The Welsh Girl (37 page)

"Oh, him," Mary says. "Took offence at their calling him English or something, and then made some joke about how he might as well be German."

"That's the one. Took himself off in a huff. Anyhow, I was sitting at the bar and this captain conies in and we both sort of looked at each other in the way you do when you recognise a fellow but can't quite place him. Anyhow, we got to talking and it turns out he was sent up here to investigate the escape, see."

Esther leans forward in the back seat.

"Well, seems he was interrogating the prisoner after they brought him in, asking him where he hid and that, when the top Jerries in the camp made a stink and demanded to see their man. Something about making sure he hadn't been ill treated. Only--and here's the part--after they were done with him, his

own people, mind, that's when he had his leg broken." "What?"

"Yeah, it was them that did it! His own men, not the guards. Those arseholes were just having us on, boasting and that."

"His own fellows. But why?"

"Exactly," Harry cried. "That's what I asked this captain, and what he asked the Jerry himself."

"And what did he say?"

"Just that they wanted to know what he'd been up to, same as the interrogator, and he wouldn't tell them."

"Why not?" Esther asks.

"Well, now," Harry says, warming to it. "Listen to this. He told the captain he valued his privacy! How about that?

Valued his bleeding privacy!
Actually, the captain reckoned

the bloke only escaped for a bit of solitude in the first place-- seems it's not unusual. I asked him if he got anything more out of the fellow, but all he said was 'What was I going to do,

break his other leg?' Fellow wouldn't even say which ones had done it to him, apparently, and they all claim he slipped."

Mary shakes her head, and Esther sinks back into the upholstery.

"Funny thing is," Harry chatters on, "I used to fancy myself an interrogator."

"Pull the other one."

"No, really. I thought about it. Back in '39. I was too old to fight, but I speak a little Deutsch and I wanted to do my bit. Besides, what's a comic do but ask a lot of questions. 'What do you call a...? What's the difference between a...?'"

"All right." Mary laughs. "I'll bite. What happened? You volunteer?"

"Never went through with it. It come to me, see, that comics always answer their own questions. That's what makes it a joke, after all, the way we let the audience off the hook. For

just a second they think it's serious, a test, and they don't know

the answer. And then we let 'em off, and they laugh out of relief as much as anything." He shakes his head dolefully. "I'd have had my prisoners in stitches before I learned anything,"

Mary sighs. "Talk about your Secret of Comedy." "Which reminds me." Harry brightens. "Get this. The

captain also spilled the beans about that major, how he keeps his swagger stick in place."

"How's that, then?"

"Turns out he has his batman sew a little loop under there, like a sling, see. Batman says he's got a wooden hand and all, but he prefers not to wear it, apparently."

"What do you know," Mary says dreamily.

Harry shrugs. "Everyone's got their little secret." He gives a little wince. "Sorry girl."

Mary squeezes Esther's hand as the girl weeps silently. "You'll be fine, luv. You're a trooper!"

At the farmhouse, Harry leans out of his window and tells Esther to listen to the show that night, and she nods absently, stands at the gate while they turn, and watches the car's headlights glide downhill. A
trouper
, she realises belatedly.

Liverpool, she thinks. A train, a car. A Jew. She can't

believe it's been just one day, she feels so changed. The air is filled with the heavy scent of freshly cut grass. Arthur's been busy. She leans over the stone wall that divides the farmyard from the fields, stretching up the mountains behind the cottage, and takes a deep breath of the familiar perfume. She can just make out in the darkness the humped grey backs of the flock speckling the near slope. A couple of the closest sheep, a ewe and a lamb, roused by her presence, clamber stiffly to their feet and move off a few yards before kneeling again.

Arthur is standing over the slate sink when she comes in, scrubbing at a burn on one of the pots, and when he sees her he tries to hide it, but she puts a hand on his arm and makes

him turn round. It's strange to find him at such a domestic task, and for a moment she stares at him as if she hasn't seen him for months. Indoors, without his cap, the red line where he

pulls it over his eyes seems to divide his face in two. Below, he's tanned an angry red from the summer sun; above, his forehead is an almost sickly white. It's as if the blood has settled below his brows, like a pint that hasn't been topped up.

"What is it?" He smiles, and she reaches up and smooths down a wisp of white hair sticking up on his crown.

"Where's Jim?" she asks. "Turned in."

"I'm pregnant," she says simply, and she sees his smile wither. He lifts his hand to her, red and dripping from the sink.
His own people
, she recalls, bracing herself, but then her father seems to stay his hand. In his eyes she can see her guilt and shame, reflected as fury, yet still he holds back, even as his hand seems bound to leap forward and strike her. It's the innocence of the child, she thinks. He would strike her, but not the child. She's guilty, but not the child. She is composed of nothing but shame and this tiny core of growing innocence. The baby suddenly seems more like herself than herself. It's as if she will give birth to herself and slough off this older, failed version. She feels fiercely defensive, willing to do anything to protect it.

So when Arthur asks, "Who?" she tells him, "Rhys," and watches him lower his arm with a sigh. "I knew it," he says, and she realises in a rush--
of course!
-- that Rhys would never have proposed to her if he hadn't already asked her father's permission. And Arthur must have given it, she thinks, as if it were back pay for the months of cheap labour, even though he knew how she felt about Rhys, even though he thought the boy

a fool himself. It feels to her like a kind of betrayal, a rejection-- perhaps he always meant to apply for work underground, hoped to get shot of the flock and her in one fell swoop--and it

hardens her in her lie.
It's an ill wind
, she thinks defiantly. His words.

But just when she thinks she's escaped the blow, Arthur tells her, "You'd best go along and let her know, eh?" Esther must look confused, because he adds, softly, "His mam." She baulks then, but he nods his head. "It'll be a consolation to her, I'd say. And maybe not such a surprise, neither. She knows he was sweet on you."

She hasn't thought it out; the name came to her so unbidden. It seemed so neat a moment before, so perfect, a way to keep her secret and the baby, a lie between Arthur and her, but now it's starting to seem messy. And yet how to take it back?

"I can't tell her," she stammers. "I'd be too ashamed." "Might have considered that before," he says, though not

unkindly. "I'm sure she'll keep it quiet if you ask her--not that that'll be possible for long; it'll get harder before it gets easier-

-but you should tell her. It'll make the world of difference."

And so she goes, telling herself it is a kindness. Rhys has already become such a memory for them all, such a fiction, really, like a character in a book, it's not hard to imagine these extra pages for him. What does it matter, anyway, who the father is? She could wait until the morning, tired as she is, but she knows she'll never sleep for thinking about it.

Outside, she heads to the barn and fetches the bike. When she comes out, she finds Jim perched on the top bar of the gate, like a bird on a telegraph wire.

"You're supposed to be in bed."

"How'd it get in there?" he hisses. "Was it really Rhys?" All she can do is swallow and nod, but when she looks up, what she sees on his face isn't doubt, but jealousy.

Rhys is hers now.

"You'll marry him if he comes back?"

She leans the bike against her side, nods again, stiffly,

feeling as if her head is a stone that might tumble off her shoulders if she moves too much. Arthur hadn't asked the question--unable to utter that 'if to her face--but she knows it's the unspoken assumption. The very end of the happy ending.

"Because you love him," Jim says, as if explaining it to himself. "And he loves you."

"Yes?" she tells him. "Yes."

He purses his lips. "But what if he doesn't come back?" She gives a little strangled yelp, shocked despite herself--

Jim has clung so tenaciously to the possibility of Rhys's survival, only to give up so easily now that he thinks Rhys hers-

-and then shocked at her own shock, at her instinctive duplicity. She puts her face in her hands to cover her confusion, and after a moment she feels him stroke her back.

"It's all right," he says gently. "If it's a boy, you could call it Rhys."

Her sobs have convinced him, satisfied him somehow, yet in the midst of her relief she wonders where they've come from. She wouldn't have thought she could cry for Rhys if she'd had to. Doesn't think herself such an actress, no matter what Mary might reckon. Will lies just spring from her unbidden now? she wonders. Is she embarked on a succession of

them, a lifetime of them? Because yes, if it's a boy, she will have to name it Rhys, and every day of its life she'll call it Rhys, Rhys, Rhys. She can feel the sobs coming again, but when Jim reaches his arm around her, pressing close, she jerks away.

"You should go to bed," she tells him, and he glares at her as if to say,
Make me
. In the moonlight she notices a faint down silvering his upper lip. But then he sticks his tongue out and runs inside.

The war will be over soon, she thinks, looking after him, and he'll be gone too. His mother, Esther knows, has written to him recently to say she was finding a new place for them--no

mention of 'Uncle' Ted--and that she'd send for him soon.

It comes to her that Colin was a boy once, and perhaps that's why, when she thinks of him now, she feels, for the first time, nothing. Not fear. Not hatred. He's done his worst, to be sure, but his worst seems suddenly so much less than her own.

She straddles the bike, points it down the lane and coasts through the dark village.

aking in the infirmary, staring at his leg suspended above him, glowing palely in its plaster, Karsten wonders

fleetingly if he's turning into the invisible man. He can't see his leg, though he knows it's there under the cast, itching fiercely, fragile as glass.

He'd been wary of the interrogator, his excellent German, so much more polished than that of the camp translator, a former lecturer in German literature who spoke an oddly accented brand of High German full of 'thee's and 'thou's, and whom the men called Charlemagne. Rotheram, the captain introduced himself as. He was in his late twenties, Karsten judged, no more than ten years older than him, yet he looked drawn, tired. When he leaned back to run a hand through his hair, he winced, clutched his side, rubbing at some ache, some old wound. His haggard look emboldened Karsten; the man seemed too exhausted to have his wits about him. He offered Karsten tea, and Karsten took it, careful not to let his hands shake. It shocked him that he'd looked forward, back in Dover, to interrogation, as a chance to prove something. But he'd had no secrets then. When Rotheram started by saying "You surrendered, I see," Karsten was actually relieved, not insulted.

The captain produced a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, held it out. "That must have been hard. Would you like to talk about it?"

It might have been the recollection of Dover or the question about surrender, but all at once Karsten realised he knew the

fellow. He reached for the name.
Steiner
.

Karsten drew a cigarette from the pack as gingerly as if it were the pin of a grenade. He hadn't had a smoke for a couple of days--he'd lost Esther's pack when he'd been swept into the sea--and the bitter taste of the tobacco on his tongue thrilled him. He watched Rotheram/Steiner light a match, extend it across the table, and he bent stiffly to the flame. It took him a heady moment to master the darting rush of nicotine, to stop himself from drawing too hungrily on the cigarette.

When he steadied himself, he said, "Can I ask you a question first? Is that permitted?"

"Not normally, no," the captain said, smiling thinly. "But I'll allow it."

"Well, then, are you a Jew? A German Jew?"

Rotheram sat very still, the smile retreating from his lips. He looked at his hands on the table for so long that Karsten thought he was counting the hairs on them. Finally he said, "Can't you tell?" And in truth Karsten couldn't. He'd recognised Rotheram as Steiner as soon as he'd offered a smoke, but that seemed less important than whether he should have recognised him at Dover, known he was a Jew. That's why he'd asked. He stared at the captain as if he might divine the other's secrets, and eventually Rotheram asked, "What if I am?"

"Then I'd ask what it was like for you to leave," Karsten said evenly. "To run? I'd imagine that must have been hard, too."

"Touche," Rotheram told him. He looked up then. "I'll tell you, if you tell me?" And Karsten, after a moment, nodded once.

"Then, yes, I am. I used to be a German, but now I'm just a Jew. Is that what you want to hear?"

It shocked Karsten to find that he believed the man. Stare at him as he might, however, Karsten couldn't see anything

different about him, any more than he had with the couple his mother had turned away from the pension all those years ago. "And leaving," Rotheram went on steadily, "running, if you

will, was the most shameful thing I've ever done in my life. The most cowardly. Sometimes I think saving my life was the worst thing I ever did in it." He leaned towards Karsten then, gave a gaping smile. "But we both know that, I think. What we'd give for a second chance, eh, Corporal?"