Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (24 page)

They tumbled down the hillside to the trees that edged the little river; crept across the rough path to the green glade that lay at the opening of the cave. It was not a cave, really, but a sort of rock tunnel that opened out again where the low bank dropped, grass over crumbling earth, to the water’s edge. But when, hidden within the cave’s mouth, she had, with much struggling, hauled up her thin cotton dress—nothing! Just a plain old flat chest like his own, two tiny pale pink seed pearls on a flat white front. ‘That’s not a girl’s chest,’ said Boyo, disgusted. ‘You’re not a girl. You’re a boy.’

‘I’m not,’ said Gwennie, indignant.

‘Oh well! Let’s go in by the river, then,’ suggested Boyo craftily, ‘and make boats out of leaves and launch them down the running water.’ Better than a hundred times pushing her on her old swing. And all for nothing.

But someone was there already. A girl was lying drinking out of the river as they themselves often stooped to drink, lying with her shoulders hunched and her head right down to the water, one arm still on the bank, lying at an uncomfortable angle, turned at the elbow, palm upward. Huge eyed, they clapped their hands to their mouths and backed silently away. ‘Boyo—it was your Megan!’

‘If she’d seen us!’

‘If she knew I’d shown you my chest!’

‘She wouldn’t tell,’ said Boyo, gaining confidence with distance from danger.

‘Well, perhaps not. She’s funny, that old Megan of yours.’

‘Lost her ’ealth,’ said Boyo, laconically, in the language of the grown-ups. If you’d lost your health, that was an act of God and no more to be done about it. And Megan had never exactly had her health, not really. Not in her head, anyway. Nevertheless…‘Never tell, Gwennie! Never tell that we went to the cave. If
she
didn’t think, other people might. If they guessed that you’d shown me your chest!’

They started back to the farm but for a moment had to shrink back into the bushes hording the path. One of the Hippies came running down into the glade and looked about and called out a name: a funny name, not one that either of them knew—and at last, looking as if he didn’t like doing it, hunched his thin shoulders and went into the cave, still calling. They hared away back to the farm as though devils were after them.

The Hippies had bought up a derelict small-holding with tumbledown farm cottage of stone held together by crumbling clay, its chimneys nested by jackdaws, its slate roof caving in. They had restored it, painstakingly, patiently; cleared and tilled the rough ground, planted a garden there, kept chickens and ducks and a goat and an elderly Jersey cow. Emlyn Lewis had cheated them over the cow; but, fair play, Hippies deserved nothing better—an ignorant, thriftless, carefree lot with their beards and long hair and the girls in long untidy dresses and hair hanging all about their shoulders. And immoral! Walking about pregnant for all to see! The men drove around in a shabby van with goat cheese and ‘natural yoghourt’ and produce from the garden. Who bought enough to make this worth while, remained a mystery. The farmers’ wives simply said roughly, ‘No!’ and turned their stout backs, criss-crossed with the straps of speckled overalls, till, unoffended, the intruders drove away. Summer visitors, perhaps, with their too-bright tents and caravans and lines of washing hung out to dry?—but they were very, very few and far between.

They were toiling in the garden when Christo came back from the cave. They called him that because he was so beautiful with his long face and scrappy golden beard like the face of the Christ imprinted on the sacred veil. He was married to Primula. They were in fact all married; it seemed rather pointless to resist what, after all, comforted their parents and made life so much simpler, especially when it came to the babies. There were three babies, one to each couple—Christo and Primula, Rohan and Melisande, Abel and Evaine. They all lived well enough on the produce of their land; and Rohan and Melisande sold their pottery to the local shops. They had beautiful names because they had rechristened themselves when they came to settle in Wales. They loved everything around them to be beautiful and if they were sometimes a little intense about it, would also often fall into laughter at their own pomposity. But it was true that their whole intention in forming their tiny community, had been to be beautiful in all ways, all through their lives.

Christo did not look beautiful now. His white face, whose skin never tanned, was all patched and streaked with pink. He gasped out: ‘It’s Corinna! She’s drowned herself!’ and sat down on the bench outside the cottage door and put his face in his hands and burst into tears.

‘
Christ!
’

‘I was late,’ said Christo. ‘She must have thought I wasn’t coming.’

They stood round him, stricken, the gardening tools still in their hands, stupidly staring—as the foolish wild mountain sheep do, faced, starving, with an artificial feed. ‘Oh, Christo, love!—don’t blame yourself.’

‘She wasn’t—accountable,’ said Rohan, comforting.

The girl was Megan Thomas, daughter of the farmer, who also carried the post; but they called her Corinna, out of Herrick, because she would wander along the hedges picking sprays of the white May blossom, holding it in a sort of ecstasy to her face, feeling the soft brush of the stamens, the caressing roughness of the hidden thorns; snuffing up the strange, musky scent. ‘Corinna’s going a-Maying…’ She was the only one of the farming people who would come near the wicked Hippies. Her Mam told her not to and her Da said he would beat her but she came, nevertheless, and hung about the cottage. Seeing his beautiful face, hearing his name, she had in her hazy, dazy mind come to fancy that here was an incarnation of Iesu Grist, come again; and now, deeply in a trouble she did not fully understand, had turned to him for help—for comfort, for absolution—who could tell? If he would meet her, down in the glade? They would not go into the cave—Christo suffered violently from claustrophobia, could not endure an enclosed space—the very doors of the house were kept open if he were alone in there. But they must go somewhere secret; if her Da knew, he would beat her. And if he knew—if he knew…‘My Da would kill me! My Da would
kill
me!’

They had supposed her to be having a baby and advised him that he must at least meet her and try to comfort and advise. If people had faith in one… After all, to love and be kind was the whole foundation of their lives. But now….‘Was she in the river?’

‘On the bank. Hanging—hanging over.’ He could not bear to re-live the horror of it, to re-visualise it. He had called to her but she hadn’t been in the glade; had thought he heard a rustling of leaves, seen nothing around him, forced himself to creep through the tunnel to the bank. ‘Her head was in the water, and one arm—one arm was trailing in the water and her hair all like—like seaweed….’

‘Did you lift her out?’ said Abel. Abel was the able one, they used to say, laughing; the alert one, the do-er. Christo—well, really, he was like a child in some ways, such a dreamer, so much at the mercy of emotions too delicate for a man. ‘She was dead. I couldn’t bear to—’

‘You’re certain she was dead?’

‘Oh, yes, yes,’ said Christo. ‘I touched her arm, the other arm. It was—sort of doubled up behind her. It was—cold.’ He shuddered. ‘Her face under the water was all… I couldn’t bear to touch her again, I couldn’t bear the—the oppression of that horrible cave behind me. So I came to tell you.’ But he stumbled to his feet. ‘Just to leave her there!—I shouldn’t just have left her there. I should have lifted her out.’ He looked at them, sick and guilty. ‘I ought to go back.’

‘We’ll go,’ said Abel. ‘Rohan and I can go.’

‘They’ll say he did it,’ said Melisande, suddenly. ‘They’ll say he made her pregnant and then he killed her. They’ll say it was Christo.’

They turned upon one another terrified eyes, the whitening of their faces turning the outward tan to an ugly grey. ‘Oh, God, Christo—they’ll say it was you.’

If Corinna had been ‘simple’, Christo also was simple; though only perhaps in the sense of an absolute simplicity—those who loved him would have said of an absolute goodness. Now, the thought that he might have injured, let alone slaughtered, any creature in the world, turned him almost faint with horror and disbelief. ‘Us so-called Hippies,’ said Rohan. ‘They’d believe anything of us. They knew she hung around Christo. Her parents had warned her not to.’

Abel said: ‘Rohan—do you think she did kill herself?’

‘An accident? Leaning over too far and then—? Oh, my God,’ said Rohan, ‘you don’t mean—?’

‘If she was pregnant,’ said Abel, ‘or only if she’d been seduced—because with a girl like that, that’s what it would have been—someone else was involved. She said that if her father knew, he would kill her. But what would he do to that other one?’

‘Christo,’ said Primula, imploring, ‘do you think it could have been an accident?’

He considered it, forcing himself to gather-in his flying wits, to concentrate upon recollection. ‘Leaning over the bank like that—you could get back if you wanted to. You could lift up your head if you wanted to.’

‘Could a person just force themselves to keep their head under water and drown, Abel, if by just lifting it up—?’

‘No,’ said Abel, sharply resolute.

‘Wait!’ said Primmy suddenly. She ran into the house. The movement, the translation into action, relaxed them, they found themselves standing rigidly holding rakes and hoes: threw the tools aside, rested, sitting or half kneeling, still in their ring, gazing into the sick white face with its fringe of ragged gold. ‘Either way, they’ll still think Christo seduced her. Her father—’

‘We can deal with fathers,’ said Abel. ‘If it’s murder—that’s the Law.’

‘There was someone else involved. They’d be bound to investigate—’

‘Where else would they do their investigating?’ said Abel simply. ‘When they’ve got us.’

Primmy came back. The front of her long cotton dress had dribbles of wetness down it and she held in her hand a sodden paper. She said: ‘She did kill herself.’

She had printed in straggling capitals, in a rough estimate of Megan’s probable spelling:
I am to unhapy
.
I will droun myself
. ‘I’ve made it all wet, as though she dropped it in the water or something; no one could say it was her writing or anyone’s writing. I haven’t said anything about being wicked or pregnant or anything. It needn’t have been that; and we don’t want to put the idea into people’s heads.’

‘Primmy—if she was murdered!’

‘Anything’s better,’ said Primula, ‘than Christo being put in prison.’

And the words had been spoken at last: they faced it at last. Christo raised his head. ‘In prison? Dear God, if they put me in prison—!’ A sort of darkness closed in upon him at the bare thought of it. The closeness and the suffocation. ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t.’

‘I’ll take it there,’ said Primmy; and before they could stop her had darted away across the little paved yard and was gone.

Abel and Rohan started after her but the girls held them back, clinging to their arms. ‘If she’s seen, no one will blame
her
for anything. Besides she knows the way.’

‘Besides,’ said Evaine, ‘she loves him. She wants to be the one to go.’

It was five o’clock. The sun was high and bright so that the shadows made dark troughs between the tall bean rows and the air was hot with the scents and smells of a farming countryside. Melisande went into the cottage and made a great can of coffee, carrying it out to them carefully on the wooden tray with two rather wobbling stacks of pottery mugs. They crouched on the dry ground about the bench and when the children toddled up to claim love and petting from them, gently sent them back to play. There was perhaps no love to spare from their passionate protection of one who so deeply, deeply needed it.

On the mountain behind them, two small boys hung about aimlessly, kicking out with stout scuffed shoes at the curled fronds of the bracken. ‘Say we’ve been here the whole time, Llew. If anyone asks you, say we was up here on the mountain. Never went near the woods above Cwm-esgair, never went near the kites….’ A dozen pairs of kites or less, in the British isles, and their nests guarded jealously, with penalties for disturbing, let alone robbing them. But a man in Llangwyn was offering two pounds for an egg. ‘Playing cops and robbers up here on the mountain,’ assented Llewellyn, comfortably. Given a little to the histrionics, Llew; you could always rely on him to embroider things…

And Nancy and Blodwen, creeping back down the side of the mountain, along the sheep track, the short cut to Llangwyn. Been to the cinema—there’s sinful! A dirty old picture—Blod’s big brother Idris had told her about it, warned her not to tell Mam. But once there, they hadn’t dared to go in to the picture house after all. Blod had seen Mam and Da talking to a man—it was mart day—and suppose they’d glanced up and seen her, and Nancy in that bright red dress! ‘Well, all right, say there’s lots of red dresses like that,’ said Blodwen impatiently. ‘We was never in Llangwyn, we was sitting over there in the fields below Cwm-esgair, reading our books.’ They had at least contrived some somewhat highly coloured magazines. ‘Come on now, get to the fields!’ Nancy was silly, really; and fancy coming to the Llangwyn at all in such a bright dress! ‘One day, Nancy James, I won’t be best friends with you any more.’

Primmy had returned from her errand. Her lovely face was very grey and strained but she was triumphant. ‘I had a better idea, I put the note on a bush near the entrance to the cave. Anyone passing down the path would see it. Otherwise, if no one went into the cave—and they mightn’t for ages—’

‘Did you—see her, Primmy?’

‘Well, I… I just went into the middle of the cave, where you can begin to see the river. She’s still there. I could—I could see her legs.’ Plump, sun-burned legs, like a child’s legs, toes turned down and digging into the grass. She confessed: ‘I couldn’t bear any more.’

‘There was no point,’ said Melisande in her own kind, comforting way. ‘You couldn’t do her any good, if she was dead.’

Christo struggled to his feet again. ‘If no one goes to the cave—she’ll be lying there. She might lie there all night. We can’t leave her, we couldn’t.’