A Short Story

Every day since the new year broke long and cold he had watched the weather, that Arctic January of her first stay there, lacing his boots with eager satisfaction whenever the great storm clouds lifted. She had not minded. Early on she had given in to the easy spell of ritual, willingly conspiring with Nans to fill the huddled rooms with the scent of warm bread in the mornings, beeswax and lavender in the afternoons and, as the night wrapped itself about the tiny farmhouse, the hot salty tang of a bacon joint or the primitive, musty pungence of simmering mutton stew.

In the evenings, always just after the nine o’clock news, Twm would make his final check on the dogs in the shed and Nans would take the short-handled shovel and with it carry half a fire of glowing coals the colour of August to warm the parlour hearth for her. Then Rhys would emerge from his improvised darkroom under the stairs, Nans would kiss each of them goodnight, and together they would lay out the day’s work on the guest bed Twm had borrowed from Mrs Ellis down in the village. She had protested at their having gone to so much trouble but Nans had said “Tut, girl, we couldn’t be letting you sleep on that old settee, you’d wake all creased up like a concertina!” And Twm had said “Duw, you’re lucky it’s got a proper mattress, better than that old straw thing we’ve got!” And Nans had slapped his arm for talking such nonsense, and Twm had grinned and winked, and Rhys had descended from his attic bedroom with an ancient eiderdown bedspread in his arms the exact shade of his eyes. “I’ve aired it,” he said defensively, when his mother tried to wave him back up the stairs, and it became the backdrop to a month of late hours whilst his parents slept.

The photographs he took grew into three rows the length of the bed then along the gleaming sideboard, propped up by Nans’s ornaments - her porcelain dancing girls in their hyacinth cha cha frocks, her art deco vases - and a fading black and white picture of Twm in a beret from his days, Rhys had explained, in the International Brigade. “There’s more,” he had said wryly, “to my family, than meets the eye.”

Rhys’s pictures, arranged chronologically, revealed less and less : Wednesday’s coarse scratches of heather were speckled with the first light fall of snow that a hard frost crystallised overnight so that on Thursday through Rhys’s close focused lens each hummock’s huddled stems stood encircled in crackling quartz . But it was toward the heights that Rhys trained his eye most often, and once he said to her that heaven was where the snow merged with the sky.

“This last one today, the sun’s almost set, you must have run like a madman to get down before your dinner went cold.”

“I can fly. Didn’t Mam tell you? It’s the blood of the Little People…come with me tomorrow, you’ll see.” He had stripped to the waist whilst she had tidied his pictures away.

“But the whole point of tomorrow” she had said with mock exasperation as he untied her hair “is to be here.”

“You and your hippy psychology” he had laughed, “you're so naturally high I get dizzy just looking at you.”

“What,” she had responded, “just what, exactly, do you know about me and my psychology?”

…………………………………………………………………..

Elis had been determined not to let the spell of the place dissuade him from his purpose. All the way from London, as he drove, he had rehearsed in his mind the words he would use – “Mam, I understand, ok? But there’s no running water ” There’s a well she would say “…the roof leaks ” Mrs Ellis’s boys, they’ll mend it “…and you’re not well ” – And he had practised in the rear view mirror the look of undeniable rationale with which he would reach her. His confidence had not wavered at the quirky little border town with it’s time-locked, languidly English village green where he had stopped for petrol, nor had it been squeezed by the narrowing of the roads or the looming encroachment of the trees as he twisted and turned his way through the Welsh foothills. He had resolutely texted his girlfriend when he had pulled into the lay-by at Dolwyddelan for a pee: def back fri, chill, will talk her round np.

When the road left the pass for the ground-hugging expanse of the moors he was as single-minded as when he had left the city. As the single lane plunged from the rim of the plateau and the peaks sprang up on all sides he had no sense of uncertainty, not at any rate of the validity of his mission, although he suspected his girlfriend was not deceived by his “np” – talking his mother out of anything was always going to be a problem, he knew that. Even when he parked beside the tiny village hall and surprised himself by feeling more like a local than a tourist, and when Mrs Morris who ran the Post Office greeted him with “Elis Tomos, haven’t you grown!” just exactly as she had on each of his childhood visits (and it seemed so inevitably right that she had) even then he held firm and did not think it incongruous that he felt the need to congratulate himself.

His grandparents had lived for some years in a compact little bungalow, one of four that had been purpose-built for the elderly next to the old people’s home. Elis had badgered Nans every day of his stay one summer to take him with her on her daily trip to the shop, so that he could watch the diggers and bulldozers at work on the foundations. The last time he had visited – he would have been about 12, he remembered, because it was the year he had gone to live with his mother’s parents – they had still been up at the farm. He had not meant to call on them until the next day but for reasons he could not fathom, had allowed the car to drive past the turn off he should have taken and had driven on into the village.

“She’s a bit gone in her head now” said Twm, the tea cup clattering on it’s saucer as he offered it to Elis. “You know, old Mrs Morris, not about her things… Duw, my English has gone boy!”

“He speaks Italian in his sleep, you know” Nans winked, first at her husband, then at Elis. “How was the journey?”

“Terrific, barely a hitch. Nain, Taid, I’m sorry it’s been so long…”

“Now don’t talk nonsense” Nans interrupted. “You young people, lives to lead, at least you’ve been writing.”

“Duw yes!” Twm waggled his finger at him. “The vicar’s son, now he’s never writing! But we’ve kept all yours.”

“Twm's kept everything” said Nans as she opened a drawer of the old dresser and began sorting an assortment of papers and photographs.

“Nain,” Elis protested, “you don't have to show me my own letters !” But he knew that the squeak that surprised him in his own voice was the first farewell of his confidence, melting.

Nans had stopped searching. She had pulled out an old brown envelope, taped together where the corners had holes, and Elis knew they were not his letters inside it.

He felt at once tiny and hugely ungainly, poignantly aware of the fifteen years that had passed since he last saw his grandmother's now paper-skinned fingers and the responsibility that seemed to confer on his youth. He wanted to sink into the home-scented safety of the high-walled seat that had been his by the fireside when he was a child. He knew what the package contained – the last correspondance of the prodigal son with a promise to return and his picture at a Himalayan base camp, blissfully expectant, his gaze focused over and beyond the eye of the camera . “Your father” Nans said, and Elis barely controlled the tremor in his hands, “would have wanted you to have these.”

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She smiled back at herself in the window as she pulled the last of the breakfast dishes out of the washing up bowl - he had been right, she knew now, she always began at the summit, as if the miracle of being there wiped out the need for an explanation, and the ribbon-thin paths the sheep etched in the heather always wove their way home. Leaving the dishes to dry face-down on the draining board she rinsed her hands, puckering her nose at the sight of her water-wrinkled fingers. She turned to look for a towel but stopped in mid spin, remembering that she had washed and pegged the towels to dry hours ago as the birds woke that morning, sleep having fluttered away as the waiting day trilled in anticipation. Wiping her palms on her jeans so as to grip the rattling bakelite door-handle, reminding herself yet again to rummage through the still unpacked boxes to find the little jar of nails and screws, she stepped out into the rambling spring sunshine.

There he was, her son, perpetually startling her with his resemblance to the boy who had leaned against that same lichen-bleached wall in the photo on Nans and Twm’s bookcase. He had turned his head at the sound of the door scraping the quarry tiles, his face tilted so that his brows ran parallel to the slow slant of the ridge behind him, hair unruly as the dark twisted limbs of the hawthorn that was just beginning to bloom behind the south corner. “Not really a garden” he said now, unrelentingly familiar, “more of a designated sheep-free zone”.

“Not for long, unless we do something with that gate”.

He glanced at where the rusted metalwork clung to the prehistoric-looking iron pegs straining to break free of the stone-age gateposts, slabs of native rock stolen from their cromlech walls probably, they had once speculated, by eighteenth century chapel-goers.

“I’ll get a hammer,” he said, but when she had finished unpegging and folding and had lifted the basket from the mountain-grass lawn, he had turned again to stare towards the high zigzag of the horizon. For the first time she noticed the bluebells growing close by the wall at his feet, making her catch her breath.

“Where they there yesterday?”

“Duh…Yes.”

He turned to her.

“I didn’t see them”.

“You can’t have been looking very hard.”

“Don’t tread on them.”

“On what?”

“The bluebells!”

“Oh.” His eyes again, the rarest of iris hues, the colour of summer snow in the deep shade, and the generous glint of his smile, laughing. “For a moment there,” he jerked his head back to indicate the scene behind him, “I thought you meant the mountains.