by Owen Sheers
She sat just behind his right shoulder, her knees to her chin and her arms round her knees, locked in place with a hand gripped at each wrist. He was silent. She couldn’t even hear him breathe. There was just the brush across the paper; an irregular, slow breathing of weak colour. Sarah watched the painting evolve. It was a watercolour and if she leant forward she could just see the faint pencil lines already marking out the landscape in front of them both. As he filled these spaces with colour, with washes of his brush, she saw that the painting wasn’t, after all, this landscape before them. And yet it also was. It was as if the scene had been put through a fairground mirror; distorted, crooked, its features enlarged, the curves of the trees made fluid. The poet continued, sometimes pausing for long minutes, doing nothing but looking. Sarah did the same, following his eyes up to the hill, then dropping them to the easel again as he filled a patch of sky pink, then grey, then blue.
He never spoke. After weeks of hearing the men’s voices she’d finally met one of them, only for him to be silent. Even without his voice, though, she could tell he was different from any man she’d met before; from her father, her older brothers, or her uncle. His eye was quick within a still body. When he lifted his hand to paint, his arm moved as though through water. He smelt different too. Not of animals and earth but of sawdust and paint. Of books and a long, quiet pain. In that way, she thought now, lying in her dark bedroom so many years later, he’d been like an animal. A wounded animal that couldn’t speak of its sickness, of how or where it hurt, but could still, somehow, wear the knowledge of that pain. Unspoken, unheard, but so definitely there.
He’d said nothing to her that first time and eventually, after a few minutes, thinking of her mother’s scolding, Sarah had got up and carried on walking down the hill, the loose coins chinking in her coat pocket with every step down the slope. The next week she walked home the same way and he was there again, so again Sarah sat down and watched him work. This time, made brave by the repetition of the situation, she’d spoken to him.
“S’cuse me, sir,” she’d said. “Wha’ yer doin’?”
He paused in his looking. “Writing a poem,” he said, splaying his brush into a pale green tablet and lifting it to the easel. “I’ve started writing a poem.” He turned to look at her. His face was serious with just the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “I think it’s going to be a long poem, although, right now, it’s rather short.” He went back to the painting. “And actually it might not be a poem at all.” Sarah laughed nervously. She didn’t understand him. He wasn’t writing a poem. He was painting. His voice too had caught her off guard. It was high, slightly tremulous, the vowels flattened under the weight of London. She tucked her chin back behind her knees and decided not to say anything else.
“Do you speak Welsh?” he asked her, not looking away from his painting.
“No, sir. Me mam does. A bit.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s good.”
He went back to his long looking. A pair of flies were buzzing around his head, but he seemed not to notice them. Sarah began to get bored. She thought of leaving, but there was nothing but chores for her back at the farm. She thought of her brothers. How now they’d left there were more chores than ever for her to do. How her father was always tired. “It’s too much, cariad,” she’d heard her mother telling him when he came in late and slumped in the chair by the fire. “Too much for jus’ you now.”
“Would you like to hear a story?” The poet’s strange voice brought her back sharply.
“Wha’ kinda story?” Sarah said. Her brothers had told her a ghost story once, about Hanging Judge Jeffreys down at Pandy. They’d been drinking at the Skirrid Inn. The landlord had shown them the rope marks in the beams where Jeffreys had strung up the Monmouth rebels. When they got back, beer on their breath, they’d sat on her bed and told her how the ghosts of those unfortunate rebels still roamed the inn, their necks hideously elongated, broken, and bruised. She hadn’t been able to sleep for a week.
“A story about that hill,” he said, pointing his brush at Y Twmpa. “About all these hills.” He swept the brush wider as if the real hills were his canvas now. He turned to look at her again. “A story about your ancestors.”
And that was when the poet began to tell Sarah his stories, recasting the land and hills she’d known all her life as the backdrop for his Celtic myths, for tales of saints and soldiers, of kings and bards. His stories worked upon the valleys around them like his paintings. He spoke of places she knew or that she’d heard of before, St. Peter’s Well, The Abbey, The Cat’s Back, St. David’s Cell, but the lens of his stories made them all new again. Some of the stories she’d even heard before, but never like this, never growing from the very hills of her birthplace. Stories of King Arthur, Lancelot, and Percival. About Welsh princes, Irish princesses, and English armies. The stories were not always about the Black Mountains, though. Sometimes he’d tell her stories from his own life too, about growing up in London, or about his time in France during the war. But while his stories of the hills were often full of war, of Llewellyn ap Gruffydd, Owain Glyn Dŵr, and the barbarous armies of Edward I, his French stories were not war stories. They were stories about the villages he’d lived in, about the French dogs and the French children. About the flowers and birds of the French countryside and, just once, a story about Christmas in the trenches. About how up and down the line one Christmas Eve the soldiers had hung wreaths on their 303s and climbed out into no-man’s-land to play football and share cigarettes. How for a day, the sky was quiet again. It was after that story, Sarah asked him if he’d ever been shot. She’d heard her father talk with a strange admiration about men he knew who’d been shot. He’d farmed throughout the war and seemed almost envious of their scars. The poet didn’t say anything in reply but just drew up his loose-fitting trousers to expose a bullet wound puckered above his left knee. His legs were thin and white, the veins ice blue and shallow beneath the skin. The wound was in the shape of a melted star. After a few seconds he lowered his trouser leg and went back to his painting and Sarah felt sorry for asking.
It wasn’t always easy for her to find the poet. As long as it wasn’t raining he was nearly always outside, painting, even when the weather got colder. But he kept changing where he painted. Sometimes it was on the slope just below the old monastery. At other times she’d find him down between the two streams, trying to capture their movement, their white water and ferny banks. But she always tried to find him after her delivery, in the hope of another story, or just to spend an hour watching his brush uncover a strange, supple version of the land around them.
Then suddenly the poet wasn’t there. Somehow Sarah had always known that one day he wouldn’t be; that he was as much a product of the season as the tall hay fields or the swallows tying knots in the air. As inconstant and brief as the spring blossom or the long, blood-streaked summer evenings. Her mother had prepared her for his going. “They won’ last long, mark my words,” Sarah had overheard her say to her father. “It’s a holiday for them, tha’ place. Another winter’ll see ’em off, you watch now. Back to their towns soon enough.”
Sarah first told her mother about the poet when she was helping her with the washing, feeding a pile of wet clothes into the wringer while her mother worked the handle. She told her about his stories, about his paintings. She didn’t tell her about his wound. Her mother had frowned down at her, shaken her head, and gone back to turning the handle. “Stories never put food on the table, bach,” she’d said as the flattened clothes emerged from between the rollers. “Work, tha’s what feeds yer. Now, put in tha’ shirt there, will you?”
Her father had been more positive. “No harm in it, is there?” he’d said to his wife when she’d voiced her concern about their daughter spending so much time in a field with a blow-in poet and painter. “Do ’er some good more like. Get out a bit, hear about the world. He was in the war, you know?” Seeing Sarah standing in the door frame, watching them, he�
�d moved closer to her mother and added in a lower voice. “She misses her brothers, see.”
But then the other stories about the people at the monastery started to come out. Stories Sarah only ever really understood or heard properly years later when she was an adult. Stories about the poet’s friend, Eric Gill, the artist who first brought them all here, arriving as a group in a pony and cart in the middle of a downpour four years ago. About his ways. The stories began in whispered knots of women outside the chapel and spread like gorse fires throughout the valley. Sarah’s mother came home one Sunday and held Sarah against her chest so hard and for so long that Sarah had to push back against her arms to catch a proper breath. Then her mother had asked her questions, a strained look on her face. “No, Mam,” Sarah had replied to the same enquiry asked several different ways but never asked straight. “He jus’ told me stories an’ did ’is paintin’. Tha’s all.” For weeks after that her father kept himself low and quiet about the house, treading carefully around his wife for fear of spilling her boiling anger. “Catholics,” Sarah had heard her mother say over tea with a visiting friend weeks later. “What can you expect?”
So Sarah never got a chance to go back to see if the poet ever returned to his rock in the field. Her mother forbade her to ever go near that end of the valley again, and over the years since, apart from Mrs. Thomas’s brief flush of interest, she’d forgotten the poet and his stories. Until now. Until the captain’s mention of his namesake and its resonance against those diagrams from “The Countryman’s Diary” that had so haunted her these past months. Those sketches and plans of subterranean bunkers, submerged under the earth and peat of the hills. They made her think of the poet and his stories again. One story in particular, about a sleeping lord and his army. There was a king, that’s what the poet had told Sarah one afternoon as he painted by the streams. A Welsh king and his army driven into the hills by Edward I. Beaten, but not killed and not captured, even though no one ever saw him or his army again. That, the poet had explained, was because they’d never come back from those hills. Thousands of men swallowed within the muscles of earth that formed Wales’s natural defences against her invaders. And they were still there. At this point the poet had paused in his painting, placed his brush into a cloudy jar of water, and leant closer to Sarah’s listening face. His voice dropped, so quiet she could barely hear him over the running of the streams. Yes, he’d whispered, still there. In the hills, deep inside them, buried under the peat, heather, gorse, rowan, bog-cotton, stone, and soil. Asleep. Not dead. Asleep. An entire army and their king, sleeping in the hills, ready to wake and defend the country in its hour of need. The sleeping lord and his sleeping army is what the poet had called them and as he’d described them, Sarah saw them: a glimmering seam of armour, chain mail, and swords, just as she’d seen in her history books at school. A rare ore of sleeping men, embedded in the hearts of the hills, waiting.
Had he known then somehow? Had he known that years later, when that little girl was a woman, her husband and all the other husbands in her valley would disappear into those same hills? That they would go underground, deep underground? If that’s where they were. She could hardly remember the pictures in that pamphlet now. Had she really ever seen “The Countryman’s Diary” at all? Why did Maggie have to burn it? So quickly. She’d been numb then, so soon after learning. Why couldn’t Maggie have waited?
Sarah turned over in the bed which still felt too wide for just her body. She was being stupid. All these hours alone. It was a story. A story for a little girl. She was a woman now; she couldn’t believe such things. But she wanted to. Wanted to believe so badly. That Tom and the others would be coming back. To defend the country in its hour of need. But wasn’t that hour already here? German soldiers in her kitchen asking questions, turning the pages of her family Bible, holding her wedding photograph. She was Tom’s country and she was in need. But he hadn’t woken. Tom hadn’t come to her. He was still out there, dumb and unseen, absorbed into the hills’ unending green. And deeper still now, under the snow too. He was sinking deeper from her every day.
She had to remember him. Properly, with all her senses. When she’d held that photograph by the fire this evening, she’d felt nothing. It was just paper in glass, light on paper. She couldn’t even conjure the memory of its being taken anymore. Her memory was the photograph, she saw that now. And that wasn’t enough. Not if she was going to hold on to him, to stop him sinking further away from her through the centuries of soil and earth. She must conjure him, not memories of him. Conjure him, Tom, here, into their bedroom. Like Edith trying to conjure her son back from the dead. But Sarah didn’t need any boards with letters on, any upturned glasses. She had him already, inside her. She just had to draw him up to her again. Draw him up through the layers of her forgetting like stubborn groundwater drawn up into a well.
The first time she saw him. Surely she could conjure that again? The moment she first saw her future husband. As a girl playing on her own in the fields she’d often thought about that man. The man who would be the father of her children, a little boy playing somewhere in another field at exactly the same time, oblivious of their impending meeting. Or maybe he was a young man already working on a farm. For a few months of her schooling, he’d even been an earnest young student bent over his books in a town with spires and old stone buildings. And then after all that wondering, years later she’d finally seen him. It was at a dance in the village hall in Longtown. One of those dances organised by the community to make the young of the valleys, who spent their lives divided by the long fingers of the Black Mountains, mix and meet. The kind of dance at which countless other women in the area had met their own future husbands.
She hadn’t wanted to go. Her father was keen she should, though. He and her mother were getting older now. “Can’t have you stuck wi’ us old’uns every night, bach,” he’d told her. He’d got his friend’s daughter Branwen to call for her, to make sure they went.
There was a band. A live band with one of them playing a fiddle and another on a trumpet. The men drank beer, cider, and wheat wine. Some of the women did too. It was the end of September, the hard part of the year over with until winter. The air in the hall was thick and musty with released energy, with anticipation.
Branwen got talking to one of the men they’d not seen before, a thin dark-haired builder with a thick moustache. It was he who introduced Sarah to Tom, to stop her hanging around Branwen like a mute chaperone. Tom had been drinking cider. She could smell it off him, sweet and rich. She’d spent all day bottling pears, all day with her fingers in their soft yellow bodies. When they’d danced, after an hour or so of talking, their smells mingled, apple and pear. “Together we make an orchard,” she’d laughed into his ear. Tom hadn’t understood her, but he’d still smiled at her, and after that first dance he’d carried on smiling all night. It was more than he’d ever smiled since, but by the time he’d called on Sarah a couple of times over the following weeks, that didn’t matter anymore. By then she’d come to like his serious silence. It was solid, like him; a strong, secure quiet, still as a sudden pool in a shallow running river.
It was a winter courtship. For the next few months after the dance, Tom would ride over the Hatterall once a week on a Sunday to meet Sarah and walk with her. They always walked, even when the weather got cold. Through the lanes, down to the ruined abbey, and sometimes up onto the bare hilltops, where birds started away from under their feet and a herd of wild ponies witnessed their first kiss. Tom knew every plant and bird they saw, and sometimes his conversation consisted of no more than a list of names accompanied by short nods of his head in the direction of whatever he was naming. Sarah told him he was like Adam walking through the garden of Eden, naming the animals for the first time. He’d looked down at her and she’d seen that again he hadn’t understood her, but she’d also seen again that it didn’t matter. Her arm through his, sharing the hillside in evening light, resting her head against his shoulder as they walked
. These were what mattered to her then.
One Sunday after their walk, Tom came in for tea. Her mother made too much of everything, bread and butter, bara brith, piled slabs of cheese. Tom and her father talked about farming and that was when he told her parents about Upper Blaen, his late uncle’s farm over in the Olchon he’d be taking on come spring. After tea her father took Tom out to show him his prize ram. That must have been when Tom asked her father for Sarah’s hand, because the next Sunday, as they were standing by the river watching the snow melt in its eddies and foam, as she warmed her fingers under his jacket, he’d asked her to marry him.
After the wedding they’d come straight to Upper Blaen, and then, that night, they’d come here to this bed. Sarah had no older sister to speak with and her mother had long since retreated too far behind her sayings and phrases to ever talk straight about anything. Still, Sarah thought she knew what to expect. She’d lived on a farm all her life, and even Branwen, whom she’d seen some more of since the dance, had at times talked of their future wedding nights.
Now, years after that first night together, after five years of marriage and two months of Tom’s missing, she tried to remember completely. Everything. The sound of him washing in the basin as she lay waiting; the scent of the skin on his shoulders; his hands touching her clumsily where they’d never touched her before; his hair brushing coarse against her cheek. The way he’d moved above her, the weight of him. The way he’d groaned as if in pain and the way he’d suddenly shivered the length of his body, the muscles of his back quivering like a horse’s flank under the touch of summer flies. The way he’d shrunk away from her afterwards, like sand through an hourglass.
