OLIVER REMAINED WITH his elbows on the bar top, spinning a shilling whose sphere resolved into the head of Elizabeth II. He followed the rays of the quarter-cut oak, golden beneath the beer mats and the smoke-streaming ashtrays, and once Lewis had emptied the half-drunk glasses into the barrel and returned to his place with a foaming jug, he accepted a refill and slid him the coin.
“Traitors!” shouted the boys in the door.
“I should never have been a farmer,” said Griffin. “I hates fucking sheep, I do.”
“Gran?” said Oliver. “Jimmy?”
“You’re a good man, Olly,” said Granville, his big rings clinking as he passed him his glass. “So. What’s all this traitor business, then?”
There were only men in the Awlman’s Arms. No local woman would ever have been seen here, and those women from off who came peering through the door every so often would rarely last a glance across the smoke-coloured walls, the soot-clouded oil lamps and Locke on his stool looking back at them skute. Besides the demolition gang, who had come by with Oliver to flog a few railway ties, everyone was a regular: the old men by the fire with their dominoes and leather leggings, the husbands and fathers, their caps tipped back on their neat-cropped hair, the various lads of Oliver’s age with hair to the collar, snug-fitting trousers and shirts for the most part open at the neck. They were men from the hills, from Penblaenmilo and Pentremoel, three months of snow still weighing on their shoulders as they watched the Crickadarn boys enter the door, press between the clustered tables, push old Adam Prosser aside at the bar and stand in formation—three abreast and four in the rear.
“Cider!” said their leader, facing down the landlord.
“Two and four,” said Lewis.
“Going to serve we, is it?”
“Going to pay me, is it?” He spread his hairy forearms.
The man took a handful of pennies from his pocket and scattered them tinkling over the flagstones. He looked back at Lewis, who did not move.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Who’s your best boy, then?”
Oliver took a draught of beer, wiped his mouth and lowered his eyes to meet the man’s gaze, working his rings slowly from his fingers. His heart was running but his mind was transparent, perfectly still. He blinked periodically, and did not speak, and when the man grinned and looked back at his friends he knew already he would win.
“How are you, boy?” he asked, at last.
“So who the fuck are you, then?”
“I’m the no-good devil what’s coming to you.”
“Oh? Fancy your chances, do you?”
“I dunna fancy yours.”
“What the fuck is that tie?” The man gave a laugh, and his friends laughed around him.
Oliver tightened the scarlet knot and patted down the vee of his waistcoat. “You hanna heard of fashion in Crickadarn, I suppose?”
“Wop fashion, is it?”
“Do you wanna say that again, do you?”
It was Oliver’s calculation that the man would swing quickly. He saw the squat of his jaw, the strata of his forehead, his thinning brown hair. He kept his feet parted, the toes of his boots alone on the flagstones, and when the man dropped his eyes a single degree he slipped a step backwards so that the ball of his fist went sighing through the smoke before his face. A fresh jibe rose in the pool of Oliver’s mind. He parted his lips, but already the man’s left was leaving his side and he allowed them to turn into a smile. Griffin’s bar stool was about two feet behind him. The next punch came in a blizzard of movement, skimming his chin with a bloom of colour, and he took his step to dodge another, then threw his right into the man’s uncovered belly—sending him grunting to the end of his reach.
The pub by now was in uproar. Another fight was squaring up next to the quoits. There was pwning on the tables, the crash as a glass met the floor.
“Lamp him, Olly!”
“Lay to him, boy!”
It was a fact of chopping wood that if you aimed your axe not for the top of a log, nor even for the bottom, but for the foot of the block—the ground itself—then with no great effort you could split almost anything you met. The man had spirit, Oliver would give him that. He was long-armed, deep-chested, quick enough almost to be good. He even appeared to be thinking now, his fists up, checking the space, moving to trap him against the bar, so Oliver waited one more moment before he sprang himself with a right like the first, to wind, to disorientate, then, as the man’s arms came down, he brought his left on the full through the levels of smoke now weaving and tangling over the ashtrays, and this time he aimed for the back of the man’s head and heard the pipe-stem crack of the bones in his nose even through the voices and the stool that splintered as he fell.
“HO! HO-EP!”
Etty swung her plant against the nearest flank and sent the beasts panicking onto the Bryngwyn track—keeping their order as they turned back towards her, close against the oval wall of the churchyard where the snow lay hunched after thirteen weeks and yet another night of rain. They were a wretched lot, for all of the fodder that Oliver had bought them—their faces as dull as the house had become, their haunches making shadows on their red-brown coats. To the rasp of the rooks and the annual crop of ravens, which was one price of having Maureen for a pet, she worked her way along the bank of the prill, beneath the overhanging sycamores, whose pink-shelled buds were bursting on infant leaves and flowers. She came to Hendy and Little Hergest, the herd’s contending queens, their fan-eared princes beside them in the mud, then she looked back at Panda, which was a step apart from the others, her calf on the outside, and although she could see no fault in her breathing, no swellings, no sign of lameness, still she felt a conviction framing in her belly and she moved herself carefully into that space, bringing pressure on the cow while the rest backed anxiously home towards the yard.
“Come in, Jess!” she called. “Come in!”
As the dog closed the movement, Panda and her calf sheered away and galloped up the track, past the end of the churchyard. Etty followed, her gumboots slapping, dragging the gate for the Funnon Field open and propping it on the hanging post to seal the way back. She looked again at the pacing animal, the hang of her horns, the black round her eyes, and this time caught a limp in her hind off leg.
If the spring was due, it was yet to arrive. The sunlight leaking from the bloated clouds still lay almost level with the fields across the valley, snow in the shadows of the contours and the hedgerows. The harrier was falling over Llanbedr Hill, vanishing behind the horizon to rise again in a tumult of silver, as if bouncing on a hidden trampoline, but despite this, despite the bright, sliding whistle of a blackbird and the efforts of the cattle and the rooks, the farm was quiet. The half of their flock that had made it through the winter were squeezed with their few dozen lambs in the Bottom Field and the Middle Ddole. Albert was plodding across the Sideland Field, trailed by crows, scattering grain with every other step: a sight so familiar after twenty-three years that Etty could hardly remember him otherwise. Idris was guiding Blaze around the Long Field, rolling the soil where he had stood in the snow to ward off the helicopter with its bales from the government.
The hills, he had said, must have their rent.
“Bring them on, Nell!” Etty whistled. “That’s it, Jess! Good girl! Bring them on now!”
The cattle bunched, revolving in confusion, but Etty called to them lightly, tapping her stick to get their attention. With the others behind them, Hendy and Little Hergest edged cautiously towards her, then suddenly poured into the Funnon Field, their weight in the wet ground, spreading among the peeping cowslips, the cinquefoil and the domed ant heaps with their red crowns of sheep’s sorrel, capering absurdly, tossing their horns as it dawned on them that their six months’ imprisonment was over.
IT WAS OLIVER alone who wore sunglasses cutting—seventy feet above the Wye at Boughrood, his shadow flexing on the churning water. They had goggles, of course—regulation issue from the Western Contractors—but if he was going to work all day in full view of the school, the post office and the houses among the sallies and oak trees on the river cliff, then he would do so with his hair in order, three buttons open at the neck of his shirt, his eyes more fashionably concealed. Boughrood Bridge was a cage of steel: four enormous, two-hundred-foot girders, one for each corner, and a mesh of diagonals in between. It was as big a demolition job as Oliver had known. Straddling one of the topmost girders, he opened the regulators, checked the gauges and looked across this next pair of braces at his mate, Jimmy Owen, who was perched with his bottles on the opposite side, scowling past his heavy leather boots. Beneath them, to the north, a couple of mooching local boys, Jerry Miles and Edward Hughes, were sitting on the frame where the rails had lain, swinging their legs and spitting at the flood-matted islands.
“I didna mean to say no harm, mister,” one of them said.
“Mister, can we come up there, can we?”
“Let ’em be, Jimmy,” called Joshua, the harried-looking foreman, appearing next to the train on the bridge-end. “I’ll keep an eye on ’em.”
“They’re all right, boy,” said Oliver. “Just getting in on a bit of the action.”
“Well…” Jimmy shrugged. He always preferred not to make the decisions. “It is your manor, I suppose.”
“On we go, then.” Oliver lit the acetylene with his cigarette, flicked away the butt and turned to the brace, waiting for the edge of the steel to melt before he hit the oxygen and started to cut.
Boys had been pothering them for six months now: birds to their plough as they worked their way south, following the last down-train from Moat Lane, through Llanidloes and Pant-y-Dwr, fitting the braking chains to hoist up the rails, tossing the ties about like matchsticks. They were a famous team, or so they had heard: Scotch and Paddies, work-bitten Midlanders and hard-raised farm boys who had never seen such money in their lives; £4–10 a day they were earning, with time and a half Saturdays, and double time Sundays, and all the cash they could count for the ties they sold to the farmers for gateposts. They had bought themselves beer and suits and jewellery. They had fitted the snowplough and worked through the winter, with a pair of ghosters every week—Monday to Tuesday, Wednesday to Thursday—and each of those was thirty-four hours, with no more rest than the odd cup of tea.
The river lay straight beyond the meander, narrowing away between flower-shaded oaks towards the dark, falling nose of the Twmpa. The clouds were divided by the new electric cables, which had appeared almost everywhere over the past year and, to judge by the angler near Boughrood Vicarage, had not as yet upset the salmon—whatever the calamitous predictions. Across the valley the blossom of the pears and cherries shone in the muted sunlight. Buds like candle flames coloured the beech trees. A swallow fled beneath the bridge with insect movements as Oliver’s torch left the second brace and the steel cross fell the height of a train to chime and leap on the beams.
THERE WAS STILL a drab of snow on the lane up to Painscastle, and with Oliver, Joseph and Granville on the bench and the four Hay lassies shrieking in the back, Jimmy had to back up twice and gun the little A40 van to make the pitch by the track to Trevyrlod. With the clutch in the air and the chassis shaking like a half-drowned dog, they crept across the cattle grid—the headlamps grazing the few Clun lambs in the Ffermwen fields and the cars and tractors spread along the verges. They dawdled, looking for somewhere to park, then found a space by the telephone box, where the engine expired into the night.
“I lost my shoe!” called Angie.
“All right, lad, you can get off me now.”
“I dunna think he wants to, Gran.”
“Where’s that bloody hipflask?”
“Olly, open the bloody door, would you? We cannot breathe in here!”
She was a tidy piece, was Angie Lloyd—not pretty, perhaps, with her keening nose and that fold of flesh beneath her chin, but high-hipped and big-breasted in a way that mattered. She was not shy either, or so went the rumours. If boys wore raddle the same as tups, she might have been bright red from her head to her feet. She clung to Oliver’s arm as the eight of them paraded down the lane, pressing her rigid sweater to his side, and in the lee of the castle, in the cigarette-spotted darkness, with the deep notes thumping in the village hall and the week’s pay fat in the pocket of his trousers, he laughed and locked an arm around her shoulders.
Painscastle always gave the wildest dances. Tony Brown would drag his black leather jacket, his record player and tractor batteries to every hall from Gwenddwr to Gladestry, but most of these places had some inclination to order. In Painscastle, there was barely a farmer not locked into some ancestral war. To have assembled any kind of peacekeeping force could have taken a lifetime of negotiations, and since the entire dance had been known to turn against them, even the police could be coaxed out of Hay by nothing less than a riot. Beneath the ball of mirrors whose shafts of light fanned through the smoke, boys were gathered in groups, by village, with cigarettes and pints from the pub—eyeing one another, eyeing the girls in their Saturday skirts who had come with their brothers and kept to the back in villages of their own. There was a story probably all of them knew, if they couldn’t have given the names or the details. Years before, some girl from the Skreen had been taking a dip in the lake at Llanbwchllyn when the lord from Painscastle came by on his horse and decided he liked what he saw. He had locked her away up here in the castle, which must have been good stone back then, not merely a mound with a sheep-haunted ditch, and when the word got out every man with an axe or a hay knife had come charging up the valleys from Llanshiver and Court Evan Gwynne, and the castles at Clifford and Hay. For several weeks they had laid the place siege until, in the end, an army showed up and put the whole lot of them to the sword. Three thousand men were supposed to have died. The Bachawy had run crimson and the blood would not mingle, even with the Wye, so the news of the battle passed all the way to the sea.
Hell, thought Oliver, as he bent for the door, but those boys had wound things up.
ETTY REMOVED HER spectacles, rubbed her aching eyes with hard-tipped fingers and began to assemble the accounts and the tax forms, the bank statements and her own financial projections, and return them to their neatly marked files. She stacked them in turn at the end of the kitchen table, where the teapot shivered on the cloth.
“Idris,” she said. “They will not have one more penny on the mortgage.”
“He shall not have the Welfrey!” Idris repeated.
“Then lease it, at least! We had it for a song—”
“Now, look you here, woman—”
Etty hit the table and her fountain pen jumped.
“Idris,” she said. “You can attack me all you like and it will make no blasted difference. I am telling you the numbers, do you understand? There are forty-four lambs. There is no money in the bank. We made the payment this year only because Oliver has work. If it weren’t for him the two of us would be stuck in a council house, and that’s if we were lucky! He shall keep on working down to Three Cocks, which will pay us to restock, but it will not scratch the mortgage and it will not buy us a tractor and that old horse will not go another year. I shall ask the vet to see Panda in the morning, but God help us if the foul has reached the other beasts…”
Idris stood above her, his long face sheer, his short breaths groaning deep in his chest. For once he said nothing, watching her take up the pile of files as if she might suddenly remember some forgotten balance sheet, some overlooked grant form he had only to sign and return. He looked, as she left them in the bread-and-cheese cupboard, as dry, as wizened as the mistletoe drooping from its thick black beam. The oil lamp failed to find his eyes. It traced the white-grey hairs that stretched between his ears—glimpses of scalp where they had slipped out of place.
It was so thick with shadows, the Funnon. The walls of the station, as Etty recalled them, had all been smooth: the rooms one level of orderly rectangles. Here there were corners and crevices everywhere; the walls bulged and cupped beneath the discoloured whitewash. No wonder the house was such a devil to keep clean. At the overlapping chimes of half past nine, she wound both clocks and blew out the lamp—the flame that remained on the mantelpiece casting long shapes over the flagstones. Her hand was huge on her husband’s back as they climbed the stairs, as they would every night, and in the bedroom she set down the candle on the dressing table, whose mirrors threw rhomboids of light across the wallpaper, the moralizing samplers and the patch of the ceiling where the rain would drip and pop in the ewer. In six years Etty had not seen her mother. She did not see her son for weeks at a stretch. As usual, she and Idris undressed back to back, pulling on a nightdress and a nightshirt respectively: stiff, white garments that fell onto their upturned feet as they knelt together at the side of the bed. Beside them, in the floorboards, were the marks of knees where Oliver was not.
A fox barked its loneliness high on Cefn Wylfre.
ANGIE LED OLIVER to a tree by a vein of a stream where the blue lights blinked in the thin, fanning branches and willow gullies dusted his spilling hair. With the sogginess of the ground, her heels kept sinking so that her eyes came barely to the neck of his waistcoat, and as she took a step towards him she stumbled and laughed and grabbed for his hands—looking up at his broad, dark face, the swelling in his cheek that made him seem to smile, his teeth repeating the white of the moon that lay above the tump of the castle.
There were the ghosts of sheep in the fields around them. There was shouting in the village, the roar of a tractor. She allowed her breasts to compress on his belly, lifted her lips and, closing her eyes, saw distant, fluttering colours in the blackness. His smell was a musk, a rich allure. His heat was such that his clothes might have hidden a fire. She felt a pressure in the tightness of his trousers and touched its shape with her long, sharp nails.
“You’re going to have to kiss me first, you are,” she said.
Well, he was younger than she was, even if she had misled him on that little matter and her friends and her girdle would not tell him different. He was a boy from the hills, however exotic his appearance. At least he bent when she reached for his neck and brought his face towards her own, his hot breath coming almost every second. His tongue met hers and circled its tip. His hand left her shoulder and gathered her breast, which he almost contained in the splay of his fingers. Before he got any other ideas she worked on his belt and dug in his trousers until his penis was projecting towards her. She crouched unsteadily, holding his leg, balancing on her toes, and brought its stale-smelling head between her lips. And yet, when she looked back up at his face, it seemed to her that he had barely noticed—his eyes turned up to the net of the branches and the stars among the moon-framed clouds.
THERE WERE NO other horses in the stable at the chapel, although the place stank as ever of urine and hay—smells that Idris had always found soothing and held in his lungs before he climbed from the trap. He tethered Duke in his regular bay, unhackled the shafts and laid them on the ground. He collected his stick, then turned to the door, where Ethel was waiting among the few cars and tractors, in the dress she had worn these ten years gone—its blackness subsided like the colour of her hair, which now recalled sand more than fire. She had powdered her nose to conceal its redness. She had painted over the scoring round her eyes, but with the bones of her shoulders and the spareness of her waist he would not have taken her back to Watkins, the expensive tailor down in Builth Wells—even if he could have met the bill.
“Boss,” said Albert, who was standing on the path by the war memorial.
“I likes your scarf, Mrs. Hamer,” said his wife.
“Thank you, Dorothy.” Ethel twisted its corner. “Purse stitch, it is.”
“Purse stitch!”
Albert sighed and ran his eyes down the names.
Clouds were closing on the blueness of the dawn. Between the listing stones, the daffodils were the only note of colour: brilliant yellow or white with orange mouths. Swinging his stick with his shorter leg, Idris joined the line of worshippers who fed into the chapel, passed beneath the gallery and dispersed onto the pews and benches with long wooden gulfs and entire rows remaining empty. At the big seat he stood in his polished leather shoes and looked across the pew where he had once sat with his brothers to Ethel, to Ruth and the girls who were his great-nieces, and Philip’s son, Griffin—his shoulders bowed and his face worn thin by five months of humping hay to their top fields. Despite urgent meetings of the chapel committee, everybody else in the place had hair that was grey at the least.
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
Incrementally, over the past few years, Ethel had begun to depart from her organ scores. Idris had spoken to her about it, even made threats, but still, when the first verse of the first hymn was over, she allowed her right hand to trace out alternatives, her feet to draw phrases of such sudden complexity that he faltered, glancing at her upright back. Beside her, Nancy kept pumping the bellows. The congregation sang doggedly as ever. His wife seemed to think she could play what she liked. She seemed to think they were accompanying her. On his raised step beneath the tall windows, Idris stood as erect as he could manage, his hands at his sides since it helped with projection and he knew the whole hymn-book by heart. The trouble was, there was an invention to her deviations; they were by no means as arbitrary as he sometimes chose to think. Despite himself, he could not help listening, nor stifle his occasional replies. He hung onto notes until his breath almost failed him. He met her harmonies with harmonies of his own. For a full two lines in the final verse he was barely a precentor at all, but once again a soloist, facing his audience—performing a hymn composed as it left his lips.
“YOU BOYS, I’M telling you!” laughed Jimmy, who was sat across the bridge in his parka and his woollen hat. “You don’t just go to a dance, do you?”
“Well,” said Oliver. “There’s dancing and dancing.”
“Ever try the Twist, lad?”
It was a dull, cold Sunday. They had been working at Boughrood a full week now and most of the top run of braces was gone. The bridge lay open: a roofless skeleton with the wire rope spooling back towards the crane, hauling yet another cross-piece. Besides themselves, Granville and Joseph were cutting at the north end, weary, hunched above their work. The foreman was abusing the same pair of teenaged boys who had claimed their place midway across the span, pitching stones into the deep, fleet water, the brown foam tangling with the currents.
“Fucking kids!”
“They’re all right, gaffer.”
“Enough is enough! I told their bloody mothers…”
Oliver shivered. Even with his gloves and his thick tweed coat, the breeze kept finding its way to his skin and he was glad for once for the acetylene torch, which bloomed white behind his sunglasses. On the entire length of the railway line, in the snow and the darkness, this was the only part of the job that he had resented. It was a beautiful construction, Boughrood Bridge: all Herculean spars, diamonds of air and rivets as big as his fist. It was a hundred years old to the month, or so Joshua had told him; three hundred and twenty tons of steel. It could surely have been saved for some other purpose—if nothing else, to cut a mile out of the journey to the tack.
The crack was so loud and the fall so sudden that Oliver did not so much as cry out. He was propelled from his seat by a terrible force, the blaze of the torch passing over his legs as his back and his head collided with a girder that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He spun, and his belly met some other shelf, which drove the air clean out of his chest. For a second he fell, and then another, and then the river exploded around him and he was freezing, blinded, wildly alert. He threw out his hands and found some sort of beam, but his fingers were rigid from the previous night and his gloves began to slide across the rust. There was the height of the hills in the force of the water. He flailed his arms, attempting to swim. He felt himself turning and remembered his mother, then his back hit a rock and, swallowing, choking, he crawled across stones onto an island of stick-woven sallies.
Perhaps not even a minute had passed. On the bank, beyond an eddy running gently westwards, the angler from the vicarage had dropped his rod. Oliver managed to roll in the saplings. The bridge, he realized, had folded in half, buckled like a thing made out of wire, so that the sides splayed sideways and most of the bed had collapsed into the river. Jimmy was somehow clinging to his girder, his swinging torch still spouting fire. The foreman was gaping, frozen, by the crane. Among the blacks and silvers of the water, Oliver caught sight of a clump of hair and he blundered towards it, splashing and shouting, and grabbed Jerry Miles by another clutch of islands. He fought his way back into the shallows, where the angler took the boy from his arms.
Half of the village was already on the bridge-end. People were scrambling down the twisted beams, calling out to Jimmy and Granville and calling for Edward Hughes. Oliver waded through the starving eddy and climbed through the flotsam onto the path, but at the gieland the ground seemed to slide from his boots and he lay without struggling beneath a fern-sprouting willow, with the pink-white faces of lady’s smock bobbing and settling around him. When he wiped his face his glove streamed blood. Above him, in the tree, he could see what must have been small birds: one with a caterpillar, another warbling flurries of notes among the buds and the yellow-furred flowers.
FOR ALL THE times he had seen him in the fields, it must have been eleven years since Idris had last been face to face with his nephew. Albert had called him the spit of his mother—a heavy-timbered Cregrina girl Idris had eyed in passing when he was a lumper—but as he stood with his father in the door of the stable, the geese by the pond still acclaiming the gander and the sheepdogs joined in fury in the kennel, he looked to Idris like nothing so much as Ivor plucked and inflated to hideous dimensions. He had the same louring eyebrows, the quick-shifting eyes. He had a chest so broad that his arms were at angles and a neck like the neck of a beast.
He murmured to calm the cob and himself, running the curry-comb from his shoulder to his belly, working in circles to rise the dirt.
“How do, Idris?” said Ivor.
“Ivor.”
“You was singing very sweetly this morning, I do hear.”
“Oh?” Idris came to the hind leg, went easy on a scratch and stood back, checking for flaws in the gloss.
“So I do hear.” His brother cleared his throat and waited. “Well, boy, I know you shanna part with the Welfrey, and that’s fair enough, like. She is your place. I shanna say no more about it, but…Fact is, boy, the two of us, we is neither of us getting no younger, and I did come to thinking we should talk about the future.”
“Oh?” Idris repeated. He picked the hairs from the comb and turned to Blaze. “Well. It is dinner time for me, it is. I’ll have my food on the table, I expect.”
“Fact is, boy,” Ivor persisted, “the old world is changing. Them old places like the Welfrey—you canna live on them no more. In’t no farmer as can live on thirty acre, not on this ground, and Cwmpiban, well, she is seventy-six and that’s no size of farm neither, let’s be honest. Now, I dunna mean to call young Oliver. He is a regular lushington from what I hears, but fair’s fair, my own boys has done their bit of boying, and we done our bit and all—”
“Drinking,” said Idris, “is no joking matter.”
“Nor it is, nor it is. Don’t get me wrong. What you done, taking in the boy, it was an act of charity, I sees that now. Michael Evans’s father was a cousin for Mam, and if your own family goes throwing its girls on the blasted state, well, it is a sorry business, it is indeed. Young Oliver, he is a fair larper—you done the boy proud, like—but let’s face it now, he binna no Hamer. And the Funnon, she is a Hamer farm. She’s been a Hamer farm these seven generations, and more besides I shouldna wonder. You and I, well…I dunna like to get the law involved, no more than you do. You’ll say you’re the oldest—you’ve told me that plenty—and I’ll say by rights as a half of her is mine—”
“So you do think.”
“I hanna come to go back there, Idris.” Ivor lifted his hands. “It do hardly matter now, in any case. Fact is, one of these days, you and I, we shall be slipping along and the Funnon, she’ll be coming to one of my lads—that’s just the way of things, in’t it? And the way it seems to me, it would be a sight easier on all of us if we was rubbing along. Mervyn here, like, he is a good strong boy. With Oliver off on the railway and so forth, it would be no trouble on him to lend the odd hand, do a bit of work with the tractor perhaps, get to know the old place. Old Albert, he’ll be tight on seventy I doubt, and it has been an unkind winter. He’d be thankful for the help, I should imagine. And Mervyn, well, he is just next-door with Ruth and their two little girls…”
Beyond the watching dogs and the quarrelling rooks, the valley was quiet, as it had been for weeks. A ewe in the Bottom Field called to her lamb and at once fell silent, as if daunted by the noise. A dog at Cwmpiban was barking at its echo. Idris went easy on Blaze’s hock, inspected his work, then hung up the comb. He slung the harness over his shoulder and turned towards the door and the house, trying to ward off another bout of coughing, dragging the thick stable air between his lips. In the yard a drizzle was beginning to fall, shimmering in the miniature puddles of the hoof marks. As he passed the two men, one of the hens gave a sudden squawk, her chicks running to hide in her feathers, and Mervyn lifted his great, bald head, screwing up his eyes to scan the sky for the sparrowhawk.
IF THE RAILS had gone and no more than the impressions of the ties still jarred beneath the wheels of Oliver’s bicycle, then Erwood Station did not appear to have noticed. It sat as ever between the gaping river and the nose of the hill where the electric poles stood in silhouette. The flowerbeds were bright with geraniums and wallflowers. The pond in the down-platform sparkled with the drizzle, distorting the circling goldfish. Dismounting by the white gate for the car park, he dragged himself limping past the ticket office, with its rain-streaked advertisements for Van Houten’s Cocoa and seaside resorts where the sun seemed always to shine. He moved from the gas lamp to the station sign to the fence around the grand new plot of dahlias his grandmother had planted to supplement her pension, and knobbled at the door of the small, square house whose gutter ran level with his eyes.
“Olly…” Molly appeared on the doormat.
“It’s not what it looks, Nana.”
“Michael! Michael, get you here!”
His grandfather propped himself beneath his arm, wheezing as they stumbled down the hall to the sitting room, where the fire was glowing in its arch of tiles, between the scuttle and the stand of tools, and the wireless was chattering on the windowsill.
“Get the kettle on, Michael, don’t just stand there!”
“Edward Hughes,” said Oliver. He fell into an armchair.
“What’s that?”
“Edward Hughes. He’s dead, he is.”
His grandmother knew the boy, of course. She knew everybody, as she must have in the past: Edward’s parents and grandparents, their friends and neighbours. She even knew the demolition gang, who had come through here a fortnight earlier, Oliver among them, hoisting the rails aboard the train with displays of efficiency normally reserved for the management. She had had them sat in a line along the platform, drinking her tea and eating her cake.
Oliver saw the blood on his swaddled hands, then the patchwork upholstery, and attempted to rise.
“Covers’ll wash, boy…”
“We been up and down the bank the entire morning.” His voice sounded thin, almost child-like. “Right down to Glanwye. He never come up!”
“Whatever’s happened, love.” Molly sat down beside him with white, gathered eyebrows and started to unwrap the bandage round his head. “Whatever’s happened I’m sure it’s not your fault. I’m sure you were just doing what you were told.”
It all seemed so simple, life at the station. There were no fields, no animals, no hostile neighbours. There were net curtains patterning the view of the river. There were daffodils in a vase on the piano. There was a photograph on the mantelpiece of Oliver’s mother—a girl in a swimsuit on a sun-bleached beach—and another of himself on yellowing paper with his fists held tight to his chest.
Molly inhaled sharply, peering at his temple. “That is some kind of gash, boy,” she said. “Do you want for me to call an ambulance, do you?”
“There was one at the bridge, Nana. It was them patched me up.”
“I’ll say it wants stitches.”
“And they did…Can you do it, can you?”
“Olly, it in’t exactly embroidery.”
“I shall find you some clothes, lad,” said his grandfather, returning from the kitchen with a cup on the ledge of his belly.
Oliver waited for the iodine whose metal stink was filling the room. He clamped his teeth and closed his eyes until his grandmother tied a fresh dressing round his forehead, and he did not resist as, with thin, bent fingers, she worked on the buttons of his sodden shirt.
She glanced from his face to the chaos of his chest: the overlaid bruises in the shadowing hair, violet fading to yellowish green.
“Jesus, boy…” she said. “What the hell have you been doing to yourself?”
“I’m all bruises today, I am, Nana,” he said, and felt himself starting to cry.
AS ETTY LEFT the landing the door’s wedge of shadow gave way in front of her, sending the candle flame ducking and spitting. The door frame spread until the bedroom was lit—the shape of the four-poster shivering on the walls where the damp paper rippled and, in one place, looped back to the floor. She set the tray on the bedside chair, although she could see that Oliver was asleep, and she stood looking down at the extent of his body, his ankles protruding from the railway overalls beyond the end of the mattress. As the candle settled, the lip of the pillowcase made a shadow across the bruises in his cheek and the crown of a bandage round his pollard-like hair. He was at once a man who smelt of antiseptic and cigarettes, and her baby, afflicted by his size, by forces she had tried to control and could not. Had she the strength, she would have gathered him up and held him all night in her arms.
Keeping to the rug, where her footsteps were softer, Etty untied the knots on his steel-toed boots and set them together on the floorboards. She opened the chest in the cupboard above the stairs and, peeling off the newspaper, shook out a couple of mothball-stinking blankets, which she wrapped round his feet and lay over his shoulders. She hesitated in the moving light, the shadows alive again on the wallpaper. She watched him breathe, his one hand clenching inside its dressings, then she kissed him lightly on his unbruised cheek, picked up the cup and went to close the curtains.
There was condensation on the window: a dingle of drops at the foot of each pane. Etty pushed back the skin of the cocoa, which itself made a few pale streaks on the glass, and drank and looked past the white-peeling bars at the black-roofed barn, the hills and the retreating valley. The drizzle had passed. The clouds had parted and dwindled into scraps. A narrow moon stood almost overhead. The stars decked the sky with their ploughs, bulls and gods—shapes, as a girl, she had defined herself as a friend doing a cartwheel, a kite with a tail of glittering bows—then, all of a sudden, there were stars on the ground. There it was at last, the electric. With envy, with wonder, she watched the bare white lights, which multiplied as the minutes progressed and the car horns called like dogs between the farms, until every contour the length of the valley had a constellation of its own.