The Woman at the Window (6 page)

‘I would have known you anywhere,' she said. ‘I bet people keep on telling you you haven't changed a bit.'

Her hand when he clasped it was thin and cold. He wondered whether he should kiss her on the cheek; and who was the younger woman.

‘This is Monique,' Glenys said. ‘She's a Berber. She doesn't speak much English. And not a word of Welsh.'

Glenys stood up and took hold of Henry's arm while Monique disposed of the chair.

‘Monique is wonderful,' she said. ‘She smokes like a chimney, and I'm the one that's got cancer. And I've never smoked in my life. There you are. One more of life's little ironies. Where can we get a decent bite to eat? Such a shame that damn plane was late. We won't have much time to talk.' 

However little English the Berber woman spoke, she knew her way about airports. She found a lift, which transported them to a lounge which Henry had known nothing about, and within minutes they were ensconced in comfortable armchairs able to gaze at a variety of dormant aircraft through a large window. The best Henry could manage was a confused smile. He failed to say how wonderful it was to see her again. He was slow even to muster up the courage to look at Glenys closely enough to register this change in her appearance. Her skin was mottled with too much sun and her head had lost any feminine aura. With her hair cut short and dyed brown, it looked stern and severe. It made him uncomfortably aware of his own shortcomings even though she was smiling at him. Her lips were thinner but her voice was mercifully the same and he clung to that. Her voice after all was the source of a haunting music he had heard all his life. 

‘This cancer… '

At last he managed to address the subject.

‘Don't worry, Henry. They say it's curable. We shall have to see. At least I can eat cream cakes.'

Monique had laid the tempting plate before them and she was smiling her approval as she sipped her coffee.

‘I don't know how long we've got,' Glenys said. ‘We are in transit.'

‘In transit?'

He heard the dull simplicity in his voice as he repeated the phrase.

‘To Switzerland. For treatment. I don't know how long we've got. To live I mean. How old are you now Henry?'

‘I'll be seventy-seven next birthday.'

‘Of course you will. And I'd bet you'll live to be a hundred.You are just the type.'

She smiled as she said it.

‘In any case I had to see you. And I've brought you a present.'

Monique opened the briefcase she was carrying and handed Glenys her cheque book. Glenys tore out a cheque already made out to Dr Henry Davies.

‘There you are, Henry dear. All the money I owe you for my education. Plus a bit extra for Christmas.'

Henry looked humbled and confused. Glenys had always been cheery and cheerful. Always a breath of fresh air and the spirit of youth and freedom. Life-giving in fact. But this was different. How could he adjust himself to her humour? 

‘Go on then,' she said. ‘Take it. Call it the bride price or whatever. We came all this way to give it to you. And look at you once again.'

He glanced down at the cheque in his hand. It was for a hundred thousand pounds.

‘I couldn't possibly…'

‘Of course you can. Take it. I've got more than I'll ever need. Think of it as the cost of my education in Switzerland.'

‘But you paid that back.'

He sounded cross as he said it.

‘My mother said you paid it all back.

‘And did she tell you she also paid for my abortion? A cunning old woman your mother. God rest her soul.'

‘An abortion? But we never…'

‘Fucked you mean. You were always such a straight-laced romantic. Poor old Henry. At this late stage at least we can afford to be honest.'

Henry closed his eyes. Her voice was relentless. 

‘No. The culprit was your favourite. The head boy. Gwyn

Alun. He said you made me ripe for the plucking. He was a cheeky bastard. He assured me it was perfectly safe. I was fool enough to believe him. I was always incurably curious. And of course it was nothing like it was cracked up to be. And the pill was in its infancy if that is the appropriate expression.'

She was much amused. Monique was paying her the closest attention, whether she understood what was being said or not. Her dark eyes showed concern for Glenys' condition.

‘You take that cheque Henry and don't you dare tear it up after I've come all this way to give it to you. Footballers earn that in a week. If you don't want it, give it to some worthy Welsh cause or other. As I remember there were always an awful lot of them.'

Monique murmured Glenys' name. It sounded like an incantation.

‘She thinks it's time for us to leave. She knows about these things. She's an absolute wizard at finding her way in this wicked world. Berber blood no doubt.'

Glenys was laughing again. Henry looked so defenceless and aghast.

‘We'd better get moving.' ‘Let me come with you!'

Henry had reached a sudden decision and was pleading with her.

‘Let me come with you. Look after you. Be with you. That's all I ask.'

‘Dear Henry. A romantic to the very end. You can come and see us off if you like. But we've had enough of men, haven't we Monique? Life is so much more comfortable without them. Don't take that personally. You were one of the best. Handsome and so well behaved. From here on we do without men. Isn't that right, Monique?'

Much saddened and subdued Henry accompanied the wheelchair to the boarding gate. Glenys made another joke about returning to Switzerland for further education and medication. Henry was unable to smile.Was reality so harsh and rough edged that a man was driven to take refuge in illusions and daydreams and wishful thinking? Was he obliged to cope with this bitter situation on his own? As they passed out of sight, his fingers strayed to the folded piece of paper in his waistcoat pocket.

The Comet

THE first thing that happened was the fax. This was in the days before you could ‘kiss your fax goodbye'. In a modest finca on a rocky northern slope of the enchanted island, where tourists were least likely to wander, the fax machine was the acme of modernity, the link with the outside world. Hefin had taken the dogs down the pine forest for one of his inspirational walks. There was the black mongrel bitch, Lollie, long past her reproductive stage but still very lively. Hefin called her the flying hearth rug. And there was Larry, the large amiable husky whose one weakness was chasing sheep. Gisella was hard at work translating the second volume of a history of the American Civil War when the fax machine gave its warning clatter. It could have been from an impatient publisher in Milan. Instead it was from Hefin's father.

Arriving tomorrow at the airport approx 3pm. Flight 507. Sorry for the short notice. Please meet. Bryn Tanat.

Gisella was so dazed and confused she could no longer sit at her desk. Should she run down the rough track to the woods to warn him? That would be silly. She wandered around the whitewashed finca worrying about how her partner would react to the news. Hefin was so sensitive. Gifted, handsome and sensitive. Those were the epithets she regularly attached to the man she shared a life with, just as devoted to his talent as she was to his well-being. He was, as she was ready to point out, spoilt for choice. He painted, he sculpted, he wrote poetry, and he was brilliant at domestic architecture. The question had been, for some years now, on which of these talents should he concentrate? He was only intermittently possessed with the desire to excel. Most of the time he was repelled by the demands of commercialism, the need for publicity, the backbiting that littered these fields of endeavour like mythic crops of dragons' teeth.

Here on their remote slope of this enchanting Balearic island they were at least at peace and reasonably happy. Gisella's industry supported their almost idyllic existence in this picturesque and primitive finca. Hefin could wake up with the rosy fingered dawn breaking over the wine dark sea just as it had done in Homer's day. She was happy to believe that her labours poured showers of miraculous mornings into his lap. Hefin was her handsome agent of perception prepared to transmute the experience into living art. Time would decide into which medium and where the highest results would be achieved.

The awful thing was that Hefin couldn't stand his father. Gisella struggled to understand but she couldn't help feeling that it was something that made life more difficult than perhaps it really needed to be. Of course she was prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of her agent of rare perception: but his father had called him a tinkling cymbal and that was a contemptuous dismissal that was hard for a sensitive soul like Hefin to bear. It took him some time to respond with, ‘What does he think he is anyway? Just a sounding brass!' which was near enough, since in those days Bryn Tanat was a prominent member of Parliament renowned for his eloquence. ‘A poor man's Aneurin Bevan,' Hefin called his father: which was less offensive than many of the things he chose to say about him.

Two years ago Hefin had returned to the island from his mother's funeral full of bitterness and loathing for his father. ‘He destroyed her,' he said. ‘That self-absorbed monster destroyed her.' He had picked up a rumour that Bryn Tanat had met up with a rich widow and was planning to marry her after a decent interval. This enraged him further. ‘He's a swine,' Hefin said. ‘He treated my mother like a slave. I never want to see him again.' Hefin had been very attached to his mother. He said he had been sent away to school by his pitiless father to prevent his mother spoiling him. That rankled all his life and who could blame him? He had worked on an elegiac sequence in her memory for some time, until he had to abandon it to undertake designing a studio for Gustavo and Ernst, a pair of artists who lived in a large wooden chalet four miles away. They were part owners of a fish restaurant in the picturesque creek above Calle san Miguel.

Hearing Hefin's footsteps she went out and kneeled to pet old Lollie. She held up the fax for Hefin to read.

‘I can't bear it.'

He crushed the flimsy paper in his hand.

‘What does he want to come here for? For what?' 

Gisella busied herself pouring water into separate dishes

for the dogs. Her head was bent watching them quenching their thirst. She only seemed to half hear Hefin's petulant complaints.

‘Just to disrupt things, that's what. Destroy my concentration. Destroy me, really. That's what it's all about.'

She could have said, ‘He's your father, Hefin, after all!' but she didn't. Not because she didn't dare but because she had so much work to do. Time would be lost in fruitless recrimination. There was a deadline to meet. She needed to retire behind her texts and her dictionaries and her lexicons. The less she said the better.

‘I don't want to see the old bastard, I just don't and that's the end of it. I'll have to get away.'

How could he? They had just enough money to pay the rent and the month's grocery bill. She kept her head down so that he couldn't glare at her as though it were all her fault. Of course in one sense it was. It was her encouragement and her determination and her industry that created the situation here and maintained it. Perhaps her silence would begin to make him realise that much?

‘I'm going to see Gustavo and Ernst,' he said. ‘It's time we started on the extension at the restaurant. I'm going to walk. I'm not taking the dogs.'

It was a relief to Gisella to see him go. He could walk off his fury and she could concentrate on yet another chapter of the American Civil War. Translating was a great comfort. Or would be if it was better paid. Some kind of a shelter from the invoices and vicissitudes of their precarious hold on what should have been an idyllic existence. Hefin after all was so gifted and so handsome. On the rare occasions when he deigned to do a bit of shopping, the women on either side of the counter would regard him with an awe and admiration that still gave her pleasure, even when she heard them wonder how he had worn so well when she looked so small and shrunken and worn out. There was a marmoreal quality to her Hefin's beauty and perhaps a certain restraint that could be interpreted as coldness. He had never been as ardent as she felt herself to be. He had a way of being frank and straightforward that suggested a disregard for her feelings; and yet he could say what he liked and had never loosened the grip of her affection. She could be hurt and still turn the sting into something close to an erotic thrill. It was strange, but she knew it was true.

Hefin returned from his trip to the chalet far sooner than she expected. He flung himself down on the wickerwork settee, tired out after the long tramp over hill and down dale.

‘Gustavo's gone and done a bunk again,' he said. ‘Oh, poor Ernst…'

Her sympathy was instant and heartfelt. Ernst was the quiet, introvert, hardworking Swede. Gustavo the colourful, guitar-playing South American: large, full of fun, easily bored. Hefin displayed an ironic attitude. This was just one more example of human folly and weakness among even the most sophisticated and cultivated people. Gisella was eager for more detail.