On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (11 page)

‘Don’t cry, my darlings!’ Mary stretched her good arm around them as they blubbed out the news. ‘Please don’t cry. He had to die some time. And it was a wonderful way to die.’

Amos spared no expense on the funeral and ordered a brass-bound coffin from Lloyd’s of Presteigne.

The hearse was drawn by a pair of glistening black horses and, on all four corners of the roof, there were black urns full of yellow roses. The mourners walked behind, picking their steps through the puddles and cart-ruts. Mary wore a collar of jet droplets that she had inherited from an aunt.

Mr Earnshaw had sent a wreath of arums to lay on the lid of the coffin. But when the pall-bearers set it down in the chancel, there were mounds of other wreaths to heap around it.

Most of these were sent by people who were strangers to Mary, but who certainly knew Old Sam. She hardly recognized a soul. She looked round the church, wondering who, in Heaven’s name, were all those old biddies snivelling into their handkerchiefs. Surely, she thought, he can’t have had that many flames?

Amos stood Rebecca on the pew so she could see what was going on.

‘“Death be not proud …”’ The new vicar began his address; and though the words were beautiful, though the vicar’s voice was resonant and pleasant, Mary’s mind kept wandering to the two boys sitting beside her.

How tall they’d grown! They’ll soon have to shave, she thought. But how thin and tired they were! How tiring it was to come home from school, and then be put to work on the farm! And how awkward they looked in those threadbare suits! If only she had money, she’d buy them nice new suits! And boots! It was so unfair to make them go about in boots
two
sizes too small! Unfair, too, not to let them go again to the seaside! They’d been so well and happy last summer. And there now, Benjamin coughing again! She must knit him another muffler for the winter, but where would she get the wool?

‘“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”’ The clods thumped on to the coffin-lid. She handed the sexton a sovereign and walked away with Amos to the lych-gate, where they stood and bade farewell to the mourners.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Thank you … No. He died quite peacefully … It was a mercy … Yes, Mrs Williams, the Lord be praised! No. We shan’t be coming this year. So much to do …’ – nodding, sighing, smiling, and shaking hands with all these kind commiserating people, one after the other till her fingers ached.

And afterwards, at home, when she had taken out her hatpins and her hat lay like a slug on the kitchen table, she turned to Amos with a look of heartfelt longing, but he turned his back and sneered, ‘I suppose you never had a father of your own.’

THAT OCTOBER, A
new visitor made his appearance at The Vision.

Mr Owen Gomer Davies was a Congregational Minister who had recently removed from Bala to Rhulen and had taken charge of the Chapel at Maesyfelin. He lived with his sister, at Number 3, Jubilee Terrace, and had a bird-bath in his garden, and a yucca.

He was a bulky man, with unpleasantly white skin, a roll of fat round his collar, and facial features set in the form of a Greek cross. His sharp mouth grew even sharper if he happened to smile. His handshake was frigid, and he had a melodious singing voice.

One of his first acts, on coming into the county, had been to quarrel with Tom Watkins over the price of a coffin. That alone was enough to recommend him to Amos – though to Mary he was a grotesque.

His views on the Bible were childlike. The doctrine of Transubstantiation was far too abstruse for his literal mind; and from the sanctimonious gesture with which he dropped a saccharin tablet into his teacup, she suspected him of a weakness for sticky cakes.

One teatime, he solemnly set his fists on the table and announced that Hell was ‘hotter than Egylypt or Jamaico!’ – and Mary, who had hardly smiled all week, had to cover her face with a napkin.

She provoked him by wearing an uncommon amount of jewellery. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘The sin of Jezebel!’

He made a point of wincing whenever she opened her mouth, as if her English accent alone condemned her to
Eternal
Damnation. He seemed intent on weaning away her husband – and Amos was easily led.

The feud with Watkins had preyed on his mind. He had called on God for guidance. Here, at last, a man of God was willing to take his side. He read, with furious concentration, the mounds of pamphlets that the preacher deposited on the tea-table. He left the Church of England, and took the twins away from school. He made Benjamin sleep apart from his brother, in the hay-loft; and when he caught the boy sneaking up the ladder with the ship-in-the-bottle, he confiscated it.

Ten hours, twelve hours, the twins had to work all day till they collapsed, except of course on Sundays when the family did nothing but worship.

The Chapel at Maesyfelin was one of the oldest Non-Conformist chapels in the country.

A long stone building, devoid of decoration but for a sundial over the door, it lay between the stream and the lane, encircled by a windbreak of Portuguese laurel. Alongside was the Chapel Hall, a corrugated structure painted green.

Inside, the walls of the chapel were whitewashed. There were oak box-pews and plain oak benches, and on the pulpit were written the names of all the former ministers – the Parrys, the Williamses, the Vaughans and Joneses – going back to the days of the Commonwealth. At the east end stood the communion table carved with the date of 1682.

In India, Mary had watched the ways of Non-Conformist missionaries, and for her the word ‘Chapel’ represented all that was harsh and cramped and intolerant. Yet she masked her feelings and consented to go. Mr Gomer Davies was so blatant a fraud, surely it was best to let him go on bamboozling Amos, who would, one day, come to his senses? She sent a note to the vicar explaining her absence. ‘A passing phase,’ she added as a postscript; for she was incapable of taking it seriously.

How to keep a straight face as Mrs Reuben Jones pounded out the hymns of William Williams on the wheezy harmonium? Or at the warbling voices and wobbly feather hats? Or the men – sensible farmers all week – now sweating and
swaying
and hooting ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Amen!’ and ‘Yea, Lord! Yea!’ And when, in the middle of the 150th Psalm, Mrs Griffiths Cwm Cringlyn reached for her handbag and pulled out a tambourine, again Mary had to close her eyes and suppress the temptation to giggle.

And surely the sermons were absolute rubbish?

One Sunday, Mr Gomer Davies enumerated all the animals aboard the Ark and at evening service he excelled himself. He stationed five lighted candles on the rim of the pulpit so that, when he pointed his finger at the congregation, five separate shadows of his forearm were reflected onto the ceiling. Then, in a low, liturgical voice, he began, ‘I see your sins as cats’ eyes in the night …’

For all that, there came a time when it shamed her to think that she had mocked these austere ceremonies; times when the Holy Word seemed to set the walls a-tremble; and one particular time when a visiting preacher overwhelmed her with his eloquence:

‘He is a Black Lamb, my beloved lamb, black as a raven and chief among the thousand. My beloved is a White Lamb, a ruddy lamb and chief among the ten thousand. He is a Red Lamb. Who is this that cometh out of Edom, his garments red, from Bozrah? Is this not a Wonderful Lamb, my brethren? O my brethren, strive to lay hold of this lamb! Strive! Strive to lay hold of a limb of this lamb …!’

After the sermon, the preacher called the worshippers to communion. They sat on benches, the husbands facing the wives. Along the length of the table stretched a runner of freshly laundered linen.

The preacher cut the loaf into chunks, blessed them and passed them round on a pewter plate. Then he blessed the wine in a pewter cup. Mary took the cup from her neighbour and, as her lips touched the rim, she knew, in a flash of revelation, this
was
the Lord’s Feast; this
was
the Upper Room; and all the great cathedrals were built not so much for the glory of God as the vanity of Man; and Popes and bishops were Caesars and princes; and if afterwards, anyone reproached her for deserting the Church of England, she stooped her head and said, simply, ‘The Chapel gives me great comfort.’

But Amos went on raving and ranting and suffering from migraines and insomnia. Never – even among fakirs and flagellants – had Mary encountered such fanaticism. In the evenings, straining his eyes in the lamplight, he would comb the Bible for vindication of his rights. He read the Book of Job: ‘“My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest …”’

He threatened to move away, to buy a farm in Carmarthenshire, in the heart of Wales. But his bank account was empty, and his thirst for vengeance rooted him to the spot.

In March of 1912, he caught Watkins in the act of hacking down a gate. There was a fight: he staggered home with a gash above his temple. A week later, the postman found the Watkinses’ mule by the laneside, still breathing, with a pile of intestines spilling out on to the grass. On April Fool’s Day, Amos woke to find his favourite dog dead on the muck-heap; and he broke down and blubbed like a baby.

Mary saw no end to the misery. She looked at herself in the mirror, at a face more grey and cracked than the mirror’s pitted surface. She wanted to die, but knew she had to live for the twins. To distract herself, she read the novels she had loved as a girl – hiding them from Amos, who, in his present mood, would burn them. One wintry afternoon, drowsy from the fire, she dozed off with a copy of
Wuthering Heights
open on her lap. He came in, woke her roughly, and slammed the corner of the binding into her eye.

She jumped to her feet. She had had enough. Her fear had gone and she was strong again. She stiffened her back and said, ‘You silly fool!’

He stood by the piano, shaking all over, with his lip hanging loose – and then he was gone.

There was one course open to her now – her sister in Cheltenham! Her sister who had a house and an income! From her writing-case she removed two sheets of notepaper. ‘Nothing’, she concluded the final paragraph, ‘can be lonelier than the loneliness of marriage …’

Before breakfast next morning, Amos trundled the milk-churn from the dairy and saw her hand the envelope to the postman. He seemed to know each line of the letter. He tried
to
be pleasant to the twins, but they returned his advances with a steely stare.

As her black eye subsided and turned a yellowish purple, Mary felt more and more elated. The daffodils were in flower. She began to forgive him and, from his guilty glances, she knew he accepted her conditions. She resisted the temptation to gloat. The letter came from Cheltenham. He was terribly nervous as he watched her slit it open.

Her eyes danced over the spinsterish handwriting, and she threw back her head and laughed:

‘… Father always said you were headstrong and impulsive … No one can say I didn’t warn you … But wedlock is wedlock … a binding sacrament … and you must stick to your husband through thick and thin …’

She said, ‘I’m not even going to tell you what’s in it.’ She blew him a kiss. Her lips trembled with tenderness as the letter flared up in the fire.

SIX MONTHS LATER
, Benjamin had shot up in height, and was three inches taller than Lewis.

First, he grew a wispy black moustache and the fuzz spread over his cheeks and chin. Then his whole face came up in pimples and he was not a pretty sight. He was ashamed and embarrassed to be so much bigger than his brother.

And Lewis was jealous – jealous of the broken voice, jealous even of the pimples, and worried he might never grow as tall. They avoided each other’s eyes, and the meals went by in silence. On the morning of Benjamin’s first shave, Lewis stamped out of the house.

Mary fetched a dressing mirror and set a basin of warm water on the kitchen table. Amos whetted the razor on its leather strop and showed him how to hold it. But Benjamin was so nervous, and his hand was so unsteady, that when he wiped away the lather, his face was covered with bleeding cuts.

Ten days later, he shaved again, alone.

Often, in the past, if either twin caught sight of himself – in a mirror, in a window, or even on the surface of water – he mistook his own reflection for his other half. So now, when Benjamin poised his razor at the ready and glanced up at the glass, he had the sensation of slitting Lewis’s throat.

After that, he stubbornly refused to shave until Lewis had grown as tall, and grown a beard. Mary watched her sons and sensed that, one day, they would both slide back into the old, familiar pattern of dependence. In the meantime, Lewis was flirting with girls; and because he was limber and attractive, the girls egged him on.

He flirted with Rosie Fifield. They exchanged a breathless kiss behind a haystack and held hands for twenty minutes at a choral evening. One moonless night, strolling along the lane to Lurkenhope, he passed some girls in white dresses searching the hedgerow for glow-worms. He heard Rosie’s laughter, rippling clear and cold in the darkness. He slipped his hand around her satin sash, and she slapped him:

‘Get ye away, Lewis Jones! And take your big nose out of my face!’

Benjamin loved his mother and his brother, and he did not like girls. Whenever Lewis left the room, his eyes would linger in the doorway, and his irises cloud to a denser shade of grey: when Lewis came back, his pupils glistened.

They never went back to school. They worked on the farm, and providing they worked in tandem they could do the work of four. Left alone – to dig potatoes or pulp the swedes – Benjamin’s energy began to fail, and he would wheeze and cough and feel faint. Their father saw this and, with a farmer’s eye to efficiency, he knew it was useless to part them: it took the twins another ten years to work out a division of labour.

Lewis still dreamed of faraway voyages but his interest had shifted to airships. And when a picture of a Zeppelin appeared in the newspaper – or the mention of Count Zeppelin’s name – he would cut out the article and paste it in his scrapbook.