by Owen Sheers
More than once she thought Tom had left signs for her. That he’d come back when she wasn’t looking and left signs only she’d recognise. First it was a yearling ewe with foot rot in the yard in the morning. The dogs were lying down, still chained, watching it as it hobbled back and forth in front of the gate, bleating weakly. Sarah couldn’t see how it would have got in. When she found it she went round the back of the house and looked up the hill, feeling her heart gulping in her chest like water from the hand pump. But he wasn’t there, Tom wasn’t there. Just this sheep in the yard with one foreleg swinging from the knee as it held its bad hoof off the cobblestones.
Since then she’d seen some kind of a sign nearly every day. Tools she was sure she’d left out hung back in the lean-to; the coal-shed door closed when she thought she’d left it open; a couple more pleachers than she’d left the previous night, woven into a hedge she’d been fixing. Once it was a new tooth in the old haul rake, a fresh blond whittled peg plugging the gap she was sure she’d seen there just the day before. But then she was so tired. She couldn’t always be certain, and over the hours doubt would seep into her sense of revelation, until by the end of the day, as she climbed the stairs to bed, she was as empty as ever, giving herself to another night of bad good dreams or good bad dreams. Both left her feeling like those branches outside her window. Robbed, exposed, bare.
This evening, after a day of no signs at all, she’d gone looking for one of her own. Opening the dark wooden wardrobe in their bedroom, she’d sat on the edge of the bed in her nightdress and pressed Tom’s clothes to her face. There was nothing of him in his formal clothes, in his best suit or his pressed white shirts. Just the acid smell of mothballs. But in his working clothes he was still there, just. As faint as the indentations of his body in the mattress had been at the end of that first day. A stale sweat smell. Musty, worn, traces of animal.
Perhaps it was the smell of Tom that brought her bleeding the next morning as she sat shivering on the seat of the ty bach out the back of the house, watching the dawn light melt through the little window from black to blue to grey. She was disappointed. For a couple of months before Tom had gone, she’d been slipping a day here or there in the calendar, hoping he wouldn’t notice. And he hadn’t, so when she was late this month, she’d allowed herself a brief blush of hope. Maybe against all odds it had happened. Tom had always been firm on this. No children while there was a war on. No more mouths to feed until it’s over. Sarah had never understood. They’d have enough food and she wasn’t getting any younger. Twenty-seven next March. So she’d begun slipping the odd day here and there, convinced Tom would be pleased when she eventually fell pregnant. And now just when she realised why Tom had been so reluctant, she thought maybe, just maybe, she’d been able to keep some of him after all. But this morning had proved her wrong. She’d known as soon as she woke. The familiar long drag of pain below her stomach. And then on coming out here, the first drops of deep black blood. She’d been wishing for the impossible, she knew that now. She’d been working hard. She was worried, not sleeping well. Of course she might be late. It had been too much to hope for, especially with Tom gone when even the simplest hope, to have him back, seemed so forlorn. As she sat there, looking out at the lightening sky, Sarah even found herself placing these two hopes on either side of a superstitious equation, with herself at the centre. Was this her punishment for trying to deceive Tom? Him and the others going like that? If it was, she wished she could turn back the clock now. To have Tom back, all of them back, that was the impossible she wished for now. That was all she wanted. The world back in place and the valley continuing as normal, whatever happened beyond it.
The still dawn she’d watched through that window turned into a crisp morning, brittle with brightness after the days of loose rain billowing like undone curtains across the valley. Every twig of every branch seemed redrawn, sharper. The edges of the hills were newly refined against the sky like old blades worked to a thinness on the granite sharpening wheel. When Sarah came out again later to untie the dogs, she saw the valley wall opposite was run with several fresh scars. The waterlogged earth had given way overnight, slipping down the slope, leaving tapering brick red marks in its wake. “Like a giant cat’s been clawing its way out of here.” Her mother’s voice again, echoing down the years. These landslips often happened after heavy rain. The valley was so steep it would always give in to itself in the end.
The sound of horseshoes scuffing on the track below Upper Blaen signalled Maggie’s arrival. Seren and Fly pricked their ears, eyes fixed on the gate that led down onto the lane, and Sarah rubbed her gloved hands and stamped her feet against the cold. Together with Maggie they’d go up onto the hill and bring down the lambing ewes. Maggie would ride her cob mare and Sarah would try and work the dogs. If things went well they might be done by evening.
The women were through the wood, its canopy opened by the autumn leaf-fall, and making their way up onto the sheep tracks running through the shrunken bracken when they heard the hammering. It echoed off the narrow valley walls, each metallic hit answered by another knock, slightly duller, following close after. It was like the working of a massive buried clock that after years of silence had found its rhythm once more. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. A pause, then the same again, regular and methodical ringing through the fragile November air.
Both women stopped. Maggie turned her mare into the slope and turned her good ear to the valley. “It’s comin’ from The Court,” she said, “or near there anyway.”
They listened in silence as the hammering beat on, paused again and started again.
“Reg?” Sarah asked, unable to suppress a breath of hope in his name.
“No.”
“But then who—”
“I dunno,” Maggie cut Sarah short. “Constable Evans maybe? I saw him at the market. Up from Pandy. Said he’d come by if he could, though I told him no need, of course.”
They listened again to the rhythm of the hammering. It was slight, a small hammer, metal. Not the wooden impact of a stake beetle or the heavy blows of a sledgehammer. On a different day with a wind up or damper air they might not have heard it at all.
“Maybe he heard The Court’s empty. Brought up some board for the windows p’haps. That’s probably it.”
Sarah could tell Maggie wasn’t convinced by her own conclusion.
“Shouldn’t we go and see? It might be Reg or one of the boys, after all.”
Maggie looked down at Sarah. “No,” she said simply. “We’ve got a job to do, bach. It’s already late to be bringing them down. Mary will go have a look, probably. Evans is one of her cousins after all, isn’t he?”
With that Maggie shortened her reins and squeezed the mare on up the slope. Seren had trotted back down to them while they’d been listening to the hammering. Sarah gave her a light stroke, tracing a finger over her head between her ears, then followed on after Maggie up the hill.
“Hold on the tail,” Maggie called over her shoulder as the mare worked the incline. “She won’t kick, long as that dog keeps out the way.”
Maggie and Sarah worked on the uplands all morning. It was slow going. They had over a hundred ewes to bring down off the hill and parts of The Court’s flock had wandered again. Maggie spent the first hour corralling these ewes from the broad expanses that opened out along the knuckles of the Black Hill. Sarah, meanwhile, set to trying to divide the flock with the dogs. Although the two bitches were instinctively aware of what they must do, they soon became confused by her attempts to guide them through the bunching flow of sheep. It was as if those invisible tethers by which Tom usually played them had become slack and unresponsive, incapable of carrying the pulses of communication needed to keep the dogs edging round the flock in the right directions.
Halfway through the day they brought the first batch of ewes back down the hill to Upper Blaen. The day had failed to find its heat and their breath clouded thickly in the glassy air in front of them. Having enclosed
the sheep in the lower meadows by the river, Maggie and Sarah made themselves lunch in the farmhouse, warming their hands at the range, the cold ebbing from their fingers in sharp stabs of tingling pain. Again Sarah suggested they go down and look in at The Court and again Maggie was dismissive of the idea. No time. Still half the lambing ewes to bring down at least. And no need. Mary would have been over.
Before they set out up the hill once more, Sarah went upstairs. “Now, don’t you laugh,” she said as Maggie heard her tread coming down the staircase again.
“Good God, girl! What you thinking of?” Maggie said as Sarah entered the kitchen. She was wearing a pair of Tom’s trousers puckered under a thick belt at her waist. One of his corduroy jackets hung loosely from her shoulders, its sleeves rolled thickly at her wrists.
“They still smell of him,” she explained to Maggie, who was staring at her as if she’d come down the stairs naked. “The dogs’ll pick it up, won’t they? It might help.”
“Well, it might,” Maggie said, “but looking like that you’ll frighten the bloody sheep away too!” She hit the table with the flat of her hand and laughed. It was the first time Sarah had seen her smile for weeks.
By the end of the day they’d managed to round up all the lambing ewes and bring them down for flushing in the richer pastures by the river. After the coarse grazing of the hillside two weeks on this richer grass would improve their fertility. More ewes would take, and of those that did, there’d be more twins too. God knows, though, Sarah thought, they had too many to deal with anyway. The splitting of The Court’s flock had given all the farms in the valley more sheep than they could handle. If Tom had been here they’d probably have sold a third of these ewes by now. But he wasn’t and they hadn’t, so for now the farm and the sheep would have to cope as best they could. And so would they.
By the time Maggie left Upper Blaen the sun was firing up the sharp edge of the Hatterall again, setting its steep mottled sides a deep black. Sarah stood in the yard for a moment, watching the first stars appear in the blue black sky above the ridge. Once again she was exhausted, the ache in her womb a nagging reminder of that morning’s disappointment, which she still felt despite her more sensible self telling her she should be relieved. But beneath these surface sensations Sarah was also strangely contented. They had brought the sheep down. Over the afternoon the dogs had begun to listen to her, retuning themselves to her pitch and tone. The sheep had begun to flow. The job was done and the ewes would be ready for tupping. Tom would have been proud of her. Just for a moment all this lent her a sense of tired ease and she relished being alone in the yard, watching the stars dot to life against the sky like the first raindrops against a window at the start of a downpour. But even this ease was short-lived. It scared her. She didn’t want to feel any second of contentment while Tom was away. She was frightened that if she did, one day she’d become too used to this. She needed to miss him at every moment. If she didn’t, then it would already be too late.
She went inside to rekindle the fire in the range and make herself supper. These were often the hardest hours of the day. Preparing for bed alone. Eating alone. She’d begun reading her small selection of books again, finding some company in the familiar stories of Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, and Scott. They were the books of her girlhood, given to her by Mrs. Thomas, an enthusiastic teacher who’d thought she shouldn’t have been leaving school when she did. She hadn’t read them for years, hardly ever since she’d married. But tonight she was too tired even to read. She would eat, write her diary to Tom, clean up the kitchen, and then go to bed, hoping as ever not to dream at all but to fall into a blank sleep instead. A sleep so deep and blind that it would, for a few hours at least, erase the dull ache of the missing body beside her.
Sarah was on her knees sweeping the ash from under the range when she heard footsteps outside followed by a sharp rap on the kitchen door. She looked up, still on her knees, to see it already opening.
“Hello?” she said.
The clear night outside was washed with moonlight. She could make out a figure silhouetted in the door frame. A man’s figure.
“Tom?” she said quietly, leaning forward on the palms of her hands. The figure didn’t move. “Tom?” she said again, louder, her frown unfolding to the tremors of a smile. The figure stepped forward into the kitchen and it was then, by the dim light of a single lantern, that Sarah saw the battered grey green serge of Albrecht’s uniform. She gasped and jumped back onto her heels, sending the rack of iron pokers and tongs beside the fireplace clattering over the flagstones.
“Please,” Albrecht said, slotting his pistol back into its holster and holding out his hand. “Don’t be alarmed, please.”
Sarah tipped herself further away until she felt the iron of the range’s oven, still warm at her back. She held the brush she’d been sweeping with across her chest, its bristles over her heart.
“Please,” Albrecht said again, “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”
Sarah saw movement behind him. A darker shadow shifting in the night. There was someone else there, in the yard. Why were the dogs so quiet? She’d heard them barking but had been too tired to go out and silence them. She’d thought they were just excited from their day’s work out on the hill.
“You are Sarah Lewis?” Albrecht said, looking down at a notepad.
She looked back into the soldier’s face. The candlelight reflected off the lenses of his glasses. Without his eyes she couldn’t read his expression. She nodded, unable to bring enough air into her clenched chest to do anything else.
“Good,” Albrecht said. The word dislodged a rattle in his throat and turning to one side he coughed heavily into his gloved hand. The cough was deep, hoarse. “Excuse me,” he said, turning back to face her. He gestured to one of the chairs around the kitchen table. “Please, sit down.”
His voice surprised her. He spoke an English Sarah had rarely heard. Clean, clear, precise, like the English of the estate owners around Abergavenny, but gentler, more careful. In this last request, however, she’d detected the slightest hint of an order. She didn’t want to press that voice any further, so slowly she stood up and pulled out a chair from under the table. Still moving carefully, she sat in it. Tom’s chair, she thought as she did, the chair her husband sat in every morning for breakfast. The chair from which she missed him every day, its blank seat always a reminder of that morning when she’d woken to the silences and spaces of his going. The thought of Tom brought the air back into her lungs.
“What do you want?” she asked, keeping her shaking hands on her lap.
“My name is Captain Wolfram,” the soldier said slowly. He held his peaked cloth cap in both hands before him, as an altar boy might carry a candle down the aisle of a church. “I am in command of a patrol unit of the German army. I am here to inform you that myself and my men have established an observation post in your area.” He paused. “I understand you were not aware this area is under German military control?”
Sarah shook her head. The hammering at The Court, it was them. German soldiers, here in the valley. After all Maggie had said. Maggie? She’d been going to check on The Court when she left this evening. Was she all right? Was she alive even?
“No,” she said quietly.
“Well, it is,” Albrecht continued. “I wanted to inform you of our particular presence personally and to reassure you that while we are allowed to complete our work here without obstruction, then we will not disturb you, your belongings, or your families.” He took a step nearer the table and, resting his hands on the back of a chair, leant towards Sarah. “I do not anticipate we will be here for long,” he said in a more relaxed tone, a tiredness tingeing the edges of his voice. “A week, perhaps two.”
Complete our work. What did he mean by that? Sarah’s mind was racing, suddenly acute, trying to take in this sudden invasion. She looked over the German officer again. His uniform was worn, threadbare at the elbows. He wore a thick black belt about his tunic. The crosshat
ched stock of his pistol protruded from a heavy leather holster on one side and a long knife hung to halfway down his thigh on the other. No, not a knife, Sarah thought, a bayonet. Again she remembered the stories of the German invasions of Belgium and Holland.
Albrecht moved towards the dresser. “Is your husband at home, Mrs. Lewis?” he said, picking up their wedding photograph.
Sarah blinked rapidly, keeping her eyes fixed on the photograph as if it was her child he held so casually in one hand, not a picture in a cheap wooden frame. Suddenly she saw, felt, the taking of that picture again. A bright May day, standing on the steps of the chapel, her veil flicking into her face in the breeze. The path covered with a confetti of cherry blossom. Laying her hand on Tom’s sleeve. Feeling the delicate tensing of his forearm under the heavy cloth of his suit.
“No,” she said, trying to stop her voice quavering. “He’s on the hill. We found a ewe with liver fluke. He’s with her now.”
“Liver fluke,” Albrecht said quietly, weighing the term on his tongue. “I see. Well, Mrs. Lewis, if you could tell him of my visit I’d be most grateful.” He put the photograph back on the dresser and gave Sarah a tight smile. For the first time she saw his eyes behind his glasses. He looked exhausted. Older than his voice. She saw too that his short black hair was flecked with grey, like when the river ran shallow over the stones, foaming white in the dark.
Albrecht gave a curt bow of his head. “Good evening, Mrs. Lewis,” he said. “I am sorry for alarming you. I promise it was not intentional.” Stepping out the still-open door, he turned back. “I hope the sheep gets better,” he said, putting on his peaked cap. “And that Mr. Lewis is not away for too long.”
