‘Cymru am byth,’ Jac had said proudly, showing Glynis the article. Wales forever.
How he would despair at what his son has done. Glynis feels a pain in her chest as she imagines the emotion in her late husband’s eyes. No longer T?’r Lan, but The Shore. No longer a bastion for the Welsh but a playground for the English, running roughshod over traditions, and not as much as a diolch from any of them except that Clemmie, who – Glynis had to concede – makes an attempt to fit in.
When Jac died, Glynis had spoken to their solicitor. ‘I’ve got his will somewhere,’ she’d told him. Jac had organised it a few years before – one of those kits you could buy from the newsagent. Properly witnessed, all legal and proper. Jac was the belt-and-braces sort – at least, he had been, before the dementia set in. T?’r Lan would pass to Glynis, who would keep the Welsh flag flying, in honour of her husband.
Only then Glynis had received a call from a different solicitor. One in the next town, who didn’t know the Lloyd family from Adam, and whose brusque tone made Glynis want to cry.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ the woman said. Glynis heard the snap of a rubber band. ‘Now, your late husband came in six months ago with your son. I have a copy of his will here—’
‘I think there’s been some mistake,’ Glynis said.
But there was no mistake.
Jac Lloyd – who, in the year before his death, all too often tipped orange juice on his cereal and put his shoes in the fridge – had made a replacement will, leaving T?’r Lan and its surrounding land to Rhys.
‘This can’t be right,’ Glynis said. For years, Rhys had been trying to persuade his father to develop the land, and Jac had always said the same thing. Over my dead body. T?’r Lan was a Welshman’s cabin; it was part of the landscape. The land might be English, but those trees were as Welsh as Jac.
‘It’s all watertight, I assure you,’ the solicitor said. ‘Although if you bring me your late husband’s DIY will, I’ll double-check the dates.’
But the original will was nowhere to be found.
Glynis stands by the window in the Charltons’ lodge and looks at the view that hasn’t changed in the seventy-odd years she’s known it.
Doesn’t Jac’s cabinet look lovely in Rhys’s office? Yasmin had said, when she was showing off the lodge to her mother-in-law for the umpteenth time. Glynis touched the bashed metal, remembering it in T?’r Lan, thinking of the mess of papers inside it.
‘Safe and sound,’ Jac used to say, as he locked the drawers and pulled his mother’s tablecloth back over it.
Jac had wanted Glynis to have T?’r Lan and the land around it; wanted her to continue protecting it. What if the original will he made is in Rhys’s filing cabinet? Finding it would prove Jac’s intentions for the land.
Glynis has spent weeks hunting for the key, turning her spare room upside down as she trawled through old photographs and papers. She found it in an old tackle tin, along with a handful of floats and some rusted fishhooks.
Now, it hangs on a long chain around Glynis’s neck.
She looks around the room. Rhys is in the kitchen, talking to Jonty, the twins offering him a sandwich. Yasmin is pouring champagne in the corner. There will be no one at the Lloyds’ lodge.
Nobody notices Glynis as she slips outside: one of the few perks of old age. She walks along the lodges, perfectly calm, because what is she doing wrong? She’s Rhys’s mother and the girls’ nain – why shouldn’t she nip out of a party to rest at their place for a while?
The front door is unlocked. Inside, the lights are low, and Glynis goes straight upstairs to the study to open the filing cabinet, the key turning as easily as if it had been used yesterday. Inside, manila folders form a muted rainbow, packed tightly together, Jac’s loopy handwriting on the flap of each one. She pulls out each in turn, flicking through the papers with a practised eye, knowing Jac’s filing system as well as her own. Not alphabetical, not grouped by subject, or correspondent’s name. Electricity bills were always filed under Gethin Jones, because old Gethin had done the original wiring job in the cabin. Maps of footpaths in the area weren’t filed together but under the names of farms they passed through. Jac had his quirks, Glynis thinks fondly, even before he lost his marbles.
She pulls out a folder marked Anti Nesta, and her heart skips a beat. Nesta – not a real aunt, but a much-loved friend of Jac’s mother – had worked in a funeral parlour. Glynis opens the folder, and knows instantly that if Jac’s will is anywhere, it will be here. There are leaflets for headstones, careful notes considering the merits of various coffins.