Dead Man's Embers

by Mari Strachan

  ‘He was dead, Non. Nothing was going to make a difference to him. I thought the least fuss, the better. What if it all came out – the reason he came here – Ben Bach – what if it came out, Non?’

  But no one knows except the two of us, Non thinks. ‘What have you done, Davey?’

  ‘Protected us,’ he says. ‘Elsie Thomas, you, me, Osian, the family, the town – all of us, Non.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  Davey does not answer. She sees that the tremor is back in his hands. She should not have questioned him so accusingly. He has been through so much, protecting them, Wales, the world, against the darkness. But she has to know all there is to know, now that she knows half of it.

  ‘Where is Teddy, Davey?’

  Davey turns to her. His cheeks are wet with tears. ‘I put him and the knife in with old Calvin,’ he says. ‘He’s in the ground, in the cemetery.’

  ‘Osian’s knife?’

  ‘Osian’s knife,’ he says. ‘Osian’s knife killed him. You know what people would think, what they would say. I had to protect Osh, Non, he can’t do it for himself.’

  Non instinctively puts her hand out to him and he grasps it as tightly as he grasped her hand when he told her he had killed Ben Bach. He grasps it as if he is drowning and she will save him.

  ‘I had to keep Osian safe, Non, I had to keep us all safe,’ he says looking into her eyes.

  She looks back at him. That is the truth in his story, she thinks. She nods at him and, tentatively, he lifts her clasped hand to his lips and kisses it.

  45

  Meg yawns and huddles closer to the fire in the range. ‘Why is Tada allowed to stay in bed late and I’m not?’

  ‘You asked me to get you up early, Meg. I thought you were going to spend the day with your Barmouth friends.’ Non lays down the wreath through which she is twining strands of ivy. It is difficult to see exactly what she is doing by lamplight. She glances through the kitchen window, but all she can see is her own reflection staring back and Osian sitting across the table to her, Herman nestling on his shoulder. When she first came downstairs this morning there seemed to be as much frost inside the window panes as there was out of doors where it sparkled in the light of a moon only just beginning to wane. The winter has already been hard after such a hot summer, and it is not Christmas for another week. She picks up the wreath again and holds it in the pool of lamplight to find the gaps that need filling.

  ‘Is that for Nain’s grave?’ Meg leaves the fireside and comes to sit next to Non at the table, shivering and pulling her woollen shawl tighter over her nightdress.

  ‘No – the big one over there by the back door is for your grandmother, and the one next to it for your mother,’ Non says. ‘If you’re going to catch the train you’ll have to get ready soon, Meg.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Meg says. ‘I could have stayed in bed.’

  ‘Won’t your friends be expecting you?’ Non moves the basket of holly sprigs, heavy with red berries – a sure sign of a long and hard winter, she thinks – out of the way of Meg’s fidgety fingers.

  ‘I only half promised,’ Meg says. ‘Are you taking the wreaths to the cemetery today, Non?’

  ‘Only if I get this one finished.’ Non begins to pick out some holly sprigs and push them among the ivy.

  ‘Who’s that one for?’

  ‘I thought I’d make one for old Calvin Edwards. Your father thought well of him, and there’s no family to remember him.’

  ‘Can I make a bunch of holly to put on Nain’s grave?’ Meg asks.

  Non pushes the basket of holly back towards her, with the big scissors and the ball of twine. What has brought this on? she wonders. It had been a shock to them all, Catherine Davies’s sudden death. Lizzie German had arrived breathless at Non’s front door one morning in October to say that she had just come up to look after old William Davies as usual and found Catherine Davies still in her bed. Says she’s going to heaven to see her Billy, Lizzie had gasped, and she gave me this, missus. The note Lizzie waved was a demand from Catherine Davies that she be buried in the same grave as Billy. By the time Lizzie and Non had hurried to the house, Catherine Davies had died. Non supposes that any wreath laid on Catherine’s grave will do for Billy, too, which saves her much heart-searching. Bess and Katie had returned for the funeral, a sombre affair, and not at all the kind of family gathering Non had once thought of arranging. They had all been shaken by the suddenness of the event, but no one seemed especially sad. Maybe Meg had been more affected than Non had thought.

  ‘It’ll be strange this Christmas without her,’ she says. ‘Your grandmother.’

  ‘Yes,’ Meg says. ‘But you won’t mind, will you, Non?’

  Non is chastened. She will not mind, but maybe she should mind a little. ‘Taid will be here.’ But not in spirit, she thinks, for old William Davies has returned to his past for good. ‘And Wil is coming home, he’ll be with us – I wonder if he’s written down any of his adventures in your journal, Meg,’ she says, hoping to change the conversation.

  ‘Ouch!’ Meg sucks at her thumb after being careless with the holly. ‘You do it for me, Non. I’m going to get dressed. Can I have the rest of the water in the kettle for my washbasin?’ She does not wait for a reply before she pours the water into the big enamel jug and carries it away.

  Non hears her careful footsteps on the stairs. Osian and Herman raise their heads to listen, then Herman tucks his head back into his feathers and Osian returns his attention to his carving. The cold does not seem to worry Osian any more than the great heat of the summer had done. With his knife – an exact replica of his old knife that he had picked out in Kerfoots’ store – he chips away at the block of lime in front of him. Non has laid pages of the Daily Herald to catch the curls of wood and to protect the kitchen table. Already from the lime emerges the figure of the Little Mermaid on her rock, with her half-legs half-fishtail curled beneath her, copied from the postcard Wil had sent Osian last week. Non thinks of Osian’s first carving of Meg – she wonders if that is why Wil chose the card. She has told Osian the mermaid’s sad story, leaving out the moralising at the end as her father used to do when he told it to her. That is not what stories are for, Rhiannon, he would say. She looks over at the postcard lying flat on the table. Cards to Osian, depicting all kinds of wonders, have been Wil’s way of keeping in touch with his family. Even Meg looks out for them. Wil is as poor a letter-writer as his father, Non thinks; she will be surprised if he has written anything in his journal – Catherine Davies had been right about Wil’s writing skills – and she should not have reminded Meg about it.

  Gwydion, on the other hand, has written pages to her – she is his only family contact. Branwen will not even reply to Non’s letters except for one long tirade accusing her of turning Gwydion against her. Non had not known whether to laugh or cry when she received it. She senses that Gwydion is finding life with Aoife’s family difficult – something he had not anticipated. He had not realised that he would be expected to convert to Catholicism for his marriage to Aoife to take place. I do not want to pretend to be something I am not, he had written.

  Non sighs, and draws towards her the bunch of holly sprigs Meg had started to gather together. She can see more clearly, now that the day has started to lighten. The whiteness of the garden appears gradually: the stone walls, the ground, the shrubs, the water barrels, the garden sheds are all encased in a deep frost that in all likelihood will not shift today any more than it has done for the past week. Non shivers, more at the thought of the cold than the cold itself, and pulls the holly into shape and wraps the twine around the stems to keep the sprigs together. She stands up to brush the remains of the ivy and holly into the basket, and lays the finished wreath and bunch of holly sprigs on top. She stretches her arms upwards to loosen her shoulders, puts more coal on the fire, fills the kettle ready to make tea.

  ‘We’ll have to put your carving away for a while, Osh, so I can make breakfast,’ she says. �
��When you reach a bit where you can stop, put it on this tray, and your knife.’

  Osian gives no sign of having heard her, but after a few moments he stops, lifts Herman from his shoulder onto the back of the chair, and lays his work on the tray as if he were putting it on display. He vanishes from the kitchen and runs up the stairs. Non can hear him moving about in his bedroom.

  My own baby, she thinks. My only baby. Fate – she had left the decision for Fate to make because she could not make it herself – has chosen not to give her a child. She does not think she is sad about this, and Davey does not seem to have thought about it at all since his memory returned and reminded him of the changes the War had wrought in him.

  She considers that she and Davey have more than enough to bind them together, secrets that are theirs alone, never spoken, but never forgotten. They are both changed from the young woman and the widowed father who had fallen in love before the War, but they are tied together more strongly than the holly sprigs. Davey is immersed in his work with his branch of the Labour Party – the future, Non, he frequently tells her – and he has an excellent apprentice who is already capable of doing much of the coffin work so that Davey can spend time on the furniture he loves to make. Yet, some nights, Non wakes to find his face wet with quiet tears. And she – she is beginning to know her strengths. She looks into her future the way she had imagined Wil looked into his, with eagerness for what it will bring.

  She reaches for the plates on the rack and lays them on the table, puts the cups on the saucers, takes the knives and teaspoons from the table drawer, a loaf of bread from the bread-bin, the butter and jam from the larder. Herman stands up on the chairback and flutters to the floor, ready for his breakfast. Non rattles the coals under the kettle with the poker until they glow red. She hears Davey’s morning footsteps on the stairs and contentment steals through her.

  For now, she is glad to be content.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Carcanet Press for kindly giving permission to use, for the title of this book, a line from the poem ‘To Bring the Dead to Life’ by Robert Graves.

  Thank you, as always, to Glenn Strachan, and to Adam Ifans, Llio Evans, Cai Strachan and Rachel Ifans, for their support, their forbearance, and their critical reading.

  Thank you to my agent, Lavinia Trevor, for her hard work, support and loyalty.

  Thank you to Anya Serota, my excellent editor, and to all those Canongaters, too numerous to list, who work so hard for every single book in their care.

  Numerous accounts of the First World War are readily available, including first-hand accounts of trench life in published diaries and letters; the experiences of under-age soldiers; the executions for desertion; the work of nursing staff in the field. By contrast, there is a dearth of information about the period immediately following the War, but I was able to gather bits of information here and there, and I have listed on my website books and other sources that I found particularly useful.

  Here, I would like to thank those people who generously gave me their time, shared their expert knowledge, and saved me from making embarrassing mistakes. In particular, thank you to Neil Evans, a respected authority on modern Welsh history, for his initial suggestions, and for his critical reading of the book and his pertinent and invaluable comments on it. Thank you to Kate Strachan, then Archivist for the Meteorological Office, whose research discovered details of the weather during the summer of 1921 and provided me with the heat that I wanted. Thank you to psychologist Dr Theresa Kruczek, Associate Professor of Psychology at Ball State University, Indiana, for sharing her extensive knowledge and expertise during our discussion about the effects that trauma may have on memory, the ways the mind may compensate for lost memories, and the ways memory may be restored. Thank you to Robert Cadwalader, seafarer, expert and enthusiast, for information about the beautiful Western Ocean Yachts and their crews still sailing from Porthmadog after the Great War. Thank you to Glyn Evans, a knowledgeable railway enthusiast from the Cambrian Railways Society, who put my heroine on the correct train journey. Any mistakes that remain are entirely my own.

  And thank you, Claude and Yvonne Courtine, for lending the name of your cat to Herman the crow.