The Owl Service

by Alan Garner

  “I know they were on the table. I put them there to finish drying. “I’ve spent all morning on those prints!”

  “They was in the way,” said Nancy. “I got work to do, and dining-room table isn’t the place for sticky paper when you has to polish it every day and sometimes twice.”

  “In the way?” said Roger. “You’ve ruined my prints, that’s all! In the way? Is it your job to decide what’s in the way here?”

  “I wishes to see Mrs Bradley,” said Nancy.

  “You’ll not interfere with stuff that doesn’t concern you, that’s what you’ll do.”

  “Hello, hello, hello,” said Clive. He began to talk while he was still coming in through the cloakroom. “What’s all the hoo-ha?”

  “I wants to speak to Missis,” said Nancy. “I’m giving notice.”

  “She went and ruined—”

  “All right, all right,” said Clive. “Let’s drop the temperature, shall we? Now then, old son, collect your tackle and scarper, eh?”

  “But Dad—”

  “I’ll help you sort it out in the parlour, but wait a tick, there’s a good lad. I’ll be right with you.”

  Roger picked up the photographs and left the room. He went through to the parlour and unrolled the sheets on the floor, and listened to the voices – Nancy’s monotone, and his father’s persuasiveness – then Clive came back into the parlour. He was putting his wallet back in his pocket. “Expensive holiday, this,” he said.

  “I was all morning with these prints,” said Roger, “and she’s messed them up.”

  “Easy does it. You’ll not go far if you don’t learn to bend with the wind, and Nance is blowing a bit strong lately.”

  Roger spread out the photographs, weighting them at the corners with ornaments. “Well, actually, it’s not as bad as I thought,” he said. “If I can keep them flat now they may be OK. Sorry I flew off the handle, Dad: it was the way she slung them about. Couldn’t she see they were there on purpose?”

  “She wouldn’t think,” said Clive. “You mustn’t expect the Nancys of this world to have too much savvy.”

  “Gwyn seems pretty smart.”

  “Ah yes: well: that’s the trouble: barrack-room lawyers we called them in the RAF. They’re the worst. But brains aren’t everything, by a long chalk. You must have the background.”

  “Is that why Margaret’s gone so County with Alison?”

  “Tricky,” said Clive. “Very, very tricky – um – you know? Now what about these snaps of yours? Shall we put them on the billiard table? It’s better than in here, and we’ll anchor them with snooker balls. Not come out too well, have they? What’s this, a wet weekend in Brum?”

  “You tell me,” said Roger. “I’ll put them in order. Now here’s the straightforward seven shots of that stone by the river. In the first three you can see Gwyn’s hand – he was sitting on top of the stone. Right. Now here are enlargements of the middle part of each picture. They’re all the same – the different shades are because I gave them different exposures – but you can see how I’ve made the hole frame the trees on the Bryn.”

  “Yes, jolly good,” said Clive. “Quite effective.”

  “Now in the last two pictures Gwyn wasn’t there. But old Streakybacon had turned up and was making snide remarks. Here.”

  “Jolly good: spot on again.”

  “Are they?” said Roger.

  Clive knelt over the prints and looked closely at them, comparing the two sets. “Aha,” he said. “Yes.”

  “What, Dad?”

  “In these last two there’s something just inside the trees – between those on the left.”

  “What is it?”

  “Um – ah. Can’t say. It’s not on the others, right enough. Have you tried a magnifying glass?”

  “No, but I’ve enlarged the enlargement. Now look at these.”

  Roger showed his father another seven prints, enlarged so that none of the Stone of Gronw appeared, only the trees on the Bryn.

  “There’s the three with Gwyn, there’s two after he’d gone, and there’s the two when Halfbacon was watching.”

  “No doubt about it now, is there?” said Clive. “There’s something extra in the last two.”

  “What is it?”

  Clive put on his glasses. “—No,” he said. “No go. If you made it bigger we might see.”

  “I have,” said Roger. “Here’s your wet weekend.”

  The prints were coarse patterns of blobs and lines.

  “What’s gone wrong?” said Clive.

  “It’s the film and the paper,” said Roger. “You can only blow the negative up so far, and then the grain of the film starts to show, and the colour definition separates into black and white, so you’re left with patches of each, and nothing in between. If you do it deliberately it can be a kind of abstract.”

  “Yes—?” said Clive.

  “I’ve tried to compromise,” said Roger, and he pointed to another row of prints. “Here. I’ve taken it as far as possible and stopped just before the picture disintegrates. What do you make of it? Again, the shading’s different because they’re two different exposures.”

  The trees in the picture were like burnt match sticks, and between two of them was a cluster of grey and black beads.

  “I’d say this was someone on a horse, either lifting a pole up, or waving his hand.”

  “Have you seen any horses since we came here?” said Roger. “The farms use tractors.”

  “It’s a bit on the small side, I must admit,” said Clive. “I tell you what, though: it could be a pony. Pony trekking’s very popular nowadays.”

  “What’s on his head?”

  “Ah – nothing?”

  “His hair’s long, then,” said Roger. “Gathered at the back and down to his shoulders.”

  “One of these beatnik types,” said Clive. “I must say, it’s not often you see them in the great outdoors, is it?”

  “Look at the next print,” said Roger. “It’s underexposed. That’s why it’s so much darker, and the blobs have run together more.”

  “He’s taken his hand down,” said Clive, “but you can’t see much of him, can you? Wait a minute – that pony’s a bit round fore and aft.”

  “It may have dropped its head,” said Roger.

  “True. But if I hadn’t known about the other photo I’d say it was a motorbike.”

  “Up there?”

  “Just the place for a scramble, though I think we’d have heard more about it, don’t you? Was there anyone riding round?”

  “No, Dad. That’s the point. The pictures were all shot within five minutes, and I was watching the Bryn. How have these two turned out like this?”

  “I haven’t the faintest: unless Halfbacon was putting a jinx on you.”

  “Are you serious, Dad? Could he?”

  “Could he what?”

  “Put a jinx on me.”

  “Now steady,” said Clive. “We’re not in the Middle Ages: you’ll be roasting the chap at the stake next.”

  Roger and his father gathered up the prints and carried them to the billiard-room. The door was open, but they could not go in, because a wheelbarrow was blocking the way. The wheelbarrow held broken pebble-dash and Gwyn was clearing the last of it from the floor with a brush and shovel.

  Roger and his father waited outside. Gwyn said nothing, but went on with his sweeping. “I’d forgotten,” said Roger. “There’s something to show you.”They waited.

  “We’ll settle for that, old lad,” said Clive. “Chop-chop.”

  “I was brushing up, like,” said Gwyn. “You don’t want this rubbish here, isn’t it?”

  “Shift your barrow, will you, so we can get in.”

  “That’s right, Mr Bradley,” said Gwyn, and went on sweeping.

  “The barrow, laddie,” said Clive. “Smartish.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Gwyn. He worked a fragment of plaster towards the shovel, holding the broom in his other hand, close to the hea
d. He followed the plaster round the billiard table and trapped it against one of the legs. He swung the shovel up, carried it to the barrow, and dropped the plaster in. “At once, sir.”

  Gwyn pushed the barrow through the doorway and bumped it down the steps to the path at the back of the house.

  “Dumb Insolence, as near as a toucher!” said Clive.

  “Never mind, Dad. Come and see this.” Roger put his photographs on the billiard table. “What do you think of our mural? – Oh, Dad!”

  He was looking at a bare wooden panel.

  “The vindictive beggar! He’s scraped it off!” Roger ran to the steps. Gwyn was wheeling the barrow. “Hey! You! Gwyn stopped. “Come here!” Roger jumped the steps. “What did you have to wreck that painting for, you Welsh oaf?”

  “Master Roger,” said Gwyn, “there’s asking for a poke in the gob you are, indeed to goodness, look you.”

  CHAPTER 15

  W hen she heard the shouting Alison rolled off her bed and went to the window. It was Roger’s voice. She opened the fanlight. Gwyn appeared below the window, wheeling a barrow towards the stables.

  The sun had warmed the ledge. Alison leant her head against the glass. Some distance away the long stone fish tank by the lawn sparked where the inlet broke from the ferns, and she saw herself mirrored among haloes that the sun made on the water. The brightness destroyed the image of the house, so that all she saw was her face.

  I’m up here, and down there, thought Alison. Which is me? Am I the reflection in the window of me down there?

  Gwyn came back from the stables. He was walking with his shoulders hunched, and he kicked at every pebble. He sat on the edge of the tank, right next to the Alison in the water: he seemed to be watching her.

  Now am I here, and you there? Or are we together? If I’m the reflection here then we’ll be able to talk to each other. “Hello, Gwyn.”

  Gwyn said nothing. He reached out to touch her hair, and she was at once gold and whiteness over the water, and Alison was back in the window and the metal frame was hurting her cheek. And Gwyn looked up.

  He had not expected to see her. He had been fighting his anger all the way to the rubbish dump and back. The water was calm, and he tried to slip his hand into the stillness without breaking the clear light, but ripples sprang from his fingers. He looked up.

  Alison was in the window. She did not move. The stillness he had tried to enter was now all round him, and Gwyn sat, and watched. But the gong sounded for lunch, and Alison hurried downstairs, while Gwyn went to drain the potatoes and put them in their dish in the serving hatch.

  “What you been up to?” said Nancy after the first course. “He says you’re not to wait on at table today.”

  “I offered to thump his son and heir a few minutes ago,” said Gwyn.

  “What for?”

  “Being personal.”

  “Did you hit him?”

  “No. Daddy broke it up.”

  “Pity,” said Nancy, and carried the cheese board through to the dining-room.

  Gwyn frowned after his mother. Pity? Then he cleared the dirty plates from the hatch and stacked them at the sink. His hands trembled at the idea. There was time, but he had to be quick, and quiet.

  Five boxes. Two from each wouldn’t be missed.

  He tried the sitting-room first. One box. He opened it, and it was full: at least a hundred cigarettes. He took ten straight away, but that was too many, and he fed them back until the box looked full again. He had five cigarettes left in his hand.

  Gwyn went into the parlour, and found two boxes, but the first he opened was nearly empty and he dared not take any. Three from the second box.

  More: more. But there were no more boxes, and knives were clinking in the hatch. He ran to the kitchen and started to wash up as his mother brought the cutlery in. She took the coffee to the dining-room.

  Minutes. Gwyn dried his hands, trying to make an inventory of the house in his head, but no boxes showed themselves. Eight cigarettes were as bad as none.

  Gwyn went back to the sitting-room and looked behind the cushions on the chairs and found nothing. There was time for only one try. He stepped into the cloakroom, and put his hand in the pocket of Clive’s fishing jacket.

  This is where the light always goes on, thought Gwyn, but nothing happened, and his fingers gripped a flat metal box.

  Back in the kitchen Gwyn put the ten cigarettes in a drawer. One was bent, but he had not time to straighten it. He opened the kitchen door to the outside passage, took the lids off the dustbins, and began to turn the contents over.

  Then Gwyn finished washing up. He came down from his bedroom a quarter of an hour later. Nancy sat by the stove, drinking the remains of the coffee.

  “Where you been, boy?” she said. “You was clumping about no end.”

  “Upstairs, Mam.” Gwyn pulled a chair to the stove. “Mam,” he said. “I’m sorry about last night. That was a rotten trick with your purse. I bought you a present, see.” He held out a cigarette packet. “I couldn’t get your usual. Will these do?”

  Nancy took the packet. Unless she noticed the wet stains from the tea leaves in the dustbin; if he had managed to fold the silver paper tightly; if the bent cigarette was not the first she picked—

  “Mm,” said Nancy. “All right, boy.” She twisted a spill of newspaper and lit it from the stove. “Mm. They’ll do. Where you find the money?”

  “I’ve been saving a bit,” said Gwyn.

  “I thought you was coming it yesterday,” said Nancy.

  “Mam, if I’d belted Roger what would have happened? Would we have been sacked?”

  “Depends how hard, doesn’t it?”

  “You wouldn’t mind if I belted him?”

  “Him? Ha! ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Where’s my photos?’ he says. ‘Who’s moved them off the table? You got no right,’ he says. ‘Don’t you touch anything without permission,’ he says. And there was all that sticky on my table I just polished. And then he comes in and thinks he can flash his pound notes around.”

  “Who?”

  “Him. Lord Muck.”

  “Mr Bradley?”

  “‘Mr Bradley’! When I think of the titled heads I’ve seen in that dining-room—! He’s not even a gentleman!”

  “How do you know he isn’t?” said Gwyn.

  “There’s ways of catching them,” said Nancy. “And when he was flashing his pound notes, I thought, right, I thought, if there was justice in Heaven there’d be others with cheque books. I’ll lay knife and fork, and we’ll see how you manages a pear, my laddo.”

  “A pear, Mam?”

  “It takes a gentleman to eat a pear proper,” said Nancy. “He had it on the floor in no time – oh, I made him look a fool!” Nancy coughed at her cigarette.

  “What happened then?”

  “That Alison covered for him. She picked hers up and ate it in her hand, but she knew. She knew. She’s a twicer, that one.”

  Nancy pulled on her cigarette, and her eyes narrowed. Gwyn said nothing. When his mother did this she was living in her memories: it was her x-ray look. “Yes,” she said. “If we all had our rights there’d be others with cheque books. My Bertram could eat a pear lovely.”

  Gwyn held his breath and tried not to move, but his mother continued to focus on a point six feet through the stove and the wall behind it.

  “Yes, Mam?”

  “What, boy?”

  “Oh – sorry, Mam.”

  “You done that job yet?” said Nancy.

  “What job?”

  “That trap door.”

  “Yes, Mam, after breakfast, soon as Alison got up.”

  “Show me,” said Nancy.

  They went upstairs to Alison’s room, knocked, and went in.

  “I done it properly, see, Mam,” said Gwyn. “Brass screws. That all right now?”

  “Yes, you done that.” Nancy sat on the bed and put her head on the rail. “Brass screws for coffins,” she said.

  “
Yes, Mam.”

  “You don’t know, boy. Them plates was for my bottom drawer. Not that I needed no bottom drawer, but he says, ‘You have them for your bottom drawer,’ he says, ‘and let them think what they like.’ My Bertram didn’t care that much.” Nancy tried to snap her fingers. “We’d be married, he said: he didn’t care. ‘Hang the lot of them,’ he says. ‘If they don’t like it they know what they can do.’ But he didn’t know what they could do, boy.”

  “What, Mam?”

  “If there was justice in Heaven,” said Nancy, “I should be sitting at that table today saying potatoes was cold, not them. But he didn’t know what they could do.”

  “What, Mam?”

  “That jealous idiot outside,” said Nancy. “That mad fool. Oh, it was accident, of course. They said.” She went to the window and threw her cigarette out of the fanlight. “But there isn’t the pound notes in London to pay me for losing my Mr Bertram, just when I had him landed, high and dry.”

  CHAPTER 16

  R oger was setting up his tripod again on the bank. Alison sat in the shade of the Stone of Gronw among the meadowsweet. Clive stood in the river.

  “You’re wrong,” said Alison. “Gwyn wouldn’t do it. I know he has a temper, but he wouldn’t deliberately spoil that painting out of spite.”

  “Wouldn’t he? You’ve not seen him when he’s vicious,” said Roger. “He’d do anything. I could tell you—”

  “Don’t bother,” said Alison. “Are you really going to spend all day clicking that thing? I want to go up the mountain.”

  “You’re not interested in my prints, so why worry?”

  “It’s stifling here: and these flowers are going to make me sneeze if I stay. There’ll be some wind at the top.”

  “As long as you don’t melt on the way up.”

  “Cut out the bickering, you two,” said Clive. “No wonder I’m not catching any fish.”

  “I want to go up the mountain, Clive,” said Alison, “and Roger just wants to waste his film.”

  “You know what they say – one man’s whatsit.”

  “I want to go up the peat road,” said Alison. “You can’t see much of it from here, but it’s the snaky line on the side of the mountain. They used to cut peat on the top and bring it down with sledges.”