The Gift (4 page)

“It isn't like that. You can tell the difference. Look, you know old Mr. Lydyard? He's the bloke at school I get a lot of pictures from—he makes history so dead boring that I'm always in the mood in his lessons. Sometimes when he's been writing on the blackboard, he turns around and blinks at us as if he were surprised to see us there—and that's what it is. He's forgotten who he's teaching and thinks he's got a quite different class sitting there, one from before the war in another school, I expect. When he does that, I can see what he's seeing, and it's so real I feel I could chuck the piece of chalk he's got in his hand and hit myself on the forehead. I don't get that with anyone else. I expect it's because he's a bit
gaga
so he has to
think
about what he's seeing, and I pick it up. Well, then there's times when he's thinking about something real which happened to him—he's got a favorite shot he once played at cricket, and there's another picture of a white road with trees down one side and goats tethered under the trees. I know they're real, like I knew about your pencil just now, but they don't feel as if they're happening to
me
. And then there's what you called fancies. For instance, he thinks a lot about necking with Mrs. Oldbrow …”

“But he's
ancient
!”

“Poor old boy. Of course, he's never done it. I know he hasn't because the pictures are all soft and they keep changing, like in dreams, and sometimes he gets her face wrong …”

“No wonder you're always getting C minus for history.”

“I probably would anyway. I like now. But all I can tell you is Davy would have known if it was true, so … Oh, I don't like it, Penny. I'm afraid of it. Sometimes it's a bit interesting, but … oh, well, you're not the only one who thinks it's horrible.”

“Cheer up. There's one good thing for you—I'm going to take care you're not bored when I'm about.”

“Don't overdo it.”

“I wonder why it's come to you. I wonder why it's there at all, just in our family.”

“I don't know.”

“Couldn't you ask Granny?”

“Well … she's never talked about it since that first time, but twice I've seen pictures of her remembering telling me. She was icing a chocolate cake, that day we had the singing party. It's funny. It's like seeing a photograph of yourself when you were almost a baby. I can remember everything she said, but I can't remember being me—what it was like, I mean. Anyway, I think she's sorry she told me all that—the thing is she wasn't sure whether she'd ever see me again, because she didn't know Mum would keep floating off. But I'm sure she doesn't want to talk about it now.”

“Ask Dadda, then. It's his family. He'd know.”

Davy made a reluctant grumbling noise.

“Please, Davy. Look, it's going to feel very … very
uncomfortable
for me from now on, knowing … I mean not knowing whether … I mean … Anyway, it won't be so bad if there's a reason—a beginning. Can't you see that?”

“Oh, all right. I'll try Dadda.”

Summer ended while they were having tea. They came in from an afternoon so heavy with heat and the dust from seeded grasses that the air seemed almost as thick as water, so that you had to drag your limbs through it. Davy's ears popped with the change of pressure while he was waiting for the milk to boil for another cup of cocoa. By the time they were washing up the rain was thudding into the dust.

That first evening was glorious, with the heat and stickiness washed away and the dry hills drinking and moist odors filling their lungs. But then came three rainy days, when the cows came muddier each night from the hillside. Dadda kept eleven cows, a herd so mixed in origin that Ian said you could count thirty breeds among them—but they all got dirty. Penny was as fussy as a cat about wet weather, but Davy used to go and coax the animals home while Dadda started the generator and the vacuum pump and fetched the shiny churns from the milkshed. Then together they cleaned the cows for milking. When he was younger, Davy had felt squeamish about wiping down the sagging udders, but now he was used to it, and enjoyed the wet, half-sweet cow smell, and the stolid patience of the cows, and their large eyes and misty breath. His favorite was a black, squat, mischievous animal called Bella, who gave a lot of milk for her size and seemed to recognize Davy with a vague, cowish pleasure when he came from England.

There were six milking stalls, but only four buckets and four outlets from the vacuum pipe, which made for a complicated shift system. But the cows all knew their places and turns; when they'd eaten their cake and been milked and unchained, they shambled back to the field without any orders. Davy fixed the sucking pipes to Bella and stood aside, watching their rhythmic jiggle as the pressure came and went, and listening to the thud of the generator and the rustle of rain on the slates.

“What's the best cow you've had, Dadda?” he said.

Dadda didn't often answer questions. Now he put his head on one side, frowned, and shrugged; but Davy saw a picture of a broad, yellowish cow with a big bag and a bulging eye. He took his chance.

“She looks nice,” he said carefully. “I'm glad you didn't have her dehorned.”

Dadda tilted his head farther still, but he looked straight at Davy while his finger scratched at his cheek near the corner of his mouth. He hadn't shaved for two days, so his nail made a rasping sound on the upstroke.

“Before dehorning, she was,” he said. “Yess, Gwenny told me you had our gift. And she's fond of you, Davy bach.”

“I'm fond of her. We're lucky to have you.”

Dadda scratched his spine and nodded, as though he agreed with the sentiment. But he said no more as he went to uncouple Nesta's bucket and pass it to Davy to carry through the milkshed. You were supposed for sanitary reasons to do this by going out into the yard and along the path there, but Dadda said, “Not likely, is it, the inspectors will come this weather?” So when it rained or snowed, he always unlocked the old door which led direct to the milkshed. Davy used this bucket to fill the first churn and started the cooler going.

“Do you know why we've got it, Dadda?” he said when he came back. “How it all started, I mean?”

Dadda scratched his cheek again and went on with the milking process. But when it was all finished and the buckets and pipes washed clean and the pump stopped (he let the generator run on to recharge the batteries for that evening's lighting), he stopped at the door of the milkshed, closed its lower half, and leaned on it, looking out at the rainy evening. The cloud base lay against the hilltops and sagged into the valley, dropping ragged patches which drifted slowly past, hiding and revealing the ranked, dark slopes of the Forestry Commission larches on the farther hill.

“A poem there is,” said Dadda. “All about Owain Glyn Dwr, you see? I could turn it to English.”

“Please,” said Davy. He'd never taken the trouble to learn more than the stammering of Welsh he needed to get through the hymns in Chapel. Ian was a fanatic for the language, and Davy thought one was enough in the family.

Now Dadda's voice deepened, and his Welsh lilt became a half chant. At the end of each phrase he paused for several seconds, scratching his chin, while he ordered the next phrase into words that would do the Welsh justice.

By Maen Mynor stayed Glyn Dwr's standard.

Galaes his hawk gripped at his gauntlet.

Through the eyes of his hawk he viewed hill and valley.

He saw the Saxons scurry before his soldiers.

They were smoke-blown sideways on the winter wind.

The smoke flies. It fades. So fled the Saxons.

The hands of the hillmen were red to the wrists.

By Maen Mynor stayed Glyn Dwr's standard.

And his captains came for praise and for profit.

“Hail to my harvesters,” hollaed Glyn Dwr.

“Your swords were sickles to reap the red wheat.

But your purses are hungry. Soon shall they sup.”

Last of the line bided Dafydd of Berwyn.

He kept many cattle in his close valley

And forty men had followed him to the mustering.

They had held the left flank by the Ford of Linan

Where the Saxons attacked with a sudden onset

Trusting by a trick to trap Glyn Dwr.

Without help they had held the ford all the forenoon.

“I do not ask praise. I do not ask profit.

I keep many cattle in my close valley.

Now all men know how I fought at the ford.”

“You do not ask praise. You do not ask profit.

I must grant you a gift still, Dafydd the daring,

So that men may not mutter I quarrel with my captains.”

“I will not take land, nor loud-lowing cattle,

Nor gold, nor goods, nor a flock of fine fleece.

But grant me a gift such as you have, Glyn Dwr,

To see through the sight of the hawk on your hand.”

By Maen Mynor a minute of stillness.

“Rash your request, but I cannot refuse it.

Privately shall you peep through the eyes of others.

And so shall your sons and their sons after,

Always wishing you had asked me more wisely.

They shall grieve for the gift through twenty generations,

The gift that is given for your fight at the ford,

The gift of Glyn Dwr. You cannot refuse it.

By a deed of like daring may your last son undo it.”

Such was Glyn Dwr's answer to Dafydd.

When the poem was finished, Dadda started scratching his chin again.

“Thank you,” said Davy. “That makes three Davids. Is it something to do with the name?”

“You see,” said Dadda, “it may not be true at all. The gift is in our family, so a man who was a poet would invent a poem, all lies, for the sake of explaining it, wouldn't he? I do not like to believe stories of that kind. They are not Christian.”

“Yes … but some of it might be true. What about the battle? Where is Maen Mynor?”

“That means only Marble Rock. Anywhere it might be. But listen—in nineteen twenty-one a scholar from Oxford came to walk in these hills and stayed in our house. My brother Davy told him the poem—not saying anything about the gift, of course. And this scholar wrote later from Oxford, saying he could not discover any battle like that in any of the histories, nor a captain called Dafydd of Berwyn—but that would be a common enough name, wouldn't it, because there are the Berwyn Mountains.”

“How long have we lived here?”

“We are in the parish registers for four hundred years, and perhaps we were here before that. Haven't you seen the silver ring Gwenny wears? The scholar was interested in that, too. He said it was a thousand years old. Our eldest sons have always given it to their wife at the wedding. Yes, your own mother is the first one not to wear it.”

“I'm sorry. But when Ian marries … he's crazy about anything Welsh.”

“You do not need to be crazy. Ian is a fine boy.”

“Yes, of course. Have you got a copy of the poem, Dadda?”

Dadda didn't answer. But that evening he read the newspaper with less care than usual and kept his spectacles on when he had finished. Most evenings at this point he went around closing all the heavy oak shutters on the ground floor windows and making the lonely farm into a fortress against the dark. Then he would take Rud, his rangy, suspicious sheepdog, out for a last check that all was well with the animals. But tonight he sat where he was, with his old, scratched spectacles on his nose, until Rud rose from the hearth and came across to see what had caused this change of routine. Dadda scratched Rud's hackles, sighed, rose, and hauled out from the dresser one of the cardboard shoe boxes in which he kept the farm accounts and other papers. He scrabbled slowly through this one and at last brought out a single sheet which he handed to Davy.

“That is yours now,” he said. “You must make yourself better at Welsh before you can read it.”

The poem had been typed long ago on a big-lettered machine. The paper was yellow at the edges but white in the middle, which showed that it had seldom been looked at. Davy puzzled it through until bedtime with the help of Ian's dictionary and his memory of Dadda's English version. Then he lay in the dark, listening to the shuffling movements of the rain and its tinkle down the drainpipe by his window. The poem was fairly satisfying, even if it wasn't true. It was at least a way of thinking about the gift, a tool to handle it with, a lens that made it less mysterious by bringing it into focus. In fact, it would be better if it wasn't true … twenty generations … a deed of like daring … twenty twenty-fives was five hundred. Penny had brought her history books to revise for her exams, and had looked up Owen Glendower for Davy. About
A
.
D
. 1500. Add five hundred and that makes two thousand. And the first David, Dafydd of Berwyn, had been a grown man, so you could subtract twenty-five years … anytime now … a deed of like daring …

I hope it's not true, he thought. I hope it isn't me. But I'd like to be rid of it. It's a nuisance. It frightens me.

3

WOLF

Early next term Davy was given a new lesson in the depths and dangers of his gift.

Spenser Mills was a New Town. It was so new that half of it wasn't even built yet. Only three years before nothing had stood among those close, ambling, south-midland fields except three dull little villages and the buildings of a dozen large farms. Now there were wide, well-lit roads, and curving rows of spruce new houses, and towers of apartments, and brand-new pubs and shops, and two industrial parks, so that in places you could bicycle along feeling that you were miles from the country. But then you'd swing around a corner and the road and lampposts would surge on in front of you but there'd be no houses at all—or, even more uncanny, neat rows of foundations with all the drainpipes sticking into the air, but nothing else. Or you'd come to a churned acre of mud in the middle of which stood three bewildered elms, which had once towered above a hedgerow and now waited, carefully fenced against being bashed by cranes and bulldozers, to see how they were going to fit into the brisk town-scape which was still only on the architects' drawings.