Lizzie rises at dawn. She feeds the hens, gathers eggs. She sees to the few remaining sheep in the barn and checks each of their leggy babies. Two are dead and she covers them in sacking, hoping John will return soon; she has come to rely on the kindness of hippies. If it weren’t for the cool and damp, she’d be unsure if she was dead herself: the air is still, and light gleams directionless from the opaque sky, the pallid earth. The quietness feels ambivalent, as if heaven and hell were the one single place, as if up and down were fantasies of convenience, as if contradictions and similarities were one and the same. Lizzie can feel a strangeness though her fingers are stiff and numb. She can taste the silence, smell that something has disappeared and hears that something else is waiting to happen. She sees a weight of absence.
Change is come to the valley, invited or not. Change is kicking its heels at the cross-roads, sniffing round the streetlamp, poking the nests in the hedgerows and dislodging the slates from the roofs… you might think it’s a change to something new. You might be wrong.
When Lizzie returns to the kitchen, there is still no-one else about. She climbs the awkward stairs to see Myfanwy’s chintzy bed hasn’t been slept in. She walks down the hall and puts her ear to Sarah Maud’s door. Lizzie wonders if she can hear two people breathing. Opening the door softly, she sees Myfanwy cradling Sarah Maud amongst the nest of quilts. There is a smell of rum and forgiveness. Lizzie hovers round the bed, leaning in on one side and the other, laying her hand in the small gaps beside the women’s bent and spooning legs, by their heads on the pillows. She feels insubstantial and incomplete; she wants there to be room for her but has arrived at this bedside, this want, too late.
She sees back past the sleeping women to child Sarah Maud, and further again to infant Myfanwy: exuberant and curious children toddling round the old rooms, as familiar as Lizzie’s own childhood. She sees herself so frequently irritated by their innocent presence; herself too impatient; too busy looking out at what she couldn’t have. Lizzie wants what she can’t have now—those times; some time—back.
The boiling kettle breaks the vacuum of noise. She is filling the teapot when Myfanwy is drawn into the kitchen by thirst… and the need to share a burden.
‘What’s going on?’ The habitual brusqueness has fallen from Lizzie’s speech. ‘What’s with Sarah Maud?’
‘David Morgan. You knew David Morgan.’
‘A good while ago. What of him?’ and as she brings the long-forgotten man to mind, Lizzie sees something familiar.
‘Why didn’t we care, Mam? What the … bloody hell.’ Swearing comes hard to Myfanwy. ‘Why didn’t we… we should have talked. Never bloody talked, just condemned, and watched her fall apart, and didn’t … talk...’
But here is Myfanwy, and here is Lizzie. Facing each other over a kitchen table. And a gulf of decades. ‘Not talking’ was the way of them both. The way Sarah Maud grew up. Sarah Maud’s trauma is Myfanwy’s guilt is Lizzie’s failing. We never bloody talked. Lizzie thinks to step towards an appeasement with Myfanwy if she can. But this is not their day. Myfanwy is in shreds, but this is Sarah Maud’s time.
Myfanwy tells—in broken, incomplete phrases—of the man with the black hair, and the awfulness and the humiliation. And the abandonment … and yet… and yet after it all, the fact of Jenner's existence makes it somehow, almost, unbearably alright.
The day is shattered, nonetheless, and they stare at the pieces of it. Until there’s a knock at the door.
Mrs Davies it is, bringing her cousin who’s driven up from Ponty surprisingly early; Mrs Davies has brought an apple cake still warm from her oven, and asks after Sarah Maud: is she… well, is she… alright now? The visitors linger in the kitchen, whispering a while.
Myfanwy is washing the tea things when there’s another knock at the door. Jem’s wife and daughters, the Jenkins women.
‘Brought a Bakewell tart and a tiny pot of royal jelly. For Sarah Maud,’ says Mrs J. No, they won’t stay. But they do hover a moment in the space around the cwtch doorway. The kitchen fills with a slight discomfort. A knock at the door and the Jenkinses are sliding inside Jenner's room now, making room for Maris the Shop with a packet of lavender soaps. And then the foreign woman who lives beyond the pub, with the name no-one remembers; she’s brought a pot of pinks, new buds on grey wiry stems smelling of cinnamon in the warmth of the women-cluttered room. She lingers a while, rests a hand on the coats by the door…
It’s late lunchtime before the stream of visitors quietens to a trickle. Women barely remembered or total strangers to Ty Merched, along with more regular acquaintances, have called, hovered a while, left gifts of food and flowers, dainty handkerchiefs and packets of pins. Trinkets and jams and freshly baked cakes rise like a harvest offering on the big table. But still, no car and no PC Jones. Lizzie retreats to Sarah Maud’s bedside. Sarah Maud hasn’t moved for a very long time; she sleeps peacefully now, and deeply as if she were a sick child whose fever has finally broken.
Myfanwy stays in the kitchen. She hasn’t forgotten Lizzie’s words of the day before, and all the events of this morning make it harder to forgive anything. Yet, overriding even all this, as the house falls quiet again she feels something is out of place; there’s a prickling behind her eyes, a tickling at the back of her neck.
Myfanwy was once in the habit of casting the tarot, and she was good at it; only it wasn’t the churchmen who persuaded her to pack the cards away. It was the constant readings of her own bad fortune that got her down. Her share of the family’s erratically distributed second sight, was an instinct for things beyond the known; an insight beyond the veils of the community that was stronger than a radio signal, more reliable that the newspaper. And now something is twitching her skin. She can’t sit until she finds the source of this itch. Where are you, you beggar… Something’s amiss.
Myfanwy locks the gates and visits the hens, and they all talk at once to tell her their news. The roof ghosts are peering in at the windows, listening to the house ghosts. They are comparing notes on what they know, what they saw, from whom do they wish to scare the bejeezus. And a newcomer on the roof ridge; speechless, and much more dead that they’ll ever be. He makes the older ghosts nervous.
Myfanwy prowls. In corduroy slippers and faded apron, she is beating the bounds of Ty Merched. Is it here? Or here? She rifles through the straw in the nesting boxes; upturns the buckets in the barn; runs her fingers through the sheep’s greasy fleeces, through the grain in the feed bins. She plucks the geese from their grass mounds, looks in their evil eyes and down their hissing throats. She paces Sarah Maud’s garden in the warming spring and counts the statues for supernumerary limbs. Lifts the shy heads of the fiddle ferns and makes them look her in the eye; rings the bluebells, listening for a flat note, a cracked note, an out-of-pitch foreign note.
Back inside Myfanwy paces, and growls through the pantry and its winking jars and cans, through Lizzie’s tissue paper-crackling bedroom, through the front room dusty and doubtful; past the old faces fusty and fretful, flat on the walls. Myfanwy prowls the cupboards, the cloths, the carpets and the clocks. Lizzie dream-hears her and stays cautiously asleep on the bed, curling round Sarah Maud and the old grey cat all asleep.
Myfanwy prowls on, and examines the windows and their views, the doors and their creaks, the taps and their drips. Until she comes to the cwtch door, and there she stops. In Jenner's room, small, folded papers, pencilled requests for help of all kinds, peep and flutter from the bedding, the shoes, the schoolbag.
Myfanwy lays her hand where Mrs Davies did. She stands on the rag rug where the Jenkins girls clustered. She runs her eyes where the recent guests looked. And Myfanwy has found the source of her anxiety: the blank spaces where a pencil, a sock, a stub of bedside candle, a pebble, have been lifted into pockets and taken away. Tokens, souvenirs. The idea of owning a relic is older than Christianity. Did the neighbours really think Jenner has imbued her books or clothing with healing qualities, as if she was radioactive? …Really?...
‘The beggars!’ she mutters. ‘The beggars; they’re after having a piece of Jenner, poor child. A touch of where she’s touched; a bit of her bits and bobs.’ And Myfanwy can only guess why. And she’s right. For of course Myfanwy shares in the otherworldly genes that, from ancestors under time, through old Lizzie and herself and Sarah Maud, have culminated in Jenner; and for the first time Myfanwy is listening to herself properly. And her bones tell her something is dawdling at the phone box, kicking a pebble down the lane, rattling a stick in the fence wires. She goes out to the lane. Still no sign of PC Jones and his promised lift to the station. But she does see, along the lines of trees and across the folds of hills, along the paths from Panteg and Rhiwfawr, even up the Gwrhyd Road from Ponty, the land is flickering and shifting as if seen through wrinkled green glass.
‘No!’ Myfanwy calls to the empty lane, the fields and hollows beyond. ‘No! You will not make any shrine in my house. You will not! She’s a child, not a bloody… magician. And she’s not bloody dead.’ She spits on the stones of the old lane.
Something has brought change; something is putting snow down Myfanwy’s back. Something is lighting the tinder in Myfanwy’s breast. Myfanwy is being unbound from the decades of her self-swaddling anxiety. The village women’s gestures of solidarity and the ending of concealment, the bringing of light into dark places, have played a significant part in her unsmothering, strengthening her heart as they bled out the toxin of rancor and judgement and secrecy. The Old Ones held mothers more significant than fathers; in the Gwrhyd Valley, there’s an Old One walking, somewhere.
‘… She’s not dead!’ Myfanwy is quieter now. But no less defiant.
-oOo-
Where has PC Jones been all day? In fact, he’s been at Ty Merched: after Lizzie’s morning shuffle; before Myfanwy’s afternoon prowling. But his day starts at the police station as usual.
When he checks in, he sees Jenner is sipping a cup of tea, again surrounded by small animals and the bits of flowers and leaves they have brought her. She’s small in the bundle of quilt and blanket. There are now three exercise books on the floor by her feet. There are no regulations covering the presence of animals in cells, even if the largest of the dogs does growl at him, so Jones returns to his desk and opens the file on the Ty Merched body. After his call to the morgue, he pockets the illegible crime scene report.
A woman in a raincoat, with deep pockets and a small dog, is waiting at the police station entrance when Jones lets the front door swing closed behind him. He nearly knocks her over.
‘Ty Merched?’ she enquires without preamble. ‘I’m to accompany you.’
‘Really? Did CID send you?’
‘I’ve been assigned, yes.’ She nudges the small dog back into a pocket; in the manner of small dogs everywhere, this one seems very keen to get inside the police station. ‘We’ll take your car, OK? I’ll show you the way.’
‘I know the way,’ Jones is fumbling with the keys, distracted by a nagging thought he can’t quite put his finger on but anxious to leave before Watcyns arrives; late though he habitually is, at some point the DS is certain to show up.
They turn right as usual, then the woman— ‘You can call me Blodeuwedd’—points to a side road he’s not noticed before: ‘Take this turning.’
‘Why?’
‘It’ll bring us up at the far end of the farm; we don’t need to trouble the household quite yet.’ This seems such a sensible, considerate suggestion that Jones settles down as he drives. The road follows the far western flank of the valley, rising along the line of the once-busy rail and passing ivy-shrouded brick-lined embankments, small grass-filled sidings, a haunted land of extinct industry. But the road itself is in surprisingly good order; considering he’d never seen it before, the solid black bitumen looks almost…
‘Here,’ Blodeuwedd points to a patch of gravel, ‘pull in here.’ A slight footpath leads down from the left bank and across the road to a mossy wooden style over the fence on their right, and into the neglected end of Sarah Maud’s garden; the same path that Jem Jenkins had taken just a week back, hunting for tigers.
She leaves the dog in the car; ‘to keep the site clean’ she explains. In the manner of small dogs everywhere, it certainly seems very keen to get into the garden. Jones doesn’t really expect to find anything, after the rain, the snow, the trampling of feet and the passage of a week. Certainly, any individual footprints are obliterated. The many shreds of fabric on the thorns and twigs could have belonged to anyone, and a predominance of navy-blue twill suggests that most belonged to the local constabulary. Some belonged to Jones himself, a week ago.
‘How was the body found?’ asks Blodeuwedd, crouching down and squinting into the tunnels of arching brambles. Dai Jones indicates with his arms outstretched this way and that, tries to describe the watery images he remembers despite his bout of rookie nausea.
‘How do you think the victim could have gotten so deep into this?’ Blodeuwedd rests a finger on the topmost thorn of the highest tendrils ‘How bad would your hands be cut, working here…Or maybe gloves…’ she murmured to herself; so quietly that Jones almost thinks it’s his own thoughts he’s following. ‘Gloves. And strength; maybe just one sudden burst of strength would do it. If the killer were a tall man. But a dead body, that’d take some manoeuvring. Your prisoner?’
‘Sorry?’ says Jones, for he is distracted again.
‘Your prisoner. The suspect you’ve arrested. Do they have scratched hands or arms? Are they tall, and very strong?’
But Jones has something quite different on his mind as he stares at the crime scene: ‘Who sent you? CID didn’t know I was coming here today … nobody knew. I didn’t even know myself until I …’ he turns to press for an answer, to find that Blodeuwedd has gone. Dai Jones turns back to consider the site of the murder, and it’s blazingly obvious the child couldn’t have done what they saw. How did Watcyns convince them all to think otherwise? Jones is mystified.
He opens the car door and the small dog leaps past and away into the garden. There is no catching it, so he doesn’t try.
Driving back to Pontardawe, he’s not at all surprised to see, in his rear-vision mirror, the road disappearing into the undergrowth behind him as he descends. Now only ivy covers the gravel ditches and ridges of the forgotten trail, the fresh blacktop vanishing immediately the rear wheels roll from it. But it doesn’t matter, for Jones has learnt all the place can tell him now.
When he returns to the station, there’s a small crowd milling around the doors, a couple of officers in uniform mingling with the dozen or so onlookers in confused shuffling.
‘What’s to do?’ asks Jones, from his car window.
PC Williams bends down, close to the car. ‘It’s the DS. He’s locked us out…he’s worse than usual.’
‘The girl? Who’s looking out for the girl?’
‘Watcyns it must be; he’s the only one in there.’
‘But…’
‘I know! Well, no, I don’t know. Actually, I don’t have a fucking clue! He came in late, tamping at all the crowd inside, threw everyone out. The ‘Drunk and Disorderly’ in Number 3, everyone. Us! It’s just her and him. He’s pushed a desk to the doors now. My keys are in there, I’ll have to walk home isn’t it’ Williams looks at the slowly dispersing crowd, ‘Oh, maybe I should stay, try to talk sense to him?’
‘Nah, hop in, I’ll give you a lift. Maybe can you phone Swansea when you get in, get some advice—’ they look at each other ‘—cover your back. You’ve got a phone in the house, yes? Tell me more while I drive; what did he say, exactly…’ Jones starts the engine.
Twenty minutes later PC Jones returns and rolls his car, engine off, into the back corner of the station car park. From the boot he takes a tarpaulin, a sleeping bag, and a satchel; he creeps quietly round the walls until he’s beneath the now-closed window to Jenner's cell. Squatting on his bag and leaning against the wall, he settles down with a paperback and a thermos of tea. He coughs quietly, and says his own name, twice, in a voice so quiet it’s hard to be sure if he really made any noise or was it just the wind in the bushes trying out some consonants for a change.
After a short while, the window squeaks open and three exercise books full of Jenner’s pencilwork are pushed through the bars to fall beside him; the window closes again. Jones puts the books carefully in the bottom of his bag under a tattered copy of the Police Manual and begins to arrange his camp before it gets dark. He glances up to the high shadowed hills of the western horizon. Somewhere behind that blackness, the girl’s family wait.
-oOo-
Myfanwy is in the yard, closing the hens up for the night. When she turns back to the door, there’s a small dog, sitting on the threshold and regarding her knowingly; his head cocked to one side, his tongue slipped along a huge grin, and a surprised mouse under one front paw.
On the house roof ridge, the ghosts have to shuffle up, for another stranger, and then one more, and yet another, have joined their number: a gathering. They steam with anticipation of something undefined. They overlap, sitting and wriggling partly next to and, partly inside, each other.
‘Don’t squabble!’ Myfanwy tells them, as she locks up for the night.