Down Among the Gods (22 page)

At the lower end of the vegetable rows is the septic tank which they had to put in when they made the new bathroom upstairs. At the left-hand side is the stream, emerging from the pipe which carries it beneath the yard. On the other side of the stream is the wall of the outbuildings, which becomes, further down, the wall of the meadow.

Patrick has reached the end of his garden.

His breathing is rapid and shallow from anger and useless exertion. He looks across at Jessie who is standing with her hands in her pockets, off in her dream world, totally impractical. In sudden fury, he rams the crowbar so hard into the soil and the bedrock beneath that he jars every bone in his body. Then he turns and strides towards the house.

Jessie stays where she is for a while. Displays of emotion were never allowed during her upbringing, and she hasn’t the faintest idea how to deal with them. The rain is soft and soothing against her skin. At the bottom of the meadow, the trees are quite still. The only movement in the landscape is a single crow crossing the sky in silence. Behind her, the front door opens and closes again.

‘I’m off for the paper,’ says Patrick.

Jessie changes, makes tea, and returns to her study. She picks up her notebook again, but her heart is no longer in it. Instead she chooses the easier of the two manuscripts and settles down to work.

Patrick is a little longer than usual down in the village, but he’s in better form when he comes back. He makes coffee for Jessie and brings her a plateful of specialities, tiny sandwiches sticky with honey, and squares of chocolate and halva.

The rain has stopped, but he doesn’t have any desire to go back to the fencing. Instead, he goes into his studio.

The cockerel is still on the drawing board. It is one of the few things he has drawn from life as opposed to from imagination, and it is not good. He knows it is not good as he looks at it now, and is acutely embarrassed that Lydia should have seen it. His use of colour is poor. The bird looks something like a dishevelled hawk, and he has completely missed the pride and brilliance that he had been trying to capture.

He looks at the piece for a long time. He doesn’t want to put it on the wall. Nor does he want to put it on top of the other drawings which lie in a pile on top of two upturned orange boxes behind him. But he is afraid that if he puts it underneath the others, he will be tempted to look through them and discover that they are equally bad.

He wanders round for a while, tidying the alcoves, studiously avoiding the drawings on the walls. He sharpens a few pencils into the empty hearth and sweeps the shavings into a neat little pile in the centre. Then he returns to the cockerel. But there is no way to improve it. Nor, yet, does he want to destroy it. Instead he just leaves it, and returns to the house. It is the first time since they moved to Wales that he has thought about the TV.

T
HERE ARE THOSE WHO
suggest that Hestia, the old hearth goddess, is dead. She is not, though, not quite. She still has small areas of influence in outlying areas such as the Himalayas and the Andes but she will never reclaim her position in Western civilisation, at least as long as electricity continues to be generated and people sit around in front of their TVs. But even before all that, long before in fact, she had resigned her seat among the Twelve Great Ones on Mount Olympus.

She didn’t mind resigning; she had always hated all the carping and bickering that went on among the family. And after all, someone had to make way for Dionysus.

That evening, when Jessie finishes work and comes into the kitchen, she finds that the dinner is almost ready.

‘Are we eating early?’ she says.

‘I thought so,’ says Patrick. ‘I was hungry. Besides, Dafydd says there’s some music on in the Bell tonight.’

‘Oh?’ says Jessie. ‘What kind of music?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Jessie clears the table and gets out knives and forks.

‘I met some nice people down there the other night,’ Patrick goes on. ‘It made me realise how isolated we are up here. We never seem to see anyone apart from Dafydd and those people who do the cave paintings.’

Jessie thumps him gently in the back. ‘They’re not cave paintings.’

‘I think they are.’

‘Well, whatever they are, they seem to be doing very well out of them.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ says Patrick, ‘I can’t deny that. They’re in the right kind of business, no doubt about it. Ashtrays, coasters, wall plaques for the tourists who are fed up with looking at their migrating ducks. Maybe I should do something like that?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Well, why not? I’m wasting my time drawing cockerels and stone walls and ... bloody ... mountain nymphs.’

Jessie moves round and stands in front of him. She puts a hand on his arm and tries to look into his eyes, but he is gazing fixedly into the peas which are bubbling under a stem of mint.

‘Don’t ever say that,’ she says. ‘Don’t ever say you’re wasting your time. Some of those drawings out there are brilliant, Patrick. You know that.’

‘No, I don’t,’ he says. ‘Nor do you, for that matter. What do you know about art?’

He is still gazing at the peas, which are taking it in turns to bounce to the surface. He gets the impression that they are trying to escape, and turns off the heat.

Jessie gives up trying to contact him, but she is disturbed by what he has said. She tries to remember what she was doing before it all arose.

‘Plates,’ he says, briskly. ‘Salt and pepper.’

‘Right!’

‘Shall we go, then, tonight?’

‘To the Bell?’

‘To the Bell, to hear the resonations.’

‘Is that what they’re called?’

‘Could be, couldn’t it?’ He laughs. The peas are subdued now, and he drains them.

After dinner, Jessie goes upstairs to change. She puts on the white shirt that she bought for Patrick, because she has realised that white suits her well, with the red hair. Since she got the shirt, she has bought herself one or two other things in white as well. It is a new departure.

Patrick comes into the bedroom as she is making up her face.

‘Warpaint,’ he says. ‘You mean business, eh?’

‘Just a bit of mascara,’ says Jessie. ‘Want some?’

‘You what?’

‘Why not?’ she says. ‘Men used to wear make-up. They wore it long before women did, in fact. I think men look brilliant in it. Just a bit, mind you. Nothing outrageous.’

‘You’ve done that before, then, have you? Hung around with blokes who wear make-up?’

Jessie thinks about it, and realises that she hasn’t. Nor is it something she has seen in photographs or films. She doesn’t know where the image comes from, but she knows that she likes it. ‘Do you think it’s kinky?’ she says.

Patrick shrugs and sits on the bed to change out of his denims. ‘Whatever you’re into, I suppose,’ he says. ‘But it isn’t my idea of fun.’

The evening is fine, so they decide to walk to the village across the Black Ram and down through the woods. As they close the door of the house, Jessie says, ‘Have you got money?’

‘No,’ says Patrick. ‘Haven’t you?’

‘No. Is there some in the drawer?’

‘Should be.’

There is a moment of hesitation, then Patrick goes back into the house. As he is about to open the drawer of the dresser, he stops, and a wave of dread passes through him. It is not because the drawer might have no money in it, but because he is sure that it always will.

The area known as the Black Ram begins at the yard gate and stretches over the shoulder of the valley and some distance down the other side. It is about a hundred acres of scrubby land, all heather and bog, where once a rogue black ram caused havoc by breeding with the sheep that grazed there. Black sheep are popular now, but in those days they were a curse to farmers because the wool fetched less from the factories. The black ram, however, was not only never caught, he was never seen. The only evidence for his existence was the extraordinary number of black lambs that were produced by the landowner’s ewes. There were rumours, though, that he stood four feet tall at the shoulder and could cover ninety ewes in a day.

There are tricky patches of bog on that land, but the way between them is clear and firm. Above the house called Cae Coed, the path forks and one branch leads down to the road, while the other takes the shorter, cross-country route to the village. There is about a mile in the difference.

Once past the Black Ram, the countryside changes to grassy hillsides with patches of bracken and gorse. Patrick and Jessie walk side by side, looking out at the view along the valley to the sea until the path narrows to cross the bank of the churning pool. Patrick stops and Jessie stops behind him. Together they stand and peer down into the black water.

Above it, the hillside is almost sheer, and cut in two by the stream which feeds the pool. The bank that the path runs along is narrow and straight, but otherwise the pool is circular.

‘Dafydd says someone fell in there one night,’ says Patrick. ‘An Englishman on his way home from the pub. That was before they put the fence up.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ says Jessie. ‘It would be easy enough to do.’

‘Yes. Looks lethal, doesn’t it? Apparently there’s a sort of sluice in the bank at the other side that they used to open when they were doing the churning. Then when they didn’t use it any more, they left it open, but it keeps getting blocked and silting up again.’

Jessie wobbles the posts. Their hold on the ground is tenuous because there is no earth there for them to go into. Beneath the thin turf of the track is a stone wall.

‘I don’t think the fence would be much help if you were about to go in,’ she says. ‘I think you’d just bring it with you. What happened to the Englishman, anyway?’

‘That was the weird thing,’ says Patrick. ‘He woke up in the morning on the opposite bank, dry as a bone.’

‘He probably didn’t fall in at all.’

‘The story is that he remembers hitting the water but doesn’t remember a thing after that. Dafydd’s grandmother said that the place was a sort of stone circle before it was turned into a churning pool, and that the old god who was worshipped there threw the Englishman out because he didn’t want people dragging the pool and disturbing him.’

‘Maybe it’s true,’ says Jessie. ‘It’s a great story, anyway. I’ll have to remember it.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, stuff like that could come in useful if I was writing something. You know, tales of the old folk.’

Patrick moves off again and Jessie follows him along the path.

‘Are you going to write about the people around here?’ he says.

‘I don’t know. I might do. I don’t know what I’m going to write yet.’

Dafydd is already in the bar with Mel and they make room at their table for Patrick and Jessie. A few mop-headed youths are wandering in and out to the back room with drums and microphone stands.

Dafydd introduces Mel to Jessie, and he greets her with a wide but tight smile.

‘Mel’s a Welsh Nat,’ says Dafydd, winking at Jessie. ‘He can’t stand the English.’

‘Oh, good,’ says Jessie. ‘Nor can I.’

Patrick is pleased with her, proud to show her off. But when he returns with the round, he sits himself firmly between her and Dafydd. It is an unnecessary precaution. He has no reason at all to worry about Jessie’s loyalty, and if he did, the danger would be Mel. He addresses himself mainly to Patrick, returning immediately to a conversation they were having two nights before about the Welsh language and the shoddy way it is taught in schools. Patrick learnt Irish as a boy and at one time spoke it fluently among the native speakers in Donegal, and although he couldn’t care less about either language, the common ground makes him feel more at ease with Mel. But Mel, very slyly, is making eyes at Jessie.

He is governed just now by Ares, the god of war. Mel is a lot more militant than he lets on even to Dafydd. If he had his way, he would settle the English by taking up arms. But because he cannot, his pent-up energy is constantly under restraint and looking for outlets. Jessie knows nothing of what lies in Mel’s soul, but Aphrodite does. And Aphrodite loves Ares.

Jessie finds that she is a little attracted to Mel, but also rather uncomfortable about the way he is being deceitful to Patrick. She turns her stool sideways to avoid catching his eye.

They drink two pints in the bar, then Mel buys a round to bring with them into the back. Jessie asks for a half, but he brings her a pint and winks as he hands it to her. She turns away as disdainfully as she can and looks around the room they are in. It is a large extension built out into the space where the car park used to be and so new that the plaster on the walls is still unpainted, still drying. Behind it the car park has moved into what used to be a field, and is big enough now to accommodate the increased tourist trade that the landlord anticipates. Over beside the rough, wooden stage, the members of the band are taking their time to get their equipment just perfect. This is the biggest gig they have done so far.

Along one wall a few tables have been set up. The pub regulars have already claimed most of these, but Dafydd manages to squeeze his little party in among some of his friends about half-way down. On the other side of the room, up at the end near the stage, is a large group of teenage girls, most of them giggling, most of them drinking shandy. At the back, a few boys are drifting in, standing with their glasses in their hands and refusing, manfully, to look at the girls.

The band finally gets organised and starts, quite stylishly, into a number which has no introduction. The vocalist is attractive and confident, but he’s not a singer. He doesn’t need to be. The band does nothing but rap, and all of it in Welsh.

Jessie finds it funny, and looks sideways to share her amusement with Patrick, but he is deeply engrossed in talking to Mel and she fails to catch his eye. She catches Mel’s instead.

In spite of herself.

Jessie resists the tug in her lower abdomen that Mel’s hungry look has produced. She turns back to her pint and watches the dancers instead.

There are already quite a few of them out there, all girls so far, jigging self-consciously to the music. The boys at the back are almost facing the wall in their determination not to be seen looking. Patrick and Mel are still involved in deep discussion. Dafydd, cut off from Jessie by the other two, is drawing pictures in a puddle of beer.