IT HAD ONCE come as a surprise to Etty to discover that her husband could sing. Nothing but the shrill of his speaking voice would have suggested to her that he was a tenor who had, as a young man, performed the solo from “Sound the Alarm” at county concerts—and the high A too, if Nancy Llanedw were to be believed. In Etty’s experience, Idris sang hymns and hymns alone. There was rarely a journey when he would not embark on “O’er Those Gloomy Hills of Darkness” or “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” and as they drove through the furious night, although she felt no exultation whatsoever, still she found that she was singing herself—her own voice clear and precise, rising into the harmonies. She sat in the trap beneath the heavy blanket, peering past the lantern at the sniping snow, while Oliver huddled under her arm, on the slight, firm bulge of her belly.
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.
The two tall windows of the Methodist Chapel looked blackly down into the lane. In its stable, others who had been at the public meeting were hackling their own traps, eyeing the weather, starting for home. Shadows skitted from their Tilley lamps. Faintly, out towards Rhosei Cottage, Etty could make out the tractor for Walter Cwmpiban—his family crammed in the box on the back, his headlamps blazing from the snow-heavy hedgerows. They followed his tyre tracks left at the crossroads, into the narrowing valley.
Here was the Pant, where Philip had arrived already and raised a hand as he humped a bucket to the beast-house. Here, half a mile further on, was the track that led to Cwmpiban: the last of the houses before their own, the lights of the tractor showing on its gable wall. Idris reached the end of a hymn; he did not begin another. At Cwmberllan Ford he flicked the reins and the three of them leant to put their weight on the shafts, climbing laboriously through Turley Wood, up the pitch and into the yard, where the ducks were circling their space in the frozen pond. The wheels lurched on the hidden ruts. They had barely stopped before Oliver freed himself and sat, almost quivering, on the edge of the soft, plush seat.
“All right, lad,” said Idris. “Down you get.”
“How are you, Nip?” The dogs came swarming round the boy, tails up, ears down, yawling with excitement. “Hello, Towser! Blackie, did you miss me?”
Albert was ready with his curry-comb in the stable. Taking the bridle, he spoke to Reuben like a long-lost friend and the cob himself grew so calm in his presence that he seemed not to notice his work on the straps. In the light that spilled from the stable door, Etty led her son and his phalanx of dogs across the sloping yard to the snow-drowned flem, which Oliver insisted on jumping, since there was, he said, a troll beneath the bridge. They kicked their boots against the step and tramped into the kitchen, where Molly looked up from her scratch-patterned spectacles—pulling her needle clear of the pullover her grandson had cagged on a bramble by the spring.
She had thought it better for all of them if she remained behind.
“He got his way, I suppose?” she asked.
Etty nodded, avoiding her eye. She hung their hats and coats from the mantelpiece, swept up the snow and held her hands to the long flames surging up the flue.
“It shan’t catch on,” Etty said. “That’s what they reckon.”
“I cannot say I am surprised.”
“The man from the Electric Board was there, though goodness knows how he aims to get home. There’s a queue across the entire country, that’s what he says. Every village gets its chance, and them as votes against, back they go right down to the bottom. It defeats me. Really. Ten more years we could be waiting now—”
“Mam?”
“Oliver, I’m talking.”
“But I’m hungry!”
“How much cake did you eat just now?”
“You binna sinking, boy,” Idris told him, arriving from the hall in a gasp of freezing air.
Oliver vanished behind the brown chenille tablecloth.
“So much for that, then, is it, Mr. Hamer?” Molly asked.
Idris grunted, arranged the long hairs back across his head and dusted the snow from the lapels of his suit. Checking his clock, which had almost reached nine, he crossed the flagstones to the windowsill—twisting the knob on the grand wooden wireless.
“Consarn it!” he muttered. “I only changed them batteries Monday.”
“Well,” said Molly. “There’s one problem we might have saved ourselves, anyway.”
Through the keening wind in the open chimney, the sound of the Home Service rose momentarily. Beneath the table, Oliver made puffing noises for the wooden train he had been sent for Christmas by his grandfather. Etty looked from her husband’s back to her mother in her chair beneath the oil lamp, then turned quickly back to the fireplace, testing the weight of the water in the kettle, the chill draught tugging at her hair.
“Now look you here, Mrs. Evans,” said Idris. “I has enough people saying how to run my farm. I takes it off the Ministry and I takes it off the taxman, but I’s blasted if I shall take it off you. If you has a hundred pound to go wasting on your precious electric, well, that is something different, that is a conversation. But while the money is mine then I shall be making the decisions in this house, and if you dunna like it you can just take your home in your pocket and get yourself back to your husband.”
IT WAS RARELY, in the darkness, a tender kind of business—even now that Etty had at last fallen pregnant. Idris had kissed her on occasion, for the scant congregation at their wedding at the chapel, in the weeks and months after she had first come to the Funnon, but more in the way that the boys had kissed her back in Erwood—suddenly, artlessly, as if searching for a way forwards. She could be sitting at her dressing table, dabbing at her eye-shadow or wiping off her lipstick, when she would find him beside her with his coarse, grey stubble, his breath coming sour and urgent.
It had often been surprise as much as revulsion that had made her turn away.
In the end, inevitably, he had settled on an approach that owed less to the embrace between Edmund Lowe and Rose Hobart in Wolf of New York, which she had coaxed him into watching at the pictures one market day in Builth Wells, than to the tiling over at the Hergest: the annual breeding of the valley’s mares. It was not unkind or, these days, particularly uncomfortable, but as he tugged up her nightdress with his leather-hard hands, as their bellies pressed together and his pelvis bit into the skin of her thighs, it might even have been useful to have had a third party present: a stallion man with cigarette and waistcoat, to guide his penis as he started aimlessly to push.
WITH THESE DAYS a hen’s stride longer, Oliver could see a trace of white between the open curtains as he peeped out of the blankets and tasted the clean, freezing air of the bedroom. The wind had, if anything, grown during the night. The sash windows were battling in their frame. There was a screaming and yelping all round the roof, as if the house were under attack from an army of witches. Lifting his eyes a little further, he made out his grandmother in her cardigan and ankle-length skirt, bent by the washstand at the foot of her four-post bed. She struck a match, which died at once with a glimpse of her eyes and shadows dividing her forehead.
“Rise and shine, Olly,” she said, glancing in his direction.
“Is it witches, is it, Nana?”
“What?”
“Witches? Are we going to have to fight them?”
“Up you get now.”
Since Molly was shielding another match, Oliver burrowed back beneath the blankets, revolved in the hollow of the old feather mattress, clambered over the cold hot-water bottle and extended an arm to the bedside chair. His shirt, his pullover and his corduroy trousers were all stiff with cold. He had to rub them together just to push his arms into the sleeves and his legs into the legs. He pulled on his stockings and his favourite red braces. He waited to be prompted, to have the bedclothes snatched away, but heard only footsteps leaving for the landing. Surprised, intrigued, he slithered out onto the rug, where his boots stood in line with his Noah’s Ark animals, his books and his jigsaw bricks.
He almost laughed when he saw the hall. Beneath the two dim windows that framed the front door, there was a thickness of snow across the entire floor, which rose at the walls and drifted up the staircase almost as far as his feet. There was a run of prints where his parents and Albert had gone outside, so, holding the banister with his spare hand, he slipped down the stairs in a series of thumps.
“Nana!” he called, peering round the kitchen door. “There’s snow, Nana! There’s snow in the hall!”
“Come in or stay out, Olly, would you, please?”
“What happened?”
Besides her shuddering candle the kitchen was dark. The morning showed only at the topmost corner of the window. Oliver put his hot-water bottle on the draining board for his mother to empty for the washing. He stood on the flagstones bare of snow, wiggling the loose tooth in his lower jaw as he watched his grandmother clear the moaning flue, rise the ashes and light the chats—an operation he had never seen performed, as his mother always woke an hour before him.
“Nana?” he repeated.
“The wind broke the latch,” said Molly. “Be a good boy and rise us some eggs, would you?”
The egg basket appeared to have suffered an explosion. He tilted it, then turned it upside-down.
“Is they froze, Nana?” he asked.
“Don’t forget your coat,” she said. “And give the door a good old pwning when you’re back. I shall have to bolt him behind you.”
Arriving on the doorstep, Oliver had to hold onto the jamb just to stop himself from falling. The snow met his cheeks like tiny arrows. The wind hurt his ears, his eyes were watering so that it was all he could do to distinguish the great, grey bulk of the barn, and it was only by doubling over, almost by crawling, that he was able to work his way along the bank of the flem, to give a small, token jump when he seemed to reach the narrow point beneath the parlour window and to set out into the storm.
Oliver knew all the nests of the bantams. He and his friend Griffin had almost as many dens in the hayloft as they did, and he had barely scrambled onto the first of its slopes before he found one of the vicious little birds to bully away from her nest. On the tall gable wall there were scratched words and numbers that had been hidden the previous year, he thought, until March or even April: the scribblings of labourers who had been here before he was born. One was a date: the word OCTOBER had been chiselled out plainly. Another seemed to be a doleful hymn they would sometimes sing in the chapel. Behind him, Blackie came clattering up the ladder with her keen dog stink and her gold-ringed eyes. She followed him to the top of the stack, where he buried his hands among the warm eggs in his pockets and stood on his toes to peer through the slit. In the yard, beyond the snow cascading from the roof, the pond and its girdle of elm trees had vanished almost completely. In their place were nothing but a few maddened saplings and a trench sunk deep into the white expanse.
It was only by the regularity of her movement that he could make out his mother, who was spooning up the snow in quick, wild flurries, while the wind brought more from the sky and the ground so she might have kept digging forever.
“I WON’T SPEAK ill of Idris,” said Molly, as she and Oliver stood among the snow-skithed cattle, which were groaning, stamping, bwnting their mangers. “He’s not a bad man and he knows this farm like I never will, but I do wish to goodness as he would have the coal by here in the yard and not way down in the Bottom Field.”
Turning away from Rachel, the house cow, she hooked her arms beneath the handle of a pail and hoisted it up onto the lip of the trough.
“Is the beasts drinking milk today, Nana?” asked Oliver.
“Got nothing else, Olly, have they?” Molly emptied the pail and crouched down to look at him, her blue eyes patterned with tiny red lines. “Now look,” she said. “You’s been a good old boy this morning, but you’re much too small to be out in this all day.”
“I’m big as half of the Juniors, I am!”
“And that’s as maybe. I want you please to go in the house, put a brun on the fire and warm yourself up. Fodder the geese, if you’re after a job. I’ve got to go see about the coal.”
“But the coal is my job, that’s what the boss says!”
“Olly…” Molly sighed and inspected her hands, which, even in their gloves, were doubled inwards like a pair of claws. She looked at him again. “You can come with me to the top of the Banky Piece, see what we’re up against, but after that you are going in the kitchen. And I don’t want no gapesing. You’re to hold my arm, you understand?”
What with the snow in the house, the cattle out of water and the wind so strong that it could sclem the boss’s hat and a wad of hay and neither of them to be seen again, Oliver had not had a thought for the sheep. He had worried about the ducks, which might have been buried or else have missed to find another pond. He had worried about the robins, the tits and the wrens, as he had not yet sunk them holes to the ground. But it was only when he, Molly and the three dogs reached the gate beside the beast-house that he had any sense of the valley’s transformation—of the monstrous ridges that had risen over hedgerows, burst around trees and swallowed whole fields so that every familiar contour was gone. The church bell was ringing away to his left. Squinting ahead of him, Oliver saw the ghost of the oak that should have marked the gate into the Oak Piece. He edged around the end wall of the barn, clinging to his grandmother, looking west to breathe, and when they came to the corner and the full, unhindered gale that fled from Bryngwyn and the desolate slopes of Glascwm Hill, he felt her coat sleeve plucked out of his hand.
“Nana!”
Several times the bank revolved. It stopped only when Oliver landed in a drift, with the barn almost vanished and the bare-limbed oak tree flailing above him. He tried to stand and sank to his waist. He looked up the slope to see his grandmother crawling backwards towards him, but then Blackie arrived with Nip and Towser, more swimming than walking, and by some means he did not pause or think to explain he realized that there were sheep beneath him, waiting in the frozen darkness, and like the dogs he started madly to dig.
THE CASE CLOCKS in the kitchen had drifted some seconds apart since the previous evening, but for once the pendulums were swinging in time and a handful of their nine o’clock chimes rang out almost together. Standing by the fire, Idris breathed his last fit of coughing from his chest, his hands at his sides, shivering, bleeding. Beside him, the women having finished, the boy was sitting in the murky, soap-stinking water of the galvanized bath—a fold between his chest and his belly, his skin clear and bronze, as others became only in the summer. He was watching Idris fixedly, this son for his wife, his fat lips parted, the lashes tabbering on his big black eyes, and suddenly Idris felt a stab of revulsion, which escaped his throat as a growl.
“Boss?” said Oliver again.
“Do you think I binna thinking on it?”
At last he felt some give in his shoulders and he was able to break the spine of his coat, which he peeled off like a chrysalis and leant against a leg of the mantelshelf.
“Time to get out now, Olly,” said Etty quietly, and the boy rose with dimpled knees and penis jutting, his wet hair already recovering its waves.
“It’s eight below,” Idris muttered. “You canna stand. You canna see. The dankering lantern blows out even in the barn!”
“But, boss—”
“They’s best off where they are, boy. They’ll be scratting on till Monday.”
The sensation was returning to Idris’s fingers. They felt lacerated, flayed, and he groaned as he unwound the bandage from his head and tested his temple where the wind had planted a shard off the roof that afternoon. There was no fresh blood on his fingers—at least, no more than oozed from his knuckles—and so he filled the jug from the bath and squeezed past Albert at his table in the corner. He made it to the larder, where the geese were in their cubs and the pig was dangling salt-frosted from the gambrel, but while he managed to work up a lather with the brush, even with two hands he could not keep the razor from shaking.
His chair was a mould of his back and his shoulders. He sat with his head slumped onto the top rail, his eyes on the three black stripes in the mantel where they would pin their homemade candles when he was a child, in the days when paraffin was scarce. “Three in one,” his father had called them: the tallow, the wick and the flame, which was the Holy Spirit and could be shared by all who held their candles in readiness. He remembered those nights before the Christmas market—himself and his brothers, Ivor and Oliver, cross-legged among the goose feathers, their father still dark-haired and robust, with their mother beside him, singing as she plucked—and he pressed his hands to his face for several seconds before he spread out the paper on his lap.
“CHILBLAINS! RADOX RELIEF AT LAST!”
“It has been reported by Mr. J. Prichard, Dderw Estate, that the rainfall for 1946, by his gauge on the Dderw Estate, was 65.23 inches. This compares with 45.49 inches in 1945 and 49.78 inches in 1944.”
“Rhyscog. Rev. A. W. Chant, Builth Wells, was the officiating minister at the Methodist Church on Sunday. Mrs. E. Hamer presided at the organ and Mr. I. Hamer was precentor.”
ASLEEP, IDRIS LOOKED not so much older than his forty-nine years as ancient beyond human reckoning. Sometimes, before she extinguished the candle at night or when she lay awake in the earliest daylight, Etty would watch him for minutes at a time—his head sunk sideways into the pillow, his mouth ajar, his short breaths gargling deep in his chest. He put her in mind of the Rocks at Aberedw, where they would go wimberry combing when she was a girl: pairs of legs and flapping skirts that would turn into people as they moved between the bushes. They would scramble together across those crumbling slopes, and in the shelter of some shelving rock she would always find a cove of flowers—pink erigeron or biting stonecrop—and pick a few to wreathe her hair, wondering that anything could live up here at all.
With the screen back in the larder, she dragged the bath off the hearthrug and spread out the blankets on the table. She fastened the shield to the nearest of the flat irons, wiped it clean and tested its heat with her cheek; then, with slow, rolling movements of her wrist, she smoothed out the creases in her husband’s shirt. Only her son remained awake. He was standing on the stool to reach the face of her grandfather clock, which, like her husband’s, he wound every night. Both of the clocks were tall and dark, with narrow doors concealing their weights and pendulums. Both had a second keyhole just beneath the hour hand to give the impression they would run for a week. Etty checked the Sunday joint in the oven. She took two cleats from the fire with the tongs and dropped them into the box iron, but by the time that she was sitting in her chair with the paper she could hardly recall how her own best blouse, the boy’s shirt and a pair of stiff, starched collars had found their way onto the pile for the chapel.
“BIRMINGHAM offers well-paid factory work to single women age 21–35; lodgings found, fare paid.”
“NURSES needed at BOTLEYS PARK COLONY to nurse and train men, women and children with undeveloped minds. It’s a grand job and a grand life.”
“Rhyscog. Rev. A. W. Chant, Builth Wells, was the officiating minister at the Methodist Church on Sunday. Mrs. E. Hamer presided at the organ and Mr. I. Hamer was precentor.”
FROM THE FAR Top Field, Oliver could see all the way back down into the yard, where the few ewes that Albert and the boss had freed the previous day were huddled round the door of the barn. He could see the trail of manure they had finally used to tempt the cattle down the canyon to the pond, the snow-weighted sycamores circling the graveyard, even the heads of one or two stones, but the Bottom Field, the Banky Piece, the track and the Cae Blaidd, all of these were lost beneath one mighty drift, while Turley Wood was reduced to a few black branches, which scrabbled into the eerie still—their shadows tangled with the prints of rabbits.
There was smoke in a pillar above the kitchen chimney, luminous against the great, dark flank of Llanbedr Hill: the fire stoked by Molly, who never came to chapel, who held instead to the church down in Erwood—at least, when she was able to go.
“Looks like the sea, boss, you reckons?” said Albert.
“Has you seen the sea, Albert?” asked Oliver.
“Have you seen the sea,” Etty corrected him.
“I seen the Channel, boy.”
“What’s the Channel?”
“That’s what keeps us from the Froggies.” He rolled his chaw of tobacco in his mouth. “Frenchies, look.”
“Is they green?”
“Head to toe, boy.”
“Urggh!”
Idris said nothing. Limping along the drift that concealed the boundary fence, he stopped at a point that he judged to be the gate and started to climb towards the common, trying to keep the worst of the snow off his suit. This high up, there was still a little movement in the air. It idled over the colourless hills, silent, as if surveying its destruction, and as Oliver followed his deep-sunk prints it must have carried the same, sharp scent of life that it had found in the Bottom Field the previous morning, since the dogs at his heels began to whimper and shake.
“Boss?” said Oliver.
“I seen the dogs, boy.”
“Is it wethers, is it?”
“Wethers for Llanowen, I expect.” Idris checked the watch in his high-neck waistcoat. “You come along now.”
Oliver remained on the top of the drift where Towser and Nip were throwing up snow in clouds. “He binna so deep, boss,” he said, tentatively. “We could have them from there, easy.”
“What day is it today, boy?”
“The Sabbath day, boss.”
“The Sabbath day.”
“But, boss, we always fodders the creatures of a Sunday. We fodders the ewes, and we milks the beast—”
“Oliver!” hissed Etty.
Idris coloured behind his stubble. “By Gar, boy,” he said, “you’s burning in your shins today!”
Away up the slope was a farm named the Welfrey: a high, hard place alone in the common, where John the Welfrey and Sarah, his wife, were toiling out to meet them on the track. Two dark figures in the glare of the hillside; one raised a hand when Oliver spotted them—in their layers of coats and scarves it was tricky to tell which of them it was, although he recognized Sarah’s voice when she called him her two-note greeting. The snow had erased all trace of the Welfrey fields, flooded Pentre Wood and swept over the ridge of their barn, but still in their yard there were sheep by the score; they might have recovered their entire flock. Oliver heard Idris summon him again. He saw his eyes beneath his low-brimmed hat, but in his mind he saw only the ewes in the Oak Piece and the Bottom Field, the wethers in the quarries or pressed against the wall of the Panneys—shivering, imprisoned—and he had made no decision and he had no plan when he turned abruptly, ducked past his mother and set out back as they had come.
THERE WAS LITTLE to be told between Oliver and the dogs, which, like him, were not exactly grown-ups and not exactly animals. They would all of them flinch at Idris’s glance, work or vanish, attend on his whims without a thought—and yet, within the lines and limits of the boss’s rule, they were a band and Oliver was their leader. As he lugged himself back over the gate from the Plock and hurried past the daggy Radnors crowded in the yard, bald in places where, after only a day beneath the snow, they had started to nibble on one another’s wool, he had no need to check that Blackie, Nip and Towser were behind him—bounding through the tracks of the cattle, eager to know what wonders lay next.
“Oliver!”
There were tits and piefinches pecking at crumbs on the trampled path to the house. There were footprints leading from the top of the yard: shadows past the end of the beast-house.
“Oliver!”
Oliver slowed down only at the lychgate, where the prints continued through a crested drift and the rooks, still hunched in the sycamores above him, had dislodged snow into the crystalline whiteness. There was a single snowdrop in the shelter of the wall. Panting, struggling, he climbed into the abandoned churchyard, and since his grandmother had followed the path herself he wound up the tump into the ring of the yew trees, heading for the smothered little cell of the church, whose bell hung exposed against the empty sky.
“Oh!” said Molly. “Oh, you gave me a start!”
“Nana…” He was breathing so hard that he could scarcely speak.
“What is it, love? What on earth’s happened?”
She was sitting in her usual pew at the front, the smoke from her cigarette twining in the light from the door. She flinched when he tripped on a frozen pile of bat droppings, hidden by the snow that had fallen through the roof, and when he reached the end of the aisle she opened her blanket and gathered him under her arm.
“It’s not them blasted ewes again, is it?”
“Nana, can you help me, can you?”
“Olly…Olly, I wish I could, love.”
“Please!”
“Look at me, boy!” She held up her hands. “I can dig the garden, given a good day, but…You heard Idris. Ten foot down or more, he reckons, the most of them, and we don’t so much as know where they are—”
“The dogs’ll mark them.”
“I know—”
“I can mark them too, Nana. I can! With the both of us, and Blackie, and Nip, and Towser…”
As the door grated open, the light grew again over the backs of the pews, which were as old and worn as the chairs in the house, over the pulpit keeling above them, the altar under its blanked-out window and the memorials on the dull white walls. Oliver’s mother must have fallen on the way down the hill. Snow was clinging to her coat and her best black dress. Behind her the dogs were standing in the porch, turned now at nervous, unrelated angles, and when he lifted his eyes to her face Oliver felt a coldness enter the hot, clear purpose in his belly.
“Come by here, girl,” his grandmother murmured.
Etty closed the door and again the church was dark. She stopped in the aisle a few rows back, and for a moment it seemed that she was praying, since Oliver waited for tears or fury and heard no more than the gasps of her breath.
“He should never have dragged you to the chapel today. Not on foot. Not in your condition. It were crazy to try…”
“You don’t want to see him,” said Etty at last.
“I don’t suppose I do.”
“Oliver…”
Oliver shrank inside the blanket.
“I know it’s none of my affair, Etty,” said Molly. “I know that. You must do what you think right. But you just remember, you’re his wife, not some blasted slave—and I know what I’m talking about. I had it for years. If it was up to me, well, it’s not up to me. I’m not saying what to think, like, but this is your farm too. You remember that.”
THE SHEEP WATCHED impassively as Etty sat the blanket and the saddle on the cob, shortened the stirrups and fastened the girth. They bunched together when she returned from the barn with two fat, wire-bound bundles of hay, but they had no strength to scatter or run, and despite the dogs, which waited with Molly as she packed the bait into the baskets and helped her grandson onto Reuben’s back, there was little more to reveal their disquiet than their jingling icicles, their flickering ears, the quickening spurts of their breath.
If Oliver felt his purpose return when his grandmother dragged the top gate open, then Etty felt as if she had torn off her clothes and stood naked before a goggling multitude, as if she had taken a step onto air instead of earth and found that it would hold her weight. As they passed between the old churchyard and the prill beneath Pentre Wood, she looked past her son’s blue woollen hat and the nodding head of the small bay horse, and with every step he broke through the smooth-backed snow she seemed to see again the catkins of the hazels and the long, bowing boughs of the sycamores, where a squirrel was darting—red as her hair.
She almost wanted to cover her eyes.
“Are you cold, Mam?” asked Oliver, looking back.
Etty realized she was trembling. She smiled, tightening her arms on his waist. “Oh…No. No, Olly, I’m fine.”
In the dingle that closed around the climbing track, she slipped from the saddle, held out her arms and took the weight of her oversized boy. With the last of the fields invisible behind them, no trace of a tree, a path or a fence, she could tell only from a flatter passage in the snow that they were on the bank of Conjuror’s Pool, by the hidden gully of the shrinking prill. Stroking Reuben’s steam-blowing nostrils, she took the reins and waded until she had to crawl. Behind her, the horse sank almost to his shoulders. He reared and snorted, snow rolling from his chest, the poles and the shovels clattering on his hips, but she spoke to him softly and again he plunged forwards, and then he was clambering onto the slope—shaking like the dogs, which were scrambling around them.
It was only on the hills and in the shelter of the Bryngwyn track that the snow had seemed to be in any way navigable. The valley beneath them was like some vast snow river: a full half-mile of razor-headed waves and tapering shadows, its occasional trees like pieces of flotsam. Even if they had found a way among the drifts, still they could never have taken the cob, and they could have dug all day in those lightless depths before they found a single sheep. Here, on Llanbedr Hill, the drifts were like hills themselves, but they were divided by spaces blown almost clean in which there were shallow, sporadic quarries—some of them cut to build the Island, the cottage for Dick the gamekeeper and Dilys, his sister, whose smoke spread faintly from a cluster of larches. Other quarries were so ancient that not even Idris seemed to know their purpose. As his mother tied the cob to the little wittan tree at the corner of the New Field, filled the feedbag and drew another blanket over the horse’s buttocks, Oliver set out straight across the unseen lane, shielding his eyes against the ice-bright sun. He knew precisely where the wethers would be, even without the help of the dogs. True, they rarely strayed far from their own patch of common, but still he could picture them, trying to escape the two-day storm, retreating through the wind-scourged fern—like a memory of his own.
At the first pale shadow, the hint of a hollow, he tipped up the pole as his grandmother had shown him and sank it hand over hand. He took two steps and tried again, and again, the six-foot length barely reaching the ground, but beside him Blackie was whimpering softly, and when he tried once more the head of the pole stopped level with his waist.
“Mam!” he called.
His coat made it hard for him to bend his arms. The spade was almost as tall as himself. Mostly he watched as his mother dug, as the hole grew beneath them and the snow begin to shudder and fragment—become a curling horn, the top of a head, a pair of thick-set, vigorous shoulders. She dropped to her knees, seized hold of the fleece and tugged until she was groaning. She tumbled backwards as the wether burst free: a seeming miracle matted with snow, falling, struggling back to his feet—turning light-blinded from the transformed hilltop to the wall of the mountains, which rose to the south like a drift on a new scale again.
“One,” counted Oliver. “Two!”
“I said to you they were tough,” said Etty. Her cheeks were pink under ginger freckles. “Tough old boys! Policemen of the hills!”
“Three!”
In turn the sheep wallowed out of the hole, each allowing the next to escape, and by the time that the snow was still, thirteen of the animals were gathered before them, between the crouching, spring-wound dogs. They stood with their tails to a fresh, faint wind, which whispered in the hawthorns and carried snowflakes twinkling around them, scratting hopelessly for grass with their hooves in spite of a bundle of hay. Picking up his pole, Oliver laughed excitedly and set out in search of another quarry. Sunk to his knees, swollen by his coat and scarf, he looked shorter, plumper, more purposeful than ever. Etty smiled, then turned at a sound to look through the larches—one of them prone with fumbling roots, two more fallen into their neighbours to lean among the cone-spotted branches where a raven croaked and scattered twigs as he launched from his listing nest.
“Hi!” The call came again.
The Island could never have been much of a farm. A five-room hovel of local stone with a few, mean fields mined out of the common, most such places had long since been left to go down. Struggling through the spinney, lifting each foot almost to her waist, Etty crossed the tracks of a hare—the splaying hind feet dwarfing the fore. She slithered down a bank and came to the foxes and weasels on the gamekeeper’s wire, which should have led from the trees to the door of the cottage. But of that, like the fences, the barn, the sheep and the couple of cows, she was able to see nothing at all.
“Dick?” she called. “Dick? Dilys?”
“Ethel! Ethel, is that you, girl?”
“Mam!” shouted Oliver, out beyond the wethers.
“Olly, get yourself here, would you?”
“But I marked another one!”
“We’ll rise him in a minute. Can you bring me a shovel?”
Etty walked a complete circle of the snowdrift, which started gradually by the lip of the hill and tailed into a cliff some fifty yards distant with a brink like a breaking wave. Had it not been for the smoke, you might never have suspected that there was anything inside at all. She tried to climb the slopes at the north and east, but the snow was loose, as fine as flour, and it sank and cascaded from her boots.
Oliver stood with the dogs among the trees, holding a blotchy, blue-green egg in the cup of his thick woollen glove. Her shovel lay in the snow beside him. He looked up at the raven’s nest, down at the wire of ice-caked animals.
“Where’s the Island, Mam?”
“Think you’d get up there, do you, Olly?” Etty asked. “You’re a handy little climber.”
“I am not little!”
She joined her hands to hold his boot and propel him upwards, floundered after him and tried again until at length he crawled onto the back of the drift, moving slowly towards the tail of smoke now snatched and scattering to the west. Oliver slipped the egg into one of his gloves, his fingers braced to keep it safe. It was warm, that was the main thing; it must have fallen from the nest only moments before he arrived. This weather, so Albert had told him, was all the crueller for coming on a few days that might have been spring. He felt the wind on his neck and turned to the slope beyond the vanished barn, to Bryngwyn Hill, to hills whose names he did not know and the distant plain where clouds were ballooning, blazing white. He glanced at his mother, who had already started digging, then lay and peered into a black-fringed hole and beneath him, in the turbulent smoke, saw a pocket of fire, movement in the darkness, the gleam of eyes in a soot-coloured face.
“Dick?” he said. “Is that you, is it?”
“Young Oliver! Is we ever glad to see you, boy!”
DILYS SAT IN her blanket on the hob, beneath the boy in the square of sky. Snow was falling wet on her face. In the night she had been here, listening to the long, despairing cries of the owls, watching the darkness stretch and tear, the sparks from the fire shrink and mingle with the stars. In the storm she had been here, while her brother smashed another chair for its wood and paced the flagstones, cussing and moithering, and the wind in the chimney made its godless scream.
“We found the coal!” Ethel shouted, on the path outside.
“Good on you, girl!” Dick shouted back, and threw himself again against the door.
The blue became grey. The boy was gone, but the snow kept falling.
He had never once looked at her, Idris—not at school, not even that time when he returned to the Funnon with his hair army-short and the hope extinguished in his face. But then, her hair had been dark and skeiny, and soon flecked with grey, and her breasts had always been hopeless gestures on her chest. Even at twenty she could not have held a candle to that flighty piece, Ethel, with her hair like fire and her morals round her ankles. Dilys had heard the clecking at market. She had done her sums. The girl had arrived at the end of July, which was not six months before her gypsy-looking baby came along. Well, Dick could shrug about it all if he liked—he could burn the last banisters to boil the kettle and welcome these people into their cottage—but she at least had a morsel of pride. She sat in her place by the snow-spitting fire, in the airless, dog-stinking cave of the kitchen, and did not utter a single word.
“OLLY, WE CANNOT.”
“But, Mam, you said!” Oliver clung to the head of the pole.
“Listen to me now.”
“Come you back up the Island, Ethel!” Dick was shouting just to be heard, his face still black from his three-day captivity, his long coat flying from the twine round his waist. “If we canna get the horse in the barn, we shall damn well have him in the kitchen.”
“Dick, my mam’ll be frantic.”
“Mam!”
“Oliver, no!”
The cob and the wittan stood alone in the whiteness, tethered together, vanishing slowly. Four thin drifts covered Reuben’s legs, for all that he still made efforts to stamp. With his broad, bare hands Dick replaced the poles and shovels. He took Oliver by the waist, dodging the west-threshing branches as he lifted him high onto the horse’s back, while Etty tried to catch the stirrup with her boot and then allowed him to help her too.
The wethers had long since returned to their quarry; the fresh-blown snow lay thick on their backs. Flitting like shades among glimpses of hawthorns and drifts that might have been anywhere at all, the dogs closed on their hiding place—driving the sheep before them, stumbling, pitching and struggling to rise when they fell. Etty kicked the cob into the wind, which seemed to pass through her, not troubling to part. A lazy wind, her mother would have called it. Its long notes howled in the branches of the beech trees, thrilled in Oliver’s chest and played on his skin in little tremors. With the ground invisible, they might have been flying. Closing his eyes, burying his face in his scarf, he felt his mother’s arms around his chest and her swollen belly in his back. He felt the warm, smooth curve of the egg in his hand. With his tongue he fiddled with his wobbly tooth. He thought of those storms when the dogs hid, terrified, and he was left alone to run in the yard or to stand on the tump by the porch of the church, where you could see from the Red Hill to Llanbadarn-y-Garreg and watch the dark sky shimmer and blink—the thunder that followed like a summons to some mighty purpose.
It was only from the angle and the movement of the horse that Oliver could tell that the ground was falling. Slowing, slipping in spite of the frost nails, Reuben began to walk in a zigzag, bringing the wind between their cheeks. They were somewhere close to the edge of the gully when, at last, they stopped. Etty shouted instructions at the dogs, but such was the gale that channelled down the dingle that Oliver could hardly hear her himself. She swung him clear onto the uphill slope, where his knees simply buckled as hard as he tried to stand. She dragged her right leg over the saddle, fighting her heavy, ice-stiff skirts, then slipped suddenly forwards and grabbed at the reins so that she and the horse fell together.
Oliver only noticed the men as they came plunging down the bank from the Bryngwyn track. Trapped on his back, Reuben was bellocking, thrashing his legs at the desperate wind. He did not relent even with Albert beside him, bent to his ear and caressing his nose. Idris flung a wether out of his way. He cursed and shrieked at the plaguing dogs, which disappeared back into the blizzard, but although Oliver was slithering towards them he did not seem to look at him once, nor even to register his existence. When Albert persuaded the horse to roll, Idris dropped into the hole in the snow. He found a patch of loose red hair. He dug again and found an arm, and then dragged Etty back into the air, holding her to his chest, stroking her face and kissing her lips until she started to convulse. Such was the snow that covered her clothes that some moments passed before Oliver saw the blood that was soaking through his mother’s petticoats. She tried to sit and turned in his direction, while the boss fell to his knees in the gully—his back to the boy, his chapel clothes white, grey hairs streaming sideways from his head as he closed his eyes and knitted his hands at his chin.