by Dai Smith
She wasn’t so sure about that last bit. Marriage to her had brought him the security of working for her father and eventual ownership, with her, of Braithwaite and Davies: Building Contractors, and, after its sale, the comfort of a well-upholstered retirement. The detached Victorian house that scowled down on the town from the common across the river from the terraces where he was born and brought up, and the maison de campagne in the Midi, which, she conceded, he did not like as much but which was, as he also admitted, better than a caravan in Saundersfoot. Yet, nothing that had happened to him, materially, after his glory days on the rugby field seemed to diminish the aura with which his life had then been, briefly and lastingly, touched. Myra had puzzled over all this long before. Her conclusions were generally the same. They were sentimental, nostalgic, immature, unrealistic, and fools. This “They” was her catch-all pejorative for those who had not noticed, or did not seem to mind, his thickening body, his barrel of a belly, his grey and skimpy-thin hair and his veined nose. Digger liked a drink and They liked to have one with him, in the institute where her father had made him a member, or in the club where his face, topped by that one tasselled International cap, adorned the wall, or in one of the many pubs where his name was still, as They would say, legend, and his presence ever welcome.
In this sense They owned him because They had created him, and his physical alteration, even his social and economic distance from Them, could affect nothing of what was a cultural bond she could not, even if she had wished it, share. Not that she wished it. Nor was this only about sport, though Myra could see that was its catalyst. No, this was something to do with a coming together, in crowds and across generations, in which she had no desire to participate and which her father, though dismissive of its inner purpose, exploited for its business potential. What had made Digger special was not only his origins in the town and his working-class antecedents, not only his loyalty to the club when well-placed others tried to entice him away, not only his physique and his genuine skill at the game, but, above all else, the style of his playing. He was, like Them, unfashionable. He was, like Them, shunned. He was, like Them, confrontational in everything. He was, like Them, rewarded but discarded. He was, like Them, not going to change for anybody. He was, like Them, root and branch, a part of something bigger together than They could ever be separately. He was, They said, A Team Player, A One Club Man, One of Us. He was Their Digger, and nobody else’s.
Myra saw all this, over again, as she’d half-smiled and fully acknowledged the faces that swam in and out of view at the crematorium. The fact was – as she had recognised on her return with the body when she was greeted, almost like royalty, by a welcoming party, a delegation as it turned out to be, from the club – it was to be Their funeral more than hers. Digger had finally been elevated to the pantheon of untouchables where They had long wanted him to be. They had gathered around her in the days before all the arrangements were made. They whispered at her like a Greek chorus in one of the plays in which Geoffrey had once appeared as some blind, demented king. “There will never be another like him.” “Would have been a giant in the professional game.” Her loss was the town’s loss, was Wales’s loss, was rugby’s loss. “Greatest player the club ever had.” “A servant of the game.” “A role model for all wing forwards, never mind so-called modern bloody flankers.” This, and much else, was arcane praise Myra neither sought nor understood, no more than she required the help They offered. Yet it came in such waves that it was easier to agree than resist. There would be a selected cohort of players, old and new, to carry him in. There would be tributes from the club president and the town’s Member of Parliament. There would be, if it was all right with her, no invitation extended to the Welsh Rugby Union and no official WRU Representative. “Because of the snub, see, love,” one explained, and she nodded. There would be short eulogies from three of the survivors of the championship winning teams of his heyday, his old pals “Spike” Jones, “Moxie” Moxon and “Spider” Webb. The three would be under strict instructions to keep it clean, They assured her, and again she nodded.
Finally, when everything from hymns to running order to the post-match reception had been mutually settled, the committee’s delegation sat on Myra’s red-and-gold Egyptian motif settee – “Like a bloody barge”, Digger had often complained – and came to the point. They appreciated how much Myra had not let “family grief” prevent “club celebration”, out of deep respect, for one of Their stalwarts. Very grateful indeed, for all that, They were. And They intended to name a new lounge under the stand. It would be, when funds were ready, built next year and called “Digger’s”. But in the meantime, They would be honoured if Myra would allow a special ceremony to be held at the end of the season, in front of specially invited people and open to all, when They would scatter Digger’s ashes beneath the posts at the Red Cow end of the ground. What did she think?
They went away pleased with Themselves, and not forgetting to remark how she was still “a smart piece even if she was a bit frosty”. Digger, They muttered, had “done well there”. And now They would do him proud. Which, Myra had to admit as she thanked Them all in a pretty little speech after the funeral at the club, They had indeed done. One of Them escorted her to the designated posts for the ceremony to come before she went home, glad to be alone at last, to sink into her Egyptian-motif cushions, and think.
What she mostly thought, in a roundabout, where-was-I way that had no discernible pattern, was how sudden it had all been. His death, of course, but all that hastened after it. The difficulties, immediate and prolonged, in France. The unexpected gush that met her, on all sides, when she went back home. The game plan, as They had put it, which she felt constrained to follow – “Don’t worry, love, we won’t let you drop the ball” – and the day itself. Even so, it was more than that. She looked at the framed photographs on the nest of side tables, ones of her mother and father, of her in cap and gown, of Geoffrey in costume and mufti with, and mostly without, Wilfrid, and of Digger. Digger, big and beaming in a wedding suit complete with its Valleys’ customary silver-foil wrapped white rose which she’d tried, in vain, to remove from his lapel. Digger in a red rugby jersey with the Prince of Wales feathers, his one cap lying across his thick-fingered hands. Digger, with her, on holiday in Venice. Digger in the garden in France. Digger to the life in photo after photo and in location after location. Digger over and over again. Not her Richard. Their Digger. As he always was, perhaps. Then. And certainly now. And as for in-between, the years with her, it was the suddenness with which all that, her control of his destiny, had been superseded which was nagging away at her. In fact, that was it, wasn’t it? The suddenness of change. The suddenness of life itself. Not at the moment of going, but the whole of the living that had been the life. Not the cliché of where has it all gone, because she knew where it had gone, all right. That wasn’t it at all. It was the shuttered closure of the lens of that actual process of living that had happened. She held the thought for a second before it blurred.So abrupt, so unwanted, so unexpected, the click of a beat upon which her husband had died. In an instant. The part clouding the whole. But it was a partial memory she would always keep to herself. Myra shuddered at the remotest chance of anyone knowing. God, how They’d all love to know. It would be the Digger story to top all Digger stories. Legend. And, Myra shivered, imagine that tart of his, Anita or Rita or something, no Lolita any more judging by the way she’d turned up at the funeral, imagine her knowing. Telling people. She closed her eyes to banish it all. But the scenario, played out and ongoing, would not disappear.
What a thing to happen, she thought. What a way to go, was what she knew Digger’s vulgarity would have added. One minute she was concentrating on Digger rampant and the next, in an instant, with a groan which she’d thought was a cry of pleasure, he’d shuddered all over and twitched, rather unexpectedly, to one side, so that she almost toppled sideways. Then, and she was proud of this, she neither panicked nor screamed. She bent over him
and she blew as hard as she could into his mouth, and she crossed her hands on his chest and thumped as hard as she could and she spoke and urged him back. But she knew he was gone. She had known it at once. She took off her shoes, held them in her hand and ran to the house and phoned the local medical centre, five minutes away in the village. They answered on the third French buzz. She hurried upstairs to put on a towelling robe. She threw some water onto her face. She ran back to the pool, and tried again. The doctor, who knew the garden well, was driving up the path as fast as he safely could. She ran to meet him. He examined Digger. Gravely, he stood up and put his arms on Myra’s shoulders: “Madame Davees, je regrette de vous dire que votre mari est mort. Je vais faire un appel et l’ambulance arrivera bientôt. Est-ce-que vous voulez rentrer dans la maison avant que l’ambulance arrive?” Myra had shaken her head so the doctor, the young M. Paul Gonzalez, not his retired father the older M. Henri Gonzalez, covered Digger discreetly with a towel and they both sat and waited.
After that most matters seemed to be handled with the meticulousness and the sluggishness which the French reserved for all matters, even private ones, that strayed into the public domain. Digger was taken to the city hospital one hour away. Myra would follow the next day, driven by Doctor Henri Gonzalez, who had taken a call from his son and visited Myra in the early evening. She mentioned, in passing, the accident on the Autoroute and Digger’s agitation. M. Gonzalez had waved his hands expressively in a gesture of sympathy. Myra remembered both him and his wife had attended, with the English expats resident in the village, one of her own late summer garden parties two years previously. She did not ask about his wife whom she knew had since succumbed to the cancer that had already been at its work then. When he touched her hand now she felt there was an extra understanding of such marital loss – his drawn-out, hers instantaneous. Others, her village friends, volunteered their services but she’d accepted the offer of a lift from this slight, bearded man, casually but elegantly dressed, who was, she guessed, a year or so younger but not so much so that she didn’t think, the following day, to dress at her own demurely but sharply tailored best.
It was Henri who shepherded her through all the formalities of identification, of triplicate signatures and the release-of-body forms, before she could organise air-transport home for Digger, and a ticket for herself. It was Henri who drove her to the airport and returned her hired car for her. Before his son came to pick him up he waited with Myra until departure time and then kissed her, twice not three times – was that significant because it was different, she wondered – and said “Souviens-toi, Myra; ici, c’est chez toi toujours maintenant. Au revoir, ma chère Myra,” before almost pirouetting away, as if any next move, next time, would be up to her. Myra flew home as bewildered as she was flattered. She had nothing with which to reproach herself, she reflected. No guilt to feel. Once back, the pace of things gave her no time to brood. Only now, with just the special ceremony to come and Digger waiting in his urn to be scattered, did Myra allow herself to drift back to France.
It had been almost five years since her cousin Geoffrey’s death, and with it the gift of his house to her. Even Digger had liked it or the thought of it, at least when he went out there with her at the start. Myra had known the house for ten years before that when Geoffrey left London to settle there with his partner Wilfrid. Myra had always been extremely fond of her cousin Geoffrey. He was the only son of her mother’s sister, Eluned, as she was the only daughter of Bobby Braithwaite and Tegwen Hughes, her quiet and quite forgotten mother, whose central place in her father’s world she had first been given, and later assumed. Geoffrey was eighteen months older than her and so they grew up together as childhood intimates and teenage co-conspirators. Eluned, Aunty Lyn, had married the manager of a gents’ outfitter who, as a professional, measured inside legs with care and, as an amateur, played a front-room piano with verve. Myra preferred the tinkling liveliness of that room to the empty echoing former coalowner’s mansion, become council property, which her father had snapped up at auction, if not for a song then for no more than a monetary consideration and a favour to the leader of the council. Aunty Lyn was to be her daytime and weekend mother. Geoffrey was her guide in play and in life. Like his father, Ron, he was a performer, and unlike Ron he would find his own way. He shared his dreams with Myra. In some senses, they became one. Or two halves. “Peas in a pod” and “Thick as thieves”, Lyn would say to Bobby as Myra and Geoffrey played at doctors and nurses, their uniforms, only the best, supplied by her father. Geoffrey, of course, was the doctor. Except when the children were left alone and roles might interchange, especially because Geoffrey liked wearing Myra’s outfits. Later, her clothes. This closeness ended when Bobby, running upstairs to fetch her one afternoon, stumbled upon a particular cross-dressing charade. Myra was thirteen, Geoffrey almost fifteen. Stern warnings were issued. They were confronted by their futures, terrible to contemplate they were told, if such nonsense continued. They had lives to lead, or so they were told.
Not necessarily, of course, the lives they would have wished to lead. Myra succumbed, surprisingly more quickly than her cousin, and withdrew into herself, admired for her pert good looks but never touched by anyone into an opening burst of life. The same could not be said of her cousin, who discovered there was a discreet way of really being himself in the Valley and, more flamboyantly, a short train ride away from it. At eighteen, Myra left the private school to which Bobby had sent her as a day girl, and went to a training college for teachers in an English spa town. For a while she envisaged it as a passport out. It was not. It was more of a rubber-stamped visa in a cross-border exchange that boomeranged. Exactly why, the young Myra could not explain. The older woman looked back and resented what appeared to her to be a stage on which she had, by upbringing and expectation, to perform a role. The one Bobby had envisaged for her. At home. His money would buy the entry into that thin sliver of professional and rooted middle-class life with which the town re-dressed its shambling presence and its eruptive past. Her rebellion, when it finally came, turned out to be Digger. She made a trophy out of the town’s very own favourite creation, and he introduced her to its topography of back lanes and mountain tops. Her father railed, at first, at the waste of it all, and with such a worthless, penniless sod, until he reined her in again with the offer of a flat they could live in on an estate the firm was building. A job, marriage and a partnership did the rest.
Geoffrey, on the other hand, had only exits to take. After the College of Music and Drama – where Jeffrey had first become Geoffrey – he picked up secondary roles in provincial theatres and, with his background and accent, began to secure occasional, meatier parts on television, playing militant union firebrands or working-class victims of pit disasters. Ludicrous but lucrative was how he put it to his friends. He met Wilfrid, a landscape watercolourist of charm and reputation, and a society portrait painter for commission and cash. He was in his mid-thirties, and his lover some two decades older. The law, just about, had become more accepting but there were, as yet, more insidious barriers, still more so in England than abroad. They moved, permanently as it accidentally happened, to the South of France. Myra visited, once or twice a year and always alone. When Wilfrid died, the phone calls grew more frequent between the cousins, and the length of her stays increased, though Geoffrey never came back. Digger suffered her gushing raptures about the house but was glad he had never been asked to go, never had been, and never would. He was wrong about that, too.
Through all of Myra’s daydreaming, sudden reveries in which the sun seemed to disperse the clouds that smothered the Valley’s summer and the remembered sound of cicadas overwhelmed the traffic’s drone, two obstacles to any real exit for her would not go away. The one was the urn with his full name and dates on it which her guests commented on in the hushed tones with which they might have praised a Chinese vase of the Ming dynasty, and the other was the letter from the club which, periodically, she took out to read. It was embos
sed with the club’s shield and motto: Play Fair, Play Hard. She read the letter again:
“Dear Mrs. Davies,
On behalf of the Committee and the Club I write to express again our deepest condolences on the Passing Away of your Late Husband, Mr Richie Davies. As you know, Digger was one of the Club’s Great Servants and a fabulous Player who’ll never be forgotten. Thank you for the Presentation of the various Memorabilia with which you have gifted the Club House Lounge to be opened in his name next Season, which we hope you will attend.
In the meantime for the Opening of this Season on Saturday September 10 we would be pleased to confirm that unprecedentedly and unanimously the Committee has agreed that your late husband’s ashes will be scattered by this year’s Captain in a Special Ceremony under the Posts where Digger scored so many memorable Tries and where, we all agree, he truly belongs.
