Candlenight, page 12
"Have a seat." said Glyn. A faded tweed suit hung limply from his angular frame. "Tell us about yourself. We won't bite you."
Giles sat down rather shakily on a wooden bar stool. The whole atmosphere had changed. He'd walked into silence and stares, and now they were making him welcome and telling him there was absolutely no need to learn Welsh—in a village where little else ever seemed to be spoken. He was confused.
"Where is your wife?" Aled Gruffydd said.
"Oh, she's , . . out. Taking a few pictures."
"Photos, is it?"
"That's what she does. She's a photographer."
"Well, well," said Aled.
Giles had the feeling Gruffydd knew this already. A feeling there was very little he could tell them about himself that they didn't already know. But he explained about his wife's inheritance and they nodded and said "well, well" and "good God" a few times as if it was the first they'd heard about it. They were unbelievably affable. And this made it more important for them to know he and Claire were not just going to be holiday-home-owners, that this was now their principal residence and they were going to preserve its character; there'd be no phoney suburban bits and pieces, no patio doors, no plastic-framed double-
glazing, no carriage lamps . . .
"Good house, that is, mind." thin Glyn said. "Been in that family for . . . what is the word in English? Generations."
"You mean the Rhys family?"
"Generations." said Glyn. "Many generations, the Rhyses."
Bloody hell, he'd never thought of that—that he and Claire were actually maintaining a family chain of ownership going back possibly centuries. They really didn't know anything, did they?
"Gosh," Giles said. "I suppose—I mean, is that why Judge Rhys came back? Because somebody left him the house?"
"Well," said Glyn. "I suppose that was one of The reasons. From England, he came, as you know, having spent most of his life there."
This was actually marvellous. This gave them a solid, copper-bottomed basis for residency. This gave them a right to be here.
"What is that other word?" said Glyn. "Continuity. We believe in that, see, in Y Groesfan. Continuity."
Giles understood now. When he first came in they weren't quite sure who he was. Now they knew he was the husband of a Rhys. Knew he belonged. He settled back on his wooden stool and began to look around. What a superb old place it was. He remembered Berry Morelli telling him on their way back to London how the buildings in Y Groes had struck him as having grown out of the landscape as part of some natural process. This pub was like that, its oaken interior so crude and yet so perfect. He felt privileged to be here. And proud too, now.
He bought them all drinks.
They told him about the village.
They told him it had about two hundred and fifty people, if you included the outlying farms. It had two shops, the general store and the post office. One garage, one school, one church.
They told him the original name of the village was Y Groesfan—the crossing. But when non-conformism had taken Wales in the nineteenth century a chapel had been
built and the name shortened to Y Groes—the cross—because it seemed more holy. When Giles said he hadn't noticed a chapel, Dilwyn Dafis smiled. Glyn, who apparently was something of an historian, said non-conformism had been a passing phase here, although nobody had bothered to change the name back.
Giles wondered briefly why the old name should have referred to a "crossing place" when the village was in fact a dead-end and apparently always had been. And would, he hoped, be the end of his own search for a spiritual home. He also wondered—very nervously—how these chaps would react to that. He realized there was only one way to find out.
"I suppose." he said, as steadily as he could manage, "that you must he pretty sick about all these English people moving in."
"What English is that?" Aled said. He took a cloth from a shelf below the bar and began to polish glasses.
"Well, you know ... I mean, we were in Pontmeurig this morning and at least half the people we met, half the shopkeepers for instance, were incomers. I just hadn't realised it was that bad. I mean, it must irritate you. surely."
"Ah, well. see. that is Pontmeurig." said Dilwyn Dafis.
"Pont is different." said Glyn. "They are always moaning about the English in Pont. But we don't moan about them here, do we boys? No cause to."
Aled Gruffydd shook his head. Glyn drained his beer glass and Giles seized the opportunity to buy everyone another drink. He was dying to ask all kinds of questions but settled on just one more as the glasses were passed over and the three Welshmen said "Cheers" rather than Iechyd Da! out of deference to their English companion. They really were remarkably accommodating. Indeed if everyone was as gently hospitable as these chaps and Mrs. Huws and Mrs. Hywels it was really no wonder the country was being
overrun by the English.
But they hadn't been like this in Pontmeurig. Only in Y Groes. A special place.
"So, what." Giles asked, "is the actual percentage of incomers in Y Groes? I mean, you know, roughly."
Dilwyn Dafis looked puzzled. "How's that, like?"
"What he means." Aled said, "is how many English compared to Welsh."
"In this villager?"
"Right," said Giles.
"What English?" said Dilwyn.
"You mean—?" The truth hit Giles like a brick. "You mean that the entire immigrant population of Y Groes is—"
Glyn smiled, his large front teeth standing out like a marble cemetery in the moonlight.
"—us?" said Giles.
"Well, there we are," said Dilwyn Dafis, raising his glass to Giles and smiling slowly, "Makes you a bit of a novelty, like, isn't it?"
Chapter XXIII
Claire climbed into the riverside field by a convenient stile to photograph a lone sheep, somebody's initials SE scrawled across its back in lurid crimson, like a splash of fresh blood.
The sheep was lying apart from the rest of the flock, benign head lifted, gazing beyond the field to the village street.
Through the lens, Claire followed the sheep's gaze but saw only a litter bin attached to a low wall with grass growing out of the top. She took a picture, the sheep dark in the
foreground.
The river was beautiful. It splashed and fizzed amiably over the rocks, calling out so strongly to Claire that she just had to scramble down the bank, camera bouncing around on
its leather strap, until her feet slipped into the soft, cool water. One shoe floated off and she had to rescue it. Then, on impulse, she put the blue shoe back in the river and took a photograph of the clear water swirling gently around it, in the background the river-washed stonework of a bridge support.
The river, the bridge, her shoe—part of the scene.
She should have come to see him. If she'd known about him wanting to take her, just her, for that walk, down the lane to the village, past the church; if she'd known that, she would have come. She imagined him talking to her softly, musically, in Welsh—how beautiful. If she'd been told about that, she would have come. No doubt her mother had thought of that. Bitch. Until that phone call Claire had assumed she'd never met her grandfather, never been to Y Groes in her life. No wonder the village called out to her to
come back.
Bitch.
Y Groes—always "some ghastly God-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere" or "some damp, dreary hellhole." If only she'd known . . .
It was her own fault. Such a placid child, people always said. Incurious about everything until her teens, when she began to take photographs and the world opened out like a huge flower. And then always too busy: leaving home, catching up on everything she'd missed, carving out a career in what then was still seen as a man's world. And forgetting for years at a time that she had a grandfather on her mother's side, an estranged counterpart to good old Reg with his garden and his golf.
And here, unknown to her—all this.
Bitch.
Sitting on the river bank, in the lengthening shadow of the bridge, strange, conflicting emotions crowded in on Claire and she wept silently. Not soul-wrenching, God-cursing tears, as often wept by Bethan, whom she did not as yet know, but quiet tears of regret.
Another shadow fell across her and she looked up, a tall figure blocking the dying sun.
It's him.
Claire's heart leapt in fear. Fear and—and longing.
The voice was soft and high and sibilant, like the wind in a cornfield.
"I'm afraid I don't know your name. So I shall just call you Miss Rhys. How are you. Miss Rhys?"
Chapter XIV
Three-fifteen. Home time.
Bethan was bustling about the school hall attending to children's major crises: the four-year-old boy whose shoelace had come undone, the girl of six with a broken nail.
"Try not to get it wet or it will come off," she said, adjusting the Band-Aid round the child's finger then turning to help a small boy who'd buttoned his coat all wrong.
A handful of mothers were waiting for the smallest children. They watched her with indulgent smiles, none of them rushing to help her. Perhaps they thought this was the
kind of therapy she needed to cure her of widowhood.
The mothers took their kids and left, leaving Bethan with just three small pupils waiting to be collected and a strange woman standing hesitantly in the doorway, clutching one of
those slim, garish packages in which prints and negatives are returned from processing.
"Mrs. Freeman," Bethan remembered. "You rang this morning. You wanted to see me."
"Hello," the woman said. She looked down at the photo envelope. "I usually do my own or take them to someone I know in London," she said half-apologetically. "I've been to one of those fast-print places in Aberystwyth. Just, you know, wanted ... to see how they'd turned out."
She seemed embarrassed. Bethan couldn't think why. She smiled at the woman. "Come in," she said. "Try not to fall over Angharad, she thinks she's a sheepdog."
Buddug had left early, to Bethan's relief. In the emptying school hall, where an electric kettle was coming gently to the boil on the teacher's table, Bethan looked at the woman and the woman looked at Bethan. They were around the same age, one dark, one blonde, one Welsh, the other . . . well, very English. Bethan thought, but who could really say?
"I'm still rather feeling my way in the village," the blonde one said. She was dressed like a very urban explorer, in fashionably-baggy green trousers and red hiking boots. "I don't know quite how I should behave."
Good heavens, Bethan thought, they aren't usually like that, the English, when they move into Pontmeurig, joining this and organising that and introducing themselves everywhere and even buying people drinks, sometimes.
"Don't be silly," she said, pouring boiling water into a chunky earthenware pot. "Sit down. Have a cup of tea."
"Thank you," the judge's granddaughter said, lowering herself, quite gracefully under the circumstances into a tiny chair designed for a seven-year-old. "That's kind of you, Miss Sion."
"Mrs. McQueen."
"Oh. I'm terribly sorry, I was told—"
"Bethan. Call me Bethan."
"Oh. Yes. Thank you. I'm Claire Freeman, but everyone seems to know that." She laughed. "Although they all seem to call me Miss Rhys—the women in the post office and Mr. ap Siencyn, the rector. My grandfather, you see, he was—"
"I know," Bethan said. "I'm afraid I never really met him. A bit before my time. He was staying in his house most of the time, when I was here. He used to study a lot, people said. In the village. I believe, he was very much . . . well, revered."
This had the desired effect of pleasing Claire Freeman, who told Bethan how wonderful it had been to discover in the cottage and in the village this whole new aspect of her ancestry, long hidden, like the family treasure.
"But you said you didn't really know him," Claire said. "So you can't have been here all that long yourself."
Pouring tea into a yellow mug, Bethan told her she'd been here nearly a year, then left, then come back. No she hadn't been here all that long, when you added it up.
"But it's different for you." Claire said, "and that's what I've come about. I suppose." She'd opened the envelope and was flicking through the photographs without looking at them, still rather ill at ease, the child, Angharad, scampering around her feet.
"Milk?" said Bethan.
"Just a little."
"Sugar?"
Claire passed. "Dim siwgwr. Is that right?"
"Yes," said Bethan. smiling a little, passing her the mug of tea. "But only if you're trying to lose weight. Can I see?"
"I haven't really looked at them yet. They won't be very good. They're just snaps."
Bethan pushed back her hair and adjusted her glasses. She opened the envelope and saw clear water swirling around a bright blue shoe. It was a startling picture. She drew it out and below it saw the judge's cottage, twilit. Then she saw the village street looking very still, with deep shadows: various close-ups of the timber-framed houses—including the tiny terraced cottage where she and Robin had lived, with the setting sun floating in its upstairs front window.
Then a solitary sheep, a view of the darkening hills, of the rigidly-upright figure of the rector standing in the grass above the river, of Mair Huws outside her shop, of the church tower braced against the dying light and photographed from a steep angle that made it look as if it was falling towards you.
She felt something at once in the photograph. This woman had plucked ripened images of Y Groes out of the air like apples from a tree, and caught the glow.
"They're wonderful" Bethan said. 'They're like something out of a magazine. No, that's inadequate, that cheapens them."
"Oh dear." said Claire. "I was hoping they'd be like holiday snaps. I can't seem to take snaps anymore."
She looked so seriously disappointed that Bethan had to laugh, quite liking her now. Out of the window she saw two mothers appear at the gate, and excused herself and rounded up the remaining three children—"Dewch yma, Angharad, wuff wuff'—gently pushing them out of the door into the playground, waving to the mothers.
When she returned, Claire was thumbing rapidly through the photographs, looking puzzled.
"Anything wrong?"
"No. I—a couple seem to be missing, that's all. My own fault. I should have waited to have them done in London. That is—"
She looked embarrassed again, as if expecting Bethan to say. Oh, so our Welsh film processing isn't good enough for you. is it, Mrs. Posh Londoner?
"Well," said Bethan. "they are a bit slapdash, some of these quick-processing outfits."
Claire looked grateful. "What I've come about—I— somebody in the pub told Giles, my husband, that you were rather brilliant at teaching English children to speak Welsh, and so we wondered—"
Bethan explained that it wasn't a question of being brilliant; English children, the younger the better, picked up Welsh surprisingly quickly. By the age of seven or eight, if they attended a Welsh-medium school, they were often quite fluent. Claire said they had no children yet. but when they did have a baby she would like it to be raised in a bilingual home, and so—"It's funny really, some people in the pub told Giles there was no need to learn Welsh in Y Groes."
Bethan raised an eyebrow. "They told him that?"
"I think it was because we seem to be the only English people in the village. I think they were just being kind, probably."
"Probably," said Bethan, thinking how odd this was.
"We'd fit in, of course, with your arrangements." Claire said.
Bethan thought about it.
"I've never done it before, taught adults."
"Is it so different?"
"I don't know," Bethan said.
"They say the brain starts to atrophy or something, when you pass thirty. Isn't that what they say?"
"Well," said Bethan, pouring herself a mug of strong black tea, coming to a decision, "let's prove them wrong, I could come to your house after school for a short lime, how would that be?"
"That would be super. I mean, Giles will have to go back to London during the week, but I'll be staying here, and could bring him up to date at weekends on everything I've learned."
Bethan said slowly. "I'm . . . often free at the weekends too." All too free, she thought. "The thing to do is to work on it every day if you can, even if it's only for twenty minutes. I'm sure we could do that most days. And perhaps at weekends we could have a revision session, with your husband."
Claire flung out a big smile, and Bethan thought she was going to hug her. "That's absolutely marvellous. Bethan. I mean, we'll pay whatever you think is—"
"Don't worry about that. I'll enjoy it. I think."
Bethan had caught a breath of something from this woman, something she realised she missed, a sense of the cosmopolitan, a sense of away.
Bethan closed the school door behind her and looked around her nervously, half expecting to find another child inviting her to inspect a dead body. She shivered, although it was a pleasant evening, still warmish, still no sign of the leaves fraying on the trees. In Pontmeurig many already were brown and shrivelled.
The arrival of Claire Freeman and her husband had, she thought, opened up the place, making a small but meaningful crack in its archaic structure. All villages needed new life, even one as self-contained as Y Groes. Especially one like Y Groes.
Learning the language was good—and something that few of the incomers to Pontmeurig bothered to attempt. But she found herself hoping (Guto would be horrified) that the Freemans wouldn't try too hard to fit in.
As she drove the Peugeot out of the school lane towards the bridge, she saw Claire Freeman standing in the middle of the village street gazing out at the river. Nobody else was on the street. Claire looked abstracted, a wisp of blonde hair fallen forward between her eyes.
Bethan paused for a second before turning the wheel towards the Pontmeurig road, and Claire saw her and began to run towards the car, waving urgently.
