‘Dinbych,’ Margiad replied. ‘She answered Mr Blair’s advert in a paper there. And what was her father doing at Tenby? To fall over a cliff there?’
‘You’re a real crusader,’ he said, ‘I can even see the lifebelt in your hands, Margiad.’
‘Go away,’ she said.
He stood beside her, and when she looked at him she enjoyed the moment of his helplessness. ‘You are even beginning to look like a fool, Mervyn. Now leave me alone.’
‘You wouldn’t go, Margiad, you wouldn’t just go.’
‘I said leave me alone.’
She heard the door close, the creak on the stairs. And then she began to pack. She took two suitcases from the wardrobe and laid them on the bed. Then she went to the chest of drawers and began to sort out her belongings. From time to time she took a dress to the light, and carefully studied it, then folded and put it away. She felt intensely sad, and once stood over the half filled case, staring at the contents, the moment made real when she looked at the open wardrobe, the pulled out drawers.
‘He can make an exhibition of himself if he wishes, but I’ll not stay here,’ and she thought of her last visit to Penuel, heard the tittering of the woman behind her, heard her brother called a silly old man. She thought of him now, back in his study, dreaming his mad dream about a woman that lived in the clouds. Shameful. Awful. ‘Perhaps he’ll deliver her another letter, and she’ll toss it into the basket,’ and that night Jones would read it aloud as he lay with the English bitch, and they would laugh, and she could hear them laughing. She finished her packing, and pushed the cases under the bed, after which she sat in the chair, and cried quietly to herself. Once, they had been happy, had lived for each other; once they held high their heads and were respected, and now … and she wiped her eyes. She would go to her sister. She would not return to the house. She went and lay on the bed, suddenly stiffened there, appalled by her own decision.
‘We are simple people, and there is a way for us,’ she thought.
The silence of the house was so intense that when her brother began to pace his study, the steps came up loud and clear to her.
‘After all these years,’ and she saw him, a good man, falling to pieces.
The pacing continued, and it did not stop, and the words followed behind him, out of his sister’s mouth, and they would not let him alone.
‘One fine morning you’ll lose your chapel.’
‘You are ill.’
‘You’ll feel the root go.’
‘You annoy me by your silliness. Wake up. Your years are crags, and they will never be velvet. Grow up, Mervyn.’
He stopped dead in his tracks, and thought, ‘Perhaps I am ill. What’ll I do?’
He returned to his desk, covered his head with his hands. After a while he sat up, looked out at the surrounding darkness, got up and closed the windows, switched out the light, and sat still in the darkened room. The world diminished, and then he heard the footsteps in his head, as Miss Vaughan walked on, sublimely indifferent to one that thought her lonely. He remembered the first evening he had seen her, and saw her now, small, and quiet, and still, seeming so separate from others that sang when he sang, and she listened, and he watched her listen, and suddenly look his way, and he was lost in a moment, the words confusing on his tongue, until quite suddenly he murmured before an astonished congregation, ‘My God,’ then, after a pause, found his peace again, and then began his sermon. But Miss Vaughan was no longer there. She had vanished.
‘I’m in love with her,’ and she was in the room, filling, drenching it.
‘I know I could make her happy.’
And suddenly Miss Vaughan was pushed rudely from his sight, and his sister was there, barring the way.
‘Gone,’ he said, and dropped his hands to the desk, thought of his sister’s life, his own. ‘If she answered one single letter, if .…’
He left the study and returned to the sitting-room, he put coal to the fire, he sat down, lit his pipe, and lay back. The door opened and Margiad came in, went straight to her chair and sat down. For an awful moment he thought she would renew her frantic knitting, instead of which she sat quietly and looked to the fire. He looked at his watch.
‘Supper, Margiad,’ he said, and immediately she left the room.
If only he could find a way in, by one single word. He listened to the kitchen noises, the tap tap of her restless feet, the shattering sound of a falling pan, and he called loudly, ‘Can I help?’ There was no answer. She came in and laid the table. ‘Can I do anything?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing.’
‘Very well,’ dragged from the tongue, pained, irritable, he wanted to shout in her face, ‘Let there be an end to it.’
She came in, they both sat down, she served him, he began to eat.
‘Margiad! Please.’
‘Not again,’ she replied, and went on with her supper.
‘I wish,’ he began, ‘I wish that…’ but she wasn’t listening.
‘I know how you are feeling,’ she said.
‘Your good intentions have wings, sister.’
‘I worry about you because you are my brother, Mervyn, and I hide my head in the town more often than I do not.’
‘The lifebelt shines in your eyes,’ he replied, and gave a curious little laugh.
‘She has no friends, and wants no friends, she likes what she is, what she does. She loves herself, Mervyn. Miss Vaughan is her own business.’
‘She seems to be yours,’ he shouted in her face.
‘You don’t even see what is happening,’ she said.
‘For God’s sake.’
‘You know there would be a living for you at Hengoed. Can’t you think about it, can’t you make up your mind, Mervyn?’
