The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  “You know,” Mrs. Roberts tells her when she’s calmer, “I always thought you’d be the one to go places. Even after you left school, I told myself: When the war ends she’ll do some things.” Her voice wavers. “So I knew my boy doted on you, but I discouraged it, you see, warned him you were meant for better. There’s a terrible mother, I am, but I had such hopes for you. I didn’t want to see his heart broken.” She pinches her lips together. “I thought we’d be reading your letters from London or someplace like that.” She fumbles for Esther’s hand. “But I’m awfully glad you’re here now.”

  Esther can only nod, over and over.

  “There’s still some hope,” she says at last, and after a watchful moment Mrs. Roberts pats her hand and tells her, “Of course there is.” And Esther thinks, Neither of us believes it. For his mother, she sees, the news is the confirmation of her worst fears, built up these months. She almost seems relieved, vindicated. And for me? Esther wonders. It feels like a punishment, for doubting him, for thinking the greatest danger he faced was his mother’s angry impatience for a letter. Yet even now there’s a part of Esther that grates at the fool for getting himself killed. It’s as if he’s vanished into the dark gap between his two front teeth.

  She sits with her former teacher for another hour and then walks her home via the pub, where she makes Jack open early and pour Mrs. Roberts a brandy on the house. When she comes back, after seeing the woman into the care of her neighbors, she finds the pub somber. People are trading memories of Rhys. The guards have started it, asking about the lost man, and she sees that he’s claimed by both sets of drinkers, the soldiers and the locals, fostering a new rapport between them. The soldiers order their drinks from her so softly, almost demurely, that she knows they’ve already heard about her and Rhys.

  “D’you remember the time...,” the constable says, and people nod, even Esther, though she doesn’t. She listens to her father describing Rhys as a strong back, a fine boy, and she looks in his face for a trace of a lie, but can’t find one. “Always good with the dogs,” Arthur is saying. “Small wonder,” he used to add, “with that space between his teeth he should have the loudest whistle in the county!” But tonight she waits in vain for the punch line. It reminds her of Rhys’s father, how Arthur had never missed a chance to vex Mervyn Roberts, calling him all manner of names, belittling his job in the quarry—rockmen being less skilled than slate splitters and dressers like Arthur’s father and grandfather—and envying it at the same time. Yet as soon as Mervyn was dead, Arthur had gone round to the house and set about helping his widow, and Esther never heard him speak another ill word about the dead man. It’s a matter of honor for him, she thinks, but it requires him to forget Rhys, the real Rhys, the Rhys who once tossed a cigarette in a haystack, the Rhys who liked to sleep in the sun, the dogs curled against him. Rhodri Rhys Roberts, the telegram named him, and for a second she’d thought it meant someone else. She’d never known him as anything other than Rhys. Now it’s as if he’s been rechristened in death, as if Arthur and the rest have created a Rhys they can mourn.

  And what about me? She tries to feel something, but she finds where her grief should be a kind of impatience that Rhys’s troubles should intrude when she’s in the midst of her own, and a jealousy, too, that in death—if he is dead—he’s been scrubbed clean, even by the constable he tormented as a boy. They want to believe he’s dead, she thinks. They like him better this way. That, and the fact that he’s the first village boy lost. They’re a proper part of the war at last, just as they’d hoped when the camp was being built. They can hold their heads higher and stiffer on market days now that there’s a name to add to the plaque in the chapel listing the losses of 1914—1918. At the end of the evening, Jack gives the bell a strike, and in the silence afterwards, rather than announcing last orders, he asks them to join him in a toast, “For a local hero.” Even the English drink.

  She walks home, hands in pockets, gripping the cold eggs waiting there.

  That night she sits up with Arthur, mending clothes and listening to the radio. When they came in and went to check on Jim, she found him awake, red-eyed, his hands clutching the white sheet, filthy, his nails bloody. She fetched a basin and washcloth and sponged them, and he told her he’d been prying stones out of the lane to throw at the Germans. “They just watched me,” he said. “Stepped back from the fence where I couldn’t hit them.” She thought of the one she’d planned to throw the eggs to, pictured his face. Jim had gone on hurling stones, and mud, and sticks, whatever he could lay his hands on, cursing in earnest this time, until they’d gone indoors. “But I never cried,” he told her fiercely. Her eyes drifted to the map on the wall, trying to see if the pin for Rhys was still there.

  When she comes out, Arthur sets a cup of tea beside her, and when Jim’s sobs start, he puts a hand on hers, turns the radio on low. Harry and Mary are doing one of their “Lil and Bill” numbers.

  BILL: I just met an old soldier, told me he’d not had any since 1930.

  LIL: Poor dear!

  BILL: Oh, I don’t know. It’s only twenty-one hundred hours now.

  Esther stares at her lap, blushing, but it’s not clear Arthur has even got the joke. When she looks up, he’s staring at her, as if waiting for something, and she thinks how dry her eyes are.

  “I’m very sorry,” he tells her awkwardly, and she nods.

  “For you, I mean, love. I know you were friends, like.”

  “He’s just missing,” she tries, not out of any real hope, but to deflect his sympathy, and when she sees the look of pity cross Arthur’s face anyway, she reminds him sharply, “You thought he was a fool to go,” and she can see he’s stung.

  “Perhaps,” he says after a pause, “you were a bigger one to let him go.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe you could have stopped him, is all.”

  She picks up her sewing basket and leaves him then, but lies in her bed, eyes wide, the tears tumbling from them at last.

  IN THE DAYS that follow, the queue at the post office, whenever Esther passes it, seems to stretch out the door. Everyone wants to admire how well Mrs. R’s holding up, assure her that Rhys will turn up. “Like a bad penny,” the postmistress braves. Esther keeps her company for the first day or two, then withdraws, queasily embarrassed to be included—“you too, dear”—in the sympathy.

  At first Mrs. R nods at the hopes expressed, but increasingly she hitches her shoulders, shakes her head brusquely. Before long she’s stooped from shrugging, but still she puts up with the well-wishers, murmuring “No, no word, thank you” as often as she licks stamps and with the same sour face. And then, one sweltering afternoon in the last week of August, the little PO packed with bodies, she finally loses patience with their pity. “I’m a mother, not a fool,” she snaps at yet another hushed assurance, and Esther, waiting in line, winces almost as much as the unfortunate customer. In her mind’s eye, she pictures Mrs. R furiously smudging the heel of her tiny fist across the board, changing “console” to “condole” as if it were a stupid spelling error.

  The next morning Rhys’s mother takes to wearing black.

  Fifteen

  ESTHER CAN’T bring herself to return to the camp after the news about Rhys. The boys are back, she hears in the pub, joined by some of the local men, even a few women, hurling abuse or simply booing the prisoners. Jim, she guesses, is there with the rest, shouting himself hoarse. She found him jabbing a stick into the ship in a bottle the day after the telegram and snatched it away from him. But he’d already knocked the mast askew with his poking, smashed the little wheelhouse. “What are you doing?” she’d cried, straining for calm, and he’d told her defiantly, “Getting it out!”

  “Does it make you feel any better?” she asks one night when he returns from the camp, and he tells her, “Yes!”

  “You could come,” he adds more softly, but she shakes her head.

  Arthur is right, she realizes. She co
uld have stopped Rhys from going to war. And that’s why she can’t go back to the camp with Jim. It’s hard to escape the feeling that she, more than any of these Germans, is to blame for his loss. If only she’d accepted him, he’d be alive, and Colin would never have been more to her than another customer. And it seems to her that if she’s to blame for Rhys’s loss, she’s just as culpable for her own woes.

  WITHOUT THE CAMP to escape to, and shy of the village, where she’s still the object of a cloying sympathy, the house begins to feel very small, as if the walls are closing on her. Or as if she’s growing, she thinks in a panic. Each morning she tries to gauge the change in herself in the small hand mirror she inherited from her mother, sucking her stomach in and studying herself in it’s bright oval. At lunch and supper she picks at her food, but stuffs herself hungrily with bread when the others are out, sometimes not even waiting for it to rise fully, but burning her fingers on the still sticky dough. In one week, she eats half the pickled eggs in the jar behind the bar, until she catches Jack staring at her, shaking his head: “Never could stand the things meself.”

  At least Arthur doesn’t seem to notice anything, but he’s been distracted of late by the prospect of work at the quarry. Old Twm Tudur is retiring—lumbago finally getting the best of him—so there’s an opening for a new dangerman and Arthur covets the job, sees it as his great chance, a foot back in the quarry. He’s already been down there, learning the ropes, nagging the old fellow to put in a word for him. “Twm got his start as a young rubbler on my father’s bargain, so he owes us that much.”

  It isn’t much of a job, in Esther’s opinion, tramping through the dark galleries with a little torch, but at first she encourages him. Anything to keep him out of the house, anything to draw his attention off her.

  “It’s a serious business,” Arthur assures her proudly after he gets it. “Checking the shafts for flooding, gas, signs of cave-in.” When the men went on strike all those years ago, Tudur had stayed on and the strikers hadn’t objected. He was keeping the place safe for when they went back, as they saw it. Arthur’s father, who never saw a scab without crossing the street, would always give Twm the time of day.

  It’s only when Arthur brags to her about going up the long, lashed-together ladders, forty or fifty feet into the moist blackness at the roof of the caverns to dislodge the loose slates that might in the past have fallen on the men below, or now on the crates of artworks, that she starts to have second thoughts. He tells her of swaying through the chilled dark, touching the black sky of the roof, chipping slates out as if they were stars. It’s the moisture leaching down through the mountain that erodes the caverns. She can smell it on his clothes after his stints in the quarry, the dankness of rain that fell on the hillside above, where their own sheep now graze, a thousand years earlier.

  She’s always known Arthur wanted to get back underground, to reclaim his father’s place. He’s never put chisel to slate, and yet on black days when he’s lost lambs, or when the debts are due, he sees Cilgwyn the way his father did, as a form of exile. “Slate’s in the blood,” her grandfather used to say, and Arthur’s always maintained that the farm killed the old quarryman, ever since he found him slumped in the pasture, surrounded by cropping sheep. “In the lungs, more like,” her mother had suggested once; the only time Esther ever saw her father raise a hand to her.

  Esther’s mother had always been impatient with his dreams of the quarry. “King Arthur,” she’d scoffed. “You and your blooming birthright!” Perhaps she took it personally when he grumbled, “Slave to sheep, I am. A flock of females, at that.” As a child Esther had once asked if the quarry was her birthright too, but her father had just laughed. Quarry’s no place for girls, he’d said, and something about the way he’d looked at her had made her burst into tears. You wouldn’t want it, her mother told her, drying her eyes with the frayed hem of her apron. Dark, dripping place. But since her mother’s death, Esther realizes now, Arthur has been talking about getting back to the quarry more and more. Without anyone to mock him, it’s stopped being a joke.

  Rhys’s loss has reminded her of how precarious the lives we take for granted are, and she’s suddenly terrified of losing her father. He works nights in the quarry, reasoning, “It don’t make no difference, day or night down there,” and claiming that this way he can still put in his time with the flock, but she can’t sleep for worry. She’s more solicitous towards him than she’s been in months—makes his favorite, milk jelly, for Sunday breakfast—though she knows that somehow this care is calculated, a hoard of love she’s storing up in the hope she might draw on it later, if he finds out about the baby. Not that her concern seems to soften him any. If he’s not expressing impatience with it, she suspects he enjoys it, the look of fear on her face when he tells his stories. And yet she knows she’s not the only one who’s afraid. He stops in the pub every night before he goes down the quarry, and though she begs Jack not to serve him, please, he’s taken to enjoying a shot with his beer. Arthur says it helps him relax, find his balance on the ladders. That if he’s too tense, he’s more likely to take a spill than otherwise. “Nothing to fear,” he tells her expansively. “Slate’s in my blood too.” Dutch courage, she thinks it, though she could never tell him that. Instead, she reminds him that all he’s protecting are some crates of artworks from the National Gallery. He’s said it himself: National bloody Gallery? How many Welshmen in there? And when even that fails to move him, she tries to assure him they don’t really need the few shillings he makes. But that’s a mistake. He bridles at the mention of money. “All I mean is, the war will be over soon,” she says. “Paris liberated and all. Things’ll get better.”

  “But that’s just it,” he tells her. They’re in the kitchen late one warm August afternoon. “You mark my word, before we know it, the quarries will be producing again, and there’ll be proper work for Welshmen once more. You didn’t think I was going to go running up and down those ladders like a monkey for the rest of my days. That’s just a start.” She’s relieved, yet he must see some skepticism in her face because he presses on. “It’s the war, isn’t it? Someone’s got to put new roofs on all those houses smashed in the Blitz. Hundreds of thousands of homes, in England and France, now Germany. Think of it! It’ll be a heyday for them ’as got a foot in the door. My father always said a slate roof will last a hundred years, but that was the very problem. They put a roof on the world from these mountains and then the demand dried up. Until now. It’ll be over soon, and when the rebuilding begins they’ll need Welsh slate again. Why, the nation will rise right along with those roofs!”

  He gives a little nod, as though he’s won some argument, but he’s mistaken her look: she isn’t skeptical, not any longer, just appalled by his logic. Thinking of Eric, of Jim. Too late, he senses her dismay. “It’s an ill wind,” he offers, shrugging on his mac, but when he sees her hardening, he withdraws even that hint of concession. “And all thanks to the war. To bloody Hitler and his cronies.” He pauses, framed in the door, and all at once she sees his nationalism for what it is, selfishness, and more than that, a kind of licensed misanthropy.

  “And the farm?” she wants to know. “The flock?” What’ll become of them if he’s working full time in the quarry? He’s already begun to neglect his duties, lying in while she milks the cow in the morning, catnapping in the late afternoon stillness of the barn.

  “Them?” He squints at the distant white bodies on the hillside. “Know what they look like to me sometimes? Maggots.”

  She shudders as she watches him stride out, his long shadow stretching up the hill.

  She remembers how he’s always talked about the cynefin, with a kind of solemnity, which she recognizes now as resentment. Preserving the flock, preserving the cynefin passed down through the ages, the weight of all that time, is more responsibility than he wants. They’re a burden to him, the flock, the land. Maybe even her.

  Isn’t this my birthright, she wants to cry, watching him leave. But
the word sticks in her throat.

  Sixteen

  KARSTEN FACES the blank page again, once more unsure what to write his mother. No word from her since that first letter, but he’s decided to swallow his pride. And yet, what to write? The problem, he thinks, is nothing ever happens in the camp. There is simply nothing to report. He squints at the white page fluttering in his hand, it’s blankness dazzling in the late August sun, the only marks on it the translucent smudges of sweat left by his thumbs.

  The heat has lasted all week.

  He sets the paper aside, lies back, propped on his elbows, staring up beyond the trees to the distant green hillside, imagining his body pillowed by that lush meadow grass. He still suffers from insomnia, the sleeplessness itself a kind of nightly prison, his bunk a narrow cell. His eyes, in the clouded mirror of the latrine, are shadowed by bruised circles of fatigue. Karsten glances around at the other men, stretched out on the coarse scrub of the parade ground. For just a second, it seems to him as if they could all be back in a public park in Munich or Berlin, picnicking on the grass, except that as far as he can see in each direction, it’s only men. They’re laid out like so many wounded, casualties of the battle of boredom, the “Sitzkrieg,” as Schiller has dubbed the grinding dullness of camp life, each day as unvarying as the rows of identical barracks behind them.