Dead Man's Embers (21 page)

Even now she cannot believe how calmly she told him half the story. And how he had not questioned it. She told him that she had become anxious about her health, the condition of her heart, that she did not want anyone to worry about it and had conceived this plan to write to a specialist in London she had heard of when visiting Branwen on a previous occasion. Before Davey had time to think of the gaps in this story, she told him the consequences of her visit and what Mr O'Neill – here she had to be careful not to refer to him as Seb – had said about her father's medicine. Davey was uneasy. He was not at all convinced that this young man would know what he was talking about. What were his qualifications? He wanted Non to take no action until he had been with her to see someone else. There must be other doctors, he said, that would know about these things, they would ask Dr Jones to recommend somebody. He said Non must be exhausted, which was true, and that she should go to bed, for which she was grateful. As she lay in bed she had heard Davey speaking to Meg when she returned, then to Gwydion and Wil in turn, about what had happened.

This morning no one mentioned her absence or her illness. Davey said that he had told Catherine Davies that there would be no Sunday dinner today, which Non hoped would bring the habit to an end. Gwydion looked at her in such a way that she knew he did not entirely believe her story. Meg was uncharacteristically quiet, and Wil gave her a hug, which told her he was pleased she was home, before leaving with his father for the workshop
where they had yet another coffin to finish for the next day. Osian was Osian, away in his own world. She could expect nothing else. She wondered if he had as much as noticed that she had not been there. Everything as usual, seemed to be the message. But everything was not as usual, was it? In London she had learnt things about herself and about her father that might change everything.

‘I said, Non,' Maggie Ellis says, leaning over the wall, ‘I said, have you got any more of that plant I can have for the closet? The honey cart's been running later and later this past week, my closet is stinking again. I'm sure to catch something else.'

Non stands up and looks beyond the shed and closet to the far side of her garden where the woody stems of marjoram sticking up from the dry earth have a few green leaves struggling to grow among them. ‘It's all used up,' she says. ‘Has Meg been giving you some while I've been away?'

‘She said to help myself,' Maggie says. ‘So I did.'

‘You didn't notice you'd had it all?'

‘Thought you'd have another clump somewhere, Non.' Maggie Ellis is not abashed.

‘And you didn't notice everything was getting just a bit dry?' Non empties the last of the water from the can into the earth under the lemon balm and begins to pull the browned leaves from their stems.

‘Too much else to worry about, Non.'

Non does not want to know Maggie Ellis's worries. She does not reply.

‘Everyone's talking about these tramps,' Maggie says, reluctant to let the conversation go.

‘Tramps? Well, they're here every summer. You know that, Mrs Ellis.'

‘More of them than ever, they say,' Maggie says. ‘Not just the usual few. All sorts. Not even Welsh, some of them.'

Non pauses in her gardening. She stands up and stretches her back. She thinks of all the beggars and tramps she saw in London, and the poor man trying to board the train. Did he think he would find more help out in the country than he found in London?

‘Looking for work, do you think?' she asks Maggie.

‘Work-shy, more like,' Maggie says. ‘Want something for nothing. Not like they used to be, always grateful for anything we could give them. They knew we were practically as poor as they were.'

It is the War again, Non thinks, all those men with no work, and with no future, after all the terrible things they have been through.

‘I only give to the ones I know,' Maggie says. ‘Not that I've got much to give. But a billycan of tea and a crust of bread I can still manage.'

‘Is anyone helping?'

‘Helping?' Maggie says. ‘Who is there to help except us? Constable Evans is trying to move them on, the new ones. I don't know where they all came from, all of a sudden.'

Non knows that she has more than most of her neighbours, but even she would find it hard to feed another mouth on a regular basis. She bends to her plants again. She wonders if the advice Seb gave her is beginning to take effect. She had taken one less drop of her lifeblood again this morning – having completely forgotten to take any last night – and she does not feel so weary. But she is being foolish; she is feeling like this because she sat in the train all yesterday, and had a long rest in bed last night. And because she is home.

She reaches the raspberries. They do not seem to be as affected
by the drought of the past three days. She fingers their leaves. She will not need any now for Arianrhod, the baby having safely arrived. She wonders what she can usefully take with her when she travels there tomorrow.

‘Didn't need the leaves, in the end,' Maggie Ellis says.

‘Leaves?' Non struggles to think what Maggie is talking about.

‘The leaves you gave me for my niece – she didn't want them.' Maggie shakes her head and looks mournfully at Non. ‘What can you do, Non? I think she's making a big mistake. But you just can't tell these young girls anything.'

This is what Maggie has been itching to talk about. Non cannot believe the girl is going to have the baby when there is a way out of the dilemma. She raises her eyebrows at Maggie.

‘You can look, Non,' Maggie says. ‘But it's the truth. She had a letter from this man to say he's leaving his family for her. Can you believe such a thing? That a man could be so . . . so . . . treacherous? To leave a wife and children like that? I said to her, you be careful, my girl, if he can do it once he can do it again.' She leans right over the wall, squashing the roses flat. ‘Divorce,' she whispers loudly. ‘He's getting a divorce. Did you ever hear of such a thing? I don't know what the world's coming to, Non, I really don't.'

Non feels the earth shift beneath her feet, a sensation with which she is becoming familiar. Treachery, betrayal, subterfuge – who is more culpable than she? She is trying to make amends to Davey but her efforts are pushing her deeper into perfidy. The penalty, she thinks, of not staying true to yourself. And she has one other she should speak with, to explain why she had abandoned him. While she is at her sister's home over the next few days, she must seek out Owen – to explain, to make things right with him, to assuage her guilt for the way she cast him off.

Branwen's house, the house in which Non was brought up after her father's death, was never home, Non realises. Home was always the place she lived with her father in Trawsfynydd, and now it is the place she shares with Davey and their children, her own place. Branwen's house stands on the Promenade, looking out to sea. Through the bay window Non can see the span of the seafront, from the pier in the north to nearby Constitution Hill where the red valerian fights its way through the shale of the old quarry. Non had spent hours on Constitution Hill when she lived with Branwen, trying to race the cliff train to the top, sneaking into the camera obscura amid the paying visitors, spying on life in the town below her through its lens, seeing everything at a remove. She senses that she still does that, as if she is watching other people's lives unfold in a play for which she is the audience, an outsider looking in at it.

She watches the glint of the sun on the sea. The ripples on the sea's surface can barely be called waves, but the tide moves the water constantly back and forth whether there is a wind or breeze or not. It is a little like Arianrhod's hair, that ripple – how
she envied her niece that hair when they were young! She and Branwen had spent the morning with Arianrhod and the baby, Branwen fussing over him, repeating her refrain of, A month too soon, you must wrap him up well. Non had seen a baby who was obviously full-term – he had all his eyelashes and eyebrows – but said nothing when she saw the plea in Arianrhod's eyes; her wedding had taken place only eight months ago. Despite Branwen's fears, the birth had not been a breech, but she still insisted that Non should have been there. Arianrhod is twenty-five, Non, she had said, old to bear a first child. And Non had pointed out that she was no midwife, and look, was it not obvious that Arianrhod and the child were in the best of health? She and Branwen had paused and looked at the mother and child, who were bound up in a world of their own for that moment, and Non was caught unawares by the pain of loss for something she had never experienced.

They had walked back along the Promenade and stopped for lunch – Catherine Davies would be pleased to hear that word – with some of Branwen's acquaintances. Non felt as out of place among them as she had in London. She did not know where she belonged, that was the truth, and she did not know how to find it out – this place where she should be, this place that she believed she had found when she married Davey. I was younger than Arianrhod is, she had thought as she watched the ladies at their lunch, what did I know that was of any use?

This room with its big window had been Non's favourite when she lived here. This was where she had squabbled with Branwen's eldest daughter, Gwenllian, who had been a few months older but no match for Non's waywardness. Arianrhod and Nêst they had both ignored, but all four of them adored the baby Gwydion. Non remembers playing with him, crawling after him around this big
room, teaching him bad ways, Branwen had said, telling her off, teaching him to be a disobedient little thing like Non herself.

And look at me now, she thinks, as Branwen brings in a pot of tea and deposits it alongside the cups and saucers on the table in the bay of the window. Non sits and begins to pour milk into their cups, then the tea. Branwen walks about the room, plumping up cushions, shaking the curtains at the window, moving books from the writing table to the shelves against the walls then back again, until Non can stand it no longer.

‘Sit down, Branwen. Whatever is the matter with you?'

‘They know – did you see them, did you see the looks? They all know, Non.' Branwen slaps her hand on the table top.

Non had thought it was odd that Branwen was so blind to what was perfectly obvious. They are having to pretend. ‘What does it matter? The baby's perfect, and Arianrhod is well and happy. That's all that matters, isn't it?'

‘That is just typical of you, Non. You don't care about the . . . the . . . niceties of life. You know – those little things that make life run smoothly?' Branwen beats a cushion almost viciously; Non can see the dust rise from it and wonders who Branwen thinks it is. ‘I know it wasn't your fault you were the way you were, Non, but it took me two years – two years! – to stop you telling people your opinion of them. I tried and tried to explain how you have to consider people's feelings. And all that business about seeing inside them. I will never – never, Non! – forget that time you told Reverend Richards's wife he had something wrong with his . . . his . . . well, you know. It makes me cringe even now. People still talk about it!'

Non smiles into her teacup. ‘What happened to him?'

‘He died, of course, eventually. But not before he went mad with it, just like that English king, George the something.' Branwen
leans down close to Non. ‘It isn't funny, Non. And it wasn't funny then. His poor wife! They had to move away in the end. The shame of it was too much. I don't know what happened to her after he died, poor woman.'

‘It wasn't funny that he preached the opposite of what he was apparently doing, Branwen. Was it?' Not that Non had understood any of that at the time.

‘Oh, you're impossible.' Branwen deflates, and sits in the chair opposite Non at the table and glances down at the seafront. ‘You were such a handful. And so righteous. All Father's fault, the way he brought you up like that. And I know you were right about old Richards – but you have to think about other things, too. His wife, and us. We have to live here, remember?'

Non knows her sister, she knows all this springs from her anxieties about Arianrhod and her new grandchild, and that Arianrhod's husband is thinking of moving them all away because he is trying for posts at colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, and is more than likely to be given one soon. He is ambitious, Branwen has told Non. She places her cup in its saucer and goes to her sister and hugs her.

‘Get away with you,' Branwen says. But her voice is softer, less anxious.

‘It'll be a five-minute wonder, this early baby,' Non says, ‘you'll see.'

‘Prys,' Branwen says. ‘Her father is so pleased that she's named the baby for him. He's telling everyone!'

‘Prys Bach,' Non says. ‘He looks a bit like Old Prys, did you notice?'

‘Old Prys!' And now Branwen smiles, if fleetingly. ‘Don't let him hear you call him that.'

The elder Prys had been kind to the little interloper Branwen
had brought into their household all those years ago. Non had been fonder of her gentle brother-in-law than of her sister when she had lived with them. ‘It must have been hard for you and Prys to take me in.' It is a statement rather than a question.

Branwen becomes serious again. She toys with tongs in the sugar bowl. ‘It wasn't you, Non, it was the way you'd been brought up. You were . . . well, almost uncontrollable. You'd do as you liked and say what you liked. I didn't know what to do with you.'

This is an old refrain, Non knows it well, but it may be an opportunity to question her sister. ‘Why did you take me in, Branwen – immediately, the way you did? One day Father was dead and the next I was living with you is all I remember. Didn't you take time to consider it?'

‘I promised Mother,' Branwen says. ‘Poor Mother. She had such a bad pregnancy with you. Well, she was far too old to be bearing another child – but it seems Father was one of those men you hear about who won't take no for an answer. She wanted to be sure you would be looked after. I'd not long had Gwenllian, and she asked me to have you, too.'