A Small Country (17 page)

He walked out to his car and cranked it up. He had been a houseman at Cardiff Infirmary and the matron, then a young sister, had been a particular friend of his.

Before going upstairs to her mother, Catrin went to find Lowri. Since she was leaving so soon, she needed to feel certain that Lowri would be staying. Her mother was very fond of her. Everyone was. She was a plump, good-natured girl with delicate pink cheeks and chestnut-coloured hair and eyes.

‘I’m going away, Lowri, to be a nurse. Only you mustn’t tell Miss Rees, yet, or anyone.’

Lowri’s eyes widened at the secret she was the first to hear.

The back kitchen was cool even in the heat of July, and smelled of herbs and bacon. Catrin looked about her, for the first time conscious of things she would miss; the cool back kitchen, the sun slanting in from the small, high window, the uneven blue flags on the floor, the baskets of fruit and vegetables.

‘You’ll be housekeeper here when Miss Rees goes, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Where is Miss Rees going?’

‘When she’s too old to work, I mean.’

‘Miss Rees. She’ll never be too old to work. Not till she drops. She’ll still be holding the reins on her death bed, Miss Rees will. Housekeeper indeed. I’ll be biding my time for twenty years.’

‘Aren’t you happy here, Lowri?’

‘Oh yes, I’m happy enough. I’ve been here ever since I came from school. Everyone’s good to me. Even Miss Rees most of the time.’

‘You’re not thinking of leaving to get married?’

Lowri’s round cheeks became a brighter pink at the suggestion.

‘I’m not even walking out with anyone. I never have done.’

‘You won’t leave us, will you, Lowri?’

‘Dear, dear, it’s
you
that’s leaving
us
. First Mr Evans and now you. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that, Miss Catrin, Mr Evans will be back I’m sure, and before the harvest too. I said to Jâms only last night, ‘Don’t you get too big for your boots, Mister Muck, Mr Evans will surprise us all and come back any day now, and then he’ll be lead horse again.’

‘In any case, Tom will be staying on here. Only that’s another secret, mind.’

Lowri’s face flooded with colour again. ‘Leaving the college and staying home to farm?’

Catrin nodded. ‘So you won’t leave us, will you? He’ll need all the help he can get.’

‘Of course I won’t leave. Never.’

‘Not even if Benji Brynmoel asks you to marry him?’

‘That run-down old tramp. Not likely.’

Lowri suddenly gave a little gasp and rushed to the oven in the front kitchen. She brought out a large golden cake, perfectly risen and smelling of eggs and spice. She carried it carefully to the back kitchen, laying it down with the batch of fruit tarts she had made earlier. Catrin watched her. ‘You’re a wonderful cook, Lowri.’

‘Quite good,’ Lowri said truthfully. ‘My bread isn’t as good as Miss Rees’s though. She says it takes fifty years to get the dough just right.’

Both girls felt the weight of fifty years on them for a moment.

Catrin was the first to shrug them off.

‘If you and Jâms were to come to any agreement, Tom would find you a little place, you can depend on it. In six or seven years, say.

‘Huh,’ Lowri said. ‘Huh.’

Catrin went upstairs to her mother.

*

‘Why didn’t Nano ever get married?’ she asked her.

‘Why should she get married? She had everything she wanted here. She was housekeeper before she was thirty. She’s been here fifty-two years, a few weeks longer than I have. She came to be my nurse-maid.’

‘I know.’

‘When my poor mother died, and I only five at the time, who would have snatched Nano from me then?’

‘Did anyone try? Did she ever have a sweetheart?’

‘She may have done. I never heard of anyone. Perhaps she hoped my poor father would marry her. That sort of thing happens now and again, and oftener too, but he was a very proud man, my father, The Morgans were real gentry once, you know; they had large estates in Pembrokeshire at one time; I’m talking now of several generations back. I suppose he might have thought, at first, of marrying some rich English lady, but he must have lost heart. He didn’t have any spirit for anything but work towards the end. Nano stayed with him, anyway.’

‘She stayed with you, surely.’

‘That’s what I mean.’

‘But you think she may have been in love with Grandfather.’

‘In love? I don’t know about that. She was a grown woman by the time I was old enough to take notice, not a girl. In any case, she was much better off here than she would have been in any small place with five or six children to rear.’

‘I hope she thought so.’

‘Of course she did. Well, I suppose she did. Some would choose poverty, I suppose. I don’t feel certain of anything by this time. Why do you bother me?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m very thoughtless.’

When Catrin told her mother that she would be leaving for Cardiff in ten days’ time, she accepted the news without flinching.

THIRTEEN

When Josi saw his son coming towards his house, he was full of anger. Pride, which he didn’t know he possessed, churned up inside him; he was ashamed that Tom should see his poor cottage, clean now, but badly in need of paint and wallpaper, bare of furniture, short of every comfort.

He went out on to the path as though to forbid him to enter.

‘Father, I’m sorry,’ Tom said, his voice so meek and troubled that Josi was immediately placated. Whatever Tom wanted, it wasn’t to humble him.

‘Come in, son.’

Josi put his arm round Miriam’s shoulders when he went back to the kitchen, a gesture both acknowledging and supporting her.

‘Here’s Tom come,’ he said.

Miriam and Tom managed to smile at each other. The three stood together, formally, awkwardly, the evening sun slanting in at them through the open door. Tom’s dark suit, his white shirt with its stiff high collar, added to the gulf between them; Josi was in his shirt sleeves, a brown spotted handkerchief at his neck, Miriam in a print dress, a long blue and white apron over it

‘It’s a fine evening,’ Josi said. He smiled, encouraging Tom to give them his message.

‘I must fetch some things from the line,’ Miriam said.

‘No, don’t go. I want you to hear what I’ve got to say.’ Tom turned back to his father. ‘Yes, it’s bad news, I’m afraid. Doctor Andrews says that Mother is dying. He doesn’t think she’ll last till Michaelmas; he’s sure she can’t live beyond Christmas. I wondered if you could possibly see your way to coming home for these last weeks.’

The shock in his father’s eyes halted him for a moment but he steeled himself to finish. ‘I know I’m making difficulties for you in asking; I know that. All the same, I don’t know what to do but ask. It’s all she wants. She talks of it all the time. And she’s dying.’

Josi sat down heavily in the armchair. Tom saw how he would look as an old man; shrunken and defeated.

Miriam caught a sob in her throat, made one strange, child-like sound, then was silent again.

‘Make us a cup of tea, love,’ Josi said at last. He got up and squeezed her arm. His words were for her. ‘It’s like a bad dream, isn’t it?’ They stood together for a moment.

Then Miriam went to the pump to fill the kettle and Josi put some sticks on the fire.

‘Sit down, man,’ he said to his son. ‘We don’t charge for sitting. How did you come, then?’

‘On the train from Llanfryn to Newcastle, a taxi-cab from there; walked from the main road because the driver was afraid of the hill.’

‘Thought I hadn’t heard a horse.’

Miriam put the kettle on the fire and got out cups and saucers. They had had their supper; she wondered what she could offer Tom; there was sanity in thinking about food and drink. She gripped the table as she caught Josi’s eyes upon her, so full of love and pain they seemed.

‘Will you have some bacon?’ she asked Tom.

‘I’ve eaten, thank you. In The Swan. I had to wait for the taxi-cab to come back from Aberaeron; someone going to the seaside earlier on.’

For a time no one spoke. The fire hissed and spat; it was a long time before the kettle started to hum.

‘Does
she
know?’ Josi asked, then.

‘No. Neither does Catrin. Doctor Andrews told me so that I’d agree to letting Catrin go away. He doesn’t want her at home.’

‘Cancer, I suppose?’

‘I didn’t ask. He had a specialist some time back, he said.’

‘Yes. He told me it was to do with the headaches she’d been having.’

‘It wasn’t that.’

‘No.’

‘Here’s your cup of tea, at last.’ Miriam’s hand shook as she passed it to him. The cup clattered in the saucer.

‘You’ll have to stay the night,’ Josi said. ‘You can have a blanket on the floor down here.’

‘Thank you. I could walk back to The Swan but it’s a fair step; I’d rather do it in the morning.’

‘What time is your train?’

‘Nine o’clock.’

‘You’ll need to start at seven, then.’

‘Half past six, seven.’

‘How was the hay?’

‘Very good – same here I suppose?’

‘Aye. Pretty fair.’

‘Davy is forecasting a wet August, though.’

‘Always does, man. Prophet of doom, old Davy. Take no notice It’ll be a good harvest, the barley’s tinkling already.’

Miriam went back to the table where she’d been ironing. She started folding little garments and putting them to air on the brass rail over the fire.

Tom knew they wouldn’t talk again about his mother until the morning. In the morning, his father would tell him what he had decided. He had to wait till then.

It was strange how he could sit so comfortably in the same room as his father’s mistress. She didn’t look like anyone’s mistress; just an ordinary, pretty woman, brown and freckled. Or was there something about her eyes? Strange eyes, wild and frightened, a strange colour, almost gold.

‘I’ll go up, then,’ Miriam told Josi. She looked a second at Tom, but didn’t smile.

‘Bring her down after you’ve fed her,’ Josi said. ‘She likes it by the fire.’

‘You can fetch her down.’

‘I’m not going back to Oxford,’ Tom said, when Miriam had left, shutting the door behind her.

‘Quite right.’

‘Catrin’s going to Cardiff to train as a nurse – that’s the latest. I’ve no idea what made her change her mind. She doesn’t say. Art School one week, nursing the next; sudden as that. Doctor Andrews pulled a few strings and got her in to the Infirmary in Cardiff. The course started in May, but he knew somebody.’

‘Does
she
know that Catrin’s going?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure you won’t have a bite to eat? What about some oat-cakes and buttermilk?’

‘I’ll have a couple of oat-cakes then, and another cup of tea.’

‘Listen to that bird. Blackbirds sing differently up here; same notes, different tunes.’

‘I knew a blackbird could whistle The Old Hundredth.’

‘No doubt.’

‘Heard it four or five times.’

‘You drink too much, boy, I tell you all the time. The Old Hundredth!’

They continued to mutter at each other good-naturedly for a while; talking of anything except what was in both their minds.

‘What’s the work like, up here?’

‘Work’s much the same everywhere, isn’t it. It’s a hard place, though, if you live in. The food’s terrible.’

‘Can’t be worse than we used to have at school. We had a dish called Workhouse Special. No one could eat it and we were all starving.’

‘Starving? You don’t know the meaning of the word, you and your school. When I was seven or eight I used to work for my Uncle Dan on a Saturday morning. Collecting acorns for the pigs, something like that. Hard work too, scrabbling under the wet leaves; you’d work for an hour to get a bucketful. And do you know what my wages were after a morning’s work? Four hours’ work?’

‘I used to dream about food in that school. Liver and onions. Dumplings.’

They were silent at last, the gathering darkness gave them the courage to be silent and to look at each other.

He despises me, Josi thought, I don’t blame him. When he’s older, perhaps he’ll be kinder, more understanding.

I think he should come home, Tom thought, it’s his duty to come home. He shouldn’t have left Mother. All the same.... All the same....

Each wondered what decision would have been reached by morning.

At last Josi yawned and bent to loosen his bootlaces.

‘I’ll have a bit of a walk while there’s still some light,’ Tom said, realizing that he’d be in the way while they were getting ready for bed.

‘See you in the morning then, son. I’ll be down by half past five. You’ll have the fire going and the kettle boiling by then, no doubt.’