Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(69)

They started back to the farm but for a moment had to shrink back into the bushes hording the path. One of the Hippies came running down into the glade and looked about and called out a name: a funny name, not one that either of them knew—and at last, looking as if he didn’t like doing it, hunched his thin shoulders and went into the cave, still calling. They hared away back to the farm as though devils were after them.

The Hippies had bought up a derelict small-holding with tumbledown farm cottage of stone held together by crumbling clay, its chimneys nested by jackdaws, its slate roof caving in. They had restored it, painstakingly, patiently; cleared and tilled the rough ground, planted a garden there, kept chickens and ducks and a goat and an elderly Jersey cow. Emlyn Lewis had cheated them over the cow; but, fair play, Hippies deserved nothing better—an ignorant, thriftless, carefree lot with their beards and long hair and the girls in long untidy dresses and hair hanging all about their shoulders. And immoral! Walking about pregnant for all to see! The men drove around in a shabby van with goat cheese and ‘natural yoghourt’ and produce from the garden. Who bought enough to make this worth while, remained a mystery. The farmers’ wives simply said roughly, ‘No!’ and turned their stout backs, criss-crossed with the straps of speckled overalls, till, unoffended, the intruders drove away. Summer visitors, perhaps, with their too-bright tents and caravans and lines of washing hung out to dry?—but they were very, very few and far between.

They were toiling in the garden when Christo came back from the cave. They called him that because he was so beautiful with his long face and scrappy golden beard like the face of the Christ imprinted on the sacred veil. He was married to Primula. They were in fact all married; it seemed rather pointless to resist what, after all, comforted their parents and made life so much simpler, especially when it came to the babies. There were three babies, one to each couple—Christo and Primula, Rohan and Melisande, Abel and Evaine. They all lived well enough on the produce of their land; and Rohan and Melisande sold their pottery to the local shops. They had beautiful names because they had rechristened themselves when they came to settle in Wales. They loved everything around them to be beautiful and if they were sometimes a little intense about it, would also often fall into laughter at their own pomposity. But it was true that their whole intention in forming their tiny community, had been to be beautiful in all ways, all through their lives.

Christo did not look beautiful now. His white face, whose skin never tanned, was all patched and streaked with pink. He gasped out: ‘It’s Corinna! She’s drowned herself!’ and sat down on the bench outside the cottage door and put his face in his hands and burst into tears.

‘Christ!’

‘I was late,’ said Christo. ‘She must have thought I wasn’t coming.’

They stood round him, stricken, the gardening tools still in their hands, stupidly staring—as the foolish wild mountain sheep do, faced, starving, with an artificial feed. ‘Oh, Christo, love!—don’t blame yourself.’

‘She wasn’t—accountable,’ said Rohan, comforting.

The girl was Megan Thomas, daughter of the farmer, who also carried the post; but they called her Corinna, out of Herrick, because she would wander along the hedges picking sprays of the white May blossom, holding it in a sort of ecstasy to her face, feeling the soft brush of the stamens, the caressing roughness of the hidden thorns; snuffing up the strange, musky scent. ‘Corinna’s going a-Maying…’ She was the only one of the farming people who would come near the wicked Hippies. Her Mam told her not to and her Da said he would beat her but she came, nevertheless, and hung about the cottage. Seeing his beautiful face, hearing his name, she had in her hazy, dazy mind come to fancy that here was an incarnation of Iesu Grist, come again; and now, deeply in a trouble she did not fully understand, had turned to him for help—for comfort, for absolution—who could tell? If he would meet her, down in the glade? They would not go into the cave—Christo suffered violently from claustrophobia, could not endure an enclosed space—the very doors of the house were kept open if he were alone in there. But they must go somewhere secret; if her Da knew, he would beat her. And if he knew—if he knew…‘My Da would kill me! My Da would kill me!’

They had supposed her to be having a baby and advised him that he must at least meet her and try to comfort and advise. If people had faith in one… After all, to love and be kind was the whole foundation of their lives. But now….‘Was she in the river?’