Candlenight (19 page)

   
He bought them all drinks.

   
They told him about the
village.

   
They told him it had about two
hundred and fifty people, if you included the outlying farms. It had two shops,
the general store and the post office. One garage, one school, one church.

   
They told him the original name
of the village was Y Groesfan—the crossing. But when non-conformism had taken
Wales in the nineteenth century a chapel had been
built and the name shortened to Y Groes—the cross—because it seemed more holy.
When Giles said he hadn't noticed a chapel, Dilwyn Dafis smiled. Glyn, who
apparently was something of an historian, said non-conformism had been a
passing phase here, although nobody had bothered to change the name back.

   
Giles wondered briefly why the
old name should have referred to a "crossing place" when the village
was in fact a dead-end and apparently always had been. And would, he hoped, be
the end of his own search for a spiritual home. He also wondered—very
nervously—how these chaps would react to
that
.
He realized there was only one way to find out.

   
"I suppose." he said,
as steadily as he could manage, "that you must he pretty sick about all
these English people moving in."

   
"What English is
that?" Aled said. He took a cloth from a shelf below the bar and began to
polish glasses.

   
"Well, you know ... I
mean, we were in Pontmeurig this morning and at least half the people we met, half
the shopkeepers for instance, were incomers. I just hadn't realised it was that
bad. I mean, it must irritate you. surely."
   
"Ah, well. see. that is Pontmeurig."
said Dilwyn Dafis.
   
"Pont is different." said
Glyn. "They are always moaning about the English in Pont. But we don't
moan about them here, do we boys? No cause to."

   
Aled Gruffydd shook his head.
Glyn drained his beer glass and Giles seized the opportunity to buy everyone another
drink. He was dying to ask all kinds of questions but settled on just one more
as the glasses were passed over and the three Welshmen said "Cheers"
rather than
Iechyd Da!
out of
deference to their English companion. They really were remarkably accommodating.
Indeed if everyone was as gently hospitable as these chaps and Mrs. Huws and
Mrs. Hywels it was really no wonder the country was being
overrun by the English.

   
But they hadn't been like this
in Pontmeurig. Only in Y Groes. A special place.

   
"So, what." Giles
asked, "is the actual percentage of incomers in Y Groes? I mean, you know,
roughly."
   
Dilwyn Dafis looked puzzled.
"How's that, like?"
   
"What he means." Aled said,
"is how many English compared to Welsh."
   
"In this villager?"
   
"Right," said Giles.
   
"What English?" said Dilwyn.

   
"You mean—?" The
truth hit Giles like a brick. "You mean that the entire immigrant population
of Y Groes is—"

   
Glyn smiled, his large front
teeth standing out like a marble cemetery in the moonlight.

   
"—
us
?" said Giles.

   
"Well, there we are,"
said Dilwyn Dafis, raising his glass to Giles and smiling slowly, "Makes
you a bit of a novelty, like, isn't it?"

Chapter XXIII

Claire climbed into the riverside field by a convenient stile to
photograph a lone sheep, somebody's initials SE scrawled across its back in
lurid crimson, like a splash of fresh blood.
The sheep was lying apart from the rest of the flock, benign head lifted,
gazing beyond the field to the village street.
   
Through the lens, Claire followed the
sheep's gaze but saw only a litter bin attached to a low wall with grass
growing out of the top. She took a picture, the sheep dark in the
foreground.

   
The river was beautiful. It
splashed and fizzed amiably over the rocks, calling out so strongly to Claire
that she just had to scramble down the bank, camera bouncing around on
its leather strap, until her feet slipped into the soft, cool water. One shoe
floated off and she had to rescue it. Then, on impulse, she put the blue shoe
back in the river and took a photograph of the clear water swirling gently
around it, in the background the river-washed stonework of a bridge support.

   
The river, the bridge, her
shoe—part of the scene.

   
She should have come to see
him. If she'd known about him wanting to take her, just her, for that walk,
down the lane to the village, past the church; if she'd known that, she would
have come. She imagined him talking to her softly, musically, in Welsh—how
beautiful. If she'd been told about that, she would have come. No doubt her
mother had thought of that. Bitch. Until that phone call Claire had assumed
she'd never met her grandfather, never been to Y Groes in her life. No wonder
the village called out to her to
come back.

   
Bitch.

   
Y Groes—always "some
ghastly God-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere" or "some damp,
dreary hellhole." If only she'd known . . .

   
It was her own fault. Such a
placid child, people always said. Incurious about everything until her teens,
when she began to take photographs and the world opened out like a huge flower.
And then always too busy: leaving home, catching up on everything she'd missed,
carving out a career in what then was still seen as a man's world. And forgetting
for years at a time that she had a grandfather on her mother's side, an
estranged counterpart to good old Reg with his garden and his golf.

   
And here, unknown to her—all
this.

   
Bitch.

   
Sitting on the river bank, in
the lengthening shadow of the bridge, strange, conflicting emotions crowded in
on Claire and she wept silently. Not soul-wrenching, God-cursing tears, as
often wept by Bethan, whom she did not as yet know, but quiet tears of regret.

Another shadow fell across her and she looked up, a tall figure blocking
the dying sun.
   
It's him.

   
Claire's heart leapt in fear.
Fear and—and longing.

   
The voice was soft and high and
sibilant, like the wind in a cornfield.

   
"I'm afraid I don't know your
name. So I shall just call you Miss Rhys. How are you. Miss Rhys?"

Chapter XIV

Three-fifteen. Home time.

   
Bethan was bustling about the
school hall attending to children's major crises: the four-year-old boy whose
shoelace had come undone, the girl of six with a broken nail.

   
"Try not to get it wet or
it will come off," she said, adjusting the Band-Aid round the child's
finger then turning to help a small boy who'd buttoned his coat all wrong.

   
A handful of mothers were
waiting for the smallest children. They watched her with indulgent smiles, none
of them rushing to help her. Perhaps they thought this was the
kind of therapy she needed to cure her of widowhood.

   
The mothers took their kids and
left, leaving Bethan with just three small pupils waiting to be collected and a
strange woman standing hesitantly in the doorway, clutching one of
those slim, garish packages in which prints and negatives are returned from
processing.

   
"Mrs. Freeman," Bethan
remembered. "You rang this morning. You wanted to see me."

   
"Hello," the woman
said. She looked down at the photo envelope. "I usually do my own or take
them to someone I know in London," she said half-apologetically.
"I've been to one of those fast-print places in Aberystwyth. Just, you know,
wanted ... to see how they'd turned out."

   
She seemed embarrassed. Bethan
couldn't think why. She smiled at the woman. "Come in," she said.
"Try not to fall over Angharad, she thinks she's a sheepdog."

   
Buddug had left early, to Bethan's
relief. In the emptying school hall, where an electric kettle was coming gently
to the boil on the teacher's table, Bethan looked at the woman and the woman
looked at Bethan. They were around the same age, one dark, one blonde, one
Welsh, the other . . . well, very English. Bethan thought, but who could really
say?

   
"I'm still rather feeling
my way in the village," the blonde one said. She was dressed like a very
urban explorer, in fashionably-baggy green trousers and red hiking boots.
"I don't know quite how I should behave."

   
Good heavens, Bethan thought,
they aren't usually like that, the English, when they move into Pontmeurig,
joining this and organising that and introducing themselves everywhere and even
buying people drinks, sometimes.

   
"Don't be silly," she
said, pouring boiling water into a chunky earthenware pot. "Sit down. Have
a cup of tea."

   
"Thank you," the
judge's granddaughter said, lowering herself, quite gracefully under the
circumstances into a tiny chair designed for a seven-year-old. "That's
kind of you, Miss Sion."

   
"Mrs. McQueen."

   
"Oh. I'm terribly sorry, I
was told—"
   
"Bethan. Call me Bethan."

   
"Oh. Yes. Thank you. I'm Claire
Freeman, but everyone seems to know that." She laughed. "Although
they all seem to call me Miss Rhys—the women in the post office and Mr. ap
Siencyn, the rector. My grandfather, you see, he was—"

   
"I know," Bethan
said. "I'm afraid I never really met him. A bit before my time. He was
staying in his house most of the time, when I was here. He used to study a lot,
people said. In the village. I believe, he was very much . . . well, revered."

   
This had the desired effect of
pleasing Claire Freeman, who told Bethan how wonderful it had been to discover
in the cottage and in the village this whole new aspect of her ancestry, long
hidden, like the family treasure.

   
"But you said you didn't
really know him," Claire said. "So you can't have been here all that
long yourself."

   
Pouring tea into a yellow mug,
Bethan told her she'd been here nearly a year, then left, then come back. No
she hadn't been here all that long, when you added it up.

   
"But it's different for
you." Claire said, "and that's what I've come about. I suppose."
     
She'd opened the envelope and was
flicking through the photographs without looking at them, still rather ill at
ease, the child, Angharad, scampering around her feet.

   
"Milk?" said Bethan.

   
"Just a little."

   
"Sugar?"

   
Claire passed. "
Dim siwgwr
. Is that right?"

   
"Yes," said Bethan.
smiling a little, passing her the mug of tea. "But only if you're trying to
lose weight. Can I see?"

   
"I haven't really looked at
them yet. They won't be very good. They're just snaps."

   
Bethan pushed back her hair and
adjusted her glasses. She opened the envelope and saw clear water swirling
around a bright blue shoe. It was a startling picture. She drew it out and
below it saw the judge's cottage, twilit. Then she saw the village street
looking very still, with deep shadows: various close-ups of the timber-framed
houses—including the tiny terraced cottage where she and Robin had lived, with
the setting sun floating in its upstairs front window.
   
Then a solitary sheep, a view of the
darkening hills, of the rigidly-upright figure of the rector standing in the
grass above the river, of Mair Huws outside her shop, of the church tower
braced against the dying light and photographed from a steep angle that made it
look as if it was falling towards you.

   
She felt something at once in
the photograph. This woman had plucked ripened images of Y Groes out of the air
like apples from a tree, and caught the glow.

   
"They're wonderful" Bethan
said. 'They're like something out of a magazine. No, that's inadequate, that
cheapens them."

   
"Oh dear." said
Claire. "I was hoping they'd be like holiday snaps. I can't seem to take
snaps anymore."

   
She looked so seriously disappointed
that Bethan had to laugh, quite liking her now. Out of the window she saw two mothers
appear at the gate, and excused herself and rounded up the remaining three
children—"
Dewch yma
, Angharad, wuff
wuff'—gently pushing them out of the door into the playground, waving to the mothers.