Past Praying For (43 page)

He tried to tell himself that after all, it was only once his car had collected the inevitable dents and scratches that he'd been able to enjoy playing with it, but even so it was a relief to think that this pretty valley would be a congenial setting for his Tess.

The little grey stone house they had come to view faced south above the valley, with a steep terraced garden in front and a green hill rising behind with a tiny stream spilling down over its own miniature waterfall. There was a luxuriant climbing rose trained up over the trellis porch, and a yellow jasmine bush was in flower by the front door; they had made their mind up almost before they had stepped over the threshold and the discovery of a glassed extension at the back giving good north light clinched it.

`I'll put my easel here, in the middle. The old armchair can go in the corner by the window and you can sit and watch me and tell me when I've put paint on my nose. Then I'll have shelves all along the back wall for my stuff, and I'll turn over a new leaf and keep it all really tidy and organised—'

`Oh, I see, you're fantasising, are you? I thought you were actually making plans—'

He dodged outside into the back garden to avoid her vengeance, and then they stood together under a huge old apple tree looking up at the steep hillside behind, with a couple of little copses of trees. The only sounds were the crisp tearing of the lush grass by a couple of sheep grazing nearby, and the bubbling chuckle of the stream bouncing down its stony course.

Tessa's hair blew about her face in a sudden gust of wind and she flung her arms wide to the heavens, taking a deep, satisfied breath.

`Isn't it wonderful?' she cried. 'You can feel free here, with nothing but the hills and the sky and peace and privacy, with no nosy neighbours to watch what you're doing and cluck about it. I could probably sit out here and paint stark naked, if I wanted to.'

`I shouldn't, if I were you. Those sheep are giving you very old-fashioned looks as it is.'

They were; they had stopped browsing to stare, their jaws still rotating busily in unison.

`They look as if they're in a class doing exercises to ward off a double chin,' Tessa said, and laughing, they went back inside.

He could almost convince himself, with hindsight, that he had felt the chill of foreboding as they went back into the dimness of the house itself. He had certainly said, a little doubtfully, as he noticed the grudging deep-set windows and meagre rooms; `You don't think it's going to be a hit dark and depressing?'

Tessa didn't want to hear. 'I think it's mainly because we've just come in from the sunshine. And think how lovely and cosy it will be in the winter with the curtains drawn and the lamps lit and a log fire,' she said blithely. 'And during the day, of course, I'll be working in the studio, so it won't matter.'

`A patio,' she had said, waving her hand largely as they locked the front door and stood on the narrow plateau outside. 'We can lay a patio here. South-facing — it should be perfect.'

David had agreed. He would have agreed if she had said she wanted to dismantle the house stone by stone and build a Gothic folly instead. They'd never got round to making the patio, though. It hardly seemed worth it for the three days in the past three months when it hadn't been either too cold or too wet.

On the way back, David had driven more slowly so that they could take stock of the hamlet of Llanfeddin itself, about half a mile from the house.

`Oh, a church,' Tessa exclaimed happily. It was a very small church with a huddle of gravestones in a plot beside it, all very plain and stark. 'I've often felt bad in London about never going—’

`Er – chapel,' David pointed out. 'Welsh Presbyterian. I don't think it would be quite your scene.'

Tessa was briefly deflated, but the appearance of a pub and a useful shop restored her to high spirits, and as she saw a woman turn from locking the door of the shop for Saturday early closing she smiled and raised a hand in greeting.

The woman did not smile back. She was short and overweight, with a pale round face and deep-set black eyes, like pieces of coal set in the featureless face of a snowman, and her expression as she watched them out of sight was sullen, almost malevolent.

`Good gracious!' Tessa said blankly, then, determined not to allow anything to spoil her mood, looked at her hand comically. `I didn't by any chance accidentally put up two fingers when I waved, did I?'

`It certainly looked as if you might have.' It was trivial, of course, but the little episode made David feel uncomfortable. George Barker, his Super, had raised his eyebrows when he had mentioned where they were househunting. 'They're a bit funny, up the valleys,' he had said, and George was a sound man.

Still, if it made Tessa happy—

She was pointing again. 'Look at that old stone! It looks very interesting—'

He pulled the car into the side. They were a little outside the village now, and in the bank was set a carved grey stone, weathered and green with lichen. They walked over, and bent to study it.

It was a primitive face, carved so that it stood proud of the surface. The features were worn but unmistakable; a man's face, distorted and leering, the eyes sly and the gap-toothed mouth twisted in an ugly lecherous grin.

Tessa gasped and drew back, disconcerted. 'That's — that's horrible!'

`Nice little chap, isn't he?' David said lightly. 'I'd pick that one up on sus if I saw him just walking down the road. Never mind, whoever modelled for it must have been dead for a few hundred years by now. Come on, we'd better get going.'

His eye caught a piece of litter wedged among the stones in the ditch below and with a policeman's instinct bent to pick it up. As Tessa crossed to the car ahead of him he glanced down at what he was holding, and had to suppress a gasp himself.

It was a crude pencil sketch, drawn almost as a child might draw, but there was nothing childlike about its content. And the man involved in the perverted act it showed had, like the carving, a leering, distorted face. Almost as if it had been left in tribute.

He crumpled it up and thrust it in his pocket. He shuddered as he got into the car.

Tessa glanced at him. 'Are you all right?'

If only he had said, 'It's this place. There's something about it that I don't like.' But he hadn't. It seemed foolish: a surly woman, a dark house, the pathetic scribble of some inadequate youth — and they had to live somewhere. And if Tessa liked it...

`That's quite a cold wind,' was all he had said, as he started the car and drove away to set in hand the making of the biggest mistake of their lives.

Tessa sighed as she turned off into the valley road, under the depressing arch of dripping trees, past the grotesque, ancient carved stone which always made her shiver. In her fancy it marked a boundary where safe, if stifling, provincial life gave way to something altogether older and darker.

She came to the doctor's house, where his wife was out in the rain, working in their beautiful garden. They had met the Webbs at the Barkers' party, but unfortunately she hadn't been terribly forthcoming. Well, she'd been drunk, actually, not to put too fine a point on it. She didn't look up from her weeding as Tessa drove past.

That was when she remembered the milk, and swore.

Milk, Tessa had discovered since she came to live in the country, didn't grow in bottles on the doorstep. Somehow she couldn't get her mind round this simple fact, which provoked a cereal crisis at breakfast every other day.

It was simple enough when she was passing the Llanfeddin Stores to pop in and get a couple of pints. And it would be childish and cowardly to turn round and drive the eight miles to and from Stetford, just to avoid five minutes of being treated like one of the lower forms of invertebrate life. Sticks and stones, she reminded herself grimly, and gritting her teeth she turned into the little car park.

There were two cars and a dog parked there already. The dog, tied to a railing, was a young springer spaniel, brown and white, and as she came towards him he stood up, ears pricked and mouth wide in an engaging grin, feathery tail swinging hopefully. Tessa bent to stroke him.

He was well-mannered but enthusiastic, the wag rate increasing as he snuffled at her hands. It was quite a novelty to find someone in the valley who was pleased to see her. With a final pat she straightened up and went inside.

The Llanfeddin Stores was a big, gloomy barn of a place, with windows that were never quite clean, cracked vinyl on the floor and a permanent miasma of dust and tired vegetables which assailed anyone opening the door.

To the left was the post office counter, presided over by the owner, Glynis Rees. She was a squat, dark woman in her forties with small, deep-set eyes and a short nose which gave her somehow the look of an ill-natured pig. She had little fat feet, too, which like a pig's trotters didn't look quite big enough to support the bulk they carried. She was proud of them, and still crammed them into the pointed, high-heeled styles of her youth, which were so old-fashioned that they had been back in vogue three times in the years she had been wearing them. She had a gift for unpleasantness, nurtured over the years as carefully as a gardener tends a prize marrow.

Her husband Dafydd, a soft, good-natured lump of a man, had faded out of existence some ten years before. He was in the graveyard by the chapel under a headstone inscribed, in Welsh, `Rest in peace', which state would, it was widely held, be something of a novelty for the poor man after fifteen years of being married to Glynis.

Bronwen, her daughter, who theoretically did the cleaning and manned the checkout in the grocery section, was another frustration. A round-faced, loose-bodied girl with her father's yielding nature, she would never, as the saying went, give anyone a sore heart. The resultant pregnancies and the demands of her miscellany of offspring provided the perfect excuse for her erratic hours and haphazard approach to her work.

The back of the shop was given over to 'Welsh crafts by local craftsmen', as a standing notice-board outside proudly proclaimed. This was the responsibility of Hannah Guest, Glynis's sister, returned to her native valley after a failed marriage to a Shropshire farmer. Like Glynis, she was short, dark and poisonous, but she was slim and slight and her manner was as silky as a tarantula's fur.

Glynis always described the craft shop as being there 'to draw in the tourists', as if once over the threshold they would then be seized with an irrepressible urge to purchase quantities of extra stamps or a dozen limp lettuces. It was unfortunate that on a good day in high summer this passing trade might amount to three people, most of them seeking directions back to the main road.

The board outside had, however, drawn in Tessa when first she arrived in Llanfeddin, charmed by the notion of some local artistic community. She nodded politely to the unsmiling woman she had seen locking up the shop the first day they visited, then made her way past the post office counter and through between the shelves of groceries to the back of the shop. It was so dark that at first Tessa didn't notice the other woman, who rose from a chair in the corner to come forward with an ingratiating smile.

Artistic presentation could never be said to be Hannah's forte. The merchandise, rather than being displayed, seemed to have been parked randomly on grubby shelving round the walls or crammed on to one of two trestle tables. The stock itself wasn't appealing either: lamps chipped out of grey stone and topped with hand-sewn plastic 'parchment' shades adorned with anaemic dried flowers; chunky pottery with unbalanced handles in various shades of sludge; some amateurish daubs representing the Welsh hills; a flock of woolly sheep with bound pipe-cleaner horns; a stack of scratchy rugs in muddy colours, hand-woven from the wool of Jacob's sheep, as the label proudly explained.

The glass box holding the exquisite silver jewellery, however, shone as the one creative good deed in the naughty world surrounding it. The pieces had been displayed — by their creator, presumably — on black velvet, airy, elegant twists and scrolls linked delicately into necklets and bracelets, earrings and brooches.

`These are lovely,' Tessa said, appreciation intensified by relief at having found something she could honestly admire.

`Beautiful, isn't it.' The Welsh lilt was very pronounced. `
Marnie Evans, she does them — lives just ten minutes up the valley there. Talented girl. That's her cards, look.'

A stack of boldly-designed cards lay on top of the case; the woman handed one to Tessa surveying her the while, emanating a curiosity so powerful that she could almost smell it.

`Visitor, then, are you?'

There was a certain pride in Tessa's smile. 'No, we live here, just along the road. I hope I'm well on my way to becoming a native.'

The other woman gave a tinkling laugh, though somehow the sound was not altogether friendly. 'Hardly that! You know what they say around here — "Calls himself a Valley man and I remember when his grandfather moved here." But I know who you are now. You must be Mrs Cordiner.'

Amused, even charmed, Tessa laughed. 'That's right, I'm Tessa. I'm very impressed by your intelligence system. I'm going to have to behave myself, aren't I?'

She simpered. 'Not much you can do around here without everyone knowing about it. I'm Mrs Guest.'

They exchanged the little, awkward nods people give when shaking hands seems inappropriately formal.