Finders and Keepers (11 page)

‘My grandfather will be a patient there from tomorrow.'

‘Tuberculosis?' Toby sprinkled his plate with salt.

‘And pneumoconiosis.'

‘Then there's no hope.'

‘None.' Harry almost choked on the word.

‘There isn't for my uncle. Not that I think of Frank as my uncle. He is, but he's only eight years older than me, so we've been more like brothers than uncle and nephew. Especially since he became my guardian after my parents drowned when the
Lusitania
went down eleven years ago.' Toby picked up his knife and fork and cut into the suet pastry.

‘Eight years,' Harry repeated in surprise. ‘But you can't be much more than twenty-one.'

‘Twenty-five. Frank is thirty-three but these days he looks more like sixty. I take it from what you've said that you're familiar with his work?'

‘I love it,' Harry enthused. ‘I read English literature at Oxford but I've always wanted to study art. His illustrations for Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
and
The Shakespeare Folios
were magnificent. I spent hours studying them when I should have been reading the text. But that's not to say his other illustrations aren't as good. It's just that those are my favourites.'

‘He's been commissioned to illustrate Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur.
The publisher almost had a fit when Frank was diagnosed. He wanted to commission another artist, but after some argument he agreed that as long as Frank planned out and oversaw the designs, I could do the actual sketching and painting. That's not to say I have any illusions about my talent. I'm the apprentice to Frank's master. As you saw today, the creation and the ideas are all his. All I do is flesh out his drafts into a poor approximation of what he would do if he were well enough.'

‘You've studied art?'

‘Three years at the Slade.'

‘I would give my eye teeth and every other tooth in my head to do that,' Harry said enviously.

‘The Slade's cheaper than Oxford. So why didn't you?' Toby questioned bluntly.

‘It's a long story.' Loath to go into details about his inheritance, he added, ‘Basically I went to Oxford to please other people.'

‘Frank says life's too short to please anyone other than yourself,' Toby held his fork poised in front of his mouth. ‘And given where he is now, he's been proved right.'

‘It must be wonderful to spend all your time working on something you're passionate about.'

‘It is,' Toby agreed. ‘But although I make a somewhat precarious living as an artist I don't consider myself one. Every time I look at one of Frank's paintings or sketches I feel a fraud.' He washed down a piece of pudding with a mouthful of beer. ‘But I have been given a few jobs on my own merit, and I like to think they didn't know who my uncle was at the time. Nothing important, just illustrations for children's story books and pantomime posters. Frank couldn't have been prouder of me. But I wish I'd never taken them. They kept me in London while he went off to Paris to hold an exhibition. By the time I joined him two months later he was already coughing up blood.'

‘You couldn't have stopped him from contracting the disease.'

‘No,' Toby agreed grimly. ‘But if I had been around I would have seen and recognized the early symptoms and stopped him from working all day and drinking all night, which is what he always does whenever he lives in Paris. Then, perhaps, the disease wouldn't have taken such a swift hold. Doctor Adams told me there was no hope for Frank the first time he examined him.'

‘That must have been tough.' Harry finished his beer and looked around for Enfys.

‘Bang your mug on the table and the silent one will appear.' Toby helped himself to an extra spoonful of mint sauce.

‘Does she ever speak?' Harry lifted his mug and tapped it on the table.

‘Not that I've heard. So you're staying here in the valley?' Toby finished the beer in his glass and handed it to Enfys when she appeared to pick up Harry's.

‘Tonight. After that I'm not sure. My sister's ill in Pontypridd and, like the rest of my family, I'm torn between wanting to stay with her and my grandfather.'

‘Doctor Adams won't allow you to visit your grandfather often,' Toby warned.

‘But I hope to be on hand when he will.'

‘What do you want to paint?'

‘I'm not sure. And I'm not in your or your uncle's class. I'm only an amateur, and a bad one at that,' Harry qualified hastily, embarrassed at confiding his ambitions to a professional. ‘I had planned to go to Paris in the hope of finding out if I have any talent worth developing, but that was before my grandfather was diagnosed.'

‘You must have had some idea of what you wanted to study there?' Toby insisted.

‘I would have liked to experiment with different techniques. I've finished a few watercolours, mainly land and seascapes, and I've sketched portraits of my sisters.' He gave a deprecating smile. ‘You know how it is. My family think I'm brilliant. I know I'm not much of an artist, not yet anyway, and perhaps never will be, but I want to try.'

‘I don't know how it is with a family, because since my parents drowned, the only family I've had is Frank and he's a brutal critic. But compared to him I'll always be third rate.'

‘So would Beardsley,' Harry added drily.

‘You're welcome to whatever little I can teach you when you're here. It will be good to have company.'

Much as Harry wanted to accept Toby's offer, he was reluctant to impose on him. ‘I told you I'm an amateur. I'll probably bore you to death.'

‘I doubt it. Have you looked at what's around here? If it weren't for Malory, God bless him, and trying to do justice to Frank's ideas on illustrating
Le Morte d'Arthur,
I'd be spending all my days in the bar just so I could talk to another human being as opposed to sheep. And, as you see – thank you,' he lifted one of the beer mugs Enfys set on the table ‘I drink more than is good for me already. Do you have materials?'

‘Not with me.'

‘Next time you come, bring some. If the weather is good, you can come out with me. I'm painting one of the lanes that leads out of Craig-y-Nos. It's not the road to Camelot, but by the time I've finished, it will be. How do you think Mrs Edwards would look as the elderly Morgan le Fay?'

‘She's far too jolly and nice.'

‘I was afraid you'd say that. Besides, I really want to paint her when she's young, before she seduces Arthur. How about the Snow Queen as Guinevere?'

It was the oddest conversation Harry had ever had with someone he'd just met. ‘She has the right colouring and she's pretty enough.'

‘Pretty and regal, but my uncle is right – her heart has been penetrated by an icicle, and it shows. Which is fine except when she's with Lancelot. Do you think, if I ask her nicely, she'll fall in love for me so I can capture the right expression for their first meeting? Frank insists that painting should be the highlight of the book.' It was an idiotic question but Toby appeared to be perfectly serious.

‘Who do you think she should fall in love with?' Harry forked the last morsel of pudding to his mouth.

‘You, there's no one else the right age and class around.'

‘There's you.' Harry pulled his beer towards him.

‘I tried, got absolutely nowhere, and have the ice burns to prove it. In her eyes I am the proverbial dust beneath her feet.' Toby handed Enfys his plate when she came to clear them. ‘How are you at seducing women?'

‘Useless,' Harry lied.

‘This would be in the cause of art.'

‘Still useless, even in the cause of art.'

‘Then I'll just have to keep looking.'

‘For another Guinevere or a man to seduce the Snow Queen?' Harry enquired in amusement.

‘Both, if necessary.' Toby stared down unenthusiastically at the bowl of rhubarb and custard Enfys had set in front of him. ‘Want to come up to my room and see what I've done? Some of the canvases have already gone up to London, but I've kept sketches.'

‘Please.' Harry stood, and Toby followed suit.

‘We'll pick up another couple of beers and whiskies on the way.'

Chapter Five

David took the rock Mary handed him and placed it on the lowest layer of the dry-stone sheep-pen wall they were repairing. Whichever way he laid it, he only had to touch it with the tip of his finger for it to move. He pushed it out in disgust and it landed with a thud on the sodden grass.

‘This is no good, Mary,' he grumbled, ‘I need a flatter one.'

She turned up the collar of her old shirt against the rain, and pulled the peak of one of her father's flat caps over her eyes. The fine weather had ended abruptly at dawn, and rain had teemed down in solid, skin-drenching downpours ever since. ‘I'm searching for all the stones that might have been a part of the wall. It looked like a capping stone.'

‘It may well have been,' he retorted impatiently, ‘but there's a bloody big hole here and I'm a long way from needing capping stones.'

‘Don't swear,' she said automatically.

‘Our life is enough to make St David swear. Just look at us!' He turned his face up to the sky and closed his eyes as rain streamed into them. ‘Grubbing around for stones on the side of a hill in a cloudburst, to mend a wall that was probably built a thousand years ago and has been past saving for the last four hundred. And for what?'

‘So the lambs can't escape after you've rounded them up ready for market, like they did yesterday,' she retorted crossly. ‘You heard Bob Pritchard's men. He'll knock at least a fiver off the forty he said he'd pay us to compensate for the loss.'

‘Those lambs didn't escape. Bob Prichard's men stole them when they went to pick up stock from Pwllcoedlog Farm.'

She sank back on her heels and examined her calloused fingers. ‘We can't prove that.'

‘We can't prove he's diddling us either, but you know as well as I do that he is.' He wiped his face in the grey blanket that he had thrown over his shoulders to protect his back, not that it was any drier than the rest of his clothes. He lifted the next stone she handed him with both hands and allowed it to fall to the floor of the pen. ‘I said flat, Mary.'

‘It's difficult to see the difference between the ones that have fallen off the wall and the ones that are just lying around.' She glanced down the hill and through the archway to the open door of the barn where Matthew, with Luke's hindrance, was cleaning out the chicken coops. ‘Here, try this one.' She handed him another.

He slotted it into place, and tested it by leaning his full weight on it to ensure that it would provide a firm bed for the next layer. ‘Iestyn has joined the army.' He spoke casually but she wasn't fooled by his matter-of-fact tone.

‘The dairyman's son from Pontardawe?'

‘Yes.'

‘He's not much older than you, is he?' she asked cautiously.

‘Eighteen months. He was sixteen last week and he went down the drill hall the day after his birthday.'

‘I'm surprised they took him.'

‘They take boys at sixteen,' he informed her authoritatively.

‘I'm even more surprised his father let him go.' She lined up three of the flattest stones within easy reach. ‘Mr Myles has a good business. He can do with all the help he can get. And Iestyn's the eldest, isn't he?'

‘If you mean he was set to inherit the business, his father has always promised him he will. But Iestyn told me that he didn't fancy waiting around for years for his father to die. He wants to see a bit of the world and have some adventures while he's still young enough to enjoy life.'

‘And eighteen would have been too old?' She glanced suspiciously at him. ‘You're not thinking of following him, I hope.'

‘Why not?' David challenged. ‘He'll get board, lodge, boots and uniform provided, and wages at the end of every week. And he'll be able to spend them on whatever he fancies. There'll be no bloody agent following him around to take them off him before they hit his pocket.'

She was too alarmed at the prospect of losing David to reproach him for swearing a second time. ‘And officers on his back every minute of every day, telling him what to do, how to behave and what to think.'

‘So what?' He dropped all pretence of building the wall. ‘They couldn't rule my life any more than the damned agent does already. Did you see Martha, Matthew and Luke's faces when you put that roast chicken in front of them yesterday? The poor kids couldn't even remember the last time we ate meat. We're working farmers and we can't afford to eat our own chickens. Now tell me, where's the bloody sense in that?'

‘Don't ever use language like that in front of the little ones.' Shocked by the depth of her brother's bitterness, she began to shake. An icy claw of fear closed over her heart. She brushed a tangle of wet hair from her eyes and stared at him. ‘You can't be serious. You can't really be thinking of leaving the farm and becoming a soldier. You're only fourteen -'

‘Iestyn told me they didn't even ask to see his birth certificate.'

‘But all this work we do … the Ellis Estate … it's for you, Davy .. .' She started at a crash of thunder. A few seconds later she felt as though she were crouched beneath a waterfall.

‘Like Dad's father said it was all for him?' David had to shout to make himself heard above the noise of the rainstorm. ‘And just like our great-grandfather worked himself to death for our grandfather, and so on, back through all the Ellises until we reach the first one who decided to farm this hellish place. I've been thinking, Mary, what have any of us really got? We certainly haven't got a life. The damned land owns us, not the other way around. All we Ellises have ever done is work ourselves to death for some other bugger's benefit.'