I had dinner with all of them, and had to answer lots of questions about school and Wim and more school. I was Nice Niece as best I could be. Everything went smoothly. Ear-piercing was not mentioned.
After dinner, I rang Wim. Someone I assume was his mother answered, but got me Wim quite quickly. I was relieved he was there. He could easily have been at a disco with Shirley. “What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Daniel was wondering if you’d like to come here to tea. You could come to Shrewsbury on the train, and we’d meet you.”
“I thought you were going down to South Wales?” He sounded very far away.
“Not until Sunday,” I said. “But it’s all right if you don’t want to come. You don’t work Saturdays, do you?”
“I do, but only in the morning.”
“Well, it’s up to you.” I didn’t want to push.
“Would I get to see you?” he asked. “On our own, I mean.”
Bless him. “Daniel said we could go for a walk or something. And they leave me alone a lot of the time.”
“So, what should I wear? For afternoon tea at a manor house?”
It was so sweet that he worried like that! “Just what you always wear would be fine,” I said. “It’s not a formal black-tie dinner.”
“Will the sisters be there?” he asked.
“Definitely.”
“What a treat!” he said, his voice dripping with irony.
“Well, see you tomorrow. On the one o’clock train?”
“Tomorrow it is.”
After he’d put the phone down I felt cold and lonely and wandered around from room to room for a while. Daniel was drinking in his study and the sisters were watching television in the drawing room. It almost makes it worse that I’m going to see him tomorrow than if it wasn’t for a week. I’d braced myself for that.
Saturday 16th February 1980
The sun was shining and Wim showed up at the station in a collar and tie, which made him look younger, more like a schoolboy. I didn’t say that, of course. Daniel accommodatingly drove us to Acton Burnell castle. The castle is a ruin, covered in new spring grass and ivy.
“There’s nobody else here,” Wim said when we got out of the car.
“Well, it is February. Hardly grockle season,” Daniel said.
Wim raised his eyebrows. “Tourists,” Daniel said. “We get a lot of them in the summer. Now, you can walk back from here. It’s not much over a mile. Or, if you don’t feel like walking, call from the phone box, Morwenna, all right?” There was a red phone box right there by the castle gate.
“All right,” I muttered. He meant if my leg fell off, of course. I shouldn’t be churlish with people who want to accommodate me, really. It’s crass.
The outwall was fallen, the moat was full of nettles, and you could just about tell what’s what in the keep if you’d seen a proper castle like Pembroke or Caerphilly where everything is marked. There were fairies everywhere, of course, which was why I’d suggested it.
I’ve noticed before that there are two kinds of people for going round castles. There are the ones who say “And here’s where we’d put the boiling oil and here’s where we’d put the longbowmen,” and the ones who say “And here’s where we’d put the settee, and here’s where we’d hang the pictures.” Wim turned out very satisfactorily to be of the first camp. He’d been to Conwy and Beaumaris with his school, so he knew about castles. We fought a very successful siege (and had a few cuddles in corners out of the wind) before he even asked about fairies.
“Tons of them,” I said, sitting down in a windowseat so that he could have my stick and see them. I looked out through the cross-shaped arrow slit, but the view so attractively framed was of pylons stretching out wires over neat Shropshire fields, and the red telephone box down below.
Wim sat beside me, with my stick across his lap and watched them for a while. They didn’t take much notice of us sitting there. When we were children the fairies would play games with us, hide and seek, mostly, and other chasing games. The ones in the castle seemed to be playing games like that with each other, moving in and around the rooms, keeping out of each other’s sight, dashing through doorways ahead of entrances through broken walls. Not having the stick didn’t stop me seeing them, of course, so Wim and I sat there and wondered aloud what they were doing. Then one of them, a tall, impossibly tall, fairy woman, with long hair mixed with swan feathers, swept through the fallen wall, saw us and stopped. I nodded to her. She frowned and came over and stood before us. “Hello,” I said, and then in Welsh “Good afternoon.”
“Go,” she said to me, in English. “Need. In—” She gestured.
“In the Valleys?” I asked. I was used to guessing games when it came to fairies and nouns. “In Aberdare? In the vales of coal and iron?”
I could feel Wim looking at me.
“Belong,” she said, and pointed at me.
“Where I come from?” I asked. “I’m going tomorrow.”
“Go,” she said. “Join.” Then she looked at Wim, and smiled, and drew her hand down the side of his face. “Beautiful.” Well, he was. She swept on, out of the doorway, and a parade of warty grey gnomes came in through the hole in the wall and followed her out without a glance in our direction.
Wim stared after her, awestruck. “Wow,” he said, after a while.
“Do you see what I mean now about hard to have a conversation?” I asked.
“Impossible, yes,” he said. “Fragments like that, you wouldn’t know if you were making up the right half or not.” He was talking quite distractedly and still looking after her. “She really was beautiful.”
“She meant that you were,” I said.
He laughed. “You’re not serious? No, you are serious? Jesus!” He peered after her, but she was out of sight.
“You are beautiful,” I said.
“I get zits,” he said. “I cut myself shaving. I’m wearing a stupid tie. She—”
“Have you read ‘Firiel’? In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil? The end of that? That’s what you’re feeling.”
“Tolkien really knew what he was talking about,” Wim said.
“I think he saw them,” I said. “I think he saw them and dreamed them into the elves he wanted. I think they are his dwindled remnant.”
“Maybe he saw them when he was a child, and remembered them,” Wim said. “I wish I knew what they are really. You’re right, they’re not ghosts, or not only ghosts. They’re definitely not aliens either. They’re not substantial. When she touched me…”
“They can be more substantial sometimes,” I said, remembering the warmth of Glorfindel beside me on Halloween.
“What did she mean? Go, need, in, belong, go, join.”
I was impressed that he’d remembered so precisely. “I think she meant I should go to the Valleys because I’m needed there for something. Maybe you’re right about my mother, or maybe it’s something else. I’m going tomorrow anyway.”
“Half the time I can’t believe it. What you told me about your mother and magic and all of that. And then something like her.” He turned to me and put his arms very tightly around me. “If you’re going to go and save the world, I want to come.”
“I’ll phone you every day,” I said.