Disturbing Ground (4 page)

So
now
the
gossips
of Llancloudy
had
something
else
to
talk
about.
Something
other
than
the
scandal
of
the
doctor’s
hus
band
running
off
to
Cardiff.
And
rumour
had
it
that
he
was
not
with …

Megan put her hands over her ears. Sometimes she could swear she too could hear the whispering, insinuating voices, the malicious, salacious shock at the turn this clean living valleys girl had ended up. When she walked into a shop, a pub, even the surgery, conversation stopped, people would turn to look and the voices breathed just behind her shoulder, murmuring inside her ear.

Gossips had had a field day ever since she had returned from her holiday four years ago with a new husband in tow. That was when they had first turned their attention on to her.
“Went
on
holiday,
she
did.
To
Italy.
Met
a
man
there.
A
foreigner.
Married
him!
Quickly.”
The words had been full of meaning, the implication harping back to the old phrase - that those who married in haste repented at leisure. The chatterers had stilled for the briefest of honeymoon periods before the gossips had sat back to await the arrival of an “early” baby. None had appeared. But they had still waited. And eventually they had been fed the richest and most satisfying of diets.

“And
have
you
heard
the
latest.
Left
her
he
did
- for
a …”

“No,”
the
listener
would
rejoin,
right
on
cue
with
plenty
of
shocked
horror.

“Ye-es.
Ah
well
-
that’s
what
happens
when
you
marry
a
for
eigner.
Quickly.
Don’t
really
know
‘em,
do
you?
Not
like
some
one
from
here.”

They were right. There was safety in marrying a boy from the valleys. Predictability too. You knew his stock. Whereas outsiders …

Work had proved a great distraction from personal life, money worries, traumatic events and the grossest public humiliation. Forget it all in a plethora of visits and consultations, prescriptions to be signed, letters to be composed, clinical meetings and medical lunches.

Lunch. Three days after Bianca’s body had been found, Megan was queuing up in the local sandwich bar. Maybe it was the heat of the day or the scent of freshly baking bread mingling with herbs, basil, oregano, parsley. It was probably the combination of all factors which evoked acutely painful memories. She and Guido had been married happily - at first. But their marital contentment had lasted less than two years before disintegrating until there was no trace of happiness left. Initially the whispers had been soft and insidious; their marital discord was carefully concealed from the outside world, almost hidden even from the probing ears and the prying eyes of the gossips of Llancloudy who dredged the town for juicy titbits. But like water breaching a hole in a sea wall the force of tittle tattle had gained momentum and the damage inflicted huge.

The low point had been a dull, December day when she had finished her surgery unexpectedly early and decided to surprise him with an offer of a peace-restoring lunch out. She had taken no notice of a strange car parked along the road, nor even of the curtains still drawn late in the morning. But when she had unlocked the front door she had known something was strange. And walking into a candelit lounge to see her husband bent over another man, both of them stark naked, she had flipped.

Even now a waft of some scented candles was enough to make her vomit. The gossips had been wrong. Guido’s interest in women had been superficial only. Flirtation to smokescreen his real predilection.

The same day he had gone from her life. But now Megan screwed up her face and allowed herself to recall the early, happy days. During their first two years, on balmy afternoons like this, she had often queued up to buy two sets of sandwiches, a couple of cakes, some flavoured, bottled water and they would meet halfway between the health centre and his restaurant - a point marked by a small chapel and a sunny graveyard. Quiet and peaceful, reminding her of Rupert Brookes and long-ago deaths, nothing too near or too painful, nothing she could be held even remotely responsible for, but as distant as the far off memory of drums beating soldiers to war.

The graves almost all dated from the first half of the last century - well before this bright beginning of the millennium. Most of the stones in this ancient place had lost even their mourners now. And because the deaths had been long ago, she and Guido could amuse themselves reading out loud the inscriptions.
Er
Cof.
Yn
annwyl.
Cariad.
The Welsh phrases sounding so much more poignant than their English equivalents, In memory of … Dearest, Beloved, the stones marking all ages - from the elderly happy releases to tragic and multiple deaths of children, early, untimely and plentiful. Doctor-like she would wonder what they died of. Infectious diseases, accidents, genetic disorders, congenital malformation, malnutrition? The South Wales mining valleys had witnessed some of the most terrible, grinding poverty between the two wars. Tales abounded of the Means Test
men, of the miners’ strikes and the vast families spilling out of tiny homes.

“What sort, love?”

She came to with a start accompanied by a thrust of panic. She was thirty-one years old. Young, she corrected. But already she was beginning to live in the past. She stared at the assistant in the sandwich bar, patiently regarding her, waiting for her to make up her mind. And she almost felt a confused and pitiful old lady. She ran her eyes along the counter. She and Guido had always had the same sandwiches - egg and cress. Despite the restaurant he had been an almost vegetarian, rarely, guiltily, tucking into huge, bloody fillet steaks before solemnly declaring it had been horrible, disgusting, and he never would indulge again. Until the next time. Meggie caught her breath at the sudden vision of Guido making solemn promises - to love, cherish and obey.

And she had believed him.

“Bacon and egg,” she said firmly, “and a chocolate covered flapjack and a diet coke.”

Everything must be different.
Everything.
She glanced behind her at the growing, impatient queue.

“One pound eighty five, please, love.”

Meggie handed over two pound coins, waited for the change to rattle into her palm, picked up the plastic carrier bag of lunch and moved outside into the street. The valleys were all this shape, long and narrow. There was only really room for one main street. The others climbed either side in steep terraces. The gardens were slanted too. Coal dust dark, with soil so impregnanted with good Welsh coal you could almost believe you could burn it on a fire. But the mud could be a threat too. It was prone to slipping in heavy rain as the slag heap had on that terrible day in Aberfan. The land in these valleys shifted because some
of the hills were not real hills but dumps of waste soil, slag heaps deceitfully grown over with grass that never grew as true lush vegetation but always looked half starved of nutrients; pale, poor scrub.

Even the streets were deceitful, the houses built on the catacombs of the ancient mine workings that burrowed beneath most of South Wales. Many of the buildings bore their cracks like the battle scars of a sword slash. The Coal Board would compensate. It was a common enough phrase. And people today were anxious to forget all about the old days and put them behind them. The mines were shut, the tips overgrown or flattened into playing fields, the hollows filled with dark water and renamed - as Llancloudy Pool had been.

A couple of the mines had been opened as museums.
Lest
we
forget
sorts of places,
Pwll
Glo.
Black Gold. Kids were taken down on school trips to teach them about their heritage. But all that people imagined about “the valleys” was different now. And the kids wanted to forget it all. Every bit of it. The male voice choirs, the chapel, the mines, the dirt, the hardship. All was gone except the real mountains. Nothing could shift those. “Not even a Conservative Government”. It was the standing joke during Maggie’s time. Those mountains and this graveyard remained unchanged. One a sign of stubborn constancy, the other a reminder of mortality. Not that she needed one in her job.

The fleeting thought conjured up the picture of that still dripping body being dragged from the small pond. Meggie frowned, her fingers looped around the handle of the plastic carrier bag tightening. It had been a strange
way to die - even for a mad woman. Had no one seen her approach the pool, sensed her intent - if intent there had been. Had no one heard a splash - and wondered - or seen her struggle? Had there been no witnesses?

Megan walked slowly, struggling still with the question of intent. Bianca’s mind had been occasionally threatening, frequently downright peculiar. Always unfathomable, invariably illogical.

So why was she, Megan’s doctor, who had seen so many manifestations of her patient’s sick mind, disturbed by the fact that she was unable to understand Bianca’s final illogical act?

As she continued down the main street she pondered this point and like leafing through the pages of a reference book she found the answer.

Folk in the Welsh Valleys were prone to gossip. Call it a trait of the Welsh. Or maybe it was something to do with the geographical narrowness of the valleys, of the limitation of an area so sealed in by mountains that there was only one road in. And that too was the road out. But, chin up, defiantly Megan had returned from Italy with Guido in tow fully aware that she would be the subject of this gossip. She already knew every row or kiss, quarrel or hug would be the focus of much attention. Maybe the locals had sensed that all was not perfectly right with Guido long before she had, not blinded by romantic love as she had been but guided to trouble by their antennae. But even very early on, soon after their marriage, their sideways glances had been laden with malice. They had wanted her to look foolish. Most of her class chums from the comprehensive had married and had families quickly and had watched her very public exit to Medical School with a tinge of envy. The valleys loved their successes. But
they watched them too for signs of it “going to their heads”. And when Megan had dumped Alun it had been seen as a sign that she had been too ready to shed her roots. This was considered a bad thing. Her return as a qualified doctor had puzzled them. Why here, she could almost hear them question. She could have gone anywhere - the world.
Why
come
back?
The answer that they could not work out for themselves was that she loved the valleys. She belonged here. And she wanted to give something back to its inhabitants. Bringing Guido to Llancloudy had alienated her from the locals - as she had known it would. Her early ecstatic happiness had made them shake their heads.
And
wait.

Only Bianca, hesitating one day, after a long, pointless and difficult consultation, had pressed her hand, looked at her with penetrating sincerity and wished her happines. Staring back into the powdered face with its brilliant red lipstick curved into a clown’s smile, Megan had been touched beyond belief.

Now she remembered that day vividly. No one, not even her parents who now refused to even mention Guido’s name, had really, truly, wished her luck from the bottom of their hearts. For that she owed Bianca.

She paused outside the gateway to the Bethesda chapel then pushed open the gate. It was a small building of grey stone with brown paintwork and arched windows. A modest building, like most of the Welsh chapels, remnants of the old country. There were still plenty of those, the rows of terraced miners’ cottages, derelict mine workings, slag heaps and chapels with Biblical names: Bethesda, Hebron, Carmel, Tabernacle. The geographical narrowness was unavoidable. But today there was a forward looking hope and vibrancy that had been absent
from the Wales of her childhood. It lifted her heart as she pushed open the gate.

She suddenly realised she was very happy and very hungry.

A cloud that seemed to have sprung from nowhere blacked out the sun temporarily but she refused to let it influence her intention and rediscovered direction. She would eat here again. Alone. Guido’s final humiliating indiscretion would not prevent her doing things she enjoyed - just because she had once done them with him.

But the elements conspired against her. The cloud burst. Heavy rain splashed onto her arms and face. The darkness now seemed to encompass the entire sky. She was forced to shelter inside the doorway.

No reading tombstones today.

The food tasted good. Salty, smoked bacon, a hard boiled egg. Fresh brown bread. Meggie realised how much even the small enjoyment of eating had diminished in the last eight months. Since Christmas time. Guido’s seasonal indulgence had been the last straw.

She must stop thinking about him. She had a new life now. One without him. A new home. She was still youngish. But it was hard to keep her head up. It had been a public humiliation. She, the pin-up of the sixth form, dumped in favour of a man. The whispering had started within hours, the gossips conducted like a WI choir by Gwendoline Owen. Everyone quickly knew each small detail.