Love and War

by Siân James

  She seems relatively untroubled at the thought.

  ‘Is that Ifor Meredyth? This is Rhian Evans, Ilona’s friend She’s had the baby... Yes, early this morning. And the thing is, she doesn’t think you should come down today. In fact, she doesn’t really want you to.’

  ‘I see,’ he says, slowly and carefully.

  ‘But she’d like you to go to her grandmother’s to let her know that she won’t be with her for another two or three weeks. To explain to her. She’ll be writing to her, tell her, to let her know how she’s getting on.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘They’re both well,’ I tell him, beginning to feel that he isn’t going to ask.

  ‘I’m very pleased about that,’ he says. ‘Very pleased. Tell her I’m very pleased about that.’

  He has a slow, lazy voice. I can see him vividly; a sensuous, well-fed, well-to-do farmer, used to his own way and his own importance at home, in the pub and in the market.

  ‘I will. Look, I’d better go back to her now, she’s on her own. You will go to her grandmother’s?’

  ‘Yes indeed.’

  ‘Boy or girl?’ he asks, then. ‘Her grandmother will want to know.’

  ‘A boy. A seven pound boy.’

  ‘Very good,’ he says. ‘Very good. And I suppose she gave you a pretty bad time, did she?’

  There’s a sort of lazy indulgent affection in the question, but I can’t let it pass. ‘She had a pretty bad time, if that’s what you mean,’ I say sharply.

  ‘Oh yes, I know about these things,’ he says. ‘Look, why don’t I come down later on today in any case? For a visit, like. I’ve made all the arrangements now, got the wife’s cousin in for the milking tonight. I could still come, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t think she’d want that.’ I take a deep breath and look out at the sea. ‘You see, things are changing for her. Well, in fact, things have already changed for her. I’m sure she’ll be writing to you later on. To explain everything – you know what I mean.’

  ‘I see,’ he says again, catching my drift at once. ‘I see.’

  There seems both regret and relief in his voice; though perhaps I’m sensing only what Ilona has already told me.

  ‘Well, tell her I’ve been to the solicitor, will you? Tell her she’ll be hearing from him. And tell her –’

  The operator comes on the line. ‘Your time is up caller. Do you wish to pay for further time?’

  ‘No thank you,’ I say firmly.

  ‘Well, goodbye, Mr Meredyth.’

  ‘Tell her to... to get in touch with me.’ His voice has taken on a measure of urgency; I smile at myself in the little mirror over the phone as the operator cuts us off.

  I stand for a minute looking out at the sea emerging from the darkness; little shivering silver plates on the olive green darkness. It must be beautiful to see the sun rising over the sea, but here we have the blaze of red and gold only in the evening. At daybreak, the sea begins to gleam very gradually with a light which seems left over from the previous night’s excesses, cleansed and calm and very peaceful.

  My eyes seem full of sand. I shall write to Jack later on today when I’ve had some sleep. I feel too light-headed at the moment to tell him all that’s happened since he went away.

  Twenty-One

  AS ILONA HAS PROMISED, life becomes a little easier in North Wales. Now that I no longer live in Huw’s house surrounded by his family, his friends, his neighbours, I certainly suffer less guilt.

  Now I have only Gwynn’s death to contend with and though this is an immensity of loss which I can only think of in Biblical terms, immeasurable like the love of God, it’s no longer a bitterness which burns my throat every time I swallow. I’m getting used to it, I suppose, getting used to feeling half a person leading half a life.

  Starting a new school means hard work and discipline. Every day I feel that I’m sitting an examination; studying the paper, tackling the first question, completing it, ticking it off and going on to the next, not allowing my mind to stray for a second.

  My digs, with an elderly widow called Lily Thomas, are clean and quiet. She brings my evening meal, simple but adequate, into the chilly front room which is my sitting room, and exactly half an hour later takes away my empty plates and cup and saucer, spreading the green baize cloth back over the little table so that I can get on with my marking. The highlight of the evening is when she taps on the door to invite me to the kitchen to listen to the nine o’clock news. As soon as it’s over, she goes up to bed, but I’m allowed to sit up and read in front of the kitchen fire – almost out by this time – until ten. If I stay a minute after, she taps gently on her bedroom floor to remind me of the electricity I’m using. She’s a tiny woman and she creeps about the house in carpet slippers, as though her chief aim in life is to disturb the air as little as possible.

  I don’t go to Ilona’s very often because her grandmother has taken a dislike to me, insisting that I’m the district nurse coming to take her away, whether to the asylum or to the workhouse she doesn’t say. I’m not even allowed to nurse the baby.

  He’s thriving in spite of that. Ilona has named him Thomas Gwynn – Gwynn so that I leave him my money, she says – but he’s called Tommy and it suits him; he’s plump as a little bird.

  I was afraid that Ilona would find it too difficult to break away entirely from Ifor Meredyth now that she’s back in Brynteg, but she never sees him as far as I know. She gets money from his solicitor every month and says it’s all she wants from him.

  To my great disappointment, Jack has written to her only once; a short letter, friendly enough, congratulating her on the baby’s birth, but making no reference to the letter I sent him. I go over it in my mind, wondering if I was direct enough. ‘She’s become very fond of you,’ I’d written, ‘and she was upset that she’d let you go on the train without managing to let you know. Why don’t you come to see her before we go to North Wales?’ Surely that was plain enough.

  He’d certainly seemed in love with her, so what had happened?

  ‘He’s met someone else,’ Ilona says if I mention it to her. ‘Why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he find someone attractive and easy-going? After all, he’s quite a catch, he’s got a good job and he’s fairly good-looking. Why should you think a bad-tempered, unmarried mother is all he’s fit for? He’s probably interested in that woman they appointed to your job. I’ve stopped thinking about him long ago.’

  Ilona’s grandmother is a small, fierce-looking woman with dark skin and yellowish eyes. She’s nearly bald so she always wears a knitted cap even in the house, and whenever I’m there pulls it down over her eyes and goes to sleep, her chin on her chest. She’s eighty-eight. Ilona is worried because she hasn’t made a will. She’s always said that her cottage is for Ilona, but with no legal proof, Ilona’s afraid that her elder sister, who has three children and an errant husband, may decide to claim it. It’s a very old cottage, dark and tiny, the windows no bigger than pocket handkerchiefs.

  My mother writes me a long letter every week. There’s heavy fighting again in Italy, between the Germans and the Allies this time, and Fredo is very worried for his sons. Someone from her chapel ran in to Huw’s mother in Llanfair and was told that Huw is in the thick of the fighting, probably in Holland. My mother begs me to write to him, but somehow I’m not able to. I’m pleased, of course, to have news of his safety, but I can’t write to him.

  Mr Churchill says the war will be over by next summer.

  I go home for Christmas: a ten-hour journey it turns out to be, three crowded short-distance buses with long waits in between. I have a really deep and dreamless sleep in my own little room and wake refreshed and ready for anything. Which is just as well because in the middle of the afternoon a telegram arrives for me: ‘Please return. Nain serious stroke. Ilona.’

  ‘Dear, dear, what a pity,’ my mother says, starting to pack my things again, taking it for granted that I’ll be going back immediately.

  �
��But it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow. I can’t leave you alone for Christmas.’

  ‘I won’t be alone, though, girl, not exactly. You see, Fredo is allowed to be here for the day. Yes, they’re not nearly as strict as they were. His chaplain has been to see me, you know, and we had a long chat about religion. He’d never heard of the Congregational sect, mind, but I explained how it meant all the people in the congregation being equal before God with no bishop or senate and he said it wasn’t so different from their religion, except of course for the Pope and the cardinals and the bishops. But it’s the same laws of Moses, he said, and the same Christ the Saviour, so that we mustn’t let small differences stand in the way. So I think I’m doing right, aren’t I, and I’m sure your father would say the same.’

  ‘I’m sorry not to see Fredo. I’ve brought him a Christmas present, look. Two pairs of hand-knitted socks. My landlady knits. They smell awful, but it’s only the oil from the sheep.’

  ‘They’re beautiful. They’ll last for ever, too.’

  And I’ve brought you some material for a new costume, a ready-made blouse, new gloves and a new hat.’

  ‘Good gracious me! And whenever am I going to wear all this finery, girl, at my age?’

  ‘I thought you might have a wedding to go to, some time next year.’

  ‘Oh dear, dear.’ And she blushes like a girl.

  Next day the buses are even more crowded with people travelling home for Christmas, but apart from me, everyone seems happy; the war news is good, food more plentiful this year and the weather is sunny and bright. When I arrive in Caernarfon, the last bus for Brynteg has already left, so I have to take a taxi: another fifteen shillings on top of the bus journey.

  I find that the old lady is in a coma and not likely to recover consciousness. Ilona is weeping; the tiny house is crowded with relations, all weeping. And I’m so tired and angry that I was called back that I start weeping too. It gets later and later. No one thinks of leaving, no one thinks of going to bed. We take it in turn to make sandwiches and cups of tea, endless cups of tea. At midnight someone switches on the wireless and we hear the bells chiming for Christmas and almost immediately Ilona’s mother comes downstairs saying, ‘She’s gone, she’s gone,’ and we all troop up to see her and start weeping again.

  Then everybody sits round the fire drinking whisky and telling wildly disrespectful stories about the old lady who seemed to have lied and cheated her way through life in great style. Nobody had ever got the better of her, it seems. They can hardly believe that she’s dead now, silent and defeated. They drink to her memory until it’s time for Tommy’s first feed.

  We spend a strange Christmas Day. The family has left, but in the afternoon we have a visit from the minister, a very shy young man who assures us of Christ’s welcome in Heaven for Theodora Owen, the stray sheep, the beloved sinner, and then has a piece of my mother’s cake and dandles Tommy on his knee.

  Ilona and I are too tired to cook either dinner or supper, but we light a good fire and watch Tommy kicking on a rug and have sandwiches again. In the evening we listen to a ghost story on the wireless and then we’re almost afraid to go to bed because of the dead woman upstairs. We’re really ashamed of ourselves in the morning.

  Greta, Ilona’s eldest sister, agrees to forfeit her claim to the cottage on condition that she has the twenty-seven pounds in their grandmother’s Post Office book and the other sisters and sisters-in-law settle for a pair of jugs each from the dresser.

  Ilona invites me to be her lodger next term and I accept.

  After the funeral, I go home again for the last week of the holiday.

  My mother tells me that Jack called the previous day, wanting news of me. ‘Yes, he trudged up Hewl Fach in all that snow we had yesterday and when he realised you’d had to go back to North Wales, he returned on the next bus, wouldn’t even stay for a spot of dinner. He seemed very disappointed, girl. A nice man, I thought him, and so did Fredo. He told me to tell you that he’s applying for the deputy Headship, now that Mr Talfan Roberts is retiring. Perhaps that’s all he had to say – but I don’t think so, somehow.’

  ‘He’s got my address in Brynteg, he can write to me if he wants to.’

  ‘They still miss you at school. Mr Cynrig Williams is giving the woman they appointed to your job a hard time, it seems.’

  ‘He gives everyone a hard time.’

  ‘There’s no need to bite my head off, girl. What’s Mr Jones done to offend you? I thought you were friends.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about him, all right?’

  My mother’s prepared a beautiful dinner to celebrate the New Year: a roasting fowl with potatoes and sprouts and all the trimmings, followed by the Christmas pudding which Fredo, who’d tasted some the previous year in camp, had insisted should be kept for me. The table is beautiful: the lace tablecloth, made by my great-grandmother and shown in the Great Exhibition in 1851, two tall red candles in a pair of heavy brass candlesticks which are always on the table for any celebration but never lit, and the best dinner service, a wedding present, grey leaves on a white background, which comprises in all thirty-six plates, four meat plates, two tureens with covers and two gravy boats with ladles, which no one but my mother has ever been allowed to wash or dry.

  ‘Is it still complete?’ I ask my mother, ‘this dinner set?’

  Other families might boast a wireless set, an indoor lavatory or the electric; we had a complete dinner service.

  ‘No, not now, girl. I broke a plate on the day of your father’s funeral and then poor old Davi Blaenhir broke another as he was putting it away for me.’

  ‘Nothing lasts for ever.’

  ‘Nothing lasts forever except longing.’ I sing the old song as she brings the dinner to the table:

  ‘Derfydd aur a derfydd arian, derfydd melfed, derfydd sidan,

  Derfydd pob dilledyn hiraeth ond er hyn, ni dderfydd hiraeth.

  Nothing lasts except grief.

  The start of a new year makes everyone introspective, I suppose, and I can’t help being aware of how much I’ve changed, of how bitter I’ve become. Whenever I read a newspaper these days I’m on the look-out for those paragraphs describing personal tragedies: the young couple killed on their honeymoon, the soldier killed on the very day his girlfriend accepted his proposal of marriage, such happenings seem to help me feel reconciled to my loss, whereas any picture of sweethearts reunited and looking at each other with love and longing makes my loneliness more terrible to bear. I’m ashamed to be so self-absorbed.

  ‘It’s a wonder to me, Rhian,’ my mother says, ‘how you can be so unselfish. There you are, spending your hard-earned money on an outfit for my wedding, when your own life is in tatters. Well, you take after your father, he was just the same. Your father could always rejoice in other people’s good fortune, even when we were scraping round for ha’pennies. I only wish I could be that sort.’

  ‘So do I. I’m not like that, I can tell you. Of course I’m happy about you, but I don’t care a jot about anyone else.’

  ‘No? What about that Ilona? Aren’t you feeling annoyed with Jack Jones because you think he’s letting her down? To me, he seems very sensible, thinking things through before committing himself. It’s not his baby, you told me that.’

  ‘People can be a bit too sensible.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘As Christ said.’

  ‘Christ?’

  ‘When they were complaining about that poor widow who’d spent all her money on the precious ointment for his head.’

  ‘I know the Bible, my girl.’

  ‘Don’t be too sensible,’ he told them. ‘Follow your instincts a bit more. Bend with the wind. And thus ye shall enter the kingdom of Heaven.’

  ‘Rhian, that’s a very free interpretation of the Scriptures, it seems to me.’

  It proves difficult to tell Mrs Thomas that I’m leaving her. ‘And there was I thinking of you as a daughter,’ she tells me in her timid little squeak of a voice. Anyway
, I order a pram suit for Tommy, bobble hat, double-breasted coat and leggings with feet, so she forgives me and says I can call in any time for a cup of tea.

  At the beginning of term, Miss Perkins, our Headmistress, breaks her leg on the slippery pavement outside school and we have a peaceful couple of weeks before she returns, more short-tempered than ever.

  During a snowy period at the beginning of March, when the buses can’t get through to Brynteg, I have to stay two weeks at a boarding house in town and I’m so lonely that I cry myself to sleep every night.

  The day I get back to Ilona’s, I find that she’s had a letter from Jack asking her to marry him. ‘How wonderful,’ I exclaim. ‘Oh, I am pleased.’

  But she’s furious with him. ‘I’m all right now. I’ve got over him. I’ve got over him and bloody Ifor Meredyth too. I’m really happy, if you want to know the truth, all the bother is over with. I’m looking forward to spring-cleaning Gran’s bedroom and whitewashing the house and the shed and digging the garden and planting potatoes and onions. All right, it might seem strange to you, but I’m looking forward to it. I’m all right now. I’ve got a bit of money saved and with what you give me for your keep and what bloody Ifor Meredyth gives me for Tommy, I’m doing all right. How dare he spend six months summing me up, weighing me up. If he’d written asking whether he could come on a visit, it wouldn’t offend me so much – it wouldn’t offend me at all, it would show he missed me and wanted to see me again and maybe start something. But to send me this proposal of marriage, making it so cold and business-like. He doesn’t even say he loves me, only that he doesn’t think he’s good enough for me, that he’s hesitated so long, aware that he isn’t good enough for me. Of course he isn’t good enough for me. What man is ever good enough for a woman? Women are always tougher and braver and much nicer as well. But I was in love with him last summer and I’d have had him then, given half a chance. But how do I know it wasn’t my body leading me astray? When your body is being flooded with all these maternal feelings, how can you be sure of anything? Perhaps all I wanted was a daddy bear with me in the cave, something like that. Anyway, he’s bloody well had his chance mate, and now I can’t decide whether to send him a postcard with a very short’ scathing message or not reply at all for six months. What do you think?’