Ten White Geese (7 page)

‘No distance at all, huh?’

‘No, here in no time.’

‘We close at one. Just so you know next time. Awen!’

The baker’s wife emerged from the back. ‘Oh, hello, love,’ she said. ‘How was the cake?’

‘Good. Rhys Jones was enthusiastic about it too.’

‘Rhys Jones,’ the baker said.

‘He loves our cakes,’ Awen said. ‘Are you settling here permanently, love?’

‘Where does he actually live?’

‘Near the mountain. That way.’ The baker gestured through the wall. ‘In late October he moves his sheep to the old Evans farm.’

‘Do you get enough customers here?’ She was starting to feel hot and took a step to one side under the pretext of looking at something in the glass case under the counter.

‘His wife died,’ Awen continued. ‘All very tragic, and if she was still alive she would never let him eat so much cake.’

‘We get by.’ The baker gave his wife a sideways glance. ‘As long as people don’t buy their bread at Tesco’s…’

‘Is there enough heating in that house?’ Awen asked.

‘It’s fine,’ she said.

‘It’s not too lonely and isolated for you?’

‘No, that’s not a problem. There are geese. And a lot of sheep now.’

‘You’re alone? No husband?’

‘Mrs Evans came here to buy her bread right up to the end,’ the baker said loudly, as if trying to drown out his wife.

‘You should get a dog,’ Awen said.

‘What would you like?’ the baker asked.

She wanted to ask what Mrs Evans had died of and how long ago, but the couple on the other side of the counter looked at her so expectantly and so inquisitively that she stuck to ordering two loaves of bread and two packets of biscuits.

‘See you later,’ she said, putting her purchases in her rucksack.

‘When you run out of bread,’ the baker said. ‘And soon we’ll have Christmas pudding.’

‘A dog,’ the baker’s wife called after her. ‘That’s a true friend.’

She pulled the shop door shut and studied the sky. It was grey. Grey and drab, but it wasn’t raining. She looked towards Mount Snowdon and remembered that she needed to keep the mountain on her left. She glanced back as she stepped off the pavement. The baker who didn’t have a name and his wife Awen were standing there motionless, watching her. They didn’t wave, they watched.

*

The route she took back wasn’t exactly the same; almost everywhere she had gone wrong on the way there, she went right on the way back. Almost. But somewhere she made another mistake after all and it took her a long time to realise she had branched off on a different dotted line. It was all so indistinguishable: the thorny hedges, the squat oaks, the pastures, the metal drinking troughs, the manic birdsong. She found that strange: it was late November, why were the birds acting like it was spring? Without planning to, she came out at the T-junction where she had first seen the mountain and suddenly knew where she was; she didn’t
even need the map any more. She sat down with her back against a wooden gate, pulled a packet of biscuits out of her rucksack and ate half of them, giving herself plenty of time to study the mountain. Despite the grey weather it was covered with different colours: brown, ochre, green, even a shade of purple. It didn’t look difficult, she thought.

*

When she carried on to the drive, it was as if it were already twilight. She had to bend over and grab a tree. When she stood up straight, the pain had nowhere to go; crouched over, the dull twinges seemed to spread out a little, becoming more bearable. She couldn’t tell where precisely it was coming from: even in her arms and legs, it stabbed and nagged. She rubbed her belly and her upper arms, pressed a hand against her forehead and thought of her uncle. A little later, when she was picking her steps forward again, she saw Emily Dickinson before her, walking through her autumn garden, a first line in her head –
The murmuring of bees has ceased
– and trying to think how to help the poem along. No, never stung by a bee, our Emily.

The next morning she took her time over breakfast. She hadn’t been eating well, regularly skipping her evening meal. She still drank plenty. The clock said half past nine. When everything in the house was quiet, she could hear it ticking:
sharp, spiteful little ticks. She didn’t want it, she didn’t want time in her kitchen. She wanted to stop the clock, but the thought of putting a chair under it was enough to make her feel sick with exhaustion. Stopping it, not just to get rid of time, but to thwart that oafish sheep farmer too. She thought about Rhys Jones a lot and it always wound her up.

She’d done her best to make something of the living room and the rooms upstairs; the kitchen was just as Mrs Evans had left it. There was a lingering smell of old woman around the sink and cupboards, an odour that, in the weeks she had lived here, she had gradually come to associate with herself. It even seemed to have impregnated the old-fashioned washing machine: immediately after she’d done a load, before she’d hung it out to dry on the rack at the top of the stairs, a musty air had already imposed itself on the fresh scent of washing powder. Yesterday at the baker’s she had clearly picked up the smell of the old woman, perhaps because the walk had made her perspire, and she had stepped sideways to avoid her reflection in the narrow mirror behind the bread rack, scared as she was of seeing a different person.

She made coffee, whisked milk, cut two slices of bread and spread them with salted butter. She spread one with blackcurrant jam and put cheese on the other, then sat down and forced herself to eat and drink all of it. She looked out, saw that the creeper, silhouetted against the clear blue sky, was growing more and more transparent, and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. She wondered if she should go to the hairdresser’s for once. After washing the plate and mug, she went upstairs. Her diary was lying on the table in the study. She opened it and studied the dates, then worked
forward from a date she was sure of and tore off a perforated corner. It was Friday 27 November.

*

She left the car in the deserted car park next to the castle and walked into town. In the street with the clock in the arch of the town wall – yet another clock – she found a hairdresser’s. It was between the doctor’s and the chemist’s; she hadn’t noticed it last time. If it hadn’t been 27 November, if this had been a normal stay, she would have enjoyed this: walking straight to a hairdresser’s in a foreign town as if nothing in the world could be more natural, as if she came here every month to have her hair done. Now the sun’s reflection on the large window was too bright for her eyes, the bread was weighing on her stomach like concrete and she felt on the point of surrender, as if she were delivering herself up to a torturer with gentle hands. And she hadn’t even gone in yet.

There was just one other customer, the doctor. He was sitting there smoking. A second cigarette was smouldering in the ashtray next to the mirror.

‘Hello, love,’ the hairdresser said. ‘Sit yourself down. I’ll just finish off this gentleman. I’m almost done.’

‘Ah, the badger lady,’ said the doctor. Everything above the cobalt-blue hairdressing cape looked like a newly hatched chick. He studied her in the mirror.

‘What’s that?’ the hairdresser asked.

‘The badger lady. A badger bit her on the foot.’

‘No! That’s impossible.’

‘That’s what I said, but it did.’

‘How?’

‘Lying down on a big rock with bare feet.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep.’

The hairdresser stopped working, standing with her comb hand and scissor hand poised in mid-air. ‘I only ever see dead badgers. On the side of the road.’ She reached out to the ashtray and sucked so hard on her cigarette that the tendons in her neck stood out. She used her other hand to wave away the smoke she exhaled.

‘Me too. They’re stupid animals. They think they own the night. That’s why they never look out.’

‘Is that it, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen a live badger. Maybe you should ask the Dutchwoman.’

Now the doctor and the hairdresser both looked at her in the mirror. The small salon was thick with smoke. Fortunately she’d already picked a magazine up off the coffee table, stunned as she was at being discussed like this, and began leafing through it randomly. Nobody actually asked her anything, so she didn’t need to answer. She tried to concentrate on an article about how to arrange pumpkins on a porch while the doctor went into detail about his patients’ complaints. He had a strange way of addressing the hairdresser as an equal, as if they were two middle-aged women who had known each other for decades, two friends discussing everyday life. Cackling back at him every now and then, the hairdresser snipped away until the moment she whipped the cape off his shoulders and called out, ‘Done!’ The doctor got up out of the chair and thanked her. The hairdresser showed no sign of moving towards the till.

Standing in front of her, the doctor lit a cigarette. ‘You coming by again?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ she said.

‘So I can check the wound. Among other things.’

‘I don’t think that’s necessary.’ She kept her eyes stubbornly fixed on a photo of an enormous green pumpkin.

‘Whatever you think best,’ the doctor said. ‘Whatever you think best.’ He left.

‘Come and sit over here,’ said the hairdresser. ‘Then we’ll start by giving your hair a nice wash.’

*

The hairdresser kneaded and stroked. Her hands were soft. The water was exactly the right temperature, the shampoo smelt very pleasant. As far as she was concerned, they could postpone the cutting for a while.

‘How would you like it?’ the hairdresser asked. ‘A trim?’

‘Short, please. Easy.’

‘The badger. Was that really true?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And badgers come out in the daytime too.’ They said nothing more during the wash. When it was finished, she thought she could smell Mrs Evans again, despite the shampoo. She looked at herself in the mirror – hair gone from around her neck, face pale, eyes dark – and knew that she was going to ask for something she had never asked for before. ‘Could you perhaps turn me round?’

‘What?’

‘Turn me round. The chair.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I…’ She didn’t know how to explain it.

‘You won’t be able to see what I’m doing.’

‘I’m confident you’ll do a good job. I like surprises.’

‘This is a new one on me,’ the hairdresser said, turning the chair with her foot. ‘I can’t see what I’m doing properly now either.’ She tapped a cigarette out of the packet and set the door ajar, after first opening it all the way and looking left and right down the street. Then she laid the burning cigarette on the ashtray. ‘Is this a Dutch custom?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Well, here we go then.’ A quarter of an hour later she was finished. No new customers had come in. The hairdresser used a dryer to dry the gel she had rubbed into her hair and pulled it into shape with rough tugs. The cigarette had burnt down unsmoked.

She got up without turning to face the mirror and walked over to the small counter with the till on it.

‘Don’t you want to look?’

‘No. I really do want it to be a surprise.’

The hairdresser stared at her and opened her mouth, perhaps to ask if that was another Dutch custom.

‘I like surprises,’ she said.

Deeply insulted, the hairdresser closed her mouth and typed an amount on the old-fashioned cash register, which rang loudly.

She paid, said a friendly goodbye and walked out of the salon, leaving the door slightly ajar. A little way down the street she glanced back and saw the hairdresser standing outside her shop, one arm crossed under her breasts with the hand tucked in her armpit, a cigarette in the other hand, staring fixedly at the perfumery across the road, her bleached hair thin in the slowly rising cloud of sunlit cigarette smoke.
She kept a grip on herself through the narrow streets and the car park, even though there was hardly anyone around. It was only when she was sitting in the car and saw herself looking like a startled animal in the rear-view mirror that she began to cry.

She inspected the wood supply in the pigsty, looking and counting, and decided not to light fires in more than one room at a time. Then there’d be enough. And if she did run out, she could always sit in the kitchen near the cooker.

The sun was shining again and the smoke from her cigarette rose straight up, just like the hairdresser’s yesterday. She leant against the light-coloured wall of the sty and felt its warmth on her back through her nightie, but her neck was cold to touch. Her head was light, as if kilos of hair had been cut off. She smoked with her eyes shut.

Here she was, without a single appointment, without a single obligation. She thought of the geese and the cord strung along the path and remembered one commitment she had made – to buy bread from the baker in Waunfawr – then felt like everything was too much. She threw the cigarette onto the lawn and went into the house, wiping her bare feet off on the mat to get rid of the slate grit. She dressed, put a towel in the rucksack and went for a walk.

*

On her own path. Across the stream and through the oiled kissing gates and the small wood of ancient trees, where the path grew clearer each time she used it. Song from birds she couldn’t identify and had never known; a squirrel. She walked straight through the stone circle and onto the embankment through the marshy ground. The map was back home on the kitchen table. Past the boggy section, she came to a steel gate with long-haired, big-horned black cattle on the other side. A stile next to the gate. She’d have to cross the field. She didn’t hesitate, but climbed over, paying no attention to the cattle. If I pretend they don’t exist, they won’t notice me either, she thought. The path seemed to follow a wooded bank. If necessary, she could crawl into the thick undergrowth for safety. The countryside kept undulating and when she looked back after fifty steps, she didn’t recognise a thing. She was lucky: the frame of what had once been a kissing gate showed that she had taken the right direction. She left the black cattle behind her. In front of her the land sloped down; she could see the water.