The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred P

10

Wallpaper’s All the Rage


‘The parlour, Da, we’ll have that now as a paint and wallpaper shop,’ Wilfred announced the following morning. He was frying black pudding, sausages and Specials for them both in the cast-iron frying pan.

‘Wallpaper’s all the rage,’ he continued, turning the sausages over. ‘Very fashionable it is, Da, mark my words. Especially the Paisley prints. And Mrs Bell Evans of Sheep Street was asking after some floral paper – orchids or sweet peas, I know that for a fact.’ Wilfred cracked an egg against the wall and plopped the contents into the sizzling pan. And if his da wondered why Wilfred had slept at home and not at Grace’s, he said nothing.

‘Double yolk in the pan! I reckon if we have a wallpaper shop we’ll have them coming to Narberth from as far away as Carmarthen to buy the stuff. By damn, I could see it working, Da.’ Wilfred lifted two enamel plates from the sink and plonked them on the table.

‘Well, Wilfred,’ his father replied cautiously, ‘I don’t know about wallpaper. Houses in Narberth don’t have straight walls. There’ll be no pasting wallpaper on a lopsided surface.’

‘Da,’ Wilfred said, slipping some Specials out of the frying pan and on to the plates, ‘don’t be daft. You can hang wallpaper on anything. Only need a dab of that Henkel wallpaper paste – it’s got potato flour in it that sticks it to the wall. You know Margaret White in Green Grove Farm up by Lampeter Velfrey, well, she apparently has even wallpapered the door in her water closet.’

Wilfred rubbed the forks clean on the dishcloth. ‘The salt’s on the chair, Da. And there’s more black pudding in the pan.’ Wilfred was ravenous. He’d slept deeply, ‘like a stone,’ his father would say, and woken with a raging appetite. He ate his breakfast with his face low and close to his plate.

‘And don’t be worrying about what’ll happen to the furniture in the parlour. It will all just about fit in the workshop behind the coffins.’ Wilfred’s knife and fork clinked and tinged on the plate as he cut a sausage in half.

‘Why would you want to turn the parlour into a paint and wallpaper shop when only seven years ago you’s turned the back yard into a workshop for coffins?’ his da asked, slicing the double yolk of his fried egg with a fork and dipping a Special in it. ‘It’s damp as anything round here. The wallpaper will be hanging off bedroom walls after a few weeks, and nobody will want that. It might be all right in Carmarthen or London, where people like something altogether a bit different and fancy and the houses are built of bricks, but around here? It’ll be a sight.’

Wilfred had to concede his da had a point. Suddenly he felt weary, exhausted. He watched an ant walk briskly across the table and around the tin of Saxa salt. Wallpapering lumpy walls would be difficult. And if he couldn’t get paper to stick on a wall, how could he ever … He felt too dispirited even to try and put into words the ways in which his life was wrong.

‘Is there a knife anywhere?’ his da asked. ‘Can’t eat an egg with a fork.’

‘There’s a butter knife in the butter, Da,’ Wilfred replied, still thinking about wallpaper. To stick wallpaper on the ancient walls of Narberth homes would require strong glue. And to leave the situation he was in with Grace would also need strength. He ate the last of his black pudding, lost in his thoughts, while his da rinsed the butter knife under the tap. Lies had got him into this mess, but the truth would get him out. Yesterday he had spoken truthfully to Flora; now he would speak honestly to his Grace.

‘You’s been talking to those travelling wallpaper salesmen,’ his da commented. ‘Tasty breakfast, Wilfred. It’s filling a hole nicely.’

What was that phrase? Wilfred thought. ‘Wallpapering over the cracks’. He might one day have a sideline to his undertaking business, decorating for the more fashionable ladies in Narberth and the surrounds, but it wouldn’t do to wallpaper over the cracks in the walls. To do so would be bad for business. Wilfred placed his knife and fork together on his plate. No, he would only wallpaper on strong plaster and a well-held wall. And nor, he decided, would he wallpaper over the cracks in his life.



Grace felt flushed and somewhat uncomfortable in the armchair where she was dozing. Her lower back and hips ached and her limbs felt heavy and swollen. She saw her reflection in the tainted mirror above Madoc’s chest of drawers. Her fingers, holding the book, were bloated, and the skin under her chin was fuller. She was getting fatter and she felt a sense of panic. She picked at some lint on her skirt. She had been sitting all morning in the armchair in the attic reading, biding time. That’s what she did these days, bide her time, engage with time and forwardness: relentless and ruthless time. Pregnancy was showing her that – that life went one way and one way only. And it took a woman with it. Life was absolute in its forwardness.

Before all this – she looked down at her body – she’d thought her life was fine, good; now that old life, the one where she used to have garden picnics, sing in St Andrew’s Church choir and tend her brother’s bees, that life had an innocence to it, a perfect wholeness it would never have again. Now her life was formed and set and she was married. There would be the … baby, her baby, though it didn’t feel like hers. It was a baby that was forced into her, against her wishes. If she had struggled she would have been forced violently. So she hadn’t struggled. She had frozen instead. So she had been forced to acquiesce, silently, mutely. I won’t think about it. Don’t think about it, she told herself. She had promised herself she wouldn’t think about it. But her body ached. What had happened was with her now – had taken over her life and was taking over her body. Wilfred hated her, her mother was enraged with her, her father was stone cold towards her, and she hated it growing within her. 32 High Street was a house of contempt. It was as if she had been filled up with hatred, and now that hatred was seeping out of her and contaminating the circle of people surrounding her.

No wonder she couldn’t read Jane Austen. Those girls, Emma, Lydia, Marianne, Fanny, going to balls and dances then falling in love with Colonels. Grace couldn’t focus and she put her book on the side-table. She would go and collect honey. But she felt strange, as if something was happening and something was shifting. The air was oppressive, and as she breathed in she felt a quiver of panic run through her. She would collect honey – it would sweeten her bitter mood. She put Jane Austen back on the shelf.



The bee had stung her! One of her bees had stung her! Grace had been checking on the hives. There was some honey to collect, not much. These days she was grateful to the bees for their friendliness and lack of judgement. Bees didn’t care. All these bees, hovering around the irises and landing on the lavender, had only one wife between them – the engorged and adored queen bee. Of what concern to bees were mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and husbands and wives? They made honey, fed larvae, found flowers, on and on across millennia, while she floundered, fatter by the day, trapped and unhappily wed day in, day out and even through the night, feeling desperate. Bees had existed for millions of years; she had been alive for twenty-four. These bees’ ancestors had lived long before her, and their offspring would be around long after her life was over. Bees, with their eternity of business and productivity, gave her a sense of perspective. They had made honey for what might as well be eternity as far as Grace, with her short lifespan, was concerned.

Grace had been thinking these thoughts, feeling lethargic, when she had been stung. The sting was on her hand, on the fleshy pad between her thumb and forefinger. The bee must have climbed up through the small gap between her sleeve and glove. Feeling itself endangered, trapped and fearing death, it had killed itself by stinging her. It hurt. Grace pulled off the glove and flicked the bee away. It hovered drunkenly. It would soon be dead. Grace saw the dark hook-like barb in her flesh and after a few moments of painless shock, her thumb then her fingers began to throb. Tears came to her eyes, long-held tears in need of an outlet.

She was shocked. The bees had not stung her before – she had been proud of that, boasted to herself that she had never, ever been stung. When patients coming to the house for her father’s surgery asked, ‘Are you not scared of all those bees?’ she had been able to answer confidently, back in the days when she had been confident, ‘No, I’m not scared of them.’ Then when they enquired, ‘Not even when they sting you?’ Grace had been able to announce fearlessly, as if commenting on the loyalty of her bees, ‘I have never been stung.’

People often asked her about her beekeeper’s outfit. Did she wear a hat? Didn’t she ever worry that a bee might get inside her suit or under the netting? Didn’t bees kill people? Grace answered calmly. She knew it wasn’t the protective clothing she wore that kept her safe. Bees were intelligent creatures; if a bee wanted to sting or a whole hive wanted to attack, it would. It had nothing to do with what one wore. Her hive didn’t sting her because all twelve thousand of the bees knew who she was, recognized her gloved hand on the cedar slats not as a thief but as a friend. They let her have their honey freely; she didn’t steal it from them. If they’d thought she was a thief, they would have unleashed themselves. As she reached out to the bees, the bees reached out to her, landing on the white suit, buzzing calmly around her.

Grace shook her hand to dispel some of the pain. Her hand was reddening and the skin around the sting was swelling into a lump. The bee, now resting on the lawn, had sacrificed its life to sting her with its poison. Its fragile body was agitated. Grace’s hand was hurting and she could feel her whole body beginning to ache. All is not well, Grace realized, looking at the nearly still, almost dead bee lying by her foot. All is not well.



‘Da! Da!’ Wilfred called, later that afternoon. ‘Where are you?’ A muffled reply came from inside the water closet. Wilfred walked through the house to the yard where the small brick hut with the corrugated iron roof stood. The closet could do with a lick of lime-wash because there was fungus on the outside and the white walls were bubbling with old, mould-attacked paint.

‘Da!’ Wilfred shouted through the door. His da was in there for an hour every Sunday afternoon and Wilfred didn’t want to wait.

‘Good God, Wilfred! What do you want? Can’t I have a moment’s peace?’

‘Da, I want to talk to you now.’

‘Well, give me a minute, boyo.’ Eventually Wilfred heard a bucket of earth being poured down the toilet and the door opened, and his father emerged doing up the buckle on his trouser belt.

‘What is it now? What is the world coming to, if a man can’t even respond to a call of nature without being rushed?’

‘Da, I want to tell you something.’ Wilfred breathed deeply. ‘Da …’ But he didn’t continue. He kneeled down to do up his shoelace, and when it was done, he stayed kneeling, looking vacantly into the distance.

‘You got me off the lavatory,’ his da tucked the newspaper under his arm, ‘and now you’re not telling me.’

Wilfred mumbled, ‘Da, there’s a woman.’

‘Are you talking about Grace?’

‘No.’

‘Another woman?’

Wilfred nodded, put his knuckles to the ground and pushed himself up.

‘So you’re telling me there’s another woman and it’s not Grace?’

Wilfred’s eyes met his da’s, and he nodded.

‘So that’s why you’ve been so unhappy … but Wilfred …?’

Wilfred knew his father understood what it was to love a woman and order himself in life around a woman, and how his marriage – even in widowhood – had sustained him and given him joy. When his wife died, his da wanted to go with her. His da lived because Wilfred lived, but his heart was gone into the grave or the heavens – wherever it was the dead went. He only dug the graveyard because he wanted to lie down in the earth by his wife, and he only studied the stars because he was looking for his wife among them.

‘But Wilfred, we both know there is a baby coming,’ his da said. Wilfred’s face clouded. ‘You must care for your child, Wilfred. You must care for Grace. It is what a man does.’

Wilfred put his hand to his forehead.

‘But Da …’ He looked at his father. He had lived at 11 Market Street for twenty-seven years, for all of his life. He and his da had walked around naked, cooked cockles and Specials with no clothes on, each taken a weekly dip on a Sunday evening in the tin bath on the rug in front of the hearth. They had lived in their small home in an unabashed and intimate way, the way a family lived, but they had never talked about things like this.

‘What is it, Wilfred, my son?’ His da looked at him and watched and listened.

Wilfred’s heart felt like a boulder in his chest, like one of those at the cove. His heart felt large and heavy and difficult and impossible to carry within him any more, so hindered was he by the secrets and lies of himself and others.

He looked at his patient, kind da who thought only of the world to come and his wife waiting for him. There was a soft, gentle silence. The door of the WC banged from time to time in the breeze and next-door’s pig was grunting in its pigscot. The sky was playing with the clouds. They stood there in their small yard with the pissabeds, the bellybuttons, the moss and the ivy, the vegetable patch and the overgrown and unkempt flowerbed that was a mass of green plants and small flowers. His da was waiting, listening; he wasn’t judging him – hadn’t even judged him or mentioned it when he understood that Grace was expecting and something was very awry, even though his da saw how unhappy he was. That’s what listening was, Wilfred realized; listening was not judging.

His da was so familiar to him he was almost a part of him. His da was just his da and was always there, like the mist on the hills around Narberth that came up from the earth and one walked within it, barely even seeing it. And like the mist, his da had no shape, no specificity; Wilfred had lived enveloped in his gentleness that was safe and familiar. But right now, there in front of him, with his light blue watery eyes, his lined face etched with experience, and his braces hanging from his trousers, was this utterly separate man. Wilfred saw that, after all, they were two distinct men, with two different lives and each with their own woman to love.

Wilfred stood up. He looked at the man in front of him and said, ‘It is not my child.’



After the revelation, Wilfred did the washing up. Back in the kitchen, he filled the sink with boiling water from the whistling copper kettle, and collected the plates and cups, throwing the loose tea in the bin. He began washing, the bubbles mushrooming out of the white ceramic sink.

‘Not your child, then?’ his da asked.

‘No.’

‘No, not your child,’ his da repeated. He was tidying up the newspapers on the table, but was too distracted to do it properly.

‘It wasn’t me, Da,’ Wilfred said. ‘It couldn’t be.’ Wilfred was accused but he was innocent. The room fell quiet.

‘So it’s somebody else’s child, then?’

‘Yes,’ Wilfred said, scrunching up the lid of the salt pack and putting it on the shelf. ‘I don’t know whose child it is. I have no idea.’

‘No. No,’ his da said, shaking his head.

‘It must be someone,’ Wilfred said.

‘Yes.’ His da nodded thoughtfully. Wilfred rubbed yesterday’s dinner-plates vigorously with the grey dishcloth. Steam was billowing up from the sink.

‘Grace will know,’ his da said. ‘Women know who the father of their child is. Women have secrets; they hold them inside themselves, like they hold a child.’ His da had never spoken like this before. This was entirely new.

While his father dried the plates, Wilfred wiped the steam from the windowpane above the sink with his hand. He looked out to the green hills beyond, the hills that curved so confidently and easily, like a well-fed woman. Sometimes Wilfred wondered if under those Welsh hills there were great women, giantesses, who had lain down on the earth in ancient times and fallen asleep, and then the earth had crept over them, over their breasts and their hips and the dips of their waists and tapering up their strong thighs. And then the green grass had grown over them, covering them with a fertile blanket of fresh plants that kept them warm and hidden.

‘What are you going to do, Wilfred?’ his da enquired. His da looked at him, and Wilfred knew for the first time that he was alone and that he, like his da, like everyone else, was utterly alone in the world in the deepest sense that it was possible to be alone. And everyone else was alone, too.



It felt wrong, Wilfred thought, as he unhooked his belt, to get into bed with this woman. He stepped out of his trousers, picked them up from the green rug and folded them. It felt wrong to untrouser himself in her presence – too intimate. He pulled his necktie from one side to the other with one hand, tugged it apart then unfastened his black cufflinks and began undoing his shirt. He would undress here this once, then never again.

Wilfred sat in what once must have been Grace’s brother’s chair, took his socks off and stuffed them in his shoes. There was something easier, Wilfred thought, something more honest about speaking the truth when he wasn’t wearing a tailored suit and waistcoat. A suit was armour for a man, in the way that corsets and brassières were shields for women. Barefooted now, he pulled on his striped navy pyjamas. The cotton was soft and yielding; a relief after the hard contours of his three-piece suit. He tied the cord of the trousers then hesitated for a moment. He would get in the bed, he would lie there and – he was determined – he would speak. Wilfred smoothed out then rolled up his necktie and put it on the dressing-table.

He hadn’t said anything to Grace and Grace hadn’t said anything to him, not for twenty-four days and nights. Wilfred took his trousers off the chair, sat back down and looked at the wall ahead with its brown wallpaper. He ran his hand through his hair. All the words he had learned from his red dictionary – well, the A section at least – and autodestruct that he was, or was it autodidact? – it would still be hard to speak. Wilfred’s newly acquired vocabulary wasn’t helping much when it came to saying the most important things. Even simple words were difficult to use when the conversation was so enormous. In fact, the enormity of the truth was so great no words seemed big enough to address it.

The chair creaked as he shifted and he noticed Grace’s leg move slightly under the patchwork quilt. She was awake, on her side with her back to him, and he could see her right eyelid close and open anxiously. He thought about Grace. She was a woman as Flora was a woman, had the same vulnerability and that same strength. Women, Wilfred thought, had an inexplicable strength, despite their delicacy: it was the strength of endurance. They often lived longer than men; he knew that from his work.

As he sat there on the mahogany chair in the corner of the attic for much, much longer than he had intended to, thoughts came into Wilfred’s mind, new and surprising thoughts – ones he hadn’t considered before. Had Grace been suffering too? Yes. Perhaps it wasn’t that she was seeing someone. Perhaps something had happened. He might imagine if it had, she would be hysterical, but she was too well brought up and disciplined for that. Certainly she’d lied, or not told the truth, and he’d been bullied into marrying her because of her dishonesty, but that wasn’t the same as being the sort of girl he had thought she was. Because she had never seemed that sort of girl before, and she hadn’t been that sort of girl with him.

He thought back to the picnic in her garden, the bees from her hives buzzing around them, her dress, yellow like pollen, and the feminine way she had served the dessert in the china bowls. There was the care that she had evidently put into the spread: the egg and beetroot sandwiches with fluffy white bread and cold butter, the dainty, precisely-cut triangles with the crusts trimmed off. Really, her dress had been demure. Wilfred felt humbled by realizing the truth. Grace’s yellow dress had covered her breasts; it was Wilfred’s lust, his own desire that made it seem otherwise. It was my imagination, Wilfred said to himself. I have looked for and imagined what I wanted to see. It was not the dress of what the lads at the Rugby Club would call a hussy. Wilfred didn’t think hussies wore yellow. In fact, he was certain that hussies wore knee-length dresses and brassières trimmed with lace. And lipstick – a lot of lipstick. He couldn’t imagine that Grace wore underwear with lace; there certainly wasn’t any lace on her white nightdress. It was as plain as could be.

Wilfred knew then that while Grace had not been honest with him, he in turn had not been honest with himself. Grace was not what he had painted her to be in his head. Grace was a nice girl, the doctor’s daughter, she kept bees – granted that was a little unusual, but it didn’t mean she was a … was a … whore. There. He had admitted it to himself. Commonplace whore was the phrase he had used to himself as he stood in the register office. He hadn’t been proud of thinking that, but he’d thought it. ‘Commonplace whore,’ he had said decisively in his mind as Grace had made her vows. It wasn’t a nice thing to call her, but he’d thought it, he admitted to himself ashamedly. But what if he was wrong? Wilfred rubbed the stubble on his face.

Maybe that was why Grace was in her condition. Perhaps she had been spooning with some spiffy limey. Or perhaps there had been a man, one who was stronger than her. These were new thoughts to Wilfred and disturbing ones. But who could it be? Surely not someone in Narberth? The boys in the Rugby Club were hefty but they were a decent lot. But then nearly any man could overpower a woman; he wouldn’t have to play for Narberth Rugby Football Club. All the young men in Narberth would be stronger than Grace – but that didn’t tell Wilfred who it was. He thought she’d been seeing Madoc’s friend Sidney, but he wasn’t sure. He was confounded. Only Grace knew, and Grace was lost in silence.

Wilfred looked at Grace, giving her more than a glance this time. Her body was folded up beneath the white patchwork quilt that was drawn up to her shoulders, tension emanating from her as if she was trying to hold herself in, make herself thinner and smaller than she was – as small as she used to be. Her curled body was no longer that of the light, elegant young woman who had served him trifle in the garden of this house. This was the body of a woman, another human being who was so strained she would surely snap soon, like a pane of very thin ice trodden on. In that moment, Wilfred’s anger with Grace dissolved.

That’s all she is: another human being. Like me. She is drowning, too, he realized, as Flora had been drowning. It had been many weeks since Wilfred had felt any softness towards Grace; indeed, his anger for her had felt more like an immovable hatred. He stood up from the chair, stepped across the brown rug and got into the bed. He didn’t know what he would say, only that he would speak.



He’s going to speak to me, Grace sensed. Wilfred, Grace knew, had for weeks been too enraged to talk to her and so they hadn’t conversed once since they made their wedding vows. Grace wondered if this silent fury was unusual. Possibly not. Married life was hard – she knew that now. It could be an imprisonment without love, and some marriages were made in hell just as surely as others could be made in heaven. Grace was trying to lie perfectly still, pretending she was asleep, and her breath against the quilt was humid on her face. She had thought that marrying Wilfred would be an answer, and it was true she was still alive, but she was beginning to realize that it was not the answer she had thought it would be. She was still confined and had been these last three months or so, and it was nothing to do with marriage. People said – some people said, the ones who were probably unhappily coupled – that marriage was a jail. It certainly was for her husband. But for Grace it was her body that was the prison.

She was aware that Wilfred had got into bed but he hadn’t curled into a tight ball at the very edge of the mattress as he had every night previously. Instead he was supine, his legs slightly spread. He was unexpectedly taking up his half of the mattress. Grace stayed on her side, her back to him, surreptitiously pulling the white quilt higher until it reached the curve of her earlobe. Wilfred was definitely going to say something. He might want to speak to her but Grace now knew something of what men were like. Men had strength, for better or for worse; men had a power and there were times when they weren’t afraid to use it. And Grace felt that soon, in the next few moments or minutes, Wilfred was going to use that strength.



On the count of three, I’ll speak. One, two, three, Wilfred counted in his head. After three. One, two, three. But still he said nothing. One, two, three. Four. Five … The air in the bedroom was charged. He sensed Grace knew he was going to speak. There had been an eternity of silence between them: it was time to speak.

‘Grace!’ His voice boomed against the profound quiet of the night. Had he shouted? Maybe Dr and Mrs Reece had heard him. No, he had spoken firmly, certainly, but no one except Grace would have heard. Now he had spoken once he would have to say more.

‘Grace.’ She didn’t reply. Perhaps she wasn’t awake. Perhaps he had finally said something only for her to be fast asleep, after all that. But then Grace’s foot moved slightly and he knew she was alert and listening.

‘There is something I want to say.’ He didn’t mean to sound like that, like an undertaker. This time his voice was quieter. He definitely didn’t want Dr Reece and Mrs Reece to hear, particularly not Dr Reece.

‘There are matters which it is important that we discuss.’ Wilfred paused. Grace was tight and didn’t move.

‘I am sorry I sound so formal … like an undertaker. I don’t know how to say what I need to say. Or ask the question I want to ask.’ There was a pause. ‘But I am sorry, Grace.’



Grace knew instinctively from the way Wilfred had said, ‘I am sorry,’ that he wasn’t only apologizing for his inarticulacy. He was apologizing for something larger, for how he’d been, possibly even apologizing to her for her life. He was saying that he was sorry for her, for how her life was now. Tears sprang quickly from Grace’s eyes and on to the pillowcase.

There was silence again but it was of a different nature from the earlier, suffocating wordlessness that had lain between them. These last weeks had been chokingly full of Wilfred’s unspoken, angry words. This new quietness, though, was peaceable; she could sense the beginnings of a calm within it and even the intimations of an answer, though she had no understanding of what that answer could be.

It was her turn to speak. Wilfred had broken his deep silence, now she must break hers. The silence between them was melting, like the white ice on a frozen river breaking up, cracking violently, then floating downstream to a warmer sea. Yes, she would speak.

‘Madoc,’ she whispered.