The Welsh Girl (32 page)

Esther fidgets as she milks, craning over her shoulder, staring into the shadows, pausing to listen to the rustle of mice.

Ridiculous! She'd laugh at herself if there were anyone to share the joke. He must be miles away by now, and moreover, she reminds herself, she hopes he is. Isn't that why she helped him, after all?

She sees Jim off to school and Arthur over the ridge to survey the rams' progress through the flock. Only when she's alone does she allow herself to think of the German again. She wonders if he's thinking of her, worried that she'll raise the countryside or marvelling that she hasn't. She tries to picture his movements. East across the mountains, or west, down to the coast and Ireland? She wishes she'd asked him, but she doubts he'd have told her. The latter, she hopes. East is England, and she shudders at the thought of crossing all that hostile ground.

But when she goes to look for eggs, she finds him crouched in the lee of the barn, as if he never left. She swallows back a scream, less of fear than surprise. She's imagined him so vividly gone, her first thought is that he must have forgotten something.
You're going to be late
, she almost cries, as if for a train.

"Good morning." He grins.

"What are you doing here?" she hisses, though even in the midst of her shock, she thinks,
I brought the dogs in last

night
. As if she were expecting him.

He smiles crookedly, touches his stomach. "Still hungry," he tells her, with a little wince at the understatement.

"You can't hang around here. What if someone sees you?"

She wants to fly at him, shout
Shoo, shoo
, as if he were a particularly bold or starving fox (the same thing, really, she reminds herself).

"I'll go if you feed me," he says simply.

Or not a fox, she thinks, but a lamb, one of those

motherless ones she's nursed with a bottle who keep following her around all summer. The ones she weeps over when they're sent to market.

She crosses her arms. "How do you know I won't raise the alarm?"

"You threaten?" He smiles, but tightly, his eyes narrowed as if trying to make out something in the distance.

"Warn," she says.

He nods. "You are correct. Perhaps I'm trusting too much." He thinks for a moment. "You know, if they catch me they will interrogate me, yes?" He gives the barest of shrugs. "They will want to know everything. Where I hide. How I ate. Who I meet."

"Now who's threatening?" He smiles. "Warning."

"At least you didn't bring your pistol today," she says tartly. He smiles at his hand, holds it out to her to shake.

"They'd never believe you, you know," she says. "You know better than I, of course."

His open palm hovers between them like a taunt, and just as he lets it fall, she grasps it.

"I do." She gives his hand one firm, swinging pump and pulls away before he can exert any pressure.

"Wait here, then. And for God's sake keep out of sight."

She returns with a thick heel of bread, a flaky wedge of cheese. It's not much, just all that won't be missed. She

bundles it up in her skirts, afraid it won't be enough, that he'll demand something more. She thinks of young Pip in
Great Expectations
, making off with a whole pork pie for his convict, and envies him. But when she spills out her offering on the straw floor of the barn, the German falls on it greedily. She'd meant to make him take it and go, but she can't bear to make him stop once he's started. Besides, he finishes the meagre meal very quickly. He's picking a last flake of cheese off his chest before he thinks to look up at her. "Thank you."

And perhaps because it's so poor a meal, and his gratitude so sincere, she takes the pack of cigarettes she has stuffed in her pocket and offers him one. Even in the gloom his eyes

light up. He fumbles out a smoke, scrabbles with the matches, and only after he's taken a long drag does he relax. He catches her staring at him, and she looks away.

"Please," he says, gesturing to the pack, inviting her to join him, but she shakes her head. Something about his face when he drew on the cigarette. It was as if she recognised him, saw him as a young man, a boy, really, like any other, lighting a cigarette at a bus stop, in the queue for the chippy.

"Where did you learn English?" she asks, to change the subject.

"Cinema," he tells her. "It's lucky," she says.

He gives a stiff little hike to his shoulders. "Lucky for my comrades. There was so much smoke in our bunker we couldn't find anything white enough for a flag. So they sent me out, because of my English. Now some call me
Weisse

Fahne
-- White Flag--behind my back." He laughs, as if daring

her to join in, but instead she feels a shiver pass through her, as though a distant door has been opened and a draught slipped in.

"I meant lucky because we can talk," she says carefully. "I suppose," he says, and then simply, "Yes. That's so."

"So you did surrender?" she asks shyly, and he winces as if she's touched a wound.

"We were overrun. We had no choice. Or so it seemed at the time." He tips his head back to blow smoke at the sky.

"Do you wish you hadn't?" she whispers. "I'd be dead."

She nods. "But still. Do you wish?"

He sucks deeply on the cigarette, his cheeks hollowing. "Every day."

"But now you've escaped."

He snorts. "Do I look so free?"

"That's why you must go," she urges. "Go and don't come back."

As if for emphasis, she presses the crumpled pack of cigarettes into his dry hand. But when he's halfway out the door, she runs after him and holds out the matches.

She watches him go then, trotting through the long grass, body bent low, her heart rattling like the box of matches in his shirt pocket.

She spends the rest of the day wondering if he's left, looking up at every flicker of movement, every stirring in the breeze. At lunch Arthur asks her, "What is it?" and she stares at her plate, waiting for him to read her guilt in the part of her hair, until he goes out again. It comes to her that the German must have been watching them, waiting for Arthur and Jim to leave, and she goes about her afternoon chores, self- conscious as an actress. It's thrilling at first, this sense of being observed, as if she's never alone, but as the day wears on and he doesn't show himself, it begins to feel oppressive, as though he's spying on her.

She should be more worried about the scrutiny of others, she tells herself. That night she keeps her head down as she goes about her work. So preoccupied is she that it takes her

a while to sense the change in the place. The local men are back, for the most part.

The German's been loose almost a week and his threat seems to have dissipated, the consensus being that the fellow's long gone. But it seems to her that the new ease in the pub isn't due just to the German's being gone. It's because the guards are largely absent--out on the search still, or stuck at the camp (the major has doubled the guard since the

escape)--and for the first time in months there are more villagers in the pub than strangers; Welsh is the loudest language. Looking round, she can see it in the men's eyes. It's their pub again, their local. It's not until her father comes in an hour later--ruddy faced from the wind, but grinning, so that he seems to still glow with the pride of having driven the guards and their dog off his land--that she recognises the same look on the other men's faces. Why, even the constable looks happy, despite the escape, or perhaps because of it, vindicated in his warnings and somehow elevated, better than the guards he's been chumming up to lately, his own man again.

Jack's telling a story about throwing out a soldier who came in late the night before: "Some joker--a captain, mind you--but he was no captain of mine, I told him when he started banging on the bar for service, and then he got all up on his high horse, said he'd get better service if he was the escaped Jerry himself, or some such rot."

"Said he was a Jerry!" the constable cries. "I'd have shown him the door meself if he hadn't taken himself off to the Prince." And Esther laughs with the rest, as if by some miracle of nerve it had actually been him, here.

Perhaps, she thinks, looking around in wonder, the German's done them all a favour, drawn off the English, freed them in some modest way even as he's freed himself. They should raise a glass to him, she thinks, feeling better about

helping him, when another thought overtakes her:
This is what it'll be like after the war ends
. But the sudden glimpse of the future makes her stomach tighten, as if she were seeing it not from behind the bar but from behind a closed window.

The next morning, she goes to the barn with two hard- boiled eggs tied in a hanky, but there's no one, and she thinks,
Well, good for him
, though not without a pang--she'd hopped back and forth while the eggs boiled, as if she were the one in hot water--and immediately hurries to town in case there's any word of his having been captured.

That afternoon, though, he's waiting for her again, and she finds herself beaming as she sees him. She produces the eggs--she's saved them, even thought to wrap a little salt in a twist of newspaper--and he closes his fists on them tightly.

"You know, you really have to go," she tells him again.

He's rolling one of the eggs gently between his palms, as if afraid to smash it, and he doesn't look up until the white starts to show through the cracks.

"What are you waiting for?" she asks. "Why stay here?" He bites down on the shining egg, and she looks away.

Between swallows, he tells her, "To let the search pass."

It makes sense, she supposes. It's as good a spot as any, wild, remote, and the guard dogs can't track him. But more than anything she feels relieved--he'll come again. As for Mott and Mick, she gives Karsten slivers of bacon rind to feed them until they know his scent.

He sleeps in the quarry, and she realises that he must have followed Arthur home one morning. Now he creeps up on them each day, watches the comings and goings, and then when she's alone, he appears.

One afternoon she's looking out for him when she sees the clothes on the line dancing wildly, bucking and writhing in the gusty wind. As she watches, one of the pegs pops off and her navy dress pulls free, streams downwind, leaping and twisting.

She should hurry to catch it, a breeze like this could carry it, soaring, out to sea, but all she can do is labour uphill, wading through the long grass. Breathless, she makes it at last, buries her face in the bundle in her arms, and when she looks up,

he's there behind her, chasing after a billowing scrap of white. He snatches it out of the air, holds it overhead where it snaps like a pennant as he brings it on to her. It flies in his face--her silk slip, she sees--and she grabs it from him, blushing.

"Someone will see!" she cries, not sure if she means him or her slip.

He comes three more times that week, fleeting visits--the first interrupted, along with her heart for a beat, by Arthur, rising early and calling for his breakfast--and each time she resolves to send him away, to refuse him food. If she keeps him here, he'll be caught, she's sure. And yet she can't stop herself.

When she heard Arthur's cry, she pressed her hand over the German's mouth. He was in the middle of saying something, and for a second she felt his breath on her palm, the odd softness of his lips in the midst of his stubble. Then she saw his eyes widen, and she drew her hand away, and they listened together.

"I have to go," she'd whispered, and he'd nodded, licked his lips.

"Where were you?" Arthur had asked. She looked away at first, but when he asked again, she looked into his eyes, told him, "Nowhere," and he just shrugged.

Only later, pouring her father's tea, did she recall the German licking his lips, realise she'd felt his tongue, too, for a flickering second, slipping between her fingers.

The second visit, there are no interruptions, and after she's fed the German there's an awkward, desperate silence until she asks him what it's like under the water.

"I'm not a submariner," he tells her with a slow shake of the

head. "My father was."

He's silent for a moment. "I did go aboard one once. A friend smuggled me on during a training drill. Cold." He shudders. "And wet--from all the leaks, I mean! Everything drips, everything tastes like salt and oil." He makes a face.

"But are there no windows?"

He laughs, and then, seeing her disappointment, recovers himself. "We heard a whale--singing, you know. My friend said it thought we were another whale. And sometimes, I swear, I could hear schools of fish swim past us, a fluttering sound like...stroking the hull." He halts, embarrassed. "The others said it was only kelp, or bubbles."

"I wish it were fish," she says, and after a moment he nods. Only at the end of the week, sitting in the gloom of the barn,

watching the dust float like stars through the sunlight slipping between the gaps in the wood, does she ask him his plan.

He shakes his head. "I can't tell you."

"You don't trust me!" She stares at him.
After all this! Just
that morning Jim had asked for another egg, and she shook her head. "The guards," she tells the German icily now, "have reduced their patrols. They're back at the bar. This is your chance. Isn't it your duty?"

"And your duty?" he asks sullenly. "Why do you betray your country?"

Why indeed, she wonders. But then isn't it her second betrayal? Perhaps it comes easier. But no, she knows that's not so. It's that the second betrayal, so much larger than the first, overshadows it, almost erases it.

"Would you rather I didn't?" she manages. "Besides, it's not my country, not in the way you mean."

He frowns. "You do not feel this...
die Vaterlandsliebe?

Fatherland-love.
Der patriotismus
."

Patriotism? She's never seen before how love of country is so wrapped up in the love of fathers, but it suddenly seems so