2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  He starts to write. In the swaying candlelight the lines on the paper look like strips of bandages, and he has the strangest impression of his writing hand, unwinding them as it moves across the page, revealing the words beneath.

  Twenty-Four

  Mrs Roberts opens her door at the first knock, almost as if she’s been waiting behind it. She seems old and frail in the evening light. Esther remembers her as a tough, bosomy woman in school. They were all a little afraid of her bustling energy. Now her previously round face is drawn, and her eyes bulge. She brings Esther through to the parlour, the best room, and insists on making tea. Esther’s never been here before, and she feels self-conscious, left alone with Mrs Roberts’s fine things: the gleaming brass carriage clock on the mantel, the etched mirror above. Beside the clock is a framed photograph, and it takes her a long moment to recognise Mr Roberts, stern beneath the bowler cocked low over his brow. And then she spots the familiar gap between his teeth. The walls, she sees, are covered with family pictures, rank after rank of faces peering down at her. Rhys is everywhere. He’s rarely smiling—shy, for once, of his gap teeth, or perhaps advised not to by photographers, conscious of customer satisfaction—and his stiff features make him seem from another time, a contemporary of his ancestors. She hunches on the stiff horsehair sofa where she’s perched, listening to her old teacher in the kitchen, trying to avoid their eyes. Instead, she meets the glassy glare of the stuffed and mounted robin on the sideboard, its beak gaping, breast puffed, but silent under its bell jar. She wonders if she can go through with this. “Mrs R,” she calls, “Mrs R!” But the shrill cry of the kettle interrupts her, and when Mrs Roberts calls back, “Did you want something, dear?” her nerve fails her. “No. Nothing.”

  The whispered thought comes to her that there might be a baby picture of Rhys on the wall, and she steels herself to look up, glancing around wildly, filled with a sharp desire to see it, as if it were the future somehow, her fate. But there’s nothing, and then Mrs R bustles back in, steam puffing from the spout of the teapot on the tray before her.

  There’s a lull while they stare at the tray between them, at the silver pot and solitary Eccles cake beside it, as the tea steeps. “Oh, I couldn’t,” Esther says at last, as if the cake has just materialised before her, but Mrs Roberts waves dismissively.

  “The funeral baked meats,” “ she says almost gaily. “I’ve been getting more food than I can eat. You’d hardly know there was rationing.” And after another pause Esther cuts the cake in half and says they’ll share. She stares at the little speckled pastry on the Willow Pattern plate before her, the knife pressed to it, and tells it, as much as Mrs Roberts, that she’s carrying Rhys’s child. Spoken in English the lie seems more abstract, easier, as if someone else is telling it.

  There’s a moment when she thinks Mrs R doesn’t believe it, a second of calculation when her features seem smudged in the lamplight, her expression indeterminate. She examines Esther with wary appraisal, as if they’ve never met, and the girl braces herself for judgement. But all she says at last is “You’re long-waisted. I see it now, of course. Don’t know how I missed it.” She shakes her head. “But that’s always the way, isn’t it? Never see what’s right under our noses.” Her face tenses and then relaxes.

  “Duw,” the old woman breathes. “Thank God.” She is up, with her arms around Esther where she sits on the sofa, knife still in hand, shaking against the plate, and Esther finds herself weeping.

  “There, child, there. You thought I’d be angry, didn’t you? Disappointed, even.” She shakes her head, pulls a clean little hanky from her sleeve, touches it to Esther’s cheeks. “Truth is, I never thought you’d have him. He was so…well, a good boy, but not quick. Still, one never reckons with love, does one? Anyhow, don’t cry. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, riot much. I know the fault isn’t only on your side.”

  Esther tries to pull away from her, but the old woman holds her tighter, puts her lips to the girl’s ear.

  “It’s not the end of the world. Oh, there’ll be talk and some jokes at your expense, it’ll be hard for a bit, but it’s not as if you’re the first as ever fell.” She leans back, nodding. “You might as well say it’s a tradition in these parts. “The Welsh way,” the English used to call it. “Welsh courtship,” if you read your Mrs Gaskell. This is a hundred years ago now, but back then it was a winked-at practice, a betrothed couple who couldn’t yet afford to marry sharing a bed before the wedding day. I dare say the practice isn’t entirely dead, although there’s some what abused it, reneged on the deal, which gave it a bad name. That’s why they call it ‘welshing’, you know. That’s where it comes from.”

  And now Esther does fight free, looks at her with frank astonishment.

  “You didn’t think I knew that, did you?” Her former teacher smiles. “But I could hardly tell you in school. Some definitions you have to wait for until you’re a grown woman.”

  She means it all as a comfort, but when she looks at Esther’s face, she seems to recoil, and Esther wonders what she sees there. Anger, perhaps. It’s your fault, she wants to shout. You taught me to speak the language. And somehow the flash of hatred steels her in her lie.

  “There, now,” Mrs Roberts says, groping for something more to offer. “But my boy’ll make an honest woman of you, mark my words.”

  Esther hangs her head, almost gagging, puts a hand to her mouth, presses her eyes closed. But even in the darkness the words appear before her—honest woman — scratched out on a schoolroom slate. It’s as if the English words are mocking her now, flinging her lies back at her like a hollow echo, as if the very language is laughing at her. She dare not speak.

  “Oh, I know,” the older woman cries, panicked by Esther’s despair, and then, “Here, here.” And’when Esther looks up she finds Mrs Roberts wringing her hands—no, twisting at her finger, pulling at a ring. “See!” she says, beaming triumphantly. “This is the ring his old father gave me. Welsh gold, it is. It’d be yours soon enough, so why not now? Yes! That’s the ticket. I’d have given it to Rhys for you if he’d only asked. We’ll say he wrote to me. In his last letter. To give it to you. You won’t have to feel a bit ashamed.” She nods rapidly and holds it up before Esther, a little golden O, and Esther feels her lips slowly forming the shape.

  She should make fists of her hands, jam them in her pockets, sit on them, anything. But when Mrs Roberts takes her hand (takes my hand, Esther thinks, shying more from the phrase than the touch), it feels limp, numb, not her own at all, and she watches in horrified fascination as the older woman slips on the ring, pressing it gently over her knuckle.

  “There!” She turns Esther’s hand back and forth in admiration. “You’re a Mrs R yourself now, and it’ll be a proper little Welsh babby, and no one can say any different.”

  Esther is still staring at the ring when Mrs R says, “May I?” And it takes her a slow moment to realise she wants to touch her. Esther nods minutely and submits, leaning back and watching Mrs R smooth her hands over her belly, like a Gypsy over a crystal ball. She wills herself not to flinch under the span of the dry fingers, looks away as they slide over her, imagining Mrs R’s hands still dusty with blackboard chalk, stares at her rapt face instead. The swollen crescents beneath the old woman’s eyes look like blisters in the half-light, and for a moment it seems to Esther as if they’ve finally split. She’s crying, she thinks, and yet there’s a gleam of light in Mrs R’s eyes. It’s the light of inspiration, and something more, Esther sees.

  “There, now. It’s going to be all right. He’ll come now,” Mrs Roberts says vehemently. It’s her classroom voice. The voice that will brook no more dullness. For all her stoicism, Esther sees with astonishment, a current of hope has been coursing through Mrs R like an underground stream. “He’ll come back now, mark me. We just have to have hope, girl. Do you have hope?”

  Esther looks at her through her tears and nods slowly. She does have hope, she realises. All this time she’s thought Rhys
dead, and now she hopes, prays, that he is.

  And then she does gag, cupping her mouth, her eyes wide with panic as she looks around the parlour, at the polished wood, the lace antimacassars, the cut glass. But in the end it’s only tea she spills, bumping the low table as she rushes out, down the tiled passage; and out of the door, to the yard and the privy. And by then she’s swallowed it down again, the bile searing her throat, so she can only spit, over and over, in an effort to get the taste from her mouth.

  After a few moments she hears the door to the yard open, and she’s sure she’s given herself away. She pictures Mrs R, ruler in hand, stalking between their desks during tests, ready to smack the knuckles of cheats. Once she’d actually broken her ruler across a boy’s shoulders. Esther had been too afraid to cheat, she thinks now. That’s why she’d always worked so hard. It wasn’t so much the ruler, but the shame of being caught in front of the whole class. And it occurs to her that it wasn’t just some boy whose back Mrs R snapped her ruler over. It was Rhys. Trapped in the tiny cell of the privy, amid the stink of bleach, Esther wishes she had cheated all those years ago, had been beaten for it.

  There’s a soft knock at the door. “All right, dear? Never mind. It’s only natural, morning sickness.”

  And perhaps because it’s dark out, just a powdery moonlight sifting through the high window of the privy, Esther misunderstands her, hears her say ‘mourning sickness’, before Mrs Roberts adds: “Silly name for it, really. It can come over you any time.”

  It’s a long, dark walk up from the village, pushing the bike, the night wet and windy. Mrs R’s ring is too big for her, rolling loose around her finger. She’d take it off, but she feels faint at the thought of losing it, so she makes a fist until the ring stands up like a new knuckle. What she’d give for a cigarette to take away the taste of sick on her tongue. She’s calmer now, trying to decide how she feels about what she’s done, probing the lie, testing it. How bad has she been? She feels a wave of tiredness, totters from it. It’s been an endless day, but she takes her exhaustion for relief, though she can’t quite shake the nagging sense that she’s completed Colin’s work, dishonoured herself finally and irrevocably. In the end, though, she’s a farmer’s daughter, and it’s pragmatism that wins out.

  Her mind turns to the last lambing season. It’s her favourite time of year, she and Arthur working closely together, his fierceness tempered by tenderness for the lambs, but the previous spring had been a hard one. Too many stillbirths, and too many of those females. The male lambs, the wethers, meant money; they’d be sold off after a year for meat. But the females, the ewes, were what the future of the flock depended on, the carriers of the cynefin.

  Towards the end of the lambing, they’d both been sitting up through the night, nursing two of the last ewes to deliver. Around three, Arthur’s lamb had been stillborn, the mother circling it for a few minutes, sniffing at it lugubriously and then withdrawing to a corner of the makeshift pen of hay bales, crumpling with exhaustion. A half-hour later, Esther’s ewe gave birth to a healthy lamb, but the mother haemorrhaged within moments of the delivery and swiftly bled to death, despite their best efforts. They’d tried setting the orphaned lamb in the pen with the bereaved mother, but she wanted nothing to do with the newborn, turning away when the lamb tried to press its head against her flank, kicking out when it followed shakily behind. Esther had to lift the lamb out of the pen to save it from being trampled. She’d gone in search of a bottle, thinking to hand-rear it, though she’d never managed to with one so young.

  When she came back into the circle of yellow lamplight, Arthur was cradling the dead lamb in his big hands, its head flopping over his wrist. He watched as she touched the snout of the bottle to her lamb’s mouth. It licked the teat once, twice, then twisted away, struggling feebly in her arms, and Arthur shook his head. He’d pulled a knife from the hay bale beside him and set about the lamb in his hands, skinning it swiftly and neatly, and she watched, horrified as he tugged the fleece from the filmy blue flesh of the body with a soft tearing sound, the bloody carcass emerging, almost as if it were being born a second time. He set it gently beside him when he was done, came towards her with the wet fleece, and numbly she held the tiny kicking beast while he plastered the dead lamb’s skin over it, tying the strips that had been its legs beneath the warm, trembling belly. By the end of it their hands were slathered with blood. They’d set the lamb on the floor of the pen and stood back as it tottered under the new weight. It had looked piteous, grotesque, the butt of a cruel joke, but the ewe had roused herself, recognising the scent of her own lamb, and approached, and this time when the lamb nosed against her, she stood fast.

  Esther’s tired mind can barely make sense of the parallels. Has she deceived, or been deceived? Is she the lamb, the ewe, the shepherd? Perhaps all three. All she knows is that having lied about who the father is, the baby feels finally, firmly hers now, hers alone.

  Thoughts of the flock make her think again of cynefin. That knowledge, the sense of place, passed from mothers to daughters, without which their very lives on the farm would be impossible. It’s what keeps the sheep on the land, and the sheep, she thinks, are what keep the people here, so perhaps they all have it. There are those who’d call her a traitor for carrying an Englishman’s child, a betrayer of her father, of Mrs R, of Rhys. But it comes to her now that cynefin is the essential nationalism, not her father’s windy brand, but this secret bond between mothers and daughters, described by a word the English have no equivalent for.

  She leans the bike against the wall to open the gate, pushes it through.

  A boy? she wonders. When she recalls Jim’s question, she realises it had caught her off guard because she’d never really considered the possibility of the baby’s being anything other than a girl. Even now it seems simply outlandish to imagine a boy inside her, a boy coming from her body. All her old fears of having the baby, of dying in labour, come rushing back when she thinks of its being a boy. Clasping her hands to her stomach, she’s somehow sure it won’t be, can’t be. And if it is a girl, she knows the name already. Eunice. After her mother.

  She wheels the bike into the barn, lingers there a moment, thinking of the German. He’d asked her once about patriotism. Fatherland-love. Why fatherland and not motherland? she’d wondered. But now she thinks: Why should the love of fathers or mothers be equated with love of country? Couldn’t you love your country by loving your children? Weren’t they your nation, at the last? Your childland, then. Your child-country. It sounds about as awkward in Welsh, but then it occurs to her to wonder if there’s a better word in German.

  She’ll look for him again tomorrow, or the next day, and ask. He’ll know what she means, she’s sure. It reminds her of the renewed talk of prisoners working on local farms, like the Italians elsewhere. Harry’s just done a skit on it: “You’ve heard of ‘Lend a hand on the land’. Now they’re lending Huns!” She must remember to tell Arthur. They’ll need some extra help about the place when she’s laid up.

  She props the bike next to the spindly question mark of Arthur’s crook. The Lord is my shepherd. How many times has she heard that text in chapel? So often her mother used to joke that there were ‘those hereabouts who’d like to think shepherding is next to godliness’. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The flock is sleeping, ghostly forms dotting the dark grass, and she finds herself creeping across the yard.

  When she gets in, she sees it’s still not quite eleven, and she twiddles with the radio knobs. She’s forgotten all about Harry’s tip to listen tonight, but she might just catch the end of the show. The wind must be buffeting the transmitter, because the reception flutters, but through the whoops and whistles of static she can just make him out, signing off, and she sits back disappointed, wondering what she missed. And then, as she arches her back against the settle, she hears it, faintly at first, the opening bars of ‘Land of My Fathers’. Harry must have switched it for ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. It’s a nod
of respect, she supposes, though typically for Harry, not without its sly mockery. But for once she feels herself inside the joke, finds herself smiling wryly, even as she sits up, stiff backed, as if at attention, until the last ndtes fade out in the wind.

  Epilogue

  Rotheram will see Hess only once more. In mid-May of ‘45, the war in Europe over at last, Hess asks for him again. It’s the eleventh hour. He’s about to leave the Welsh safe house for London and a plane back to Germany. The powers that be—Colonel Hawkins, Rotheram suspects—grant the request in the hope of some last revelation. The orders catch up with Rotheram almost too late—he’s been on the road between one camp and the next—and though he drives through the night, he arrives to find the house packed up, furniture shrouded in dust sheets, Hess sunning himself, perched on a tea chest in the drive like so much luggage. They nod to each other. Hurrying inside, stepping between two empty metal filing cabinets that flank the door like suits of armour, Rotheram reports to Major Redgrave, who tells him, studying his watch, that the only way to talk to Hess now is if he travels with him to London.

  “Baker’s around here someplace. He’ll drive you.”

  “You and Lieutenant Mills won’t be travelling with us?”

  “Captain Mills has gone ahead to brief the prosecutors, sit in on the interrogations. Hess isn’t half as exciting as Goring now, you know.” Rotheram searches himself for a flicker of jealousy. “And as for me,” the major adds, “if he wanted to talk to me, he’d have done it by now, I think. No, he’s asked for you. Seems you made an impression last time through. Honestly, I doubt he’s much to offer, but if you fancy a trip to town, I can authorise you to go up.”

  Rotheram hesitates—he has reports to file, men to interview—and Redgrave tells him impatiently, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Most men would jump at the chance of forty-eight in town, especially this weekend.”