‘To think that your father’s meat would make you this sick,’ she said.
He coughed and spewed again. ‘The meat?’ he said.
‘I didn’t eat any.’
‘Who’s to say it wasn’t your hand?’
She looked at the hand on his shoulder. No, she thought, it was the other one, the left hand that was now on his stomach. An infected hand? The boy stood up and wiped his mouth, shaking her off in the process. He stepped to one side, turned on the tap and began to brush his teeth. The light from the landing wasn’t strong enough to see his face properly in the mirror.
‘Just kidding,’ he said after he’d rinsed his mouth.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said.
They were standing opposite each other, or more side to side. He took her hand and lifted it to his mouth. ‘Just kidding,’ he said again and kissed it. ‘See you tomorrow.’ He walked out of the bathroom and closed the study door behind him.
*
She couldn’t see her own face properly in the mirror either. She licked the back of her left hand; it tasted like her. She took a tablet. Later, back in bed, the stream sounded more syrupy and when she imagined the water cycle again it was infinitely bigger, bluer, whiter and wetter. She laid her hands on her belly to have the boy with her, somehow, after all and even thought she could feel his tension radiating into her skin. How easy it would have been for her to let one hand descend a little, laying her other on his chest, pulling him back against her, his head on her shoulder, his throat defenceless, his smell mixed with a sour tang. Give and take, she thought, in the part of the imagined cycle where a cloud was about to rain on the mountain. Him behind me, me behind him. He has to go, but not entirely. ‘There, there’, and ‘ach’, that’s about all there is.
She drifted away on the syrupy flow of the stream, her thoughts stretching out, she was almost asleep. She had just enough time to think how pleasant that was, sleep. How separate from everything else. How free from the things that worry people when they’re not sleeping, the things that scare them, the things that loom before them like a mountain.
50
‘It must have been the anchovies,’ Bradwen said, leaning on the rusty, broken-handled rake he was using to even out the soil he’d turned. He looked a little paler than usual, perhaps because of the hat. His own, old hat was dark green. Earlier in the morning, drinking a coffee, he hadn’t taken the new one off. ‘It was a tin I found in a kitchen cupboard. Who knows, it could have been there thirty years.’
She was leaning against the wall of the old pigsty. The sun was shining, there was hardly any wind. There was no longer any trace of snow or winter. Like before, she felt the warmth radiating from the light-coloured bricks. Like before, the smoke rose vertically from her cigarette.
‘With her buying it long before I was born. That’s a weird thought.’
She turned her head. There were no cows on the other side of the garden wall. It felt lonely. A flock of raucous black birds — she didn’t even try to name them, there were too many possibilities: crows, jackdaws, ravens or rooks — flew from one tree to the next. It was as if it only took them a minute to realise that a particular tree was unsuitable.
‘Or is it impossible for something like that, in oil, to go off?’
He’d started to rake the second rectangle. The soil was light brown, it didn’t look very rich. There wasn’t a single ominous cloud. The geese, out of sight from where she was standing, clucked softly. Contented, not frightened. She was listening to him, but not everything he said was getting through. Maybe he was glad to be feeling better, relieved that he’d just managed a biscuit with his coffee. She felt no desire to answer. He was working, sweating, feeling healthy and alive. She drew on her cigarette, which she was holding between the fingers of her left hand, the hand which he — before coming up with the anchovy theory — had blamed, in jest or otherwise, for his vomiting. The old-woman smell was lingering around her again, or rather, still, even out here in the fresh air, despite the cigarette smoke. She threw away the butt and pulled open the door of the sty. There wasn’t much wood left; the pile had shrunk without her noticing. For a while now the boy had been taking care of the stove and the fireplaces, along with going to Tesco’s and the Waunfawr bakery. Apart from the doctor’s visit, she had stuck close to the house. She’d come here and kept her world small, then she’d gone out — feeling homesick in the refrigerated aisle at Tesco’s, walking to the bakery, having her hair cut short and standing in the reservoir — and now the world was limited again. The homesickness had subsided, almost unnoticed. The garden, the goose field, the house, her bed, the shelf under the mirror in the bathroom, the boxes of tablets. A whole life in a matter of months. Until the New Year. Because this house and garden weren’t hers. It wasn’t her shelf under the mirror. She was a tourist, a passer-by. A foreigner, a German according to most people here.
‘I’m going to plant them,’ Bradwen called.
She stared at the greenish tiles of the cellar floor. For a moment she imagined that, instead of Sam, it had been Bradwen sitting in the oafish sheep farmer’s big black pickup. And that the dog was snuffling around here now.
*
‘I want another arch,’ she said. Now that the rose bushes were in the ground there was hardly anything to them. They’d looked a lot larger in the pots. ‘Here, along the edge of the path, as a gateway to the side path. And then you have to buy two special roses. Roses that want to climb.’
‘Ramblers,’ the boy said.
‘Is that what they’re called? Take the car and drive to Dickson’s Garden Centre.’
‘Now?’
‘Why not? I’ll give you money.’
‘OK.’
She pulled a hundred pounds out of her wallet and gave him the notes.
*
When he was gone, she took the lid off the bin, fished around inside and found the empty, greasy anchovy tin. She walked over to the window above the sink and, without too much difficulty, read Best before: June 1984 on the bottom. The boy had even been right.
She looked up. From an invisible chimney, hidden between oak trees, smoke was rising as on a listless day in June — smoke from cooking, not heating — bees waltzed past the kitchen window, butterflies flitted from a red rose to a yellow rose; the garden wall was two stones higher, a farmer on a dull red tractor was tedding the grass and the alders along the stream were full and round. She had her hair up and she was wearing an apron. Maybe she was already widowed, maybe the man on the dull red tractor was Mr Evans and she was about to take him something. In a basket. She pressed up against the sink and considered adding some cold beer to the basket, two bottles, enough to make Evans feel drowsy, ready to let the grass be for a while and lie down under an oak. Stretching out in the shadows with her. Warm. Clothes off.
She threw the tin back into the bin and washed her hands with icy water. She pulled on her boots without tightening the laces. Then she went upstairs.
51
The portrait of Dickinson was facing the wall again. With a sigh she turned it round. For weeks the boy had been sleeping in the most beautiful room in the house, the only room with windows on two sides. ‘Dual aspect,’ the house-hunters on Escape to the Country would say contentedly. ‘So light and bright and airy in here!’ For weeks now the open volume of poetry had lain on the oak table with the blank sheets of paper next to it, pen and pencil waiting. Habegger’s much-too-thick book didn’t even mention the poem, let alone discuss it. Suddenly she was furious, not just at the biographer — the old gossip — but at Dickinson too. A puling woman who hid herself away in her house and garden, wordlessly insisting with everything she did and did not do that people should just ignore her, yet fishing for validation like a whimpering child, scared to death that the affection she showed others, mostly in letters, would remain unanswered. A bird of a woman who made herself small and can only have been fearful, signing letters ‘Your Gnome’, and staying timorously in her room during the memorial service in the entrance hall for her dead father, but keeping the door ostentatiously ajar to demand the lion’s share of the attention for herself. ‘I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her,’ wrote one of the men with whom she corresponded. A woman who took to wearing the white of a virgin. Only now did she realise that it had been this anger that had motivated her to write a thesis, subjecting what she saw as the many overrated poems to a critical investigation. Almost as a day of reckoning. ‘Not good,’ she said softly. ‘Not good at all.’