Dead Man's Embers

by Mari Strachan

  She saw the cobbled yard, the huge wooden doors with the gold lettering above them on the lintels, the carved stone decorations, all as her father had described to her. The east wing was so large and imposing that the thought of her father being there as one of the many honoured scientists filled her with pride. She had asked the attendant in the hallway for help and was guided to a reading table where she was given books containing the names of all the members during the years when her father had been a frequent visitor. Many of the names were familiar to her; she had heard them on her father’s lips so many times during her childhood, some spoken with more admiration than others.

  But her father’s name was not among them. She went through the lists three times. First reading down the page, then backwards up the page, then down again, putting her finger against each name so that there was no chance of missing one. She asked the stern man behind the desk if it was possible that a mistake had been made but his expression was so incredulous and unforgiving that she felt herself shrink just like Alice in Mr Carroll’s book. But she asked again if there were other lists she could consult, told the stern man her father’s name and his work. The man informed her that there were other – and here he paused in disdain, Non saw his lip curl – that there were other royal societies of this and that, but this Royal Society was not where her father had belonged, or spoken about his voyages, or been given money from a collection – another curl of the lip – which enabled him to buy her mother a betrothal ring. She had walked away from Burlington House angry with the attendant, angry with her father, angry with Branwen for refusing to speak of him, angry with herself for her gullibility, and utterly confused.

  When she had arrived back at Angela’s lodgings, she had been exhausted, hot and near to fainting. She was glad to drop into the armchair in the stuffy little room. She was fed pink salmon from a tin and brown bread dry from the heat of the day, food that made her want to gag, and which she washed down with the tea for which she was desperate and grateful. And then she was persuaded by Angela – because she had neither the heart nor the energy to keep refusing – to come out for the evening, to come to this other stuffy, crowded room.

  ‘Shhh.’ Everyone in the place seems to be shushing everyone else. Non’s neighbour turns to her – who has not uttered a word – and shushes her, her finger against her mouth as if Non were a five-year-old. The shushing is like the sea on the sand at home, and pleasanter than the chattering. The air in the room is stifling and the smell of sweat overlaid by the scent of perfumes and pomades takes Non’s breath away. She dips into her handbag to find the thyme oil she carries for Osian, inhales deeply from the vial and feels her breathing ease a little. She wishes she had thought to bring some water to drink in the bottle that Branwen had pressed on her for the train journey, for her mouth is dry already.

  The audience falls silent and each member of it gazes towards the stage – a wooden dais at the front of the room, with a curtain drawn across it. In the silence the gas lamps hiss and their flames leap, but their light fails to combat the dark shadow cast by the church to which the hall is attached. Through one of the room’s high windows Non can see the bright, cloudless blue of the sky, and thinks she ought to feel less enervated here in this shade, but somehow the dimness is neither restful nor comforting, and takes her back to that other room in Port with Catherine Davies and Elsie. She had been surprised that Angela was so anxious to come to this séance, but now she recalls her mother-in-law’s yearning to contact Billy, and Elsie’s joy in the train on the way home, and supposes that similar feelings have brought Angela here.

  The curtains are drawn back to reveal a small round table holding a lamp, with a chair next to the table on which the medium, dressed in mourning, is seated. At her feet sits a child, swathed from head to foot in white. Despite her disbelief, Non shivers slightly with apprehension at this further reminder of the scene in the little sitting room in Port, and she hears again Ben Bach’s voice calling his mother.

  The audience seems to hold its collective breath as the child descends the stairs from the dais and walks step by slow step along the aisle looking from side to side at the rows of eager and anxious faces. Gasps follow her – whether of disappointment or relief, Non cannot tell – when she passes people by. Some proffer rings from their fingers, or letters, creased and dog-eared, from their pockets, but they are all ignored by the child. Non wonders if all mediums use children, first Madame Leblanc, and now this one. It is not right to make a child do this kind of dishonest work, this hocuspocus.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ says a voice from the dais as the child stops to take a ring that is held out to her. The woman proffering the ring is close enough to her that Non can see she is young, and pale, and holds her now ringless hand to her breast. To stop hope escaping? The child carries the ring back to the dais, and the medium holds her hand out for it, then fingers it, turning it round and round, while the audience waits in intense silence, broken only by the hiss and stutter of the gaslights and the distant hum of noise from the city going about its business outside.

  ‘You have lost a beloved one?’

  The young woman gasps and nods and puts her hand to her mouth, and Non feels fury spurt inside her at what the woman on the dais is doing.

  ‘I have a message to tell you not to worry. He is safe and is watching over you.’

  The young woman is hiccupping and crying, and fumbles with the ring when the child brings it back to her. The audience is already watching the child to see who will be chosen next. How can Angela, an intelligent woman, sit here and believe that woman is anything but a charlatan? All these people, desperate – just like Elsie Thomas and Lizzie German, and old Catherine Davies – desperate to think their husbands and sons are safe somewhere and thinking of them. Non decides to leave. She tries to rise from her seat but Angela puts a strong hand firmly on her thigh and forces her to sit back down. And Non sees that Angela, too, has a ring in her hand, which she now holds out towards the child, who walks past without taking it. More rings and letters, a watch, even a mysterious leather pouch, are taken to the dais and their owners comforted by the medium’s platitudes. Again, the child walks along the aisle, and approaches Angela; Non can see the tremor in her hand as she offers the ring to the child. It is a ring Non has not seen Angela wear and she supposes it must be a gift, a betrothal gift perhaps, from Edward. Non watches the child take the ring and walk to the dais with it. She is consumed with anger at herself for allowing this, and at the medium when Angela cries with joy to hear that her beloved is praying for her.

  ‘That is just like Edward,’ she says to Non, smiling and dabbing at her tears with her handkerchief as the child returns the ring. Angela is desperate to find Edward, Non thinks, but without hope of ever succeeding because he is lying somewhere in the soil of France where already lush grass and red poppies are claiming him. A woman sitting in the row of chairs behind them puts a comforting hand on Angela’s shoulder. That small hand in its black glove makes Non instantly ashamed of herself for her lack of understanding and for thinking only of her own concerns. She hears Lizzie German admonishing her, People want to know, don’t they, missus? No one speaks of it, she thinks, looking at the people around her in this room, no one speaks of their terrible grief. Angela’s face still shines with her tears. She is a woman left on her own to make her way bravely in a world which has no place for women on their own – bachelor girls, is what Non has seen them called in the newspaper, as if it is a choice they make for fun. Non sees that Angela will never recover from Edward’s death, and not just the fact of his death but the way of it, the ignominy of it. No wonder she has had to harden the exterior she shows to the world, she has needed to do so in order to survive; but here, now, Non sees the young woman with whom Edward fell in love. In a surge of compassion Non puts her hand out to find Angela’s hand and clasps it tightly.

  26

  As her train whistles and chugs its way out of the grand station at Whitchurch and through the countrys
ide Non begins to feel that she is, at last, going home. Angela, turned once more into the efficient nurse, had seen her to Euston and a train that had been as packed on the way out of London as it had been on her journey into the city. What a vast and confusing place London was, and the station at Euston in its bleakness and blackness, even when the sun had managed to struggle through the grime, was like a conduit to the city, reflecting the variety of its people from the obviously rich, with their maids and their luggage looked after by porters, to the down-and-outs, the tramps and beggars that the policemen were constantly moving on. She had barely caught her train because of an altercation outside the ticket office between a young policeman – he had not looked any older than Gwydion – and a tramp of indeterminate age who was trying to board the train, ticketless. The tramp had been turned away in the end, to the tutting and relief of most of those waiting.

  Non wonders about the tramp, about why he was so anxious to board the train. She is ashamed that she did not help him in some way. She could have paid for a ticket for him, she had money left in her purse. Where had her sense of charity been? When the tramps came round at home on their tour – it was like an annual pilgrimage, always with the same familiar pilgrims – they were given tea in their billycans and slabs of bread and butter, or dripping, and even cheese or meat from those who could afford to give it, to see them on their way. The gentlemen of the road were treated with respect. They were treated like vermin in London, she had seen it.

  You would have to be blind not to notice the indigent people everywhere, women and children as well as men. Every street corner had a maimed soldier, sometimes in a vestige of a uniform, sometimes smarter in an old suit and hat, trying to sell matches or bootlaces from a tray to passers-by. Sometimes they had given up any pretence at dignity and just sat on the dirty pavements, their despair there for all to see in the heads sunken onto their chests and the scruffy caps upended next to them to hold the few coppers anyone could spare. Ignore them, had been Angela’s advice, and in the end that was what Non did, not because she thought they were a stain on the face of the city, as she had heard someone claim, but because when they looked at her to thank her for her pennies, she could not bear the misery and desolation and hopelessness in their eyes. It reminded her too much of the look she often caught in Davey’s eyes.

  Jane Eyre lies open and unread on her lap. She has scarcely turned a page over since her journey began. She needs to order her thoughts before she arrives home. News of a different kind will be expected there – news of Arianrhod and the expected child, and of Aberystwyth – and Gwydion, no doubt, will want to know if she found an opportunity to speak to his mother, to prepare the way for his own news. She remembers her father quoting a great Scottish writer to her, Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive, and explaining to her that it was always best to tell the truth. She has found out that Osian Rhys taught her one thing but did another. It does not help her now to think of that, but she is determined that Branwen will tell her what she wants to know about their father.

  She is glad to sit with her own thoughts. Her rushed stay with Angela has tired her so much she does not think she could converse with anyone. She had been so certain that she would find the reason for Davey’s strange behaviour, but she had been disappointed. Angela knew nothing that gave an indication of what might have wrought such a great, and apparently sudden, change in him. Whatever it was must have happened before his second time in the clearing hospital. Angela had been a little vague about the date – and why not, why should she remember one event among the many? – but Non has worked out that it must have been after Ben Bach had been killed. Davey was meant to be keeping an eye on him for Elsie, he had promised her that he would do so. And so, maybe Ben Bach’s death, coupled with the extensive damage to his platoon soon afterwards, was the cause of the change in Davey’s behaviour that Angela had noticed, that thousand-yard stare. In London she has seen how affected other men have been by the War, and she can partly understand Davey’s response, but not the story of what Angela had called the liaison. What led to that? She gazes at her book – the pages may as well be blank – and closes it with a bang that disturbs the dust and the one other occupant of the compartment, an old man who had been snoring gently in the seat next to the other door. The train squeals to a halt in Welshpool, with the usual hiss of steam and the stink of burning cinders that the engine spits out, and the old man gathers his belongings, doffs his cap to Non and leaves the compartment.

  He is almost immediately replaced by a young family, chattering like a flock of starlings. In her own language. She smiles at them all, and exchanges Good afternoons. The young mother carries a baby, fast asleep, and the next child in age is a boy – a rascal, Non thinks, when she catches the look in his eyes – and then two girls with their hair in long plaits that must have taken time in a busy day. The eldest girl, the one in charge of this little crew, sits demurely next to Non. Her father pats her on the head and tells her she is a good girl before he, too, sits down. Non thinks she can feel the warmth of the glow coming from the child at the praise from her father. A toy is brought out to keep the rascal occupied, a cup and ball. He concentrates hard on mastering the art of throwing the ball into the cup, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth like a kitten’s.

  Non never managed to do that, catch the ball in the cup, she did not have the patience. Her childhood suddenly seems a long time ago; she must have been about the same age as this eldest child next to her here when her father died. She does not think she was as good. She can barely remember what her father looked like. She has his book, his famous herbal, at home, with his photograph in the front – but he had been young then, and she had never known him young. He seems to have become a figure in a story that she was told, as if he invented himself for her benefit. She does not know if any of the stories he told her about her mother, about his work, about his scholarly pursuits, about his travels and those foreign men that used to visit him – she does not know if any of those are any truer than all the stories of old and the fairy stories he told her. She believed every word, never questioned any of it. Although she does, now, recall occasional puzzling remarks from neighbours, and asking her father to explain them. Ignore them, Rhiannon, he had told her – our neighbours are good people, but because we do not share their belief that there is a God looking down on us, they fear for our mortal souls. Non suspects now that the neighbours had long given up their crusade for her father’s soul, they were likely concentrating on saving hers. Her father had left her to her own devices much of the time, to develop her own ideas about life from the information and the teaching she had from him. By now she understands that children can develop strange and perverse notions when matters are not explained to them. She knows she must have been an odd little thing by the time her father died and she was taken in by Branwen – an odd, wayward little thing. She feels bereft, as if something has been taken from her, as if now she has lost her father all over again. She needs to find out what is true and what is not, and she reminds herself that she will insist that Branwen answers her questions about Osian Rhys when she goes down to Aberystwyth for the birth.

  She is jolted out of her reverie when the train stops at Newtown and the young father takes his son on his knee to make room for a woman dressed in heavy mourning – in this heat! – accompanied by a young man, her son or, more probably, her grandson. The young family, with the exception of the sleeping baby, is fascinated by the woman, they are all watching her with interest, but Non turns her eyes away – she sees a woman whose heart is compressed by a great sorrow, who is beyond the help of the Sal Volatile her caring grandchild is holding for her.

  The heart is a mysterious organ. She thinks of the drawings she saw in Seb’s consultation room. How can it be that a lump of flesh – for that is all it is – full of gristle and muscle and tubes can hold our feelings? She should have asked how that could be, if Seb’s own heart had felt something when his friend
was lost. Would he have an answer? Would his laboratory be able to tell him that? Or tell him why Angela is still alive when her heart is broken utterly?

  Last night, still angry with her father’s deceit, Non had decided to place her trust in modern medicine and, without thinking too long about it, had taken one drop less of her nightly draught, and this morning another drop less. She is not sure if she feels different, whether she is better or not. She is still tired, exhausted, worn out by the heat and by the city. How can people live all their lives in such places? She hopes Seb knows what he is about. Perhaps she will slow down the rate at which she is reducing the number of drops she takes of her lifeblood, until she receives his letter with the results of the tests that he had promised to send her.

  A thought has come to her since he spoke about symptoms. He had asked her whether she had hallucinations and she had laughed at him. But she was not entirely sure that she knew what such a thing was. When she looked at the elderly woman on the seat opposite, or when she saw the child on the way to London, and saw the sickness in them, was she hallucinating? Were these figments of her imagination? They were moments of great clarity and distress to her, but were they real? Branwen is the only living person who knows of Non’s gift, and she prefers to pretend it does not exist since one unfortunate diagnosis of Non’s that involved a local minister. Non’s sister had been – and still is – a great chapel-goer, and she had been mortified.

  Non closes her eyes and leans on the glass of the compartment window, cooled slightly because she sits on the opposite side to where the sun is slowly descending into the west, still a red-hot ball, the sky aflame with the certainty of more heat the following day. She is on her own, listening to the rhythmic clatter of the wheels on the final stage of her journey. The young family waved her a goodbye at Aberdyfi, and the mourning woman and her grandson left the train at Barmouth . . .