“AND I SAW before me,” said Philip the Pant, “a grand expanse of land. A grand, golden land it were, with the cattle fat and the wind in the oats and the soil rich and red where it were ploughed. There was houses set with precious stones, all of them with a good plot of ground, and a castle with tall old spindling spires, and the people, they was all of them happy and smiling. Oh, you would have ached to see it. Ached, you would!”
“Get out, dog!” growled John Llanedw.
“But between me and this beautiful land there was this bridge, see? This long, thin bridge across a shining river. No piers he had. To be honest with you, I was afeared as he would not support me. But then I turned to see where I was stood, and around me I saw only a wasteland: a pit of sin lit by livid flames. Infernal, it were! Infernal! There weren’t nothing but hunger and intoxication and the very worst of human abasement!” Philip rested his hands on the Bible, casting his eyes meaningfully about the chapel. “The people, they was all of them weeping and moaning, and as I turned again to my little bridge, in that moment I did give myself to the Lord. A wave of faith come upon me and I crossed the bridge in safety!”
On the pews and the benches, the congregation stirred and murmured and waited for this latest account of Philip’s famous vision to end. There were muffled sobs from Vera Cwmpiban, whose husband, Walter, the Month’s Mind service was intended to remember. There was laughter from boys where once, when the preachers wept and shouted, there might have been cries of “Amen!” As Nancy Llanedw worked the bellows with long, decisive movements, her round face hidden by dark, curling hair, Etty turned on her stool and set her fingers on the manual. The sheet music was open on the stand, but she kept her eyes on the oblong mirror in which Philip was hobbling down the steps from the pulpit and Idris rose from the big seat beneath him—the rest of the chapel following his lead. With the windows at his back, her husband’s face was more shadow than light. He struggled a little to breathe between the lines, but still his voice rang over the others: Heather Llwyntudor in her fox-fur stole, Albert in his too-tight collar, Ruth in her lipstick and her shoddy Edwardian coat. The smells of the room were shoe polish, hair oil, coal smoke and mothballs. The colours were black and white, or grey where the one had leached into the other. It could not have been to Etty alone that her son stood apart, taller than Idris by some inches now—his dense black hair slicked back from his forehead, his golden face turned up to the cross on the wall.
And, when the waves of ire
Again the earth shall fill,
The Ark shall ride the sea of fire,
Then rest on Zion’s hill.
“Christ, you’re a dirty bugger, Griffin,” Oliver muttered as the two boys filed back down the aisle.
“Oh? Why’s that, then?”
“I seen what you drew.”
“Oh! Noah.” Griffin laughed, peering up at him sideways. He had ceased to grow some two years earlier, but remained as wiry and restless as ever. “Now, let’s face it, boy. He were on that boat for thirteen month. What the hell else were he going to get up to?”
They passed beneath the rickety gallery and wove among the people massing on the steps, spreading into the green-grey graveyard. The day was chill and threatening rain. The smoke of the men was pale against the muckery clouds. As the women gathered round Vera, Ruth and Siân, murmuring memories and commiserations, the two boys leant on the wall by the war memorial—their eyes on a nearby gaggle of girls, their hands in their pockets, since they were not allowed to smoke themselves.
“His boy binna here,” said Griffin. “Vivien, like.”
“He come to the funeral,” said Oliver.
“He shanna come back. You mark my words. What’s he gonna want with bloody Cwmpiban? Got himself the good life in Hereford, in’t he? Nice job. Nice car. Missus. Kids…Christ, if I had a Ford Zephyr you wouldna see me for dust neither!”
“So. You getting soft on old Ruth, then, are you?”
“I’ll be soft on the beasts first.” Griffin grimaced. “Old Walter…Fair play to him, like. He was a good lad, but he wasna no farmer. Cwmpiban’s on her uppers, let’s face it. They’s been leasing fields, what? Five year now? Ruth could be as tidy as you like, and you’d still have to pay me to take the place on…I sure as hell in’t squabbling with Mervyn for the privilege!”
Oliver’s mother emerged from the arch-topped door with her long black coat buttoned up to the neck and her black dress flaring over slim, heeled shoes. Perhaps she had made alterations herself, brought in the waist and lifted the hem. Perhaps it was simply the slant of her eyes, or the colour of her hair, but where others looked awkward in their old-fashioned uniforms, or so it seemed to Oliver, she and her clothes were of a single piece. It was with some pride that he took her arm and followed Idris down the path among the urns and crosses, around the west wall to the back-side of the chapel: the devil’s side, as it was known. Here there were no more than half a dozen graves. One belonged to John the Welfrey, who had shot himself as well as his dog. Another belonged to Oliver’s brother, as they would call him, who had not lived to be baptized. The three of them stood at his unmarked stone. They prayed in silence. They picked fresh daffodils to arrange in the vase.
In the neighbouring field, lambs were calling and jumping, chasing wildly between the hedgerows.
“I SAW YOU in the paper,” said Amy Whittal.
“Oh,” said Oliver. He gave a grunt of amusement and whistled up the dog, which was dancing between them, nuzzling him for attention. “Catch us a daisy, Jess! A daisy now. Go on.”
“Not a bad likeness, I thought.”
“Good girl!” He gave the flower a wipe and handed it over. “A little slobbery, but no worse for that.”
“Go on. What’s that one, then?”
“That? That’s speedwell, that is. And that there is chickweed. I do not think the dog would know them, mind.”
“You aiming to be a florist, are you?”
“It is my mother,” said Oliver. “A tremendous one for flowers, she is. Stop a day with my mother and you’ll know them as well as I do, you can be sure of it.”
Amy climbed the stile into the lane, gave a little skip and waited by the hedge as a brown Ford Popular came bowling round the corner, changed gears roughly and turned down the track to the Vron. With his hand on the dog, Oliver found himself for once at the same height as the girl. He saw her bright bay eyes beneath her neat yellow fringe, a patch of powder on the flank of her nose where she appeared to have concealed a blemish. She had not filled much since their primary-school days, but the legs above her gumboots had a new, fluid shape and there was the pressure of breasts in her pale blue pullover. As she started up the slope of Penarth Mount, over the ditch that looped round its base and the sheep racks that made little ditches of their own, he watched her bottom in her pink cotton skirt.
On the summit she waved a stick as a sword—the hawthorns behind her in the low, dark clouds.
“I saw your uncle Ivor yesterday.”
“Oh?”
“He had a calf breach. I went over with Dad.”
“Well!”
“I cannot say that I see the resemblance.”
“By Thy grace and mercy!” Oliver spread his bag on a fallen tree, lit the two cigarettes he had snaffled from his grandmother and put one of them between her lips.
“Mind you,” said Amy, “his boys don’t look a lot like him either. It is Vron blood they have, the both of them.”
Oliver picked up her stick from the grass and hurled it in the direction of the Edw, here more stream than river, which wove its way south between clustered willows and crowds of purpling alders. On the commons the yearlings were coming to the fences. In the fields where the starlings moved like one amorphous being, a tractor appeared from the barns at the Vron—one man shovelling clumps of muck to be shredded by his brother in the grass. Tapping the ash, he sat down beside her, his jacket open on the ornate birds he had sewn onto his waistcoat with his grandmother’s assistance.
“I cannot say,” he said, “as I have ever seen their mother.”
“Three parts cow, I’d say.”
“I know one or two like that.”
Amy frowned and punched his arm, which he nursed as if it were broken. She took a shallow pull on her cigarette. “The younger boy, Mervyn. That is her as a man—save for the hair, of course. I’ve a theory that he cannot speak at all. I’ve known him since he was, what, four or five, and I cannot say that I have ever…No, I tell a lie, I have heard him call his dog, but I’ve never heard him speak to another human being. Every Saturday night he comes back from Hundred House, driving all over the lane. We found him one morning asleep in the hedge! Honest to God! We figured he must have stopped for a wee and passed out where he was. I don’t know. You’d have thought you’d hear him cussing or singing or something.”
Oliver slipped an inch or two sideways and felt her hip give minutely as it touched his own. He took the stick from Jess, which was whining, trying to push her nose between them, and as he threw it again he allowed his arm to fall around Amy’s shoulders.
“All the boys are bigger than their fathers,” she said, reflectively. “You wonder where it will end.”
IDRIS COULD REMEMBER the ideal Sunday. His mother had been there, so he could not have been more than eight years old. They had been singing, the two of them. They were always singing. From their blanket in the orchard, among the cornflowers and butterflies, they had been able to see the length of the valley where the fields lay dry and, for all of the dark clouds pressing on the hills, not one farmer was tedding or cocking, loading or humping the hay. That was a Sunday as the Lord intended, a day of rest and holy contemplation. If the other farmers worked he would suffer, of course, but they would see the error of their ways. He would have his reward when the last days came.
The door scraped open and the boy entered the kitchen, his streaming hair almost touching the mistletoe as he took a tiddler from the depths of his coat: a mimmockin thing, all legs and eyes, which he dried on a scrap of towel.
“You’re out of bed then, Nana,” he said.
His grandmother coughed and managed a smile. “I was needing a change of scene, I was, Olly.”
“That’s it, little one.” Ethel received the lamb. “Lovely and warm it is by the fire, see?”
“You been to see that Amy again, have you?”
“Might have, Nana.”
“Pretty girl, she is. You going to bring her by here sometime, are you?”
Oliver shrugged. He removed the sacks from his waist and shoulders and hung them from the mantel, by his mud-spattered suit, allowing his raven to perch on his arm, her wings and her beak stretched open in the heat. Already so much steam was boiling from his sweater and his corduroy trousers that he and the women were enveloped in a dull white cloud.
“Two legs, boss,” he said, turning to the table.
Idris sniffed and set down his book. “Has you been smoking again, boy?”
“No no, boss.”
“You’ll be putting my blasted barn on fire!”
“I never, boss! You couldna light nothing out there, in any case.”
“Well,” said Idris, after a moment. “Two legs then, is it?”
“Two legs…Good size calf by the looks of him. Annie is making some work of it.”
“Is it coming the right way?”
Oliver presented two fingers, palm downwards. “Seems OK to me, like.”
“You had best rise some rope, boy. Drink up your tea. I shall come out the beast-house presently.”
Idris moved his toes in the Radox soak, easing the persistent itching of his chilblains. He lifted Foxe to the rain-muted window and found his place in the story of Romanus, the deacon of the church in Caesarea, who had been condemned by the Roman idolaters on the seventeenth day of November, A.D. 303. The man was scourged, put to the rack, torn with hooks and cut with knives. His face was scarified, his teeth were broken from their sockets and his hair was ripped out by the root. And yet he thanked the governor for what he had done—“for,” he said, “every wound is a mouth, to sing the praises of the Lord.”
AT 7:06 P.M. the following day, Oliver packed his homework into his satchel, rose from his seat and stood with a hand on the luggage grid—inspecting, in the dim evening light, a poster showing an arch of sand where figures lay scattered or played in the waves and a comely girl in a bathing suit was trying to catch hold of a seacrow. It occurred to him briefly that, in a place like this, even Amy might be induced to remove some clothes, but then the wheels juddered on the points, the rails winced and the Edw Valley women came gaggling around him, as they would every Monday, with their flooding skirts and market baskets. As Aberedw Station appeared out of the silhouetted fir trees, the train slowed to a halt and the passengers fed chattering onto the platform, a few Builth boys in the carriage behind them began to bay and stamp their feet.
“Traitors!” one shouted, as the whistle went.
There was a hiss of steam and a clank of steel—red sparks swimming in the blackening sky.
“Get you here and say that!” David and Jeffrey, the two Trevaughan boys, set out after them, dodging round Oliver and Lizzy Glanedw, running alongside the lurching train. One of them reached inside a window, seemed to land a fist, but he jumped away at the end of the platform and came back, cursing, holding his hand.
It was the first of April, the first day of the new moon, but the clouds lay in broad, dark fields above the Wye Valley. With the confusion on the platform and the red oil lamp on the back of the train now shrinking away beneath Aberedw Rocks, it was some moments before Oliver noticed his grandfather, climbing from his Beetle in the car park, weaving among the people of this muddy little station three miles north of his own. He could see little more than the barrel of his body, the glow of his cigarette, the sky’s faint gleam on his naked scalp.
“I seen you in the paper,” his grandfather said, arriving beside him.
“Famous, I am!” said Oliver.
“Your mother’s proud, I should imagine.”
“She’s read it once or twice, like.”
The women squeezed into an Austin Seven, which ground its way up the bank towards the village, its headlamps fanning over Treallt fields.
A Hillman followed a short way behind.
“Did you…Did you have a word with your grandmother, did you?”
“I had a go, Grandad. I canna say as I got very far.”
“Is she picking up at all, is she?”
“Some,” said Oliver. “I don’t know. It’s still a good day if you see her in the kitchen. It’s her rheumatics, that is the problem, see? She’ll catch anything going, that’s what the doctor says. It is the second time she’s had the pneumonia now.”
His grandfather shuffled his shoes in the chippings. “There is no aim to it, boy,” he said. “I write to her and write to her. I dunno what else I can do, to be honest, save…save coming to see her.”
“Well. You’ll find her in.”
“What do you think, like?”
“I think you’d best give Mother a miss.”
“Are they doing their singing this week, are they?”
“Wednesday. Pant it is, this week. They was up at ours last.”
“Wednesday,” he repeated. “You’re a good lad, Olly.”
As the headlamps faded and the darkness settled, Oliver could see his grandfather a little more clearly—his narrow eyes deep in the folds of his face, his shoulders twisting as he rooted in a pocket of his jacket. He took the cigarettes he offered with a word of thanks. He slipped the clips round the ankles of his uniform trousers, then lifted his bicycle from the wall of the toilet block, flipping the dynamo onto the back wheel, while the new lambs called in the level valley fields and the train’s lamp appeared again in the distance—its spark repeated by a curl in the river.
TOWARDS THE END of Turley Wood, the paler clouds above Cefn Wylfre parted to reveal the moon: a hair-thin crescent, long at the top, which the boss would have said meant rain. Slinging his right leg over the saddle, Oliver slowed and hopped to the ground, the headlamp dying into an ember. He removed his cap, put his hands together, bowed his head and made a wish. Beside him in the Middle Ddole, the creatures were calm. The moonlight shone from the puddles in the track, and since it was not fifty yards to the gate he decided to walk the rest of the way—leaning his bicycle in its corner of the stable before he tramped up the path to the house.
“I binna going to no hospital!” Idris exclaimed.
“For crying out loud, Idris,” said Etty. “Will you please hold still?”
“I binna—”
“Why on earth do you think we pay taxes?”
“I’s blasted if I know!”
Idris appeared to have been flung into his chair. The long grey hairs straggled over his ear, clinging to the clump on the top of his head. His harrowed face was plastered in mud, which continued over the breast of his jacket, covered his hands and stopped abruptly at his gnarled white legs—their hair cut in places by ancient scars, the right calf bloated and twisted in his bunching trousers.
Between the hooks in the kitchen walls hung sheets and pillow cases, shirts and drawers.
“What…What happened?” asked Oliver.
“Thank God you’re back,” said Molly.
“I shall not have the Lord’s name used in vain in this house!”
“I said to you that bridge was dangerous,” said Etty. “Didn’t I, eh? It is too blasted narrow!”
“What do you want me to do, Mam?” Oliver took the heavy, sloshing fountain from his grandmother, who was attempting to lift it with her elbows.
“Have you done your homework, Olly?”
“I done it on the train, Mam.”
“Get you round the lambs!” Idris barked.
“Hop back on your bike if you would, please, Olly. You know the doctor’s number, don’t you? There’s pennies in the pot on the mantelpiece.”
As Oliver hung the fountain from the swye, Molly sank into a chair by the fire and took the bottle in a thin, crabbed hand to feed one of the tiddlers wailing in the basket.
“Lambs!” Idris repeated, and started to cough.
“Idris!” Etty dropped the flannel in the steaming bowl. Among the shivering shadows of the washing, her hair was loose, her cheeks were pale. “If you do not let me wash you I shall just go off round the lambs myself. I have quite enough to be getting along with until I have found us a boy—”
“Boy?” said Idris. “Boy?”
“You heard me.”
“Has you lost your mind, woman? It is lambing, if you had not noticed! In any case, there is a larp of a boy right here!”
“Oliver has his O-levels in a month, as you very well know.”
“You squeeze your ears against your head now, woman. This is my farm! I shanna waste one single shilling on no blasted boy, so you can rid yourself of that idea for starters.”
“Idris.” Etty had still not moved. “The situation is quite simple. I do the books. I know what’s what. There is a little money put by for an emergency, and that I shall spend on a boy to work with Albert until you are back on your feet. If you think you’re going to wreck my son’s education because you cannot be bothered to look where you’re going—”
“Are you listening to me, are you?”
“It is that or I sell something.”
“Oh! Well! What you going to sell, then?”
“Well, the Welfrey is no blasted use—”
“The Welfrey is mine! That money is mine! You canna do nothing without my say-so!”
“Oliver is going to school. That’s my final word.”
“And mine and all,” said Molly.
“The day I hears your final word, Mrs. Evans—”
“Don’t you dare talk to my mother like that!”
Oliver stood uncertainly at the fireplace, still in his school clothes, the penny beginning to sweat in his hand. He watched his grandmother set down the bottle, fixing Idris with her sharp blue eyes.
“Now look you here, Mr. Hamer,” she said.
“Mother, I am handling this!”
“That boy goes to school—”
“Or what?”
“Mother!”
“Do you want for me to spell it out, do you? I should like to see you manage without us, I should! You and your broken leg!”
“Oh!” Idris pulled himself almost upright, moaning as his foot dragged over the flagstones. He wiped one hand on the tail of his shirt, pushed the hairs back onto his head and opened his lips on his brown-white teeth, which tapered back to the root. “Well. Where you going to go then, Mrs. Evans? You answer me that, can you?”
IT WAS NORMALLY the geese that heralded a visitor: the geese then the dogs, which refined their cries with calls of greeting or warning. Through the chaos of voices that Wednesday evening, Etty heard the popping and the clatter of a car. She turned down the volume on her little plastic wireless, listening closely, and although the dogs did not seem to know the driver she filled the kettle at the butt in the larder and hung it from its notch above the fire. She emptied the last of the loaves onto the table, piled the next week’s sticks in the bread oven, then closed the latch and removed her apron—brushing the flour from her spare, red hands.
“Well,” said Idris, through the boards of the ceiling. “If it’s not Michael Evans.”
Etty froze near the end of the hall, on the mat between the thin, grey windows.
“Good evening, Idris.” Her father’s voice was low and hesitant. “I didn’t…Well—”
“What are you upon, boy?”
“I was…hoping to see my wife, I was.”
“In your cups, is it?”
“I have stopped all that, Idris.”
“Oh?”
“Six year now. I’ve not had a drop.”
Second cousins as the two of them were, Etty could see some trace of her husband in her father’s face—in his shelving eyebrows, in the verticality of his flushed, heavy cheeks, which had fallen into jowls in the seventeen years since she had last seen him close to. In her old, patched skirt and the lumpish cardigan she had knitted in the winter, she stood on the step beneath the open window where Idris was keeping his invalid’s vigil, his electric torch on her father’s head. His hair had retreated to a red-grey arch.
“Hello, Etty girl…” he said.
He approached the bridge through the darkening drizzle, carrying a pair of cardboard boxes.
“And what do you want?”
“I…wanted to see you, girl. You and your mother. I brung presents for the both of you.”
“You’ll get from here if you know what’s good for you!”
“Please, Etty.” He held one of the boxes between his knees, opened the other and held up a dress—low-cut, red with a black polka dot. It spread from the belt and shone in the cone of the torchlight. “I did ask Oliver what he thought you would like. I…I seen him at the station, down in Aberedw. It was me found him. It is not his fault…It is your size, I think, but I can always have it changed?”
“And just what the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
Etty’s voice had cracked in spite of her efforts. She turned her head to conceal her eyes, and at the top of the yard she saw her mother: her face like tallow even in the twilight, her walking sticks like additional legs. She was staring back down the slope towards them, tiny-looking beside her grandson and the towering trees that surrounded the churchyard—the knots of their rookery black against the louring sky.
CROSSING THE TACK field on Saturday morning, three days later, Oliver could see a line beside him, extending through the dew all the way to the riverbank: a seam in the air where the light was thin and rainbows blinked and went out of being. It stopped when he stopped, lying motionless as the dogs at his feet, forty-five degrees precisely off his shadow, but the moment he moved it was dancing again—teeming at the far edge of his vision.
It had occurred to Oliver more than once that if Philip was looking for his grand, golden land he had no need to travel further than Llyswen: the tack, where the yearlings had their winter grazing. The house at the Dderw was palatial, pink enough to be bejewelled. The earth was, indeed, red where it was ploughed, and in places, in the banks of the Wye’s first meander, you could see its depths, the layers that made the place: not the frail grey shale of Rhyscog but half-inch on half-inch of glorious soil with, far beneath, a firm red sandstone, like the bridge across the flem at the Funnon: the long, old stone which Idris had unearthed once on Llanbedr Hill. Oliver had been to his Geography lessons. He knew about flooding and silt deposition, about river cliffs and slip-off slopes, but the farming he knew was the farming of the hills and this abundance made his eyes swim.
“Get away by, Jess!” he called. “Go round, Blackie! Bring them on now! Bring them on!”
The grass in the valley was greener, brighter. Already the trees were embracing spring: the wych elms were matted with red-purple blossom and the sallies were so thick with yellow-green pussies that from a distance they seemed to be leaves. As he closed the gate and followed the sheep out of their field, back over the railway embankment, he saw cowslips, sheep’s sorrel and, among the blackened patches where the sparks from the train had caught, a bulbous flower with sprawling yellow petals, which he did not know and picked and stowed in his pocket.
The railway bridge was grand and ancient: a box of girders that stretched across the river to the bramble-tied cliff and the sun-glinting windows of the school and the houses of Boughrood. Pausing again at the top of the embankment, Oliver watched the sheep crowding into the next field, then whistled at the dogs to lie down. He trod carefully from tie to tie, above the few loose plates not stolen by the wind, and once he could see the water beneath him he straddled one of the glistening rails and let his legs swing loose in the air. His grandfather, by now, would have taken his grandmother off on her day-trip. Where that might lead, what it all might mean, he could hardly bear to think. Its uncertainty hung in him, cold and tremulous. He had three Navy Cut left in his packet. He balanced with his boots as he struck a match, smoking, watching the rocks and the currents until the blood in his ears became so loud that he was forced to close his eyes.
“LLANGODEE,” SAID IDRIS. “Black House. Gwarallt. Gilfach. Blaenhow…Cloggau?” He lifted his hand. “Cloggau.”
He turned to yet another list of farms, with their earmarks cut from the page beside them so that its edge resembled lace. Many of the places he had never even seen—farms out for Eardisley, Rhayader and Kington—but for decades he had been watching their stock, recording here and in the books on the counterpane these hundreds of minutely different slits and notches, the names of sales, buyers and lot numbers. This was the knowledge that allowed you to survive, not the doddle you were told in a classroom. Had he wished, he could have traced the bloodline of almost any sheep within fifteen miles, as like as not through forty generations.
“Fforest Farm. Graig-yr-onen…Vron.”
With his right leg in plaster, sloping to the ceiling, Idris had to struggle to twist himself sideways, to open the window with the hook of his crook and peer down into the yard. Albert he could see quite plainly from his pillow, sowing the oats in the Sideland Field now that the frost and the old moon were gone, but to see Ethel in the pen by the barn took all of the muscles in his stomach. There she was with a drooling ewe, making an incision in the short head wool, holding the syringe with a nurse’s care to draw out the tapeworm and its bladder of eggs.
He had warned her against that beethy hay.
With a sigh Idris fell back onto the bed and looked at the wall above him, its flower-tangled paper, the verse from Galatians embroidered by his mother—fruit trees following its wandering border. In the yard his wife was singing softly; she must have completed the operation. It was a song he remembered clearly from the wireless, back in the war when he still lived alone: something about swallows and choirs and mission bells, which was, in truth, better suited to her voice than the stridency of hymns. Perhaps, he found himself admitting, it would have suited him better as well. The recording he remembered was performed by a quartet, with the lead a fine, slightly quavering tenor, and although Ethel was singing almost to herself she gave the song that same precision and restraint—the delicacy and lightness she brought to the piano and the organ. As she passed beneath the window he murmured himself the long, minor notes of the backing chorus, pausing when she paused, following her timing, until she faded with the corner of the barn and he picked up the book and turned another page.
“Stowe,” he said. “Ton Farm. Brilley Court.”
THERE WERE SKYLARKS, invisible in the bare, blue air, their wild songs tumbling in conflicting time. There were buzzards flirting, spiralling in the sunlight, and humming cars on the striped main road, which Oliver had been annoying for the long two miles between the bridges at Llanstephan and Erwood. From Glannau Pool, the sheep pressed on through the heather of Llanbedr Hill and, crossing the track from Troesyglowty to Llanbwchllyn Lake, passed the grave of Twm Tobacco: a highwayman, so the story went, who had been hung, drawn and quartered for murdering a farmer, then buried at these crossroads, since none of the local churches would have him. If Oliver had learnt from his mother the birds and animals, the plants and trees, then Idris had at least taught him the places—if only with a word or phrase. He had shown him, by example, that you should always leave a pebble here. Oliver dug one out of his pocket, and stood by the grave for a moment or two, his hand on his chest, while the dogs coused on towards the crumbling cliffs—Garreg Lwyd and Craig-y-Fuddal—where a cousin for Maureen showed his belly to the sky and righted with a satisfied honk.
Yearlings as they were, the sheep knew their patch of the common. They had been here as lambs, the previous summer, and they started to hurry as they sensed its proximity—spilling over the wether-shorn contours, past occasional wind-shaped hawthorns, until they came to the fences for the Island and began to disperse among the quarries.
“Go back! Go back! Go back!” called a grouse, rising red out of the heather.
Oliver sat against the fence of the New Field and ate his bait, flicking a crust or two to the dogs, which returned, low and wagging, seeking out his hand with their noses. There were Funnon sheep grazing the new grass at the Welfrey. In the valley Albert was working his way across the Sideland Field, the hopper on his shoulder, throwing out arc after arc of grain—as ragged as the bwgan in its old hat and coat, which did nothing discernible to scare off the crows. At Cwmpiban a brown Ford Popular was parked in the yard, by the front door of the house. Mervyn was ploughing a field that, to Oliver’s knowledge, he and his father had never ploughed before—the sunlight bright on his big, bald head and the long green bonnet of his tractor. He remembered Griffin’s clecking at the chapel. As he watched, he saw Ruth appear with a basket and follow the grass around the lines of the hedgerows until the two of them met among the furrows.
ONCE, AT THE age of five or six, Etty had crept to the privy at Erwood School. The rules among the children were as rigid as the hierarchy. To use the cabs, as they called them, for more than a wee was unthinkable, and yet, without any particular need, she had sat herself on that chill wooden seat—so tense, so alert to voices or footsteps, that she barely allowed herself to breathe. She had that feeling now as she stood in the kitchen, pulled down her skirt, unbuttoned her blouse then peeled off her slip and even her bra and her drawers. The draught from the larder passed over her shoulders, the ingress of her back, her buttocks and close-held legs. The fire mapped her downturned face, her breasts, her stomach rounded only by children, the red hair at the join of her thighs. Although her mother and her son were away, she was trembling as she opened the box—counting to ten once, and again, before she pulled the dress over her head and felt its cool silk arrange itself around her.
“Ethel!” Idris called from the bedroom. “Ethel! How about some dinner, woman?”
Etty heard the rustle as she moved her hips. She looked at the straps on her thin, freckled shoulders and was pleased to see a groove just emerging from the neckline, which, by closing the belt, she was able almost to double in length. She thought about fetching her Sunday heels, which Idris had bought her along with her dress, one improbable day in Builth Wells, but better bare feet than to make any sound. Opening her drawer in the bread-and-cheese cupboard, she dug beneath the books and the photographs, took out the dog tag and tied it round her neck. Then, noiselessly, she glided down the hall to the parlour and stood before the panes of the tall sash window. In the yard there were goslings and filing kittens. Chicks were scurrying after their mothers, yellow in the full, warm sunshine. Etty felt the hardness of her feet and her fingers, the scrawling, uncomfortable veins in her calves, but still, in the reflection, it was a girl she saw: full-haired, straight-backed, with the name of a soldier hanging at her throat as if the father of her son might suddenly appear, begging pardon for these seventeen years.
THE VW BEETLE had not long returned when a candle appeared in the window of the church—squeezed between the trunks of the sycamores, faint beneath the waxing moon. In the kitchen Oliver completed a long-division exercise, checked his calculations and added it to the pile to be sent to his teachers. He set the next one in the space on the table, but the meaning of the numbers was gone. Years must have passed since his grandmother had last used this signal. There had been a time, when the two of them were allies, when it was usual for him to creep out of the back door and huddle together with her in a blanket. Now, he had been working since six that morning. He was too worn out to go hiding from Idris, and he waited only for Maureen to scale his arm, clicking her beak when she reached his shoulder, before he clumped his way down the hall to the yard and climbed towards the Bryngwyn track—the torch in the window throwing a shadow in front of them.
“How do, Nana?” he said. “Grandad?”
With only the candle, deep in the socket of the window, the half-ruined church was almost as dark as the churchyard. The cross made an elongated shape on the altar, but the bulk of the pews showed only their backs, and the door of the vestry where the bats went to roost was lost in the blackness of its wall.
His grandparents were hunched at the front—each confirming the age of the other.
“How are you, Oliver?” asked his grandfather.
“Where’d you two go, then?” Oliver sat down across the aisle, trying to force some cheer into his voice.
“Llangorse Lake,” said Molly.
“Is it?”
“We hired a boat…We’d go there a lot, see? Me and Michael.”
“I’ll have seen you from the hill.”
“Keeping up a fair old pace, we were. Blink and you’d miss us!” She smiled momentarily.
“We was wanting to talk to you, boy,” said his grandfather.
“What’s going on, Olly? Are you working here again next week?”
“Well. I expect.”
“What does Etty say?”
“Not a lot she can say, is there?”
“Olly…” Molly looked past the collars of her new fur coat at the bats’ lozenge droppings and the grass and nettles that were sprouting between the flagstones. She watched Maureen pace on the back of Oliver’s pew, then lifted her eyes to his face. “Things has changed, they have. The two of us, we’ve been talking today and, well, the way I sees it it’s been a good long while since I was any sort of use round here. A burden I’ve become, that’s the honest truth—”
Suddenly the two of them were talking at once.
“I’ve been bad on you, boy,” said his grandfather. “I know I have. You and your mother and your grandmother, all of you—”
“You do have a choice, see?”
“Two spare bedrooms there are at the station. You can have your pick. There’s a telephone, and running water, and more coal than you’d know what to do with.”
“You could hop out of bed and straight onto the eight o’clock. You could be at school Monday, easy as that. And you could go on, like, if you wanted. Do your A-levels…”
“Well!” said Oliver.
“You don’t have to decide now.” Molly ran her fingers up one of her sticks.
“Have you spoken to Mam, have you?”
“She won’t have it from us, boy. Perhaps you…Well…”
Oliver turned and leant on his knees, looking past the light-filled cavity of the window to the bare oak body of the altar. There were dull green lines on the wall behind it, reaching down from the cracks in the roof to grow into moss towards the floor. There were memorials among the flagstones, almost illegible from centuries of feet. When he tipped back his head he saw stars in clusters and the moon on the edges of the broken slates.
“Well,” he said. “I cannot leave her on her own, like, can I?”
EVEN AFTER A decade of growth, there remained in the outline of Pentre Wood the long, squint-backed shapes of those terrible snowdrifts where the few starving rabbits that had made it through rationing had gone hopping and creeping, nibbling the bark from the exposed branches. As Oliver left the lychgate for the Bryngwyn track, he remembered their shrivelled, picked-clean bodies revealed by the last of the melting snow. He remembered the sheep that had hung from the trees: fleeces empty of all but their skeletons and the foetal skeletons of their lambs.
“Boy!” shouted Idris.
“Yes, boss?” He climbed into the yard.
“What are you upon, you blasted pwntrel? I opens my window and the first thing I hears…”
Once Oliver noticed the keening sheep, he could not believe that he had not heard it before. His mind, it seemed, was in disarray. Thin above the valley, there was the cry of the barn owl in the Oak Piece; the dogs were baying from the Pant to Cwmpiban, joined in moments by Blackie and Jess. Still, under any usual circumstances, the noise of the ewe might have roused him even from his sleep. Fetching the stable lamp from its shelf, he set off into the Banky Piece with Maureen’s feet spread wide on his shoulder and Idris’s torchlight skidding through the grass. A few lambs ran into the shelter of their mothers, burying themselves with flickering tails. A couple of them fell in behind him, their voices raised, as if in accusation. When he came to the brook he lifted the lantern to throw its ring across the chunnering water. He jumped and landed on the muddy pebble beach at the head of the wash-pool, where the ewe was tucked among the flood-striped roots and the long, limp catkins of the alders. In her lee was a lamb in an afterbirth slick—its eyes red pits, its chin so bloody that it might have been feasting on flesh. It fell and managed to stand again. It opened its jaws in a voiceless gargle as Oliver grabbed it by the hind legs and climbed the bank to swing it hard against a rock.
The twitching stopped. The lamb hung still, dribbling blood into the hoof-pocked grass. There was nothing, Oliver knew, that he could have done—the crow would have been here some hours earlier, if it had not been a raven, which he tried not to think about—but it always went bad on him, killing a creature. Laying down the body, he felt in his pocket for the last of his grandfather’s cigarettes. He stood among the trees at the foot of the Panneys, trying to conjure up an image of Amy, while the first sheep to yean, on the hillside before him, watched him with the lantern in their eyes. From here, looking eastwards, he could see no trace of the dingle between Cefn Wylfre and Llanbedr Hill. The hills formed a single, moon-trimmed blackness—as if they had joined. As if they had sealed the valley.
IT WAS A wonder, really, how the procedures came back. Moving the washstand to the side of the bed, Etty folded the flannel round her hand and dipped it in the basin. She rubbed up a lather on the carbolic soap and turned to her husband, who was watching her warily, as the soldiers would, from the white towel that covered the pillows and the bolster.
“I shall wash myself,” he repeated.
“You will just get the bed wet.”
She started with his face, working outwards from his eyes to the grey hair slewing over his head. She washed round his ears and continued down his neck, with each stroke using a different part of the flannel, and once she had passed the nub of his larynx she pulled tight the strop on the window catch and started to sharpen the razor. By the door of the barn her father’s car fired and spluttered into life. Its headlamps strafed her face as it turned. For a moment both she and Idris listened to the dwindling engine, and listened for the clatter of the front door latch, then she worried the brush in the shaving soap and painted his cheeks and his chin.
Idris muttered but did not dare to move. He watched Etty sideways as she wiped down the blade, untied the rope from the foot of the bed and fed it through the pulley until his plastered leg was flat on the blanket.
“Oh, he itches!” he said. “Oh, dank me!”
In a mere five days, the sinew of his body had started to soften. As she helped him to sit, to move the towel, a fold appeared among the stone-hard ripples of his belly. There was the slightest slack to the skin of his arm, a little give to the muscles of his chest, where the bullet scar shone white beneath the clavicle.
“No,” said Etty, firmly.
“Now—”
“No.”
“You’re my wife, you are!”
“Idris,” she snapped. She did not look at the swelling in his drawers. “I have not slept more than three hours a night all week. I’m the nurse, the cook, the cleaner and the blasted farmer. I’m damned if I’m going to do that as well!” She took his shoulder roughly and rolled him on his side. “Now then. Oliver. Next week.”
“It is lambing, woman, for dank’s sake!”
“We will be done by the weekend as you know full well.”
“The beasts is kindling. The Sideland wants rolling. It is high time the boy paid his way…He can go to his exams. I said to you.”
Etty soaped the flannel for the nape of his neck, making quick, broad sweeps across his back and the pale, tangled place where the bullet had left.
“If you want a rag,” she said, “there is one on the chair, but I’d be glad if you would wait until I’m gone.”
“FED UP WITH SLAVING IN AN OLD-FASHIONED KITCHEN?”
“Payments made to Radnorshire for the financial year ended 31st March, 1956, were £15,440 15s.”
“Out with the….OLD. In with the….NEW.”
“Sixteen-years-old Oliver Hamer (son of Mr. and Mrs. Idris Hamer, Funnon Farm, Rhyscog) still continues to be very successful in the Three Counties Boxing Tournament. A pupil at the Builth Wells Grammar School, he was the winner in his age group in the recent Scott-Paine Boxing Tournament, and later won his fight against the Worcester Amateur Boxing Club. He is now middle-weight champion of Hereford and holds the Builth Shield for the middle-weight class.”
The boy in the photograph wore shorts and a vest. There was a fix to his eyes, a vigour to his proud, strong face. His fists were brought up close to his chest, revealing shadows in his bicep muscles. For a minute or more Etty looked at her son, then she set down the paper and, pulling on her oven gloves, lifted the fountain from its notch above the fire, her boots spread squarely, her thin arms trembling. She sat it on the stool, turned the tap to fill the teapot and ran the rest into the long zinc bath.
The clocks continued.
The bull at Cwmpiban proclaimed his virility.
Finally Oliver arrived in the hall, his hobnails hollow on the flagstones. He ducked for the lintel of the kitchen door, his raven sitting low on his shoulder, having learnt the new dangers of perching on his head. He slumped among his revision at the table, pale as she had seen him, the oil lamp playing on his dishevelled hair.
“You all right, Olly?” she asked.
“Lost a lamb,” he said.
“It happens.” She put her hands on the back of his chair. “Is Mam—”
“She’s gone.”
It seemed extraordinary suddenly that Etty was able to stand at all, with just two legs and so much to carry. The sensation that came over her was such an unholy tangle that she could hardly tell her exhaustion from her relief from her old, redoubling anger. She and Molly had long ago agreed. There was no going back. Oliver was one thing; he had not been there. He had known her father only cowed and sober. But her mother, she had seen him throw Etty out of her home and hurl her bag down the platform after her. He had thrown Molly out too when she tried to stand up to him, and cursed her to hell as he did it.
She had trusted her to keep her word.
“Do you…want the bath, do you?” she managed.
“I’m…You go first, Mam. Dunna worry.”
“I’ll just fetch your father his tea, then.”
It was the first time Etty had used the word in years. Somewhere in her son’s transformation into this man in scale, it had fallen away from them, like Santa Claus.
“Oh,” said Oliver, and reached in his pocket. He straightened the petals of an Oxford ragwort, heaved himself back onto his feet and slipped its stalk into a buttonhole of her cardigan. “I found her by the railway. New one on me, she is. I did think you might like her.”