The Earth Hums in B Flat Page 25

  Tada distempered the scullery to cheer her up but it didn’t work. Only Dr Edwards’s tablets cheer her up. But when she is cheered up, is it on the inside as well as the outside?

  With a hiss and a splutter the kettle boils, and Bethan pours the water onto the tea leaves in the teapot. We’re waiting for the tea to brew when Tada comes in from work. Today, he doesn’t say: There’s nowhere like home. Instead, he says, ‘I’ll go up and get changed, Siân,’ and leaves his jacket and beret and food sack on the hat-stand and goes upstairs.

  Mam doesn’t look as if she’s heard him arrive. I watch the firelight flicker on our faces and for a moment we look like a family in one of Aunty Siân’s magazines. With a machine from outer space in our midst. Maybe the aliens have captured Mam and left her empty, smiling shell behind. I don’t say this out loud.

  ‘Let’s have a look at your mam,’ says Aunty Siân, and she heaves herself out of Tada’s chair to take the dryer hood off Mam’s head. I’m sure I can see steam coming from some of the curlers and Mam’s ears are scarlet. It must be hot inside that hood. Perhaps the aliens have cooked Mam’s brain.

  Aunty Siân undoes one of the curlers. ‘Feels dry,’ she says. ‘Bethan, switch this thing off. And Gwenni, you get up on the chair again and unhook it. Here, I’ll pass you the bulb to put back in.’

  When I put the bulb back in the light comes on with a loud pop and I nearly fall off the chair. Black spots dance in front of my eyes.

  ‘Silly me,’ says Bethan. ‘I switched it on too soon.’

  ‘Don’t make a fuss, Gwenni,’ says Mam. I jump at the sound of her voice. All I’m doing is rubbing my eyes so I can see to get down.

  ‘Bethan,’ says Aunty Siân, ‘you be more careful. Gwenni could have been hurt. Come down, Gwenni; give me your hand. A nice piece of cake will sort you out.’

  Then she carries on taking out Mam’s curlers until Mam’s head has yellow worms crawling all over it. The yellow has a greenish tinge, but no one else mentions it so I don’t either.

  ‘Has it taken?’ says Mam.

  ‘Definitely,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘We’ll leave it to cool thoroughly, Magda, and comb it later. No point in risking a frizz.’

  Aunty Siân’s hair is a natural frizz. She always says what she needs is a perm to make it straight. Her hair is so black it has blue lights in it like a blackbird’s feathers. And it curls and curls, all round her face and down to her shoulders. She ought to look like a witch but she looks more like the angel I’ve written into Catrin in the Clouds.

  Tada limps down the stairs and stands in the living room doorway. He’s put on his Saturday clothes and combed his family hair back with Brylcreem. He smells like Aneurin.

  ‘Ready?’ says Aunty Siân.

  Tada nods and moves over to his seat at the table.

  ‘Pour the tea, Bethan,’ says Aunty Siân and Bethan begins to fill everyone’s cup. I put a slice of cake on a plate for everyone, the smallest slice for Aunty Siân and the biggest for Tada.

  ‘Let’s all sit round the table for our tea and cake,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘Come on, Magda.’ Mam laughs as Aunty Siân pulls her out of the chair and onto her feet. But she looks at Tada and stops laughing.

  So, we sit around the table to eat our cake and sip our tea. I have to share a chair with Bethan and she scowls at me. Aunty Siân chatters all the time. She tells us funny stories about her train journey and her walk up the hill with her bump. But we all seem to be waiting for something.

  When we’ve all eaten our cake, even Mam, Aunty Siân says, ‘Gwenni, at the bottom of my bag is an envelope. It was under the cake tin; did you notice it?’

  I shake my head. Is this what we’re waiting for?

  ‘Well, it’s there,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘Would you get it for me, please?’

  I go into the scullery where John Morris pretends he can’t see me and sits with his bottom suspended just above the floor. I dip my hand into Aunty Siân’s bag and bring out a fat and furry brown envelope. I’m sure I can see a mouth gaping in the blue distemper as if it would swallow the envelope, but I don’t stay to look too closely.

  I give Aunty Siân the envelope. She turns it over and over in her hands.

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  Aunty Siân takes a deep breath and begins to open the envelope. ‘What I have here,’ she says, ‘are some photographs of your grandmother to show you. Your mother’s mother.’

  Mam’s hands begin to shake so much they drum on the table.

  Aunty Siân puts her hand over Mam’s hands. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘I’m going to tell you your grandmother’s story.’

  Mam whimpers and the fat, yellow worms on her head writhe. ‘You promised,’ she says. ‘You promised.’

  ‘I did,’ says Aunty Siân. She looks at Bethan and then at me. ‘I’m breaking my promise to your mam by telling you about your grandmother. But I’ve thought for a while that the two of you should know what happened to her. So, when Emlyn came to see me yesterday . . .’

  ‘What?’ says Mam.

  ‘I went to see Siân,’ says Tada, ‘and asked her to come here soon. The girls ought to know what happened to Eluned. I didn’t know exactly what happened to her because you wouldn’t tell me, would you, Magda? When I spoke to Siân, she told me the whole story. I don’t know why you couldn’t tell me.’

  ‘I don’t want anybody to know,’ says Mam. She bangs the table with her fist and the cups and saucers and plates tremble. ‘Not anybody. You’ve got no right, Siân.’

  ‘It isn’t anything to be ashamed of, Magda,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘It isn’t, really.’

  ‘I thought you came to give me a perm,’ says Mam. She scrubs at her curls with her fingers as if she’s trying to tear them out. ‘Not to do the dirty on me.’

  ‘I did come to give you the perm,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘And I was going to talk to you about this beforehand. But . . . well, I could see you weren’t yourself, Magda, and Bethan was home, so I just decided to have a nice day with you both and wait until Emlyn came back from work.’

  ‘Huh,’ says Mam. ‘Emlyn. Everyone thinks Emlyn is so wonderful.’

  ‘I don’t,’ says Bethan. ‘He’s pretended to be my father for all this time.’

  ‘Bethan,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘You’re very lucky to have Emlyn for a father. But you see where all this secrecy leads?’ She looks at Mam. ‘It leads to sheer misery.’

  Mam tries to push her cup and saucer away and they rattle against each other. Aunty Siân glances at Tada and he says, ‘Go on, Siân. This has to be done.’

  Aunty Siân takes a photograph out of the envelope. ‘This was your grandmother,’ she says. ‘I was your age, Gwenni, when she . . . died. This is how I remember her. She was my father’s sister but they didn’t look alike at all.’ The woman in the picture is standing beneath an archway of roses and she looks exactly like Mam and Bethan except that her hair is on top of her head in a big, floppy bun. ‘See how much you resemble her, Bethan?’ says Aunty Siân. ‘She had fine fair hair like you and Magda; she had such trouble keeping it up in that bun – especially when she was gardening. She loved those roses.’ Bethan takes the photograph and stares and stares at it. I don’t think she’ll mind having that family face and that family hair.

  Aunty Siân takes out all the photographs from the envelope and spreads them on the table. ‘You can’t tell from these photographs,’ she says, ‘but Aunty Eluned had an extremely hard life. Of course, I only know that from what my mother told me when I was a bit older. When you’re a child you tend to accept that what happens in your family happens to everyone else’s family; that it’s the normal thing.’

  Mam pushes her hands down on the table and tries to lift herself from her chair. ‘I’m not sitting here listening to this,’ she says. ‘You and Emlyn have betrayed me. Betrayed me.’ But she can’t quite get to her feet and she slips back into her chair where she begins to sob and rock to and fro.

  The Toby jugs shift themselves on their shelf and lean forward to
watch.

  ‘Has Magda had any of her tablets during the day?’ says Tada to no one in particular.

  ‘I don’t think she’s had anything since I’ve been here,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘Bethan?’

  Bethan shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ says Tada. ‘Dr Edwards said she ought to take them regularly.’ He goes into the scullery and comes back with two white tablets and a big glass of water. ‘Here you are, Magda,’ he says to Mam and she takes the tablets and swallows them both with a gulp of water and then throws the rest of the glassful all over Tada. Bethan and I shunt our chair back from the table but Aunty Siân can’t move so quickly and some of the water splashes over her face and she gasps with shock. Mam laughs as she watches Tada rush to the scullery and come back with the stripey towel for Aunty Siân.

  ‘Serves you right,’ she says, ‘for what you’re doing to me.’

  ‘Sorry, Siân,’ says Tada. ‘But those tablets will work quite quickly, you’ll see.’

  Aunty Siân waves her hand at him as if to tell him not to worry. She finishes drying her face and dabs at some of the photographs with the towel. Aunty Siân looks at Mam, who’s closed her eyes and is rocking in her chair as if she’s putting herself to sleep, and she puts her hand over Mam’s hands again. ‘I do hate to see her like this, Emlyn,’ she says to Tada.

  ‘I can’t understand it, Siân,’ says Tada. He covers his eyes with his hand and shakes his head. Maybe Tada doesn’t want to understand it.

  ‘Well,’ says Aunty Siân, ‘me neither.’ And she sighs.

  ‘I’m going out to see Caroline soon,’ says Bethan. ‘So can we be quick, Aunty Siân? Please.’

  Aunty Siân picks up one of the photographs of Nain Eluned. ‘Your grandmother’s married life was a hard one,’ she says. ‘She was young when she married your grandfather and they hadn’t been married long when he went off to the war,’ she says.

  Bethan frowns and wrinkles her nose.

  ‘The First World War,’ I say to her.

  ‘I know that,’ says Bethan. ‘I’m not stupid, like you.’

  ‘Bethan,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘Now, your grandfather was a changed man when he came home. Whatever he’d gone through in the war made him violent a lot of the time, and unpleasant, and Eluned bore the brunt of it and became quite ill. I don’t remember your grandfather, because I was only small when he caught pneumonia and died. Your mam was still at school then. Well, everyone expected Eluned to get better after that, but she didn’t. My mam thought he’d made her so depressed, you know, that she didn’t know how to get out of it. And you couldn’t get the medicines then, like you can now, that might have helped her.’ Aunty Siân stops and looks at Mam who has her eyes still closed but is smiling the way she does when she’s had her tablets. Emptily. ‘If help is the right word,’ she says. ‘Anyway, it was hard for your mam to look after Eluned, first when she was still at school and then when she was working.’ She pats Mam’s hands but Mam doesn’t notice.

  Tada interrupts. ‘Then I met your mam and she was so beautiful and brave and I wanted to look after her. I’d have done anything for her. But it was wartime when we married and I had to go away. So, your mam was left on her own again to look after Eluned.’ He rubs his face with his rough hands. ‘So you see, Bethan, why it was your mam needed somebody to . . . Because I was away and because it was so hard for her with Eluned. She’d have gone mad without someone to . . . someone to . . .’ He stops and puts his hands over his face. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about. My poor Magda.’

  Poor Mam?

  Aunty Siân rubs his arm comfortingly. Bethan stares at Nain Eluned’s photographs, one after the other. They don’t tell us any of the things Aunty Siân is telling us. Like the photographs in the box that Bethan tore up. It isn’t that they lie, it’s that they tell a different story. How can we know which story is the true one?

  ‘When Eluned realised your mam was having Bethan and it was obvious that Emlyn couldn’t be the baby’s father, she couldn’t bear the shame of it.’ Aunty Siân glances at Bethan. ‘That already seemed a bit old-fashioned, you know; there were many other women in a similar situation. War turns things upside down, Bethan. Anyhow, Eluned became so . . . ill that my mam called the doctor to her and he had her taken off to Dinbych straight away.’

  Bethan looks up from the photographs. ‘Dinbych?’ she says. ‘To the mad house?’

  ‘To the asylum, yes,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘They treated people there for those kinds of illnesses. They said Aunty Eluned responded to the treatment very quickly and they soon sent her home.’

  ‘Are you saying Gwenni’s got her madness from Mam’s side of the family?’ says Bethan. She picks through the photographs on the table; I look at them as she holds them up. Does Nain Eluned look mad in any of them? What does madness look like?

  ‘What kind of thing is that to say, Bethan?’ says Aunty Siân. ‘Your sister isn’t mad any more than you are. It was your Nain’s circumstances that made her ill. It isn’t catching, like measles.’

  I look at Mam. I’m not so sure.

  I know some of this from what Nain next door said. But I don’t know how Nain Eluned died. Will Aunty Siân tell us?

  ‘Let Siân tell us everything,’ says Tada. ‘Time’s going on and she has to catch the train home.’

  ‘You mean there’s more?’ says Bethan. ‘I want to go to Caroline’s, remember.’

  Aunty Siân takes a deep, deep breath and she says in a rush, ‘But the doctors must have made a mistake. Eluned wasn’t better. When she’d been home a day she killed herself.’

  ‘How?’ I say. But somehow I know.

  ‘No, no, no.’ Mam moans and opens her eyes and tries to grab Aunty Siân’s hand.

  Aunty Siân looks at Tada and he nods. ‘Like Mrs Llywelyn Pugh,’ she says.

  The Toby jugs almost tumble off their shelf.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Bethan, and nobody tells her off.

  Aunty Siân’s lips quiver. ‘Your mam found her, of course. It was terrible. Terrible.’ Aunty Siân’s voice quivers, too. ‘And she’s always blamed herself.’

  ‘For having me, d’you mean?’ says Bethan. ‘You’re saying it’s my fault? On top of not having a father, I’ve got to take the blame for my grandmother killing herself?’

  ‘No, of course not, Bethan,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘Never think that. And remember, you do have a father who’s cared for you since you were born.’

  ‘Huh,’ says Bethan. And she sounds just like Mam.

  ‘And it wasn’t your mam’s fault either,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘Your nain was ill. If it was anyone’s fault, it was your grandfather’s for making her like that.’

  ‘But the war made him ill,’ I say.

  ‘It did, Gwenni,’ says Tada. ‘There was no fault anywhere.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have sent her home from the madhouse, should they?’ says Bethan.

  ‘Probably not,’ says Tada. ‘But they did.’

  ‘I don’t think I wanted to know all this on top of everything else,’ says Bethan. ‘I had a really nice day with you, Aunty Siân, and now you’ve spoilt it.’

  ‘It’s better to have things out in the open,’ says Tada. ‘And it might help your mam. She doesn’t have to worry about you finding out about your Nain Eluned if you already know about her.’

  Mam’s big empty smile disappears. She sits up straight in her chair. ‘You can’t tell anyone,’ she says. She’s trembling all over; her greeny-yellow curls wriggle in sympathy.

  ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Magda,’ says Tada.

  ‘I don’t want any of you to tell any one,’ she says. ‘Promise me. Promise. Cross your hearts and hope to die.’ She bangs the table and we all jump. ‘Go on, do it. Cross your hearts.’

  ‘Magda,’ says Tada.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Mam says to him. ‘You weren’t there. You left me. You had no right to bring Siân here to do this.’ She points at Aunty Siân. ‘You crossed
your heart,’ she says. ‘You’ve broken your promise.’

  ‘I know,’ says Aunty Siân. ‘And I’m truly sorry. But I was only Gwenni’s age; I didn’t realise what I was promising. And I didn’t break my promise lightly, Magda. I agree with Emlyn about—’

  ‘Huh,’ says Mam. ‘You crossed your heart and hoped to die. Maybe you’ll die in childbirth. Maybe the baby’ll die. You’ll pay—’

  A knock on the back door stops her. She covers her mouth with her shaking hand and begins to cry.

  ‘That’ll be Lol,’ says Tada. He looks at Aunty Siân who is as white as Nain next door’s sheets on a Monday. ‘She said she’d walk down to the station with you, Siân. Are you all right to go?’

  The back door opens. ‘Yoo-hoo,’ Nain calls. ‘Lol’s had to go to an emergency fire brigade meeting. And that John Morris is standing in a plate of meat in here. If that’s your supper there’s not much left.’ There’s a scuffle in the scullery and John Morris yowls. ‘Off you go, you bad, lazy cat,’ says Nain and the back door bangs shut.

  Nain comes into the living room. ‘This is nice,’ she says. ‘A tea party. I’ll walk down to the station with you, Siân. Can’t risk you falling on the hill. My goodness, look at the size of you. Have you got twins in there?’

  Aunty Siân stands up and rubs her baby bump. ‘It kicks enough for two,’ she says, and she looks happy again. ‘And how are you, Mrs Morgan?’

  ‘Can’t grumble, Siân,’ says Nain. ‘Can’t grumble.’

  ‘You go home, Mam,’ says Tada. ‘I’ll walk Siân to the train.’

  ‘D’you want me to make food for you all now that the cat’s had your supper?’ says Nain.

  ‘We’ll get some chips,’ says Tada. ‘It’ll make a change.’ He hustles Nain back through the scullery door before she has a chance to notice Mam crying and rocking and muttering to herself at the table.

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