“Quite. So, am I unbalanced? Am I faking my amnesia?” He leaned close and Rotheram could feel Hess’s breath against his cheek. “The truth is—I don’t remember any more.” He stepped back, smiling apologetically. “We have something in common, you and I. The same dilemma. Are we who we think we are, or who others judge us to be? A question of will, perhaps.” He glanced over Rotheram’s shoulder, and then back, meeting his eyes. “How can you hope to judge me, Captain, if you can’t decide about yourself?”
He held up his hand before Rotheram could answer.
“If you go now,” Hess said softly, “you may outrun him.”
Behind him, Rotheram heard Mills whisper, “Oh, bloody hell.”
He turned to where they were looking. A bull had appeared on the hillside below them. Rotheram was stunned. Where had it come from? Had it been hidden in the shadows by the wall or lying in a shallow dell? It trotted steadily across the field, brushing aside frothy blooms of Queen Anne’s lace almost daintily, not more than twenty feet below them, and as Rotheram watched, its dark, velvety head swung round—he saw the pale curve of its horns turn—to study them.
“Hell,” Mills said again. The cigarette that was dangling from his lower lip fell to the ground. “Bloody bloody bleeding hell.”
It occurred to Rotheram that Hess, slightly higher and looking past them, would have seen the beast first. He wondered if all the talk had simply been a way to distract them while the bull approached.
“Come on,” Mills was saying. Rotheram felt a hand on his arm.
“I believe he’s seen us,” Hess noted calmly. “Gentlemen, I am fifty years old, and with a limp, I might add. I can hardly outrun him, but you might. If you go now.”
Rotheram felt himself fill with disgust. What foolishness! To lose the prisoner to a bull.
“Are you coming?” Mills hissed.
“The corporal can shoot it,” Rotheram said, searching beyond the bull, but although he could make out the car, beyond the stile at the near corner of the field, there was no sign of Baker, who might have gone for a smoke or a piss. Rotheram and the doctor were unarmed, standard procedure for interrogators with a prisoner, but even if Rotheram had had his service revolver, he doubted he could stop a charging bull with it.
“Even if the good corporal were to see us,” Hess said, “he would need to move very smartly to get a clear shot. And,” he added wryly, “I’m not so confident of his marksmanship. Not on a Sunday morning.”
“Come on!” Mills had already started to edge towards the stile, but as he took a step in that direction, the bull moved almost leisurely to cut him off. Its bulk seemed ponderous, but it was flanking them, Rotheram noticed, shocked by the animal’s intelligence, angling up the slope, avoiding charging uphill at them. In a few moments it would be above them. It was already close enough for him to see its dark coat wasn’t smooth, but kinked with tight woolly tufts, the black curls licking at the base of its horns. He could smell it, too, a rich smoky scent on the breeze.
“Go now, please,” Hess told Rotheram.
Before he could make up his mind, Mills took to his heels. He’d seen what Rotheram had seen, and spotted also that the route to the near corner was now open. Rotheram felt Hess’s hand on his back. “Really, there is no need to die for me, Captain. It would be foolish, no? To die for a dead man?”
He pushed again, but weakly, and Rotheram stood fast. He was trying to decide if he could carry Hess (he doubted it, given the condition of his ribs) or perhaps draw the bull off. He stared at the creature, and for a second its huge dark eyes appraised him in return, and he was suddenly and profoundly conscious of himself as no more than an animal. For all his learning, his civilisation, he might still be killed by a beast.
“Captain.” Hess raised his voice. “I really must insist.” Rotheram, glancing away from the bull, saw the determination in his face. He tried to steel his own will, to keep his eyes on the old man’s, but he could hear the hoofbeats now. “Wouldn’t this be easiest for all of us?” Hess whispered. He was fumbling with the buttons of his greatcoat, drawing out the bright red scarf that had been tucked into his collar. With a final feeble shove, not much more than a pat on the back, he set Rotheram in motion towards the stile and himself hobbling towards the bull, the scarf flourished behind him on the breeze like a signature.
Rotheram found himself running—it came so easily, instinctively, his legs adjusting to the steep slope of the ground—chasing the doctor, making headlong for the stile. He couldn’t remember the last time he had run. He made a point of walking out of the building during raids in London. He must have run since that time he fled the cinema in Berlin, he thought, but he couldn’t recall. It troubled him because, even as his rib seemed to grind in his side, even as he heard the thunder of hoofs behind him, he found he rather liked running, the wind in his face, the blood beating in his head. It made him feel so alive, he couldn’t imagine why he had ever stopped.
Sensing the beast closing, he veered sharply for a low stretch of the wall, his arms bracing him as he swung his legs over the top, and tumbled into the soft unmown verge of the lane. Looking up, he saw the bull’s galloping momentum carry it past, saw Mills clattering over the stile into the arms of the corporal, as the beast broke off its chase, tossing its great glaring head.
He climbed to his feet, favouring an ankle he must have skinned on the wall, and looked uphill. There was no sign of Hess.
For a sickening moment Rotheram stopped searching for the man and started looking for a prone body, but then he saw him, upright on the hillside, waving. Rotheram felt a rush of relief, and then almost immediately an overwhelming flood of disappointment that left him light headed and sagging against the wall.
He watched numbly as Hess hobbled downhill and Mills scurried to join him.
“Are you all right?” the doctor called.
“An old man wasn’t worth his trouble, apparently,” Hess cried. “The black beast didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“But are you all right?” Mills insisted. He sounded panicked, almost hysterical, but to Rotheram Hess looked better than he’d ever seen him. He seemed braced, his eyes gleaming, his cheeks as rosy as his damned scarf.
“Really, Doctor,” he was saying. “I’m perfectly fine. Your concern is appreciated. Although,” he smiled ruefully, “I doubt very much that you can actually save me from anything in the long run, you know. Is that the car?”
Mills and Rotheram watched him limp down the lane towards the corporal. They looked at each other and then quickly away, before they followed, Mills staggering a little. “Awful thing,” he muttered under his breath. “Running before the enemy like that.” And Rotheram nodded and told him softly, “It’s all right.” And yet for a long, numb moment, he couldn’t conceive how the war was being won.
Major Redgrave was waiting when they pulled into the driveway. He eyed them carefully as they got out of the car. “Everything all right, Lieutenant?”
Mills wouldn’t meet his eyes, but glanced around at the others and shrugged. “Fine, sir.” A light rain was beginning to ring in the trees around them, and the doctor ushered Hess inside while Redgrave stopped Rotheram. His new orders had arrived; the transfer to POWD as predicted by Hawkins, but also a second cable, urging him to a camp in North Wales.
“Been an escape, apparently,” the major was saying. “Sloppy! Anyhow, you’re expected there post-haste to look into it.”
To Rotheram it seemed like a cosmic joke at first. An escape? After what had just happened? But almost at once he felt a tremendous relief, as if given a second chance.
Ten minutes later, he was throwing his luggage into the Humber. He didn’t plan to offer any goodbyes; nevertheless, as he climbed into the car, the whole strange household straggled out to see him off. Mills and Corporal Baker even waved, although Hess, between them, kept his arms at his sides. Under their gaze, Rotheram set off down the drive, but then swung the wheel round to circle it, pulling up again, gravel spattering under th
e wheels. He hurried back inside, ignoring their startled faces, re-emerging moments later with the film cans held before him like an empty tray, the densely wound reels shifting and sliding inside them, making him feel as if they were about to spill.
Apart from the near miss with the flock, he’s kept his foot on the gas ever since, turning north and continuing to rise through a layer of cloud, and yet ahead of him now, as the mist shreds, he sees night is starting to fall. The steep grassy slopes to the west are already a velvety black, just the white flecks of sheep like faint stars in the dark. The thought of more sheep in his path makes him ease up at last, slacken his breakneck pace. Where is the escaped man going to go, after all, he asks himself. What chance does he have with hundreds of miles of hostile ground between him and home?
Eighteen
It’s a crisp Friday, the first in September, and she’s washing eggs, cleaning the muck off them with a stiff little brush. After the heat of August, September has come in damp and blustery. Jim went back to school two days earlier, his face as overcast as the skies, and the night before, Arthur came in off the mountain, his eyes teary from the wind, grumbling that the dampness was going to hold up the haying. Only Esther welcomes the cool weather, pulling on heavy sweaters, swaddling herself in her long winter coat when she ventures out. Arthur set the rams to the flock earlier in the week, and each morning, looking up at the hillside, she can count more of the ewes, their rumps smeared red from the raddle. She’s scrubbing the last egg as if she’d scour the speckles off it, wondering what she’s going to do, when Arthur bangs out of the bedroom, his hair rising in wispy flames, and snatches his shotgun off the hook above the door.
For a pale second—such is her guilt—she thinks it’s for her, that he’s guessed her secret. She fumbles the wet egg in her hand, catches it, heart thudding, then watches silently as Arthur cracks the breech of the gun, jams the bright red shells into the barrel. Their brass firing caps stare at her owlishly and then wink shut as Arthur snaps the stock to.
“Loose dog,” he bites out, grim faced. “What are you, deaf?”
She must have been so lost in her thoughts. But now she can hear the distant barking and, following him to the door, see the flock flying across the fields, rippling over the uneven hillside in the morning sun.
It’s happened before, she knows, drying her hands and watching her father hurry uphill. Hikers’ dogs have got in among the sheep. “Worse than foxes,” according to Arthur. But she hasn’t seen hikers in years, not with the war on, and the only local dogs are working animals—like Mott and Mick, now snapping at their chains—who know better than to worry sheep, and the guard dogs she’s heard baying from the camp. But she can’t recall ever seeing them loose before.
And then she’s running too, waving and shouting after her father, but her cries must be whipped away by the wind because Arthur keeps surging upwards, alternately dwindling and growing as he crosses ridge after ridge, until he vanishes over one rise and doesn’t reappear.
She struggles on, bracing for the sound of the shotgun blast, but there’s nothing, just a lone seagull, strayed in from the coast, floating across the grey sky.
At last she comes sweating and panting over the brow and there’s Arthur in the hollow below her, leaning into his shotgun as if into a gale, and facing him two guards from the camp, one with his own rifle raised, the other with both hands clenched around the leash of the dog, which lunges and snaps between them.
The guards and the dog all seem to be barking at once; it takes her a moment to make out that one of the guards is shouting at the dog, “Down!”, the other at Arthur, “Drop it!” By contrast her father is still, intent, only the muzzle of his gun drifting slightly with the bucking of the dog in his sights.
“Stop!” she cries, but it comes out as a croak, so winded is she from the climb. She has to put a hand to her chest to summon her breath, and when she looks up, her throat tensing to try again, they’re turning their weapons on her. Arthur flinches away as if scalded, but the guard’s aim lingers. She feels her hands rising before her, buoyant as the gull floating overhead, and then she clenches her fists, forces them down, nails biting into her palms. Instead, she calls out in English, calls their names. She knows them from the pub: George, the Malaya veteran, hunched over his rifle; and Les, who waved his hanky when he told them about the Germans surrendering, hauling on the dog’s leash. Finally George’s head lifts off the sight.
One of the prisoners has escaped, Les explains when Esther joins them—all three men, even the dog with its lolling tongue, somehow calm, abashed—and she can’t help twisting her head as if the German might be watching them, just as she might have watched him from the hillside. But which one? she wonders.
“Thought they weren’t supposed to have the gumption to escape,” Arthur says.
Les is blotting his brow. “Dog had his scent before you stuck your oar in.”
“He had a scent, all right.” Arthur gestures towards a clump of gorse in the deepest part of the hollow. The ground around is torn up and muddy, raddle smeared on the grass; the rams have been busy. Then Esther sees the tufts of wool, snared and fluttering on the low branches; makes out the spindly legs tangled in the brush, still and twisted as branches themselves; finally recognises the familiar face with its one ruined eye. Not raddle, it comes to her, but blood.
There’s no sign of the prisoner, that day or the next, though the countryside is crawling with guards. “Poking bayonets into every hedge, and noses into everyone’s business,” as Arthur puts it, with a contemptuous smile. Esther had feared trouble after the confrontation on the hillside, especially when her father loudly asserted his right to shoot any dog on his land during tupping season, but in fact the guards have given in without a fight. The dogs are likely useless for tracking, too easily distracted by sheep spoor and the occasional rabbit ricocheting uphill, but Arthur considers it a triumph, as if he’s driven the invader off his land (though soldiers can still be seen climbing to and from the uplands along the brow of the hill). He sits in the pub that night, answering Bertie Prosser’s questions about the stand-off, like a king in his court.
He’s fortunate the guards are all out on the mountains, Esther thinks, breathing on a glass to polish it in the deserted lounge. Even Constable Parry is lending a hand, flying up and down the local lanes on his bicycle, dark cape whipping behind him in the wind as if he hopes to run the escapee down—though he does stop off for a quick pint, and to report that the camp commandant has sent for an investigator—from London, no less.
At the end of the evening, Jack tells her she doesn’t have to come to work for a few days. “Not with this desperate fellow about.”
She thinks she might creep down to the camp again instead. She’s curious which prisoner has escaped, wonders if it might be the one she spoke to. He seemed bold enough, and with his English he might have more of a chance than most. If she dared go back to the camp, she’d look for him. But the closest she gets is the ridgeline, ducking below it when the searchlight reflectors on the guard towers catch the sun, as if she’s the hunted one. Besides, she hears the boys have been warned off: the guards are trigger happy now, according to the constable. Whichever prisoner it was, he apparently scaled the fence while the guards were chasing off the boys.
“Found a blind spot and took advantage of the distraction,” according to Parry. “Slipped away with the crowd in the dark when the guards ran them off.”
“See!” she tells Jim later, a little too pleased that the taunting of the prisoners has backfired.
“As if it’s our fault,” Jim cries. It’s not, Esther knows, but after feeling so guilty that the prisoners were being abused for Rhys’s death, she feels oddly vindicated (though, to her surprise, Jim has lately confided to her that he thinks Rhys might be a prisoner after all).
The boys, at any rate, keep clear of the camp, more interested in patrolling the village, armed with sticks and cricket bats, at least until called in for supper.
On Sunday, the third day of the escape, a scare sweeps through the congregation gathered for chapel. Esther comes in late—she’s tarried at her mother’s grave, tidying the blanket of heather transplanted from their own hillside—catches only the scraps of rumour. Someone’s clothes have gone missing from a washing line; someone else has lost half a pint of milk left out on a windowsill. Muddy footprints have been found on newly scrubbed steps. The whispers are only stilled when the reverend starts the service. Beside her, Esther sees Arthur holding his head up, family chin out, though whether in a show of staunchness or because she’s starched his collar too severely, she can’t be sure. For herself, she’s been so anxious these many weeks on her own account, it comes as a strange relief to hear the unusual fervour in the hymn singing and prayers, to sense the fear of others. It makes her feel less lonely. And then she catches a glimpse of Mrs R’s straight, black back before her, and bows her head.
The last time Esther was at the PO she’d noticed a picture frame above the counter, turned towards the wall. She’d stared at it—some government poster? outdated postal rates? A photo of Rhys, she’d abruptly intuited. Mrs R was in the back fetching a parcel; Esther couldn’t help reaching for the frame, twisting it round. The colours were faded, the three jaunty plumes rising from the crenellated crown more grey than silver, but she recognised it from the schoolroom, where it hung over the board: a needlepoint sampler of the Prince of Wales’s coat of arms.
“That old thing,” Mrs R sighed, returning. “I’d have taken it down altogether but the wallpaper’s so faded.”
“But why?” Esther murmured.
“Couldn’t stand to read it.”
Esther traced the letters scrolled around the banner at the base of the crown: ich dien. “I don’t know Latin.”
“‘I serve’,” Mrs R translated. “Only it’s not Latin. It’s the motto of the King of Bohemia, taken by the Black Prince after he defeated him at the Battle of Crecy, 1346.” She turned it back to the wall. “It’s German, you see.”
2007 - The Welsh Girl Page 23