by Anne Berry
But once the young Elizabeth sweeps into the abbey, it all falls flat. There are lots of boring speeches that drone on for what seems like hours. Lucilla pushes a lump of cold lamb around her plate. It has veins of yellowy fat in it that make her feel queasy. If she had a dog, while they were all hypnotised by the television, she could conceal the meat in the palm of her hand, lower it discreetly to her lap and dispose of it. Lacking a real pet, she invents one, sausage-shaped and shaggy, with a wet black nose. She sneaks the fatty meat off her plate and drops it clandestinely onto the floor, and her make-believe dog woofs it down in a gulp. The grey screen seems tiresomely dreary now. If she could instil a bit of colour into it she would make Queen Elizabeth’s beautiful dress bright orange. And the horses would be purple with yellow manes and red tails. She would shade the carriage in hydrangea pink. She sighs quietly, her previous curiosity wholly dulled.
‘I’ve finished. Please may I get down?’ she pleads. Her mother looks annoyed at the interruption, but her father humours her, nodding in assent. So she climbs down, giving her imaginary dog a secretive wink. If you can’t hitch up your fancy wedding dress and vault into the saddle for a gallop on your horses, there doesn’t seem much advantage in being a queen. Suddenly, everyone at the table cheers. Then they clamber to their feet to sing the national anthem in hearty voices. And her father slaps Frank on the back, causing him to choke on the mouthful he is guzzling. Aunt Enid administers a glass of water with an annoyed frown.
‘Long live Queen Elizabeth the Second,’ bellows her father, and they all take up the shout. Now that she is crowned queen at last, Lucilla wonders if there will be another ride in the carriage, another opportunity to stare spellbound at those mystical white horses? If not, she will ask if she can go outside to play. She dearly wants to track the bumblebees crawling inside the yellow and pink thimbles of snapdragons.
Chapter 15
Bethan, 1953
WE DON’T HAVE a television. They’re far too expensive. Only a wireless. But we listened to it on the wireless. What am I blathering on about? What is on everyone’s lips? Why the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, of course. In fact, I’m glad we didn’t see it on a television. No, honestly I am. Sometimes I think your sense of sight limits you. As it was, I could close my eyes and listen to the commentary, visualising the spectacle. Not camera shot by camera shot, but the whole thing, as if I was sitting in the sky gazing down over the edge of a cloud. The golden coach and horses, the radiant Queen’s face framed in the window, the joyful crowds lining the streets, her dress when she stepped out sparkling in the sunshine, the crown being solemnly lowered onto her head. Oooh, it makes me shiver now to replay the pageant of it.
Actually we have a lot in common, me and the Queen. Ah, you wouldn’t think it I know. Me, Welsh, a farmer’s wife, busy at milking cows and churning butter all day, my complexion boiled with all the steaming pots on my stove. And she, a queen of the realm, covered head to foot in jewels and rich gowns, and showered with presents. Everyone bowing and curtseying to her and calling her Your Majesty. Her days are spent ruling Britain. Mine are occupied running the farm, and feeding great hulking men with bottomless stomachs.
I’ve anticipated what you’re going to say. There’s chalk in Wales and cheese in England. Not that I’m suggesting the Queen is a wheel of cheese, you understand. But if you think there’s no comparison to be made, I suggest that you’re being premature. You’re ignoring some key similarities. For openers, we’re both mothers. And I hear tell Queen Elizabeth takes motherhood very seriously. Second, we both gave birth to our first child in 1948. Granted, my time was before hers, but it was in the same year, mind. She was delivered of a son, a prince, Prince Charles. And I was delivered of a daughter, a princess, who I called Lucilla for want of a better name – my gift baby. And now the coincidences become uncanny. They do, really. Serendipity, that’s what it’s called.
In 1950, she gave birth again, this time to a daughter, Anne. And barely a year later so did I. My second child. My echo baby, Lowrie. Of course, you would be right to highlight the significant departures in the way our fates are unravelling. See, I had to give my gift baby away. She is five now, Lucilla. Fancy that. She’ll be talking, walking, playing, laughing … crying. Calling another woman her mam. She’ll have had her first day at school. I wonder how it went? Did she take to it like an intrepid duckling splashing into a pond, or were her reactions similar to her mother’s, her true mother’s … to me. I was impatient to be gone, gasping for want of fresh air. Although you don’t get an abundance of that in London. A stew of smoke and smog and exhaust fumes there, if my remembrance serves me well.
The two tiny photographs of Lucilla that Valeria Mulholland, the secretary from the Church Adoption Society, sent me after the adoption are falling to pieces. I’ve kissed them so often, slept so many times with them under my pillow, or clutched to my heart, that it’s hardly surprising. But when they do, disintegrate entirely I mean, I’ll still treasure them. She was around six months in the pictures, lying in a cot and in a pram, gazing up at her. Of course by now she’d have changed so much. I spend hours trying to visualise her face, sculpting the alterations. Her strawberry-blonde hair growing long, her cheeks thinning down, shedding their chubbiness, the intelligence in her turquoise eyes deepening. I see it in the suds lying on the surface of the dishwater in the sink, in the crusty bark of an oak tree, in the ripples of a stream, in the wood grain of our dining table. Honestly, it’s as though her baby face is stamped on the table. And when I touch it, let my fingers trace the lines of the silky wood, it is as though I am touching her skin, her lips, her hair. Don’t laugh. It isn’t a joke. It’s a bit like one of those visions of Mary, Mother of Jesus, the ones that cause mass hysteria. You know, the way someone ordinary sees her features imprinted on a lump of stone, and the faithful flock for miles to glimpse it and pray for miracles. True, the circumstances differ, I suppose, because there’s only me. No other pilgrims staring at the apparition, astonished, mumbling under their breaths, ‘Don’t you see? Don’t you see her there in that line, and there in the curve. And look there, her eyes gazing out at you. That sunbeam striking the water. The luminous shade of turquoise. It’s her eyes, I swear it. I’d recognise them anywhere.’
I have established shrines now, places I go and pay my respects. Leslie is an atheist in this, blind to sightings of the blessed Lucilla. For him she is merely theoretical, a name on a certificate of adoption. He’s not a man with imagination. He doesn’t dissect the past, doesn’t fret about the future. The present is more than sufficient for him. Not for me though. He doesn’t ask questions either, and that suits me very well. So the other day when I encountered him in the barn chopping up the old dining table for firewood, when I got hysterical, he was genuinely confounded.
‘Whatever’s the matter, Bethan?’ I was yanking his arm, the one wielding the axe. I could feel his muscles bunched and unyielding, could see the pulsing raised veins. I thought about the blood pumping through them.
‘Just stop,’ I begged. ‘Stop what you’re doing. Don’t destroy the table! Don’t!’
‘But, love, I’ve bought you another one. It was going to be a surprise. It’s on the back of my truck. Solid yew. And a bit of carving on it too.’
‘I don’t want it. I tell you, I don’t want it.’ He’d only chipped a bit out of a sturdy leg, and now I threw myself over the table top, sobbing. ‘Please, Leslie, please. I want to keep this table. I’m used to it.’ I caressed the corner where her face was, fingered the imprint as if it was her supple skin I touched and not resisting wood.
‘If it means that much to you, I’ll repair it,’ he conceded. No fight, no argument, simply total bafflement.
‘Oh it does, it does, Leslie. Please can you mend it for me?’ I slid off the table and hugged him tight till my arms throbbed.
‘I’ll never fathom women,’ he muttered setting down the axe, his hand on my head, lifting a tress of my hair. ‘I’ll fix it so you won’t
know it’s been hacked about by a farmer wanting to surprise his wife with a grand new dining table.’
I pulled back and studied his face. He was a kind man, a generous man. Some men beat their wives, I know. People talk. On market days you see the gaps, who isn’t there, and you hear gossip. Leslie doesn’t hit me. I don’t believe that he has it in him. ‘And it was a lovely thought,’ I said at last, remembering myself. ‘We will use it in the dining room. Let’s put this battered thing in the scullery. It may be wounded but it’s still useful.’ I forced a smile, attempted too late to conceal how much it mattered. He had the final word and so I waited.
‘Very well. Give me half an hour and I’ll bring it in.’
I kissed him on the cheek at that. It was late afternoon and he’d be wanting his tea any moment. So I hurried indoors and chopped and sliced and peeled and fried, counting off the minutes. On the dot of half past five he appeared with my table, and together we manoeuvred it through the back door and into the scullery.
‘No more tears now, cariad,’ he said, standing back to survey his handiwork. I shook my head. He stepped up to me and encircled me in his broad, strong embrace. He pulled me close. And it was a comfort, I won’t deny it. But in the way that a lesser comfort reminds you of what you really desire. With a nod of his head, he indicated a pile of tablecloths, freshly ironed, sitting in a wicker basket on the stone floor. ‘You put a pretty cloth on it and we’ll none of us know how scratched and chopped it is underneath.’
But I didn’t even want to do that. It would have been like covering her up, like a winding sheet, like … like an omen, like she was dead. When I began objecting again, he turned on his heels and went quietly outside. I saw him through the window striding manfully across the fields, his Welsh Springer, Red, at his heels. He wouldn’t give the dog a human name, said that was sentimental tosh.
‘We’re all God’s creation,’ I had challenged fondling the puppy. ‘Can’t we give her a more personal name?’
‘Dogs are dogs,’ he declared unequivocally. ‘They have their place. Not to be confused with human beings. Red’s a fine name for a working dog, a gun dog.’ The puppy’s ears twitched upwards. ‘There, the bitch recognises it already.’
That is Leslie. The land is the ground under your feet. The fields are there to be carved up, to plough, to sow, to crop, to be harvested. The sheep are supplied for us, their wool to keep us warm, their meat to feed us. A dog earns its keep tracking, retrieving, hunting, herding. And when the animal fails, when age or disease catches up with him, the humane thing to do is dispatch him with a single shot to the head.
And a woman? Ah Leslie, the riddle of a woman. He faces the woman he has married with a complete lack of comprehension. I know he can’t solve the riddle of me. His wife is a tangle, a knot that will not loosen. But that is his folly. If he takes a moment in his day to chew on a straw and meditate, he will have an epiphany every bit as powerful as God appearing to Moses in the burning bush. He will peer into the flames that are consuming his wife, and see that she is foremost a mother, and only afterwards … a woman. ‘The farmer wants a wife, the farmer wants a wife, E-I-E-I-O, the farmer wants a wife.’ But the problem, oh, the problem is that the wife doesn’t want a farmer, she wants a child, her child. She is Modron. Earth mother. It is a mother he took to his bed, not a wife. And her heart is destined to be eternally elsewhere.
I’m sorry for him, that I can’t be his helpmate. For my part he’s become familiar, like a pot I cook with regular, or a cardigan I wear all the time, or shoe leather that has been worn to the mould of my feet with constant use. They say you can get accustomed to anything. And as such I’d miss him, I’d reach for him if he was gone. But no more than that. Besides, you can easily replace a pot, knit another cardigan, go to the shoe shop and purchase supple boots. The only faults I can level at him are that his hands are inclined to be clammy, that his breath can be a touch sour. But that’s all. Not so dreadful when you consider what women have endured throughout history. I wanted him to give me a boy, like Charles, like Prince Charles. I prayed for a boy. It wasn’t much to ask, all told. I could have forgiven him the rest if he’d managed that.
‘Don’t you think it’s a boy?’ I said to Leslie patting my mound, my anxiety doubling then trembling as my time fast approached.
‘Ah I don’t know about such things, Bethan. To me it’s what it is, a boy or a girl. No earthly reason to get yourself all worked up about it. I’ll be happy with either. Besides, we can have another go if it’s a girl.’
Poor Leslie! He doesn’t know that this is going to be my last, this echo baby. I’ll have no others, no more counterfeits. After this I’m done with the business of procreation, or it’s done with me. It depends how you want to look at it. Almost as much as I think of my gift baby, Thorston occupies my thoughts. I recall the letter, the second letter. I know there was a second letter. I saw it in my father’s turquoise eyes, the darkening of them. Was it from him? Had he written with his address, so I could run away and find him? I wonder if he’s met someone else by now? If he’s married? If when he makes love his memory transports him to the war that brought us together, to Bedwyr Farm in Wales? If he sees my face in ecstasy overlaying hers? I wonder if there are days when he travels back to the bitter winter of 1947, to the walls of snow hemming us in, to the shed, battered and bashed by the moaning, mewling wind? I wonder does he recall our cold flesh meeting, the friction of it, the matches of our bodies striking against each other, and the fire we made heating our blood? I wonder does he also have another child? Girl or boy? He didn’t know what we had, so it probably doesn’t torment him so much.
But for me during my second pregnancy it became an obsession. I wanted a son. I willed it to be a boy. Oh, not because men hanker after an heir to bear their family name, a lad about the place to train to the labour, someone to hand the farm on to. Leslie wasn’t troubled either way. It was no sham. He harboured no private longings, no secrets at all. He was a plain man, a predictable story. It was me who cared. I didn’t want a girl. I’d had a girl, see, and she was flawless, the most perfect in all creation. You couldn’t improve on her. No one could replace her. When my apprehension festered, I read old wives’ tales about what you should and shouldn’t eat if you wanted a boy child. My mam said to have lots of grain and meat to make a son. ‘I did when I had Brice,’ she confided with a wistful smile. ‘And for a girl it’s dairy products, cheese and milk and butter.’ So I put myself on a strict diet, something that’s not straightforward on a farm. I plucked a hair from my scalp, knotted my wedding ring into it, and dangled it over my belly to see if it would go back and forth for a boy. And when it began to circle I lied to myself.
Lowrie was born at 3.35 am, at home here on Carwyn Farm. And when they told me it was a girl, I was as disappointed as I imagine Anne Boleyn was when she gave birth to Elizabeth. I didn’t have a King Henry strutting about expecting a prince. Only me. Well, what was left of me, like Swansea after they bombed it. I wanted a departure from my yesterdays. A boy to carry me into the future on his sturdy back. We learned about Anne Boleyn in school. When was that? Oh a million years ago now it seems. In that far off schoolroom the teacher said that if the baby had been a boy, Queen Anne might not have had her head chopped off. Ironically that stands for me as well. Since her birth, Lowrie’s birth, my head’s toppled off entirely. I don’t recognise the one sitting on my shoulders. It has a shrewish tongue in it that isn’t mine.
What did I feel when they put the baby in my arms, when my husband came in all glowing with pride and exultant, when my mam looked serene and top heavy with tenderness? Ah, I braced myself for the avalanche of love that had come when my gift baby was born. Nothing. Not so much as a snowball to unseat me. I looked deep into her eyes, brown like her father’s, the brown of the upturned earth at plough time, and I felt … angry. No more than a handful of breaths and already she had let me down. Where were the turquoise eyes of my gift baby? What right had this imposter to show u
p and shove her shadow out of the crib? If I was worth anything as a mother I must fight to keep her space free, vacant, ready for her to return to me.
‘Can you take her now, Mam,’ I said, thrusting her away from me.
‘But she’s still hungry, Bethan,’ she protested, as the tiny mouth rooted for milk. ‘A few minutes more, surely.’
‘I’m tired, Mam. And I’m not sure that I want to breastfeed. After all, I didn’t breastfeed before.’
‘But you can now. Nothing stopping you,’ my mam whispered when Leslie had tactfully left us alone together.
‘I know I can, Mam,’ I retorted. ‘But I don’t care to.’
Her brow crinkled. She was confounded, uncertain how to react to this recalcitrant mother. ‘It’s good for the baby. When the first milk comes in it’s full of antibodies. It’ll protect her. You know that. It’s why … why …’ She broke off and dropped her voice still lower before continuing. ‘It’s why the other baby got sick.’
‘The other baby?’ I queried, heaving myself up on my pillows.
‘Lucilla,’ she mouthed.
‘Oh well, she recovered all right didn’t she, Mam?’ I presented my case reasonably. ‘She was in prime condition when I gave her away.’
My mam had the decency to blush, and hastened off with my legitimate baby to heat up some milk.
Lowrie was two years old last week. She’s a pleasant disposition. I can’t complain. Good-natured. Leslie adores her. He is devoted to his daughter, spending hour after hour playing with her, or merely sitting her on his lap before a cosy fire crooning Welsh ballads. I see her as his daughter, my husband’s daughter. And not mine. Besides, she has more the look of him. I expect the Queen will go on to have more babies. Why not? She has the staff to help her, nannies and so on. The other night when Leslie came to bed (I generally go up before him), he lifted my nightgown and spoke, his large hands dividing up my body.
