The Sunflower Forest (36 page)

A sudden smile lit up Angharad’s face and she leaned over and spoke in Welsh to her husband. Owen Jones gave way with a loud guffaw. Ho, ho, ho, he went, just like Santa Claus. ‘Is
that
what you thought it meant? Forest of Flowers?’

‘Coed-y-Bleiddiau, yeah,’ I replied.

Ho, ho, ho, he hooted. Ho, ho. At least all the laughter was waking him up.

‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

‘You thought
bleiddiau
meant flowers?’

I nodded.

‘Oh no. No. Forest of Flowers would be
Coed-y-Blodau
. Your Welsh is good enough for that, isn’t it? You knew that, didn’t you?’

I stared.

He was still laughing. As if I’d told the joke of the century. ‘Oh no, no, no. It’s a much older cottage. The rhodos have only been here since the beginning of the last century. No, the cottage was built ages and ages ago. The name means Forest of Wolves.’

‘That can’t be,’I said.

‘Oh ay, Lesley.
Bleiddiau
means wolves. Didn’t you realize that?’

I sat, stunned into horrified silence.

Angharad smiled gently.
‘Blodau, bleiddiau
. They sound very much alike. If you didn’t know the language, you could easily confuse them.’

Dumbfounded that Mama could have made such a terrible error, I remained speechless.

‘It’s an understandable enough mistake to make,’ Angharad said.

Slowly, I nodded. ‘Mama must not have understood. She was Hungarian, you know. I guess she must have mixed up the similar sounds.’

‘You mean The Lady?’ Owen Jones asked.

I nodded.

‘The Lady?’ he asked again cheerfully. ‘Oh no, not The Lady. She knew what it meant. She could speak the old language. Quick to learn was our Lady. In no time at all she could talk it. Well as my old
nain
. Ay, The Lady was a right wonder.’

I gaped at him. ‘You mean my mother knew Welsh?’

‘Oh, ay, that’s what I’m saying. The Lady, she knew.’

T
he sensation of impending tears came up the way nausea does before you vomit. It started in my hands with pins and needles; my palms went clammy. My stomach clenched. Suddenly chilly in the warm kitchen, I shivered. My throat grew too tight to swallow.

Owen Jones was still chuckling, and I hated him for it.

Without excusing myself, I dragged myself off the bench, stood up and struggled toward the kitchen door.

‘Where are you going, Lesley?’ Angharad asked. Owen Jones’s merriment halted abruptly.

‘Lesley?’ he called after me. But by then I was out of the kitchen and I shut the door firmly behind me. The cast-iron latch clicked into place, shutting off the sound of their voices.

Where
was
I going? Where could I go, wearing no more than my underwear and Owen Jones’s bathrobe?

‘Lesley?’ The door from the kitchen opened.

I limped on to the front porch. Spying a pair of Wellington boots, I pulled them on and clumped out into the farmyard. The wind had died, but it was still raining steadily. I hobbled as fast as I could across the yard. Behind me, someone had already reached the front door.

Stumbling into the darkness of the barn, I groped for the light switch. Unable to find it and full of a desperate urgency to keep away from whoever was behind me, I felt my way along in the blackness until I came to one of the pens at the end. I opened the gate and fumbled my way into the hay.

The barn door swung open, and Owen Jones’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. He turned on the light. There was only a single, naked bulb to illuminate the entire length of the barn, so I was still in murky shadows.

‘Lesley?’ He came slowly down the aisle of stalls and pens.

My only conscious thought was one of humiliation. Ridiculously dressed in a man’s bathrobe and a pair of rubber boots, sitting in a sheep pen, I felt like a fool. Not being seen that way suddenly took on bizarre importance, and I scrambled backward over the hay.

Owen Jones appeared at the gate of the pen. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you.’

‘Just go away, all right?’

‘I was tired,’ he said. ‘It just struck me as funny. But I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’

‘They’re not hurt. I’m all right. Just go away.’

Rain pattered against the roof. Nervously, Owen Jones shifted from one foot to the other, his bewilderment undisguised.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I don’t know what made me laugh like that.’

‘It wasn’t the laughing.’

Silence.

I picked bits of hay from one bale.

He watched me.

I twisted a long piece around my finger.

No sound but the beating rain.

‘She
told
me it meant Forest of Flowers.’

‘Who?’ he asked.

‘Mama. She told me the name of the cottage was Forest of Flowers.’

His forehead puckered. ‘Ay, but that’s not such a big thing, is it? Maybe she forgot.’

‘She didn’t forget. My mama didn’t forget things.’

‘Well,’ he said gently, ‘maybe not. But it’s not a very big thing. Not a matter worth an upset, is it? It’s just a name.’

‘It’s
not
just a name, believe me.’

He said nothing in response.

‘What it is, is the last straw for me,’ I said. ‘This is the very last thing I can tolerate.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a lie.’ I looked down at the hay, picked at it. ‘Because it’s suddenly made everything a lie.’

‘Well …’ he said with gentleness still in his voice. A moment or two passed, and he failed to complete the thought. He moved his weight back to the other foot. Looking away, he studied the timber of the stall beside him, then he looked back at me. Another weight shift. ‘Well,’ he said again, and the nagging discomfort of not knowing what to do echoed in his voice. Finally, he unzipped his waterproof jacket. ‘Here. You’re going to take a chill sitting out here. Put this on.’

I let the jacket lie where it had fallen. ‘Please, just leave me alone.’

He did. My attention was on the hay, and when I looked up again, he was gone.

The barn was damp and cold and smelled of sheep. It was an unwelcoming place to be. Reaching down for Owen Jones’s jacket, I put it on. The rubber lining felt clammy against my skin.

Where tears should have been, there was nothing. I had no idea what to do with myself. I sat, numbed. Everything in the world seemed wrong. Everything suddenly seemed tainted to me. Nothing had value.

The rain stopped. I stood in the doorway of the barn and watched the mist lift off the immediate hillside. Dawn had come sometime during the previous hour and the sky had gone from black to leaden grey, a colour it might remain all day.

Wearily, I leaned against the door frame and tried to think of what to do next.

The light was on in the kitchen. Siôn Twm and Eirian were up. I could see their small shadows bobbing on the wall by the window. A longing to go in and be with them overtook me. The kitchen would be warm and scented with bacon and toast. Siôn Twm would still be bleary-eyed with sleep, his teddy bear in his arms. He wasn’t an early riser. Eirian, though, would be chattering, shoes on the wrong feet, shirt tail untucked, as it was every other morning.

When I looked across the yard, I noticed that the Land Rover was gone. I hadn’t heard Owen Jones leave, but the tracks in the mud were full of rainwater, so he must have gone before the storm had stopped.

Going back into the barn, I took down one of Owen Jones’s shepherd’s crooks from the wall. I zipped up the waterproof jacket, shut the barn door and made my way through the farmyard mud to the steep path leading toward the cottage.

The journey back was difficult. I was tired and my foot hurt. Even with the shepherd’s crook to support me, progress was slow over the sodden, slippery grass of the incline.

In the forest I found my way blocked by a fallen tree. It was an old oak, one that had been half dead previously. It lay sprawled over the path, so I had to retreat into the underbrush to get around it. A lot of branches were down in the forest, all of them oak or beech or maple. The supple, evergreen rhododendrons stood, untroubled, in the aftermath of the gale.

The clouds remained low and heavy against the breast of the mountain. Soon it began to rain again, gently but persistently. When I reached the fork in the path at the edge of the forest, I paused and looked across the hillside to the cottage.

There was no way to reach it. The stream had grown into a small river, crashing noisily down the hill. All the flat land around the cottage was swampy.

Forest of Wolves.

It was ugly. It was godawful ugly, really. It always had been. Grey walls against grey roof against grey rock against grey sky. Grey and swampy green. At least she’d been honest about that. But the cottage was nothing more than a man-made pile of rubble, desperately trying to revert to its natural state. My three months’ occupation had done nothing to stem the tide of decay. It was almost a relief, I thought as I leaned against the shepherd’s crook, not to have to pretend any longer that it was lovely.

I continued to stand, supported by the crook, my mind completely without thought. The rain strengthened. Thick cloud curled in around the cottage, and the grey stones softened and blended into the mist.

I began to cry, and the cottage and the hillside and the wild little stream dissolved entirely behind tears. Turning, I walked slowly up the path over the ridge, pulling myself along with the shepherd’s crook, picking my way around lichen-covered slate outcroppings that glistened in the rain. All the heather was in bloom, a muted purple contrast to the stone and grass.

Above me a rook rose up from a gorse bush, circled and called overhead.

The rain continued.

Upon reaching the upper ridge, I crossed into the high pasture. Weary and in pain from my foot, I finally stopped at the wall on the far side. The pasture ended abruptly there on the rim of an ancient, disused slate quarry. Below the wall, the gouge in the mountainside dropped away in sheer terraces for hundreds of feet. On a clear day the spot afforded a spectacular view of the small, quarried cwm garlanded with heather, as well as the adjoining valley that widened westward toward the sea. Opposite rose the large mountains that formed the heart of Snowdonia, and when the clouds were lifted, the mountains ran away, one after another, as far as the eye could see.

However, on this morning, there were only gradations of grey. Below me, the valley was completely obscured by fog.

Leaning against the wall, I wept.

The clouds thinned and lifted slightly, shredding apart on the rocky pinnacles of the mountain opposite. The rain slackened and then stopped altogether. But the sky never lightened.

A flock of wood pigeons was started up from the forest below, and they flew into the air in a great group, the sound of their wings carrying across the hilltop. I raised my head to watch them. Like a single being, they all turned mid-air and then dropped out of sight below the ridge.

With my attention on the pigeons, I did not hear her. Not until she had come through the pasture and was only yards away. Startled by the sudden awareness of movement, I turned.

Angharad wore a thin, blue plastic raincoat, the kind you buy for fifty pence at the seaside when caught in an unexpected shower. She had her skirt tucked into a pair of Owen Jones’s heavy waterproof trousers, and it occurred to me upon seeing her that she never wore pants.

She came up beside me. Without speaking, she leaned against the wall and looked down into the cwm. Gently, she lay her arms between the sharp, spiky slabs of upright slate along the top of the wall.

Silence prevailed for several minutes.

‘I used to come up here,’ she said quietly. ‘When I was younger.’

She leaned farther over the wall. ‘See down there?’ she pointed. ‘See that farm? You can just make it out through the mist. By where those trees are.’

The mist cloaked everything that low in the valley. I strained to see.

‘That’s where I was born.’

A pause.

‘And I used to walk up here sometimes. It’s about three miles. Straight uphill.’

Somewhere behind us a bird began to sing a beautifully fluid song. Angharad turned her head toward it. It stopped. I gazed into the sheerness of the quarry. Sheep, as surefooted as mountain goats, climbed up the stony terraces to nibble heather.

Angharad looked back toward the valley. ‘I was about sixteen or seventeen then,’ she said. ‘I climbed up here to see if I could see beyond the mountains. I came up quite often for a while.’

She lifted her eyes to the mountains beyond.

‘It’s the closest I ever came to getting out of this valley,’ she said.

I studied the mountain opposite. It looked mammoth in the mist, and mysterious, a mystery I knew would be dispelled in bright sunlight.

‘Did you know,’ Angharad said, ‘that the Welsh have more words for “mountain” or “hill” or some other barrier in the landscape than the Eskimos have for snow?’

‘I don’t really want to know anything about Welsh right now,’ I replied.

‘I think it must be because there are more mountains and hills in Wales than any other thing. They couldn’t manage with the few words the English have.’

‘Then they must have a million words for sheep,’ I said without humour.

Angharad smiled anyway.

The silence returned. I felt full of sodden tiredness and braced my head with one hand. Angharad remained motionless against the wall, her gaze fixed on the shrouded mountain across the valley.

Far below in the quarry a ewe cried. Another ewe called out too. She was near us and had a late lamb with her. It butted anxiously at her, and she watched us warily, without trust.

‘Doesn’t your father miss you?’ Angharad said.

I shrugged.

‘You’re such a help. Doesn’t he miss having you at home? Especially now, when he’s alone and has the little one to take care of.’

‘She’s not so little. She was ten on August eighth.’

‘But he must be lonely,’ Angharad said.

The ewe was still bleating. Many other sheep had joined in and the small cwm below us filled with an almost deafening sound, like cheering at a ball game. Their voices varied greatly. One was gravelly like an old grandfather’s. One was deep. One was almost a Bronx cheer. One was as melodic as a song. One was the voice of an infant crying. Back and forth across the cwm they called, their voices funnelled up the steep sides of the quarry for perhaps the better part of ten minutes. I’d always meant to ask Owen Jones why they did that, because every day, at some time or another, I would hear them bleating all together.

‘You want to know something, Angharad,’ I said.

She turned her head slightly but did not look at me.

‘Do you want me to tell you how my mama died?’

My heart began to rush in my ears.

‘I don’t know how to say it exactly, how to tell it so that it makes sense to anyone.’ I paused. ‘My mama was in the war and she had her little boy taken away from her then, in Germany. And for some reason, I don’t know what, she got to thinking this child in the town where we live now, this child in Kansas, was that little boy of hers. She just got the idea into her head, and no matter what we did to try and convince her that he wasn’t, she went right on believing this was him, her son. We did everything we could think of. We tried and tried and tried to make her change her mind. But it did no good. She thought they were Nazis, the boy’s parents, and that they were keeping him away from her.’