Yew don’t get no holidays, do yew?”
I shake my head and try to smile but my lips are rigid with cold. The woman’s hands are raw and bony, the tendons like red ropes. A mother’s hands — one who did the washing-up three times a day, peeled the veg and stirred the terry nappies in their scummy cauldron. Hands like that will die out in another generation, along with waist pinnies and the Sunday roast.
Bowed double against the rain, Richard pushes the buggy along the little road to the cathedral. Emily is so drenched she has made the transformation from child to water sprite. “Mummy?”
“What is it, Emily?”
“Baby Jesus has got a lot of houses, hasn’t he? Is this where he comes on his holidays?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. Ask Daddy.”
Cathedrals are built to inspire awe. Sacred fortresses, they always look as though they have been lowered from heaven onto a hill. St. Davids is different. It sits on the edge of a small Welsh town — a city in name only — hiding its virtues in a valley so perfectly designed it feels like an engraving. Cattle graze almost up to its walls.
I love this place. The ancient chill that fills your lungs when you push open the door — the trapped breath of saints, I always think. I must have been seven or eight the first time I came here, candy floss from Tenby on my lips. Licking them now I can still taste its cobwebby sweetness. I have seen grander cathedrals since, of course: Notre Dame, Seville, St. Paul’s. But the greatness of this church lies in its smallness, barely bigger than a barn really. You wouldn’t be surprised to find an ox and an ass by the font.
St. Davids is one of the few places that bids me be still. And here in the nave I realize that, these days, stillness is an unaccustomed, even an uncomfortable sensation. The cathedral is timeless, and my life…my life is nothing but time. Rich has taken Emily and Ben to explore the gift shop. Left alone, I find my mouth forming words no one can hear: Help me.
Asking a God I’m not sure I believe in to get me out of a mess I don’t understand? Oh, very good, Kate, very good.
On the far wall, there is a slate tablet commemorating a local grandee. In memory of Somebody Thomas and of his relict Angharad. Relict. Same as relic? Will have to ask Rich, he’s good at Latin. Had a proper education, not the comprehensive shambles I had to put up with.
Outside, a vertiginous gingerbread staircase links the cathedral to the tiny city on the hill. I haul the buggy backwards up the steps, feeling each bump in my lower vertebrae. Rich carries a squally Emily on his shoulders. She and Ben badly need their tea. Guilty bad mother. I always forget children are like cars; without regular injections of fuel they judder and stop.
We walk down a street full of cafes and peer through the windows, inspecting each one for child-friendliness. Is there room for the buggy? Are there older people in there who would rather not share their toasted crumpets with a dribbly Ben? Britain is still no country for young children. Venture too far from Pizza Express and you find the same resentful sighs I remember from when Julie and I were kids.
We settle on a chintzy establishment full of other holiday parents, as spooked and unrested as us, and make for the farthest corner. Draped over the backs of chairs, our wet coats steam like cows. I read out the menu and Emily announces loudly that she doesn’t want anything that’s on offer. She wants pasta.
“We can do ’oops from a tin, like,” offers the kindly waitress.
“I don’t want hoops,” wails Emily. “I want pasta.”
Metropolitan brat. All my fault for giving her everything so young. I didn’t taste my first pasta till I was nineteen years old. Rome.
Sometimes I worry that I’ve traveled this far, done this well in life, only for my kids to grow up as jaded and spoiled as the people I was patronized by at college.
As Rich cuts up the children’s Welsh rarebit, there is a little twiddly beep from my mobile. It’s a text message from Guy.
TurkE crisis.
Rod & R C–C away.
Devaluation?
Turk shares collapsing.
Wot do?
Oh, hell. Jump up, barge past other families, trip over labrador, run into street. Try mobile, but this time it’s making another kind of beep telling me the battery is low. Can’t get a signal. Of course I can’t get a signal, am in Wales. Run back into the cafe.
“Have you got a phone I can use?”
“’Scuse me?” The waitress looks blank.
“A pay phone?”
“Oh, yes, but it’s not working like.”
“A fax?”
“Facts?”
“A facsimile machine. I need to send an urgent message.”
“Oh. They might ’ave one over the paper shop.”
Newsagent has no fax; he thinks chemist has fax. Chemist does have fax. Fax needs paper. Back to paper shop. About to close. Bang on door. Beg. Have to buy brick of five hundred sheets, of which I need precisely one. Back to chemist. I scrawl a note to Guy using the prescription pen which is tethered to the counter:
9:50 P.M. There are huge jams in both directions on the M4. The headlights form a three-mile diamond necklace. From the driving seat, Rich shoots me inquiring, sidelong glances. I am grateful for the dark; it means I don’t have to pick up his distress signals until I feel ready.
Finally he says, “I still think it’s a bit odd, Kate, you sending yourself those flowers on Valentine’s Day. Why did you do it?”
“As a morale boost. I wanted people in the office to feel I was the kind of person who got flowers on Valentine’s Day. And I wasn’t sure you’d remember. Pathetic, really.”
Easy to lie when you try. Easier than saying that the flowers came from client with whom I have recently dined, client who has since occupied much of my conscious mind as well as rudely gate-crashing my dreams. Time to change the subject.
“Rich, what’s a relict? I saw it on a tomb in the cathedral today: AND HIS RELICT ANGHARAD.”
“Widow. It means literally what is left behind.”
“So the wife was the remains of the husband?”
“Exactly, Kate.” He laughs. “Of course, in our marriage, I’d be what was left of you.”
It’s said with enough love to sting. Do I really make him feel that way? That small? Over the miles to come, I embroider any number of plans, strategies to make things better between us. Put things right. But three hours later, as we pass Reading, I start to feel the gravitational pull of London, and the resolve to change my life burns up on re-entry.
1. Better quality of life.
2. Can buy mansion with en-suite minstrels’ gallery for cost of Hackney heap.
3. Chance to be real mother who has time to love husband, learn secret of children’s hearts and discover
