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Gareth didn’t expect to find the cow up here. But he needed to check, to rule this out, because it was easier to search here. If she was not here, then he would have to check the bog. He did not want to think that the cow was in the bog and he hoped he would find her here but knew that he would not. He wanted to find her before the vet came for Curly. Being in the top fields he could hear the cars coming and would know if the vet came down the lane because he knew the sound of the old vet’s van. Then he would have the bike to get back. He knew she was going to have a calf but somehow he didn’t care about the cow inside and was more worried about the way Kate would be and the things that would happen if he didn’t find her. He knew that he was looking in the top fields in case the vet came and he knew inside that the cow would not be here, and that he should look for her in the bog.
Chapter Four
He lies awake now — so still at night — and I know he’s thinking of the unhung gates, and the dead grass, and perhaps of how fat my body is. Other nights, reading, reading, reading. By the bed light he looks at his father’s diary — not a diary. A collection of things he remembers.
I think it is hard for him to read the diary — the memories that were handwritten by the old man. He has to decipher the writing, and the Welsh sometimes, because it is a difficult language often, even for the people who speak it. He has Dylan’s old school dictionary by the bedside, and I can hear him scrabbling for meanings as I lie beside him, when he thinks I am asleep.
__
After the first miscarriage she was not well. It was strange because Dylan had taken strongly, and had grown full and vibrant and well inside her and she had not suffered any loss before him as many women do — as if their body cleans itself by flushing out the unused mess of ten years or so, so it can begin fresh and rich and make the healthy baby of a clean young body. It was then the headaches started. They were rare, but they were very bad.
They continued to try, first easily then with more need, to give their son a brother or a sister. She miscarried twice. On the third time they told her she couldn’t have children then. She was thirty-four and damp like Autumn, not wet in the way young women are, like Spring, but damp and rich and earthy, and it didn’t seem right that she could not have a child. She was fertile and hungry, like fallen leaves.
When she took the farm hand she was angry and possessive. Gareth was away from the farm that day.
The farmhand was younger than her and blue-eyed and heavy and Gareth had taken him on because after the miscarriages her headaches had grown more frequent and Gareth wondered if it was because she could not do the work. She loved her husband very much but she was in the shed and the farmhand was there.
When he touched her she kissed him hard and pushed against his hands and when she tore off her jumper so he could see her full breasts he looked hunted and scared of what he had started. She took him in her hands and got out of her clothes and let him take her against the filthy tyre of the tractor.
When it was done she felt sick and he was sitting on a bale in shock, and she grabbed her clothes and her Wellingtons and ran barefoot and crying over the yard to the house and in the bathroom she was sick over and over and she cut herself for the first time. Gareth found her sitting in the shower with the long cut on her arm starting to clot. She wouldn’t speak to him.
It was two years before she was well again but she still feels sick now when she thinks of what she did, and the nagging doubt haunts her sometimes. It has never been the same since then. He blamed it on the miscarriages.
__ Emmy
It was hard to bring up Emmy with Kate being ill. He had taken her from the shower and cleaned her cut and they had made love very gently after crying together. Kate cut off her hair, so it was all short and severe, and still talked very little; and when the pregnancy held past the more dangerous months Gareth was very happy. Emmy was born in the Spring.
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Water
Gareth cuts across the open fields, knowing the cow will not be there, and crosses the hedges where the gaps are wide and dry. He can see in the dry bank the places that have been dug by badgers, and their beaten path. In the blackthorn, or here and there around a fence, you can find the stiff grey hairs, touched black and white, if you look.
You can see as well the trail of hay and straw they steal from the feeding troughs to make their bedding which they keep meticulously clean, or the pads of red bracken. There’s a tree he knows, an elder, where they go to clean their claws and keep them sharp, taking off the damaged parts and the caked earth on the rough bark of the tree. This is close to the set, and he’s very secret about where the badgers are, even though they can bring disease to his cattle and his land.
In the third field down, close to Bill’s plot, a wide strip of bright green grass follows the line of an underground stream which goes down to the river. There are a lot of good springs on his land, he is lucky, though this year even they are too little. Even so, he has to pay a tax each year for the water he takes from his own land. They flooded valleys full of farms and villages once, to give water to towns.
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Rachel
He sees Bill climb onto the old Fordson tractor and they lift a hand to each other. If you look at him now, he looks emaciated; has dissolved almost to the point where he looks as if he’s held together by his clothes. On his plot, amongst chaotic sheds full of his tools, sometimes you feel he could simply dissipate into the clear air, like so many dead leaves. It’s strange for Gareth to think that he’s seen this man more or less most days of his life. He hasn’t seen his sister for years.
She was small and pretty and when her father shot himself she was sixteen. She did not like her mother, who could not tolerate her growing up, and she left home to become an air stewardess. It was as if she wanted to refute things utterly. The hold of the land on the people who grew up here. The hold of a meaningful place.
Gareth never forgave himself. She was one or two years younger than him and he’d rescued her more times than he could ever remember. From pirates, Red Indians, dragons. She grew up expecting to be taken away.
One day they were in the hay barn hiding. He can never remember what from. They weren’t old enough yet to realise that, actually, they had started hiding from nothing, just to be together and feel their hearts quicken, with their breath held and them both trying not to pee.
They were at the top of the hay and there were mouse droppings and dry, pasty white bird droppings and feathers and white shafts of strong light coming in on them where the barn slates were broken. Their skin itched and stung in the hay pleasantly. She was lying next to him in a blue check dress that she wore all through the summer — and if it got dirtied it had to be washed so she could wear it the very next day. Not knowing why, he felt his penis come awake and though he went red and tried to hide it she saw it stiffen in his shorts. She made a quick exclamation as she saw it move and closed her top lip widely; then she put out a finger and pressed it. He was incredibly embarrassed. It had happened very suddenly and it was bewildering. He climbed down from the hay and ran off. Nothing ever happened between them again.
__ the Mole
Four days ago Kate found a mole. The cats had brought it dead into the kitchen. They never eat them, because the taste is bad to cats, but they bring them in as gifts. It always amazed her how clean moles were, with the velvet fur which can brush either way. She was angry at the cats for killing something beautiful and blind but they didn’t understand. If they caught a rat they got a plate of milk.