By the shop, women in their second-best hats are queuing for the early bus to Swansea; they are as talkative as ever, but today the conversations are all spiralling round the same topic. For Mrs Barry is calling on the vicar—du, but she’s had a lot of social mileage from that daytrip to Abergavenny.
To all appearances, Reverend Morgan is ruminating over a well-thumbed bible as he prepares tomorrow’s sermon, the light of God gilding the pages in this sunny corner of the vicarage garden; even so he wears light gloves and a long coat against the morning chill. Certainly, Zipporah Barry thinks the Reverend is deep in thought as she pushes open the gate. ‘Reverend! Such a morning!’ she calls as she steps carefully on the damp slate flags of the path. She has her best shoes on; and a well-flowered hat that almost matches.
In fact, Reverend Morgan has acquired a fear of the dark and its new tenebrous inhabitants, and had sat awake all night hearing, listening, shivering; the shadows of his drear, celibate bedroom were full of urgent whispers and shifting pressures that hurt his ears, dragged at his belly and challenged his balance. Now he’s sleeping in the welcome safety of this patch of sunlight and nods his head unconsciously.
‘And how do we find you this morning? Such a day, wasn’t I just saying to Mr Barry! The women of the valley, now; they’ve asked me to come and speak to you. Not my way to put myself forward I’m sure you know it, but they did insist…’ Mrs Barry settles onto the bench opposite the reverend’s deck chair, but her habitual coyness in the presence of the bachelor cleric has precluded her from noticing he is in fact still asleep, and her long-winded simpering has only helped to keep him so, ‘… and far be it from me to deny my help be it ever so little that poor I can offer, especially in such a good cause as in this case…’
The vicar sleeps on.
‘… so we would like to use the church hall. Tomorrow. After service.’ As a regular donor to the funds appeal, Mrs Barry sees no reason for the customary ‘os gwelwch yn dda’ and the lack of such a cue as ‘please’ —in either Welsh or English—fails to alert the dozing man that something was being expected of him. ‘You will be there? To add some gravitas, isn’t it?’
The vicar mumbles.
‘Pardon, Reverend? I said you will be there? We’ll see you tomorrow?’ Zipporah’s voice rises in volume, she peers uncertainly at the vicar’s face for the first time. There’s a smell of heavy spirits hanging round the vicar; something about being unusually close to him makes her grimace a little and draw back. ‘Reverend Morgan? Twdr Morgan? I said, Twdr, you will be there tomorrow?
The reverend snorts awake, the dream-dust of his childhood’s recurring nightmare muffling his ears. ‘Yes, yes!’ he blinks as the face of Mrs Barry swims into focus while the bloated ghost of his rampant father, bullying brother, recede. ‘Hu-hem! Yes, Mrs Barry. Tomorrow; of course.’
‘And we’ll need the keys today, please. Do you have them here?’
‘Keys, Mrs Barry? Chapel will be unlocked before service, as always.’ He struggles to sit upright in the canvas deck chair, and his bible slips from his lap to the grass, falling opening at a red silk bookmark.
‘No, Reverend; for the hall. Not the chapel, no; the hall. To rehearse, isn’t it.’ This is harder than she had expected. Mrs Barry starts over. ‘The women of the valley, now; they’ve asked me to come and speak to you…’ but falters as she focuses on some startling doodles in the margins of his bible. Blushing, she clutches her handbag tighter and carries on. The vicar snaps the book shut. He is still not listening, not really.
The hall key is found under a pair of muddy leather gloves in the scullery, and Mrs Barry hurries on her way. As soon as the door swings closed behind her, the reverend scrubs out the rowdy marginalia of his bible with a piece of stale bread, glancing up once to notice, through the window, that the sun has been clouded over again.
He returns to sleep, indoors by the electric fire. He dreams his nightmare again, only this time it is Twdr who holds the whip.
-oOo-
By the Ty Merched yard, the lane is empty of movement. Scattered clods of earth lie where they were thrown against the fences and walls; some hang suspended in the hedgerow branches, more are flattened under boot prints. The bank they were torn from is as dishevelled as a rugby pitch turned side-on. Cigarette butts, a rag of someone’s shirt cuff, and the WPC’s whistle—clogged with mud— are visible among the kicked-about litter covering the road. The hippies, in the communal spirit of their kind, have tidied away the stones and rubbish and barricade, reset the fenceposts as best they can, and left the air thick with bitter-sweet smoke.
In the barn Sarah Maud is wobbling through her duties with the sheep. Sarah Maud is running on automatic, an abandoned engine rolling down a shallow slope. A casual observer might think she has forgotten her child.
Lizzie is trying to help, but the skill has slipped from her fingers these past days; what she knows is losing its connection to how she moves, and she is surprised to find, again and again, that she’s sitting on a bail of straw, her mind a dark blank, when the last thing she remembers is going to help Sarah Maud with this or that small task. The stillness is soothing after the strife of yesterday and the expectation of more police intrusion at some point. Lizzie is surprised—angered—at how little investigation is being done; though she is growing in rage and frustration at any mention of DS Watcyns and his actions, following the report Myfanwy has brought back from Ponty, surely there must be some more activity to be endured; some proof to be hunted down that will exonerate Jenner, find where the real guilt lies?
The quietness is framed by the occasional bleating of a new lamb, the shuffling of a sheep in the hurdles, or Sarah Maud clattering a bucket in the feed bin. Lizzie takes a ragged breath. She stares out the doors to where a robin is nest-building in the ivy: surely that's a good sign. She breathes deeply to release the tightness from her chest, and sees some silvereyes flitting by the chicken coop…
Has she dozed? The sun is veiled by thickening cloud, and the air is turning chill, even while the quiet remains deep and unruffled.
‘Sarah Maud? Do you need any help? I might get us a brew of tea if you’re alright for a minute…’ Lizzie speaks over her shoulder, while still watching the pair of silvereyes with tired contentment. The birds peck away at the mud, where breadcrumbs are plentiful after the closing moments—the awkward sharing of tea and cake—of the day before. How like the valley it is, to end a row with tea. And cake. She smiles for the first time in days, watching the birds tussle over a raisin and waiting to see who wins. It is the one with the largest white rim round its eyes that carries off the prize. Their small chirrupings fade, leaving silence. ‘Sarah Maud? Where are you at, dwt?’
Her eyes still adjusting from the yet-bright sky, Lizzie can’t make out the shapes when she turns to peer into the gloom of the barn, but she can tell there is nothing moving.
Myfanwy is alerted by Lizzie yelling and comes sour and disapproving to the kitchen door. Myfanwy is all finished with shouting, forever if possible. Her sleep was shredded by worry for Jenner and what she’d seen in the Ponty police cell. In her dreams she searched through rushes and rhos, tore her hands looking for a key, a sign, a door; she ran uphill with grey hounds behind a grey king; she cried for her failures until the pillowcase stuck to her plain sad cheek.
‘What is it?’ she calls, but Lizzie isn’t visible. Myfanwy goes to the barn door where Lizzie is bent over the shape of Sarah Maud prone in the straw. Sees Lizzie cwtching Sarah Maud in a nestling embrace and whispering to soothe. Myfanwy opens her mouth and the wrong words come.
‘Why did you always hate me? Always. You were never this kind to me.’
‘What?’
‘Why did you hate me?’
‘I never hated you, bach. I just didn’t want you.’ Lizzie doesn’t look up. ‘Can you fetch some help here? Don’t just stand gawping, woman, your daughter is hurt.’
But Myfanwy was a daughter herself, before ever she was a mother. She turns and goes back inside the house. Lizzie closes her eyes. Accidental truth has undermined her. She whispers ‘Shhhh now, it’ll be alright,’ and she cannot be certain who she’s hoping to comfort.
Mich finds them there, Lizzie stiff and numb with cold and crouching, Sarah Maud’s dress dark with muck and water from the barn floor. Sarah Maud is put in a warming bath by the sisterly Mich, while in the kitchen Lizzie and Myfanwy cannot hold each other’s eye.
Soon, ‘We’re low on tea’ says Myfanwy and reaches for her hat and coat.
‘Myfanwy—’ Lizzie starts. But the door is shut on her before she has figured out what to say. She gets up to stretch her knees again, lays a hand on an unopened packet of tea that sits on the pantry shelf. The outer door opens again, and Lizzie is caught in the pantry doorway.
‘Shut up!’ Myfanwy comes abruptly back into the kitchen. ‘Shut up.’ Her face is inches from Lizzie’s. They can see the old skin of each other, smell the soap and talc, feel Lizzie’s heat, Myfanwy’s chill. ‘Just… just shut up. Nothing you can say. Shut up.’ And Myfanwy is gone again.
Myfanwy walks the lane like she’s stepping on expired obligations.
The shop is crowded, for the bus from Swansea has not long disgorged its final passengers with their baskets and string bags. The women are clustered in close little groups that break apart and reform anew in flurries of words and gestures. Myfanwy enters and there is sudden, sharp silence. All eyes are turned away. She stalls in the doorway.
‘Maris,’ she nods to the proprietress. There’s a murmur of agreement through the crowd, for that is Maris’s name, yes. Myfanwy knows these people, sees she is out of the loop, intruding on something. ‘Oh, I wanted some tea but now I think about it…’
‘You had half a pound from me just last week.’ says Maris, careful to keep everyone on side. ‘Isn’t it?’ she nudges.
‘Du. What am I thinking? I’ll call another time... Bore da…’ Myfanwy can barely get the farewell out, so hasty is her retreat. The shop bell dings in the silence behind her. But once outside, under the slanting afternoon light and the high chill air and the vast architecture of the clouds, Myfanwy stands by the crossroad a long while. Not wanted at home, not welcome in the shop, she reviews why life is so small and mean and besmirched, ticks the points off on her fingers until she has it settled in her mind where the fault lies. It’s not with her.
Behind her, the shop is quiet. It is unspoken but agreed: their plan excludes the family at Ty Merched. The women wait till Myfanwy has moved off before any leave for their own homes. Some few link arms and head towards the chapel hall, heads together and singing quietly, occasionally breaking into dispute over pitch or lyrics. Over the western ridge a low cloud bank has rolled in over the hilltops and now spills down into the afternoon shadow at the bottom of the valley; a dragon’s breath before sunset, draining away to Ponty. Out of sight, someone’s laugh on the cooling air; someone’s sigh.
-oOo-
Down in the Pontardawe police station, there is muttering. Free of the DS’s caustic weekday presence and vicious, suspicious eyes, the weekend shift is fidgeting about the tearoom, the locker room, the corridors. The officers are anxious about the welfare of the strange child in the cells; they’re unhappy about the lack of progress of the investigation and the invisibility of the reasons for her arrest. There isn’t any evidence. There isn’t even a name. Just a man on a tray in a fridge in Swansea. But they also feel powerless to stand against DS Watcyns. He has the longest tenure of any in the force, and threads run from his stubby fingertips through the entire South Wales Constabulary with a pervasiveness that would surprise even the most senior. He’s a gross idle bastard, but a cunning one.
PC Jones is suffering yet another weekend shift, punishment for some unknown slight to the DS; or maybe not, maybe just that Watcyns is a small-minded poisonous toad who likes to test his powers, ‘Working Time Directives’ be hanged. PC Jones hasn’t had a day off in three weeks. But today, it feels a good thing, so at least he knows how the child is being treated.
Jenner will not eat or drink anything. The morning sun had woken her a bit and she had roused to ask again where she was, and to take some porridge and milk with wide-eyed distress at the strange men all watching her through cell bars; but now the room is in shadow and she has curled under the blanket, crushing the tatty posy into her crossed arms. Jones is unable to answer her question about a dog, nor was it mentioned in the Llandovery officer’s report.
Jones goes looking for the post-mortem report; it hasn’t arrived. He checks the paperwork; no post-mortem has been scheduled. The duty officer is watching him but gives no clue as to allegiances. Jones looks in the folder for the site examination documents. They seem to have had tea spilt on them. He holds the illegible page up to the duty officer, who shrugs noncommittedly before returning to his newspaper. This is not the first time Jones has checked through his DS’s paperwork and found it wanting; but in a murder case, he had hoped for more rigour; there was no rigour at all. A pencilled note, ‘Witnessed it!!!’ in heavy capitals and underlined three times, seems insufficient.
Jones considers phoning WPC Davies and asking her advice… he glances up as the first rays of sunset reflect off the eastern valley walls and shed a dark gold, formed more of shadow than light, through the station windows, to the cell doors.
‘Hello?’
Jones hears the girl’s repeated call, goes to the door and looks through the bars.
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘Hello.’ A few dapples of reflected light shine on Jenner’s foot as it hangs over the edge of the cot; improbably, she smiles. ‘Can I have some paper and a pencil, please?’
-oOo-
Sarah Maud sits cross-legged in her birds’ nest of a bed, with a tea tray nestled between her knees. She lifts a spoon, she opens her mouth, but forgets to connect the two. The spoon hangs mid-air in her hand, trembles, then sinks back down to the plate. She hasn’t seen Jenner for days and she had meant to be such a good mother. She can remember that: she had meant to be a good mother; but she is failing to remember what that was going to look like: something about touch and song and… looking each other in the eye, yes; recognition. Care, in heart. Strength, in… Words form in her head. She looks for a pencil and paper to get them out, but as she reaches towards her bedside table, the tray tips off her lap and the boiled egg in its willow pattern cup rolls down and onto the floor, trailing a tail of yellow yolk like an incoming comet in the shadows; thin strips of toast spill onto the quilt and leave a buttery stain overlaying older buttery stains. Sarah Maud slides back into somnolence as she watches the drizzle of yolk turn opaque, solidify, and crack into a dozen tiny lengths. When she next wakes from a doze, the house is silent.
The house is too silent. Sarah Maud has been feeling more frightened of late, frightened of being alone; she’s aware that the old fears have snuck back into her head. She gets up and puts trousers and shirt over her nightdress, and steps carefully out into the yard. There’s a bruise on her hip, and she limps to protect that leg. Her bare feet flinch in the gravelly mud, and she remembers there’s a pair of Lizzie’s old galoshes in the shed, so Sarah Maud heads there before slipping out the yard gate and into the lane, where there is just enough light to walk by. The waxing moon is overhead.
Myfanwy in her room, and Lizzie in hers, do not hear Sarah Maud leave. Mich standing outside her stationary bus on the hill does not see Sarah Maud leave, although her empathy to Sarah Maud’s fractured affection usually keeps her attuned to the slightly older woman’s movements. But Mich is looking across the darkening valley to where unusual activity has the church hall at its centre. And she can hear scraps of music on the air, from one place and another. John comes out with two mugs of tea.
‘What do you make of this?’ She smiles as she takes the proffered mug.
‘What?... Oh… Ooohh.’
They lean against each other’s arm, look down and around at the lights in house doorways, the people moving along the tracks or clustering in the lanes, the drifts of music and song.
‘Ach! In all my years. Well, I never.’
‘Ha! I dunno what accent you think you sound like, but it's not Welsh!’ Mich laughs aloud and turns out of the descending cold and into the bus for a smoke by the stove. John glances at the sky for a moment then follows her, ducking under the doorway. He doesn’t notice the stars are pooling and reforming into constellations older than those European newcomers; that the stars are dancing across dark space.
When he next steps outside, the stars are all returned to their charted places, moving through the set pieces of a vast choreography as galaxies roll and suns dwindle. Below, he sees Reverend Morgan is at the crossroads again, moving past the streetlight’s reach.
-oOo-
It is late; very late for a troubled woman who’s had nothing more than a few cups of tea all day. Sarah Maud sits staring glass-eyed at her sockless, galoshered feet, limp and shivering by the pub’s blazing pot belly stove. Gwyn has ticked up several drinks that never existed, and Sarah Maud feels she should go home if only she had that much volition, while her second rum and black' waits untouched on the table beside her.
The door opens. The usual quorum of drinkers is already at the bar; even so, they look at each other just to make sure it’s not one of themselves, as you do.
‘’Evening, vicar.’ Gwyn covers his surprise—two visits in a month! —by lifting a wine glass down from the rack and polishing its dusty foot. ‘White, isn’t it? On the house, vicar.’ And, in a lowered voice, ‘But not this house,’ he winks as Reverend Morgan slips his wallet away unopened. Gwyn adds a tick to Sarah Maud’s perfidious tab.
‘Uncommon activity in the valley tonight!’ suggests the vicar. The Quorum look at each other again, uncertainly. This pub-visiting vicar is an unsettling development.
‘Ydu. Happen.’ Jem mutters.
‘It’s the women, isn’t it?’ Mr Barry looks even deeper into his pint glass with the jaded eye of a habitually drowning man. ‘My Zipporah’s been up to summat with the women.’ He paused a beat. ‘All of ‘em. Allus up to summat’. He returns to peers into the depths of beer-bubbled memory; his happy bachelor days lie wrecked at the bottom of every pint. No matter how much he drinks, they stay drowned, and he cannot retrieve them.
‘Hmmm. She came to speak to me.’ Thus, the reverend confirms Zipporah’s long-winded account to her husband, earlier in the day. ‘Now, what was it she was saying?...’
‘The memorial, it’d have been, surely?’ prompts Gwyn.
Reverent Morgan’s eyes narrow under anxious brows. ‘What memorial, remind me?’
‘To the dead man by Ty Merched. They wants to send him off to heaven right.’ Jem feels an element of ownership. For years to come, to his grandchildren’s giggling confusion, Jem Jenkins will still talk about ‘the day I found me body in Ty Merched.’
Morgan smells danger; feels something crawl up his spine and squeeze his ribs in fear, and stronger: in anger. This is not the way it will go: outside his control. This attention, no; attention on the body is wrong.
The reverend is just drawing a deep breath and is just about to object, just about to say that it cannot, must not happen. For aren’t the dead his responsibility? Surely the dead are his dead; they belong to the church. The reverend is just rising from the stool to draw a breath and open his mouth to object, in full flight as their moral lodestone and guiding star…
… when Sarah Maud also rises, unsteadily, from her bench by the fire.
‘Dewi?’ she falters. She sways towards, then away from, the vicar. Her face is unreadable, her voice a croak. ‘Dewi?’ Her arm stretches towards him then recoils as if her fingers touched on something hot, or sacred, or foul. She stops in the middle of the room, bent at the waist to lean both towards, and aside from, Reverend Twdr Morgan. ‘Dewi? Oh Dewi, I’m sorry, sorry. Where you been, my love?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, woman,’ says Reverend Morgan, ripe with ire. For he and Sarah Maud have never met; she’s never been to church since she was an infant—too restless, too noisy for Myfanwy to endure—and he’s got no idea who this shabby drunk is. Only… when she repeats that name, he flinches ever so slightly, flushes red-cheeked then goes as waxen as one of his votive candles. The name flicks a whip in the back of his mind. Off-balance, he shifts to strike a more deliberately nonchalant pose but his foot slips awkwardly off the bar stool rung and he jerks upright. ‘I said I don’t know any Dewi.’
Well, there’s two lies in one breath, think the pub ghosts, called away from their game of cribbage in the cellar by the crackling of tension in the bar. Pub ghosts have the longest memories.
Gwyn is polishing a glass. The other drinkers have stopped reading the charabanc tour notice one more time and are, as one, staring slack-jawed at Sarah Maud.
‘Dewi, love. I waited I did, but you never came back. Why’s you hurt me so, Dewi? When I said no, not there, not in the mud.’ Sarah Maud talks slowly, carefully, but there is no other noise and even the fire has stopped muttering. ‘Why did you do that when I loved you? Dewi, but I had our baby, didn’t I? You didn’t come back. Dewi? And. And I means to be a good mother, Dewi. I do. I loves her.’ She shakes her head a little, as if to clear some dust from it. ‘Only, well, she… she reminds me that you hurt me so. I wanted to be married, and yes, I will marry you, like you said we would, Dewi. But nage, cariad, not like that. In the mud, and then you gone. Not that…’ Sarah Maud is gripping the bar with whitened knuckles. Edging closer to the vicar but still holding the bar.
The glass Gwyn is polishing cracks in his hands. Some of the Quorum breathe again.
‘I’m not Dewi, that’s not me, my name.’ says Twdr Morgan. ‘I don’t know you, woman, I don’t know who you are, and I have never seen you before this moment.’ He backs towards the door, one arm raised before him with the hand palm out, fending off Sarah Maud, obstructing the things she’s saying. ‘… Prince of the heavenly armies, defend me…’ Muttering, he gestures to ward her off, glances at Gwyn and around the bar, then is gone.
Sarah Maud is marooned at the bar.
Gwyn hands her a drink unasked for; but before he marks the slate, someone in the Quorum clears their throat. Gwyn wipes one stroke off the slate. Another cough at the bar, louder. Gwyn wipes the slate clean, with a grunt and a nod. He had never reckoned on his customers watching. But of course they were always watching.
Sarah Maud coughs on the brandy; she holds the bar with her right hand, she shuffles her left foot, she cries soundlessly. There is a long—a very long—quiet moment.
‘Well now,’ says Mr Barry carefully, looking at the counter before him, ‘that’s one old question raised and answered in the same night.’
‘But, he’s not called Dewi.’ Dai Jones, a relative newcomer now married into the valley, is only five years before the bar of the Rhiwfawr Arms.
Gwyn and Jem sneak a look at Sarah Maud, then at each other. ‘David?’ says Jem softly, and several nod in agreement: David, indeed; David. They know that David Morgan called himself Dewi… when he chose to.
‘I never knew there was a David…’ Voices are barely above the whisper of the fire.
‘Dead, he is. Trouble. He was always into trouble, that one. Drove his father crazy though they were the spit of each other for temper and tamping. Some years back, it’d be… Oh, some years back, he lived by here…’ Gwyn slides away from his calculations of years. ‘Dewi, eh? Ydu, there’s a bugger of a question and an answer in one night.’
They look again at Sarah Maud, lost in grief and hugging the empty glass to herself; she’s as thin as a bad dream these days, and yet was a time, so beautiful no-one thought they might have dared to touch her...
The older men are slowly filtering through the memory cards in their beery brains, backwards from when Sarah Maud ‘went awry’ with the fatherless baby, back to the happier young woman, the girl they’d known; back when everyone was younger. Why didn’t someone… at the time… was it all condemnation, wasn’t there one friendly… well, but … Du du du.
Gwyn checks the mantle clock. It’s nearly ‘time’, and if John isn’t here already, then he’s not coming. ‘Tell you what, Sarah Maud, how about Dai here walks you home? Would you do that now, Dai Jones?’ Gwyn reaches over to pull the empty glass from Sarah Maud’s locked hands.
‘I’ll come too,’ offers Mr Barry, and soon all the Quorum is out the door, shuffling into their coats as they go, lighting cigarettes two off a match, and encircling Sarah Maud like a herd of old sheepdogs bumbling about the single sheep in their midst. She hasn’t said another word since the vicar left, and remains silent, as the group is drawn down the lane by the thread of Jem Jenkin’s torch light.
There are no lights on at Ty Merched. Jem knocks on the kitchen door, hears footsteps from the room above skittering about a moment in the dark, then coming down the stairs; lights come on. Jem slips behind the other men, as it just occurs to him that he might not be well received after all.
Myfanwy in a pink chenille dressing gown and her grey corduroy slippers is backlit by the kitchen light. ‘For the gods’ sake! Sarah Maud? I thought you were in—’ Myfanwy moves sideways and the light streams out over Sarah Maud and the rotund forms of the nearest few chaperones. Myfanwy knows enough to see that everything is not right; these men would never come this far down the lane, and certainly not at this time of night without it being at the very least a war… ‘Sarah Maud? What’s happened. What is it?’ She is unable to stop talking even after the men nod to her and turn away into the night, mumbling good night.
The outside door is closed and locked. Leaving Myfanwy to dither alone, Sarah Maud goes into her room, falls into bed. Later, when she wakes to go to the toilet, she finds the spilt egg and toast with her bare feet and is startled into tears, and hunger.
Alone in the pub, Gwyn is reviewing some recent conversations he’s had with the vicar. Jenner has been much talked about by Morgan, and with sanctified venom; now the publican is reassessing everything he’s heard, and said, and done. He locks the pub up carefully as ever but stays a while longer at a seat by the fire as it cools. Then climbing to the bedroom above, he starts talking to his sleeping wife, for he must share with someone. She wakes, ready to harangue, but this night she listens, and she doesn’t say a word.
-oOo-
Twdr Morgan is pacing the pathless heights beyond Rhiwfawr. In the darkening moonset, under cliff and over stream, he navigates by the muttering in his ears, the chill fear in his backbone. His head, never strong when left to itself, is twisting in the push and pull of long-smothered conflicts: public family and unsafe family, duty and desire, loyalty and cowardice; vanity and the devils of his soul; vanity and fear and vanity. Before such a flagellation of the spirit, God flees in self-preservation.
With an audible snap, Morgan lets his mind go; this liberation is so much better, for now he can see the gates of glory.