The Sunflower Forest (34 page)

‘I remember once when I was eight. I asked your mam to marry me. Right daft about her, I was. But I said that if she’d wait until I was a man, then I’d marry her and she could come down to live in the big house.’ Owen Jones looked over at me and smiled. ‘It sounds a laugh, doesn’t it? To remember the things you said as a child. But, ay, I was daft as could be about her. And she says to me, “Owen
bach
, I have a husband already.” And you see, she would always send us home. We would be there at the cottage, and when he came up the path, she would say very excitedly, “Here comes O’Malley!” You could hear how happy she was about that. She’d say, “Here comes O’Malley. You have to go now.” And once I asked her why I had to leave. Why couldn’t I stay? And she said, “I want to be with him now. I am his wife.”’ Owen Jones nodded. ‘Ay, I was jealous. I didn’t like always having to go home when O’Malley came.’ Another nod. ‘So that’s what I remember most about your dad. That he was always coming home!’ And he laughed.

We drove into the farmyard. Once out, I helped hold the back door of the vehicle open while Owen Jones prised out the sheep. He shooed them into a pen inside the barn. I followed him into the gloomy darkness.

‘Would you mind if I stayed there a little while?’ I asked.

‘Stayed where?’

‘Up at the cottage. I’ve got my sleeping bag and stuff. Would you care if I camped there for a few days?’

‘We’ve plenty of room down here at the farm. You needn’t stay up there.’

‘I was thinking I’d like to. If you wouldn’t mind. Just a day or two or something.’

‘There’s nothing there, you know.’ he said. ‘No lights. No plumbing. Nothing.’ He removed his cap and ran his fingers through his hair.

‘I just think I’d like to be up there, that’s all. If you wouldn’t mind. I could pay you the same as I was going to for staying here.’

He snorted and flapped a hand in my direction. ‘
Duw
, wouldn’t think of it. It’s all yours. No one else uses it, excepting the sheep.’

When we came into the kitchen, Angharad was sitting in a rocking chair beside the coal-burning stove. She held the younger boy, Siôn Twm, in her arms. He was asleep, his head flopped back over her arm, his lips parted, his dark hair plastered to his forehead by the raging heat of the stove. She smiled at us and rose to put the boy, still sleeping, down on to one of the benches at the table. To Owen Jones she said something in Welsh, and he laughed. He went and leaned over the child, smoothing back the boy’s curly hair with his fingertips.

‘A right Winnie-the-Pooh is our Siôn Twm,’ he said to me. ‘Cleaned out the honey pot again.’ He bent and kissed the small boy’s head.

Angharad made a pot of tea. She brought down a big tin box filled with plain cookies and handed it to me, then the mugs, the small plates, the teaspoons. Unexpectedly, I was reminded of the countless times Megan and I had set the table together at home. I glanced at the clock. It would be just after lunch in Kansas. I wondered what Megs and Daddy were doing. I wondered if they ever thought of me in this way, reminded by small, incidental things. And eventually, as all things seemed to affect me then, I was reminded of Mama.

‘Do you remember the sunflowers?’ I asked Owen Jones. He was sitting on the bench beside the sleeping child. Having opened the box of cookies, he was engrossed in selecting and eating them, one by one. ‘Up at the cottage,’ I said. ‘My Mama always used to talk about the sunflowers. They were growing wild when she and my father came.’

Lost in memory for a few moments, Owen Jones contemplated one of the cookies. Angharad poured the tea. She had a strainer this time to catch the tea leaves. Adding milk to her husband’s mug, she handed it to him. He was still thinking.

Then he shook his head. ‘No, I don’t. But then I’m not a gardener. Could have been anything growing up there and they’d all be just flowers to me.’

Angharad laughed in agreement. Owen Jones grinned at her.

I smiled too. It was hard not to around Owen Jones. He had a very contagious sort of happiness about him.

‘It’s just that my mother was always telling me about them. Great wonderful stories. She loved flowers, and those sunflowers meant so much to her. She’d been in a camp during the war, you know, a concentration camp …’

I looked down at the tea mug. The tea steamed. I blew on the surface and circles formed. Then I lifted the mug and drank. It was too hot and burned my tongue. I added more of the rich milk from the creamer.

‘Anyway, when she and Dad came here, there were sunflowers growing wild at Coed-y-Bleiddiau. That was what made her fall in love with the place. Those sunflowers made her so happy.’

‘Ay,’ said Owen Jones, ‘I remember her with her flowers. She was always in the garden. And beautiful things she’d grow. She’d bring them down to the house sometimes. My old
nain
was alive then, and The Lady would bring her flowers from the cottage garden to set in the parlour.’ He turned to his wife. ‘Remember that, Angharad, those photographs of
Nain
? Remember those flowers in the vase? Those was The Lady’s flowers.’

‘I looked for the sunflowers. I looked especially for them,’ I said. ‘But the sheep must have got them. They seem to have eaten everything but the daffodils. So I guess I was just wondering if you remembered where they’d grown.’

‘No,’ replied Owen Jones. ‘I’m afraid I’m no help to you there. And it was a long time ago.’

The small boy stirred. He was between Owen Jones and his wife on the high-backed bench, and both of them turned to the child when he moved. Owen Jones bent low over him and covered the boy’s face almost entirely with one hand, leathery and calloused against the child’s translucent skin. He whispered to him. The child shifted but still slept.

I wondered why the boy was here and not in his bed. Had Angharad thought he would be sick from eating all that honey? Or perhaps she had punished him for it and was sorry for it now. Or reluctant to let him go to sleep crying.

Finally, Angharad lifted her head and turned her attention from the child. She reached over and put the lid back on the metal box containing the cookies. She picked up the tea strainer and put it on her plate. It had left a small puddle of tea on the table top. Owen Jones noticed it, took out his handkerchief and wiped it away. All around us was a soft, end-of-day silence.

‘I’ve never seen anything like those rhododendrons. When I thought of a forest of flowers here, I never imagined rhododendrons. They’re gorgeous.’

Owen Jones looked at me. He snorted derisively.

‘Don’t you like them?’

‘Bloody nuisance is what they are. They’re over-running us up here.’

Surprised by his animosity, I shook my head. ‘People in America grow them in their gardens.’

‘Ay. And some bloody fool did that here too, and look what’s happened. The rhodos all but own the place now.’

‘But they’re valuable. In America they’d be worth a fortune, growing big like that. In America we’d have made a park out of that forest.’

‘Ay, no doubt. And I’ll sell you these any time you want them. Can’t get rid of them. Hack and hack and hack, I do. But you can’t kill the bleeding things. Come up in a million places then. Just like bloody starfish they are. The more you cut them down, the more you’ve got. Even the sheep can’t eat them.’

I paused, thoughtful, and drained my mug. The deep, nighttime silence came back around us, and I felt my tiredness. Angharad bent and picked up the small boy in her arms. She leaned back against the wall and cuddled him.

‘They’re beautiful though,’ I said. ‘With all those flowers, they are beautiful.’

‘Ay, they’re that,’ Owen Jones replied. ‘But it doesn’t make them good.’

I
stayed on. Not for one day or two days or a week but instead for all of June and July and into August. Most of the time I was up at Coed-y-Bleiddiau, but sometimes I stayed down at the farm. I drifted into an informal arrangement with the Joneses, trading help with the children, the garden or the farm work for the privilege of the cottage and for some of the more basic amenities, such as baths.

Most of June I spent making the cottage habitable. I scrubbed the stone floors, dusted out the majority of the spiders and swept down the fireplace, which was so large that it contained internal steps to allow the child chimneysweeps of centuries past to climb up inside and clean it.

Angharad helped me put up sheets of clear plastic over the windows and Owen Jones came up one Saturday and covered the worst of the broken slates in the roof over the main room. Even then the cottage provided only the barest form of shelter, and my stay was never really elevated above camping out. But on the other hand, it was free and it kept me safely in the damp, green Welsh mountains, which was where I wanted to stay.

I learned to survive on the surplus of eggs and milk and butter from the farm, to build fires from green rhododendron wood and to cook over the open grate. I tolerated the draughts, the rain down the chimney and the outhouse to the back of the cottage, which while primitive and full of spiders was functional. Perhaps most of all, I learned to make myself indispensable to the Joneses by working harder and longer than I ever had in my life. If they questioned my sudden appearance in their lives, they never said. Mostly, I suspect they didn’t. Hospitality was a tradable commodity up here on the isolated farms, and I think they realized they were getting a good rate of exchange.

Initially, I had been frightened of Angharad Jones. She was a very silent woman in a way I had never encountered in America. Not knowing what caused her silence, I was afraid that she didn’t like me, that she found my presence a troublesome intrusion or perhaps that she felt excluded from the animated discussions Owen Jones and I had about people she had never known. But as the summer passed, I grew accustomed to her silence and saw it as unrelated to me. She was simply a woman of few words. In fact, beneath the silence was a casual, down-to-earth sort of friendliness. Angharad accepted me, I suspect, with the same unaffected regard she had for the rejected lambs during lambing season, which Owen Jones brought down for her to put in cardboard boxes and keep warm in the open oven of the cookstove.

I knew Angharad was grateful for the extra pair of hands around the house because she often said so to me. And I came to believe that she also appreciated my company, because whenever I mentioned its being time for me to go back up to the cottage, she always offered one more cup of tea or suggested one more thing that needed doing there in the house. But she was never talkative. She never enquired about me personally, about my family, about my life before. Nor did she ever tell me about herself or her existence before I entered it. In a way it was comforting to be padded with that silence. For the first time in ages I found myself able to loosen my guard and relax, knowing there’d never be any questions. And that relief was tremendous. Eventually, I was completely comfortable with the peace in the house and seldom spoke either. When we did talk, it was only of things having to do directly with the farm. Our days revolved around food and fuel, the children, the weather, the sheep and the dogs. Those were the only things that had importance here. Angharad accepted me as part of that, taught me how to survive in such a world and never questioned why I should want to know it.

Garrulous and good-humored, Owen Jones had his head as full of stories as did my mama. We talked constantly about my parents. Often I would keep him company when he moved the flocks of sheep from one pasture to another. It was then he was most likely to spin out the long, rambling tales of his boyhood, growing up here on the farm with his two brothers. He never needed much of an audience when he talked. Mama would want you to hang on every word, to urge her on to tell what came next, to participate so fully that in the end the story was as much your own as hers. But not Owen Jones. Once started, he rolled onward with his tale without any prompting to continue. Sometimes I had to run to keep up with him, as he walked on the hillsides, to avoid missing out on the things he said. But otherwise, I never had to do more than listen. Perhaps because of that, there was a remoteness to the stories. My parents evolved into people I was familiar with, like characters from an often-watched television show, but whom I no longer knew.

In many ways Owen Jones stood in stark contrast to my mother. Despite his head for stories, he was no dreamer. He was an unsentimental, almost cold-bloodedly realistic man. Contriving a livelihood out of thin soil over solid rock was a kind of skilled warfare for him, and it left him with few romantic notions about his or anybody else’s way of life. Yet at the same time he had a profound relationship with his environment. Its magic was already there for him; he did not create it.

One day we were up in the high pasture. It was drizzly, and the clouds were so low that you could see nothing beyond the curvature of the mountainside. I’d come along to help Owen Jones fit stones back into a wall where it had tumbled down in one place. Wearing both the trousers and jacket to my waterproofs, I was as wet with perspiration from heaving up the stones for him to replace in the wall as if I had never worn any protection from the rain at all.

We took a breather. I was on one side of the wall; he was on the other. Unzipping his jacket, he flapped it open to let in air, then turned with his back to me and leaned against the wall.

‘Look at those daft sheep,’ he said and pointed across the pasture to where a small flock of ewes was grazing through boggy heather. ‘Standing right in the water. They’ll have foot rot, sure as anything. Look at them. Right in the bog. Daft, bloody daft sheep.’

I wasn’t looking at them. Trying to rest my arms between the top slates set upright in the wall to form a spiky barrier, I was staring across the pasture to the shrouded hillside. From this vantage point you could see the edge of the forest rising up over the crest of the hill, but because of the clouds it was no more than a vague rib of darkness fading into grey. The thing I was thinking about was how drab and ordinary this landscape was in sunlight. It wasn’t an area meant to be seen clearly, because then all that was visible were the faults. You saw dilapidated farms huddling on hillsides that looked equally worn. You saw scars of a century’s slate mining and the abandoned skeletons of Victorian industry. The mountains themselves were reduced to smallish, barren slopes. But when the clouds dropped and the mists rolled in, the landscape renewed itself. It became a vibrant contrast of shiny greens and greys and blacks in the rain. The mists seemed full of haunting promise and the mountains grew huge, and mysterious behind their shrouds. Most remarkable of all was the sense of timelessness. You didn’t need books to tell you how old this area was; you
felt
it. And you felt that if the thin film separating past from present might be torn anywhere, it would be here.

Owen Jones was still talking about the sheep. He was worrying because he wanted to go down to Dolgellau to the sheepdog trials, which meant he would be gone from the farm for two days. There was so much to be done, so many of the sheep were unhealthy this year, he was saying. A wet summer always meant more work.

‘Have you ever lived anywhere else?’ I asked him.

‘Huh?’ He turned his head.

‘I said have you ever lived anywhere other than on the farm? Like when you were younger.’

‘No.’

The rain strengthened. Owen Jones zipped his jacket up but made no effort to resume work on the wall. Beyond us in the pasture a ewe bleated. Once, twice. She looked over at us. A lamb answered.

‘Went to Liverpool once,’ he said. ‘When I was about fifteen. My father went to get two shire horses and I went along to help him.’ He gave a long, low whistle and shook his head. ‘Never again. Never. Too many people. The crowds made me nervous. I got a sick stomach from it.’

‘What I mean is, did you ever
live
anywhere else but here?’ I was trying to imagine what it must feel like to be Owen Jones, living all your life in the place you were born. After all the years of wandering after Mama, I couldn’t really conceive of what that kind of familiarity with a place would be like. ‘Did you ever want to?’

‘No.’

The same ewe was still bleating, standing up to her ankles in the bog and crying. It was a melancholy sound, startlingly human in its timbre.

We were watching her, and she was watching us.

‘No,’ Owen Jones said again. ‘That trip to Liverpool, that’s the only time I’ve been out of Wales. And that was enough.’

I fell silent. There was lichen on the rocks in the wall between us. I scraped at it with my fingernail.

‘You’ve not even been to London?’ I asked.

‘No.’ Pursing his lips, he ruminated a few moments. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘a friend of mine, Gareth was his name, he asked me to go. To go down to London with him for a weekend. He meant for a good time, you know. To go to those places, you know. Where lads go when they’re in their twenties. Anyway, he asked me. It was a long time ago now. 1962, maybe. Or 1963. I don’t remember. Anyway, he asked me and it was summer. And I said, “No, Gareth, not in summer.” It’d be hot and miserable in London in the summer, while it was cool here. I didn’t want to go. So time went by. And Gareth came again and he says, “Owen, do you fancy going with me to London for a weekend?” By then it was autumn. And I thought to myself, I can’t go in autumn. There’s too much to be done on the farm in autumn. And so I said, “No, Gareth, not this time.” I didn’t want to go. So, time goes by again. And this Gareth, he’s a good lad and doesn’t give up. So after Christmas he stops by the farm and he says, “What about London, Owen? Shall we go have ourselves a good time in the city?” It was winter then. And I thought to myself, I can’t go in winter. In winter the farm’s quiet. It’s the only time I have to get out and do things that I want to do. I walk sometimes. Down by the river in the valley. Last winter I made those bird tables by the back door. I think, truth be said, I like winter the best of all seasons. And so I had to say no to Gareth. I didn’t want to go. The last time Gareth asked me was in May. He comes and says, “Owen, it isn’t summer, so London can’t be too hot, and it isn’t autumn, so the harvesting’s done, and it isn’t winter. Will you come with me to London for a weekend?” And I thought to myself, how can I go in spring? Have you seen a spring here? So I said to Gareth, how can I go away from here now? And he said, “Owen, it’s only for a weekend.” He said, “I don’t think you want to go.” And he was right. I didn’t want to go to London.’

I was smiling. His story reminded me of a song I’d heard. The singer had been unable to find a season in which to leave the woman he loved. And if I remembered correctly, as the story that had inspired the song progressed, it was the woman who betrayed and left him.

I looked over at Owen Jones. ‘But still, haven’t you ever just wanted to know what London was like?’

‘No.’ He turned his head to look at me. ‘I’ve seen it on the telly. You can see things ever so much better on the telly anyway. That’s the way it always is. Like the rugby matches. Same thing. I’m warm and comfortable in my own sitting room, and I can see better what’s going on than all those blokes who are there.’

I studied my fingernails. ‘But it isn’t the same.’

‘Good enough for me.’

I extracted lichen from under my nails with a sliver of slate. ‘But what about music and things? And plays. Wouldn’t you like to go to London and see a really professional production in the West End? Or a live concert? Or go to a really nice place to eat?’

He shook his head.

‘Wouldn’t you want to go just to
be
there? Being really honest now. Just once? Just to say you’d actually been there for yourself?’

Again he shook his head. ‘Why would I go?’ he asked and he turned enough to see me again. ‘What would there be for me to do? Mortar and bricks. That’s all it is. With all those streets and buildings. A rat’s maze, that’s all. Nothing to it but mortar and bricks, mortar and bricks, everywhere you look. Why would I go there when I have this?’

His contentment with life on the farm made Owen Jones’s memories of my mother and father stand out all the more vividly. Living up in the cottage for the major portion of his youth, my parents had seemed wildly exotic figures to young Owen Jones, not only because they were foreigners, but also because they had come and lived among the locals and become like them and still in the end were able to leave.

Owen Jones had loved my mother desperately and unashamedly. All through his childhood he had made the trek up to the cottage from the farmhouse just to be near Mama. He told her about school and chapel and life down on the farm. He played word games with her to strengthen her vocabulary. He sang for her in his high, schoolboy soprano, which she loved most of all. And Mama, for her part, kept him there with her smiles and her laughter and her exquisitely spun tales of Hungary and Dresden. Owen Jones, I discovered, knew as much about Lébény as I did myself.

Mama, for her part, I suspect, did nothing to discourage him. He was undoubtedly her favourite among the three boys. It was easy to hear that in his stories, although he never said as much. I reckoned it was more likely because he was nearly the same age as Klaus than anything else, and Mama was making do with a make-believe son, but I never said that to Owen Jones. Whatever the reason, knowing Mama, I had no difficulty imagining her enchantment upon discovering this bright-spirited boy, who sang with the voice of an angel.