The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred P

11

The Willow Pattern


Wilfred hammered the nails into the wood with fury. The plank would break if he kept hammering like this. Flam! Flam! Flam! He threw his claw hammer down on the iron nail with huge force, then dragged his forearm roughly across his brow to wipe off the perspiration with his sleeve. Fat circles of dark sweat bloomed from his armpits. He took off his shirt. The cedar would fracture, shatter. Then the side of the coffin would widen and break. And he would have to replace the whole damn panel again.

I don’t care, he thought. I don’t care if this bloody coffin splits. I don’t care if this bloody coffin breaks its ruddy sides. He had never hit a nail in wood with so much force. Mr Auden would turn in his grave. ‘Wood, Wilfred. Treat it with love,’ he had cautioned. ‘An undertaker caresses the wood in his hands. A hundred years the growing, an hour in the felling, a week in the shaping and an eternity with the deceased.’ But right now Wilfred needed to bang and thump, and this wood here would have to take it.

Madoc! he thought. Madoc with his ruddy Army uniform and his marvellous West Wales Board Higher School Certificate and his bloody Sergeant stripes. And those bloody fancy-dress costumes he wore at Narberth carnival. Bloody, bloody Army. Madoc? Madoc! Never in all his born days …

It had not occurred to Wilfred during those turbulent, wakeful nights as he went through one after another of the players in the Rugby Football Club and eventually every young man in Narberth, that it might be Grace’s brother. It simply had not occurred to him. This was Narberth! This was 1924. They weren’t Stone Age people. Or cannibals! Sweat from his temples ran into his eyes. He hammered another nail into the corner. The timber creaked, complained and threatened to burst.

Last night when Grace had whispered Madoc’s name, Wilfred, in that first split second, decided she was lying – but there was something in the plain and broken way in which Grace had spoken her brother’s name that told Wilfred she was speaking the truth.

‘Hell of a noise in there,’ his da called from the back door. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’

‘Nothing, Da.’

‘Well, it doesn’t sound like nothing to me.’

‘Making a coffin.’

‘Are you killing someone to go in it as well?’

Wilfred held the hammer in both hands, pausing. He took another nail from the box. He rammed it into the wood.

After Grace had told him, he had lain awake perturbed, desperate to understand, while Grace had slept in a way that appeared almost serene, as if released from an overwhelming burden she had been carrying, and relief had given her respite. She slept, but Wilfred was utterly awake; his mind charged and clouded with incomprehension. What would the Revd Waldo Williams say? Dr Reece? Mrs Reece? He imagined telling Flora. He tried to lie still, but couldn’t. It was too big, the truth of it too enormous to understand or envisage. All night he felt fevered, the skin on his face burned, the bones in his head ratcheted tighter and his legs moved restlessly between the sheets. Madoc. It was all he could think about and he was unable to rest with the truth of it – and he knew it to be true.

Madoc.



‘Doctor Reece?’ Wilfred called. He knocked on the panelled door to his father-in-law’s surgery. There was no answer.

‘Doctor Reece,’ Wilfred stated with more resolve. There was still no reply, but this did not deter him. The man might be a doctor of medicine, he might be older than him, he might even be his father-in-law, but Wilfred would not be intimidated. Wilfred would not be bullied, not this time. That was over now. Unbidden, he opened the door and stepped into the room.

Dr Reece didn’t look up. Instead he put the lid on his fountain pen with a snap, replaced the Mont Blanc on his ledger and took his blotter between his hands. Relations between the two men had been exceedingly strained since the early summer when Dr Reece had come round to 11 Market Street and waited a whole warm, sunny afternoon for Wilfred to return home. Since then there had been no small talk – no talking of any kind. Until now.

As hard as it was to imagine, seeing the doctor’s aged face, Wilfred knew that Dr Reece had once been a young man who had all the thoughts that all young men have, and that he would have been sweet on Mrs Reece, when she was younger and fleshier. But Grace’s father had assumed that Wilfred had had these same feelings towards his daughter and had acted on those thoughts, made them a reality, with the resultant consequences. That, outside the strictures of marriage, was unforgivable.

Wilfred coughed, but Dr Reece ignored him. This man is a doctor, Wilfred said to himself, looking around the dark front room that was the surgery. He must know far more about the birds and the bees. He must have studied such things in books at university. Indeed, Wilfred thought, Dr Reece would know more about the matter than anyone else in Narberth – theoretically, of course. This man here, his arms folded like a shield in front of his chest, sitting at his large, heavy desk, so certain that Wilfred had nothing worthwhile to say, knew more about intercourse than any of the other three hundred or so people in Narberth. But he didn’t know about his son. He doesn’t know that, Wilfred thought.

‘Doctor Reece, I want an annulment.’

His father-in-law looked up at him with his piercing eyes and snorted. He smoothed his hair slowly and moved his stethoscope to the corner of his desk.

‘From Grace,’ Wilfred continued. He was no longer cowed by Dr Reece’s silence. Nor would he be daunted if the doctor spoke as if Wilfred had said a ridiculous thing.

‘Of the marriage.’

Dr Reece glanced briefly at Wilfred.

‘Because the marriage was not consummated.’

It was awkward indeed, to talk about this thing with a man, even a medical man, about his daughter. Awkward? Impolite? Would those be the right words to describe it, Wilfred wondered. No, not really: this was beyond impolite, beyond normal conversation.

‘And how will you prove the marriage is unconsummated?’ the doctor asked, emphasizing the word ‘prove’. He was a scientist; he wanted proof. Wilfred looked back at him, held his eyes steadily. Wilfred knew that Dr Reece expected to win, was used to winning. Grace’s father was certain of his power and practised in the art of bullying.

‘I shan’t,’ Wilfred admitted. He looked down at the floor. A bird flew past the window, creating a quick shadow. Dr Reece picked up his prescription notepad and moved it purposefully to the centre of his desk. Wilfred could see he had been dismissed because of his perceived ignorance and stupidity, and that the doctor was about to resume his paperwork.

‘I won’t prove it to you, Doctor Reece, nor to the magistrate at the courthouse.’ Dr Reece looked at him as if he was dull. Wilfred continued: ‘Grace will admit it.’

The grandfather clock ticked. In a couple of minutes it would chime quarter past three. Almost time for afternoon surgery. Wilfred looked at Dr Reece but Dr Reece looked away. Feigning disinterest, he picked up his pen again, unclipped the lid and held the nib above the notepad. He is going to write something, Wilfred thought, but the pen stayed poised above the paper for one, two, three, four ticks of the clock, and Wilfred realized that Reece didn’t know what to write or what to say.



Dinner that evening was the first occasion the four of them had eaten together since the wedding. Oddly, Mrs Reece wasn’t slamming the crockery down on the table. Grace had often wondered why the dinner-plates had not smashed, so vehemently in the past week had her mother slapped them on the table, splotting the gravy over the table linen, then wailing at the mess it had made, not once conceding that she had caused the splodges, not admitting her own culpability.

Bone china, Grace thought, looking at her dinner-plate, breaks less often than the bones it is made of, which was good, as her mother’s tight, hard grasp would have shattered weaker plates.

Grace knew Wilfred was at the dinner-table not because he wanted to stay married: Wilfred still wanted what he had wanted for several months – his freedom from her. Wilfred was here this evening as he thought her mother and her father couldn’t and wouldn’t say anything to her while he, her husband, her protector of sorts, was sitting at the dinner-table. Wilfred was different now. He’d changed. He’d become stronger in the way he spoke and in how he held himself. Wilfred had even sat next to Grace. On the other side of Wilfred there was the empty chair for Madoc, her brother. The chair was waiting for when he next came back on leave from the Welsh Guards.

With her husband here, Grace hoped her parents wouldn’t proselytize, that there would be no rage – no sharp words from her mother. Grace knew Wilfred was buying her time, sitting with her while her parents, dumbstruck, reeled through the first and worst of their shock. By the time Wilfred had gone, when he was no longer sitting here eating chicken, boiled potatoes and mashed swede, her parents would – she hoped – be slightly calmer. He was protecting her from them. That is what husbands do, Grace realized, even unwilling husbands.

‘Please could you pass the salt,’ Wilfred said, ‘salt for the meat.’ Neither Dr Reece nor his wife moved, Mrs Reece pretending not to hear, Dr Reece sitting stone still, like the statue of a biblical king. Grace reached across her father.

‘Excuse me,’ she said faintly, and picked up the small, three-legged saltcellar.

‘Thank you,’ said Wilfred, shaking the salt liberally on the chicken pieces. ‘Very nice dinner, Mrs Reece.’ Grace thought that Wilfred didn’t eat proper meals very often; that he and his da probably didn’t know how to cook.

Wilfred was the only one around the table able to eat. Grace felt nauseous, as she did continually. Her mother, who was even thinner, even sharper these last few weeks, was pretending to starve herself in protest at the injustice meted out to her through her daughter. Her place setting was empty. And her father? He looked too lost to eat. Her father wasn’t used to losing or being told he was wrong, but Grace supposed he knew enough not to fight against a man strengthened by the power of the truth. It would be futile. Wilfred, though, ate his dinner like a man offered a reprieve. He put the last potato on to his fork with his knife, pushed it around in the gravy and put it into his mouth. A lesser man, Grace thought, could be triumphant now because he had been wronged, but Wilfred seemed humble, just hungry.

‘Thank you, Mrs Reece. That was very nice,’ he said. Grace saw that Wilfred was grateful for the meal and that he had an appetite again. Her mother would have begrudged him the food and its cost. Mrs Reece nodded, unable to lower herself to speak to him. Grace got up to leave the table.

‘Right,’ said Wilfred. ‘If you’ll excuse me …’ That had been the first dinner she had ever eaten with Wilfred. No doubt it would be their last supper, thought Grace. Wilfred stood up and put his crumpled napkin on the table.

‘I’m off to see my da,’ he announced.

His heart has been with his da all along, Grace thought, watching him.

‘Sit down,’ Dr Reece commanded. Wilfred saw the ropey cords of the man’s neck leap out and twitch. ‘You’re staying here.’

Wilfred instinctively tensed and clenched his fists. Dr Reece was his father-in-law. He was a doctor, he was powerful – it was true. Wilfred knew that it often depended on Dr Reece whether someone ended up dead and in his workshop or not. That was power. But Wilfred was different now. He had met Flora Myffanwy and he had become, to his own mind, through recent experiences and something newly forged within him, something he couldn’t articulate but that he could best describe as ‘a purveyor of superior funerals’. He was rooted in the world, felt his place in it. In his mind’s eye he imagined his feet growing roots that surged into the earth, forming a net of tendrils spreading deep and wide into the Narberth soil, holding him here, holding him upright. Wilfred did not sit down.

Dr Reece’s face turned a deeper shade of puce. He put his large hands on the table as if to rise to his feet. Grace averted her eyes and stepped back. Grace’s mother snatched the china tureen from the table.

‘I am your father-in-law. You will do what I say.’ But Dr Reece’s words sounded papery and lightweight as if they could dally and float on the breeze.

Wilfred straightened his back. He had his da, his work, his friends at the Rugby Club, the people he knew in Narberth. And there was Flora Myffanwy. He was supported by the strength of those he loved. They would all have something to say – probably not all of them to his face – but they would buffer and hold him. So Dr Reece could bellow in fury – and Wilfred in his health and strength, his youth and most of all, in his rootedness, would not succumb or snap. Wilfred pulled back his shoulders.

‘Yes, Doctor Reece, you have been my father-in-law.’ He met Grace’s eyes. ‘But I am my own man.’

Dr Reece leaned right back in his chair and was rendered speechless, seemingly as much by the strength that resonated from Wilfred’s body as by his words. Wilfred felt himself to be like a tree with inner rings of new growth that were hidden deep inside, but nevertheless present and holding up a strapping trunk easily and naturally.

‘Do as I say.’

‘No.’ It was the straining of Dr Reece’s neck, Wilfred thought. No one with any power ever had to strain their neck.

Mrs Reece was frantically scouring the draining board with steel wool. She repeatedly dabbed her eyes in a fury of self-pity and contempt. Well, Wilfred thought, she could dab her eyes and she could cry. The drama and self-righteousness would feed her for years. She would have an occupation now in her small life.

‘Wilfred Price,’ Mrs Reece interrupted shrilly, ‘what would your mother say?’

Wilfred was thrown: his mother, so absent from his whole life – he hadn’t thought what she would say and hadn’t known her at all to even be able to have a sense of her response.

‘My mother,’ Wilfred replied, once he had centred himself, ‘is dead.’ And I bet Grace wishes her mother was dead too, he added to himself.

‘You would have killed your mother with this. And your father broke his back working to look after you.’

Broke his back? Had his da broken his back for him? An image of his da came to him: his da was stooped, it was true. He didn’t want his da to break his back for him.

‘Yes, see? I am right – I can tell by your face,’ said Mrs Reece, with a look that, to Wilfred, seemed like one of utter hatred.

‘Worked like a slave for you.’ She put the corner of the hanky to her eye.

Then it occurred to Wilfred that he could say, ‘It is your son who has caused all this. I know what Madoc did to Grace.’ And watch all the veneer of respectability, pretence and snobbery crack and fall away like carefully applied, generations-old varnish. It wasn’t me; it was your son. I would like to inform you … how would he say it? How did you inform people of the most devastating and unacceptable fact that they would ever hear?

Wilfred considered speaking. He looked at Dr Reece sitting at the head of the table, with his power and his title, who had immediately assumed it was Wilfred and judged him harshly. Yet Wilfred knew that somewhere inside that formal façade there was a man who watched over the people of Narberth, who rubbed his hands together to warm them before placing them on the tissue-thin skin of elderly people with arthritic joints, who cared that the people of their small town were rosy-cheeked and sturdy, were born alive, lived robustly and died without too much pain. A man who drove as fast as he could, but also carefully, to patients who were sick at night in nearby farms. A good man, with Madoc for a son.

The dishes clacked as Mrs Reece scoured them in a fever. Wilfred looked at Mrs Reece, deliberating what he would say. She had an empty life of housewifery with nothing to peg herself on but her husband’s position and her son’s rank. But now there was the agony of her daughter’s fall. Madoc. Five letters: Madoc – that’s all he need say. Suddenly he understood Grace’s trust and courage in telling him the raw, skinless truth. And Grace’s dignity in not telling anyone else.

Madoc. The name was on the tip of his tongue. No. And he walked out of the door.



If Grace had been surprised that Wilfred had stayed for dinner, she was even more astonished later that evening when she heard the stiff latch on the attic door lift and realized it was Wilfred coming in. He had not come back the other night and there was no need for him to pretend – he could go home to his father’s again tonight, to his kind da who loved him so much and to whom Wilfred was the world. Grace, in not speaking the whole truth, had deprived Wilfred’s da of his son and of his son’s happiness. Grace winced at her cruelty, more cruelty again. It went on and on; intentionally, unintentionally, it didn’t matter. The end was the same: broken people left in pieces, lives fractured, love bludgeoned.

She saw Wilfred undressing out of the corner of her eye. Wilfred’s father would be pleased – over the moon – to have his son back with him, though Grace doubted he would say anything but instead would keep his counsel, as wise people often did. And even if Wilfred did one day marry, he would be wounded from this failed marriage. He deserves a wife, Grace thought, who loves him and does not use him for her own ends.

She glanced at him as he undid his cufflinks. It occurred to Grace that she didn’t know much about Wilfred, not really, despite being married to him. She knew he liked trifle with whipped cream. That he had liked her yellow dress. Perhaps he liked yellow dresses. Perhaps he liked yellow. She knew that at night he put his socks in his shoes, one in each, but Grace suspected all men did that with their socks at nighttime, in the bedroom, ready for the morning. Grace didn’t know much that was personal or intimate about Wilfred: he had told her nothing, she hadn’t asked anything.

Though she felt as though she was married to a stranger, it would also be true that once their marriage was annulled – when the court had ratified it – she would always have once been married to Wilfred. He would always be her first, probably only, husband. Even in twenty years’ time, in 1944, which was unimaginably distant in the future, when this all might possibly – possibly – not be the end of the world any more, it would still be true that she, Grace Amelia Reece of 32 High Street, Narberth, had once been married to Wilfred Aubrey Price, undertaker.

So she felt calm and kindly, resigned even, when Wilfred, her once and soon not to be husband got into their marriage bed – the bed that had once belonged to her brother. And when Wilfred moved into the centre of their bed, that no man’s land where neither of them had dared to lie for the whole of their married life, Grace let Wilfred take her in his arms and hold her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.



It was the middle of the night. Wilfred was asleep, but Grace hadn’t slept. Over the long hours of the night, her resignation had turned to anxiety and her anxiety into appalling anguish.

Eventually she said, ‘Wilfred … Wilfred, can I ask?’

He stirred. Soon they were both lying on their backs in the dusky half-light of the room, looking at the ceiling, the eaves, the beam and sickly brown wallpaper. She hated this bedroom, Madoc’s old room, with his boxes of Snakes and Ladders and Tiddlywinks on the shelf and his suit hanging loosely, like the clothes of a ghost, in the wardrobe. She hated this room in which her life had happened.

‘I am afraid, Wilfred. If you stay, I will be a good wife to you. A kind wife, and I won’t be like my mother, and we could have a child together. Children.’ Her voice sounded needy and her words were fast. ‘I would be kind and good and I would follow our wedding vows and I would be kind always.’ She was trying to strike a bargain, like she sold honey in Narberth, to sell him herself and her life as if it were honey in a jar to offer, something that he might want.

‘And we could live with your father, I’d be happy to live with your father, and I would look after him and clean and keep the house tidy, and … and if you show me how, I can help you laying out the bodies and getting them ready and …’ Her words were gabbled, her eyes wide, her heart beating. ‘And I would take care of the baby and it would be no trouble and it wouldn’t get in the way, Wilfred … and … and I will pay my way by selling honey. And I could even train to be a teacher at the school because I always like reading. And you wouldn’t need to visit my mother, or see any of my family, ever. And I would like you, Wilfred. And I wouldn’t carry on with other men. And we could say to my father that it doesn’t need to be … annulled.’

She put her hand between his legs. He gathered and tightened almost immediately. She sat up, took off her white nightdress and put her hand back where it had been. She heard Wilfred swallow and moved next to him.

‘We would be happy, not like my mother and father, but like your ma and da.’ She slightly tightened her grip. She had never touched that place on a man before, never even seen it, only glimpsed it once, a part of it, but she wouldn’t think of that. She took Wilfred’s hand and placed it between her legs. Wilfred moved on to his side and faced her and put his hand on her flank. Only once, Grace thought, and the marriage couldn’t be annulled. Grace knew that doing this only once with a man could change the world.

An hour or so ago she had crept out of bed and put red lip-stain on her lips, had rubbed it on surreptitiously after combing her hair, even dabbed her wrists with Chanel N° 5, the new French perfume she’d bought for her wedding, before half-undoing her nightdress.

She shifted closer to Wilfred, till her breasts were brushing against the hair on his chest and she felt the muscles in his arms tighten. She pushed aside the flies in his pyjamas, making room for her hand to move. She thought that maybe she should move her hand. She didn’t know what to do, but Wilfred was responding to her tentative gestures. He put his hand on one breast, then quickly across to the other one.

‘Oh,’ he said, as if he was sinking into himself.

He pushed into her and she turned to lie on her back. Wilfred, lying over her, pulled up his pyjama jacket, freeing his stomach, and then he reached down and tried to undo the knot in the cord but he couldn’t do it with one hand. He rolled on to his back. Grace noticed the intensity and heat in his face while he tugged at the knot. She had seen once before that look of utter focus, that unconsciousness of everything around him when a man was gripped by the tautness in his body. Men had one vulnerability, Grace thought, watching – that soft, squidgy place, softer than a woman’s breast, as honest as a woman’s stomach, and stronger in its effect than anything else in the world. Wilfred was still trying to get the knot undone and becoming frustrated, pulling at the cord. It was loose. He yanked down his pyjamas trousers, started to drag his top over his head but it wouldn’t go, pulled it down again, undid the top button and with both hands, lifted it over his head. Then he lay on top of Grace and she felt the weight of him over her.

Wilfred used his left leg to push open her legs. He brushed her hair from her face, put his arms under her and held her tightly. Grace bent her knees and lifted up her legs. How did she know how to do this, she wondered.

She thought she could do this without it hurting. She had licked her fingers earlier and dragged her fingers between her legs to moisten herself. And if it hurt she would bite her lips, she would close her eyes, she would think of the bees in their hive, think of each precise step of their dances. If it hurt or rubbed harshly she would think of her bees.

This was easier than with … she wouldn’t think about it. She felt a blunt nub along her upper thigh, pushing blindly into her. Wilfred pressed his forehead into her forehead and took his weight on to his arms, hunching his shoulders. That hard-soft nub kept pushing into the flesh at the very top of her leg, searching blindly for what it wanted. Grace could feel it moving nearer and nearer to where it wanted to go, where it needed to be for the marriage to be consummated. Only an inch … less than an inch, and the way forward would be smooth and easy. Oh …

‘No! No …’ Wilfred climbed off Grace, threw himself back on to the bed, legs apart, arms above his head. His face was covered in sweat. Grace saw the dark hair on his chest and stomach and his thick, muscular legs spread out on the sheet.

‘No, Grace. I want it – God help me, I want it. But I won’t want it in the morning, when I’m spent and empty.’

Grace looked at him. His body still wanted it: here, now, regardless, with her. That’s what men’s bodies wanted. Bodies didn’t care about consequences.

‘You are … you are lovely,’ he continued, breathing deeply and wiping the sweat from his brow, ‘and I was sweet on you in your yellow dress. Wanted to know, Grace, how you got out of it. Imagined you taking off your dress at the picnic, imagined where the buttons were. Wanted you there, on that blanket, naked, wanted to be inside you.’ He breathed out audibly. ‘But it was only for a moment. And that was the moment I proposed.’ He rubbed his chest back and forth with his hand.

‘I wanted to love you, but it was only for a moment, not a lifetime.’ He brushed his hair from his face and brought the sides of his pyjama trousers together, covering himself. ‘Grace, you are beautiful, you are good. And your brother has ruined your life.’ He was lying spread-eagled in the middle of the bed; Grace was on her side at the edge, her hands across her breasts, her feet pulled up.

‘I could take Madoc and I could hold him against a wall and I could … I could break his body, Grace, for what he’s done to you.’

The room fell silent. The air was muggy with the sweat and smell of their bodies. They lay there, abandoned. Grace looked at the brown wallpaper. Eventually she spoke.

‘Is there someone else?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’