PENGUIN BOOKS

NEWFOUNDLAND

Rebecca Ray lives anywhere and everywhere. She is enjoying a happy, healthy retirement.

Newfoundland

REBBECCA RAY

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PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published by Hamish Hamilton 2005

Copyright © Rebbecca Ray, 2005

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193873-8

Contents

Autumn

Winter

Spring

Acknowledgements

This book is for my family and for
Wales

Autumn

She found the deaf girl smashing bottles on a garden path. That was how it started. The town was called Ynys-morlan and she knew no one. She had come here to change her life.

It was the first day that she came down to the place itself, her third day in the house. You could see it from the edge of her garden, little buildings in distant sunlight. Two long, thin rows of houses stretched along the coast. They held their backs to the shoreline and to the floodplain on their other side, a reach of flat land laid like pages all the way from the mountains’ feet out to the sea.

Gentler mountains, dark in the mornings, shadowed like a memory. They’d be touched along the ridges with sudden sun. She had spent a long time just looking. The grassed slopes were almost yellow, the stretches of bracken tinted rose. They seemed to hold the clouds away, dusky, a still storm behind. It was right to be alone in a place like this.

There was silence in the mornings. She’d thought, coming here that first night, that she might hate the morning’s quiet, but she loved this too. Only the sound of the gulls and the light on the walls of her home.

The third day. The people who lived in Ynys-morlan didn’t own the mountains or the sea. She thought she would keep that in mind. And anyway, she didn’t think she’d speak to anyone.

She applied a little make-up. She stood in front of the mirror, touched her hair and the lines around her mouth. She picked the right coat and the right bag. Small things like this were important, a proper impression. She sat in the hallway before she left, wearing the right coat, holding the right bag. She looked at her bare hands and at the door.

The lane led down a small hill from which she could see the town drawing closer. The houses were all tipped angles from here: corrugated roofs and slate and salt-worn wood. She saw lines of washing, moving slightly, and a rusted weathervane in the shape of a dragon, that was still despite the wind. It wasn’t a temporary place but it felt that way. The buildings looked like a line of driftwood that had been piled here by the sea.

Charlotte Weyland walked with her head up and her back straight. She passed a gift shop with closed doors and dusty windows, a blank concrete space outside. It was October now, the end of October and the summer had gone.

Ynys-morlan was quiet in the cold. Wheeling birds and a vacant street. The houses had small windows, very deep-set windows where the light met only the few little things left near the glass to be seen: model ships and trophies, things like that, and only shadows behind. In this silence, she could hear her own shoes walking and received the sound of every step. She looked out and past and over, like she wasn’t going into the town at all, but going through it, heading on.

Charlotte held her bag. In this new, hushed street she saw the little girl.

Two years old maybe, three at the most. Brown hair cut into a thick fringe and very pale skin, very dark eyes. When she shifted, the hair fell across her face. And there was something – Charlotte paused. She didn’t hear her feet stop. There was something – in the expression on the girl’s face, in the way she stood. She looked at nothing around her. She was so concentrated, removed. Charlotte stood in the stillness. For a moment, she forgot about the bag she was holding, she forgot about the mountains and the sea; that this was her home too. She saw the expression on the little girl’s face and felt memories rise in cold threads.

She was holding the bottle, holding it outstretched. Her arms were straight, as though balancing. It was a milk bottle, Charlotte saw. And then she saw the others, a line by the girl’s feet. More milk bottles, Bell’s whisky here and there. Her small hands were blanched around the glass. Her knuckles were red.

The child’s shadow was draped across short grass and perfect flower beds, curving over the stones of the garden’s low wall. And she dropped the bottle. The noise was violent in an empty day.

My God, she wasn’t sure if she thought the words or if she said them and she looked around, she looked down the street for someone else and there was no one. Standing on the garden path, the girl stared down at what she had made. Charlotte should have walked away.

‘Oh God, Nia. Nia, no.’

And then the front door was open and Charlotte saw the woman. Saw her run down the path, saw brown hair just like the girl’s.

‘Nia,’ the woman said, but her voice was very low. She had one shirtsleeve rolled up to the elbow.

This is private, Charlotte thought. And the little girl just stood, gazing intently at the ground about her feet.

‘Don’t do that, Ni, what are you doing? Don’t.’ As though she spoke to herself. And Charlotte didn’t walk away. Clearly, slowly, the mother shook her head, strain overwritten on her face. ‘Nia…’

Charlotte saw her try to smile, crouch down, her face caught momentarily by the light – and watched as she gathered up the bottles, held them to her chest with small sounds. All of them in her arms, the woman didn’t stand. Glass pressed to her, she just remained there, looking at the broken scoops and the shards, the soft spots of light they cast, and then closing her eyes.

Motionless. At rest in the sun and the sharp air, her daughter stood taller than her. They looked like a painting, Charlotte thought. The girl reached out and she touched her mother’s hair.

And Charlotte didn’t turn as they stirred, stood up, or as the woman lifted her head. They saw each other. Bottles clinked together, glass against solid glass. Behind, fallen leaves moved on the road.

Tight and still and ready, though she didn’t want to be, Charlotte waited for the ugly words. What sort of person was she to stand staring at people over garden walls?

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said, though. She gave a big, distracted smile. ‘Don’t worry, we’re just mad, don’t worry about us.’ She stepped forward, laughing, saying, ‘Oh we just like to break things, bottles, furniture. We do it on Thursdays.’ Trapped by the collection in her arms, her fingers moved, they fluttered. She put the bottles down while Charlotte stood without answering. She reached over the wall to shake hands.

‘Ruth Lewis.’

The touch was cold.

‘My name is Charlotte. Charlotte Weyland.’ Hearing the sound of her own voice, she wanted to walk away. Finally she said, ‘I heard a noise.’

‘Yes, well.’ Ruth Lewis gave a playful schoolma’am frown, said, ‘That’ll be this one. Little mischief maker, she is. Little Dennis the Menace.’ She reached for Nia, drew her gently forward. ‘This is the culprit.’

Charlotte looked at the girl’s quiet face.

‘Can’t keep track of her half the time, she’s inside, she’s outside, I think she does it just to wear me out. What can I do next? she’s thinking.’

Reaching her hand out again, she began for the child, ‘I’m Charlotte.’

And then Ruth said, ‘She’s deaf.’

There was a silence.

She asked Charlotte if she was on holiday. She said that really the season was over now but that she’d never understood why people only wanted holidays in summer. ‘I think it’s nicer here in autumn than it is in mid-July,’ she said.

‘It’s lovely.’ Charlotte turned from the girl’s face, nodded and cleared her throat.

‘Mind you,’ Ruth went on, ‘I think if I was American, I’d have to go for holidays in Florida. Take Nia to Disneyland maybe. I bet it’s hot in Florida all year round, I bet it’s lovely there.’

‘I’ve never been.’ Charlotte smoothed her coat, she didn’t look at Nia. ‘I’ve lived in London since I was twelve.’

‘Oh well… you’ve still got the accent, that’s all.’

‘I’m not on holiday,’ Charlotte said. That’s how I look, she thought. ‘I’ve bought a house. It’s on the hill there…’

‘Really?’

‘You know it?’

‘Yes… well, I knew it’d sold. Course, it’s been on the market for years now, since I can’t remember when. And you bought the garden too? The walled garden, I mean.’

‘That’s right.’

She could have said a lot of things. She could have told the woman that she’d bought the property only because of the garden. She could have said that the house was fine but really it was the garden – really it was only the garden. She looked away and didn’t see the expression that passed across Ruth Lewis’s face.

Goodbyes would sound natural now. Sometimes it was easier just to walk. Coming or going, it didn’t matter.

‘It must be very derelict.’

‘It needs work, yes,’ Charlotte answered.

Now the woman was looking at her in a different way. ‘I’d love to hear about it… Maybe, have you got time for a cup of tea?’ And then she said, ‘You could probably do with a cup of tea, lots of sugar and milk, what with Nia scaring the life out of you. You could probably do with one.’ She gestured to the little house at the end of the path. ‘Have you got the time?’ she asked.

It was small and pink and pebbledashed. It had perfect little curtains and was surrounded by the year’s final flowers. The woman could have been saying, just step over the shattered glass.

This was the day, the 27th of October, when Dai Meredith found his mother dead. Half an hour before, he sat doing a crossword puzzle. He liked to fill in the little blank spaces in crosswords with circles or sometimes with squares. When he was at home and he had colouring pens, he always did the circles yellow and squares red; had a feeling that squares should be red. Here in the café, he only had a biro though, and had to leave the colours in his head. It was three twenty-eight in the afternoon, and he didn’t think that life could be like that, that you could just be sitting with your crossword puzzle and drinking your hot chocolate and then you could find your mother dead.

The café wasn’t busy, just a few regulars. Bethan’s mum called them regulars, she said that he was one and when he came in she always smiled. She said, ‘The usual?’ like that. There was Mr Edwards in the corner by the window, with his newspaper and his magnification sheet. His mother had a magnification sheet but she kept it away in a drawer and she called it ‘that wretched thing’. Mr Edwards’s magnification sheet caught the sunlight and made Dai feel ill.

There was Bethan’s mum, Patty, behind the counter with the tea-maker and the milkshake flavour bottles, hung upside down. And there was Bethan, sitting here with her friend, Bethan holding the baby. Dai looked up at her but only for a moment. The sun lay across the table and his crossword puzzle. There were cooking sounds, the smell of vinegar and tea and something stale. He listened to Bethan’s voice.

She always sat in the same place, the table by the counter. Had done all through the last part of being pregnant and then, when she’d come back with the baby, she’d started sitting there again. She liked to get all her things arranged around her: the cigarettes and the ashtray, the coffee, her magazines. Sometimes she just stared out of the window. His mother said, ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.’

Now she wasn’t reading her magazines or looking out, but listening to her friend talk. She had the baby on her knee.

‘It’s on at the rugby club,’ her friend was saying. Dai kept his head down. ‘Saw the sound system, they had it set up yesterday, speakers like a fucking cliff face. I’ll be deaf for a week. I’ll hit the top note and break every window in Aber. Ultrasonic, it’ll be. People’ll think the bomb’s hit, and all their dogs’ll have bleeding ears. You wait, you’ll read it in The Star the day after, like: shell-shocked Labrador found wandering in street…’

Bethan snorted a laugh, she was quieter. ‘What are you doing then? Decided?’

‘I’m doing “Search for the Hero Inside Yourself”. M People.’

‘That’s inspiration, like. I hear that song, it’s as much as I can do to hold myself back from going parachuting.’

Dai looked at his puzzle, half finished. The paper rustled under his hands. It was three thirty-two and fifteen seconds. His mother had bought him the digital watch – he’d picked it out himself, the blue one. He needed to go home now. He looked out through the window at the tarmac, the low-lying afternoon, and didn’t want to.

This was where he came every day after work. Outside he could see the cart, sitting quiet on the shadowed pavement. He liked to have hot chocolate after work, at the same time. Regular.

‘I’m doing the curlers tonight, the lot.’

Dai looked up, he saw Bethan move the child on her knee, he saw her nod and not look at her friend. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Well, don’t drink any cider and black. Some poor bastard’s got to clean up the stains the next day and whoever it is, they’ve got my sympathies, like. I could tell them from personal experience, Vanish Mousse won’t work, never mind what the advert says: “Pasta? Red wine?” No, actually, vomit. Got anything for that?’

‘Haven’t drunk cider and black for a year and a half now.’

Bethan still didn’t look up. ‘Well, just don’t start again.’ Her hands fussed around the baby’s clothes. After a moment, she said, ‘You’ve not got college tomorrow?’

Dai got up slowly from the chair.

‘We’re only doing electrolysis at the moment. Hair removal,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s complicated, got to be done right. I don’t need to go in, though. Claire said I’ve got it down pat already.’

Bethan nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But then you’ve had a lot of practice.’

Between them, there were empty tables, little menus like open books, salt and pepper and sugar. They changed the menus at twelve o’clock, you could come in here and always know what time it was, even if you didn’t have a digital watch. Changing the menus took the morning away from the afternoon.

Dai folded his paper slowly, he put his pen in his overall pocket and his feet scuffed against the checked floor; a large man, too tall when standing.

‘Have a good time anyway,’ Bethan was saying. She brushed the baby’s fluffy hair. Her own was long and blonde and flat. Sometimes when she sat down, she caught it under herself.

The café was quiet without their talking. They saw him there.

‘Afternoon,’ he said. ‘Afternoon, Bethan.’ She looked up, maybe smiled, and then turned to the baby again. Sometimes she did that, she used the baby not to talk to him.

‘How are you, Bethan?’

‘I’m fine, Dai. I’m always fine,’ she said. Then she looked up at him and suddenly said, ‘How are you? You all right?’

Dai felt a smile like butter. ‘Very well, really well. You know, I had a cold. But that went away.’ He came forwards. There were dummies, rattles, things like that lying across the table. ‘Mum’s still ill.’

‘Reckon she’s ill enough to forget about my rent then, Dai?’

‘Oh no. No, I don’t think she’s that ill. No.’ The baby on Bethan’s knee jiggled as she held it. ‘You look nice with it,’ he said.

Bethan smiled, she looked briefly into the baby’s face. ‘Think she looks like me?’

‘Looks like you. No. I wouldn’t really say that, like, that she looks like you.’ He watched Bethan tickle her.

‘Got my double chin, though, haven’t you,’ she said.

He stood in front of them, not knowing what to say now. He wanted to tell her she looked nice with the baby again. He wanted to explain to her why. Every day, he came into the café and she was almost always here. He wanted to tell her that gradually, over the months, you could watch the baby getting bigger. Like she’d got bigger before having it. Always here and changing a little bit each day. You could see time in her and in the baby. You didn’t say that sort of thing to people, though. Instead he just told her, ‘It’s grown.’

Bethan laughed, a little snort. She looked like she was judging a sheep.

‘Feels like I’m carrying a bag of cement around these days. I swear, by the end of the year, you’ll see me on telly: world’s strongest man competition. Fucking tyre-dragging’s nothing to this. You know what it is,’ she said then, and she looked up at Dai. ‘Breast-feeding,’ she said. ‘Two months of it at the start. I reckon the stuff’s so full of calories she’s still getting fat on it now.’ She smiled up at Dai, stuck with the baby between the immovable table and the immovable chair, all her things spread round. She smiled. ‘Breast-feeding,’ she said. ‘That’s a funny feeling, Dai. I tell you.’

He stood still in front of her.

And then her friend laughed. He looked up with the sound of it and, after a moment, Bethan turned away, the smile gone from her face.

‘Hey, Dai,’ she said. Something lacking in her voice as well then. ‘You want to hold her?’

‘Oh no. No. I don’t think I’d want to do that, no. But thank you.’

But Bethan said, ‘Go ahead. You won’t break her. Bounce her on the floor a few times.’

And she lifted the baby from her knee with effort, held her out across the table. Dai cleaned his hands on the legs of his overalls. The baby had its back to him.

‘I…’ he said. But she was giving it to him. Careful, he thought now. Very very careful. He reached out and took the baby from her, careful, like he’d put his mum’s back against the pillows when she told him to move her.

The baby was heavy.

‘It’s heavy,’ he said.

From the corner of his eye, he saw her draw her arms back across the table and rest them there. He thought very quickly, all in a moment, that she looked changed without the baby, suddenly like a whole different person.

It moved slightly.

‘It’s moving,’ he said, and then he laughed. He said, ‘You can’t tell how much it moves till you hold it. You just can’t tell.’ He shook his head.

‘She’s a “she” not an “it”,’ Bethan said quietly. ‘And her name’s Chelsea. You know that. I’ve told you.’

Dai didn’t answer. The baby was almost looking at him. He could feel the nappy, bulky and plastic under her clothes. He could see the pink in her cheeks, tiny little fat cheeks. Tiny little nose. She made a sound.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Her arms moved above his hands.

‘It’s like being a giant,’ he quietly told them.

He wasn’t sure how long he held her for. He knew how time moved so well, he always knew how much time was passing. But the baby shifted. It was tiny and alive and stopped time from being noticeable.

Dai Meredith felt the warmth of the café around him, he smelled all its memories. Outside, beyond the closed door and its little ringing bell, the sun was a thin wash across the street. But here he stood, Bethan’s baby held in his hands.

He thought that he wouldn’t forget this. He thought he would make sure by recalling it every day. The baby’s hair looked so soft. It didn’t even cry.

‘Thank you,’ Dai said. And Bethan gave a smile that passed over her face.

‘This used to be my mother’s house,’ she told Charlotte. She moved a lot as she was speaking, took things from cupboards and held them in her hands, seemed always to be doing something. ‘Lennie and I moved in… it must have been four years ago. It doesn’t feel like that. Married in September… must’ve been four years. September’s a lovely time to get married. I always thought that I’d marry in spring, you know?’ She shrugged.

Charlotte smiled. She watched the woman move from the sink to the kettle. She had a gap between her teeth.

‘Probably don’t keep it as well as my mum’d like.’ She put the cups down on the counter.

The room was perfect, a place for everything and everything in its place. She had pots labelled Tea, Coffee, Sugar. She had them facing slightly in towards each other, like a little group of friends. An oilcloth on the table, a small bunch of flowers in a vase, each chair tucked in neatly and every surface clean.

‘It’s lovely,’ Charlotte said. The bottles stood on the counter by the window. ‘Better put them out of that one’s reach,’ Ruth Lewis had joked. A line, and the light stretched through them, cast glass shadows across the floor.

And now Nia stood near to them, she kept her back against the counter and her eyes on Charlotte. She twisted both hands in the hem of her jumper. Charlotte had never seen a deaf child before. She wondered if the girl could feel the difference between conversation and quiet. And how this room seemed to her. She watched as Nia’s hands moved against each other in the wool. So lonely, she thought.

She made a small smile at Nia’s staring face. But the girl didn’t know her, maybe felt afraid.

‘Is she watching you?’ Ruth said, laughing. ‘She’s got some stare on her, bet she wins the staring competitions at playschool.’ Ruth made a glaring face and Charlotte smiled, looked down at the tabletop. ‘Did you ever do that in school? Sit there staring till one of you laughs or looks away or something. I was always the loser, only have to look at me to make me laugh. I tickle from a distance.’

The woman put tea bags into the cups and Charlotte watched her, thinking that she seemed very young, thinking that she seemed to let go of every thought she had. But people liked that, of course, openness. Ruth Lewis must make a lot of people feel comfortable. In Charlotte’s lap, her hands were still, intertwined.

‘She’s so good at playschool, never makes a fuss.’ Ruth ruffled her daughter’s hair. ‘You’re good aren’t you?’

‘She doesn’t have an aid,’ Charlotte said. ‘Or an implant?’ She found herself looking at Nia again. The child’s silence drew the eye.

‘No, well.’ Ruth turned, she watched the kettle click off. ‘She’s only three now, bit little for us to make a decision like that, an implant. And it’s only in the last year that it’s really been… noticeable, you know. Two-year-olds can be very quiet, even hearing two-year-olds can be. And she passed her IDT at six months. Infant distraction test, that is.’ With her back turned, Ruth poured the water. ‘Bit of a long name for banging a drum out of sight. Lennie says the only reason they call it that is so they can give people the job of making up the name.’ She put the kettle down. Charlotte saw her push a strand of hair behind one ear. ‘But anyway, she passed that. A lot of children develop hearing problems in the first five years, though. Meningitis sometimes, not that Nia’s had that but… But anyway, they do a cochlear echo, that’s what they did on Nia. They put a little microphone into the ear.’ She stirred the tea. ‘Tiny little thing. They listen to the sounds that the ear makes, the response. And a deaf ear gives no echo.’

Charlotte looked at her back across the room.

Ruth turned round, a cup of tea in each hand.

‘Is it too weak? Sorry, I’m a dishwater-tea kind of person.’

‘It’s fine. Thank you.’

‘Was my mother’s china, this, so no juggling, all right? No playing frisbee with the saucers.’

Charlotte smiled again, she tried to think of something to say and couldn’t, something that would make Ruth laugh, put her at ease. She picked up the cup and sipped.

‘Anyway, I’m babbling on about myself. I do that, I talk people into the ground…’ Ruth moved her hands around the cup. ‘The house must’ve needed a lot of work, been empty for a while…’

‘There wasn’t that much.’ The questions would come now. Her cup made a tiny sound as she placed it in the saucer.

But Ruth only said, ‘The garden must be… a ruin.’ She looked at Charlotte, waiting for an answer.

‘Not a ruin.’

‘No?’

‘It only needs work. You see it from outside, it could still be functional… I’ll get it done obviously, but it’ll take time. I may have to get someone in for part of it.’ She cleared her throat.

‘So the brickwork’s still all right.’

‘You’ve been there,’ Charlotte said. It had never even occurred to her, that someone from the town might have. People had lived there, people had moved in and out of course. But still the place was – it had no sense of that. It was hidden.

‘I used to go up there… Yes, you know, a long time ago.’

‘You knew the people that lived there?’

‘Well, I mean, it was empty then. Was a long time ago, donkey’s years. Why do we say that, donkey’s years?’ Ruth watched her own hands, drinking. The liquid shifted.

‘A lot of people know it then?’ Charlotte pictured the walls, the wooden door. Not so secret.

‘Well, I wouldn’t think “a lot”. I went there a few times with people, you know, other kids. They got bored there, though. Not so much to do, I suppose. I never understood it though. It’s lovely.’

‘It’s a very beautiful place.’

‘I used to push pennies into the walls. You know, in between the bricks, make holes. You could put your little finger in.’ She laughed then, as though it was silly, though her expression looked full of the past, sad.

It stalled Charlotte. ‘It’s hard to get inside now.’ She thought of the walls, which still looked strong in the sunlight or rain. The red bricks darkened. She’d watched them yesterday. They were ivy-trailed. ‘You can open the door.’

‘It’s still there?’

‘It’s… yes, it’s still there.’ There was no handle now, only a hole in the wet wood. You had to bend to walk inside. ‘There are no paths, though,’ she said. ‘Just overgrowth.’

‘There are paths. I mean, I’m sure they’re grown over. They were almost gone even back then.’

‘Where? Do you know then, what it looked like when it was still in use?’

‘No. I mean, not really. It was such a while ago. You could work it out, though… It must be very bad if you can’t even see the paths. It’s been neglected for a long time then.’ She waited, watching, and Charlotte realized it was a question, that the woman wanted her to say something else. To say again that it only needed a little work, a little time, a person. She opened her mouth to answer. In another room, a telephone rang.

Ruth Lewis moved. She said something like, ‘I’ll get that,’ or, ‘I’ll only be a minute.’ But for a moment, the smile was gone from her face, the talking and the motion and the jokes. When she wasn’t laughing she was somebody else.

Charlotte watched her leave the room and looked down at her tea. She wondered how old Ruth had been when she’d seen the garden. She thought of the brambles and could imagine her there, making holes with pennies.

In the other room, Ruth’s voice said, ‘Lennie.’

Charlotte shifted on her chair.

‘– no, I’m fine. I’m fine.’

She saw the oilcloth and her thoughts grew diffuse.

‘– I know. I miss you. Nia misses you.’

She felt the unfamiliar kitchen and the unfamiliar rooms around. From the corner of one eye, she saw something shift.

With her back to the counter, still watching Charlotte, Nia was edging sideways.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ruth said.

Charlotte didn’t move. In the daylight, on the counter, the bottles stood in a line. Nia took one hand from her jumper’s hem.

‘Nia…’ Charlotte said. ‘Nia.’ The girl’s fingers reached upwards.

Charlotte almost stood. She looked back at the kitchen door, wedged open, but she could only hear Ruth’s voice.

‘Nia, don’t,’ she said. ‘Your mother won’t want…’

The girl’s hand touched a milk bottle, she just stared at Charlotte’s face. Skin that became almost translucent as she stepped into the sun.

Ruth said, ‘– I will. No, I will. Really.’ And Nia grasped the bottle’s neck.

Charlotte took a step back from the table, her chair scratched against the slate floor.

‘– well I love you, Lennie.’

In the room, the autumn sun was weightless, a dusting on the air. It touched the edge of the bottle, gleaming. The girl’s hands only reached halfway round.

‘Nia…’ she said.

She reached out and she put her own hand round the glass, suddenly felt its cold and the girl’s small grip give out. In another room, Ruth said goodbye to someone. Charlotte heard the phone replaced as Nia stepped away from her and ran out through the open door.

And then she was standing alone in this family’s kitchen. Standing here with their biscuit tins and closed cupboard doors. Charlotte held the milk bottle. It was dirty inside, still whole, as she placed it gently on the counter again.

Ruth watched the woman walk away through the kitchen window. She was wrapped up in her coat again, the velvet scarf swept over one shoulder. Ruth saw her dark hair, the long white streak, running from above her temple, all tied back into a bun.

‘Well, Dalmatians watch out,’ she said. The kitchen was empty. Charlotte Weyland walked like she was somewhere else, like the path didn’t touch her feet. A little street in London, Ruth thought. The sun was warm through the window. A little street, clean pavements and wrought-iron railings. She watched the woman pass the real houses by. There would be trees. Maples, she thought.

The Weyland woman walked with her head up; even steps.

This ice-cream pink house was small, needed repainting. Mismatched slates on the roof, from which the old stone of the chimney rose.

Ruth swept up the broken glass outside, pausing only once, when she was almost finished. She looked out at the hill that framed this side of the bay, and at the lane, branching from the main road, tree lined. She couldn’t see the house, white stones.

She thought that later she’d put Nia on the sofa and they’d watch something on telly, maybe a video. They had a lot of Busby Berkeley musicals on video. Maybe one of those. Nia loved them, would gaze at them for hours. Sometimes Ruth loved them herself. The costumes were beautiful, matching. The girls moved past each other on the screen in a pattern, like a huge kaleidoscope. They danced and changed until they didn’t look like girls at all but like some lovely complex design that you could get lost in. She and Nia could draw the curtains, she thought.

Dai Meredith began the walk home, rolling the cart slowly, happy with the sound of its wheels on the pavement. The day was lower now and soon the sun would push through the alleys between the houses on the seafront. The bus would be here with the people from school, coming in with the noise of engine and brakes, dropping them in bunches with their messy uniforms to talk and walk and move away and leave the street quiet again. He tried to take everything in as he strolled, the little sounds, the smells. Days like these were the good days and it was nice to hold on to them. On days like these, he wasn’t confused, didn’t need to think about time or the museum.

It was closed up now, the museum. Boards and polythene and peeling paint. It had been closed for a long time, sometimes it still made him sad. He didn’t know what the museum looked like inside, now that the day didn’t come through its windows. If the glass cases still lined the walls, settled in dust, or if the photographs still hung there.

He often needed to remember the museum. On days when he felt like everyone was watching him, or things were happening and happening, when he walked with his hands gripped very tight around the handles of the cart. There had been photographs of the town from a long time ago. The houses hadn’t had porches on them then, or windows that stuck out from the roofs, there’d been no cars in the street. In the pictures, the houses seemed bare and there were people in caps with grey faces. But it was the same place, the same long road. When he felt bad it helped to remember this. Little things throughout Ynys-morlan, changing like the dunes.

He passed the bus shelter. No seats, just a little roof and a map. ‘Go further!’ the map said, though Dai couldn’t read it. It had a lot of lines, all moving away from Ynys-morlan. It said, ‘Look how far you can go!’

Dai glimpsed the curve of the hill, where he’d walk now. Just a silhouette. He made his decision as he passed the last few houses, which faced the evening with their stones and darkglass. He would give Bethan one of his hedgehogs. He thought about it as he walked up Brynheulog Lane, the road that Charlotte Weyland had taken a while before. He thought about it as he left the town behind, and was smiling as finally he came into his mum’s yard. Full of dust and shadows it was, the sound of birds. It might still have been summer here.

He had thirty-two hedgehogs in all, little beanie-bag ones and puppet ones. But he thought he might give her the best. His best hedgehog was as big as a very big cat, it had long fluffiness for its spines and its face was pink felt. She would like that one most, he thought. Chelsea would like that one most. And when she kept it in the café, on the table by her side, people would ask her where it came from.

Dai opened the back door to his house, to the little windowed porch where he left his cart. He sat there on the bench, untying his laces, with a reddening sky reflected in his eyes. It darkened the shoes and coats, his mum’s gardening basket. Trowels and little forks and things, her gloves laid ready over the side.

It was quiet as he walked into the house.

There was a structure to coming home and there was nothing he did that evening that did not fit. On the landing at the top of the stairs, his mother’s door was closed. The slate floor was cold, walking around in his socks. He went into his bedroom and took off his overalls. He stood next to the kitchen window and he put the kettle on.

He always made tea for her. The kitchen clock made its sounds. Before his mum had started being ill, he had taken the tea into the living room. They’d sat there and talked with the night growing outside. These days, he took it to the bedroom. It was a change he didn’t like. It wasn’t the room, his mum had a chair by the bed, they could still talk. She’d sit up with all her pillows. It wasn’t the change he minded, it wasn’t even that he was worried about her being ill. It was something else.

It was laziness to lie in bed too much, it was a waste of time. He remembered all the days she’d called up to his bedroom when he had slept in late. ‘The birds are up,’ she’d say. And if he didn’t get up then, she’d knock on his door. ‘Come on now, Dai,’ she’d say. ‘Time’s time.’ When she was working, she’d work herself out. ‘My feet are clay,’ she’d say when she’d finished. ‘They’ll crack.’ Now, she was almost always in bed. It was wrong. He’d look at her big face and hear her loud voice. He’d think, you don’t like people lying in bed. The thought sat there like a little hitch between them, it tainted everything.

He looked at the dry tea bags in their cups. On the gas, the noise of the kettle rose.

He was so careful as he carried the tea up. He watched the liquid slip gently from side to side, ready to talk. The steps creaked very softly. Upstairs, the landing was cold. There was nothing he’d done differently that evening. There was nothing he had done wrong.

Dai said her name as he opened the door. He said it quietly, ‘Mum?’ Because she might be asleep. And he moved into his mother’s bedroom, where there were no lamps on. Where there was only light from the little window, that touched the covers on her bed and fell, soft as autumn, over the lines of her face.

There were stains on the bedside table from other cups of tea they’d drunk.

‘Mum?’ he said.

He put the cups down gently. He thought that she’d have to drink the tea soon or it would get cold. She didn’t like it cold. That was particular about her tea. She liked two sugars in it. He reached out and touched her hand. He liked to measure them very carefully, spilling out grains of sugar from each side of the spoon and back into the pot. Exactly the right amount. He was thinking this and her hand was very cool.

In the evening light, he touched her. Her skin moved. Nothing else about her moved, not her hair on the pillows underneath her, not her slightly open mouth, nothing. Dai bent over her in the quiet room and looked at her, not moving, not warm.

For a long time, he didn’t touch any other part of her. She didn’t like to be touched like that, it wasn’t OK to touch her like that, prod her, push her, shake her. She would hate that. For a long time, as the tea cooled on her nightstand, he just moved his hand on hers. He waited. He said her name many times.

He didn’t hear the sound of his voice change until it was too loud. Until he realized that he was almost shouting at Mum, in her own bedroom. And then he took his hand away and only stood there. His voice dropped into quietness. Her face was still. ‘Come on now,’ he said.

Very slowly, the daylight moved out and away from the room. It left her bed and her hand in greyness. After a while, he stopped asking her to talk to him. He sat down on the edge of her bed as the tears started. He reached out very slowly, hesitating, and he stroked her hair. Several times, his mouth opened as though he had something to say. He wanted to have something.

He thought about the word ‘death’ and knew it with no understanding. His hand moved like another shadow. All her expressions had been taken away from her.

He cried for a long time as the room grew colder. At some point, he heard the noise of the central-heating boiler start downstairs and it made him cry again. Below him, in the fading kitchen, the little red light was on. It sent the first gradual flow of hot water to the radiators in other rooms. There was a while when Dai tried to lie down with his mum, to get very close to her. He tried to hold as much of his body as he could against hers, while the boiler worked on downstairs. It warmed the house very slowly, though none of the lights were on.

Before he left, Dai pulled the bedspread up around her. He went down the stairs and he opened the front door. He walked out into the yard and the wind. He stood there for a little while and then he began again, through the gate and down the lane. He walked until he was standing on the path of a lit and pretty house. A large house with two parked cars in the driveway and a nameplate on the door. The house belonged to Emyr and Gwen Morgan. It was the right place to go. He knew because Gwen had told him. Talking to him in his mother’s kitchen, she had taken things out of her shopping bag. She had cleared a little space on the counter and put them out in a line. Bread. She had nodded at him. ‘Right down the lane,’ she said. ‘Any trouble at all, you come to us.’ It had been raining that day, he remembered it. Upstairs, his mother had been asleep.

Dai stopped walking now and only stood there as he started to cry again.

Their house looked very warm to him, standing there on the road as around him the night congregated. It all seemed warm to him, the little diamonds in the window glass, the bright spill that came from the kitchen and settled on the ground. He shivered.

It was so pretty. He could see the kitchen table where they’d be having a nice dinner soon. They might be having roast lamb, with roast potatoes and peas and gravy. He wanted dinner. He stood looking and the guilt was very heavy, he wrapped his arms around his tummy. He wanted dinner and being in there. He couldn’t see their sofa but it must be nice. It must be very comfy and perfect to lie down in, lie down with all the lights on and sleep. That was all he wanted, to just be in there and sleeping. He wanted someone to put a duvet over him, he just wanted to close his eyes, have someone touch his face. He didn’t want to go home.

Behind, all about, Dai heard the trees wend and sway. He looked at the Morgans’ brass doorknob. Above him, the sky had lost the day.

Behind the front door and through the carpeted hall, where people took off their shoes, the lounge was tranquil. The three-piece suite was cream coloured. Gwen had chosen it at Leeke’s last year. Now, she sat at one end with her ankles crossed and a cup of tea on the table beside her. Every so often, she reached and picked it up and sipped, then settled her hands back on her knees. ‘Emmerdale’ was on the television and Emyr sat across the room in the armchair. He was reading a book on industrial architecture. Lamplight from the upright standard touched his square glasses when he shifted and when he cleared his throat, following the lines on the page with his finger. Their two little King Charles spaniels were stretched out and asleep.

There were two walls between this room and the night. The walls were painted cream as well, they glowed.

Gwen didn’t hear any sound, there was no ring at the bell. She was moving for her tea when Lucky rolled over, sat up and looked suddenly at the door to the hall. She stopped her reaching hand. Lucky’s ears were lifted, she saw Baby sit up.

You didn’t need to be an experienced dog trainer to create two intelligent dogs. She spent a lot of time with them. She talked to them and, when they looked into her eyes, she saw understanding and obedience that other dogs just were not capable of. Now, they sat staring at the hallway.

She saw Lucky stand up. She said, ‘Are you expecting anyone, Emyr?’ He wasn’t expecting anyone, she knew. It would have been one of the first things he had said, walking through the front door.

Emyr was holding his place on the page with his finger.

Gwen watched the dogs move toward the hallway together. ‘Emyr…’ she said, but she didn’t look at him. She could hear them now, growling. She got up slowly, smoothed the front of her skirt and glanced towards the door. ‘Emyr?’

The soft strains of this lamplight lay over the carpet and brushed reflections across her husband’s framed steam train prints, hanging evenly along the wall.

She said, ‘They don’t growl for no reason. Lucky’s sitting there.’ She moved towards the hallway. ‘He’s sitting by the front door.’

Crouching, with his hackles raised.

‘Well, for God’s sake,’ Gwen said suddenly. She walked into the hall.

She was a small woman with a small nose and small lines. Her hair was short, ash blonde and moussed into waves. It cost fifty pounds per fortnight, she had it done in Aberystwyth where the girl who served the tea never needed to ask what she wanted. Now, looking at the door, she moved a curl from her forehead with one finger, coral-nailed. There was someone standing outside, she felt sure of it. And what sort of person stands outside a front door and doesn’t knock? In the small pane of glass at the top of the door, the world seemed very dark.

Gwen stood without moving, stiff and straight. She always carried herself this way. Sometimes in the evening, lying in a foam bath, she found that there was a pain in her back that wouldn’t leave her. She took very long baths, often an hour, she rested her hands on the dry sides and listened to Emyr moving in the other rooms. She would try sitting up, lying down but there was nothing that would make the pain go away and sometimes when the bath was finished, she would stand and watch the water and the scented bubbles sink slowly into the drain. It was typical, she would think, that good posture could give you such a bad back.

Lucky’s bark was suddenly loud. She heard the wind outside. What sort of a person would only stand there? It was a ridiculous thing to do. She reached out but her hand paused, hesitation, before she opened the door. Later she wouldn’t remember.

She would remember the way she saw him, though: standing on her doorstep, looking down at her with the dark behind. She would remember the look on his face, the wetness she saw there, and pain. His matted hair blown every which way.

For a moment Gwen was caught without words, her mouth was open. She felt the cold touch her face and her throat.

‘Dai –’ she said.

She saw the motion as Lucky rushed out to his feet, barking, jumping. Dai was crying. His face was beaten by the cold. Lucky’s noise sharp between them, ‘Dai,’ she said again. She said, ‘Lucky, stop it now. Dai, what on earth…?’ Her hand held tightly to the door’s brass handle. ‘What’s wrong? Why didn’t you ring the bell?’

Standing on her doorstep, he didn’t answer. His face seemed broken. He wasn’t wearing any shoes.

‘What is it?’

She saw him wipe his sleeve across his face. Scrubbed at the skin. He stared out to her, where she stood on the warm cream carpet, in the bright light of her hall.

‘She’s dead.’ His voice was raw.

Gwen felt Baby touch her ankle, move past.

‘She’s dead,’ he said. And then a sound came from his mouth.

Gwen faltered. ‘Oh God…’ she said. ‘Oh, Dai.’ She tried to clear her throat and felt her own hand, her soft palm, on her mouth. Somewhere behind her in the hallway now, Emyr was talking. She didn’t hear the words. ‘Come in.’ she said. ‘Come in now.’ She held the door open for him as he stepped into her house.

‘Thank you,’ he said, the words sounding strange where nothing had been strange only just before.

He stood there, large and dirty between the clean walls. Around his feet, the dogs were moving and she saw his glinting tears.

‘Come into the lounge now, Dai,’ she said. And when she turned, she saw Emyr standing in the doorway in his shirt and ice-cream pink jumper. He looked as if he’d had notes prepared for this and perhaps had lost them. She felt anger pass through.

The television was playing in the living room, the closing credits of ‘Emmerdale’. The voice that came on over the music told her that it would be shown at the slightly later time of eight o’clock next week. She looked at the cup of tea on the table. And felt uprooted, confused.

Somewhere around her, Emyr was standing. That would be his solution. She touched Dai’s arm, she pressed him towards the sofa.

He sat like there was no point in standing. He stared at the carpet, hunched as though he would curl into himself. Gwen’s hand moved on his arm and on his shoulder. ‘Shh,’ she said. She felt him hitch. ‘It’s all right now, Dai.’ He looked so pitiful, for a moment she wanted to hold him. ‘Dai,’ she said. ‘Tell me what happened. Come on, it’s all right.’

There was silence then and the sound of Dai’s breathing below his meat-red eyes. His weight sunk the sofa cushions.

‘Just go and make a cup of tea for him, Emyr? Will you do that?’

‘I’ll phone the doctor,’ he said.

‘I’m dying,’ the woman had told her. Gwen remembered.

A year ago, Eirian Meredith had still been hands-on at the gift shop, settled in like some queen insect behind the counter or moving between the shelves with that way she had, that fat and stately way. Only a year. And then bedridden and growing more bitter each day. Of course, Gwen would never have said that to anyone. But it was true, she had seen it: more bitter and more hateful, ‘Stewing in her own juices,’ Gwen’s mother would have said. And if anything, Gwen had seen it coming. If you were going to take the kind of attitude that Eirian had taken – well, you could only expect the worst. Of course she had seen it coming. Only the other day, she had said to Siân Humphries what a terribly sad thing it was. Standing in Spar with her handbag settled over her shoulder, she remembered. She had said that and she’d shaken her head. Obviously, she hadn’t told Siân what it was really like, the things that Eirian Meredith had really said – the way she had said them, wetting her lips beforehand like the taste of them was something to anticipate. She’d spoken with nothing but mercy for the woman, sadness for her situation. Memories of Eirian had seemed better to her then, talking over the counter.

‘Just bed to fire, it is for her now. Poor woman, it’s a terrible thing.’ Compassion in the face of insult, she’d shown.