Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  Through all of it, Caro had supported her sister: sometimes literally, with money, mostly just with listening and company and sympathy. When Keith went back to live in Wales and got Welsh Arts Council funding to make the first film, Penny had two small babies. Instead of finding a house in Cardiff, or even in Pontypridd, Keith had insisted – on principle – on taking her to live in a council house on the edge of a huge, bleak estate on the side of a mountain in Merthyr Tydfil where she didn’t know anyone, and no one liked her because she was posh and English. It was half an hour’s walk with the pushchair down to the nearest shops. Caro left a job in London and came to live in Cardiff to be near her, and every weekend after work drove up to Merthyr to help her out, and drive her to the nearest supermarket, and try to persuade her to pack her things and leave. Penny had made the house inside gorgeous on next to nothing, with rush mats and big embroidered cushions and mobiles and chimes pinned to the ceiling; she painted the lids of instant coffee jars in rainbow colours and kept brown rice and lentils and dried kidney beans in them. But the wind seemed never to stop whistling round the corners of the house, and in round the ill-fitting window frames, setting the mobiles swinging.

  Keith usually wasn’t there, and if he was he and Caro hardly spoke. One strange Saturday evening he had had a gun for some reason: perhaps it was to do with the film, she couldn’t remember, although that wouldn’t have explained why he also had live ammunition. He had claimed that he knew how to dismantle it, had taken bits off it and spread them out on the tablecloth in the corner of the room where the children were watching television: he was drinking whisky, and erupted with raucous contempt when Penny said ‘she didn’t want that horrible thing in her home’. He picked the gun up and held it to Penny’s head while she struggled away from him and told him not to be so silly.

  ‘Don’t be such a bloody idiot, Keith,’ Caro said.

  ‘Shut it, sister-bitch,’ he said in an absurd fake cockney accent, swinging round, squinting, pretending to take aim at her across the room. Presumably without its bits the gun wasn’t dangerous, but they couldn’t be sure. They hurried the protesting children upstairs improbably early, bathed them with shaking hands, singing and playing games so as not to frighten them, staring at one another in mute communication of their predicament.

  ‘Put the kids in the car and drive to my place,’ Caro said, wrapping a towel around her wriggling, wet niece, kissing the dark curls, which were just like Keith’s.

  ‘Wait and see,’ said Penny, ‘if it gets any worse.’

  In the end Keith had not been able to put the gun back together, and had fallen asleep in front of the television: Penny hid the ammunition in her Tampax box before she went to bed. She had been right not to overreact: Keith wasn’t the kind of man who fired guns and shot people, he was the kind who liked the dark glamour of the idea of doing it.

  Caro could remember going to see Keith’s film at the arts centre in Cardiff – not at the premiere (she hadn’t wanted to see him fêted and basking in it, and had made her excuses) but in the week after – and it had made her so angry that she had wanted to stand up in the cinema and explain to all those admiring people in the audience how unforgivably he used real things that mattered and milked them to make them touching, and that in truth whenever he was home on the estate that he made so much of in the film, he was bored and longing to get away to talk with his filmmaking friends. Actually, the audience probably weren’t really all that admiring, the film got mixed reviews. She had seen it again recently when the arts centre did a Welsh film season, and had thought about it differently: only twenty years on it seemed innocent and archaic, and its stern establishing shots of pithead and winding gear were a nostalgic evocation of a lost landscape. The one he did afterwards about the miners’ strike was his best, she thought: it was the bleakest, most unsentimental account she ever saw of the whole business, capturing its honour and its errors; the ensemble work was very funny and complex (apart from the leads, he had used non-professional actors, mostly ex-miners and their wives). His career had neither failed nor taken off since then: there always seemed to be work, but it was always precarious (it was a good job Lynne made money with her photography).

  In the end Penny made friends with some of the women from the estate she met in the school playground, and got involved with the tenants’ association, and had her third baby in Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr, and probably looked back now on her time on the estate with some affection. She grew very close, too, to Keith’s parents in Cwmbach: she saw more of his father in his last illness than Keith did; she really seemed to love the reticent, neat old man, who had been an electrician at the Phurnacite plant and in his retirement pottered about his DIY tasks in their immaculate big postwar council house, putting in a heated towel rail in the bathroom, making a patio for the garden. She stayed good friends with his mother and his sister even after she and Keith were separated.

  When Penny eventually decided that he and she should go their different ways, she did the teacher training she had put off for so long, and met her present partner, a biologist working in conservation who was everything suitable and reasonable that Keith was not. They lived in the country near Banbury, not far from where Penny and Caro had grown up. Meanwhile Keith met Lynne, and they shared their time between London and the Dordogne. So that in the end it was Caro who was left living in Wales, and if she thought sometimes that it was because of Keith Reid that she had ended up making her life there she didn’t mind, she just thought that it was funny.

  She turned out all the lights in the flat; she could see well enough in the light that came from the street lamp outside her front window to pour herself a whisky in hopes that it would help her to sleep. She sat to drink it with her feet tucked under her on the end of the sofa where she had sat an hour or so before listening to Keith; she heard a soft pattering of rain and a police siren, too far off to think about. In the half-dark, awareness of the familiar fond shapes of the furniture of her present life – modest but carefully chosen, tasteful and feminine and comfortable – was like a soft blanket settled round her shoulders; she should have felt safe and complete; it annoyed her that she was still gnawed by some unfinished business just because Keith Reid was asleep in her spare room. There were other men who had been much more important in her life, and yet when they came to stay (sometimes in his spare room bed and sometimes in hers), it didn’t bother her this way.

  Her heart had sunk when halfway down the second bottle he began to wax nostalgic and maudlin about the Sixties and the decay of the socialist dream. You heard this everywhere these days, in the newspapers and on television; usually, of course, from people who had been young then. The formula, surely inadequate to the complicated facts, was always the same: that what had been ‘idealism’ then had declined sadly into ‘disillusion’ now.

  ‘But remember,’ she had insisted, ‘that in 1968 when we marched round Trafalgar Square we were chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh”! I mean, for Chrissake! Ho Chi Minh! And at that Revolutionary Festival there were Coca-Cola bottles with French riot police helmets you could knock off with tennis balls. And remember us getting up at the crack of dawn to go and try and sell Socialist Worker to workers in that clothing factory in Shacklewell Lane. Expecting them to spend their hard-earned money on that rag with its dreary doctrine and all its factional infighting. And I used to go back to bed afterwards, when I got home, because I hated getting up so early. Remember that we spoke with respect of Lenin, and Trotsky, and Chairman Mao, all those mass murderers. Remember that we had contempt for the welfare state, as a piece of bourgeois revisionism.’

  ‘There were excesses,’ Keith conceded fondly. ‘But then, excess was in the air. Anything could have happened. That’s what’s missing now. Caro, you sound so New Labour. I’m still a revolutionary, aren’t you? Don’t you still want socialism?’

  She shrugged. ‘Oh, well, yes, socialism, I suppose…’

  That conversation had ended awkwardly, each embarr
assed by what they thought of as the other’s false position. Keith probably thought Caro had sold out (he might even have put it in those words, perhaps to Lynne). She worked as personal assistant to a Labour MP, a man she mostly liked and respected. (Before that she had worked for Panasonic.) On the second and fourth Mondays of every month she went to Amnesty International meetings in a shabby upstairs room of the Friends’ Meeting House and was currently involved in a campaign for the release of a postgraduate student imprisoned in China for his research into ethnic Uighur history. This compromising pragmatic liberalism might in time turn out to be as absolutely beside the point as the articles she had once written for Black Dwarf: who could tell? Your ethical life was a shallow bowl brimming impossibly; however dedicatedly you carried it about with you there were bound to be spills, or you found out that the dedication you brought wasn’t needed, or that you had brought it to the wrong place.

  While Caro was tidying up she had had to go into the spare room to put away her grandmother’s nineteen-twenties water jug, painted with blue irises, in its place on the lace mat on top of the bureau. This could have waited until the morning when Keith was gone; perhaps she had just made it an excuse to go in and take the measure of him uninhibitedly, free of the wakeful obligation to smile and reassure. She swung the door quietly behind her to admit just a narrow ribbon of light, then stood waiting for her eyes to adjust, breathing in the slight, not unpleasant fug of his smell: good French soap and cologne and a tang of his sweat and of gas flavoured with the garlic she had put in her cooking. He slept on his side with his face pressed in the pillow, frowning; his chest with its plume of grey-black hair down the breastbone was bare, the duvet lay decorously across his waist; under it he seemed to have his hands squeezed between his jackknifed knees; his mouth was open, he made noises sucking in air. She wondered all the time she stood there whether he wasn’t aware of her presence and faking sleep.

  He didn’t look too bad. He took good care of himself (or Lynne took care of him): he hadn’t put on much weight, although where he had been lean and hard he was nowadays rangy and slack, with jutting, bowed shoulders under his T-shirt and a small, soft pouch of belly above his belt. He was almost certainly still sexually attractive, which Caro supposed she wasn’t any more, although she, too, took care of herself (that was an old gender inequity, probably less to do with patriarchal systems than with desires hardwired into human evolutionary biology). He had opted to deal with his advancing baldness by cutting very short even the rim of hair he had left growing behind his ears and at the back; this was a good move, she thought, pre-empting pretence and turning what might have looked like a vulnerability into an assertion of style. However, it made the starkness of his craggy head shocking. All the years of his age, all the drinking, all the history and difficulty of the man, was concentrated in the face laid bare: its eaten-out hollows, the high, exposed bony bridge of his nose, which rode him like the prow of his ship, the deep, closed folds of flesh, the huge, drooped purple eyelids flickering with sensitivity.

  She sat thinking now about the time when Keith was the most attractive man in the room, the man you couldn’t afford to turn your eyes away from, careless and dangerous with his young strength. It hadn’t been a good or tender thing exactly; it hadn’t had much joy in it for Caro. None the less she quaked at the power of this enemy, stronger than either of them, who had slipped in under her roof and was stealing everything away.

  When Keith had telephoned from France to say that he had to come over for a couple of days to talk to some people in Cardiff about a new film project, Caro had planned and shopped for an elaborate meal. She didn’t make anything heavy or indigestible, but unusual things which took careful preparation: little Russian cheese pastries for starters, then fillet of lamb with dried maraschino cherries and spinach, and for dessert gooseberry sorbet with home-made almond tuiles. Living alone, she didn’t get much chance to cook.

  She had spent all day getting ready what they had eaten in an hour or so. And of course the food had taken second place to their talk, with so much to catch up on; although Keith had helped himself hungrily and appreciatively. In her thirties she had resented furiously this disproportion between the time spent cooking and eating; it had seemed to her characteristic of women’s work, exploitative and invisible and without lasting results. She had even given up cooking for a while. Now she felt about it quite differently, the disproportion seeming part of the right rhythm of all pleasure: a long, difficult, and testing preparation for a few moments’ consummation.

  She had learnt to love all the invisible work, the life that fell away and left no traces. She used her mother’s rolling pin to roll out her pastry; she kept Keith’s mother’s recipes for Welsh cakes and bara brith. In her tasks around the flat – polishing furniture, bleaching dishcloths, vacuuming, taking cuttings from her geraniums, ironing towels and putting them away in the airing cupboard – she often thought about her mother and grandmother having done these same things before her, was aware of a soothing continuity of movements and competence, working alone in quiet rooms, or with the radio for company. She had had, in fact, a stormy relationship with her parents, and used to think of her mother’s domesticated life as thwarted and wasted. But this was how change happened, always obliquely to the plans you laid for it, leaving behind as dead husks all the preparations you none the less had to make in order to bring it about.

  WE HAVE BEEN TO THE MOON

  Huw Lawrence

  Just in the last four days the Spar had closed. Ten o’clock, late morning, still as a cemetery. Except Pentre Foundry’s gates were swinging. A crisp packet blew along the gutter by my feet. In our street the Harrises had finished moving, their removal van out of the way well in time, as promised, another two neighbours less. Breeze-block windows made up a quarter of the street by now. Our house looked no different from always, except for the cars, but appearances are deceiving. I couldn’t know it at the time, but it, too, would soon be empty. He lay in the front room, the ‘parlour’. The coffin had been closed. Four days ago he had lain in view, cushioned in purple, hands crossed, eyes shut. With the lid down he was all but gone.

  Auntie Laura spotted me as I entered and came forward. Even on a day like this she wore too much make-up. I kissed her and shook hands with Uncle Wyn in his dark suit, the quiet opposite of his wife, blue scar not quite hidden by his hair. Then I shook hands with Uncle Col, on my mother’s side, alert enough to scare the hands off a clock. He taught physical education at the secondary school, where he was a deputy head, thanks to Uncle Glyn, who shook my hand next. My plump, grey-haired mother bustled forward and led me into my father’s study, closing the door behind us. On the inside of the door Dad had pinned a note:

  Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta

  Più caramente

  On the desk lay books on ecological crisis and alternative economics, and Nigel Lawson’s The View From No. 11, all library books that would have to be returned. Scribbled notes lay on the desk. I picked one up.

  …our unique brain freed us from the bare purpose of survival, enabling us to share collective goals, develop economy and civilised society, think abstractly, conceive the very idea of purpose. Are we to be persuaded we have no more control over ourselves than creatures that have not changed their behaviour in thousands of years?

  My mother stood waiting so I didn’t finish it, stuffing it in my pocket without thinking. Before saying her piece, she asked me what the Italian meant. ‘He only just put it there,’ she explained.

  ‘“You shall abandon everything beloved most dearly”,’ I translated.

  Tears came to her eyes.

  ‘He meant what was happening here, not us. I think it’s Dante,’ I said, producing my handkerchief, but it was too dirty to offer.

  ‘Tut, tut, tut’, she went, snatching it away from me. ‘That bloody protest. Down Cwmffynnon every day, when he wasn’t going on the wireless. Getting himself worked up. It wasn’t even his bloody school.’ She might hav
e gone on if someone hadn’t called to her. ‘Wait,’ she commanded. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  On the turntable was Nabucco. My father still played vinyl records. A tenor himself, he had learned Italian in his youth to understand opera librettos, and in my childhood he had made it a secret language between the two us. In one of the desk drawers I found packets of different indigestion tablets. He never realised he had angina. I scanned the ‘Education’ shelf for a book mentioned to me by a contemporary of his I’d met at a job interview, The Rainbow Bridge, but it wasn’t there among those long-forgotten volumes by the likes of Dewey, Illych and Neill. I smiled at the booklets on teaching arithmetic with Cuisinaire rods, or the Dean’s Apparatus. He had tried out everything when he first returned to Ystrad to teach the children of his former workmates, testing most of it on me first. He had me doing enormous calculations using different colour bits of Lego, and only then bought abacuses for the school. My mother had worked, helping to put him through college. He ended up headmaster of the school he’d attended as a pupil. Not bad for a boy who went down the pit at fifteen. Last thing I wanted was to remember the arguments we’d had. But I guessed I was going to be reminded.

  When my mother returned she put a clean white handkerchief in my hand and got to the point. ‘Uncle Glyn will be sure to talk to you after the funeral. Listen to him, please, will you? If only to be polite. I want you to promise me that, right now.’

  ‘OK, I promise.’

  Local control, my father had called it, and I had called it corruption. Those arguments were history now and I was alone, without his footsteps to question or follow. He had died before I’d had a chance to tell him how much I thought of him. Hell, did I really care about nepotism in these dead valleys? Did I even care if they closed Cwmffynnon School?