The Line Between Us (14 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

I remembered standing in the queue outside the New Picture House in Monmouth eating cod and chips wrapped in newspaper. We had one portion between us and took turns holding it to warm our hands and Jenny said her mother disapproved of eating in the street and I said mine did too and it became a small transgression for us to share. There was fat and newsprint on our fingers and both of us breathed the same steamy, greasy air. Jenny said she rather wished she’d had a pickled egg as well and I offered to go back and get her one if she kept my place, but she caught me by the coat,

“Ifor –?” She was wearing my old navy scarf and a knitted blue cloche hat on her head and peeping out between the two, her face had an affirmative, look at us enjoying ourselves expression, drawing attention to the fact, using it in evidence.

“I’ll get you an egg, if you want,” I said.

She shook her head.

“You finish the chips then …” The queue advanced a few paces and I put my arm around her to shepherd her forward and she curled against me.

“We’ll share them …” she found the fattest chip left and held it up to my mouth and as I was taking it between my teeth I heard the familiar, intermittent sound of the Daimler, Brown declutching to change gear as he pointed it in the general direction of the kerb. It came to a halt a few feet from us and he bustled round to open the door, holding it for you as you stepped out onto the pavement. I bit into the chip, then chewed and swallowed it. You swept by in evening dress, some kind of velvet cape not designed with warmth in mind, held in place by a brooch in the shape of a jaguar picked out in diamonds. It looked like a jaguar, but with inexplicable agitation I wondered if it might be a leopard, or some other big cat and I was so intent on resolving the matter to my own satisfaction that I didn’t notice the gentleman stepping out behind you until he slid his arm around your waist to guide you past the head of the queue and into the cinema. There was black braid down the side of his trousers and his patent leather shoes had a celestial gleam. I couldn’t take in anything else. I closed my eyes, remembering your slightness as I carried you in my arms across the Drowning Pool. I felt skinned alive by what I’d seen.

“What’s wrong with queuing, like everyone else?” muttered Jenny.

I blinked. We reached the kiosk at the entrance and I bought our tickets: there were only balcony seats left and I got two in the front row, with only a dim idea of what I was doing or where I was. My head was full of the hurt that you and I had inflicted on one another.

“Ifor?” Jenny tugged at my sleeve.

“I’m just going to the gents,” I said. “There’s your ticket. I’ll see you inside.” I reached the foyer wall and leant against it, feeling slightly sick as the patterned carpet shelved away beneath my feet. The people pressing into the auditorium were a series of broken images with no sequence or continuity, a blur of faces, hats, coats, a handbag, a silver-topped cane. I kept seeing the man’s arm slide around you and all I wanted to do was to elbow my way through the throng and plough along the rows until I found you. I wanted to rescue you. I waited, leaning against the wall until my breathing slowed and the moment passed. I could hear the crackle and hum of the audience whispering and unwrapping their chocolates, then the crash of cymbals as the music started. I ran up the stairs to the balcony two at a time and made my way to my seat as the lights were dimmed.

The film was some Noel Coward frippery called
Bitter Sweet
. I watched the opening scene in a stupor, staring at the pleats of cigarette smoke rising in folds above the stalls. At one point Jenny leaned over and murmured in my ear, “Hugh Williams is very handsome,” meaning to get a rise from me, but I was scouring the darkness below to see if I could find where you were sitting.

I recollected myself. “I thought the other chap would be more your type,” I whispered back and then I spotted you, your outline silvery in the light from the projector. I’d know the shape of you anywhere, even with the cusp of your cheek turned away as it was then. I watched you watching the screen, taking in your small responses: shifting your weight against the armrest then settling further back into your seat, the rueful play of your features as you listened to the song the heroine was singing – something about the world having gone awry. Your face was expressive even in repose, I wanted to interpret every nuance, to be your diviner, your willow witcher.

I’d have taken any kind of proximity, whatever the collateral cost, so I sat in a vigilant, dream-like state, suspended between what I could see of you, what I imagined and all that I remembered. When your companion, whose broad back and sandy, thinning hair I had dismissed as an irrelevance after the shock of the first sighting, inveigled his arm around your shoulders you stiffened, but you didn’t pull away, and I glimpsed the incline of your nape in the treacherous shadows, knowing that I was a traitor myself.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I remembered the heat of the summer before the fire struck, how the migrainous sunshine cracked the earth and shrivelled the plants, so that everything seemed to cling: people, places, clothing. The cottage felt far too small for us, though Delyth had set a date for her wedding at last, and each exhalation that we made seemed to add to the sum total of the warmth so that we hardly dared to breathe. Day after day I worked in the vineyard, carrying a cylinder of copper sulphate solution in a harness loaded onto my back, spraying the grapes to protect against downy mildew, the old house like a mirage shimmering at the top of the slope and the sky above an undeflectable blue. The valley no longer seem to be full of living things, I kept finding small desiccated creatures in the flower borders and under the scanty shade of the brassicas in the vegetable garden: mostly dormice, but once I came across the dried out punctuation mark of an adder. We were all of us turned to tinder in the exterminating heat, which sent fissures shooting through people’s composure that opened up without warning into ravines of irritation. A whole roster of arguments took place: Ma had a go at Delyth for leaving the tap on or some such nonsense and Delyth had a go at Ma for nagging and sometimes in the evening when I went to Brown’s dugout to pick up the paper I could hear Mrs Brown and him tearing each other to shreds, blistering rows they had, and I walked straight past, wondering what was waiting for me at home.

Brown was mightily impressed by hearing the King at Christmas and he set his heart on having his own wireless, although it cost him a good part of his savings. He wouldn’t tell me how much exactly, he came over all evasive, but he said it was more than fifteen pounds. Fifteen pounds! Perhaps that’s what the rows with Mrs Brown were about.

He went all the way to Cardiff to fetch it and when he got it home he set it up in pride of place bang in the middle of the shelving made from wooden wine crates – his collection of tobacco tins was consigned to a cardboard box on a high ledge to make a space. I went round after work to see it.

“Known as the Dartmoor Special,” Brown said. “It’s a Murphy A3.” Before he got properly into his stride I asked if he would turn it on for me, but he wasn’t going to be that easily distracted, “Look at that grille silk now, will you?”

I looked, obligingly.

“Grey – see? Your Ekco wireless uses copper coloured silk, but not your Murphy. More pleasing to the eye, the grey – wouldn’t you say?”

I would. I did.

“R. D. Russell design,” he said, modestly. He scratched his head as though he couldn’t possibly take any credit for the excellence of his choice. “They’ve recently brought out the Murphy A3A. They’ve moved the tuning window slightly on the newer model, but I’m rather taken with this one, I must admit.”

“Can we have a listen, Mr Brown?”

He turned it on and twisted the dial with such attentiveness you’d have thought he was cracking a safe. The sound came and went amongst the bristling static until, unmistakably, we heard a woman singing. I thought for a moment of the nuns at Nanagalan intoning their plainsong in the olden days and in a way this voice was just as eerie. The song she sang was husky with smoke, a late night song full of whisky and regret and Brown and I were open-mouthed at the wonder of it.

“Elizabeth Welch,” he said in awe when it was over, blinking as though coming from darkness into light. The next song she sang was ‘Love for Sale’ and the two of us sat there nursing our cups of tea imagining ourselves in some Harlem speakeasy. “A bit racy, that one is …” he said after, clearing his throat, concerned for my innocence, my married innocence.

It was a rare evening, sitting rapt in the dugout listening to the strange, spellbinding acoustic of the Murphy A3 and it stuck in my memory because so much of what we heard on the wireless after that was bad news. It seemed that there were other conflagrations breaking out before our fire started. We heard reports that in Germany the Nazis had started burning books only months after Herr Hitler became Chancellor. A book is a terrible thing to burn, all that civilising knowledge destroyed on a whim, and the Jews began fleeing from the encroaching flames like the poor field creatures I kept finding as I worked in the gardens.

I was doing the final spraying about two weeks before the harvest was due and a bumper crop it was, on account of the weather. I saw a young lad working his way down the hillside towards me, a proper dandy in a linen suit with a silk cravat and a handkerchief that matched and I braced myself for the fact that he was probably another of your suitors – there had been one or two, of late – fearing that if I hardened my heart too often it would stay hard, that already, for too much of the time, it felt like a calcified fist in my chest, when I realised that it wasn’t a young lad at all: it was you.

“It’s my Marlene Dietrich look,” you said, dismissively, then you took a little swipe at me because you could. “Nicholas says he likes me in trousers.”

I stood there thinking that I wouldn’t play a game of parry and thrust where the only aim was to draw blood, I wouldn’t play a round of Lucky Nicholas with you. “Looks good,” I said. “Takes a bit of getting used to, mind. Thought you were a bloke …”

“How is Mrs Ifor?” you asked sardonically, but I answered your gaze and held it, until your pupils widened and all I could see was the darkness at their centre, none of the oceanic blueness which I loved, and I wondered if your heart was becoming as calcified as mine. “Actually,” you glanced away, wanting to ask the question but not to hear the answer, “I came to find you because we’ve had a call from the fire brigade in Whitecross Street. There’s a forest fire on the Crown Estate near Monmouth –”

“I know,” I said. “They were talking about it in the village yesterday. Bound to happen. We’ve had temperatures of ninety degrees or more for weeks now.”

“Yes,” you said. “Well.” You slid your hands into your pockets and for a moment all your sophistication disappeared and dressed up in your strange attire, you looked as young as a girl fresh from school. “They’ve advised us to dig some fire breaks.” You turned and gestured to the wooded slope beyond the Drowning Pool, our ruined cathedral made of beech trees open to the sky. “Along the top. Over there.”

I nodded. “How big do they want these fire breaks to be?”

“As wide as you can manage, I suppose?” you said. “Only, Ifor –?” Our eyes met again and I was disarmed without any warning, doubled up with wanting you. I shifted the weight of the cylinder on my back. Sometimes the desire I felt for you rose like violence from a part of me I didn’t much admire, outstripping politeness and respect and all of my good intentions. I gripped the straps of the harness for something to hold, hating everything about the situation we were in, wondering if it was the not-having that made the wanting so unquenchable and whether we should just give in, forget what people would say, forget Jenny and your mother, lose ourselves …

As if sensing the contagion that had a hold of me, you glanced along the row of vines, then at the ground, then at the slope beyond the Drowning Pool; you looked everywhere but at me. “Don’t spend too long on it, will you?” You fiddled with the end of your cravat and the tension was as tight as wire, humming between us. “With the harvest so close I’m sure you’ve got better things to do with your time,” you said and I saw you realise that you had no idea what I did with my time and that the thought was a brief affliction to you, sharp and swift as a paper cut.

“Yes, Miss Ella,” I said and then added, because I couldn’t help myself, “Who’s Nicholas, then?”

You didn’t answer, although you considered my question for a moment with the ghost of a smile. “Let me know if you need extra help from the village.” You began to walk back up the hill and I unclenched my hands, examining the welts which the strap of the harness had made in the hard skin of my palms, until you were out of sight.

We dug a flat, wide trench through the woodland on the brow of the hill, Brown and I, while Samuelson gave us the benefit of his close supervision. He raked the leaves and twigs into occasional piles and at around three o’clock he sauntered off in search of a tarpaulin to put them in, whistling the while, and Brown didn’t alter the pace of his digging by one jot, he kept at it with stoic persistence, just the set of his mouth a little tighter, that was all. An hour later Samuelson came back without the tarpaulin and lugubriously regarded his piles of leaves. With a sigh, he rolled a cigarette, lit it, and then dropped the match on the ground. Brown shouted then, he fairly bellowed at him.

“Samuelson! You stupid – blighter!”

“Keep yer hair on –” Samuelson growled, stamping on the match.

“Can anyone smell – burning?” I interrupted, sniffing the air and Samuelson looked at me witheringly and waved his cigarette under my nose.

“No – not that,” I said brushing him away and sniffing again. It was unmistakable: the briny smell of wood alight in the open air.