Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  But before expelling the second body, there were still things to be done, the odd jobs that followed a sudden death like removing Hywel’s clothes from the wardrobe. Although only in his early forties, he had never dressed like a television producer but spent extravagantly on clothes as if he had been some kind of executive (which, of course, he’d hoped to be) and there were at least half a dozen expensive suits from Austen Reed and Daks which would have to be given to someone. There was also a Dunhill cigarette lighter, various items of gold jewellery, sets of cufflinks and one or two masonic watch chain decorations he’d inherited from his father, together with an assortment of ancient silver cigarette cases, propelling pencils, even a snuffbox, which were in the drawer where he’d kept his valuables. Each one of them would have to go, Delyth had decided. Before Hywel’s mother said anything, she would make it clear that at present she did not want either of the children to have a single memento of their father. She would cleanse the house of him immediately and deal with the family when the occasion arose.

  First, however, there was his mother whom she had never liked and had always refused to call by her Christian name of Morfydd even when continually asked to do so. The Mason-Morgans were a grand lot anyway by Delyth’s standards. Hywel’s father had been an army padre. Morfydd herself, as she would tell anyone within minutes of meeting them, was the first woman to get a first-class honours degree in geography at Aberystwyth, the family returning to Wales from the sumptuous grandeur of Aldershot (according to Morfydd) only when Hywel’s father retired. That Hywel had needed all T.J.’s influence to get him into any kind of educational establishment after a childhood spent on the move from one army establishment to the next, that he had learnt Welsh only when it profited him, while his elder brother had run away from home and spent half his life in the Far East moving from country to country only a few steps ahead of the law – all these were Mason-Morgan problems, undeniable facts that would have buried themselves like slivers of glass into the conscience of any woman other than the woman who now sat preparing a second onslaught, having drawn not so much as a flicker of an eyelid upon Delyth’s face with the first.

  ‘I must do something about Hywel’s clothes,’ Delyth said.

  ‘His clothes?’

  ‘I thought you might take them with you tonight? There’s a lot of junk as well. I don’t want any of it in the house.’

  Throughout the memorial service, Morfydd Mason-Morgan had sat like a ramrod, her stiff back erect, her size dwarfing Delyth who had no alternative but to sit next to her. Morfydd had not cried as she threatened to do but as the eulogies were uttered by the controller of the broadcasting station, she had nodded her head frequently, occasionally giving forth with a curious grunting assent like a sermon-tasting chapel deacon hearing familiar words of praise. She was a tall, striking woman with angular features, sharp eyes and pronounced cheekbones with a kind of statuesque dignity that was emphasized by her severe mourning clothes. A cartoonist would have drawn her with a mere two or three lines, that ramrod of a back, the flinty beak of a nose, the parabola of her downturned mouth, but the cartoonist would have missed the extraordinary brightness of her narrow-set eyes which were blue like her late son’s and gave to her face a look of singular intelligence. This was a woman who missed nothing you might think, and even in her seventies, there was not a hint of weakness or frailty about her. She had an abundance of white hair swept up in a neat bun and since she wore no jewellery, you had but to look at her and your gaze was somehow automatically swept up into her face. It was as if there was only the face and the forbidding image it presented, like that of an elderly warden of an unduly strict women’s hostel where promiscuous girls were constantly under surveillance. What was extraordinary was that you could never imagine her being a girl herself and the few photographs Delyth had seen, seemed to be of another person altogether, as if that face had somehow been obtained halfway through life and bore no relation to anything that had gone before, certainly not to youth or frailty, or normal human weaknesses. The face, as Hywel might have said himself, was a production number!

  Now the chin rose as Delyth’s meaning was made clear.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of leaving tonight.’

  ‘I’m sure it would be much better if you did. And if you could take the clothes and things?’

  ‘We normally give these things to the Salvation Army.’

  ‘I don’t even want to go through the pockets of his suits,’ Delyth said firmly. But she bit her lips. She was already weakening. At first, she’d determined to leave nothing unsaid. She should have told her straight. ‘God knows what’s in the pockets!’ But let her find out, she thought. Thank goodness the children had gone away to friends straight after the service and wouldn’t be coming home for at least a day.

  ‘I just want to be on my own tonight, that’s all.’

  ‘I thought, in the next few days…’

  ‘And the next few days if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

  Here we go, Delyth thought, hardening again. She hadn’t forgotten the accusation of brutal callousness.

  ‘There are some large cardboard boxes in the garage. They’ll fit into the boot of T.J.’s car. If you’d just take the clothes, I’ll deal with everything else before the children get home. We can pack them now.’

  ‘I’m not certain T.J.’s coming.’

  ‘Yes, he is. I asked him especially.’

  ‘Without consulting me?’

  ‘I thought you were too upset.’

  That was a lie again. What she should have said, was ‘Get out of my house, my life!’

  ‘I don’t understand you, I really don’t. It’s beyond me. You’ve changed out of all recognition. One of the things I was going to ask you was, how long is it since you’ve had any kind of medical check-up?’

  ‘I’ll get the boxes,’ Delyth said, standing.

  ‘Very well, but before you do, I should tell you that T.J. feels exactly the same as I do. We were all horrified. Horrified! How the French authorities allowed it, I do not know!’

  ‘It’s very simple. I asked them. I was his wife.’

  ‘But was there no religious service? Didn’t you think I’d want to be there? His mother?’

  ‘I didn’t want anyone to be there.’

  ‘But what if it got into the Press?’

  ‘He wasn’t important enough for that. Anyway, there was no service and I brought the ashes home. Now it’s all over, I just want to be on my own. I’ll put the boxes in the drive. You know where the bedroom is.’

  ‘Give her something to do,’ Hywel had always said. ‘It’s the only way to deal with her.’ Delyth concealed a smile and left the room.

  Soon she opened the garage doors, turning instinctively to find Morfydd had wandered out into the drive after her. By now, the pleasantries were entirely dispensed with and in the evening breeze, Morfydd’s hair was ruffled and her striking figure reduced. Now she was about to break.

  ‘I can’t think what he ever saw in you,’ she said querously.

  Delyth smiled. That was the whole point. ‘Someone unlike you,’ was the true answer. But the hardest question was in reverse. Why, oh why, had she herself not seen through him, all of them for that matter, at the very beginning? What they had done – give or take a month or two – was their very best to ruin her life.

  II

  ‘Blame the Welsh!’ Hywel would have said. It was what he always said when anything went wrong. ‘The most paranoid people in Europe apart from the Lapps but at least they have the climate to contend with!’ Hywel was never stuck for something to say and, for a short time, was often quite amusing. He had been so from the start whereas she herself was such a mouse and had once actually dressed up as the Walt Disney character Minnie Mouse in a college rag. The girl he had married was often tongue-tied and no match for the grandeur of the Mason-Morgans whose youngest son had quite swept her off her feet. Hywel, of course, had a sports car while
still a student. Apart from T.J. there were other uncles who also spoiled him, and the sight of him, his dark tousled hair and fresh complexion under a variety of sporty caps and wearing the kind of expensive sheepskin coat with the cuffs rolled back, made him stand out as a student pacesetter. He was never short of friends then and was already prominent as a leader, casting a kind of glow upon those who were accepted into his company. He had a laughing way of dismissing the responsibilities which blighted other people’s lives. He was always laughing, his jutting family eyebrows often raised in jest, his rather thick lips invariably amused; indeed he treated everything as an entertainment. He did not so much arrive as descend, bringing with him an aura of gaiety so that nothing seemed quite as it was before he’d come. It was a very difficult thing to explain, and perhaps the answer really was that she was such a simpleton at the time.

  She’d taken him home, his car, his clothes, his family name, and the street was agog. Her father was a bosun on the Irish Ferry and she and her sister lived with their semi-invalid mother in a terraced house without a view of the harbour, their upbringing hardly rural as Hywel had once suggested since they were bound by tides and there was never much to spare as long as Delyth could remember. But they managed, both girls became teachers, although, of course, beside the Mason-Morgans, the academics, the magistrates, the auctioneers, the landowners, all her people were out of a different drawer, despite the fact that Hywel always insisted that there were no class distinctions among the Welsh. Somehow, all the memories of the past always got mixed up with what Hywel had said and he was quite likely to make such statements when they suited him in the face of any number of incontrovertible facts. He had, for example, gone to public school, one of the few in Wales and although the standards there raised a good few knowledgeable eyebrows, there was about Hywel that engaging charm that came from a kind of rootlessness for he seemed then to be free of the marks of any kind of place whereas she herself was a simple small-town girl, the kind who was quite thrilled to meet anyone from the BBC or any of the Welsh television stations. She was in awe of such people and the family joke was that if she’d have been a boy and of another generation, she was the kind who might have run off with the circus, she was that impressed by anything that came from outside her own happy little world.

  Like him, of course. He was slightly older than most of the students at the training college which they attended. There were unexplained gaps in his education, but he had ambitions even then. He was the kind who thought himself much too good for teaching. The children merely existed as material for him to show off his skills. Teaching was going to be a step towards the media from the very beginning. There was then as ever always an intangible hint of quite exceptional promise, of other, always unspecified things.

  But it took her father to see through him at a glance.

  ‘Well?’ she’d asked after that first visit.

  ‘It’s up to you, my girl.’

  ‘No, come on! None of that.’

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘Don’t you like him? What is it?’

  ‘Your life’s your own.’

  Her father wouldn’t be drawn. And it upset her terribly. Like herself, her father was small but broader with immensely strong arms and wrists, the kind of weather-beaten, sure-footed man who is seldom seen out of a jersey and who seemed to spend half his life with a tool bag under his arm, his wizened face under a crop of short white hair eternally sunburnt, a grin never far away. As a little girl, she’d thought he could do anything. He’d once cast the broken eye of a doll in perspex and set it so that it would wink at the press of a button, the tiniest eye of the tiniest doll and when he had handed it to her, she knew there was no other doll like it in all the world. And he was of the world too, a real traveller with tattoos to show for it. But he removed his cap when Hywel came into the room and she was mortified.

  Then Hywel started speaking to him as if he were a local character, one of those old men who sat on the bench in the park, sucking their pipes and spitting on dandelion leaves. And Hywel wouldn’t even let him buy a round in the pub.

  ‘No, this is on me,’ Hywel said, but everything about him said, ‘I am aware that you are living in impoverished circumstances.’ So much for the Mason-Morgan view of Wales and its absence of class distinctions.

  But at the time, she’d blamed her father! He’d retreated into a shell she never knew existed. He made no effort, he was merely dangerously polite. And said nothing. Nothing at all while her mother waited on Hywel hand and foot and her sister was very matter-of-fact. Her sister was going with a boy who lost his foot in a motorcycle accident but soon after, her sister shrugged her shoulders and married him just the same. Her sister had her father’s calm, but there was no doubt that it was she, Delyth, the youngest, who was her father’s favourite. And it was her father whom she had hurt the most. When Hywel came to the house afterwards, he seemed to have acquired a knowledge of the tides, unerringly picking the times when her father was away. It was as if he had known what her father knew, had seen in a glance, a knowledge which had taken her the rest of her youth to acquire.

  There followed the oldest of stories. Pregnant when she married in the summer they qualified as teachers, she did not know that Hywel already had an illegitimate child. What she did know was that the Mason-Morgans were extraordinarily welcoming. And Hywel would not leave her alone. It was a time when, like an exhausted traveller in the desert, she felt blotted out by the sun.

  Later, she had many nights in which to reflect upon it all, those brief months, in particular the totality of his physical presence. Whatever you read, or viewed, there was nothing that ever explained the ferocity of sexual attraction, and there had never been anybody with whom she could discuss it, but years later, she believed her father had seen that there was in Hywel the kind of maleness that belonged in stable yards and while it excited her, it also upset her, in particular, the total dependence which it awakened in her.

  ‘My legs are shaking!’ she’d cried one night. ‘They’re shaking!’

  She supposed in her ignorance that it was because she was so small and he was so big, but there was more than that. There was something about him that came alive in her presence. He couldn’t wait to look at her, to touch her and it was as if his eyes fed on her – as if every part of her must be scrutinised as well as owned. And he made her limp. She seemed to have no will and things seemed to be happening to her that she could tell no one about. And then she was pregnant and immediately overwhelmed because not for a second did he hesitate and there was not the slightest regret on his part.

  They would marry at once. The Mason-Morgans too were equally welcoming, Morfydd clapping her hands when they announced the date of the wedding and Hywel’s father who was still alive then, hoped very much that her family would allow him to take part in the service. Within a month she was whisked around the family and met them all, including T.J, who made it his business to call on her parents to tell her father what a lovely boy Hywel was and how pleased they all were. The pregnancy was not at all obvious but she got the feeling that they were so relieved to see Hywel married that they wouldn’t have minded even if they’d known. And that was that, the invasion of the little chapel, the day over as quickly as a flower carnival, the honeymoon in Rhodes where she miscarried, a house immediately provided for them together with a job for Hywel in a nearby Welsh county town and the march towards the media had begun.

  And she’d thought she was as happy as it was possible to be!

  There were, however, as ever, things she did not know, little items on the agenda that added up to make her education a total experience. What she did not know then was the Hywel had been given an ultimatum. Marriage was very much on the Mason-Morgan agenda. Morfydd had had her difficulties with her children. There had been problems with the vanished elder brother, little peccadilloes involving cheques, but since most of them had taken place in England they did not concern the family in quite the same way. The brother was
no longer mentioned. Now it was Hywel who needed to settle down. Fortunately, Morfydd saw nothing wrong in getting married at a young age. She thought Delyth a pretty little thing and said so. So did T.J., who spent half the reception yarning with her father. And the whole tribe appraised her jovially, the ferryman’s daughter. They were delighted she could speak Welsh and thought the fact that she was a qualified domestic science teacher an accomplishment that provided her with a reason for living.

  ‘There’ll come a time when Hywel will want to entertain,’ Morfydd said warmly.

  And her father said nothing.

  She was pregnant again when she learned about the ultimatum. They were living then in a comfortable terraced house, purchased through an estate agent who was also a relative. Jobs were hard to come by but Hywel had experienced no difficulty and had walked out of the interview saying that after a few years in a comprehensive school, he could begin to look for something better. He was a well-connected young man with a young wife and an old way with him, and, as ever, there was a feeling that he was at the start of a very distinguished career. Far from feeling he had been given a chance, he gave his seniors the impression that he was allowing them an opportunity to participate in a wondrous future. Of course, there were governors as well as politicians on the selection committee, but even the politicians were impressed and the estate agent had been quietly confident.

  In fact, he said so.

  ‘I won’t say any more, Morfydd, but I am quietly confident. You can tell T.J. from me. Quietly confident…’

  Three months later, Hywel was working late on a school drama production when T.J. rang, his voice betraying the urgency of the call. At first, she’d thought it was Hywel’s father who Hywel said was suffering from a deliberately undiagnosed cirrhosis of the liver, but it was not, and T.J. would not leave any message except to ask that Hywel should ring back the moment he came in. As it happened, Hywel was already saying he was being delayed by various production difficulties even then, and she was asleep when he came in so that T.J. rang again on the following morning, missed him, and then asked for the number of the school. It was the first time she’d heard the strain in T.J.’s voice.