The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred P

4

The Invitation


‘You couldn’t look smarter if you tried.’ Mrs Reece, flushed with vanity, reached up and straightened Madoc’s epaulettes. ‘Doctor Reece, doesn’t Madoc look a picture?’

‘Son, you do us proud.’ Grace watched as her father patted her brother on the arm, his worn, red fingers against the sleeve of the khaki uniform.

‘A Sergeant, Doctor Reece!’ Mrs Reece interjected. ‘Sidney isn’t a Sergeant and he’s been in the Fifteenth Welsh Regiment for six years as well. He enlisted just after the war, the moment he was seventeen – and he’s still only a Lance Corporal. I was telling Sidney’s mother last Monday, “Well, Madoc’s now a Sergeant and has a three-point chevron on his sleeve”. I know for a fact she didn’t like it that her son is still a Lance Corporal after all that time – when my son is a Sergeant.’ Mrs Reece reached up and tugged at the corner of Madoc’s collar. ‘I did a tidy job of those boots. I greased them with Quikko lamp black. They look very clean.’

Grace looked down at Madoc’s Army boots with their thick, serrated soles, tough hardened leather uppers and the extreme black perfection of their shine. They were big boots: Madoc had big feet. He’d always had big feet, to match his large head and his thickset body. Madoc smiled, his blue eyes charming beneath his bushy eyebrows. God only knows what happened to him in the war, Grace thought.

‘Mother, now! You spoil me. I’ll be back at the barracks before long and polishing them myself. Didn’t use spit, did you?’

‘Oh, get away with you, Madoc!’ Grace watched her mother beam and her father smile at Madoc’s teasing.

Grace straightened her pearl necklace, formed a smile on her face and felt a tugging in her chest. Her brother was going off again, somewhere no one had ever heard of in Africa, some camp in a wilderness, full of a mess of green tents and men polishing their shoes and pressing their uniforms, smartening themselves to kill. That’s all the Army seemed to Grace, polishing and killing. The Army was men without women and, Grace knew, being without women changed men, made them forget, made them more violent. Or Madoc, at least. Men without women thought everything was a war. Men who had been without women for a long time were dangerous when they returned.

‘Oh Madoc, what’ll we do without you?’

‘Pull yourself together, Mrs Reece,’ Dr Reece admonished. ‘Our son is a grown man with a job to do: let him go in peace. He’s not a child any more.’

‘You take your lunch tin with you, now, for the train journey. I’ve made you cucumber sandwiches. Don’t forget to eat properly.’

‘Mother!’ said Madoc, grinning. Then Grace watched as he bent down and picked their mother up in his arms and swung her round.

‘Madoc!’ Mrs Reece cried out jubilantly, her long woollen skirt sailing out. Grace could see that her mother was delighting in her son: his strength, his humour, how he tended her.

‘Madoc now, put your mother down,’ Dr Reece said, smiling and speaking quietly, knowing Madoc didn’t like loud noise since he’d come back from the Battle of Mammet and the trenches.

‘You’re light as a feather, Mother,’ Madoc commented, her wooden clogs tapping against the flagstones as he set her down on the floor.

‘Madoc,’ Mrs Reece said, taking her hanky from the pocket of her pinny and dabbing at her eyes. She was wearing her best pinny, the one Madoc had given her for Christmas.

Grace watched her father’s eyes moisten. Her parents were genuinely happy to be here with Madoc, but some of their cheerfulness was false; some of their red-faced animation was because they knew that their son might go away to the Army and get killed. They all knew that. It was quite possible that Madoc would board the boat to that world of men he lived with, and for another man, from somewhere else, to point a gun at him and accurately, precisely and intentionally and immediately, kill him. There would be a grave. And that would be the end of Madoc. In this parting there was the image of his death.

‘Grace …’ Madoc said. She stood there quietly.

‘Grace,’ prompted Dr Reece, ‘say goodbye to your brother.’ Grace looked down.

‘Don’t be getting all emotional,’ her father chided. ‘Madoc will be back. There’s no need for anyone to get upset. What are you getting upset for?’

Madoc held out his hand and Grace shook it, still looking down.

‘Hold yourself together, please, Grace,’ Dr Reece said.

‘Don’t go annoying the bees,’ Madoc said to Grace. For reasons Madoc hadn’t explained and no one understood, he hadn’t gone near his bees since he’d come back from the war. ‘I want to come home and find them all alive, every single one of them. I’ll be counting!’

‘Oh, Madoc,’ Mrs Reece said. ‘Don’t tease!’

‘Your suitcase is in the back of the motorcar. Come along now, young man. You’ve got a job to do.’ Dr Reece patted his son on the back. He had put on a maroon and navy Welsh Guards tie to mark the occasion.

Mrs Reece rushed to the kettle, which was whistling hysterically, filling the kitchen with steam.

‘No time for tea, Mrs Reece,’ Dr Reece decided.

‘Oh, Doctor Reece, we can’t be seeing Madoc off without a hot drink!’

‘No time at all, Mrs Reece. Madoc, Mother’s put some Bara brith in your case. Give Ishwyn Thomas a slice when you arrive. And give him our best regards.’

‘I will, Da.’

‘Tell him I saw his mother. She came to the surgery last Thursday. I examined her knee joint and it is my opinion that she is walking much better.’

The back door was open; it was still early in the year and the air was chilly. Grace wrapped her wool shawl around her shoulders, holding herself within it. The hooked ham was swaying and the clean laundry hanging from the ceiling was flitting in the breeze.

‘Right,’ her father said, swelling out his chest. ‘One mustn’t keep His Majesty’s Army waiting.’

Then, almost immediately, Madoc had left and the house had a new emptiness – and Grace wondered if Madoc was really going off, or if a part of him stayed always here, always with them.

From the parlour window she watched him walk down the front path to the wrought-iron gate, his broad shoulders emphasized by the epaulettes, his brown leather belt buckled firmly at his waist. The iron half-moons on the soles of his boots hit the stone path with a tight, hard click. At the end of the path, he put his cap on his head, one hand at the front, one hand at the back, straightened it, then opened the gate, which squeaked discordantly. He walked sharply, backbone stretched exaggeratedly in the way men in the Army were taught to walk. He looked distinct, smarter, more powerful and purposeful than the other people milling around on Narberth High Street. He seemed ordained and restored by Her Majesty, or God, to a higher purpose, one of deciding and presiding over the death of others, one who fought evil with the goodness of rationality.

Grace sat on the windowsill observing Madoc stride up the street, past the dust cart, jovially doffing his peaked cap to people, being slapped on the back, ruffling the hair of a small child as if he was a hero among Narberthians, leaving for a quest. Her father followed behind, taking the long route to the car, the public one, past houses and carriages, a cart and pedestrians. Madoc stepped off the pavement on to the road, passed the Star Supply Stores and was gone. And he might not return.



A few days later Grace was standing by the kitchen door because her mother had called her. Her father was sitting squarely in his usual place at the head of the table, her mother hovering tensely nearby. In the centre of the table there was a boiled fruitcake.

‘Now then, Grace,’ Dr Reece began, putting down The Lancet and peering over his glasses, considering her.

The problem, Grace realized, with having a father who was a doctor was that he was practised at observing, and right now he was observing her.

‘Grace Amelia, your father is talking to you.’

Grace didn’t answer her mother; instead she walked over to the stove and began re-folding a starched tea towel to keep her hands – and her mind – occupied.

‘Grace …’ her father began solicitously.

‘Your father and I are perfectly aware that you are down in the mouth,’ her mother interrupted, before slamming her hand down hard on the tabletop to kill a bluebottle. The teacups rattled in response. ‘Look what you’ve made me do, Grace Amelia. There’s tea spilled everywhere!’

Grace placed the now neatly folded tea towel back over the stove rail.

‘Is it … might it be to do …’ her father enquired ponderously. ‘We thought it could be to do with Wilfred.’

Wilfred. Grace knew they would know, that they were only pretending to guess. Wilfred, her now ex-fiancé, who was supposed to have been besotted with her, marry her and then provide order and respectability.

‘Wilfred hasn’t set foot in this house five weeks on Saturday,’ her mother pronounced indignantly. Her father removed his gold-framed spectacles and began polishing them with a clean white handkerchief.

‘It is not what is to be expected by a young man of sensibilities who has declared his affections,’ he offered.

‘Madoc would never behave like this,’ Mrs Reece declared, sawing a slice from the loaf, ‘and that’s because I’ve brought him up properly.’ She wiped the blade of the bread-knife with the dishcloth. ‘I’ve taught my son right from wrong. He knows how to behave.’

Her father, pointing at the fruitcake, said to his wife, ‘Now, Mrs Reece, pull yourself together. Madoc will be back before you know it. And best cover this fruitcake with a net, or there’ll be flies landing on it. We wouldn’t want it to spoil.’

Grace lowered her head and stared at her shoes, trying to focus. Her father was a highly educated man, but also a practical one. Doctors had to be practical. She knew that he would make a suggestion – a realistic, workable one that would hold within it a path forward. That was what he did for his patients; he gave them a way of coping.

‘Have you actually seen Wilfred?’ her mother called accusingly from within the pantry where she was selecting a cake-dome. Grace inwardly winced at her mother’s directness and also cringed at her last meeting with Wilfred. Narberth was a small town; someone would have seen her shaken and tearful at the bottom of Sheep Street or walking desolately to the castle where she had sat forlornly on the hefty broken wall of the keep, swinging her legs and crying. Someone would have noticed and told her mother.

Grace was quiet, waiting for her father to speak, knowing he would.

‘I have a suggestion,’ he said, leaning back. ‘I shall invite Wilfred to come here for lunch this week, on Thursday. I shall use the telephone and ask him myself. What do you think to a shoulder of Welsh lamb with mint sauce and some mashed potatoes, Mrs Reece? Or perhaps a rabbit pie? Grace, perhaps you can make one of your Madeira cakes. Then at least you young people will see each other.’

‘Oh!’ said Grace’s mother, her eyes sharp and shining. ‘Now there’s good.’

‘I expect he’s overcome with sheepishness,’ her father surmised, ‘being an undertaker and all, and more used to funerals than weddings.’



Wilfred was leaning on the kitchen table reading his notice in this week’s Narberth & Whitland Observer:



Mister Wilfred Price.

PURVEYOR OF SUPERIOR FUNERALS

Motorized Hearse (with glass sides and wood panelling)

11 Market Street, NARBERTH

Telephone for all inquiries: Narberth 103

Superior sounded honourable, although he could hardly advertise himself as Purveyor of Inferior Funerals. What would that mean? Burying the living? Dropping the body? That had happened. Trying to break a stiff corpse with rigor mortis so as to lay it flat in its coffin? No. Superior Funerals were the right words, the apposite words, for W. Price, Funeral Director, Narberth. And with a motorized hearse, despite the cost, all the polishing and the occasional temperamental behaviour from the engine, Wilfred was on to a winner. Adamantine, Wilfred said to himself: his motorized hearse was adamantine in the sun from all that polishing. He’d learned that word this morning.

Wilfred went to the shelf and looked for something to eat. He grabbed the end of a loaf and the tin of Griddles Old-Fashioned Black Treacle, dipped a spoon into the treacle and spread it on the bread. Mind, a bit more custom wouldn’t go amiss. Not that there was much he could do about that; business was in the hands of the Lord.

He took a bite off the corner of the bread and moved his dictionary to one side. Mr Ogmore Auden had said, ‘Everyone in Narberth is a potential customer, Wilfred. Treat them well. A corpse has yet to come through the front door and ask for a funeral.’ Wilfred tried always to be polite and was mindful of his pleases and thank yous, but beyond that he could hardly go around committing murder to acquire corpses. He licked the spoon clean. January and February – his busiest months, when it was cold and dark and more people passed away – were over and it would be quiet for a while now. Even worse, the weather was fine. That never helped because people didn’t kick the bucket half as much when it was sunny. He had heard though, that Mrs John Howell-Thomas, Kilgetty way, had a funny turn last Tuesday. But Mrs John Howell-Thomas was a tough old boot. And her sister had been ninety-four before she’d fallen off the perch.

Wilfred rubbed the stubble on his cheeks thoughtfully. It was a long time since he had finished his apprenticeship and he ought to be extending the business. There was no shame in having been an apprentice. An apprenticeship was a very honourable path. His father had agreed to it: it would keep his son busy. Idle hands made work for the devil, especially for young men – and Wilfred would be exempt from conscription – and so his son was apprenticed to O. Auden, Funeral Undertakers, Wheelwrights & Cabinet Makers of Whitland, six miles away.

Wilfred licked the back of the spoon. It had been easy for him to choose undertaking for his trade, what with his da being the Narberth gravedigger and – well … most of what he knew of the world was death. Perhaps it was because his mother had died when he was so young, only an infant, that Wilfred had gone into the funeral business. It was an unusual profession for a robust young man in rude health, but it was what Wilfred had always wanted to be – a craftsman and a businessman. A businessman: Wilfred felt pride when he said the word to himself. He rolled up his sleeves purposefully and took a big bite of the bread.

Wilfred remembered how he had lodged six days a week with Mr and Mrs Auden, all the while becoming versed in the art of funerary. He had learned about the oak, the beech and the pine, and how to rub planks with a brick until they were smooth and splinter-free, and he’d made coffins, measured for drawers, hinged doors, glued veneers, dovetailed corners and, eventually, did inlay on cabinets.

Wilfred remembered how he had returned after four years, full of hope and ambition, to Narberth to offer the services of coffin-maker whenever the Revd Waldo Williams, MA, popped round to visit his father with news of a death in the parish and the need for another grave. Old Tom Wheeler in the High Street, who made tables, chairs, dressers and coffins retired when Wilfred came back, and Wilfred was blessed with no competition, and these days, experience was making him increasingly proficient. Nevertheless it would make good sense to extend the business and, to that end, he was wondering about turning the parlour into a paint and wallpaper shop. It would improve his prospects, he would be better able to look after his da and it would keep him gainfully employed and perhaps even make him more eligible. Yes! The parlour would do splendidly as a wallpaper shop! He put the spoon down on the table decisively and stretched his arms along the back of the chair. Shelves along the rear wall. The counter facing the door so he could greet the flood of customers when they came in.

He wouldn’t spend much money on the initial stock – he knew that was a common miscalculation that amateur businessmen made. ‘Young men can get too big for their boots,’ Mr Ogmore Auden had cautioned once, ‘have fancy ideas about their little businesses and get on their high horse. This is Pembrokeshire, Wilfred, not London.’ Wilfred had never left Wales and been up the line to England, and he was certain that Mr Ogmore Auden hadn’t either, but he suspected his apprentice-master was right. It was true that a Welsh gentleman, Mr John Lewis, had a department store in London, on a road called Oxford Street. So did Mr D. H. Evans, but they hadn’t started out as undertakers. When Wilfred opened a wallpaper shop, he would begin modestly, although he would need to place a new advertisement in the Observer:

Mister Wilfred Price

Funerals and Wallpapers of Distinction

No, that wasn’t right, he realized. It sounded like he might wallpaper coffins.

‘Bora da, Wilfred. Post here for you,’ the postman shouted through the open front door.

‘Bora da, Willie. What have you been up to, then?’

‘Well, Wilfred, that’d be telling. But it’s wonderful what you see when you haven’t got a gun.’

‘How’s the wife?’

‘Right as rain.’

Wilfred checked his pocketwatch; it was a quarter past two. The third post was as punctual as ever since they’d installed central heating in the general post office. There had been some concerns about that within Narberth, what with the installation costing sixty pounds.

‘I’s put the post here now for you, as usual, Wilf,’ the postman stated, pointing to the corner table in the hall with the telephone on it. ‘What are you up to, then, standing in the front room like a man with no sense?’

‘Business being as it is, I’m thinking of turning the parlour into a wallpaper shop,’ Wilfred explained.

‘There’s tidy,’ the postman said. ‘Wife can’t get enough of the stuff. She’s talking about wallpapering the scullery. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Wants to do it in cherry blossom. Nonsense on stilts. Too dull to fart, she is.’ He adjusted the bulging postbag on his shoulder, ‘Picture postcard for you, Wilfred. Can’t make any sense of the message on the back.’

‘Thank you, Willie. See you now.’

Postcard? Wilfred thought, measuring the back wall for shelves and putting the ruler back in his trouser pocket. Eight foot long – that would be a good-sized shelf.

It was a postcard with a photograph of the sea and two cottages. That’s on the way to Amroth, Wilfred thought. It showed a young woman in a large bonnet holding the saddle of a bicycle, and there was a man’s cycle propped up nearby on the grass. The Welsh sea was calm in the background.

Wilfred turned the card over. The cottage, the cove, Saturday afternoon. No name, no signature, not even, Dear Wilfred. Was it for him? Yes. It was addressed to Mr Wilfred Price, Esquire. Who could it be from? Wilfred was flummoxed. Could it be from … a woman? But it was no good running away with fancy ideas. It could only be business. Had a person popped their clogs in one of those cottages and wanted the body removed and buried? He hadn’t heard of anyone being ill down Amroth way, nor of any ladies expecting. It wasn’t the usual way to contact the undertaker: mind, some of these farming folk had their own ways, weren’t quite up with the modern world and telephones.

Wilfred began to mentally prepare. He would need to take the motorized hearse with him just in case; he couldn’t carry a body on his bicycle. And he’d have to press his white shirt. Thank goodness for a bit of business, thought Wilfred with relief, putting the postcard in his pocket – when the telephone trilled abruptly. Even more business, he thought with excitement, walking briskly and with a sense of purpose through to the hallway and picking up the receiver of the telephone. It was always an occasion when the telephone rang.

‘NARBERTH 103. WILFRED PRICE, FUNERAL DIRECTOR speaking.’ It was necessary to shout into the receiver, as reception was extremely poor, especially when it was raining. Wilfred thought sometimes it would be more efficient to stand at the front door and bellow the conversation.

‘Afternoon, Wilfred. DOCTOR REECE here. This is DOCTOR REECE speaking.’ Dr Reece, Wilfred thought and then, with excitement at the prospect of business: somebody has died.

‘Wilfred. You are invited to COME ROUND FOR DINNER. ON THURSDAY. THIS THURSDAY COMING. With Mrs Reece and myself. And our daughter, GRACE.’

Wilfred was confused. The line crackled frantically with static.

‘You don’t have a FUNERAL, do you?’ Dr Reece enquired, filling the pause. ‘Do you, or do you not, have a FUNERAL, Wilfred?’

‘No …’ replied Wilfred, forgetting to shout. There were never funerals on a Saturday. Saturdays at St Andrew’s Church and the Bethesda, Calvinist and Tabernacle Chapels were kept for weddings.

‘That’s settled, then. Look FORWARD to it. We’ll see you at ONE on Thursday, Wilfred.’

‘Pardon?’ Wilfred shouted but he heard a click and the line went dead.

That man! Why couldn’t he just stand up to him? And why did Dr Reece think he would want to go to lunch with Grace on Saturday when he was no longer engaged to her? Wilfred ran his hand through his hair. But then it occurred to him – Grace hadn’t told her parents. Which meant Wilfred would have to tell them himself.



On Thursday lunchtime, Grace’s father carved the joint with the steel carving knife. He prided himself on his precision and the Welsh lamb flopped in even slices, each a quarter of an inch thick. His years of wielding the scalpel and performing small surgeries on lumps and warts and toes meant he was a confident carver of meat. Grace saw the lamb was lightly bloodied: in the middle of each slice was a large red spot. ‘Not properly cooked,’ her mother would have muttered critically if Grace had roasted the joint. But her mother said nothing. She wasn’t one to draw attention to her own failings or shortcomings in the kitchen.

‘Move the tureen of vegetables out of my way, please, Grace,’ her father requested, and she lifted the heavy tureen further away from the carving platter.

‘Thank you,’ her father replied. ‘And the gravy boat, please. It is also in my way.’

Wilfred was supposed to be here. An extra tablemat and a silver knife and fork had been laid for him in Madoc’s place. Her father had invited Wilfred by telephone – had shouted the invitation down the line. Grace had heard him while she was upstairs. Wilfred no doubt had shouted back his acceptance. They had waited three-quarters of an hour until it was a quarter to two, by which time the boiled vegetables had long since stopped steaming and started to toughen. Now it was painfully obvious to her, and to her father and mother, that Wilfred had proposed – but not meant it – and said yes to dinner – and not meant it. Was there a word for this, Grace wondered. Jilted? No, jilted happened at the altar. This was being jilted before the altar was even in sight.

‘Is this lamb from Green Grove Farm, Mrs Reece?’

‘It is,’ her mother replied curtly. There was the sound of the knife sawing into the bone. A small pool of thin blood gathered on the platter. Raw meat was dangerous. When a patient rushed to see her father bent double, clutching their stomach, and the sound of their retching filled the whole house, her father lectured them on what he called food hygiene: ‘The cleaner you are, the healthier you are,’ he was fond of declaring, and advised his female patients that it was better to singe the pie or burn the joint than to undercook it. ‘A burned dinner is safer than a raw one,’ he’d state. But now at the dining-table he was unforthcoming in the face of the uncooked lamb, unwilling to provoke his snappy wife.

Grace was trying hard to keep her thoughts under control and, to distract herself, began studying the picture decorating her dinner-plate. It was the Willow Pattern. Grace had read about it in her Olive Wadsley’s Weekly magazine: the blue man and the blue maiden, Chang and Knoon-shee, were crossing a bridge, Knoon-shee carrying her box of jewels, leaving the pagoda, fleeing her enraged father because he forbade their love. But Knoon-shee’s father would catch them and set the couple’s wooden house alight while they were sleeping. Her own father would do that! The two doves at the top of the plate were their spirits, flying to the realms of eternal happiness.

‘Mrs Reece, the dinner-plates, please,’ her father commanded, stroking his beard. Grace’s mother collected the plates and her father put a slice of meat on each one.

Grace looked again at the three fragile figures on the bridge printed on her side-plate, and it occurred to her that perhaps, instead, it was the father and the daughter who were chasing the young man. Perhaps Chang was fleeing from imprisonment in an unwelcome marriage. Perhaps he was looking to the Sugarloaf Mountain ahead, to his freedom and his future in a blue and white landscape, while the father and Knoon-shee were running futilely, doomed to never reach him – always chasing, never catching.

‘Pass the gravy, Grace,’ her father requested. ‘You’ve made a wonderful meal, Mrs Reece. Most pleasing,’ he said to her mother, adding appeasingly, ‘Delicious, just what the doctor ordered!’ He smiled artificially at his joke, trying to cajole his wife to smile. Mrs Reece gave a taciturn half-smile.

Thin blood seeped out of the undercooked lamb and over the bridge, the sea, the pagoda and the hills on Grace’s plate, then her mother slapped down a lump of grey mashed potato covering the tiny figures. Dinner finally began, although no one touched the meat, it being raw.

‘What an utter waste of food! This shoulder of lamb cost good money,’ her mother complained, addressing the empty seat, her voice high with annoyance. ‘If I’d have known I wouldn’t have bought it. I won’t give Wilfred Price house room from now on.’

Grace, in earnest hope, was wearing her yellow dress again, believing the sight and memory of her clothing would inspire and ignite Wilfred’s love and passion. Now she felt silly, pretending the lamb wasn’t raw, eating dinner in yellow silk, with each mouthful she ate emptying her plate until more of the Willow Pattern and another unhappy family were exposed.

‘You’ve had a long face on since we sat at the table, Grace Amelia; no wonder Wilfred doesn’t want you with a face like that.’

Grace cut into a piece of honey-glazed carrot. She thought of the queen bee in her hive with her hundred, hundred lovers – all unswervingly devoted to her for the one whole summer of their short lives. But she wasn’t a queen bee and Wilfred wasn’t a drone.

‘Grace Amelia, sit up properly. No man will ever look at you if you slouch like that.’

Perhaps Wilfred was held up by a sudden death, a body to collect, Grace thought, straightening her back.

‘Would you think Wilfred has gone to collect a body?’ her father asked, as if reading Grace’s mind. He too, must be searching for a simple, practical answer as to why Wilfred wasn’t here.

‘Who could that be, now?’

Grace suspected her father was going through the names of his older and frailer patients. But it was unlikely, Grace knew, that there would be death in Narberth that her father didn’t know about. Usually within minutes of someone dying people rushed to her father, rapping on the front door, calling out his name, even when it was obvious their loved one was dead, not ill. It was as if they hoped the doctor could do something, cure mortality the way he cured sickness.

‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this,’ her mother stated.

Grace squashed the cold leeks against the silver fork. The sense of insecurity that had resided in her these last few weeks now grew bigger and quivered within her and she felt nauseous.

‘What will the explanation be, I wonder?’ her father said aloud. ‘What could it be?’



It was now late Thursday afternoon, lunch with her parents and without Wilfred was over, and the light was fading. Grace was watching Mrs Hilda Prout who, with a sense of ceremony, drew the heavy, tasselled drapes.

‘Not a soul must see,’ Mrs Prout mouthed, opening a portmanteau and taking from it an engraved box. Grace had heard rumours that Mrs Hilda Prout kept a crystal ball though no one Grace knew had ever actually seen it. Motes of dust leaped in the air as she opened the box and unwrapped a crimson scarf. Grace was surprised at how large the crystal ball was.

‘There were whispers you had a crystal ball,’ she remarked, crossing Mrs Prout’s palm with silver. Mrs Prout held the ball in both hands as if it were a divine entity.

‘I have had it since I was a small child – not that I used it then. My grandmother taught me to keep it hidden from human eyes and never gaze into it until I could endure a mystery. Until then, all one can see in a crystal ball is empty glass, fingerprints or nightmares …’

Mrs Hilda Prout put her face close to the ball, then closer still until her eyeball was against it. Grace winced squeamishly. Was Mrs Hilda Prout not right in the head? Many people came to visit her because she was a charmer and known in Narberth for curing warts by rubbing them with a live black snail while murmuring her rhyme,

Wart begone on this snail’s back,

Go and never more come back.

Not that there was anything at all unusual about being a charmer. But crystal balls? They were for gypsies, not Welsh women who read the Bible and attended the Bethesda Chapel. Somewhere a door banged. Grace felt uneasy.

‘I see you are now woman enough to keep a secret,’ Mrs Hilda Prout stated, staring Grace straight in the eye, and Grace very slightly flinched.

This afternoon in Mrs Prout’s darkened parlour with its wallpaper of trellis roses and the ornate Victorian furniture, Grace didn’t think about what the Revd Waldo Williams would say. Grace wanted answers, certainty, and her future known. And she wanted normality. Mrs Prout had said she would marry Wilfred, and she wanted to hear her say it again – reassure her in clear, certain, straightforward words that she was loved by Wilfred and would be married to Wilfred; to know that everything somehow would be all right.

Mrs Prout rolled the ball in her hand until it was smudged and greasy with fingerprints. Did Mrs Hilda Prout already know about Grace’s life and was now seeing some unknown future world with Grace in it, without Grace saying a word? Were there people who could grasp the truth, guess it, divine it, without being told?

Mrs Prout was hidden away from the bright world of science and modern medicine with its new vitamins and vaccines, and she earned her living charming shingles, warts, jaundice and dropsy. This was the ancient custom and it went unremarked upon and accepted in Narberth.

Grace asked self-consciously, ‘What do you see?’

Mrs Hilda Prout ignored her and gazed into the depths of the ball, then blinked tightly.

‘I was hoping to ask you about Wilfred Price …’

‘Ah … your affianced. “There is a willow grows aslant a brook”.’

‘Pardon?’ asked Grace, not understanding. ‘A willow? I don’t understand.’

Mrs Prout stared intently at her. ‘Were you expecting to understand?’ she asked harshly, brushing her brittle grey hair back into its bun.

Grace didn’t want riddles; she wanted a fact about the future, something she could hold on to, pin her hopes on.

Mrs Prout turned her back on Grace, wrapped the translucent orb in the scarf as if wrapping the relic of a saint, and locked it away in its case. She tucked the key down her bosom, drew back the curtains then sat down opposite the girl, saying nothing.

‘I didn’t hear from Wilfred … and …’ Grace desperately tried to explain. ‘You said I would marry him.’ There was a quivering note of panic in her voice but Mrs Prout ignored her.

‘There’s rain coming. I saw that.’

Grace didn’t know how to respond. Is that all? she thought.

‘Take your brolly. Don’t forget.’

‘Did you see anything in the crystal ball that might … help me?’ Near-hysteria was welling within her as her hopes were dashed.

‘Yes, but there is very little to say about what I saw,’ said Mrs Hilda Prout, ‘except to say that all mothers are healers.’



‘Grace, bach,’ Dr Reece called gently that evening, knocking on his daughter’s bedroom door. Grace watched her father come in. He looked ill at ease, which was unusual; she almost never saw him like that. As the only doctor in Narberth he was always the more confident one, the one who wasn’t in pain, the one with all the answers. He never needed his patients the way his patients needed him.

‘Grace …?’

Grace was waiting for his answer, which she knew – as was his habit – he would provide.

‘Would you take this?’ he asked soberly.

There it was – the answer, Grace thought. He placed a blue bottle of medicine on her dressing-table, the bottle clanking loudly on the curved glass covering the dressing-table top. The bottle, with its viscous liquid, stood next to the gilded hand mirror her grandmother had given her when she was twelve. Dr Reece gently put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and left it there for a few moments.

‘You may find it is of assistance,’ he continued, ‘for the heaviness you are experiencing.’ He avoided her eyes and Grace looked at her patchwork quilt. What did her father know? She crushed the thought.

Once her father had left the room and she’d heard his solid footsteps on the stair linoleum, Grace picked up the bottle. It was unlabelled. Her father hadn’t said how much to take. She could ask him, but she knew she wouldn’t.

Grace thought of Mrs Prout’s comment: she didn’t know if all mothers were healers. Her mother? Her accusing, rejecting mother? No. When she or Madoc had been ill in childhood it was their father who paid a visit to W. Palmer Morgan, the apothecary, who waited while the pills were made and then who dispensed – with exactitude – the treatment. It was true that very occasionally it had been her mother who had wrapped the laddered silk stocking around her or her brother’s neck when they had sore throats and who had lit the camphor lamp that burned through the night when Grace had tonsillitis, and had thrust teaspoons of Invalid Bovril into her mouth, but it had been at her father’s instruction.

Mrs Hilda Prout was wrong – completely wrong. Her father, with his thick grey beard and piercing eyes, was the healer – not that he would have called himself such; he would think that word was mumbo-jumbo. A healer was what he would call ‘antediluvian’, whereas he, Dr M. H. Reece, MD, was a man of science, a man of rationality, a man of answers.

Grace held the cold, glass bottle in her hands and thought of her bees. There were those people who believed bee stings were medicine, people who covered themselves, leaving only their arthritic knees exposed before annoying a hive. The bees landed on their bare skin, stung it, and the arthritis was improved, cured even. But that was old medicine, not the modern twentieth-century science her father practised. What her father knew came from books. This bee remedy was learned from the garden and the forest, among the green leaves and the seeds and flowers. Doctors who studied text books would never believe that the insects and the lavender, the birch trees and the roses had something to teach them. Her father would think it was all nonsense. He’d say, ‘It’s all medieval mumbo-jumbo left over from the Dark Ages and the time of Pwyll. These people live as if the Age of Enlightenment had never happened.’

Grace didn’t have a teaspoon in her bedroom so she unplugged the cork and took a swig, almost desperately, like a drunk. It tasted so bitter she retched, then forced herself to swallow again. Her eyes watered and her stomach convulsed. Swallow. Just swallow, she told herself. Mrs Hilda Prout was right: Grace kept a secret. But mothers as healers, that was beyond her experience – for now.