Finders and Keepers

by Catrin Collier

  ‘Not with me.’

  ‘Next time you come, bring some. If the weather is good, you can come out with me. I’m painting one of the lanes that leads out of Craig-y-Nos. It’s not the road to Camelot, but by the time I’ve finished, it will be. How do you think Mrs Edwards would look as the elderly Morgan le Fay?’

  ‘She’s far too jolly and nice.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that. Besides, I really want to paint her when she’s young, before she seduces Arthur. How about the Snow Queen as Guinevere?’

  It was the oddest conversation Harry had ever had with someone he’d just met. ‘She has the right colouring and she’s pretty enough.’

  ‘Pretty and regal, but my uncle is right – her heart has been penetrated by an icicle, and it shows. Which is fine except when she’s with Lancelot. Do you think, if I ask her nicely, she’ll fall in love for me so I can capture the right expression for their first meeting? Frank insists that painting should be the highlight of the book.’ It was an idiotic question but Toby appeared to be perfectly serious.

  ‘Who do you think she should fall in love with?’ Harry forked the last morsel of pudding to his mouth.

  ‘You, there’s no one else the right age and class around.’

  ‘There’s you.’ Harry pulled his beer towards him.

  ‘I tried, got absolutely nowhere, and have the ice burns to prove it. In her eyes I am the proverbial dust beneath her feet.’ Toby handed Enfys his plate when she came to clear them. ‘How are you at seducing women?’

  ‘Useless,’ Harry lied.

  ‘This would be in the cause of art.’

  ‘Still useless, even in the cause of art.’

  ‘Then I’ll just have to keep looking.’

  ‘For another Guinevere or a man to seduce the Snow Queen?’ Harry enquired in amusement.

  ‘Both, if necessary.’ Toby stared down unenthusiastically at the bowl of rhubarb and custard Enfys had set in front of him. ‘Want to come up to my room and see what I’ve done? Some of the canvases have already gone up to London, but I’ve kept sketches.’

  ‘Please.’ Harry stood, and Toby followed suit.

  ‘We’ll pick up another couple of beers and whiskies on the way.’

  Chapter Five

  David took the rock Mary handed him and placed it on the lowest layer of the dry-stone sheep-pen wall they were repairing. Whichever way he laid it, he only had to touch it with the tip of his finger for it to move. He pushed it out in disgust and it landed with a thud on the sodden grass.

  ‘This is no good, Mary,’ he grumbled, ‘I need a flatter one.’

  She turned up the collar of her old shirt against the rain, and pulled the peak of one of her father’s flat caps over her eyes. The fine weather had ended abruptly at dawn, and rain had teemed down in solid, skin-drenching downpours ever since. ‘I’m searching for all the stones that might have been a part of the wall. It looked like a capping stone.’

  ‘It may well have been,’ he retorted impatiently, ‘but there’s a bloody big hole here and I’m a long way from needing capping stones.’

  ‘Don’t swear,’ she said automatically.

  ‘Our life is enough to make St David swear. Just look at us!’ He turned his face up to the sky and closed his eyes as rain streamed into them. ‘Grubbing around for stones on the side of a hill in a cloudburst, to mend a wall that was probably built a thousand years ago and has been past saving for the last four hundred. And for what?’

  ‘So the lambs can’t escape after you’ve rounded them up ready for market, like they did yesterday,’ she retorted crossly. ‘You heard Bob Pritchard’s men. He’ll knock at least a fiver off the forty he said he’d pay us to compensate for the loss.’

  ‘Those lambs didn’t escape. Bob Prichard’s men stole them when they went to pick up stock from Pwllcoedlog Farm.’

  She sank back on her heels and examined her calloused fingers. ‘We can’t prove that.’

  ‘We can’t prove he’s diddling us either, but you know as well as I do that he is.’ He wiped his face in the grey blanket that he had thrown over his shoulders to protect his back, not that it was any drier than the rest of his clothes. He lifted the next stone she handed him with both hands and allowed it to fall to the floor of the pen. ‘I said flat, Mary.’

  ‘It’s difficult to see the difference between the ones that have fallen off the wall and the ones that are just lying around.’ She glanced down the hill and through the archway to the open door of the barn where Matthew, with Luke’s hindrance, was cleaning out the chicken coops. ‘Here, try this one.’ She handed him another.

  He slotted it into place, and tested it by leaning his full weight on it to ensure that it would provide a firm bed for the next layer. ‘Iestyn has joined the army.’ He spoke casually but she wasn’t fooled by his matter-of-fact tone.

  ‘The dairyman’s son from Pontardawe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s not much older than you, is he?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘Eighteen months. He was sixteen last week and he went down the drill hall the day after his birthday.’

  ‘I’m surprised they took him.’

  ‘They take boys at sixteen,’ he informed her authoritatively.

  ‘I’m even more surprised his father let him go.’ She lined up three of the flattest stones within easy reach. ‘Mr Myles has a good business. He can do with all the help he can get. And Iestyn’s the eldest, isn’t he?’

  ‘If you mean he was set to inherit the business, his father has always promised him he will. But Iestyn told me that he didn’t fancy waiting around for years for his father to die. He wants to see a bit of the world and have some adventures while he’s still young enough to enjoy life.’

  ‘And eighteen would have been too old?’ She glanced suspiciously at him. ‘You’re not thinking of following him, I hope.’

  ‘Why not?’ David challenged. ‘He’ll get board, lodge, boots and uniform provided, and wages at the end of every week. And he’ll be able to spend them on whatever he fancies. There’ll be no bloody agent following him around to take them off him before they hit his pocket.’

  She was too alarmed at the prospect of losing David to reproach him for swearing a second time. ‘And officers on his back every minute of every day, telling him what to do, how to behave and what to think.’

  ‘So what?’ He dropped all pretence of building the wall. ‘They couldn’t rule my life any more than the damned agent does already. Did you see Martha, Matthew and Luke’s faces when you put that roast chicken in front of them yesterday? The poor kids couldn’t even remember the last time we ate meat. We’re working farmers and we can’t afford to eat our own chickens. Now tell me, where’s the bloody sense in that?’

  ‘Don’t ever use language like that in front of the little ones.’ Shocked by the depth of her brother’s bitterness, she began to shake. An icy claw of fear closed over her heart. She brushed a tangle of wet hair from her eyes and stared at him. ‘You can’t be serious. You can’t really be thinking of leaving the farm and becoming a soldier. You’re only fourteen -’

  ‘Iestyn told me they didn’t even ask to see his birth certificate.’

  ‘But all this work we do … the Ellis Estate … it’s for you, Davy .. .’ She started at a crash of thunder. A few seconds later she felt as though she were crouched beneath a waterfall.

  ‘Like Dad’s father said it was all for him?’ David had to shout to make himself heard above the noise of the rainstorm. ‘And just like our great-grandfather worked himself to death for our grandfather, and so on, back through all the Ellises until we reach the first one who decided to farm this hellish place. I’ve been thinking, Mary, what have any of us really got? We certainly haven’t got a life. The damned land owns us, not the other way around. All we Ellises have ever done is work ourselves to death for some other bugger’s benefit.’

  ‘The first Ellis who came here built the house we live in, and it’s a fine place,’
she countered forcefully, proud of her heritage.

  ‘It’s fine all right, but the roof leaks, the walls are cracked and let in the damp, and the windows are rotten. We’ve had to sell almost every stick of furniture we possessed, and the way things are, we’ll never be able to furnish it again. And although we may live in the house, Mary, we don’t own it – there’s a big difference.’

  ‘Dad showed you the carving over the lintel, just as he showed it to me. The name of the first David Ellis and his date is up there.’

  ‘Have you ever thought that we only have Dad’s word for that?’ he challenged. ‘He couldn’t read those words any more than we can. For all we know it could be Bob Pritchard’s great-great-great-grandfather’s name up there, and between you and me it would make more bloody sense if it was.’

  ‘Dad told us the truth, I know he did.’ Mary was glad of the rain because it hid her tears. ‘The first Ellis to come here built the house. He owned everything and left it to his son -’

  ‘Who left it to his son until it was taken away from us in seventeen fifty-four by another greedy landlord. I know the story as well as you, Mary.’ He brushed his sodden sleeve over his forehead. ‘And look what happened to Dad when he tried to buy it back. I was the one who held his legs when you and Mam cut him down, remember? Is that what you want for me? To be killed by hard work and the swindling landlord and his agent, like Dad?’

  ‘Davy, I had no idea you felt this way,’ she protested wearily. ‘I thought you understood that we were working to try and keep the farm for you, and for the little ones to have somewhere to live until they grow up.’

  ‘Why won’t you see further than the work that has to be done every day, Mary?’ He threw a stone aside and it hit one of the few low, scrubby bushes that grew in the pen, breaking a branch. ‘The only future any of us will have if we stay here is the workhouse, or tramping the roads. We have to get out and make a living that will keep us and the little ones somewhere else.’

  ‘By soldiering you’ll only make enough to keep yourself,’ she warned soberly.

  ‘There are other jobs.’

  ‘All both of us know is farming. You said it yourself, we can’t even read and write. I’d be lucky to get a job as a kitchen maid. And if I did, what would happen to Martha, Matthew and Luke?’

  ‘The doctor and his family would keep Martha on as a live-in maid.’

  ‘So, what are you saying? That we should put Matthew and Luke into the workhouse?’

  The silence between them grew tense and unbearable, as the rain continued to pound down, pulverizing them and the earth. David turned back to the wall when another peal of thunder heralded a second cloudburst.

  ‘And I thought it couldn’t get any wetter. Here.’ He took the stone she held out to him and thrust it on top of the one he had already placed.

  ‘Davy, you won’t really go, will you?’ she pleaded.

  ‘Not without talking it over with you first.’

  ‘Talk – or have you already made a decision?’ She was shivering more from the prospect of trying to live without him than the freezing rain.

  ‘I haven’t decided anything – yet. I heard you talking to Mam before she died. I know she made you promise to look after all of us until we were old enough to look after ourselves.’ He held out his hand for another stone. ‘Well, you don’t have to bother about me, not any more. I can fend for myself. But you can’t look after the other three and do everything that needs doing around here, not all by yourself you can’t.’

  She didn’t argue with him. She was too heartbroken by his declaration that he didn’t think the Ellis Estate worth fighting for to try further persuasion. All her hopes for a better future when the family might actually live her father’s dream of owning their rightful inheritance had been shattered.

  And she had struggled too long to keep the family together on the farm to consider what she might do with the rest of her life if they no longer lived there.

  *……*……*

  Harry woke early the next morning to the sound of rain hammering relentlessly on his bedroom window. There was no sign of Toby at breakfast. Mrs Edwards told him that he had risen early, taken one look at the weather and caught the train into Swansea to buy paints and canvases. Harry breakfasted alone, and afterwards sat in the cheerless dining parlour and tried to read, but he spent more time watching the hands crawl round on his wristwatch than looking at his book.

  As the morning wore on, the rain grew even heavier. At a quarter past ten, he dressed in his mackintosh and gaiters, jammed a waterproofed felt hat on his head and crossed the yard to put up the hood on the tourer. He’d garaged it in the old barn, which Alf had turned into a mechanic’s workshop.

  He drove to the station half an hour before the train was due in. The ambulance was already there, parked outside the stationmaster’s house. He left his car alongside it, pulled up the collar on his mackintosh, angled the brim of his hat to stop the rain from falling into his eyes and headed for the platform. He handed over a penny for a ticket and waited in the doorway of the ticket office.

  He heard the train before he saw it. Then he spotted a mist fogging the rain above the trees that bordered the track. The engine slowed, crawling towards the station at a snail’s pace before finally drawing to a steam-spitting halt. Doors banged open and half-a-dozen men and women emerged. They stopped to put up umbrellas before hauling the shopping they had bought on Swansea market out of the station. Harry caught the whiff of fresh fish and the vinegary tang of cockles as he walked along the train and peered into the carriages in search of his family.

  When he was halfway along, he saw his Uncle Joey jump down from a carriage at the end of the train. He turned and lifted out a suitcase. Lloyd leaned out and passed him a wheelchair. Harry ran towards them, reaching them just when Victor emerged carrying his grandfather.

  Even wrapped in his woollen winter overcoat, with a muffler around his neck and his cap pulled down low, Billy Evans looked fragile. In the three days since Harry had seen him, his face had shrunk, his teeth suddenly seemed too large for his mouth and his eyes were dark, glittering, pain-filled hollows. Harry had difficulty keeping his voice steady.

  ‘Hello, Granddad.’

  Billy looked at him as Victor set him gently in the chair. ‘Harry,’ he whispered, with a ghost of a smile. ‘I’ve put you to a lot of trouble, boy.’

  ‘No trouble, Granddad. The ambulance is waiting.’

  Lloyd picked up the suitcase. Joey folded a blanket over his father’s lap, tucking it beneath the shoe on his artificial leg. It said something that Billy didn’t protest at his youngest son’s fussing. He touched the hand Harry set on his shoulder.

  ‘Lloyd tells me that you’ve arranged everything in the sanatorium.’

  His grandfather’s voice was so weak Harry had to crouch down to hear what he was saying. ‘And I’ve found good lodgings at an inn, Granddad. So I can come down to see you as often as they’ll let me.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Billy said with a trace of his old spirit. ‘You should be in Paris, painting … you should go …’ The effort of speaking was too much after the journey. He fought for breath, his face turned blue and he fell back weakly in the chair.

  ‘We’d better get you out of this rain before you get soaked, Dad,’ Lloyd said.

  Lloyd and Joey walked either side of the chair, Victor wheeled it to the gate and Harry hung back, hoping there’d be time for him to tell his grandfather just how much he loved him.

  The ambulance driver and his mate hauled the chair, and Billy with it, into the back of their cab, secured the doors and drove off. Harry unlocked his car doors and his stepfather put the suitcase into the boot.

  ‘You’ll take us straight to the sanatorium so we can see Dad settle in, Harry?’ Joey climbed into the back seat.

  ‘I’ll take you there, but they may not let you see him, Uncle Joey.’

  ‘Yes, they will.’

  ‘Not everyone falls prey to your c
harm, Joey.’ Victor sat beside him. ‘And the last thing we want to do is upset the people who are going to be caring for Dad.’

  ‘How is Edyth?’ Harry asked urgently.

  ‘No change,’ Lloyd answered briefly. ‘But a word of warning: we had to tell Dad that she tumbled downstairs because he heard her cry and saw the rest of us panic before he passed out. But we’ve told him she’s fine, just collected a few more bruises.’

  ‘Granddad looks terrible,’ Harry ventured.

  ‘Doctor Williams warned us that he might not survive the journey,’ Lloyd said quietly. ‘But we all agreed that he would be better off here than in the Graig.’

  ‘Even Granddad?’ Harry pressed.

  ‘Doctor Williams asked him for us, but we already knew the answer. Like most miners, he’s been afraid all his life of dying in the workhouse,’ Joey answered.

  Subdued, they drove the rest of the short distance from the station to the castle in silence. Harry turned into the courtyard. The ambulance was outside the main entrance. He parked opposite it.

  ‘I’ve ordered lunch for all of us at the inn I stayed at last night, but I told the landlady I couldn’t be sure when we’d be there, so she said she’d sort something that won’t spoil if we’re delayed.’

  ‘Just as well.’ Joey opened the car door.

  ‘You’re not coming in?’ Lloyd asked Harry when he didn’t make a move.

  ‘No, Granddad’s so weak it will be as much as he can do to say goodbye to you three. As there’s no change in Edyth, I thought I might stay over for a day or two, to make sure Granddad settles in all right.’

  ‘And when did you make that decision?’ Lloyd asked.

  ‘When I saw him just now,’ Harry admitted.

  ‘As you said, you might not be allowed to see him.’

  ‘Even if I’m not, I’ll be on hand to make enquiries, Dad. It’s only four miles from the inn to this place and they both have telephones. Besides, the weather is foul for driving.’