THE CRY WAS a fracture in the midsummer night: a new note in the music of the party, which sounded to Oliver less like songs than some machine wanting oil. He glanced across the cramped little sitting room, past the young men sprawling in the armchairs with leather sandals and skeiny beards, the women in T-shirts, draped on the men’s laps or cross-legged on the blim-pocked carpet. Had he known that Naomi’s friends would look like this, he would have thought twice before polishing his shoes, combing in his Brylcreem and choosing his waistcoat with the prancing deer on the left-hand panel. He would have thought twice about coming at all. The gabbling woman, or rather the girl, who had him pinned against a sheet-covered wall was wearing a deep-cut, velvet dress, but to her it seemed to be some kind of joke. Leather boots showed under its hem. Her face was made up almost like a clown.
“You…got to excuse me,” said Oliver, trying not to spit, since the ceiling forced him to lean above her. “I have a baby, see? Upstairs he is.”
“That waistcoat!” she exclaimed again.
Oliver was always able to hear Cefin. He could wake him with the slightest noise. Once, when Naomi had gone to see about her next year’s studies, taking the boy with her, Oliver had still woken regularly throughout the night and would have bet money that his son had woken too, in his basket, wherever he was.
He grappled his way towards the door, stepping over people and ashtrays, avoiding the light in its spherical shade, but he could not remember, he realized, how to get to the hall and arrived instead in the thin, dirty kitchen, where bodies were crowded on the lino and the sideboards and Naomi was leaning on the fridge, talking to a man in yellow-lensed glasses who might have been an old boyfriend for all that Oliver knew. She smiled when she saw him—her eyes black-rimmed, her jacket tight to contain her belly and make the most of her milk-heavy breasts—but he turned and then caught his head on the lintel, so that the people around him looked and winced.
The hall seemed narrower than he had remembered, although perhaps it was just these numberless people. It was a wonder that there was air enough to breathe. They sat in lines against either wall, their legs interlocked, their knees in ridges—some of them surely not half of his age. At least here he was able to stand upright, and with the staircase slanting high to his left he held onto the banisters as he stretched for each space, muttering apologies, awkward, conspicuous. One man looked up and caught his eye: a lecturer possibly, his hair run with grey. By the front door stood two men in leather, one with a ring in his nose like a bull, and a black man with long hair fashioned into snakes, who grunted a greeting as he passed.
There was a couple having sex in the bedroom, moulded half-dressed over the bed so that at first Oliver mistook them for the bedclothes. Their noises joined the lamb-like wail of his son. He tried not to look as he took the basket and hurried back onto the miniature landing, into the women who were waiting for the toilet.
“Oh! What’s her name?” They gaggled round him, putting out their fingers.
“Cefin.” He wrapped him in his arms, held him to his chest like some part of himself restored. “He’s called Cefin. Like…Well, like Kevin.”
“Hello, little Cefin!”
“I like your accent. Where are you from?”
The front door now stood open to the street, giving a glimpse of space beyond. Lying the baby on his forearm, his small legs working, his dark, angry face enclosed by his fingers, Oliver picked up the basket, the nappy bag and the bottle of milk that Naomi had pumped before they left her mother’s house that evening. He hardly noticed if he trod on anyone as he clambered back down the stairs. The air outside did seem to bring Cefin some measure of calm, although the street was no better than a strip of tarmac between terraced houses like great, dead hedgerows. There was a weed or two curling out of the pavement, but there was not one tree, not one patch of grass. The houses were distinguished only by pebble-dash, the colours of the doors and the way that the light fell from the craning streetlamps. At either end were yet more houses. As Oliver stood, rocking backwards and forwards, he looked up, through radiating telegraph wires and the television aerials on the chimneys, into the slice of tainted sky, down at his Land Rover in the line of cars.
“Olly!” Naomi appeared in the door behind him, fighting her way through the crush on the step. “Olly, where are you going?”
“Home,” said Oliver.
“No,” she said. “No, no, you’re not.”
“Naomi, he was screaming, he was. There was two people fucking half on top of him! You think that’s all right, do you? I don’t think that’s fucking all right!”
“Olly, I didn’t know. I didn’t hear him. I only checked on him ten minutes ago! We’ll…What are you even thinking, anyway? You can’t leave me here. Can I have him? Please?”
“I do not want him going back in there. I shall fetch him home and you when you’re done.”
“Olly, I’m…He’s two months old! I’m breast feeding, for God’s sake!”
“It will be dawn in half an hour or so. I have got the bottle. I shall pick him up some of that powder.”
Cefin was starting to cry again, his voice dividing the lifeless street.
“Olly…” Naomi stood before him, her lips almost quivering, a line slicing into her forehead. “Love, come on. Please. It’s all right. We’re both of us exhausted. He’s hungry, that’s all. Please. I need to feed him. We’ll…We’ll go to my mum’s house—”
“And what? September, he comes back to this, does he?”
“It’s a party, Oliver! For Christ’s sake, I’ve not been to a party in a year! You don’t live in the bloody pub, do you? I’m sorry this is hard for you—really I am—but you do have to make a bit of an effort, you know? This is where I come from! It’s not like I’ve ever had you come here before, and I’ve bent over backwards to fit into your place, haven’t I?”
“Well,” said Oliver. “I’m here, in’t I?”
Naomi took the baby with a noise like a whimper and at once the pain subsided in her face. She tugged at her jacket, pulled the scarf from her hips to hang over her shoulder and put him to her breast, his cry a mewl as he smelt her milk. The two of them became a single entity: a thing self-sufficient in the unnatural light, in the music still spewing from the too-small house, by the mud-striped Land Rover where Maureen was watching them, hunched and black on the steering wheel.
BY THE TIME that the sun scored the clouds to the east, Oliver had already crossed the Beacons. The mountains were black and crested to the south—where they should have been—above knitted hedgerows, stirring creatures and the sky-framed trees on the ridges of the hills. He must, he thought, have made choices in his life, but for the life of him he could not remember any. He had asked Naomi to marry him but she did not, she said, agree with marriage. She had suggested that he sell the Funnon, or suggested it was something they had to consider, since no place was more important than a child having parents and she was damned if she was going to abandon her degree. But even if he could have consigned his mother to some bungalow in Aberedw or Builth Wells he did not have the deeds, whatever his name. With half of the farm gone to Ivor or Mervyn, and with the mortgage paid, he would have been left with barely a pocket full of change. Perhaps, in the end, that was his choice: nothing the one way and nothing the other.
“What do you think, girl?” he asked Maureen, quietly.
The raven clicked her sharp black beak.
“It’s not so bad, is it, eh? They’re only stopping at her mother’s for a spell. And we always knew she’d go back to university. It’s not like that’s any news…We done all right. We’ve had her to ourselves all year.”
Blank as he was, with the passing of the city and those long valleys choking with houses, Oliver felt the strength returning to his body—to his hand as he flipped down the visor on the windscreen and pushed his sunglasses onto his nose, to his arms and his legs as he dropped through the gears and turned by the Griffin, into Llyswen. There were no other cars on the Wye Valley road. The sunlight surrounded the Radnorshire hilltops, picking out the ditches of Twyn y Garth, striping the high Ty Isaf fields with the shadows of oaks and hawthorns. Coming out of Erwood the ground rose slightly and the light poured into the window beside him, turning Maureen from black to a welter of colours, like oil on water, while beyond the bridge, the shelving rocks of the urgent river and the picnic tables of his grandmother’s café, the fern was green around the long, dark head of Llanbedr Hill.