The Woman at the Window (13 page)

That morning one of Alberto's games was in progress when we were astonished to witness three women in torn dresses racing along the margin of the lake pursued by a gang of youths wearing red scarves and brandishing knives and shears. The eldest of the three women was the first to stumble. They caught up with her as she fell into the water and bent her arms behind her back and began to shear off all her hair. They were rough about it. Blood streamed down her face as she screamed for help. As we watched, the younger women were captured and dragged along by their hair to suffer the same punishment. When they became aware of an audience the youths grew more violent. They shouted that these women had consorted with the Tyrant's storm troops. They were treacherous whores and due for retribution.

I heard Nomen muttering to himself. He was pale with an anger I had never seen him show before. He was deploring something he called the awesome versatility of the Devil in words I barely understood. He stood before the gang of young men and demanded they release the women. For a moment it appeared they would accept his authority. Then one of their number shouted he was a collaborator. Even as we watched they turned on the man we had accepted as our leader. In a collective frenzy they stabbed him repeatedly with their knives and shears. His blood soaked in the sand. They stood appalled at what they had done before they fled and left him bleeding to death on the ground. To our lasting shame we never sprang to his defence. We were unarmed, we told ourselves to excuse our cowardice. We were appalled as much by our paralysis and inertia as by the speed of the terrible event. He was bleeding to death as we trembled and then tried to attend to his wounds. Candida and her group did what they could. We were so unprepared. We had seen death and destruction but this was something different. We were more in awe of him as he lay still than when he talked to us. Could he have been so perfect when he was alive? Within hours he was embalmed in our memory. From the moment he lay on the marble altar in the church with a bell tower, we began the painful struggle to recall the things he had said. Were they meant as lessons and prescriptions or were they only sequences of memorable phrases? Candida and her group were loudest in their grief. They called him the man who defended women. It became clear to me as soon as he was buried, the island would become the centre of a cult and Candida would play a central part in its development. For the rest of us there would be little left except to struggle with memories before we faced the world and its recycled burden of incurable infirmities. How much light and guidance could his vanishing voice offer us in what already threatened to be the gathering of a new darkness? Would we ever find again a person so intent on sharing the freshness of the world with the people living in it, every newborn child inheriting the newborn day?

Home

‘YOU mustn't keep on going over it,' my son Daniel says. ‘It won't bring him back and it won't help you.'

He is quite right of course. But I keep on going over it. Dennis groaning like an animal in pain; turning that awful colour and his eyes sticking out of his head and me pulling desperately at the communication cord. I am gasping for breath myself, the green and purple colours of hell appear whichever way I look. The ambulance on the deserted station platform in the dead of night and the sudden pitiless light in the emergency room at the hospital in Viterbo. A place that Dennis used to love and I never want to see again.

‘Look, mama,' Daniel said. ‘You are only seventy-three. These days that is nothing. You could have ten even twenty years ahead of you.'

My son Daniel, always good at counting: beats to a bar and rates of interest. By the time he had finished in the Royal College of Music he had become an expert in share dealing. He said it would make up for the insecurity of being a clarinet player in a world stuffed with clarinettists. Well before he was thirty Daniel made a fortune in some aspect 
of the recording business that his father looked down his nose at.

‘The thing is, Dilys Myfanwy, you'll have to learn to stand on your own feet.'

True enough. And the trace of reprimand. As he sees it I lived in his father's pocket and he was incarcerated in a wretched boarding school in Kent while his parents went off in hot pursuit of his father's brilliant career.

‘You can go where you like,' my son Daniel says. ‘You can do what you like. Think of it as a new adventure.'

I had more than enough adventure with Dennis, more than forty years of it. I was dazzled by his accomplishments. He could speak six languages, take an engine to bits and put it together again, he was an accomplished pianist. He was no matinée idol to look at, but he had a beautiful, seductive voice and a dashing, carefree manner that many women liked, and yet he chose me. He was red haired and impetuous to the point of being explosive, but with me he was a little lamb, always warm, loving, devoted. Whenever he went off on some film safari without me, which was not often – he said I was his right and left hand rolled into one – he always rushed back to me, panting for love and reassurance.

‘If you want to settle down, you can settle wherever you like. You've lived in goodness knows how many places: Lucca, Aix en Provence, Klagenfurt, Piansano and goodness knows where else. You must know which will suit you best by now!'

Wherever. That's the trouble. When Dennis was alive I never thought anywhere in Europe was foreign. Wherever we went he was always accepted because he spoke the language so perfectly and had the manners to go with it and the exotic surname of Macphail. Things always went swimmingly until he lost his temper at some blatant piece of chicanery. He was easily taken in, in spite of his brilliance. Without him, every- where becomes cold and hostile and foreign and I am like the proverbial pilgrim in a foreign land. None of his accomplishments were mine so what am I without him? I can't cling to my son Daniel. That is the last thing he would want.

‘You know money is no problem.'

Not any more. Has not been for sometime. Daniel is rich and generous. But I would rather have Dennis back and all his problems. I was useful then. It used to make me laugh, the pride he took in his lack of business sense. ‘Money never meant much to the Macphails,' he said. A breed of Anglican clerics, including a bishop and several colonial administrators. Daniel was quick to point out that his father had no religion and a fine contempt for British imperial pretensions. They were so different my husband and my son. What could I do about it? Just find some corner to curl up and die.

In Rome I spoke to that dear old Viennese Herr Doktor Fischer. He was always nice about Dennis, and Dennis was more patient than usual listening to him. ‘He knows a lot,' Dennis would say, wagging his head mysteriously as if to suggest the Herr Doktor had access to arcane depth that his own linguistic skills had never penetrated.

‘Dear Mrs Macphail,' he said. ‘Think of the world as you knew it before you ever met Dennis.'

I shook myself to make the effort. Somewhere in the mists of the mid-twentieth century I was considered a bright girl who had clambered out of a Welsh nonconformist background via academia to the sunlit uplands of the London BBC. I must have believed something like that myself. A clever little girl delighting in her own cleverness. My mother was proud of me, but not so proud perhaps as she was of my brother Silin who became a distinguished physician and took up a professorial chair in Sydney, Australia. Poor thing, she never saw him again. Family pride moves in mysterious ways. I am still ashamed of the sacrifices my parents made on their miserable ministerial wages (never more than three hundred pounds per annum) to secure educational advantage for their two children.

‘Think back through your life, dear Mrs Macphail. Where were you happiest?'

The answer was one I had used before, particularly when I was most exasperated with Dennis, but I never thought of it as a compass point to where I might settle. Gelliwen. My grandfather's modest smallholding. All of thirty-eight acres. I knew the name of every field and paddock. It was wartime but that meant nothing to a child of five or six. The whole world of the island was under intense cultivation then. There was happiness there, unalloyed, like riding home from Cae Pella, the furthest field, on the back of what felt like a huge cart horse. (I can still smell the leather collar they called mwnci and feel the gentle sway of the unhurried progress, my fingers clutching the coarse hair of Capten's mane.)

‘Daniel, I think I know exactly where I'd like to try to settle.'

‘If settle you must.'

He gives me a smile that suggests after all he likes me in his tolerant way.

‘Gelliwen.'

He frowns with an effort to recall although he surely must have heard the name before. Or had he? Yet another little stab of guilt. There were so many gaps in communication in years gone by that could never be filled.

‘Sir Fôn,' I said. ‘That's what we called it in those days. Never Ynys Môn or Anglesey.'

In his reserved way he showed approval. It was of course the backwoods as far as his world was concerned, but within easy reach. Near enough for him to visit me at will and far enough to keep me outside the sphere of his activities.

***

It was disconcerting to descend on Sir Fôn on the magic carpet of Daniel's millions. I don't know whether he realises how much the power of his wealth impresses me. I hope he doesn't. I struggle to maintain a sense of proportion. This place both is and is not Sir Fôn as I knew it. There are things that can't be changed, the contours of a geology that my poor father was so ridiculously proud of: from the top of Penmynydd, Mynydd Caergybi, Mynydd Mechell and Mynydd Bodafon stick out of the horizon as they have always stuck out; and looking south, from the Gogarth toYr Eifl the noble range of Eryri has not changed: how could it? Beaches can't change much, nor the untidy tilt of the rocks as they pile on top of each other.

I must begin with Gelliwen. Find a still centre in my confused world. Daniel is being patient with me. On the farm lane, which is rough and stonier than I remember, he allows me to take his arm. He listens to my reminiscence. I point to a boulder. It was there, according to my grandfather, that his Uncle Owain hid his carpenter's tools before emigrating to America without saying goodbye to his mother. The farm was too small to keep them all. But they wrote to each other for the rest of their lives. My father deposited the letters in the County Archives along with his notebooks and the other bits and pieces he found so interesting. I linger over the little spring that never ran dry. My grandfather would not drink any other water. It is choked now with wild watercress, but still there.

The house was a horrid ruin. The roof leaking and the windows boarded with rusty corrugated zinc iron. The out- houses collapsing, open to the elements, offering shelter to cattle. The great oak tree, in what was the paddock, stands as monument to walls and hedgerows that have disappeared forever.

‘This is where my father was born. Gelliwen.'

I had cherished a hope Daniel could have taken a picture of me on the path to the front door where thyme and rosemary grew on either side. There was nothing there except mud trampled by the cattle and, where the door had been, more rusty corrugated zinc iron.

‘He loved the place. We all did. From our bleak manse in the quarrying village it seemed the earthly paradise across the straits. And look at it now.'

‘I don't really remember him,' Daniel says. ‘I was in that school in Sevenoaks when he died. Before that I hardly ever saw him.'

I am pierced with guilt. I put my poor widowed father, the Reverend John Roberts, BA, BD, in a Ministers' Retiring Home in a part of the country he never liked so that I could accompany Dennis on his brilliant erratic career to nowhere in the end. There is still no centre. People are in permanent orbit like the planets. What am I doing here?

Back at the hotel we buy local papers to show what properties there are for sale. There will always be a residue of resentment that I can do nothing to remove. I can't make it up to him. The best I can do is to be grateful and uncomplaining and not be a burden. I can't turn back now. There simply is nowhere to turn back to. He thrives on complete freedom of action. I owe it to him to accept his bounty and find a dwelling where he can visit and I can call home. There is an estate agent and valuation firm called Roberts, Luke and Evans, offering a wide range and it occurs to me that the Roberts could well be a second cousin who became an auctioneer. He would be about my age and auctioneers go on forever or at least their names do. Daniel is not curious.

‘Better not to do business with relatives,' he says quite firmly.

I can see that. He prefers to use his wealth and the screen of his surname. In any case homosexuals avoid family entanglements. At least he did.

We were filming at an archaeological site in Anatolia, the kind of work that Dennis loved, when Daniel's wife Heather telephoned on a bad landline. She sounded hysterical which was not like her. A still calm is part of her dark beauty. Daniel had left her, and had gone to live with a Swedish millionaire called Axel. They had a place on a Greek island. Dennis was furious and disgusted. Couldn't bear to believe his only son had turned out to be a queer. Dennis had a thing about queers in the business forming cabals to promote each other. He believed a bunch of them had done his early career a lot of harm. The poor old darling never realised it could have been his own impetuous and explosive nature that might have done him damage.