A Small Country (11 page)

‘Won’t she do for you?’

‘She’s all right. She’s all right.’

‘She’s filling out. Even Auntie Hetty says so.’

‘She’s all right. She’s all right. It’s just that she won’t have much of a life, that’s all.’

‘You mean, because she’s a hedge child.’

‘That’s a very coarse expression.’

‘I don’t know any other, That’s what she is, anyway. In fact, she’s more of a hedge child than most. She was born in a hedge as well, very near.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that, anyway. I was only thinking of her being brought up poor. It’s no joke.’

‘You and I survived. She’ll survive too. She looks a little fighter. Look at her fists. Anyway, I can think of plenty of people worse off than us, we’ll have ten shillings a week and a cottage.’

‘A pretty poor cottage with nothing decent to go in it.’

‘Are you regretting Hendre Ddu already?’

‘Of course not. I never cared for Hendre Ddu.’

Miriam didn’t reply but looked at him sadly. That was her greatest worry; that he had made an over-hasty decision.

‘It wasn’t the farm I ever wanted, it was Rachel. Does that make it worse? It wasn’t that I was so much in love with her, only triumphant, somehow, that she was so much in love with me. Can you understand that? She was older than I was, a large gracious woman who looked as though she’d never been young and yet she was as silly about me as a sixteen-year-old about her first sweetheart; had to have me with her every minute. Her father was dead-set against me of course, and I was excited by that, and by the way I won every round. When her father shouted about the damned cheek I’d had, asking her to marry me, I said I never had, she had asked me. It was the truth but I shouldn’t have said so, I know. Only I hated him; everybody did. When he died there wasn’t so much in it for me. And when she’d had Tom and Catrin; she had a bad time with Catrin, I’ll give her that; she thought the farm would be enough for me. But it wasn’t, it never was. I could never be interested in grappling and grasping for more and more profit. That’s how people get rich, by loving money, thinking of nothing else, becoming slaves to it. Old Griffydd Morgan used to wait for his ha’penny change. He’d insist on his discounts, even from little traders almost going bankrupt. When he bought, he could afford to wait till prices were low, but he never sold low. Nobody ever had a bargain from him. I don’t get pleasure from doing people down. Having a bit of money is fine, of course it is, but if it’s in your blood to make it grow and grow, it’s the devil taking over, that’s how it seems to me. Anyway, it was never my farm but Rachel’s so I saved my soul. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to be able to buy a little place, I would, but I wouldn’t get rich. I’d work hard. I can’t help that, it’s in my nature to work hard, but I know when to stop and I know how to enjoy other things. You know that.’

For the first time, the way he was looking at her made Miriam sad.

‘You’ve had other women,’ she said.

‘No one.’ Josi thought it was true. The others hadn’t counted. ‘No one but you. Whatever made you say that? Miriam, what’s the matter?’

She had turned from him and was looking into the dying fire.

‘I saw your daughter in Llanfryn on Thursday morning. She was in Lloyd the Chemist’s.’

‘Catrin? Why didn’t you tell me? What happened?’

‘She followed me into the street. She just wanted me to know, she said, that you’d had plenty of other women before me and would have plenty after.’

Josi said nothing for several moments. After a time he got up from his chair and came to sit at Miriam’s knees and kissed her hand. ‘Only you and I know,’ he said. ‘Only us two. Oh, I’m sorry about Catrin. I’m sorry about everything. We both knew how it would be for you, didn’t we? At least I’m with you now. We can’t get married, but we’re together. Aren’t we? We’re together.’

‘I’ve got a few things in Rhydfelen,’ Miriam said in quite a different voice – her schoolteacher voice which he hadn’t heard for months. ‘I left them in Nant Eithin’s barn. Neli Morris said she’d mind them for me till I sent for them. We should take them with us when we go; it’ll cost more to send for them later. They’re only odds and ends but they’ll be useful, blankets and so on, pots and pans, two chairs and a chest of drawers that belonged to my mother.’

‘I’ll fetch them on Monday. I’ll borrow a cart from someone.’

‘Won’t you be afraid of people talking?’

‘They’ve talked enough by this time. Why should I mind? Do you think I’m ashamed of you?’

‘You should be. And of yourself.’

‘You’re not ashamed.’

‘I’m not religious like you are, so I don’t feel the same. I feel sorrowful about your family, even Catrin. I don’t like to think of your wife who’s a good, kind woman, everyone says so, whom I’ve wronged. But the wrong’s done. Neither of us could choose differently so I try not to feel ashamed. Life’s hard enough without that. I know you feel bad about moving from this place.’

‘Not at all. We’re only crossing an old mountain. Only thirty miles. Some of my people went to America when times were bad, we’re only moving to another county.’

‘A different place, though. Different people.’

‘Poorer, that’s all. Land’s not so fertile, that’s all. What does it matter. I like a challenge; a bit of a struggle.’

The baby was fast asleep, her little face old and resigned as though she knew already that life was a struggle, one way or another. Miriam handed her to Josi again while she made the fire safe and got a candle to take them upstairs.

‘I hope to God we don’t have too many of these,’ Josi said. ‘They’re nice little things, I know, but they all have to be fed and watered.’

NINE

Catrin spent a miserable Saturday.

She had always felt thoroughly at ease with Edward Turncliffe. She had never been wary of him as she was with other young men; he was her brother’s friend, and in any case engaged to be married. She had allowed herself to think of him as a friend, one of her few friends, so that the new feelings he had aroused in her filled her with shame and anger; a new and deeper relationship was the last thing she had wanted.

The idea of marriage had always been so abhorrent to her. She hated weddings – she seemed to go to so many – merriment for everyone except the poor bride who generally looked timid and embarrassed. And if the broadest of the jokes were anything to go by, the wedding breakfast was only a preliminary to a farm-yard kind of coupling, leading as inevitably to the first pregnancy; the bride of a few months by this time pale and big-bellied, the finery of the wedding and the presents forgotten.

Catrin couldn’t bear to think that she had nothing to hope from life but the early ‘good’ marriage which everyone seemed to predict for her. At least she was determined to go to London first. Since her holiday there with Tom the previous year, it had been the focus of all her dreaming; so full of colour and life; art galleries, shops and concerts. If she could spend, say, seven years in London, she was sure that she would be willing to come back then to face the inevitable farmer bridegroom. To her mind, a bride of twenty-five, a mature woman of the world, wasn’t a figure of pathos like the innocent bride of eighteen.

She wanted to ‘live’ first. If she had been asked what exactly she meant by ‘living’, she wouldn’t be certain, she only saw herself moving among beautiful intelligent people, accepted and admired.

She had been in a state of rebellious waiting for over two years. She remembered when it had begun, in the spring following her sixteenth birthday. Before then, she had enjoyed school and certain aspects of her life on the farm, particularly riding; since that time, all her most deeply felt experiences had come from books, she had hardly lived at all at first hand. She had sold her outgrown pony and declined the offer of a horse, her schoolwork began to pall, she found the girls silly and the boys dull and immature.

It was a theological student, preaching at their chapel one Sunday morning, who had brought about the abrupt change from schoolgirl to woman, though it would probably have been someone or something else if not he.

He had been a painfully shy, incoherent preacher, even her mother had seemed a little embarrassed by him and everyone else in the congregation quite openly restless. ‘Poor young man,’ Miss Rees had said after the benediction. ‘His spirit was soaring, I’m sure, but the old words just wouldn’t come out.’

They had stayed behind in the little cold chapel to invite him back to dinner. He was grateful indeed, he assured them, but he had made other arrangements. He had shaken hands with them. To her mother and Miss Rees he had stammered out a few conventional words of thanks. Then he had taken Catrin’s hand and in very distinct, ringing tones had said, ‘I am the Rose of Sharon.’

‘Thank you,’ Catrin had said, taking her hand away as quickly as she could. She had never seen the strange youth before or since.

Back in the brougham afterwards, her mother had ventured an explanation for the young man’s outburst. ‘He was trying to tell Catrin that her beauty is a gift from God,’ she said. Miss Rees had been glad to agree, she had been a little worried about him, wondering whether the ordeal of preaching the word had gone to his head. Before they had arrived home the two women were firmly agreed that his words were certainly in order and possibly of divine inspiration. ‘If he had said “
You
are the rose of Sharon”, it would be different,’ her mother had said, ‘and a little impertinent, but he kept to the scriptures unaltered.’

Her father, told of the incident over beef and Yorkshire pudding, was quite ready to agree with his wife. ‘He was still in the high places,’ Josi had said. ‘No insult intended, I’m sure of it.’

No one was surprised that he should have been struck by her beauty, only that he had commented publicly about it.

Until that Sunday, Catrin had never seriously considered her looks. That afternoon she went to stand in front of the long mirror in her mother’s bedroom and studied herself from all angles and accepted her beauty. Nothing had been the same afterwards.

She accepted that she was different.

There had always been a gulf between her and her colleagues at school; now she understood it. Pretty girls generally had a good time at school, they were popular with other girls and teased by the boys and the masters, but beauty obviously set one apart; both boys and girls were rather in awe of it; it was as though the possessor belonged to a slightly different species.

Lowri, one of the maids at Hendre Ddu, seemed to be her only close friend.

It was she, a few months later, who showed her the picture-postcards, a series called Edwardian Beauties which her mother had collected some years earlier. ‘This one looks just like you,’ Lowri had said. ‘I wish you had a dress like that. I wish you’d let me put your hair up.’

And so, on a wet Saturday afternoon, Catrin had borrowed one of her mother’s dresses, a pale blue silk she had worn on her honeymoon, and a fan and a shawl, and Lowri had brushed and combed her hair, arranging it in elaborate coils which she piled one on top of the other like fruit in a bowl. Then Catrin had stood with a hand
on her hip whilst Lowri had surveyed her. ‘Miss Lily Langtry,’ she had said. For a time the two girls had giggled together quite happily.

Then Catrin had stepped out of the borrowed dress, letting it fall to the ground in a heap, and pulled out all the hair pins and shaken down her hair and brushed it and plaited it again.

‘What’s the matter?’ Lowri had asked. Catrin looked as though she was about to cry.

‘What am I going to do?’ she had asked. ‘What will become of me?’

Lowri was two years older than Catrin, a good-natured, motherly girl.

‘Don’t be such a little silly. Nothing is going to become of you, nothing at all. You’ll just stay home here with us until you’re old enough to get married. And your husband will be very rich and important, a doctor perhaps or a member of parliament, and you’ll live in a mansion and have a big motor-car. Now you put your skirt and blouse on quick and come down to the kitchen. Everybody’s out and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.’

But Catrin had stayed up in her bedroom crying. She was beautiful, she’d be a fool not to know it, she was different. She wasn’t going to stay at home until some idiot would notice her and ask her to marry him. She was going to use her beauty. She wanted....

She wasn’t sure what she wanted but she was quite certain that it wasn’t marriage and a quiet life in the country.

She had always been impatient by nature. As a small child every fine summer day had agitated her, she had insisted on getting up at the first light and going out with the men, even though she had very soon to return to the house to get ready, after breakfast, for a long walk to school. Miss Rees, worried that such a little creature would over-tire herself, used to coax her to stay in with her, even offering to let her wash the kitchen floor, at that time her special treat; but it was no use, Catrin would just point to the iridescent blue outside and run off.

When a picnic had been promised and had to be postponed, not because of a change in the weather which she had no difficulty in accepting, but because visitors had arrived or for some other ‘trivial’ reason, she would be inconsolable. ‘Tomorrow,’ her mother would say. ‘We’ll go tomorrow, I promise you.’ ‘Today,’ Catrin would shout, stamping her feet or throwing herself on the floor. ‘Today. Today. Today.’