The story was that shortly before being packed off to school in Spain, a nanny had been brought into the house to look after her brother and herself, a pretty girl about whom her mother had instantly had her doubts. Ostensibly the girl was the daughter of an old friend Ernesto wanted to help out, but, employing a private detective, Maria soon discovered that she had been Ernesto"s mistress for some time before he had conceived the daring but ill-starred plan for making her person more readily available by smuggling her into the family home. With extraordinary professional competence the detective had been able to discover Ernesto"s pa.s.sword by which he obtained access to his safe deposit in Chancery Lane, from which a number of letters were recovered full of amatory material of the most explicit character. What I was not told, but learned from a gossiping in-law much later, was that Maria waited for Ernesto just inside the front door when he returned home that evening and shot him at close range with the ridiculous little .22 pearl-handled revolver she still carried in her handbag when I first knew her. The occasion was dramatic but the damage slight, for the bullet, aimed at the heart, stuck in the gristle under the collar bone. Ernesto took a taxi round to the doctor who readily extracted the slug, and was back within the hour, by which time Maria had doused the nanny with the contents of a slop-pail kept ready for the moment and thrown her into the street. A fulsome reconciliation followed, and life at Gordon Street went on as if nothing had happened.
It remained a mystery to me that, while the relationship between husband and wife had settled to an obviously affectionate one, Ernestina should have decided to take up a cause her mother no longer had the slightest desire to defend. I could only suspect the existence of obscure psychological factors of which Ernestina herself may have been unconscious. Up to this time the relationship between father and daughter seemed to have been an exceptionally close one. Ernesto had made sure that his eldest child should have - as he saw it - the best of everything, while up to and through her adolescence she made it quite clear that he had occupied the centre of the stage of her life. Each saw the other as a paragon. Everyone complimented Ernesto on the possession of a beautiful and talented daughter, on her great store of precocious knowledge, her charm and her wit. She in turn constantly witnessed the deference shown her father by visitors to the house from Europe and the United States, how they bowed themselves into his presence and, if from Sicily, frequently pressed his hand to their lips. Now, suddenly, womanhood had taken her unawares, demoting an immortal father to common humanity, exposing his innumerable fallibilities, and she was guilt-ridden and resentful that her love for him should have failed. So this sordid little pa.s.sage salvaged from the past had come to her aid. It was impossible to say to him, "I no longer love you." Far easier, "You betrayed my mother."
The watershed, as it seemed to me, in the relationship between my father-in-law and my wife, was reached as a result of the episode of the emerald ring, although this too, I suspected, was no more than an excuse to open up a campaign on a new front, when the quarrel over the fake nanny had begun to flag.
Ernesto had bought his daughter several valuable necklaces, a diamond-encrusted wrist.w.a.tch, a spectacular diamond and sapphire ring, and for her seventeenth birthday he had made the journey to Santander to present her with a plain gold ring in which was set a large emerald.
She was proud of the journey, undertaken with some effort at that time, as well as the ring itself. "He was three days on the train," she said. "All that way to be with me on my birthday. I was the envy of the whole school. The diamond ring is more valuable, but I don"t like it so much." She would slip off the emerald ring, twist it under a lamp and laugh with pleasure, or hold it against a background of a silk scarf, or her dress, so that the emerald tempered the colour of the silk with its secret viridescent flash. Spanish was the language reserved for the praise of the emerald: "Ay que bonito! Mira los colores. Es exquisita. No te parece?"
But one day Ernestina"s suspicions about the ring seem to have been aroused. She took it to a Bond Street jeweller, under the pretence of offering it for sale, and he put a gla.s.s in his eye, examined the back of the stone, shook his head and handed it back. Briefly he told her that the emerald was a "chip" cut from a larger gem and that, possessing a flat base, was of far less value than a perfect stone shaped as a rhombohedron.
Possibly by Ernestina"s design I was present when the inevitable confrontation took place.
"Did you know the emerald was a chip?" Ernestina asked, deadly calm in her manner.
Ernesto said, "You were a young girl. Only an expert can tell the difference. It was an expensive ring."
"You deceived me," Ernestina said. She took the ring from her finger, walked to the window and threw it into the street. Now she had discovered a personal grudge with which to reinforce vicarious injury.
The formal visit by the Corvajas to my parents in Enfield took place shortly before the opening of the breach. Ernestina and I had been to Enfield on many occasions, but by the time the Corvajas had brought themselves to the pitch of journeying to the outer suburbs a coldness had developed between Ernestina and my mother, the fault lying largely with my mother. Ernestina got on well enough with my father, who was warm in manner, more adaptable, and could even be gallant, but my mother exhibited all the traditional defects of an Anglo-Saxon - or in this case, Welsh - mother-in-law, and it was clear to all of us that Ernestina would never be received by her as a daughter, however much Ernesto and Maria Corvaja treated me as a son.
The Corvajas rarely left their house except to visit the opera or once in a while for some celebratory meal, eaten in an upstairs private room in Gennaro"s restaurant in Frith Street. The journey to Enfield involved them in much forethought and planning. Sicilians are the most urban of people, with an affection for bricks and mortar and the consoling familiarities of the home. Largely this is a response to an environment which has compelled people to draw close together for protection, in a country with no isolated houses, no villages and no town so small that it could not muster a defence force in an emergency to fight off an attack by an armed band. As late as the period immediately following the last war there were some twenty of these at large, spreading terror through the countryside.
In the Corvaja household one minded one"s own business and asked no questions. So engrained is this traditional Sicilian reserve that I was sometimes inclined to the theory that normal human curiosity, as we understand it, did not exist among them. Sometimes however, grudgingly, reluctantly, sensitive facts could no longer be suppressed, and what began to look like more and more extraordinary security measures controlling the family"s movement had to be explained. Ernesto, Maria explained, had to be on his guard from a visitor from America who might visit London with the intention of killing him. Hence the ineffective pistol carried in her handbag. Hence the imposing snub-nosed (and loaded) revolver in the top drawer of Ernesto"s desk. She added one further piece of information: that Ernesto had narrowly escaped death in an ambush a few days before they had taken the first ship out of New York, his hat on this occasion having been blown off his head. On these matters Ernesto himself preferred to add no comment.
The visit to Enfield must have seemed to the Corvajas as novel and strange as a traveller"s first experience of the Amazon rain forest. They knew nothing of England outside a square mile of London"s West End, and the ten-mile drive in the old Bugatti through some of Europe"s seediest suburbs came as an eye-opener to them. Maria, a kindly and compa.s.sionate woman, although imbued with a "let them eat cake" att.i.tude where the poor were concerned, could not understand how people could consent to live in Tottenham and Edmonton, and why there were no taxis about. Forty Hill, Enfield, bewildered the Corvajas for other reasons. Apart from the rusty planes growing in Gordon Square, Ernesto had seen few trees since the old days of the Parco della Favorita in Palermo. Now, suddenly, he found himself deep in flowering cherry orchards, reacting to them with a curiosity not wholly free from suspicion. Sicilians had good reason to distrust wooded places, so much so that precautionary deforestation had left a single sizeable reserve of woods in the whole country, the Ficuzza, which still gave shelter, I was informed, to numerous outlaws.
Our small house must have astonished them too, in its terrible vulnerability. We trudged together up the garden path, and it occurred to me that this might have been the first time in twenty or thirty years that the Corvajas had walked on anything but lush carpets and city pavements. The unfamiliar presence and scent of foreigners set all the local dogs barking, and Ernesto nodded his approval of their outcry. It was good to have reliable watchdogs about the place.
The meeting, from the very beginning, showed signs of being a great success, and the Corvajas, who had probably prepared themselves to crunch on the claws of more toads, were clearly delighted to find that my father and mother were normal human beings, eccentric perhaps in their choice of living accommodation, but no more than that, certainly harmless and reasonably intelligent in a cold-blooded English way. Ernestina, who was exceedingly vivacious when pleased, made a successful effort to be kind to my mother, and my father nodded instant agreement when I asked him to switch off the musical box tinkling "Guide Me Oh Thou Great Redeemer" in the background.
After the brilliant emptiness of life at Gordon Street, our modest house, the garden and the surrounding orchards seemed to the Corvajas encrusted with small wonders, which they investigated with the delight of children collecting offerings left by the sea on a sandy beach. The exotic birds in my father"s garden aviary entranced them, and Ernesto wondered if he could not build something similar into one of his bathrooms. My father amazed them with the present of a pot plant which had been in some way cajoled into becoming host to mistletoe. Best of all for them were the weird-looking Polish Fancy chickens that lurched about the place half-blinded by their feathered crests, and Ernesto took the name of the last remaining supplier, determined to buy some to relieve the squalor of his back garden. Although both my father and Ernesto could only normally be understood by members of their own family, it was quite extraordinary the degree of communication they established, although my father admitted later that it had proved a disappointment to find that his dog Latin did not help.
Maria, grossly over-painted, frilled and flounced, danced from plant to plant in the garden, insisting that everything she found growing there was edible if cooked with the right herbs. For once the sun shone, the trees held their umbrellas of blossom over us, hundreds of blackbirds were in full song. A spotty local girl on the arm of her lover arrived to deliver a pot of cream, and Maria said it reminded her of a scene from Cavalleria Rusticana. What could be a greater tribute to Forty Hill, Enfield, on a May morning than that it should be seen so closely to imitate the opera? Life, displayed here in so many small facets of delight, must have presented a moment of joy of the kind the Corvajas had not known for years.
The Corvajas had brought with them the ritual gift of panetone, the bread of love from pagan times, exchanged by all Italians on feast days, and in particular at Christmas. When removed from its festive wrappings of blue and gold paper, what remains is in fact stale bread dressed up to look like cake, but my parents munched it with a civilized pretence of relish. Ernesto had also brought a bottle of Gancia along to wash the stuff down with, and this was opened up. My father had his fair share of Welsh hypocrisy where alcohol was concerned, and normally let himself be seen only drinking Wincarnis, which he claimed - despite his contempt for medicines - that he took for health reasons. He had to be persuaded that Gancia was its Italian equivalent before he consented to take a gla.s.s - although this was soon followed by a second.
It was inevitable that my mother, refusing to be guided by me, should have gone to her friends for advice as to what her foreign guests would like to eat. The general agreement was that where Italians were concerned one could not go wrong with spaghetti, and this view received further support from the strong body of vegetarians in the movement, who declared this to be a vegetarian dish. When informed at the last moment that this was what was proposed, my heart sank, for spaghetti like panetone is ritual food, bearing as prepared in the average English home little resemblance in appearance, substance or flavour to the Italian original. The Corvajas, moreover, were tremendous gourmets. Maria was an exponent of the refined north Italian cuisine in which a strong French influence is to be detected, while Ernesto"s preference was for typical Sicilian dishes. These suggested the survival of a Moorish tradition, and whenever an excuse could be found the meat they contained was spiced with such ingredients as ginger, c.u.min, coriander, cardamoms and saffron to which might be added various kinds of chillies, and above all an abundance of garlic. The Corvajas rarely bothered with spaghetti, but when they did it was cooked with rare expertise, and finicky attention to detail.
My mother led me away to inspect the dish in course of preparation. I found it to be a coa.r.s.e version of macaroni, the only form of pasta to be had locally, a rank of thick-walled, rubbery tubes simmering in cream in a dish under a layer of tomato sauce squeezed from a tube. My mother worked from a cookery book which suggested a cooking time of thirty minutes, but she was allowing forty minutes to be on the safe side. By this time I foresaw that the macaroni would be reduced to a pulp.
In due course we were seated at table and the guests were invited to serve themselves from the ochreous mess sizzling in the dish. Gastronomic disaster was confronted by the Corvajas in the same adventurous spirit with which the other incidents of their day in the country had been faced. The Gancia was now at an end, but my father produced a bottle of Wincarnis, of which, for his health"s sake when the rest had been served, he permitted himself a half-gla.s.s.
Despite everything, and largely due to the Corvaja enthusiasm and resilience, things were going remarkably well. Ernestina had put on the best possible front with my mother, and insisted on helping out with small domestic tasks, and now they frequently exchanged sickly smiles. Watching my father closely however, I detected certain familiar and worrying symptoms. They were picked up by my mother too, who began to wave her hands about vigorously as if to dissipate a cloud of smoke. Ernesto and his wife paid not the slightest attention to this behaviour which they probably a.s.sumed to be part of a traditional welcoming ceremony in a British household.
I knew only too well now what was about to happen. After a decade of mediumship my father had never developed predictability or controllability. At his best his performance probably surpa.s.sed that of the average professional medium, but these whatever their limitations, accomplished what was asked of them in a subdued and orderly fashion, and with as much regard for the niceties of time and place as, say, an insurance broker. My father had never achieved anything approaching this bland professionalism, and there was something haphazard and all too spontaneous about what he had to offer. A group which had gathered for a seance might sit for hours on end in a fog of incense, to chant Sankey and Moody and set the musical box endlessly tinkling, and absolutely nothing would happen. Father dealt in the unexpected. It was a painful fact that at no other time could he call up the souls of the dead with greater ease than at the table set for Sunday lunch, with possibly a couple of relatives present, when without the slightest encouragement or preamble and before the guests had had time to dip their spoons into their soup, he would unleash his apocalyptic torrent.
These experiences, to which I never became hardened, caused me paralysing embarra.s.sment. The first time at the age of twelve or thirteen, when trapped in such an ordeal, I scrambled under the table and remained there until it was all over, and later I got out of the room as fast as ever I could, on picking up the first warning sign. But now, knowing what was coming, there was no escape. My mother"s gesticulations of exorcism would clearly fail, and the stern commands with which she ordered the hovering spirit not to intrude upon our lunch party would also, as I could see, have no effect. My father closed his eyes, and began a soft, preliminary braying, the knife and fork fell from his hands, and he began to writhe and sweat.
All these goings-on appeared to escape the Corvajas" notice, as they continued to tackle their macaroni with imperturbability. Ernestina, who had been warned by me that such things could happen, looked down and d.i.c.kered with the mess on her plate. My father, ceasing to writhe, had now begun to babble softly, and this was a danger sign. My mother, realizing that the thing was out of control, had given up and was murmuring a prayer, eyes closed. I gripped the edges of my chair, ready for the worst, while the unshakeable Corvajas continued their mastication.
There was a moment of electric silence, then a child"s voice spoke. "Mamma, mamma, mamma." It was impossible to continue with the farce of pretending to eat. We exchanged bewildered, stricken looks. My embarra.s.sment bordered on panic. I longed to get up and dash from the room.
"Mamma," the voice said again. "Mamma." It was thin, and unearthly and troubled, and I felt Maria at my side go tense.
"Yes, darling. Darling, I"m here. This is mamma."
Now I was confronted with the second shocking aspect of this situation. Maria Corvaja, a self-proclaimed atheist, had been taken by surprise by belief.
"Mamma, oh mamma."
"I"m here, darling. I"m listening," Maria cried out. "Where are you? Talk to me."
"Oh Mamma, mamma, mamma."
The thin, whining little voice had become progressively weaker, and now it trailed off into silence. It was all over. My father opened his eyes, blinking, still far away from us, and my mother was ready with a sponge and cold water with which she sponged his forehead. Then we all got up and went into the garden, where Maria affirmed her conviction that the voice was that of her second child, who had died some ten years before. For me the voice could have been that of any young child, but it remained a puzzle and always would, how it could have been produced by the vocal cords of a man of sixty. I had no way of knowing whether my father had ever heard of the existence of this second daughter.
The visit had two lasting effects on the Corvajas" lives. Maria became a clandestine spiritualist, although to me her furtive incursions into that uncharted and illusory territory in which my parents had so long wandered in search of their lost one, suggested little more than the exchange of resignation for heartache.
An unimportant development was that Ernesto now became even more of an animal-lover than he had been, adding to the dog, the cats, and the tame hawk so often encountered in Italian families, a brood of chickens in which he delighted, and which for him typified the delights of the rustic scene. Since Polish Fancies and other freakish breeds of the kind recommended by my father could not be procured at short notice, my mother-in-law went to the pet shop in Tottenham Court Road, bought a dozen week-old Rhode Island Reds, plus a sizeable coop, and installed this in their bedroom - a large semi-bas.e.m.e.nt chamber in which an almost complete absence of daylight was compensated for, in Corvaja style, by a huge excess of electrical voltage.
The chicks" stay in the coop was short. During the daylight they had the run of the room, fouling the Bokhara carpet to their hearts" content, and at night they slept in the matrimonial bed. Both Corvajas took an interest in their diet. They were fed the best Italian food, chopped mortadella, Parma ham, and rice flavoured with garlic and saffron, plus occasional cannibalistic treats of chicken flesh cooked in various complex styles. The result from this remarkable start in life was that they all developed extreme cases of rickets, staggering through the bas.e.m.e.nt rooms, balanced on their wing tips, upon grossly bent and distorted legs, although otherwise in good shape and possessed of exceptional s.e.xual energy. Like all other mild eccentricities abounding in the Corvaja household, the poultry-keeping mania was accepted by Ernestina and her brother with extreme phlegm.
All in all the trip to Enfield could be counted a success. The Corvajas and my parents had taken a liking to each other, and Ernestina now did her best to conquer her dislike for my mother, and to make allowances for her absurdly over-possessive att.i.tude towards her only son. There followed regular visits by my parents to Gordon Street, where they were entertained - in the preferred English way, as the Corvajas believed - invariably with the accompaniment of hot crumpets and strong tea.
Chapter Eight.
WITHIN A FEW WEEKS of the Enfield visit a summons came to Wales, and this filled me with huge misgivings. I had paid two duty visits in Carmarthen since the disastrous eighteen months spent there in childhood, noting - although Li lived at home once more - a change for the worse in my grandfather and my aunts. Now it was my turn to be involved in family affairs of the kind I would have wished to avoid.
About two years previously my grandfather, who had continued to sell tea until the age of eighty-six, pa.s.sed away in his sleep. When the will was read my father learned that he had been disinherited - something for which he was well prepared, and which in no way surprised him. There were more grievous consequences for his brother, my Uncle John, who had worked for the old man all his life. The business had pa.s.sed on to him, but the transfer had been tied up in such a way that most of the profits had to be paid to the aunts. John, understandably, took to the bottle, died within the year, and his widow Aunt Margaret was obliged to sell her Carmarthen house and move into one of the picturesque, if slightly sinister cottages on the beach front at Llanstephan. A low price for a quick sale was accepted for the business in King Street, and most of the money raised went to the aunts.
Following an unsatisfactory, even mystifying correspondence with solicitors and my Aunt Polly, a diplomatic visit to Wales on my father"s part was called for, to see what, if anything, could be done to rescue Margaret from the penury into which she had been plunged. At this point my father informed me that he was tired of life, and that nothing would induce him to leave Enfield again. The diplomatic visit then fell to my lot. My problem now was that Ernestina was determined to accompany me.
"You don"t realize what you"re letting yourself in for," I said.
"It"s no good trying to talk me out of it. I wouldn"t miss it for anything."
"What you have to remember is you"re not dealing with ordinary, civilized people. They"ll probably tell you to go away."
"Well, if they do, I will."
"Or even throw something at you."
She giggled. "Not even relations of yours could be as uncivilized as that."
"All right then, but don"t say I haven"t warned you."
There were two aspects to this particular quandary. The first was the traumatic effect the madhouse in Wellfield Road might have on our relationship. The second was that Ernestina"s unaccommodating personality might endanger any hope of a negotiated settlement with these elderly and unbalanced ladies, consumed as they were with suspicion and paranoia, and inevitably detesters of foreigners of every kind.
A central legend of the Celtic people is that of the Lady of the Lake: the union between a human being and a fairy who endows her human husband with all manner of material and spiritual benefits, but who leaves him when he objects to her irrational behaviour. There were times in our a.s.sociation when I was reminded of the legend. The fairy at Myddfai startled the human beings among whom she lived by exaggerated displays of feeling, and this sometimes happened with Ernestina too. She had a quick sense of humour which was easily stimulated, and would fall into paroxysms of laughter over some episode that most English people would not have found particularly funny. When listening, on the other hand, to an ex-convict describing in Hyde Park what it was like to suffer the cat-o"-nine-tails, she burst into vociferous weeping. Her rare fury was demonstrated by the occasion of the emerald ring.
I was convinced that it would not be a good idea at all to take Ernestina with me to Carmarthen, but she refused to be left behind. "It sounds quite an adventure," she said. "I"m going to enjoy it."
We drove to Wales, and stayed at the Ivy Bush Hotel in Carmarthen, where I called on a number of distant relatives and made enquiries as to the situation at Wellfield Road. They were able to tell me little. The aunts had become recluses, no longer seen outside the house, which was dirty and neglected-looking and badly in need of a coat of paint.
Carmarthen too had changed for me, grown smaller, seedier, drained of all the magic it had had for me, even as a captive, when a child. There had been so many freedoms no one had been able to shut out: the little bright snails, pink, yellow and blue, that had come over the walls in their hundreds to deliver themselves into my eager collector"s hands; the cackle of the knowing jackdaws awaiting their cake; the song of the linnets and the goldfinches I trapped; even the freedom expressed in the smell of the country town itself, spreading through all the lanes and entering every window, which was of ferns, and milk and freshly wetted earth. Above all I remembered with nostalgia the great freedom of escape with Aunt Li to the summit of Pen-lan, followed as we trudged up into the mists by the chiming every quarter-hour of the bells of St Peter"s church, which became thinner and sweeter until they were gone, and I heard nothing more but our footfalls and Aunt Li"s sighs.
Having spied out the land as best I could, there was no point in putting off the evil hour and we found ourselves at the door of the house in Wellfield Road, which was much smaller and greyer than I remembered, set in a garden that had become a tangled thicket in which brambles predominated. A square of cardboard covered a hole in one of the grubby windows, and the jackdaws nudging and jostling each other peered down at us from the roof. One thing remained in all this change and decay that was almost startlingly well cared for. This was the lawn, as immaculate as ever, and at that moment a grey little wraith of a woman, who I understood could be none other than my Aunt Li, was mowing it with an astonishing, almost frenzied vigour. Spotting us she stopped for a moment to treat us to a hostile glare before starting off again.
I rang the bell and the door opened instantly, and a firm, spruce, smiling man was there, hand outstretched. He introduced himself as Emrys Davies, a Baptist minister, who knew all about us and our projected visit. "Your letter was pa.s.sed on to me," he said. He had put less important things aside to be able to welcome us in a proper fashion. Miss Warren Lewis, he said - referring in this way with formal respect to my Aunt Polly - had not been herself for the past few days.
We were conducted into her presence by someone who clearly had the run of the house. She sat, very small, shrivelled and shapeless, in a large rustic chair at the head of the scrubbed table and, bending down to kiss her cheek, it seemed to me that the squares and oblongs of grafted skin were even more clearly outlined than before. Small, writhing shapes like those left by worms showed on the areas they left uncovered. Her eyes moved and she made a faint sound like a tchk of exasperation, but there was no way of knowing whether she recognized me.
All the ugly, functional kitchen objects were in their places as I remembered them, and a trick of memory brought back the faint b.l.o.o.d.y reek of pigs" intestines in a tin bath awaiting their transformation into chitterlings. The Reverend stood behind her, bland as a Buddha, like a man displaying a well-grown vegetable at a show of garden produce.
"Auntie," I said. "Auntie, we"ve come to see you. How are you, Auntie? It"s been a long time."
The stripes of tissue that served for lips parted, to release a faint, scratchy whisper.
The Reverend Davies translated this. "Very happy indeed she is that you and your new wife have come here to see her," he said.
The faint throaty sound went on. At one point Aunt Polly nodded her head in emphasis of whatever she had to say, showing a scarred and polished scalp that was now quite bald.
"A long and arduous journey from London as we all know," the Reverend Davies went on. "Nice it is to be showing such consideration for your aunts. Better it might have been to postpone your visit for one week, as Miss Lewis has just embarked upon a new treatment for her condition, which recently has shown signs of deterioration. After lunch I always insist on a short nap, which is important to conserve her strength. Your Aunt Elizabeth asks to be excused for one moment until she has completed her task in the garden. But your Aunt Anne will be waiting for you in the breakfast room when you are ready."
"She"ll frighten you out of your wits," I warned Ernestina. "She can"t stop laughing, and you"ll probably find she"s dressed up as a pirate."
The scene that met our eyes in the breakfast room was quite otherwise. Annie sat on the floor, barefoot and dressed in a grubby shift. The hair hung like grey seaweed over her eyes, and the laughter had dried up. She was absorbed in painting a tiny face which had inherited her vacant smile on an acorn, which would when finished be added to a small pile already painted in this way, and there was no sign that she was aware of our presence. This, the Reverend Davies later explained, was a therapeutic task she had learned in a "home" where she had been confined for some time, and where Li, preceding her, had been kept busy endlessly mowing lawns. So this was the end of Grandfather"s once cherished and protected family, and of the little empire founded on spoiled tea that had brought him the Model T Ford, the house with teak doors, the deaconhood of his chapel, the French mistress, the touch of a king"s fingers.
"Mr Lewis, bach," the Reverend Davies" musical voice sounded over my shoulder. "Come you, Mr Lewis bach, and Mrs Lewis. Time now to partake of something to refresh the body. You don"t mind in the kitchen? Miss Lewis is happier there. This is my little kingdom, she sometimes says."
He had slipped away while we had been occupied with Aunt Annie, and now, as if by magic, places had been set at the table, with napkins folded intricately and thrust into gla.s.ses. The Reverend lifted a chicken in a ca.s.serole from the oven. "Head cook and bottle-washer I am today," he said, cheerily. "All I"ll be needing now is a chef"s hat." He picked up a small bra.s.s bell and dingled it, and Annie shuffled into the room carrying a bowl like an oriental beggar, and he sawed delicately at the chicken"s breast to cut off two slices of meat, which he dropped into the bowl before shooing her away. There was no sign of Li but we could hear the irrepressible click and natter of the mower as she trudged backwards and forwards over the lawn.
"Come now, Miss Lewis. Time for a little nourishment, isn"t it?" The Reverend Davies had taken up a position behind the chair on which Polly sat like a freshly unwrapped mummy, her features blurred from the old injuries and the tiny, black, motionless eyes veiled in a pinkish webbing which the body had provided in an effort to replace the lost lids. He had placed a fork in the small, clawed-up right hand and with it he helped her to skewer a morsel of chicken and lift it to her mouth. "Miss Lewis, fach, eat you now," he said, cajoling her in the comfortable country style. "Necessary it is to refresh the body, as the soul." He s.n.a.t.c.hed a beautifully folded napkin from a gla.s.s, unfolded it and dabbed at the corners of her lips.
When it was all over, Ernestina and I took refuge in the drawing room, shabby and smeared now with the grime of years, where the parrot cage of old still stood, and the crack-throated piano had been left open to bare its yellowed teeth, and the ancient clocks, mysteriously kept wound, still disputed the hour of the day.
"Well, what do you think of it all?" I asked Ernestina and she shook her head.
I told her in a quick mutter that I"d summed Davies up by voice and manner as a one-time h.e.l.l-raiser who"d won the battle for the Lord in the hills where sin meant unnatural conduct with animals before moving down to Carmarthen where the devil set up heavier targets.
A moment later, the Reverend joined us again, more breezy and self-confident and a little less bland in these fusty surroundings than he had been in the kitchen.
"Mr Lewis, far be it from me to wish to pry, but I would like to ask you if you will be visiting your Aunt Margaret in Llanstephan on this occasion?"
"I expect to see a number of my relations. As many as I can. Why do you ask?"
"Will you have heard that there has been a split between the two branches of the family?"
"Yes," I said. "I"ve heard that."
"Mr David Warren Lewis was a member of my congregation for some years," said the Reverend Davies and, studying his face again, I realized that he was probably twenty years older than I had taken him to be, a man comforted by certainties that had kept him young. "The Miss Lewises are among my most cherished friends. I can hardly express my admiration for the courage with which they have faced certain afflictions."
"They"re very brave," I said.
"It is my sincere hope that this quarrel that has arisen can be kept within bounds. A pity it would be to upset the delicate process of conciliation."
"Mr Davies," I said, "I shall take the opportunity to see a solicitor while I"m here but I hadn"t heard there"d been any conciliation. As I"ve been told this was a take-it-or-leave-it situation. And seeing the state my aunts appear to be in I don"t see that they"re capable of taking such a decision - or any other decision, for that matter - for themselves."
"They"re not, Mr Lewis, bach. That"s the fact of it. They are obliged to lean upon their friends."
"Including you."
"Well naturally, as their pastor, including me."
"Mr Davies, what are you trying to say? I can"t see quite where all this is leading to. What do you expect me to do?"
"Well, since you put it that way, my advice would be to refrain from raising false hopes in Mrs Margaret Lewis"s bosom. That is what I"m saying to you."
"And you think I"m likely to do that?"
"Everything is possible. I know Mrs Margaret Lewis well. She"s a very persuasive lady. To be absolutely frank, I would like to reach an agreement with you. Some very small concession might be possible. I can"t promise it. If Mrs Lewis renounces any claims, I"m saying."
"Much as I appreciate your kindness and your a.s.sistance, Mr Davies, this is a matter arising between my aunts. The most I can do is give them my advice. You talk about reaching an agreement with me; but I don"t see where you come into it?"
Smiling and unruffled as ever, he reached in his pocket, took out a paper and handed it to me. Without reading it, I knew that it was a power of attorney.
Turning our backs on the depressing situation at Wellfield Road, we drove to Llanstephan to consult with my Aunt Margaret - always my favourite relative - a glowing, pink-cheeked woman who had had the misfortune to marry into the Lewises, and thereafter waste her sweetness on the desert air. She had been a pretty girl apprenticed to a master baker in Lammas Street when my Uncle John had first spotted her. Such essential occupations as bakery, with its sacramental undertones, conferred little prestige in Carmarthen as elsewhere by comparison with parasitic employment, and the scornful nickname Maggie the Bun stuck to her for the rest of her life. When I had lived in Wellfield Road as a child I had sometimes been allowed, as a concession, to visit my warm and hospitable Aunt Margaret in her own home, but she was clearly never welcome in my grandfather"s house. In terms of all the human qualities, particularly of dignity, she was enormously superior to my uncle, and it was a shame that she had been forced by a pregnancy to marry him.
In Llanstephan they no longer stoned holiday-making miners, and ten years had gone since Mr Williams had put up his placard for the last time warning Sunday visitors to keep holy the Sabbath day, but a tight rein was still kept on religious belief, the social life of the village being firmly bound up with the chapel which took a hard-line fundamentalist approach in matters of faith.
Ernestina had fallen silent after Wellfield Road, but her spirits revived at the edge of this salty wilderness. Madonna lilies spread their faint, sweet deathliness in every garden. It had rained earlier and now the sound arose everywhere around us of the flinty chuckle of pebbles moved by water in the bright rivulets on the beach. These were the scents and the sounds, and for the eye there was nothing but the healing vision of the great smooth hump of the Silk Back over the water, and in it one last blackened spar of the old wreck, like a finger crooked at eternity. No one here could drag themselves clear from the past. In a nearby cottage curtains were lifted by unseen hands, then let fall, and presently two tall thin women in black, wearing flat wide-brimmed hats of the generation before, came out and began to walk very slowly and in step away from us, as if at the head of an invisible procession. A man with a donkey cart selling c.o.c.kles and illegally netted sewin had turned the corner. Not a bad place for a widow to retire to, one would have said, after the drab terrace house in Carmarthen.
"Pretty it is, yes indeed," my aunt agreed with enthusiasm. We sat in her trellised rose arbour, sipping the slightly salted Lewis tea. Wearied of beauty, she had placed herself with her back to the great seascape. "But there"s a sameness, isn"t it?" she said. She was a philosophic old lady, never a one to complain, and now she faced the reality that there was faint hope of a civilized arrangement with her sisters-in-law or their advisers with profound resignation.
The problem that troubled her was the encroaching shadow of loneliness. Since she was likely to spend her remaining days in the village, acceptance into the local community was essential, and to do this she would have to become a member and a regular attender of a chapel where services were conducted in Welsh. This, as a townswoman, she spoke in a defective fashion, and was therefore placed at a great disadvantage. The minister had listened sympathetically and proposed a kind of a.s.sociate membership during a period when she would be expected to learn some biblical texts and essential responses in cla.s.sical Welsh. On the Sunday when this formal induction into the chapel and the life of the community was to take place, Aunt Margaret, full of hope and enthusiasm, had risen early, collected a large bunch of flowers, put them into a vase, and taken them to the chapel, to be interrupted as she was about to place them at the foot of the pulpit by the minister who rushed in, arms thrown out and shrieking in horror. "Paganiad, Mrs Lewis, fach. Paganiad."
Aunt Margaret"s paganism would have to be publicly acknowledged and repented in an act of contrition to be spoken in Welsh. It was a proposal that daunted her, but she could expect to be cold-shouldered by the village until she had gone through with it. The inhumanity of her treatment by her sisters-in-law and their legal and spiritual advisers was the least of her problems.