The Line Between Us (24 page)

I heard the scrape of a chair some distance behind me and Jenny saying my name with an urgency that managed not to breach the protocol regarding noise levels.

“You can’t go in there.”

Until that moment, I wasn’t sure what I planned to do. The type bars clashed and Emlyn reached to untangle them, lifting his head absently when they proved intractable. He must have caught sight of Jenny because I saw his face – alter. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been on the lookout: it was not much more than a softening in his bearing, of tension fleeing as a glance was held a second longer than it might have been, and in that instant I couldn’t find it in myself to dislike him. He was about to resume reading what he had written on the reference card, when he noticed me.

“You can’t go in there,” Jenny planted herself between me and the door, “It’s private,” but my grip was already closed around the handle. “It’s Staff Only, Ifor. Don’t cause a scene.” I paused only to make my intention clear, then I opened the door. “Look – we can talk about this at home.”

Emlyn was scrambling to his feet and a pile of files tipped over, scattering across the floor. He eyed them for a moment, weighing up the indignity of scuffling after them. He let them lie. Instead, he straightened his tie and fastened the button of his jacket and when there were no other adjustments he could incorporate, he offered me his hand to shake. “You must be … Mr Griffiths?”

I stood there, sizing him up. After a beat, he held his hand out further. I gave a single nod then I took it and we shook.

“I was just … passing,” I said.

“Going abroad soon, aren’t you?” he observed, after a longer pause.

“I believe so.”

“I’ve got a medical exemption,” he said. “Tuberculosis. When I was younger.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Getting ready for the off, are you?”

“Yes.”

We stared at one another. We seemed to have covered everything. Under the guise of scratching his head, he shot Jenny a glance and she tugged at my sleeve.

“Ifor –?”

“I’ll make sure –” Emlyn said. “I’ll keep an eye –” he swallowed. “While you’re gone.”

I sighed at the thought of him, the intimacy they seemed to share so ordinary, and in its way so enviable. I pushed my plate to one side. “I’m not very hungry. I’m sorry.” My wife and I were long past speaking of our infidelities and our disappointments, but they were present at the table with us and through the clearing up after the meal.

“Would you like some hot milk? I’ll be having some …”

I shook my head. “Jenny –” There was one thing I needed to say. “If anything happens – to me – you will look out for Ma, won’t you? There’s Delyth, I know, but she’s not that close and …”

She was pouring the milk into a cup to measure it and then into a saucepan. She had her back to me.

“Only she didn’t look too special, when I called by today.”

After a moment’s hesitation, in which I imagined her weighing up her debts and obligations, she nodded, and the two of us stood there waiting out the time it took for the milk to come to the boil.

“I hope things go well,” I offered, “When the baby comes. You will let me know …?”

“I’ve made up the bed in the spare room for you,” was all she said in reply.

I lay awake under the eaves and it seemed to me I heard every quarter that the clock told, those bleak and sonorous measurements sounding through the night. I couldn’t sleep. Coming back to a place so haunted by memories had rather stumped me: caught between then and now, I felt that it was me who was the ghost.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

I remembered the months we spent tucked up on the German border while Adolf and his bully boys were busy in Poland. They were relatively pleasant, if one can say such a thing. The RAF jockeys practised fighting high overhead in French skies that looked uncannily like English ones and when Jerry had a spare moment he’d drop propaganda leaflets down on us, which our corporal had us gathering up for use in the latrines. Some of the officers clubbed together and imported a pack of beagles so they could go hunting, but there was a shortage of foxes and the French authorities wouldn’t let them bring live ones in from England.

Time, not the Hun, turned out to be our greatest enemy and we fought continually against boredom, discomfort and more physical exertion than most of us were used to, not to mention rotten army food. The sort of diversions we could look forward to were a nineteen-mile march in full kit with a mock battle at the end of it. There were some fine men in my platoon, but only one of them – a Welshman called Cadwalladr – appeared to be able to shoot.

If you had asked me at that point, I would have said I’d had a good war.

Then, out of the blue one April morning, I received a tight little note from you written to me care of the colonel of the regiment – an old friend of your father’s. It is the cruellest month. I stared at your handwriting, at the loop you made of my name on the envelope. I used a knife to open it because I didn’t want to tear it. The single sheet had a deckle edge and I ran my finger apprehensively along it.

“I hope this finds you well. It seems congratulations are in order – Mrs Ifor, delivered of a healthy girl,” you wrote. The sting came in the postscript. “I expect to have some news of my own, in the fullness of time.” I inhaled the thick, kaolin scent of the paper, searching for gardenia; I tried to picture where your hand had touched the page. “Wallet litter” is what they call the personal effects they find upon dead soldiers. I didn’t want your letter to be wallet litter. I was in an agony about where to put it for safekeeping. I read it over till the expensive glaze grew thin, in a torment at what your news might be.

Everything happened so quickly after that. At the beginning of May the Germans invaded the Low Countries and within weeks they were fighting on the Somme as if it were 1916 all over again, with all the lives still lost and the years between still lived, but none of the lessons learned. We had learned nothing: the Allied armies were avoiding rout in the same Belgian villages and on the same rivers as they were twenty-six years ago – Brussels fallen, Paris in danger, everything exactly the same, and we were supposed to be heroes crusading to save the civilised world.

Our lot were part of the scramble towards Arras: cut off Jerry before he reached the coast, that was the plan, though in the event it turned out to be not one of the best laid ones: instead of two infantry divisions we had two infantry battalions. You can work out the shortfall for yourself. It was the Frenchies who saved us, gave us the cover to withdraw, when we had come all the way to France to save them.

I tried to forget the eight-mile march we had along roads congested with refugees just to reach the battle’s starting line; that there was no time for us to study our orders or to do any reconnaissance. I tried to forget about the shelling coming from a nearby wood, or what it was like to be pinned down by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire. I tried to forget all of that. I tried to forget about hand to hand fighting in cornfields; about out-dated weapons and lack of ammunition and radios that do not work; about dead civilians, about the confusion and the terrible, terrible fear as forty thousand Tommies who didn’t make it to Dunkirk were taken prisoner by the Nazis, and we kept falling back and back and back, until we reached the Brittany coast at St Nazaire and couldn’t fall back any further.

*

I was picked up by a trawler in the end. A Frenchie leaned over the side, stretching his hand out to me, but I couldn’t get a hold. I kept slipping from his grip like a piece of soap, there was so much oil all over me. He grabbed me by the seat of my pants and hauled me on board. I lay on the deck for a long while, the dry wood warm against my cheek. I shouldn’t have lain there all that time. I should rot in hell for doing that. I should have leaned back into the water and grabbed a small memento, something, anything to identify the dead man who helped me cling on to life; something to send to his mother or his wife. But I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t move. I let him float away as I lay there, remembering that this was a June afternoon and the sun was still shining; trying to believe that I was safe.

There were twenty or thirty of us on the fishing boat, some with broken arms or legs; many with bullet wounds; one man with the flesh melted from his face; the least of us coughing our guts up. When I did move, it was to vomit shiny black strings of oil over the side. The Frenchie trawler took us to one of the destroyers. The man with the melted face didn’t make it and we left a couple of other bodies behind with him. There was sweet tea waiting for us and a sailor held the mug for me while I drank. He said we’d be going home on the
Oronsay
and when I started to shake, he put his arm around my shoulders. “It’s alright, mate. You’re going to be alright.”

The wounded were carried from one ship to the next like parcels. I didn’t want to go on the
Oronsay
, sister ship of the
Lancastria
, damaged herself, with no bridge, already listing. It hurt my hands to hold the rope rungs of the scrambling net, but nobody complained as I inched my way up the side of the liner. One of the ratings helped me up the last few feet and found a space for me on deck. He unlaced my boots and tugged them off, removed my sodden trousers and wrapped a blanket around me, using one of the corners to wipe my face. The lad was half my age, yet he tended me as if I were a small boy. I couldn’t stop shaking.

A young naval officer made an announcement. He said that England was four hundred miles away, that we had no escort, a ten-degree list to port, no bridge, no food, and that the Captain had broken his leg and had only a handheld compass and a sketch of the coast of France to guide us by.

I survived it; I survived all that: the sinking, the rescue and the return, because I hoped that you would be waiting for me, if only I could get myself home.

The Red Cross greeted us at Plymouth. I had my boots and a blanket and nothing else. A nice young lady gave me a pair of trousers and a shirt and directed me towards the holding centre. People from the town were lining the streets from pity, or curiosity, or to look out for a loved one. Someone pressed a tin of corned beef and a ten bob note into my hand. A young girl held out her autograph book for me to sign.

I didn’t follow the dazed line of men to the depot. I kept on walking; listing myself a little because I couldn’t quite believe the ground was firm beneath my feet. At the station I bought a ticket. The steam from the train swamped the platform and I could hear somebody shouting, and I thought I was back in the water with the smoke all around me, with the body of my unknown comrade in my arms and the dead scales of the silver fish rising to my face, and the person who was shouting was me.

It was evening when I came back to Nanagalan. I walked from the village through the valley and it was as if I was already dead, or dreaming; the landscape veiled in the twilight, but every curve of it known, every dip and hollow a part of me. The vines had gone, though. I could see that much. And the flowers in the Herbar had that winded look that comes after the first frost, not in the heartbreak of high summer.

My boots slurred the gravel in the drive and for a moment the dark horizon tilted. “I’m home,” I said to steady myself. I could see the wall of the summerhouse like a prow, rising through the dusk. I leant against it, shaken, when being back here should have made me feel so happy. I twined my fingers through the wisteria and held on.

I made my way inside. The greenish scent of the stonework was like kelp and the Delft tiles were downy with damp. There was a crack in one of the windows – I made a note to tell Jenkins, and then stopped myself. I sat for a long time, breathing crystals onto the cobwebs, remembering the glass glitter of your face the first time I saw you.

I steeled myself. I had come back almost from the grave, my only thought to say I love you, that I have always loved you. I walked round the edge of the Herbar, with the clamour of leaves in my hair. A watchful moon gleamed above Long Leap. I reached the house and looked up. The blackout was drawn, no slit of light to warn a man, to put him on his guard. The stone façade was faintly warm and all I could feel was remorse and I didn’t know why.

At the corner of the building I stopped and peered round. I could make out several pallets piled up in the centre of the courtyard, a tractor at one end, with the plough disengaged, its blades shining propeller-bright. I felt incalculably cold walking into the yard, having endured so much yet still so unprepared.

There was a blue sports car parked up close to the house, and as I walked across the gravel I could hear the voice of a man and the forced sound of your laughter, floating down from an open upstairs window. The blackout whisked apart, and Nicholas looked out.

“Of course there’s nobody out there, you funny little thing. Now don’t be such a goose …”

I froze midstride and then I said your name, out loud, just once, “ Ella –” It’s been my grace, that I have always loved you, but I knew that I’d come to the end of all my blessings.

I stood there, thinking where on earth I could fall back to now – falling back and falling back, with no end in sight. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Brown’s dugout, then our cottage and I thought of Jenny and her daughter in safe oblivion inside and wondered if she’d have her mother’s dark hair and earnest myopia, and I wanted so much to wish them well.

I turned to go. My feet were heavy and slow, as if I were wading through water. “I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest.” I retraced my steps past the Herbar, the scent of rosemary was sharp on the summer air and I stopped to breathe it in. “I will not leave thee.” I hesitated, waiting to see if the half-heard songs of Nanagalan would sing for me, but though I closed my eyes to listen better, I couldn’t catch the echo.

“Ifor –”

I started walking. By straining my eyes through the shadows, I could see that Dancing Green had been ploughed over. Digging for victory. The first peas were coming on, and rows of what must be beans were planted where the cricket pitch had been.

“Wait! Ifor, wait! Don’t go!”

I wondered if the Land Girls had thought to sow some beetroot and whether there were radishes and globe artichokes ready to harvest yet. It was the time of year for rhubarb and perhaps a few late asparagus. I could have bent down and scooped some of the good Welsh earth into my hand, but the road to the village stretched ahead of me and I had half the lumber of a lifetime in my head to carry with me. Then I thought of my Dad, heading off to the war without ever turning back and I twisted my head around to take one last look at the valley that I loved.

It was then that I saw you, running up the hill towards me, waving, calling out my name. When you reached me you were panting with the effort and you put your hand to your chest to calm your breathing.

“I wanted to tell you,” I said. “That Jenny’s baby isn’t mine. She’s been having an affair. But I never got the chance.”

You were gazing at me, the consternation on your face visible in the pale, immaculate moonlight. I must have looked like a man come back from the depths, crusted in sea salt and blackened oil, my skin burned in places, wild-eyed, the carnage I had seen still trailing in my wake. The twist of a sound came out of you. “I married Nicholas,” you stammered.

For a moment I wished I was drowned at the bottom of the sea. “I’ve always loved you,” I bowed my head. “And I’ve never been able to say it.”

Your hand flew to your mouth and I could see the glint of a ring on your wedding finger. “I suppose I was blind with jealousy when I heard she was pregnant. I was so – I had no right, I know, but I …”

I reached out for you and put my arms around you.

“I wanted to hurt you –” you said, with a sob. “That’s the truth. What a mess. What a terrible mess …”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. None of it.”

“I’ve loved you too. I’ve always loved you,” you said. “But you know that.”

I held you close. There were tears on your cheeks and I wiped them away with my thumb and then at last I kissed you. I felt as if the waters were closing over my head again, but it was a different kind of drowning and when I breached the surface, I could almost believe that the valley was alive with ancient voices and that I could hear them singing: “I will bring thee again into this land.”

If you enjoyed
The Line Between Us
check out Endeavour Press’s other books here:
Endeavour Press - the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books
.

For weekly updates on our free and discounted eBooks
sign up to our newsletter
.

Follow us on
Twitter
and
Goodreads
.