The Typewriter Girl

by Atlee, Alison

  Dilys and she seemed to get on rather the way Mrs. Seiler got on with the new girls on her staff at the hotel. The three little ones—eleven-year-old Janny; Briallen, seven; and little Owen—tended to appeal to Dilys for their needs, even though Dilys told them, “Ask your mam.”

  “Mam” always glanced over their heads to Dilys before making any answer.

  Not long before she would be bearing her own children, John guessed. Better for her to have Owen out of the way. He’d send for the little girls within a year, he decided during this first evening home, until he remembered there was Lillian to consult on the matter. Miss Gilbey, his fiancée.

  Let go of the lever and the pointer will slip back to zero.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  With time before his father was due home from the quarry, John headed for the churchyard, discovering along the way Briallen and Owen trailing after him, both of them licking the sticks of rock he had brought from Idensea. For a moment, he didn’t know he wanted the company, but Briallen, with Owen in tow, looked as sturdy and determined as her mother used to, and John let them come along.

  “Who sees to the grave?” John asked her, in Welsh, when they arrived. The gravestone, of the purple slate mined from the quarry, hadn’t been in place when he’d been here for the funeral. Beside it, a heliotrope still had a fresh-planted look to it, and the trimmed grass seemed tender despite the growth of a spring and summer. A bouquet of meadowsweet tied with string lay before the stone. “Anwyliaid,” read the inscription below the name and dates. Beloved.

  Kneeling, Briallen picked up the bouquet and began to pinch off the wilting blooms. “Everyone,” she answered.

  A fullness in John’s throat tripped up his smile. Briallen’s encompassing response was probably not so great an exaggeration, considering how the village had loved his mother. Briallen tucked back one corner of her mouth, studying him.

  “You’re not used to missing her?”

  “I am not, little one. Are you?”

  She shook her head and replaced the bunch of meadowsweet. “But you’ve been far off a great long time.”

  “One sort of missing that is, being far off. Another sort to have her in heaven.”

  “Mam is with the brothers,” Owen said suddenly. He was lining pebbles atop the footstone that marked both brothers’ graves: Davey, gone at age thirteen, and Gildas, the babe John had never seen.

  “Do you think it’s so?” Briallen asked John.

  “I do. And look at you.” He sat back on his heels and bade her stand before him so they could look each other full on. He held her little waist. “A good deal of herself she’s left behind in you, Briallen-my-girl, and glad it makes my heart to see it.” He rocked her lightly, laughing at her pleased smile. “What think you, Owen-my-boy?” he said, noticing Owen watching them.

  “Her arms are little. She can’t hold me strong in her lap.”

  Briallen’s smile slipped. John clutched her to him. His other arm invited Owen. Owen hesitated, and once more, John grieved his decision last March to leave without saying good-bye to the boy. He’d been hoping to save Owen some tears, but what if he’d only created distrust between them?

  “Come, you,” he said, his voice a rasp, and Owen did and let John rough his hair and fold him in next to his sister. “Bri’s arms will grow strong, you know. They will grow strong.”

  And his own were strong already.

  • • •

  The cottage needed attention before winter came upon it. After Mared timidly showed him a small area where the thatch had begun to rot, John ordered enough slate from the quarry to replace the entire roof. He borrowed an Irish-car and a horse to pull it, gathered up the children, and crossed the bridge to Cardigan to buy a new pane of glass. The children he charged with an errand to buy the widest variety of sweets they could with the coins he gave them, and then he went alone to order wedding gifts, a tea service for Dilys, a pair of chairs for his father’s house. They would be a surprise, delivered weeks after he had left.

  He’d never spent so much money in a single day. He signed bills of sale and did not know if his scruples were for his prodigality with his savings, or that it felt mean to have such savings in the first place.

  Climbing a ladder the following morning, he reminded himself, either way, it little mattered. He was going back to a good position and a wealthy wife and a fine house her father would pay for. Every damn thing he wanted was waiting for him back in London, so what difference if he spent every shilling he had?

  Roofing was hazardous work. It put you above, it put you alone. He was glad when the children were out of doors, playing and calling up to him, helping him sort tiles and watching him drill holes in the slate. Passing neighbors provided occasional relief. When there was no one, he fitted tiles with ardent care. He pounded pegs with vehement concentration. The task, as John performed it, did not permit introspection.

  In the evenings, his father joined him when he was done at the quarry, not taking the usual time to wash away the slate dust. One night they spent half an hour pretending it was not too dark to work, and then Mared picked her way up the ladder with two tankards of cider for them.

  “Will I keep supper?” she asked her husband as he sidled down to take a tankard and pass it back to John. He took a long swallow from the other before he shook his head and told her to feed the children, he and Iefan would be in later.

  He took another drink. “There is good, Mared.”

  Exchanges like these were all John had witnessed of their relationship—Mared, careful and eager to please; his father a host, trying to make her welcome.

  “As well to go in now, is it?” John asked. “Not much for us to do, and it dark.”

  “Thought you’d like to come to it.”

  John paused with the cup at his mouth, the liquid tickling his lip.

  “Or wait another night or two, you could,” said his father, his tone dry, “if you are thinking still on how to say it.”

  “No,” John answered, but in truth, he wasn’t ready. He had yet to speak a word of his purpose to his dad, to anyone here, save a silent prayer at his mother’s grave.

  He edged down the roof so he could sit beside his father. The rear of the cottage looked to the Preseli Hills, and their scrubbed black peaks barely ruffled the horizon, still lit with the last blush of the faded day. One massive cloud, as smooth and purple as the roof slates, bore down on the light. He could hear dishes and the children’s voices clattering together, the sounds rising up with the scents of warm food and damp earth.

  Deeply, he breathed it all in.

  “Dad, I want Owen. Janny and Briallen, too. Take them back to live with me.”

  The words hung in the air, like blasphemy from a pulpit. They sounded too stark. In his imagination, this conversation had been direct, rational, but spoken aloud, to his father, his request seemed threaded with something obscene.

  His father said, “I suppose I can see to them what I brought into the world.”

  “Dad—”

  “Just like this roof. I’d’ve been seeing to it soon enough. It didn’t call for your notice, and sure didn’t call for such extravagance as what all this slate is.”

  “I meant to help. I want to help the little ones. I can do fine things for them with this new position—”

  “Already heard of your new position.” His father edged toward the ladder and climbed down, going to the water pump. John scrambled after and stood by as his father stripped off his waistcoat and shirt and stuck his head into the stream of water.

  “I think Mared—”

  Water sprayed the air as his father jerked up his sopping head. “Respect for your stepmother, if you please.”

  John’s jaw locked. He could not refer to that girl he’d gone to school with as mother. She came rushing from the house with a towel, a corner of it in each hand to have it at the ready. She backed away uncertainly when her husband took it and bade her go back inside.


  “You think she’s put under by the little ones,” he said to John when she was gone, “but she knew what it was when she took my offer. She’s learning, is all. Takes time.”

  “I meant no ill to her. I only want Owen and—”

  “He’s my son. The only son God gave me to raise.”

  John started.

  “See to a man, is what I mean,” his father added. “Your poor brothers, rest their souls, never came close, and you—you raised yourself, Iefan. John. Ran off and took care of yourself, soon as you could. You ran off, your brother Daffyd taken from us hardly a month.”

  He pulled on the pump handle and put his head back into the water, scrubbing his face and hair. Watching, John remembered a letter his mother had written him, years after he’d left home, in which she’d confided that her heart, in those first months of John’s absence, little knew the difference in her griefs for him and for Davey. Her heart had known two lost sons, and that was all.

  John hadn’t thought of that when he’d left. At twelve, he had only known he’d woken from a fever to find Davey already in the ground, and it felt like those hills that ruffled up against the horizon were in his chest and throat, and the need to get out and live had come after him, a derailing train demanding either his flight or his surrender.

  Standing here, John now knew his mother’s confusion, the old grief and panic for Davey snarling up with the freshness of Charlie’s death.

  His father’s face disappeared into the towel, and it seemed like that moment at Charlie’s bedside again, when it snapped in his brain that possibly, Sarah lay beside a dead child, but no, such a thing couldn’t be. If he could just get to Charlie soon enough, it would not be.

  “Dad, you listen to me,” he said, groping for the thing spinning out of his reach. “You have to hear me.”

  His father took down the towel and turned to pull on the shirt Mared had left for him. “Your mother’s last babe, Owen is, and his father I am, and will be. Same for the girls.”

  “You’re not even thinking! Just tossing it all aside, before you even give it a look. Have some time, won’t you, to think on it—and ask the little ones, before—”

  “Iefan! The little ones hardly know you.”

  “They do! They know me—written, I have, sent gifts and money—come here, visited each time I could. They know me, and know I love them.”

  “The kind stranger you are, and hardly more.”

  “I’m their brother, damn you.”

  John stumbled suddenly, jerked forward by his father grabbing a handful of his clothes.

  “And I their dad, please you to remember.”

  After so many years, there remained a familiarity in the shock of being yanked by the shirtfront, notwithstanding the fact that now he looked down on his father’s face rather than up at it, as he had as a boy. John’s father had whipped him but once, for saying a lie to his mother, but he’d demanded his son’s notice in this way often enough for it not to be forgotten.

  Always, John had hated it. But this evening was the first time he tried to get free of that hold, twisting away as he gave his father a shove that was perhaps unwarranted and certainly too emphatic. His father staggered, tilted, and missed falling utterly to the ground only by one hand that planted itself in the mud surrounding the water pump. He leapt up again, almost with no betrayal of his age, almost before John realized what he’d done.

  “And your father, too,” he said. “And into my house you’ll not come again until you’ve remembered, now.”

  He pulled his fingers into a muddy fist and went into the house, ignoring John’s demand that he listen, just think and listen. John felt the hills, ragged and black, in his chest. He felt his feet turning cold, the puddle his father had yanked him into seeping into his shoes. He thought of Elisabeth at the shore, treading into the waves alone.

  “Dad!” he called once more, loud enough to drive the image away. The door finished closing, and when it didn’t open again, John charged for it and burst inside.

  It had been clawing for freedom, this thing in him, bold and alien and hostile, but in the face of his family, blinking up from their supper, it cowered and abandoned him. His father, not yet seated, stilled in the act of cleaning his hand, Mared close by. Dilys and Janny’s spoonfuls of bwdram hung in the air, and the corner of Briallen’s mouth remained tucked back as she considered him. Owen said, “Shw mae, Iefan!” and held out a crust. Bread crumbs dotted his black hair.

  John revoked his entrance, his invasion. A duck of his head, a backward step, and he was over the threshold again, and then he was striding into the sunless chill of the moors. At an ancient congregation of stones, he went to his knees and put his face into the earth, his entire being a prayer unarticulated, a need unnamed.

  The dampness of the ground infused his clothing as he knelt there. After a while, he felt it reach his skin, and he heard his father calling for him—John, once or twice, then Iefan—and he sat up, answered, “Here.”

  The ground hissed slightly under his dad’s steps. He held a bowl down to John. “Have it.”

  He sat down at the cromlech with John, and John ate, the first bites a duty. Then his hunger overtook. The dish, of oats and salted herring, was wholly familiar, as though his mother still lived. Dilys’s work, he supposed. Bread there was, too, buttered and topped with blackberry conserve normally put up for wintertime.

  “You wanted something different,” his father said as John was scraping the last tastes from the bowl. “So may your brother and sisters someday, but till then, I’ll spare them the heartache of being sent from everything they know.”

  “You are their dad.”

  “Your own little ones you will have.”

  John wanted to lick the bowl. It was dark and he sat upon the ground, so he licked. And even though he was ashamed to tell his father the fraud he was doing, though he knew he would choke if he had to speak Lillian’s name, he said, “I am to marry. Before the summer is done.”

  “Bless God! And nothing you’ve said of it!”

  “I’ve not.”

  “Well, and who is she? English?”

  “So she is. She is—”

  The calamity of my life if I leave here without those children. And even if I don’t. A promise I have made, but she is a lie to my heart, no matter what.

  “She is—”

  Without warning, his gut seized, and he rolled over onto an elbow and vomited every mouthful he’d just consumed.

  His father said, “Wedding day, no more than toast to eat, hear?” and flagged his pocket handkerchief.

  John swiped his mouth and sweaty forehead, dimly noting the texture of the fabric and feeling certain better light would reveal it the blue in fresh morning snow. He pressed his forehead to one support stone of the cromlech, and the coolness from its depth took the sweat from his brow. Owen would play here, just as his older brothers and sisters had.

  John said, “She is a good girl.”

  “She is, sure. What name has she?”

  Around them, the uplands rustled with matters of the night, the digging in, the preparation of the hunt, the mild bow to the mist. John whispered, “Elisabeth,” and the sound was like one of those furtive creatures in the night, one of the cautious prey, and it was all wrong, spoken like that, and it demanded correction.

  “Elisabeth Dobson,” he repeated, louder, and the release and comfort of it made him laugh. He rubbed his hands over his wretched face, laughing, and he stood, laughing, and he shouted into the night.

  “Elisabeth!”

  How he needed her.

  “I am in love with her,” he added softly. “And I mean it when I say she’s good. Like a tune you must sing each time you think of it.”

  His father snorted. But then added, “Sure, I know.”

  “And Dad—well, but I do not feel good with her. Good, you know, by the way of the straight and narrow.”

  Heat struck his cheeks, and he could all but hear his father blushing, as thoug
h that cottage where he’d raised his children was not made of close rooms and slight walls.

  “As it should be,” his father said after a moment.

  “She would have given Owen and the girls her whole heart.”

  “And so she will your own little ones.”

  “I know it.” He couldn’t be certain of children, but he was certain of Betsey’s heart. And what had he done to it, that fierce, raw—true—heart of hers?

  “She is not—not what I expected to need.”

  His father did not answer this time, except for a sound in his throat.

  “Foolishness I have to undo,” John said. “The nearest telephone is in England still?”

  “It is.”

  “Then I will send wires,” he said, and started across the moor.

  . . . brush the type with a dry tooth or type brush, being careful all the time not to let any strain come upon the type bar.

  —How to Become Expert at Type-writing

  Aside from the funeral, Betsey had seen Sarah nowhere except within her own bedroom, where the tidiness was so absolute that it chilled Betsey. Dora Pink had had her way in there as Sarah sat, indifferent and possibly oblivious, sometimes acknowledging her visitors, sometimes not.

  Thus, as she waited under her umbrella for her excursion group to arrive, Betsey felt stunned by the sight of Sarah driving up to the rail station alone. The softness of Dr. Nally’s medicine was absent, making her I’m-doing-fine casing brittle as shale, but since she seemed so determined to maintain it, Betsey did what she could to help.

  This was the day Baumston & Smythe came for its outing, Sarah remembered, and asked whether Betsey were uneasy about it. Yet her attention drifted as Betsey responded, and soon she interrupted, “When are you coming home?

  Betsey had stayed with the Seilers while Sarah’s family was in Idensea, unsure if she would ever return to The Bows as a tenant. So much had changed since that quiet row between them, before the night of the ball had become the night of the fire. But hearing Sarah’s expectation removed her uncertainty. What a comfort it would be to restore that portion of her life.