A Thing of Nought

By Hilda Vaughan

In novella A Thing of Nought, Hilda Vaughan returns hauntingly to the theme of lovers parted by the world. Megan Lloyd's handsome lover Penry Price departs for Australia, to find work and build them a home, but is thwarted at every turn by drought, poverty and illness, and finally begs her to think of him as dead. Heartbroken and lonely, Megan succumbs to the attentions of strong-minded preacher Rees Lloyd, but is just married when an unexpected face returns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908069429

Hilda Vaughan

Hilda Vaughan (1892-1985) was born and raised in Builth Wells. During the First World War, she worked in a Red Cross hospital and as organising secretary of the Woman’s Land Army in Breconshire and Radnorshire. She married the novelist Charles Morgan in 1923 and they had a daughter and a son. Vaughan published ten novels, two plays and a number of short stories. Her work is distinguished by its lyrical yet realistic evocation of Welsh rural landscapes and customs, and by her incisive deconstruction of the politics of class, gender and nationality.

Book preview

NOUGHT

To her neighbours she was known as Megan Lloyd. In my memory she lives as Saint Anne.

Years after I had lost her, I was wandering through the Louvre, and came upon the picture attributed to Leonardo. I stood before it, happy; and my eyes filled with tears. Megan Lloyd, when I knew her, was older than this wise and gracious mother of the Virgin. Her hair was white as lamb’s wool; her face, like a stored apple, seamed with fine wrinkles. Yet there was her familiar smile, full of tenderness and understanding.

She is in my mind now, seated, like Leonardo’s homely saint, in the open. Often I saw her moving about the farmhouse kitchen, or sitting beside the whitewashed hearth, her fingers, as she stooped to warm them, cornelian red in the glow of a peat fire. Sometimes she had a grandchild in her lap, and another in the cradle that her foot was rocking with slow rhythm. But I remember her best as I saw her often during my last summer in Wales, out of doors, her faded lips parted a little to the hill wind.

She sat on an oaken chair upon the stretch of sward surrounding Cwmbach homestead, where hissing geese paddled to and fro, bobbing their heads on long necks. From the neighbouring buildings, white as mushrooms in the green landscape, came the cheerful noises of a farmyard and a house full of lusty children. Her eldest son, dark and dour, clothed in earth-brown corduroys, her busy shrill daughter-in-law, her tribe of swarthy grand children, to me were present only as a background to Saint Anne. They and their home were like the walled towns, the cavalcades of horsemen, the plumed trees, behind the central figure of the Madonna in some fifteenth-century altar piece. They had no connection with my tranquil saint. Their toil and clatter, their laughter, quarrelling and crying did not disturb us, who were the only two human beings of leisure in the countryside.

I was idle and self-tortured throughout that long hot summer. The harsh gales of spring were raging through my mind, unemployed and as yet empty of experience. She was profoundly calm; serene as an autumn evening after a tempestuous day, when the wind has fallen and the dead leaves lie still. It was with difficulty that she dragged herself abroad. Her fingers were twisted with rheumatism; she could no longer work. She could not even see to read her Bible. So, during these last months of her life, she sat, content to wait for death, with hands folded, while she watched the shadows of the hills on either side of Cwmbach as they stole across the narrow valley. The shade of the eastern hill dwindled behind the house as the sun reached its zenith; that of the western hill advanced when the sun began to sink. Little Cwmbach was so strait that only for an hour at noon was its whole width lit by sunshine. The mountains rose like walls on either side, shutting out the world. Down in the dingle lay the solitary farm and a stern chapel, square and grey, with the caretaker’s cottage clinging to its side, as a white shell to a strong rock. An angry stream, hurling itself against boulders, foamed between these two dwelling places, and a thin ribbon of road wound its empty length up over the pass, where the hills converged.

Day after day I climbed across a waste of heather, moss and bog, and, scrambling down the channel of a waterfall, flung myself at Saint Anne’s feet. I was eighteen. The universe to me was the stage upon which my own tragedy was being acted. I talked by the hour about myself and my important emotions. She listened with inexhaustible patience. When I told her that no one had ever loved or suffered as I did, she smiled, not with derision, but sadly, as one who knew better.

If I looked up at her and found her smiling in that fashion, I fell silent. Then, after a while, she would begin to talk. It was thus I came to know her lover, her husband and her child. Her words were few, but they had magic to conjure up the dead. I knew so well their looks, their