Dead Man's Embers

by Mari Strachan

  Meg waves her hand about airily, a woman of the world already. ‘I know that, Non. I’m not going to be kept, don’t worry. I’m going to work hard at school and go to university, like Gwydion.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Learn French,’ Meg says.

  ‘French?’

  ‘Yes. Did I show you my French penfriend’s photograph?’

  ‘No,’ Non says. ‘You didn’t.’ And Meg knows perfectly well that she did not.

  Meg takes her feet from the chair and a box from beneath the table. She lifts the lid and draws out a photograph that is already dog-eared. ‘Don’t you think Jean’s very handsome, Non?’

  The boy in the photograph is older than Meg, maybe as old as Wil. He has dark hair and dark eyes, and his eyelashes are ridiculously long. He is handsome, Non thinks, but she says, ‘You can’t really tell from a picture, can you, Meg? It depends what the person is like.’

  Meg snatches the photograph back. ‘Well, I know that,’ she says. ‘But he looks as if he’s very nice, doesn’t he?’

  Non smiles at her, and Meg blushes. ‘Jean’s father runs a lycée,’ she says. ‘What’s that, Non, a lycée?’

  ‘A school, I think,’ Non says.

  ‘Oh.’ Meg seems slightly disappointed. ‘A school. I thought it was something more . . . romantic than a school.’

  ‘Well,’ Non says, as seriously as she can, ‘it is a French school.’

  ‘That is romantic, isn’t it?’ Meg says. ‘Jean said I could go there and teach English. I thought he meant teach him English, but maybe he didn’t. I’ll have to ask him. I don’t want to teach a whole school.’

  ‘But, Meg,’ Non says, ‘you’re Welsh, not English.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I can speak English, can’t I? And read it. And I can write it a lot better than Jean. You should see his letter.’

  Non holds out her hand, and Meg looks puzzled for a moment, then she grins at Non. ‘I haven’t got it in here,’ she says.

  ‘So, you’re planning on leaving, too?’ Non says.

  ‘Will you make me a special leaving supper and make everyone give me presents? Like Wil had.’

  ‘Only if you say you’re going for good,’ Non says.

  ‘You don’t mean that, Non. You’d miss me. You miss Wil, don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ Non says. And she does, far more than she even feared she would. ‘But that’s the way it is. Children leave home like birds fly the nest.’

  ‘Herman didn’t,’ Meg says. ‘He fell out of it and broke his wing.’

  ‘You’re the one learning French,’ Non says. ‘You should know about the exception that proves the rule.’

  The rustling shrub waves its laden branches at them as if a wind is trying to blow through it. Several angry wasps fly out from it. Non wonders if they have a nest in there. Meg throws the beaded cover over the lemonade jug and nods meaningfully at the waving shrub. Non shakes her head at her, and Meg turns her attention to her box again.

  ‘Look what else I’ve got in here,’ she says. ‘You’ll like this, Non.’ Meg unwraps tissue paper from the round object. She holds up between her thumb and forefinger the most exquisite carving Non has ever seen.

  ‘It’s you,’ Non says.

  ‘Osian gave it to me this morning. I don’t know why. He’s gone a bit silly with this carving, Non. It’s all he ever does.’

  He is rather obsessive about it, but Osian is like that with whatever he does. That’s just Osian. Non turns the tiny carving this way and that. He has made a head and shoulders portrait of Meg, and caught her resemblance to Grace. Non is surprised by the detail Osian has captured in such a tiny piece.

  ‘It’s perfect, Meg. It’s lovely. I don’t know how he does it.’

  ‘Well, he just picks away with that little knife, doesn’t he? Pick, pick, pick. It could drive you insane. It’s really sharp that knife, Non, all I did was touch – just touch – the blade, and it cut my finger. It’s a bit dangerous.’

  ‘He’s been using it for years, Meg, and he hasn’t hurt himself,’ Non says. ‘What I meant was, how does he capture the person he’s carving? Look at this – it’s more you than you are, somehow. What do you think it tells you about yourself?’

  Meg takes the carving from Non and studies it. ‘It tells me I look a lot prettier when my freckles don’t show.’

  ‘Oh, Meg,’ Non says.

  ‘Well, at least I’m not brown like you. That’s a bit common, you know, Non. If you had a baby it would probably be brown like you, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard you and Tada talking the other night. D’you think you’ll have a baby, Non?’

  Non begins to wonder what else Meg has heard up there in her bedroom. She and Davey will have to be careful in future when they are sitting in the kitchen discussing matters they want to keep private.

  ‘We’ll have to see, Meg,’ she says.

  ‘It won’t bother me, you know, a baby. And I would be leaving, anyway, wouldn’t I, before it was very old?’

  Is Meg jealous? Or is she stating the obvious?

  ‘Who will Osian carve when I’ve left, I wonder.’

  The baby, maybe, Non thinks.

  ‘He won’t change, will he?’ Meg says. ‘He won’t get better. You’ve only got to look at him sitting in that coffin in the workshop to see that.’

  ‘No, Meg, I don’t suppose he will,’ Non says. ‘So it’s lucky he’s happy doing his carving, isn’t it?’

  ‘He’s not so happy since that Teddy came, is he? He really, really doesn’t like that Teddy.’

  ‘How do you know, Meg? How can you tell?’ Maybe that was what she had felt when she held the carving of Teddy. She had felt Osian’s own fear and dislike of the man.

  ‘I don’t know how I know,’ Meg says. ‘I just do, that’s all. I don’t like that Teddy either. It’s his eyes. Haven’t you noticed his eyes, Non?’

  Non has not seen Teddy’s eyes. When he came to the door, looking for Davey, he’d looked down when he spoke to her, dipped his head. She thought he was embarrassed, ashamed even, of his state. And he has not been in the workshop when she has visited Davey there.

  ‘You look at him,’ Meg says. ‘He’s not . . . right in the head.’

  Non laughs at her expression and Meg demonstrates the look in Teddy’s eyes by giving Non an empty stare that is so unnerving it stops her laughter instantly.

  ‘See?’ Meg says. ‘It scares me – and Osian.’

  The rustling shrub gives a frenetic shake and keels over into their garden with a crash, carrying Maggie Ellis with it until she is lying on her belly on its branches, beating away the wasps that gather around her head.

  ‘I was wrong,’ Meg says. ‘She’d have made a useless spy.’

  40

  Davey has been quiet all evening. It is not a companionable quiet. This is more akin to a white-faced, thousand-yard-stare-into-the-distance quiet that means Davey is troubled.

  He had sat at the supper table with her and Meg and Osian, had pushed his food around the plate and then pushed the plate aside. For the rest of the meal he just stared at the place on the tablecloth where the plate had been. Meg had looked enquiringly at Non but not taken it further. They had both regaled Osian and Davey with the story of how they had lifted Maggie Ellis out of the shrub and helped her home full of excuses about how she had come to be leaning so heavily on it that it had fallen over, ripping its roots out of the ground. They did not expect a response from Osian, but they did not have one from Davey, either.

  Once the apparatus of supper had been cleared away, Non had sent Osian to bed, after telling him that he had made a wonderful carving of Meg, which also elicited no response. It would be so easy to entirely forget that he was there and never to speak to him. And what kind of mother did that make of her? A mother fit to have her own child? Meg had rolled her eyes at Non about her father’s behaviour and flounced off to her bedroom. No doubt to bury herself in Madame Bovary. In Fr
ench!

  Davey sits now in the kitchen armchair, staring into the small flames that flicker in the range. Non closes the door into the hallway, she closes the window, she closes the door into the garden. She can make it no more private than that. She has shut out all but the loudest sounds of the evening; the hoot of an owl out hunting is all she can hear. She has shut out the scents of the phlox and the roses that linger on the air. She has shut out the world and made a safe place for her and Davey. There seems to be a need for a haven tonight. She pulls a chair from under the table and sits on it beside Davey by the range. She takes hold of his hand.

  ‘What’s wrong, Davey?’ she says.

  Davey shakes his head. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Tiredness is all, Non. Albert’s fussing about this coffin for Calvin Edwards, it’s such a big thing – I’ll have to go in tomorrow to finish it.’

  ‘You need your day of rest,’ she says.

  Davey shakes his head again. ‘Funeral’s on Monday morning. There’s no family to want a viewing so Albert wants to get Calvin in the coffin, seal it up. Best thing, anyway, this weather.’

  ‘And?’ Non says. ‘There’s more than tiredness here, Davey.’ She gives his hand a little shake, as if to shift him into speech.

  He shrugs, as if it is nothing. ‘Bit of trouble with Teddy, too,’ he says.

  She has been expecting something of this kind.

  ‘There’s something serious wrong with him. You know . . .’ Davey taps his forehead. ‘Like war damage. Can’t talk sense, just looks at you half the time as if he’s not all there. The drink can’t help. He reminds me of Aggie Hughes’s grandson. Maybe that’s the kind of hospital he was in.’ He taps his head again. ‘They had places like that for the officers.’

  ‘Wil said he reminded him of Bobby,’ Non says. ‘And everyone who’s met him thinks there’s something wrong about him.’ These last few days, whenever she has been in town, Non has been accosted by people asking after Wil, telling her it must be quiet without him, what a nice boy he is, just like his father, and then a quick change of tone to ask how Davey is getting on with that tramp, shaking their heads as they speak of him. Non has never been so popular.

  ‘Not his fault if it was the War. But I’m not sure there wasn’t something before the War, something else. As if he’s never been quite right. It’s the way he talks about things.’

  ‘What things?’ Non says.

  ‘Everything,’ Davey says. ‘It’s just the way he says everything. Anyway, I started asking him questions today – I got a bit tired of him going on and on. He’d got hold of some story about someone from here being court-martialled. Said he heard it when we were in the clearing station.’

  Non gasps and holds Davey’s hand as tightly as she can.

  ‘Well, I said that was nonsense, if anyone from here had been court-martialled I’d know about it, but he insisted he was right. Then he got upset, and said a pal of his had been shot for cowardice and it had been a big mistake. This lad’s village weren’t going to put him on their memorial, or something. He got in a real state, Non, telling me all this, crying and shaking, saying it was his fault, he was the one should be dead. I couldn’t understand half of it. But I got the idea they were a bit more than friends, which might account for any trouble before the War. He had our address on that letter I gave him to send you if . . . well, you know, and he’s got some connection with the Graves family here, and in his head it made sense for him to come here and find out about this man who was court-martialled and shot, like his friend had been. It made no sense at all to me.’

  ‘That’s because it doesn’t make sense,’ Non says.

  ‘I tried to talk to him – to make him see that he’d upset everybody if he went around telling those sorts of stories. It’s hard enough for everyone as it is.’

  Out of doors the owl hoots, and another answers in the distance. A hunting party. The corpse birds, she thinks.

  ‘Everyone’s on edge in this heat,’ Davey says. ‘Teddy could find himself in trouble if he starts telling those sorts of tales.’ He stares through the window.

  The dusk gathers out of doors and the light from the rising moon puddles on the floor between their chairs, and lights their joined hands and Davey’s face.

  ‘There’s more, Davey,’ Non says. ‘What is it? D’you think he’ll make trouble?’

  ‘Hold my hands tighter, Non,’ he says.

  Non does as he asks. She holds both his hands, his rough workman’s hands, as hard as she can. He rocks slightly in the old chair and it creaks along with him. She looks into his face but he will not meet her eyes. Panic wells in her breast and makes her breathless. This must be the memory Davey has been afraid of remembering. She wonders if his mind has tried to rub it out because it is unbearable, but left behind an imprint that sends him crying and shivering under the kitchen table. The colour has drained from his face.

  Time passes. The moon brightens as the darkness deepens, and its light shines on them as if there is no one else in the world for it to shine down on except the two of them here in their mortal fear, one because he knows, one because she does not.

  ‘Davey?’

  ‘I killed Ben Bach.’

  ‘What?’ Non loosens her grip on his hands.

  ‘Don’t let go. Don’t let go, Non.’

  She tightens her grip. ‘Davey, that can’t be true. Are you remembering wrong again? Like with Angela. Are you?’

  ‘I killed him, Non. I killed Ben Bach.’

  ‘No,’ Non says. ‘No, that can’t be right. You’d never kill anyone. Not you, Davey.’

  His hands jerk in her grip. He groans. He speaks through his clenched teeth. ‘Oh, Non, Non, what do you think I was doing over there for nearly four years?’

  Non’s tears brim over and run down her cheeks. Where has their safe haven gone now?

  ‘I was walking home tonight, thinking about what to do about Teddy, and the Pentre’r Efail boys were out in the road playing soldiers – I’ve passed them playing like that dozens of times, Non, and never thought, never remembered before. They were marching one off with a rag tied over his eyes – they’d captured him, you know – and it hit me. I thought I was going to throw up right there.’

  Davey pauses, seeming to listen to the owl’s mournful hoots. Non waits.

  ‘Ben was court-martialled for running away, Non. He didn’t – well, he did, but you should have seen the state of him by then, he wasn’t fit to be there. Nobody would listen, Non. They sentenced him to be executed. He’s the one Teddy was talking about. And I shot him. Shot him just as the sun was coming up.’

  Non wants to scrub the tears from her face, to be brave for Davey, but he is clinging too tightly to her hands. ‘Poor Benjamin, poor boy,’ she says. A brain the size of a pea, says the headmaster’s voice from the past. ‘You tried your best to get him sent home – you told me that.’

  Davey carries on as if Non has not spoken, not tried to make it right. ‘The way those firing parties worked, Non, was they picked ten men from the unit and then the officer put bullets in the rifles and a blank in one of them – so you could spend the rest of your life pretending it wasn’t you fired the killing shot, I suppose. It’s stupid. You can tell if it’s real when you fire.’

  Non holds on to Davey’s hands as if she is saving him from drowning. The room tilts around them, the ground shifts beneath their feet, as if they are being rocked on board a ship on a wild sea.

  ‘They bound his eyes, Non. He didn’t understand what was happening. He kept calling, Where am I, Mam? Some of the men were crying. We were all jittery. It seemed to go on and on, the waiting for the signal to fire, though I don’t suppose it did. I hoped I didn’t have the blank in my rifle, and I fired before the signal was given. You’re not supposed to do that. I wanted to make sure Ben didn’t suffer, that he died quick. You heard some terrible tales about those executions, botched shots, prisoners in terrible pain, officers refusing to finish them off. I knew from the recoil I had a real b
ullet, Non. It was a good shot. I killed him cleanly.’

  Non does not know who she is crying for. Davey, Ben Bach, Elsie, herself, the whole of human kind? She cries and cries.

  At last, she says, ‘Who else knows?’

  ‘Nobody here,’ Davey says. ‘Our boys were all scattered by then. There was only me and Ben left in our lot. I should have looked after him better, Non. I promised Elsie I’d look after him.’

  Non says, ‘Elsie must never know.’

  Davey grips her hand tighter. ‘No,’ he says, in a whisper.

  ‘And we will have to live with what we know.’

  ‘Nothing I ever do again will be as hard and as terrible as shooting Ben Bach, Non.’

  ‘You’re a good, good man, Davey. You saved Ben from suffering.’ And he is, has been always, a good man. As his memory has returned, so has the old Davey with his kindness and humour, but he has brought with him for ever that other Davey who has been irrevocably marked by what he has seen and done. That is something else she and he will have to learn to live with.

  Davey stares into the range. The fire has long died, leaving cold coals and ash to mark the place it burned.

  Non takes a deep breath. She says, ‘And Teddy will have to go away. How can he be persuaded to—?’ She stops as a loud noise from outside startles her, though Davey does not blink. ‘What’s that?’ she says, as someone bangs hard on their front door. ‘It can’t be Gwydion back already, surely?’ She lets go of Davey’s hands and rubs the snail trails of tears from her face.

  Someone begins to call Davey’s name in accompaniment to the knocking.

  He pushes himself up from his chair as if he is sleepwalking and goes through from the kitchen into the hall. She hears the click of the latch as he opens the front door.

  ‘Davey, thank God. Come quickly. That Englishman of yours has been causing trouble. Calling us all cowards. Drunk as a lord. He got in a fight and the Constable hauled him off to the police cell to cool off. Told us to get you.’