The Woman at the Window (20 page)

‘Outside then!'

Rod seemed to be in charge. We sat there in the candlelight until the dark figure reappeared in the entrance passage, blocking out the light at the end of the tunnel. Standing there he was a formidable, threatening figure so much stronger than the sleeping creature under the spiral stone.

‘Is that your beautiful motor car down there?'

In the candlelight he could see my involuntary nod. 

‘Now isn't it a beautiful model? If I had a camera I would 
take a picture and maybe sell it to the papers!'

Rod cleared his throat. He was still determinedly in charge.

‘You're on the run,' he said. 

‘Now why should you say that?' 

The Irishman sounded quite hurt.

‘I'm a magistrate,' Rod said. ‘We're informed about these things.'

‘Are you now?'

‘A man with an Irish accent escaped from Presswood Open Prison three days ago. Or was it four.'

‘Dear, dear.'

The Irishman gave a deep sigh and then a smile.

‘The public are advised,' he said, ‘to contact the police and not to approach him. Especially three old men.'

In a matter of seconds he produced a flick knife and held it to my throat.

‘Now if you'd just hand me the keys of the car, I'd be off in the twinkling of an eye and trouble you no more. I'll be one careful driver.'

He had more to say as I fumbled for my keys but before he could say it Pritch had slammed the thick end of his walking stick into the side of his head, Rod had stamped on his hand and half the candles went out. The man lay moaning on the ground.

‘Now what did you go and do that for,' he whimpered. 

Pritch shone the torch in his face and he groaned even 
more.

‘You're a monster,' he said. ‘I'm maimed for life.'

I was still trembling from shock. For once I would not be the one to make the arrangements.

‘What are we going to do with him?'

Rod was examining the flick knife in the poor light as if it were some new type of scalpel. He slipped it in his jacket pocket.

‘Let him go,' he said. ‘We're not policemen. I don't think he'll get very far.'

Together we pushed him down the entrance passage and watched him stumble down the steep slope, nursing his hand. In the parking ground he stopped to give my BMW a vicious kick before running on to the main road.

‘Team work!'

I said it triumphantly although I knew I had done very little. They were the heroes of the hour. It did strike me however that in all the years we had known each other, this could be the very first time we had acted in concert. That had to be a cause for celebration. Out in the open we sat on the turf mound and I wanted to make a pleasantry about being too old for Old Boys Matches, that sort of thing. But Rod looked tired and defeated, fed up, now the excitement was over; and Pritch was cross that whatever he wanted to demonstrate had been spoilt by an unseemly intrusion.

‘Disgusting,' Pritch said. ‘The fact is you've seen very little standing stones and decorated stones. And there are twenty cromlechi on the island.'

‘Place is covered with stone sermons.' 

Rod was turning sarcastic.

‘And how many chapels and how many churches? The fact is you've left it late in the day Mr Pritchard.You should have started your exploration of superstition at least fifty years ago.'

My heart sank. They were launching into a fierce argument about religion. In my business career that was one subject to avoid. I felt a strong desire to drop into the office at Philips Partners. Nothing more soothing than the sight of things nicely ticking over. Unfortunately I would need to take a grumpy Rod back to Llandeilo before I could get there. Old age was not enough to share in common. Our lives had run in parallel, but for the life of me I couldn't remember whether parallel lines met in infinity or not.

A Little History

HISTORY comes to an end when you stop breathing, my mother said and knowing her I think I know what she meant. It was not some version of solipsism: the world ceases to exist when I do. History comes to an end when you can't do anything about it.That's what she always believed and that's why she dragged me off to Greenham Common to shiver for days and even weeks on end outside that ghastly fence.

‘Look at it girl!' she said.

‘If you must rage against something, rage against these missiles! There will be no light for you and yours, girl, unless we do something about it.'

The drill was always to be aware of what was going on and always be ready to do something about it. And that's why I suspect she arranged for me to be conceived on that moonlit night in early November 1952.

***

It was quite a contrast really for those who bothered to notice. Their backgrounds are so different, it was noted in the staff room, when the news of their relationship leaked out. What they had in common, it was surmised, had to be a thoughtfulness and a shy withdrawal from boisterous contact, so different from the general run of sixth formers. Zofia didn't cling to ridiculous gossiping about boys, and Ifan was absent minded and had no taste for horseplay. Zofia Worowski was a year older than Ifan Roberts and in the opinion of some teachers too old to be still at school. Ifan, it was generally agreed, had always been too old for his years and heavily under the influence of his mother and even more of her father, a retired minister who made his home at the farm. A pretty boy had developed into a handsome youth, they said, but he spoiled this effect by always looking worried at an age when a healthy lad, the heir to a useful farm like Maen Bedo, should not have a care in the world. Zofia was more entitled to look worried. She was blonde and tall (at least an inch taller than Ifan), not beautiful in any conventional sense, but she moved well, conscious because of her height, of the need to be poised and graceful. But, apart from her brains, it seems she had little to fall back on. It was 1952 but in some respects she was still a refugee.

Mr Worowski, it was mooted abroad, had been in Polish Intelligence. That could have meant he had been a spy, but for whom and on whom Ifan had been too polite to inquire. When Zofia was four or five the family fled from Poland. Her father had been imprisoned in Moscow for two years and, he claimed, tortured. When he was released they moved to somewhere awful in Siberia and that's where her little brother, Karol, died. She remembered train journeys that went on forever and ever and she could still hear the clank of the engine and wheels and the shaking and shuddering, sometimes in her sleep. Then came the agreement between the Soviets and the Polish government-in-exile in London. This time the family moved to Persia, so that Mr Worowski could join the Polish element in the British Army. Zofia went to school in Palestine. Just as the Jewish-Arab war broke out they moved from Gaza to Egypt; and then to London and to Birmingham where things did not work out. Now they were more or less settled in the Polish colony-camp outside Pendraw and Zofia was in her last year in the grammar school. Mr Worowski was still set on getting to America, but he had developed heart trouble and it seemed unlikely he would ever get there.

To Ifan, Zofia Worowski was a revelation. After an innocuous school debate on literature and music, they went on arguing on the way to the bicycle shed, if arguing is the appropriate word. Zofia held forth and Ifan listened. A girl, whom he had hardly ever heard speak before, was telling him that music was the highest art not merely because it could touch the sunshine but because it was abstract and had the unique power to cross linguistic cultural ethnic boundaries. It all seemed more significant because of her accent, which he assumed to be central European. It was a culture in itself. It may well be, she said, that individual words had more magic than single notes, but what was the use of that when a word was trapped, caged, in a single language? Cycling home, Ifan was disturbed and even troubled by Zofia's pro- nouncements. They touched a nerve. He was besotted with Cymric strict metres and, taught initially by his grandfather, he had become quite skilled in the art; but as things stood, this superior intelligence that had invaded his life would never understand let alone appreciate his efforts.

A dialogue came about that both urgently needed. It seemed so amusing when Zofia pointed out they were both pontificating about meanings in English which was a second language to both of them and, in her case, a third. Ifan said that should make their arguments more precise. Wasn't it true that traditional scholars argued in Latin, wherever they came from? This seemed something of a joke too, and as their friendship developed the world around them grew brighter and more amusing. In a provincial society caught between hankering after an old tried and tested way of life and a growing appetite for prosperity and progress, they were able to make their own discoveries of the miracle of being young and alive. That summer of 1952 they explored the seashore together, visited ruins and churches, cycling through the green countryside and reaching a level of communication they sensed was higher than any other they had experienced. They seemed to question everything with an assumed objectivity that would have done credit to a pair of ageing dons.

People noticed of course and snide remarks were made in and out of school. It was a time and place when male and female were assumed to associate for one purpose only. Any remarks overheard, nods, winks and whispers, only served to confirm to Zofia and Ifan that they had moved to a higher level of existence. At the same time they were self-critical and modest in a manner they felt appropriate to a gifted elite.

Ifan was anxious for Zofia to meet his grandfather. There was one fount of wisdom and understanding to be compared with another. Tensions that had arisen in his mind between views that sometimes seemed to conflict could only be solved by a face-to-face encounter between the two sages. At Maen Bedo, a family farm that had a view of the bay and was beginning to expand a caravan site on rough ground with access to the beach, the Reverend Hughes,Taid, took refuge in a study bedroom that was lined with books. On most mornings Ifan brought him his early morning cup of tea. Mrs Roberts took quiet pleasure in the bond that existed between her father and her son. There was a similar quality in the pride she took in both. Her husband Gwilym wished the boy took a greater interest in the farm and the caravan site in the disused quarry by the shore and the daily pressures of profit and loss. If he had brains, as everybody said, it was important they should be put to good use. ‘High thinking and plain living' exemplified by his father-in-law were all very well, but philosophy and literature had never been known to pay the rent. He respected the image of the cultured farmer, that was a tradition in Lleyn and Eifionydd, but it only worked in the real world if the prototype in question was as good at judging an animal and ploughing a furrow as he was at knocking out an englyn.

It took Ifan a little while to summon up the courage to ask his mother whether he could invite Zofia Worowski to tea at Maen Bedo. He declared that the brightest girl in the upper sixth was anxious to meet his illustrious grandfather, and he covered up this piece of wishful thinking by claiming ‘she was very keen to understand local history', which sounded more plausible.

‘And she's learning Welsh,' Ifan said.

‘So she should,' was Mrs Roberts' instant reply. Then as was her custom she took her time to consider an unusual request.

‘Well, I don't know. I shall have to ask your father.'

This was the standard evasion he had heard all his life. In social matters it was always his mother who made up his father's mind for him. She had been a schoolteacher before marrying a farmer and as a minister's daughter she was accustomed to taking a prominent position in the affairs of the chapel. She would also consult her father on what she took to be a matter of some delicacy.

‘Who's this young lady, Ifan, that you've made friends with?'

The Reverend Hughes addressed his grandson in the cheerful broad-minded manner he used when asking quest- ions that could sound inquisitive or intrusive. He was blessed with rosy cheeks and curly white hair and a honeyed voice that could command a singing tone when the occasion demanded it.

‘Zofia Worowski, Taid. A really clever person. Physics, Chemistry and Maths but she could do anything really. In schoolwork I mean. Very interested in philosophy and she says she's eager to learn Welsh. I wanted you to meet her. That's why I want to ask her to tea.'

‘Nothing of a sentimental nature then?'

‘Not at all. We just have all these interests in common. That makes us good friends. In a way you could say it's just an accident that she happens to be a girl.'

His grandfather suppressed a smile. There were humorous points he would have enjoyed making about the nature of accidents and the accidents of nature, but the boy was anxious and this was not the time to make them. Ifan was enthusiastic and he had talents that needed to be nurtured. He was a sensitive plant. There was also the problem that being Polish, the girl would certainly be Catholic and although the Reverend Hughes was widely read and broad- minded, he was very wary of lingering prejudice in the chapel and indeed throughout the denomination. In those early fifties, in Welsh-speaking Wales, Catholicism was still anathema to nonconformist and socialist alike.