D O W N   I N   T H E  V A L L E Y (Part Two)

     My husband, of course, did not have the joy of being pregnant to sustain him. And although we both liked living in Wales, I had one great advantage over him:  having lived over half of my life in a desert climate, I love rain. It rained a lot when we were in Wales. It rained the day we moved into our cottage. It rained the day the midwife came to our house. It rained the day I was admitted to the hospital, and that happened to be the day that my husband started graduate school. It also happened to be the day that our car broke down, as my husband was on his way to visit me in the hospital. My husband remembers this as a particularly low point in his life. He had no money on him; he had been on his way to a bank. He had a heavy bag of things for me, and his textbooks, and a long walk ahead of him.. He ended up getting home late, very wet and cold, with a bag of soggy fish and chips for his dinner, which he ate in the frigid stillness of our tiny dining room. The propane cylinder in the downstairs fire was empty again.

     Things picked up a bit after I got out of the hospital. For the next month, I could not eat much, but I was able to keep almost everything down. Heartburn set in and that was rough, but it was not nearly so rough as throwing up after every meal had been. Gradually, I began to feel as though I had not just walked off the set of ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ I had the energy to brush my hair and wash my face everyday, and began to dress myself in the mornings again, instead of living in my nightgown and slippers.

      By this time it was late October, and the rain was becoming an almost daily feature. Every day Peter would leave for his classes, and I would have the cottage to myself until he came home. At first, I was not up to much. I would do the dishes, tidy up what needed to be tidied up – which back in those days before children strikes me as being close to nothing – then groom and dress myself. When I finally started eating meals again, I decided that it was time for me to start exploring the village. That did not take long.

    Our village consisted of about eleven rows of miner’s cottages, a station which was virtually deserted at all times, a newsagent’s that did not have The Guardian on sale, one café, and a derelict pub with half the roof missing. At the time, they were building a mining heritage museum, and as I walked past the building site for the very first time, one of the construction workers paid me the supreme compliment of a wolf whistle. I could not have been more astonished; I had not dressed with care, my bushy hair was lank and ill-kempt, and my skin had the pasty look commonly seen in chronic invalids. But after walking around the village for the first time I realized why I had gotten the wolf whistle:  when there isn’t much going on, you’ve got to appreciate what you do have to the fullest. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in that village, and if a waddling, dull-eyed, semi-invalid female made some guy’s day, I was prepared to set aside my feminist agenda for that one moment and admit that his wolf whistle made mine. I will admit that I did not look to see if someone more presentable were behind me or on the opposite side of the street, and I wholly rejected my husband's suggestion that the wolf whistle might well have been in jest. Whatever the reasons for it might have been, that was my wolf-whistle, and I preferred to think of it as proof that I was back in the land of the living.

     Just around Christmas, when I was finally able to keep down big meals, we decided it was time to start leaning on the landlady to do something about the washing machine she had promised us she would install.  We had been lugging our dirty laundry into our car once a week and taking it to a launderette in a nearby village. This was inconvenient, of course, but we had no other choice. At first, I had been too ill to handle the laundry, and after that I had been too weak.  But with a baby coming, we reasoned, it was best to get a washing machine as soon as possible.  And now that I was capable of doing the laundry again, we decided it was time we had our own machine instead of trekking back and forth to the launderette. So after many phone calls and much badgering, we finally managed to persuade our landlady to make good on her promise, and she presented us with an elderly second-hand twin-tub washing machine. 

     Not surprisingly, it didn’t work very well. For one thing, when it was fully loaded and had gone into its spin and rinse cycle, it sounded like a jumbo jet on the runway, just before take off. It was so noisy that if you had the stereo on at the same time, you could hear the stereo only if you were prepared to turn it on full blast. If Peter and I had to talk to each other while it was running, we had to either go upstairs or shout. Then it started leaking. At first it only leaked a little, but then one day, after we had used it perhaps three times, the leakage reached crisis level. By this time I was six months pregnant and could no longer see my own feet very well. I walked into the kitchen one morning while the machine was mid-cycle and skidded madly through a rapidly growing puddle of greasy, soapy water, landing on my back. That evening, Peter and I lugged several jumbo plastic bags of wet laundry to the launderette in the next village.

     It took me some time to find a repairman who would agree to come and look at our washing machine, but one day in mid-January someone finally agreed to come. The Gulf War had begun, and as I waited for the repairman to show up, I listened to the BBC World news and pitied the Iraqi civilians whose towns were being bombed. I pitied myself a little too, though, I am ashamed to say, sitting in a freezing cold kitchen (the propane heater was out of fuel again), waiting to pay a man to fix a piece of junk which we did not own, just so we could wash our clothes.

    By this time, both Peter and I were full of despair. It hardly seemed fair to us that we should have ended up with a cold-hearted shark of a landlady who was penny wise and pound foolish at our expense. We had had to beg and cajole and endlessly badger her to get someone fix the doors so that they would close. Ditto for the hole in the wall and the numerous holes that mysteriously appeared in the stairwell. We had a ‘carpet’ that was a magnet for hair, dust and all lint, windows that were of a glass so thin and cheap the cold came through them as though they were thin air, two heaters that were extremly difficult to light and keep refueled, and plastered walls that magically grew mold every few weeks and had to be endlessly wiped. Our hot water heater seldom worked properly, the bathroom was painted with flat paint that was already beginning to peel, and the clothesline was broken. True, the view of the valley was spectacular and our neighbors were kind even if they were hard to understand. And the garden was something to look forward to – full of daffodil and tulip bulbs, larkspur, evening primrose, candy tuft, sweet peas, and poppies, all planted by Peter, who had put in at least two weeks’ worth of hard work clearing debris, hoeing, fertilizing, planting and watering, after the gardener the landlady had promised us failed to materialize for the third time in a week. We were looking forward to seeing our garden in all its spring glory. Our baby was due just after the tulips, and I had visions of the three of us sitting in our garden soaking up whatever sun was on offer, enjoying the color and scent of all the flowers Peter had planted. But the general disrepair of our cottage and the landlady's broken promises were really beginning to get us down. And having to fix a washing machine which we had hardly even used was just the last straw.

     The man finally came. He fixed our washing machine, which he said was so dangerous the way he had found it that he didn’t even want to think about what might have happened, we were lucky we hadn’t been electrocuted. He charged us 30 pounds, for which I wrote him a check, then he left. Five minutes after he had gone, the landlady called. I mentioned the faulty washing machine to her and she hastened to tell me that any repairs were entirely our responsibility, even if the washing machine had been virtually junk to begin with. This did not come as a surprise to me, but what she had to say next did. She and her husband were getting a divorce and needed to dispose of their joint property. They would be selling our cottage as a result, and needed us to move out within six months. 

     We found a new place the very next day. It was in Cardiff, had a large, overgrown garden without a scrap of debris in it, radiators that belted out heat, an automatic washing machine that actually worked, and a bathtub that gave out almost as much hot water as you could ask for. There were real carpets on the floors -- never mind that they were outlandishly purple and gold -- and best of all, the rent was cheap. We moved in a week later.

     The night we moved out of our cottage, it snowed. We had been planning to move in the morning, but we were worried that the roads would ice over and be dangerous to navigate in the morning.  It was bitterly cold, the coldest it had been all winter. Our propane fire was out of gas again, but we didn’t care. A friend of Peter's came to visit and helped us load what furniture we had into our rented van. We got it all into our new place, then went out and celebrated with an Italian meal.  I had heartburn all night, but it was worth it.

     A few days later we went back to the cottage for the rest of our things. I was petty enough to go out into the garden and dig up some of the daffodil bulbs Peter had planted in September. I would have gotten the tulips too, but I could not remember where he had planted them.

     Months later, when we went back to the village to show off our baby, Ron and Irene told us that our tulips had been the most beautiful in all the village and had cheered them up immensely, as their own had failed to bloom. They also told us that without any tenants in our cottage to keep it warm, the pipes had burst. It had vexed the landlady no end, they said, she’d been upset that we had inconvenienced her by moving out so soon. She had not, as it turned out, gotten a divorce from her husband. That had just been a story she made up to get us out so that she could get some new tenants in and raise the rent. Ron and Irene told us that they had suspected all of this to begin with.

     Unfortunately, the landlady’s plans had backfired, Ron and Irene took great pleasure in telling us. The new tenants hadn’t paid their rent for over three months,  and then after they had been ordered to come up with the money or else, they had done a moonlight flit, leaving no clue as to their whereabouts. Our cottage had remained vacant for some time after that, and the tenants that had moved in afterwards were not a dependable lot.  The garden had become a neighborhood dump again, much to their dismay.

     It was July, and almost a year had passed since that day I stood in our cottage bathroom and learned that I was pregnant. I tried hard to recall it all – the bitter cold, the overwhelming nausea, the endless phone calls to the landlady, the long waits for repairs that were never carried out, the puzzling conversations with Ron and Irene. But although I could recall everything very well in essence, I found that I was less able to recall how it all actually felt. For one thing, Ron and Irene were far easier to understand by this time. And it was hard to get a sense of how oppressively cold it had been when the sun was beating down on our shoulders and turning our car into a little furnace. Feeding and caring for a new baby, I was famished all the time, so the memory of nausea, too, had faded considerably. In fact, I could almost feel nostalgic about it.

     So we said goodbye to Ron and Irene and gave our old cottage a last lingering glance. There were different curtains in the windows -- and the new tenants too had obviously been unable to remove the builder's masking tape which had been left on them -- and a different was name over the doorbell. No doubt there was a new washing machine, too. We found ourselves wondering about the carpet, though, and the holes in the stairs.    

     Then we drove away, out of the valley and back to the comfort of our new house.