Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 23

The kitchen table is invisible beneath a collection of cartons, tins, platters and plastic containers that seem to provide the raw ingredients for all Norwegian meals. So far I’ve only been able to tell breakfast apart from lunch and dinner by the absence of wine bottles; otherwise, it’s been potato salad, a kind of coleslaw called italiensalad, salamis, cured hams, flat breads and the family favourite, a sweet brown goat’s cheese, pretty much round the clock. If you don’t put them away there’s little point in ever leaving the table, and today we don’t.

Rosemary is wearing her pearls with a pert, semi-transparent pink housecoat tied with a bow around the neck. The white wine in her glass is the exact shade of the highlights in her hair.

‘Most women are boring, don’t you think?’

I don’t really think so, but it doesn’t matter. Rosemary has a disturbing tendency to listen intently to the first ten seconds of a reply and then drift off, as if she’s guessed the rest and lost interest. Perhaps she’s hard of hearing.

So far today I’ve learned the cost of Rosemary’s shoes; the saga of her courtship with Bob, a soon-to-be-unmarried English gentleman from Copenhagen; her opinion that people should marry rather than just live together; that women look better in feminine dress; and that Norway has phenomenally stern drunk-driving laws, the consequence of which is that from a young age her daughters have acquired a good knowledge of Oslo’s mass transit system.

My wine matches neither my oversize orange T-shirt nor my very short dark hair. I seem calm; I focus on Rosemary’s life and decide to buy some Norwegian goat’s cheese to bring to Marguerite in France. But there’s desperation licking the back of my brain. The only way I can explain my presence in this kitchen on this July afternoon is that I’ve come to Norway to practise Welsh. With Welsh I have a purpose; without it my presence here is like a Christmas tree: diverting, but ultimately useless and, to half the world at least, inexplicable.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to get the Cymraeg ball rolling, but without Rosemary’s help I find I’m marooned on the flat with no downhill in sight. Unlike Iori, or Tim back in Lampeter, she’s shown no interest in the role of language mentor. I can’t blame her: I’m still at the stage where speaking Welsh is exercise rather than intercourse, and Rosemary has no stake in doing verbal callisthenics with me. Never mind that’s why I’m here … Instead I learn that Bob is getting a beer gut, and inwardly berate myself for being the gutless kind of person who needs a language mentor. Every time one of us begins a sentence in English I wince under the twin reflexes of relief and shame.

Rosemary gets up and plucks another wine bottle from the fridge. I foolishly hold out my glass. ‘Too bad Aneurin Rhys Hughes, from the embassy, is on holiday. He’s very Welsh. But tell me, did you enjoy the party the other evening?’

‘Hmmm? You mean tonight?’

‘No, Pamela, the Celtic Ladies’ party.’

‘Oh. Um, yes. Ummm.’ Tonight a dozen or so members of Cymdeithas Cymry Oslo will shell out fifty kroner a head for the pleasure of meeting me at a wine and cheese hosted by Rosemary. Earlier in the week one of the five women who call themselves the Celtic Ladies – three Welshwomen, a Scot and an Englishwoman married to a Welsh diplomat – had invited us to a ‘CL’ dinner party. Rosemary was upset that Anne, the hostess, had served plates already fixed with food.

‘That’s absolutely not done in Norway. I don’t know what she was thinking,’ Rosemary told me in the pub we’d stopped at on the way home. Indeed, at her daughter’s boyfriend’s birthday party the next day we passed around a whole cake and each cut our own slices.

‘You’re the Welsh lady writing the book?’ Sion, one of the Welshwomen, had asked shortly after Rosemary and I arrived at Anne’s apartment near Vigeland Park.

‘I’m not really Welsh.’

‘I thought you’d be a dumpy little grey-haired lady, about seventy, with glasses and a big handbag.’

‘Oh no,’ Rosemary countered. ‘I thought she’d be another lotus flower. The last woman who stayed with me who was writing a book removed her shoes and sat in a lotus position on my pink velvet settee.’

‘She looks Welsh, doesn’t she?’

‘Oh yes, she looks very Welsh.’

Was my quest really so bizarre that people thought I appeared too normal for the part? The Celtic Ladies all seemed to have picked up Norwegian with ease, which I guess makes travelling the world in search of Welsh a bit radical. To a woman, they were comfortable in Norwegian, but less so in Norway.

‘I certainly don’t want my ashes scattered over the fjords,’ the friendly, gap-toothed Sion had said.

‘I’m not ready for a little plot in a Norwegian churchyard either,’ echoed another CL. Even Rosemary, who had been married to a Norwegian, who’s lived in Norway for years and who considers herself at least in part Scandinavian, hasn’t ruled out the possibility of moving back ‘home’. For now she makes do with frequent trips to the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show.

It is for expatriates above all, I thought, that Wales glows with its famous once and future sheen. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean that misty, magical, mystical nonsense fed to Wales by PR agencies with the tourism account. That stuff needs to be flushed from the country’s bowels, and fast. I mean that expats share a kindred sense of incompleteness with their ‘non-historical’ homeland. Their experience in Wales is unfinished, yet it is their past and probable future there that give the present boundaries, make it approachable, comprehensible and, above all, impermanent. Wales itself, hijacked by the language of a foreign land, isn’t finished with its destiny yet either.

The telephone rings, bringing me back to the kitchen. It’s Rosemary’s mom, calling from Tregaron. I jealously do the dishes as they jabber in Welsh, until a crash from the living room interrupts their conversation. Rosemary, forgetting my limitations, yells to me in Welsh to investigate. I reply triumphantly, equally forgetful that I’m speaking her language.

‘Beth sy’n bod?’ – ‘What’s the matter?’ I shout. The cats knocking over an ashtray is so far the linguistic zenith of my day.