Ghostbird Read online

  ‘I wonder who I might have become, if I’d chosen a less solitary occupation,’ she said.

  ‘You mean like a policewoman or a teacher?’

  ‘Why not?’

  What might her life have been away from the village and her mother’s legacy, from the make-believe world of faeries and wicked queens? There were times when Lili allowed herself to consider a different way, then Violet would flounder and Cadi would appear at her door and she would be grateful for the simplicity of her life.

  The fierceness of her love for Cadi still startled her. If she harboured any resentment, the love she felt for her dead brother’s child masked it. She would remember Teilo and be satisfied with her choices.

  ‘You’d hate it,’ Sylvia said, breaking into Lili’s reverie. ‘Policewomen have to wear all that stuff: radios and bullet proof jackets. And boots in summer.’

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘You’re your own boss, Lili, and you’ve got the surgery to keep the wolf from the door. You get all the low-down on the gossips, so you can get your own back!’

  Lili laughed. ‘Don’t. I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Good job it’s me then, and not you.’

  The truth was Lili’s nature rendered her uninterested in other people’s business. Whatever it may have suspected, the village had nothing to fear from Lili. Not that she had much time for virtue, not even her own. Moral excellence smacked to her of self-righteousness. What went round came around.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly, Syl. And I have to go, Cadi’s calling.’

  ‘Keep the faith, girlfriend. And send back my illustrations.’

  Eleven

  Love is a choice and however she rationalised it, Cadi loved Lili best.

  Awake early and too distracted to read, she tried to feel guilty about putting Lili first. Even when Lili was being a pain, she was less of a pain than Violet. Whatever Lili seemed reluctant to tell her, Cadi knew from experience, if she was ever going to learn anything from her aunt, it would be wise to bide her time.

  She feared her mother’s anger more. Violet didn’t need much of an excuse to criticise Lili. For now, Cadi would keep her head down and her eyes open.

  She sometimes thought she might disappear altogether. Violet had a way of rendering her invisible, though at other times, her scrutiny could be intense. The complexity of her mother’s indifference no longer surprised Cadi.

  Violet’s life was before, and had little to do with after. Cadi didn’t belong in her mother’s old life and barely figured in her present one. Now and then she sensed Violet looking up from her knitting, turning her head and staring, her gaze one of vague bewilderment. I neither know nor understand you, the look said. How did you get here? Then Violet’s face would clear and Cadi knew she was making a mental note to rein in her thoughts. At times, she knew her mother couldn’t bear to look at her. I remind her of him.

  Violet’s gaze was so fierce, Cadi swore she could see right through her.

  Cadi shivered and pulled the pillows round her head.

  Everything seemed haunted and yet the ghost of her sister now seemed distant. Cadi’s sense of her was beginning to fade and her heart felt small with longing. She fell asleep and dreamed of a hand in hers – not Lili’s or Violet’s, not even her father’s. It was another smaller hand. And when she woke, once again the scent of meadowsweet clogged the air.

  Damp mist overlaid the morning, as if a dragon exhaled.

  Still in her pyjamas, Cadi picked up her book, slipped through the gap in the garden wall and curled up on a chair under the cherry tree. Reading, she thought she might get Lili to check out what Jane Eyre had to say about being told what to do by people older than herself, who imagined they knew better.

  Lili found her, lost in her book. ‘It’s not even seven o’clock.’

  Cadi looked up, her finger keeping her place. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘I keep thinking about them. My dad and Dora.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t think you do.’ Cadi closed her book, marking the page with a feather. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Lili.’

  ‘Is that what we’re doing?’

  ‘It feels like it.’

  Lili sat in the other chair. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay what? That doesn’t mean anything either. It’s like the “everything’s going to be alright” speech. It’s stupid.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.’

  ‘What?’ Lili stared, her eyes round as plates.

  ‘It’s from Jane Eyre. You really ought to read it.’

  ‘I have read it.’

  Cadi waved the book in front of Lili’s face. ‘You complicate things, both of you. Why, when if you wanted to, you could make it so simple? And you wouldn’t even have to use your precious magic. You could just tell me.’ She stood up. ‘Or Mam could.’

  ‘Cadi, I…’

  ‘Don’t bother, Lili. I’m so bored by both of you.’

  Twelve

  There were more umbrellas in the village than cats.

  August meant unexpected storms taking only visitors and Violet by surprise. The village knew, even when the day dawned soft and sweet, in August you didn’t plan a picnic. Only fools or lovers went for long walks in the woods.

  ‘It rains every day in this damn country,’ Violet had said to Lili, not long after she moved to the village.

  Lili told her it only seemed that way. ‘It’s August, it’ll pass.’

  Violet watched the sun in the morning, listened to the blackbirds singing as if they were in love, and in the evening heard the rain falling so hard she thought the village might drown.

  Her entrance into the family skewed its continuity. Hopkins were ‘old village’. And the village had a long memory. Lili’s father, Iolo the solicitor, had been trusted with myriad confidences. His premature death came as a blow to everyone. And regardless of her reputation as a witch woman, when Gwenllian died soon after from a broken heart, Teilo and Lili found themselves nodded over with some sympathy. Teilo’s wayward nature, and concerns about his sister were set aside. Those who didn’t actively dislike Teilo or Lili pitied them, and who could say which was worse?

  In the end, kindness prevailed. The village decided it could tolerate the wild Hopkins boy and his witchy sister, with her bare feet and her book writing.

  Violet was another matter altogether. Violet was an outsider who wore her Englishness like a mockery. Hopkins might be odd; at least you knew where they came from. With her loose hair and closed demeanour, Violet confused people. Nobody’s child and with no discernible past.

  And a secret past – even the hint of one – casts a circle of suspicion. Family connections were a serious matter, much like other people’s business.

  In Violet, they saw a person without a past and it made them uneasy. It didn’t matter that she’d married the Hopkins boy; ironically, it was part of why they didn’t trust her. They watched her from behind their lace curtains and smiled blank smiles whenever they met her in the street. Her every move was noted. Violet set off on her walks caring nothing for their opinions.

  Her husband’s dreams that Violet might learn Welsh or join the choir or the Women’s Institute came to nothing. Violet did none of these things. With no history of her own worth falling back on, she cared less for the family name than she did for the price of a pair of shoes. Violet didn’t trust anyone. She stayed at home and knitted. She might have gardened: since Lili did it so much better and Gwenllian’s legacy was fabled, after a few attempts, she gave up.

  ‘That woman who runs the spring fête,’ she had said to Lili one day as they sat under the cherry tree. ‘I asked her if she’d like some of my things.’

  ‘Miss Bevan.’

/>   ‘That’s her. I showed her a baby shawl and she said it was very nice.’ Violet shook her head as if she had been told a joke and didn’t understand the punchline. ‘Nice is a bit thick, don’t you think?’

  ‘You know what village people are like, Violet, something new and they panic.’

  ‘I don’t actually. I’ve never met people like them before. And in any case, the last time I saw a ball of wool it didn’t strike me as particularly innovative.’

  Lili smiled. ‘It isn’t personal, Violet. When people see what you make, they’ll love it. Your work’s exquisite.’

  Violet lit a cigarette and inhaled hard. ‘Oh, it’s personal alright.’

  When the only pieces of her work that sold were bought by visitors, she declared her case rested. Hurt and unable to translate the feeling into anything tangible, Violet never offered the village another thing. Instead, she knitted herself a long coat. A breathtaking garment in every shade of blue she could find, colours as dark as a lover’s night, as delicate as the first bluebell. Blue for sadness and serenity, for ambiguity and freedom; suspicion and trust and wisdom. And caught in a cuff, a strand of honeysuckle yellow, for an unconscious moment of joy.

  Little threads of green and lilac bliss she had no memory of including hung from the hem of Violet’s coat. It took her a whole year to make and she wore it every day as if in defiance.

  Look what you could have had, the coat said, as Violet passed like a fleeting glimpse of air and sky.

  Long sweet summers came and went; sharp winters when cold and frost had sent Violet and Teilo into one another’s arms. When he was at home they walked and loved and Violet had tried to understand his attraction to the lake.

  ‘Can’t we go somewhere else?’

  Violet’s mother disappeared across the ocean. With its sullen surface and shadowy banks, her distrust of water made her wary of the lake.

  Teilo laughed and kissed her. ‘Don’t be silly, cariad, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s only a lake.’

  He would soothe her fears. Each time the respite was brief and her unease would return. The lake felt forlorn and it made her dreams restless.

  To placate her, he took her to beaches carpeted with grey pebbles, where the sea played lightly and it never rained in August. He took her to long-lost gardens and ancient castles where they ate picnics and drank wine.

  The lake would always pull him back.

  When he told her he had to work late, Violet wanted to know why.

  ‘You’re always at the garage.’

  ‘Cars don’t fix themselves, cariad. Joe relies on me and I owe him. He gave me a job when I left school and no one else would look at me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was wild back in those days.’ He winked. ‘Joe knew my dad – he fixed Iolo’s cars. They were good pals. Joe trusts me. We’re a team.’

  I thought we were supposed to be a team.

  A distancing occurred, born of her fear of rejection, giving energy to her growing dislike of summer, and in particular, the incessant rain in August. Lili, she believed, viewed her as an interloper and Violet retreated still further.

  The woods around the village were dark and full of mystery. Violet sought solitude for its own sake – an old quarry was as welcoming as a bluebell wood. She wandered at random, pursued by her magical cardigan. It snagged on twigs, leaving shreds of wool floating like feathers. As she walked she inhaled the smell of fungus and crushed grass, the scent of strange flowers. She slipped between tall trees that in the dim, damp light appeared as insubstantial as she felt.

  Made smaller by Teilo’s constant defections, and her own self-imposed isolation, Violet began to feel more at home in the woods than she did in the cold cottage where even the ghosts of dead people she had never known seemed to talk about her behind her back.

  In his careless fashion, Teilo loved Violet, in some ways he was devoted to her. And when he returned from who knew where, he came paying court, bearing gifts and charm. Violet’s beauty would take him by surprise; her need for love would overcome her feelings of abandonment. They would be fools in love again.

  Nevertheless, after a while he couldn’t always reach her.

  ‘You’re like a ghost,’ he told her. ‘It’s like I can’t see you.’

  ‘Maybe you aren’t looking in the right place.’

  ‘I don’t get you sometimes, Violet.’

  ‘I don’t think you get me at all. Why didn’t you warn me living here would be so – Welsh?’

  She threw his heritage at him as if it were an irrelevance.

  ‘If I had, you wouldn’t have married me.’

  ‘I might have.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For security? To escape?’

  He called her a bitch. Now it was Teilo’s turn to feel something slipping away.

  When she told him she couldn’t live this way, he said it was the only way he knew.

  And in the shadows, his jealousy waited.

  ‘What did you do today?’

  ‘This and that – laundry and shopping.’

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Or you won’t say.’

  He knew what he did when he said this but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted her pliable and when she resisted, Teilo’s short fuse threatened to ignite. Her silence – her refusal to defend herself – simply fed his fury.

  He would watch her disappear, her pale reproachful gaze the last thing he saw, leaving a chill behind her.

  ‘What did you expect?’ Lili said, uncharacteristically rubbing it in. ‘You need to pay her more attention.’

  ‘I pay her attention; I saved her from her bloody awful life. I give her everything.’

  ‘It isn’t everything she needs, Teilo, it’s you.’

  He told her to mind her own business.

  His jealously took hold. And the disappointment at the turn her life had taken made it the same for Violet.

  There they were, right before one another’s eyes, and yet it seemed as if, once the bargain had been sealed – Teilo the warrior and Violet rescued – the game was over. With the dragon (Madeleine) slain, and the damsel proving herself reluctant to conform or show gratitude, Teilo took off in pursuit of other quests.

  Left in charge of her cottage-shaped castle, Violet yearned for something she couldn’t name. Her reticence became ingrained. Out in the woods, she walked and walked. Her thoughts turned into secrets, and she derived a sly comfort from knowing Teilo and Lili were strangers to them.

  Violet’s walks were her business.

  ‘Don’t go off by yourself, I’m here now.’

  And so he was: with flowers and endearments and doing his best. ‘Come to the lake with me, cariad.’

  Violet would catch his lop-sided smile and give in.

  He laid her down beneath an oak tree, among the fallen leaves. His fingers threaded flowers through her hair: daisies and corn-cockle, meadowsweet and broom. Kissing away her fear of the deep dark water, in his passion, Teilo loved his mysterious wife and conjured the most beautiful girl child he could imagine.

  Thirteen

  Standing at the bus stop, trying to get away from her thoughts, Violet turned around as someone asked about Cadi.

  ‘She’s fine, thank you.’

  ‘Such a good girl, not like most.’

  For the life of her, Violet couldn’t place the woman.

  ‘She must be a comfort,’ another woman said.

  Why don’t you say what you mean? Violet thought, all the while dreading one of them might.

  When she told him, Violet thought he might burst with pride.

  ‘You’ve made me the happiest man in the world.’

  The idea of a child meant, for a while at least, Teilo hardly went anywhere. He fussed over her, and strode about, proud as a peacock.

  Violet looked ahead, trusting to a second chance at her future. As she settled into pregnancy, she and Lili became friends of a k
ind.

  ‘Look,’ she said, running into Lili’s kitchen. A tumble of white wool fell out of her bag.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Lili said, meaning it. ‘Like spider silk,’ she added, for good measure.

  And Teilo told Violet she could spin a web around him as tight as she liked.

  But it was you cast the spell on me. Violet moved away from the group of women, poked in her bag as if searching for something. You promised me the world and left me alone with no one to look after me, and the wrong baby to love.

  She listened for the bus, willing it to come.

  Tiny as a bird, small hands like wings, fingers outstretched as if she might fly away, the baby was their miracle.

  When she was born, on the first day of August as the first drops of rain fell, Violet knew something she’d never in her entire life experienced before: a moment when emotion and conviction linked her to this tiny creature forever.

  She lifted the baby into her husband’s outstretched arms.

  ‘She’s perfect,’ he said. ‘From now on, I think a part of me will always be good.’

  Violet smiled her hopeful smile. ‘Yes. I suppose that’s what babies do to us.’ She leaned up on her pillow. ‘We still haven’t decided on a name.’

  ‘Can you smell the meadowsweet?’ he asked.

  She couldn’t. He told her it was a magical flower.

  ‘Listen.’ He rocked the baby in his arms. ‘Listen to this, baby girl.’ Swaying from side to side, he whispered in the baby’s ear. ‘I was spellbound by Gwydion, prime enchanter of the Britons, when he formed me from nine blossoms, nine buds of various kinds; from primrose of the mountain, broom, meadowsweet and cockle, together intertwined.’

  The baby slept.

  ‘That’s poetry, that is, Violet.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking…’

  ‘Long and white your fingers, cariad,’ Teilo sang to his baby, as if they were the only two people in the room. ‘Long and white, as the ninth wave of the sea.’

  He turned to Violet, triumphant. ‘Fy Mlodyn bach – my little Blodeuwedd.’

  Violet had her own legends: Isadora Duncan with her dancing and her scarves. She wrapped her baby in the cobweb shawl and got to the register office first.