Love and War

by Siân James

  All day long I sit in my nightgown, shifting around from chair to chair, sighing and groaning. My mouth feels as though I’ve eaten metal polish, my feet are swollen, like an old woman’s. Ilona tells me about a woman in Brynteg who developed dropsy after her husband died. Because she couldn’t cry, her tears flooded her body and eventually drowned her heart. The people Ilona knows in Brynteg! She says they’re descended from a tribe of night-worshippers.

  The next day, I manage to go to school and to take my classes. My teaching is completely mechanical, words I’ve used many times before flow out of my mouth in what seems an appropriate sequence and my pupils take notes, stare about them, mumble messages to those sitting nearby in quite the usual way. I begin to think I can count myself among the walking wounded.

  In the afternoon, though, Arthur Williams in 2A manages to ground me again. He’s developed a great shambling calf-love for me because I ask after his father who’s still in prison. ‘Miss,’ he says, ‘isn’t it terrible about Mr Morgan, Art? I was watching you in Assembly this morning, Miss, when the Head told us about him getting killed, and you went as white as a potato. It’s not right is it, Miss? Old men like Mr Morgan having to go and fight for the English? It’s not right, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not right,’ I say, sitting heavily at my desk, the drift of my lesson lost in the blackness in my head.

  He prompts me. ‘Dafydd ap Edmwnd, Miss,’ he says ‘How his poetry compares with Tudur Aled’s.’

  ‘Thank you. And don’t interrupt me again, Arthur.’

  ‘No, Miss.’

  The two girls in the front desk smirk at one another.

  Does the whole school know what I’m going through?

  Does it matter?

  The Head summons me to his room at the end of the afternoon. ‘Funeral on Wednesday,’ he says. ‘Two-thirty in the Catholic church. The school will be dismissed at two-fifteen. Of course all the staff will want to go, black arm-bands are all that will be necessary. That’s all, I think, Mrs Evans. Oh, and Mrs Evans, I just want to say that I’m not disappointed in you. Full marks again, Mrs Evans. That’s all.’

  I look him straight in the eye. ‘Thank you for coming up to tell me on Saturday.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mrs Evans. Sometimes I can be quite human, can’t I?’

  I learn the difference between grief and grief. When Gwynn and I had to part – and it was a parting full of sorrow for his absence, anger that he’d had to go and fear for his safety – my heart seemed to be agitated by quivering cross-currents, an extreme disquiet that I thought might kill me if it went on too long. When I knew he was dead, it seemed as though my heart was muffled and buried. I could feel black dust and choking darkness. It was like being already dead.

  I keep on remembering poor Marged Rees whose young husband was thrown from a horse and killed and who’d gone out every morning for years – at least six or seven years – looking for him, pulling at people’s sleeves and asking ‘Have you seen Elis?’ ‘He was killed, Marged fach,’ someone would tell her, ‘and you bought a black coat and had him buried tidy and decent in Bont.’ And then she would remember and go to the churchyard and spend the rest of the day there in all weathers. When her mother died a few years back, they had to take her to the asylum in Carmarthen but she doesn’t speak at all now, according to the one or two people in Tregroes who still visit her. I keep on remembering her. Marged Rees. No-one could do anything for her, though everyone tried; the doctor and the minister and the district nurse and all her neighbours.

  *

  The funeral isn’t as bad as I’d feared; in fact the desolate music and the unfamiliar Latin words give me a small measure of comfort. Ilona has had time off from the Post Office and I’m sitting between her and Jack.

  Celine, in black from top to toe, manages to look both dignified and dramatic. Her face, behind her velvet hat’s black veil is luminously white. I suddenly see her naked; sensuous and white. She and Gwynn were married for almost twenty years, slept together for almost twenty years. I’m ashamed of the rage of sexual jealousy I feel. In a church, too, and during a funeral service. Tears rise to my eyes but before I can blink them away, Ilona hisses something in my ear. I turn towards her. ‘Mary Powell,’ she mouths. ‘What the devil does she want? Tell Jack she’s here.’

  I catch sight of Mary at the opposite side of the church and point her out to Jack. As I stare at her, she catches my eye and I can feel a stab of hatred coming from her. And I’m suddenly aware that it was Gwynn she was in love with and that her spite against me wasn’t because I was angry with her about Alun Brooke, but because she suspected or had found out that Gwynn was in love with me.

  For a moment I feel sorry for her. Gwynn had once taken her home for Sunday tea because she was lonely and shy, and she’d fallen in love with him. And all the nonsense about Alun Brooke had grown out of that.

  Poor Mary Powell with her round face, her shapeless body and her awkward ways. How lucky and blessed I was to have been loved back. I’d lost him, I’d lost him, but I’d never lose the knowledge of his love.

  I love you, I whisper to him in the dark, incense-smelling church. I love you. Don’t forget my love.

  When the service is over, I break away from Ilona and Jack, determined to confront Mary Powell.

  I come across her almost at once and manage to turn her from the path to the patch of grass between the church and the priest’s house. She’s wearing a short black coat which is too tight for her and her face is the colour of porridge. My sympathy towards her has gone.

  ‘You were in love with Gwynn Morgan weren’t you?’

  A tear trickles down her nose. ‘What if I was? What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. He’s dead now and no-one can claim him, but I won’t have you ruining Jack’s life. You don’t love Jack. You only need him to soothe your pride – I know you don’t love him.’

  She looks bewildered, as though she’s trying to place him. ‘But I don’t want Jack,’ she says at last. ‘I’ve had some money come to me from my mother’s brother and I’m going to Cambridge to study Law. It’s nothing to do with you, but I wrote to Jack last week to break off the engagement.’

  ‘Did you? I hadn’t heard that. I’m sorry I said what I did. But you’re doing the right thing, believe me. You’ll do well in Cambridge.’

  For a moment we look at each other with something approaching kindness. Then the moment hardens. ‘You were just making use of Jack,’ I tell her. ‘It wasn’t right.’

  ‘I suppose you think you’re blameless,’ she says venomously.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know about you and Gwynn Morgan. I used to watch you going up to the Art room every lunch hour and I knew quite well what was going on. And you a married woman with a husband on active service. And he married too, and both of you entrusted with shaping the lives of innocent young people. It was disgusting. You had sexual relations together, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, we did as a matter of fact.’ What makes me admit to it? Pride? ‘Yes, we did.’

  Her face seems to disintegrate. ‘I don’t ever want to speak to you again,’ she says. ‘Let me go. You’re disgusting you are. I’ll tell you what you remind me of. My step-mother’s got a rose in the parlour in a glass vase. A very beautiful red rose it looks, but that’s only the half of it. The other half is the thick, ugly stem in the water, a vivid green with great thorns like beaks sticking out of it. That’s you, that is. Oh, you’re pretty enough, but cruel and evil as well. And you weren’t the only girl he was after. You know that, don’t you?’

  My blood is boiling now. All I want to do is hurt her. ‘I know he was never after you anyway. He invited you home to tea once because he felt sorry for you, because you were so lonely and pitiful. And you made trouble for him, telling everyone he’d taken you out for a birthday celebration. He didn’t even know it was your birthday. He was certainly never after you.’

  ‘I don’t ever want to speak to you again,’ sh
e says, ‘I’m going straight to the station to get the next train home. I intended to have a few words with Mrs Morgan, but I can’t face her after this.’

  ‘She’ll survive that.’ Ilona is suddenly at my elbow. ‘Yes, his wife will survive that very well. We’ll all manage to survive your departure with great fortitude, so don’t delay it on our account. Come along, Rhian.’

  ‘You’re a fallen woman, Rhian,’ Mary Powell says, ignoring Ilona and looking at me with round, frightened eyes. ‘I’d never, never have believed it. I thought you were only flirting with him, and that was bad enough.’

  ‘For pity’s sake, don’t let that crazy woman upset you,’ Ilona says as we follow the crowd to the churchyard.’

  ‘She hasn’t upset me. She’s written to Jack, releasing him from the engagement, so I suppose I can forgive her anything. I wonder why he didn’t tell us.’

  ‘He told me, but it didn’t seem important. All I’ve been able to think about is you and Gwynn.’

  But of course, Mary Powell’s words did upset me. ‘You’re a fallen woman, Rhian.’ Those frightened, accusing eyes. I was even more upset though by the way I’d attacked her.

  Eighteen

  DAYS PASS, AS THEY DO. The summer term is always too full, but I suppose the extra work involved in getting the Fifth and the Upper Sixth ready for their examinations means I have less time to brood. I don’t mean that I’m beginning to recover, but beginning, perhaps, to get over the shock and to be reconciled to my enormous loss.

  I start going to chapel again, smiling carefully at Huw’s parents but avoiding them after the service. It surprises me that my mother-in-law is able to let things ride; she’s usually a great one for Having Things Out. She’s built that way; thirteen and a half stone of well corseted flesh with – on a Sunday morning – a straw hat on the top.

  I get three letters from Huw in less than a week, all written, I think, before the invasion, but I can’t answer them. Even the short, uncommitted letters I’ve been writing for the last few months now seem too false.

  Eventually I decide to tell him the truth. Too much has been hidden from too many people; suddenly I feel the need to proclaim my love and my loss. My dear Huw – I underline the ‘dear,’ feeling very tender towards him as though he’s a character in a story, someone rather young and innocent who impulsively married a foolish, worthless girl. I tell him about my passion for Gwynn and how I succumbed to it, admitting to breaking every marriage vow and giving him permission to feel free of me. He can divorce me, I tell him, when he comes home. I promise to give up the house and furniture and to make no financial demands on him. I’m quite sure he’ll never forgive me, but I hope he’ll eventually recover his trust in women and find somebody else. It’s quite a long letter, stilted, but still moving. I cry a lot over it.

  But I find I can’t post it. I feel sure that he must be in the fighting by this time and I can’t take the risk that getting my letter will make him even a jot less determined to survive.

  What I decide is to take the letter to his parents, telling them what’s in it, explaining that I’m letting them decide when to send it to him because I feel that they are now his next of kin.

  I know that I’m going to hurt them badly, yet as I walk down the hill to their house I’m feeling almost peaceful, almost serene. It’s been raining and I get a sense of well-being from the cool, damp air. The pavements are full because it’s a Saturday morning but I feel detached from everyone. Two girls from Form Five call out to me and I smile at them, but hardly knowing who they are and hardly caring.

  The mood lasts. I say what I’ve planned to say quietly and firmly, almost as though I’m only delivering a message from someone else, as though I’m not really responsible for any of it.

  I haven’t given any thought to their reaction. My mother-in-law stops unpacking her shopping basket and sits down at the kitchen table, too stunned to speak. She’s never thought that I’m the right person for her son; she’d have much preferred a frivolous, gossipy little town girl, someone who’d be running to her three times a day for advice and help, but now she’s thinking only of Huw. She opens her mouth but immediately shuts it again. She picks up the letter as though she can hardly bear to touch it. She doesn’t raise her eyes to look at me.

  My father-in-law reminds her that he’s come in for his lunch and that he hasn’t got all day. She turns on him. ‘Yes you have,’ she says. ‘You’re staying home this afternoon.’

  It’s only then that he realises the seriousness of the situation. He sits down, too. ‘But I always work till four on a Saturday,’ he says truculently.

  I repeat that I’m sorry for the way things have turned out.

  ‘Didn’t we give you everything you wanted?’ he asks me, managing, as ever, to reduce life to the most basic level.

  ‘You’ve always been very generous,’ I tell him. ‘But from now on I’ll be giving you Ilona Hughes’s rent and paying you the same amount myself.’

  It was the right thing to say; he nods his head and grunts a bit. ‘That seems fair,’ he says.

  My mother-in-law though, is still silent; not being so mercenary, she’s not so easily appeased.

  ‘I have to go now.’

  As I close the back door behind me, I can hear her anger against me beginning to break out. I go and walk by the sea which is blue and still.

  I wish I could think of that visit as a great ordeal, but I can’t. I suppose I was carried along by the knowledge that I’d feel less stifled, less hypocritical after writing to Huw and handing over the letter, and this proved true. After that Saturday morning, I really felt I could breathe more easily. I felt I’d only done what I had to do; what my life had been leading up to.

  A few days later I write a letter of resignation and take it to the Head. I tell him about the letter I’ve written to Huw, tell him that I intend to burn my boats and move to North Wales with Ilona.

  He’s silent for a moment or two, his face blank. ‘How about your mother?’ he asks at last. ‘How will she feel about your moving away?’

  ‘She’ll be all right. She’ll be getting married again as soon as the war’s over. She’ll be all right.’

  ‘Well then, I can’t object, can I? I’ll be sorry to lose you, that goes without saying. I’ve got nothing but praise for your teaching. You can depend on me for a decent testimonial.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And perhaps I ought to tell you something else, now that you’re leaving us.’

  I look at him quickly and wait for what’s coming. He always enjoys his power to surprise. ‘I never really blamed Gwynn Morgan,’ he says. ‘How could I?’

  I try to smile, to acknowledge whatever affection or admiration he intends, but I can’t manage it. I sit opposite him, my eyes red, my throat sore, but feeling his sympathy.

  ‘No-one will talk to me about Gwynn. Everyone is too embarrassed. If I were his widow, people would be willing to talk about him and it would keep him alive for me.’

  He clears his throat. ‘He came to see me before he left, told me how things were between you, how you were going to move away together when he came out of the army.’

  ‘He told you that!’

  ‘You’re surprised. Well, he was on my staff for almost twenty years, you know. I suppose we were quite close in a manner of speaking – that is to say, I never interfered with his department and he kept out of my way. A good working relationship. We weren’t friends exactly, but we certainly weren’t enemies. Anyway, he told me about his plans for the future, how he was going to try to make a living from painting.’

  ‘Did you try to dissuade him?’

  ‘Oh yes, I thought it my duty to try to dissuade him. I didn’t mention his private affairs, you understand, but I did remind him about his pension and all that. But he said...’

  ‘What? What did he say? Please tell me.’

  ‘“Bugger the pension,” were his actual words. An inelegant phrase, I thought, but expressive enough. “Bugge
r the pension.” Yes.’

  ‘And was that all?’

  ‘That was all. He was sitting... no, he was standing, but with his foot on the rung of that chair, and at that point, he shoved his hand out towards me, we shook hands and then he left.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The Head gets up, shaking his head like a dog that’s been out in the rain. ‘He left some of his drawings in the Art room,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d get Miss Simpson to mount some of them for the Prize Day exhibition, but if you’d like one or two, perhaps you should have them.’

  Without further word, he marches me out along the crowded corridor and up the two flights of stairs to the Art room, the chop and cross-currents of voices dying out as we progress by.

  I haven’t been in the Art room since Gwynn left at the end of last term and I have to battle with a flood of memories. If the Head had said anything to me in those first moments, I think I’d have burst out into a noisy bout of crying.

  But he doesn’t. He turns his attention to small, grey-haired Miss Simpson, Gwynn’s replacement, who’s mixing paint for her afternoon classes.

  ‘Well done,’ he says. ‘All preparation completed before the bell is my fundamental rule for all practical classes. I hope you’re not mixing too many colours, though, Miss Simpson. Three colours are quite sufficient for any piece of work these days. Five! Miss Simpson I’m afraid you haven’t learned to husband your resources. The war may last another six months, you know, or even another year. In the meantime, three colours only and much smaller sheets of paper, Miss Simpson. Please don’t forget.’

  Miss Simpson, realising how lucky she is to get even this temporary post, smiles as he bullies her. The bell rings for the beginning of afternoon school. ‘We won’t disturb you for long, Miss Simpson,’ the Head says. ‘Mrs Evans and I are here to decide what to do with Mr Morgan’s paintings. I’m sure you’ll see to it that your class – 4B isn’t it? – doesn’t disturb us.’