2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  He declined, gruffly at first, “Not likely,” and then, as she went about filling the kettle from the pump in the yard, with increasingly desperate politeness: “I’d not want to be a bother.” Finally, thinking perhaps she didn’t understand his English, he tried being firm, as if talking to a dog: “Missus? No, missus. No!” But she ignored him, carrying in the sloshing kettle and easing it on to the stove. Beads of water skittered over the hot plate. “You can’t make me,” he yelled, taking a step back down the passage as Esther pushed her sleeves up. He’d fought her tooth and nail, but she’d grappled with too many oily sheep, helping strip them of their fleece, for him to have a chance. The steam was billowing from the kettle when she marched him back into the kitchen in just his vest and drawers. She poured a steaming, silver stream into the tub, added cold from a jug, and told him to hop in, turning away demurely, though not without catching a glimpse of his bone-white flanks before he sat down with a quick splash.

  She started to move towards him with a brush and he flushed, cupped his hands between his legs, and bawled, “You’re not my mother!” and she stopped as if slapped.

  Instead, she scooped up his clothes where he’d thrown them and bent over the fireplace, feeding them to the flames as he yelled from the tub, half rising and then sinking back beneath the water. “ln-fes-ted,” she shouted, turning back to him. “I can hear their little bodies popping in the flames. Uckavie!” She gave a shudder. How dare he bring lice into her mother’s house!

  Tonight, after a chapter of Dickens, she reads the newspaper with him, helping find the towns and villages on the map of Europe tacked to his bedroom wall.

  “Caen,” she says. “Cherbourg.” She points them out and he bats her hand away. “I can see.” She lets him use the pins from her sewing kit, moving them east across the map with the Allied advance. She’s always forgetting who they represent—Monty, Patton, Bradley?—or pretending to, at any rate, because he enjoys telling her.

  “Who’s this, then?” she asks, pointing to a pin still stuck near London.

  “Rhys,” he says, with an edge of accusation, and for a second she wonders, Who?

  It’s been less than three months since his proposal, but it seems a lifetime ago. Esther went along with Jim to see Rhys off at the station after his last leave despite, or perhaps because of, turning him down. The village was too small for hard feelings. His mother was there, fussing about, picking lint off his uniform collar, then smoothing it down. “Quite grand, isn’t he?” Mrs Roberts asked Esther, speaking in English, as if they were still in class. “I thought I’d always have to iron and polish for him.” She gave a wobbly smile. “At least until he found a wife. And here the army’s gone and taught him how.” Esther and Rhys both glanced down, and his mother followed their eyes. “And would you look at his boots,” she breathed in wonder, but when she looked up, Esther saw the tears standing in her eyes, like pearly pinheads, and it occurred to her that his mother was terrified for him. Rhys was so placidly confident about returning, Esther had never imagined him not, and even when she considered it now, it was almost impossible to imagine anything as interesting as getting killed ever happening to him. And yet the sudden fear of it must have made her weaken, because when Rhys leaned out of the train window and whispered, “Can I at least hope?” she nodded slightly and promised to write.

  And she has. Only a couple of brief, dutiful notes, to be sure, but Jim has written too, and all they’ve had back is a measly picture postcard of the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square, addressed to ‘Mr Evans, Esther, and Jim’, saying how friendly the English were, how dingy London was, and that he’d been assigned to the kitchens—news that managed to disappoint or annoy all three of them.

  Not that his mother has heard much more herself. “It’s embarrassing,” Mrs Roberts confided to Esther with a little laugh, over the counter at the post office. “Here I am, the postmistress, and my own son a poor correspondent. Not that he was ever much good at his English when I was his teacher, as you know. And it’s because he has to write in English, you see. The censors can’t read Welsh.” She shook her head. “Can you imagine! Strangers reading a boy’s letters to his mother.”

  It’s just as well that Mrs Roberts is a talker, Esther thinks.

  She’s always a little tongue-tied around her former teacher (still scared that Mrs R, as they called her in school, will criticise her grammar), but more so when the subject is Rhys. The first time she saw his mother after the rejection, she kept her hands clasped behind her back, as if afraid she’d get a rap across the knuckles with a ruler. Thankfully, though, it seems Mrs R doesn’t know of the proposal.

  “Last known location,” Jim is saying now, resting a finger on the head of the pin representing Rhys, twisting it back and forth to press it home. Esther’s eye wanders to Rhys’s postcard of the picture palace, propped up between two lead soldiers on the deep windowsill that serves as Jim’s desk. The last word Mrs R had from him, over a fortnight ago, was that he was awaiting orders. But to Esther, it’s almost as if he might still be inside the grand cinema, sitting in the stalls.

  It miffs her, that one postcard. She’s wanted to share Rhys’s escape somehow, or better yet, have it instead of him, if he’s too cloddish to enjoy it. (He told her when he left he’d be back just as soon as the war was over. “But why?” she asked crossly, thinking him a mother’s boy, and he blinked and coughed and told her, “For you.”) Esther has promised Mrs R, good student that she is, that she’ll write regularly—faithfully, she almost said. But whenever she starts another letter, her own news about the village or the farm—the gathering, the washing, everything the same as every other year—seems so drab she can’t go on. Besides, it makes her feel foolish, as though she’s encouraging him, or worse, chasing him.

  And once she’d started stepping out with Colin, she could hardly write to Rhys.

  “Course, he could be anywhere by now,” Jim says. “Probably not allowed to tell us.”

  “I’m sure he’s safe.” But she’s misread the boy.

  “Safe!” he scoffs. “I bet that was a cover, about being a cook. He couldn’t very well say if he’s a secret agent or something. He’s probably already behind enemy lines.”

  She tries to seem serious. “Sounds dangerous.”

  “Not half!”

  She sees how much he misses Rhys then, how his longing, too, is etched with envy, his desperation for an escape of his own, from childhood. From her, she thinks with a start. Rhys and Jim shared this small boxroom when Rhys worked at Cilgwyn, and the two of them became thick as thieves—Rhys as patient with Jim’s childishness as Jim was with Rhys’s ponderous English. Rhys had even taught the boy to whistle. She remembers them, last summer, bouncing around the barn like a pair of mad things, trampling down the hay pile.

  “Why don’t you write him another letter?” she suggests. “I bet he’d like that.”

  “If he can even get letters where he is,” Jim says, but after a moment he gathers paper and pencil, bends over his desk, and she leaves him to fetch another lamp.

  Rhys, a spy? Rhys dangling under a parachute? She wants to laugh, but for a second the romance of Jim’s vision seduces her. The boy loves him, she thinks, and she feels a pang of envy. If only she could. It seems so suddenly attractive, a way of turning back the clock. She thinks about writing to Rhys herself. Could she still accept him? Could she just pass it off as a mistake, a confusion. “Oh, you mean you want to marry me!” He looked so smart in his uniform. Well groomed, she thinks, turning the words over in her mind, as if she’s just understood something.

  And yet when she imagines kissing him, her tongue flinches from that dark gap between his two front teeth.

  When she checks back later, Jim is staring at the line of marbles running along the edge of the window, each balanced in a little scallop of putty.

  “What have you got?” she asks, leaning forward to look at the paper, but he hunches his shoulders.

  “Come on,” she says,
and reluctantly he pulls away and she sees that the paper is blank, the whiteness stumping him.

  “Why don’t you let me help,” she says, her voice taking on a teacherly tone.

  He shakes his head.

  “You could tell him about the bike.”

  “I was gonna!” He glares at her reflection in the dark window.

  “I’ll check your spelling if you like.”

  He ignores her.

  “Well, tell him I say hello.”

  “He’s my friend,” Jim rounds on her with sudden heat. “Not your boyfriend.”

  She chokes out a laugh. “You can have him!”

  Lying in bed later, she thinks of the nights last summer when she heard them, down the hall, chattering away in their mongrel mix of Welsh and English, whispering and laughing. About her? she wondered.

  “Shh,” she’d hissed at them. Rhys was no better than a child, she’d thought. Yet now it occurs to her that perhaps she’d been jealous. Not of Jim, but of Rhys and his easy rapport with the boy.

  She stares into the darkness, tossing and turning. She feels so…full somehow, filled with feeling, throttling on it, but with no way to let it out. The words lie curled and heavy in her belly. She can’t write to Rhys: if she put pen to paper, she doesn’t know what would come out, how she’d ever control the words. She has an urge to confess, feels it pressing behind her teeth, swallows it down, but also gnawing on her is the desire to blame someone—Colin, of course, but also Rhys. If he hadn’t been so…dull, she might have fallen in love with him, mightn’t she? So wasn’t it his fault as much as hers?

  Now that she thinks of it, she pictures him home on leave after finishing his basic training, coming into the pub the evening before she saw him off at the station. He’d been with a group of other young people, including a couple of local girls, Mair Morris and Elsie Pritchard, all of them underage. Esther refused to serve them at first, but Jack had intervened, smiling. He glanced over at the constable in his accustomed corner, who nodded indulgently, and told her, “I think we can make an exception just this once.” Esther had watched Rhys get drunker and drunker, Elsie braying with laughter at his jokes, Mair running a hand down his uniformed arm. Esther had had to wave Jack away when he asked if she wanted to knock off early and have a drink with her pals. It had dawned on her that Rhys was right, that people—Jack, PC Parry and, if those two, then half the village—thought him her swain, and a furious shudder swept through her.

  And that was the first night she’d talked to Colin, it seems to her now.

  Nine

  In the last week of June, Esther pulls a cardigan on to go down to Williams the butcher with the new month’s ration coupons. She’s been stretching the meat portion out all week, day after day of lobscau, the thin, salty stew of mutton, leeks and swedes that she serves with onion cake. Arthur tolerates it with a kind of grim pride—it’s a national dish—but Jim hates it with an expressive passion, making faces, claiming it’s made of some unholy mixture of lobster and cow, hence the name. If only! Esther thinks. She pines for the old days, when during the shearing or haying the men of the village would descend on each farm in turn for a day, and the woman of the place would feed them lunch in exchange. It was a fierce competition among the wives to see who could set the best table. Esther’s mother had been a famous hostess—the old-timers would tell her so on quiet nights at the pub, licking their lips at the memory of her mother’s stewed blackberries—and Esther wonders now if, in her own clumsy efforts to emulate such hospitality, despite rationing, she might not have encouraged Rhys when he worked at Cilgwyn. She’d certainly practised her baking on him, and he’d swallowed down the sourest rhubarb crumbles, the tartest gooseberry pies, with a fixed smile. Mistaking her pride for love, she laments. At any rate, she determines to bake Jim one of his favourites, a curd cake, for tonight, though for some reason the thought of the sweet, gelatinous dessert makes her momentarily queasy.

  She’s still at the door when she spies Jim below her, cycling up from the village. Even through the hawthorns that line the lane, she can see he’s labouring up the slope, standing on the pedals, doggedly refusing to dismount and push the bike, though it would probably be faster. He only left for school, feet up on the handlebars, fifteen minutes ago. He must have forgotten something. She tries to picture the bully-beef sandwich she made him, still sitting on the kitchen table in its greaseproof paper; but no, she remembers giving it to him. A book, then—he hates lugging the Dickens tome around—or maybe some new treasure he wants to show the others. Whatever it is, she thinks, ducking back inside, he’ll need help finding it if he’s not going to be even later for school—a thought that makes her flush with annoyance.

  But when he swoops into the yard, scattering hens, dropping the bike with a clank on the cobbles, he runs past her, past the house, heading for the gate to the meadow.

  “Jim!” she calls, “Jim!” and he stops on the last bar, glances back at her briefly, and then ahead up the hill, where she spies half a dozen boys racing through the long grass. More are cutting across the field behind the barn, a flock of starlings rising before them.

  What mischief are they up to now? she wonders. Jim has finally given up his bandage, but only because it’s served its purpose. He’s become more popular in the last fortnight, a bit of a hero even to the Welsh lads. And all because he’s been struck by an Englishman. But now he has something to live up to. Just last week, when there was a spate of shoplifting, he got caught trying to smuggle a marrow out of Thomas’s under his jumper. “Looked like he was in the family way!” the grocer told her, too amused to be angry, although he added ruefully that some other lads had made off with five pounds of strawberries. Esther suspects Jim was a decoy, but she hasn’t pressed him on the other boys involved. What she fears is that the incident at the camp has taught him something—that getting caught and keeping your mouth shut are how you prove yourself.

  “Come back here!” She takes a step towards him, trying to smile despite her raised voice.

  He’s redfaced, gulping for air, and waves her off until he catches his breath.

  “Nasties!” he finally yells. “The nasties are here!”

  “What?” She shakes her head. “What did you say?” But he’s already dropping down into the meadow on the other side of the gate, charging off through the bracken after the rest, his satchel bouncing wildly on his back.

  It strikes her that he’s making for the camp by the shortest route, over the ridge, and she’s suddenly fearful. Didn’t he get enough of a fright the last time he was there? For her own part, she’s not ventured anywhere near it in two weeks. She just knows he’s going to get into more trouble. He’s already clambering over the mountain wall, halfway to the ridge. The boys are far ahead, and she feels a flash of irrational anger at them for not waiting for him. But then she sees they’re not alone on the hillside. Several small knots of people are working their way up the slope from different angles, and on the brow above she can make out other figures now, too large for children, silhouetted against the white clouds. And then it comes to her, what he shouted from the gate, and she sags back against the doorjamb.

  At last, she thinks. They’re here.

  It means the sappers must be finished. It means Colin must be leaving.

  She only comes back to herself when one of the hens struts over and starts pecking at her feet, expecting to be fed. She kicks it away impatiently, watches it totter off haughtily, as if on high heels. She focuses again on the figures climbing the hillside. She should tell her father: the flock is in the summer pasture over the ridge, and he’ll be worried about the new lambs. They can be sensitive creatures; a bad scare can stunt the newborns, make the ewes dry for a season. The flock has been dangerously reduced over the past few years—the combination of a cold snap during the last lambing and a particularly vicious fox abroad this spring—and they can hardly afford more losses.

  She finds Arthur in the barn, grinding a pair of shears on the whetst
one. He always likes to put away his tools in good order. As a child she sometimes thought he loved them more than her, even his father’s old quarry chisels, which he oils every year.

  “Hallo, luv,” he calls, as her eyes adjust to the gloom. The only light in the barn is the sun coming through the door and the gaps in the plank walls. “Can’t understand how these lost their edge,” he says, running a finger down one blade. Esther’s overheard Parry down the pub saying the boys snipped through the wire fence at the camp with shears, but she keeps her mouth shut.

  “So, what’s the palaver?”

  “Better come see. The upper pasture’s turning into a grandstand.”

  “No!”

  She nods, and behind him she hears more running, sees the shadows of hurrying figures flowing along the back wall of the barn, flickering through the chinks in the wood.

  “Bugger,” Arthur swears—in English, as is his habit. He rises from the shearing bench he’s been straddling, yanks his cap off the nail behind him and calls for the dogs. They’ll be in the hay somewhere, napping in the heat, and sure enough, a moment later they trot into the yard, yawning pinkly. Arthur is already past the gate when he turns and looks for Esther, who is hanging back. “Come on, then.” It’s the same brusque tone he uses on the dogs, and she finds herself following automatically. He sets a fast pace, making a beeline for the ridge, kicking up sparks of dew. Esther weaves a less direct path behind him, picking her way around the rough ground. Mott, the older dog, stays close to her, leaping from tussock to tussock, while Mick, the youngster, scurries ahead of Arthur, glancing back anxiously. This is how they work—one dog to push the sheep, one to steer them. She can feel Mott trying to press her on, tacking back and forth behind her, but she’s in no hurry, only putting one foot in front of the other out of alarm for Jim, the mischief he might get into.