Peaks and Troughs

by Nick Perry

  Someone got a crook round my neck and pulled me backwards. Suddenly I was lying on the ground with a boot on my chest. That was when Jack got stuck in, pulling them off me and giving me a chance to pick myself up. As one of them came running towards me I swung a punch, perfect in its timing, and watched him go down, out cold, flat on his back.

  It stopped the whole fracas. I’d ‘put his lights out’, I think is the expression. I could see Jack, breathless, with a bleeding nose, while the dishevelled mob had gathered in a circle and were staring at the crumpled heap that lay before me. Others who had been attending the auction stood only as onlookers. No one moved or uttered a word. But it was time to say something and I spoke out so everyone would know why the brawl had taken place.

  ‘What’s going on here today is illegal price fixing, the greedy lining their own pockets. You know who you are, and you’ll suffer the consequences.’

  There was no response, so Jack and I walked through them and drove away. In the rear-view mirror they were still watching us as we disappeared out of sight.

  After we had driven a mile or so without a word passing between us, I pulled off to the side of the road. That was when I told Jack the secret I had kept hidden for so long. How I had found Daphne Musto’s note the day we arrived at Dyffryn. The suspicions I had always felt about Gethin, that he was playing a dirty game, knowing he was trouble, up to no good behind our backs. I reminded Jack it was he who had stolen our water. Then I let it sink in, everything I had just said. I felt a tremendous sense of relief. Then both of us burst into laughter.

  ‘And where did that little monologue at the end come from?’ asked Jack, still unable to stop laughing.

  ‘I think it was Gary Cooper, in High Noon.’

  It wasn’t really funny, none of it was funny. When I swallowed, my Adam’s apple ached, bruised by the shepherd’s crook. My knuckles felt the pain of the punch I had thrown. My ribs hurt where the boot had stamped down on me. Blood had congealed inside one of Jack’s nostrils, and there was a blue swelling on his bottom lip. Our war wounds. I wondered if reprisals would follow, or whether my accusing words would break the ring. At least they knew we were aware of what they’d been up to. And where did the auctioneer stand in all this? Was he in the pocket of the mob? I was certain he was. They were vultures, picking over the remains of a hard-working man who had gone under.

  That night at Dyffryn as we sat round the supper table, Jack and I told the whole story. Hamish must have wondered if he was staying with a bunch of roughnecks. I told him not to form the wrong impression of us, that what had happened had to be faced up to. Rob thought they could come after us, while Ros was more worried about the fellow I’d knocked out pressing charges for assault. Jack thought they could poison our dogs, or run our sheep from the fields. The whole incident created some unease. The conversation went round in circles as we weighed up the possible outcomes.

  As I was falling asleep, I decided on one last course of action. The damage had been done, so it could not make matters worse if I paid an unexpected visit on Gethin Hughes.

  When Harry came by in the morning, he told me the story was out. He’d been playing darts in the Quarryman’s with Boomer Harris, who had described it as the punch-up at the Garndolbenmaen corral, adding that the chap I had laid out was Will Hughes who farmed over in Criccieth. He’d been taken to hospital to have his jaw X-rayed.

  ‘What do you think they’ll do, Harry?’

  ‘They’ll come after you in some dirty way to get revenge.’

  Once the morning feed and mucking out was over and I’d seen Rob and Hamish going down to the lower fields carrying bales over their backs to feed the bullocks, I took the opportunity to make my way over to Cae Uchaf. I didn’t tell the others because I felt they would be against it. I wanted to defuse any plotting and planning for revenge.

  As I climbed the stile in the boundary wall, Gethin was driving up the track in his Fordson Major, his rear-end loader stacked with bags of phosphates. Rather than wait for him to see me, I walked to the yard, where his wife was hosing down the flagstones. The water sparkled as it splashed on the ground. She seemed away in a world of her own. Not once did she look up as I called out to her. Only when my shadow fell across her did she jump with fright, throw down the hose and run into the house, leaving it wriggling like a snake until I turned off the tap. I couldn’t see her anywhere, staring from a window as she had done before. I wondered if she was stone deaf. She must have heard me calling.

  I could hear the tractor coming into the yard. Gethin was about to discover me standing there in front of his house, on his land, where he had once said I must never set foot again. In that minute I prepared myself for what was to follow. As he got closer, I stood with my feet apart, arms folded across my chest. An aggressive stance to show him I was ready and not going to back down.

  When he saw me he hit the brakes and came to a stop no more than a dozen feet in front of me. He sat in his cab glowering, with the engine still turning, his hands gripping the steering wheel. What was going through his head, I wondered. Maybe his dominance of the mob, which as far as I knew could have begun years ago, was at last threatened. And here I was, confronting a way of life that didn’t allow for strangers coming in with new ideas. Everything following a code of behaviour laid down by previous generations: this is how it has always been, and this is how it will remain. Had they made the Mustos’ lives a misery too? I suspected so from the note Daphne had left.

  Was he rattled? How was he going to deal with me? Had anyone defied him before? I couldn’t remember the last time I had lost my temper. Strange that I felt no fear, none whatsoever. Maybe he would pick up this fearlessness like a scent, backtrack and concede. Perhaps I would detect in his turn of phrase a hint that he wanted to make peace, a radical undertaking for a bully who was used to getting his own way.

  At last he turned off the engine, climbed down from the cab and slowly made his way towards me. When he was no more than an arm’s distance away, I saw in his eyes the look of a man no longer brazen and domineering, but toppled and exposed.

  ‘Here to finish the business are you?’ He spoke as if resigned to a fate already decided.

  ‘The game is up,’ I said. ‘All your dirty tricks, your conniving, your arrangements, your price fixing, all out in public now. And there’s nowhere for you to hide.’

  I told him I was considering going to the police (I wasn’t, but I thought I’d chuck it in for good measure), intended to speak to the FUW (Farmers’ Union of Wales) to seek advice on the matter, would have a serious word with the auctioneer. ‘He was certainly in your back pocket.’ Gethin’s reign was over and he knew it. ‘And tell your boys they are as guilty as you.’

  He said nothing, just stood there with his hands in his pockets, spat at the ground to show his defiance.

  ‘Do you remember the first words you said to me?’ I asked. ‘Good walls make good neighbours. Well, you’ve been a lousy one.’

  As I walked away, having said what I had to say, an unfamiliar feeling came over me. I had taken the high moral ground, but who was I to appear so righteous? I who dealt in cash and had my own secret stash in a shoe box under the bed? Was I a hypocrite, laying down the law to him? But there was no one around here who didn’t keep a certain amount of income back from the tax man. It was because so much was dealt with in hard cash. It’s in your hand in an instant. The animal you have just sold might be dead the next day. Cheques take days to clear and could bounce; where would that leave you? And if the boot was on the other foot, it was pointless going after the man who had sold you the beast to ask for your money back. We already knew that from our own experience with the dealer in Devon: ‘They were fine when they left here.’

  Most people didn’t trust banks after the financial crashes their fathers had lived through. The hill farmers saw them as institutions with smart carpets behind frosted windows, not places for those covered in earth and dung. Here everyone survived on subsidies and hid what
cash they could. ‘Who will feed the family if I go under?’ The answer was ‘No one’, so life was hard and you lived on your wits. That’s what Gethin Hughes had always done, and his father before him. The difference between us was that the way Gethin survived in the world was at the expense of his neighbours, who struggled by his side on the same hills. It was malicious, unfair, and had made their lives harder. All this went through my mind as I walked back to Dyffryn, feeling for certain that there would be no recriminations, that they would not be coming after us.

  Dave was chewing the metal bars of his pen, his twizzle fully extended, smelling a sow, wanting her to be let in. How many times had he done it? He was always ready to perform; nothing ever diminished Dave’s appetite for a good shag. He never turned his snout up at any sow; even in sub-zero temperatures he showed the same enthusiasm. Where would I be without his extraordinary sex drive, his amazing sperm count?

  We’d been at Dyffryn more than five years. How many weeks is that, the days, the hours? It felt as if I had learnt something every single minute. Or maybe it was just today, trying to put a value on everything that had happened. Who did I think I was, speaking to Gethin Hughes so self-righteously?

  Ros realised without my saying a word that I was preoccupied. I was never in the house mid-morning, making a cup of tea.

  ‘Where have you been? What’s going on?’

  So I told her. She wasn’t sure I had done the right thing, or that they would let the matter lie.

  ‘Gethin Hughes is an unpredictable man,’ she said. ‘We will know the consequences soon enough. Anyway, we have other things to think about.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have to wean Frieda’s calf.’

  Another one of those jobs I find painful and emotional. I carried the calf into the old milking parlour and bedded him down on some fresh straw. I would have to hand feed him, but at least he would still be drinking his mother’s milk, even if it was from a bucket. We no longer reared calves and would be selling him in a couple of weeks. Frieda bellowed her unhappiness around the farm. In the evening I turned up the music; I couldn’t bear to hear her. I hated myself for causing it. In the morning, when I milked her, she just stood there and let me get on with it. ‘Why do you let these things affect you so?’ asked Harry, immune to such feelings.

  ‘Because I care about her, that’s why.’

  Sunday, and we drove to Trefanai with the children. Our journey was delayed by a herd of Friesians blocking the main Caernarfon road. Sam had earache and was short tempered with his sister and brother. A cow pushed its wet slobbery mouth against the window of the car, while Glyn Roberts, a farmer I knew well, waved his arms, cursing in Welsh, trying to turn his herd into a field where they had bottle-necked. When we got past them we were running fifteen minutes late, and I knew it would irritate Eryl. Even if we explained the reason for our lateness she would say ‘You should have allowed for it.’ What’s more, there were slots she had allocated when Gwyn could take visitors. She was frosty when we arrived, telling Ros she needed to speak to her. She pushed me upstairs, letting me know I could have no more than ten minutes with him.

  When I entered, Gwyn was reading, his half-spectacles balanced on the end of his nose.

  ‘You should read this. The New Man, by Maurice Nicoll.’ He took a pen from the bedside table, wrote my name inside the cover and handed it to me. ‘You’ll get a lot from it. He was a disciple of Jung’s.’

  He was slipping away, his eyes sunken, cheeks hollowed, a yellowish hue to his skin. I offered him a glass of water that he sipped at only once before waving it away.

  ‘It’s only an ending here. A new beginning somewhere else,’ he said with a smile. ‘You are to share the books with Rhys [his son]. Those are my wishes.’

  I walked to the window overlooking his beloved Menai Strait, the wide gap of sea that separates the mainland from the Isle of Anglesey. Guillemots landed clumsily on the calm drifting waters. A rower’s oars broke the surface with a splash of whiteness that came and disappeared after each stroke. All were passing down the river of time, while on the footpath where we had walked so many times a Labrador barked at a ball floating away on the tide. I turned back and sat beside him on the bed.

  ‘Gwyn, is there anything you need me to do?’

  For a few moments he looked at me, reaching out his hand, almost whispering to me. ‘You’re not a Welshman, my boy, and this is not your home.’

  ‘What are you saying to me?’

  ‘When you know it’s time to go, do not stay for the sake of others.’

  I didn’t know what he meant, neither did I find out, for Eryl, after a gentle tap on the door, entered the room, saying he needed to rest now.

  ‘You can come again during the week,’ she said to me.

  I hadn’t thought of it before, his ending, the closeness of it. Throughout the house there were cards from well-wishers; on the hall table, along the mantelpiece in the dining room, filling the kitchen shelves, even on the ottoman upstairs.

  Eryl displayed the equilibrium of a woman in control of her emotions. Her outer persona showed a gracious attitude to the sympathetic feelings of all who knocked at the door, and it must have required an inner strength not to be pulled down into a world of tears. For those who knew him had come laden with their sadness, with gifts of flowers, too many to find a place for in the house. Some were in vases in the conservatory, others she sent to the cottage hospital. She declined Ros’s offer to come and stay with her. She preferred to sit alone in the evenings, watching television with a glass of sherry. A nurse now slept in the room next to Gwyn’s, while Eryl slept at the far end of the landing. The chime in the grandfather clock had been turned off. At eight o’clock in the evening she took the receiver from the phone, and the house fell silent. At ten she went upstairs, opening his door the necessary inches to see if he was sleeping. She left the bedside light on, entering the room only to remove his glasses, or to take a book from his hands.

  In the morning I arranged with Rob and Hamish to look after things, and left to say goodbye to Gwyn. It was autumn and after the chill night a warming sun rose over the fields, vaporising the dew in little mists not even knee-high, a layer of whiteness covering the grass at Dyffryn. The mountain peaks sharpened in clear skies. Down on the Caernarfon road I drove with my headlights on, stuck behind Gitto’s cattle lorry. Between the gaps in the woodwork I could see the eyes of Welsh Blacks looking out, their wet nostrils breathing heavily. The hedges were thick with blackberries and wild honeysuckle. Stray sheep grazed the verges, three feet from certain death if they decided the grass was greener on the other side.

  Eryl was in her dressing gown when I got to Trefanai, carrying a handful of letters in one hand, a cup of tea in the other. She told me to go up, that he was awake and knew I was coming.

  ‘Remember, no more than ten minutes,’ she insisted. ‘He’ll lose concentration anyway.’

  ‘Who’s looking after things?’ he asked, as I pulled up a chair beside the bed.

  ‘Rob,’ I said, ‘and a Scotsman called Hamish.’ I told him the story of how they had met, the advantages of hitchhiking around Europe wearing a kilt.

  ‘I want you to take Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, and here,’ he said, ‘I’ve made a list of others for you to read. Take it, take it.’ He handed me a piece of paper. ‘How’s Jack? Has he got himself a girlfriend yet?’

  ‘No, he seems more interested in sheep.’

  He laughed. ‘And your mother, does she still pine for her Cypriot fisherman?’

  ‘I think that’s far behind her now, but you know my mother, she is naturally romantic.’

  ‘Now, I’ve written you a letter to be opened after I’ve gone. Here, put it in your pocket.’

  ‘Gwyn, thank you for your friendship is all I can say. I don’t know what . . .’

  ‘Enough said. Leave it at that.’

  I got up and walked over to the window, looking out over the Strait.
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  ‘Tell me what you can see.’

  ‘Far off in the distance, above the blur of mist, I can see an unclouded day, and the white peak of a mountain, veined like marble. The trail of a high-flying plane, no more than an inch long in a huge sea of blue. I can see the stonework of the Menai Bridge. There are three cormorants flying east to west. And below, on that bench where we have sat so often, a woman is throwing bread into the water. There, that’s a picture of the day painted for you, my dear friend.’

  When I turned back to face him, he had fallen asleep. For a minute I stood and watched him, his chest barely rising, his eyes light-lidded, his head lolling gently to one side.

  ‘Goodbye, Gwyn,’ I whispered tiptoeing from the room.

  Later that morning in the warmth of an autumn day, Ros and I stretched out our sheepskins to dry in the sun. Six of them nailed to sheets of chipboard, clean and brushed, they looked like works of art. The plan was to find somebody who could make jackets from them. Hamish, who was leaving later in the week, said there were crofters all over the Highlands who made garments for the London trade.

  ‘I’ll be your Scottish representative,’ he said.

  He seemed serious about it, and when he mentioned it again I said, ‘What’s the deal?’

  ‘Ach, I want no money for it. I’ll get you names and addresses.’

  His plan was to join his uncle, who had a trawler in Mallaig, go to sea for three months, then head off to Kathmandu.

  ‘In a kilt?’

  ‘Aye, in a kilt.’

  After lunch Ros left, taking Seth over to Trefanai. Jack and I went to check on the hives. They never got the attention they needed, out of sight, never part of our daily routine. If Jim Best knew he would be disappointed, for though I had a genuine interest in bee-keeping I just did not have the time. Besides, as Jim had said, they are the most highly evolved creatures on the planet; surely they could look after themselves.