Chapter 5 Two Miles of Washing

Olwen had four hundred sheets of cotton in the flat and the week from the twelfth to the eighteenth, and no girl to do them, because the girl had gone to Bangor for her sister's wedding and would not be back till the Monday. "You can lift them," she told the machine. "That's all. If you lift them while they're going you take the weight off the cloth and you'll have a streak down every sheet and the woman will count them, she counts them, she's counted them since she was thirty." The counter at the drapery was run by a woman called Mrs Pugh who had been widowed in 'forty-two and had a way of saying good morning that made it sound like an audit. The rooms upstairs smelled of hot cotton and camphor and the particular damp that Ildwater got in June. Olwen was on the second floor with her own four hundred on the line behind her and the windows open on both sides, so that the air went through. The stack came off the line at nine and went up the stairs in armfuls, and by two she had done ninety, and her back had that hot woolly feeling under the shoulder blades that comes with August. "Morning," said Mrs Pugh, at the top of the stairs with a ledger. "Two of the Jennings girls are back from Bangor, so I shall want them Thursday instead of Monday." "Right you are." "And your sister's boy came in for salt." Olwen stopped with an armful of sheets. "Which boy." "The tall one off the pans. Gwyn. He bought a quarter of a hundredweight and paid with a note and asked me if I knew anybody had a cottage to let." Mrs Pugh wrote a figure. "It isn't my business to say, but if a lad of sixteen takes a cottage on the water in a place like this, his family will find out what it cost him." "He won't be sixteen for a year." "They're all sixteen." Mrs Pugh shut the ledger. "You'll tell your sister I said it." Olwen said she would, and went down to the ironing, and stood in front of the hot boxes with her hand on a sheet that had stopped moving, and thought about a sixteen-year-old boy taking a cottage on the water at Sallowry, which was a long way to walk from the pans at four in the morning, and which would have been absurd, except that she had been in this town nine years now and knew exactly what it looked like when a person got it into their head that they could not live in their sister's house. She had written to Cerys on the Sunday. The letter went in the Tuesday post: > *Gwyn was in for salt and asked me if I knew of a cottage. I did not tell > him about the two at the Marsh End, so you may have them both if you have a > mind to. Don't work him to the bone, she is one to work and you are one not > to. He says the pans are down to the last boil and the Harbour Board man has > been twice.* She read it back over the stove and thought, *I am asking you about a boy when I meant to ask you about a book*, and she did not add a line, because a woman who adds a line to a letter every third of a lifetime is a woman who wants to be answered. The answer came on the Wednesday, in Cerys's writing, which was upright and pressed so hard on the paper that the back of it stood up like a blister: > *Gwyn has a wage and a bed here and I have said so and shall go on saying so. > As for the Marsh End pair I would have no objection to the one by the ditch if > there is any road at all to it, but it is not mine to let, ask the estate. > You are to come at Whitsun if you can get a bed in the village and I will put > you in the front room and you can see for yourself how things stand, and you > are not to write to me at work again, because Mrs Pugh reads the cards.* Then, on the same sheet, below that, upside down because she had run out of paper and turned it: *The roll stays where it is. There is nothing for you to do about the roll. There has never been anything for you to do about the roll.* Olwen put the kettle on the ring and did not make tea. She took her mother's letter out of her apron, the one from the February before, which had been in her pocket for four months because she had not been able to throw it away and had not been able to look at it either. > *Cerys, I have had the cottage at the Marsh End seen into. It wants a new > roof and the sea took the garden wall in the flood and the man says he will > not have it back. Four pounds a year for the ground and he will not take less > than three years in advance. I have not said yes. I want you to see it first > and to tell me honestly whether there is anything in the front room that > ought to keep me here, because I will tell you now that I have looked and I > cannot see it, and I have not said that to you before and I am not going to > begin.* Olwen read her mother's writing until the steam came off the kettle and marked her wrist. There was nothing in the front room that ought to keep her here. She had known that since she was fifteen and had spent eleven years not saying so out loud, because a girl who says that out loud in a house like this is a girl who has asked to be given the reason. Mrs Pugh came up the stairs at half past four with the day's count and stood looking at the letters on the ironing board, because nobody who has run a drapery for twenty-six years has ever been able to help looking. "Trouble?" "No." "You're crying over your ironing." "I'm crying because the shop closed in 'fifty-one and my mother's cousin took it and I've been an assistant ever since," Olwen said, "and I would like to be asked one question about it in my life, Mrs Pugh, and you haven't asked me one." Mrs Pugh put the count down. "Whitsun," she said. "You said your sister has the front room." "She has." "Then go at Whitsun," said Mrs Pugh, "and take the two nights at the George and the rest of it walking, and ask her yourself whatever it is you want to ask her, because a thing you write about is a thing you can go on writing about forever, and a thing you ask is a thing that gets an answer." Olwen ironed another hundred sheets after she went, and her sister was three hundred miles away and sixty miles across water, standing in a front room by a lamp with a leather cover open on a table and a hole in it shaped like a man's hand. ---