by Anne Berry
There is, however, a version of events that no matter how many times I explore my house of speculation is entirely absent. It’s the one in which a young Welsh farm girl is brutally raped by a German POW, where her screams are smothered by a rough hand clamped over her bleeding mouth. I can’t say why but I am absolutely sure that I was conceived in an act of supreme love. My natural parents fell in love while bombs bloomed in the night sky, and planes buzzed overhead on raids, and women wept abjectly for their wasted men. He stayed in Wales after the war because of her. I’m sure of it. Will Henry call me romantic if I tell him? But then he’s romantic himself. No, it was not violent, not furtive, but unstoppable. While the world was bent on self-destruction, my mother and my father were intoxicated with the champagne of creation.
Chapter 7
Bethan, 1947
SHE HAS AN energetic wriggle in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep, perhaps when neither of us can sleep. As if she’s restless, in a hurry to get out, to peek at what’s on offer. If she had any idea she’d stay put for sure. She? Goodness knows why, but I feel certain it’s a girl, that the baby growing inside me is a girl, my daughter.
Damn! Oh damn, damn, damn! Why can’t I stop this wheel of thought? I want to. I really want to. She isn’t real, I say severely to myself. She’s not there, filling me up, pushing the boundaries every day, testing the limits. She’s as insubstantial as feathers stuffing a pillow. Tear it open and she’ll float off in cahoots with the wind. I’ll have her, you see, and they’ll take her, someone will take her, someone else will be her mam. She’ll be abducted. And I’ll be empty, empty inside. The pillow will sag. My shape will come back. We’ll return to the farm and everything will be the way it was, the routine unchanged. All the same, all familiar. She gives me a kick as if she’s tuned in, as if she’s listening to my internal broadcast, a bulletin of her future, of what’s to come. Seems to me she’s not very glad about it. Oh, cariad, I’m not either. But I can’t do anything to prevent what’s coming. Funny when you dwell on it, birth is as inevitable as death.
I’m lying on my side. I’m far too big now to rest on my tummy, and I get indigestion when I roll onto my back. I have to pee all the time as well, get up in the middle of the night. There’s only one toilet in the flat and it’s next to Mrs Heppell’s bedroom. I get terrible worried that the noise of the flush will wake her. I try to hang on until the last moment, but I can’t help myself and I don’t want to go wetting the bed. Her flat’s in London, Rochester Row, not far from Westminster Cathedral, from the River Thames, from St James’s Park. But oh dear, so many miles from Wales, from Bedwyr Farm. That’s where I go most days, to the park. I wander around and feed the ducks. I sit on benches and watch the birds all fluffed up with the cold, or pecking in the grass. I can’t bear it really, having nothing to occupy me. Mam says knit, do a bit of crochet, embroider a cushion cover. She should know better. I despise sewing. Always have. All dainty and still. I like to be out and about, to fill my lungs with fresh air, to work with the animals, to pitch in.
The smutty oxygen here half chokes you to death, full of exhaust fumes and dust it is. At home I’d near as be off to sleep the second my head hit the pillow I was so tired. On the go, always on the go, muscles like frayed ropes, dreaming of my bed. Now I’m an insomniac. Only I don’t count sheep because that only makes me want to cry. I’m idle, a big lumpy thing, heaving myself about, with no company but my own rambling thoughts. And they do buzz on, my thoughts. They stick to me like a maddened swarm.
I’ve got a roomy coat, navy blue, serviceable wool. A bit threadbare at the elbows, but who’s looking? It’s baggy and that’s the important thing. It pretty much hides the bump. Otherwise I don’t think Mam and Mrs Heppell would like me going out. They’re mortified by the sight of me, the condition I’m in. Mam’s eyes are so cynical when they meet mine, though they seldom do these days. I know she can’t help it, that along with Dad she thinks I’ve betrayed Brice, that I’ve done an unforgivable thing to my dead brother. He came to me in a vision the other night, like the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary – only the tidings he brought weren’t such a shock. I opened my eyes and he was sitting on the windowsill smoking a cigarette, the outline of him all silvery and shimmering.
‘Hello, Bethan,’ he said in a low rumble. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. I hope you don’t mind me making an observation but you’ve got dreadful fat. And I don’t suppose it’s the chocolate that’s done it either.’
I shuffled up the bed and manoeuvred myself into a sitting position. There weren’t any bushes in the bedroom so I didn’t waste time beating about imaginary ones. ‘I’m pregnant, Brice,’ I announced baldly.
‘Well, what do you know. My little sister, a mam.’ Then, ‘I didn’t think you were married.’
‘I’m not,’ I confessed.
‘Oh dear, whatever do Mam and Dad feel about this?’
I bit my lip and heaved a hefty breath. Not as easy as you might suppose, with no room in there for my lungs to expand. I decided to divulge the lot. Besides, being as he was sort of intangible he could be a mind-reader. ‘Brice, I’m ever so sorry but the father, he’s a German, a POW who came to work on the farm.’ No reaction so I raced on. ‘But he’s not what you think. He’s kind and gentle. I love him, Brice. I really do.’
He levitated to his feet and in a wink was at my bedside. He tipped my face up to his and his hands were chiselled ice. He didn’t say a word, only shook his head all mournful like and vanished. I haven’t seen him since. I wish he’d come back because I need to explain how it was, how it is. So with maudlin fancies like this in my head, you’ll see why I can’t cope with sitting around in the flat all day. I’ll go bonkers. And it’s worse when Mrs Heppell is around. She makes me feel uneasy, her eyes drilling into me and her mouth all prim and rosebud tight, saying nothing. She’s an odd one, Mrs Heppell. Eira. She told me to call her by her first name, but she said it in the tone you use when you mean the opposite.
She works at Barkers department store, South Kensington, she says. She’s employed by a ticket agency, selling tickets for all performances at London theatres. They have a booth there. In the war though it closed down, and she moved temporarily to the rationing office they set up on the premises. She was employed as a supervisor, in charge of staff she’s fond of saying.
‘I had countless responsibilities and I shouldered the lot. I could be relied on. So many can’t,’ she said, her eyes sliding like soap over my bump. Probably why she has such a posh voice. Mam says it’s a telephone manner. You cultivate it so that when people ring in, they’re so impressed they buy lots of tickets. But I don’t know, it would just put me off and make me want to slam the phone down, I think.
‘You needn’t call me Mrs Heppell. After all, we’re near enough in age. You can call me Eira, if you like.’
That’s what she said. But she paused before the ‘if you like’ bit, tagged it on in a way that meant ‘don’t you dare’. Well daring had nothing to with it. I didn’t like. Snooty cow hates me. Or p’raps I should say the snooty cow hates me as well. She’s the daughter of one of Mam’s old school friends who married an Englishman. Went to live in London, she did. Consequently, Mrs Heppell’s a city lady, fashionable, high heels that I don’t know how she walks in, tube skirts that make her bum look huge, and not a hint of a Welsh accent. When I speak she won’t meet my eyes. Condescension, that’s what it is, that and loathing and disgust. Well, I s’ppose I shouldn’t blame her. Her husband was one of the parachute troopers. First jump. Sicily. Killed by a sniper shot. And here am I invading her flat, a miniature half-German growing in my belly.
She’s tall and scrawny, though she does have an arse the width of Poppit Sands. And she’s all blocked up, if you know what I mean. She’s a head of hair the colour of weak tea. Not to my taste. If you’re going to have a brew it should be a shade of dark honey so you can really taste the cuppa, or why bother. That’s what I say anyway. What’s more, it’s al
l frazzled she uses those curling irons on it so much. She’s got a pointy chin, a thin squiggle of a mouth, down turned, sour, and a large nose with a bump in the middle of it. Her eyes are pale, a shade of hazel, with a look in them as hard as gravel. I sound as if I’m being bitchy. It’s not that she’s ugly. If she smiled she might look tolerable, attractive even. Only I haven’t seen her smile or heard her laugh. Mam and her are a right old pair, gloomy as crypts.
Mam’s been back and forth a bit. She says Dad needs her on the farm. Of course he does. I mustn’t be so selfish. He must be struggling with all of us gone, me and Mam and … and Thorston. He has a couple of young lads helping him out, come over from Ashton’s Farm. So he’s getting by. That makes me feel less guilty. If you must know, I had a weak moment a night or two ago. It all got too much. I felt so homesick, so out of place. We were listening to the radio, Henry Hall and his orchestra, hunched up by the fire, though God knows why. Mrs Heppell won’t burn more than four pieces of coal a night. And there’s no hot water either, so you have to boil a kettle if you want a wash down. She doesn’t like you doing that, frets about the gas. I grab my chance when she’s at work. I’m not going to pong, and besides a wash makes me feel better somehow.
So you can picture it, just the two of us, chairs pulled up close to a dying fire, and me fair shivering, teeth chattering with the cold. Oh! It was freezing. Rain spitting against the windowpanes, and that bloody bulldog of hers wheezing and farting. It’s so fat that dog. Hardly ever gets out of its basket. Well, before I knew where I was, I had started to weep. I didn’t make a row, not much really. I was so embarrassed, but they kept coming, hot tears running down my cold cheeks.
‘I’d stop that right away if I was you,’ she says, her mouth all knotted. ‘Your tears are wasted on me. Save them for someone more gullible.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I sobbed back, making an effort to pull myself together. But it was no good.
She stood up then and looked down at me for ages. Then after a bit she folded her arms and said, ‘Let’s get one thing clear if you’re going to be staying here. I’m not your friend. I’m tolerating you for one reason and one reason only.’ She was using her telephone voice, and that made what she was saying even more nasty. ‘My mother asked me to put you up as a favour to your mam. Now I care about my mother. And so because this means a lot to her, it being that she was so close to your mam back in the day, I agreed. I’ll sit at the table and have my tea with you. And I’ll sit like this of an evening and try not to mind too much if you’re here. But that’s it.’ And then her eyes narrowed and her tone became thistledown soft, so that I had to strain to hear it. ‘In my opinion you’re a whore, opening your legs to some German lout, some soldier who more than likely wasted the blood of our fine British men without a second thought. When that brat of yours arrives you keep it away from me, understand. Or I just might strangle it where it lies and throw the fiend out with the rubbish.’
I blinked away my tears then and started protesting. ‘Please, let me explain how it –’
‘Oh no you don’t,’ she hissed, butting in and taking a step back. ‘You can’t fool me you little slut. I know what you did and so does God.’ Her cheeks were a constellation of red stars and even her neck had flushed crimson, and her nostrils were flaring.
‘Look, I’m sorry for your loss, for what happened to your Douglas.’
She dashed forwards at that and raised her hand to me. The dog snarled and I thought that she was going to slap my face. But she didn’t, just kept her hand in the air as if she was swearing an oath in court. ‘Don’t you even mention his name. You’re not worthy to speak it.’
‘I lost my brother as well. Brice. I know how you feel but the war’s –’
‘No you don’t,’ she axed in, ‘because if you did, if you had felt a fraction of the grief I’ve had to bear, you wouldn’t have let that German violate you. You’d have preferred to die than have a murdering Nazi have sex with you.’
We neither of us said any more. After a minute, I staggered up and went to bed. We haven’t spoken since. Well, what more can you say after that. And maybe she’s right. Maybe I don’t understand and I haven’t felt her misery. Maybe she’s only voicing what Mam thinks but won’t say, what Dad thinks, what everyone would think if they knew. So I’d best dry my tears, best get used to enduring things, the awfulness of being separated from the man I love, the only man I will ever love, carrying his child in the certain knowledge that I have to give her up, to hand her over to strangers, going home and spending the rest of my life trying to do penance for the heinous sin I’ve committed.
During the days the baby’s so motionless that sometimes I forget I’m pregnant. It’s as though she knows she shouldn’t be coming, that she wasn’t invited, that she’s about as welcome as heavy rainfall the night before the harvest begins.. It’s New Year’s Day, month nine now. She could arrive any hour. Mam’s staying permanently and I’m grateful for that. She talks to Mrs Heppell, mostly about her mam, what they did when they were girls at school, how naughty they were. And I go for my walks and remember. It’s a guilty pleasure.
I despise this city with its hullabaloo and its grime and its rush, rush, rush. You get trampled down here. Buildings everywhere, some all bombed and scarred. Hardly any grass or flowers. And no animals to mention. Oh how I miss the animals, the sheepdogs, Fflur and Gwil. Fflur’s black with a white patch over one eye, and Gwil’s light brown and cream and likes to have his tummy rubbed. When you do, his eyes glaze over as if he’s in paradise. And I miss the cows, the sheep, the chickens and the horse. I even miss the pigs. And I don’t know what to do with myself. My earache has been bad again. It’s the cold I expect. I’ve become a dreadful fidget. I walk to the river, beside the river, and up and down the street, as if I’m ploughing a field. I tread in puddles the way I did when I was a girl. Sometimes I ride on the buses. I don’t go anywhere in particular, just ride for a while on the top deck, then get off, cross the road and ride another bus back again. As I said, I go to the park. But the only place that seems to calm me is the cathedral. When you sit in there it’s like being inside a great bell.
It’s very grey is London, and it rains like the sky is a dishcloth being wrung out. But that’s not a novel experience to me. We have more than our fair share of rain in Wales, and it’s the farm’s blood. Nothing grows without water. But when it’s not too grey in the city, when the sky breaks open like an egg, I amuse myself stepping into the shafts of light that slash through the windows of the great cathedral. I know it’s a stupid whim, one a child might have, but I’ve taken to fantasising that I’m sucked up into a beam of light, as if God’s sucking me up through a straw. And he deposits me far, far away, in a peaceful land where there hasn’t been a war, a land where the graveyards aren’t full up with dead men, and where women aren’t stooped with anguish, where they cluck like crotchety hens as their sons grow up strong and healthy and their husbands grow old and grumpy.
And Thorston’s there, in that land, waiting for me, open-armed. ‘Ich liebe dich, Bethan,’ I love you, he says, as he pulls me close. And we have the prettiest little house, painted white, with blue window boxes full of gay flowers. And there’s a rectangle of brilliant green lawn, with a path winding through it and a picket fence running round it. Positioned like a mouth in the front door is a letterbox, polished brass lips and flapping tongue. Through it the postman feeds our letters, lovely letters and greeting cards with not a bill among them. I pick them up and read who they’re addressed to. ‘Mr and Mrs Engel,’ they say. And while I open them, I gaze out over the back garden where there’s a pram standing in the cool shade of an oak tree. And I can just glimpse our baby’s chubby hands reaching up to catch at the green leaves fluttering in the breeze.
Then a soggy grey cloud bowls up and the limbs of light wither, and it feels dreadfully sombre and chilly in the cathedral, like a dungeon must feel I expect. I try to hold on to the days of snow in that most cruel of winters last year.
The whole of Wales seemed to be sealed in ice, held in suspense, one great glacier. There was no heat to be had anywhere save in his bed, his rickety bed on the tick mattress, with the wind serenading our lovemaking. I close my eyes and I am back there, with his mouth moving against my ears, the nectar of his wondrous words dripping into me, the only witness in that opaque bone-white desert where silence breeds silence. I open up like a rose, a single winter rose blossoming for him. His hair has grown longer, and a darker blond without the sun. He is so tender, so giving, so patient that my want becomes a frenzy.
I gloat over my tiny hoard of memories. I only wish they could have multiplied. But we had to be careful, make certain we gave no cause for suspicion, that our nocturnal couplings remained secret. I recall the coming of that spring, the onset of a thaw like no other. I recall us sitting in the corner of a field far from prying eyes, eating buns and jam, our sticky fingers linked in the tangled grass. Bringing the sheep down from the high pastures and stealing a kiss behind a tree. His lips tasted like spring water, cool and pure, leaving the honey of his sweetness on my tongue. Bending over him as he drew, the pencil seeming to guide his hand, not the other way round. And that intense look on his face coupled with humility, as if he recognised his skill was a gift, really a gift, something that God had given to him. And his round spectacles shining like gold coins in the candlelight.
‘I love you,’ he said. He pushed the hair behind my ears. I could see the mist of our breaths rising in the frosted air. We rubbed noses. Eskimos do that, don’t they? And he climbed to his feet and unbuttoned my shirt, then laid his head against my breast. ‘I can hear your heart, Bethan. I can hear it talking to me,’ he said. And later, in bed, I rested my head on his chest and watched daffodils of light bobbing their heads on the whitewashed walls.
