by Dai Smith
Goodbyes came a few minutes later, despite Ben’s unwillingness to let us go. Tea was something he could manage, part of the old code of hospitality. ‘You could stay long enough for that, bachan,’ he said wistfully. ‘Auntie would like it. Wouldn’t you, Sara?’ I couldn’t be sure whether the shapeless little doll in the chair moved or not. Perhaps there was something minutely different about the expression. I tried hard not to think so as I took the powerless hand and came for a moment again within the foetid arc. ‘Goodbye, Auntie! Look after yourself.’ The ridiculous words came out before I could stop them. I rushed out after the others, fearful that Mair might have heard. I knew Ben would not.
But they were standing by the gate looking at a small yew cut like a bear. It had an empty tomato tin upturned on one paw. ‘His honey pot,’ said Ben, simply and without excuse. ‘Who did it? You?’ I asked breathlessly, anxious to purge myself by saying anything, anything. ‘Yes,’ he said, waving a hand as though expansively. ‘I can’t draw any more, but still like to make things.’
‘You’ll come again, Mair, won’t you?’ he asked. ‘You’re not too far away, half an hour on the bus at most. Never mind what your Dada says. He can’t stop you from where he is. Come now.’ His grip on the girl’s arm was urgent and his face serious.
‘Yes, I’ll come,’ she said. We got into the car and slid away quietly down the cul-de-sac. I could see Ben in my mirror: he was standing outside the gate with one arm upraised, motionless. The stacks against the Llwchwr dropped quickly out of sight, and the sea’s dull grey was lost behind the rising angle of the roofs. What elevation there had been, and it was just enough for us to see the river as it debouched, had disappeared, and near-sightedness, the care of the crowded road, took over again.
THE INHERITANCE
Sally Roberts Jones
To the child Mari, the tea service was the most beautiful thing that she had ever seen. It sat in splendour on its own particular shelf in the glass cabinet, as remote and magical as the crown jewels. And yet splendid was not really the word for it. Chaste, perhaps; elegant, refined – she had no words adequate to describe how it rested there among the painted jugs and the souvenirs of Sunday School trips to Aberystwyth to Tenby, alien and yet quite at home.
Once Mari was allowed to handle it, during the ritual washing of the ‘best’ china. Her aunt laid a padded sheet on the carpet, and Mari took the twelve cups out of the cupboard one by one, then the twelve saucers and the twelve plates, the two square bread and butter plates, the milk jug, the sugar and slop basins and last of all the rectangular fluted teapot, setting each one in its own place as delicately as though she were handling egg shells. The china was a clear, shining white, its decoration an austere pattern of ivy leaves in pure gold; each plate and saucer had an outer rim of the same delicate gold leaf.
‘It has never been used,’ said Aunt Anna. Mari nodded. It was almost inconceivable that there would ever be an occasion on which it would be suitable to use the tea service. Even for the Queen herself…
‘One day it will be yours,’ her aunt told her. ‘After I am dead. It goes always to the eldest girl in the next generation, and I have only sons. If you have a daughter then it will go to her, but if not, then it will go to your brothers’ children. First Gwilym’s eldest daughter, and if he has no girls, to Huw’s. You must remember that. It’s not written down, you see, for the service doesn’t belong to me or to you or to any of us, but to the family. Everyone knows. It won’t be in my will, but your mother understands. I’ve left you the cupboard though, so that you’ll have a proper place to keep it. That’s written down, of course.’
Mari listened gravely, a small acolyte being instructed in the ritual of worship. The directions seemed to refer to a future beyond knowledge, and the idea of Gwilym, a noisy three-year-old, or the still-swaddled Huw being themselves married, with children, was almost laughable. Aunt Anna picked up one of the plates and dipped it into her bowl of soapy water, moving it gently under the bubbles. Then she took it out again and handed it to Mari, to be dried. Last of all, when the non-existent dust had been washed away, and the glass shelf wiped, the tea service was put back, each piece placed with the utmost delicacy and precision. Then the cupboard door was closed for another year.
Aunt Anna lived for many years after that, and when at last the tea service came to Mari she was already a married woman with children of her own, living in a small town in a South Wales valley. She put the bow-fronted cabinet in her front room and spread out the white and gold china inside it like an exhibit in a museum. Then she took her daughter, Siân, by the hand and led her up to the cabinet.
‘Pretty!’ said the little girl, laughing with pleasure. ‘Pretty flowers!’
‘One day it will be yours,’ said Mari, and smiled for joy in her two treasures.
When she was five years old, Siân caught diphtheria, and not all Mari’s devoted nursing could save her. The child died, and was buried at home in Bryncader with the rest of her kin.
‘She will be less alone there,’ Mari told her husband, knowing as she said them the foolishness of her words.
‘Well, no doubt we’ll join her there one day,’ he agreed. He too came originally from the little village on the banks of the Teifi.
As time went on, the glass cabinet filled up once more with Welsh lady matchbox holders, flower vases, jugs, all the garish ornaments that her son gave Mari on her birthday each year. The tea service withdrew once more to its one special shelf, where it seemed to Mari all the more beautiful against the surrounding bric-a-brac of human affection. Sometimes, when she had a moment free from the pressure of washing and cooking and mending, she would go into the front room and sit, just looking at the golden tendrils of the ivy, until she heard the banging of the back door and went back to the kitchen to see what was wanted, oddly refreshed by the few minutes of contemplation. In a strange way, it seemed to her, the tea service was the source of her strength; while it was there she knew who she was; it linked her to the long generations of women before her, and their courage and purpose were hers. But these moments were rare. Work and the lack of it, the husbanding of their small resources, these were the framework of life.
Mari’s husband died in an accident at the steelworks where he worked, not long before he was due to retire, and Mari was left alone. Their son was an architect and lived in London with his wife and family. He had married well, the daughter of a London Welsh family in comfortable circumstances, solid, chapel-going people, and his home was modern, elegant, a showcase for his success. Since he could not hide his Welshness, he used it as an accessory, like the decorative harp which no one in the family could play, but which stood prominently in the lounge. There were many heart-searchings before he and his wife agreed to ask Mari to come to live with them. Her quality was less amenable than the harp or the Welsh tapestry covers on the chairs.
Mari would have preferred to remain in her own home, but her health had finally shown the effects of the years of overwork and poor food, and though she was not ill, her doctor urged that she should not live alone if there was an alternative.
‘You’ll have your own room, Mother,’ said Ivor. ‘You can have your own things about you there.’
‘Nothing too big, of course,’ said his wife Ceridwen, hastily. ‘The rooms are too small for this heavy old stuff, naturally.’
‘And you won’t get much for them in auction,’ said Ivor, regret in his voice. ‘Still, they didn’t cost much, I suppose.’
‘Not much,’ agreed Mari. Much though she loved her son, she was aware of a certain lack of understanding, an inability to appreciate what fell outside his own experience, and she did not expect her new life to be one of unalloyed delight.
In the event, it was better than it might have been. At the least she was useful to Ceridwen, and if she soon saw that she was not expected to join the company in the lounge when visitors called, there were always the children. Ceridwen was bringing them up according to whichever theory was mo
st in vogue at the time, and they came to cling to Mari’s firm but unvarying kindness as a fixed point in the continual movement between strictness and softness.
Mari’s room was small, but pleasant, and it held the one piece of furniture that she had kept when she left her old home. The glass cabinet took up more than its fair share of space, but the tea service stood out as perfect as ever against the distempered walls of the bedroom, shaming its bareness into elegance. She had considered giving it once to Bronwen, Huw’s eldest daughter who was heir to the white and gold china. But Bronwen and her husband were living in two rooms in Cardiff, and had two small children to care for; just now her inheritance would have been more of a burden than a pleasure to them all. Still, Mari made it clear to Ceridwen that the service was held in trust, and should anything unexpected occur, it must be passed on to Bronwen with due ceremony. Ceridwen was not pleased. Something drew her to the heirloom – perhaps the very fact that it was an heirloom – and she would have liked to display it on Thursday afternoons when her friends came to drink tea and play bridge.
‘It would be such an attraction,’ she told Ivor. ‘But your mother won’t hear of it. Anyone would think it was the finest Sevres or Dresden. And it really should be yours when she dies. The oldest daughter indeed! The whole thing’s positively tribal.’
‘If I land the commission for the Delano offices, you’ll be able to buy yourself a solid gold teaset if you want it,’ Ivor assured her. ‘Take no notice of Mother. You know what she’s like. Too long in the land of her fathers. Now if she and Dad had got out a few years earlier, come down here instead of hanging on in that godforsaken terrace—’
‘Oh, it’s easy for you,’ sniffed Ceridwen. ‘And she’s your mother.’
When the War began, in 1939, the children were sent back to Wales to stay on the farm with Huw and his family. Mari was happy at the thought, remembering her own childhood in the green fields above the Teifi. She would have liked to go herself, but the farms were not large, and Ceridwen, involved with endless committees and voluntary good works, had a greater need of her now that servants were no longer so easy to find. (Not that either of them put it so baldly, even in their most private thoughts.) Ivor, unfit for military service because of the angina that had come with success, made up for this by becoming a fire-watcher, and though they suffered all the inconveniences of the Blitz and the years of war that followed, the tragedy passed them by. Mari lived to see bonfires on VJ Night, but after that, the need for her help being past, she drifted gently away into a death that seemed as welcome as it was peaceful, and in due season was buried beside her husband and her child at Bryncader.
It was some three weeks after the funeral when Ceridwen, turning at last to the depressing task of clearing out Mari’s room, became aware once more of the tea service.
‘Shall I pack it up for you?’ asked Siân, her eldest daughter. ‘Then we can take it up to Auntie Bronwen next time we go to the farm.’
‘No, no,’ murmured Ceridwen, staring at the cabinet. Its veneer was beginning to flake, and in the harsh light from the uncurtained windows its contents looked as pitiful and shabby as the leftover rubbish after a jumble sale. Only the white and gold cups and plates caught the light and seemed to grow more translucent, more glorious with it.
‘No,’ Ceridwen had decided. ‘Bronwen can have the cupboard and the knick-knacks if she wants them but the tea service belongs to Ivor. He’s his mother’s heir, and this is the only thing she had worth inheriting. I won’t give it away just because of some archaic nonsense.’
‘But Mummy, it belongs to Auntie Bronwen. We can’t keep it.’ Siân knew very little of her mother after the years in Wales, but Mari had had more success with her granddaughter than her daughter-in-law, and Ceridwen saw that the matter must be handled carefully, or Siân would ruin everything.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ she temporised. ‘Now, what about the clothes? The next parish appeal, I think. There’s nothing here worth keeping, even for the material.’
For the moment Ceridwen left the glass cabinet untouched. Then, a few days later, Ivor came home with the news that he was on the point of landing the biggest contract of his career.
‘After this I could retire,’ he said. ‘Get away somewhere, out of this country, somewhere there’s warmth and light and no austerity. The Bahamas, perhaps.’
‘Will you get it?’ Ceridwen was already lounging in thought beside a crystal-clear blue sea.
‘It’s in the balance. Look, you could help. You’ve met Sir Iorwerth Thomas through your welfare committee. He’s on the Board— if he supported us—’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Ceridwen was doubtful.
‘Well, he’s obsessed with tradition. Can’t stand anything more recent than 1900. If you could invite him to – tea, say— and impress on him that Evans and Hartlepool are as traditional as Yorkshire pudding and Beefeaters— or cawl and Welsh cakes, I suppose, in his case? It couldn’t do any harm.’
‘I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything. You know I’m not good at all this leeks under the toenails stuff.’
The lure of the Bahamas was strong, however, and in due course Sir Iorwerth received and accepted his invitation to tea. The afternoon of the visit saw Ceridwen putting the last touches to a table on which the white and gold tea service was laid out in all its splendour. Beneath the china was a spotless lace tablecloth borrowed from her sister, who lived nearby; on and around it was an array of sandwiches and cakes all with an appropriate Celtic flavour.
‘Be careful of that cloth,’ said her sister, who had just dropped in to see how things were going. ‘It belongs to my mother-in-law, and it’s priceless.’
‘Don’t worry. The children are all out for the afternoon. We don’t want any wrong notes, after all, and they will keep on about that wretched farm. Sometimes I wish they’d go back there if they like it so much.’
‘They’ll settle down in time. Now they’re getting older they’ll soon come to appreciate the advantages of city life.’ Her sister was as complacent as only one without the same problem can be. She gave the table a last inspection before taking her leave. ‘You know,’ she commented, ‘that tea set really is rather fine. It must be quite valuable.’
‘Well, from what I heard, it’s never been useful. Never been used since the day that Ivor’s great-great-great-great-grandmother got it.’ Ceridwen shrugged her shoulders irritably. The whole business was somehow awkward, like a stone in an old, comfortable shoe.
She saw her sister out, and waited. Soon Sir Iorwerth arrived, together with the other members of the committee, whose presence made the party legitimate. After tea they were to discuss plans for a charity concert.
‘Do have a scone,’ Ceridwen urged, taking her place by the teacups. She lifted the teapot and noted with some annoyance that is was damp; fortunately the pottery teapot stand had protected the tablecloth from any damage. Carefully she poured the tea into the glistening cups. Slowly, one after another, the white shells darkened and turned brown as the hot liquid seeped gently through the china and overflowed on to the lace cloth. After a century without use and five years of constant bomb blast, the cups could hold nothing, and were as porous as filter paper.
‘How very strange,’ said Sir Iorwerth. ‘And such a perfect service. I remember seeing one very like it in Swansea. Ah well! Now, about the soloist—’
After the committe had gone, Siân came in to hear her mother rejoicing over Sir Iorwerth’s discreet hint that the contract was Ivor’s and to help clear the table. Ceridwen was triumphant, but the near-disaster rankled.
‘Well, after all the fuss, your grandmother’s old tea set wouldn’t even hold the tea! We’ll have to throw the cups away, I suppose, they’re dreadfully stained, but the plates will do for a while. Just look at Jenny’s cloth. She’ll be furious.’ She dabbed angrily at the stain.
‘It was so lovely,’ said Siân. She picked up the only undamaged cup and cradled it in the palm of her hand.
/>
‘Lovely is as lovely does,’ said Ceridwen, tartly. ‘If you like it so much, you can keep it. I’m sure I don’t want it, and I doubt if your Auntie Bronwen will think much of it now. Neither ornament nor use.’
‘It wasn’t meant to be that sort of useful,’ said Siân. ‘Can I have the cabinet if Auntie Bronwen doesn’t want it? To keep it in?’
‘Do what you like,’ said Ceridwen. ‘I’m going to soak this cloth. Heirlooms! You can keep them, for my money.’
But Siân was not listening. She was looking at the unblemished bowl and the curving golden tendrils that caught and concentrated the light as though they were on fire.
‘It never was a useful thing,’ she said. ‘Only beautiful.’
THE WAY BACK
Tony Curtis
Pugh squinted through the wedge of his crossed shoes—a stone circle by Rauschenberg; Leda turning wistfully from the Swan; Leonardo’s drawing of a giant crossbow, a great engine of war cocked back ready to hurl its shaft into some stone wall; below and to the left a miner strutting across the wall, twisted side-on to the shoulder bulged in profile, narrowing down an arm like a piston.
The noise of feet down the stairs and along the corridor signalled the hour and Glyn flexed his legs to bring the feet down from the edge of his desk. Midway, caught in an absurd position, between slouching in the low chair and hinging himself up with enough momentum to stand, he held the position for an instant, imagining how some of the students passing might look in and see him as a figure landing clumsily from a height.
