by Richard Gwyn
Pouf? I repeat, bewildered.
When I first met Megan, she continues, I was nineteen and in a bad way … my parents had just divorced … I was doing drugs, had dropped out of university after a year … I’d been in these parts over the summer with a bunch of people up on the mountain beyond the Priory – she means Llantony – some stupid kind of hippy commune. One day we had been taking magic mushrooms, I had no idea where I was, who I was, and all the lanes around here with the big hedges, never wide enough for two cars to pass, well she almost ran into me in that estate car of hers, and she stopped in the road and there I was, walking nowhere, completely off my face, so she sat me in the car, drove me to the house and looked after me while I began to come down … and that took quite a while because I had psilocybin poisoning and she had to call a doctor out. He, the doctor, was a friend of Megan’s and he said I’d have to go to hospital and have my stomach pumped, vacuum my insides, and I was totally paranoid all this time, of course. Megan stayed with me in the hospital at Abergavenny, held my hand … and afterwards she brought me back here and let me stay. I had to go and get my stuff from the community, at the farmhouse where they lived. Megan drove me there and I saw how she went about things, no nonsense …
I knew of this community, or ones like it; sometimes in the lanes I have come across these New Age crusties in their beat-up vans, and have had to reverse to let them pass. Such groups of dopehead visionaries have been a fixture on the landscape of rural Wales for as long as I can remember.
I didn’t have anywhere to go, Alice says … my dad had gone to Australia with his new wife, Mum wasn’t in any state to help herself, let alone me, so I came here and stayed two, three weeks, and Megan fed me soup, made with vegetables from her garden; she nursed me back to health, and she talked to me, asked me questions, talked about herself, about her life, and she read to me, she read the metaphysical poets, especially Henry Vaughan … she was a very well-read person, as you know, but she was also thoroughly practical … I needed someone like that in my life right then …
Alice looks almost apologetic. Perhaps she is concerned about causing offence, in case she is portraying a closer relationship to Megan than I ever enjoyed. But I don’t mind, I really don’t. There’s a magnetism about Alice that draws me in; reminds me, in fact, of Megan.
Alice and I talk into the night, as though her arrival at Llys Rhosyn were a long-awaited visit rather than a sudden and uninvited intrusion, and we talk about Megan, in the way that people do when they share memories of a person they both love, and I offer to heat up some soup, to which Alice replies that she is almost always hungry, especially when staying here at Llys Rhosyn, it must be the mountain air, and it occurs to me that she thinks of this place as home as much as I do. As we sit down to supper I am wondering whether to ask her if she wants to stay the night in the house as it is cold out by now, but then, I think, she might misconstrue the invitation. As it is, she starts yawning as soon as she has finished her soup, rises abruptly and takes herself off to her tent, calling out a goodnight as she closes the back door behind her.
When Alice has left, I go to the library and set a fire, kneeling on the sheepskin rug that lies before the hearth to spark the kindling, then add logs from a big wicker basket. The fireplace and its surround are of an impressive size, and there are elaborate carvings set into the stonework, depicting mythical creatures, the twin centrepieces being a man whose face is the sun and a lion who is either devouring or spewing out a second sun. Apart from the sun-man, the lion and the various creatures that adorn the uprights, there is a row of small friezes, set below the mantel, of a man and woman, or rather a king and queen (they both wear crowns), and they are naked, in various states of conjunction or copulation, sometimes sharing the same body (but with distinct heads) and sometimes sharing certain limbs but not others. They are encrusted with soot, and charred in places, but immaculate in design. The stone is well preserved. As a child I was fascinated by these carvings, and I inspect them again now. One in particular attracts my attention, of the couple lying on their tomb-like bed, while above them a cherub bursts through swirling cloud. I find a rag and brush away a quantity of soot, so as to reveal what I know lies there, a large bird, possibly a crow or raven. Peering closely, I can also make out that the bird is looking down at another, identical bird, of which only the head is visible. The subtle indentation in the stone around the second bird’s head suggests that its body is in water, that it is either drowning or else emerging from some kind of sea or swamp. The mason, or sculptor, had evidently gone to a lot of trouble to illustrate some symbolic point whose purpose remained a mystery to me.
The fire is blazing now; it spits and crackles, briskly consuming the dry wood. I select, almost at random, a leather-bound book from a pile on the desk, which happens to be John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, and settle into the armchair. The night stretches ahead with an awful implacability and I know that I will not sleep, that I will shift restlessly from my place here to the sofa in the living room, that I will go through my usual routine of trying to write a little, that I will give up in frustration and start watching a late night film on television or else a DVD from Megan’s collection (perhaps Brief Encounter, again, but no …) and that I will drift off for a few minutes now and then, but never much longer, and I will shuffle in and out of the kitchen making tea, and in fact I do all these things, as I do every night, and in the end I watch Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and I hadn’t noticed before, but do this time – perhaps following Alice’s questioning of me earlier that evening – that there is a dog in the film, a spaniel of some kind, called Jasper – a preposterous name for a dog. What a pain it must be to have a dog like that, which keeps running off, and which needs such close tending. It would drive one mad. And when I get up to make tea, for the third time that night, and am standing by the kitchen window waiting for the kettle to boil, I look at the tent, its colour muted in the moonlight, the blue tent that my Aunt Megan sewed with her long, slender fingers, and her slender-fingered protégée lying within.
8
Shortly after daybreak I drop off to sleep in Megan’s favourite and final resting place. By the time I struggle into wakefulness it is mid-morning and Alice is kneeling by the fire alongside me, an iron poker in one hand, smoke swirling thickly in the fireplace. My first thought on seeing her is that she is going to smash my brains in with the poker. I have a fleeting vision of her setting about the deed with unrestrained ferocity, and I sit up with a start. But no, she has made tea, and hands me a cup and saucer, in Royal Worcester china.
I would not, in the normal run of things, have used this tea set, certainly not while living here on my own, and I am almost affronted by Alice’s decision to bring it out from the Welsh dresser in the kitchen. But, even in this moment of mild outrage, I realise that, paradoxically, I approve, and I think: Megan would want us to use the best china. Of course she would. She always liked attention to the detail of things.
Alice is dressed in the same patched jeans as yesterday, and wears a large and tattered grey pullover.
I knocked, she says, but there was no answer, so I let myself in. I hope you don’t mind. Do you always sleep here?
No, I say, rubbing my eyes and sitting forward to sip my tea. I sleep, when I can, in a variety of locations about the house. Wherever I happen to be.
Like a cat, she says, wherever you find a perch? But as she speaks, she is studying the carvings in the stone fireplace.
She turns and re-arranges herself on the rug so that she now sits cross-legged, facing me. The sleeves of her oversized pullover cover her hands like mittens and she clutches the cup between them. Her auburn hair is dishevelled, loose ringlets brushing the bare skin where the pullover strays down over her shoulder.
Hey, she says, as though the idea has just occurred to her, how about we take a trip today? A mystery tour. I choose the place, you drive.
I surprise myself by agreeing.
We climb into the old Mercedes Estat
e, which in spite of its change of ownership still exudes the personality of my aunt: old-style breeding, and a benign, no-nonsense reliability. It chugs along the country lanes with a reassuring purr, which, given its age and lack of tending, is impressive. It is another fine day. Alice sits by my side in the front. She has taken off her shoes and is resting one bare foot on top of the dashboard in a pose of relaxed – but possibly studied – abandon. I let down my window and the scent of mown grass and hedgerow spills into the car.
Following Alice’s instructions (she has yet to divulge where we are going) we pass the village of Cwmyoy, the hill behind it supposedly rent asunder by an earthquake on the day of Christ’s crucifixion, then on towards Llanbedr along a slightly broader lane, its borders bright with purple and yellow flowers.
At Crickhowell we join the main road, and follow the river valley, past Bwlch, where the country opens out, with undulating hills crested by plantations of Norwegian pine foregrounding vistas of the Beacons and conferring on the native landscape the incongruous effect of a hastily-added coniferous tiara. As we descend a long sweep of embankment, Alice points out the little church, which lies just off the road to the right. Wooded hillocks punctuate the terrain, and close by flows the Usk, its water reflecting the midday sun.
I park in the lay-by just beyond the church and we climb the path towards the graveyard. A faded yellow placard advertises the final resting-place of the parish’s most famous son, Henry Vaughan, who called himself The Silurist (after the Silurian tribe that occupied the area during the Roman era), with quotations from his poetic works: it also informs us that the whereabouts of the remains of his twin brother, Thomas, the one-time pastor, are not known.
They say Thomas was sacked from his job here, says Alice, for drunkenness and immorality, but that was a common Roundhead accusation against priests whose sympathies lay with the king. Thomas may have lost his parish because he was a royalist, or else because he was an alchemist, or on both counts. But I’m sure you know all this, being descended from the Vaughans yourself. In case you’re wondering how I got into it, she adds, it’s because of your aunt reading Henry’s poetry to me when I was convalescing at Llys Rhosyn. She convinced me to go back to Cardiff and finish my degree. I wrote my dissertation on Henry Vaughan.
I wondered how much more of the family story Alice knew. About Thomas, specifically. Although he was one of the three or four most important alchemists of his day, information about him was sparse. He published a number of texts or treatises in English in the 1650s under the name of Eugenius Philalethes. Apart from his brief tenure of the parish of Llansantffraed, he is known to have lived in both Oxford and London, finally quitting the capital during the Plague year, 1665, and settling in Albury, near Oxford, where he met his death by inhaling mercury, or else – according to a different account – in an explosion caused while experimenting with heated mercury. A dangerous business either way, sniffing or cooking mercury.
In 1651, he had married a woman about whom nothing is known, except that her first name was Rebecca, but she died seven years later, causing Thomas terrible grief. The marriage had, as far as records tell, been childless. Vaughan is supposed to have been buried on March 1st 1665 at the parish church of Albury, but if this is so, no record remains. The registers at the parish hold no trace of him, and his brother, Henry, records in a letter to one John Aubrey that Thomas died ‘upon an employment for His Majesty’. So, some mystery was evidently attached to the circumstances of both his death and burial; and, to compound the mystery, two years after his alleged death, there appeared in Amsterdam a treatise in Latin called Introitus Apertus Ad Occlusum Regius Palatium, accredited toEiraneus Philalethes. However, scholars are generally agreed that Vaughan was not the author of this tract, on the dubious grounds that he had not previously published in Latin (though he was, of course, quite capable of writing it), and the rather more plausible grounds that he was, by all accounts, even if unproven, already dead.
Family legend, however, is that Thomas faked his own death – no doubt due to some fall-out from that ‘employment for His Majesty’ – and secretly retired to a cottage in an obscure Welsh valley, where, among other things, he had a beautiful and ornate fireplace carved, before dying peacefully of old age.
Bluebells grow in clusters around the peripheries of the graveyard and the encircling hedgerow blossoms with small white buds. I stop to examine some of the more extravagant gravestones as we pass by the church. The first to catch my eye is the statue of a robed and girdled angel, a star on her crown, holding in one outstretched hand the flower she has just plucked from the ground, an image elaborated upon by the words chiselled into the stone beneath her: ‘It was an angel visited the green earth and took the flower away’. The flower was a little boy named Awbery, who had died on the 14th of January, 1905. On the plinth below the statue and its inscription, barely legible beneath a century of moss and damp, are the words: ‘Good Night Darling, Not Good Bye’. Over a century on, the gravestone invokes an Edwardian world populated by characters from Peter Pan. Alice kneels to read the inscription. I cannot tell from her face what she thinks of all this.
In the porch of the church a note informs visitors that a key is available from the warden in the pink house to the side of the churchyard. I can see no pink house from where I am standing, and in any case feel no desire to go and ask to be let inside. The head of a hideously moustachioed man wearing a Norman helmet protrudes from the wall by the door presaging further Gothic aberrations within. Instead we amble through the long grass, sprouting dandelions and elder, towards the churchyard’s celebrity grave, which lies beneath an ancient yew. Henry Vaughan obviously wanted posterity to know of his extreme humility, for his moss-stained epitaph reads SERVUS INUTILIS: PECCATOR MAXIMUS HIC IACEO. Here lies a useless servant and very great sinner. Three curiously bewigged moon-faces illustrate the slab, to what purpose I cannot guess. At the foot of the tomb, looking down over the churchyard towards the Usk, where sheep nibble the grass in a scene of perfect rural tranquillity, stands a brand new bench. I sit on it, while Alice studies the wall that supports the more antique, fallen headstones from around the graveyard. She stops in front of one and gestures to me that I should come and look as well.
I peer at the weathered headstone lamenting the loss of Ann, wife of Thomas Thomas of this parish, who died on the 4th of November, 1857, aged forty-five years. Below was inscribed Gwyliwch, gan hyny, am na wyddoch pa awr daw eich ARGLWYDD. I translate, at Alice’s request: ‘Watch, therefore, because you do not know at what hour your LORD will come’.
I do not know at what hour my Lord will come, Alice repeats, half-statement, half-question, and she seems, for a moment, to be lost, dazzled by the dire sentiment captured in those words. Not far away, with a keen sense of occasion, someone starts operating a chain saw, and its fearful buzzing tears in on the peace of the graveyard. Alice puts her fingers in her ears, again reminding me of a child. If I cannot hear it, it does not exist.
We leave the graveyard and head down towards the river. Woolly white clouds scud above the sheep-dotted hills, suggesting picture-book symmetry. A woman walker approaches: sturdy shoes, riding breeches, sensible blonde hair. A shaggy black and white dog gambols at hectic pace beside her, veering away in a wide arc, black snout hoovering earthward, tail rotating so wildly its hind quarters seem to be about to detach from the body. A creature delirious with life. The woman greets us with an upward jerk of her patrician jaw, and a cursory ‘morning’, as though the time of day were hers, and she were bestowing a portion of it on us. I return her greeting; Alice scowls and kicks a loose divot.
On our way back I decide to buy some meat, and we stop off at the butcher’s in Crickhowell to pick up some lamb. I realise, as I pay, that Alice and I have already moved into a sort of assumed domesticity. I have taken it for granted that we will eat together this evening.
Halfway back to the house, where the road narrows after Llanbedr, the skies open with tropical fervour. Lightn
ing dances on the ridges of the mountains and thunder shakes through the car, making the doors rattle. With my wipers on double speed the windscreen becomes unintelligible, a streaming globular chart that dissolves with each swish of rubber, only to reassemble chaotically in the half-second between. Straining forward in poor visibility, I flick on the headlamps.
I catch sight of the animal only very briefly, its eyes freeze-framed for just the fraction of a second necessary to make a vital difference. I slam on the brakes, causing the car to skid noisily, but harmlessly, into the bank. Alice is out of the car already, and by the time I have struggled across the passenger seat and into the lane she is kneeling, cradling the limp and rain-soaked body of a young sheepdog. I look around. Although it is not possible to see far beyond the hedgerows, I know this stretch of road well. There are no houses nearby and the nearest farm is half a mile up a dirt track. The dog lies in Alice’s arms, its body pumping. I recognise it as the dog I saw in the drive the day before.
Alice looks up at me, wet hair in her eyes, the long pullover making her look as bedraggled as the creature cwtshed against her chest, and she says: I’m bringing it home.
Not ‘back to the house’, or ‘back to Llys Rhosyn’. Home.
She steps towards the car. I squeeze in across the passenger seat ahead of her – the car is halfway into the hedge on the driver’s side – and wait for Alice to settle herself again on the front seat.
You’re going to be all right, Alice tells the dog. I’m going to take you somewhere warm and dry and we’ll get you fixed up. She looks up at me defiantly, although I have said nothing to indicate that I don’t want her bringing the poor creature back with us. But I have already decided that it cannot stay.
The dog is a half-grown border collie, with a dappled grey and white coat and startling eyes, one blue and the other brown. (Like David Bowie, Alice later claims.) It makes a lot of noise to start with, but by the time we have turned up the gravel drive of Llys Rhosyn it has quietened, and seems content in Alice’s arms. We ascertain that there is no bleeding, but one of the back legs might be broken. I phone a vet from the landline as soon as we get into the house (mobile coverage is non-existent in these parts), and am told that the surgery stays open until seven that evening, so we get back into the car and drive to Abergavenny, half an hour away. The rain has eased to a slow drizzle and the sun is already breaking through a fissure in the blanket of cloud. By the time we reach the village of Llanvihangel Crucorney, a rainbow arches across the coppery storm-clouds between the mountains of the Skirrid and the Blorenge.
