by Dai Smith
He remembered the towel at last and rubbed off most of the soap from the unshaven cheek and jowl, forgetting that he hadn’t really finished the other side. ‘Eisteddwch i lawr,’ he said. ‘Sit down, sit down.’ His hands and arms were dark, tanned in the way holidaymakers dream of, but there had been little sun and leisure in his past. His fingers were thick and clumsy now, the joints stiffened and the thumbnails broadened and turned in towards the quick.
‘You mustn’t mind me,’ he went on. ‘I’m a bit slow now. Don’t hear very well either. So Auntie and me, we don’t do a lot of talking. Can’t be helped, though, can’t be helped. But I’m glad to see you, bachan, indeed I am.’
Mair was sitting quite still, waiting to understand. She had never really known her grandparents, who had died long ago, outside the first unthinking decade of her life. This was the first time she had been really close to an old age that was linked to her in blood. Sensing a little constraint, I stood up to close the gap and rally Ben a bit. I peered in the glass beside him.
‘The older generation of Evanses may not have been handsome, but they were certainly distinctive,’ I said. It was true. Six brothers and three sisters, some round-headed and some long-, three of the brothers and one of the sisters dark as Spaniards, and all of them with the haughty, sometimes digressive, nose that looked as though it were a child’s attempt at distinguishing a Roman patrician. Ben’s nose was the best of all, the most digressive and outrageous, achieving by stature what it lacked in accuracy. And it was the only one alive too.
‘Should have some value as a museum piece, shouldn’t I?’ he queried, amusement leaping from crag to crag of his face.
‘Scarcity value. Very hot on that these days, I’m told. Eighty years old and a craftsman’s job. Nothing like it round here now.’
‘Mair,’ he said, turning, ‘don’t take any notice. Your father’s always rude to me.’
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘He’s always rude to me too.’
‘Well, well,’ he murmured, recovering his grasp of routine. ‘Time to get Auntie out.’ With that he disappeared into the adjoining bedroom. I had been in the bungalow just long enough to notice how cold it was, and trying to suppress a first shiver in action, I got up to see whether I could help. At the door of the bedroom I stopped: Ben was already coming towards me with a bundle in his arms. There was condensation on the top panes of the only window.
‘Take her a minute, will you, while I get the chair ready.’ I caught my aunt under the armpits and held the poor four stone of her, clothes flouncing and dangling, nothing visible except the head lolling against my chest. From this burden came up a foetid smell, the smell of incontinence, of clothes lived in like a burrow. I was sickened momentarily, revolted. I tried desperately to hold my breath. Then Ben was taking the burden from me and tucking it down in the chair. On what looked like a child’s face, pink and white and unlined, was a feeble smile, made of parted lips and something, just something, in the eyes.
‘There, Sara. You didn’t believe me, did you? But here’s Gerwyn, as I said. And Mair. You’ve not seen Mair before, but I’ve told you about her, haven’t I? You remember. She’s at university now.’ Mair and I in turn felt for the limp fingers hidden in the end of the long woollen sleeve.
‘How are you, Auntie?’ I asked, my voice sounding louder than necessary. The lips moved, but no sound was detectable at the range of formality. Bending down, I picked up the burden of the whisper as it was repeated. ‘All right, boy. All right but for this ol’ complaint.’
‘Good, good. That’s it, that’s the way.’ I followed with other meaningless heartiness, of which I was ashamed even in the saying. I did not know the end, let alone the way. And to have known something of the beginning seemed at that moment of very little help. It was a mercy that these dishonesties elicited no further reply beyond the barest parting of the lips.
But my uncle was not one to leave me in difficulties for long. Never getting any answers, or none that he could hear, he had long been accustomed to a rhetoric of his own devising, which bounded forward at quick irregular intervals, as though, having played his ball onto a wall or an angle of his private fives court, he had to jump in and slash it back, or missing, take it another way on the rebound. He appeared to know that he could afford a second or two for plain inattention, but must then make some immediate, possibly violent, move.
‘How’s Celia, then, bachan?’ He did not wait for an answer, his dark face animated. ‘Our Rhian’s won a scholarship, did you know? To university, yes. Clever girl, she is. There’s not many can say they’ve got a granddaughter that’s won a university scholarship, now is there?
‘When…’ I began. ‘When…’ But my thought had already been distracted by the movement that I sense rather than saw. I was conscious of some urgency in the doll-like figure in the chair. Looking more closely, I realised that the lips were moving.
‘Photograph.’ The word formed slowly and whisperingly. ‘Ben, show them the photograph.’
Ben was talking hard, rallying Mair now and pushing her shoulder back with the blunt ends of his extended fingers. He had taken no notice of my attempted question, let alone his wife’s tiny excision of her envelope of silence.
‘Uncle,’ I said. ‘Uncle! I see I shall have to do some bullying too.’ He looked at me in surprise half thinking I resented his familiarity with Mair. ‘The photograph. Auntie says what about the photograph.’
For a second or two he still looked at me blankly. Then, realising and turning almost concurrently, he disappeared into the front room and came back with it in his hand. ‘There,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Isn’t she a fine girl, our Rhian?’
I looked at the photograph carefully. There were the features again, unmistakeable. The dark, handsome, almost negroid face with the distended nostrils and the mass of little scalp-curls. Idwal to the life, all but the squint she had against the brightness of the light. A fine-looking girl, by any standards.
‘Taken in Adelaide?’ I was trying hard to avoid the real questions.
‘Yes, Adelaide. That’s the university in the background.’ It was a slab of white wall. It could have been anywhere, provided anywhere was sunny enough.
He took the photograph back slowly, keeping his eyes on it as though there were something about it that he had not really seen before. Then, turning away, he put his arm round Mair’s shoulders with sudden boisterousness. ‘Come on, merch fach i, let me show you the bungalow. Great place we’ve got here, you know. Extensive. Room for twice as many.’ His voice swept down the passage and into the front room. I was at a loss. The invitation had not seemed to include me: indeed, I had some sort of sense that it was important to Uncle Ben that I should not tag along. ‘At all costs,’ said a cowardly urge, ‘don’t get left here, mun. Don’t be left with Auntie. What will you say?’ I went down the passage far enough to be out of sight of the invalid chair and stood still. Uncle was talking photographs in the room beyond, pointing out each individual face. Mair was mute, probably muddled by the many names she did not know and afraid to reveal her ignorance. They wouldn’t be out for a minute or two yet. I stood in this transit-place, aware that I had deliberately walked out of life and all ears not to be caught doing it. I stood with both palms against the clammy wall and thought.
That photograph. Shaking really, that anybody could be so like. The past living again, but in Australia. Something about that transplanting was a wound, even to me. It was an end and a cutting-off, whatever life was in it.
I found myself pressing against the wall, for no reason that I could name. Perhaps I had walked out of time too. I was possessed by that utterly alien feeling that one has only in childhood, that sense of seeing and understanding and not being at home. I was back forty years and the wall was cold behind me. Uncle Ben was an ironmonger then and Aunt Sara, in her cold, composed way, was queening it among the locals. An inexorable social aspirant, Sara. Her good looks, broad brow and closely curling hair didn’t hold the attention lon
g. The hardness came out like a ratchet to fix one exactly in one’s place, and it had to be a very special occasion for me not to be conscious of being pinned down, not so much intimidated as powerless to escape the measuring tape with which her square hands were so constantly occupied.
Whatever Ben and she were did not so much matter. It was for Idwal, her son, that she planned and drove. Ben must work harder, make all possible. Ben must immolate himself on the altar. Ben must not question the unspoken contract she had with the greatness of her son’s image. It was a hard, cumulative story that had cracked now as iron cracks. It was all so old, and unbelievable. And yet it had produced Idwal, if only for a time. Idwal was in some ways a replica of his mother, only handsomer, with black, curly hair and dark, almost negroid features with wide-spreading nostrils. How poor Ben, with his digressive nose, could have had a part in such symmetry was at first hard to see. But he had given the boy his colour and the black scalp-curls too. I remembered going down to the river at Llanybyther once to find Idwal. He was about twelve then, bare feet and jam pot for tiddlers and all, and I was two years younger. I went to the river because I had been sent. The truth was that I was a bit afraid of Idwal: he was tougher than I, more confident as well as older. Not at all prissy and sensitive as I was. Idwal laughed when I arrived and showed me off to a lot of other kids. ‘My cousin, look,’ he said. ‘My cousin. Down from the Valleys.’ He laughed again, as though daring any comment. I quivered inwardly, wishing myself anywhere else in the world, knowing that the next step would be a dare. Across the river by way of the stones, many of them awash. What would my mother say? And my best shoes too!
Later, more than five years later, Idwal proposed to follow a course in medicine at a London hospital. Ben, at Sara’s bidding, sold his ironmonger’s shop and bought a dairy business in Cricklewood at a price that crippled him financially – just to save lodging money for Idwal and to keep him in Sara’s sight. We met occasionally in the next few years, Idwal and I – I was a clerk in the Aldgate branch of Lloyd’s Bank for my first permanent appointment – and once in a while we foregathered at Stewart’s or Pritchard’s in Oxford Street or at Hyde Park Corner. These meetings would be on Sunday nights when I had come across for the service at King’s Cross Chapel, whether for my cousin’s sake or to hear Elvet Lewis I never quite knew. Idwal had the same confidently jovial manner then as that day by the river, but enlarged as perhaps only London could enlarge it. He slapped me on the back and patronised me happily to his fellow students. ‘Our banking member’, he called me. I didn’t feel much larger on these occasions than if he had dared me to wet my shoes again. Rotund, earnest and vulnerable, I reserved my wit for those who were a bit slower than I was. I knew I cut no figure beside Idwal’s broad sholders, and dark, authoritative head.
Once or twice, too, I visited the dairy at Cricklewood looking for my cousin. Uncle was always dead beat with work, cycling the last rounds himself in plimsolls with a few bottles on the tray of his bike. Up at four in the morning, working sixteen hours a day at least and grey in the face with fatigue. My aunt kept a prim house behind the shop and welcomed me with only the briefest of smiles. She regarded me as a hanger-on, an amiable nobody who could not, even if he would, help her son in any way. I didn’t like facing her on my own. Give Idwal his due, when he was there he brushed past all this, jollied his way in and out. And then even my uncle would joke for a minute or two, till his arm dropped off my shoulder with weariness.
Idwal failed his exams a couple of times, but the power behind him was inexorable. In the end he passed. Six years – or was it seven? He could hardly do anything else. And then he suddenly said he wanted to join the Army, become a doctor in the RAMC. I say ‘suddenly’ because I’d never heard of it until it happened. I was over at the dairy one night after the results of his examinations were known – this was not the celebration: we had had our junketings at Stewart’s and in The Coal Hole and other places too many to remember – and I sat down at the piano to play for Idwal to sing. He was no singer but he liked to have a bawl now and again, a concession to the Welshness of his youth, and Sara approved my pianistic skills (which didn’t really go much beyond knocking out a tune by ear) because they were a means for Idwal to make more noise than I did. She sat in the background, a faint smile on her face, intervening only to suggest that we might drop some of those ol’ Welsh hymns and sing something a bit more refined. Ben came in once, in his plimsolls, and joined in a verse or two, singing in a resonant voice that was nearer the note than Idwal’s. But Sarah’s was impatient, waving him away. ‘Get finished, Ben, before coming in here. You know very well it’ll be ten o’clock before you’ve finished with those bottles. Go on.’ Almost as the door closed, Idwal switched his bawl to the sort of conversational tone that he thought wouldn’t ding my ear in. ‘You know I’ve decided to try the Army, don’t you? In my astonishment – partly at the news and partly at the unnecessary drama of the decibel-drop – I let fall my hands on the keyboard in an unspeakable disharmony of sound. Sara’s patience with me, always thin, broke at that, and it was no more than a perfunctory few minutes before I was on my way out. I didn’t really need to work for my bank exam – I’d been at it both the nights previous – but it was the quickest thing to say.
It was some months before I heard the news and many years before I understood that I should never see Idwal again. The rigorous medical examination he had been given by the Army Board had revealed a kidney complaint at a stage already advanced: he had, in the doctors’ opinion, six months at most to live. It was suggested to him, however, that his life might be prolonged if he could make up the salt deficiency somehow, perhaps by going on board ship and crusting it in by wave or wind all hours of the day and night. The hope was not much but he seized it; he signed on as a ship’s doctor and, war breaking out within the next few months, sailed back and fore to the Far East in troopships – at least till Singapore fell, and after that on voyages more devious but always fresh with the winds of continuance. So nearly eight years passed: the war was over, and Idwal, still journeying back with the repatriated and out with the emigrant hopeful, strengthened his hold on life. So much so that he ventured on marriage to Margaret, a nurse of Welsh descent who had been brought up in Australia (where her mother still was), and steeled himself to take a post ashore. For nearly a year the omens held: Rhian was born of the union, Idwal managed as a houseman in a Liverpool hospital. Then the end came, and suddenly: he went blind and was dead within the month, prescribing for himself with full medical competence at each deteriorating and terrible stage of the disease. It was an exercise in doggedness, the tight-lipped parries of a man who had counted out his days for more than a quarter of his life.
It was the end, all this, of more than Sara’s hope in Idwal. Margaret went back to Australia to her mother, taking Rhian with her: later she married a schoolmaster named Robertson, a colleague of hers in the boarding school where she served as matron. So all that was left of this flesh and blood was in the Antipodes, a slip of a girl with an Australian accent and a name that her acquaintances would most certainly mishandle. And that photograph! – the likeness was uncanny. The hatpeg nose would die with Ben, but his colouring and the curled wool of his hair had been transplanted successfully. A whole culture off and yet a biological survival.
It would be ridiculous to suppose that all this flashed through my mind’s maze as I stood with my back to the wall in the passage of the bungalow. And yet it was all there, colied, uneasy in my consciousness. It had been collected from letters, the chatter of an ageing female cousin, and just two visits, the last one more than ten years ago. Truth to tell, I hadn’t wanted to see Sara. Why should he survive, I could imagine her saying: why should he survive who never had anything about him, when Idwal, with twice the presence, could not? An aircraftman, that’s all I’d been, and a pretty poor one at that. And if I was a bank manager now, was it due to much more than a ready smile and a terrible fear of doing the wrong thing, socially and fin
ancially? But there was really no need any longer for this reluctance of mine to visit Ben. Sara had Parkinson’s for upwards of six years and for the last three or four she had said nothing. Nothing that was readily audible, anyway. And yet I couldn’t face her, couldn’t produce tenderness for one who had needed fear of old. And pity? I was suddenly uncertain of my motive for coming at all, though I had thought it a matter of conscience that had been nagging me for months, years.
It was at this uneasy moment, when I had begun to lose myself as well as time and place, that I heard Ben’s voice growing louder. He had been the round of photographs and was shepherding Mair back to the kitchen. I had no time for a new posture: all I could do was advance with an air of happening to be on my way to look for them and to meet them in the doorway.
‘Nice bungalow we’ve got here, haven’t we, Mair?’ Ben said when he saw me. ‘Too big for us really. You must come and stay some time. Leave your old Dada. He doesn’t appreciate you. Only thing he cares about is counting the coppers. He won’t notice you’re gone even.’
Unease or no unease, I couldn’t help rising to this. The Evanses could always spark off the present, whatever past or future might say. ‘Go on, Uncle. You set too much store by that unique beauty of yours. Unrepeatable value and so on. There’s something to be said for bank managers, you know.’
‘Something, but not much,’ said Uncle Ben, his eyes wrinkling with a friendliness that took all the sting out of words. ‘Come and look at the garden,’ he added, fumbling with the back door, which had a piece of sacking nailed to the bottom to keep out draught. An overlapping piece was stuffed down the side, too, and it was this which made necessary what looked like furious efforts on my uncle’s part. ‘All these damn doors stick,’ he muttered, suddenly flushed about the temples. The garden, when it finally came into view, was a large kite-shaped patch with the length of it dragged steeply uphill to a point where two other gardens nipped it with brick walls and shrubbery and held it there, immovable. In the middle distance were some old brussels sprout stalks, bare to the palm-plumes at the top. Nearer were one or two lumps of squitch and a great deal of groundsel. ‘Too much for me now,’ Ben said heavily. Good soil, too. But it can’t be helped.’
