“YOU’LL MIND THE headstones now?”
“We’ll do what we can, Mrs. Hamer.” John Watson sipped his tea with a pensive nod. “We have had a few of them up, like—we couldn’t get ourselves up there otherwise—but Ken here, he did mark them. We’ll have them back the minute we’re done.”
His son stood silent by the gigantic truck, the smoke draining half-seen from his cigarette.
“It is a shame, like,” John continued. “If it was up to me, like, I’d be all for fixing her up, but you know how it is. That roof. If it were to fall on some poor bugger, well…Something must be done, like, and she can’t have seen a service in, what—”
“Not in my lifetime,” said Etty.
“Not in thirty years!” His big red face recovered its grin.
The mist was thinning a little with the morning, shading to blue as Etty looked upwards. She watched the digger crawl through the cavity at the top of the yard, through the hole where there had been a lychgate, its tyres slipping then biting the slope. The bucket rose, its weight coming backwards. John was shouting through the riot of the engines. As he reached the level ground on the top of the mound, two metal legs descended from slots. He leant from his cab to beckon to the boy, who reversed the bleeping truck between the limbs of the yellowing sycamores.
The bell chimed once with the swing of the backhoe, and again, more dully, in the grass. A second swat removed the remainder of the belfry. The digger’s claw reached into the roof and scooped up a skeleton of rafters and ridgepole, the last slates falling like leaves. High above the yard, the church perhaps was in the open sunlight. It appeared to grow brighter where the rest of the world was opaque. Etty had thought somehow that this would all have been more difficult, that it would, at least, require another visit. The idea that the building could fit in a lorry, whatever its size, made her brain seem to press against her skull. She watched the gables wobble and fall. She watched the porch go the way of the roof, the windows implode, the altar itself, which even Oliver had refused to touch, rise through that unreal light and tumble into the still-hollow back of the truck until, suddenly, the church was gone and the mound was crowned with rubble alone.
It was funny, almost, that it had come down to bats. Had the colony survived, so the Church Council woman had told her, they would have had no choice except to rebuild. The Greater Horseshoe was endangered, apparently. Neither of them had spoken of God, nor had Etty said that something ought to mark this place whose yews, according to the professor, were probably two thousand years old. She knew well enough how she would have sounded. There was nothing to be gained from a sympathetic nod or some observation on the sorriness of the times. As the engines continued, she made her way slowly past the pillars of the lambing shed and followed the flem up the side of the house, dipping her head for the old wireless aerial, which appeared abruptly in the pearly air. In the orchard by the nailed-shut privy, she found her market basket and dragged the wooden ladder from the garden shed—moving uncertainly from rung to rung when she propped it against the first of the apple trees.
ON GARREG LWYD, where he always stopped, Oliver killed the engine of the quad and looked back across the hollows and sidelands—the bank for Penbedw and the gieland spilling towards Cwmoel. Llanbedr Hill was an island this morning. The shallow light lay over its back, measuring each lift and fold in the heather, turning silver its dew-heavy cobwebs. The ocean around him might have been the light condensed; it boiled and broke on the distant mountains, curling away into the east, where there was, they said, no hill worth the name before Siberia. In his own valley, the churchyard provided a solitary islet: a nub of ground on the brink of the shadow, its trees like reeds, its summit marked only by John Watson’s JCB.
“Get away off out!” he called to the dogs.
The Island itself sat alone above the mist: a dim little cell with tattered plastic windows and a stench of beasts that a day with the pressure washer had done almost nothing to dispel. It had silenced Oliver, to discover its value. How that rascal of a cottage could be worth fifty grand when the cattle in its fields would lose him three or more was more than he was able to fathom. With occasional whistles, he watched Dee couse beneath the far-off beech trees, the bronze of their leaves conferring to the grass. He watched Meg vanish and appear in the quarries, driving the usual couple of dodgers, then run out wide round Llyn y March until every yearling on the whole long hilltop was hurrying towards him—startling a flock of plovers, which sheered together across the rust-coloured fern, the berry-spilling wittans and the snag of a cliff where he sat.
He rejoined the track as the sheep crowded by and followed them west towards the grave for Twm Tobacco: a roadster, or so he had been told, who had been carrying tobacco in the days when smoking was bad, like drugs today, and had been killed for his wares in this desolate place. Nowhere in this archipelago of hills could he see another person, or a house, or even so much as a mountain pony. A skylark in the radiant sky poured its frantic song across the common. Coming to the crossroads, he put his hand to his chest and took a stone from his pocket for the pile in the grass. With a word he brought the dogs in yawping, dividing the two flocks so that the sheep marked OH scattered into the heather and the sheep marked MH fled away to the north—spilling into the lapping mist like the pool, the Henllyn, down to their right, which had, it was said, one noon dark as midnight, disgorged itself of its water and fishes to form Llanbwchllyn Lake.
THE SUNLIGHT LEAKING from the bare stone tiles streaked the dust disturbed by Etty’s feet. It made bright little patches on the sagging tunnels of ancient cobwebs, the various pieces of the four-poster bed, a grouse in a case, the toys, the tools, and the apples she had already arranged across the sheets of last week’s newspaper. A hand on a joist, she knelt down carefully on the floorboards of the attic. Two floors beneath her, the washing machine was making ineffectual noises; it astonished her the things had ever caught on. In the yard the two men were talking, dragging the gates back across the mouth of the Bryngwyn track.
They had not, of course, replaced the gateposts.
“Teachers may flush drugs.”
“Gay voters could determine the next MP.”
“Many believe telematics will provide the biggest opportunity for pro-active development in rural areas since the agricultural revolution four hundred years ago.”
“Mrs. Hamer!” There was a pwning at the door. “Mrs. Hamer, we’re heading off now.”
The world, it seemed, had moved on without her—if she had ever been aboard in the first place. Etty had never even heard of telematics. She had not, to her knowledge, seen a drug in her life. She took the apples from her basket and laid them out in the remaining space, keeping them upright, neatly apart, then she sat down to wait in a prolapsed armchair, leafing through the paintings in the box beside her: the trees in which Idris had found his consolation. She had thought at times about getting some framed. He had been right; they were not bad at all. Here was a birch tree naked with winter, half-silver, half-shadow, with twigs that shrank and divided the sky. Here was a wittan on the open hill, its trunk and branches twisted left, as if reaching for something past the edge of the paper. Here was an oak in the fullness of summer: a tangle of limbs clothed in emerald leaves.
“Mrs. Hamer!”
“It’s pushing two, it is, Dad…”
“I’ll scribble a note, look. She’s a good old girl.”
When, at last, the truck began to move, its engine bellowed; its brakes hissed and howled. Etty felt its weight in the bones of the house. The apples were trembling. A couple of glasses were toasting one another in a cupboard. Following the wire from the satellite dish, a squirrel appeared suddenly from the eaves but stopped when it saw her—its small eyes black, its fur the same white-grey as her hair. For several moments they watched each other, neither of them so much as twitching, then the vehicles reached the smoothness of the tarmac track and the squirrel whisked its tail back outside.
“I DREAMT LAST night I went to the moon,” said Oliver.
“Was there any grass?” Griffin asked.
“Aye, there was, and you’d bloody had it.” He leant past the line and cast his quoit, which floated through the steep light falling from the window of the pub and the shadows of its guidebook stickers, bounced from the peg and settled at the edge of the dish.
“One.” Lewis marked up the board with the chalk. “You better come some shape sharpish, boy!”
“I did lease some ground off Llanedw, as it goes,” said Griffin. “Too busy with the cars they are, see?”
Oliver resumed his stool, dipping a chip in his pool of mayonnaise while Angie Lloyd flattened her cigarette—her face all paint, her hair in coils. She stood on the line in jeans so tight that her knickers showed plainly beneath the pockets, balanced, scowled and flicked her wrist.
“And two.”
There was a girl in the corner where there had been a Pac-Man machine, where Lewis had once pulled Oliver and Mervyn apart. She was a walker by the looks of her boots, a tourist in any case: not thirty years old, lean and smooth-skinned with yellow-white hair, her thin lips moving as she read her book and speared another mouthful of salad.
“Come on, Panty!” Griffin gave the cockerel dip of his head.
He threw his quoit, then crowed and made a lap among the people eating dinner, in the old brown sweater he wore year-round, his grey hair flapping on his ears.
“And five!”
Oliver peered at the cover of the book, which was leaning towards him so that it was hard to read more than a letter or two of the title. He peered at the girl. The only line anywhere on her face was a crescent of concentration between her faint, pale eyebrows. He wondered what path could have brought her to this place, which was surely no more than a stop on her way, to be remembered only for the quality of its lettuce, for some chance witticism from the fat old landlord or the way that the shadow cut the tightening valley. Perhaps she would continue by Cregrina, Glascwm and Colva and slip from his map somewhere beyond Lyonshall. Perhaps she would follow the route of the old railway and from Builth travel north by Rhayader and Llanidloes and disappear only when she passed Moat Lane.
“Oy!” said Angie. She took one of his chips and put her elbows on the bar, her tan leather jacket pressing cool against his arm as her wire-bound breasts thrust into the smoky air.
THE TELEVISION WAS a wonder to Dilys. After twenty-two years of life in Aberedw, she had still not quite got used to the thing. If she was trapped here, in her bungalow, as she had once been trapped in a snowdrift at the Island, at least she had seen in this distended window the jungles and the oceans, the terror of earthquakes and buildings so tall as to shade a Scots pine. And if she tired of a programme she had merely to press another of the buttons in her lap to see a game of football or one of those nice old black-and-white films in which an hour and a half would disappear. And then there was the window itself: the sunlit lane and the squat little house for Angie Lloyd, her feeder for the tits and the piefinches in the garden, and the two fields banking to the yellow-red wood on the ridge.
The bungalow was warm, that was the main thing. Dilys had sat here in tempests and felt no draught at all—and when, in its season, the winter came, she would just make the journey across the smooth brown carpet, between the sofa and the armchair where Dick’s narrow backside could still be seen for all of the nurse’s work on the cushion, to the lino squares in their chessboard pattern and the dial on the wall by the door to the kitchen.
Angie Lloyd, well, brassy hardly covered it. Five children she had, all of them flown, and still she had no ring on her finger. Flicking the lever on the arm of her chair, Dilys reversed to watch her return, piert from her Saturday dinner at the Awlman’s, with that big-sorted scrat who called himself Hamer although he was black as a Jew or worse. She had seen the paper that week. She might not have been so good at her letters, but she knew her numbers well enough. Five hundred pounds he had paid for the Island, and all generosity when he’d had those men up fixing the roof. Even Dick might have had something to say about that, had he not been listening to the wnts—him and Idris and Ivor, and Albert, who had gone that year in his cottage in Llanbadarn-y-Garreg. Close on everyone she had ever known.
Dilys had seen them once in an upstairs window, grimacing equally, Angie’s great dugs swinging like two bags of shopping. Dipping her spectacles, she watched the man call his dogs and tie them to the gatepost, with the woman beside him, clecking and laughing and all but unhackling her trousers. She sat in her chair with her lips wrought tight, but when the curtains closed she remembered the pain in her back and her feet, which were as bad today as they were in the nights. To the whirr of the motor she turned back to the screen to wait for the nurse, who would be coming at four to make her tea and run her bath.
A TREE HAD fallen clean across the track to the common—bowed and leafless, so strangled by ivy that Oliver could scarcely see the bark. It lay almost flush with a pair of old gateposts, one of which still bore the burn-mark of the Glanusk Estate. He might, he thought, have pulled it up by hand, but if he was taking no chances with a breathalyser on the lane he was not about to give himself a hernia. He stopped the quad and got to his feet, frowning into his well-scratched sunglasses while Meg and Dee hopped down from the back. There was pell wool in the twigs where sheep had passed, a honeybee or two on the ivy flowers that could have travelled all the way from the Welfrey, since you never saw the wild bees now. There was a slapping across the little field behind him and he turned to see a pigeon leave the green-gold hazels of the bank where some prince had hidden seven hundred years earlier, and then been betrayed by a man in Aberedw. Seven hundred years and the cries of “Traitors!” had still not left the village in peace.
“Hello, there!” said the girl from the pub. She ducked out of the trees. “I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind me crossing your field.”
“Well,” said Oliver, and turned his left ear. “Since it’s not my field.”
“I was just visiting Llywelyn’s Cave.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Not much of a stronghold is it, really?”
“Standards has risen, I doubt.”
The girl, he saw, was surprisingly tall, and scarcely wider than a telegraph pole. Her face was a startling shade of pink. Pleasantly depleted though he was, this being a Saturday afternoon, Oliver presented the dome of his waistcoat and allowed his eyes to fall behind his sunglasses, looking for breasts beneath her turquoise fleece and settling for her legs, which, if not shapely, were long enough for her to step clean over the fence.
“My name’s Siriol,” she said. “I’m…afraid I have the advantage. I saw you in the Awlman’s Arms. You’re Oliver, aren’t you?”
“I expect,” said Oliver.
“I spoke to the barman. I mean, I guessed it had to be you, but he told me you would be coming this way…I’m working on a paper about Naomi Chance, you see? The poet.”
“Well.” He paused, then nodded slowly. “I did think I recognized the book.”
“You’ve read it, of course?”
“I cannot say I have, to be honest.”
The girl’s face was nearing the colour of the wittan berries. “I have to say,” she said. “Please don’t think me impertinent, but I really am excited to meet you.”
“And why’s that, then?”
“Well. You’re surely aware that you appear in her work? I mean, her Drought collection. That more or less started me writing myself…It’s one of the formative books in post-pastoral poetry.”
“Post-pastoral? We in’t done yet, girl.”
She rummaged in her pockets. “If I could ask you a couple of questions I would be so grateful.”
Oliver looked at the sun on the ridge of the hill, at the shadows falling through Hendre Wood: this curious bank where fields were squeezed between shelves of rock and the scrub oaks were red and gold and green where their tops met the angling light. He took the pliers from the box on the quad and turned to the rusty fence around the field. There had been no farmer at Pen-y-Garreg for ten years now, and the gatepost was so soft and riven that he could have prised out most of the staples with his fingers.
“You met in…1976,” said the girl. “Is that right?”
Oliver grunted noncommittally.
“And your son. He lives with you?”
“He in there as well, is he?”
“Well. Yes.”
“Did.” He breathed and pulled back the wire. “University…What was your name again? Cereal?”
“Siriol.”
“So we’re all of us in this book, are we, Siriol?”
“Well.” The girl hesitated. “I mean, you are the major figure, really.”
“Major figure,” said Oliver. “Well!”
The Glanusk burn-marks were rare these days, with most of their gateposts replaced by railway ties, but still you could spot them, here and there, all the way back up to Hundred House. There had been a plan, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years earlier, to build a dam at Aberedw and turn the entire valley into a reservoir. That it had not happened was no thanks to Lord Glanusk, whoever he was, who had bought every farm that might have been flooded with an eye on a profit from the compensation. There were few things, Oliver thought, to be said for farming on shale. One was that you might as well try to dam a sieve. Another was that the ground was so close to worthless that, by and large, you were left well alone. He picked up a flake of stone, which he turned between his fingers then slipped into his pocket for Twm Tobacco. With a nod to the girl he whistled up the dogs and started the quad—pressing through the hole he had made in the fence, rolling over the half-eaten nettles and the thin, bare branches at the head of the fallen oak.
THE HILLS AND the valley were grey with the evening—the sun having gone, the stars having yet to arrive. The yard light was shining down at Cwmpiban. The quad was crossing the Middle Ddole, the grass showing green in the vee of its headlamps, between the shadows of the parting sheep. Its engine was a pair of notes—a deeper drone and a higher whine—which grew among the hedgerows and the contours of the hillside as Etty fetched the empty bucket back from the kennel and Oliver climbed out of the Banky Piece and appeared from the silage and the long-twigged sallies with a dead ewe lolling on the rack behind him: seventy-five pounds’ worth of good, healthy animal, as she had been that morning, which was no little money, what with the BSE epidemic and the export restrictions on the beasts.
“I found her by the track,” he told her, as the quad fell silent. “She were sclemming, I doubt. That bloody Mervyn…”
“It was Mervyn did this, then, was it?” said Etty.
“I shall get him back, don’t worry.”
“Did you see him, did you?”
“Course I didn’t see him.”
Etty stopped beside him and leant on her stick, peering at the ear tag and the hole in the skull of the sheep.
“Olly,” she said. “Think with your head, would you? That’s what it’s there for.” She looked up into his dim, ruddy face and the bag of flesh hanging under his chin. “It could have been anybody, couldn’t it? It could have been the post van. It could have been John. Or Ken. God knows that truck would have taken some stopping.”
“Mervyn,” said Oliver. “Bound to be.”
“Why? You given him a reason, have you?”
“No…”
“Well. Do you want to know what I think, do you? I think that sheep’s dead because she got out, and I think she got out because the hedge for the Middle Ddole is more glats than growth. If you’d been hedging this afternoon, like we said, not buggering about, then it wouldn’t have happened. Simple as that.”
“Dank me, I had to go to the tack, didn’t I?”
“For eight blasted hours?”
“Have you looked at her, Mam, have you? She’s been a goner for six at least!”
Etty sighed and picked up the bucket. “All right, all right,” she said. “There is tea in the pot. We’ll dump her up the wood in the morning.”
For a little while Etty had let herself believe that Cefin’s arrival was the change she had hoped for—as if farms still passed inevitably from father to son, as if farming remained an inalienable condition. Once, when she was young herself, a farmer might have been a natural athlete or a brilliant musician; it would have made no difference. He would still have been a farmer. Now the sons with other interests or ambitions would go their own way, and her grandson was no different. He had always had a flair for things like mathematics. She wondered if at least he might phone that day. He sometimes would on a Saturday evening.
“You out tonight, Olly, are you?” she asked as they arrived in the kitchen, where the tap on the Rayburn had run almost dry and the swilling steam clung to her face and hands.
“Not tonight, Mam.”
“You want the bath first?”
“No. No, you carry on.”
Etty carried the tea tray over to the table, rose the cold-water pail from the sink then went to stand in the hearth’s enclosure, between the Rayburn and the old zinc bath. The steam was thick as the mist had been that morning. Even when the water was a reasonable temperature it boiled around her, striped by the light from the joins in the screen, whose top was almost level with her eyes. As she worked her way down the buttons of her cardigan, she watched her son return from the bookshelf, switch off the muted, blinking television, sit at the table and open his waistcoat—although he had stitched another panel in the back. His scalp shone through his trained-back hair. He wiped the condensation from his spectacles and began to turn the pages of Naomi’s book, which looked a delicate little thing among his fingers with their great, golden rings.
A minute passed, or two.
He frowned, inhaled and put a hand to his forehead.
As a rule, Etty tried not to look at her naked body. Lowering herself quietly into the bath, she worked the flannel over her hands—their backs brown-speckled, like an egg. She scoured her feet, running the stiff brush under her toenails, but when she came to her slack-skinned arms, the gullies in her sides and her falling breasts, she kept her eyes on her bony knees, which jutted like islands from the gathering soap scum. Unpinning the bun on the back of her head, she unwound its coils to save them from tangling and reached for the shampoo bottle on the rug. The ends aside, she had not cut her hair in thirty years or more. When she brushed it in her bedroom, at her dressing table, it hung almost to the floor. It was white by her face, grey at her shoulders, red where it floated on the surface of the water.