BRUCE CHATWIN

The Novels

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Hanya Yanagihara

title logo for The Novels

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

The author and publisher are grateful to Faber & Faber for permission to print lines from Ezra Pound’s version of ‘Exile’s Letter’, from Selected Poems 1908–1969, 1975

Bruce Chatwin has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

About the Book

While Bruce Chatwin is best known as a master of travel literature, his three acclaimed novels must not be overlooked. Here we see a writer exploring human life, from its freedoms to its limits, in ever more exhilarating and unexpected ways.

In On the Black Hill, twin brothers begin to realise that the world beyond their familiar fields is changing. In Utz, a scholar visits a communist state to meet an eccentric porcelain collector. And in The Viceroy of Ouidah, an ambitious slave trader makes a choice that could threaten his ultimate dream.

About the Author

Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. After attending Marlborough School he began work as a porter at Sotheby’s. Eight years later, having become one of Sotheby’s youngest directors, he abandoned his job to pursue his passion for world travel. Between 1972 and 1975 he worked for the Sunday Times, before announcing his next departure in a telegram: ‘Gone to Patagonia for six months.’ This trip inspired the first of Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M. Forster award and launched his writing career. Two of his books have been made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah (retitled Cobra Verde), directed by Werner Herzog, and Andrew Grieve’s On the Black Hill. On publication The Songlines went straight to No. 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list and stayed in the top ten for nine months. His novel, Utz, was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. He died in January 1989.

Also by Bruce Chatwin

Introduction

In 1972, Bruce Chatwin left England and began to travel. This was not so long ago, and yet the world back then was still so unmapped: a traveller could, and did, wander through it as Pausanias, as Ibn Battuta, as the explorers who wrote the first drafts of the romance of movement, of the twinned danger and delight of finding yourself in a place where you were at the mercy of unfriendly but intriguing strangers. A traveller, back then, was far less likely to find traces of the familiar in the foreign. Depending on where he ventured, he had significantly fewer guarantees of safety and, equally thrillingly, only limited ways of communicating with those he knew and had left behind. And it wasn’t only that you could (and, indeed, would) travel as Ibn Battuta had, but, crucially, you could travel where he had, as well: Sana’a and Baghdad and Damascus, all of which are now treacherous or off-limits, cities in countries forced, by war or disaster or bad governance, to deny their cultures’ extravagant senses of hospitality.

Chatwin was thirty-two when he began this, the latest of his reinventions – from an Englishman of England, to an Englishman of elsewhere – and for the rest of his life he would remain (more or less) in that elsewhere. Great travellers are recessive personalities; the best are unmemorable. This ability to shape-shift, to adapt oneself to one’s context instead of imposing oneself upon it, is a necessary skill – the gift of self-erasure ensures one will see and hear things one ought not. One’s goal as a traveller is to be forgettable, to leave no footsteps in the sand.

Though Chatwin may not have been forgettable, he was adaptable. Before embarking on his new life, he had been a student in archeology at the University of Edinburgh, and, before that, an expert in antiquities and Impressionist art at Sotheby’s in London. He was not forgettable in appearance, either, in his particularly English brand of soft blond beauty, the kind destined to spoil quickly in equatorial sun, the kind in which one could see the remnants of a too-pretty boy wearing short pants and round-toed black shoes that gleamed like beetles. (Part of the enjoyment of inhabiting The Songlines and In Patagonia, Chatwin’s inimitably vivid travelogues, is imagining their author moving through those baked and lonely landscapes, a slim white flame licking his way across such scarily empty territory.)

Chatwin also possessed another quality that all great travellers have: the ability to remain completely who he was, even as he proved himself ceaselessly malleable. Writers who deliberately seek out the company of those foreign to them need to be armed with an unshakable sense of self-possession and a certain sense of arrogance; you need to be able to walk into a place (be it a city or a souk or a tundra) without wondering whether who you are is actually where you’re from, because you already know that where you’re from doesn’t matter. This kind of writer is certain that his identity has resulted not from where he was raised, but in spite of it. We think of travellers as people who have no attachment to things, but true travellers are people who really have no attachment to place. Home is not a beloved memory or something to yearn for and fetishise, but merely a matter of circumstance: a piece of land (sometimes large, but usually small) on which one eats and sleeps, sometimes for a lifetime, and sometimes for a day. Home, therefore, is anywhere, and yet nowhere as well. Chatwin was powerfully attracted to nomadism, and you might view his collective writing as a struggle to discard this idea of home as a kind of heaven, and to replace it with the radical notion that the person who found himself adrift, in perpetual motion, might already be at home – that movement itself might be the ideal human state.

This sense of certainty, the feeling the reader has that a place is being used as a mirror to reflect the author’s own image, is also what made Chatwin’s travelogues so controversial. His critics called them self-absorbed confabulations, fiction presented as fact. This isn’t untrue, but it is also incidental to the works’ resonance and beauty. Writings about place are almost always about the writer: the most rigorous are a series of self-exposures, revelations of their chronicler’s prejudices and ignorances. The genius of The Songlines is not its veracity, but its artificiality, of plot, character and storytelling: it is a book that feels like what it is, a performative diary, a person trying to prove to himself a thesis about the human condition. Chatwin doesn’t claim to be an expert on Australia, or nomadism, or Aboriginal culture – he doesn’t even claim to be an expert on himself. But the reader allows herself to be guided by him anyway, because what is being revealed is not a physical terrain so much as the twisty, dead-endy pathways of the author’s own subconscious, and it is a glorious maze to be in, sparky and colourful and punctuated with unexpected roundabouts.

That is Chatwin’s so-called non-fiction. But in fiction, he finally cedes the stage. His three novels are remarkable for the distinctiveness of their styles – The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) is a humid, grotesque fable of African colonialism that reads like a third-hand rumour; Utz (1988) is a linked chain of dispatches that evokes the absurdist, bleak humour of the Eastern European Soviet age; and On the Black Hill (1982), the most traditional and conventionally beautiful of the trio, is a perfectly calibrated history of two brothers, as well as of England in the twentieth century – but also for their especial uncanniness, their relentless omniscience. The reader senses a dedication to honesty in these works, as if within them are the most astonishing, the most haunting of the anecdotes Chatwin had heard on his travels and, thinking them too improbable for non-fiction, he saved them for a realm in which they might be taken more seriously, or might be allowed to chime most loudly. The Viceroy of Ouidah, which concerns the brief rise and ignominious decline of a Brazilian slave-baron in the short-lived and brutal Dahomey kingdom, is in particular replete with these curious and exposing details, the kind of fabulist and dangerously intimate family secrets one would confess only to a stranger one was certain never to encounter again: the jilted ancestor gone mad with waiting for her beloved; the treasured daughters who were sent back to Brazil as wards of a trusted friend, who instead made them into whores; the blood pacts and curses and long-ago vengeances. With this book, the reader also imagines Chatwin, but this time she sees him near a fire, or in someone’s home, aware that when he was listening to these stories, he was on the knife-edge of peril, and that in those moments only his attentiveness, his ability to sit still and say nothing, spared him his life.

The novels are a reminder, too, that fiction provides a kind of safety; it allows the writer to create outlandish stories and characters without fear (not reasonable fear, anyway) that they might be taken as representative of an entire culture or ethnicity or race – indeed, in these books Chatwin says more about colonialism, and tin-can monarchies, and failed systems of government, than you find in either The Songlines or In Patagonia. They are also more relaxed, more revealing of obsessions from Chatwin’s own life, than his non-fiction: behind the scrim of fiction, the writer is able to stop performing as an author and devote his energies to being a storyteller instead. Chatwin had a keen appreciation for objects, and all three novels are decorated with lovingly, precisely described material goods, evidence of his ability to conjure an entire history by noting the stuff of people’s lives. Utz, for example, is a sad, sweetly funny elegy for Mitteleuropa, told through the story of a maniacally single-minded collector of Meissen porcelain, a collection that imprisons him in both Prague and, by extension, socialism itself. In Ouidah, the titular viceroy’s daughter hoards some of her father’s possessions, a catalogue – ‘… his silver-mounted cigar case; his pink opaline chamber pot; his ivory-handled slave-brand with the initials F.S.; his rosary of carnauba nuts; some scraps of paper covered with his handwriting; a lithograph of the Emperor Dom Pedro II; a picture of a Brazilian house, and a particularly bloodthirsty canvas of Judith hacking off the head of Holophernes’ – that forms its own miniature portrait, a biography of a man found not in the people he sired or the land he conquered, but in the things he cherished.

But of all his books, it is perhaps On the Black Hill that displays Chatwin at his finest and most surprising: certainly it is the most disciplined of his novels, the least dazzling in setting or circumstance, but told with an economy and elegance of language and, most strikingly, a deep tenderness. Here, the location is not some impossible land, but a farm in rural Wales. Here, the people are not eccentric collectors or sadistic potentates, but twin brothers, farmers and sons of a farmer, who, through first the Great War and then the next, never leave home for any significant period of time. The world moves into modernity, but Lewis and Benjamin largely remain behind, sometimes scrabbling forward to catch it, but mostly just clinging to its tail, being dragged reluctantly forward. Though they, too, are Chatwinesque oddities, their lives are not sources of irony, but instead of wonder.

The book is also a reminder of how lovely Chatwin’s language could be, how years of seeing had given him the power to describe in terms both startling and true: a ‘pewter sun’ hangs low over the cold Black Hill, the rooks’ ‘wingtips glinting like flakes of ice’; an Afro-Brazilian boy in Ouidah is notable for his ‘wad of blonde hair’; and in The Songlines a prized possession of childhood, a conch shell from the West Indies that Chatwin named Mona, is rendered as a ‘sheeny pink vulva’ in which he first heard the sea’s shushing slush. Such instances are testament to how Chatwin could isolate the most revealing detail from the people and places and situations he observed: he may have been writing about himself, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t watching everything around him. A writer, like a traveller, is a thief. He waits and waits, and at the moment of divulgence – as there inevitably is, should he be able to wait long enough – he seizes the secret or confession that he came for, magpie-like, and flits away, a glossy black shadow. Someone else’s story becomes his own, and his to tell and share. And when there were no appropriate words for a tale, when English provided no exact match? Well, then, Chatwin simply invented (or resurrected) the language he needed, sometimes so evocatively, with such charm and precision – such as the flies on a hot day in June ‘zooming and zizzing’ around the twins’ barn – that one forgets one is encountering them for the first time here, that they are Chatwin’s own creations. (Resourcefulness: another of the traveller’s necessary qualities. When something doesn’t exist, be it shelter or friends or words, one learns to make them with whatever’s available.)

It is never quite a satisfying exercise – and at any rate, a rather insulting one – to try to excavate from a work of fiction evidence of the author’s regrets and misgivings about his own life. But On the Black Hill makes it near-impossible not to indulge. By the time the novel was published, Chatwin had been a professional peripatetic for a decade; seven years later, at the age of forty-eight, he would be dead of an AIDS-related illness. One cannot help but wonder if, in Lewis, an armchair traveller and geography lover who is never quite able to venture far from home, Chatwin was writing himself an alternative narrative. For this is a book about the difficult work of standing still; it is a book that suggests that although (maybe?) the ideal human state may in fact be movement, the more challenging one is remaining exactly where you were born, that accepting that the earth may not be yours to occupy is its own kind of nobility. ‘The planet was now full of bickering little countries with unpronounceable names,’ Lewis comforts himself. ‘The real journeys only existed in the imagination.’ But for Chatwin, the journeys were both real and imaginary: fact became fiction, and fiction fact, and the terra incognita he travelled between them was where the true adventure lay.

For Francis Wyndham and for Diana Melly

Since we stay not here, being people but of a dayes abode, and our age is like that of a flie, and contemporary with a gourd, we must look some where else for an abiding city, a place in another countrey to fix our house in …

Jeremy Taylor

One

For forty-two years, Lewis and Benjamin Jones slept side by side, in their parents’ bed, at their farm which was known as ‘The Vision’.

The bedstead, an oak four-poster, came from their mother’s home at Bryn-Draenog when she married in 1899. Its faded cretonne hangings, printed with a design of larkspur and roses, shut out the mosquitoes of summer, and the draughts in winter. Calloused heels had worn holes in the linen sheets, and parts of the patchwork quilt had frayed. Under the goose-feather mattress, there was a second mattress, of horsehair, and this had sunk into two troughs, leaving a ridge between the sleepers.

The smell of mothballs came from a pyramid of hatboxes piled up beside the washstand. On the bed-table lay a pincushion still stuck with Mrs Jones’s hatpins; and on the end wall hung an engraving of Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’, enclosed in an ebonized frame.

One of the windows looked out over the green fields of England: the other looked back into Wales, past a dump of larches, at the Black Hill.

Every morning their alarm went off at six. They listened to the farmers’ broadcast as they shaved and dressed. Downstairs, they tapped the barometer, lit the fire and boiled a kettle for tea. Then they did the milking and foddering before coming back for breakfast.

The house had roughcast walls and a roof of mossy stone tiles and stood at the far end of the farmyard in the shade of an old Scots pine. Below the cowshed there was an orchard of wind-stunted apple-trees, and then the fields slanted down to the dingle, and there were birches and alders along the stream.

Long ago, the place had been called Ty-Cradoc – and Caractacus is still a name in these parts – but in 1737 an ailing girl called Alice Morgan saw the Virgin hovering over a patch of rhubarb, and ran back to the kitchen, cured. To celebrate the miracle, her father renamed his farm ‘The Vision’ and carved the initials A.M. with the date and a cross on the lintel above the porch. The border of Radnor and Hereford was said to run right through the middle of the staircase.

As boys, only their mother could tell them apart: now age and accidents had weathered them in different ways.

Lewis was tall and stringy, with shoulders set square and a steady long-limbed stride. Even at eighty he could walk over the hills all day, or wield an axe all day, and not get tired.

He gave off a strong smell. His eyes – grey, dreamy and astygmatic – were set well back into the skull, and capped with thick round lenses in white metal frames. He bore the scar of a cycling accident on his nose and, ever since, its tip had curved downwards and turned purple in cold weather.

His head would wobble as he spoke: unless he was fumbling with his watch-chain, he had no idea what to do with his hands. In company he always wore a puzzled look; and if anyone made a statement of fact, he’d say, ‘Thank you!’ or ‘Very kind of you!’ Everyone agreed he had a wonderful way with sheepdogs.

Benjamin was shorter, pinker, neater and sharper-tongued. His chin fell into his neck, but he still possessed the full stretch of his nose, which he would use in conversation as a weapon. He had less hair.

He did all the cooking, the darning and the ironing; and he kept the accounts. No one could be fiercer in a haggle over stock-prices and he would go on, arguing for hours, until the dealer threw up his hands and said, ‘Come off, you old skinflint!’ and he’d smile and say, ‘What can you mean by that?’

For miles around the twins had the reputation of being incredibly stingy – but this was not always so.

They refused, for example, to make a penny out of hay. Hay, they said, was God’s gift to the farmer; and providing The Vision had hay to spare, their poorer neighbours were welcome to what they needed. Even in the foul days of January, old Miss Fifield the Tump had only to send a message with the postman, and Lewis would drive the tractor over with a load of bales.

Benjamin’s favourite occupation was delivering lambs. All the long winter, he waited for the end of March, when the curlews started calling and the lambing began. It was he, not Lewis, who stayed awake to watch the ewes. It was he who would pull a lamb at a difficult birth. Sometimes, he had to thrust his forearm into the womb to disentangle a pair of twins; and afterwards, he would sit by the fireside, unwashed and contented, and let the cat lick the afterbirth off his hands.

In winter and summer, the brothers went to work in striped flannel shirts with copper studs to fasten them at the neck. Their jackets and waistcoats were made of brown whipcord, and their trousers were of darker corduroy. They wore their moleskin hats with the brims turned down; but since Lewis had the habit of lifting his to every stranger, his fingers had rubbed the nap off the peak.

From time to time, with a show of mock solemnity, they consulted their silver watches – not to tell the hour but to see whose watch was beating faster. On Saturday nights they took turns to have a hip-bath in front of the fire; and they lived for the memory of their mother.

Because they knew each other’s thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking. And sometimes – perhaps after one of these silent quarrels, when they needed their mother to unite them – they would stand over her patchwork quilt and peer at the black velvet stars and the hexagons of printed calico that had once been her dresses. And without saying a word they could see her again – in pink, walking through the oatfield with a jug of draught cider for the reapers. Or in green, at a sheep-shearers’ lunch. Or in a blue-striped apron bending over the fire. But the black stars brought back a memory of their father’s coffin, laid out on the kitchen table, and the chalk-faced women, crying.

Nothing in the kitchen had changed since the day of his funeral. The wallpaper, with its pattern of Iceland poppies and russet fern, had darkened over with smoke-resin; and though the brass knobs shone as brightly as ever, the brown paint had chipped from the doors and skirting.

The twins never thought of renewing these threadbare decorations for fear of cancelling out the memory of that bright spring morning, over seventy years before, when they had helped their mother stir a bucket of flour-and-water paste, and watched the whitewash caking on her scarf.

Benjamin kept her flagstones scrubbed, the iron grate gleaming with black lead polish, and a copper kettle always hissing on the hob.

Friday was his baking day – as it had once been hers – and on Friday afternoons he would roll up his sleeves to make Welsh cakes or cottage loaves, pummelling the dough so vigorously that the cornflowers on the oilcloth cover had almost worn away.

On the mantelpiece stood a pair of Staffordshire spaniels, five brass candlesticks, a ship-in-a-bottle and a tea-caddy painted with a Chinese lady. A glass-fronted cabinet – one pane repaired with Scotch tape – contained china ornaments, silver-plated teapots, and mugs from every Coronation and Jubilee. A flitch of bacon was rammed into a rack in the rafters. The Georgian pianoforte was proof of idler days and past accomplishments.

Lewis kept a twelve-bore shotgun propped up beside the grandfather clock: both the brothers were terrified of thieves and antique-dealers.

Their father’s only hobby – in fact, his only interest apart from farming and the Bible – had been to carve wooden frames for the pictures and family photographs that covered every spare stretch of wall. To Mrs Jones it had been a miracle that a man of her husband’s temper and clumsy hands should have had the patience for such intricate work. Yet, from the moment he took up his chisels, from the moment the tiny white shavings flew, all the meanness went out of him.

He had carved a ‘gothic’ frame for the religious colour print ‘The Broad and Narrow Path’. He had invented some ‘biblical’ motifs for the watercolour of the Pool of Bethesda; and when his brother sent an oleograph from Canada, he smeared the surface with linseed oil to make it look like an Old Master, and spent a whole winter working up a surround of maple leaves.

And it was this picture, with its Red Indian, its birchbark, its pines and a crimson sky – to say nothing of its association with the legendary Uncle Eddie – that first awoke in Lewis a yearning for far-off places.

Apart from a holiday at the seaside in 1910, neither of the twins had ever strayed further than Hereford. Yet these restricted horizons merely inflamed Lewis’s passion for geography. He would pester visitors for their opinions on ‘them savages in Africky’; for news of Siberia, Salonika or Sri Lanka; and when someone spoke of President Carter’s failure to rescue the Teheran hostages, he folded his arms and said, decisively, ‘Him should’a gone to get ’em through Odessa.’

His image of the outside world derived from a Bartholomew’s atlas of 1925 when the two great colonial empires were coloured pink and mauve, and the Soviet Union was a dull sage green. And it offended his sense of order to find that the planet was now full of bickering little countries with unpronounceable names. So, as if to suggest that real journeys only existed in the imagination – and perhaps to show off – he would close his eyes and chant the lines his mother taught him:

Westward, westward, Hiawatha

Sailed into the fiery sunset

Sailed into the purple vapours

Sailed into the dusk of evening.

Too often the twins had fretted at the thought of dying childless – yet they had only to glance at their wall of photographs to get rid of the gloomiest thoughts. They knew the names of all the sitters and never tired of finding likenesses between people born a hundred years apart.

Hanging to the left of their parents’ wedding group was a picture of themselves at the age of six, gaping like baby barn-owls and dressed in identical page-boy collars for the fête in Lurkenhope Park. But the one that gave them most pleasure was a colour snapshot of their great-nephew Kevin, also aged six, and got up in a wash-towel turban, as Joseph in a nativity play.

Since then, fourteen years had passed and Kevin had grown into a tall, black-haired young man with bushy eyebrows that met in the middle, and slaty grey-blue eyes. In a few months the farm would be his.

So now, when they looked at that faded wedding picture; when they saw their father’s face framed in fiery red sideburns (even in a sepia photo you could tell he had bright red hair); when they saw the leg-o’-mutton sleeves of their mother’s dress, the roses in her hat, and the ox-eye daisies in her bouquet; and when they compared her sweet smile with Kevin’s, they knew that their lives had not been wasted and that time, in its healing circle, had wiped away the pain and the anger, the shame and the sterility, and had broken into the future with the promise of new things.

Two

Of all the people who posed outside the Red Dragon at Rhulen, that sweltering afternoon in August 1899, none had better reason for looking pleased with himself than Amos Jones, the bridegroom. In one week, he had achieved two of his three ambitions: he had married a beautiful wife, and had signed the lease of a farm.

His father, a garrulous old cider-drinker, known round the pubs of Radnorshire as Sam the Waggon, had started life as a drover; had failed to make a living as a carter; and now lived, cooped up with his wife, in a tiny cottage on Rhulen Hill.

Hannah Jones was not an agreeable woman. As a young bride, she had loved her husband to distraction; had put up with his absences and infidelities, and, thanks to a monumental meanness, had always managed to thwart the bailiffs.

Then came the catastrophes that hardened her into a mould of unrelieved bitterness and left her mouth as sharp and twisted as a leaf of holly.

Of her five children, a daughter had died of consumption; another married a Catholic; the eldest son was killed in a Rhondda coalpit; her favourite, Eddie, stole her savings and skipped to Canada – and that left only Amos to support her old age.

Because he was her final fledgling, she coddled him more carefully than the others, and sent him to Sunday School to learn letters and fear of the Lord. He was not a stupid boy, but, by the age of fifteen, he had disappointed her hopes for his education; and she booted him from the house and sent him to earn his own keep.

Twice a year, in May and November, he hung round the Rhulen Fair, waiting for a farmer to hire him, with a wisp of sheep’s wool in his cap and a clean Sunday smock folded over his arm.

He found work on several farms in Radnorshire and Montgomery, where he learned to handle a plough; to sow, reap and shear; to butcher hogs and dig the sheep out of snowdrifts. When his boots fell apart, he had to bind his feet with strips of felt. He would come back in the evenings, aching at every joint, to a supper of bacon broth and potatoes, and a few stale crusts. The owners were far too mean to provide a cup of tea.

He slept on bales of hay, in the granary or stable-loft, and would lie awake on winter nights, shivering under a damp blanket: there was no fire to dry his clothes. One Monday morning, his employer horsewhipped him for stealing some slices of cold mutton while the family was out at Chapel – a crime of which the cat, not he, was guilty.

He ran away three times and three times forfeited his wages. And yet he walked with a swagger, wore his cap at a rakish angle, and, hoping to attract a pretty farmer’s daughter, spent his spare pennies on brightly coloured handkerchiefs.

To wake the girl he threw a twig against her bedroom window, and she slipped him the key. Then, tiptoeing through the kitchen, his shin caught on a stool, and he tripped. A copper pot crashed to the floor; the dog barked, and a man’s deep voice called out: her father was on the staircase as he bolted from the house.

At twenty-eight, he spoke of emigrating to Argentina where there were rumours of land and horses – at which his mother panicked and found him a bride.

She was a plain, dull-witted woman, ten years older than he, who sat all day staring at her hands and was already a burden on her family.

Hannah haggled for three days until the bride’s father agreed that Amos should take her, as well as thirty breeding ewes, the lease of a smallholding called Cwmcoynant, and grazing rights on Rhulen Hill.

But the land was sour. It lay on a sunless slope and, at the snowmelt, streams of icy water came pouring through the cottage. Yet by renting a patch of ground here, another patch there; by buying stock in shares with other farmers, Amos managed to make a living and hope for better times.

Rachel Jones obeyed her husband with the passive movements of an automaton. She mucked out the pigsties in a torn tweed coat tied up with a bit of twine. She never smiled. She never cried when he hit her. She replied to his questions with grunts or monosyllables; and even in the agony of childbirth, she clenched her mouth so tightly that she uttered not a sound.

The baby was a boy. Having no milk, she sent him away to nurse, and he died. In November 1898, she stopped eating and set her face against the living world. There were snowdrops in the graveyard when they buried her.

Three

One Sunday matins, not a month after the funeral, the vicar of Rhulen announced that he had to attend a service in Llandaff Cathedral and that, next Sunday, the rector of Bryn-Draenog would preach the sermon.

This was the Reverend Latimer, an Old Testament scholar, who had retired from mission work in India and settled in this remote hill parish to be alone with his daughter and his books.

From time to time, Amos Jones had seen him on the mountain – a hollow-chested figure with white hair blowing about like cotton-grass, striding over the heather and shouting to himself so loudly that he frightened off the sheep. He had not seen the daughter, who was said to be sad and beautiful. He took his seat at the end of the pew.

On the way, the Latimers had to shelter from a cloudburst and, by the time their dog-cart drew up outside the church, they were twenty minutes late. While the rector changed in the vestry, Miss Latimer walked towards the choir-stalls, lowering her eyes to the strip of wine-red carpet, and avoiding the stares of the congregation. She brushed against Amos Jones’s shoulder, and she stopped. She took half a step forwards, another step sideways, and then sat down, one pew in front of him, but across the aisle.

Drops of water sparkled on her black beaver hat, and her chignon of chestnut hair. Her grey serge coat was also streaked with rain.

On one of the stained-glass windows was a figure of the Prophet Elijah and his raven. Outside, on the sill, a pair of pigeons were billing and cooing and pecking at the pane.

The first hymn was ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah’ and as the voices swelled in chorus, Amos caught her clear, quavering soprano while she felt his baritone murmuring like a bumblebee round the nape of her neck. All through the Lord’s Prayer he stared at her long, white, tapering fingers. After the Second Lesson she risked a sidelong glance and saw his red hands on the red buckram binding of his prayerbook.

‘“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient …”’

She gazed at her hassock and felt her heart was breaking. After the service Amos passed her in the lych-gate, but she flashed her eyes and turned her back and peered into the boughs of a yew.

He forgot her – he tried to forget her – until one Thursday in April, he went to Rhulen market to sell some hoggets and exchange the news.

Along the length of Broad Street the farmers who had driven in from the country were tethering their ponies, and chatting in groups. Carts stood empty with their shafts in the air. From the bakery came the smell of freshly baked bread. In front of the Town Hall there were booths with red-striped awnings, and black hats bobbing round them. In Castle Street the crowds were even thicker as people jostled forward to inspect the lots of Welsh and Hereford cattle. The sheep and pigs were penned behind hurdles. There was a nip in the air, and clouds of steam rose up off the animals’ flanks.

Outside the Red Dragon two greybeards were drinking cider and moaning about ‘them bloomin’ rogues in Parliament’. A nasal voice called out the price of wicker chairs, and a purple-faced stock-dealer pumped the hand of a thin man in a brown derby.

Two blue farm waggons, strewn with straw and piled with dressed poultry, were parked beside the municipal clock; and their owners, a pair of women in plaid shawls, were gossiping away, trying hard to feign indifference to the Birmingham buyer, who circled around them, twirling his malacca cane.

As Amos passed, he heard one of them say: ‘And the poor thing! To think she’s alone in the world!’

On the Saturday, a shepherd riding on the hill had found the Reverend Latimer’s body, face downward in a pool. He had slipped in the peat bog and drowned. They had buried him at Bryn-Draenog on the Tuesday.

Amos sold his hoggets for what they would fetch and, as he put the coins into his waistcoat pocket, he saw that his hand was shaking.

Next morning, after foddering, he took a stick and walked the nine miles to Bryn-Draenog Hill. On reaching the line of rocks that crown the summit, he sat down out of the wind and retied a bootlace. Overhead, puffy clouds were streaming out of Wales, their shadows plunging down the slopes of gorse and heather, slowing up as they moved across the fields of winter wheat.

To the east was the River Wye, a silver ribbon snaking through water-meadows, and the whole countryside dotted with white or red-brick farmhouses. A thatched roof made a little patch of yellow in a foam of apple-blossom, and there were gloomy stands of conifers that shrouded the homes of the gentry.

A few hundred yards below, the sun caught the slates of Bryn-Draenog rectory and reflected back to the hill-top a parallelogram of open sky. Two buzzards were wheeling and falling in the blue air, and there were lambs and crows in a bright green field.

In the graveyard, a woman in black was moving in and out among the headstones. Then she passed through the wicket gate and walked up the overgrown garden. She was halfway across the lawn when a little dog came bounding out to greet her, yapping and pawing at her skirt. She threw a stick into the shrubbery and the dog raced off and came back, without the stick, and pawed again at her skirt. Something seemed to stop her from entering the house.

He raced downhill, his heel-irons clattering over the loose stones. Then he leaned over the garden fence, panting to catch his breath, and she was still standing, motionless among the laurels, with the dog lying quietly at her feet.

‘Mud!’ she laughed. ‘Mud can’t dirty this house. And besides, I have to leave it.’

She showed him into her father’s study. The room was dusty and lined with books. Outside the window, the bracts of a monkey-puzzle blocked out the sunlight. Tufts of horsehair spilled from the sofa on to a worn Turkey carpet. The desk was littered with yellowing papers and, on a revolving stand, there were Bibles and Commentaries on the Bible. On the black marble mantelpiece lay a few flint axeheads, and some bits of Roman pottery.

She went up to the piano, snatched the contents of a vase, and threw them in the grate.

‘What horrible things they are!’ she said. ‘How I hate everlasting flowers!’

She eyed him as he looked at a watercolour – of white arches, a date palm, and women with pitchers.

‘It’s the Pool of Bethesda,’ she said. ‘We went there. We went all over the Holy Land on our way back from India. We saw Nazareth and Bethlehem and the Sea of Galilee. We saw Jerusalem. It was my father’s dream.’

She led the way down a passage to the kitchen. The table was scrubbed and bare; and there was not a sign of food.

Outside again in the sunlight, he saw that her hair was streaked with grey, and there were crow’s-feet spreading to her cheekbones. But he liked her smile, and the brown eyes shining between long black lashes. Around her waist there curled a tight black patent leather belt. His breeder’s eye meandered from her shoulders to her hips.

‘But Amos Jones is a wonderful name,’ she continued, strolling beside him to the garden gate. Then she waved and ran back to the house. The last he saw of her, she was standing in the study. The black tentacles of the monkey-puzzle, reflected in the window, seemed to hold her white face prisoner as she pressed it to the pane.

He climbed the hill, then bounded from one grassy hummock to the next, shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Mary Latimer! Mary Jones! Mary Latimer! Mary Jones!, Mary! … Mary! … Mary …!

Two days later he was back at the rectory with the present of a chicken he had plucked and drawn himself.

She was waiting on the porch, in a long blue wool dress, a Kashmiri shawl round her shoulders and a cameo, of Minerva, on a brown velvet ribbon round her neck.

She threw back her head and laughed, and the dog caught a whiff of the chicken and jumped up and down, and scratched its paws on Amos’s trousers. He pulled the chicken from his knapsack. She saw the cold pimply flesh. The smile fell from her face, and she stood rooted to the doorstep, shuddering.

They tried to talk in the hall, but she wrung her hands and stared at the red-tiled floor, while he shifted from foot to foot and felt himself colouring from his neck to his ears.

Both were bursting with things to say to each other. Both felt, at that moment, there was nothing more to say; that nothing would come of their meeting; that their two accents would never make one whole voice; and that they would both creep back to their shells – as if the flash of recognition in church were a trick of fate, or a temptation of the Devil to ruin them. They stammered on, and gradually their words spaced themselves into silence: their eyes did not meet as he edged out backwards and ran for the hill.

She was hungry. That evening, she roasted the chicken and tried to force herself to eat it. After the first mouthful, she dropped her knife and fork, set the dish down for the dog and rushed upstairs to her room.

She lay, face down on the narrow bed, sobbing into the pillow with the blue dress spread round her and the wind howling through the chimney-pots.

Towards midnight, she thought she heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel. ‘He’s come back,’ she cried out loud, gasping with happiness, only to realize it was a rambler rose, scratching its barbs against the window. She tried counting sheep over a fence but instead of sending her to sleep the silly animals awoke another memory – of her other love, in a dusty town in India.

He was a Eurasian – a streak of a man with syrupy eyes and a mouth full of apologies. She saw him first in the telegraph office where he worked as a clerk. Then, when the cholera took her mother and his young wife, they exchanged condolences at the Anglican Cemetery. After that, they used to meet in the evenings and take a stroll beside the sluggish river. He took her to his house and gave her tea with buffalo milk and too much sugar. He recited speeches from Shakespeare. He spoke, hopefully, of Platonic love. His little girl wore golden earrings, and her nostrils were bunged up with mucus.

‘Strumpet!’ her father had bellowed when the postmaster warned him of his daughter’s ‘indiscretion’. For three weeks he shut her in a stifling room, till she repented, on a diet of bread and water.

Around two in the morning, the wind changed direction and whined in a different key. She heard a branch breaking – cra-ack! – and at the sound of splitting wood, she sat up, suddenly:

She groped her way downstairs. A draught blew out the candle as she opened the kitchen door. She stood shivering in the darkness. Above the screaming wind she could hear the little dog snoring steadily in his basket.

At dawn, she looked beyond the bedrail and brooded on the Holman Hunt engraving. ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you,’ He had said. And had she not knocked and waved her lantern outside the cottage door? Yet, at the moment when sleep did, finally, come, the tunnel down which she had wandered seemed longer and darker than ever.

Four

Amos hid his anger. All that summer, he lost himself in work, as if to wipe away the memory of the contemptuous woman who had raised his hopes and ruined them. Often, at the thought of her grey kid gloves, he banged his fist on the lonely table.

In the hay-making season, he went to help a farmer on the Black Hill, and met a girl called Liza Bevan.

They would meet in the dingle, and lie under the alders. She plastered his forehead with kisses and ran her stubby fingers through his hair. But nothing he could do – or she could do – could rub away the image of Mary Latimer, puckering her eyebrows in a pained reproach. At nights – awake, alone – how he longed for her smooth white body between himself and the wall!

One day, at the summer pony fair in Rhulen, he struck up a conversation with the shepherd who had found the rector’s body.

It began to rain next morning as Amos reached Bryn-Draenog. The rain washed down his cheeks and pattered on the leaves of the laurels. In the beeches round the rectory young rooks were learning to flex their wings, and their parents were flying round and round, cawing calls of encouragement. On the carriage-drive stood a tilbury. The groom waved his curry-comb at the red-headed stranger who strode into the house.

She was in the study with a ravaged, scant-haired gentleman in pince-nez, who was leafing through a leather-bound book.

‘Professor Gethyn-Jones,’ she introduced him without a flicker of surprise. ‘And this is plain Mr Jones who has come to take me for a walk. Do please excuse us! Do go on with your reading!’

The professor slurred some words through his teeth. His handshake was dry and leathery. Grey veins ran round his knuckles like roots over rocks, and his breath was foul.

She went out and came back, her cheeks flushed, in wellington boots and an oiled drabbet cape.

‘A friend of Father’s,’ she whispered once they were out of earshot. ‘Now you see what I’ve suffered. And he wants me to give him the books – for nothing!’