The Woman at the Window (14 page)

He took the high moral ground. ‘What about Marian and Gabriel?' he said. ‘My God, how self-absorbed can you get?' As it turned out Heather and the children were well taken care of. They lived in a beautiful house outside Marlow. Marian was the resilient one. I worried about Gabriel. He was highly intelligent and beautiful like his mother and just as shy and sensitive. Heather was a gifted harpist. She had a career of her own, but she preferred teaching. Dennis began to take an interest in his grandchildren, of whom to be honest, up to that point he had been barely, though benevolently, aware. The trouble was there was little we could do to help them. Our commissions were drying up. Dennis decided he would retire. ‘I'm sixty-seven next birthday,' he said. ‘Time to cash in the chips and enjoy ourselves.' That was all very well except there were precious few chips to cash in. I was seven years younger and I could have worked but he needed me more than ever. What would a renewed, youthful irresponsibility be worth without me as a partner in crime? All we needed to do now was enjoy ourselves. We spent a dozen years looking at megaliths all over the place and embarked on such amateurish enterprises as a photographic record of remote churches in southern Italy.

Dennis never chose to be aware that it was his son that was making all this possible. Our current account was never empty and he never enquired too closely why this should be so. ‘I don't know a thing about money,' he would say. ‘Dilys looks after the cheque books. These Euros are jolly handy things. Marvellous idea.' Because we moved about so much everybody was glad to see him. I think I've moved about too much.

‘Daniel, my son, you are wonderful,' I say. ‘I trust your judgement. I think you understand me better than I do myself!'

***

So, here I am. Mrs Macphail, Henefail. The lady of a miniature manor. ‘A quite delightful conversion and extension of the old smithy, surrounded by trees on the north side, a flourishing garden and a garage space for at least two cars.'

‘I only need one,' I murmured. ‘And a small one at that.' Nobody heard me. The thrusting young estate agent has been quite cowed by my son Daniel's prolonged silences and aura of affluence. What it is to have a son who is a multi- millionaire ex-clarinettist! Ah, the seductive power of wealth. My father resisted it as a temptation. My husband resented it as an impediment to freedom. My son revels in it. I never witnessed Daniel in action before. So cold and formidable, so unlike his amiable if explosive father and pliable mother. There was a choice of properties and we visited them all in three days.

‘Take your time,' he said. ‘Bear in mind what you most want to do once you're here.'

He was restrained and patient with me but I made an effort to speed up the process. It did occur to me that his intense concern for my welfare was some form of restitution for having disappointed his father. Or was I transposing my own resolve to sort my father's papers, put them in order and even publish them, with the County Archives permission, something he always intended to do, something I could have helped him with, instead of gallivanting around the world with my beloved, dashing Dennis? I had some expertise in editing. Peter Fry offered me a job in the Documentary Script Unit. That was before Dennis. A nice man Peter. I remember he was much taken with me, but not his face or even his voice. No more than a face in a crowd. When fateful choices we make, etcetera.

Anyway here I am. Lady of the manor complete with faithful retainers. A part-time gardener and a daily help. It is a warm late September and I can still sit in the garden so long as I don't get in Wil Hafan's way. There is a lot to do. The garden has been neglected most of the summer and Wil Hafan regards it all with his own brand of cheerful disapproval. The hedges are overgrown and he particularly dislikes a great clump of pampas grass that is quite out of control, its leaves sticking out like thin knives in all directions. Spiders' webs glitter from one overgrown plant to the other and it comforts me to stare at them as though they meant something more than a decoration, which of course they do. Daniel when he was a little boy told me a fly would need to be five hundred times stronger in order to break out of the web. Or was it six hundred? I might dare to ask him next time he calls. Or I might not. A family is a web too. I turn my attention to a single bramble branch, which stretches down from the tip of a cypress hedge to the broad leaves of a peony as if it were looking for something to hold onto. It dangles like a red rope, with clusters of young green leaves every foot or so on the way down. Wil Hafan with his spade and billhook is moving systematically closer along the border and I wonder how long the briar will be spared. I see more of the seat of Wil's thick trousers than his face. He is older than I am, but determined to go on working. He says he can understand people wanting to live in Sir Fôn, but is mystified by anyone wanting to leave it. He tells me he was born in a village called Paradwys, Paradise, so why on earth should he want to live anywhere else? He is very partial to gnomic utterance and no doubt encouraged by the way I listen to him. Sooner or later I have to ask him if he remembers my grandfather, Evan Roberts, Gelliwen.

The daily help brings him tea and biscuits and I retire indoors. They get on well together, the local man and the Bulgarian refugee. That is what Katica amounts too in the spirit. She still sighs for the roses of Stara Zagora, but she made the mistake of marrying a long-distance lorry driver from Liverpool. He turned out to be violent, and having beaten her up disappeared into Eastern Europe never to be seen again. Katica now lives for the wellbeing of her two children. Rosita is ten and gets bullied at primary school, not because she's foreign, but because she's fat. Her son, Cyril, is fifteen and studious and his mother's pride and joy. Katica was pretty once and struggles to be cheerful but a martyred look can easily pass over her face. Her moods are reflected in her movements. When her spirits are down she tends to slump and drift and sigh. Cleaning becomes an effort.

Both my retainers are anxious to please. Over a few weeks it has become clear to them that I exercise my seigniorial authority through gentle persuasion. A pattern establishes itself. My favourite William Scott hangs on the living-room wall; my Chinese cabinet is in the study along with Daniel's stamp collection and his chess set. With commendable speed everything is in place and everyone knows his or her place. I take a benevolent interest in Wil Hafan's health, which is his chief interest, and in Katica's children. In turn they cherish their routines and accept that I can be absent minded at times because I am engaged in an unspecified literary work worthy of their quiet respect.

***

A corner shop has opened close to the crossroads, opposite the boarded-up chapel and the empty post office premises. An event of great moment. It is no more than a shack really, a former small-scale garage with a corrugated iron roof, but it is brightly lit inside and crammed with everyday necessities. Wil Hafan becomes quite lyrical about it: a dove with an olive branch in its beak, flying above the flood of supermarkets threatening to engulf our little world. That sort of thing. Katica was less approving. I urged her to use the corner shop as much as she can. She protested everything costs two or three pennies more. I said it doesn't matter and that pained look passed over her face, suggesting if cost matters so little I should be thinking of paying her a little more. Nothing in the world would please her more than a trip to Bulgaria, but how could she ever afford the fare?

For some time now Katica has had the key to my solid back door so that she can let herself in and I can cultivate the habit of lying in bed late if I feel like it. She can bring me breakfast, which is no more than muesli and goat's yoghurt. She makes fresh coffee the way I like it and she seems to relish the role of a caring and close retainer. This morning she brings me my coffee looking extremely pleased with herself. It seems that Mrs Price the corner shop is a very good person after all. She has a son, Cledwyn, who is in the same form as Katica's son, Cyril. They have become firm friends in the sudden cohesive way that adolescents are capable of. Cledwyn is large and lumbering and Cyril is small, wiry and quick moving. In Katica's view this means they complement each other. She is delighted that they play chess together and go bird-watching and have no taste for football.

I find all this encouraging too. If this is to be my home my father's papers already make me realise a home can't flourish without a neighbourhood. Judging from his sermons, which I admit I find hard going, he seems particularly keen on parables like the good Samaritan that posed the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?'

The task I have set myself is daunting. There is an odd chronology driven by my father's family pride. He revels in any resemblance he can detect in the behaviour or appearance between generations, convinced of his own likeness to his great-grandfather and so on. He believed there is a thread that runs through their reaction to events at home or in the world at large, in Wales or in the Middle West, an adherence to principles that continues from the eighteen sixties to the nineteen sixties! No wonder my own youthful response was quiet rebellion and an urge to escape. And yet there is something quite moving in that long correspondence to and fro, from the new world to the old, in the same sober biblical Welsh interspersed with bursts of homely dialect humour. So much to puzzle out. And how to reconcile historical fact with my private myth of a golden age in Gelliwen? There must be some kind of a link between the language of my childhood and the healing process of happiness.

I am meditating these matters when the telephone rings. It is Heather my daughter-in-law. In a cautious sort of way we have always got on. There could have been a touch of envy once. I had a devoted husband. Now we are equal. We can even share a sisterly duty towards each other.

‘Dilys.'

That is a good start. It feels supportive. ‘Gabriel wants to come to visit you.'

That sounds more of a challenge. From the moment he went to university Gabriel took up extreme positions. Never satisfied until he had been beaten up or spent a night or two in a cell. He never came to Dennis' funeral. Heather said he wasn't fit to be seen. His hair and beard were long and he had taken to sleeping in the back of an ancient Saab, motoring from protest to protest. Heather said he smelt which was an awful pity because he was such a clever, handsome boy. Heather insisted that he wasn't mentally unstable and his attitude had nothing to do with a refusal to take his father's money. When pressed, Heather suggested he suffered from something she called ‘world contempt' and it was more than possible he had caught it from herself.

‘That's fine,' I say. ‘Really. I'd love to see him.'

‘He's cleaned up,' she says as though she were reading my thoughts. ‘He's very keen to learn about his great-grandfather. Your father that is.'

‘Well that's wonderful Heather. That's just what I'm doing myself these days: in a lackadaisical way. If Gabriel came he would sharpen me up. He's such a clever boy. He can stay as long as he likes!'

She moderates my enthusiasm.

‘He's not the easiest person to live with. Very outspoken when he feels like it and subject to prolonged silences that can get on your nerves. I know they get on mine.'

I restrain myself from blurting out, ‘How like his father'. 

‘He imagines your father was a protester of some sort. 
And a bit of a mystic. Is that right?'

‘Well, a pacifist anyway,' I say. ‘A sort of Welsh Quaker. Poor old boy had to put up with a lot. Anything but a popular preacher.'

Heather couldn't be certain when he would turn up. Gabriel wanted to take a look at Wales first. He knew more about Nicaragua. He wanted to take the temperature, test the water and all that sort of thing. She suggests this would take a week to ten days. In any case he hoped to learn more at the feet of Gamaliel, meaning I suppose my father, and even me.

***

I find myself in a state of trembling anticipation. There is a space in my new home for another generation. What a concept to gladden my father's heart. He was so aware of tradition and continuity. If I understand his papers correctly there always needs to be traces of time past in the here and now to make both meaningful. The first thing I will do is take Gabriel to see Gelliwen. This is not just sentiment; or if it is, what better lubricant to a relationship? In my own case it is clear I need something to care about and that means someone to care for, as I did for my dear, dashing Dennis. If the boy is so intrigued by my father's life and way of thinking, who knows what fascinating result could come from such an unusual combination?

It is half term. Cledwyn and Cyril have arrived to give Wil Hafan a hand in removing the overgrown pampas grass. There is a smell of autumn in the air and they are making a bit of a mess trampling the lawn in that corner of the garden. Wil has his little truck attached to the back of his car. He provides the boys with leather hedging gloves to transport those knifelike fronds and he wields a machete to excavate the roots of the massive clump. He will fill the gaping hole and leave a batch of raw soil where he intends to plant fuchsias. He is old and it all takes time and of course I want the place to look attractive when Gabriel arrives; although he was never one to take close notice of his immediate surroundings. Always too wrapped up in his own thoughts I suppose.

To possess my soul in patience as much as anything I take a trip to Mynydd Bodafon. The cloak of mingled ling and 
heather is very beautiful at this time of the year. And the view from the little summit was always something that set my father's heart swelling with pride. How he used to go on about it and how impatient I was to listen. In the stiff breeze at the top I become aware of the obstacles I shall have to face in dealing with Gabriel; the barriers, language and landscape in their subtle shapes so intimately connected. How much of my father's stuff will I need to translate and how patient will Gabriel be when I try to explain the difficulties? Under this ancient mountain that is really little more than a hill, there still stands the little chapel and field where my grandfather attended an open-air meeting during the religious revival of 1904. A field full of folk in their summer Sunday best, hats wilting in the heat, corsets creaking, the gorse crackling. My father records that the old man experienced a ‘heavy sousing' in spite of his dry dissenter spirit. Intriguing to me, but will Gabriel understand that kind of language?