The Gift (15 page)

“And then … well, he did not go away that day, nor that year, not walking out of the house, I mean. But that was when I lost him. And when there were arguments after, ordinary arguments, there was always that underneath. Those nights I would lie awake and see, as clear as I see you, Mrs. Thomas smirking on my doorstep and I'd feel the sticky flour all up my arms. And the arguments grew more bitter, and came more often, until … yes, he was after us to spend the money we'd put by, Dadda and I. He said the farm was too small for him, and he wanted to take in more of the hill for fields, and buy more animals, and build a big barn, all modern. But we did not want the change or the risk, we wanted to go on living quietly until we should die quietly. So then it came around to all that about how I had murdered his father, and I grew so angry that I said he must go—I do not remember the words I said, only my throat all tired, and me running to the door at last to try to stop him, and him shouting again at me and walking down the hill. And after that, why, of course Dadda was my husband and we had no children. There are many couples live like that.”

She sounded very tired now, dried out with the effort of recalling that old sorrow. Her voice had no sap in it, her eyes were closed and the good fingers of her right hand turned and turned the flat silver ring on her left, unconscious of what they were doing.

“It does not sound very much,” she said suddenly. “But to think of him standing there on that platform, telling my story to all those people, just to get a few shillings for my shame.”

“Penny says he's a good man,” said Davy. “She's the one who gets angriest with him, but I think that's because she understands him best and loves him most.”

“I have never told you, but you are the image of him. It's a knife in my side sometimes to see you stand in a doorway, and say something and laugh, with your head held just his fashion.”

Davy didn't like the idea.

“I'm
not
him,” he said. “I can't imagine me doing what he did, or some of the other things he's done to Mum and us. But … you know, Dad isn't what he
does
. All that's just something that happens to him on the surface; but inside … you know you sometimes see the moon on a windy night with the clouds racing over it and it looks as though it's the moon that's rushing along when really it's standing still—he's like that.”

“He has only to ask my pardon and he will be welcome here.”

“Couldn't you start it off—write him a letter? Please, Granny.”

“The new eggs are in the yellow crock.”

“Aren't there any of yesterday's?”

“Look in the blue one, then.”

And of course Granny would know exactly how many eggs had been left from yesterday, just as she'd know that Davy had enough sense to prefer them. It was her way of saying neither yes or no.

Perhaps she wrote. It didn't matter, except to her and Dad.

Penny was listening to Radio One next afternoon and caught a familiar word in the news bulletin. She came rushing down the steep home field to where Dadda and Ian and Davy were repairing the lambing pens, ready for the year's first lambs, which always seem to be born just as the worst storms of January set in. This was bitter work, standing still in the nagging wind and tying poles and hurdles into position. You can't knock a nail in properly, or lash cord firm, if you are wearing gloves, so Davy had no feeling at all in his fingers when he heard Rud's intelligent little yap, that meant something of interest was happening. In the next instant he heard Penny's shout, too, and saw her careering down the slope. He was glad of the excuse to straighten up and search for warmth with his hands in his trouser pockets. Penny started gabbling before she reached them.

“It was on the radio! There's been a bomb in our house!”

Dadda and Ian stopped work, too.

“I'm sure it must be ours,” she panted. “It said Spenser Mills and a key witness in the bank raid case.”

“Where was Mum?” said Ian.

“They're both okay. Miraculous escape, it said. It went off at ten o'clock this morning. The house was wrecked. But there was no one in it. Attempted murder, the police say. They think the timing device went wrong, otherwise …”

“He wouldn't have understood it,” muttered Davy.

“Who?”

“Wolf. Mr. Black Hat had time bombs. He used them to blow up the site generators.”

“What the hell are you on about?” said Ian. Davy shrugged and looked at Penny.

“Ian,” said Dadda, “wouldn't you like to get on your bicycle and ride down to Mr. Prichard's? He will let you use his telephone and then you could try to find out what has happened, couldn't you?”

It was almost an order, which was why he made it sound like a question. Ian jerked his head at Davy, telling him to come, too. Together they plodded up the field.

“Now,” said Ian, as soon as they were out of earshot, “what's he been up to this time?”

“Oh, you know that bit in the newspaper about me and Penny and the photographs I took …”

“Didn't bother to read it. Nothing to do with me.”

“Well … Look, there isn't time …”

Ian scowled, but indeed they were nearly at the farm and it was an understood rule that they didn't talk about Dad when Granny might overhear. Ian got into his leathers, Davy put on two extra layers of clothing, the bike started first kick.

Ian went carefully down the lane. Even in midwinter you couldn't be sure that some idiot tourist wouldn't come dicing up the slope with his family lurching around in the backseat as he took the tight bends. Davy clutched hard at his brother's waist, leaning into the corners as he'd been taught; perhaps he'd been too numbed with cold down at the lambing pens, but now the shock of news, if it was true, chilled him from the inside as much as the whistling air did from the outside. When he had hoped that Wolf would escape, he had never thought of him coming back for revenge, or to prevent Dad from going into the witness-box. Wolf would do
anything
if he believed, in the turmoil of his mind, that it would help Mr. Black Hat.

Suddenly Ian pulled into one of the little widenings which had been made to allow cars to pass in the narrow lane. He switched the engine off and said, “Okay. Fire ahead.”

“Well,” said Davy, “those photographs you didn't look at, the reason why I was there at all that morning was …”

He had been half thinking of concealing from Ian that Dad had been at any stage an accomplice. After all, he might easily have stumbled on the plot somehow. But Davy didn't like the idea of not trusting Ian completely, so he told him the whole story, leaving out only the existence of the gift. Ian wouldn't understand about that. Trying to tell the story fast, he made a mess of getting events in their right order. When he finished, Ian laughed.

“You've got to hand it to him,” he said. “Dad's consistent, if nothing else. So now he's lost the house after all. What about his job?”

“Penny says if he really wants to keep it, he'll manage somehow. I wish he could be friends with Granny again.”

“It probably wasn't all his fault,” said Ian surprisingly. “Gran's a dear old biddy, but she's a moral thug as well. I don't think she's ever given way over anything.”

“Don't you remember, the first time we came, I twisted my ankle in the quarry and she wanted Dadda to whip Penny and you said you'd never forgive her if he did? You shouted at her, and Dadda made her change her mind.”

“Lord, that was long ago. I'd completely forgotten that. Okay, let's get on.”

He kicked the starter, but the half-warm engine was temperamental and he was still kicking when a glossy dark car rounded the lower bend and drummed powerfully up the hill; by the lamp on its roof, though it wasn't flashing, they could see it was a police car. As it whisked past the bay where they were waiting, Davy saw a face in the rear window and a hand waving, but the car was gone before he realized that it had been Mum. Ian kicked again, swearing, and the motor caught. He swung the bike around in the lane and roared up after the police car, arriving in time to find Mum had just got out and was standing in front of the car in her yellow check trouser suit and giving little shrieks of protest against the cold.

Ian took off his goggles to kiss her and showed her into the house, which left Davy to watch Dad climbing slowly out of the car. He moved like an old man to stand in the lane for a while, looking up and down the valley. He sighed and shrugged, then turned to smile at Davy; but even that seemed an effort.

“Granny will be pleased to see you,” said Davy, trying to make it easy for him.

“Cup of tea, Bob?” said Dad to the police driver. When the offer was accepted, he had to go in, too.

“I bet he's always dreamed of driving up the lane in his own Rolls,” said Penny. The parents' arrival had meant a reshuffle of rooms, with Davy and Ian sharing the icy attic. Penny and Davy were up there, making the beds.

“And he'd have a bank account big enough to buy twenty new barns,” she went on, “as well as color tellies in all the bedrooms.”

“I expect so,” said Davy, who had in fact seen several versions of that dream during the last few years. He didn't want to talk about anything to do with poor Dad just now.

“Mum's extraordinary, isn't she?” said Penny. “She seemed to hit it off with Gran, just like that, and you wouldn't have thought they'd have anything in common at all.”

“Provided she doesn't try to help with the cooking,” said Davy.

“You'll have to take her for walks. Trot her up a few hills while Gran and I are cooking. Then she'll be able to eat as much as she likes, too.”

Mum throve. Ian drove her once into Llangollen to buy warmer clothes, but apart from that she didn't seem at all restless. Perhaps having her own house bombed had satisfied her need for drama for a while; she was content with the old gossip of the valley, which Granny was happy to relate for hours, and could soon tell the five different Thomas families apart, which Davy had never learned to do. She had once done half a course of evening classes in mending china, and after supper put together several old cups and teapots whose pieces Gran had carefully stored away. She didn't seem to miss the telly, or the beauty parlor, or Spenser Mills at all.

But Dad was moody and silent, as silent as Dadda. It wasn't just the old quarrel with Granny—they treated each other very formally. It was something to do with the explosion. Penny was probably right, Davy thought—that's how you would react if all your running and dreaming brought you to this end, back to your boyhood home in failure, with your own house rubble and the years of your manhood a meaningless waste.

On the third morning Dad went out to walk on the hills alone, brushing off Mum's puppyish attempt to go with him. He was not back by lunch when the weather, which had been cold and dry with brief powdery snow showers, changed and became a foul cold sleet out of the northwest. The visibility dropped to a few yards; the paths had changed in thirty years; he missed his way home. A stranger would have been lost altogether in the bare and houseless hills, but in late afternoon he stumbled across a remembered landmark and worked his way back in the last light, drenched and exhausted. Mum had a fine time playing hospital nurse, putting him to bed in hot blankets and feeding him gruel, but by next morning the play was real and his temperature high enough for Ian to ride down to the Prichards and telephone for the doctor. It turned out that Dad had developed a mild form of pneumonia; there was some talk of moving him to hospital, but the beds were all full in Llangollen, so in the end they decided to keep him where he was.

In the dusk of the following evening Wolf came to the farm.

10

DAVY

Mum decided to go for a walk and look for birds. Davy had to go with her, for fear that she might get lost, too. She marched across the hillsides with a bird book in one hand, Ian's binoculars around her neck and a transparent umbrella held sideways to shield her complexion from the chapping wind. She was determined to see something unusual, but almost nothing moved on the drear, dun, snow-streaked slopes. At last a couple of largish birds, alarmed no doubt by the umbrella, rose and flapped sulkily away into the distance. Mum identified them as blackcock, local to rare in those parts; Davy, no puritan about birds, agreed for the sake of her pleasure, though privately he thought they were some sort of crow. Apart from them they saw nothing but a snowy owl which turned out to be a sheep skull and a red fox which was only a rusty bit of corrugated iron. They trudged home, cheered by the blackcock.

“Look, there's a bear,” said Mum.

“Honestly, Mum, they're extinct.”

“Well, it could've got out of a zoo. Or somebody might've had it for a pet and brought it out here when it got a bit too large for the flat. People can be ever so foolish.”

Davy peered along the sloping flank of Moel Mawr. Already the early winter dusk was beginning to suck the color out of the landscape, but the thing Mum had pointed at was black enough to show up sharply, a mysterious and unidentifiable shape, obviously alive. It could quite well have been a bear, but then it moved and became a cow—Bella. Bella, who, for reasons only a cow would appreciate, had chosen to break out and go maundering up across the fodderless hill.

“Drat her,” said Davy. “You go home, Mum. Tell Dadda I'll bring her in and milk her.”

In winter Dadda kept his cows in the home paddock, where there was a shed for shelter, and ferried their fodder out to them. Even in a heavy snowfall he didn't have space to house them in the farmyard. It was typical of Bella to break out now. Probably, since Davy was out for his walk and Ian was down in Llangollen playing with the machine guns, Dadda had simply opened the gates and called, expecting the cows to come in their accustomed turns; and Bella, who was at the low point of her milk yield and therefore not yet uncomfortable, had taken the chance to go for a jaunt. As she was the last to be milked, Dadda would be missing her about now.