The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred P

6

Half in Leaf, Half on Fire


‘What are you doing up there, Grace Amelia?’ Grace’s mother called shrilly.

‘Reading, Mother.’

Grace had never stood on a book before. She’d been taught not to fold over the corners of the pages but to use her leather bookmark with the picture of St David’s Cathedral embossed on it, and also never to break the spine despite the satisfying crack it made as the glue broke and, while nobody had told her so, she knew putting her feet on books was unconscionable: equal probably only to burning them, something that had happened during the Crusades, a long time ago, in darker, more violent times. Imagine burning books – they were so precious, more so than herself. She would take her shoes off first; that would make it somewhat better, but her parents would be shocked, nevertheless, that she had stood on books.

Grace took some volumes from the shelf and placed them in a small, exact pile. She looked up at the ceiling beam, calculating its height: six books – two piles of three – on the dressing-table should be enough. She was going to choose very carefully. The books she would put her feet on were important; they would be the ones she stood for and the ground she stood on. She looked at her bookshelf, reading the spines. Jane Eyre? Jane Eyre was well intentioned, just in difficult circumstances. People in History? Boudicca was Amazonian and strong-armed, riding her chariot and fighting for freedom. There was Madoc’s copy of Beekeeping: A Discussion of the Life of the Honeybee and of the Production of Honey by Everett Franklin Phillips, Ph.D? George Bernard Shaw’s new play, Saint Joan? But Joan of Arc was impossibly pure, and a martyr. This Side of Paradise – Madoc’s friend Sidney had given her that.

Then there were her childhood books: Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, What Katy Did Next, Pollyanna – stories about girls who were good. All Pollyanna had ever done wrong was ruin her parasol. Beth in Little Women was so perfect she was only fit for heaven. Why were girls in novels exemplary, almost saintly? Grace preferred adventure stories, histories and romances about what to do if you were damned and female, tales about women who were kind, likeable and believable, who escaped unpunished. No thin Quakers with lace caps. No beatific consumptives coughing delicately. No unloved, eternally jolly orphans. Grace craved books about girls like herself: good women, normal women in a world bigger and more powerful than themselves.

Suddenly a fragment of memory burst into her mind. She heard herself speaking in an urgent, desperate whisper, so frightened her parents would overhear what she was saying and equally terrified he wouldn’t hear her. ‘No, no, don’t, please don’t!’ she pleaded. ‘Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t!’ They were in the bedroom. Next to the stairs! Her mother and father came up the stairs. He was here again, charming, neat, handsome, personable, his shoes squeaking on the linoleum. ‘Please, oh please don’t!’ That was all she had said. And she had meant it, really meant it. Perhaps he thought she hadn’t meant it – or didn’t care. And while it was happening to her, what filled her mind’s eye was the brown wallpaper: she focused on the intertwining lines of the raised shapes, she saw the exact tone of the slick, dark brown paint on the paper and the delicate six-petalled daisy trapped in the arms of one square of Anaglypta.

‘Grace Amelia!’ her mother squalled from downstairs, interrupting Grace’s thoughts. ‘You’ve been up there too long; you’d better be doing something productive. I’m going to the Mothers’ Union Thursday Club for the afternoon. And I’m expecting you to have finished knitting those dishcloths before I get back.’

‘Yes, Mother.’

Grace heard the front door click and her mother walk out. The house was empty. She took the jar of cold cream and talcum powder from her dressing-table and put them on to the floorboards, then dragged the dressing-table into the middle of the room so it was hard against the bed. There was a dead bee under the dressing-table, so she picked up its weightless, papery body and dropped it out of the top of the sash window. A memory came to her as if on a wave and she felt herself overcome with its reality. And shock. She would not, would not think of it.

If she pushed the dressing-table to the left … she’d have to take the glass cover off first otherwise it would be slippy … Would the piece of furniture take her weight? The pile of books needed to be high enough and level – one more big book should do it. She remembered her copy of The Mabinogion and took it out of the drawer in her bedside cabinet where it was always kept. The Mabinogion, the very first Welsh book, began with a story in Narberth. When she took that step off the dressing-table, right under her feet would be the book she loved most. She dusted the wine-red cover then opened it at the first page and read, And he saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was on fire, from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf. Grace felt like the tree in The Mabinogion, the one that had stood by Narberth Castle nine hundred years ago, the tree that was half on fire and half in green leaf. That was how she felt, both burned and oddly budding.

Then again, in her mind’s eye, she saw the wallpaper. She blinked tightly, desperate to crush the memory away. She tried extremely hard never to think of those moments but it happened without her wanting to. And it was impossible for her to think clearly about anything to do with it, except that she must be the only person in Narberth, in Pembrokeshire, perhaps in the whole world, to have this happen to her. Her face was pushed against the paper on the wall; she saw the intricate daisy held safe and sound in the square. It was a square with rounded corners. A perfect memory of one patterned square. She knew it had happened because she remembered the bedroom wallpaper. It was true but it wasn’t convincing. It wouldn’t stand up in Narberth courthouse:

‘What do you remember of the event in question?’

‘I know it happened because I remember the wallpaper.’

‘What else do you remember?’

‘Only the wallpaper.’ No one would be sent to Swansea Prison because of the memory of wallpaper.

The six books were chosen now. She placed them in two piles in the middle of her dressing-table. From its drawer she took a silk scarf. The midnight-blue fabric was beautifully, imperceptibly woven; it seemed almost impossible that thread could be so fine and that a craftsman – or probably a machine – could weave it so delicately. She had been given this neck scarf by her nana for her twenty-first birthday, had chosen it herself from the display in the shop window at Mrs Hewyll Russell’s Haberdasher’s & Draper’s, liking the white fleur-de-lys against the blackish-blue background. She wore it when she wanted to feel like an adult, a woman, and appear more sophisticated, more knowing, than she felt.

The practicalities were proving more awkward than she had imagined. Her silk scarf felt sleek in her hands and she was concerned the knot wouldn’t hold – she had washed the scarf two days ago for this purpose and it was very silky. What if the knot slipped out? Should she sew the scarf around the beam – Grace wasn’t sure she would be able to reach that high – and would the stitches even hold? Grace didn’t want to put stitches in her beautiful neck scarf, didn’t want to pierce the finely woven fabric that her nana had bought for her. Did she need rope instead?

Grace picked up the Lily of the Valley talcum powder from the floorboards and twisted the lid open and shut. She didn’t have a choice. Secrecy wasn’t possible, her body wouldn’t allow it and it was naïve to think so. She had hoped for a few weeks that perhaps she would have some luck – but her luck was lousy. It was not that she wanted to die; it was that she didn’t know how to endure what was now her life. She wouldn’t think about what she was going to do, she would just do it.

There was the verse in John, chapter eight, And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Her mother had embroidered it as a sampler and it hung in an unvarnished frame opposite her parents’ iron bed. What if Grace told the truth? Her mother would scream – if she didn’t die of shock. Or kill Grace. What would the neighbours say? No one would believe her. And if they did, they would tell her to lie. Say she’d gone mad. It was more than people could sympathize with, too real for people to bear. And too real for her to endure.

She held the scarf to her face and breathed in the faint aroma of lavender from the muslin bag of dried flowers she kept among her clothes. Perhaps Wilfred …? If she told Wilfred, would he understand? He had loved her once, if only for an afternoon. Grace had tried to be light and airy for Wilfred, to pretend that she, her situation, was simple when the truth was bleak, complex and barely utterable, never mind explicable. And if she explained, would anyone, anyone, understand? Her world would be different if she knew that only one person would understand.

Grace took Moll Flanders from the bottom of the neat pile on the dressing-table and sat in the window seat, scrunched herself up tightly and opened the book randomly but soon put it down by her stockinged feet, unable to read. A desk, six books and a silk scarf. Or honesty. It was a stark choice. ‘Speak plainly,’ was what her father said to his patients as they struggled to explain their symptoms when they were embarrassed, ashamed and guilty. ‘Speak plainly so that I can understand.’ Perhaps, then, her father would have an answer – he seemed to have an answer to a hundred illnesses. But to this? Did this happen anywhere else? Surely not in Narberth.

There must be an answer. There must be a way out.

Grace looked up to the ceiling and the creosoted beam above her dressing-table. There was a way out in the roof. She climbed on to the dressing-table. I will lift up mine eyes to the Lord from whence cometh my help. Is that what King David meant: a pile of books on a dressing-table and a silk scarf around a beam?



Wilfred’s da had work to do. He looked around at the graves in St Andrew’s churchyard, many of which he had dug. Gravedigging required strength, a cheerful disposition and a robust state of mind. Wilfred’s da had taken to it over twenty years ago, enjoying the toil of digging the earth whether it was frozen in the winter or full of rainwater in the spring. He felt at peace in the graveyard with its view of the green curvaceous hills.

As he began digging he thought of his wife – Wilfred’s mother – who had died after giving birth to their son. Wilfred’s da didn’t know a woman, least of all his quietly spoken wife, could make sounds like that – the screams and the bellowing – for almost five hours. He had waited in the kitchen and then in the yard listening to her. At ten past six in the morning his wife’s screams had been replaced by Wilfred’s crying, and then for four endless days, his wife’s incessant moaning for water, finally followed by the quiet of her death room, overlaid by the mewling of the small baby. His sister, Blodwen, had given Wilfred goat’s milk from a glass bottle and the baby had sucked vigorously. ‘He wants to be alive,’ he said in Welsh to Blodwen, and then to his tiny son, ‘you suck like you want to live.’ Wilfred had learned all this from his Auntie Blodwen who had been at both his birth and his mother’s death.

After his wife’s death, Wilfred’s da had been a broken man, at a loss as to how to live and go on without his wife beside him. It had taken a good two or three years, until Wilfred was up and toddling about, before his father had been able to find a way forward. By day his father worked as a labourer on Clunderwen Farm, but at night he would go and visit his wife, sitting tranquilly by her grave. It gave him a sense of peace and soothed his grief, which was more intense and painful than anything he had ever known. It was during these nights that he met the gravedigger, a now elderly man of fifty-nine; too old to do his work well. The gravedigger had befriended his father, understanding as he did the nature of grief – his father hadn’t been the first person to sit through the night by the granite gravestone of a loved one – and accustomed to the solemnity and madness of the bereaved. Wilfred’s father had begun to help the older man to cut the sod and dig the graves, and had eventually taken over the position himself when the gravedigger’s arthritic spine prevented him from working.

Wilfred’s da felt blessed, as he dug the new grave, to like his work. He toiled in the day tending to the grass and the hedgerows in the graveyard but he liked to dig graves at night by moonlight, to be free and alone with the stars and the planets. He took satisfaction in being outside, casting an eye for Cassiopeia or the three stars in Orion’s belt, and was pleased when he recognized the familiar and distinctive light reflected by Jupiter. Every couple of months he borrowed The Constellations of the Stars for the Enthusiastic Amateur by Ferdinand Nell from the Mechanics’ Institute Library, each time reading about a different constellation then searching for it in the night sky, mapping it out and watching it, over the months, cross the heavens.

When there was a death in Narberth or Templeton, as there was earlier today, he would go unbeckoned, the wind flapping at his coat, a lantern on a stick, to the graveyard at St Andrew’s and measure the plot. He left home at nine o’clock at night, after a pint in Mrs Annie Evans’s public house the Conduit, then dug until four o’clock in the morning. It took him seven hours – one, he said, for every age of man – never less, never more. He would put an hour of sweat into the earth for every decade of a man – or woman’s – allotted time in the world whether the deceased had had a full lifespan or not. It was different for a child; a child’s grave never took long.

Wilfred’s da knew this earth, he knew the different textures of the soil in the graveyard: where the roots of the blackberry bushes matted the mud, where the whitethorn grew, how the shale at the bottom of the graveyard was waterlogged in spring and mottled with moss. He was acquainted with where the magpies nested, where the red squirrels built their drays and where the moles would likely make their crumbly molehills. He remembered when to expect the swarms of swallows and the murmurations of starlings and he watched the swifts flicking and dashing, marvelling at how – some birdwatchers said – they could stay airborne for years without landing once.

From his work, Wilfred’s da carried the aura of death about him, more so even than Wilfred, and for that reason some of the town’s inhabitants slightly shunned him, were wary of him, as if by conversing with him they would need his services sooner rather than later, for surely he would be the one who would dig their graves. Sometimes the simpler folk in Narberth even confused him, in their mind’s eye, with the Grim Reaper, despite the Grim Reaper being of an altogether different nature. People were shocked, especially the young, that the gravedigger was not horrified and terrified, the way they were, by the empty, pitch-dark graveyard at night. ‘If the buggers didn’t hurt me when they were alive they won’t hurt me when they’re dead,’ he told anyone who had the courage to ask if he was frightened. That was true – to an extent, the person who had asked the question would think. But what about the other worlds – the Afterworld and the Underworld – didn’t they swim around in graveyards? And weren’t all graveyards populated by corpses? Sometimes dancing corpses?

For over several decades, Wilfred’s father had dug many graves, from the very tiniest to the grandest, cutting into the earth with certainty and precision to shape with the blade of his spade the grave’s four edges. The spade’s ash handle was worn smooth by his hands and kept oiled by the grease and sweat from his palms. It was an old tool but they were the best ones, his da knew. It was made of cast steel from the steelworks in Flintshire and, of a morning after a night of digging, Wilfred’s da would, without fail, fill a pail with icy water from the water pump opposite the Conduit Stores and wash the blade and shaft with a chamois leather full of holes. The implement would then be dried and the metal polished on a piece of clean lint he kept especially for the purpose. His spade was precious to him: ‘You couldn’t have a gravedigger without a spade,’ he’d say. Indeed, as he dug, he felt that the tool was an extension of his very body. It was as if his back and shoulders, along his arms and into his fingers, flowed into his spade and they worked as one.

And as Wilfred’s father laboured he thought about how he was cutting the good Welsh earth, the fields of which had fed his family for generations and which he would in turn nourish with his own body. He felt at peace with his work; it was part of a great cycle – and it gave him a sense of repose to work within it.



Grace had barely slept, but in her snatched sleep she had dreamed of her father, and in her dream she found a way to survive. She felt giddy all morning and faint through lunch. Enormous waves of anxiety rippled through her and her throat kept contracting.

She put down the book she had just started reading, or looking at – her mind wasn’t able to focus. It was Moll Flanders again. Moll Flanders was a fallen woman: what was going to happen to her? A lot, no doubt. More, Grace hoped, than would happen to her, her mind racing. It was as if the atoms of her body were dissipating and could no longer find a centre, could no longer hold her together. It would be the truth. She would tell her father. He was a doctor and he was capable of being kind. She would break her father, her good, upright father, with the truth. Right now – in the hope that he would help her. She would tell him immediately. I cannot die, she thought to herself, not now, especially not now. I want to live. I want to stay alive. Whatever I have to live through, I will live through, Grace thought to herself. She was decided.

Grace straightened her dress, pulled it down at the hem so it was hanging straight and not bunched up at the waist, and retied the belt. She thought about Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc had been pure, true, wronged against. But Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake. Grace expected that in the past women were burned alive for this, but at least she wouldn’t be put to death, not in 1924, in Narberth. Things were different these days, at least a little bit.

I will tell him now, without waiting, she told herself. Grace combed her blond bobbed hair, her hands shaking, and then drew a line with the tail of the comb to make a straighter parting. Combing her hair always made her feel slightly more in control. She smoothed her hair and put it behind her ears then turned back the cuffs of her cardigan. She looked neat, ordered. Out of her small bedroom window, the sky was a pure blue and cloudless: the sky was neat as well. In her mind’s eye she suddenly saw the brown wallpaper, but forced it from her thoughts. She swallowed. I shall put on my shoes to tell him, Grace thought to herself. While she didn’t need shoes to walk downstairs to her father’s surgery, as her slippers would suffice, she had an intimation she would need them afterwards. She buckled the pearl buttons on her shoes and looked for one more thing to do, to delay herself a few short seconds. She straightened the sleeve of her cardigan and pulled up her beige stockings, which had crinkled somewhat at her ankles. She looked presentable. She would go and tell her father and it would be the end of an innocent world. She walked downstairs.

Grace knocked on the surgery door tentatively. ‘Father …’

‘Come in, come in,’ Dr Reece said cheerfully.

‘Father …’

Grace went to stand in front of his large, imposing desk and next to the simple chair for his patients. On his desk she saw the fat blue paperweight with the air bubbles inside, trapped. Air trapped in glass. The paperweight was heavy – she knew that from when she was a little girl and her father would let her hold it. She had had to sit up properly in the leather armchair first, hold her hands open and her father would bring it to her.

‘Here you are, Grace, bach. Mind you don’t drop it. Daddy doesn’t want glass all over his surgery, does he now?’

‘No.’

Her father would carefully place the weight in her small, unformed hands so Grace could hold it and put her face close to the glass. There was the big bubble in the middle that looked like a jellyfish, and then teensy-weensy baby bubbles around it. The bubbles didn’t pop, Daddy said, because they were stuck in the glass for ever.

‘For ever?’ Grace would ask.

‘Aye, for ever. Or until the glass is smashed.’

‘We would never smash it, would we, Daddy?’

‘I would hope not, Grace. What would I do with all my prescription forms? The wind would be blowing them.’

For as long as Grace could remember, the paperweight had sat on her father’s desk. She looked at her father.

‘What is it, Grace?’ her father enquired.

‘I’m having a baby.’ She said it. The room turned vivid and perfectly defined: the wine-red carpet, the black ink blotter, the white clock-face with each capital letter absolutely clear: S. BELL CLOCKMAKER SAFFRON WALDEN. The silver-framed family photograph of the four of them, Madoc in his uniform. There were great gasps of time between each sharp tick of the grandfather clock. Perhaps the house will fall down now, Grace thought.

Her father placed a broad palm against his forehead, his other hand held his fountain pen loosely. Ash-grey, he stood up, went to the coat-stand in the corner, pulled on his herringbone coat and picked up his doctor’s bag. There he stood, lost, before walking back to the armchair and collapsing down heavily.

‘Wilfred,’ he said simply. ‘Wilfred Price.’ And with that he rose and walked out of the room.



Wilfred popped a red and white aniseed ball in his mouth and put the hearse into third gear. This was good news – well, of course it wasn’t good news, it was terrible news, very, very sad for all involved. Mrs Cole had kicked the bucket. Wilfred had almost given up hope! It had been such beautiful weather, the leaves on the trees were out, full and bright and green, and there were bluebells everywhere: no one was going to pop their clogs on a day like this. Good old Mrs Cole! She’d had a decent innings as well, sixty-five. That was Calvinism for you. Husband already gone – he’d buried him a couple of years back. Wilfred negotiated the corner into Kilgetty, and the pine box in the back slid slightly, despite the cotton bands holding it in place.

‘Hold on tight there, Mrs Cole,’ he called over his shoulder.

He moved the aniseed ball around his mouth with his tongue. Wilfred hadn’t thought Mrs Cole would ever kick the bucket: she’d had more funny turns than the Waltzer at Tenby fair. Mustn’t poke fun at the dead, Wilfred remembered. Oh no, mustn’t be making jokes. But it was felicitous that she’d conked because he needed the money. And now the old dear was in the back of the motorized hearse and dead as a dodo, he’d get her straight back to the workshop and start on making a coffin.

‘Soon be there, Mrs Cole,’ he said solicitously, glancing in his driving mirror. ‘Don’t you worry, now,’ and he pressed down on the accelerator. ‘Steady on, Wilfred, lad,’ he heard Mr Auden say. ‘This is not Pendine Sands and you’re not Malcolm Campbell trying to break the world land-speed record. Fifteen miles per hour is more than enough for a corpse.’ Wilfred put his foot on the brake as he negotiated the sharp bend at Cross Hands, remembering something else Mr Auden used to say: ‘Cars can easily provide work for undertakers.’

‘I’m driving carefully, Mrs Cole, don’t worry,’ Wilfred reassured the corpse, putting both hands on the steering wheel. ‘Did you read in the Narberth & Whitland Observer that there have been three motorcar collisions in Narberth in only six days, all at the Commercial Inn and Coach and Horses corner. It said in the paper that Aunrin Rogers’s car was knocked completely over, and Mr Edward Evans and Miss Henton were extricated from a perilous position.’ Wilfred checked the speedometer and pressed slightly harder on the brake.

He’d have to measure the poor dear for her small coffin; she wasn’t that big and had shrivelled in old age. He liked preparing the coffins. In his workshop, which he’d built in the yard behind the house, Wilfred decorated the caskets, screwing in the brass handles, the nameplate and the occasional crucifix, then trimmed the box with deep purple drapery – white for the very young – by tacking the material to the four sides. He positioned the bodies: dabbed lines of blood from the corpses’ mouths, combed dead hair and placed stiff lace handkerchiefs over waxy faces. He arranged for the photographer to come – only when the family asked, of course, and some did, especially the more old-fashioned ones. Then the photographer, Arthur Squibs of Tenby, would make a glass plate of the corpse. On occasion Wilfred even upended the coffin, as the next-of-kin requested he do, so that the body was standing upright, the head leaning heavily against the side while the photographer did one long, four-minute exposure.

‘Arthur Squibs is coming to visit you this afternoon. We’ll have to get you looking your best.’

He’d better get going, too, on preparing Mrs Cole’s body what with the weather being so warm. The rigor mortis would leave by the day after tomorrow. Good grief, these aniseed balls are strong! thought Wilfred, taking the sweet out of his mouth and throwing it in the glove compartment. And he’d tell Da to get digging.

Wilfred glanced over his shoulder to check that the plain box he used for collecting the body of the deceased was in place; he didn’t want it slipping out of the back of the hearse. The engine purred reliably, almost musically. He rolled up his sleeves. On Thursday evening he’d put a polite note through the Reeces’ door declining Saturday’s dinner invitation, saying it was no longer appropriate to accept their hospitality in respect of the now changed relations between Grace and himself. He had worried about how to decline the invitation all week and had felt much better after doing it. He felt relieved and was feeling dapper; business was flowing again. But it wasn’t only that. It was because of Flora. He had held her dear, soft body in his arms and stroked and kissed her hair. That’s all. There were many more things they could have done, might one day do, but each moment had been precious to Wilfred.

He tried to think about the proportions of the casket but his mind kept turning back to the cottage. He swerved round the corner past Templeton and saw the purple Preseli Hills in the distance. The hearse rolled down the hill smoothly. This hand here, he thought, looking at his hand on the steering wheel, touched Flora’s long hair. And my shoulders, that’s where she rested her head.

Wilfred folded down the top of the window, rested his broad arm on the ledge and reclined back in the dun leather seat. The air was fresh on his face and he felt himself expand and soar. That exquisitely gentle afternoon with Flora had marked his life. There had been an intimacy between them and although that intimacy wasn’t fully realized, such closeness had nevertheless been unimaginable to Wilfred before he had experienced it. This woman, Flora, who was smaller than him, with her slender waist and dark, flyaway hair: her life, her body, was precious to him. He had felt her preciousness, and perhaps, it occurred to Wilfred, this was what love was, this preciousness. Even her shoes, her slightly scuffed, brown leather sandals were precious to him because they were her shoes. Wilfred looked up at the cloudless sky. He could see clearly now.



‘And how is Mrs Reece?’ Wilfred’s da asked. By damn, this was getting awkward – that was the third time he’d asked after Dr Reece’s wife. She was well half an hour ago; no doubt she was still well now. And he’d asked after Madoc twice and then Grace and then Madoc’s friend Sidney who was in the Army with him, yet Dr Reece had only nodded. But it was a bit trying, sitting here in the middle of the day – a nice day as well, and no rain for once – with Dr Reece at the kitchen table with not a word to say for himself. And the wireless off. It was usually the other way around: when the undertaker came to visit he was supposed to dampen the proceedings.

Wilfred’s da brought the mug of tea up to his mouth. Dr Reece had been sitting at the kitchen table waiting, silent as a Sunday, for the past nearly three quarters of an hour and counting. Well, clearly something was up, that much Wilfred’s da was certain of. No one he knew of was dead, apart from Mrs Cole and that wasn’t too great a surprise. Wilfred had gone to collect the body and should be back soon. It could only be that someone in Narberth had taken their life in their own hands and Dr Reece didn’t want to say a word about it until Wilfred was here. Terrible thing that, terrible thing.

‘I’ll wait. I’ll wait for the boy,’ Dr Reece had stated ominously when he arrived, keeping his thick wool coat on, despite the sunshine, and his doctor’s bag tightly in his hand. He looked disturbed.

‘You’ll excuse the mess,’ the gravedigger apologized. Dr Reece snorted. Wilfred’s father moved several old copies of the Weekly News, the book on the constellations, the blue teacup and the dictionary from the kitchen table and on to the windowsill. The kitchen was none too tidy, Wilfred’s da knew, but Dr Reece would have seen worse: after all, he looked after Mrs Hugh Pugh and gave her daily injections, and she was known for her filth and her twenty cats.

Dr Reece wouldn’t have a cup of tea so Wilfred’s da had offered him a custard cream biscuit then a Jacob’s Cream Cracker, but Dr Reece had frowned his refusal. It was a solemn occasion then; as well it might be with someone in Narberth taking their life, and no time for biscuits. But there was no knowing exactly when Wilfred would be back, and on a fine day like this, it was going to be a long wait and a stuffy afternoon.

‘It’s been pleasant weather now for a couple of days,’ commented Wilfred’s da, attempting one last time to lighten the atmosphere. Dr Reece harrumphed out of his nostrils. So Wilfred’s da joined his visitor in sitting wordlessly. Without conversation, Wilfred’s da was left to his own thoughts as to who it could be, which sad soul had done such a dreadful thing.



‘Da? Da!’ Wilfred called, bursting through the front door of 11 Market Street later that afternoon.

‘Here’s the boy,’ his father said with relief. Dr Reece stood up tall and waited while Wilfred walked along the passage into the scully.

‘Wilfred,’ stated Dr Reece portentously.

Dr Reece must have read Wilfred’s note declining the lunch invitation and had come to acknowledge it – or perhaps more likely to admonish him, Wilfred thought. His stomach dropped to his feet, but whatever the man had to say, Wilfred knew he had done the right thing by breaking off the engagement.

‘Hello, Doctor Reece. How are you?’

The doctor’s face was set sternly, and Wilfred noticed the puce colouring of his cheeks. Wilfred held out his hand. Dr Reece didn’t shake it. Instead he stated, ‘You’ll marry Grace on Saturday. At the register office.’

Wilfred stared at him.

‘At two o’clock,’ he added. Wilfred was trying to understand. ‘There’ll be no honeymoon, of course.’ Dr Reece looked around the messy and humble kitchen with disgust. ‘You’ll be living with Mrs Reece and myself from Saturday.’

‘Married?’ asked Wilfred’s da.

‘But’, Wilfred said incredulously, his eyes wide open, ‘I sent you a note explaining …’

‘This is no time for protestations! I’ll not be having any protestations. It’s too late for those, boy.’

‘But …’ Wilfred repeated.

‘What’s done is done,’ Dr Reece stated.

Wilfred was flabbergasted. Dr Reece was trying to make him marry Grace and they weren’t even engaged.

‘We’re not even engaged,’ Wilfred declared earnestly.

‘Well, you are now,’ Dr Reece replied.

It was Wilfred’s father who spoke next. ‘Doctor Reece,’ he said, ‘surely, now, Wilfred needs an explanation?’

‘He’s made his bed. Now he must lie in it,’ was the man’s terse answer, the muscles in his jaw flinching.

Wilfred looked at the slate floor. A register office? That could only mean one thing, especially with the Reeces being such respectable people. There was only one reason people in Narberth got married in the register office.

‘Now listen to me, Wilfred Price. You’ll be in that register office at five minutes to two this Saturday. No doubt about it. You put right what you’ve done – quickly. Saturday.’ And with that Dr Reece picked up his doctor’s bag, turned and walked out, the door banging behind him.