Brand X

by Christianna Brand

  And now on her solitary holiday in France—if you could call it being solitary in the company of three gay and amusing friends: there was nothing, outwardly at least, of the desolate widow about Ellen—now, here she was as usual, roaming through the shopping centre, gawping in at windows, looking out for something to take home to Cathy. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ellen, skip it!’ said her friends. ‘You know she’ll never wear anything her mum buys for her. Kids don’t.’

  ‘Other kids buy things for themselves,’ said Ellen. ‘And one never knows. Besides she’ll be terribly hurt if I come back empty-handed; she’ll think I’ve not thought about her.’ And with Cathy, irrational as ever, this was true. There was a peasant’s overall in the blue, blue toile de Vichy which looks faded even while it’s new. ‘She might wear this, over those ghastly old slacks. It’d look terrific.’

  ‘And at least be something clean,’ agreed the friends. Ellen made no secret of at least the lighter side of her sorrows sharing them around with rueful humour, while she inwardly bled. ‘Look, loves, you go ahead and start on the cathedral; just let me pad about in peace.’

  And then, in a jeweller’s window, she saw the St. Christopher medal.

  It was beautiful: modern in design, a heavy oval of dull silver with the outline, deeply scored in, of the humped figure carrying the smaller hump of the Christ Child on its back. All on a chain of thick silver links. It will keep her safe from the skinheads, was Ellen’s first thought.

  They were a good deal troubled by skinheads in Notting Hill Gate. Cathy took it calmly but Ellen felt sick with anxiety, every time she watched the slender figure setting off so jauntily for what she now called home—putting off her departure, ever resistant, to late in the evening when trouble would be about. ‘No, I don’t want a taxi. You’re paranoid about those silly old skinheads, Mum. They call after me and bang against me and things, but they’ve got their own chicks, they won’t hurt me.’ William, ever tolerant and peaceable, had tried to make friends with them, invited a bunch of them into the pad for tea and buns. The skinheads had seemed much pleased, proffered new sources of hash or heroin, even a pair of their own home-made bovver boots. ‘Come in useful any time, man. Might have to pertect your chick, she’s a slick-looking chick and it’s not only us skinheads round here.’ Skinheads didn’t put the boot in on chicks, it was only on other gangs and of course the Paks and that. They departed full of friendliness, leaving the walls covered with drawings of the utmost filth which the chicks had been surreptitiously executing while their menfolk conversed. Thenceforward Cathy was subjected to much the same jostling and crudity, no more no less. ‘Well, after all, we didn’t ask them all in to tea. I expect these are other ones, they all look much the same to me.’

  ‘Cathy, it’s dangerous. I hate you living in that awful place. If I gave you the money, couldn’t you all move somewhere safer?’

  ‘Where’s safer?’ said Cathy with only too much truth.

  The friends all thought that Cathy would adore the medal. ‘This time you really are on to something. It’s not like clothes that she can think are square or whatever the word is now. And after all, she’s got a great eye for beauty—and this is beautiful.’

  ‘If only she’d wear it! I have this mad idea that it would keep her safe. I mean, he is the patron saint of travellers—if you can call it travelling, between St. John’s Wood and Notting Hill Gate.’

  ‘At any rate it might inspire her to wash her neck,’ said the friends, laughing. They were all in their own way fond of Cathy; beneath the dirt and the neuroses, none could escape the magic of the delicate beauty, the all too endearing little charms of that other Cathy whom Ellen also—but too rarely—knew. ‘I sometimes wonder whether poor Ellen doesn’t just handle her wrong,’ they would confide to one another. ‘She’s always enchanting with me.’ For the storms, the uncontrollable irritable aggressions were kept for home and Mum, where one was safe. Which is right, Ellen would tell herself, fighting her own despair. After all, I’m her one security. God knows, I get angry, we have these awful rows, but she knows I’ll never let her down. And better that she should let it all out on her, on Ellen, than on William, for example, and lose his love. Then we would be in trouble, Ellen thought. She even now and again went out of her way to attract to herself the release of Cathy’s tensions. I must be a ruddy saint, she would say to herself—only too well succeeding.

  Now, however… The medal was beautiful, lying so warmly and heavily in her hand; the soft, dull silver was as though it had been very slightly oiled over, so that it almost slid against her palm. Her heart lifted. It’s marvellous, she must like it and at least she can’t say I didn’t think of her. The hearts of her friends also lifted. ‘Thank goodness you’re settled now, Ellie, and won’t go on and on tramping round, shopping.’ Nevertheless, they had all bought something for Cathy themselves. ‘You can’t help somehow loving that wretched kid,’ they would say to one another, and to Ellen: ‘Perhaps she’ll take it, as it’s from me.’ Ellen, had they but known it, in her dread of yet another cold rejection, frequently put their names to her own offerings, in the same hope. Cathy, full of quite sincere gratitude, would quietly put the things aside and they would later be found abandoned, broken, trampled underfoot in her curiously clumsy progress about her room; or burned with the stubbing-out of a ceaseless chain of cigarettes on the first thing that came to hand.

  Now, however—miracle of miracles!—she accepted the St. Christopher medal with genuine delight. ‘Oh, Mum, it’s super!’ She hung it round her slender throat with its engraining of dirt, yanking down the neck of her jersey so that the soft, dull gleam lay warmly between the first gentle swellings of the apple-blossom breasts. ‘William will be mad on it, I’ll never take it off, never, never.’ And she went off triumphantly, quite early for once, the tattered old shiny black macintosh hanging unbuttoned so that her treasure might be visible to all. But at the gate, she turned and ran back, flung her thin arms round her mother’s neck in one of her own rare hugs. ‘I know I hurt you sometimes,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know why I do. But I do love you. Thank you for the presie.’

  It was midnight when Ellen got back to her home. She sat down on the edge of her bed, groped blindly for pencil and paper: any old used envelope-back would do. She wrote: ‘I’m sorry. I hope whoever finds me won’t be upset. But I can’t wait to do things differently, I can’t live even one second longer with the thought of what they did to her. Her lovely, lovely little face…’ She broke off there, went into the bathroom, shovelled down the pills, all the pills, everything, anything she could lay hands on. Later, in a sort of haze, she fumbled for the pencil and wrote again. ‘They said they’d never have done it, they never put the boot in, that’s what they said, they never put the boot in on a chick. But they were cold stoned, they needed some bread, money I think that means, they wanted something to steal…

  ‘They said they saw this silver thing shining round her neck…’

  The Blackthorn

  IT WAS APRIL WHEN she first saw him and the blackthorn blossom lay like splashed milk over the spare beauty of the mountain-sides in spring. Her skin was as white as the blossom, her eyes were grey, her hair, shoulder-length and outward turning, was oddly colourless. She was fourteen: but she looked at Charles Shawn standing there in the kitchen of the tiny farmhouse—and fiercely, steadfastly, exclusively of all other passion, she loved him from that hour.

  She had been up since dawn. Before ever he had left the doubtful comfort of his bed in the shabby hotel in the shabby little town sixteen miles away, she had milked a dozen cows, helped Evan, the farm servant, to load the churns on to the back of the tractor for the jolting journey to the cross-roads picking-up point; had got breakfast for the two of them and her grandfather, poured milk and broken bread for the three thrusting sheep-dogs, had satisfied the plaintive bleatings of two bottle-fed lambs. Nor had it been hardship. She loved every moment of the life she had known all her childhood, the life that was all she
had known. Till she saw Charles Shawn. From that hour there was no childhood any more: no peace ever again in the heart of Dionne Rhos.

  He had come to buy the farm from her grandfather. An unheard of thing, here in Carmarthenshire, to sell your farm—and to a foreigner to Wales, a rich city man come down from London on some tangled grape-vine of introduction, a stranger to them all. But there was to be no change. It was all a tax fiddle, he explained cheerfully to the grandfather whose Welsh ear listened, hardly comprehending, to the flow of English, who knew nothing of taxes or fiddles, who heard only that he would be able to continue to run his farm as usual and be paid a fabulous sum for the privilege. As long as ‘the books showed a loss’: then Mr. Shawn could set the losses of his farm in Wales against the profits of his business in London, and in some way this was Good. Old Jenkin Jones had never kept a book in his life; but Mr. Shawn would see to all that. And it was perfectly legal, nothing to worry about. Tax evasion wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  He came down again some months later, and again; and over the following years dropped in now and then to see how his losses were flourishing. They were not doing too badly, in fact, for increasingly the old grandfather grew sickly and helpless, increasingly Evan, the servant, grew correspondingly slack; and increasingly Dionne’s heart and mind were elsewhere. Slowly and painfully over the years she was arming herself for the battle that was to come. The first visits, timid but grimly resolute, to the ‘beauty parlour’ in the neighbouring town, the porings over the fashion magazines to gain ‘dress sense’—more important than all, the relentless study of every available book that might serve to prepare her for a world outside all she had ever known: text books, lesson books, literature, books of deportment, biographies, the lives and ways of the famous and fashionable… On his rare visits she gave him no sign of it all, only sat silent and watchful so that to him she was no more than the milky blackthorn, white against the dark of the leafless hedgerow, on his drive in from the hotel: a pearl-pale glimmer of a girl in the shadows of the old man’s kitchen, pale-faced, pale-haired, with burning great grey eyes.

  Doctors had foretold the probable length of her grandfather’s life and sure enough, in her eighteenth year, he died. When the funeral was over, the solicitor read her the will. The money Charles Shawn had paid for the farm was hers. ‘I shall take it and go up to London,’ she said.

  He was aghast. ‘You’ll leave the farm?’

  ‘Evan can manage the farm.’

  ‘Evan Evans is no good. He’ll let the farm rot away.’

  ‘It’s not my farm,’ she said.

  ‘Dionne, this money seems a lot to you; but in London it won’t last you a year.’

  ‘A year will be enough,’ she said.

  In London the self-education continued, single-hearted, resolute, almost grim. She made no attempt to see him, to seek him out. She had allowed herself six months before she should do so—and half the money. When both were spent, she rang him up at his office. ‘Miss Rhos?’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘Dionne Rhos. From the farm, from Penberyn.’

  A thin, colourless, angular schoolgirl, silent and watchful in the shadows of a farmhouse kitchen. ‘I’m afraid, Miss Rhos, I’m frightfully busy today.’

  ‘This evening, then. It’s urgent.’ Indeed it was urgent: she had waited for it nearly five years.

  ‘Well, come along at six o’clock, then.’ He had nothing to hurry home for; as it happened, his wife and the children were away in the country. (Not in vain had Dionne calculated upon Easter school holidays—nothing had been left to chance.)

  So she came to his office, his goldfish bowl of glass and chromium and panelling of pale mahogany and polished pitch pine: and to it brought a breath of Carmarthenshire in spring. The flower mouth might be delicately lipsticked now, the grey eyes skilfully shadowed with blue, the ashen hair might be artfully artless in its casual, shoulder-length, outward curl: but the lessons that had tutored the mind, had not touched the wild, wilful heart nor taught restriction to the unfettered soul. He had expected some London-Welsh hussy, turned to over-bright make-up, brash behaviour, tarty-smart clothes: but the manicured hands were still the white hands that could trundle a milk churn, the narrow feet, elegantly shoe’d, could still tramp the mountains in search of a strayed ewe or lamb. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘So you are Dionne Rhos!’

  ‘You’ve seen me before,’ she said.

  He eyed her, one eyebrow comically raised. ‘Do you know—I’m not too sure that I have.’

  She gave him one brief glance of the grey eyes: and this he certainly saw and was not likely to forget. He said uncertainly: ‘What a beautiful name you have—Dionne. Is it Welsh? What does it mean?’

  ‘It means Blackthorn,’ she said. ‘At least that’s what it comes from…’ She pronounced a word that sounded like ‘Dryne-dee-on’. ‘The blackthorn was in blossom when I was born.’

  ‘A lovely flower,’ he said.

  ‘But bitter—the fragile white flowers on the cruel black thorns, no disguise or softness of green leaves, just blossom and thorn. My mother died in the hour of my birth and that day my father left the farm for ever. But before he went he gave me my bitter name.’ She dismissed it all as of no further interest. ‘Evan Evans writes me that you’re going to the farm next week.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘On Wednesday.’

  ‘Before you go, I think you should know something. Evan Evans is no good, he’s letting the farm run to seed.’

  He shrugged. ‘Between you and me, this was not outside my calculations.’

  ‘It’s one thing,’ she said, ‘to “run at a loss”. It’s another thing to be seen to be doing so deliberately. And it’s another thing again to neglect the stock; and that’s what Evan’s doing. He’s lazy and no good without me there, to drive him on.’

  ‘I thought you’d left the farm,’ he said, ‘and lost interest in it?’

  ‘The two are not synonymous,’ said Dionne.

  He lifted the eyebrow again. Not so did little Welsh farm-girls answer back. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want you to go down a day early. I’ve written to Evan to take a day off, that I’ll be down and manage for him. Meet me there and I’ll show you what’s wrong.’

  ‘Well—it’s all rather startling,’ he said. ‘What will Evan Evans think?’

  She gave him the grey glance again. She had known Evan Evans from the hour of her birth, had sheltered in his arms from many childhood fears, as she had sheltered—the motherless child—in the rough tenderness of the few, scattered farming folk toiling their hard way through the bitter work of the mountain farms. But what cared she now for what Evan Evans thought?—for what any of them thought, any more than she had cared for the death of the loving old grandfather, save as a calculated event which at last had set her free. All her will was bent to one purpose; she exerted it now and he, mature, experienced, sophisticated, strong, yet bent before it, before the strength of a will forged through five long years of unceasing endeavour. ‘All right. I’ll come,’ he said.

  He had been married fifteen years; having sown his wild oats, waited for wisdom, chosen with deliberate care. And successfully: his wife was all any man could wish, cultivated, charming, devoted: his children attractive, sufficiently clever, very close to his heart. He himself at forty-five was good looking, debonair, well-to-do and more than content with his lot—as well he might be for it was what he had planned and achieved. A little light dalliance here and there to which Cecilia turned a blind marital eye, an occasional regret at the passing of youth away; but that was all—no man could be more fortunate in his life.

  He rang up his wife that evening in the country. ‘Oh, and by the way, I’m going to Carmarthenshire on the Tuesday, after all.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said, idly interested. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve had—information—that things aren’t too good there. I want to catch Evans on the hop.’ He was a little appalled to recognise himself suddenly plunged alre
ady into evasions. ‘Actually the girl’s been to see me, the old man’s grand-daughter. She says Evans is up to no good.’

  ‘Well, do you actually care?’

  ‘We can’t let it look like deliberately losing money.’

  ‘Is Evans dishonest?’

  ‘I don’t think so: just lazy and a bit ineffectual. Up to now the girl’s been there to keep him at it.’

  ‘Oh, well, poor old you! I know how dearly you love the comforts of a small-time Welsh hotel!’

  He could not help saying: ‘There are always compensations.’

  ‘Carmarthenshire in spring? I must say,’ she admitted, ‘the children are sick with envy at your going there at all. There’ll be new born lambs now, won’t there?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They come late, up there in the mountains. That’s one of the troubles: the ewes are weak, they aren’t feeding the lambs. Evans neglected the pasture last year…’

  ‘Good lord,’ she said—standing there, pretty, well-groomed, innocently secure, the easy, unheeded shillings and pennies ticking away, ‘what a lot you always get to know about anything you take up!’ But then of course he was so clever, so marvellous in every way: in all the years of marriage, she’d never found a weakness in him yet. The children were riding a pony, turn and turn about, as she came away from the telephone and stood lovingly watching them. She thought to herself, with vague gratitude to fate, that no woman could be more fortunate in her life than she.