2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  Esther stared at the brown paper backing. “They’re just words,” she tried, and Mrs R smiled tightly. “Did I not teach you any better than that?”

  Esther hasn’t seen her since, and she seeks her out after the service.

  Mrs R is studying the scythes and pitchforks leaning against the chapel wall, the grim-faced farmers retrieving them for the walk home. “Woe betide any German out for a stroll on this fine Sabbath.”

  “You must hate them,” Esther blurts.

  “Do I sound so bloodthirsty?”

  “It’s natural enough.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I did go back, you know, to their camp.” It’s only because she looks away as she says it that Esther is able to compose her own features. “I don’t know what I was imagining. That I’d curse the lot of them, probably. But when I got there, all I could think was to ask if they knew where he was.” She shakes her head at the foolishness. “As if I spoke more than two words of German.”

  Esther’s about to say that some of them speak English, but bites her tongue.

  “Besides, it’s pointless. They were captured before Rhys went missing. They couldn’t know what’s become of him, any more than they could have…could be to blame. As for this one we’re all so afraid of, all I can think of is his mother.” She sees Esther’s face and laughs. “He must have one, you know!-She’s probably worried sick.”

  Mrs R purses her lips, nods in the direction of the cemetery. “Well, I should pay Mervyn a visit.”

  Esther returns to work the next night, as usual, telling Jack she couldn’t leave him in the lurch, though in truth there are hardly enough customers to warrant her presence. Even the turnout in the public bar is sparse, several local men notable by their absence. Esther is ashamed at first, thinking them cowardly, until Jack notes morosely, “Wives keeping them home, isn’t it,” and Harry—doughty, defiant Harry, who’s insisted to Mary and the others that no Jerry’s going to drive him out of his favourite pub—adds in a falsetto, “Save me, save me!” Esther feels a sudden superiority to the other women, a prickling pride in her own bravery. For surely that’s what it is. Arthur, to be fair, has insisted on walking her to work, and Jack accompanies her home. But she doesn’t need them.

  As if to prove the point, she stands alone in the darkened yard after going to the privy, listening to the night sounds, searching herself for fear. And there’s nothing. Not even when she feels a puff of air against her neck, as if someone has just blown on her. The owl from the barn, she tell& herself. The draft of its wingbeat. And sure enough, a moment later she hears it shush into the long grass. After a vole, probably. But even then she stands fast. So this is bravery, she thinks, staring at the stars pinned above her. This absence of fear. Not something you feel, after all, but something you don’t.

  The following morning she waits with the other women in the queue at the butcher’s, watching the scarved heads bend towards one another, listening to the gossip. “Gives me the heebie-jeebies,” someone is saying, “to think what he might do.” There’s a long pause, during which Esther feels herself stand a little straighten Then someone else perks up, “Still, every cloud…” and the women smile slyly at each other, cover their mouths to stifle giggles.

  “I don’t know what you’re afraid of,” Esther cuts in, and they shuffle themselves into composure. “Of course not, luv,” someone says soothingly, but Esther is already hurrying away, even though it’s almost her turn and she hasn’t any meat for dinner. She knows then why she’s so fearless, and it’s nothing to be proud of: because the worst has already happened to her.

  That night after the pub closes, it’s the constable who walks her back to Cilgwyn. “Don’t fancy the thought of a young lady alone with a fugitive about,” he tells her meaningfully. “Why, I wouldn’t let my Blodwyn out of doors after dark.” She tries to tell him the German must be miles away—“If I were in his shoes, I’d be long gone by now”—but Parry shakes his head doggedly, almost as if he hopes the fellow is still around, about to pounce from behind a tree.

  She smirks, recalling a joke of Harry’s from that week’s show. D’you hear the toilets at the local police station have been stolen? Police say they’ve nothing to go on!

  “Best not take any chances,” the constable is saying, giving her a narrow stare. “You’ve no idea what he might be capable of.” It comes to her with a flush of anger: He’s trying to scare me. “No,” she retorts icily. “No, I don’t. Why don’t you tell me?” Which shuts him up for the duration of the walk.

  Only later in bed, tossing and turning in the darkness, does it occur to her why she snapped so. As much as the constable wants to recapture the fellow, some part of her yearns for him to have escaped. She falls asleep dreaming of him swimming to Ireland, hair a dark pelt across his brow, shoulders cutting cleanly through white water, a gleaming smile gripped between his teeth.

  She’s pictured him as Johnny Weissmuller, she realises, recalling the dream with a blush when she wakes. Though wasn’t he German, perhaps, with a name like that? She lies in bed, still heavy with sleep, until the cow’s lowing sets off the dogs. She wraps her mac over her nightgown, stuffs bare feet into her clammy Wellingtons, and stumbles out into the dawn. The dogs fly at her, chains clattering on the cobbles, and she whistles for them to settle. The cow’s bellows feel like an ache in her own chest. She’s halfway to the barn when she glimpses some movement near the chicken coop, chases around the corner, clapping her hands as if to startle a fox, and finds a man crouched there.

  For a second she starts to smile—still dreaming, she reckons, still drowsing in bed—and then a hand covers her mouth.

  She thinks of Colin, suddenly, thrashes wildly and feels the grip tighten on her jaw, hears a voice in her ear: “Don’t cry.” And strangely something about the heavy accent calms her. Not Colin, of course, but a German.

  He drags her back into the shadow of the barn, so swiftly that she feels one of her boots slip free. The cold air on her bare foot reminds her of the danger she’s in, but the thought comes to her less with fear or anger than weary recognition. This. Again.

  It’s only his poor English that helps her keep her head, gives her a sense of superiority even as he holds her. “Cry out,” she wants to correct him; she isn’t about to cry. But she settles for nodding emphatically, her chin working against his cupping hand. His fingers smell of raw egg. He hesitates a moment, but she can feel his grip relax and she opens her lips to speak. For a second she can feel his finger against her teeth, and then he releases her, as if afraid she’ll bite.

  It’s their first proper look at each other, and her immediate response is relief—it’s him, the German from the fence. She remembers how embarrassed he’d been then, how he’d blushed at the bad language, and momentarily she’s actually pleased to see him instead of some other, some stranger.

  He smiles slightly himself, then recovers, whispers tersely, “I have a gun,” a hand jammed in his pocket like a gangster at the pictures. He’s lying, she’s almost certain (she’s heard of no one missing a gun, no pistol to be sure), pretending as if it were some kid’s game. Yet when she looks down, she finds her hands tensed over her stomach. It takes an effort of will to unlace her fingers.

  From the back of the barn, the cow bellows again, tosses her head. She’s terrified, and Esther, trained all these years to treat the beast as well as a person—better—starts toward her.

  “Don’t move, please.” He jabs the ridiculous ‘gun’ at her again, and she almost dares him to show it. Still, she has an instinct she might be safer if he thinks she believes him.

  “She needs to be milked.” She meets his eyes. “If not, she’ll keep that up until she brings someone else.”

  He’s silent then, and she moves past him, limping without her boot, pulls up the three-legged stool and presses her head to the beast’s flank. The cow stamps once, twice, snorts wetly, finally stills, and now the only sound is the drumming of milk in the tin bucket.

/>   She feels him hovering behind her, then bending close, and she tenses, but when he rises, she sees he’s only set her boot beside her. She wiggles her foot inside.

  “Thank you,” she calls, but he’s silent.

  All Esther can see of him from this angle is his feet in the straw. She watches him edge his way around the animal, perhaps looking for a way out of the barn on the other side of the stall, or trying to put the beast between him and the main door, so its bulk shields him. When he strays too close to the hind legs, she snaps, “I wouldn’t. She’ll kick.” He’s still then, and she stares at his scuffed boots, his muddy trouser cuffs, as the patter of milk in the pail changes to a long hiss as it fills.

  The milking will be done soon. And then what? She wonders if she can outrun him to the house, raise the alarm, fetch Arthur. She doubts it. She might scream, yet somehow having waited this long…how to explain why she waited? For the sake of a cow? It made perfect sense to her a moment before, but now it seems foolish. She imagines trying to explain it to Arthur, to Constable Parry, imagines Harry getting wind of it: “Pull the udder one!” She doesn’t want to attract any attention, after all, any laughter.

  She lifts the pail, backs out of the stall, and he gingerly eases the cow aside to follow her.

  “Please?” he calls softly.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she hisses, “if you go now.”

  He studies her for a moment.

  “My father will be up soon.”

  He still has his hand thrust in his pocket. Any harder, she thinks, and he’ll wear a hole in it. And then he smiles. “Thank you…Esther.”

  Jim! She flushes. The little liar.

  “It is Esther?” he asks. “Like the swimming actress?”

  She nods slowly, more shocked that he knows Esther Wil-liams’s name than her own.

  “And what do they call you?”

  Hans? she dreads. But he tells her, “Karsten.”

  “Karsten?” The name feels dry in her mouth, and she wets her lips, looks up to see him doing the same.

  “Please?” he says again, and it dawns on her that he’s eyeing the bucket in her hand.

  She stares at him a moment more, then reaches for an old china teacup, its handle snapped, that Arthur keeps on the shelf for when he wants a drink of water from the pump. The German dips it into the pail, puts it to his mouth, rears back slightly.

  “Warm?” he says in surprise, and she nods solemnly.

  He drinks a long draught, his throat throbbing, then another. He’s scruffier than she recalls from the camp, his dark blond hair sticking up on his head, but he seems bigger too, as if he’d been stooping behind the wire.

  When he’s finished he holds out the cup and she sees a thin white line below his nose, and despite herself she starts to smile.

  He tenses.

  “You’ve—” She swipes a finger before her own face, and he rubs the residue away with the back of his hand. Only when it’s gone does she see that it’s the hand from his pocket.

  They stare at each other and then she snatches up the pail and hurries towards the house, fast as she can without spilling, as if it were blood. She’d so nearly burst out laughing, but inside, with her back to the door, she finds she’s already swallowed the laugh. Instead, she fumbles with the bolt—she can’t recall the last time they actually locked their door—skins her knuckles shoving it home. She crouches at the window, sucking the scrape, but there’s no sign of him.

  She should tell her father, but at his door, her hand raised to knock, the thought of him charging out of the house with the shotgun again gives her pause. He’ll not catch the German, and then they’ll have soldiers and dogs crawling all over the farm again. And for what? Her breathing slows to match the steady tidal draw of Arthur’s snoring. Her fist falls. He’ll be long gone by then, this Karsten.

  In the kitchen, she slowly drags back the bolt.

  She lets Jim sleep in until he’s almost late for school, then hurries him out of bed and through his breakfast, watches him run down the lane. When she goes back into the kitchen Arthur is up, drawing on his boots between slurps of tea. She holds her breath while he stamps across the yard to the privy, but there’s no cry, no shout, though when he unchains the dogs on his way back and they hare around like they’ve caught a scent, he yells after them, “Silly buggers.” She hurries out to sweep the yard, setting them sneezing, and then busies herself strewing fresh straw in the barn, gathering eggs and broken shells from the coop, until she sees Arthur stalking off uphill to inspect the flock, with the dogs in attendance.

  Only after she’s satisfied that she’s covered any traces, leaning breathless on the broom, does she search herself for remorse. What if the German hurts someone, kills someone? Wouldn’t she be partly to blame? Yet somehow she can’t believe it. He seemed so…polite, so contrite. Besides, couldn’t he have hurt her, killed her, if he had a mind to? She’s put no one else at any more risk than herself. And if he wouldn’t attack her, whom would he attack? Frankly, she’d be more worried about him if he ran into anyone else; she recalls the glinting collection of pitchforks and scythes propped against the chapel wall after the service on Sunday. No, she tells herself, she has too many regrets already. She refuses to take on another. Besides, the whole country’s against him; why should she make one more. She hopes he leads the guards a merry dance.

  Still, through the day she checks herself for guilt, as if for a pulse, but there’s nothing. Without it, the encounter hardly seems real, as if it were the dream she’d first imagined it to be. Me Tarzan, you Jane! But then she remembers his name, Karsten. She’s never heard it before; couldn’t have imagined it. She says it over and over to herself as she goes about her chores.

  She’s almost giddy in the pub that night, can’t recall the last time she felt so unburdened. Harry winks at her, crosses his eyes and lolls his tongue, but she doesn’t care. A few of the guards, George and Les among them, straggle in before last orders and she teases them, asks them if they think their man’s in the pub somewhere—“In a barrel, maybe? At the bottom of a glass?”—makes a little skipping show of looking behind the bar. It’s reckless, she knows, yet how are they to catch her if they can’t even catch him?

  It’s a quiet night and Jack lets her go early. The constable offers to walk her home, but she tells him to save his legs, and when he starts, to object she simply takes to her heels, hitching up her skirt and running up the lane into the darkness, leaving him to call her name over her ringing footsteps and laughter. When she pulls up breathless around the bend, she can’t believe how easy it is to get away. Though for all that, she’s caught by a sudden pelting downpour before she gets home.

  Nineteen

  It’s almost a letdown the next morning when she looks into the barn and there’s no one, just the cow eyeing her moistly. Esther fidgets as she milks, craning over her shoulder, staring into the shadows, pausing to listen to the rustle of mice. Ridiculous! She’d laugh at herself if there were anyone to share the joke. He must be miles away by now, and moreover, she reminds herself, she hopes he is. Isn’t that why she helped him, after all?

  She sees Jim off to school and Arthur over the ridge to survey the rams’ progress through the flock. Only when she’s alone does she allow herself to think of the German again. She wonders if he’s thinking of her, worried that she’ll raise the countryside or marvelling that she hasn’t. She tries to picture his movements. East across the mountains, or west, down to the coast and Ireland? She wishes she’d asked him, but she doubts he’d have told her. The latter, she hopes. East is England, and she shudders at the thought of crossing all that hostile ground.

  But when she goes to look for eggs, she finds him crouched in the lee of the barn, as if he never left. She swallows back a scream, less of fear than surprise. She’s imagined him so vividly gone, her first thought is that he must have forgotten something. You’re going to be late, she almost cries, as if for a train.

  “Good morning.” He g
rins.

  “What are you doing here?” she hisses, though even in the midst of her shock, she thinks, I brought the dogs in last night. As if she were expecting him.

  He smiles crookedly, touches his stomach. “Still hungry,” he tells her, with a little wince at the understatement.

  “You can’t hang around here. What if someone sees you?”

  She wants to fly at him, shout Shoo, shoo, as if he were a particularly bold or starving fox (the same thing, really, she reminds herself).

  “I’ll go if you feed me,” he says simply.

  Or not a fox, she thinks, but a lamb, one of those motherless ones she’s nursed with a bottle who keep following her around all summer. The ones she weeps over when they’re sent to market.

  She crosses her arms. “How do you know I won’t raise the alarm?”

  “You threaten?” He smiles, but tightly, his eyes narrowed as if trying to make out something in the distance.

  “Warn,” she says.

  He nods. “You are correct. Perhaps I’m trusting too much.” He thinks for a moment. “You know, if they catch me they will interrogate me, yes?” He gives the barest of shrugs. “They will want to know everything. Where I hide. How I ate. Who I meet.”

  “Now who’s threatening?”

  He smiles. “Warning.”

  “At least you didn’t bring your pistol today,” she says tartly.

  He smiles at his hand, holds it out to her to shake.

  “They’d never believe you, you know,” she says.

  “You know better than I, of course.”

  His open palm hovers between them like a taunt, and just as he lets it fall, she grasps it.

  “I do.” She gives his hand one firm, swinging pump and pulls away before he can exert any pressure.

  “Wait here, then. And for God’s sake keep out of sight.”

  She returns with a thick heel of bread, a flaky wedge of cheese. It’s not much, just all that won’t be missed. She bundles it up in her skirts, afraid it won’t be enough, that he’ll demand something more. She thinks of young Pip in Great Expectations, making off with a whole pork pie for his convict, and envies him. But when she spills out her offering on the straw floor of the barn, the German falls on it greedily. She’d meant to make him take it and go, but she can’t bear to make him stop once he’s started. Besides, he finishes the meagre meal very quickly. He’s picking a last flake of cheese off his chest before he thinks to look up at her. “Thank you.”