Testimonies: A Novel (13 page)

“I do not think I would be breaking any rules if I were to tell it with names and places—it was nearly all out in public at the end—but perhaps I ought to change the names and ask you not to repeat the details.

“These two brothers, and the wife of the elder, farmed … well, T
ŷ
Bach. The younger was a widower, childless, like the others: he was a more retiring, timid man than his brother, and something of a bard. It was an ideal ménage. They were not well off, but they were comfortable; that corner of land is fertile, and although it is small it kept the three of them even in bad years. They had an excellent understanding among themselves and they worked together like characters in a moral story-book. I speak of what I know, because the younger one gave me Welsh lessons, and I saw them at all times. They would not have been anything like so comfortable with children—apart from the expense the house was very small. It was a long house: there are still a few of them inhabited, you know—those long low old houses with the people on one side of the passage and the cattle on the other, with one big kitchen and a half-loft over it and hardly anything else. The dairy was part of the main room—an alcove behind the chimney-breast—and hens were walking in and out all the time. It was the kind of room where a wireless set looks mad, like something out of another world. I don’t know how people ever manage to bring up children in those places, but they do: I knew a family of thirteen in one.

“However, there were no children in this case. A little farther down there was a widow with five or six. She was said to be a widow, but I don’t know that anybody had ever married her. She was one of those curious things, a rural whore—well, perhaps not whore, because I doubt if she was ever paid, but the children all had different fathers. She was a hideous slattern, mentally deficient I think, and apparently quite old, but still year after year she produced these children.

“I must say this for the people up there, that although they would not have anything much to do with the woman they were kind to the children. They went to the village school with the others, the schoolmaster saw to it that there was no difference made, and there were people who gave them proper clothes and taught them cleanliness and took them into their homes.

“The people I am talking about, the Evanses, had a particular fancy for the second boy, who was called Alfred—his father was probably an English vagrant. Alfred was always at T
ŷ
Bach, a well-mannered little chap for a Welsh boy—not that that is saying much, because they are the most indulged, spoilt set of brats I have ever come across—and he helped with all the things that a boy can do. I used to see him eating enormous meals there at all hours of the day, and it was some time before I understood that he was not of the household.

“Well, as I was saying, these people pretty well made themselves the foster-parents of this lad. I could bring dozens of instances as evidence of mutual affection, encouragement, and so on and so forth. But the point is that the boy was thoroughly liked by the childless, middleaged people of T
ŷ
Bach.

“Very well. In the winter the brothers were cutting chaff. You have seen the big external water wheels in most of the farms? This one still worked; they had a good stream, and the wheel churned the milk, cut the chaff and turned a grindstone.

“You cut chaff by feeding straw into the machine at one side: toothed rollers carry it in and a large, heavy wheel with curved blades attached to its spokes cuts it into short lengths. The wheel revolves very rapidly and makes a deafening noise when it is cutting.

“The younger brother was shoveling chaff into the storage place; the elder was in the straw-loft. The boy was feeding straw into the machine: he had been told not to touch it.

“The elder brother heard Alfred scream, but before he could get down from the straw the mischief was done: the younger brother, on the other side of the machine, did not hear the scream but did hear the changed note of the cutter and ran to stop it. He kicked the driving-belt off and between them they got the boy’s arm out. The hand was gone just below the wrist and the forearm was terribly mangled: he was bleeding profusely and he was unconscious.

“There was one thing clear in the subsequent confusion: a case for damages could be brought against them. They had not expressly invited the boy; they had even told him not to touch the machine, the guard of which was defective; but the case might lie.

“They carried the boy through the blinding rain to a shaft some three hundred yards from their house. It was an unsuccessful trial shaft for a slate quarry and they used to throw their dead sheep down it instead of burying them in the shallow earth. The boy was certainly unconscious, but whether he was dead or alive when they threw him down was never established. They threw rocks and earth on top of him.

“Very well. There were inquiries made, but they came to nothing and it was supposed that Alfred, who was a forward, adventuring lad of thirteen, had gone off on a lorry to seek his fortune perhaps at sea. He was big for his age, precociously self-reliant, and he was determined to be a sailor in time. There were plenty of long-distance lorries passing on the main road, and once before Alfred had gone as far as Swansea before being discovered.

“In seven years the brothers fell out. The woman was now about forty or forty-five; her personality appeared to change radically and she no longer made the house comfortable for them. She would no longer cook: their meals came out of tins or they cooked them themselves. The atmosphere of the house was poisoned by her nagging.

“What brought their quarreling to a head was the deaconry of the chapel—I mean which should be deacon now that there was a vacancy. The younger brother was the literary one of the family, but the elder had the elder’s rights. They had both taught in the Sunday school for many years, though of the two the younger was the more active.

“You know the great importance of the chapels here, and the prestige and influence a deacon has: you can hardly overestimate it in the high farming valleys where there is no other authority or public opinion—where public opinion is integral and undiluted, I should say.

“God knows what went on up there in T
ŷ
Bach, but the outcome of it was that when it was certain that the elder brother was going to be the deacon the younger denounced him to the police.

“Well; there you are. Those are the sort of people we have to deal with: you see my point?”

“Yes, I see your point perfectly well, but I do not see how you can argue that the Evanses were typical or that this ghastly affair has any bearing on the national character of the Welsh. After all, on that basis you could go through the Newgate calendars of every country and prove the survivors the greatest rogues unhung.”

“Hm. I suppose I have explained it badly. It was not the thing itself that I was meaning, but the manner of it, and the motives.”

“Yes, I appreciate that. But I still think that you could duplicate the whole of it elsewhere. Surely you do not intend to confine hypocrisy, violence and self-seeking to the Welsh. I am very sure that they do not have a monopoly; and more than that, I should say, saving your presence, that they have a larger share than usual of the contrary virtues.”

I thought he was going to answer angrily, but he checked himself and said, “No. I have not chosen my case well. It does not really bring out what I meant to say—and the rest obscures it. I should have emphasized the
closedness
of these people, the fact that I was on terms of friendship with them—that the boy was—and that I knew nothing about them, never pierced through the barriers to see what sort of people they really were—and this
after
they had done it. That’s the important point. I was there within a matter of days of the crime, and I took my tea in a happy, model family and went over a number of englynion that the younger brother had just written.”

There were a good many replies that came to my tongue, but I could not say them in his house. He went on eagerly, “You must have come across it. I am sure you will recognize it if you reflect. You know the Thomases at Hendre, don’t you? Or even more the people at Gelli—that is the place where the old man and his wife came from Cwm y Glo, isn’t it? And where the young one married a girl from Cwm Priddlyd recently? Yes, of course it is. Well, what do you know of the good people at Gelli? You think you know them pretty well, don’t you?” He paused and seemed to recollect himself; he looked at me for a moment, and I did not know how to interpret the look: I thought he was going to go on. He hesitated, fiddling with a pawn, and said in a different voice, “It’s a matter of years, perhaps. In the end you’ll come round to my way of thinking.” Then he began to rearrange the chessmen.

I
t was toward the autumn that I began to feel so continuously unwell. I know it is ridiculous to keep harping on this, but I do insist upon it because a man (myself, at any rate) is ruled by his stomach. If it does not behave well one’s whole outlook on life is changed, and I really believe one’s character changes with it.

My choice of a doctor was not fortunate: Davies had been an Army doctor for a long time and in Dinas he had a very large panel practice. I went to him on a vague recommendation and never after summoned up enough moral courage or energy to change. Changing doctors in the country is a great upheaval, and even if the other man had agreed to it he might have turned out worse. I did not often go to Davies or send for him; I was willing to be impressed, but I had no confidence in his
mist. alb.
or his brisk “No beef or mutton.” He would have cut off a leg or set an arm with the best, but he was not the man for me. What I wanted was one of those quiet, humane doctors who have few patients: they sometimes go into semi-retirement in country towns and doctor their friends from kindness and a desire to go on being useful; they do take notice of their patients, and even tend to coddle them. I knew such a one in Thame, and I lost a good friend when he died.

If I had been a good physician to myself, I should have refrained from going down to the farm and from spending my afternoons on the Craig y Nos staring down to see Bronwen. It was always worse after that; but if I did not see her there was such a strong impatience in me, a tearing restlessness, that it had the same effect and I would find myself as nervous as a cat, unequal to my food, useless for reading or settling to any sort of work. As for my book, it had dropped into the utter distance; the pseudo-Basil and the nameless monks whose work I had transcribed into so many heavy notebooks for so many heavy years, and who had occupied my slow thoughts for such a dull length of time, they were as far from me now as I was from my old self.

Nothing seemed worthwhile, and I am afraid that I let the household chores slide day after day until I was living in a slum. And how slowly the time passed. I had a little chiming clock that beat the quarters: as each passed after an empty gray space it seemed that I had gained something; and the hours were a victory, each one. I would not have minded so much if I had been able to sleep.

I felt I was a constraint on them down at the farm, but I still went in the evenings: earlier on, when the surprise—the shock, even—had been new to me, I had almost stopped my visits, but now I went down quite often. I could not keep away and now, more than ever, I wanted to know whether I was right about Bronwen and Nain.

I had noticed it in the first place, at a time when my perceptions were dull—how dull, and what a heavy clod I must have been for all those years of my life; half alive, no more.

Now it was essential for me to know whether I had been right then, when I was an unmoved spectator. All the innumerable little things that had given me that impression seemed to point out that Nain was not being properly used. I had my periods of reaction, when I told myself that I was making a fool of myself, creating an image of Bronwen that had no relation to herself apart from physical resemblance. Then I would be sorry for my treachery, and go all the way back again.

But there was something there, and the more I thought about it, when I was balanced between extremes, the more I felt its importance: because if she was in fact hard and unkind and dispossessing towards Nain, then she was not the woman I was breaking my heart for. I said that that would be for the best: I could go away then. Then I tried to see Emyr’s share in it (he was not always kind, and rarely considerate) and I tried to exculpate Bronwen, to lay it all on the difference of habit and tradition, the different way of life. But in the end I wanted the truth. The truth—no comfortable deceit or compromise—that was the essential.

I was afraid of what I might find, and as time went on I became more afraid. It was all very well to say in my mind that I wanted my release; it was a damned lie. I wanted my love made certain, confirmed, redoubled; but my heart was afraid. (I cannot talk of this without the sound of romantic clap-trap: I am sorry for it.) I was very willing to search for the truth if it should tend in the direction I wanted, and I hated the search for it when everything seemed to point away.