In Another Country (25 page)

 

The van tilted, rocked from side to side. The descent always did look perilous. Carrie, watching, was glad when he reached the girder bridge and the start of the road. There he paused, got out, waved, blew her a kiss, departed. All the way out of sight she watched him travel. Then she went indoors to prepare the house. As for herself, she made an abeyance. She feared Seth's changes. They were the abyss. Now he was marshalling events the way she most desired. Or the way she dreaded most. Or both. And between her and him, one flesh, it was never certain whose proposal they were following, either might serve the other for the self's obscure desires. She knew that much, but it appeared impenetrable and induced in her a passivity and a fatalism, under which, like a spring making for daylight, ran the irrepressible force of self-asserting life.

In the late afternoon Carrie and Gwen went down to the bridge and the junction of the little stream with the river creeping out from under the black doors of the dam. They were less in the wall's shadow there, the sunlight lingered a while longer. The rabbits fled; watched; soon resumed their trespassing. At the waterside Gwen was absorbed by all the babble and movement. A yellow wagtail flitted over and stayed close. Carrie lost her consciousness almost wholly in the child and the bobbing, darting soft-coloured bird. Her particular complexities were postponed.

At the waterside she heard the motor but could not see it. The rhythm was unfamiliar, the arrival might be somebody else, though scarcely anyone ever came so far. Having no wish to see a stranger, she took Gwen in her arms and climbed the track home. The engine still approaching made her nervous, like a pursuit. Not till she was on the level, at their usual viewing place, did she turn. The vehicle, an old estate car, long as a hearse, was riding grandly over the bridge and embarking, with great caution, on the rocky track. Seth and Benjamin. Where's the van? she asked. Seth was pleased with himself. Sold it. More seats in this. Carrie said: What about our bed, if we move? We're not moving, Seth replied. Here we are now. First job tomorrow: improve our approaches. Benjamin stood to one side, smiling, very uncertain. An army surplus haversack seemed to be all his luggage. Again that gaucheness, again his black eyes seeing more than his tongue could utter. It lurched under Carrie's heart. So here we are, to stay. Again; anew; as before; wholly new. So be it.

Then began a good time for the three of them; for the four of them, since Gwen among the childish grown-ups continued in gaiety and satisfaction with only little bouts of fret. That very evening, in a lingering daylight, in firelight and candlelight, Seth begged their forgiveness and explained as clearly as he could what he must try to do in his drawing and painting henceforth. He said: I look at you. I look from you to my hands. I can make a likeness of you but it will not be enough. It won't be what it is truly like. So my premise is failure. My axiom is that whatever I
can
do, whatever my hands
can
make, will not suffice. Carrie was anxious, wanted to halt him, she saw him raising the precipice. No, no, he said. Through what I
can
do, its manifest failure, I will feel my way towards what I should do, always by failure, I'll know what isn't right, what manifestly will not do. Carrie stood up and stopped him softly with her fingers on his mouth. We haven't had enough music lately. She fetched the guitar for Benjamin, the fiddle for herself. Benjamin shook his head. You men, she said. So fearful. Start, it will come back. Listen to this.

 

Seth said he would go and stock up. Food, and we need a sledgehammer and a pickaxe, he said. Gwenny's coming with me. Back for lunch. Carrie strapped her carefully in; leaned over her, kissed him on the mouth, feeling for his tongue with her tongue. Benjamin stood in the doorway.

 

A bit uncertainly, Carrie first, Benjamin hanging back, they came out of the house, to greet him. They were like children, he laughed at them, how he loved them, he laughed aloud over them and him, he exulted, the life there lifting up before his very eyes filled him with a wild glee. Guess what, he said, handing Carrie the sleeping child, guess what, or perhaps you knew, and he kissed her lips, perhaps you knew already when you brought me here? What? She asked. Such a shop I did, food and alcohol for a fortnight and tools for eternity. He was handing the plastic bags out to Benjamin, overburdening him. What did I know already perhaps? Carrie asked. Shelley's down there, him and Harriet, under the second reservoir. They were alive down there and planning a thorough revolution of our ways of being in the world, in the summer of 1812. They came up here for picnics. It's all in a book, I bought a book, it's in that bag Ben's holding with the cheeses, five different cheeses. Truly, there's no end to this place. He faced the towering black wall. That wasn't here then, of course. It was a high valley with the little river hurrying down. He cupped his mouth, tilted his head and shouted at the dam. Back came the clearest sound of craziness imaginable—the sole name: Shelley, fracturing and chiming. Gods, said Seth. Did you know that as well? No, said Carrie. Benjamin stood like a beast of burden with the shopping, watching Seth and Carrie as he had under the viaduct when they appeared like an enchantment on his life. Shout, Ben, said Seth. Shout out who you are. Echo it to Rhayader that you're here. Benjamin looked called up for an ordeal. Shout, said Carrie. Stand where Seth is and shout your name. First time no sound came, none from his mouth at all. He licked his lips, raised his head, called out his name. The echoing fell away in a cadence that was utterly forlorn. Carrie ended the game. Food, she said. Then work, said Seth. Work and pray. Work and play. But work first, the chain gang. Anchor me with a ball and chain, don't let me float away.

That afternoon, with pickaxe, sledgehammer, shovel, wheelbarrow, in boots and heavy gloves, they worked at smoothing a way from the girder bridge to their platform under the dam. Parts had become like a riverbed, from frost and sun and torrents, and it was with some reluctance that Seth made them carriageable. He worked next to Benjamin, or parting and returning as the tasks required, almost without a word, in the intimacy of a shared hard labour. At first Benjamin was shy, watchful, but Seth won him over, slowly and surely into something akin to his own present state. By four the job was half done. Enough, he said. The sun was behind the dam. They went indoors, made tea, sat at the table in a too-early dusk. Carrie was at the window with Gwen. Not far down the valley lay the sunlight still, the shadow advancing very slowly over it. She felt the haste more characteristic of Seth. We must show Benjamin the water, she said.

All they had seen so far cried out to be seen again, to be seen and shown, and he was the only fellow human they wanted for the revelation. The climb was eerie, chilling; the wet trickled on them as though night and blackness were exuding an icy dew. They felt the cold of the body of water through its concrete shield. But all the while, as in a seaside town when a street heads at an incline for the sea, Carrie and Seth were expecting the enormous light over the brink and treasuring it like an imminent gift for Benjamin. At the last they sent him ahead and waited, looking down over their own chimneys to the pool of sunlight on the woodland very far below. Then they joined him on the rampart of the dam. The breeze; but gentler, warmer, a zephyr if there ever was such a thing. And sunlight dancing, a shattering white radiance further than they could see, more than they could bear to contemplate. They drifted apart, drifted together, gauche and ineffectual, brimful of love and joy and their mouths silenced with shyness.

So their days rose, whatever the weather, they had work to do, they played like children, were passionately companionable. Benjamin went back to the echo, he became the master of it. He positioned Gwen on the ground to listen to the names returning strangely. He invented birds and animals, he brought them forth for her, as though from an ark.

In the evenings they read or Seth painted, Benjamin withdrew as far as the room allowed, turned his back on them, strummed softly at the guitar and in an undertone, barely audible, hummed and mumbled some words of his own invention. Seth said aloud: Nantgwyllt went under the water in 1898. The Shelley Society lodged a formal protest. The Welsh were evicted from their homes, where they had lived for many generations. Carrie went for her bath. The clock ticked more audibly. She came in naked and kneeled on the hearth rug between her husband and her lover, bowing her head, towelling her long hair, the curve of her spine in the lamplight. She sat back on her heels, the firelight on her knees, her belly, her breasts. She slung her damp hair forward in one hank over her left shoulder. What else is under the water? she asked. The house of his cousin Thomas Grove, where he stayed in 1811, wondering what to do, when they had sent him down from Oxford for professing free love and atheism. Nothing under our dam here? Some sheepfolds, one or two cottages already given up and the ruins of a chapel at the very far end with a holy well, a hermit lived there in 1300, he had moved further and further into solitude and come this side of the hills from the Cistercian community at Strata Florida.

They trekked over hill and bog and down through woodland to a vantage point over the second reservoir from where, closely comparing Seth's old maps and the reality, they believed they must be looking on the surface under which Nantgwyllt and the house belonging to Shelley's cousin lay submerged. On a long day, first climbing the stairway that started from their liberated spring, they circumambulated the reservoir, the highest, under which, night after night, they slept, and located, to their satisfaction, the place a diver would have to sink himself who wished to visit the anchorite's roofless cell. Question, said Seth. Does the well still bubble up oppressed by tons of water? They took out the deeds of their home, Craig Ddu, and climbed the little stream, to see where they began and ended, their forty or fifty acres. But this was harder than imagining a village or a dwelling fixed forever under sheets of water. The walls had collapsed, the bracken and sedge were over all. At the head of the stream, where it split, where its three strands were plaited together into one, there was a ruined fold, one hawthorn clinging on, its roots in rock, its shape, set by the wind, offering a threadbare roof over a waterfall. Emblem: the survivor. I don't know what we own and what we don't, said Seth. Whatever, wherever, the land was given up, for humans it was long since finished and the crows, the kites, the buzzards and the kestrels were left at liberty to scour it lot by lot.

Seth's work was changing. Carrie looked over his shoulder now and then, his concentration was intense, he did not mind. She loved to watch his hand, so quick, so deft. But what came of it troubled her. At first she thought she must make a new effort of understanding, to do him justice. He had said his way must be that of groping through failure towards the truth. But in truth she had to confess to herself that she understood him perfectly well. The lines of his art were forfeiting all insistence, one figure elided into another. One that by the shock of black curls and the steady eyes most resembled Benjamin had the bodily shape of an adolescent girl; she saw herself with Seth's short hair and features haunted by all his previous alienations. Everywhere there was doubling, tripling, echoing, fragmentation and dispersal, fleeting as Welsh weather, faithless as water. Even that she might have said yes to, and praised his courage. They were change, flux, movement, or they were dead. That was their principle, was it not? What distressed her were his trials with colour, the way he exceeded and overrode his slight outlines with a willed carelessness, like a child's smudging and genial mess, the watery colours running and giving up their selves whilst the draught of some elusive shape ineffectually showed through. But this was a man with the keenest sharpest gaze she had ever known. She had watched him when he bore on a thing and truly saw it. She knew how exact and knowing he was: when he dashed off a likeness for a favour; and in the devising and execution of a particular pleasure. So why this allowing a world in which nothing belonged, nothing had shape or fixed identity or an outline marking it off from anything else? She remembered his axiom, and it chilled her: Whatever I
can
do will not do. He was reneging on his peculiar abilities. For what?

 

Seth took off his boots and entered on stockinged feet, quite silently, though he had no intention of stealth. Carrie and Benjamin were sitting in the window. She was buttonng her dress, he was cradling Gwen and murmuring over her. Carrie was contemplating him and her baby with a contented love. The light from outside was on the three of them. Seth stood, he saw the beautiful ordinariness of their intimacy, the daylight fact of it. He turned, quitted the room, his movement alerted them, Benjamin came out to him as he was putting his boots back on. Seth kept his face averted. Nothing, he said. I was going to show you something. Benjamin touched him on the shoulder. What then? Seth shrugged, still averted, but walked across to the stone barn, allowing Benjamin's arm along his shoulders. And step by step he felt the virtue going out of him.

In the barn, standing still, he couldn't for the life of him remember what he had wanted to show Benjamin. He was attending dumbly to the transmutation taking place in him, a sort of petrifaction, the replacement of every atom of faith with an atom of hopelessness. He stared in stupidity at the tractor. It had slumped forward on burst front tires. He motioned vaguely at it. The weights? said Benjamin. No, no, said Seth. Nothing. The weights, a couple of cast-iron pyramids, were still slung from their rings under the tractor's front bar. Stop you going over backwards, said Benjamin. He was staring at Seth, who at last looked him in the eyes. Tell Carrie, will you, Ben. I'm very sorry. Then he covered his face. The tears forced through his fingers, the wells of his hopeless sadness burst their strong restraint.