by Owen Sheers
Sarah dropped her arm. They were sitting on a stile at the edge of a small wood. It was the first time they’d stopped since they started out from the Olchon just before dawn. The plateau of the Hatterall had been broader than Albrecht expected, thick with bilberry bushes and purple heather. Twice they’d disturbed skylarks from their nests and stood and watched as the startled birds ascended above them, disappearing up the threads of their songs.
Over the past five years Albrecht had travelled through countries, over seas, and into countless sectors of unknown territory, and yet this short walk over the Hatterall, no more than an hour, had felt the most adventurous of all his expeditions. This sensation was accentuated when they descended the other side of the ridge and the Llanthony valley began to open out before them. After his months in the Olchon, after all the days waking to its familiar shape and character, this suddenly different view invigorated him. The interlocking spurs of the high-backed hills gave the valley a folded appearance, while the broad glacial floor was patched with rich alluvial fields. Compared to the deep notch of the Olchon it was more open, more gentle, and, with the ruins of the priory settled within it, more resonant with the mark of human hands. Albrecht felt like a Victorian explorer stumbling upon a hidden discovery. He knew, however, he was discovering nothing more than the depth of his own retreat these past months. The extent to which, apart from that brief motorbike ride out of the valley, he’d shrunk his world to a scale he could know and control.
The ruins of the priory were impressive. A great wrecked ship of a building run aground on the valley floor. A morning mist hung low about its walls. Many of its arches and long windows were still intact, framing the hills opposite and lending the ruins a beguiling impression of both order and chaos, of studied construction and natural decay. Its ragged towers and fallen walls emerging from the mist reminded him of another priory he’d seen in France. That too had been a ruin when he saw it, but its remains had risen out of grey smoke, not mist. The priory had been used as a dressing station and in its crypt they’d found more than a hundred wounded men. Only the low grind of their moaning indicated that some of them were still alive. In the chancel Albrecht had found a statue of the Virgin fallen from her pedestal, her head resting on a pillow of shattered stone and dust. The paint on her face was chipped below her eye in the shape of a tear. Albrecht was not a religious man, but at that moment he’d been willing to believe that someone, somewhere, was crying for what they had done.
“My father said Landor wanted that path t’be a road right over to Longtown.” Sarah was still looking in the direction of Landor’s house. “But he never got it further than that field.” Albrecht traced the path away from the trees to where it faded and petered out into a grassed depression, then nothing.
The walk over the ridge seemed to have energised Sarah too. There was a new animation about her that lit her features. Every time Albrecht looked across at her it took some effort to make himself look away again. She had, he supposed, been away from the valley of her birth for a long time. While they sat on the stile she told him what she knew about its history.
“That’s the Honddu,” she said, pointing towards the river meandering between the spurs of the hills, shining metallic in the first light of the morning. “Means ‘black water.’ ” Sarah lowered her hand. Albrecht felt her shift her weight on the stile beside him. She scratched her calf with the toe of one of her scuffed boots. She seemed nervous.
“They say St. David came here. Down there, where the chapel is, see? That’s where he had his cell. He came here late on, when he was old,” she added before pausing again. Albrecht thought of the orphan lamb, awkward in its unfamiliar skin.
“William de Lacy built the chapel. He was a Norman knight. Came into the valley on a hunting trip an’ never left. The priory came later. Didn’t last long, though. Locals wouldn’t leave the monks alone, so they left in the end.”
Albrecht began to feel uncomfortable too. She’d never spoken to him like this before. She’d never offered so much of herself. Was she trying to tell him something? This valley and its history was, after all, a graveyard of failures, littered with the remnants of men foolish enough to think its geography sufficient to extract themselves from the world.
What Albrecht didn’t know was that ever since their walk back from the Red Darren yesterday Sarah had been mining her memories for everything she’d ever been told about the valley by her father, Mrs. Thomas, and the poet. It wasn’t that she wanted to impress Albrecht. It was more important than that. He’d shown her the map, he’d explained its secrets to her, and now she wanted to be able to guide him in return. She wanted to be his equal, to show him that although she had none of his studying, she could still navigate the history of this living map below them.
“The old monastery, where David Jones lived with Eric Gill and the others? That’s further up. You can’t see it from here.” Sarah was careful to use their names. To call them as she always thought of them, as simply “the artist” and “the poet,” seemed childish now. And she did not want to appear a child to him. This was her valley and she wanted to reveal it with all the authority and love with which he’d translated the map.
Albrecht nodded in response to Sarah’s observations, interjecting now and then with, “I see, yes,” or just a murmur of understanding. She said nothing he didn’t already know. The books he’d obtained in Oxford had already told him everything she mentioned, and more. In a history of the valley he’d read the original extracts from Giraldus Cambrensis, who’d first referred to the tradition of St. David’s Cell. The biography of Landor he’d been reading at The Court had described how William de Lacy, sick of the trivialities of the royal court and seduced by the valley’s isolated beauty, had resolved to restore the squat chapel below them and take up a life of contemplation and prayer. And from a recently published walking guide to the Welsh Marches he’d learnt how the monks had been harried from their cloisters by the lawless peasants whose ancestors had, no doubt, earned the valley its other name of the Vale of Ewyas, from the old Welsh word gwyas, meaning “a place of battle.”
The sun was rising. The people in the valley below would soon be stirring. “And that is where Landor built his villa?” Albrecht said, pointing once more to the trees at the end of the overgrown track. He looked down at the cows moving in and out of the ruined priory.
“It’s all right,” Sarah said, getting off the stile. “They’re beef, not dairy. We’ll be good for a bit yet.” Turning away from him she began walking across the open field.
Albrecht was suddenly panicked. Years of battle had left him with a natural wariness of such open pieces of land, even though it was now just the eyes of strangers he feared, not bullets or mortars. But those eyes could still be lethal. They could still take it all away. And that’s why the panic fluttered in his chest. Because he did not want to lose her now. Not after so long, not when he could sense them becoming closer by the day. He slid off the stile and followed her, looking anxiously down at the ruins and the farm beside them, ready to retreat back into the woods at the first sign of life.
Over the long winter nights of reading his biography by the fire in The Court, Albrecht had grown fond of the eccentric and rebellious Walter Savage Landor. He somehow thought he understood what fuelled the eclectic gentleman poet who’d bought an estate in this valley with the vision of creating a feudal Utopia; the energetic dendrophiliac who’d planned to plant ten thousand Lebanon cedars on the bare Welsh hills. The ruins of his house were, therefore, a disappointment to Albrecht, and a sorry monument to the man and his ill-fated dreams. A few free-standing piles of fern-topped stones and four broken-topped walls of brown red sandstone round a square of bare earth was all that remained of the villa Landor never saw finished. The ground within the walls was shot with nettles and cut up by the hooves of sheltering cattle. The unfinished cellar beneath these walls was dank and thick with the smell of sheep droppings. The only roof was provided by the trees; saplings when t
he foundations were laid. These at least, Albrecht thought, would have pleased Landor.
Sarah watched Albrecht as he moved slowly about the ruins, running his hand over the flaking sandstone just as he had across the surface of the map. He still wore a pair of grey green uniform trousers, Wehrmacht-issue boots, and an army water bottle on his belt. But from the waist up he was dressed in clothes from The Court; a heavy tweed jacket over a shirt and dark blue jumper. Sarah wondered who the jumper and jacket belonged to. Reg or one of the boys? She thought of Reg’s son Malcolm, dragging his heavy foot over the hill. Leaning back against one of the ruined walls, she let herself slide down its rough surface until she was crouching at its base. How had it come to this? Alone with a German, half-soldier, half-farmer, in the ruins of a house in which she’d played as a child. She’d probably seen those clothes before, when she’d talked with Reg and the boys or watched them at their work just months ago. Maybe that was the very shirt Reg had been wearing last summer when she’d come across the stubbled field with a flagon of cider. When he’d paused in pitching his forkfuls of freshly cut hay onto the wagon to drink thirstily from that flagon, spilling some of it down his front, before handing it back to her with a playful wink and a hoarse, “Thank you, bach.” Perhaps if she got close enough to Albrecht she’d still smell that spilt cider. Still smell another man’s summer on the clothes he wore now.
She looked up at him. The low sun caught the frame of his spectacles. He didn’t look like a soldier anymore, but more like the scholar he said he once was, running his fingers over the remains of this ruined house. His hands looked pale against the dark stone, long-fingered, delicate almost. She was too far away to see the veins branching over the knuckles, but she already knew how blue they were under his pale skin, like mapped rivers under ice.
Tom’s hands were rougher, broader. Other parts of Tom, his smell, his face even, were fading from her, but not his hands. She remembered them. He’d worked with them all his life. Each finger bore the scar of a slipped knife or a barbed-wire nick. Each knuckle held some of the cold and heat of the many seasons he’d worked outside in all weathers. They were heavy, thick hands. When Sarah touched them she used to think he’d only feel her if she dug her nails right in or pressed with all her weight into his palm.
She looked again at Albrecht’s hands. They were hands for turning pages, holding books, for passing slowly over the surface of ancient maps. They were not the hands of a soldier. She couldn’t imagine them holding a gun, a grenade, pulling a trigger. But she knew they must have. She’d seen it for herself that night he came into her house. That night she’d thought he was Tom, back at last, only to see Albrecht standing there, one of his pale hands holding a pistol.
Sarah got up and walked over to where Albrecht was leaning against a corner of the ruin. He was looking down towards the priory as if he wanted to remember its every keystone and fallen arch. She stood behind him, at his shoulder.
“Have you killed people?” she said quietly, speaking as if they were in a crowded room and she wanted no one else to hear them.
Albrecht didn’t move, just let out a brief, almost imperceptible sigh, like an escaped fragment of something larger collapsing within him. His gaze shifted from the priory to a buzzard catching its balance on the morning air in the field below them. “Yes,” he said at last.
“How many?”
“I don’t know.” He watched the buzzard drop then turn a slow glide over the field.
“You wouldn’t think it,” Sarah said. “You’d think t’see it. But you don’t.”
“No,” Albrecht said, “you don’t.”
He pushed himself off the wall and walked along the track that ran away from the ruins, trying to get a better view of the priory below. Sarah followed a few feet behind him until he stopped and sat on a hummock of moss under a tree. Looking down at the ground he tore a few blades of grass from between his feet before looking back up at her standing beside him. “What will you do?” he said. “When this is over?”
“Nothing. Stay here, with Tom.”
Albrecht smiled and nodded his head as if he’d been stupid to ask such an obvious question. “Of course,” he said, “of course you will.” He ripped another handful of grass from between his legs. Sarah came and sat beside him.
“You are a remarkable woman, Sarah.”
The sound of her name in his mouth caught her unawares. She looked up at him but he was staring back down at the priory again. In all the months they’d known each other, they’d never used each other’s names. She had always been Mrs. Lewis and he, whenever she spoke of him to Maggie or the others, was “the captain.” In calling her Sarah it was as if some game they’d been playing was suddenly over. Except she’d never been playing at anything.
“You really believe they’ll come back, don’t you?”
There was no challenge in his voice, just a quiet admiration. Nothing for her to resist or to provoke her anger.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
She was lying, but only partly. She didn’t know about the other men, but she did know about Tom. And she did believe he would come back, or at least that he was still here, that he wasn’t dead. She wouldn’t believe that he could die and she wouldn’t know, somehow. A shift in the air about her, a tint upon the light of the day. Somehow, she’d know.
“What about you?” she asked Albrecht. “Will you go home?”
Albrecht followed the buzzard as it made another slow spiralling descent before coming to rest in the upper branches of a tree at the edge of the field. The bird stretched its wings once, then folded them, disappearing to a dark bud, invisible to the passing eye.
“I have no home to go back to,” he said. “I was a student before the war. Always on the move. My parents’ house is no longer there. It was destroyed in an air raid. The same one that killed my fiancée.”
He’d never mentioned Ebbe to Sarah before. She had never wanted to know anything but the barest of facts about his past. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He leant back against the tree. “I was in Russia when they died. I didn’t know until over a month later. For over a month I wrote to all of them, but they were already dead, and I never knew.”
She wanted to reach out and touch him then, but she couldn’t. He was wearing those clothes. To touch them on him would be a betrayal of everything she was holding on to. “Germany, though,” she said eventually. “That’s your home, isn’t it? You’ll be going back there when it’s over, won’t you?”
Albrecht rested his head against the trunk of the tree, closed his eyes, and tilted his face towards the sun rising over the Hatterall ridge behind them. “When I was stationed in Holland,” he said, speaking with his eyes still closed, “I used to go to a park every Sunday to listen to a band that played there. They were very good. I got to know the bandleader. One day I saw a Party official also watching the band. He was holding a clipboard, making marks on it with his pencil. When they were packing up, I asked the bandleader what the official had been doing. He looked at me as if I was mad not to know. ‘Checking we’re playing within the regulations,’ he said. ‘No sideways swaying of the saxophone. No muted trumpet. No ostentatious trills or double-stopping.’ What he meant was nothing that might resemble ‘Negro music,’ as he called it.” Albrecht thought of the distaste on Steiner’s face when they’d tuned through snatches of jazz on the radio. “I am German,” he said, turning his face away from the sun and looking back down at the abandoned priory. “But Germany is not my home anymore.”
For some minutes they sat there, beneath the tree, saying nothing. A blackbird sang from one of the ruined walls beside them. A crow cawed, brash and harsh, as it fought in the tree above with a pair of magpies. It was going to be a warm day. Sarah could feel it, the potential heat heavy in the air. She was in the valley of her childhood, where she’d grown up. She knew the contours of the land about them intimately. And yet she was also in a place unfamiliar to her, somewhere off the edges of
any map she’d ever known.
Eventually it was Sarah who spoke again.
“That night,” she said, speaking slowly as if it was an effort to draw up the words. “The night they left. All of us woke late the next morning. We’ve never spoken about it, but we did. Slept right through. Never heard a thing. All of us. I’ve tried speaking to Maggie. Ask her why she thinks that was. But I can’t. She knows why, though, an’ so do I. I even went looking for the bottle. But I can’t ask her. It’d be too much, I reckon.”
Albrecht shifted his back up the trunk and turned to look at Sarah. “Your husbands did the right thing,” he said. “It is what men all over Europe have done. It is what I would have done.”
“That may be,” Sarah said, sighing through a weak smile. “But that don’t make it any easier. I’d rather they were wrong an’ here than right an’ not.”
Albrecht turned back to face the valley, then looked over again at the ruined walls of the house Landor had only ever dreamt of living in. “You know, he was a very fine writer of letters, Landor,” he said, still looking at the ruins. “There’s a line in one of them that has stayed with me ever since I read it: ‘More people are good because they are happy than happy because they are good.’ This is what he says. And he is right.” He glanced back at Sarah. She met his eye then looked away. “It is very hard to be good now,” he continued. “But after all this, when we are able to be happy again, then I think maybe we will be good to each other again too. In ways that do not have to be so painful.”
He kept his eyes on her face, willing her to turn back and look at him. But she did not. She just looked down at the grass, nodding her head, as might a child who wasn’t really listening to the words being spoken to her.
“This is what I hope, anyway,” Albrecht added more quietly as he unclipped the water bottle from his belt. Unscrewing the cap he offered it to Sarah. She shook her head without looking at him. He tipped the bottle to his own lips and drank briefly, before finding himself swallowing at nothing but air. He upended the bottle and a few drops of water landed in his palm.
