by Dai Smith
‘But which one of them?’
‘God help us, if you’re going to start being an echo like those two.’
‘God help us,’ I began. But she cuffed me on the head and turned the wireless on.
To think that one of them could have been my auntie. My Auntie Dilys was nice enough, but she wasn’t special in any way.
If I hurried over my supper and the washing up, I had two whole hours to spend at the Arwels and I savoured every moment.
I’d be shown first into the drawing room where we’d have coffee, real coffee, served in a silver coffee pot, where I sat in a fat velvet chair and was passed a cup and saucer of green and gold eggshell china, pink crystals of sugar and exotic dark chocolates. After this delightful ritual, I might look at their photograph albums; two plump little girls sitting together on a garden seat, chubby legs and solemn round faces, two young girls in frilly party dresses with ribbons in their hair, two young ladies in their first ball gowns.
‘This one is you, isn’t it Hester?’ I’d ask.
‘Wait a minute, now. I really can’t tell. No one seemed sure, even at the time. They always called us the girls or the sisters, you know, never our names. We hardly knew ourselves which of us was which, did we Louise?’
‘We hardly knew ourselves, did we, Hester?’
The house was so beautiful, so wickedly luxurious; thick carpets everywhere and floor-length velvet curtains, heavy as the falling darkness outside. They lent me a dressing gown of plum-coloured chenille and after I’d bathed and washed my hair, they’d take me to their bedroom and take it in turn to brush my hair, brushing gently, gently, almost as though they were in a trance. They each had an ivory hairbrush, I remember, one with a silver H on its back, the other an L. I wished my hair was long and straight and raven-black instead of short and reddish-brown. Gran had forbidden me to use make-up, but they insisted that complexion milk didn’t count, so they smoothed it into my face and my neck and my shoulders. It felt soft and silky and smelt of little white roses and purple violets, so different from Gran’s carbolic soap. ‘She’s got such delicate skin, hasn’t she Hester?’
‘Her skin is as soft as a baby’s, isn’t it, Louise?’ Afterwards I was encouraged to try on their perfumes – luckily Gran had lost her sense of smell – and I loved repeating their grand French names; Je Reviens, Bal de Nuit, Ma Griffe, L’Air du Temps, Mon Désir, Arpège.
Their house had several bedrooms, six or seven I should think, but they slept together in the largest and grandest one in the front. (The long small room at the back of the house was where their maid, housekeeper, cook slept, a bustling little woman called Gwladys who had been with them since their birth. They always got her to walk home with me, but she never came very far because she was frightened of the dark and I wasn’t.)
They slept in a high, old-fashioned bed with a brass bedstead. The quilt was a bright turquoise silk, the colour matching the tiny rosebuds on the cream wallpaper, and the carpets, the heavy curtains and the satin lampshades were a deep, voluptuous pink. There was a highly polished bedside table on either side of the wide bed with a framed photograph on each.
One evening Hester picked up the photograph from her side, gazing at it as though willing me to notice it. I didn’t need much prompting. ‘What a handsome man,’ I said. He was handsome; dark curly hair, slanting eyes, straight nose and full, curved lips. And as I might have guessed, Louise then brought me the photograph from her bedside, and at first I thought it was the same man in a different pose.
‘Brothers,’ I said then. ‘Twin brothers.’
They smiled at each other, but didn’t volunteer any information and I was too shy to ask.
One evening towards the end of my holiday, though, when it was mothy and dark as Gwladys walked me back to Gran’s, I ventured to ask her about the handsome young men.
She seemed flustered. ‘What young men?’
‘The brothers in the photographs on the bedside tables.’
‘Yes. Very nice young gentlemen,’ she said then. ‘Sons of a very good family. Not from round here at all.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘Killed in the war.’
‘Both of them?’
‘Both of them. Nice young men. Real gentlemen. Not from these parts, of course.’
‘Poor Miss Hester and Miss Louise.’
‘Yes indeed. 1944. Ten years ago now, very near. And never anyone else after.’
‘Gran told me that my Uncle Bob was friendly with them once.’
She was furious. ‘Nonsense. Your Uncle Bob was a labourer. He worked on the farm but he never came to the house. He knew his place, Bob did. Your Gran likes to boast, that’s all. I’m turning back now. You can run from here, can’t you.’
‘Gwladys was in a stew when I told her about Uncle Bob courting the sisters,’ I told Gran.
‘She knows nothing about it. She was in Swansea nursing her mother during the war. It was I who had to look after the sisters then.’
‘Do you mean when their young men were killed?’
‘Their young men? What young men are talking about now?’
‘Real gentlemen, Gwladys said they were. Sons of a very good family.’
‘Gwladys is getting soft in the head.’
Now that I had my interesting association with the Arwel sisters to sustain me, Gran didn’t seem so much of a trial; indeed she often seemed nothing but a fairly harmless relic from an unhygienic past. Sometimes in the evening, I sat at her side on the old rexine sofa, leaning my head on her shoulder, almost able to ignore the dirty dishcloth smell coming from her.
‘Tell me a secret, Gran.’
‘What about?’
‘You know. About the sisters. About their past. Tell me why they’re different from other people.’
‘I’ll tell you when you’re older.’
‘Gran, you’ll be dead when I’m older.’
She chuckled at that. She liked straight talk. She leaned forward, looked me straight in the eye and cleared her throat. ‘They never had any men friends, real gentlemen or otherwise. They only had one man between them and he… he was an Italian prisoner of war.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘He was a handsome man, anyway. I saw his photo, two of his photos.’
‘Married, of course.’
‘So they were in disgrace, is that it?’
‘You could say that, yes.’
I could see her hesitating about going on, but I squeezed her arm and gave her an imploring look.
‘Their father found him in bed with them, you see. In between them, he said. That seemed to be the last straw. I don’t think he’d have minded quite so much if he’d been either firmly on one side or the other, but there he was cuddled up between them. All three of them naked as babies, he said.’
‘Naked?’ I swallowed hard. Of course I knew about sexual intercourse, but I found certain of the details very unsavoury.
‘Naked as new born babies.’
‘And after the war, I suppose he went back to Italy?’ I tried to keep the quiver out of my voice.
Gran paused again. ‘No. No, sometime later he was found shot in Henblas woods.’
‘Murdered? Do you mean murdered?’
‘That’s right. Murdered. The Italians weren’t exactly loved at that time, especially the very handsome ones. No one found out who’d shot him. There were no clues. It could have been anybody, I suppose.’
‘I think it was their father don’t you, Gran, who murdered him.’
‘It could have been their father. He had a massive heart attack six months later. It could have been guilt, I suppose.’
‘Poor things. Poor Hester. Poor Louise.’
‘Don’t cry. You wanted the truth and now you must accept it.’
‘And you had to look after them. Were they very unhappy?’
‘They were, of course. Very unhappy.’
She glanced at me again, as t
hough wondering how much more I could take. ‘Go on,’ I said.
‘And pregnant as well. Very pregnant. Five or six months pregnant.’
‘Both of them?’
‘Both of them. Well, that’s what happens when you lie naked in bed with a handsome young man, especially an Italian.’
‘Both of them pregnant?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh Gran, whatever happened to their little babies?’
‘I looked after their babies, one boy, one girl, until they were old enough to be adopted. And it was straight after that their father died.’
‘Gran, it’s a terrible story, a cruel story.’
‘That’s why I didn’t want you to hear it.’
We were both silent for a while. I felt there was a hand twisting my stomach. I wanted to be sick, wanted to vomit up everything I’d heard.
‘But they’ve still got each other, haven’t they,’ I said at last.
‘Yes, they’ve still got each other, God help them, foolish as they are.’
I thought of them, their arms tightly clasped round each other’s waists, repeating each other’s sentences, spending hours laying out their dresses on the wide bed, deciding which to wear, trying on their lovely jewellery.
‘Shall I spend the whole day with them tomorrow, Gran? Because it’s my last day? They said I could.’
‘Then I suppose you can. Silly girl. Go to bed now. You can come again next year… unless I’m dead before that, of course.’
I bent to kiss her good night. ‘Silly girl,’ she said again.
A VIEW ACROSS THE VALLEY
Dilys Rowe
What was left was a presence in a room where all the wood was scrubbed white. The presence, already disembodied, had assumed a power it never had before. It was hard for those present to know what they felt in the presence of an event so difficult to understand, so impossible to reconstruct. Feelings ran like mercury between compassion and awe. Fortunately routine provides a set of phrases and even a tone of voice which concealed this confusion. Time that morning was short. The man considering the case said he must ask himself what else it could be but misadventure; he found no answer, he said. No one unfortunately would have been likely to pass by that place, not at that time of day and on a Sunday. He paused again and found the next part of the formula. All too often, he went on, in that place the deaths of children came before him, but it would have been unfair in this case to expect the parents to start a search immediately because a girl whose habits must have been a little out of the ordinary did not return in time for her lunch. He sighed and made a gesture with his open hand. He was disgruntled like a good workman who had not been given the right tools for the job. He was returning this verdict, he said, because they did not know what went on up there.
The child had been alone on the slope of the hill. She drew all her hair down before her face, pressed her chin to her neck, and knelt there for something to do in the brazen afternoon. Through the back of her neck the sun drove a boomerang of light grown solid, a creature consumed by light, as light had consumed the pieces of white hot metal pulled out of the furnace to amuse her as she stood at the foundry door. They would pick them out for her on the long tongs, shapes like toys distorted and fantastic, shapes pure with light and possessed by it; they held them out to her so that the heat flew at her face like an angry swan restrained. She felt the white-hot boomerang now probing through her neck to meet her chin at the other side. She pressed her chin still closer. She created dusk with the heavy curtain of hair, and at the day’s height she put out the sun. It was a new state of being, and labouring with her breath she enjoyed to the full its exquisite pain. She opened her eyes to the thick falling hair, blew on it and felt the moisture returning from it to her face. She shook it three times. It swung in its own weight like a pendulum, and then hung still. Sweat started on her forehead and spread. When it became unbearable she raised her head and through the hair falling back around her face she saw the scar cut by the valley white after her own dusk, until in a moment the sun drenched it again.
She hitched up at her waist the green pleated skirt which the last wind before the heat of the day blew against her legs. Haze was beginning to rise on the summer Sunday. Occasionally gorse cracked in the heat. It must have been between one and two o’clock because below nobody was moving in the toy streets. She saw the tower of feathers where a train crawled on its stomach amongst the black hulks of the steel works and the bright red boxes of the new factories. A car visible only in the sun’s searchlight moved where a road must be. From the cemetery something too small to see, a glass shade it may be with two dirty joined hands inside it, flashed her the living sun from amongst its deaths. No one moved in the streets. They were all in their houses stifling in the fumes from roast beef, lamb and mint, hot jam and rhubarb. The valley had life as a wound has microbes, but not on a Sunday between one and two o’clock. Stripped of its power, it lay harmless and neutral in the sun.
She was high above it where woods had been, where there was nothing to wreck. Somewhere behind her foxes and badgers played, and beyond that further than she could walk there was a lake. But only men with their heads in the clouds and gentle happy madmen would use this right of way with wind strumming in their ears when there were other ways in and out of the valley. And so it was no part of the landscape where the girl was now. Where she was four white clovers might spring up in all her footsteps, or she might be a girl conjured for convenience out of flowers. But she was not. She was a girl who was out at a forbidden time on the muted Welsh Sunday.
From her pockets she took the six bracelets. She put three on each arm and shook them towards the sun. She held her thin arms out and admired them hanging at her wrists, then pushed them hard up her arm as far as each would go. The sharp edges cut into the white freckled flesh. She had chosen them carefully for their graded sizes, two from jam jars, two from jars of chutney and two from jars of fish paste. She pulled them down again to the wrists and ran her fingers through the grooves of the red weals, three on identical places on each arm. She sat on, above the valley, shackled in the six bracelets.
From here the river was only a river, winding its way on a map through the lie of the land. Its banks were not doomed by memories of old deaths; it was not a place where pitiful drowned dogs covered with the grey plush that is left of them show the holes of their eyes. Down the valley the viaduct leapt in three great bounds across it, and she could see now that when trains stopped on it, sprawled in their monstrous immobility, people would be up there with their heads well out of the smoke, parcelled eight at a time in little boxes. In a musty book which might have been the only one an illiterate old man long dead had in his house for sentimental reasons, she had once seen a drawing on a page hanging off the thin cords of the binding. ‘A landscape in Tuscany’, it said, showing a long arched bridge in the fields with hills behind it. This might have been a landscape in Tuscany under the sun.
Time in this new dimension of sun and space was long and vacant, solid so that she felt she could have cut it into little blocks. She was appalled by the length the afternoon would be. She cupped her hand and called, not seriously thinking that at this time it would bring the others up to her from the valley. Calling still she beat her hand against the sound. She was the child the children follow in the streets; when they form their little groups conferring against walls, it is she who bends the lowest in the centre and walks first away, upright carrying the threat and the secret of the destruction they have planned. If she says there are to be no spitting games today nobody spits for the furthest, the longest, the slowest, although the game has been devised by her. To this call they did not come.
But it was then for the first time that the hare showed itself, its haste less like fear than the movement of a dance. Seeing her he ran back to the slope below all in the flick of his tail. She went to the place where she had left her shoes and made on them the two crosses for seeing a hare. She took them off again, and threw her
self down with her face into the sun. Turning she watched the leather of her shoe lapping up the crosses for as long as, in a more familiar dimension, a kitten would take to drink its saucer of milk. Then time came over her again, and pressing her fingers to her eye balls she walked about in the yellow halls behind her eyes in the greatest nothing she had never seen.
Into the depths of this endless time she threw at random one thought after another and watched them ripple slowly outwards and outwards in the lazy afternoon. It was between one and two o’clock on a Sunday in the whole long history of the world, and the moment that had just passed and this minute had gone for ever into the whole world’s past. There would never be another time when one girl and one only, 13 years and 6½ days old, would be lying alone on the hill hungry and damp from the sun between one and two o’clock. She thought of valleys which are green and fruitful and yellow with corn; a slow river would be winding through green banks. Cowslips would be lying like newly-washed children around it and poplars and larches would be beyond the water meadows. This valley was not green, but sometimes a piece of slag would have the print of a fern stamped deep into it. Sometimes a stream would turn red with copper like the biblical sea or yellow like the Tiber with filth. When the snow came the birds left their confident footprints on the slag heaps mistaking them for hills. When it was two o’clock the hooter sounding between hills sent packs of soiled and sweating men moving through the valley. And when it was dark the furnace opened its inflamed mouth and caught stars for flies.
The vaporous halls behind her eyes turned solid, and through the skin of her lids she saw the cloud that was passing for a moment over the sun trailing with it a wind that was no more than a message. She sat up. Purple lights blocked her newly opened eyes. When they cleared the hare came again running in the arc of a circle from below. She called to him, and crossed her shoes and ran to where it had disappeared. Licks of flame were playing in the bracken and in the grass at its edge. Over its blazing purity the river was full of the thick and various filth it collected, there were leprous deaths on the grave stones and the black hulks of the steel works were crusted with barnacles of soot and grime. On the canal she could pick out the galleon, the treasure boat, with the gold breast plates and the rings with stones like blood on the sandals and the bracelets. It was rotting and sodden, the coal barge that had not been used for thirty years. Every year of her life its swollen timbers had become a little more decayed until now their ends were fraying. Sitting in the sun with the fire beginning she remembered one of many deaths. Men stood with ropes and poles for the whole of a day; children looking for sensations as hens peck for anything that comes out of the ground were shooed away only to gather again and again. The boy lay only where he had fallen in the discoloured yellow water. He did not get himself destroyed in a lonely place. He fell quietly, almost under their eyes, with a low wall between him and the road, and the path was there for anybody to be walking on at a lucky time.
