Brides of Aberdar (4 page)

‘Tomos, you’ve been listening at doors again!’

‘I like to know what’s going on,’ said Tomos. He added: ‘And so do you all, don’t mind pretending!’

They put up little resistance. Not much that was new came their way through the long days of toil that had become a great deal more arduous since the advent of The Walloon as they called her. They had found out Madame’s origins and, ignorant of its meaning as simply a native of a southern part of Belgium, found the word comic and used it in a sort of jeering opprobrium. And the change from Nurse, one of themselves, sharing in the life of the servants’ hall, to the nursery governess, was meat for curiosity: a creature so far not encountered, a soul in limbo, hung between heaven and hell. ‘But the scar, Tomos?’

(‘She writes that her face is scarred,’ the Squire had told them, visiting them in their own quarters for a quiet word. ‘A kick from a horse. She thought it right to warn us in advance. Nothing so ugly, she says, as to upset the children, but a long scar down the side of her face.’ He had stood there, musing over it, the brave fore-warning of her disfigurement; brave and—pitiful. ‘So when she comes, we will all just try to ignore it, seem not particularly to notice it. I know you’ll all be kind.’)

‘Well, right enough it’s not horrible, just a bad scar. Spoils her looks, but doesn’t—well, alter her expression, like. A great gash it is, running down her cheek. A kick from a horse—yes, that could be it, right enough.’

‘And nice spoken?’

‘Well, quiet. Respectful like. Mind, anyone can play at being respectful; I do it myself, all the time.’

‘Not all the time, my boyo,’ said Menna in Welsh. Menna had been almost thirty years here, rising to be cook and, in the absence of any real mistress in the house, as general manageress. She, like Tomos, came from the sheep-farming mountains of the south. Here on the border, employment of the ‘real’ Welsh was naturally very common.

‘I do it when I must,’ said Tomos, shrugging. ‘Which is more often than I enjoy—not that I grudge it to the Squire. And the sparrow can chirp up a bit quick herself, I can tell you! Old Walloon was having a go, pecking at her. She wasn’t having none of that! “What you call my servitude,” she says. “I’m not ashamed of that.” ’

The housemaid, meanwhile, was escorting the new arrival to her rooms, the house-boy having carried up her small trunk and travelling bag and deposited them beside the bed. ‘I’m to help you unpack, Miss, if you need it,’ said the maid, under instructions but heavy with resentment. She gave a deep, unlovely sniff.

‘No, thank you very much—I can manage for myself quite well.’

‘So I should hope,’ said the girl under her breath, departing. She turned back, however. ‘I was to show you the other rooms.’

Of the two wings added on to the original house, all in a straight line, many years ago now, one was devoted to the nurseries, running the whole length of it along the first floor, over the fine ballroom, long unused. At present, besides her own, only one bedroom was used, shared by the two little girls; and there was a nursery—smallish, square rooms, panelled half way up the walls to protect the soft, easily damaged paint and plaster of the original Tudor. A third room, however, had now been re-furbished to be used once more as a schoolroom for the new generation—made larger and lighter than the rest by a projecting oriel window—that same window from which the children had watched the departure of their mother’s funeral cortege, and seen the beautiful lady and the frightened-looking gentleman.

‘They’re to take their lessons here. And their meals. You’ll take your meals with them,’ said the girl, grudgingly: more trays to carry and heavier, more things to lay on the table and clear away and carry downstairs again. The fact that the nursery-maid, Bethan, would perform all this as part of her normal duties, counted with her not at all; self-pity overwhelmed her. ‘I bin lying awake all night worrying about it,’ she said, her large slightly prominent eyes actually filling with tears. She gave another of her dreadful sniffs.

‘I’m so sorry. In what way does it trouble you?’

‘If you don’t see that for yourself,
I
shan’t point it out,’ said the girl and walked away. She said over her shoulder, ‘They can show you the rest of the arrangements.’

‘Don’t mind about Olwen, she’s always complaining,’ said Lyneth. ‘Come back to your room and let us unpack for you.’

A blissful half-hour, lifting out the carefully folded things, selecting their places in closets and drawers—disposing of the few personal possessions, where each would look its best: the old-fashioned mahogany writing-desk—‘That belonged to my mother; she died when I was a small child’; the ebony workbox inset with its pattern of mother-of-pearl, by no means in perfect repair; the flowered china ink-stand with its two little pots and the channels for pencils and pens…‘These are all from my old home: my father’s house. My papa was a clergyman. Our home was in the village near Greatoaks Park where I went to work after he died.’

‘Didn’t you have pretty things like these in Greatoaks Park?’

Her mouth lost its easy smile. ‘I left those behind. I can’t carry a great deal about with me and it doesn’t become a governess, anyway, to be surrounded by valuables.’

‘You said you made it like your home. Why did they send you away if they loved you so much?’

And now the scarred face had grown very stiff and cold. ‘You have within yourself great depths of passion, my child,’ her gentle father had said to her, long ago, lying upon his death bed—he who saw so deeply into other hearts. ‘Be on your guard! In love and in unlove you are too intense; and either, unbridled, may bring you to harm. For such passions in man, Alys, may grow up healthy and strong as a fine tree but, the tree being struck by lightning and split all in a flash down the centre, may grow to one side of the riven fork, fresh and sweet and green—to the other dark and dry. Beware, beware, of the lightning flash—and if such should strike you, turn all your heart with quiet deliberation to the fresh green bough…’

A lightning flash had struck her and she had been hard put to force her heart to the freshness of the green bough: was hard put now to reply with gentleness to the innocent questions that recalled the bitterness that had rent the tree of her life in twain. She forced her voice to lightness. ‘Ah, well—things happen, grown-up things. There must be change. I was happy there and now there is a new start for me—and I will be happy here.’

And she would be happy, she vowed to herself: she would! He would write to her as he had promised (she replying coldly that she would prefer to leave all the past dead), would let her know how things were with him—and with—
her
… And he had given her the ring, the ring that now she wore on a fine chain about her throat. ‘Keep this at least, in remembrance.’ She put up her hand to feel the hard circlet beneath the stuff of her dress, composed her voice to serenity. ‘Oh, darlings, how beautifully you are doing it all!’

She could not help observing with what effortless perfection Lyneth arranged the special treasures, while Christine was content with anxious care to dispose of the neat, dull underwear, the chemises for day and night wear, many petticoats, linen and wool—for a governess would not aspire to the vast, hooped crinolines of the day but must wear the small, neat hoops of wire or simply round out her skirts with a multiplicity of petticoats—the cotton nightgowns with their matching laced-edged caps: she unobtrusively removed and herself stowed away the divided drawers with their bands of solid embroidery just below the knee—the stockings and handkerchiefs. Into the closet went the two warmer dresses for winter, the long cloak and sober velvet bonnet, each in its own sealed muslin bag with sachets of lavender to guard against the moth. The reedy arms struggled with the long poles hooking the wooden hangers on to a rail so high that the skirts of the dresses, drooping without the hoops or petticoats that would round out and shorten them, should not sweep the closet floor.

Lyneth, her task completed, picked up a framed picture. ‘Is this a portrait?’

‘Yes. You can see it was done several years ago. Six years ago, in fact.’

‘Is it your house?’

Tears filled her eyes but she schooled her voice to equanimity. ‘It’s where I worked as a governess, yes: Greatoaks Park, it’s called.’

‘Are these all the people, in the group outside the front door? Is this the little girl that got too big?’

‘Yes, there she is.’ Anticipating further questioning, she slightly hurried over the rest of the likenesses. ‘And here’s her grandfather, and this pretty lady is her mother, and this is her Uncle George and her Aunt Kitty; and here am I!’ She added with deliberation, ‘That was before my poor face was scarred.’

‘But your face is still pretty on the other side. And are these all the servants? Much more than we’ve got, we’ve only got Menna and Olwen and Bethan and Tomos and Rod—’

‘—and the laundry-maids and ones that come up from the village—’

‘—and Hil,’ said Christine, ‘and the outdoor people in the stables and everywhere. Only Hil isn’t a servant. He’s the one that looks after all of them. He looks after everything.’

A man lifting her trunk easily up on to the platform of the pony-carriage, tall, lithe and strong: a man with a deep blue, strangely penetrating glance—waiting upon her with the oddest air of irony in his servility. ‘Would that be Hil, who drove me from the railway station?’

‘Oh, yes, he’s our great friend, our greatest friend in all the world. But I don’t know if he likes
you
,’ said Lyneth, naively wondering.

‘Not like me? He doesn’t know me. Why should you suppose that?’

‘He looked sort of afraid,’ said Christine, uncertainly.

She recalled that strange, uneasy glance he had given her as she entered the house: made no denial, asked slowly, ‘But why should he be afraid of
me
?’

‘Well—Hil knows things. He sees things—things that haven’t happened yet.’

‘He doesn’t exactly see them,’ said Christine. ‘But he understands.’ She gave a little shiver as though she suddenly felt a chill.

‘Shall I close the window?’ said the governess, going over to it. ‘You both begin to look cold.’

‘But closing the window wouldn’t be any use,’ said Lyneth, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Let’s go on unpacking. We’ll soon be warm again.’

Christine had dealt with everyday woollens but Lyneth must be the one to hang up the soft silver-grey and smooth its folds and fasten it up in its muslin. ‘It’s a lovely dress!’

‘It was a present from… It was given to me—with love,’ she said.

‘But you haven’t got many dresses, have you? Tante Louise has closets and closets full of things.’

‘Your Tante Louise is a well-to-do and fashionable lady. It’s only proper that she should dress accordingly.’

‘Mama had very few dresses; she wore soft muslins and soft silk dressing-gowns most of the time, so that the boning and lacing wouldn’t hurt her.’

‘Long ago, when she used to come downstairs and see people,’ said Lyneth, ‘she wore grand dresses then. But she got too tired. She never came down in the end.’

‘She was ill, your poor Mama.’

‘Hil says she wasn’t ill—not exactly. She was… He said she only wanted to escape to where she belonged.’

‘She belonged where people go when they die,’ said Christine. ‘But Hil says other people wouldn’t understand that.’

And yet, I think I do understand, thought Miss Tetterman. She herself had been near to death in the incident that had torn the scar across her cheek, and something of that other world that then had come so close, seemed still to cling about her. She had known then, that where she was going was where she—belonged. And though in the end she had not gone there, still that otherness, that other belonging, seemed sometimes very close to her. She said gently: ‘Is not Hil—well, in your father’s employ? I think perhaps you should not attend too much to what—what people say who don’t know a great deal about the—facts.’

‘Hil doesn’t deal in facts,’ said Christine, evidently quoting. ‘Hil is different.’

To Miss Tetterman also, he had seemed indeed a little ‘different’. Thirty perhaps?—difficult to guess his age exactly. A red-gold blond with deep blue eyes and an odd air of remoteness, almost of disdain. His name she was to learn later, was James Hill, but he was known universally by his surname only and then without the second T. He appeared to be, under the Squire and without any particular title, in overall charge of the estates, gardens, fisheries and, beyond those, the home farm and the affairs of the tenant farmers. He lived alone in a house on the brow of the hill and mixed only as a superior with the indoor staff. The little girls adored him in their confiding way; he spoke to them always as if they were grown-up—though so far uninformed—young women. It was typical of Hil, she was to discover, that he should confide to the children that their mother had died of no illness but the wish to go to the other world where she ‘belonged’.

But…‘Why should he not like me? He hardly knows me. Why should he be afraid
of me
?’

‘Hil knows things: he sees things that haven’t happened yet,’ the child had said.

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, in the parlour below, Tante Louise was saying, with one of her deprecating Gallic shrugs,’ Alors—she will do, I suppose. We have heard from this Sir Charles at Greatoaks Park—a Park, that is a good address, yes?’

‘Everything about her former post seems to have been unexceptionable. And I think she is the same.’

‘—that she knows the work of institutrice. She is dressed
comme il faut
—indeed, she has quite good taste, this black ribbon together with the brown on her bonnet, that is
assez chic
—but I daresay passed down from some other hand. A little quick to rise up the temper and speak-back, but that can be cured—’

‘She refused, perfectly properly, to be treated as a servant. I must ask you, Louise, not to behave to her as if she were one, nor to speak to her as one. The servants are well-treated here and happy and they know their place. I hope she will be the same: but she also knows hers.’