Disturbing Ground (8 page)

But events conspired against her. A couple of weeks later, on Friday morning, the sixth of September, a request was filed for her to visit Triagwn House, now a home for fifty elderly residents and the responsibility of herself, Andy and Phil. The Social Services had been the rambling house’s salvation. Unless a practical use had been found for the building it would have been pulled down years ago and the land used for a much needed housing estate. But in the early nineteen eighties, when the grand house had been falling into irreversible decay the council had anticipated a growing need for local nursing home care for the elderly. And so they had bought Triagwn House and adapted it.

As Megan threaded down the valley away from Llancloudy, towards the bottom of the valley, she was conscious of an unaccustomed sense of relief. Since Bianca had drowned, the village of Llancloudy had seemed particularly oppressive, almost claustrophobic. The weather had turned hot and the streets had felt even more cramped than usual. It had been noisy too with the streets filled with people, car windows open, blasting music into the air. The houses had looked different; front doors had been propped open, windows thrown wide, people sitting in what little front gardens they had. The patch of land opposite the surgery had been packed and one day Megan had even watched a small boy float a plastic yacht on the Slaggy Pool. To leave the crowded village behind felt like a welcome escape. The road, the river and the disused railway shared the bottom of the valley and she drove downwards until she
reached the point where the valley widened out and the ground flattened. By the time she reached the town of Nantyglo and ran the gauntlet of the long rows of pebble-dashed, semi-detached houses she was singing along with the car radio and an All Saints record. The sun beamed in through the windscreen. The road gave way to a petrol station and a wide roundabout. Left and right would lead straight onto the M4, left to Cardiff, right to the West - Swansea and beyond to the narrow lanes of Pembrokeshire and the St David’s Pensinsular.

She drove straight on, towards the market town of Bridgend, tapping the steering wheel in time to the music, then took a small lane to the right which led to a narrowing road and some tall, iron gates permanently propped open. The car rattled across the cattle grid and finally she faced Triagwn; a pleasing, square red brick building with a white pillared portico, vividly bright in the sunshine.

As she drew nearer to the house it was hard not to reflect how starkly different the mine owner’s home had been from the tightly packed, higgeldy-piggeldy terraces of cottages which had housed his workers. Their homes had been as different as their working days, the one, mole-like, underground, the other living from it and above it in splendid luxury which must have astonished the miners the few times a year when, usually on Bank Holidays, the doors were flung open to the general public. Megan smiled, in no hurry to end her approach, for once obeying the 10mph speed limit set more for the safety of the sheep that roamed the grounds - having picked their way across the cattle grid - than the inmates who mostly stayed indoors.

It was ironic that some of the current inmates of Triagwn had once been employees of the mine owner. And now they lived here alongside their one time task-master.
Geraint Smithson, aged 94, resided in one small room of this great house when he had once occupied and owned the entire building and most of the land both around it and underneath it. Today he was probably the most troublesome resident of Triagwn, a cantankerous old man who still believed he was master of the mine. And of the house too, so he bossed the nursing staff around mercilessly. The only person he had any regard or respect for was his son, Arwel.

Arwel was the florid faced member of the local hunt, a 54-year-old bully who had his own delusions. He still believed he had the right to deflower any female who came within touching distance of his long reaching and ever groping hands. Arwel lived in the Woodman’s Cottage, a few hundred yards behind the main house; set amongst the trees which had once provided the wooden pit props the miners had been so fond of. Megan remembered her grandfather telling the reason for this affection. “Because,
cariad,
if they are goin’ to break they tell you. They do crack first, make a noise, give you warnin’, give you time to get out - most of the time - whereas steel. Well - it do just go.” His eyes
had taken on a dark, unhappy look and Megan, the child, had visualised roofs crashing down and had held her hands over her ears to stifle imagined screams. But it was true that until the mines had closed the miners had trusted their lives to native wood and rejected the steel manufactured just a few miles towards the west.

She was at the top of the drive. She skirted the fountain and resumed her recollections as she often did when she visited the big house. She was hazy when exactly the Smithson family had moved out of Triagwn and decamped
to the Cottage, or when Geraint had been admitted back to his onetime home as a patient. She could vaguely remember walking up the drive when she had been a child, maybe ten years old, and the place had been derelict. She could recall peeling paint and dirty windows, gardens overgrown with nettles and weeds, threatening Keep Out signs, boards nailed across ground floor windows, threats that trespassers WOULD be prosecuted and tugging her father’s hand, wanting to escape the forbidden place.

Even now, when she entered through the rear entrance she could still sense dripping gutters and damp ferns. In those days the cherub of the fountain had been coated in green slime and the pool filled with stagnant rainwater. A contrast to the pure diamond drops that spurted from the cherub’s mouth today.

And when Bianca had made that fatal visit twenty years previously things must have been different again. She could picture it, the heyday of the house, the Smithson family throwing open their garden gates with pride and patronage a few times a year, inviting the locals to gasp at their wealth. It must have been on one of these public days, almost fifty years ago now, that three-year-old Bianca Rhys had visited Triagwn with her parents, fallen in this fountain and almost died. And so a pattern had been set for her strange and tragic life. Until finally she had died in a similar shallow pool.

During Megan’s teenage years she had vaguely been aware that Triagwn was being energetically renovated for some purpose. And when the scaffolding was finally removed Triagwn had looked different, all remnants of neglect wiped away. Then the signs had been erected, announcing that it was due to reopen as a nursing home
for the elderly. The climax had come late in the nineteen eighties when a local celebrity - a paunchy, ex-rugby player - had arrived in a stretch limousine with shaded windows to declare Triagwn House open. The first inmates must have arrived within days.

She remembered all this before swinging the wheel around and covering the last few yards of the drive, pulling around to the left and halting next to a mud splattered Land Rover.

Sandra Penarth must have been watching for her. As soon as Megan reached the front door it was pulled open. Acting Matron Sandra was a bright, competent woman in her early forties with thick, red hair which escaped from what probably should have been a neat chignon. But her hair was too heavy to stay up and flopped onto the nape of her neck. She was casually dressed in navy blue trousers with a turquoise shirt.

As usual the welcome was warm. “Come and have a nice cup of tea, doctor, and I’ll tell you about the few residents we’d like you to see.” Without waiting for an answer she bounced along the corridor, still chattering, the rhythm of her rapid speech tapped out by staccato steps on the vinyl tiles. The air was scented with lavender Airwick which failed to disguise an underlying odour of cabbage. And lurking beneath that was the unmistakable scent of old age.

The pictures that hung from the yellow walls lifted the atmosphere depicting cornfields and rural scenes against cloudless, blue skies, the
shadows starkly defined by bright, golden sunshine. They sported the optimistic primary colours of a child’s palette. Red, yellow, blue. Megan recognised a Van Gogh, a Rousseau, a Gaugin. No Gericaults here.

They turned at Van Gogh’s
Cornfield
into Sandra’s inner sanctum. Familiar, tidy, organised, neatly copied staff rotas pinned to a cork board. On a small table in front of the window stood a tasteful arrangement of fresh flowers - chrysanthemums and gladioli - and on either side a couple of framed photographs. The desk was light Ikea, the top clear except for a blue plastic pen holder and a maroon diary, closed, a long ribbon marking a page. The chairs were comfortable and new looking, upholstered in heather coloured wool. Megan settled into one, Sandra Penarth sat behind the desk, legs crossed, still talking.

“To be honest the biggest worry is old Mr Driver. I think he’s got broncho pneumonia. His chest has always been awful and now he’s got a bug on it to add to his worries. The trouble is that he doesn’t want to go to the hospital and his relatives really don’t want him to be forced to leave here. I mean, he’s been here six years. I don’t mind keeping him. As far as I’m concerned he can stay. He won’t last long. The work may be heavy for the nurses but they don’t complain. They just get on with it. The only thing that troubles me is it upsets the other residents when we get a death.” She looked up. “You know, Megan, one death, someone they know so well. Brings things a bit nearer.”

“Need they know?”

Sandra’s bosom jerked. “Hah. Try keepin’ it a secret. In fact try keepin’
anythin’
secret in this place. It’s hopeless.”

They were interrupted by a knock on the door and one of the Care Assistants in lilac trousers and white top brought in a tray of tea.

Sandra handed Megan a cup, sipped and smiled, waited until the door had closed again before continuing. “The other patient I’ve really got my worries about is old Mr Smithson. He’s always been a difficult patient, bossy and demandin’ but recently his mind’s wanderin’
somethin’ awful. He’s getting quite wild. He’s telling tales so bizarre he’s frightening all the other residents. And that’s not good for them.”

Megan took her tea. It must have been the phrase “tales so bizarre” that pricked her interest.

“What tales?”

“Silly old stories. Absolute nonsense.” Sandra put her teacup firmly down on the desk.

Megan persisted. “What stories?”

She did not receive a direct answer. Sandra Penarth rattled on. “You’ll have to sedate him, doctor. He’ll have to have more Largactil.”

“What dose is he on?”

“I’m not absolutely sure. We’ve been giving him a bit extra.”

“How much extra? You can’t justify giving him extra Largactil on account of his telling tales.”

“An extra tablet or two a day. If we can’t keep him under control,” Sandra said with the tiniest hint of a threat, “he’ll have to go to a mental hospital or somewhere better equipped to deal with him. And that would be a shame really to take him away from here. Being as it was his place all those years ago when he exploited the men of the valleys down his mine. I tell you what - I don’t know how his conscience is clear listenin’ to half the inmates coughing and spluttering up their coaldust.”

“They get compensation.”

“They’ll all be dead by the time that comes through.”

“Well - what could he have done? He isn’t personally responsible. It was the way coal mines were run in those days.”

“He could have done more.”

Megan was anxious to put a stop to the conversation. She stood up. “I’d better see them all,” she said.

Sandra followed her out of the room and together they started the laborious ward round, stopped in the corridor by beslippered residents, all of whom had vague symptoms and vaguer questions. It was as though they needed to see a doctor purely to retain their health. But then they had little else to focus on. And all the inmates in Triagwn were over seventy-five years old. They were likely to have some pathology.

Megan talked to all of them but the phrase Sandra had used, “tales so bizarre”, had reminded her of one consultation with Bianca which had stuck in her mind. It had been about eighteen months ago, during a period when she had been at her uncontrolled worst, peering round the surgery door as she had entered, checking the telephone briskly for a bug and finally blurting out to Megan that the child was dead. She had fixed Megan with pure anguish in her eyes, her forehead wrinkled with worry. “She’s definitely dead,’ she said. “I know it now - for certain. I’d wondered before but when he told me, this time, I
knew
it was the truth. It was the way he said it, you see. I knew he’d done it. Such a sweet little girl she was too. Always chattering. Never shut up. Little Rhiann.” Her face had sagged, bleak and hopeless and tears had tracked down her cheeks. “Isn’t he awful,” she had finished. “Why does he do it?”

Megan had given her patient her injection but half an hour after Bianca had left the room she had still been struck with an awful horror. For those few minutes she had glimpsed just how real and terrible Bianca’s delusions were. And now it sounded as though Smithson senior was suffering in a similar way.

Sandra Penarth was watching her, concern wrinkling her brow
.
“You all right, doctor? You look miles away.”

Megan licked a smile onto her lips. “I’m fine, Sandra. Just a bit tired. End of a bit of a busy week. If the weekend’s sunny I shall head for the beach. Take my towel and a good paperback and brush up on my tan.”

Sandra grinned. “Like the rest of the population? Sit in the queues all the way to Porthcawl more like.”

Megan laughed. “Whatever.”

And yet she couldn’t resist probing. “What stories?”

“Sorry?” There was a pause. “Oh - you mean Mr Smithson?”

“Yes - what stories?”

Sandra brushed aside a lock of stray hair. “About the mines when they were working and having to sack so many men when they were slack. Then he goes on about not knowing about their lungs being so affected and what’s that other thing - where their fingers go numb?”