Dead Man's Embers (10 page)

It is too hot to build up the fire but Non has to do so this morning to heat the smoothing irons. The pile of clothing is back in the basket after yesterday's wash – clean and dry now, and waiting to be ironed. She does not feel up to the work, she is tired – from the heat, from rising so early morning after morning with Davey, from the sheer effort of watching him suffer. Today he had gone through exactly the same scene as he had yesterday: crawled from under the table, stood up ramrod straight, and aimed and shot at someone or something. Whatever Davey was doing, she thinks, was not done in the heat of battle, it was too deliberate. And surely if he had been aiming at a rabbit or bird for the pot, or even at a horse, he would not be re-living it in this way. She does not understand, but she does know that the experience is exhausting Davey. He had left for work ashen-faced and so grim with tension that she wished he could go back to his bed and sleep for a day.

She shovels coals onto the fire and takes off her coarse apron, giving it a shake as she turns to hang it from the back of the door. The rustle in its pocket reminds her of the bill she stuffed into it
yesterday, and she takes the envelope out to put it aside for Davey. She glances at it to see who it is for and sees that it is addressed to Davey, at the workshop. The handwriting is delicate, done with a fine nib and pale ink, the tops and tails of the letters curving and curling. She thinks, Someone has an artistic clerk to send out their bills. Then she notices the postmark. She looks at the envelope for a long time, the fire and her ironing forgotten. Should she see what it is? An envelope postmarked London may hold a clue. And she will be looking for Davey's sake. She takes out the single sheet of paper inside the neatly cut envelope and reads the words written on it in the beautiful and obviously feminine writing. She knows the name at the end of the letter too well. Angela.

She lays the letter face down on the table and stares out into the garden through the open door. The hens cluck disconsolately, the bees drone, Herman stands on the threshold with his head on one side and watches her with his bright brown eyes for a while, then flies away. She picks up the sheet of paper and re-reads what is written on it. It has not changed. Davey had told her he had betrayed her with this nurse, this Angela. But the letter says not. In no uncertain terms. She reads the letter once more. I never believed it, she thinks, I never believed Davey could do such a thing. The room revolves around her, faster and faster. She bends forward with her head between her knees until she feels steady. The letter has scrunched in her hand; she smoothes it flat. It must be true, she thinks, it feels true. But . . . Davey has made us live for more than two years as if he had done this thing. Why? Why did he invent such a story? It has made us so unhappy. And yet again, she remembers, there is Osian . . .

The dying fire sighs in the grate and galvanises her into action. She shovels more coal on the embers and blows them alight with the bellows. She sets her smoothing irons to heat. The letter has
turned everything on its head, but the ironing has to be done. So, she scatters drops of water onto the dry and wrinkled shirts and aprons and trousers and handkerchiefs and blouses and skirts and underclothes from the previous day's wash and rolls them tight for the dampness to spread through them evenly. Then she takes her first iron from the fire and cleans it and begins to iron the damp articles – on which the words of Angela's letter seem to be imprinted – until they are free of their wrinkles and creases, then hangs them on the pulley above the range to air. When her iron becomes too cool she swaps it for the hot one waiting on the range, and by the time Osian comes home from school she has ironed all that needs ironing. She is tired, hot, hungry, and still puzzled – she is no nearer the answer to the mystery that the letter presents than she was when she began the ironing.

She prepares bread and cheese for herself and Osian to eat. ‘We'll go to meet Tada and Wil from the workshop,' she tells him. Osian likes being in the workshop amid the sawdust and the scents of the wood – though it is difficult to tell for sure – and she longs to ask Davey about the letter.

‘We've come to visit you, Osian and I, and to walk you home,' Non says as she walks in through the workshop door. Osian immediately vanishes into one of the coffins lining the back wall. Davey stops what he is doing and looks towards her, not at her but at something through and beyond her.

‘Wil's gone down to the station to meet an order off the five o'clock train,' he says. ‘And I'm very busy, Non, can't stop. Did you hear old Evan Williams died? Got to get the coffin made today, in oak, none of the ones at the back will do. Pity the family didn't care about him as much when he was alive. Funeral tomorrow, because of the weather.'

‘No, I didn't hear,' Non says. ‘But I've been ironing all day. I haven't seen anyone to talk to.'

‘They found him first thing,' Davey says. ‘Been dead since Sunday night they think. Flies busy already. State he's in we can't leave the coffin open.'

Non knows the man's daughter, knows things about Evan Williams that Davey won't know; knows he was unkind, a bully, violent sometimes, not a man his daughter willingly went to visit. Maybe she wants to make sure he is well nailed down in a sturdy oak coffin.

The letter rustles in her skirt pocket as she turns around to look out of the door. She has read the words so many times that they whirl in her mind. And she has written down the return address in case Davey wants the letter back.

She had hoped Wil would take Osian off with him to the back of the workshop somewhere, as he usually did when they went there, and keep a watch over him so that she could talk to Davey.

But Wil is not here and Davey is too busy.

‘What can we do to help?' she asks.

‘I don't need help,' Davey says. ‘I just need to finish this coffin. Take the boy home. He'll only hurt himself or damage something without Wil here to look after him. You know how he is.'

Osian is clumsy in many ways, and yet, watching the intensity with which he examines the different kinds of wood stacked in the workshop, Non knows that he will be at home and safe here amid the aromatic shavings and dusty air. She runs her hand along a piece of wood Davey has shaped and sanded and laid aside while he makes the coffin for old Evan Williams. It is warm and smooth as flesh, a living thing that leaves a sweetness on her hand for her to inhale. Is this what Osian senses, a life in the wood that he awakens with his whittling knife and his dexterity?

‘This is lovely, Davey. What is it for?'

Davey has his back to her, sanding one side of the coffin. The muscles clump in his shoulders. He is as overwound as a stilled clock. He did not use to be like this before the War. He has to hold himself tight to keep everything, whatever everything is, inside him. She thinks, He inherits that kind of control from Catherine Davies. But he never used to exercise it.

‘A cabinet to go into the library at Wern Fawr when your nephew's finished sorting Davison's books for him.'

‘What wood is it?'

‘Cherry. He had it brought here 'specially for me to work it. First time I've made anything with cherry. See what a fine colour it is, that brown, and how different the grain is compared to the pine and oak?' Davey, too, strokes the wood, he lifts the piece to breathe in the scent of it. His shoulders relax. ‘It'll polish to perfection, this.' His love of his work cannot be disguised. She wishes he did not have to spend so much of his time making coffins, but he is employed by Albert Edwards, Carpenter & Undertaker, and has to do what is needed when it is needed.

Osian has come out of his hiding place to wander the length of the workbench, stroking and sniffing at the coffin until Davey fetches a small block of light-coloured wood from the woodstore and gives it to him.

‘See what you can make out of that,' he says. ‘It cuts like cheese, that wood.'

Osian turns the block around, smoothing it with his hands, rubbing it on his cheek, licking it and studying the change of its colour.

‘What wood's that? It's got no grain at all.' Non peers at the block.

‘Lime. It's lime.' Davey is impatient. He really does not want
them here. But he is not happy in whatever false world he has made for himself, either.

Osian has scurried back into one of the upright coffins and taken his knife from his pocket. He will not hurt himself, this is one thing he is not clumsy doing, this working with wood.

‘We'll be off then, Davey,' Non says. ‘But you should have some rest or you'll be ill. I'll make supper ready early tonight so that you can have a longer evening.'

She will speak to him then, when he is rested. She will ask him about Angela. About Osian. About all the things that have remained hidden.

‘I'm off to a meeting tonight, straight from work,' Davey says. ‘If we're to have a proper Labour Party branch here, we have to get on with it. It'll be election time before we know it. We have to be organised.'

‘Is it only for men, this meeting?'

‘Well, you can't vote, can you?' Davey says. ‘Not until you're thirty.'

‘I can take an interest,' Non says. ‘Nancy Graves is a socialist, you know. She's too young to vote but it didn't stop her being interested. We talked a lot about it when little Mary Pugh who helped her with the baby and the cleaning and cooking was poorly and I took her some herbs and—'

‘Socialist, is she?' Davey interrupts. ‘D'you think she has any idea what it's about, socialism? With all that money her family's got? And that husband of hers with his poetry?'

‘Well, he fought in the War like everyone else,' Non says, having a fondness for poetry.

‘You'd think, wouldn't you—' Davey bangs his hand down on the workbench, sending a cloud of sawdust into the air. ‘All his fuss about this place – his family here all these years – and when
some of the local boys went to complain about conditions and ask him to stand up for them he sent them off with a flea in their ear. Someone told them he made fun of them after, made fun of the way they spoke. They never asked his help again—' His shoulders slump. ‘You've no idea, Non!'

How did they get here? What wrong turn did the conversation take?

Davey notices the sawdust settling on the wood he was sanding when she came in and dusts it away, tense and furious again.

Non looks round for Osian. ‘Come on,' she says. ‘We'd better be getting home. Meg will be back soon, and Wil, and I expect they'll both be starving, as usual. Bring your new piece of wood with you.'

She really does have to do something. And now she has a way to do it.
Dear Angela
. . . She rehearses the letter she will write.
My name is Rhiannon Davies. I hope you do not mind that I am writing to you like this, but
. . .

She had not expected to be on the train to Port again so soon. She looks at Wil seated opposite her, his hair flattened to his head with his father's haircream each side of his parting, wearing the Sunday clothes that she had pressed yesterday for the occasion. Leaving home and going to sea! But at least he will be coming home with her today, she will be the first to know whether the Master has taken him on, which she is certain he will do because Wil is such an excellent young man, sturdy and sensible beyond his age, anyone can see that and hear it when he speaks to them. And an outstanding reference from Albert Edwards in his pocket.

And in her own pocket a missive of a different kind altogether, but one that may change her life every bit as much as Wil's may soon change. She fingers the envelope. She thinks, Don't be foolish, it is still there.

She had kept her letter short in the end. Yesterday morning, when everyone else had left the house, she sat at the kitchen table with pen and paper and poured out her story onto the pages, so many of them, and when she finished she pushed them all into
the fire and started again. She had written,
Dear Angela, I am Davey Davies's wife. I would like to meet you and talk to you about what happened to Davey during the War. He is such a changed man. I can come to London if you would be willing to see me. Yours sincerely, Rhiannon Davies
, and blotted the words after every line so that they would not smudge.

She took the greatest care with her handwriting, but though it was bold and clear and beautiful for its purpose, it was no match for the lovely hand in the letter to Davey, however hard she tried to curve and curl the letters. She puzzled for some time, while the unattended fire died back and the breakfast debris remained around her, about how to ask Angela to reply. The postmen knew everyone's business if it came through the post; one of them might mention it to Davey if she received a letter from London.

After she re-lit the fire and carried out her morning chores, she sat to sew a button on Wil's best shirt for the following day, and it occurred to her that she could re-use one of the envelopes in her sewing box in which her dressmaking patterns had come from London. She chose the tidiest of them, which housed a shirt pattern, removed the old stamp and replaced it with two penny ha'penny ones just in case one was not sufficient for such a large envelope, wrote at the bottom of her letter to Angela,
P.S. I enclose an envelope with stamps on it for your reply
, and folded it all up together into a smaller envelope onto which she wrote the address at the top of Angela's letter to Davey. This way, she thought, she should be able to receive a reply from Angela without arousing any curiosity whatsoever in anyone. No one paid attention to clothes patterns; that was women's work.

Now, as she listens to the train wheels singing their way over
the rails, she thinks, I have become good at subterfuge, all that work with the herbs in the War, and Owen – I must put things to rest with Owen – and now this, which will probably lead to more subterfuge. It occurs to her again that she is, though in different ways, as changed from the Non that married Davey as Davey is from the man she had married. She wonders if Davey has remarked the change in her. She realises that Wil has spoken to her and she has not heard what he said.