2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  “You’ll just be a blur.” Mary laughs. “A beautiful blur!” Still, Esther waits until they’re speeding along the coast, flat drab fields on one side and the flashing high tide on the other. The sea looks so inviting, so alive, the waves breathing in and out, she can’t understand why she’d ever preferred a pool. Tawny autumn sunlight glances off the surface, ripples through the carriage, and she pictures herself in one of the gaily striped changing huts along the front at Llandudno or Rhyl, stepping into a new bathing suit, ready to strike out into the waves like Esther Williams. But when she catches a glimpse of her face, hanging ghostly in the window, she sees her own smile is pallid, not the bright bared beam of the swimmer. And what of poor Karsten? He’s not going to be swimming anywhere soon. She visualises his leg in a heavy cast, dragging him down beneath the waves, like a movie gangster with his feet in cement.

  She steps gingerly out of her clothes, putting out a hand to steady herself against the speed of the train, blushing at the state of her underwear, until Mary hands her the new clothes and then she’s lost in the feel of them, the smooth clasp of the silk stockings, so unlike the scratchy woollen ones she’s used to wearing, the softness of the blouse at her neck. She thinks of the stockings Eric had given her years earlier, but she’d slipped them on only once, surreptitiously, in the house, just up and down quickly, too frightened of discovery even to look at herself in the mirror.

  Afterwards, Mary conies close, tucks Esther’s hair behind her ears and smooths rouge into her cheeks—“War paint!”—pats her softly with the downy sponge from her mother-of-pearl compact.

  “There,” she says, and positions Esther by the window as they thunder through one of the tunnels along the coast, for her to admire her dark reflection, “Chin up,” Mary whispers in her ear, and when Esther straightens, Mary shrugs the rayon macintosh off her own shoulders and drapes it over Esther’s like a cape. “Bravo!”

  Later, after the giddiness has passed and the tracks have turned inland towards the city, Mary asks her gently if she’s sure, and Esther nods, because she is. She’s thought it through. All she can think is that what’s inside her is a little piece of Colin. Mary tries to tell her, “It’s not him, whoever he is, not anymore, luv. Whatever’s in there isn’t responsible.” But Esther just stares ahead, unblinking, at the approaching city, its smoking chimneys like a thousand steaming kettles. England, she thinks, wondering when they crossed the border.

  Mary has the cabby they meet at the station drive them around the town. “My pal’s never seen the city,” she says, and he takes them past the docks so that Esther can glimpse the Mersey, the golden Liver Birds glinting dully in the distance. He takes them past the cathedral, detours around streets closed and flattened by bombing, and then Mary has him drive past theatres she’s worked at. The Orpheum, the Apollo, the Regency. “Regency’s gone,” the driver says, and Mary slumps a little. “The old Reg. Got my start there in a dance act, Bean and Bubbles.” She squares her shoulders. “Well, now they can put in those better dressing rooms they was always promising us.”

  Beside her, Esther stares out at the ruins around her, the ruins Arthur is so eager to rebuild. She’s seen the newsreel footage of the Blitz, the burning buildings and the littered streets looking as rocky as the slopes around the quarry. But it has never been quite real to her. Now she begins to understand. A single gutted house still stands at the end of one flattened terrace like an exclamation mark, and she suddenly sees the streets as sentences in a vast book, sentences that have had their nouns and verbs scored through, rubbed out, until they no longer make any sense. All those buildings, she thinks, I’ll never see. The boarding houses she’ll never sleep in, the cinemas she’ll never sit in, the cafes she’ll never eat in. And not just here, but in London, in Paris. She has so much wanted to see the world, and now, before she’s got any farther than Liverpool, she’s beginning to see how much of it is already gone.

  Mrs R’s map, which she’s taken out to follow their route, lies across her lap, but when she goes to close it, she can’t seem to work out how to fold it flat however hard she tries.

  “There, now.” Mary throws an arm around her. “There. It’ll be OK.”

  She has the cab drop them at the Queen Anne Hospital, and she goes in and asks for Dr Trotter. “Doc Rotter, we used to call him,” she whispers to Esther. “Just a joke! He started out looking after one of our leading men with the clap—only applause he never wanted, let me tell you!—and then moved up, or down, I suppose.” The doctor looks surprisingly old when he comes out—silvery at the temples—but when he gets closer, Esther sees he’s not as old as she thought, just haggard, his tall frame bent over. She can see the outline of his knuckles where his fists are thrust deep into the sagging pockets of his crumpled white coat. It’s as if they’re holding him up, those straining pockets, and she concentrates on them, unable to look him in the eye.

  “Yes?” he says impatiently, and then he sees Mary and his pale face reddens in blotches. Without another word, he strips off his coat and throws it in a wicker hamper by the door, ushers them across the street into a dank pub.

  It seems perfectly fitting to Esther that on this strangest of days someone should be ordering her a drink from a barmaid.

  “Thank you,” she says shyly when he sets a Guinness in front of her.

  He shakes his head. “Don’t,” he says. “It’s medicinal. And don’t even ask,” he tells Mary. “If I’d got your telegram sooner, I’d have sent back you were wasting your time. I’m not in that line any more.”

  “Anyone would think you weren’t pleased to see me,” Mary says with a little pout, but he’s not having any of it.

  “I’m not doing it, Mary. It’s no use.”

  She stares at him, and he leans across the table.

  “You’re thinking you can blackmail me, perhaps, but in the first place I don’t care, and in the second place no one else will either. You know what I have in there? A ward of blokes just brought in on a hospital ship. Pulled out of the North Atlantic. Torpedoed. Know how cold those waters are? Man’s lucky to live ten minutes. Know what kept them alive? All the oil burning on the surface. I’ve fellows in there with the hair scalded off their heads, and frostbitten toes. You think they give a toss what I’ve done in the past?”

  He glares back at Mary across the table, and she takes a sip of her drink.

  “Please,” Esther says, but softly, as if she’s talking to one of those poor torpedoed men.

  “Not a chance, miss. I’m sorry for you, but…” He drinks, sets his glass down with a knock. “I lost four patients overnight. Four.” He’s studying her, but she can’t take her eyes off his hands, the long fingers curled around his pint. “They’re the ones I pity. Someone’s got to. Lord knows the enemy doesn’t. Those U-boat bastards never stop for survivors.”

  “The enemy!” she starts, but then has no idea what she means to say. Something about his being as pitiless as the Germans, but then it comes to her that they’re not all without pity.

  The doctor waits, frowns, then adds more softly, “If you want my advice, you just won’t, all right?” He turns to Mary. “And you won’t let her, if you’re her friend. Just look at her. She’s a slip, anaemic for sure. Undernourished and overworked, I’d say.”

  He finishes his beer in two more swallows and rises to his feet. Mary stands quickly and Esther sees her open her mouth, close it, then take his hand in hers. He flinches slightly, but she holds on.

  “Look after yourself, all right, Doc?” she whispers, and stretches to give him a peck on the lips.

  He seems to stand a little straighter after that, and as his features relax, Esther sees how handsome he is. But then he gives an impatient hitch of the shoulders and leaves the pub.

  When she sits down, Mary points at Esther’s drink and tells her weakly, “Bottoms up, darling.”

  “He’s a grumpy bastard, I know, but he’s a good doctor,” Mary says after a couple more sips. “If he says it isn’t sa
fe, it isn’t safe.”

  Esther stares at her. “Have you ever…?” she begins, and Mary says, “How do you think he got into the game?” She takes a swift drink. “He was married then. She’s dead now. Wouldn’t leave her. Couldn’t, he said. So I told him I couldn’t have it, or I’d scream blue murder and make a scandal. And so we…unmade it. And a couple of times since, I’ve brought other girls to him, for his sins. I’m sorry. I suppose the war’s changed him. For the better, mayhap.”

  She frowns, and after a second Esther asks in a scared voice, “Did you ever have children, Mary?”

  She shakes her head. “And I’m a bit long in the tooth for all that now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You’ve enough to worry about, dear.” Mary pats her hand.

  “But if his wife’s died—”

  Mary cuts her off. “In the war, luv. In the bombing. I couldn’t very well…It’d have felt like taking advantage. Profiteering, almost.”

  Esther studies her drink. She’s not sure. It seems neat to her—Mary, the doctor—a tying up of loose ends. She wants something to come out of this trip. “Besides,” Mary says, “we’ve a lot of water under the bridge, I just told you.”

  “But if you were in love…”

  “Hearken to her about love,” Mary cries, but when she sees Esther’s face fall, she softens. “You need to save some of that hope for yourself, sweetheart. Not to mention, I think Harry would have something to say if I ran back to the doc.”

  “He could find another partner,” Esther begins, and then she stops herself, conscious of Mary watching with that same patient stillness as when she’s waiting for a punchline to sink in.

  “Don’t look so shocked,” she says, nodding. “You’re not the only one has secrets. He’s not so bad, really. When he’s not drinking or telling jokes, he’s actually quite the darling.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Why do you think he kept stum about this whole trip?”

  “He knows?”

  “He knows to keep stum.” She studies Esther’s face over the rim of her glass. “I’m sorry, luv, I had to tell him. It’s all right. Not everything’s a joke to him, you know.”

  It feels like such an intrusion to Esther. The thing she’s most feared. She imagines Harry’s hearty voice announcing her, her name flying through the air, invisible in the night, slipping out through the radios of the village.

  “Tell me something, then,” Esther says fiercely.

  “What?”

  “Harry’s secret. Where’s he from?”

  “From?” Mary looks at her carefully and decides. “He’s from Golders Green, luv.”

  “But why’s it such a big secret?”

  “Because he’s a Jew, you little idiot. Harry’s Jewish.”

  They wait outside the pub, opposite the hospital, for another cab, watching the ambulances pull up. Uniformed men are carried in, and two come out, one on crutches, one with a huge white bandage wrapped around his jaw, as if for a toothache. Mary treats her to cream tea at Lyons, and sitting there amid the tinkling din of china and silver, Esther realises she’s going to have the baby. And that she’ll have to tell Arthur. There’s not much chance of concealing it from him any longer, a man whose business is pregnancy.

  In the train on the way back, they don’t talk much. Once Esther asks, “But about Harry. How can he make jokes all the time? Jokes about the war?” And Mary shrugs. “Hardly know myself sometimes. He says it’s how he knows he’s still breathing. Life has to go on, I suppose, luv.” Esther leans against the window frame and watches the country flicker past in the long evening like a film strip. When they enter the string of tunnels along the northern shore, it comes to her why so many of the films she’s seen show trains racing through tunnels at romantic moments, and she flushes—not at the crudity of the imagery, but at her own denseness for not getting it. She sinks back in her seat and braces herself for each thundering entry, the rushing, pounding darkness of the tunnels. In between, she watches the coast slide past, the sun setting on the shining sand flats, a lone child toddling across the wetness with a bucket and spade in hand.

  As dusk falls and she begins to recognise the landscape around them, she stands and begins to undress.

  “You can have those,” Mary says. “Really, luv. They look so much better on you.”

  But Esther shakes her head. “When would I wear them?” She smooths and folds them perfectly and lays them back in the case.

  The train begins to brake, a feeling like falling in the pit of her chest, and instinctively she clutches herself, her hands spanning her stomach, cradling it, she thinks.

  She looks up to see the flags fluttering from Caernarvon Castle, black against the sunset. “They say it’s well preserved,” Mary says absently. “Is that so? Impregnable? Like our modern shore defences, thank goodness.”

  Esther nods, doesn’t bother to correct her. She herself had thought the castle, jutting into the straits, was an ancient version of the squat concrete pillboxes along the coast, until her father disabused her of the notion. “That ain’t why they built it. It’s for the English garrison, stationed there to put down any Welsh rebellion. Defence against invasion, indeed! We’d already been invaded. That was the first outpost of their empire.” But so what if Wales was the first colony, Esther thinks now. It’s still home, still ours.

  Harry is waiting at the station, and he offers Esther a ride, and she accepts, eager to get home, to get it over with. They don’t say much on the drive—Mary next to Esther in the back, Harry up front like a chauffeur—but the silence is companionable. Esther studies the back of Harry’s head, his face in the mirror, but it looks no different.

  “Did we miss anything?” Mary asks, and Harry shakes his head, then stops himself. “Actually, yeah,” he says. “I ran into a soldier while I was waiting for you at the station bar. Captain who came into the Arms, Esther, one night when you weren’t on, a week or so back. You remember, Mary. This was when the other guards were all off hunting Jerry, and this one soldier comes in and gets into it with the Welshies?”

  “Oh, him,” Mary says. “Took offence at their calling him English or something, and then made some joke about how he might as well be German.”

  “That’s the one. Took himself off in a huff. Anyhow, I was sitting at the bar and this captain conies in and we both sort of looked at each other in the way you do when you recognise a fellow but can’t quite place him. Anyhow, we got to talking and it turns out he was sent up here to investigate the escape, see.”

  Esther leans forward in the back seat.

  “Well, seems he was interrogating the prisoner after they brought him in, asking him where he hid and that, when the top Jerries in the camp made a stink and demanded to see their man. Something about making sure he hadn’t been ill treated. Only—and here’s the part—after they were done with him, his own people, mind, that’s when he had his leg broken.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it was them that did it! His own men, not the guards. Those arseholes were just having us on, boasting and that.”

  “His own fellows. But why?”

  “Exactly,” Harry cried. “That’s what I asked this captain, and what he asked the Jerry himself.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Just that they wanted to know what he’d been up to, same as the interrogator, and he wouldn’t tell them.”

  “Why not?” Esther asks.

  “Well, now,” Harry says, warming to it. “Listen to this. He told the captain he valued his privacy! How about that? Valued his bleeding privacy! Actually, the captain reckoned the bloke only escaped for a bit of solitude in the first place—seems it’s not unusual. I asked him if he got anything more out of the fellow, but all he said was ‘What was I going to do, break his other leg?’ Fellow wouldn’t even say which ones had done it to him, apparently, and they all claim he slipped.”

  Mary shakes her head, and Esther sinks back in
to the upholstery.

  “Funny thing is,” Harry chatters on, “I used to fancy myself an interrogator.”

  “Pull the other one.”

  “No, really. I thought about it. Back in ‘39. I was too old to fight, but I speak a little Deutsch and I wanted to do my bit. Besides, what’s a comic do but ask a lot of questions. ‘What do you call a…? What’s the difference between a…?’”

  “All right.” Mary laughs. “I’ll bite. What happened? You volunteer?”

  “Never went through with it. It come to me, see, that comics always answer their own questions. That’s what makes it a joke, after all, the way we let the audience off the hook. For just a second they think it’s serious, a test, and they don’t know the answer. And then we let ‘em off, and they laugh out of relief as much as anything.” He shakes his head dolefully. “I’d have had my prisoners in stitches before I learned anything,”

  Mary sighs. “Talk about your Secret of Comedy.”

  “Which reminds me.” Harry brightens. “Get this. The captain also spilled the beans about that major, how he keeps his swagger stick in place.”

  “How’s that, then?”

  “Turns out he has his batman sew a little loop under there, like a sling, see. Batman says he’s got a wooden hand and all, but he prefers not to wear it, apparently.”

  “What do you know,” Mary says dreamily.

  Harry shrugs. “Everyone’s got their little secret.” He gives a little wince. “Sorry girl.”

  Mary squeezes Esther’s hand as the girl weeps silently. “You’ll be fine, luv. You’re a trooper!”

  At the farmhouse, Harry leans out of his window and tells Esther to listen to the show that night, and she nods absently, stands at the gate while they turn, and watches the car’s headlights glide downhill. A trouper, she realises belatedly.

  Liverpool, she thinks. A train, a car. A Jew. She can’t believe it’s been just one day, she feels so changed. The air is filled with the heavy scent of freshly cut grass. Arthur’s been busy. She leans over the stone wall that divides the farmyard from the fields, stretching up the mountains behind the cottage, and takes a deep breath of the familiar perfume. She can just make out in the darkness the humped grey backs of the flock speckling the near slope. A couple of the closest sheep, a ewe and a lamb, roused by her presence, clamber stiffly to their feet and move off a few yards before kneeling again.