The house rests in the folded hills like an old woman abed this spring-dawning morning, blinking her window eyes at the first light. The sky cups its cloudy fingers over a pair of hen harriers as they fly their courtship race: rocketing from shade to light as they soar above the hamlet, the road, the chapel, the graves in the dewy damp. Above the blue sky’s curve, a man is preparing to walk on the Moon, but down here it’s a very special morning.
Lizzie lies deep in the folds of her bed that was her mother’s before her, and mother by mother before that. The yellow ceiling hasn’t been recoated for more than her hundred years; her mother gazed unfocused on that same paint the night Lizzie was conceived, pressed into the same feather mattress, and probably had the self-same quilt tangled round an ankle as she arched her hips up to meet the body of her husband; both relicts of former marriages and well into the enjoyment of the sacramental gift.
But Lizzie doesn’t think of old Gwenllian and Dafydd, tupping away with grins of mutual delight. She’s smoothing her own body, her gnarled old fingers spidering their way round under her bedclothes. No-one touches an old woman intentionally, so she strokes herself, reminds her skin and nerves of pleasure, of where she starts and ends, of her edges and shapes. Inside her head there is no much-patched bedding or soft yellow welkin: it’s hot and crowded…
Mmmm, warm, the soft belly of me. I’m an old cat I am in the sun, love my belly scratched… Love the feel of soft skin even the old girl I am. Ach, an’ it’s my birthday oh god.
Lizzie shifts in the depths of her bedding and the Spring sunrise catches in the corner of her eye. A sunbeam gilds the dressing table, a cut-glass bowl throws a reflection onto the wall, a snippet of rainbow curves across the corner of a picture frame: a monochrome couple in their best Sunday clothes pause seventy-eight years on chapel steps: he tilts his head and smiles out askance; she frisks, smiles, on the brink of a laugh. The girl’s veil is a frozen blur in a breeze that never let go.
William, oh my own dear man, but you left me alone to bury our sons. There’s right for a father to die before his boys but ach, cariad, the grief of it … they’re by you now in the hill; do you chat, in the dark or in the noon? Where are you now, William bach, with your poor health, and your beautiful smile like the fox, like the wolf, like the hungry moon rising over Panteg?...
The orbit of her thoughts tracks its yearly path, back through loss to gain and from need to want, from adult disappointments to childish plans. Duty and harness, cleaving to and cleaving from. All the past sits at her bedside.
Come round me you blessed ghosts you all, canu penblwydd hapus a fi: sing a hundred happy birthdays to me; sing and blow out the candle of me. Happy births and deaths and teas and suppers and beds and graves for all of us. There’ll be cake and beer; I will squeeze this day for all the milk and honey it will give me…
Lizzie shifts again, aware of her full bladder, fumbles the bedclothes away from her skinny legs, feels the cold dawn, smells the old stones of the house.
‘Bugger’ she mumbles as her left foot misses the rug and taps the chilly floor; she gathers the fuggy nightdress round her knees. It is Lizzie’s birthday. No gazunder for her; she heads towards the new-fangled bathroom down the passage, where she is going to flush the indoors toilet.
Out the window, frowning low under the sloping roof, she can see the valley as it’s always stood: rocks and hills and sheep, and neighbours.
‘Bugger you and all’ she mutters. She has long ago stopped caring for the neighbours; she doesn’t even care that it’s mutual.
Her feet stir dust along the corridor, where rag rugs hold the cloths and scraps of decades, knotted and flattened and staring up her skirts as she ages and sheds the years like flakes of grey and lacey skin. Memory whispers round her like a fog. A nothing-hand tickles at her from the brass handle of an old dresser lining the hall, tugs a greeting. Moths stir awake inside a bunch of dried flowers, nudging another petal into silent dust. In the bathroom, the eyes of a porcelain jug watch protectively as Lizzie’s soft backside hits the cold toilet seat with a quiver. She rubs her feet in cloths that layer the stone floor like geological strata.
Through the window the garden is a frosty grey. Inside, the dawn fills the dusky room with a loamy damp. On the lip of the basin is an orange sliver of coal-tar soap; its heavy-handed odour soaks through everything this end of the house, overriding Myfanwy’s rose geranium soap in the blue bowl on the windowsill. But here next to the toilet the two scents meet with a vengeance that annoys Lizzie’s nose.
She opens the window, watches disinterestedly as the pink soap arcs down into the garden shadows. It might have been an accident. The sharp air of the open window sets the furnishings muttering with alarm. An irritated curtain flicks itself; a towel skitters sideways. The small ribbon looped through the bathroom door key glances about anxiously.
The chill follows Lizzie back up the hallway as she returns to her room, closes the door against the silence of the house. After a pause, the bed creaks under her returning weight.
Throughout the house, breathing slow, the other women are still asleep, their eyes shut and their doors ajar. Down the hallway, Lizzie’s granddaughter—feckless and frightened despite her nearly forty years—Sarah Maud curls round herself and dreams in beat and rhythm and span of low-grade, self-conscious verse; her thoughts are dancing in gloomy candle-lit rooms feverish with hangovers. In sleep, she tangles her hands in a withered flower garland that fell from her fair hair during the night. Sarah Maud needs both her names to hold her up. With the nervous strength of a thoroughbred filly, but mind-light and starved of everything good, Sarah Maud knows life as a string of shattered nights and unendurable days, her eyes only work when she’s half-asleep. As her feet move through the habituated steps of an old jazz riff, Sarah Maud accidentally kicks the grey cat that owns the foot of her bed.
The grey cat resettles to his dreams of wind and warmth and bats in the eaves.
Above the kitchen, forever clay-footed from the day she was born some seventy-six years and a few months ago, stolid Myfanwy dreams of her mother Lizzie; over and over she dreams of burying her mother. Is she dead? asks the dream vicar, leaning over the bottomless grave, but Myfanwy does not want to answer.
Myfanwy has been wanting, and not wanting, to bury her mother for a very long time. What’s being dead got to do with anything?
Behind the kitchen stairs, in the child’s cwtch, ten-year-old Jenner, dark-haired, birdish daughter of Sarah Maud and the fourth in line for Lizzie’s bed and the yellow welkin, visits a place of leaves and feathers and wordless unclothed creatures, in her sleep. The ghosts lean by Jenner’s bedstead, watching and caring for her solitary soul as they have done all her little life, for no-one else is taking enough notice of the child.
This: the morning dream state of Ty Merched farmhouse. The house so cluttered the walls recede to infinite distance. The house so full of ghosts, the living have no need to talk to each other.
Lizzie hates the epithet she is known by, Lizzie Ty Merched, Lizzie of The Women’s House, for it reminds her that regardless of her grip on those chapel virtues of wealth, and pride, and determined work-boots, of her good bones and the sacrifice of her family’s blood to Welsh soil and old wars, this one thing is all the neighbours want to know of her. Her family’s story, in the minds of her neighbours, is only this: that all the men she loved or should have loved—father, brother, husband, sons—are dead, and what’s more, died prematurely, died younger than they ought to. Yet here she is, surviving beyond love, beyond those loved bodies’ graves. Her grip on life provokes people.
But who’ll look after things arightly if I go? Myfanwy is no farmer for all her bulk and broad feet, and Sarah Maud is …’ Well, Sarah Maud will always be the unwed mother of Jenner—that flightful child! —but otherwise ... who can say what Sarah Maud is.
There will be no letting go. For who would catch and who would fall? Lizzie sleeps on, dream-wandering, and in her sleep a ruby necklace slips through her fingers, to be caught just before it drops away.
The sun rises further above the valley.