The Gift (2 page)

First, a vast bite had been chewed from the hillside, leaving a semicircle of blue cliffs, two hundred yards long and about thirty feet high at the southern end. The floor of the quarry was not flat but was a series of terraced levels along which little trucks had once run. Roofless sheds and huts stood about. In places you could see where the quarrymen had mined into the hillside, following the layers of high-grade slate that the shaping pressures of the hills had made there. And from each level, especially below the largest shed, gray screes of waste stone spilled down the slope. Where the quarry had stopped somebody had come and taken all the movable iron for scrap—the winding wheels and the engines and the rails—but you could still occasionally find a lever poking through the obliterating grass, or follow the line where some engine had run back and forth and left a trail of still-poisoned vegetation to show its path. The mining shafts had been deliberately caved in when the men left, but it was still a dangerous place. Dadda had showed them why, on the very first day.

He had said, “Will you come with me, now?” and had taken them up the hill and shown them the quarry. Without a word he had led them to the top of the scree below the big shed; he had looked at it, humming, with his head cocked on one side, and then he had taken a fence post and levered free a large stone near the top. The stone crashed away down the slope, slithering at first, then bouncing in increasing leaps; the stones that it had held in place moved, too; with a shuddering grumble the whole surface of the scree had shrugged itself downward and at last slowly resettled—hundreds of tons of grinding boulders. Gray dust hung above it for a moment, like smoke.

“There is water in the hillside, you see?” Dadda had murmured when the upland quiet had settled around them again. “The stones are heavy, and the water changes the ground under them, and then they fall. You will not be coming here alone, please. It is a dangerous place, for men, even.”

He turned and looked at the jagged curve of the cliffs. Speaking softly as ever he added, “My own brother died in this place.”

When Davy hurt his ankle, Ian was helping Dadda mend the milking machine. Penny said Davy mustn't go to the quarry, which was another reason for doing so, and if he was going to be wicked, Penny thought she might as well, too. And then he put his foot into a hidden runnel and fell, with his foot trapped fast.

When he finished weeping from the pain, Penny ran back to the farm. Davy waited, moaning a little, and at last Dadda walked along the level below him, climbed carefully up, and stood looking down at him, shaking his head. His thin arms lifted Davy with no effort at all and carried him back to the farmhouse kitchen. Then Dadda started his old, old Morris up. Granny sat beside him with Davy on her lap, and they drove down to Llangollen.

The X ray showed no bones broken, but the doctor said Davy must not put his weight on that foot for at least four days.

When they got back, Granny wanted Dadda to take a strap to Penny for letting Davy climb in the quarry.

“It's my fault,” said Davy. “I started it. Penny tried to stop me.”

“You're punished already,” said Granny.

“If you do anything to Penny,” shouted Ian, “I won't forgive you. Ever. Nor will any of us.”

So far, from the moment Davy was carried into the kitchen, her face had not changed at all. But now every muscle in it hardened, her mouth became a thin line, and two red spots appeared on her cheeks. Davy was very frightened indeed.

“Forgiving and not forgiving,” sighed Dadda. “Enough of that we've had, haven't we?”

Granny glanced sideways at him and started to say something, but Dadda sighed again and shrugged, and she turned away, biting her lip; she moved the two black swans farther apart on the mantelpiece and riddled the range and shifted the stockpot and turned back to the room. Her face was calm now, but her eyes were still bleak.

“Ian,” she said, “will you help Dadda bring the long chair from the front room? Davy must lie up in here and be company for me. Tomorrow, after tea, Ian and Penny and Dadda will sing me ‘All Through the Night'—Ar hyd y nos—in Welsh. Dadda shall teach you and you shall learn, and that will be the three of you punished for climbing in the quarry and speaking so to the woman of the house. Davy is punished already, with the pain and with lying still for four days, when he's here in the hills, in May.”

The singing went well. Ian had always been in the choir of any school they were at, and Penny could sing on the note. But Dadda turned out to have a voice such as you sometimes hear on a request program on the radio when a listener asks for a famous old tenor singing a forgotten ballad, a voice as soft and as strong as the west wind.

“That is good,” said Granny, almost smiling. “Hasn't Ian a fine voice? Dadda, when these children go back to England, people will be asking them whether they have heard any Welsh singing. Why don't we have a little party Sunday evening?”

She suggested a few names. Dadda suggested a few more.

“It's going to be a rather large little party,” said Ian at last.

Dadda laughed.

So on Sunday morning Granny didn't go to Chapel but baked instead. Davy lay on the long chair and watched her, very bored. The kitchen smelled sleepy with risen dough and the black clock tocked in its long case and the blue plates gleamed on the dresser but not so bluely as the sky outside, on the hills, where it was May and Davy couldn't go. Granny had sung to him and told him old stories while she mixed and kneaded, so he had been entertained in his mind, but all his body was restless with health and good air and good food, and the restlessness infected his mind and made him bored. And now he was sleepy, too, with the warmth and idleness and cooking smells.

But he was still wide-awake when he saw the picture. It was not part of any dream.

“Funny hat,” he murmured.

Granny's hand stilled for a moment at the oven door.

“What's on the mantelpiece?” she said as she opened it.

“Those two black swans and some brass candlesticks.”

“This room, is it?”

“No … the mantelpiece is lower and the walls are green.”

“But what is funny about the hat?”

“It's gone now. It's all gone.”

That always happened when Davy tried to concentrate on one of his pictures.

“But you can remember the hat?” said Granny.

“Oh, it was black and tall and pointy, like a witch's, but she didn't look like a witch. And she had a lace shawl and a black glove on one hand but not the other, and she was sitting in a black wooden chair.”

“Yesss. Her, that is.”

“Who?”

“My Nain. Your great-great-granny. Were you knowing you had the gift, Davy?”

“What gift?”

“It was like a picture you saw of her?”

“Um … they aren't quite like that. They aren't flat, I mean. You can see into them. Why?”

“And they come often?”

“Not very. I don't know. They're only a sort of dream, really. The last one was when Dad was driving us here, and I saw a picture of a house just like this, only there was a pump at the door and the lady who was working it was like you except she had a blue dress and a black apron and her hair was dark. That was funny, wasn't it?”

“Words do you hear, ever?”

“I don't think so. Only sometimes I feel feelings. Why?”

Davy was uncomfortable now. Granny wouldn't answer any of his questions, and her own questions were about his pictures, which were part of that private, inside Davy which no one else could ever look at or touch. And besides, there was something about how she was moving and talking. She had taken a sweet cheese flan out of the oven and was simply standing there, holding it, with the oven door open and all the useful heat flooding into the kitchen. Then the flan tin burned her fingers through the oven cloth, and she put it down with a clatter and closed the oven door.

“What gift, Granny?” he said five minutes later. She was working now in the way Mum sometimes worked when Dad had made her cross, as though the busy action of arms and fingers could hush the wild gusts in her mind. Granny didn't answer.

“It isn't fair not to tell me,” he said.

“It's not for me to do so, you see?”

“Who shall I ask, then? Mum?”

She stopped beating the white mixture in her bowl, picked up a wooden spoon, and with slow, cunning movements eased all the sweet goo neatly into a funnel-shaped bag. Then she bent over a large chocolate cake which Davy had looked at time and again with salivating hunger. When she squeezed the bag, a white worm spun itself out of the metal point of the funnel and coiled onto the cake. The coil moved steadily, crisscrossing over itself into a looped lacework, pretty as a flower on the dark brown surface.

“Your mother does not know and would not believe,” said Granny with a sigh.

“There's no point in asking Dad.”

“Why? No, I do not want to hear … So it must be me, Davy. Very well, then. Ten minutes ago I was thinking of my Nain, I don't know why. I saw her in her old Welsh costume that she wore for Chapel on Sundays. When she was a little girl, she caught her hand in a chaffcutter and wore one glove always to hide its ugliness. All that you saw. She gave me my swans, but the candlesticks she gave my sister who went to Canada. Oh, and your Dad—he was thinking of this house. When I was younger, my hair was dark, and often I wore a blue dress with a black apron. Yes, and there was a pump at the door, wasn't there? You saw that, too. The day he left …”

She paused, intent on the growing lacework of sugar on the cake.

“Why did he leave? Why has he never been back?”

Davy was much more interested in the answer to these questions than in his pictures. He and Ian and Penny had whispered many guesses.

Granny straightened up and glared at him.

“No business of yours,” she snapped, before bending to make the worm start winding into a series of little coiled cones.

“But the gift's my business, I suppose,” he said sulkily.

“Yes, you have that,” she said dryly. “It is said to run in your family—Dadda's family. Often it misses a generation. But usually there is one of your blood alive who can see pictures in other people's minds.”

“But I
can't
. I mean, if I could … well, I'd know what was the matter between you and Dad.”

“No,” she said. “I knew another Davy that had the gift. He told me that you could not summon it. It comes when your mind is empty. He said it happens like weather. It is always pictures, with no words, like the cinemas when I was a girl—though he could see the colors, of course. Like that it is, isn't it?”

“I suppose so,” said Davy unwillingly. It ought to have been exciting, being told he could do a trick like that. But he didn't really like it. And why had he never been told before? And why was Gran making such a fuss about telling him now? He watched her move her icing bag with cunning, careful strokes across the clear space she had left in the middle of the cake. He thought she was writing something, but when she finished, she tilted the cake toward him and he could see that she had drawn the bars of a stave and three notes of music.

“That's clever,” he said. “It looks scrummy.”

“You may lick the bowl, then,” she answered.

Granny was a careful housekeeper. On the rare occasions when Mum iced a cake she always mixed too much and left lots in the bowl, but Granny had left only a thin film of piercing sweetness which he could scoop onto his finger and lick off, but nothing he could chew or swallow. It reminded him that there were no sweets in the farm, and the ice-cream van never seemed to pass this way. That was a pity.

“Oh, Davy, Davy!”

He looked up from the bowl in surprise. He had never heard the calm of her voice rumple, even that time when she had been so angry with Ian.

“Don't be unhappy, Granny,” he said. “I like it here. It doesn't matter about the ice-cream van. I won't climb in the quarry again, I promise.”

She lifted the tray of scones from the oven and moved them to cool on a cake rack, picking each up so deftly that the heat of it had no time to hurt her fingers. Only the last one somehow turned into crumbs in her hand and scattered itself over the pale wood of the tabletop. She stood looking at the crumbs as though the pattern of them had a meaning.

“Davy, Davy, you're too young,” she said. “And I cannot know if I shall see you again to tell you when you are older. So I must tell you now, and you must try not to fret yourself. It is like this—ach, of course, it may not be true at all, only a story—but they say in your family that the gift has always brought grief with it.”

“Grief? How?”

“The ones who had the gift tried to use it. They saw a picture, and they tried to use the knowledge it gave them. They tried to use the gift. It brought them grief.”

“I don't understand,” he said.

She stood looking at him, shaking her head. She started to scoop the crumbs onto a plate.

“What happened to the other Davy, then?” he said. “What sort of grief?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“I suppose I'll have to ask Dad then.”

“No!”

He was feeling sulky again. His lips were fat with pouting. A gift is a sort of present, and what's the use if people won't tell you about it? It's like being given a new, sharp pocketknife and then seeing it put away on a high shelf in case you should cut yourself, or your pillowcase, or something. Then he looked at Granny, and saw that her face had gone all knobbly again, as it had when she'd been angry with Ian. But she wasn't angry now. There were no red spots on her cheek. Her lips moved as though she wanted to speak but couldn't.

“What's the matter, Granny?” he said. “I'm sorry.”

She made the effort.

“You must promise me, Davy,” she said.