Cat and Mouse (2 page)

“I wonder how wrong we are,” said Miss Friendly-wise, laughing. She stood on tiptoe to look into the office mirror and skewered two preposterous roses into the crown of her hat. “I’ll have to go and look her up if I spend my holiday in Wales this year. …”

W
HETHER THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH
Amista had wakened vague old longings in her, or whether it was merely coincidence, Katinka Jones had been seized with a sudden desire to see again the land of her fathers where her earlier childhood had been spent. Nobody remained but Great-Uncle Joseph, known in the Welsh idiom as Jo Jones the Waterworks, because of the proximity of his home to the giant reservoir—the nearest he’s been to water for a long time, thought Katinka, eyeing with disfavour his unattractive person. He lived some miles out of Swansea and considered that blameless town no better than Sodom and Gomorrah. He spoke little but Welsh and as he affected also to be stone deaf, conversation with him was hardly riotous. Tinka’s red fingernails shook him to the core. “He says how do you get them that dreadful colour?” asked the housekeeper, a fearsome old woman dressed from head to foot in mauve. “I dabble them in the blood of unhallowed babes,” said Katinka. But her feelings were hurt: she had taken advice from Miss Let’s-be-Lovely’s column in the Holiday number and considerably toned them down for country wear. “Better than nasty black rims, anyway,” she said to the fearsome housekeeper. Great-Uncle Joseph’s hearing took a sudden turn for the better and he hid his gnarled hands under the rug across his knee.

So she moved into Sodom and Gomorrah and took up her residence in a gloomy little hotel. She bought a picture postcard of the lovely Mumbles coast and marked it with a cross. “This is where I am not staying,” she wrote to Miss Let’s-be-Lovely, who was stewing away in the London office, having taken her holiday in June. “Uncle Jo Waterworks thinks I am the Scarlet Woman and I have left under a cloud. By no means the only cloud, as it does nothing but rain.” All round the edges and upside-down across the top she added: “Wrecked my holiday, because now it’s too late to book rooms anywhere else, and I don’t know a soul here.” Miss Let’s-be-Lovely sent back an aerial view of London and wrote simply upon it: “Well, why the hell don’t you go and call on Amista?”

So Katinka told her hotel that she wouldn’t be in to tea and caught the brown bus that rattles out into the beauty of the valleys, leaving the town and the docks and the sea behind. The rain continued to fall as they chugged up the interminable hill, the stout Welshwomen in their Sunday-best black dresses voluble after their excursions from the mountain villages to the grand Swansea shops, the miners weary and silent, looking down at their boots, their eyes pink-rimmed in faces black with coal dust. The bus conductress poked at her bushy curls with bunched fingers and called out: “Pentre Trist! Here you are, then, girl—didn’t you want Pentre Trist?”

“Oh, thank you,” said Katinka. Her voice, usually so high and gay, sounded flat against the shrill upward inflexion. She gathered her smart tan handbag and matching leather gloves, and jumped down into the road. The bus rolled on.

A formless village street, straggling without pavement edges through the huddle of little shops, branching off now and again into subsidiary streets that climbed away from it up the steep hillside or tippled over the edge and ran down like streams of lava from a volcano, ran into the valley half a mile below. Katinka noticed little ugly grey houses, an ugly tin-roofed Methodist chapel, a flaring billboard across the dingy façade of the single cinema; and across the valley was the mountain—the great, solid, splendid bulk of it, heavy and grey beneath its mantle of softly, ceaselessly failing rain.

And high up on the mountain, crouching like a bird against its rugged breast, a house. Katinka pointed it out to one of half a dozen men who lounged, cigarette on lip, against a wall.

“Would that be Mr. Carlyon’s house over there?”

The man took the stub from his mouth with thumb and forefinger and looked over at the house. He had a deep scar running down one side of his face. “Well, properly speakin’ now—no, it wouldn’t he Mr. Carlyon’s house.”

A second man detached himself from the group and came towards her. “Don’t let him pull your leg, my girl. It’s old Mrs. Williams’s house, but she’s been dead ten year, and now Mr. Carlyon’s rented it for a bit. Dai Jones Trouble came down and took it for him, a few months back. Eh, boys?”

“That’s right,” said the men. They eyed her with a friendly curiosity.

“Dai Jones Trouble?” said Katinka. “What a lovely name.”

“Don’t you
know
Mr. Carlyon?” said the man, evidently surprised. He elaborated: “Otherwise, you’d surely know Dai Trouble.”

“Dai Jones come from round these parts,” said the first speaker. “He’s Mr. Carlyon’s man now; and when the master wanted a quiet place, it seems, Dai thinks back to his boy’ood and come down here and took Penderyn for him.” He gestured towards the grey roofs of the house across the valley.

“But why is he called Dai Jones Trouble?”

They all looked ever so faintly down their noses. “Sort him out from all the other Dai Joneses round here,” said the man with the scar. “Including me.” He smiled. “They call
me
Dai Jones Ych-y-fi.”

Memory groped back into the days of childhood. “That’s what my nurse used to say to me when I was a dirty little girl: Ych y fi!”

“Well, he’s a dirty little boy,” said the men, laughing. “He’s the plumber.”

“And Dai Jones Trouble?” (She could probably get a few pounds from somewhere for an article on these odd Welsh names, when she got back to Fleet Street.)

They all looked down their noses again. “He got all the girls round here into trouble,” said the second man who had spoken to her. “And finally skipped off to London—not a moment too soon! But that was—twenty years ago, boys?”

“I wonder what became of that Gwladys Griffiths,” said the first man.

“
And
Bronwen Hughes!”

But they were too well mannered to discuss local gossip before a stranger who could not be interested. “You don’t come from round Pentre Trist?”

“No,” said Tinka. “Though my name’s Jones, too. But I was born in Swansea, and my uncle Jo still lives out by the reservoir.”

“Is that Jo Jones the Waterworks?”

“It was,” said Tinka. “He’s probably the late Jo Jones by now. He was just about to have a stroke when I left, largely due to the colour of my nails.” It was her habit to repose her confidences in the most unlikely strangers.

“And now you’re going to see Mr. Carlyon?” said the second man who had spoken.

He was different from the rest. Instead of their uncreased trousers and threadbare coats, he wore a good suit of just too intense a brown, and a neat tie and collar. He was perhaps thirty-five: a handsome man—an extraordinarily handsome man when one looked at him a second time—with the aesthetic good looks of the romantic clergyman in a Victorian novel; a thin, pale face, dark hair, astonishingly upright of carriage, just the least bit prim. “I was thinking of going over to see Mr. Carlyon myself,” he said.

“Actually it was Mrs. Carlyon I wanted,” said Katinka.

No information seemed forthcoming about Mrs. Carlyon. “They don’t come to the village,” said Dai Ych-y-fi. “Too posh, I daresay. I seen that old woman they got working there with Dai Trouble, but you never see anyone else from Penderyn.” He shrugged.

The Victorian Adonis looked over at the mountain. “River’s very high.”

“Miss Evans the Milk could take you across,” said one of the men.

“Will she be going so late?”

“She didn’t take the milk this morning, that I do know, because she was in Swansea all the morning with my butty’s wife; gadding round the fancy shops, no doubt, getting themselves up posh—there’s women for you! But it means that she’ll be going this afternoon, Mr. Chucky, so you’re in luck; and the young lady.”

“We’ll go up to her house and see,” said Mr. Chucky to Tinka. “It’s just by here.”

Miss Evans the Milk lived in a tiny house perched up above the road where the bus had stopped. Mr. Chucky rapped primly at the door and then, without further ado, pushed it open and marched into the little hall and, putting his head in at one door after another, called out: “Miss Evans! Miss Evans-oh!” What the hell have I got myself into
now
, thought Katinka.

Miss Evans appeared, looking in at her own front door, like a cuckoo out of its clock. She was a tiny woman with a weather-beaten face and eyes of a quite amazing gentian-blue. “Hallo, Mr. Chucky! Was you calling me?”

“This is Miss Jones, Miss Evans, bach. We was wondering was you going over to Penderyn this afternoon?”

“Isn’t there any way but bothering Miss Evans for a lift?” said Katinka.

But apparently there was no other way, unless you liked to take a bus twelve miles further on into Neath, and walk back over the other side of the mountain! The river was swollen with the summer rains, and the ford had gone. “It’s not much of an old boat, mind,” said Miss Evans, doubtfully, “and the young lady with her clothes so pretty! But there you are—no other way to go!” She departed to collect her milk cans. “
She
doesn’t mind,” said Mr. Chucky, complacently. “She always makes a fuss.”

The room was hermetically sealed and coarse lace curtains shut out the lovely view. The shelves were filled with an assortment of books, romantic novels jostling well-thumbed classics, the big family Bible, lovingly protected by a fold of tissue paper, tall books of music, song books in English and Welsh. “Miss Evans’s mother came from Shropshire,” said Chucky, who seemed familiar with the affairs of everyone in the village. He gestured to where, above the bright brass firescreen that hung from the mantelpiece, an old-fashioned daguerreotype smiled down of a woman with a sheet of music in her hand. “The English Lark they used to call her; proper lovely singer she was.” Welsh accent and idiom were sometimes pronounced in him, sometimes barely discernible.

Miss Evans returned, dangling two milk cans by their thin tin handles. Mr. Chucky took one of them, and together they all set out across the main street of the village and down the steep road to the river. Dai Jones Ych-y-fi and his companions gave Katinka a friendly parting wave; at least, she thought, I know someone now, in Wales. Slipping and skidding down the pebbly road, she trotted between her two companions—Mr. Chucky tall and straight as a ramrod, his neat shoes picking their way between the streaming puddles, Miss Evans with the milk can tinnily jangling in her little brown paw. I must be mad, thought Tinka. I must be mad—sweating up and down mountains, submitting myself to a damn Welsh downpour and heaven knows what perils of the deep to come, all to visit some half-baked little idiot that I don’t even know, and probably will loathe at sight. … A vision rose up before her eyes, a vision of Amista as she and Miss Let’s-be-Lovely had conceived her in their careless comparison of notes. A pretty face; a foolish, rather vapid, but a very pretty face, delicately oval, blue-eyed, flower-lipped, framed in conventionally curling pale gold hair. And foolish she may be, thought Tinka, but Amista’s got something that
you
haven’t got my girl, for all you think yourself so bright. She’s got her Carlyon: bassinets any minute now, and she won’t even have to live with her mother-in-law. Whereas you, my poor Katinka Jones, have to make do with a career, and look as if you like it! She had meant to have six children and, in the days before her chances had grown so thin, had expressed her opinions pretty freely in her gaily positive way, as to how the young should be brought up. Her married friends had listened, much interested, but continued to rear their families on conventional lines.

Miss Evans was obviously devoured with curiosity, but did not like to put direct questions. Katinka volunteered a lively sketch of life in London, in the offices of
Girls Together
. “I think I have taken that book now and then to Penderyn,” said Miss Evans. Tinka surprised a rather startled look upon the romantic features of Mr. Chucky, as though he were puzzled by her. They came to the river.

Miss Evans’s boat lay tossing on the swollen waters, jerking at its mooring like a goat on a too-short tether. Miss Evans tugged it in by the chain and hoisted her milk cans aboard. She refused assistance from Mr. Chucky and pulled them strongly across to the opposite bank. “It’s a long way,” said Katinka, “to come over with a pint or two of milk. Darned if I would! And up that path to the house! Do you come every day?”

“Not every day. They tell me when they’ll want more. Not that I’d mind,” said Miss Evans, her blue eyes glancing over across the river to the dark mountain looming over them. “I like the walk. The river there’s peaceful! And you climb the path and look back over the valley and the village; it makes you understand how little it all is, compared with God.” She gave them a suddenly very lovely smile.

If she were articulate, thought Katinka, swallowed up for a moment in Miss Friendly-wise, if she were a suburban spinster, she would be writing me letters full of platitudes, asking me whether she’s right to remain loyal to the memory of a fiancé killed in the war (when all the time I know by bitter experience that she’s probably never had a chance to be anything else) or whether she should stick to an ailing mother, or why she’s growing hair on her upper lip. … And I don’t know that I’m much better myself: jolly nearly thirty and nothing in my life but the office and the Women’s Press Club and being Bright in pubs. There was something to be said for being country bred, for finding one’s joy in the river and the mountainside, for knowing how to rise up out of the valley and leave the little cares behind.

The little make-shift landing stage was almost entirely swamped. They scrambled ashore and began the long, steep ascent of the mountain to the house. A narrow path, cut into the hillside by the feet of men, straggling through the bracken up the treeless hill, dodging round a boulder here, split there by a rivulet coursing down to join the main stream; but all the time climbing up and up to the house. Above them towered the tall cliff of the Tarren Goch. It was as though, in some gargantuan frolic, a giant hand had scooped a great hole in the mountainside, had flung back the rocks so that, carelessly falling, they formed a kind of rough stairway, each step higher than a dozen men, up either side of the depression in the hillside. Mr. Chucky lagged civilly behind with Katinka, as Miss Evans forged sturdily ahead. “I used to play there as a boy. Underneath those rocks that are tumbled up each side of the quarry, there’s a sort of chain of caves—not real caves of course, but little dark rooms, formed by the heaped-up boulders. The one nearest Penderyn is best; you can go in almost at the bottom and climb right up through them, hardly seeing daylight till you come to the top.” He pointed to a narrow ledge that seemed to hang like a painter’s cradle, jutting out from the edge of the precipice almost at its very top. “That’s where the caves come out.”