The Earth Hums in B Flat

by Mari Strachan

  They both turn towards me at the same time. Mam drops her knitting and half gets up from her chair. The firelight flickers on her bouncy yellow curls, and they gleam like Nain’s brasses.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ says Bethan, giving me another push. ‘I wasn’t anywhere near her. She was talking to Alwenna and then she threw up all over the tombstone they were sitting on. The Voice of God said I had to bring her home. I don’t know why she couldn’t bring herself home.’

  ‘Look at the state of you,’ says Mam. ‘And the smell. Look at your school mackintosh. How am I going to get that in a fit state for you to wear again?’

  ‘Are you all right, Gwenni?’ says Tada. He stands up and folds his Daily Herald and pushes it under his seat. ‘Let’s get you out of that old coat.’

  ‘Let her do it herself,’ says Mam. ‘Look at her, vomit all down the front of it.’

  ‘She’s disgusting,’ says Bethan. ‘I’m going to Nain’s; I can’t stand the stink.’

  ‘Hold on,’ says Tada. ‘What happened exactly?’

  Bethan shoves me again. ‘She’s a baby. She threw up because Alwenna told her Ifan Evans was found in the Reservoir.’

  ‘Ifan?’ says Mam. ‘What do you mean, found in the Reservoir? Is he all right?’

  ‘Alwenna said he’d been there since he disappeared,’ says Bethan. She turns and goes out through the front door. ‘I’m going next door. I bet Nain hasn’t heard yet or she’d have been round to tell you.’

  Mam has her hand over her mouth. Her nails dig into her face, making flares of white in her skin.

  Tada puts his arm around her and pats her on the shoulder, ‘Deep breath, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘Take a deep breath.’

  ‘Alwenna says we’ve been drinking him for days,’ I say. The thought makes me retch and I run through into the scullery and heave over the sink. There’s nothing left to come up. I wipe my face with Tada’s damp flannel; it’s cold and rough and smells of his Lifebuoy soap. I’d like a drink of water but what if Ifan Evans’s maggots come through the tap?

  The faces in the distemper have all grown long ears to listen all the better with. I scurry past them into the living room. Mam sits shivering in her armchair. She shivers all over like Mrs Evans did when she had her teeth out. On their high shelf the Toby jugs lean over and watch Mam through narrowed eyes.

  ‘It’s the shock,’ says Tada, still patting her shoulder. ‘Well, it’s a shock for us all.’ Is that what made me throw up? I didn’t like Ifan Evans, but he’s the only person I know who’s drowned.

  ‘What can have happened to him?’ says Mam, and I have to reach forward towards her to hear what she says. Her face is white and there are red blotches where her nails dug into her skin. The scent of Evening in Paris is strong and my head begins to throb.

  ‘He must have fallen in somehow,’ says Tada. ‘Perhaps he couldn’t swim.’ He sighs, then turns to me. ‘Gwenni, come and sit in my chair, here by the fire. The warmth will make you feel better.’

  I can smell the vomit on my coat and its sour taste is still in the back of my throat. Tada takes off my coat and folds it so that the sick is all hidden. He carries it through into the scullery and opens the back door and leaves it in the lean-to. I sit in Tada’s chair. I burrow into the warmth he’s left behind and the scent of his soap and his tobacco. A log crackles on the fire and spits tiny flares out of the grate. Tada rushes back from the scullery and stamps out the glowing embers on the linoleum.

  ‘Drat that wood,’ he says. ‘Give me coal any day. None of your spitting nonsense with coal.’

  He looks at me and then at Mam. She sits with her hands over her face, making no sound at all. ‘What you both need is a good cup of tea,’ he says. He picks up the teapot from where it’s resting on the grate and puts his hand around its belly. ‘Still nice and hot,’ he says, and begins to pour tea into the cups on the table. He puts two spoonfuls of sugar into each cup and stirs them round and round. He puts Mam’s cup and saucer down on the floor next to her chair and hands mine to me. I take a tiny sip; the tea is stewed and too sweet. Tada looks at my face. ‘Drink it down,’ he says. ‘Best thing for shock, sweet tea.’

  ‘Be quiet.’ Mam’s shout makes me jump but I don’t spill my tea. ‘How can you prattle on about stupid things like that when we’ve just heard that Ifan is dead?’

  ‘It’s true, I suppose,’ says Tada. ‘Nanw Lipstick has a way of getting to know these things. I wonder if anyone is looking after Elin Evans and the little girls.’

  ‘What about me?’ says Mam. ‘You think about looking after me. I’m upset too.’

  Tada takes a deep breath but he doesn’t tell Mam to do the same. He lifts her teacup to her hands where it shakes and splashes the tea over her lap until he takes it away again. Mam doesn’t notice any of it. Tada picks up her pink cushion from the floor and tries to put it behind her shoulders but she snatches it from him and wraps her arms around it and starts to rock to and fro in her chair.

  ‘Whatever can have happened,’ she half whispers. ‘Ifan can’t have just fallen in the water and drowned. He can swim like a fish. Why, when you were in the army we swam every . . .’ Mam stops and pulls her cushion up over her mouth.

  ‘Well,’ says Tada.

  So Mam wasn’t just a girl when she went about with Ifan Evans.

  She closes her eyes. Tada and she are quiet and still as if time has stopped. But the brown clock on the mantelpiece tick-tocks as loud as ever.

  John Morris crawls out from under Tada’s chair and jumps into my lap, purring in fits and starts like the engine in Aunty Lol’s Lambretta. I stroke his soft fur but I don’t touch the ragged ear that was torn during one of his fights with Nellie Davies’s cats. John Morris and his warrior spirit. I wonder if Ifan Evans’s spirit escaped into the water of the Reservoir when he drowned. Did his spirit pass through the pipes into the Baptism Pool? Did I foretell the future, like Nain with her tea leaves, when I flew over the Pool and saw the dead Baptist?

  ‘Well,’ says Tada again. Mam doesn’t open her eyes. Tada starts to roll a cigarette, tamping his Golden Virginia into the Rizla paper until the smell of it fills the living room. He licks the edge of the paper, and picks little bits of tobacco off his tongue and flicks them into the fire. He runs his thumb along the seam, then bends down to light a spill from the fire and holds it to his cigarette.

  ‘Did Alwenna tell you anything else, Gwenni?’ he says, drawing on his cigarette to light it and blowing smoke into the air.

  I’m too warm now, and I push John Morris off my lap and wriggle out of Tada’s armchair. ‘Yes, but not about Ifan Evans,’ I say. I don’t want to think about him floating in the Reservoir with his eyes wide open for the moon to shine into. ‘What will happen to Catrin and Angharad and Mrs Evans now, Tada? Will they be thrown out of their house?’

  ‘No,’ says Tada, sinking into his chair. ‘I expect family will come and take care of them, Gwenni. I don’t think they live far away.’

  ‘But they’re nearly all dead,’ I say. ‘I heard Mrs Morris say so in the meeting last night.’

  ‘Surely there’s someone who’ll come,’ says Tada. ‘Well, if not, we’ll do what we can for them, Gwenni.’

  ‘Huh,’ says Mam. She opens her eyes. ‘What did that Alwenna tell you that wasn’t about Ifan?’ she says to me.

  I shrug. ‘She said I was doolally like my . . . but she didn’t say who.’

  Mam gasps as if someone has thrown cold water at her. ‘That girl has no shame,’ she says. ‘She’s got a loose mouth just like her mother. It’s time you stopped seeing her.’

  ‘But what did she mean?’ I say. ‘Who’s doolally in our family, Mam?’

  ‘You’re a wicked girl repeating filth like that. Go and wash your mouth out with soap.’ Mam springs from her chair and swings her arm back as if to hit me.

  Tada takes hold of her arm. ‘Go upstairs, Gwenni,’ he says. ‘Go upstairs and read one of your books. Your mam’s had a shock. It’s
not your fault.’

  ‘It is her fault. It’s all her fault. I wish she’d never been born.’ Mam begins to scream, then sobs.

  ‘Try a deep breath, Magda,’ says Tada. ‘Come on. Deep breath.’

  The living room door bangs shut behind me and I run upstairs. Mari the Doll looks at me from her chair. ‘How far away d’you think I could fly before I had to come down to Earth again?’ I ask her.

  17

  See how the moonlight shines through the trees to make the leaves dance on the white walls of Brwyn Coch. Tada straightens his jacket after knocking on the door. He says it’s good manners to pay your respects the day after a death. So here we are, even though Ifan Evans drowned before yesterday; we just didn’t know about it. Mam wouldn’t come with us. She said: I’ve no respect for that woman. I pull my best coat tighter around me; the air is cold because the evening is so fine. Behind us across the bay the lights of Lln twinkle in the dusk. How long would it take me to fly that far? In my sleep I never fly beyond the shore on our side of the water. The eyes stop me.

  Tada is still tugging at the back of his coat when Mrs Evans opens the door. He clears his throat and smiles his big white smile at her, but only for a second. ‘I’m so very sorry for your loss,’ he says and holds his hand out to her.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Morgan,’ Mrs Evans says and shakes his hand. ‘Will you come inside? I’ve just made a pot of tea.’ The swelling has gone down on her lip at last, but there is a smudge of a bruise left behind and I’m sure I can hear a lisp when she speaks, though Price the Dentist has already made her new teeth. Mam had to wait weeks and weeks. Mrs Evans’s hair isn’t in its tidy bun tonight; it’s hanging loose around her face, wavy as the stream when it tumbles over its stones.

  ‘Well,’ says Tada. He turns to me. ‘Gwenni is here with me, too, Mrs Evans. She has something she needs to say to you. And yes, a cup of tea would be very welcome, thank you. Come on, Gwenni.’

  Tada said I should go with him to take Ifan Evans’s photograph back, but Mam didn’t want me to. She didn’t want Mrs Evans to know I’d borrowed it. Taken it. Stolen it. But Tada said everyone else knew by now because everyone had seen my poster, so Elin Evans would soon know if she didn’t already, and anyway, she should have her property returned to her.

  We walk behind Mrs Evans into the parlour with its shelves of books and its faint, powdery, violet scent. I can see the gaps on the shelves where my books used to sit, though the books next to them have keeled over to half fill the spaces. Catrin and Angharad both sit in the window-seat, in their nightdresses, ready for bed. Catrin jumps down and runs over to me and puts her arms around my legs and rubs her face in my best coat. Mam washed my school mackintosh this afternoon but she says it will be wet for days.

  ‘I like your coat, Gwenni,’ says Catrin. ‘It’s soft like a little lamb.’

  ‘Sit down, Catrin,’ says Mrs Evans. ‘Angharad, you come to help me bring in the tea things.’

  ‘Gwenni,’ Catrin says in a whisper as soon as her mother has gone through into the kitchen. ‘Have you written my story? I don’t like Alice in Wonderland; it scares me. Don’t tell Angharad.’

  I sit next to her on the window-seat and take hold of her hand. It’s small and cold and nestles in my palm. Tada stands in the middle of the room and turns around and around like the hands of a clock and looks at all the shelves sagging under the weight of their books and Mrs Evans’s desk with the piles of exercise books still on it and the big fire in the inglenook sending a flickering light over everything.

  ‘I’ve written some of it,’ I say to Catrin.

  She squeezes my hand and snuggles up to me. ‘What’s it about?’ she says.

  ‘Flying,’ I say. I stroke her hand. ‘You run after a white goose, like Alice ran after the White Rabbit, and fly up into the clouds with it and have lots of adventures. And you’re never scared.’

  ‘What’s my story called, Gwenni?’

  ‘Catrin in the Clouds,’ I say.

  She whispers the name and kisses my hand. ‘Thank you, Gwenni,’ she says.

  Mrs Evans comes back with the tea tray and Catrin takes her hand from mine.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Morgan,’ says Mrs Evans. ‘Do you take milk in your tea? Sugar?’

  Tada sits in a chair beside the fire. The logs don’t crackle and spit the way they do on our fire. ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Plenty of milk and two spoonfuls of sugar.’

  ‘It’s good for shock,’ I say to Catrin. ‘Plenty of sugar.’

  Mrs Evans pours my tea without needing to ask what I want in it and she makes a milky tea for Catrin and Angharad. For herself she takes a cup of black tea, which she sips though it must be hot on her bruised mouth.

  No one speaks as Mrs Evans drinks her tea. Tada blows on his tea to cool it, the way he does at home. Angharad giggles, and Mrs Evans says, ‘Drink up your tea, girls, and say goodnight to Mr Morgan and Gwenni.’

  But the girls leave their tea and Catrin waves at me, a baby wave with her fingers. When she and Angharad have gone from the parlour and we hear their footsteps scuffling up the stairs, Mrs Evans turns to Tada. ‘They’ve been very good,’ she says, ‘very good girls. Of course, they don’t understand what’s happened.’

  ‘It must be hard for them,’ says Tada, ‘losing their father so suddenly, so—’ He stops as if he’s not sure what to say, but Mrs Evans doesn’t seem to notice. She’s thinking again, the way Tada admires, gazing into the distance beyond the parlour wall at something we can’t see.

  Tada lifts his cup to his mouth but before he can drink any of his tea there is a terrible howling from outside the cottage. What if the black dog has come back? Tada’s cup clatters back on the saucer as he leaps to his feet and heads for the parlour door.

  Mrs Evans puts her hand out to stop him and he grasps hold of it as if he’s trying to protect her. ‘It’s poor Mot,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t know what to do with himself without Ifan. I daren’t let him off the rope.’

  Mot howls again and again. What if Ifan Evans’s spirit has come home from the water? I huddle into my chair and take a sip of my tea. The milk in it is on the turn. Tada sits down again and I try to signal to him before he drinks any or he’ll get the old family stomach. But he frowns at me and takes a mouthful of his tea. He stays quite still for a long second then swallows it with a gulp and puts the cup back on the saucer and both of them back on the tea tray.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Anything I can do to help, Mrs Evans, just you let me know. I expect you’ve got umpteen offers. But I would be honoured to help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Mrs Evans. ‘There haven’t been that many offers, Mr Morgan, so I appreciate yours.’

  ‘Well.’ Tada’s eyebrows rise into his hair.

  ‘People don’t quite understand the situation,’ says Mrs Evans. ‘So they prefer not to . . . become mixed up with it. Poor Guto’r Wern is the only person to call – apart from the Minister and Twm Edwards – and I could barely make out what he was saying he was wailing so much. I think he was wailing in sympathy with my . . . our situation. He frightened the girls, of course. Poor Guto.’

  ‘Poor Guto,’ agrees Tada. ‘There’s no harm in him. He’s innocent as a child.’

  There’s a small silence, except for the sighing of the fire, then Tada says in a rush, ‘Magda sends her condolences, of course. She wasn’t too well, and asked me to apologise for her.’

  I look to see if Tada has crossed his fingers. But he’s lying.

  ‘And Gwenni here has something to say, I’m afraid,’ he says. He turns to me. ‘Go on, Gwenni.’

  I pull the poster from the pocket of my best coat. This pocket is not as good as the pockets on my school mackintosh and the poster is folded over again and become faintly green and furrier than ever where it’s rubbed on my coat. I unfold the poster and smooth the creases from Ifan Evans’s picture. What if Mrs Evans is cross with me? What if she’s sad that I’ve done this to the photograph of her dead husband? I hand the poster to h
er. ‘I’m sorry that I took the photograph without permission and I’m sorry I showed it to everybody,’ I say. ‘And I’m sorry about Mr Evans.’ Maybe I should have crossed my fingers when I spoke the last bit.

  Tada nods at me; I’m not sure what he means by it. Does he want me to say more? ‘But I thought I was helping,’ I say. ‘I thought I could find Mr Evans for you and Angharad and Catrin so you didn’t have to be thrown out of your home into the cold, and starve and become ill.’

  ‘Well,’ says Tada. ‘Gwenni, Gwenni.’

  Mam said I was only supposed to apologise, and not make excuses. No need to make a meal of it, she said. I forgot.

  Mrs Evans smoothes the poster with her palm. The scrapes on the back of her hand have healed over into neat scabs. ‘I should have been clearer when we spoke, Gwenni,’ she says, ‘about what I did and didn’t want you to do. You did ask but I gave you no answer; I was distracted. I noticed that the picture was missing before you’d gone home but I didn’t do anything about it.’ She looks up at Tada. ‘My fault, Mr Morgan, not doing anything about it there and then.’ She smoothes and smoothes the poster as she speaks. ‘My fault.’

  ‘It’s very good of you to take it like this, Mrs Evans,’ says Tada. Mrs Evans sits and looks at the photograph in silence and Tada clears his throat and makes to move towards the parlour door. ‘Time Gwenni and I were off. Leave you in peace.’

  ‘I’ve never liked this picture of Ifan with the fox,’ says Mrs Evans and she scrumples up the poster and throws it on the fire, where it catches light immediately. Tada jumps towards it as if to save it from the flames but she waves him away. ‘Gwenni is a kind girl, Mr Morgan. She doesn’t always do things the way other people would, but that’s because she’s got the intelligence to see that there are different ways of doing things. Don’t be too hard on her.’