Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  What she did know was that he was on a Welsh bandwagon, and he was a clear example of what one of her sardonic colleagues had described as the contemporary disease. He suffered from Wales-in-the-head. This consciousness affected his every idea and dominated his life which was understandable as far as his work was concerned, she supposed, but she was beginning to realise that it had very little to do with the daily realities of most people’s lives. But like every other idea Hywel held in his mind for long, it was very profitable, although she had a longing for someone to stand up and say there was no such thing as a purely Welsh germ! Except Hywel himself, of course. This was how she thought now. He wasn’t going to get round her, and one day, coming across an old school geography textbook which dated to the 1930s, she found that the word ‘Empire’ was mentioned so frequently that it struck a chord in her mind. People then, it seemed, were always doing things for the Empire. They built roads, bridges, sacrificed their lives, their health, their children, all for the Empire. If you substituted the word Wales for Empire it was almost exactly the same kind of thinking. It was quite extraordinary for her to have noticed something like that, but she didn’t dare say anything to anybody. She hoarded it all away.

  She said he wouldn’t get round her. The way he got round her was by asking her things now in front of the children so that any refusal on her part put her in the wrong. He had now reached the stage where there were people he wanted to invite to dinner, and they suddenly began to receive more and more invitations as if those on the echelon below them had also realised that Hywel was worth cultivating. Some of them were the same wives who had given her such looks previously. But now there was a more obvious regard for Hywel, a slightly different appraisal of her but always as if she had somehow miraculously survived and kept pace, quite a surprising little thing. She had gone to one or two houses with the grime of the classroom barely removed from her fingernails. It was at a time when confidential record cards were introduced in schools and she was aware of daily realities in a way she never had been before, in particular of the crimes visited upon children, the beatings, the sexual assaults, the shouted scenes behind locked doors, the visible evidence of hurt, worst of all the silent children who said very little but whose eyes confirmed things she would never have believed possible. And she would sit smiling as the conversation buzzed around her, seldom contributing but saying to herself, ‘Ah yes, the Empire. We must keep the Empire, the jolly old Empire!’

  ‘Delyth teaches,’ Hywel would say, and then he would say where, naming the shabby districts as if she, in T.J.’s words, was doing valuable missionary work and people were suitably impressed. What nobody understood was that her teaching was the lifeline from the lot of them!

  On some nights Hywel would look at her with warm regard as if he too was in some way infected by this view of her as a person who had come on. Now they slept in separate beds. If he touched her, she turned away. But soon, he was wooing her again. But it was the one thing he could not do in front of the children, so he had no chance.

  Entertaining was another matter, however. Entertaining was part of his career now. So, it seemed, was keeping on the straight and narrow for he seldom went away and even offered to take her with him on one or two trips. He’d used the children as blackmail before they went on holiday, and she’d been available, as she’d learnt to put it, only because she knew that the children wouldn’t have had a father on holiday with them otherwise. That was one for the record cards, but her lack of response made him drink all the more and she didn’t care. But entertaining outsiders was not like entertaining him in her bed. That was no longer part of the grand design. But entertaining would produce him another colony.

  So again, she went along with it, shrugging her shoulders and setting out to prove something to herself. She was not a prude but gluttony seemed to be an undiagnosed industrial hazard of the media people Hywel knew. It was no good doing wonders with coriander or traipsing to the market to get fresh artichokes, they didn’t want subtlety, they wanted quantity, stuffing themselves over Normandy pork with rich puddings to follow, all the things she despised. And they drank like fish, one or two often using Company drivers as they went about their hogging, and just as Hywel had years ago been a great maker of statements about the Welsh (he’d dropped it recently), now she took up the same irreverent strain.

  Like her Empire thoughts, these other irreverences remained buried, although in one of the schools in which she taught there was an old, exhausted, permanently hungover Welsh teacher, a Cardi like herself who could not face a class until he had read the Western Mail from cover to cover and was the last exponent of ‘silent reading’ and to whom she often reported on the young notables who now began to come to her house. Like T.J., he was also known by his initials, a white-haired old soak with a country turn of phrase.

  ‘Well?’ O.O. would say, ‘who did you have last night?’

  She would report whereupon O.O. would shake his head in mock sadness. ‘That beauty! The pee’s not dry on his legs yet!’

  And of another, he would add, ‘I knew his father. Very few ministers could empty a chapel, but by God, one look at him was enough!’

  She was never without one friend.

  The entertaining continued, so did the entertainment. Now Hywel, portly and preposterous, began to cultivate even more important people. He affected waistcoats on occasions and got out his father’s gold watch chain and once, when she was required to attend the memorial service held for a famous sporting personality, she’d trotted beside him wearing a cloche hat and feeling like the maid. This was the final period before he got the job he really wanted when the lies began again, and eventually he had become so gross that she could not imagine any woman, certainly a woman younger than him, being interested in the least. His belly sagged and his thickly bearded face had now begun to resemble that of some debauched Old Testament prophet, the eyes often inflamed for, despite his workload, he was never without a glass in his hand. Now the wives looked at her with sympathy once more but also with a certain unmentionable curiosity as if they could not imagine how she endured such a gross physical presence.

  But she had already calculated a date for leaving him when he died.

  VI

  She faced them all in the memorial service like a celebrity. No one could understand why. She wore a sheath dress, patent leather shoes, her highest heels, a black suspender belt, and sheer, seamed stockings, the tiny bulge of the clip of the suspender belt visible through the material of the dress when she sat. She knew because she could see Hywel’s mother staring at it. She also wore a hat which was hardly a hat, more like a half-formed butterfly perched on the top of her head with her hair, neatly curled up, coiled around it. She’d recently been to a beauty parlour in France and had her eyebrows plucked and she wore the slightest tint of dove-grey eye shadow, all of which gave her face an altogether more interesting aspect. If anything, it looked thinner, but since she was handsomely tanned, not only had she never looked healthier (as some people remarked) but there was now, for the first time in her life, a certain air about her, a chic that was quite devastating. Had she been a model, you would have expected the ferryman’s daughter to appear soon demonstrating what could be done next with a fisherman’s slinky jersey! And now her face was quite inscrutable. The reshaped eyebrows had removed the Minnie Mouse look completely and the marks etched below her eyes merely made her look experienced. There was not a hint of her former self.

  She’d told her father and sister not to come and she hoped there was no one there from her family. Up until the last minute, she wasn’t certain she would go herself, and, as usual, it was only for the sake of the children that she’d agreed, one of the many problems faced by the harrassed controller of the broadcasting station who wasn’t at all sure that the memorial service should be held, but had given way himself to departmental pressures. He seemed to be aware of his mistake since there were so few people present and began the customary eulogy with a nervous cleari
ng of the throat, his thick north Walian accent making his ill chosen words seem all the more ponderous. Once you got these people away from their desks you realised how inadequate they were. Throughout, Delyth kept her eyes riveted on the bridge of his spectacles, her chin tilted pertly, allowing herself neither a glance to right or left. The gist of his peroration was soon revealed. Hywel was a man who had given Wales to the world. Of late, his speciality as a producer was what might be called The Welsh Connection, with distinguished exiles, with foreign lands, with those industries that had taken Welsh people the length and breadth of the globe, not forgetting Hywel’s other preoccupation with the vanishing past.

  But Delyth soon stopped listening. It was the mixture as before. It might even have been Hywel speaking himself. The Vanishing Past, she thought. By it, the controller meant images concocted from obscure farm ploughs or the hulks of derelict schooners which had once plied their trade to long forgotten harbours. As for crossing and recrossing the length and breadth of the world, while it was quite true, what he should have said was that if Hywel had found a Chicago gangster involved in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre with a name like Evans, it too would be good for a programme, together with the expenses and the month-long booze-up that went with it. They would do anything rather than address themselves to the present. Later, during the final hymn, Morfydd clutching her throat beside her as she sang querulously, Delyth stole a glance at the assembled congregation. Besides the top brass – the Empire builders – there seemed an unusually large number of women which was a surprise. He couldn’t have gone through them all, especially the policewoman, she thought ironically. At last, she felt uninvolved.

  When the service ended and the procession of people came over to greet her, she had but one image in her mind and had she revealed it, she would have horrified everyone. She knew exactly what everyone was saying. ‘Isn’t she bearing up splendidly? She’s looking so well considering… I always knew she was a brave little thing!’

  But it was all she could do not to giggle. She’d fixed the lot of them. What had upset Morfydd so much, was not just the suddenness of her son’s death, but the fact that she had not been informed of it for several weeks. They’d gone on holiday to the south of France and on the very first morning, Hywel had been playing football on the beach with the children when he’d suddenly put his hand to his heart and dropped down dead. There’d been a doctor nearby who told her he’d had a massive stroke. Then with three weeks of the holiday remaining, she determined to carry on with it, making up her mind on the spot since they were touring and had a number of places booked. They’d not had a family holiday for four years; by now Hywel scarcely saw his own children for any period longer than half an hour so she’d come to an abrupt decision. The hotel had been marvellous, arranging the crematorium in Marseilles and eventually, she’d driven home, refreshed and tanned with Hywel’s ashes in the back of the car, only informing his mother a few days before they’d got on the ferry. But although it was a decision taken quickly, it was not taken lightly and she had no regrets whatsoever. She’d even had a laugh that she could never communicate to a living soul. Hywel’s ashes had been placed in a plastic urn and once, when she’d been stopped for speeding, she’d inadvertently produced the cremation certificate with the other documents and the incredulous look on the faces of the gendarmerie had made her feel like a celebrity. The gendarmes had asked to see the urn and when they did, saluted with that thrilling French precision, even escorting her away from the intersection.

  That was the last of Hywel really, sliding about in the boot of the car.

  THE FARE

  Lewis Davies

  Naz had been waiting. The clock clicked forward, timing the day, his fare. Rain traced lines between the droplets on the windscreen, tugging each one down. The wipers swept forward, then back. He checked his watch; the fare was for four-thirty. He wanted to finish by six. He was hungry. He hadn’t eaten for nine hours. He didn’t like getting up before it was light to eat. It didn’t suit him. The days were longer with no food.

  He hoped the boy would eat tonight. It had been nine days now. He could see the heat inside his son as it rose to his skin in sweat. But his eyes were still quiet, looking beyond them to somewhere else. The hospital was clean, white and efficient, and it frightened him. The single room surrounded them, hushed.

  He needed to finish. Time to eat. Time to visit.

  He turned the engine on. A light in the hallway of the house caught him before he could drive the car away. Then the door opened and a man ran from the doorway down the path to the waiting cab.

  A rush of cold air filled the car as the man clambered into the back seat. He was out of breath, his coat ruffled up. Naz watched the man as he tried to settle himself and his briefcase into the seat. The man took off his glasses to wipe the steam and rain from the lenses. He peered into the front, up at the mirror, his eyes squinting with the effort.

  ‘Crickhowell House.’

  The man spoke with an accent that Naz found difficult.

  ‘Sorry, say again.’

  ‘The Assembly building.’

  ‘Ah, no problem. The bay, yes.’

  The man just nodded and turned to face away from the mirror.

  Naz concentrated on the traffic ahead as he pulled wide into Cathedral Road. The cars were lined tight, nudging each other out of the city for the weekend. This was a city that dozed through the evenings, only coming awake for a brief few hours between eleven and three, alcohol lowering its inhibitions. It pulled tight to itself during the day. The churches still blistered the city, still calling to it through empty pews. There wasn’t enough here yet to break with its past.

  Naz had lived in Manchester. It was a real city, full of people, full of the swirl of imagination. There were secret places in that city. Even for him, there were places to drink, to meet women. It was OK to pay for it then. He was a single man. There were necessities he couldn’t ignore. He could remember his male friends on the streets at home, holding hands. Frustration dripping between them and not a woman in sight. Death and marriage had saved him from that.

  His father had always expected him to give in and come home. The old man was still expecting his son’s defeat when he cut into his leg with a cleaver. An accident but still death. Naz had looked for the memory, searched through its corners, even though it couldn’t be his. The street thick with the smell of meat. The gutters running with rats and the crows ready to pick scraps from the bones. The panic for a taxi. The blood pouring from the severed artery as his father had seen it pour from so many dying animals, knowing he was dying. Naz had escaped that. His father had died in a taxi on the way to hospital.

  The youngest son, he was allowed a chance, a chance to become himself. His brothers had paid for a marriage then. Sure he wasn’t coming back. Insuring against him coming back. A proper respectable girl. A good name. Her family lived in Cardiff. They were cousins of a cousin. He would have to move from Manchester. Too many memories, connections for a man about to marry. It was another city, a smaller city.

  There were fewer cars going back into the city. It was a straight run, Cathedral Road, Riverside, Grangetown, Butetown, Docks. He could see the faces and houses change colour as he followed the river to the sea.

  The man in the back shuffled the papers in his briefcase. He caught Naz looking at him in the mirror and smiled unsurely back.

  ‘I’m late.’

  Naz smiled. ‘Can’t go any faster. The traffic.’

  ‘No, don’t suppose you can.’ He looked forlorn.

  ‘Important meeting?’

  The man looked as if he didn’t quite understand the question.

  ‘At the Assembly?’ prompted Naz.

  ‘No, not really. A commission.’

  ‘You’re an important man?’

  The man straightened himself in the back seat. He looked to see if Naz was mocking him. It was a straight question.

  ‘Er, no, I don’t suppose I am.’

&nb
sp; ‘What’s the rush then?’

  The man looked away. He watched the river rush below him and the space where there had once been factories now filled with cleared land. A sign marked the opportunity: ‘Open to offers!’

  The radio crackled through. Naz picked it up. A voice told him he had another call at the university. He could go home then. Narine would be waiting for him. She had been at the hospital for days. They allowed her to sleep there at first. Waiting. But she couldn’t sleep and she just spent the nights staring out across the lights that marked the limits of the city. Naz liked the view from the ward. It was the only thing he liked about the hospital. At nights he could see the towns on the far side of the estuary and imagine what it would be like living there. Anywhere but here, now, while his dreams struggled through in the bed beneath him. It was a strange country, this. A country trying to find its way. There was nothing he could see that wasn’t just smaller than Manchester.