A heat-scaled tin can, a landing pod burns down the sky into the ocean, parachutes open. Three moon-dusted men are jubilantly shaken about inside it, three in the furnace. A man has walked on the moon and made his way home through fire.
Ash angels fall down the winds; their feathers scatter and catch in the wires and hedgerows, skitter down even to the wet sand of a crescent bay. There is no return for Ty Merched.
In Swansea lock-up, DS Watcyns is beginning his second day of remand, pending trial. If there’s no more abuse from his fellow inmates than on his first day, then he could consider himself the luckiest bad cop in the Welsh prison system. But some of the inmates, some of the guards, have known him a long time. He is not the luckiest bad cop in the Welsh prison system.
White soot has bloomed across the Gwrhyd hillside in agonal exhalation as the last uprights collapsed. There is something of flowers about the site. These dusty petals were things, yesterday: chair, photograph, glove; jug, cradle, cake tin; poem, quilt, stocking; hen, bowl, spoon. Person good, person bad; person sad, person mad. The old oak timbers burned with such intensity nothing is identifiable, nothing is distinct inside the shell of blackened ashlars. From low orbit it looks like a giant dandelion head: she loved me, she loved me not, she loved me.
The space that was Ty Merched wears its funeral wreath of ash quietly in the early morning sun. A couple of firemen arrive and poke about the sheds for a bit, until they notice they’re not alone. The Quorum had staked a guard on the site; in shifts, perched by the hedge with thermos and snap tin and a pack of cards.
‘Ta-ra’ they smile with teeth bared at the departing firemen. Other sightseers and fossickers arrive: local kids and unknown travellers, a fox with a taste for roast fowl. Only the fox is allowed entrance.
The Misses P are in their window seat, fingers interlaced, watching the passers-by. They see Mrs Barry walking the lane partway, then returning home, only to pause at her gate and turn to walk the lane partway, then home again where she turns back to the lane before finally sitting down on the bank above Ty Merched; they see Mr Barry settle beside her a while before leading her home. The Misses P see people sitting on graves up in the churchyard, looking out towards the gap that was Ty Merched. They see the valley adjusting to events.
The Misses P hear, over the ridge, the hammering of a hand-lettered sign on the wall of the Rhiwfawr Arms: for sale.
Lizzie is floating in a thick cloud of bedding, in the back of a bus and high on a hill. She rubs her fingers over the rough blanket until they are red and raw. She looks at the roof, but only sees flames; she sees Myfanwy walking into the fire. Myfanwy walks into the fire and Myfanwy walks into the fire and Myfanwy walks into the fire. The fire burns and burns and burns, there are a hundred years to burn up; comfort and plenty are in the fire, worn hopes and forgotten days are burning. Myfanwy walks into the fire and Lizzie understands and does not understand the act; Lizzie knows and does not know her daughter now; Lizzie could stop her own breath easier than stop Myfanwy walk and walk. Lizzie hears Sarah Maud moving quietly out of the bus, as Myfanwy walks into the fire. Why?
Why not? Myfanwy speaks over her shoulder as she walks into the fire; the vicar lifts his head from within her grasp, grins in agreement: why not, you old witch?
Sarah Maud has wrapped a blanket over yesterday’s clothes and taken a path away from the bus. She sits on a slab of weathered limestone, a fallen bronze-age wall now buried in the grass, and hugs her knees in her crossed arms. She’s watching the birds over the valley. But she doesn’t see birds. She sees Myfanwy walk into the fire. She sees Dewi, flickering unfocused, overexposed. She sees her notebooks in the fire, and she reaches out a hand to brush along their stained and crushed spines as the turgid words come to bright life for the first and only time. She sees Myfanwy walk into the fire. Sarah Maud toddles along the old hall of Ty Merched; she hears but doesn’t understand Myfanwy’s rancour at returning home a dependent; she climbs a tree to wave at the ghosts in the loft window. She packs her schoolbag, turns up the wireless to puzzle over the war news and the victory news alongside her mother, dances to a new beat, works the sheep, meets a man at the gate, cries in the dark, clutches her belly, peers into the eyes of a baby. Sarah Maud hears Myfanwy’s opinions: pretty, naughty, too slow, too quick; feels Myfanwy brush her hair and chide her for wanting beauty, wanting to make beauty. Feels Myfanwy struggle: ‘puzzled’ became ‘angry’ when door was locked, when baby came, when darkness…
Sarah Maud sees Myfanwy walk into the kitchen, sees Myfanwy walk into the garden, walk into the bedroom and reach down into the new crib with crying eyes, walk into the fire and walk into the fire. Tracking concentric orbits all their lives, Myfanwy had been by turns close then distant then close again, to finally bloom like a comet, blazing hot and close as she left Sarah Maud for the last time.
Sarah Maud walks in her mind around the walls of Ty Merched where the stones, now laid bare of plaster and lichen, wear new cloth of mourning soot; Sarah Maud makes her selection. She feels the weight of granite, of hammer and chisel, in her thoughts, as she watches Myfanwy walk into the fire and into the fire and into.
Jenner sleeps on. In her dreams she ticks off the apologies one by one. Noisy: sorry Mamgu; wild: sorry Mamgu; grubby, sorry Mamgu; slow to learn, absent from chapel and school, filling the house with bits of things from the woods and streams and hills: sorry Mamgu, sorry Mamgu, sorry Mamgu. Existing, breathing: sorry Mamgu, I didn’t mean to. Messing the clean apron with an uninvited hug: not sorry Mamgu, and I do it again, don’t I?
It was impossible to think of Myfanwy without Ty Merched; it’s long been impossible to think of Ty Merched without Myfanwy. Myfanwy has simply become absolutely, finally, at home. Jenner takes a mug of tea to her mother but fails to find her; she leaves it on a stone by the bus and slips down the slope with Smalldog, to study the remains of her home.
Standing now on the bus steps, from her high vantage point Lizzie can’t see the cupping hands of safety and familiarity she once imagined cradled her home. The land is dragging down, a waste chute of limestone shovelling the habitations, crowding them together as if to pitch them all into the bay along the path of the glaciers, the mammoths and giant forests; the bronze weapons, the ancient pride and the modern hubris that drags godhead down to a clean floor, a tidy cupboard. She sees a land that will discard this short-lived civilisation, shake off the scabby life that crusts its vast flanks.
Lizzie is timid without the wolf’s head walking stick now, timid about where to go, or why. So, Sarah Maud has no trouble catching up, skittering down the slope to shuffle beside Lizzie in silent companionship as they make their way along the lane.
Clumps of idle neighbours move aside for the women, and they join Jenner at the most obvious viewing point in the lane, where the hedge is broken; a spray of dried blood is being erased by the footfalls of the curious.
But there is only so long a person can stand and do nothing at the gate of their destroyed home. Salvage can wait; with no place to take things, anything that isn’t ash may as well stay where it is. The silence frays, melts, gives way to mumbles, speculation, children pointing and asking loud questions. The neighbour women, practical, nod amongst themselves about spare items to be offered: a change of clothes, a bowl of cawl.
A couple of hill farmers, old gaffers, prod at the nearest bits of soot with their sticks, quietly congratulating themselves for still being alive to see such an amazement as the fall of Ty Merched—old as the very bones of these living hills—even if not the end of the now mythically long-lived Lizzie. PC Jones arrives.
‘This is a murder scene,’ he reminds them. Is it? Who said that? The crowd thins like fog in sunshine, and he feels, without any reason, that there might be difficulties. But Lizzie in yesterday’s clothes wrapped over with a blanket from the bus, Sarah Maud and Jenner too, are the immediate concern.
‘Is there someone I can call? Do you have insurance, need to speak to … Family?’ Jones can only think what he’d need himself. Mainly, whisky and his mother’s embrace. ‘A cup of tea?’
‘Breakfast. Let’s get you some breakfast, and a warm coat,’ WPC Davies has arrived, off-duty.
‘No. I…’ Lizzie leans on the charred gate post where once Smalldog dropped a wormy turd. But there’s nothing to be won by resisting. She lets herself be taken down to Ponty: the clothing store where Lizzie has had an account since 1937, the pub they have never entered. The family jiggle and rub against each other, rustle around the unfamiliar table, looking and not looking for the something missing. They cannot arrange themselves comfortably, there’s an imbalance they can’t settle. Their hair smells of smoke, their eyes are dry and red, blinking and flickering to catch the thing just out of sight, the person who should be standing there but isn’t.
Lizzie’s agent arrives unbidden—the news has spread like, well, like wildfire—and they talk briefly, privately, a moment of near normality. He is a reliable man.
‘There is a cottage,’ Lizzie tells the company round the table. ‘We have a cottage that’s vacant.’ And the careful wealth of the Coombe family finds purpose; that long-predicted ‘rainy day’ has arrived. The cottage, owned since before Lizzie was born, is lovely. Sitting high above even Panteg and Yr Allt to catch the first rays of sun, further up the next valley, a line of well-lit rooms lead through to a level, grassy space by the river where it rushes over stones, bright, noisy and fragrant with the special smell of brisk rivers. The agent had been letting it for holidays, but his wife is even now phoning London, cancelling bookings, negotiating alternatives. There are beds and bedding, furniture enough, a handful of books. A bus stop nearby. Charity is not required.
No ghosts that they know. No old stove needing to be tended like a skittish pony, no sloping-roofed bathroom, or attic of old apples, or cupboard of coats and hats bent to the exact curve of their owners’ bodies.
The retained old woman who has had care of the place since she was a schoolgirl has been in and dusted. A bunch of hedgerow and garden flowers in a yellow vase fills the centre of the dining table. The agent unloads the brief shopping they have done; the retained old woman returns, this time with a mutton pie and a dish of potatoes hot from her oven. Lizzie, who hasn’t been here since old Elizabeth’s death and the reviewing of the estates, is aware of her own age, her grimy skin and dusty hair, against the freshness, the normality, the kindness these employees show.
Only, it would have been Myfanwy who would have thanked the old woman, in the right valley manner. But Myfanwy walked into the fire. There’s a clumsy moment, until Jenner takes the old woman’s hand, asks her name. Blodeudd it is, a common enough name round here, but:
‘They said you’d come by,’ says old Blodeudd and peers deep into Jenner's eyes, holds Jenner's hand to her papery breast. ‘Before I died, they said; you’d come by.’
PC Jones must speak to them, about imprisonment, kidnapping, rescue, about the fire and Jenner and Myfanwy and Morgan. But PC Jones must wait. There is a new packet of rose geranium soap in the bathroom.
Mrs Davies takes the news to the shop. There is, she tells, a cottage in Ynyswen. There is, she can confirm, an account at the clothes store in Ponty. There is much to consider. Maris is laying in fresh stocks of biscuits and black ribbon.
‘Well now, they won’t want our help!’ Several women are in agreement, not just on that but on the difficulty of hitting the right tone between affront and relief. Someone remembers the cottage, a tale she’d heard from someone else.
‘No, that’s another place. This one’s by the river.’
How many houses does the Coomb family own? A few women fall silent about their landlord… then, no, for this is too big a story and they chime in their part.
‘Millionaire then, is she?’ and the discussion heats up, swings round in changing moods from admiration, envy, a little laughter and daydreaming, from woman to woman, until:
‘Myfanwy, you’d never guess by her ways now, that the family was worth all that…’ and the voices fall again with the muted respect that a well-managed household should always earn, even if affection was lacking. That’s the thing, see, about the valleys. You can dislike, distrust, even ignore or condemn, but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel close. Like a coat you sometimes like and sometimes don’t. Valley life, village life, it’s like that: shared, known, understood. Half the fun is changing sides.
‘Did she really...?’ asks one incredulously, breathily.
‘Ie’ several confirm in hushed voices.
‘Why, do you think?’
Although ‘why’ is understood by many, the question must be asked. That’s what community does: the healing by talking; the resettling of the village hierarchy, the pecking order, following a change in the participants; the airing of thoughts in the safe space, between shelves of canned fruit and shoelaces, onions and saddle soap. The setting in place, the writing of the story for the next generation, is starting here, today. Myfanwy walked into her kitchen and the dust has yet to settle.
The words come round and round the shop; like a choir these life-old friends and neighbours know the timbre and pitch of each other’s thoughts; when to take the solo lead and when to provide the continuo, the antiphon, and the chorus.
‘Is there anything left to..?’
‘Nage, nothing that we could see.’
‘Ah, remember that beautiful sideboard, gone it is.’
‘Och yes, and the dinner plate, we used to have it as a treat for Myfanwy’s birthday teas when we were but farthings and her Da made us all laugh so…’
‘She were a fine cook. Hopeless at lambing time but pastry to die for.’ A few chuckles that the solid woman had such soft hands and cool fingers.
‘I wonder, did anyone get her recipe for brandy cake. Ahh what a loss that cookbook is.’
‘The rooster they had there, I think I saw it up the lane. Sent the boys to fetch it… don’t suppose they’ll miss him now.’ A long pause and the scale of the disaster is visited anew, each thinking how they themselves would cope at such a time, on what chair they could set themselves down after such a total loss.
‘You'd remember they had this old harebell jug from Ynysmeudwy potteries; pretty thing. My mam tried to steal it once…’
‘She was in love, you know. Before the old man, aye.’ And voices huddle round some well-polished old stories. Though all the participants are now dead, still delicacy doesn’t hurt.
Elder Miss P has been examining the small selection of stockings for much longer than it warranted. ‘Young Miss P, and me. I… we… she’s not my… can I just say that, if anything should happen to me, she…’
Maris looks up. ‘Oh, of course dear. We know. Beautiful playing you did yesterday. Just beautiful.’
Mrs John Davies rounds her mouth, ‘Oh my god was it only yesterday? My god, like a lifetime ago, it feels… Yes, dear, no need to announce. Oh, but have you seen Sarah Maud? Oh goodness, it’s like someone’s turned the lights on again after all these years…’
‘And Jenner. Oh, Jenner. How funny we never...’
And the talk swirls round and round again. Just like it does in the pub. The bank. The hairdresser’s and the barber’s. A house so old can’t just leave, and no-one needing to talk it through many times over.
Memories are dredged, dragged with grappling hooks, for the reasons behind that curse of one hundred years or more; no-one remembers accurately.
‘Didn’t someone die the day she were born? What was that all about then?’
‘Ydu, her da and a half-brother. So Mam said. Du, but Lizzie Ty Merched’s had a time of it, all things considered. I suppose, a life this long, can’t all be roses now, can it?’ and the talk skips over the facts of happenstance and tracks the memoried paths of gossip again. The ruby necklace is mentioned. A mumbling old cousin’s apocrypha is discounted as being a different curse over by a different valley.
A story so long and deep and wide that no amount of chat will cover the spread of it. Words turn and turn about the valley. But one thing is certain, a tacit agreement is unspoken; Morgan will not be mourned, he will not be counted, and he will not be mentioned ever again.
-oOo-
PC Jones sets up a table and chairs, notebooks, teacups and an urn, in the meeting room upstairs at the Rhiwfawr Arms. The walls are lined with oilcloth portraits of worthies long gone; familiar noses and hairlines on jaundiced or florid faces, garnished with bat droppings and pockmarked by darts and the thumbtacked, tattered streamers of a forgotten jubilee. Under their painted gaze, he has evidence to gather, crimes to address, laws to uphold.
PC Williams stares into the varnished yellow eyes of a dead Williams predecessor and scratches his left buttock. He has given Jones a list of the most likely people; Jones has given it back and Williams has been out all morning rounding up whoever he could find.
‘Mrs Barry, Mr Barry, thanks for coming. Um, together isn’t necessary.’ Jones indicates the single chair on that side of the table. Barry seats his wife and with a proprietorial air discloses a second chair under the window drapes.
‘Shall we start with the fire? What can you tell me about the fire?’
‘Oh now,’ says Mr Barry, while his wife twists a solitary glove between her hands. ‘The fire. Well, we were in the church hall, see, and then someone called fire, so we all ran over. Mr Protheroe, I think it was, wasn’t it Zipporah? Yes, Mr Protheroe. So, we all ran, which was a shame now, the timing. Miss Perry, the elder one, you know she’s got a beautiful touch on the piano. Well, she was playing the piano, in the hall; Mendelsohn, was it Zipporah? Mendelsohn, yes. Lovely piece, so delicate a touch she has. And I was just thinking the piano needed a tune, the high A was a bit flat…’
‘The, ah, fire?’ suggests Jones.
‘Och, yes, the fire. Well. Are you alright dear? Excuse me could we have a tea for Zipporah, she’s… it’s been a trying few days… thanks. Oh, me too, yes why not, why not. Lovely. Diolch.
Now, the fire. It was Ty Merched wasn’t it, burning over there. We could see the smoke from the hall. Yes, definitely Ty Merched. Is there a biscuit? Lovely, diolch yn fawr, Young Williams. Umm. Ty Merched. Lizzie’s place...’
‘I know what house it was, Mr Barry, thank you. I want to know what you saw when you got to the site of the fire.’ Jones glances at Williams, but Williams is looking at a different portrait with uncommon interest.
‘Oh! When we got there, why didn’t you say? Sure, it was well alight. A lot of smoke, and the heat look you, we were well back on the lane, from the heat; I had a burr in my sock, troubling me; didn’t I, Zipporah? I had to sort that out, next thing I saw, the roof had fallen in. John, that English hippy John, he let the hens out. I didn’t know if he was allowed, all things considered. Yes. A lot of smoke.’
‘And Myfanwy Coombe?’
‘Who? Ah now you meant Myfanwy Thomas, now; she was born a Coombe of course, Lizzie’s first, but married. Before Sarah Maud was born; nothing improper there. Old Eifion Thomas, up Cwm Giedd, didn’t think he had it in him; apologies, my love, that was indelicate of me… Lovely woman, dependable, a great sadness. Great sadness… loved her home she did. So clean. Great sadness. Yes.’
‘Did you see her enter the house, while it was on fire?’
‘Ah now, I couldn’t be sure that I did… I had this burr in my sock, you see. I mean, did she now? Or was she… I just don’t know. Great—’
‘Sadness, yes, I agree. But I don’t understand, Mr Barry, why you have such a vague recall; surely this must have been the most…’
‘Astonishing! Absolutely astonishing, yes. The last thing anyone would expect. Beautiful house. Lovely woman. Great—’
‘Mrs Barry? Can you add anything, about the events you witnessed?’
Mrs Barry has been quite overcome by the policeman’s attention and she finds she is unable to add a thing to her husband’s account. She has been barely able to speak a word since Sunday church. They take a second biscuit each as they pass the tea urn on their way out. Jones again looks at Williams, who says nothing. The retired music teacher is next.
‘Mr… Davies? What can you tell us; were you in the hall when the fire started?’
‘Oh yes, splendid arrangement, they’d done such an excellent job with the Under Elevens Choir. All boys yes; girls that age, just screechy. Yes. Miss Perry was at the piano; good touch the woman has, good touch. Lovely bit of…’
‘Mendelsohn, yes.’
‘Mendelsohn? God no, du du du man it was Chopin! Have you no ear? Chopin. So then just at the 16th bar—the piano needs a tune; top A is flat—someone called our attention to a possible conflagration across the valley. Now, who was it… Mr Barry, I think. Yes. No. Mr Protheroe, yes. Anything else I can help you with?’
‘Ah, well I really—’
‘It’s just that the bus is due, I’d best be off now. Glad to be any help. Thanks, no tea; I’ll just take a biscuit if I may. Right. Bus,’ he affirmed, though no bus could be heard.
Jones consults his notes. ‘Mrs… Davies next? Same family?’
‘Not recently. There are a lot of Davieses round by here. This is Davies the Fridge’s wife’
‘OK, ask her to come in.’
A small boy appears at the door before Williams reaches it. ‘Mam says to tell you she’s sent me instead; busy she is.’ The boy clambers into a chair, wipes his nose on his sleeve, hitches up his socks. ‘She says can I have a biscuit please.’
‘Williams?’ says Jones, joining his assistant by the window.
‘Sir?’
‘Williams, what the fuck is going on?’
The afternoon wears on, the biscuits diminish, and the bald facts stay as bald as an egg. No-one mentions the vicar. The way they see it, no harm done; this is a secular investigation.
-oOo-
Out and far away, John and Mich, and the woman known as Blodeuwedd but of uncertain appearance—her raincoat does have exceptionally large pockets—are moving towards a common focus. There is a drawing in; there will be another memorial, a singing and a gathering and a drawing in. Soon.
-oOo-
It’s dusk, and rain has roared up the Swansea Road, sweeping away the heat of the past few days, clearing the sooty air. Lizzie and her smaller family are settling. They shift lopsided round the bright empty house, unsure of themselves and their places. Lizzie is reminded of the Grimms' tale of the bird and the mouse and the … she forgets; something about changing the roles in a happy household, and disaster follows. She thinks to look it up, remembers where the Grimms' Fairy Tales book sat on the bookcase nine decades; and now gone. Yet she can still feel the pages, the worn green cloth cover, in her fingertips’ memory.
Unlike the furniture here, which is wrong to the touch. The beds, the light switches, the number of people, all is wrong. She is wrong.
John and Mich arrive with the end of the storm, bringing simple gifts; cider for Sarah Maud, a book and pencils for Jenner, and new eggs and a newspaper for Lizzie… that Myfanwy would have liked… Jesse, on duty at the bus, has sent a bone for Smalldog.
Lizzie bustles about, awkward in the strange space, looking in cupboards for a sugar bowl that never lived here, for the tea caddy burnt to crumbs. Sarah Maud cradles the cider bottle, leads them across the wet grass and down to the river. Lizzie is troubled by the smoke of their cigarettes lingering by the door, but when she climbs into bed (all wrong the mattress, the blanket; a wrong picture on a wrong wall) she’s comforted by the murmur of their voices over the sound of the river flowing fast, here where the channel narrows though rocks. Late and long and later still, they talk. She has fallen into a deep sleep—a lake, an ocean of sleep laps over her—before Jenner slips out the side door, Smalldog running ahead in excitement, to meet a woman of uncertain appearance. A quarter moon rises over an unfamiliar horizon, to soothe this unsettled house.
Just before dawn, Sarah Maud farewelling her friends at the front gate, greets Jenner returning. Smalldog goes to sleep on the doormat. They linger in the garden, touching each other’s arms as they talk. There is much to be recovered but little that can be hurried.
‘Do you want I to mother you now, bach? You’re not childish anymore, yet still my only.’
‘No, Mam. No more than I need to mother you. But I’m still and always your only.’
The rebuilding needs time. Not much is said in words, and none of it carelessly.