A Small Country (26 page)

He knew nothing of the letter she had received at the beginning of July, just after Edward’s death in action. Edward’s wife, Rose, had forwarded the unposted letter to her after receiving it among her husband’s personal effects.

My dear girl,

I have found an inch of candle and a quiet corner so that I can write to you again. As always, you are in my mind.

There is to be an offensive tomorrow. Somehow, I don’t feel frightened once it has begun. Beforehand, though, I feel the need of wine and music – Captain Fielding has a gramophone and some Bach records – and more than either, and more than sleep, and more than prayer, I need this communication with you. The greatest blessing in my life is to have loved you. This morning early I wrote to Rose. She will understand, I know. All the confusion falls away. My candle is flickering, but I don’t need a light. You fill the emptiness around me.

‘
My dear Catrin
,’ Rose had written in a covering letter,
‘Edward was killed in action on the 22nd of June. He was my dear and loving friend. We must both try to be brave
.’

Her room mate had told the sister of their ward that Catrin had received bad news about a friend at the Front, and she was excused duties and allowed to stay in her room. For two whole days she did nothing but look at Edward’s letter and hold it to her cheek. On the third day, she bathed her eyes, burned the letter and returned to her duties. In old age she would still remember Edward, golden and perfect, as the love of her life. She knew that. The letter, like all his letters, was a part of her.

‘Yes, he’s a good, honourable man,’ Nano told Catrin when they came home from visiting Doctor Andrews. ‘Your poor mother would be very pleased about your engagement to him, I know that. He was as kind as an angel to your poor mother. Mr Tom’s friend, now, Mr Turncliffe, yes, he was a flower among men, he was indeed, but Doctor Andrews is respected and kind and he leads a lonely life, you can tell that, and your poor mother thought the world of him. No, no, there’s no need to cry. A good, hard-working doctor and a lovely house too.’

TWENTY-ONE

All through the winter Josi stayed in Cefn Hebog alone. Miss Rees sent young Dan up every week with a sack of food for him, but each time the boy had to leave it outside the locked door of the little farm house. For over four months Josi saw no one.

Days and nights passed by, leaving no mark. He walked and worked, usually in snow, during the short days, collecting sticks and chopping wood, and sat at a fire during the long nights without even a dog for company. For weeks he didn’t sleep except in snatches at the fireside. His sweat dried on his body. He worked and sweated again. He never washed.

He had no bed; no furniture except for a few broken odds and ends the previous tenants had left behind. After his wife’s funeral, his need to escape had been so urgent that he had taken nothing with him but a couple of blankets. Miss Rees sent him clean clothing from time to time, and soap and candles, but except for bare essentials he left everything untouched. He ate bread and cheese, made porridge, until his saucepan burned through, drank spring water.

He derived a certain satisfaction from the idea of being an outcast; he needed to feel that he was being punished, ostracized from society. If he thought at all, he imagined that he would spend the rest of his life there, alone. But he tried not to think. Collecting enough firewood on that isolated snow-bound moorland was an arduous task that filled his mind. The snow and the wind filled his mind.

Then, in the second week of March, some spring force, an insistent bird or some green growth, jolted him out of the death-wish of his existence and he began to think again of Hendre-Ddu which he had left to Jâms and Davy Prosser, and of his family. He washed himself and shaved, burned his old clothes and found new, swept out of his kitchen the accumulated debris of months, and decided to return to the work he knew and the familiar faces. In the space of a morning he had realized that his self-imposed exile was nothing but an indulgence; that he had to live, thinking and working, through his guilt and grief.

When he returned to Hendre Ddu that afternoon, ready to take over the management of the farm, though still determined never to live there again, he found Mari-Elen at ten months old already a little girl, tottering about and looking up at him with Miriam’s clear, unshifting gaze. She had gone to him at once as though aware of the relationship between them, and had clung to him when he had got ready to leave that evening. After that, the one necessity of his life was to find a way to have her with him.

Even on that first day, he realized that he would have to marry Lowri. She was the one he had – almost sub-consciously – chosen to look after his daughter: it followed that she must be his choice as a wife. A little girl needed a woman to care for her and a poor man couldn’t afford a housekeeper or even a nursemaid. It had to be Lowri, if she’d have him.

Cefn Hebog had to be renovated; the roof repaired, window panes replaced, papered inside and white-washed out, before anyone could decently live there, and Josi set himself to the task. He worked at Hendre Ddu every morning – he had slipped back with the greatest ease to his old routine – then spent his afternoons at his own small-holding.

In May, when the weather was warm, he had Lowri bring Mari-Elen up there on the pony so that while he worked he could watch her staggering about the yard or sleeping on the grass in the little walled garden.

He cleaned out the pond and brought up some ducks and ducklings. After putting the cow shed in order he went to Llanfryn mart and bought two cows and a white heifer.

Mari-Elen seemed to love being with him, mistress of all. The open moorland was beautiful in late spring and summer; larks sang without ceasing and the tiny streams were clear and cold.

He tried not to think how idyllic it could have been. Perhaps it could never have been idyllic. Perhaps Rachel’s illness and death had affected him more deeply than anyone, except Miriam, had understood. He tried to live in the present, tried not to think of how it might have been.

It was late September when he asked Lowri to marry him; the cottage was ready, the garden dug and planted. ‘Let me know your answer tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can go home to talk it over with your parents tonight.’

He wished he could make his proposal sound less like a business transaction, but he realized that to kiss her or touch her in any way would be to overwhelm her entirely. Many times he had tried to hint at what was in his mind, but it had obviously been useless; she could not have been more surprised if he had told her that he intended marrying Miss Rees.

‘How old are you?’ he had asked her.

‘Twenty-two.’

‘Perhaps there’s someone else you’d rather marry? You can tell me, you know. I won’t be offended. Jâms perhaps?’

‘No. Oh, no.’

‘You’re very fond of Mari-Elen and she thinks the world of you. Being married won’t be too bad. You don’t hate me, I know that.’

But Lowri looked so miserably embarrassed that he was tempted to let her off the hook, to tell her he could easily find someone else, someone a bit older, perhaps.

‘Think about it, anyway,’ he said at last. ‘Let me know tomorrow. I’m much too old for you, I know, and I may have done some things that you and your parents don’t much like, but on the other hand....’

He got stuck. He didn’t care to bring seventeen acres of hard land and a small stone cottage into the reckoning, and he couldn’t bring himself to lie about the state of his heart.

‘But on the other hand, it would suit me very well,’ he continued abruptly. And he nodded to her and smiled, and hurried from the room. He knew she would accept him.

And sure enough, she stood before him next morning blushed, and said, ‘My parents and I thank you and we would like to accept your offer.’

It was what he had expected and wished for, but his heart lurched and his throat burned.

Before he could say anything, though, Mari-Elen found them – Lowri never managed to escape from her for long. She ran to them; she still hadn’t quite mastered the trick of walking, she ran to them, and fell at their feet.

‘Will you come to live with me in Cefn Hebog, sweetheart?’ Josi asked her, swinging her up into his arms. She smiled, jigging herself up and down to show her eagerness, then collapsed on his chest, her lips on his face.

‘She’s a lot more enthusiastic than you are,’ he told Lowri. ‘Now, while there’s no one in the kitchen, I think I’ll have a kiss from you as well.’

‘Oh, no.’

He pulled her towards him but she was too shy to kiss him. All the same, she laughed and coloured and the distance between them was bridged.

For days Lowri was afraid to tell Miss Rees her news, afraid of her anger or scorn. Finally, Josi told her, and to Lowri’s surprise she seemed to have expected it and to think it a good idea.

She did not, however, waste any time on congratulations.

‘Now, Lowri,’ she said as soon as Josi had left the kitchen. ‘The thing I always want you to put first is your duty to Mari-Elen. We won’t talk about her mother; we never have done, and I’m not going to start now, but I know you’ll understand me when I say you must bring the child up with even more than the usual care, to go to chapel and Sunday school and to learn her verses and to love God above everything. Mr Evans is a good religious man at heart, and if you are strong in your faith he will follow your example. Remember that Mari-Elen is half-sister to Mr Tom and Miss Catrin and you must bring her up accordingly. Caring for the animals on the clos and the dairy work and the cleaning are what most farmers’ wives put first, their children fending for themselves quite early, but you mustn’t ever let Mari-Elen go about in rough old clothes and dirty boots, or let her hang about for her meals. Remember that I’m here to help you and I will always have a bit put by for her because she is Mr Tom’s half-sister, so it’s only right and proper she should have everything she needs. You will be a good housewife, I know, because you’ve been trained to do things right. Many times you’ve said to yourself, that old Miss Rees, but you’ll live to thank her, indeed you will. Some girls think that getting married is dressing up in fancy clothes and stopping for a cup of tea at three o’clock; it’s those who get miserable when they wake up to the reality. You have more sense than that. Remember the proverb which is at the back of every tidy wife: a change is as good as a rest. When you’ve been carting out after the cows, now, or scrubbing the dairy, then it’s a rest to do some baking or some ironing, but if you’re foolish enough to sit idle with your hands in your lap, you won’t catch up with yourself all week. But you’ll be all right, I’m sure of it. Even your bread is much better than most girls’, and though we all know that a man cannot live on bread alone, no man can live on shop bread even if it’s brought round to your door twice a week, which it won’t be up there in Cefn Hebog. Another thing, Lowri, while I remember....’

At the wedding service in Lowri’s chapel, the squat little brown chapel he had gone to as a boy, Josi hadn’t been able to keep his mind off Miriam. She had scorned Christian wedlock, and to him, too, the words seemed empty and faintly ridiculous. He looked at Lowri at his side, a stranger in a new light-coloured dress and blue Sunday hat. When the minister elicited her promise to love, honour and obey, Josi wanted to apologise to her. Who was he that she should obey him, let alone honour, let alone love.

‘That was a lot of old nonsense, wasn’t it,’ he whispered to her as soon as he could, squeezing her arm. But her eyes were full of tears. Dear God, he thought with terror, she’s in love with me, is it possible? I’m old enough to be her father and I’ve hardly considered her at all.

For the rest of the day, while they were at her mother’s, he stayed near her, glancing at her from time to time as though he were an ordinary bridegroom, trying to eat what was put in front of him, smiling when that seemed necessary.

Lowri’s sisters had all come home for the wedding, there were four girls between Lowri and Megan, the youngest. Lowri’s mother had been in school with Josi. Once plump and pretty, she was now thin and faded with darting, uneasy eyes. She kept on saying how much she was looking forward to a grandson after all the girls she’d had. Her husband was considered one of the most intelligent men in the area; he had been destined for the ministry, but had had to leave college to get married. He was the foreman in the woollen mill at Henblas. They were a respected, hard-working couple.

Josi wondered why they had let Lowri marry him; it seemed a careless way to dispose of a first-born whom they should have guarded and cherished.

Miss Rees was the guest of honour, and apart from Josi himself and possibly Lowri seemed the only one less than happy. She was probably thinking of the other wedding almost twenty-five years before, the grand reception at the Grosvenor Hotel afterwards, the other bride. He and Miss Rees were pre-occupied with ghosts. Poor Lowri’s troubles were at least of flesh and blood. I’m frightened as well as you, he wanted to tell her. Of minutes that are black with pain, nights that seem endless, regrets that squeeze at the heart. Miriam.

He took Lowri’s hand and patted it. He touched the ring on her finger.

‘You two can go now,’ Lowri’s mother said. Josi wondered if she was jealous of her daughter, she seemed so intent to embarrass her. Plenty of women had wanted him, perhaps she had. He looked at her coldly.