The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  There’d been no sign of pursuit, the guards charging after the boys if they could be bothered to go after anyone, and he thought that if the other prisoners kept quiet, he might not be missed until the next morning. But he’d been idle for so long, his muscles felt stiff and tight as he strode up the dark slope, and dropping down the far side, he began to realize that he had no food, no shelter, no idea what he was doing. He might have broken his ankle, even his neck, that first night, sliding down a long slope of scree in the dark, but he’d been lucky, had stumbled upon what he thought was a cave mouth, and pulled himself inside. He’d lain there that night, and only then had it come to him, what Jim had whispered at the wire, a name, her name. Esther.

  Why of course! he’d thought, laughing at the perfect dreamlike inevitability of it. And then, miraculously, he’d slept, his deepest night of sleep in months, and on a bed of stone at that, only to be woken by the baying of dogs on the breeze, wondering if he’d merely dreamed her name. He’d drawn back into his lair and discovered that the cave he’d imagined was no cave at all, but a tunnel, a mine shaft. Praying the dogs couldn’t track his scent over rock, he’d retreated underground, only to get lost in a series of galleries. He’d stumbled around in them for hours, maybe a day or more, until he’d made out a dim light, hurried towards it, to find an old man snoring at the foot of a tall ladder, a bottle beside him.

  Karsten had waited, starving, terrified his rumbling stomach would give him away, until the old fellow roused himself, and then Karsten had followed him, trusting him to know the way out. Karsten should have left him then, of course, struck out in the opposite direction as soon as he emerged, blinking, into the grey dawn, but his stomach was now his compass, and instead he followed the fellow to his farmhouse.

  It had seemed like fate to find the girl again, the coincidence, more than anything else, making him trust her that first morning. But afterwards, gone to ground again, he couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t get away from the sense that talking to her was the closest thing to freedom he’d tasted since his escape.

  But now she has told him to go.

  Talking to her about his father has reminded him that his father never wanted him to go to sea. Karsten had been aggrieved by that; all his friends, sons of other fishermen, were expected to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. But when he’d pushed his father, all he’d say was “Have you ever seen a drowned man?” It had made Karsten think his father afraid, though later, after he was lost but his body never recovered, it occurred to him that his father was trying to spare him something, protecting him even in death.

  He’s not sure why he hasn’t tried for Ireland, but once she says it, he wonders if he is afraid of drowning. If he returns to her, perhaps she’ll think him a coward, and he can’t bear that.

  He leaves the mountains and climbs down to the coast, one foot pulled after the other, not using the lanes but crossing the fields, pushing through clumps of sheep or cattle, once outrunning a bull, squeezing himself into hedges to sleep. In the darkness he feels the slope flattening, and an hour later he’s on sand again. He hates the feel of it underfoot, the yielding. He retraces his steps to the wrack line, following the dirty path of seaweed and jetsam in the starlight, until up ahead in the watery predawn gloom he sees the jumbled lines of tipped masts.

  The boats are beached in the sucking mud, waiting for the tide to lift them, but he knows that with the tide will come their owners. He can’t move any of the larger vessels, but he manages to haul a dinghy through the mud, alternately pushing and pulling it to the water, his ankles sinking in the muck.

  He shoves it through the surf, and when he feels his feet being lifted from the bottom, he scrambles over the stern and collapses in the bilgy bottom, breathing hard, letting the current pull him down the shore until the boat scrapes bottom again—a sandbar—and he unships the oars, begins to pull for the distant dawn. After what seems an hour, he looks over his shoulder and sees a streaky brightening. He’s heading east, at least, though before him, where he’s come from, is still pitch. And when the sun comes up, he can’t see the shore, the beach, just the mountains behind it, rising up smokily into the clouds.

  He thinks he’s rowed the whole day when the sky darkens again, but looking up he sees storm clouds pressing down, feels the wind begin to pluck at him. He’s drenched with rain first, and then the inky black waves start to slap the boat, break over it, the water so dark he thinks he must be stained by it. There’s nothing to bail with, and in the gloom he feels his feet, then his ankles, then his calves grow cold.

  Finally, in one slow, rising toss, the boat bucking beneath him like a live thing waking, he’s in the water, the little vessel snatched out from under him like some joke. He’s going to drown like his father and for a fleeting moment he is at peace. Died escaping, he thinks. Died trying. Died at sea. Honor restored. He thinks of his mother receiving the news, wonders if his body will ever be found. A splintered oar flies end over end above him, impales the surface with a great gulp not a yard from his head. It might have killed him on the spot—and in that second, gazing at it bobbing before him, he realizes he doesn’t want to die, clutches for the oar. He clings to it through the afternoon, and then the night, alone and yet feeling his father close to him, watching him, and sometime in the darkness it comes to him: it wasn’t drowning that his father was afraid of, but seeing men drown. How many must he have watched over through his periscope. In the morning the misty curtain of dawn lifts over a line of grey peaks and he kicks for them, lets the tide shove him in.

  The Wicklow Hills, he thinks, licking the salt off his lips. Relief breaks over him like a wave.

  He lies on the beach, where water meets sand, for a long time, letting the surf lift and lower him. He drifts off to sleep like that, and when he awakens he’s high and dry, the sand beneath his hands warm from the sun. The last time he went in the water was in France, before the invasion. It tastes the same, he thinks.

  From his prone position he seems to see a pair of wide, dark eyes hanging over him, watching him, and then he focuses, sees that they’re the firing slits of a bunker cemented into the cliffside. He lies very still, feels the morning sun warm as blood on his neck. Behind him, then. To the east.

  So, not Ireland after all.

  He squints up at the bunker, staggers to his feet. No point in running. He walks towards the emplacement, hands up, waiting for the cry, waiting for the flash. It reminds him of the walk out of his own bunker, the wait for death, and it comes to him suddenly that it was the bravest thing he’s ever done, surrendering. Only when he’s staring point-blank into the slit does he see that the bunker is empty, unmanned, disused, and he sinks down against the concrete and wraps his head in his hands.

  Later, shivering in the wind, he lowers himself through the gun slit. Where better to hide while he recovers his strength? No one will think to look for him here. The bunker smells so familiar, it feels like coming home.

  Twenty-One

  SHE’S FEEDING THE HENS two mornings later, swinging her arm in long arcs to scatter the grain, skipping slightly to avoid their pecking, when he walks out of the barn. Her fist tightens reflexively on the handful of feed in her grasp. He’s smiling through his beard but stumbling a little, staggering—it takes her a moment to realize he’s swaying, dancing, imitating her steps with the hens. “Did you miss me?” he asks, reaching for her closed hand, raising it as if to twirl her, before she jerks away.

  “Get off!”

  He tries again, smiling, as if she’s just a clumsy partner, and she flings the grain at his feet.

  “What are you still doing here?”

  She sees his smile waver, sees how forced it is, how fixed. He looks like he might laugh, but hysterically.

  The hens dart between them, and he nudges them aside.

  “I’ve nothing else for you,” she tells him, though more than once since he’s left, she’s wished she’d cleared out the pantry for him. “No food,” she repeats,
enunciating the words slowly as if the problem is only one of language. It comes to her that she’s somehow keeping him here, as if her helping him to escape has only bound him more. “I’ll scream,” she tells him, even takes a deep breath, but he just watches her, shaking his head.

  “Who will hear?” She’d think it a threat but for the way his shoulders slump, as if at the futility.

  “Don’t you want to get away?”

  He gestures to the mountains, the sky. “Where should I go? With no food, no clothes.” He plucks at his fraying, torn uniform.

  “Then why escape at all?”

  “I saw a chance. That’s all.”

  “A chance of what?”

  He looks around as if for an answer. “I don’t know. Nothing more than this view, perhaps. Something else to look at other than wire and fence posts.”

  “So now what?”

  He shrugs. “They catch me. I give myself up.” He sees her face. “I’m sorry.”

  “No wonder you trusted me,” she says bitterly. “It didn’t matter if I turned you in. I thought you wanted to get away. To... to—”

  “To where?”

  “To redeem your honor!” she cries. “No wonder you surrendered.”

  “Ruhe!”

  The word rings off the house behind her, a word she doesn’t know but understands.

  She tries to run then, but he catches her wrist, drags her into the barn. She shakes loose, but by then he’s blocking the door. She moves to dart past him and he’s before her and she springs back, panting, about to scream. No! she thinks. Not again.

  “Wait!” he calls. “Wait. Please! I’m sorry.” He slumps down on one of the hay bales, a hand up to placate her. “I tried. You hear. There is nowhere to go. But I tried.”

  She takes in his matted hair, the salt stains on his tunic.

  “You swam—”

  “Swam! I almost drowned! Might be better if I had.” He shakes his head mournfully. “You can’t know what it is to lose your honor.”

  She has taken a step forward at the thought of his dying. “Yes, I can.”

  “How?” he starts, and she cuts him off: “I just can.”

  He searches her face, then slowly nods, not that she’s told him something new, but that he’s finally understood something. He holds out his hand and she takes it, and he pulls her down beside him on the bale, and for a moment they sit very still between the glinting dusty bars of light.

  “You’re the only one I’ve told.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re the enemy.”

  He presses his lips together.

  “His enemy, at least. He was one of the ones who built your camp. Left the day you came. Off to France.”

  “Then it doesn’t matter,” he says. “No one else knows.”

  “They will,” she says. “Soon enough.”

  He opens his mouth, closes it.

  “What will you do?”

  She shrugs, and he nods as if she’s answered, finally bows his head.

  This close, she can smell him, and the scent is surprisingly familiar. It takes her a moment to realize, he smells like the mountain after sleeping on it.

  “You must be starving,” she says presently, and he raises his eyebrows. She clasps his hand and leads him towards the house.

  He hesitates at the threshold as if fearing a trap.

  “How do you like your eggs?” she asks.

  “Very much,” he says, looking about, and she doesn’t correct him, but fries them as fastest.

  She sets them before him, two lace-edged eggs, looking oddly naked on the plate, and steps back, suddenly shy of him. He falls on them, eating the first methodically, lapping the sluggish yolk—she’d compromised between hard and soft—with the rubbery white, before he thinks to look up. He swallows hard and gestures to the chair across from him.

  He eats the second egg more slowly, smiling and nodding between mouthfuls. Afterwards, she pushes a napkin towards him and he dabs at his beard.

  “Thank you!”

  “You’re welcome.”

  They both fall silent, as if overhearing their own conversation for the first time.

  “I want you to know, I would never have told them about this.”

  She nods.

  “How have you been traveling?” she asks, to change the subject.

  He rubs his face. “I just follow the sheep. I thought they would know to keep away from any soldiers.” He laughs. “I envy them! If only I could live off grass, I could be free.”

  “Not so free,” she says, thinking of the cynefin. “They don’t stray far.”

  “Maybe it’s a kind of freedom too. To stay home.”

  She gives a short laugh. “I never thought of it like that.”

  He shrugs.

  “How much longer do you think until they find you?”

  “A few days, perhaps, if I’m lucky. But I think I will give myself up. End my holidays.” He smiles crookedly.

  “For me, you mean.”

  He purses his lips. “I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

  “No trouble,” she says. “I could feed you, find you clothes.”

  “Even if I never escape?”

  She nods slowly.

  “Thank you,” he breathes. “But no.”

  “When will you do it?”

  “Soon. Today.” His face clouds, and she knows he’s thinking of it, of surrendering again, raising his hands.

  “Surrender to me,” she says suddenly.

  He smiles, shakes his head. “They’d never believe it.”

  “You’re too proud,” she says, “to surrender to a woman.”

  “And you? Who would you surrender to?”

  She studies his face. The beard, she thinks, becomes him. True, he looks a little like a castaway, but also older, as if he’s coming into himself.

  “It’s why you kept coming back, isn’t it?” she asks, and he grins. “I was starving.”

  She’s silent for a long time and then he raises his arms, palms out, and she steps forward, takes his hands, draws them down around her.

  SHE HAS LED him out of the house, gripped by a sudden claustrophobia—it’s her father’s house, her mother’s—to a sheltered corner of the field behind the barn. Now she lies beneath him, buoyed by the thick bed of uncut grass at her back, staring at the sky, the clouds ebbing across it. She fears she might recall Colin, but instead it’s Rhys he reminds her of, with his gentle, gingerly fumbling, and she wonders suddenly if Rhys died a virgin; hopes not, for his sake. She presses her face to his neck, tastes salt—the sea—watches the clouds slide together, then slowly and silently tear themselves apart.

  Afterwards, lying side by side, staring at the sky, he asks, “So, did I surrender to you, or you to me?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  He turns his head in the grass. “No.”

  “Me neither,” she says. “Not everything is war, after all, I suppose.”

  She stretches. “What would you be doing now if there were no war?”

  “The same, I hope. You?”

  “Not likely.”

  He rolls onto his side and stares at her.

  “I’d make you... woo me.” She giggles.

  “How?”

  “Ask me to the pictures?”

  “Of course! Would you care to join me?”

  “Why, how ever did you know? I love the pictures.”

  He holds his arm up, crooked, and she slips hers through his, and they lie there staring up at the bright screen of the sky, arm in arm. After a few minutes their breaths are so steady they seem to fill the clouds, blowing them away. Like filled sails, she thinks.

  “How on earth do you get the ship in there, anyway?” she asks suddenly, and he laughs.

  “No, really. I want to know the secret.”

  “No secret. You just ask the bottle very nicely!”

  She joins him then, the two of them in each other’s arms, stifling their laughter agains
t each other.

  When she finally sits up she feels lightheaded, as if she’s just rolled down the hillside, the way she used to when she was a girl.

  “WHAT WILL YOU DO?” he asks a little later, and she knows from his tone what he means. She may have been thinking of Rhys, but he was thinking of Colin.

  “I don’t know.”

  She feels the tears drawing up from somewhere so deep inside she’s sure they’ll be ice cold.

  And then he breathes, “I wish I could marry you.”

  She stares at him, shoves the tears aside with the heel of her hand as if to see him better, finally starts to laugh.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not sure that would help exactly!” Then she sees his face. “But I wish you could, too.” And she does. Her second proposal, she thinks, stroking the long grass.

  And then he whispers, “Keep it.”

  Her fists tighten on the stalks. “What business is it of yours?”

  “I might have shot him,” he says, “your soldier. If I hadn’t been captured, I mean.”

  “I wish!”

  “Or he me.”

  “Don’t say so.”

  “I’m the enemy, remember. I shot others not so different to him. I don’t even know how many.” He looks at her, and her eyes flick away. “Keep it,” he says. “For me.”

  “For my enemy?”

  “Your prisoner.”

  She starts to deny it, stops. He’s right. These are the very last moments of his freedom. It would be easy to promise him, but instead she turns away, stares down the long slope beyond the house to the wavering shore, the breakers flipping and churning like the sheets of a restless sleeper, studying it all as if she’ll never see it again.