2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  Arthur is standing over the slate sink when she comes in, scrubbing at a burn on one of the pots, and when he sees her he tries to hide it, but she puts a hand on his arm and makes him turn round. It’s strange to find him at such a domestic task, and for a moment she stares at him as if she hasn’t seen him for months. Indoors, without his cap, the red line where he pulls it over his eyes seems to divide his face in two. Below, he’s tanned an angry red from the summer sun; above, his forehead is an almost sickly white. It’s as if the blood has settled below his brows, like a pint that hasn’t been topped up.

  “What is it?” He smiles, and she reaches up and smooths down a wisp of white hair sticking up on his crown.

  “Where’s Jim?” she asks.

  “Turned in.”

  “I’m pregnant,” she says simply, and she sees his smile wither. He lifts his hand to her, red and dripping from the sink. His own people, she recalls, bracing herself, but then her father seems to stay his hand. In his eyes she can see her guilt and shame, reflected as fury, yet still he holds back, even as his hand seems bound to leap forward and strike her. It’s the innocence of the child, she thinks. He would strike her, but not the child. She’s guilty, but not the child. She is composed of nothing but shame and this tiny core of growing innocence. The baby suddenly seems more like herself than herself. It’s as if she will give birth to herself and slough off this older, failed version. She feels fiercely defensive, willing to do anything to protect it.

  So when Arthur asks, “Who?” she tells him, “Rhys,” and watches him lower his arm with a sigh. “I knew it,” he says, and she realises in a rush—of course! — that Rhys would never have proposed to her if he hadn’t already asked her father’s permission. And Arthur must have given it, she thinks, as if it were back pay for the months of cheap labour, even though he knew how she felt about Rhys, even though he thought the boy a fool himself. It feels to her like a kind of betrayal, a rejection—perhaps he always meant to apply for work underground, hoped to get shot of the flock and her in one fell swoop—and it hardens her in her lie. It’s an ill wind, she thinks defiantly. His words.

  But just when she thinks she’s escaped the blow, Arthur tells her, “You’d best go along and let her know, eh?” Esther must look confused, because he adds, softly, “His mam.” She baulks then, but he nods his head. “It’ll be a consolation to her, I’d say. And maybe not such a surprise, neither. She knows he was sweet on you.”

  She hasn’t thought it out; the name came to her so unbidden. It seemed so neat a moment before, so perfect, a way to keep her secret and the baby, a lie between Arthur and her, but now it’s starting to seem messy. And yet how to take it back?

  “I can’t tell her,” she stammers. “I’d be too ashamed.”

  “Might have considered that before,” he says, though not unkindly. “I’m sure she’ll keep it quiet if you ask her—not that that’ll be possible for long; it’ll get harder before it gets easier—but you should tell her. It’ll make the world of difference.”

  And so she goes, telling herself it is a kindness. Rhys has already become such a memory for them all, such a fiction, really, like a character in a book, it’s not hard to imagine these extra pages for him. What does it matter, anyway, who the father is? She could wait until the morning, tired as she is, but she knows she’ll never sleep for thinking about it.

  Outside, she heads to the barn and fetches the bike. When she comes out, she finds Jim perched on the top bar of the gate, like a bird on a telegraph wire.

  “You’re supposed to be in bed.”

  “How’d it get in there?” he hisses. “Was it really Rhys?” All she can do is swallow and nod, but when she looks up, what she sees on his face isn’t doubt, but jealousy.

  Rhys is hers now.

  “You’ll marry him if he comes back?”

  She leans the bike against her side, nods again, stiffly, feeling as if her head is a stone that might tumble off her shoulders if she moves too much. Arthur hadn’t asked the question—unable to utter that ‘if to her face—but she knows it’s the unspoken assumption. The very end of the happy ending.

  “Because you love him,” Jim says, as if explaining it to himself. “And he loves you.”

  “Yes?” she tells him. “Yes.”

  He purses his lips. “But what if he doesn’t come back?”

  She gives a little strangled yelp, shocked despite herself—Jim has clung so tenaciously to the possibility of Rhys’s survival, only to give up so easily now that he thinks Rhys hers—and then shocked at her own shock, at her instinctive duplicity. She puts her face in her hands to cover her confusion, and after a moment she feels him stroke her back.

  “It’s all right,” he says gently. “If it’s a boy, you could call it Rhys.”

  Her sobs have convinced him, satisfied him somehow, yet in the midst of her relief she wonders where they’ve come from. She wouldn’t have thought she could cry for Rhys if she’d had to. Doesn’t think herself such an actress, no matter what Mary might reckon. Will lies just spring from her unbidden now? she wonders. Is she embarked on a succession of them, a lifetime of them? Because yes, if it’s a boy, she will have to name it Rhys, and every day of its life she’ll call it Rhys, Rhys, Rhys. She can feel the sobs coming again, but when Jim reaches his arm around her, pressing close, she jerks away.

  “You should go to bed,” she tells him, and he glares at her as if to say, Make me. In the moonlight she notices a faint down silvering his upper lip. But then he sticks his tongue out and runs inside.

  The war will be over soon, she thinks, looking after him, and he’ll be gone too. His mother, Esther knows, has written to him recently to say she was finding a new place for them—no mention of ‘Uncle’ Ted—and that she’d send for him soon.

  It comes to her that Colin was a boy once, and perhaps that’s why, when she thinks of him now, she feels, for the first time, nothing. Not fear. Not hatred. He’s done his worst, to be sure, but his worst seems suddenly so much less than her own.

  She straddles the bike, points it down the lane and coasts through the dark village.

  Twenty-Three

  Waking in the infirmary, staring at his leg suspended above him, glowing palely in its plaster, Karsten wonders fleetingly if he’s turning into the invisible man. He can’t see his leg, though he knows it’s there under the cast, itching fiercely, fragile as glass.

  He’d been wary of the interrogator, his excellent German, so much more polished than that of the camp translator, a former lecturer in German literature who spoke an oddly accented brand of High German full of ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, and whom the men called Charlemagne. Rotheram, the captain introduced himself as. He was in his late twenties, Karsten judged, no more than ten years older than him, yet he looked drawn, tired. When he leaned back to run a hand through his hair, he winced, clutched his side, rubbing at some ache, some old wound. His haggard look emboldened Karsten; the man seemed too exhausted to have his wits about him. He offered Karsten tea, and Karsten took it, careful not to let his hands shake. It shocked him that he’d looked forward, back in Dover, to interrogation, as a chance to prove something. But he’d had no secrets then. When Rotheram started by saying “You surrendered, I see,” Karsten was actually relieved, not insulted.

  The captain produced a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, held it out. “That must have been hard. Would you like to talk about it?”

  It might have been the recollection of Dover or the question about surrender, but all at once Karsten realised he knew the fellow. He reached for the name. Steiner.

  Karsten drew a cigarette from the pack as gingerly as if it were the pin of a grenade. He hadn’t had a smoke for a couple of days—he’d lost Esther’s pack when he’d been swept into the sea—and the bitter taste of the tobacco on his tongue thrilled him. He watched Rotheram⁄Steiner light a match, extend it across the table, and he bent stiffly to the flame. It took him a heady moment to master the darting rush of nicotine, to
stop himself from drawing too hungrily on the cigarette.

  When he steadied himself, he said, “Can I ask you a question first? Is that permitted?”

  “Not normally, no,” the captain said, smiling thinly. “But I’ll allow it.”

  “Well, then, are you a Jew? A German Jew?”

  Rotheram sat very still, the smile retreating from his lips. He looked at his hands on the table for so long that Karsten thought he was counting the hairs on them. Finally he said, “Can’t you tell?” And in truth Karsten couldn’t. He’d recognised Rotheram as Steiner as soon as he’d offered a smoke, but that seemed less important than whether he should have recognised him at Dover, known he was a Jew. That’s why he’d asked. He stared at the captain as if he might divine the other’s secrets, and eventually Rotheram asked, “What if I am?”

  “Then I’d ask what it was like for you to leave,” Karsten said evenly. “To run? I’d imagine that must have been hard, too.”

  “Touche,” Rotheram told him. He looked up then. “I’ll tell you, if you tell me?” And Karsten, after a moment, nodded once.

  “Then, yes, I am. I used to be a German, but now I’m just a Jew. Is that what you want to hear?”

  It shocked Karsten to find that he believed the man. Stare at him as he might, however, Karsten couldn’t see anything different about him, any more than he had with the couple his mother had turned away from the pension all those years ago.

  “And leaving,” Rotheram went on steadily, “running, if you will, was the most shameful thing I’ve ever done in my life. The most cowardly. Sometimes I think saving my life was the worst thing I ever did in it.” He leaned towards Karsten then, gave a gaping smile. “But we both know that, I think. What we’d give for a second chance, eh, Corporal?”

  Karsten watched the ash on his cigarette grow longer and longer, until it seemed that if he moved it would tumble, that he was sitting still in order to save it. Then Rotheram pushed his empty teacup forward. Karsten tapped the ash into the saucer, took a long last pull on his cigarette, and slowly shook his head.

  “I’d do it again,” he said quietly, and when Rotheram opened his mouth, Karsten whispered, “And you would too. It’s all right.”

  Rotheram had bent across the table, frowning. “Do I know you? I mean from before, from home?”

  And then there’d come a hammering at the door.

  “Yes!” he’d cried in annoyance, and a guard hurried in, bent down to him and muttered something.

  “The major sent you?” Rotheram demanded angrily. “The major?” He seemed about to say more, but then glanced at Karsten, composed himself. “Well, it seems there’s going to be a brief interruption to our conversation.”

  They’d congratulated him at first, the camp leaders, called him a hero, an inspiration. Schiller was with them; he’d probably begged to come along. He’s my friend, Karsten could imagine him crowing. He’d actually winked at Karsten at one point, and he’d seen it then: The slate wiped clean. A way back into the fold. Welcome home.

  But then they’d wanted to know what he’d seen, as if he’d been out on reconnaissance. He couldn’t see how to tell them without talking about the girl, and if he mentioned her, even in passing, he knew it would spread, embroidered with rumours, beyond this little room, beyond these men, to the rest of the camp, and eventually to the guards. So he’d hesitated, and they’d seen it and become suspicious. How had he managed to elude capture so long? Luck, he suggested, but they shrugged it off. He wasn’t the lucky kind, was he? It made them wonder, they said, wonder what he’d really been up to. Talking to the British, maybe?

  “I’m no traitor,” he said, and they sneered at him.

  “Did you really not learn anything out there?” Schiller pleaded, and Karsten nodded.

  “Well?”

  What did he learn out there? Nothing new, exactly, nothing the rest of the men didn’t know. He’d realised it in the empty bunker, but it had come to him not as something new but something old, something recognised. He’d known it in France, on the beach, only he’d not been able to face it then.

  What had so amazed him there was that the invasion, so vast in scale, could have been kept a secret. He’d heard, and discounted, the rumours of invasion all spring, just like the rest of them, yet still he couldn’t fathom it. How had that time, that place, been kept so close? How had those thousands of men been kept secret, training at bases, massing in camps, produced now, as if by magic? He suddenly imagined the whole of Britain—not just the leaders, the soldiers, but the civilians, the families with sons and husbands and fathers in uniform—knowing, or at least suspecting, but somehow not breathing a word. A million people keeping a secret. It was almost more astounding than the sheer force of arms, that force of will. He had wanted to ask someone about it, but around him the men in the stockade hadn’t breathed a word about the invasion to each other, just stared out through the wire as if they couldn’t believe their eyes, as if it were all invisible. And yet there was nothing else to talk about. It was as if, he thinks now, we were keeping the secret ourselves.

  He remembers, amid the long line of men moving past him, focusing on the small white cross on a chaplain’s helmet as it bobbed along in the column, coming closer and closer, and then as it passed he saw the man’s pale face, the fear on it, and something about a priest’s fear moved him. He wished he could comfort him somehow. He wanted to offer tips—tell him about the baker in the next village who sold passable wine from the back of his shop. He wanted to tell him not to worry, Father, that he’d make it, that he’d live. You’re going to win, Karsten wanted to cry, and recoiled at once from the thought.

  So he’d known it then.

  The war was lost. Not quite over, but lost. That was the secret. The deserted shore defences he’d slept in had only confirmed it. But no, that wasn’t quite right either. Really, it had been the girl who’d convinced him, or helped him accept it, rather. He’d felt such astonishment slipping inside her, as if he’d never quite believed it possible. It had seemed, even to him, the amateur conjuror, like true magic. He thought of a shining coin palmed snugly in the fleshy fold beneath his thumb; a still-warm pocket watch ticking in his hand beneath a silk handkerchief. Gone, disappeared. Just like that.

  For a moment, he had thought the whole war had been waged for that purpose only; he had felt such peace, he was sure it must be over, that they’d separate and rise to the bright news of armistice. An end to the war that was neither victory nor defeat, just peace.

  “What do you want to know?” he’d asked the camp leaders.

  “Anything. Everything!”

  “We’re going to go home,” Karsten said. “The war’s almost over.”

  “How do you know?” Schiller asked hopefully, and then another voice, sterner, daring him, “Who’s winning?”

  He looked into Sulzer’s face. “They are.”

  “What?” Schiller had wailed, but Sulzer had just turned away, and Karsten had marvelled, He knows.

  They’d called him all the old names then—turncoat, coward—and he’d spat at them.

  “You think it would have made a difference to fight to the death. What would it have meant? A minute’s delay for the British, two maybe.” He stared at Schiller. “Our deaths might have prolonged the Thousand-Year Reich by five minutes.”

  “Traitor!” they howled. Karsten had known what was coming, but he leaned over the table and said it anyway: “Before long they’ll all have surrendered, all our countrymen. Will they all be traitors? Or just Germans?”

  “Why, you,” Schiller began, and Karsten struck him in the face. It felt so good. He’d been dying to hit Schiller for weeks, he thought. And then he hit him again in the middle of his bloodied, surprised face, and this time Schiller went down. It’s a favour, Karsten had thought viciously. Now they won’t think we’re friends. But then the others were on him, as he knew they would be. He tried to stay upright as long as he could under the flurry of blows, tried to remain consci
ous until he heard the whistles of the guards.

  In the infirmary, he has begged, through his split and swollen lips, for a window bed, and the orderlies have taken pity on him, laid him down where he has a view of the fence and the trees and the hillside, where he can keep watch for her. The Welsh girl. The pregnant girl. It’s growing dark now, though—the flame of his candle reflecting in the dark pane—and he knows she’s not coming tonight.

  He wonders about her baby, wonders if he should have said what he did. What business is it of his? And yet when she told him about it, he’d had a sudden impulse, I can save it, that same impulse, he thinks, that he felt towards Heino and even Schiller just before he surrendered. And he’d welcomed it.

  Rotheram has been to see him that afternoon, but he seemed taken aback by Karsten’s injuries, asking his questions gently and not pursuing them. He thinks they did this to me because I talked to him, Karsten realised. “You’ll get no more out of me than they did,” he said, and Rotheram replied, “I see that now.” When he was done and packing his bag, Karsten told him, “I never knew you,” and Rotheram barely glanced at his ruined face, then nodded.

  Before he left, Karsten asked him for paper and pencil. Rotheram had slipped a pack of cigarettes under the lined sheets, which Karsten appreciated but hadn’t meant to ask for. It’s time to write to his mother again, he thinks. There are questions he wants to ask her about his father—how he was after the last war, how he was before. But first he must tell her the truth, tell her of his surrender. He thinks of passing down that long, dark tunnel out of the bunker, the blood pulsing hot in his ears, pushing himself on into the blinding light. And he pictures himself, at last, holding up his hands, though now as if he were waiting for someone to grasp them and pull him out. Like a second birth, he thinks.