2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  She’d looked at Karsten, but he refused to meet her eye, as he had ever since Jim appeared. What else could he do, she thinks, and yet seeing him square his shoulders as the men left, she couldn’t help feeling he was relieved somehow, and she feels cheated. And it comes to her, watching her father’s grim face, that perhaps it wasn’t escape she’s been lusting after these past few days, but capture. Could that be it? Was all her recklessness just a desire to be caught red handed? How many times this past week has her heart raced at Arthur’s appearances, how many times has she felt a kind of anger at him for being so dense? Is that why she’d driven Karsten away so vehemently? Because, if she were caught, so would he have been? But now he is caught, she thinks, and she envies him almost as much as if he’d got away. He’d been protecting her by not looking at her, not speaking to her, as she paced back and forth across the yard, but now she wishes he’d just embraced her, or she him.

  This is what men will never understand, she realises, watching the distant figures breast the ridge, Karsten’s hands thrown up against the sky for a final moment, then sinking out of sight, followed by Jim’s silhouette, Arthur’s. Their dishonour, men’s dishonour, can always be redeemed, defeat followed by victory, capture by escape, escape by capture. Up hill and down dale. But women are dishonoured once and for all. Their only hope is to hide it. To keep it to themselves.

  That evening the pub is filled again, as if the village has breathed out. The guards are back too. She hasn’t seen it so full since D-day.

  Even Jim is allowed in, a signal honour. Arthur hoists him on the bar, patiently lets him tell his story in English, while the other lads can only cluster at the doors and windows. Jim’s glowing, Esther sees, burning with heroism (or at least the beer Harry’s been letting him sip). It’s another gift the prisoner has given him, she sees. One man’s loss, another’s gain.

  “Why, I thought he was going to prick Jerry like a sausage with that pitchfork!” Arthur is telling them in Welsh.

  When it’s her turn to speak up, she plays her part, albeit mutedly.

  “Thank goodness for Jim here.”

  “Ah, there was nothing to be scared of,” George, the guard, says. He’s drunk, Esther sees, making up for his lost nights’ drinking.

  “It’s not like you caught him,” she hisses.

  “Lucky for him, or he might not have walked back to camp, but been carried. Trouble he put us to.”

  “Can’t blame him for trying to escape,” Arthur calls from the other side of the bar.

  “Enemy sympathiser, is you now, Evans?”

  Esther starts guiltily, but the constable is glowering at her father, jealous, she sees, that Arthur is the one to have brought the fugitive in. “Your enemy’s enemy, is that it?” It’s an old gibe. The constable likes to needle the nationalists by reminding them that some of their leaders had spoken up for Germany before the war.

  “There’s no dishonour in serving your country, I think,” Arthur growls in Welsh. “Wouldn’t you agree, officer?” he adds, switching to English, which shuts Parry up. “Like to think I’d do the same,” Arthur goes on. “Like to think we all would.”

  They carry Jim home, asleep and snoring heavily.

  Arthur lays him in his bed, and Esther tucks him in, and the two of them stand over him for a moment, watching him sleep.

  Later, as she lies awake in her own bed, she envies Jim his deep, even breathing. She wonders if it’s the German’s fate that’s troubling her.—She could have fed him, she thinks, perhaps hidden him for months. But when she thinks of it now, she feels the burden of it, the responsibility, pinning her to her bed. She didn’t want his life in her hands, she realises, not even after they’d made love. Otherwise she’d have insisted on concealing him.

  Her hands steal over her belly. The escape has distracted her, delayed her. But now she feels her stomach growing heavier, a weight pressing her deep into the mattress, deeper, until it seems like the weight of a man covering her, and she sits up with a cry.

  Twenty-Two

  The sun, which she’d thought gone for winter, comes out again briefly in mid-September, swelling from behind the clouds, drying out the grass, to Arthur’s delight, but making Esther melt beneath her sweater and heavy coat.

  She knows there are ways to get rid of babies, but she doesn’t know what they are. All she knows, from the farm, is how to save lambs. It frightens her, the thought of losing the baby, but then she looks at Mrs Roberts, back at work behind her counter the very day after the telegram—calmer now than before the news, as if the worst is over—and she thinks, If she can stand it, a grown child, all that wasted love, so can I. Esther hasn’t seen her cry once since the day of the telegram; the circles under Mrs R’s eyes look leathery as scales.

  On Jim’s thirteenth birthday, the week before, she’d appeared at Cilgwyn with a present for him, a box of lead soldiers. “Cor!” he cried, falling on them like treasure, and Mrs R gave a twitchy smile and told him they were Rhys’s. “He’d want you to have them, I expect.” Esther had seen the torn look on the boy’s face as he fingered the little figures, how much he wanted them for himself. But then he thrust the box out. “Rhys will want them…when he gets back.” It’s Jim’s latest hope that Rhys has escaped from some German camp. The box had swayed there in the air for a long moment. “Well, you look out for them until then, eh?”

  Mrs R told him softly, and Jim declared, “I will!” in his new baritone, as if she’d just entrusted him with a life.

  Esther has taken her lead from Mrs R’s stoicism, trying to be equally brusque with well-wishers offering sympathy after her encounter with the German. Truth be told, she knows she’d crumple at the first hint of kindness over her real woes.

  At the pub each evening, she watches Mary across the bar, not listening to her but watching her lips, trying to imagine her saying, “Oh, luv, I know just the remedy.” Then, in late September, Harry announces they’ll be off soon—“Called back to London, now things aren’t so hot”—he and Mary and the whole BBC contingent. Numbly, Esther rings up his order and stares at the pair of cigarette cards from the Wireless Wonders series, autographed by Harry and Mary, that hang in frames behind the bar. She can hardly recognise the impossibly young Harry doffing a homburg to reveal a lush head of hair, or the silkily airbrushed Mary in pearls and a marcel wave, wouldn’t believe they were the same people if she hadn’t seen them sign the cards—‘Cheers, big ears,’ followed by Harry’s scratchy autograph, and ‘Kisses! MM,’ the rounded M’s, one above the other, tracing the line of Mary’s perfect decolletage. She listens to the show that night (Harry doing a skit about two German POWs caught digging a tunnel: “Ach du lieber, Fritz. Next time, vee need to hide zeh dirt.”

  “But vere, Hans?”

  “Vee vill dig another toonnel and hide it in zere!”), thinking, I’ll never see them again. Yet she still can’t imagine telling Mary.

  And then, on the fifth evening after Karsten’s capture, she hears George and Les laughing. When Harry wants to know what the joke is, they tell him, “Not so much a joke as a pratfall, you might say. Bit of slapstick. Seems our Jerry runner took a tumble, slipped on a bar of soap—”

  “Oh, it might have been a banana peel,” Les volunteers to renewed laughter, none of them having seen bananas for months.

  “Or perhaps a patch of ice,” George continues. “Anyhow, seems he broke his leg, snapped like a stick of rock, I hear.”

  Esther puts a hand to her mouth. So this is what it is to be caught.

  “Oh, it’s all right, luv. Luckily he wasn’t going anywhere for a while.” She’s grateful that George seems more interested in Harry’s reaction. “Now don’t tell me that don’t tickle your funny bone. Don’t tell me it don’t crack you up.”

  But Harry just sits stone faced among the laughing men.

  “Thought you’d appreciate it, specially like,” Les says, and the others quieten down.

  Harry takes a sip of his drink. “How’s that then?�
�

  “Why, on account of you’re a…joker, of course. A jester? Ain’t that what you are? Harry Hitch? Hairy Itch, more like!”

  “Fuck me, if it isn’t Oscar Wilde,” Harry says pleasantly.

  “All right, gents,” Mary weighs in. “Amateur hour is over. Don’t call us, eh?”

  “Don’t call you what?” Les leers.

  “That’s enough!” Esther sticks a finger in Les’s face. “Or you’ve had enough. The lot of you.” She glares around at the guards, who smile, look to Jack and the constable—“Listen to the lady, lads”—and finally shrug.

  “Hecklers,” Mary is saying. “Radio’s made me soft, or I’d have had his guts for garters. But thanks, luv.” She smiles approvingly. “Grown right up, you have. Anyhow, I owe you one.” Behind her, Harry ndds over his beer.

  It comes to Esther later, on the slow walk home, that she’s been clinging to some shameful, superstitious hope of the German’s seed driving out Colin’s, of the war being fought in her womb. Of bloodshed.

  The next night she summons the courage to follow Mary out to the privy, telling her of the pregnancy in the shadows behind the pub, not ten yards from where she first kissed Colin four months ago. The thought of that somehow makes her laugh, and Mary tells her, “Oh, luv. That’s not one little bit funny.”

  Yet perhaps it’s the laughter, the hysterical edge to it, that convinces Mary.

  “Aren’t you the dark horse,” she says sadly. “So that’s your secret.” But Esther shakes her head.

  “I’m not saying who the father is, so don’t ask.”

  Mary gives her a sidelong look.

  “You don’t know him, anyway, so don’t think you do,” Esther snaps.

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “I want to keep my secret.”

  “Just not the baby,” Mary says a little fiercely, and Esther nods, head bowed. But when she replies, it’s with steely bitterness.

  “It’s all right for you. You’re free. You’ll be leaving soon. The war’ll be over and you can go anywhere, do anything. And don’t tell me the world’s not all it’s cracked up to be—you stay here!” She struggles to get her anger under control, offers a last tight plea: “I’ll do anything.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  But after a long, appraising pause, Mary tells her she knows a fellow.

  “Doctor in Liverpool. Used to look after girls on the boards if they got into…difficulties.” She studies Esther closely. “Well, luv, ‘If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly’.”

  Esther nods.

  She’s restless all the next day, until in the afternoon she calls to Arthur where he’s working in the barn that she’s going black-berrying. She’s halfway there before she realises that the best bushes scraggle along the lane behind the camp. She hasn’t been back since the escape, and she’s shy now, bending over hedges, concentrating on her picking until she reaches the shadows of the trees. Only then does she let herself look up, tarry. The men below her seem even more lackadaisical than usual. She’s heard he’s got two weeks in solitary, but there’s no knowing how long he’ll be in the infirmary while his leg is set. She can make out the cellblock from here—the same cells Jim was locked in the night of her rape, a prison within a prison. Men are playing football in front of it, and she winces as they slide into tackles, imagines the sickening pop of bone, and suddenly she can’t bear to look, crouches low over her basket, staring into it at the dark berries and then at her fingertips, stained with juice as if with ink. She gets up slowly and climbs away, never looking back at the camp.

  That evening, Mary comes up with some cock-and-bull story about a visit to an ailing friend in Liverpool—“Old Miss Bunbury”—and spreads it round the pub. Harry makes a fuss about missing her, but Mary tells him to give over. Then she says, “‘Ere, Esther, you’re always on about seeing the big city. Why don’t you come along with me. Miss Bunbury won’t mind, and I could use the company. Even treat you to a ticket, I will.”

  It seems so transparent to Esther, but Jack thinks it’s a capital idea—he has a bit of a crush on Mary, Esther realises—and Arthur can’t keep up with Mary’s rapid English long enough to object. Stubborn as sin, Arthur is nonetheless abashed by Mary, for once in his life embarrassed by his slow English, too proud to let this woman see she knows more than him. He knits his brows in concentration, his shaggy eyebrows curling like fish hooks. “Forecast’s for rain,” he says with a shrug. “I suppose I can spare her.” And for a moment Esther feels sorry for him, even though every day since she’s realised she’s pregnant, she’s lived in fear of him finding out—not so much that she’s pregnant, but by whom, her own private shame suddenly a shared national one.

  That night, she lies awake thinking of him at the last lambing, hands red from a basin of steaming water, tying a noose in a waxed cord, telling her to steady the shuddering ewe between them—its breath coming in hot, grassy snorts while he reached into it. But that lamb had lived, she tells herself.

  She has a spasm of doubt the next morning, tells Arthur she doesn’t think she can spare the time, but he tells her nonsense. “You’ve been…not yourself lately,” he says, and she looks away. He’s sharpening the scythe, following its curve with long, whistling strokes of the whetstone, but he sets it aside. “Down in the mouth, I mean. It’s understandable, what with the news about young Roberts and the fright of that Jerry.” He nods as if agreeing with himself, reaches for the whetstone again, sets it singing back and forth along the blade. “Do your spirits a world of good, a bit of excitement.”

  The hardest part is telling Jim, who’s instantly jealous. “It’s not fair! Why can’t I go? I’m from there!” And when Arthur tries to hush him, the boy cries, “He was my friend. Why does she get all the sympathy?” He only shuts up when his newly broken voice betrays him, rising girlishly.

  In her anxiety, she arrives too early for the bus to Caernarvon, where she’s to meet Mary. She looks up from her watch to see Mrs R beckoning from the post office door.

  “Off to Liverpool, I hear.”

  Esther nods, unsurprised.

  “An adventure! I remember my first time. I didn’t want to come back.”

  The possibility hasn’t crossed Esther’s mind, yet it’s so suddenly obvious she feels guilty as she hastens to deny it.

  “Only teasing. You should see a bit of the world. Here, I’ve a map of the city about someplace, might come in handy.” Before Esther can object, she’s popped back inside. “Hang on a mo.”

  It’s chilly in the shadow of the post office, and Esther looks longingly towards the bus stop, the green bench shining glossily in the morning sun. The street is momentarily empty, utterly still. Like a photo, she thinks. And then the bus grinds into view around the far corner, its maroon flanks scraping the hedgerow.

  She’s on the verge of bolting when Mrs R reappears, slaps a yellowing map into her hand.

  “There, wouldn’t want you to get lost.”

  “Thank you,” she breathes, a little too fervently, but Mrs R cuts her off. “Better run now.”

  Esther opens the faded map on the bus, stares at all the streets spread before her, but the tiny type makes her dizzy so she gazes out of the window instead. The trees are still full, she sees, but where they hang over the road, the leaves that flutter against the glass are dull and curling slightly, like hands at rest.

  Mary meets her in front of Caernarvon station, a little round valise in her gloved hand, and when she asks Esther if she’s all right, the girl nods and smiles nervously. “I’ve never been on a train before,” she says, and Mary grips her hand.

  Once they’re in the compartment, Esther fidgets, craning back and forth, looking around her, her hands stroking the nubbly upholstery. It’s all familiar from the films she’s seen, yet when the train clanks forward she starts and giggles. “It’s so…exciting,” she says, by way of explaining to Mary, and then she hears herself and her face falls.


  They pick up speed, the racketing clatter building all the time, and she looks at Mary in alarm. “Is something broken?” And the other smiles and shakes her head.

  When they’re settled, just the two of them alone in the compartment, Mary hands her the valise, and Esther, after a moment’s hesitation, springs the catch and opens it.

  She ‘sees her own eyes grow large in the vanity mirror set into the satin-lined lid.

  “Glad rags,” Mary tells her, leaning back on the seat cushions with a lopsided grin. “For your day on the town.” Esther looks down at herself, her thin gingham dress—Sunday best, though she feels a hypocrite in it—and her long wool coat, too heavy for the season but all she has that’s halfway decent.

  “Go on,” Mary says.

  Esther pulls out a neat tweed suit with a matching hat and gloves, an ivory-colored blouse—“Silk?” she breathes, and Mary nods—and lastly filmy stockings, a garter belt. She looks up teary, and Mary crosses the compartment, holds her, lets the train rock her through the countryside.

  “I thought you might want a…a costume,” Mary says at last. “I don’t know. That’s the actress talking, eh? I know it’s silly, but I bet you’d feel better if you put them on. For a bit of confidence. You’ll need a change anyway. Why not put these on now and get into your others after?”

  A disguise is what she means, Esther thinks. So she’ll look like a city girl. When she fingers the watery blouse, she can’t imagine herself in it, but that somehow seems the point. That in it she won’t be herself any more, but someone else.

  “They’re so lovely,” she says. “I can’t—I’d just get them dirty.”

  Mary clasps Esther’s hands in hers and whispers, “Put ‘em on.”

  And she does. Though not without a shy glance at the windows.

  The compartment is a non-communicating one, there’s no danger of interruption, yet there’s glass on all sides of her.