Resistance (21 page)

It wasn’t always easy for her to find the poet. As long as it wasn’t raining he was nearly always outside, painting, even when the weather got colder. But he kept changing where he painted. Sometimes it was on the slope just below the old monastery. At other times she’d find him down between the two streams, trying to capture their movement, their white water and ferny banks. But she always tried to find him after her delivery, in the hope of another story, or just to spend an hour watching his brush uncover a strange, supple version of the land around them.

Then suddenly the poet wasn’t there. Somehow Sarah had always known that one day he wouldn’t be; that he was as much a product of the season as the tall hay fields or the swallows tying knots in the air. As inconstant and brief as the spring blossom or the long, blood-streaked summer evenings. Her mother had prepared her for his going. “They won’ last long, mark my words,” Sarah had overheard her say to her father. “It’s a holiday for them, tha’ place. Another winter’ll see ’em off, you watch now. Back to their towns soon enough.”

Sarah first told her mother about the poet when she was helping her with the washing, feeding a pile of wet clothes into the wringer while her mother worked the handle. She told her about his stories, about his paintings. She didn’t tell her about his wound. Her mother had frowned down at her, shaken her head, and gone back to turning the handle. “Stories never put food on the table,
bach,” she’d said as the flattened clothes emerged from between the rollers. “Work, tha’s what feeds yer. Now, put in tha’ shirt there, will you?”

Her father had been more positive. “No harm in it, is there?” he’d said to his wife when she’d voiced her concern about their daughter spending so much time in a field with a blow-in poet and painter. “Do ’er some good more like. Get out a bit, hear about the world. He was in the war, you know?” Seeing Sarah standing in the door frame, watching them, he’d moved closer to her mother and added in a lower voice. “She misses her brothers, see.”

But then the other stories about the people at the monastery started to come out. Stories Sarah only ever really understood or heard properly years later when she was an adult. Stories about the poet’s friend, Eric Gill, the artist who first brought them all here, arriving as a group in a pony and cart in the middle of a downpour four years ago. About his ways. The stories began in whispered knots of women outside the chapel and spread like gorse fires throughout the valley. Sarah’s mother came home one Sunday and held Sarah against her chest so hard and for so long that Sarah had to push back against her arms to catch a proper breath. Then her mother had asked her questions, a strained look on her face. “No, Mam,” Sarah had replied to the same enquiry asked several different ways but never asked straight. “He jus’ told me stories an’ did ’is paintin’. Tha’s all.” For weeks after that her father kept himself low and quiet about the house, treading carefully around his wife for fear of spilling her boiling anger. “Catholics,” Sarah had heard her mother say over tea with a visiting friend weeks later. “What can you expect?”

So Sarah never got a chance to go back to see if the poet ever returned to his rock in the field. Her mother forbade her to ever go near that end of the valley again, and over the years since, apart from Mrs. Thomas’s brief flush of interest, she’d forgotten the poet and his stories. Until now. Until the captain’s mention of his namesake and its resonance against those diagrams from “The Countryman’s Diary” that had so haunted her these past months. Those
sketches and plans of subterranean bunkers, submerged under the earth and peat of the hills. They made her think of the poet and his stories again. One story in particular, about a sleeping lord and his army. There was a king, that’s what the poet had told Sarah one afternoon as he painted by the streams. A Welsh king and his army driven into the hills by Edward I. Beaten, but not killed and not captured, even though no one ever saw him or his army again. That, the poet had explained, was because they’d never come back from those hills. Thousands of men swallowed within the muscles of earth that formed Wales’s natural defences against her invaders. And they were still there. At this point the poet had paused in his painting, placed his brush into a cloudy jar of water, and leant closer to Sarah’s listening face. His voice dropped, so quiet she could barely hear him over the running of the streams. Yes, he’d whispered, still there. In the hills, deep inside them, buried under the peat, heather, gorse, rowan, bog-cotton, stone, and soil. Asleep. Not dead. Asleep. An entire army and their king, sleeping in the hills, ready to wake and defend the country in its hour of need. The sleeping lord and his sleeping army is what the poet had called them and as he’d described them, Sarah saw them: a glimmering seam of armour, chain mail, and swords, just as she’d seen in her history books at school. A rare ore of sleeping men, embedded in the hearts of the hills, waiting.

Had he known then somehow? Had he known that years later, when that little girl was a woman, her husband and all the other husbands in her valley would disappear into those same hills? That they would go underground, deep underground? If that’s where they were. She could hardly remember the pictures in that pamphlet now. Had she really ever seen “The Countryman’s Diary” at all? Why did Maggie have to burn it? So quickly. She’d been numb then, so soon after learning. Why couldn’t Maggie have waited?

Sarah turned over in the bed which still felt too wide for just her body. She was being stupid. All these hours alone. It was a story. A story for a little girl. She was a woman now; she couldn’t believe
such things. But she wanted to. Wanted to believe so badly. That Tom and the others would be coming back.
To defend the country in its hour of need
. But wasn’t that hour already here? German soldiers in her kitchen asking questions, turning the pages of her family Bible, holding her wedding photograph. She
was
Tom’s country and she was in need. But he hadn’t woken. Tom hadn’t come to her. He was still out there, dumb and unseen, absorbed into the hills’ unending green. And deeper still now, under the snow too. He was sinking deeper from her every day.

She had to remember him. Properly, with all her senses. When she’d held that photograph by the fire this evening, she’d felt nothing. It was just paper in glass, light on paper. She couldn’t even conjure the memory of its being taken anymore. Her memory was the photograph, she saw that now. And that wasn’t enough. Not if she was going to hold on to him, to stop him sinking further away from her through the centuries of soil and earth. She must conjure him, not memories of him. Conjure him, Tom, here, into their bedroom. Like Edith trying to conjure her son back from the dead. But Sarah didn’t need any boards with letters on, any upturned glasses. She had him already, inside her. She just had to draw him up to her again. Draw him up through the layers of her forgetting like stubborn groundwater drawn up into a well.

The first time she saw him. Surely she could conjure that again? The moment she first saw her future husband. As a girl playing on her own in the fields she’d often thought about that man. The man who would be the father of her children, a little boy playing somewhere in another field at exactly the same time, oblivious of their impending meeting. Or maybe he was a young man already working on a farm. For a few months of her schooling, he’d even been an earnest young student bent over his books in a town with spires and old stone buildings. And then after all that wondering, years later she’d finally seen him. It was at a dance in the village hall in Longtown. One of those dances organised by the community to make the young of the valleys, who spent their lives divided by the long fingers
of the Black Mountains, mix and meet. The kind of dance at which countless other women in the area had met their own future husbands.

She hadn’t wanted to go. Her father was keen she should, though. He and her mother were getting older now. “Can’t have you stuck wi’ us old’uns every night, bach,” he’d told her. He’d got his friend’s daughter Branwen to call for her, to make sure they went.

There was a band. A live band with one of them playing a fiddle and another on a trumpet. The men drank beer, cider, and wheat wine. Some of the women did too. It was the end of September, the hard part of the year over with until winter. The air in the hall was thick and musty with released energy, with anticipation.

Branwen got talking to one of the men they’d not seen before, a thin dark-haired builder with a thick moustache. It was he who introduced Sarah to Tom, to stop her hanging around Branwen like a mute chaperone. Tom had been drinking cider. She could smell it off him, sweet and rich. She’d spent all day bottling pears, all day with her fingers in their soft yellow bodies. When they’d danced, after an hour or so of talking, their smells mingled, apple and pear. “Together we make an orchard,” she’d laughed into his ear. Tom hadn’t understood her, but he’d still smiled at her, and after that first dance he’d carried on smiling all night. It was more than he’d ever smiled since, but by the time he’d called on Sarah a couple of times over the following weeks, that didn’t matter anymore. By then she’d come to like his serious silence. It was solid, like him; a strong, secure quiet, still as a sudden pool in a shallow running river.

It was a winter courtship. For the next few months after the dance, Tom would ride over the Hatterall once a week on a Sunday to meet Sarah and walk with her. They always walked, even when the weather got cold. Through the lanes, down to the ruined abbey, and sometimes up onto the bare hilltops, where birds started away from under their feet and a herd of wild ponies witnessed their first kiss. Tom knew every plant and bird they saw, and sometimes his conversation consisted of no more than a list of names accompanied by short nods of his head in the direction of whatever he was
naming. Sarah told him he was like Adam walking through the garden of Eden, naming the animals for the first time. He’d looked down at her and she’d seen that again he hadn’t understood her, but she’d also seen again that it didn’t matter. Her arm through his, sharing the hillside in evening light, resting her head against his shoulder as they walked. These were what mattered to her then.

One Sunday after their walk, Tom came in for tea. Her mother made too much of everything, bread and butter,
bara brith
, piled slabs of cheese. Tom and her father talked about farming and that was when he told her parents about Upper Blaen, his late uncle’s farm over in the Olchon he’d be taking on come spring. After tea her father took Tom out to show him his prize ram. That must have been when Tom asked her father for Sarah’s hand, because the next Sunday, as they were standing by the river watching the snow melt in its eddies and foam, as she warmed her fingers under his jacket, he’d asked her to marry him.

After the wedding they’d come straight to Upper Blaen, and then, that night, they’d come here to this bed. Sarah had no older sister to speak with and her mother had long since retreated too far behind her sayings and phrases to ever talk straight about anything. Still, Sarah thought she knew what to expect. She’d lived on a farm all her life, and even Branwen, whom she’d seen some more of since the dance, had at times talked of their future wedding nights.

Now, years after that first night together, after five years of marriage and two months of Tom’s missing, she tried to remember completely. Everything. The sound of him washing in the basin as she lay waiting; the scent of the skin on his shoulders; his hands touching her clumsily where they’d never touched her before; his hair brushing coarse against her cheek. The way he’d moved above her, the weight of him. The way he’d groaned as if in pain and the way he’d suddenly shivered the length of his body, the muscles of his back quivering like a horse’s flank under the touch of summer flies. The way he’d shrunk away from her afterwards, like sand through an hourglass.

Sarah hadn’t shivered like Tom that night and she didn’t for
many nights afterwards, until early one morning, when Tom was out on the hill, she’d discovered she could move herself in a way that Tom never had. Lying there on her own that morning, with the grey wash of the dawn seeping through the curtains, she’d made herself lighter. It had felt as if she was turning a cord within her, tighter and tighter, until eventually it broke inside her, releasing her thighs to clasp about her fingers as she fell from the height of her rising. As she’d fallen Sarah’s blood had switched within her, flicking the wrong way down her arteries and veins before subsiding back, diminished with its return but still charged with the resonance of that sudden momentum. A slow burn dissipating across her pelvis and hips like the concentric ripples of a sinking stone, spreading and fading over the surface of a lake.

Sarah gasps. Lying alone once again, in her dark bedroom, she lets out a short, rasping gasp. The dogs in the yard below bark, their sounds muffled through the snow at the window. She’d wanted to conjure Tom. She’d wanted to salvage him from the depths of his missing with all her senses. And she had. He’d been here again, with her in their bed, looking down at her. But then as she’d lain beneath him his face had begun to change until it was no longer his she saw above her, but that of the captain’s. The German captain’s face, looking down at her, the snow melting in his hair as he removed his glasses to reveal those two red impressions, imprinted like shallow brandings on either side of the bridge of his nose.

T
he coming of the snow made a choice for the whole valley that Albrecht had already made for himself and his men. They would not leave. They could not go anywhere. The Olchon was choked with snow, frozen closed. Even the distant view, had they been able to climb the hills, had gone, obscured behind low cloud and mist. It was as if his silent prayer had been answered and for once the weight of his own decision taken from his shoulders. It had even been Alex who’d suggested going out to help the farm women. So all he’d had to do was respond, respond to circumstance just as any good Wehrmacht officer should. That was why he’d gone to see the old woman afterwards. To ensure some kind of a working balance, an equilibrium in their shared and now forced isolation, for however long it might last.