The Line Between Us (20 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

I remembered how our mother aged about ten years when Ted died. She had the gnarled lean of trees in a hedgerow at the mercy of the wind, her hair a startling widow’s white, her flesh thin clothing over angular bones. I couldn’t quite suppress a feeling of irritation that she’d let herself get so ancient, as though it were an oversight, as if she could have done something about it if only she’d paid more attention. Don’t go growing old, Ma, not you.

At your suggestion, (“Out of respect for your loss, Ifor. It’s the least that I can do.”) Brown drove us in the motor to Ted’s memorial service at the plain-spoken chapel in Mynydd Maen. With no body, and no grave, soberly we committed to him to memory.

“You’ll come in for tea, won’t you?” Ma said when Brown deposited us at the door of the cottage in Morwithy.

Jenny fingered her wristwatch. She watched the chaotic progress of the Daimler down the road and out of sight. We were all of us slightly shaken by the journey. “The thing is, I’ve got studying to do …” she said evasively.

“On a Friday?” I said in surprise.

“Oh, there’s always, you know, work to put in. If you’re going to do something …” She looked the length of the road again, and the rest of the saying hung in the air.

“Do it properly,” Ma supplied without thinking, rooting in her bag for the door key.

“I’d better –” Jenny gave me a tense smile, “ – go, then. If that’s alright.”

“Alright,” I said.

Ma served tea in the parlour, not in the back room, so I should have realised something was afoot. She used a veiny cane to walk with and insisted on carrying the tea things and a plate of cake as well. She wouldn’t have any help from me. That tea took a long time to make.

She levered herself down into the armchair and we sat without speaking for a while, thinking about the service, waiting for the tea. Jenny, studying on a Friday? I shook my head, then slid the cosy up the side of the teapot so that I could lift the lid.

“Shall I give it a wind, Ma?”

While I was busy stirring the pot and pouring the tea, Ma heaved herself up out of the chair, her joints snapping with the effort, so that she could reach the family Bible down from the top shelf in the alcove. She dropped back down rather more quickly than she’d anticipated and sat for a moment with her head leaning against the anti-macassar and her eyes shut. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones,” she murmured. “That’s what they say …”

“You’ve the least broken spirit of anyone I know.”

“I’ve got the driest bones, mind,” she said, arranging herself more comfortably in the chair, tugging a cushion into the small of her back. “Poor Delyth …” she straightened the book on her knee and opened it, sending some pieces of paper sifting onto her lap. “There’ll be some mending of the spirit for her to do before she’s right again.”

“What have you got there, then, Ma?” I asked.

“The family safe. If anything happens to me … well, you know … when it happens, it’s all here.” She picked up a few of the sheets and let them fall. “Stuffed full of everything, it is. Your birth certificates, the letter telling us you got into the grammar school, Delyth’s Cyclist badge from the Girl Guides. Oh, she was so proud of that. Don’t know why I’ve kept those –” She dropped some newspaper clippings and a yellowed knitting pattern on to the floor. “Then there’s the telegrams,” she said.

I could see what was coming.

The paper was cracked along the folds and after all these years the ticker-tape message was lifting off the page and curling at the edges. It’s strange how something so slight and small can knock the breath out of you. In an instant I was a nine-year-old lad again, the steam in the kitchen clearing round us as our world tilted on its axis and sent us reeling. Ma opened her mouth to read what was written but she stopped before she could get a word out, pressing one hand to her breastbone. After a moment she handed me the telegram so I could read it for myself. She was discreet in her grieving, locking Delyth and me out and herself in. From the corner of my eye I could see her twisting the wedding ring round her finger. Our Dad, killed in action at Messines.

“There’s one for Glyn as well.”

“I know.”

The whites of Ma’s eyes were shining. “Your father could have made a special case, as an agricultural worker he could have asked for an exemption. But he wouldn’t.” She blinked fiercely. “He wouldn’t do it, silly bugger. Not for me, not for any of us. ‘Doing my duty,’ that’s what he said. ‘For King and country.’”

Once again I was a lad staring along an empty lane, waiting for a turning back that never came.

“Your brother lied about his age,” my mother said.

I didn’t know that. With a sharp intake of breath I bowed my head.

“He couldn’t join Kitchener’s army quick enough. He was only fifteen.” She stared at the telegrams, touching the corner of one so that it lay in alignment with the other. “That’s all you’re left with,” she said. “That, and a watch, and a Bible.” She faltered. “And a penknife, too.”

“Finish your tea,” I said, my heart beating hard in my chest. “Or it’ll go cold.”

She nursed the cup in her hands, not drinking, regarding me through the steam. “Promise me …” she began.

All of us knew the war was coming, would come, at some point. Germany and Italy had signed some malodorous pact between them. The Foreign Secretary had warned Hitler that we would fight to protect Belgium. We knew.

“I’m thirty, Ma.” I said uneasily. “They won’t want an old fellow like me. And I’m a land worker, to boot.”

“Promise me,” she insisted. “Promise me on the Bible.”

“Besides, it may not happen.”

“With Ted gone now, as well.” She closed the Bible and held it out to me. The weight of it was too much for her wrist, thin as a twig in winter, and I had to catch it to stop it from falling.

“I can’t lose you as well,” she said. A glimpse of my dad’s knife, raised aloft, flashed between us and part of me wanted to curl myself into a ball and lean against the warm, forgiving wood of our back door and forget about the lot of it. Instead, I thought of the men who downed their tools and kissed their wives and quit their homes, their goodbyes flung backwards after them or never spoken, their valleys left, their farms neglected, their jobs taken by others; no more cricket, no more pale ale, no lengthening shadows on a summer’s evening, no scent of wood smoke in the autumn, no frost-sketched breath on a freezing morning, no more hot and tarry tea, no freshly laundered sheets, no more pedalling uphill for the swooping abandonment of the downhill ride, no walks to Withy End in the slanting light, no more Nanagalan, no more you.

Would I lay down my life for a principle like my Dad? Like Glyn? Would I? Would I give up everything I loved – everyone who loved me – when my turn came? I felt the weight of the Bible in my hands and Ma’s gaze upon me and when I glanced up, there were tears in runnels on her weathered cheeks so I knelt on the floor beside her chair and put my arm around her and I could feel a pricking in my own eyes as well, for the dead that were lost, and the lives of the living that were taken too.

I swore on the Good Book to give my mother ease and she wiped her face and gave me a wafery kiss. “Keep yourself safe for me, Ifor, there’s a boy.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

I remembered the weekend of Jenny’s conference. We were lying back to back in bed reading when she told me about it. I was on the last chapter of
To Have and Have Not
and she had the latest Dorothy L. Sayers.

“Oh, I think I forgot to mention,” she said, turning a page, “there’s a conference in Nottingham at the end of the month. Proposed Improvements to the Dewey Decimal Classification in British Public Libraries.”

“Nottingham?” I said, still reading.

“I think I should go.”

“It’s a heck of a way.”

Jenny rested her novel on the coverlet and glanced back over her shoulder in my direction. She took a moment to answer. “It’s over a weekend. There’s a couple of colleagues from work ...”

“I don’t know much about Nottingham.”

“It’s where D. H. Lawrence was born,” she said automatically, turning back to her book.

“I never finished
The Rainbow
. It was a bit – I couldn’t get to grips with it, somehow.”

“We thought we’d go up on the Friday before.”

“Of course,” I said.

“So that we’re fresh.”

“Which colleagues?” I asked as an afterthought.

“My boss Marjorie and one of the other assistants.”

“Oh yes?”

“Emlyn Ellis. He’s doing the correspondence course as well. I think I’ll stop now.” Jenny slid her book on to the bedside table and reached to blow out the candle.

I flicked the remaining pages through my fingers. There were more than I thought. I wondered if I should save it till the following night. “You’ve got to keep up with your studies,” I said counting how many there were until the end.

I worked late in the estate office on that Friday, catching up with the accounts. I’d just got all the receipts into little piles and had plunged myself into the arithmetic, when you popped your head around the door.

“Haven’t you got a home to go to?” You came fully into the room. “I saw the light was on.”

“I won’t be long,” I said, scribbling down a sum on a piece of scrap paper before I forgot it. I raised my head, then made a slight, involuntary sound at the sight of you. You were dressed formally in something long and velvety, the greenish grey of undergrowth at dusk, your hair the last shaft of sunlight, shining gold.

“I’m just going out,” you said, adjusting the lie of the strap of your dress. Your shoulder looked so white beneath it. Briefly, you leaned against the wall. “My old friend Nicholas is back,” you added, as though a polite apology was in order, as though you knew what it would mean to me.

“I’ve just been going through the bills, checking payments. The quarterly accounts.”

“He was posted to India a few years ago, but now he’s come home,” you explained, waiting.

On the desk in front of me was an invoice for copper sulphate solution. I stared intently at the figures, thinking hard about paying it on Monday, concentrating on the need to do so.

“He’s having a party to celebrate. Half the county’s invited,” you went on, relentlessly informative. I don’t think you meant to be unkind. I don’t think you did.

“Wasn’t he ...?”

“His family’s estate adjoins Nanagalan. We used to go to the pictures together, that sort of thing. Our parents were quite keen ...”

I could recall every detail of him: his broad back, his thinning, sandy hair, his arm stealing round your shoulders; you, acquiescent in the flickering light of the cinema projector. “I think you did mention him.” I picked up the invoice and put it down again. “I’d better get this finished ...” I said, gesturing towards the receipts, scattering them over the blotter as I did so.

“Mrs Ifor must be wondering where you are,” you said finally, rippling yourself upright with an arch of your back.

“She’s away on a course this weekend.” I was stooping to retrieve one of the bills which had fallen on the floor so I couldn’t see your face, but I could feel the atmosphere changing for a moment, the invisible threads of comprehension pulling tight.

“Oh,” it was the softest registration of sound, no more than a mouthing. “Well,” you murmured. “Brown will be waiting ...”

“Have a good evening, Miss Ella.”

I went home to the cottage when I had finished my reckonings, my brain seized up with all the sums. The light was on in the dugout when I went past and strains of some music from the wireless trickled into the darkness, the louche melancholy filtering through the courtyard. I knocked on the garage door thinking to nod in for a minute or two, but Brown didn’t hear me, or perhaps he didn’t want to. He’d be in there tinkering with something to pass the time until he had to collect you, his pipe on the go, a cup of tea cooling on the workbench.

I didn’t want to think of you in your ferny evening dress at Nicholas’s party.

When I got in, I put a couple of logs in the stove and heated some water to fill the zinc tub: having a proper wash with water that wasn’t already filmy with other people’s soapings was a rare treat and I sat curled like a clam, steamed pink, listening to the resinous spit of the apple wood burning, taking time to adjust my bearings to account for the solitude. Jenny and I defined one other in such detail: the great truths between us being unspoken, we addressed the smaller issues exhaustively and without her it was as though I had been decompressed. There was too much air to breathe and I felt light headed. I towelled myself dry and dressed, putting on a clean shirt. Upstairs in our bedroom I opened the window, leaned out and listened to the silence. Brown had shut up shop and I was conscious of the sibilant shift of leaves in the breeze and the rustle of a fox: night sounds, the absence of birdsong.

I went downstairs, tipped my bath water down the sink and heated up some soup. I thought about Delyth in her aloneness: no proper mooring, just Baby Gwynne to cling to and I decided I’d put my freedom to good use and go to Mynydd Maen to see them over the weekend. I washed the dishes, drank a glass of milk and spread yesterday’s paper on the kitchen table. The Duke of Windsor, as we must call him now, had married Wallis Simpson. There was a photograph of the two of them looking slightly stunned at what they’d done.

I don’t think I heard the motor. I was idling my way through the news and I reached for an apple, polished it on my sleeve and was thinking about eating it, when there was a knock at the door. I stood up to answer it, the apple still in my hand.

You were standing on the threshold in your dress the colour of twilight, holding a bottle of Nanagalan Blanc de Blanc carelessly by the neck. “I was just passing ...” you said with an awkward smile.

I glanced behind me on a reflex. The column of light from the gas lamp shone thinly, seeking out angles. My glass stood empty on the table. The room seemed homely enough to me, I liked the sparseness of it; I didn’t want to see it through your eyes.

“May I come in?”

I didn’t stand aside and hold the door wider. I stared down at the apple, turning it over in my hand, feeling the russet skin. “It’s nearly eleven o’clock ...” I knew that letting you into my empty house at a late hour on a June night would be as good as – I stopped, so constricted by a sense of propriety I couldn’t even risk the thought. “I won’t bite,” you said. There was a hint of derision in your voice.

I switched my gaze to your face. The excitement of the party was still in the ether around you, an echo of the dancing, the witty exchanges, the drinking. You seemed agitated and it struck me that you might be as unmoored and as lonely as my sister. A poor little rich girl in the darkness on my doorstep with her bottle of champagne. I could see that you were shivering and as I felt the cool of the evening closing in, I shivered too.

“I was just ...” I said warily. This was the last – the only – line of my defence.

“I’ll go, if it’s not convenient –”

“Don’t go!”

“If you’ve got something more pressing ...”

“No.” I felt slightly out of breath, as if I’d been running and running to get here. “There’s nothing pressing.”

“May I come in, then?”

You slipped into my kitchen and gazed around you, blinking. I closed the door and leant against it, then exhaled with slow precision. Everything seemed too ... acute. It was like physical pain. I stood without moving because I feared that anything I touched would burn me.

“Will you open this?” You held out the bottle. “Or shall I?”

I took the bottle, ripped off the foil and unwound the wire. The cork eased out with a breathy sigh. “I’ve only got half-pint glasses,” I apologised, rinsing the milk from one, stretching up to get another from the shelf.

“Just the ticket,” you said, reaching for some champagne with more effort than was required, so that the movement carried you in an indistinct arc to the chair that I’d been sitting in. You dropped down onto it. “We can drown our sorrows.” You looked across at me. “I’m not drunk, Ifor, but I would quite like to be.”

I sat down carefully in Jenny’s chair. “What sorrows, miss?”

“Oh, you know, the usual kind.” You took a sip of your drink, and then another. You scanned the newspaper lying open on the table, then loosed a small mewling sigh, putting your glass down and propping your head in your hand. You touched the photograph of Mrs Simpson with your fingertip. “And they lived happily ever after,” you whispered.

“What sorrows?”

You paused for a moment. “The thing is, Ifor, I’m not ... accountable ... to anyone. That’s what I find hard.” You seemed to consider what you’d just said, as though the admission had slipped out without you quite realising. “That must seem strange to someone like you.” You lifted your head and subjected me to a brief scrutiny. “I expect being accountable is something that you hate.”

I shrugged. I rolled the wine around my glass, watching the bubbles rising to the surface, tiny beads in flight.

“And because of that,” you said, “it can feel as if nothing has much ... meaning.” You drank again, for longer this time. “There. Now you know my darkest secret.” You gave me a brittle smile. “So you must tell me one of yours in return.”

“My secret ...” I could have told you that I loved you, there and then. I wish I had. It’s the things we don’t do that we regret the most. “... is that I don’t really believe in happy ever after.” I regarded you, levelly. “There.”

“What a pair we are.” You sighed a small, regretful sigh. “It’s awfully bright in here, don’t you think?” you observed, looking from one side of the kitchen to the other. “What do you believe in, then?”

I stood up, fetched a candle from the drawer beside the sink, put it into an old earthenware candlestick that Jenny’s parents had given us and struck a match. “I think I believe in making the best of what you’ve got. Or trying to, at least.” I leaned forward and lit the candle, then turned the gas lamp out. I extinguished the match. The half light feathered round us as the candle flickered into life.

“And does that work?” you asked. “Is it something I should try?”

Your silhouette washed in soft shadow across the distempered wall, so that your presence in the room was everywhere. I stood, susceptible and still, taking you in.

“Some of the time.” One of Ma’s sayings flashed into my mind. “Any fool can have a miserable life. It takes a clever man to lead a happy one.”

“And you’re ... clever?”

“I was a grammar-school boy,” I answered dryly.

A spill of wax ran down the side of the candle. You checked its passage with your fingernail. “So you and Mrs Ifor are happy, are you?”

I was still holding the match. I pinched the head of it between my fingers to see that it was cold and put it on the table. “I think you know the answer to that.” I half turned, meaning to sit down in my wife’s chair, but you caught my hand and held it in both of yours. I could see a pulse beating in the vein at your temple, frail and blue.

“He tried to kiss me tonight. Nicholas. I had to excuse myself and he was in the corridor waiting for me, after. He said he knew I wanted it. That a woman, living on her own, must have needs ...”

I was on my knees beside you. “Are you alright? What did he –?”

“The man revolts me.” Hesitantly, you rested your head on my shoulder until I could feel the curve of your cheek against my neck. My arms described the space around you. I wasn’t going to touch you. I wouldn’t let myself touch –

“Will you hold me for a moment?”

A tremor went shooting through me, the lightning strike of conscience. I laid a faltering hand against your hair. “I ...”

“That’s what’s left for unmarried women of my age: the opportunists, the gropers. Not you,” you breathed, as I retreated a fraction. “Not you.” We leaned close for a minute, for another minute, lost in the eddy and slip of each other, our bodies inclining together, time sliding past us in soft currents. I closed my eyes to have the learning of you better.

“At least we’re not dancing,” you murmured and I gathered you to me in spite of myself. You tilted your head back, your eyes swimming beneath their lids and all I could think of was your quickening pulse, the whiteness of your neck, the soft meld of you and me. You brushed your mouth across mine, and so began the gentle articulation of lip and tongue, the long, drawn out syllables of a kiss. We were disclosing ourselves with slow langour, weightless in each other’s arms; we were elsewhere, we were other, we were in flight, we were falling.