No Way Of Telling (24 page)

“Hey, Ivor! What have you done with my pocket-knife?”

“Nothing,” said Ivor. It was a vulnerable position, being youngest of the family, and Ivor’s defence, built up over the years, was imperturbability. He buttered his slice of bread calmly and heaped it with spoonfuls of gooseberry jam.

“Your knife’s in the drawer, Ray—I put it there,” said Mrs Protheroe, appearing in the doorway. She was dressed and neat but her eyes were tired, as though she had slept little, or badly. “Oh, Ray—just look at those heels! In all my life I never knew anyone to make such holes in their socks as you do. You’ll have to take another pair from the basket—you can’t go off in those. Ivor, will you fetch me in some sticks from the back porch—I must get the fire going, no matter what else. And I only hope there’ll be a better end to this day than there’s been a beginning.”

“Fire’s not out, Mum,” said Ivor, inspecting the jam on his slice to make sure it had enough actual gooseberries in it. “All it wants is just a bit of blowing up, that’s all. Suppose they say we can’t have the snow-plough back—what then?”

“Oh, Ivor, they’re bound to, when your Dad puts it to them—all that about kidnappings and political prisoners and plots and escapings and I don’t know what else—you heard what Mr Everest was telling us. We can’t leave poor old Mrs Bowen and Amy all alone up at the Gwyntfa if there’s a chance even of such people about in the neighbourhood.”

“That’s not his name, Mum,” said Ivor.

“Well, no, not quite I daresay—but near enough. And don’t you put on airs with me, Ivor Protheroe, for if I didn’t get hold of his name exactly right, you didn’t either, nor anyone else, and where’s the difference? He won’t mind, I’m sure.”

Ivor took a large bite and then chewed rapidly so as to clear it out of the way before speaking. “He won’t mind if we can’t get hold of his name, Mum. But he’ll mind if Dad and Mr Pugh go saying on the ’phone why it is they want the snow-plough back in such a big hurry. They promised they wouldn’t.”

“Then they won’t say it, not if they promised.”

“Then perhaps we won’t get the snow-plough back.”

“Oh, Ivor!” exclaimed Mrs Protheroe. “How is it you were born so provoking! Wait and see. We’ll know soon enough.”

But Ivor was right. Down in Melin-y-Groes police station Mr Victor Pugh and Mr Protheroe were finding it by no means an easy task to convince the sergeant on duty at police headquarters eight miles away of their urgent need for a snow-plough which had only left them a few hours before, without giving away to him over the telephone more than they had sworn not to give away.

The sergeant thought their request a surprising one and particularly unreasonable for being made so early in the morning. In any case it would be a matter for the County Council to deal with, he said, and suggested they should wait until nine o’clock and then ring the Highways and Byways office, although in his opinion they were bound to be refused. After all they had had their turn and there were plenty of other roads as badly blocked or worse, and not enough ploughs to go round as it was. They were lucky, he added, to be on the telephone still—many of the villages had their lines down, no means of communication at all. And the two miles they wanted cleared beyond their village never had been cleared, not any previous winter; it was a dead end, it served no other village, no hamlet, not even a farm for that matter. Victor Pugh, getting his word in at last, said that it served old Mrs Bowen who lived up the valley alone with her little granddaughter, and he had reason to believe that she was in difficulties. When the sergeant asked him what reason and what difficulties he looked helplessly at Mr Protheroe, who whispered in his ear:

“Measles!”

“It could be the measles, Sergeant,” said Victor Pugh aloud into the telephone. Mr Protheroe nodded at him encouragingly.

“Who’s got the measles then?” asked the police sergeant, eight miles away in Llwynffynnon. “Is it the old lady you’re speaking of or the little girl?”

“Well, now, it could be either,” said Victor Pugh cautiously. “Mind, all I’m saying is, it
might
be the measles—I’m not saying for certain it is.”

“Just a minute then—hold on.”

Fragments of conversation reached the two anxiously waiting men.

“...measles in Colva school right enough...”

“...can be nasty...”

“...shouldn’t like to think that...”

The telephone receiver began to speak again:

“I tell you what we’ll do for you then—we can count it an emergency, and if we were to get on to Ted Jones right away—he’s a good lad, he won’t mind making an early start when he hears it’s special circumstances. And he can have it done and still be back for the Brynmawr road on time, or near enough. I don’t suppose it’ll take him many minutes to clear that bit on from you, not once he’s up there.”

Victor Pugh thanked the sergeant and put the receiver down.

“I didn’t like to have to give him that part about the measles,” he said. “Good as a lie, it was.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Mr Protheroe. “They’ve got the measles at Colva school—that’s no lie. And we don’t know but Amy might be covered in spots by now—she could be. And didn’t that chap say for us to keep this tale to ourselves, not to go spreading it around?”

“He wasn’t having us on, you don’t think?” said Victor Pugh. “Suppose it is no more than a tale? Some fellow killed down Cardiff way and another fellow on the run with information like dynamite, dangerous enough to blow a whole country up. Well, I ask you, Tom—does it sound likely? And both off a foreign ship, foreigners—same as this chap himself is, come to that. Mind, I’m not saying a word against foreigners, Tom—but there’s no denying it, they’re different. You can’t be sure exactly where you are with them, and that’s a fact.”

“I don’t know are you right or not, Victor,” said Mr Protheroe. “All I know is, I liked him.”

“Maybe you did, but there’s no proof in liking a chap. He turns up here on Ted Jones’s snow-plough with fur on his coat and a name we can’t any of us pronounce, and says he’s an Ambassador. Does he look like an Ambassador to you?”

“Well, I don’t know, Vic,” said Mr Protheroe again. “I’ve never seen one before, have I?”

“There you are then—that’s what I mean! Suppose he’s one of these practical jokers you read about? Or raving mad, he could be. We’d look pretty silly, Tom, if it turned out he was a lunatic.”

“We didn’t any of us think he was a lunatic last night, Vic. We believed his tale last night—you did just as much as me.”

“So we did, but what you believe at night you don’t always believe in the morning. I’m not saying it is a tall story, mind—I’m just saying it might be.”

“Now you look here, Victor Pugh—if this was a question of you and me maybe having our legs pulled and no more than that, I’d be inclined to agree with you and say—leave it alone, boy! Keep out of it! But you stop a bit and take it the other way round. Suppose he’s telling us the truth—just you think of the fright old Mrs Bowen’s going to get, and Amy too, if any of that lot he was talking about should happen to come knocking at their door. Why, it could put her in her grave! And even suppose it is a tall story like you say, Vic, I’d rather risk being made a fool of than fretting myself sick the way I’m doing, and that’s another fact.”

“Right then,” said Victor Pugh, and the two men climbed back into Mr Protheroe’s Land Rover and drove through the still dark and dozing village to Dintirion to collect shovels and ropes and whatever else might be necessary in the long and difficult trudge up from the road to Mrs Bowen’s cottage; and also to collect the two Protheroe boys, Colin and Ray, and to tell Mrs Protheroe what arrangements had been made, and to have a quick bite of breakfast before setting out again to meet Ted Jones and the snow-plough.

Ivor had blown up the kitchen fire for his mother and brought her in a supply of wood, enough to keep it going for some time. Without a word he had watched his brothers adding to the pile of equipment they were getting ready for their expedition and listened to them disputing each other’s choice of essentials. He finished his first chunk of bread and butter and jam and cut and spread himself another. Then, with this in his hand he wandered out of the kitchen into the stone-flagged scullery where all the coats and oilskins, caps and hats and scarves belonging to all members of the Protheroe family hung from a long row of wooden pegs. Wellington boots littered the floor.

Having parked his slice of bread and jam on a shelf, Ivor proceeded to dress himself in a random selection of outdoor garments. This done, he went and stood in the back-yard and wondered as he munched what the darkness indicated. Some mornings arrived, it was true, more slowly than others and of course it was early yet. But it seemed to Ivor that this darkness was not the remains of night fingering on: it was a new darkness brought by the day, a warning of worse to come.

On the other side of the house their Land Rover was returning home from the village. Ivor could hear how his father swept it in a circle round the front-yard so as to leave it facing in the right direction, ready for starting off again. The doors slammed, and then he heard Mr Pugh’s voice, and his father’s answering laugh. They had gone into the house together. Now they must be in the kitchen.

He had finished his second slice of bread and jam. Unless he meant to get himself a third slice he might as well go. Ivor glanced about, consideringly. Yesterday he and Ray had cleared the snow from the whole back-yard, shovelling it into a huge blotched mound in the centre. But on the sloping roofs and beyond the yard the snow lay still untouched and smooth. It looked in the gloom not white but a pale dull grey. The buildings were black and brown. There was no colour or brightness in anything. There was no wind either, no movement except for the vaguely tossing heads of the ponies as they jostled against the railings of the enclosure where they were always penned in exceptionally bad weather.

Ivor crossed the yard to the big barn to fetch a bridle. He trod warily. The ground was rough and slippery with lumps of frozen dung and frozen slush. Inside the barn he was given an ecstatic welcome by the smallest and youngest of their three sheepdogs, named Kettle for having been the only one of his litter without a white hair on him; Ket for short.

“Why, hullo, Ket! Didn’t you go down the village with Dad, then? Seems like he means to leave you behind, boy, same as me.”

It was almost pitch dark in the barn but he could find what he wanted by touch. Beyond the further partition the cattle were shuffling and heavily sighing. Ivor lifted the bridle off its nail and picked up a sack.

Supposing his father changed his mind at the last moment and shouted out that he could go with them after all? It was unlikely, but there was just a chance he might. Ivor stood, biting his lip. Then he sat down on an empty oil-drum to wait.

Presently he heard the front door slam, and voices calling; not for him. He sat quite still in the darkness, holding the bridle across his knees, listening. Ket nudged at his legs, but Ivor took no notice. He heard the doors of the Land Rover bang shut, and the engine cough into life. “Colin!” his father was yelling. Colin always kept everyone waiting. There was a grinding of gears—
“Colin!”
—a final slamming of doors, and they were driving away. Ivor stood up.

“Come on then, Ket.”

As he approached the ponies’ enclosure he could see them crowding together to meet him, restless, fretful at being confined in such a small space, all eager for him to set them free. But Ivor leaned across the railings and winding his hand in the coarse mane of his own pony, Ginger, tugged him along to the gate, opened it narrowly, urged him through, and shut it again quickly before the others could follow. In the yard he bridled Ginger and flung the sack on his back instead of a saddle. Then he led him out on to the hillside and there mounted.

“If you want to come with me, Ket, you’ll have to ride. That snow’s too deep for you to run in. Up boy—up! Quiet, Ginger! Come on, Ket, then—up! Up, boy!”

Ket ran to and fro as though trying to decide whether or not to take the risk. Suddenly he gathered himself and sprang. With one arm Ivor caught him and held him, while keeping the reins close in his other hand in order to steady Ginger. But the pony, unconcerned by Ket’s flying leap, only backed a step or two: he was used to carrying a dog as well as a boy. Then Ivor tapped with his heels and they were off.

Ginger knew the way better even than Ivor. He had been born and bred on this hill and was as tough as one of the native thorn-trees marking their path, and as well adapted to all exigencies of weather. He plodded on at an energetic walk, not too close to the bank on their right where the snow had drifted deep, nor far enough to the left to get off the track, and when his hooves slipped, as they sometimes did, he recovered himself nimbly.

Every so often Ivor pivoted so as to look back towards Dintirion. The light, though reluctantly, was increasing and the blurred group of trees and buildings showed further and further below him. All at once he was seized with exhilaration. He hugged Ket and bent forward to pat Ginger’s rough neck, although really it was himself he wanted to pat and hug for having had such a good idea. Whatever his brothers did it would be what they were told to do by their father and Air Pugh, and here was he, out on his own, quite independently. Nobody knew where he was, even; and no one but he had thought of climbing Cader Ddu for a view of the short way over.

But the higher he went the colder it grew, and the colder it grew the more Ivor hunched himself up and dug his chin into the collar of his coat to save his face. And after a while his mind began to dwell on the numbness of his fingers and toes instead of the triumph of reaching the far side of Cader Ddu. Also, he found himself wishing very much indeed that he had had that third slice of bread and butter and jam. Then, with a terrible pang of longing, he remembered the bowl of porridge he had gone without, and he began to imagine what he would do if it were steaming in front of him now—how he would scatter on the sugar, cover it with cream, scoop up a dripping spoonful... Tormented beyond bearing by this vision he raised his head sharply so as to get rid of it, and found with surprise that during his absence of mind it had started to snow.