful electric shock surged through his body. As his fingers clenched in spasm and couldn’t let go, as his right knee jerked sharply upwards and cracked against the underside of the washbasin, the face in the mirror opened its mouth and let out a stream of incoherent, jabbering yells. The eyes bulged. After what seemed like minutes, but was probably no more than five seconds, Harry wrenched his hands from the taps. Still shouting, he hobbled out of the bathroom and flung himself onto the living-room sofa.

He lay there, mewing. He was stark naked, bruised and dirty. His arms tingled with electricity, from his fingers to his shoulders. They were numb, although he could clench and unclench his fists. His right kneecap was hurting terribly from its violent impact on the basin. As the feeling returned to his fingers, he massaged his forehead and his neck, trying to rub the tension out of them. He looked down at his body and explored all the bruises on it: the gash on his thumb, his throbbing kneecap and the tingles and aches in his arms. Worst of all, when he squeezed his eyes shut, he saw sparks. ‘Please, no!’ he whimpered. ‘Oh, God, please, no . . . not now!’ He rubbed and rubbed with his fingers to try and make the sparks go away, hoping they’d been caused by the electric shock and would soon disappear. Oh, God, he thought, anything but the migraine, please, anything but that!

Enraged by the prospect of the kind of headache he’d dreaded since puberty, he ground his teeth together and stopped mewing, determined to tackle the problem in his bathroom. He strode into the kitchen, stepped into his Wellington boots and went into the bathroom again. He had the vague idea that the rubber boots would protect him from electric shocks.

He touched the taps with his fingertips. There was a tingle of current. Gingerly, he gripped one of the taps. There was a surging of energy, even in the soles of his boots. His fingers curled, his right knee jerked, but there was no bruising impact with the sink. He breathed out and relaxed. His fingers unclenched. His face in the shaving mirror looked uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, Harry decided to run the bath. Somehow or other, he must get clean. Handling the taps with a dry towel, he let the bath fill to a depth of three or four inches and then he stepped in. The water hardly covered the instep of his Wellington boots. Squatting on his haunches, he found that, if he dipped both his hands in the water at the same time, he received an unpleasant electric shock, despite the rubber boots, right through his arms and chest and into the back of his neck. He had to wash himself single-handedly. It was the most strenuous and least successful bath he’d ever taken. Deciding not to risk kneeling forward and submerging his head, he managed to rub some wet soap into his hair and rinse most of it out again with splashes of grey water.

It was worse than Sudan. There, he’d quickly grown accus­tomed to bathing from a tin bucket he carried from the Nile. It was simply a matter of practice. Perhaps he would adjust to the electrified bathwater, find better and less painful ways of using it. When at last Harry emerged from the bathroom and dried himself, his towel was streaked with the soap and dirt that had remained on his body. After dressing in clean clothes, he returned to the garden with a basin of clean water, where he sat on the rockery, took off his boots and washed his feet. The blebs on his fingers had stopped itching. When he squeezed his eyes shut, he was enormously relieved to find that the dancing sparks had gone.

The natterjack watched from within its cave. It solemnly blinked, licked its lips with a long, grey tongue and rubbed its little hands together.