Cat and Mouse Read online

  “But why is he called Dai Jones Trouble?”

  They all looked ever so faintly down their noses. “Sort him out from all the other Dai Joneses round here,” said the man with the scar. “Including me.” He smiled. “They call me Dai Jones Ych-y-fi.”

  Memory groped back into the days of childhood. “That’s what my nurse used to say to me when I was a dirty little girl: Ych y fi!”

  “Well, he’s a dirty little boy,” said the men, laughing. “He’s the plumber.”

  “And Dai Jones Trouble?” (She could probably get a few pounds from somewhere for an article on these odd Welsh names, when she got back to Fleet Street.)

  They all looked down their noses again. “He got all the girls round here into trouble,” said the second man who had spoken to her. “And finally skipped off to London—not a moment too soon! But that was—twenty years ago, boys?”

  “I wonder what became of that Gwladys Griffiths,” said the first man.

  “And Bronwen Hughes!”

  But they were too well mannered to discuss local gossip before a stranger who could not be interested. “You don’t come from round Pentre Trist?”

  “No,” said Tinka. “Though my name’s Jones, too. But I was born in Swansea, and my uncle Jo still lives out by the reservoir.”

  “Is that Jo Jones the Waterworks?”

  “It was,” said Tinka. “He’s probably the late Jo Jones by now. He was just about to have a stroke when I left, largely due to the colour of my nails.” It was her habit to repose her confidences in the most unlikely strangers.

  “And now you’re going to see Mr. Carlyon?” said the second man who had spoken.

  He was different from the rest. Instead of their uncreased trousers and threadbare coats, he wore a good suit of just too intense a brown, and a neat tie and collar. He was perhaps thirty-five: a handsome man—an extraordinarily handsome man when one looked at him a second time—with the aesthetic good looks of the romantic clergyman in a Victorian novel; a thin, pale face, dark hair, astonishingly upright of carriage, just the least bit prim. “I was thinking of going over to see Mr. Carlyon myself,” he said.

  “Actually it was Mrs. Carlyon I wanted,” said Katinka.

  No information seemed forthcoming about Mrs. Carlyon. “They don’t come to the village,” said Dai Ych-y-fi. “Too posh, I daresay. I seen that old woman they got working there with Dai Trouble, but you never see anyone else from Penderyn.” He shrugged.

  The Victorian Adonis looked over at the mountain. “River’s very high.”

  “Miss Evans the Milk could take you across,” said one of the men.

  “Will she be going so late?”

  “She didn’t take the milk this morning, that I do know, because she was in Swansea all the morning with my butty’s wife; gadding round the fancy shops, no doubt, getting themselves up posh—there’s women for you! But it means that she’ll be going this afternoon, Mr. Chucky, so you’re in luck; and the young lady.”

  “We’ll go up to her house and see,” said Mr. Chucky to Tinka. “It’s just by here.”

  Miss Evans the Milk lived in a tiny house perched up above the road where the bus had stopped. Mr. Chucky rapped primly at the door and then, without further ado, pushed it open and marched into the little hall and, putting his head in at one door after another, called out: “Miss Evans! Miss Evans-oh!” What the hell have I got myself into now, thought Katinka.

  Miss Evans appeared, looking in at her own front door, like a cuckoo out of its clock. She was a tiny woman with a weather-beaten face and eyes of a quite amazing gentian-blue. “Hallo, Mr. Chucky! Was you calling me?”

  “This is Miss Jones, Miss Evans, bach. We was wondering was you going over to Penderyn this afternoon?”

  “Isn’t there any way but bothering Miss Evans for a lift?” said Katinka.

  But apparently there was no other way, unless you liked to take a bus twelve miles further on into Neath, and walk back over the other side of the mountain! The river was swollen with the summer rains, and the ford had gone. “It’s not much of an old boat, mind,” said Miss Evans, doubtfully, “and the young lady with her clothes so pretty! But there you are—no other way to go!” She departed to collect her milk cans. “She doesn’t mind,” said Mr. Chucky, complacently. “She always makes a fuss.”

  The room was hermetically sealed and coarse lace curtains shut out the lovely view. The shelves were filled with an assortment of books, romantic novels jostling well-thumbed classics, the big family Bible, lovingly protected by a fold of tissue paper, tall books of music, song books in English and Welsh. “Miss Evans’s mother came from Shropshire,” said Chucky, who seemed familiar with the affairs of everyone in the village. He gestured to where, above the bright brass firescreen that hung from the mantelpiece, an old-fashioned daguerreotype smiled down of a woman with a sheet of music in her hand. “The English Lark they used to call her; proper lovely singer she was.” Welsh accent and idiom were sometimes pronounced in him, sometimes barely discernible.

  Miss Evans returned, dangling two milk cans by their thin tin handles. Mr. Chucky took one of them, and together they all set out across the main street of the village and down the steep road to the river. Dai Jones Ych-y-fi and his companions gave Katinka a friendly parting wave; at least, she thought, I know someone now, in Wales. Slipping and skidding down the pebbly road, she trotted between her two companions—Mr. Chucky tall and straight as a ramrod, his neat shoes picking their way between the streaming puddles, Miss Evans with the milk can tinnily jangling in her little brown paw. I must be mad, thought Tinka. I must be mad—sweating up and down mountains, submitting myself to a damn Welsh downpour and heaven knows what perils of the deep to come, all to visit some half-baked little idiot that I don’t even know, and probably will loathe at sight. … A vision rose up before her eyes, a vision of Amista as she and Miss Let’s-be-Lovely had conceived her in their careless comparison of notes. A pretty face; a foolish, rather vapid, but a very pretty face, delicately oval, blue-eyed, flower-lipped, framed in conventionally curling pale gold hair. And foolish she may be, thought Tinka, but Amista’s got something that you haven’t got my girl, for all you think yourself so bright. She’s got her Carlyon: bassinets any minute now, and she won’t even have to live with her mother-in-law. Whereas you, my poor Katinka Jones, have to make do with a career, and look as if you like it! She had meant to have six children and, in the days before her chances had grown so thin, had expressed her opinions pretty freely in her gaily positive way, as to how the young should be brought up. Her married friends had listened, much interested, but continued to rear their families on conventional lines.

  Miss Evans was obviously devoured with curiosity, but did not like to put direct questions. Katinka volunteered a lively sketch of life in London, in the offices of Girls Together. “I think I have taken that book now and then to Penderyn,” said Miss Evans. Tinka surprised a rather startled look upon the romantic features of Mr. Chucky, as though he were puzzled by her. They came to the river.

  Miss Evans’s boat lay tossing on the swollen waters, jerking at its mooring like a goat on a too-short tether. Miss Evans tugged it in by the chain and hoisted her milk cans aboard. She refused assistance from Mr. Chucky and pulled them strongly across to the opposite bank. “It’s a long way,” said Katinka, “to come over with a pint or two of milk. Darned if I would! And up that path to the house! Do you come every day?”

  “Not every day. They tell me when they’ll want more. Not that I’d mind,” said Miss Evans, her blue eyes glancing over across the river to the dark mountain looming over them. “I like the walk. The river there’s peaceful! And you climb the path and look back over the valley and the village; it makes you understand how little it all is, compared with God.” She gave them a suddenly very lovely smile.

  If she were articulate, thought Katinka, swallowed up for a moment in Miss Friendly-wise, if she were a suburban spinster, she would be writing me letters full of platitude
s, asking me whether she’s right to remain loyal to the memory of a fiancé killed in the war (when all the time I know by bitter experience that she’s probably never had a chance to be anything else) or whether she should stick to an ailing mother, or why she’s growing hair on her upper lip. … And I don’t know that I’m much better myself: jolly nearly thirty and nothing in my life but the office and the Women’s Press Club and being Bright in pubs. There was something to be said for being country bred, for finding one’s joy in the river and the mountainside, for knowing how to rise up out of the valley and leave the little cares behind.

  The little make-shift landing stage was almost entirely swamped. They scrambled ashore and began the long, steep ascent of the mountain to the house. A narrow path, cut into the hillside by the feet of men, straggling through the bracken up the treeless hill, dodging round a boulder here, split there by a rivulet coursing down to join the main stream; but all the time climbing up and up to the house. Above them towered the tall cliff of the Tarren Goch. It was as though, in some gargantuan frolic, a giant hand had scooped a great hole in the mountainside, had flung back the rocks so that, carelessly falling, they formed a kind of rough stairway, each step higher than a dozen men, up either side of the depression in the hillside. Mr. Chucky lagged civilly behind with Katinka, as Miss Evans forged sturdily ahead. “I used to play there as a boy. Underneath those rocks that are tumbled up each side of the quarry, there’s a sort of chain of caves—not real caves of course, but little dark rooms, formed by the heaped-up boulders. The one nearest Penderyn is best; you can go in almost at the bottom and climb right up through them, hardly seeing daylight till you come to the top.” He pointed to a narrow ledge that seemed to hang like a painter’s cradle, jutting out from the edge of the precipice almost at its very top. “That’s where the caves come out.”

  “It looks most horribly dangerous.”

  “It is,” he said. “I wonder some of us weren’t killed, as kids. You come bursting out into the light and there’s nothing between you and eternity but that little ledge.”

  “There’s nothing between me and this beastly stony path but a pair of very thin soles,” said Katinka, looking down ruefully at her soaking shoes. “Have we got much farther to go?”

  “A couple of hundred yards or so; not more.”

  “Well, Amista had better be worth it, that’s all I can say!” Miss Evans strode on steadily ahead of them, nimble as a mountain sheep. Chucky said: “Amista?”

  “Mrs. Carlyon. I only know her as ‘Amista.’ Come to think of it, I suppose she’s really got some other name?”

  “I’m not on those terms with her,” said Chucky.

  “Is she nice? Having sweated all this way to see her, I hope she is! She’s pretty anyway, isn’t she?” She thought how Amista’s fair young face would flush with pleasure at the advent of her dear Miss Friendly-wise. (At least I hope she’ll be glad to see me!) It had not occurred to her before to doubt it.

  “Mr. Carlyon appears to think her pretty,” said Chucky, grinning. His stiff back, neat belted mackintosh over the smart brown suit, preceded her up the path. “She’ll be glad to see you. She must be lonely here. …”

  (“… and, dear Miss Friendly-wise, it’s very lonely here. Nobody to talk to but the two servants and now and again the woman who brings the milk. But of course there is Carlyon. …”)

  Up and up and up the narrow incline; and then a turn in the path, and there was the house.

  It had looked so romantic from across the valley—Penderyn, “the bird’s head,” lying against the bosom of the mountainside. It was almost a shock to find it a modern house: an ugly, modern house, its stolid walls covered with what Tinka thought of as egg-and-bread-crumbing, with patched-on bow windows; peaked at the top and finished off with a nasty wooden trimming as though an outsize child had been at its toy with an inadequate fretsaw: An untidy house, with attics poked away behind little purblind windows, an insignificant peaked front porch stuck on all anyhow to shelter the insignificant suburban front door. There was no garden; only a gravelled path across the rough, wet grass, dreadfully bordered with broken coloured glass.

  Mr. Chucky caught up with Miss Evans and spoke to her as they stepped off the rough path onto the gravel. She disappeared round the back of the house and he waited for Tinka to catch up with him. “She says to wave a white handkerchief and she’ll come back across the river for us.” He put out a lean hand and pulled at the bell handle, dangling just inside the porch.

  They were kept waiting. Above them wood scraped on painted wood as a window was cautiously inched open. Tinka glanced up and was in time to see two heads bob back: a man’s grizzled hair and a woman’s cheerful, round pink and white face with puce-coloured lipstick, lavishly applied. “But hush,” she said to Mr. Chucky. “We are observed.”

  “But ‘soft,’” corrected Mr. Chucky.

  “I was just remarking,” said Tinka, coldly. “Not quoting.” He gave her a glance of open unbelief and for a moment extinguished one bright brown eye in an enormous wink. A rather objectionable person after all; she wondered how she could have thought him prim.

  The front door opened slowly inward. A little man stood there, a little solid, stolid, bow-legged Welshman, with deep grey eyes set in a square brown face. “I called to see Mrs. Carlyon,” said Tinka, nipping in smartly in front of Mr. Chucky.

  The little man gestured her inside, evidently including her companion in the invitation. They stepped into the hall. “I just, er—called in, hoping to see her,” said Tinka, shaking herself like a wet dog over the mat inside the door, to try to get rid of some of the rain from her mackintosh. She added: “My name is Miss Jones.” It seemed sufficiently absurd, having travelled six miles in a jolting bus and been rowed across a flooded river, to say that one had just dropped in. She would not add to it by announcing herself as Miss Friendly-wise. “Miss Katinka Jones, but she won’t know the name.”

  “Wait,” said the man. He opened a door and poked his grizzled head inside. She could hear him murmuring that a Miss Jones had come. Above their heads there was a rustle and the pink and white face swam in the shadows of the landing. Evidently visitors were an event at Penderyn.

  A rug that gleamed with the silken sheen of old Persian craftsmanship had been thrown across the ugly brown polished linoleum. A shabby felt hat was hitched up on one of the pegs of the hideous fumed-oak hatstand and a shawl, as vivid and glowing as the rug, was draped across it from one peg to another, falling in curtained folds of shining glory. Beneath it, on the table part of the stand, was a heap of letters; and on top of them, one marked with the familiar seal, the familiar gold-flecked scarlet wax, with the name “Amista” carved across the small oval of its surface. Amista had not written since just before her wedding day; evidently now Miss Friendly-wise must start all over again with confidential advice on the difficulties of the married state.

  At the end of the hall, a door stood open and through it she could see a pleasantly tiled kitchen and beyond that the open back door. Two jugs of milk stood on the table and Miss Evans looked up and smiled briefly, clapping the lids back on her empty cans. At that moment, the bow-legged man came back into the hall. He gave his head a jerk towards the inner room and said: “All right. Go in.” Mr. Chucky gave her an interrogatory shrug, which seemed to say, What—me too? But she could not be bothered with Mr. Chucky any more. She was conscious that he followed her unobtrusively into the room and stood behind her in the doorway.

  She went in—and there was Carlyon.

  He was tall—not too tall, but above the average height, and very slim. His skin was brown, and against the thin brown face his hair had a look almost of silver. His eyes were a clear light blue and there radiated from him a sort of charm that Miss Friendly-wise had met with seldom in her hectic career through life—the charm of unassuming, but nevertheless absolutely unmistakable integrity. His clothes were the sort of clothes that men wore in the serial stories in Girls Together, but they wer
e still the clothes she loved a man to wear: grey flannel trousers a little baggy at the knee, a loose tweed jacket that had come from a good tailor, but a very long time ago; shoes of a beautiful leather, lovingly cared for. In the curve of one arm he held a Siamese cat, a small, sleek, biscuity coloured creature with slanting sapphire eyes. And with his free hand he pushed aside a strand of the silvery hair that had fallen “soft and sort of spikey” across his forehead. The unconscious gesture robbed him for a moment of maturity, left him for a moment, sure enough, as Amista had said, “an unhappy little boy”; a rather untidy, deeply vulnerable, vaguely unhappy little boy.

  He said politely: “Miss Jones?”

  “Yes,” said Tinka. “And you’re Mr. Carlyon, are you?”

  He bowed. “And the gentleman?”

  Let Chucky explain his business later. “We’re not together,” said Tinka. “Actually I—er—I just called in hoping to see Amista—well, Mrs. Carlyon.” She remembered too late the handwriting disguised, the “accommodation address”; she hoped her visit was not going to make things awkward for Amista.

  Carlyon said politely, a little bewildered: “But I don’t know anybody called Amista. There is no Mrs. Carlyon.”

  The room was like the hall: an ugly room made beautiful with a scattering of beautiful things. An exquisite rug on the cheap brown linoleum, an exquisite piece of china on the mantelpiece, a little post-Impressionist snow scene hanging on the wall. Amista had mentioned the snow scene. It was by some artist or other, she couldn’t remember the name, but Carlyon knew all about these things. … Katinka said, astonished: “But I don’t understand—you said you were Mr. Carlyon?”

  “Brothers and sisters have I none,” said Carlyon, politely smiling. “Nor any Mrs. Carlyon either. There’s no such person.”

  She was confounded. “Well—I don’t know… Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps you’re not married yet? But she does live here, doesn’t she—Amista, your ward?”