Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  ‘Thought we could put them up for a while,’ Iola said. ‘A bit of rest and recuperation.’

  It becomes clear that the young are a problem too. When your daughter corners you, it is hard to decide whether this world is too big or too small.

  ‘Where has she been this time?’

  His aunt was glaring at him as she crouched over a small fire, cooking peppermint cake in a dirty little saucepan. At the heart of the glare lay the congealed reproach of a lifetime. He had gone over to the enemy and she would never allow him to forget that that was still the way she looked at it. All he had done in effect was marry the daughter of Penllwyn Hall, in her view the pretentious home of a family of turncoats. At some stage well within Keturah Parry’s copious memory, his late wife’s grandfather, a mean and grasping quarry owner, had deserted Methodism for the established church. These fragments of local history did not concern him much, except to remind him, on occasions such as this, of the appalling narrowness of his aunt’s views. They were no more relevant to modern living than her working wig that rested low over her forehead like an inverted bird’s nest. He could never venture to laugh at her. She knew too much. He had a perfect right after his marriage to abandon primary school teaching, and to go into business in a limited way as a property developer, but she had a way of referring to the transformation as something vaguely discreditable. As far back as he could remember there was always accusation in her glance. When he was small in chapel, if he became restless during the service, she would never fail to transfix him with a glare across an expanse of sparsely populated pews.

  ‘Genoa,’ Mihangel Parry-Paylin said.

  He pronounced the name clearly for the benefit of her hearing. She took quiet pleasure in getting it wrong.

  ‘Geneva,’ she said. ‘From Bala to Geneva. Nice little book. Things were so much more civilised in those days.’

  She had acquired the perverse habit of appropriating the life experience of her parents’ generation as her own. The world had taken a definite wrong turning in 1914. The Alderman said that may well have been the case: but since Keturah was only seven at the time, there would have been very little she could have done about it.

  ‘Genoa,’ he said. ‘Where those terrible riots took place. A young lad was shot dead there.’

  ‘I haven’t got a television,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  She had a wireless that was fifty years old but she only heard what she wanted to hear. She liked to complain about Radio Cymru. Too much noise and not enough sermons.

  ‘I’ve been telling you for years, Mihangel Paylin,’ she said. ‘You spoil that girl.’

  He could only agree with her. On the other hand, what else could he have done? She was still in school when she lost her mother and he lost a wonderful wife. Easy enough for an old witch to talk. What had she ever lived for except the chapel and the good name of her family: and both these were no more, he suspected, than extended aspects of her own absorption in herself. All these things he thought and could never really tell anyone since Laura died. His closest friend Morus had moved to live in the Dordogne. His daughter Iola had driven off Charlotte Sinclair, who with a great deal of persuading, might have become his second wife, on the grounds that she was too English and should never be allowed to defile her mother’s bed or Penllwyn, which was in fact her mother’s inheritance.

  ‘You want to bring her to heel,’ Auntie Keturah said. ‘I’ve told you before. Her mother was weak enough with her. Spare the rod and spoil the child.’

  Mihangel Paylin sat in the uncomfortable wooden chair despairing of his situation. No movement seemed possible on any front. His only daughter was impervious to argument. This old woman would never budge. She loved squatting in her squalor, so what could he do about it? He looked up at the shelf above the open fireplace and stared at a tin with Mr Gladstone’s stern features painted on it, staring back at him. That was where she kept her pennies for the Foreign Mission. They were still there long after pennies had ceased to be legal tender. That’s the kind of woman she was. Wedded to the past. Like one of those clothed and crowned skeletons that hang in the crypts of Sicilian churches. A bride of silence. If the chapel was to be sold somehow or other she had to be moved out. As things stood she would only leave feet first in a box.

  And how are things at home he asked himself. Will somebody tell me exactly what is happening?

  II

  The first thing he noticed in the dining room was the absence of his framed photograph on the Welsh dresser. It was taken when he was the youngest mayor ever to be elected by the County Council. He wore the splendid mayoral robes. The chain itself was worth several thousand pounds. A colour photograph, tastefully lit, demanded a substantial frame. There was no good reason why a man should not be allowed to take a certain pride in his appearance and achievements. People had been known to remark he was a fine figure of a man.

  ‘Where’s my picture?’

  Iola was fussing about helping the unmarried mother to feed her little son who seemed to be rejecting unfamiliar food.

  ‘In the drawer, with your albums. Standing behind the Queen opening the new bypass. Church parade in full regalia. It’s all there. Safe and sound.’

  ‘What did you want to do that for?’

  ‘Well it’s a bit out of date, isn’t it? And you wouldn’t want people to think you were self-important, would you?’

  Who were ‘people’? This wretched girl and her wretched boy. Iola said her name was Maristella and the boy she called Nino. What were they to him that his daughter should remove his mayoral portrait from its place of honour on the dresser? The furnishing at Penllwyn was unchanged since his wife died. And she in her day had cherished her family antiques with a religious care. They still stood as memorials of her quiet devotion – in such contrast to his daughter’s iconoclastic inclinations. Did the girl do anything these days except protest, and when she could spare the time, call the whole purpose of his way of life into question? It was his habit to be genial and generous. They were essential qualities for public life. Smiles all round. You needed to work the familiar streets, dispensing cheerful greetings and armed with pockets full of goodwill. Did that mean he had to be genial and generous to this unlikely pair? He had a legal right to turn them out. Flotsam and jetsam didn’t have a vote. There were facts to be established. He addressed his daughter in a tongue the new arrivals could not understand.

  ‘Where did you find this one?’ he said.

  He made a stiff effort to be judicious and impartial.

  ‘On the ground,’ Iola said. ‘A policeman was kicking her. And hitting her with a truncheon.’

  He knew these things happened. Outside the limits of his council’s administration there existed a dangerous world. There was his regular evening television viewing to demonstrate this ferocious fact. But why should his only daughter want to plunge into the heart of it? Such a perfect quiet child. She was twelve when she lost her mother and a light went out of his life. She grieved so quietly. So intense. So determined. It was only worrying about her, and the increasing demands of public life – he would tell sympathetic colleagues when they were inclined to listen – that kept him sane. She showed every sign of academic brilliance. And then just before her sixteenth birthday a police car brought her home from some large-scale language protest. Her forehead was bleeding and he had never seen her look happier. That had to be the take-off of a great career of protest. For years it was something to tolerate. From prison or from foreign parts she would come limping home to recuperate. He could not but welcome her. She was his only daughter. Remonstration proved ineffective. Iola was an excellent cook and it became her practice to prepare a celebration supper as soon as she felt she had recovered. This, however was a new departure and it made him nervous. This was his home; his citadel. He needed the privacy, the space; the relaxation that belongs to a proprietor at the heart of his estate. Did she propose to turn it into a refugee centre?

  ‘We won’t be in your wa
y, Mici Paylin.’

  She had a way of creating a variety of versions of his name and using them, in the first instance, as badges of affection. As time went on and he felt her character toughen, it would all depend on her tone of voice: it could vary from habitual affection to thinly veiled contempt. With both these women, as it were at both ends of his life’s candle, he was obliged to be so circumspect. They had never much taken to each other. His theory used to be, because they were too alike: stubborn and intractable. Even when Iola was small her great-aunt was displeased with her prolonged stubborn silences. ‘I don’t understand this girl at all,’ she would say, as if her inability to fathom Iola’s hidden depths was entirely the little girl’s fault. And now when Keturah Parry was clinging so stubbornly to her unhygienic and desperately independent life, he had noticed how little interest and sympathy his daughter had with the old woman’s predicament. ‘Go and visit your aunt,’ he would say. ‘She doesn’t want to see me,’ she would answer. ‘We don’t have anything to say to each other. We live in two different worlds. It’s your problem, Alderman Paylin,’ she would say. As if it were only one more of his civic responsibilities instead of a family problem that reached in fact, right back to his childhood and even to his birth. With all her capacity for indignation, Iola could be quite heartless.

  ‘I need help in the house and in the garden. There’s an awful lot to be done. You’ll be free to attend even more committees, Mici P. Think how much more good you’ll be able to do.’

  Was that snide or was it sincere? These were the questions that beset him latterly almost whenever his daughter spoke. How much good in fact did he do? Public Health, Education, Ways and Means, Planning. Why should there always be a question mark over Planning? There was a crying need for better housing and it had been no more than coincidental that the three barren fields below the closed quarry were part of the Penllwyn estate. It was a social necessity, and the purchase price came at a crucial time.

  ‘I think you ought to know, Alderman Paylin. Maristella and your darling daughter have been through the fire together.’

  He inquired more closely. It transpired that Maristella had been tear-gassed at the EU summit in Nice. This had aroused her ire and stiffened her sinews. Protesters of the world unite! You have nothing to lose except your unemployment benefit. The world was disintegrating and there were fragments flying in all directions and what good was that supposed to do? There was a string of sarcastic remarks he could make that remained stillborn in his brain. He managed to mutter a question in Welsh about the identity of the little boy’s father.

  ‘She was raped.’

  Iola snapped her answer out rather than saying it. For a moment she seemed to be the voice of women through the ages. It was up to him to accept the universal guilt of his sex.

  ‘By a Corsican.’

  And that was that. The subject was closed. He could not inquire whether there were black Corsicans. Any further enquiry would have been unpardonably indelicate. He had his own thoughts to cultivate. What was this girl any more than one of those decorative drifters who hung about Riviera resorts? She knew how to be still and unobtrusive like a piece of furniture. It was possible to discern that, in her own fragile way, she had once been decorative. And here they were, old comrades in arms, who couldn’t have known each other more than three weeks or possibly a month: and Iola using a blowlamp flame of enthusiasm to create twin souls. Strangers were settling under his roof protected and patronised by his only daughter and there was so little he could do about it. At what point would he be able to inquire more closely into her motives and purposes?

  ‘I thought I’d make a bread and butter pudding, Tada. Would you like that?’

  The least he could do was show he was melted for the time being by the warmth of her smile.

  III

  In the damp vestry of Soar chapel Mihangel Paylin marvelled at the transformation in his aunt’s appearance. And in her manner. She was no longer an ancient witch, crouching over a bunch of hot cinders, stirring a brew in a battered saucepan. In some way she was more alarming. A lighter wig was mostly concealed by a black hat of ancient vintage trimmed with a skimpy veil. The black costume she wore had a green tinge and a square shouldered wartime cut. He saw her as an emaciated simulacrum of the stern deacon and Sunday School teacher who had tyrannised his childhood. The washing facilities in Soar cottage across the road were limited. In any case it was possible that in old age Keturah had got out of the habit. The creases on her neck and the wrinkles on her face seemed lined with venerable grime. She had unlocked a safe and was laying out documents on the green baize of the deacon’s table.

  ‘You will be fascinated by this, Dr Derwyn. A membership paper. Or ticket should I say? Dated April 15th 1819. “Let it be known that Jane Amelia Parry who bears this paper is a full member of the Christian Society gathered in Soar chapel, Llandawel.” Isn’t it wonderful?’

  Dr Derwyn Dexter had no choice but to agree. He was a tall thin man with a prominent nose and a small mouth set in a propitiating smile. Since he had been placed in charge of the university archive he had cultivated a manner of inoffensive shrewdness.

  ‘Well yes indeed,’ he said. ‘Yes indeed.’

  He clasped his hands behind his back and bent to scrutinise the faded paper more closely.

  ‘My great great-great-grandmother,’ Keturah said. ‘She thought nothing of walking thirty miles to a preaching meeting.’

  Her voice was loud with triumph. Dr Dexter half turned to indicate that by the same token Jane Amelia would have been related to Alderman Paylin too, since his late mother was Keturah’s sister. To Keturah in her present elevated mood this could be no more than a peripheral detail.

  ‘1822 this sanctuary was built on the foundation of the original chapel which had been a barn. “A delightful wayside temple,” Dr Peate called it. I was standing just there when he said it. “If I had the funds,’’ he said, “I would love to transport this chapel stone by stone all the way to the Folk Museum at St Fagans.” “No indeed,” old William Cae Clai said. “Indeed not, Dr Peate. This is a place of worship and it shall remain so as long as I live.” “Well of course William Jones” Dr Peate said. “Quite right too”. Poor William did not live so long after that.’

  Dr Derwyn saw a chance for a pleasant diversion.

  ‘Ah, Dr Peate,’ he said. ‘He put me in the second class for the Crown Poem in ’74 was it? He was dead against vers libre. “If this competitor is under twenty-one, there is still hope for him.” I was twenty-seven at the time so I gave up competing. No crown for me. He knew his stuff though. About architecture. And about poetry if it comes to that. I was never meant to be a poet.’

  Keturah Parry paid little attention to the archivist’s anecdote. She had the pressing anxiety of a peasant woman who has arrived late at the market to display her wares. From a drawer in the deacon’s table she extracted a rusty key that opened the stiff door of a wall cupboard. Inside there were stacks of notebooks.

  ‘Now this is something,’ she said. ‘Really something. The sermons of five generations of ministers. And all of them notable preachers. Just look at them.’

  Mihangel Parry-Paylin shuffled to one side and left the responsibility of looking to the archivist. Keturah took down a notebook as if to display a sample. She opened it and held it at a distance to read the handwriting.

  ‘“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not appear what we shall be”… John Jones’ last sermon. My grandmother remembered it you know. The chapel was full to overflowing and they sang, she said, full of joy and thanksgiving for the blessing of holy eloquence. It all happened here. Those were the days, Dr Derwyn. Those were the days. They had something to sing about.’

  Keturah stared at each of the men in turn defying them to disagree with her assessment.

  ‘A better world inside these walls,’ she said. ‘Simple people wrapped in love and righteousness.’

  Dr Derwyn felt obliged to make a judicious commen
t.

  ‘A simpler world certainly,’ he said. ‘Less complex. Less loaded with distractions.’

  ‘It will come again,’ the old woman said. ‘It will come again. Only if we keep the flame alight. John Jones had a wonderful sermon you know on the parable of the ten virgins. The church is One you see. The living and the dead keep the lamp burning. We need money Dr Derwyn. There’s the roof you see and other repairs. Now then. If you take this wonderful collection of documents into your care, the question is how far could you help us?’

  Dr Derwyn’s small mouth opened and shut as he pondered a sufficiently tactful reply. Keturah made a visible effort to contain her impatience.

  ‘Men like to talk business,’ she said. ‘Mihangel here is a Trustee. We have to save this place one way or another. I’ll go and make a cup of tea.’

  Leaning on her stick she moved carefully to the small kitchen and scullery attached to the vestry. She opened the rear door to empty the teapot of a previous infusion. An early section of the graveyard stretched between this rear door and the lean-to toilets that needed painting. The headstones were mostly in slate and dated from the nineteenth century.