A Small Country (22 page)

In the evening, Miriam would do some hand-sewing for her while she was busy with the sewing machine which was her most treasured possession.

At first Miriam had been trusted only with the hemming, but had recently graduated to button-holes and fancy stitches; Mrs Thomas scrutinizing everything she did and occasionally rewarding her with a small, tight smile. She had mentioned paying for her help, but Miriam – receiving twenty-five shillings a week from Rachel Evans’s solicitor – had refused to let her.

As well as helping with dressmaking, Miriam also did most of the housework. Partly because it passed the time, partly because she felt grateful to Mrs Thomas for giving her a home. She knew it wasn’t easy for her; her neighbours talked, and she was dependent on the neighbours for work.

Mrs Thomas would volunteer no information about herself; neither about her childhood nor her married life, and wanted to hear nothing of Miriam’s life. Miriam had once told her about her mother’s poverty and early death, only to be cut short as though such personal details embarrassed her.

The previous week, though, they had been making a wedding dress together. The bride’s mother had bought the material, a bright blue satin, six years earlier, after getting a particularly good price for the annual calf. ‘The only time in my life for me to have any money I didn’t already owe,’ she’d told Mrs Thomas and Miriam. ‘Twenty-three and sixpence it cost me, six yards at three and eleven, and Leyshon and the boys all needing boots, but they had to wait. Make it up pretty, won’t you.’

The bride-to-be was a fat girl with a round, vacant face, but Miriam had taken the greatest trouble, whipping the neck and cuffs with a paler blue thread and smocking the yoke and shoulders.

‘A wedding isn’t everything,’ Mrs Thomas had said, fearing that she was being carried away. ‘It’s not all roses.’

‘Oh it is,’ Miriam had said. ‘A fine wedding is every girl’s dream.’

‘One they soon wake from, you believe me. Many girls get married and spend the rest of their lives wishing they hadn’t. You think everyone is happy but you, but there’s plenty of married women would leap at the chance to change places with you, I can tell you.’

It was the first time Mrs Thomas had spoken so freely to her.

‘But what about the disgrace?’

‘Disgrace? Oh, you’re trying to trick me into saying there’s no disgrace in doing what you’ve done. I won’t do that. But I’ll tell you this; there’s plenty of disgrace inside marriage as well as outside it. I lived in Swansea for a few years while my husband was on the railway there, and I saw plenty of disgrace and heard it too, every Saturday night, especially among those priest-ridden Mary’s children.’

‘But among the Welsh, chapel-going people?’ Miriam had persisted.

‘You won’t get me to say a word against the chapel; I know what you’re after. But I’m not so narrow-minded not to realize that there’s goodness and decency outside chapel as well as inside, outside marriage and inside it.’

It was the nearest they had got to intimacy; the only time when Miriam had felt that Mrs Thomas was on her side, and that her initial reluctance to have her as a lodger was that it might have an adverse effect on her livelihood, not that she herself had any real qualms about Miriam’s character.

But the letter Mrs Thomas had received that morning had shown otherwise.

It was from her youngest son, Ifor. He had enlisted, he told her, and, finding himself stationed at Wrexham, intended coming home for a few days.

The letter seemed to have thrown Mrs Thomas into a state of near panic. She hadn’t said much; had read the short letter to Miriam, that was all; but had spent the morning staring out of the window, then walking about clutching her side as though in pain. She had done no sewing, though the mourning dresses she had cut out the previous evening were urgently needed.

Mrs Thomas, Miriam felt sure, was agitated at the thought of her young son being under the same roof as a fallen woman. She felt she ought to leave, for a time at least. She felt she should return to Llanfryn to her Aunt Hetty, but couldn’t face the questions and sermons she would have to endure. ‘You’ll be back, my girl,’ the old woman had told her when she had left in June, ‘Oh yes, you’ll be back for sure. That man of yours won’t stay away when he begins to feel the shoe pinching. He’ll be back in his good farm before winter, you mark my words.’ How could she return, to prove her right? How could she stay where she was, when her presence was so unwelcome?

In her anxiety, she had walked much further than usual and found herself, for the first time, in the neighbouring village; outside the little school.

Nostalgia overcame her as she drew up by the gate and heard the familiar sounds of children at work and at play; the older ones chanting a poem whilst the little ones clapped and sang to a tinkling piano. She seemed to smell the familiar smells; charcoal stove, chalk, dusty books, carbolic soap. She stood there listening and remembering until afternoon school ended with the Lord’s Prayer and the clanging of desks and chairs. She rushed away then, conscious of what she had lost, She had enjoyed teaching, the children had liked her, she had liked them. And the schoolhouse, only a small four-roomed cottage, was clean and cosy. She had been respected and independent. Now she was an outcast. For the first time, having nothing to uphold her, she felt it bitterly. Instead of retracing her steps, she walked on and on, weeping inside herself.

It was almost dark when she returned. (‘Where have you been?’ Mrs Thomas would say. ‘You’ve kept that baby out too long. The days are drawing in.’)

As she got near the cottage, Miriam could see a young man sitting on the low wall, looking out to sea. He was in khaki uniform, the first Miriam had seen. She thought it must be Mrs Thomas’s son, home earlier than expected, but as she got nearer she realized it was Tom; Josi’s son, Tom. Her heart started to pound. She hurried towards him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘I’m home for a week’s leave,’ he told her. ‘Returning tomorrow.’ She had no idea that he had joined the army. It seemed a strange thing to have done when his mother was so ill.

Uneasy, unable to make small talk, she waited for him to continue. But he didn’t seem to have anything to tell her.

‘I’m sorry I can’t ask you in,’ she said at last.

‘That’s all right. I have to get back anyway. I’ve got to get the seven o’clock train to Llanfryn. I’m going back to my regiment tomorrow.’

‘I must feed the baby,’ Miriam said. Elen had begun to whimper and shake her fists.

‘I’d like to see her. May I?’

Miriam picked her out of the perambulator, turning her towards the sea and the setting sun. She blinked and stopped crying.

Tom examined her gravely. She was the first baby he had ever really looked at.

Why had he come? Miriam wondered. What news had he for her? He couldn’t have come merely to see the baby.

‘It’s my mother,’ he said at last. ‘That’s what I’ve come about; my mother. Even in the last few days I’ve been home there’s been quite a change in her condition; she’s sinking fast. She’s in considerable pain most of the time.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Miriam said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I just wanted you to know how it is,’ Tom said. ‘So that you understand.’

‘Thank you for coming.’

‘So that you know how things are. How my father is.’

‘I do understand. I really do.’

At any other time Mari-Elen would have appreciated being held up close to look at the blazing sky, but not now. She was hungry and cold and she began to cry hard and insistently. Her lower lip shook with indignation.

‘I must go in. Thank you for coming. I do understand.’

Mrs Thomas said nothing when Miriam came in. Only took the baby while she took off her shawl and got ready to feed her. Afterwards she poked the fire and made her a cup of tea.

‘I’m Mr Evans’s son,’ Tom had told her when he’d asked for Miriam. He had seemed quiet and well-spoken. It had made her wonder, and it was only a lifetime’s reserve that prevented her asking Miriam what he had wanted with her.

Miriam felt Mrs Thomas’s eyes on her and imagined her disapproval. Perhaps she would now think she was involved with two men. Luckily, she was beyond caring what anyone thought. How beautiful the setting sun had looked.... I just wanted you to understand.

Of course she understood. She didn’t blame anyone.

The baby, still only five months old, sucked so vigorously that she seemed to be taking away her whole substance. She imagined herself being sucked away until only her skeleton remained. She could hear the sea outside.

The evening passed somehow. Another day almost finished. Almost finished. Like Josi’s poor wife. And his son. Going to France, to kill or be killed. ‘The minstrel boy to the war has gone.’ She had taught that song to many classes of children, always moved by its pathos, never till tonight so moved.

She lay back in her chair, desire wounding her. Josi would never be the same with her again. She knew that. ‘The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.’ The way of a man with a maid. Beautiful words. Like flowers. Like burrs.

Not that he would desert her. After a decent interval he would come for her, but it would be his duty to her and the baby which would bring him. The headlong love she wanted was dead. How could it be otherwise? What love was proof against righteousness and guilt? Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust and guilt and righteousness doth corrupt. The urgent unquestioning love she wanted was dead. The wages of sin is death. They had disregarded everyone and everything in their passion, but the God of Israel neither slumbered nor slept.

She roused herself angrily. She wouldn’t sink into that self indulgence; God keeping watch over her.

Life was without any plan, totally chaotic. God was the wheel in the sky, nothing more, in its drive she had been insignificantly torn aside like the skylark’s nest by the harrow. I am poured out like water.

There was a sharp death taste in her mouth.

After Mrs Thomas had gone to bed, Miriam crept out of the house and walked towards the sea.

SEVENTEEN

Edward’s marriage had an inauspicious beginning.

Rose was anything but a serene bride. A few hours before the wedding, she seemed to recover all her old spirit, feeling that her parents had taken advantage of her humiliating loss of nerve under arrest in order to get her safely off their hands, despising herself that she had allowed them to manipulate her into a marriage she wasn’t ready for. She all but refused to go through with the ceremony, but once more she was not quite brave enough to act according to her conscience.

During their honeymoon in Devon, she confessed to Edward that she had married him largely out of weakness and fear, and was unable to accept his repeated assurances of sympathy or his insistence that marriage should not limit her opportunities in any way: she should continue to work for the Women’s Movement in Oxford, where he, too, would throw himself into the struggle. He was unfailingly loving and undemanding, but couldn’t help the occasional feeling that he had, perhaps, lost even more than she. Ten or eleven days passed bleakly by.

It was the imminence of war which brought them together.

Rose’s cousin, Claire, had been studying in Europe for some months, and having missed their wedding, travelled to Devon to see them.

‘We’ll be at war in a few days,’ she told them. ‘The French are already mobilizing and we can’t let them fight alone, the Germans are breaking treaty after treaty. When I was in Berlin it was already obvious that nothing was going to stop them. I’ll never forget the mood of the crowd in the Unter den Linden, cheering and singing whenever a company of infantry or a squadron of horse went by. They’re a people so full of aggressive energy that they’re ready to surge through Europe. And it’s up to us to stop them. England must unite with France to defend the freedom of the little nations. To remain neutral would be treachery.’

Edward and Rose were fired by her patriotism. They read all the newspapers they had neglected and decided to cut short their honeymoon – they were to have spent a month in the West Country – in order to be back in London at the centre of things.

When they got off the train at Paddington, they realized that Claire’s prediction had been proved right; the station was thronged with troops going to join their regiments, and the newspaper boys outside the station with their placards – ‘War Official’ – were being besieged by normally placid and sober citizens wrestling for copies of the evening paper. The King had already proclaimed that the Army Reserve should be called out on permanent service.

The next day, the Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, asked Parliament for power to increase the number of men in the army by half a million and Edward immediately decided to apply for a commission instead of returning to Oxford.

London seemed transformed. There was wholesale panic buying of food – even perishable goods – as though people expected an immediate invasion. German shops and businesses were boarded up, their owners gone. There were long queues of men standing for hours outside every recruiting office. Even the noises of London; the cries of street traffic, the hooting of horns, the screams of trains, seemed to have become more strident and aggressive.