Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  Miskin said, ‘Thanks, butty.’

  They climbed out. Lady lapped the lukewarm tea, then Miskin carried her all the way home, shovel, mandrel and hatchet roped across his back. Beynon carried the bowsaw, crowbar and bucket, a steady plod in cold drizzle, trailed by the brindle lurchers and the long-jawed terrier.

  BREAKOUT

  FOXY

  Glenda Beagan

  Into the cornfields of the Philistines the burning foxes run. Red gold of the foxes. Red of the flames. Gold of the corn.

  I’ve decided to be me. I know it’s living dangerously but I’ve made up my mind. This is me as I really am. All the highs and all the lows. Intact.

  And almost immediately the dreams start. Ordinary daytime things become extraordinary night-time marvels. Fine. So far. It’s when extravaganza of sleep slips into the hours of daylight that the trouble starts. This time though, when the storm comes, I intend to ride it.

  I’m an artist. Well, I used to be an artist. But the marvels became terrors and my well-meaning husband Giles persuaded me to get expert help. Those were the words he used. Dr Drysdale’s expert help was very expensive but his prescriptions worked well. I had no complaints. For peace of mind I was prepared to jettison every creative atom in me. I was thankful for the calm.

  And then I met Foxy.

  I’m jumping ahead of myself. I must tell you how I came to this outpost in the mountains, this cottage at the end of a narrow valley in north Wales. Our home is called Cae Llwynog. Foxfield in English, but it sounds so ordinary in English. And there’s nothing ordinary about this place. Its signature is slate. Look one way and you see nothing but the old quarry workings, the great heaps of slate waste that are almost mountains in themselves. It has its own kind of beauty. Its light and shade, its cloudscapes. I never knew there were so many shades of grey.

  I didn’t want to come here at all. We had our rural retreat in the Rodings, so easy to get to and from London, so charming too. We still own it, but for the most part Giles rents it out to friends. And friends of friends. But why Wales, I said, nearly seven years ago when he bombarded me with estate agents’ brochures and I met Foxy. Well, it was her cub I met initially. He stepped out of the bracken like a little ginger puppy. I nearly fell over him! And he held up his paw as if he wanted me to shake hands with him. You know sometimes things are just too cute to be true. Ghastly word cute, I know, but there you are.

  The fox cub was there for just a moment and then he seemed to dematerialise back into the bracken. I scanned the bare grassy part of the hillside beyond and sure enough a little while later they emerged, a vixen and three cubs. She stopped and stared at me, at a safe distance, admittedly, but quite without concern.

  And that was my first encounter with Foxy.

  As I said, I’m an artist. And what I’d hoped would happen, happened. Even before I’d stopped the tablets completely the dreams came back. And the ideas, weird ideas sometimes, but I welcomed them all. Not that my first drawings were in the least bit weird.

  One of the things you can’t help noticing when you come to Wales is the chapels because even the smallest village has at least two of them. I reckon there must’ve been terrific competition between all the denominations, Baptists and Wesleyans and Calvinists and Congregationalists, all of them striving to build the grandest and the best. Not terribly Christian that, perhaps, and now as the increasingly elderly worshippers decline and die the chapels do the same. More and more you see these often huge places standing empty.

  The quintessentially Welsh scene for me is one of an ornately pillared and porticoed chapel set behind railings and wrought iron gates, with, in the background, a hint of mist and fir trees. And then there are those heaps of broken slate glinting in the rain.

  Anyway, I started to draw chapels.

  I went looking for them. Since I lost my nerve with driving I’ve taken to the buses in a big way, bizarrely irregular and infrequent as they may be. My chapel studies started as strict architectural drawings. It was as if I had to re-educate my eye. And hand. There’d been a time when I could execute the finest precision drawings with ease. Not now. It was painstakingly hard work. Then, as I grew more confident, I started to sketch more loosely, more in my original style. It was as if I’d had to get back to the mechanics of drawing itself and be sure of that before I could allow myself a freer rein. When Giles came up one weekend after I’d managed to produce quite a portfolio, I showed him them and was pleased for two reasons, first that he liked them and was glad that I’d revived my former skills, and secondly, and most importantly, that he still had no idea that I’d stopped the medication. There was no real reason why he should have guessed it, since I was perfectly relaxed and contented, but in a way it did indicate how little he understood me. He didn’t seem to make the connection. It didn’t occur to him that it was strange I should suddenly take up my art again, after years of not even thinking about it.

  Cae Llwynog stands on its own at the end of the valley facing the village in an oblique sort of way, looking out on the hugest, grandest chapel you ever saw. Engedi. It was the first chapel I drew, naturally, as it was right on my doorstep. It’s been closed for some years now. The few remaining members of the congregation must have rattled about in its vastness, and running costs must have been punitive. I’m not surprised it had to close its doors for the last time and perhaps there’s a moral to the story after all. Of the three chapels in the village, this, the biggest and most grandiose, was the first to close, whilst the smallest and most modest of the three, the plain whitewashed Gosen, is now the only one in use.

  Engedi is still an extraordinary monument, its façade being so over-the-top ornamental it takes some getting used to. Frankly, it’s ugly, but so confident in its ugliness as to be almost endearing. I tried to imagine how the original worshippers must have saved and saved to build it, how they must have pondered over the builders’ style books of the day before deciding on this dubious combination of Classical pillars and Gothic stained glass in windows incongruously like portholes, except for one quasi-rose window dominating all. The whole thing looks sad now. It’s emblazoned with FOR SALE signs, and more recently, and more desperately, MAY LET signs as well.

  There was never a dull moment at Cae Llwynog. I augmented my chapel sketches with landscapes, moody monochrome things that wouldn’t please the tourist but reflected the mountains more truly than sky-blue prettiness and sunshine. And I took an increasing interest in the wild life of the area, sketching that too, especially the birds, kestrels and buzzards and the wonderful ravens, nesting high up on the quarry terraces. They’re so talkative, constantly chattering amongst themselves. In spring and way into our brief summer, I would listen out for them calling to each other as they soared. And how utterly different were these calls from the harsh croaks we commonly associate with ravens. They were notes of joy, clear as bells.

  And all the time I was getting to know Foxy. If a day came and went without my catching at least a glimpse of her I felt quite bereft. I would often go walking up in the hills behind Cae Llwynog, looking for her in a way, I suppose, though at first it hadn’t seemed that straightforward. I had only recently acquired this confidence, to go walking on my own. To make me feel really safe though, I always took my grandfather’s walking stick along with me, my talisman. It had been kept all these years as a thing of beauty rather than for its practical application, but practical it most certainly was nonetheless and I loved its smooth dark wood, its shape, its fine sense of balance and the band of enscrolled silver on it. I reckoned it brought me luck.

  I’d been reading about Australian aboriginal art in one of the journals I’d started subscribing to again. The article was a bit of a hybrid, part artistic critique, part anthropology, but I was fascinated by what it said about the way those truly native people acquire totems. They don’t choose their totems. Their totems chose them. Surely Foxy had chosen me. I found this whole idea thrilling. I watched her and her little family with growing fascinati
on. I found places where it was easy simply to sit and wait for her to come by. I never tried to hide from her at all. I got to know her body language, what I can only describe as her gestures, her means of communication and believe me, she did communicate. She was not in the least bit afraid of me and though I never tried to get too close to her and her cubs, I knew that on some level she accepted me. I was not an outsider, not to her. One evening I remember in particular, one of our special September sunsets turning the mountains into a paintbox. I sat there quietly watching Foxy at the edge of the woods. We were both perfectly still, looking sort of sideways at each other. Then as the lightshow moved slowly across the sky the glory of it caught her magnificent white bib and turned it pink, no, more a deep cochineal. She was thin, crumpled and shabby after all that breeding and nurturing, but still with her rich brick colour. Now she was regal. Just sumptuous. And still we watched each other. A mutual frank approval. I felt I accessed her pure intelligence.

  I was conscious though, and, not for the first time, that despite the proximity and acceptance of my totem, I could never be a true native. Love of a place is not enough. But even if my ancestry and my language debarred me from really belonging in human terms perhaps I could be redeemed by knowledge. I determined to get to know this land and the creatures of this land in the deepest way possible. It was not going to be just a matter of enjoyable country walks any more. It would involve a proper thoroughgoing study. I would keep a nature journal. I would observe more rigorously, not simply to enjoy the sights and sounds around me but to understand their interaction, their constant interplay. I would become a true ecologist.

  The next time Giles came up he seemed to be rather amused by my acquisition of binoculars and reference books and my new interest in his ordnance survey maps. I thought he was being patronising and told him so, my earnestness alerting him for the first time that there was, maybe, a difference in me. He began to look at me rather quizzically, keeping his thoughts to himself, though, because Adrian knows what he’s talking about so when he suggested I choose the best of them and write a little history of the chapels, explaining the relevance of each name, for instance, and then send them off to Resonant Image, I was all ears. And then he said something about the name Engedi, and how it struck him as strange.

  It sounds really Welsh, he said. Don’t you think?

  And it suddenly struck me too. Yes, it did sound Welsh. It was also unusual. The Horebs and the Salems and the Seions might be commonplace but Engedi was different, special, and, as far as I knew, a one off. I had no idea what it referred to either, so next time I went on the bus to Caernarfon I found myself in the library poring over a Biblical concordance. Here it was, in the Book of Samuel, the story of David and Kind Saul, their enmity, and Saul’s spies informing him that David was hiding in ‘the strongholds of Engedi’. I liked the ring of that, and how, while Saul slept in a mountain cave with all his men about him, David crept up from within the cave’s depths and cut off a section of his garment, challenging him later by holding up the piece of cloth to prove how easily he might have killed the sleeping king. Why did this story appeal so much to our valley’s quarrymen that they named their proud new chapel after it? I was none the wiser, unless they too thought the word had a Welsh sound to it, and liked, as I did, the idea of ‘the strongholds’. For surely these mountains were still a language and a culture’s strongholds even today. I kept repeating the phrase to myself. It had an appropriately bleak, astringent music, did the strongholds of Engedi, with paradoxically, at the same time, a kind of friendliness.

  As I sat there in the library the concordance flicked open to a nearby page and I saw the word ‘fox’. Quite casually I looked up the reference in the Book of Judges and read on, intrigued by an astonishing story of lust and violence and horrible revenge. I read with horror and incredulity about Samson gathering together three hundred foxes (now quite how did he do that?) setting fire to their bushes (the implication being that he did this rather as a chain-smoker lights one cigarette from another) and then letting them run loose, the poor panicking things, into the Philistine fields. It was the time of the harvest.

  Red gold of the foxes. Red of the flames. Gold of the corn.

  I felt that this was my image, that these were my colours. I can’t explain it. I was exhilarated, appalled too, but I have to say mostly exhilarated. Something rushed up and out in me, like a logjam breaking. I knew with growing excitement and conviction that this would become a painting, by far the best, by far the strongest thing I’d ever done. The background of it was there in my mind immediately, familiar as breathing.

  Here was my stronghold of Engedi. Here was the view from Cae Llwynog, the row of quarrymen’s cottages with the circlet of hills behind, the stark geometrics of the quarry, the heaps of waste and then the chapel itself, handsome and new, a congregation descending its front steps following a sermon, a nineteenth-century congregation dressed in all their Sunday finery. A woman is prominent amongst them. She stands a little apart, pointing out across the valley, the foreground of the painting. It was one expanse of wheat. And it’s starting to burn but you guessed that. The painting has a split personality, half painted entirely realistically and with meticulously detailed control, half executed as a Dionysian welter, violently surreal. Half is grey, dark, wet, sombre. You can see the fronds of fern amongst the stones, the individual bricks in the wall. You can smell wet bombazine, wet gaberdine and serge, and the wet leather of hymnbooks. Half is an inferno, of stalks and seedheads, smelling horribly of burning leaf and grain, of singeing hair and fur. And amongst the corn run the glorious flaming foxes, consumed by their own fire, the colours of the sun.

  I bought my acrylics, my boards. And I couldn’t wait to get home. Did I know then that my latest craziness had begun? I think maybe I did, but if I did, I know, too, that I embraced it.

  CHARITY

  Clare Morgan

  At the wedding she had said ‘Yes’, and ‘Until death’. That was a long time ago and her hair was quite grey now, and her eyes were marooned in a sea of little wrinkles.

  Alessandro saw them, the eyes and the wrinkles, when he knocked at her door. She was a typical, timid woman who answered his knock, too many years without a man, too many days and nights in the long bed (bought to accommodate her husband, surely, because she was a very short woman) alone.

  Alessandro held out the collecting box, and seeing the refusal begin to form in her, the tensing of the muscles in her neck and the start of the side to side movement of her head that would send him back down the steps empty-handed, he said,

  ‘It’s a good cause.’

  What he really said was, ‘Ees a good cau-sa’, because he found English difficult, having only recently, and reluctantly, given up a long-standing career at sea.

  ‘I deen wanna’, he said to his one friend Elis, who was also an exile, having settled by accident in the county after spending most of his life in the North.

  ‘I deen wanna.’

  But what else, his accompanying shrug seemed to indicate, can a man do?

  ‘Ees a good cau-sa,’ he repeated, standing on her top step with the wind that funnelled up the street, and before that, up the valley that became the street, lifting the blunt ends of his straightish hair.

  He shook the collecting box and the coins inside rattled. The wind brought with it the smell of living in a strange place. He knew many of the smells of the different places in the world. Rio, Santiago, Durban, Qatar. Now he smelled the particular smell of this small part of a small country. It had nothing to do with politics. The smell of a place was made up of its weather and its history. That was how he wanted to think of it. It wasn’t as simple as that but he wished it to be simple, because he had led a complicated life and it had tired him, and now he wanted to lead a simple life, and feel the tiredness leave him, and sense himself to be at peace.

  He shook the box again and said,

  ‘Anything…’

  She moved her head from side to s
ide, very firmly this time, with just the right balance of decision and condescension, lengthening her neck a little so that the large lapels of her flowered blouse could assert themselves.

  ‘No,’ she said, in a soft voice that was definite too. He thought that she had probably been a schoolteacher. Either that, or a district nurse. He could imagine her quelling unruly children with a look. He could imagine her too in uniform, closing her front door at dawn or before dawn, pulling it to behind her with a click and getting into her dark little car and feeling the hem of her gabardine raincoat rasping her stockings as she adjusted her legs.

  He was going to say something more to try to persuade her but she had already closed the door, almost, and the only thing that was left of her was an eye.

  And what an eye it was, he said to himself afterwards, walking along with the collecting box hanging by its two strings from his wrist. It was an eye that was ageless and placeless. It was Eve’s eye. It was the eye of every woman he had made love to, and most of those he had fucked.

  Alessandro (it was a nickname, he had been baptised Guiseppi) was widely experienced in women. He had fucked women in most of the countries of the world. He had made love to women rather more selectively, perhaps in only two or three countries. There had been a few boys too, Morocco had been bad that way, for temptation, but he did his best to forget about those experiences. There were things it was better not to let in, they cluttered up your life, they made it difficult for you to be at peace.

  That evening, when he was sitting on the bench by the war memorial waiting for Elis (it was a warm enough June, and girls with their legs all bare and little cotton tops that their breasts pushed out of were walking up and down) he thought of the woman again. She was fifty, or more than fifty. He thought of her body and knew what it would be like, because he had measured the decay of his own. He had measured the decay and hated it. His own age, other people’s age; he hated the fact that youth was naturally fuckable and age was not. If he had been a different kind of man he would have taken to drink. As it was he confined himself to moderation and maintained a certain terseness in his dealings with his inner and regretful self.