The Travellers and Other Stories (16 page)

He began to scrabble between his bandy legs for the cuffs of his shirt, telling himself that as soon as he was dressed he would climb up into his old buggy and head off back up the valley and once he was home he would think about what to do, whether he should sit there on his veranda and wait until they came for him, or if he should leave tonight and go somewhere they wouldn't be able to find him, or if he should come back in the morning and talk to Boyce and explain things to him in his own words so he would understand. He bent to the chair where he'd laid his clothes and picked up his neck-cloth, looped it behind his dipped head and pushed his arms into the sleeves of his dangling shirt, and he would have left then, probably without saying another word, probably just reaching out for his hat and heading for the door, but by the time he'd raised himself again and looked up into the room to where Susan Boyce was standing, she had begun to unhook her bodice.

She was loosening her skirt and pulling her chemise over her head and undoing the tapes of her petticoats and then she was letting the whole lot slide to the floor around her feet on top of the broken remains of the teapot and its lake of cooling water until she was standing before him in nothing but her woollen vest and her cotton drawers, and then she was taking those off too. She did it quickly, hurriedly, as if she thought she might never again get the chance to show him, as if she thought, even now, he might not be on her side.

She looked smaller, without her clothes, different in every possible way, turning in front of him, displaying the split, puffy flesh of her thighs and buttocks, the mottled green, black and yellow of her belly, the long, weeping purplish thing that started under the hair at her neck and ran down the back of her like a half-made ditch. She came towards him, stepping through the puddle of tea and over the piled-up heap of her things. She took his small brown hand and lifted it to her cheek and closed her eyes like someone who hadn't known till now how tired they were, and then she asked him, would he help her, please, to dig the hole.

ON COMMERCIAL HILL

HE MET HER
, my English grandmother, on a chilly summer afternoon on the beach at Southerndown. She was sitting on a rock, on top of her coat, smoking a cigarette and he—I heard this from someone, from Daddy or Mair—was enchanted. He asked her if he could sit down next to her and, no doubt because he was such a big and handsome man, she said yes, and he lit a cigarette of his own and she told him her name, which was Agnes, and he told her his, which was Will.

That day the two of them walked along the road from Southerndown to Ogmore, and from Ogmore over the dunes at Merthyr Mawr to Ewenny, where they watched a pot being fired with a blue treacle glaze, and before she left him to go back to the hotel where she worked, she let him hold her hand.

He came back the next week, and the week after that, and every day that they didn't see each other they wrote to each other, and at the end of four weeks he brought her home for the first time, up on the train to the valleys, and it was there that she discovered something about him that he hadn't told her. Perhaps she overheard it somewhere, or maybe someone made a point of telling her, thinking it was something she ought to know. Anyway, when she asked him about it, he waved his hand and told her it was nothing. It was a daft embarrassing thing that had happened a long time ago, a story about him some people still liked to tell, but it wasn't important and it didn't mean anything any more—the whole thing was a remnant of his youth, something from so long ago he could hardly believe he'd had anything to do with it. Most people had forgotten it and so had he and if anyone ever mentioned it again she should take no notice because he never did any more, and when she said, ‘Really?' he said, ‘Yes, really.'

Three months after that they were married.

He was thirty-five years old, quite a bit older than she was, and his full name was William Illtyd Parry.

William and Agnes Parry.

They moved into a house on Victoria Street, next to the Co-op, and had three children: the two boys, quickly, first my father Emyr, then my Uncle Tudor, then my Aunty Mair, three years later. I still have a photograph of Will with Mair—at Southerndown again. They are both eating ice-cream. She is wearing a pink ruched bathing suit with a frill around her bottom and he has rolled up his trousers to just below the knee and he is actually wearing a knotted handkerchief on his head. I never knew people really did that till I saw that picture of him. He is holding her hand. He looks happy. He does not look like someone who wants for anything. ‘It is enough for me,' he seems to be saying with his sunburned face and his big smile, ‘to be standing here on the beach at Southerndown in the sunshine with my baby daughter eating ice-cream.'

He worked at the marshalling yard, and at some point he bought the four-room house on Commercial Hill, the one I visited as a child when Agnes was still living there, and people have told me that when he talked about his life at that time he spoke of good suppers and sweet bathed babies and the peace and quiet of the evening. It gave him joy, he used to say, to walk down the high pavements of the sloping streets and feel the mountain in his back and the closeness of the houses in their long staggered rows, the lighted windows of the shops. He never understood why anyone wouldn't want to live their whole life there. He could not think of a better place on earth.

And then the day came when he was promoted at the marshalling yard and he was sent off in the evening to the Red Cow for an hour because Agnes and the children were getting a party ready for him—sandwiches and paper decorations and a cake with candles on it because even though it wasn't his birthday the children begged for candles and Agnes laughed and said, Oh all right then, we can have candles. It was supposed to be a surprise but he knew what they were up to. Mair had spent most of the day behind the settee with a bottle of glue and a pair of scissors and a packet of crêpe paper. All afternoon he'd heard the sound of her trying to be quiet. The boys had shut themselves in the back with Agnes and for hours there'd been a clatter of pans and spoons and jolly shrieks and shouts.

And now he was sitting by himself at one of the brown varnished tables in the lounge bar of the Red Cow when his friends came in, Tom Bara and Cy Fish and Jack Midnight and Will America, all of them looking shifty and serious, and when he said to Tom Bara, ‘What is it then, Tom?' Tom looked sideways at the others and then at his feet and said, ‘She is back.'

I have often pictured him, nineteen years old, standing there that day in the chapel: dark wavy hair greased neatly in place, neck scrubbed and pink from the bath, starched white collar; waiting. Standing there like an idiot, red-faced and sweating for an hour and a half; everyone whispering and coughing and shuffling their feet and turning their heads to see if she'd arrived yet; some people looking at each other and nodding to indicate that they'd seen it coming, a girl like that. The minister eventually touching his arm and saying, Come on then Will boy, perhaps it's time to call it a day.

‘Where is she?' he said now to Tom Bara. Tom shook his head and looked at his feet and then over at the door that divided the lounge bar of the Red Cow from the passage outside.

‘Tell her to bugger off, Will,' said Tom. ‘Tell her she has come too late.'

At the house Agnes said to Tudor, ‘Go fetch your father, we are ready.'

But Tudor was fussing with the cake, and so was Emyr, both of them trying to fit the last of the candles into its metal flower.

‘You then,' she called out from the back to Mair, still busy in the front room with her decorations. So it was Mair who ran off up the hill to the Red Cow to call him home; Mair who ran up the hill to the opaque glass door between the outside passage and the lounge bar and found a stranger in a brown hat at the threshold; her father rising slowly from his chair, all his silent friends behind him.

Mair remembers standing there, bits of crêpe paper stuck to her cardigan and her small gluey hands. She remembers that he looked at her and closed his eyes; that a breeze blew in from the passageway, lifting a few strands of his hair, which then settled in a slightly different place, lightly across his forehead. And what she also remembers—Mair who is old now, Mair whose grasp of the here-and-now is getting frailer by the day but whose memory of the past is clear and sharp and fierce and abiding—what Mair remembers is him stepping forward in the stone-still room towards the door, opening wide his arms to her and saying, ‘My lovely girl.'

JUBILEE

STANDING NOW AT
her shoulder, no longer caring much about his future, Arthur Pritt began to speak.

In a quiet voice he apologised for the tediousness of the day, for the marching bands and the pipers, for the choirs and the speeches and the dreadful cacophony of the morris dancers on the cobbles; for the boring gifts. In a whisper he told her he wished they'd been able to conjure something new for her, something splendid and fascinating and unthought of instead of the dull nonsense she must have seen a thousand times before in a thousand other places.

At ten o'clock he had been at the station with the rest of the town to greet her and had known not to expect a happy smiling face. He'd known to expect something miserable and grim-looking, and with her short neck and her pouchy eyes and her sad downturned mouth she'd reminded him, emerging slowly from her compartment, of a hundred-year-old tortoise he and Alice had once seen at the bottom of a dusty pit at the zoo in Calcutta.

He'd wondered if it was true what people said, that she had her husband's clothes laid out for him every morning, his stockings and his shoes, his diamond star, his sash and garter, as if she could not let go of the hope that he would come back to her one day from the dead.

Arthur had never laid out any of Alice's clothes.

He had some of her things that he'd brought back in his trunk from India, a dress and a cotton wrapper that smelled of soap and dust and heat and happiness. He looked at them often, hanging in the armoire in his room, and most days he lifted a sleeve or a hem and held it for a few moments between his fingers. It had never occurred to him though, to lay out any of her things, in spite of his dream that she would come strolling in one day wanting to put them on.

Ahead, in the square, the pipers in their furry headgear were still at it; he could hear the dismal grating moan of their instruments. The town had been informed that Her Majesty was very fond of a bagpipe but looking at her now, at her grey stony profile, he found that hard to believe. There was the same look on her face as there had been all day—the same look as when she'd sat enduring the shrill repeated notes of the Manchester Flute Band; as when she'd had to put up with the morris men cantering back and forth across the cobbles like escaped lunatics in their noisy wooden shoes, shaking their foolish ribbons and their bells; it was the same look she'd worn through all the shouts and cheers and hoofbeats and the pealing of the church bells; it was a look that seemed to be asking,
When for pity's sake is this all going to end?

How small she looked on the town's makeshift throne!

How bored and miserable and alone, how remote and marooned and cut-off from the world.

All day he'd found himself wishing they'd thought of something in every way more exciting and unusual. Fireworks perhaps. Acrobats, magicians. Anything that would enliven her sad doughy face and bring a sparkle of interest to her half-closed eyes and help her forget, just for a moment, that after all these years she was still bereft.

And then the moment had arrived for the presentation of the gifts—Mr. Boucher's Morocco-bound
History of the Town
, Mr. Binns's map of Lancashire, Mrs. Maudesely's commemorative cake—the moment when he, alderman Arthur Pritt, was to stand at the old Queen's shoulder and murmur a few words of introduction and explanation as each new offering was brought up onto the platform.

For a while he had held Boucher's
History of the Town
and quietly turned its gilt-edged pages, hunting for items that might kindle her interest or otherwise lift her leaden spirits. Obediently he had highlighted the illustrations of the linoleum factory, the wallpaper works, the brewery, the old bridge and the new bridge, the Priory and the lumpy piece of ground below the castle where the Roman Baths had once been. The Queen had continued, though, to sit like a stone, a poor unhappy tortoise, and as Binns's map was lifted up onto the crimson-covered platform and propped up before her between two rows of greenhouse plants in their earthenware pots, Arthur had decided he could no longer go on, and glancing quickly at her son the Prince who stood next to his mother on her other side, he began, in a soft whisper close to her ear, to apologise.

His name was Arthur Pritt, he said, and he was sorry for the day.

He was sorry they had not thought of something beautiful and exciting. Fireworks perhaps or acrobats. A magician. He said he wished that in the many, many meetings he'd attended with the other aldermen and the Town Clerk and the Treasurer and the Mayor, and in all the letters that had been exchanged between the Corporation and her Secretary of State on the question of how things should be organised, they had not thought of arranging things a little differently for once.

The Queen's face didn't move. Her mouth seemed locked by its downturned corners into the deepest and most immovable frown.

Binns was kneeling now on the carpet, indicating with a malacca baton the course of the river through the town. On the far left-hand side of the platform, Arthur could see Mrs. Maudesely's vast three-tiered cake on its trolley, ready to make its approach. The Queen had shifted her head slightly and was looking at it, at its profusion of thistles and shamrocks and roses, its expanse of hard white icing like plaster of Paris, and at the lonely little sugar statue of herself balanced on the topmost layer. She looked away, as if the cake had depressed her even more than the bagpipes and the morris dancers. It seemed to produce a lowering effect on her spirits, to have to see herself up there on the cake looking so tiny and isolated and aloof. She rested her chin on her hand, her eyelids drooped. Arthur wondered if she'd heard what he'd said about him being sorry for it all; perhaps she was about to turn to someone from her household and order them to remove him immediately from the platform. Instead she turned a little towards him and said, ‘Tell me a story, Mr Pritt.'