Encounters (17 page)

G
rass the colour of young beech leaves stood high in the valley when the young man came to Cae Coch. Megan, her eyes blue with the freshness of forget-me-nots, would go quietly through the wood, down the way the brook went and peer through the hazel brakes to see him. He was tall and his skin was pale. She had never seen a man with pale skin before and her eyes rounded at the whiteness of it. The men of the hills had their faces reddened by the wind and tanned, young, into coarse leather. This man was smooth and she imagined his skin silky and cool like the keys of Dai Morgan’s new piano.

Each morning Jeff would come out of his grandmother Lewis’s cottage and sniff the sweet air with disbelief. After a city childhood and youth he had not dreamed such air could exist. He sometimes sensed the eyes watching from the wood beyond the brook and would peer into the undergrowth, wondering what small animal was hidden there. Never did he see a movement, save where the wind stroked the leaves and made them dance.

‘Jeff, his name is,’ Megan whispered to herself as she watched him. Raymond the Post had told her mother that, winking, as he put the parcel from Swansea on the scrubbed wooden table.

Today, as she watched, Jeff was wearing a dark green jersey, warm and soft. He must be cold inside himself she thought, to need the warmth of lambswool in the summer sun. She crouched lower and took a step forward.

It was shy she was or she could have taken eggs to Cae Coch, or warm bread from her mother’s oven. She did gather roses once from the mossy ramblers on the back wall and tried to dare to take them down to the old lady, but then she gave them instead to her mother.

Often she sat with her books in the warmed stones of the ruined farm over the valley. It was quiet there. She felt secure, the crumbling wall with its curtain of ivy at her back. She did not look up as the shadows of the clouds chased one another over the hillside and a buzzard soared, mewing, out across the empty air.

The pony’s hoofbeats must have been muffled by the grass for when he spoke she dropped her book with the fright of it.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What a lovely place to read.’

The ride in the wind and sun had whipped a delicate shade of rose into his ivory cheeks.

Megan felt her hands begin to shake. Stupid it was when she had dreamed so often he would speak to her.

‘May I sit with you for a moment to rest the pony?’ His eyes were dark and secret like the eyes of the romany folk over by the town. Without waiting for her answer he lifted a long leg easily over the pommel of the saddle and slid to the ground. The pony dropped its nose to the sweet grass and blew gustily. ‘Are you Megan?’ he asked, sitting next to her.

She nodded shyly. ‘How did you know my name?’

‘Raymond the Post told me.’ He smiled. ‘I’m staying here for a few months’ convalescence. I’ve been ill.’

‘Are you better?’ Her enormous blue eyes were turned to gaze at him, full of sympathy and concern.

‘Much, thank you. The air is so good I’m eating like a horse now.’ They both turned as the pony tore up a mouthful of weeds and stood champing them on her bit. Then they laughed.

‘Is it buttercups you eat then?’ she asked quietly.

‘Even buttercups.’ Unnoticing he had put his hand on hers. It was warm and dry and friendly. Without speaking they both gazed out across the valley towards the distant mountains to the west.

‘My parents are coming over next weekend. You and your mother must come down and see them.’ He looked down at the glossy curls of the girl beside him. ‘I dare say your mother knew my mother when they were children.’

‘Mam never said.’ She screwed up her nose to think. ‘She goes to Cae Coch sometimes, for a chat like, but she never said.’

There was silence again. Then he rose and went to take the pony’s rein. ‘Will you walk with me a little way, back to the stables?’

She shook her head, suddenly shy again and took up her book. ‘I’ll stay here a while if you don’t mind, to read a bit.’

He shrugged and smiled and mounted the pony which laid back its ears and took a last defiant mouthful of buttercups. The small hooves made no sound on the grass as he went.

‘Oh yes, I knew Sarah Ann,’ her mother said thumping the dough with a floury hand. ‘A fine madam she was. Got into trouble she did with one of the Jones boys from Llangoed, then she went to Birmingham. I never heard from her after that. Granny Lewis never talks about her and I never asked.’

‘Will you go down there Saturday and see her?’ Megan ran her finger round the edge of the jam pot on the table and licked it delicately.

‘Take your hands away, girl.’ Her mother slapped at her, scattering flour. ‘Indeed I will not. I doubt if I’ve anything to say to Sarah Ann Lewis after all these years. And you’ll not talk to that boy again, Megan. Like mother, like son, no doubt.’ She snorted and turned the dough again, punching it.

For three days Megan took her books to the ruin, sitting, the pages blowing on her knees, her eyes fixed on the track at the edge of the wood. But Jeff never came. The fourth day she crept down the wood to the back of Cae Coch and waited to see him come out and breathe the fresh air.

A car was parked in the yard. When he came out there was a girl with him. She was tall and slim and had stylishly cut red hair. Megan could hear the sound of her laughter from across the brook. It was English laughter: strident, confident; and as she laughed the girl slipped her arm through Jeff’s and clung to him possessively. Megan, in spite of herself, looked down at her own thin brown hands. She could almost feel the warm touch of Jeff’s fingers again.

That girl would wear nail varnish and have smooth oval nails without a crack. Megan knew that. Her jeans were elegantly cut and her shirt immaculate.

Jess glanced up at the trees as though he felt the eyes watching him again, but already Megan had slipped back into the dark of the wood, her sandals making no sound on the leaf mould beneath the trees.

She went back to her books, and back after two days of rain to the ruins of the farm. She sat on the stone wall to be out of the damp and wrapped herself tightly in her jacket against the wind.

Although she did not watch for him any more she knew when he came out of the trees. It was a different pony. Behind on his sorrel came the girl, her head tied in a headscarf, her stirrup leathers too long.

Megan hunched her shoulders. He should not have brought the girl here. This was
her
place.

‘Hello, Megan.’

She did not look up.

‘Megan, I want you to meet my fiancée, Rose.’ She heard him slide from the saddle. ‘Aren’t you cold up here in this wind, Megan?’

‘I’m used to the wind, Jeff, thank you.’ She looked up at last.

The girl, Rose, had not moved from her saddle. Her face was wary. Megan could see she had light blue eyes and gingery eyebrows. So the colour of her hair was real then. The slim fingers holding the rein were manicured. The nails were coloured; she had been right. They glowed a delicate shade of plum. Megan noted the sapphire with bleak satisfaction. So she hadn’t got a diamond then.

There was no talking today; no need to rest the ponies. The sorrel pawed the ground, impatient to be gone. When they were out of sight, Megan closed her book. Quietly she slipped down into the wood to make her way home.

She didn’t see Jeff again for many days but she thought of him in spite of all she could do to stop herself. Nor did she go to peer through the hazels at Cae Coch. The farm too was spoiled for her now. She took to rambling on the mountain, watching the sheep as they wandered through the bracken and gorse.

It would soon be time for her to go away to college. She put the date away from her. The rest of the summer came between her and that day. Her last freedom. She climbed higher towards the rocks and took deep breaths of the air, storing them up against a time when she would see the great open mountain sky no more.

She saw the galloping pony a great way off and stood to watch as he rode recklessly up the pony path, great clods of peat flying up from the thundering hooves. This time he was alone.

‘Megan,’ he called as he reached her. ‘I’ve not seen you for ages.’ He slid from the saddle and grinned at her. Now his skin was almost as brown as hers.

‘You still have the book under your arm, I see.’ He smiled, his dark eyes lighting with silver.

‘How is your fiancée, Jeff?’ she asked, not wanting to say it, not wanting to know. She saw his face fell, his smile go.

‘She’s well, thank you.’ He sat down on a lump of rock and then he smiled at her again in spite of it. ‘She’s gone back to Birmingham now.’

‘Has she indeed?’ Megan felt her own heart lighten a little. She sat down beside him. The warm wind stroked her hair back from her face. He looked at her for a moment, then his fingers went gently to her forehead.

‘You have lovely hair, Megan. Soft and shiny like nut-brown silk.’ His eyes were serious as they looked into hers. She felt the message of them pierce right through her and she knew what he wanted so badly.

‘Is it loving me on the mountain you’re after?’ she asked him direct, and she saw his eyelids droop in assent. His hands slowly strayed to the top button of her shirt, undid it, and the next. Gently, with his warm hands, he stroked her breast.

Towards the end of summer when the evenings were drawing imperceptibly in there was a wind; a storm from the west which brought with it the message from autumn that the leaves were doomed to fall from the trees as they turned colour and sent late harvesters scurrying to collect in the last of their store.

Then it was that Jeff told Megan he was leaving Cae Coch. She had borrowed his comb and was kneeling in the soft-brown leaves within the walls of the ruin, combing pieces of grass out of her hair.

‘Back to your Rose?’ She smiled up at him wistfully, still combing. He nodded, his eyes pained. He had expected her to cry. He buttoned his shirt and went to tighten the girths of the grazing pony.

‘Will I see you again, Megan?’ He asked it over his shoulder half afraid to turn, to see her face.

‘I’ll be here till I go.’ She smiled enigmatically, slipping his comb into her own pocket. Without a word she began to walk back down towards the trees.

He stood and watched her go, gently stroking the pony’s muzzle. In his heart there was already an ache of emptiness he had never felt before.

When he went two months later to her cottage Megan had left for college. In vain Jeff pleaded with her mother for her address.

‘No son of Sarah Ann Lewis is going to follow my daughter,’ she cried adamantly, hand on hip.

He walked back slowly through the wood to Cae Coch, his heart heavy with longing. The track he followed came out in the trees at the back by the brook, the place he had always thought he felt eyes watching him in the mornings. He smiled gently. So it had been Megan, that shy fawn of the woods whom so often he had tried to glimpse through the trees.

He groped in his pocket for the little box. Inside lay a ring, a tiny diamond on a band of white gold. The large sapphire, returned with such venom, had more than paid for it. He kissed the cold stone and put it back in his pocket.

Megan wilted beneath the dark city skies, but she worked hard and tried not to think of the mountain and the brook. Above all she tried to forget the image of the grazing pony and the buttercups.

Her first vacation she spent in Swansea with her Aunt Bethan. The next she went to London and met her mother for a three-week stay in a small hotel in Bayswater while they visited the shops and museums and had tea with Great Aunty Elen who lived in Richmond.

It was not until the sweet summer winds were blowing again over the mountains that she returned home. Granny Lewis had died at Easter and Cae Coch lay empty, the windows already broken by boys from the village.

Megan laid aside her new town clothes and climbed at long last back up to the ruined farmhouse. The stones of the mossy wall were familiar against her back as she sat reading in the sun. The gable wall had fallen some time during the winter and already the nettles were poking up thickly amongst the scattered stones, but she felt happy here; relaxed and safe again. No one else would come to sit beside her on the warmed stones.

She read through the long warm afternoons, watching only sometimes as the shadows of the trees lengthened across the path out of the wood the way he used to come with the pony.

The first storm of the autumn tore some slates off the roof at Cae Coch, leaving a gaping hole. The gate was hanging off its hinges.

Sadly Megan walked down out of the trees and stood in the yard for the first time, looking round. Raymond the Post had told her that it belonged to Jeff now. But he had never been back to see it. Never come back to the mountains.

She heard a soft whinny and shivered in spite of herself. It sounded like a ghost from the past. The sorrel pony was tethered to the fence behind the lean-to, out the back of the cottage.

She stood for a moment, uncertain, overcome with shyness. Then she turned and ran back towards the shelter of the wood. For a brief second she turned back to peer through the branches not letting the hope come. The yard was deserted and silent, the past a whole year away now. Sadly she made her way up the hillside, away from the brook towards the ruins of the farm.