by Dai Smith
When Hywel got home that night, there was a weariness on his face which he could not conceal. He was still slim then, handsome in an old-fashioned swarthy way with dark, smouldering good looks, but his voice was slightly hoarse when he answered her questions. He said he was using his voice a good deal in school.
‘What was it?’
‘Oh, T.J.’s fussing. We’ve got some shares in an investment bank and he thinks my brother’s after them.’
It sounded plausible enough. Delyth knew nothing about money. The brother existed as a shadowy spectre, and anything could be attributed to a spectre. Now Hywel seemed troubled, so she did not ask any questions, although much later she became very curious for different reasons altogether. But that night T.J. rang again. She could not help overhearing the conversation since the telephone was at the foot of the stairs in the little hallway.
It seemed the family had offered something and something was not enough. But the irritation in Hywel’s voice increased until he was saying simple words like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in a screaming frenzy. Then it appeared that T.J. had mentioned a likely visit.
‘How has she got my address?’ Hywel said hollowly. This time there was defeat in his voice.
At the time, Delyth had no inkling of anything untoward. Hywel’s ardour had not cooled. After the miscarriage, their GP had laughingly suggested ‘a little bit of what you fancy’, but pregnant again, she had never felt stronger. She also looked stronger. She had lost the bewildered look which Hywel’s attentions seemed to have induced. She had once been a competitive gymnast and now went to Keep Fit classes where her figure won admiring glances and she had started to teach on several afternoons a week before she found she was pregnant again. Hywel was glad and, as usual, they seemed to be unduly well off. He dealt with all financial matters and she had not yet learned to drive. In all respects, she supposed she was an old-fashioned wife in the way her mother had been, leaving everything important to her husband. They had been given the house, which made Delyth a little ashamed when she heard other young couples complaining about mortgages, but she was enough of a realist not to let it weigh on her conscience. If she had any complaint, it was that she had not yet had the opportunity of showing off her domestic skills. No one came for a meal, Hywel explaining that he had not yet met anyone worth inviting.
Now when he came in from the hallway, the colour had left his cheeks. He was clearly shaken by something. She’d been ironing one of his shirts on the large Harrods’ ironing board which yet another of his relatives had given them and she put the iron down on an asbestos mat.
She attempted a joke.
‘Don’t tell me T.J.’s lost all his money?’
He looked at her blankly. It was only later that he developed the faculty for remembering his own lies.
‘The investment?’ she said. ‘Is it shares or something?’
‘I was hoping not to have to tell you.’
‘What?’ she laughed. ‘We’re broke?’
‘No, no, it’s me… Well, it’s a spot of bother I got into a few years ago. It’s going to come as a bit of a shock, I’m afraid.’
Years later, she would learn that his brother used such phrases, ‘a spot of bother’, ‘a touch of the deficits’. They both sounded so un-Welsh, but then Hywel’s normal speaking voice had convinced the people they met in Rhodes that he was English. The spot of bother was an illegitimate child, an Irish nurse who refused to be silenced and for whom a financial settlement had been arranged, a settlement that now had to be improved on the advice of her brother who was a solicitor and who had only just learned of it. It seemed that Hywel had a past.
Somehow she understood her father’s look at that very moment but Hywel was very plausible and she was soon convinced. Wasn’t it possible for him to have got involved with some hard-faced Irish hussy who knew exactly what she was doing? He’d never seen the child. He thought it his duty to marry her but then someone had told him that she’d been married before. There was even some doubt about the paternity. He said he’d broken down and confessed to his mother and T.J. had been sent to fix things. You would not think even T.J. could be so foolish but at the time, it had seemed as if everyone were anxious for a settlement. It had been made, Hywel said, for the child’s benefit. It was not as if it had been a lasting relationship. But now she was determined to screw every penny she could from them. Hywel hoped he’d done the right thing in telling her at last.
She remembered sitting motionless on the arm of the chair the iron still switched on, its red warning light blinking like a traffic beacon – it was a Harrods’ iron with every safety device. She didn’t know what to say. She’d felt herself go cold at first, but then, very soon, she had every sympathy for him. It was the way he had of putting things.
‘I wish you’d told me before. I wouldn’t have minded then.’ She meant, before they were married.
‘I know. I should have told you.’
‘And not lie to me, an investment.’
‘Don’t you see? I didn’t want to hurt you.’
All the time, he had never relaxed the pressure of his hand and very soon, they made love on the floor, the red light of the iron winking like a warning beacon above her. The woman did not come, Hywel’s father died, his death releasing certain funds in mysterious ways and everything was settled. Later, she suspected that once she had been told the threat of exposure vanished, but anyway, the matter was closed. Hywel’s drama group won the county championships and at a staff party, the deputy headmistress told her that Hywel was doing wonders with the children, but the headmaster, who had opposed Hywel’s appointment, was not so forthcoming. Then a month later, their son was born, a difficult birth necessitating a caesarian and she felt her body would never be the same again. Three months later, the headmaster visited when Hywel was ill with flu. Hywel tried to order him out of the house, but the headmaster was grey-faced.
‘If any charges are brought, it’ll concern the two of you.’
The parents of a seventeen-year-old sixth-former had complained. Hywel had spent the night with the girl at a hotel after a drama competition and from that night, Delyth took away the ugliest phrase which remained in her mind like a talisman and which she frequently recalled every time Hywel went off on one of his long explanations. Again, after denying the accusation, he attempted to describe a half-caste girl who would not leave him alone, but the headmaster who’d either seen a medical report or had one quoted to him, said, ‘There was vaginal haemorrhaging for several days’.
This time she could not speak. She knew. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there were no charges brought and Hywel left the school at the end of term, and they moved to the capital city where Hywel found a job in a deprived area, a dockside school where, despite all expectations, he was very successful.
‘Why didn’t you leave him then?’ a friend had once asked her.
It was very simple.
‘I’d just had a baby.’
But the truth was, she didn’t want to meet her father’s eyes, didn’t want to confess failure. It would have been more understandable if her father had argued or if there had been some terrible scene, but he’d never said a word, just that single glancing look before he covered his own hurt. It was quite extraordinary but her feeling for her father kept her chained to a sense of duty which she could never have defended. So she made the best of things. Later, thinking of her father’s influence, she compared it with the disastrous effect Hywel’s mother had on her sons, but she could make no sense of it, any of it.
And once in Cardiff, everything changed for a while. ‘Blame the Welsh!’ Hywel would say every time anything went wrong. But he didn’t include Cardiff. Its very cosmopolitan nature was as strange to him as it was to her and while they discovered it, it was as if, for the first time, they were doing things together, like foreigners in a new land. Or so it had seemed at the time. There were even – dare she admit it? – days when she was happy.
III
After t
hree years of marriage during which a second child, a daughter, was born, the birth equally difficult, Delyth began to take stock. At twenty-four with two small children, she still felt bruised enough. But she’d recovered her natural optimism. They were still young. She hadn’t, as her father would have said, jumped ship at the first sign of trouble, in exactly the same way as her sister stood by her fiancé when he lost a limb. Neither of them were that kind of people. Now Hywel came home nightly full of tales of the school where he taught. He spent most of his day in a condemned secondary modern building incorporated into a comprehensive complex which was still in the process of construction. It was a grim, prison-like building with an asphalt yard backing on to a glue factory. The staffroom had been in use as a morgue during the First World War and some of the classrooms were merely spaces in an ancient assembly hall separated by wooden partitions so that you could never escape from noise and it seemed the things the teachers said were quite as outrageous as the unruly behaviour of the pupils. Thus he would report on the scripture teacher’s latest gem. ‘God doesn’t want you to be a clock-watcher boy!’ Another member of staff, on being introduced to Hywel, made no comment but remained seated at the staffroom table with his head held in his hands, later to announce mysteriously that he was ‘Up before the Committee on Thursday’. Thinking he was applying for a new post, Hywel politely offered his good wishes, only to be stared at. ‘No,’ his new colleague said, ‘Whitchurch British Legion. Fighting, foul language and threats!’
Daily there was some such anecdote which Hywel reported and it seemed he had found himself a niche amongst a collection of derelicts, many of whom, like himself, had things to hide, but far from becoming resigned, he now began to plunge himself into school activities with an enthusiasm that immediately brought a response from children who had long been deprived. It wasn’t long before his drama groups and clubs came to the notice of the Authority and when he reported that the Inspectorate were interested in what he was doing, she knew that it wouldn’t be long before he turned things to his own advantage.
For her own part, when she looked back on this time, her sole problem seemed to be to get enough sleep. Both children were fractious and she would later say that Siân, their youngest, did not have an unbroken night’s sleep in three years. Days seemed to pass in a blur, days that she could never after recall, but days nevertheless when their lives seemed to have an entrancing normality about them. Then, she was just like everyone else when her only companions, apart from the children, were the other young mothers whom she met in parks, tied like herself. What was odd was that she and Hywel seemed to avoid those who were Welsh-speaking like themselves and for a time, Hywel deliberately kept away from anyone who might remotely have any knowledge of that incident in the Welsh county town they had left. It was as if he was doing penance in the worst area of the docks and although it was never mentioned again, she noticed how disinterested he had become in things Welsh. There had been a time when he was at the centre of various nationalist groups, when many of his conversations were political, when he could be relied upon to give his support to the multiplying Welsh causes, but now he, like herself, seemed to be deliberately removed from almost everything they had known. She herself was so busy and involved with the children and the house that it was understandable, but Hywel even avoided the pub which were becoming increasingly colonised by outsiders as the Welsh language media grew in strength and little areas of the city seemed to be taken over by people from much the same background as themselves. It was as if he was dropping out of sight and awaiting his chance.
The chance came with yet another telephone call from T.J. Now there were magical words uttered for the first time, ‘Educational broadcasting’. It seemed that a Welsh broadcasting station was looking for production assistants with teaching experience and T.J. happened to be speaking to the newly appointed Controller about his nephew who was doing missionary work in the docks and quite wasted from the point of view of the nation’s needs as a whole. T.J. always spoke in this way and although Delyth was inclined, at last, to bite her lip when he said anything at all, she was well aware of the implications. The young mothers whom she met daily in the park always referred to Welsh language television as ‘Telly Welly’ and never watched it, but of course, she knew that while they might regard it as a joke, they were quite wrong and she herself was a warm supporter of all the causes which Hywel had seemingly abandoned. If she was not as active as she might have been, it was because she was preoccupied.
But one night she felt a particular apprehension. Hywel had gone to talk to a cousin who had carved a niche for himself in religious broadcasting on T.J.’s advice. She had a feeling that the cousin would emulate the role played by the estate agent previously. She had no doubt that Hywel was interested and while they discussed the post about to be advertised, they had thought merely in terms of salary which was expected to be more than his present meagre teacher’s wage. With the children and the recent purchase of a car, they were not as well off as they had been and although they did not have to pay rent, things were still tight. She was not sure but it seemed that the Mason-Morgan benevolence was not quite so forthcoming, partly, she suspected, because she always put off Hywel’s mother from visiting. Now, more than ever before they were on their own.
But that was not the cause of her apprehension. The proposed job would, it seemed, involve irregular hours of work and periods away from home and now, for most of their married life, she had got used to Hywel’s regular habits. There was no doubt he worked hard, no doubt he was appreciated, no doubt that he had done well and the very fact of sticking a job in that terrible area was itself a mark of character. Sometimes when she had to get up in the middle of the night to attend to one or other of the children, she did so without disturbing him and often when feeding the baby, she would sit in the armchair with a strange feeling of contentment, knowing that he was asleep upstairs with the front door locked against the outside world. She imagined her mother must have felt like this when her father was home from sea and the more she thought about it, the more she began to appreciate the regularity of their lives. But, of course, there was more to it again. For some reason, she did not see Hywel as a man behind the scenes despite the fact that he was considering a lowly production assistant’s job – she didn’t quite know what that meant exactly – but instead she saw him as a performer, a personality, one of those household names who were steadily increasing in number. And it was not just the regulars who crossed her mind, those instant opinion givers who appeared on programme after programme with monotonous regularity, but the real stars, those professionals who fronted programmes of every kind and had a kind of glamour that was evident in the way they dressed, the company they kept, their habit of attaching themselves to more famous people, particularly actors or singers, their attitudes seldom critical and often displaying that lugubrious fawning servility which somehow seemed to her the hallmark of such people. It was very noticeable on the Welsh language channels as if minor stars were seeking some of the glow cast by those who populated the major constellations. But she simply thought it greasy and unpleasant. She wouldn’t want Hywel mixed up with anything like that. To tell the truth, despite everything, she was rather proud of him for having done so well at a very ordinary job. In a way, it was rather like being a bosun. In Tiger Bay too, she thought. Her father had mentioned that with a wry smile, very surprised when she’d told him.
So she completed her chores and awaited Hywel’s return, deciding at the last minute to wash her hair, finally using a blow-dryer and ruefully fingering a clutch of grey hairs and noticing for the umpteenth time that although she had recovered her figure, there were marks appearing in the corners of her eyes, the pronounced crowsfoot lines that would one day become permanent. She remained a bit of a Minnie Mouse, especially when she was tired and the wrinkles showed.
She was seated in a dressing gown when Hywel came in.
‘Well?’
‘I’m not sure.’
She felt an immediate relief.
‘It’s for you to decide eventually.’
Her relief vanished.
Of late the old ebullient Hywel had returned, the air of promise and unspoken things to come, and with it, a filling out of his stocky frame. He was not only beginning to put on weight, he was putting it on in the wrong places and when he sat, poised on the edge of the settee as he did now, he reminded her of his father, that mysterious simpering grey-faced man who agreed with everything everybody said, whom she had met so briefly. But where his full face was long-suffering, Hywel’s was eager for approval.
‘It’s not just that the money’s more, it’s the long term prospects. I’m not going to get much further in teaching without much better qualifications.’
It sounded reasonable. He went on to describe the likely growth of Welsh television and very soon, it was as if he was rehearsing a speech for his interview. There were things he felt he could contribute, and then she knew, he had already decided. Of course he would be starting at the bottom, he said. There would be difficulties, but they had the children to think about. They lived in what by middle-class standards was rather a shabby neighbourhood. Very soon, they would have to think of schools for the children. Whatever course the future took, it was only right that he should do the best he could for them. But it was for her to decide.
Much later, she would think that half of what he said to her on such occasions was like a private sharing of what would later be a public utterance, and yet, she still listened, still felt that she mattered, still went along with him. But later still, she realised that this going back to what he thought were his own kind, far from being a healthy thing, was a death sentence. They were not his own kind, they were a new kind and he was entering a world which had never existed before. That night, and the night he came home to tell her that he had, of course, been successful, she felt an apprehension that she could not precisely articulate at the time. It was very odd but she felt there was an immediate parallel in the sudden departure of a Methodist minister from the town they had just left. Thought by most of his flock to be a complete nonentity and a backslider, he had suddenly emerged a television personality and was constantly seen on arts programmes, his face flushed and gestures expansive, rumours about his drinking and private life circulating freely while he became more and more prominent. It was laughable in some ways, disgraceful in others, and yet she could not help but feel that the very act of becoming such a public man was in some way an act of frenzy – as if the urge to be on public display was a new disease. It was what her father would have said. There was also the strange feeling that Hywel would be leaving something decent for something indecent. Above all, what was quite extraordinary, was that now for the first time she seemed to be thinking for herself.
