She pictures a blank space on the page, a gap in the record. She has the idea, fixed from the schoolroom, that Mrs R knows all the words in the dictionary, but she can’t imagine her knowing this one. Not that her old teacher hasn’t been known to swear. “Dash it all!” she would cry if the chalk broke, or sometimes, more softly, “Dash it, girl,” if Esther disappointed her. It seemed at once so unladylike to curse, and yet the phrase had a kind of tough elegance, so much less crude than her father’s ‘blast’s and ‘bloody’s. Looking up the word one night, when she had stayed behind to clean the board and Mrs R had been called to see the headmaster, Esther was pleased to see the meaning. To smash, to throw down. She pictured a teapot, for some reason, swept on to the slate flags of the floor, shards flying in all directions. She’d snapped the book closed on the rest of the definition before Mrs R had bustled back into the room. Her teacher had dismissed her then, thanking her solemnly, and in this way Esther had known the headmaster, Dr Lock, had told her that Rhys was failing in another class. She only stayed behind in the hope of walking home with Mrs R, talking to her about some book she’d borrowed (something by the Bronte’s, say, whose works she devoured her last year in school, fascinated by the doings of the English gentry, though she knew Arthur would disown her if he knew). But on days when Rhys had got into trouble, Mrs R would send her on ahead, sit in the schoolroom for a while, and walk home alone. She looked so beaten down those evenings—a mother suddenly, no longer a teacher—Esther wanted to hear her swear, “Dash the boy!”
Only months after leaving school, reading one night, she came across a passage of dialogue, a character cursing, the line printed only as—“—!” and it dawned on her. Of course! What a dashed fool she’d been to miss it. Suddenly it seemed the most literary of swear words. Not a word at all, really, but the absence of words, words too awful to print, to speak.
Except now, she thinks, she knows some of those words, those awful English words.
And then, at the start of August, Esther misses something else. It must be the second time, she thinks when she works it back, the weeks, the months, and yet somehow she had ignored the first time, missed the missing, like a dash in her own life. The absence of blood.
I should have known.
She’d count herself cursedly unlucky—pregnant her first time!—if it didn’t make her feel such a fool. She pictures herself: the pregnant girl sent to sit on the stool in the corner with the dunce’s cap on, ‘Spoke English’ round her neck on a loop.
Her whole life living on a farm, her family’s whole livelihood dependent on breeding and birthing, tupping in the autumn, lambing in the spring, and it’s taken her weeks to realise she’s pregnant. She’s seen her father mix the raddle, the oily red pigment he daubs on the belly and legs of the rams every September, watched him take the count each night of ewes with red tails, smeared rumps, where the raddle has transferred. And like a ewe in heat, no better than a dumb beast, she’s taken the tup at the first time of asking. A fool, she thinks hotly. She would laugh if it were anyone but herself.
And then too, finally, she feels as if she might really have been raped. All this time, thinking she’s escaped Colin, thinking she’s escaped with her life. Yet she’d been right to start with, when the word had sprung to her mind as he’d pressed her against the mildewed tiles of the pool. He had wounded her, she thinks, and not a small wound, the drops of blood in her drawers, but something deeper and stranger. What a wound it is that stops you bleeding. And in her heart there’s a morbid fear that what he’s given her is a lingering death, nine months long, that she won’t survive childbirth, that she’ll die and he’ll have raped her after all.
She takes the heavy scissors out of her pocket at last and sets them back in her sewing basket, impaling a ball of wool. She’ll be needing her knitting and sewing soon enough, she thinks. But in the meantime, there’s nothing to be protected from any more.
She’s subdued for days. Even the pictures, where she goes to escape, no longer feel like a refuge. Outside, the marquee’s lights seem to wink at her, ‘Now Showing, Now Showing’. Inside, she sits at the very front of the stalls, shrouded in the blue fog of cigarette smoke that settles beneath the stage, as far away from the courting couples in the back row as possible. But with the screen looming over her she finds herself dreading a glimpse of Colin in the newsreels, finds her eye drawn to a shock of curly black hair, a trim moustache, a certain rakish angle to a forage cap. This close she can feel the rumble of the Allied tanks rolling through French or Dutch or Belgian villages; she recoils from those girls on the screen throwing flowers and beaming, dancing in the streets.
Afterwards, she can barely recall the news when Arthur asks her. She has thought of writing to Colin, telling him, but she doesn’t have an address for him, and even if she had, she can’t imagine how to put it. I’ve missed, she tries, but all that comes is I’ve missed…you. And she recoils, first from the lie of that, and then even more from the truth within the lie, the truth that if she tells him, she’ll be asking him to come for her, to put it right. So is it shame that’s stopping her writing, she asks herself, or pride? Both, perhaps? Either way, she refuses to give him the satisfaction of an appeal. Belter by far not to ask than to be refused.
Instead of going to the pictures, she takes to spending her free evenings, and then any time she can escape from her chores, in the trees above the camp, smoking to keep the midges off, staring at the men.
She wonders what will become of the Germans now. The war has gone on so long—her whole life, it feels to her sometimes—it’s hard to imagine it ever ending, despite the victories. They’ll be there for the rest of their lives, she thinks, studying the men, until they’ll have lived here longer than they ever did in Germany.
She finds herself wishing it were Colin down there behind the wire, a prisoner himself. She thinks of him surrendering, hands raised, pictures him in solitary confinement, curled up in a dark cell. But even as she smiles grimly to herself, the very word ‘confinement’ turns on her. It’s as if the language is coming to life, talking back to her in its slippery English tongue. For she’s the one, she thinks suddenly, she’s the one who’ll be in her confinement soon enough. The word itself seems a cell to her, pressing in on all sides, inescapable. She watches the grey men trudging across the dusty parade ground, wonders what the wire feels like clutched in a fist. She wants to run down there, press her face, her breasts, her stomach to the fence, feel it pressing all over her, the metallic tang of it between her teeth. She’d bite down on it, just to stop screaming.
And then she wishes Colin not a prisoner at all, just dead, slaughtered by one of these very Germans if possible. Him, or him, or him.
She hasn’t seen the gang of boys at the camp again—most likely bored by the prisoners at last—but one evening Jim returns alone. He’s had some falling-out with the others (over her? she wonders, over what she said to Pinkie? but he won’t talk about it). At first she thinks he’s come looking for her, and she presses against the tree she’s leaning on, but he only has eyes for the camp. By rights she should send him home, but there’s something so plaintive about the way he kicks his scarred leather ball down the lane alongside the fence, then sits on it, bouncing slightly, staring in at the Germans’ game, that she doesn’t have the heart.
She holds her breath when one of the Germans drifts over to him—the one she talked to, she’s sure—strains to hear what they say, but there’s no shouting this time, no name-calling. The German just crouches behind the fence, pretending to be a goalkeeper, while Jim fires his ball over and over against it, making the wire ring. Jim’s back the next night and the night after that, talking with the prisoner, about what she can’t imagine. Once she sees Jim slip his small hand through the wire, and later, as the German walks back to his barracks, she sees him lighting a cigarette. It makes her want one, but looking into her pack—she’s taken to buying her own now—she pauses, trying to remember how many there were the last time she
had one. She has a vision of Jim going into her bag, stealing one, the very one the prisoner is smoking now, and she’s instantly affronted, not at the prisoner—she’d not begrudge him—but at Jim. She wants to have given the German the smoke.
What on earth can they be talking about anyway?
The next night, she sees the German pull something from his tunic, shielding it from the guard towers. It glints in the dusk as he slips it through the fence into Jim’s open hands.
She’s waiting for him later, sitting on hjs bed in his room when he comes in, and she holds out her palm.
“Give me.”
She expects him to bluster, but he seems almost relieved to show it to someone. A thin green beer bottle—she recognises it from the pub; they sold a crate to the guards recently—and inside it, when she holds it to the light, a tiny ship, a fishing boat made of matchsticks, with a square scrap of grey cloth for a sail. Sailors, she recalls, submariners. The glass is still hot from the boy’s hand.
He looks at her expectantly.
“How do we get it out?”
She’s thinking of a grey shirt with a small square hole in it.
“How do we get it out?” Jim repeats, and now she sees why he’s offered it up so eagerly, but she shakes her head. He takes it back, tries his fingers in the neck one by one, but even the longest won’t quite reach the prow.
“You can’t,” she says gently. “Not without breaking it. That’s the whole point.” But she can see it’s lost on him. The prisoner has given him a toy he can’t play with.
“Well how’d it get in there?” he asks, concentrating on his little finger, waggling behind the glass, like a worm on a hook.
She shrugs, stumped. “Some trick.” And the boy nods heavily, as if he’d expect no more from a German.
“You’ll get that stuck,” she warns, and he pulls his finger out quickly.
“What do you two talk about?” she asks.
Jim holds the bottle up, squints down its neck. “He wants food, fags.” He tilts the glass to his lips as if to drink, then blows experimentally, and she sees the little sail flutter. “And he keeps asking your name.”
“You didn’t tell him!”
“Course not!”
She smooths her hands down the front of her skirt.
“Well, you’re not to go back there. Ever! You hear me?”
He sets the mouth of the bottle to his eye, peers at her through the thick glass, as if through a telescope.
“Aye-aye, Cap’n.”
She nods, satisfied, but then she can’t resist. “What’s his name, anyway?”
“Hans.”
“Hans,” she begins, and then Jim cracks up, “Hans up! Get it?” She recognises it as one of Harry’s gags.
She drifts off that night wondering about him, the German, wondering what he misses most in his captivity. He’ll miss that square of shirt come winter. She wonders where it’s from. The small of his back? Under his arm? She leans in to study it. I could patch that. Suddenly a finger pokes through, crooks as if beckoning.
She looks for the bottle the next day when she’s making Jim’s bed, marvels at the workmanship. The rigging, which she’d taken for button thread at a glance, is too fine. Hair, she thinks. His? And there, at the prow, the curve of the anchor, a pared crescent of fingernail. There’s even a figure, face pinched out of candle wax, in the little wheelhouse. When she looks down the neck—wrinkling her nose at a meaty reek of fat, the glue perhaps, lingering beneath the old-beer stink—she’s amazed how much smaller the ship is when not magnified by, the glass. In the miniature cabin, the tiny wheel rocks back and forth. It startles her somehow, the shrunken enclosed world, and she lowers the bottle, rests it in her lap. She wonders how the German made it, wishes she could ask him.
The following morning, when she’s alone, she hard-boils a couple of eggs—all that won’t be missed. Fresh eggs would be too risky, she’s decided, too easily broken. She listens to them knocking in the pan, looking over her shoulder the whole time, then picks them up, still hot, and juggles them into her coat pockets for later. She thinks of them there, cooling, the whole time she’s preparing lunch.
She tells herself she’s just being magnanimous. The latest news from France is good. Jim needs more pins for his map. Cherbourg has fallen, Caen, the Allies have pushed twenty, thirty, fifty miles inland. Orleans is next, Paris in sight.
And then abruptly the news is bad. Mrs Roberts comes by the house, interrupting the three of them at lunch, red faced and flustered, a telegram gripped in her hand. Who could be sending them a telegram? For a clenched second, Esther thinks it’s from Colin, or from one of his mates about him. That her wish has come true.
“I just left,” Mrs Roberts says, sinking on to the settle. “Didn’t even lock the door. There’s terrible, I am. Left my post. But I couldn’t think what else to do. You were so good, Arthur, when I lost Mervyn.” She looks from Arthur to Esther, and takes her hand. “And you deserve to know too, love.” She holds out the telegram, and when she sees Esther hesitate, she flaps it impatiently.
“Go on!” Jim hisses.
She scans it silently -1 am directed to inform you, with regret…notification has been received…—offers it quickly to Arthur, who bats it aside. “What’s it say?” he hisses, and she tells him softly, “It’s from the War Office. Casualty branch. Rhys is…missing.” She can’t take her eyes off the word—missing—runs her finger over the ridges of the heavy black type where it’s pressed into the onion skin. She thinks of her contempt for Rhys, her dull fury at him for failing to write, and she almost gags.
“There it is.” Mrs Roberts nods, for all the world as if Esther has just given the right answer in class. Arthur stares at his former neighbour for a long moment and then sits beside her, grasps her hands in his—“Vivian”—and to Esther, stunned, it seems weirdly as though Rhys has got his old childhood wish, uniting them at last. “I’d just finished knitting him a nice scarf,” Mrs Roberts begins, and somehow the thought of this breaks her. She sobs against Arthur while Esther and Jim look on. The scene reminds Esther vividly of her own mother’s funeral.
“Missing?” Jim whispers to Esther. “What’s that mean?”
“Missing in action,” she tells him weakly, but she can see he doesn’t understand the gravity. She suddenly can’t bear his innocence, and she bends towards him, whispers, “Presumed dead.”
“He can’t be.” The boy recoils. “He can’t be, Mrs R. Not Rhys.”
They’re all staring at him now, and he looks from one to the other.
“It’s not true,” he says, and Arthur motions Esther to take Jim out, almost as if he doesn’t want to parade a child in front of the bereaved woman.
“You don’t think so?” Jim asks her outside, and Esther looks at him. They’ve been so distant these past few weeks. She wishes she could tell him something. In the hedge nearby a thrush is singing, the same two notes, over and over.
“He could be on a mission,” Jim says with desperate enthusiasm. “Something top secret.” She shakes her head, more in wonder than denial, but she sees the hope drain from his face and something else take its place. “Bastards,” he says. “Those German bastards!”
And before she can reach out to stop him, he’s gone, haring up the slope. She would go after him but Arthur’s at the door, motioning her inside. “She keeps asking after you. Come and see what you can do with her, eh? I’ve to go and see about locking up the post office.” He shakes his head. “Says she won’t have a moment’s peace until she knows it’s done.” Esther casts one more glance after Jim, yearns to outrun him, and then Arthur touches her arm. She looks at his hand on her sleeve, nods mutely, and goes in to Mrs Roberts.
“Oh, my dear,” the older woman calls, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry. I know this must be hard for you, too.” And hesitantly, Esther takes her hand. It’s not the time to debate how much she felt for Rhys, certainly not to say that she’s turned him down, and even as she thinks of it, th
inks of him gone, she feels the tears coming, though whether for him or herself she doesn’t know, and the doubt suddenly stills them. Her eyes prickle but the tears draw back. To where? she wonders, blinking.
“Second of August,” Mrs Roberts is saying shakily. “That’s when they say it happened, more than a week ago. I can’t get it out of my head, what was I doing then? I can’t remember for the life of me. Nothing, probably, nothing special at any rate. And all the days since then. Just living. It’s really true what they say, isn’t it? Ignorance is bliss.” She claps a hand tight to her mouth, as if to trap the words, and Esther wraps an arm around her, holds her, shyly at first and then more firmly as she shudders.
“You know,” Mrs Roberts tells her when she’s calmer, “I always thought you’d be the one to go places. Even after you left school, I told myself: When the war ends she’ll do some things.” Her voice wavers. “So I knew my boy doted on you, but I discouraged it, you see, warned him you were meant for better. There’s a terrible mother, I am, but I had such hopes for you. I didn’t want to see his heart broken.” She pinches her lips together. “I thought we’d be reading your letters from London or someplace like that.” She fumbles for Esther’s hand. “But I’m awfully glad you’re here now.”
Esther can only nod, over and over.
“There’s still some hope,” she says at last, and after a watchful moment Mrs Roberts pats her hand and tells her, “Of course there is.” And Esther thinks, Neither of us believes it. For his mother, she sees, the news is the, confirmation of her worst fears, built up these months. She almost seems relieved, vindicated.
And for me? Esther wonders. It feels like a punishment, for doubting him, for thinking the greatest danger he faced was his mother’s angry impatience for a letter. Yet even now there’s a part of Esther that grates at the fool for getting himself killed. It’s as if he’s vanished into the dark gap between his two front teeth.
2007 - The Welsh Girl Page 19