The Line Between Us (19 page)
Read The Line Between Us Online
Authors: Kate Dunn
I remembered His Majesty’s Silver Jubilee and how it rescued us, for a day or two, from our worries and our fears. The Prime Minister was too old and frail to contemplate what German rearmament might mean: what need did Adolf Hitler have of conscription, not to mention his own Luftwaffe? With the scars from the war to end all wars still livid, this was a question that most of us were scared to answer. The plans for the celebrations of the glorious reign of our King Emperor were a diversion from plans for a major civil defence exercise to teach us all how to use gas masks.
The parish council came up with a cracking programme: on the day before the jubilee there was to be a sports afternoon for the village children, followed by tea; then in the evening there was to be a pageant at the village hall describing the history of Morwithy. On the day itself, a service of thanksgiving was to be held in the parish church. You offered to hold the sports day and the teas in the grounds of Nanagalan as a thank you for the loyal support of the villagers at the time of the fire.
I’d hardly seen you since the night we danced together. Our next weekly meeting was cancelled because it was Easter, then all of us were caught up in the preparations for the jubilee, so you went about your business and I went about mine and perhaps both of us felt some relief. I saw you once, though: Jenkins and I, Tom Ten Bricks and some folk from the village were putting the finishing touches to the marquee on Dancing Green. Something made me lift my head – the leaf weight of your gaze upon me as you wandered over the grass towards us.
“Is everything going alright?” you asked, scanning the marquee. You had a tiny puppy with you, a whippet dog and you crouched down to make much of him.
“Reckon so, Miss Ella.” I watched you playing with the little fellow, scratching his tummy as he lay on his back till he was in transports of delight.
“Good,” you said, glancing up to see that my eyes were on you as your fingers worked the dog’s sleek pelt. “You’ll let me know if there are any problems, won’t you?”
“Of course, Miss Ella.”
You fiddled with the puppy’s collar, not looking at me now, then with some sleight of hand on your part or the little fellow’s, I could have sworn you let the dog go free.
“Damn,” you said. “He hasn’t had his inoculations.”
Tom Ten Bricks and Gwilym Jones the Ancient exchanged glances at your blasphemy, then recollecting themselves they made minor, sanctimonious adjustments to a guy rope.
“He’s not meant to be off the lead,” you said, shading your eyes to see the kinetic perfection of the whippet streaking away across the garden, not much more than an impression of flattened ears, shoulder blades carving forwards and the piston effect of muscles working. You turned to face me with that artless, aristocratic helplessness I’d come to know.
“Would you like me to go after him, miss?”
You hesitated, looked in the direction of the men, then nodded. We set off and you followed me through the nut tunnel, each of us keeping a careful distance. “What’s his name?” I asked.
“His full name is Bayard Clarion’s Jasper,” you said wryly, screwing up your eyes to peer into the distance. “I call him Jasper for short.”
We lapsed into silence after that, scuffing our way through the long grass. I felt a heaviness in your presence I had never felt before. I was full of guilt at what had happened and resolve that it shouldn’t happen again, yet these righteous feelings were tempered with anxiety that you might be feeling the same remorse and regret that I was, a prospect that would have finished me altogether. I kept my eyes fixed on the hummocky ground and walked a length ahead of you, without speaking.
From time to time you called out for your dog and then upon a reflex I remembered to scan the slope ahead. I could see the first green graze of spring in the branches of the trees cresting the hill and the sight of it caught my breath: the unfailing promise of renewal. It made me sigh out loud.
The dog’s lead you were holding slipped through your fingers and you stooped to pick it up. “We were probably both a bit carried away the other evening.” You straightened up so that your back was at an angle to me. You stood obliquely turned away.
“Probably …”
“Although it’s not as if –” You dropped your gaze to the dog lead, running the leather through your fingers, tracing the grain of it with your nail. “I mean, we were only dancing …”
“Yes,” I said, flinching as you used the excuses I had made.
You nodded, and then you started to fiddle with the chrome clip at one end. “It’s not as if we were doing anything wrong.”
“Wrong’s different for different people,” I began, thinking of Jenny, edging my way towards saying what had to be said, spelling it out for me as much as for you.
“One dance –” You gave the lightest lift of your shoulders, a thistledown shrug, but you didn’t turn to face me.
“I’m a married man,” I said.
You were still for a moment. “Yes.” You began to coil the lead up tight, binding the leather round and round. “And anyway, I’m –”
“Yes.” I didn’t want to hear you list the differences between us any more than you wished to hear of my – attachment.
“And you’re –”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
You nodded. “Well,” you said. “No more dancing.” You looked back at me over your shoulder; a slow, relinquishing stare. Then before we knew it, the little fellow was upon us; he’d crept up on us unawares. “Jasper,” you cried, bending down to pet him and he licked your fingers as you fed him biscuits and you clipped the lead onto his collar, then scooped him up and held him in your arms.
The heaviness that was on me settled. No more dancing. I stood there, watching the puppy nuzzle against you, his snout following the scent of biscuit to your pocket, so that you laughed and whispered and tickled his neck and he gave a tiny yowl of pleasure that tore into me. The lonely rich buy things: expensive clothes to wear, and motor cars, and houses, and holidays, and animals to love; that’s how they fill the vastness, while the rest of us …
“Best be getting back to work, Miss Ella,” I said.
I remembered how terrible the gaiety of the jubilee celebrations seemed: all that joy on display as we strained to escape what was coming to us. It made everything seem out of kilter: Jenny trying to mend her heart with hopeless glue and smiling as she did it, and me smiling back at her encouraging, compensatory smiles; you and I acting as if nothing had happened between us and wishing that something had. None of it seemed real. There were three million people unemployed, Herr Hitler was leading us all to hell in a handcart and our response was to set the trestle tables for tea, whip out the bunting and have a party. Perhaps that’s what has put the great into Great Britain, but it seemed peculiar to me.
The King had the measure of it more than the rest of us. He didn’t forget the unemployed, or the disabled – he gave them pride of place in his special broadcast. He wasn’t afraid to talk about the future, either. “Other anxieties may be in store, they may all be overcome if we meet them with courage, confidence and continuity.” I thought about his words a good deal after, searching for those qualities in myself.
The garden was wearing its new spring clothes: the clematis was out and the white lilac which your mother had loved was beginning to unfurl. We’d marked proper chalk running lanes along the lawn in front of the marquee and everything looked tidy. Some of the women from the village, including my old Ma, were seeing to the last minute touches, arranging posies of flowers in patriotic colours on every table, and I needed to get hold of Jenkins. I wanted him to direct any cars which arrived to the designated parking in the courtyard, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. On a couple of occasions I’d run him to ground in one of the greenhouses, staring hotly at the trays of plants, mouthing information, so I was on my way to the kitchen garden to see if he was there, when I bumped into Brown. He’d volunteered to oversee the races and was heading for his dugout to fetch the starting pistol. He walked with an old man’s shuffle as if he were wearing carpet slippers, although his shoes were polished to a shine you could see your face in.
“Ifor –” he said my name as if I were still a boy; I half expected him to reach out and ruffle my hair. He was the father I’d gained, not the Dad that I’d lost.
“You haven’t seen Jenkins, have you?”
He shook his head. “Queer sort of a lad,” he observed ruminatively.
“He’s not so bad. He’s a bit of a whizz at Linnaean Classifications – knows them all inside out and back to front. Puts me to shame.” We fell into companionable step together. I shot him a sideways glance. “Everything alright for this afternoon, Mr Brown?” It was as close as I could come to asking him if he could cope, knowing as I did that he was more out of kilter than the rest of us, following the fire.
“Reckon so,” he answered, non-committally. I followed him into the dugout and watched as he reached up to the top of the wooden wine box shelving and lifted down a tin wrapped in some greasy gabardine. He unwound the material and opened the lid, then lifted out the gun which was wrapped, in its turn, in some wadding. “It’s a Webley Mark One air pistol,” he said. He wiped the wooden handle with his sleeve. “Should do the job nicely.” He scooped up a handful of pellets and put them in his trouser pocket, then replaced the gun in its tin.
“Are you sure ...” I began, mindful that even the blow from a hammer could make him jump. I couldn’t help thinking of him leaning against the door of the Daimler, with his hat fallen to the floor.
“I know how to handle a gun, for Christ’s sake!” he snapped.
“Of course, of course – I didn’t mean –”
He made small, offended adjustments to his shoulders, twitching them into place. He picked up the tin and tucked it under his arm. “Let’s find this lad of yours, shall we?” he said brusquely.
Jenkins wasn’t in any of the greenhouses and he wasn’t in the potting shed. We made our way back through the courtyard. The door to the kitchen was open and the scent of sugar and vanilla hung on the breeze. Drawn by the smell of baking I strolled up to the door, although Brown hung back, glancing up at the clock tower. “Shall we grab a quick bite ...?” I suggested. “There’s a good twenty minutes before the crowds start arriving and I haven’t had any lunch.” I began to wander down the passage, when I heard something that brought me to a standstill. It was Mrs Brown, her voice like raw silk, reading out a recipe.
“I’m going to take eight ounces of sweet almonds and pound them in a mortar with some orange flower water.”
I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Then I’m going to add a quarter pound of bitter almonds for the taste, see ...?”
In my mind I could see her silvery, dark hair coming loose in the heat of the kitchen, the plunge of her open neckline, her spectacles sliding down her nose. Oh no, I thought.
“And mix them with the whites of three well beaten eggs ...”
There was a moment of silence, of stealth, of fingers being licked for their sweetness. It was broken by the sound of footsteps in the passage.
“Mr Brown –” I held out my hand to bar his way, shaking my head, but he barged straight past. I caught up with him as he reached the threshold. Mrs Brown was leaning with both arms on the table, her blouse unbuttoned, with her head thrown back and her mouth slackening. Beside her was Jenkins, his face fierce with concentration, weighing her released white breast with one hand.
Brown stood for a moment, taking in the scene. He seemed to be in retreat, although he didn’t move a muscle: his gaze lengthened, he held the tin with the gun a little tighter – imperceptible signs of recoil. The quality of the silence changed and Jenkins swung round. He blushed to the roots of his hair.
“She was showing me how to make Ratafia biscuits,” he stammered.
Mrs Brown briskly fastened the buttons of her blouse. “Is it hot in here, or is it me?”
I remembered the children racing. They stumbled through the egg and spoon race and the sack race and the three-legged race, but the one that I recalled was the hundred-yard sprint. They went hurtling by in a flash of white aertex, their stubby legs working, their eyes straining wide with intent, and the sight of them reminded me of the lines from the Bible about time and chance: that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, and I thought of Brown, firing the starting pistol again and again without flinching, and the children running with uncomplicated clarity towards the finishing line.
I remembered the day that Jenkins was trimming the box hedges in the Herbar, while I was taking some cuttings from the philadelphus in the flowerbed at the edge of Dancing Green. I could hear a lamb bleating Mayday messages on some hillside further down the valley and the persistence of it made me raise my head to listen for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a sturdy figure bumping a pram down the drive. It took me a second or two to recognise my sister.
“Delyth?” I called.
She swung round at the sound of her name and even at a distance I could see that she looked distracted, a little askew. She was pushing a pram which she parked on the grass verge, kicking on the brake with her foot. Baby Gwyneth (not an Angharad or, to my old Ma’s secret sorrow, a tiny Glyn) was five months old. Her mother hauled her out of her nest of blankets.
“What’s up?” I abandoned the pot of cuttings I was holding on the lawn and hurried over to her. “Is it Ma?”
“It isn’t Ma. It’s Ted.” The lamb was still bleating further down the valley. At the highest register in Delyth’s voice I could hear the same demanding note. She angled her cheek for me to kiss and held out Baby Gwynne. “Take her, will you? She hasn’t slept, she’s teething and I need five minutes peace and quiet to think.”
“Ted?” I exclaimed. My niece and I regarded one another with mutual alarm as Delyth thrust her in my direction.
“Oh, if he hasn’t gone to Spain and joined the International Brigade,” she snapped. “Is there somewhere we can sit? I’m worn out.”
“He’s what?”
Baby Gwynne’s mouth curled then widened and a terrible squawking sound came out of it. She had dribble down her chin and phlegm on her upper lip. Tears now, too. I looked from daughter to mother in consternation.
“What does that fellow think he’s doing?” Delyth asked. I followed the line of her gaze. In the Herbar, sensitive to signals of distress, Jenkins was standing with both hands covering his ears.
“You’d better come with me,” I said. I took them to the tool shed and settled Delyth on the bench. “Perhaps you’d take her,” I began, holding out her wailing offspring to my sister. “Just for a tick? While I put the kettle on?”
Delyth ducked her head to one side, “Give me a break will you, Ifor?”
With Baby Gwynne flailing on my hip, I took the kettle to the outside tap and filled it. I juggled my niece and the kettle and the primus stove and the matches. The gas went out. Gwynne’s tiny body was convulsed with sobs. My sister ran her fingers through her hair with a ragged sweep, then held her head in her hands. “Jiggle her up and down,” she said. “That sometimes does the trick.”
“Shh, shh, shh,” I said, jiggling away. “You’ll make the tea then, will you? It’s on the shelf up there.” I took the baby out into the kitchen garden. Her crying came in snatches now, small shuddering afterthoughts. It stopped altogether when I introduced her to the scarecrow, a ramshackle old thing with a sacking face, a moth-eaten jumper and a pair of overalls Samuelson had discarded years ago. She was particularly taken with his hat, gripping it with her fat fists, seeing how much of it she could fit into her mouth. She nested into my arms and I was utterly undone by such flattery.
Delyth was sitting hunched in the tool shed holding a mug of tea against her chin, biting her thumbnail. She looked at us, unsmiling, as we came in. I inclined Baby Gwynne in her direction, but she shook her head, so I found an old crate to prop the little mite in and gave her a ball of garden twine to play with.
“He’s in somewhere called Albacete,” my sister said. “He just upped and went.”
“When?” I said. “Why? What did he say?”
“Last Tuesday.”
I remembered the sullen look of her when she was a girl and she could fill the house with her brooding. She took a sip of her tea, her narrowed eyes fixed on something I couldn’t see.
“What did he say?”
She roused herself enough to sigh. “He said you have to fight for what you believe in. That it was a matter of conscience.”
Gwynne had discovered that if she threw the ball of twine across the shed I would pick it up and give it back to her. She was putting the knowledge to good use.
“What did you say to that?”
She didn’t answer. She bit her lip, holding it between her teeth in a tight white fold.
Absentmindedly I rolled the twine back towards the baby, but this time she ignored it. She was plucking fretfully at the air. “I suppose our Dad must have said something like that, when he enlisted.”
“That was different, Ifor,” Delyth said scathingly. “And anyway, look at the good it did him.”
“You must feel ...”
“I feel bloody angry with him, that’s how I feel.”
My eyes widened and I glanced in the direction of Baby Gwynne, who was grumbling away to herself. She’d got her thumb caught in the cuff of her matinee jacket and I leaned across and freed it for her. She let out a stream of unintelligible syllables, detailing her disgruntlement. I found an old flowerpot and put a few zinc plant markers inside it and rattled them around for her, a gift she accepted sceptically, on provisional terms.
“I told him straight. I said he had responsibilities, that he didn’t have to fight, that he was making a choice.” Delyth began. “He said he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t go. That’s what he said! I couldn’t believe it. What about living with Baby Gwynne and me? He said it was a matter of principle. Principle? I said to him. You have to stand up and be counted, he said. Don’t we count? I said. Me and Baby Gwynne? Don’t we count at all?”
I was thinking how quickly love is twisted into grievance, my Jenny with her downturned mouth and her air of disappointment never far from my thoughts, when my sister paused for breath and burst abruptly into tears. “He wouldn’t go if he really cared for us, would he? Oh, Ifor!”
I put my arm around her. “Shh, shh, shh. There now ...” Baby Gwynne, daughter of two activists, soon came out in sympathy and sat in her wooden crate howling, until I picked her up and perched her on my knee, jiggling inexpertly.
“Let me have her,” Delyth sniffed and then swallowed, reaching for her daughter and the two of them sat damply entwined, holding on to one another, the uncomprehending tears wet on their faces.
“Have you told Ma?” I asked, anxious to forestall more weeping.
“I’ve been putting it off. On account of Dad and Glyn and so forth ...?”
I nodded. We weren’t on intimate terms usually, but we sat side by side and she leaned against me and I laid my hand upon her knee in sympathy.
“She’ll take it badly ...” Delyth lapsed into thought, imagining of the lug of our mother’s grief coming to rest on her own shoulders.
“He’ll be back before you know it.”
That evening Jenny came home and slung a canvas bag full of books onto the kitchen table. “I’ve too much time on my hands.” She unfastened her coat, shrugged it off and laid it on the back of the chair. I understood what she was saying: between us we had found some of the companionability that comes from habit, although the lack of any children (the slow cessation of relations between us) was like a physical obstruction, a presence so huge that it pressed us up against the walls and into the corners of our life together.
“I’m going to do a correspondence course,” she said. “I’m going to study the shelf arrangement of interdisciplinary works. I want a proper qualification. Then one day maybe I’ll be head librarian.”
On Thursdays she stayed on after hours at the library. “It’s not all theory,” she said a little breathlessly the first time she was late home. There was a sprinkling of rain on the shoulders of her coat. She brought the outdoors in with her – the dashed hope that comes with a wet April, the broken promise of spring, though she spoke with more animation than I was used to seeing in her. “We need to work on the practice as well. Make sure books on the same topic can be found in the same place. One of the other assistants is doing it with me.” She hung her outdoor clothes on the back of the door. I watched her loop her scarf over the hook, scattering stray raindrops onto the floor. “We’re going be learning about synthesised notation next week. Did you keep some of the shepherd’s pie for me?”
The news about Ted found its way back to Mynydd Maen in the winter of that year. He was under siege in a town called Teruel, fighting from street to street, ceding territory to the Nationalists one neighbourhood at a time. They were battling it out in blizzard conditions – we heard later that Ted was suffering from frostbite and hadn’t had a proper meal for days. A man’s principles can cost him dear; I knew that, in my own small way. He was holed up behind some makeshift barricades with a Frenchman and two Spaniards. It was the Frenchman who got a message to Delyth, after it was over. Ted was standing at a crossroads, his shoulder leaning into the corner of a building, steadying his gun. No longer the mastiff, his clothes hung loose on him, not holding any warmth. He swung round the corner, aiming without looking, cracking out a shot. There was a moment’s respite as one of the Spaniards let rip some covering fire giving him time to reload, shouting at him, Rapido! Rapido! His fingers were blackened stubs; pus-filled, fumbling stubs paralysed by the cold and the cartridge was as slippery as ice. Rapido! Rapido! He dropped it. The metal casing landed soundlessly in the falling snow and he was stooping to retrieve it when the sniper got him. He didn’t make it home to Delyth and Baby Gwynne; another of our dead we never buried.
Overnight, my opinionated sister went from knowing everything to being certain of nothing. She looked dazed. She couldn’t take in anything we said to her. She made Baby Gwynne into a bundle that she held in her lap like the last possessions of a refugee. She had to be reminded to feed and change her.
“What? Yes. In a minute.”
She drank endless cups of tea, fresh leaves each time, the only comfort we could give her. It wasn’t that she stayed with us for a few days; she was stranded with us, marooned in shock and disbelief.
One night, I woke to the sound of terrible violence being done. Dredged from sleep, I went racing into the front bedroom we’d given over to our guests thinking she must be killing the baby, but she was lying on the floor beating her fists and her forehead against the wooden boards, as though grief was something she could destroy with her bare hands.
“Stop it!” I flung myself onto my knees beside her, “Delyth! For goodness’ sake! You’ll do yourself an injury, stop it!”
“It hurts. It hurts so much ...”
“Stop it!” I caught her by the shoulders and hauled her up so that she was slumped against me. “There, there. Shh. Hush now.”
She gave a small, exhausted convulsion and the silence gathered close in broken fragments. Baby Gwynne rolled over in the bottom drawer we’d made into a makeshift crib and risked a timid cry. After a while I helped Delyth into bed and tucked her daughter in beside her and fetched a cold flannel compress for her poor, swollen eyes, then I sat with them until they were both asleep and for several minutes more, although I was worn out by the glimpse I’d had of the aftermath of love.
The next morning my sister, depleted and a little shaky, insisted on going home to Mynydd Maen to the rooms she’d shared with Ted. “Not sure what I’ll do when I get there, mind,” she said. On her brow a raised, red bruise was flaring yellow at the edges. “The factory’s had a whip around, all the lads from his old works, to tide us over. I could always take in washing, I suppose.” She ran her thumb along the handle of the pram, a sad little gesture tracing the brightness of the chrome. “Like Ma,” she whispered.
I walked with her up the drive and slipped a tenner into her pocket, a few bob short of two weeks’ wages, but it was the best that I could do.
“Ifor, I don’t need charity,” she began, retrieving the note and holding it out to me with a flash of her old, contestable spirit. She hesitated. “Perhaps I do,” she said, tucking it back into her pocket. She stood on tiptoe and pecked me on the cheek, learning to be grateful, learning to be alone, then she looked down the road in the direction of the village, turned the pram around and set off on the long journey home.
