The Welsh Girl (34 page)

she's somehow keeping him here, as if her helping him to escape has only bound him more. "I'll scream," she tells him, even takes a deep breath, but he just watches her, shaking his head.

"Who will hear?" She'd think it a threat but for the way his shoulders slump, as if at the futility.

"Don't you want to get away?"

He gestures to the mountains, the sky. "Where should I go?

With no food, no clothes." He plucks at his fraying, torn uniform.

"Then why escape at all?" "I saw a chance. That's all." "A chance of what?"

He looks around as if for an answer. "I don't know. Nothing more than this view, perhaps. Something else to look at other than wire and fence posts."

"So now what?"

He shrugs. "They catch me. I give myself up." He sees her face. "I'm sorry."

"No wonder you trusted me," she says bitterly. "It didn't matter if I turned you in. I thought you wanted to get away. To...to--"

"To where?"

"To redeem your honour!" she cries. "No wonder you surrendered."

"
Ruhe!
"

The word rings off the house behind her, a word she doesn't know but understands.

She tries to run then, but he catches her wrist, drags her into the barn. She shakes loose, but by then he's blocking the door. She moves to dart past him and he's before her and she springs back, panting, about to scream. "No." she thinks.
Not again
.

"Wait!" he calls. "Wait. Please! I'm sorry." He slumps down on one of the hay bales, a hand up to placate her. "I tried. You hear. There is nowhere to go. But I tried."

She takes in his matted hair, the salt stains on his tunic. "You swam--"

"Swam! I almost drowned! Might be better if I had." He shakes his head mournfully. "You can't know what it is to lose your honour."

She has taken a step forward at the thought of his dying. "Yes, I can."

"How?" he starts, and she cuts him off: "I just can."

He searches her face, then slowly nods, not that she's told him something new, but that he's finally understood something. He holds out his hand and she takes it, and he pulls her down beside him on the bale, and for a moment they sit very still between the glinting dusty bars of light.

"You're the only one I've told." "Why?"

"Because you're the enemy." He presses his lips together.

"
His
enemy, at least. He was one of the ones who built your

camp. Left the day you came. Off to France."

"Then it doesn't matter," he says. "No one else knows." "They will," she says. "Soon enough."

He opens his mouth, closes it. "What will you do?"

She shrugs, and he nods as if she's answered, finally bows his head.

This close, she can smell him, and the scent is surprisingly familiar. It takes her a moment to realise, he smells like the mountain after sleeping on it.

"You must be starving," she says presently, and he raises his eyebrows. She clasps his hand and leads him towards the house.

He hesitates at the threshold as if fearing a trap. "How do you like your eggs?" she asks.

"Very much," he says, looking about, and she doesn't correct him, but decides frying would be fastest.

She sets them before him, two lace-edged eggs, looking oddly naked on the plate, and steps back, suddenly shy of him. He falls on them, eating the first methodically, lapping the sluggish yolk--she'd compromised between hard and soft--

with the rubbery white, before he thinks to look up. He swallows hard and gestures to the chair across from him.

He eats the second egg more slowly, smiling and nodding between mouthfuls. Afterwards, she pushes a napkin towards him and he dabs at his beard.

"Thank you!" "You're welcome."

They both fall silent, as if overhearing their own conversation for the first time.

"I want you to know, I would never have told them about this."

She nods.

"How have you been travelling?" she asks, to change the subject.

He rubs his face. "I just follow the sheep. I thought they would know to keep away from any soldiers." He laughs. "I envy them! If only I could live off grass, I could be free."

"Not so free," she says, thinking of the
cynefin
. "They don't

stray far."

"Maybe it's a kind of freedom too. To stay home."

She gives a short laugh. "I never thought of it like that." He shrugs.

"How much longer do you think until they find you?" "A few days, perhaps, if I'm lucky. But I think I will give

myself up. End my holidays." He smiles crookedly. "For me, you mean."

He purses his lips. "I don't want to make trouble for you." "No trouble," she says. "I could feed you, find you clothes." "Even if I never escape?"

She nods slowly.

"Thank you," he breathes. "But no." "When will you do it?"

"Soon. Today." His face clouds, and she knows he's thinking of it, of surrendering again, raising his hands.

"Surrender to me," she says suddenly.

He smiles, shakes his head. "They'd never believe it." "You're too proud," she says, "to surrender to a woman." "And you? Who would you surrender to?"

She studies his face. The beard, she thinks, becomes him. True, he looks a little like a castaway, but also older, as if he's coming into himself.

"It's why you kept coming back, isn't it?" she asks, and he grins.

"I was starving."

She's silent for a long time and then he raises his arms, palms out, and she steps forward, takes his hands, draws them down around her.

She has led him out of the house, gripped by a sudden claustrophobia--it's her father's house, her mother's--to a sheltered corner of the field behind the barn. Now she lies beneath him, buoyed by the thick bed of uncut grass at her back, staring at the sky, the clouds ebbing across it. She fears she might recall Colin, but instead it's Rhys he reminds her of, with his gentle, gingerly fumbling, and she wonders suddenly if Rhys died a virgin; hopes not, for his sake. She presses her face to his neck, tastes salt--
the sea
-- watches the clouds slide together, then slowly and silently tear themselves apart.

Afterwards, lying side by side, staring at the sky, he asks, "So, did I surrender to you, or you to me?"

"Can't you tell?"

He turns his head in the grass. "No."

"Me neither," she says. "Not everything is war, after all, I suppose."

She stretches. "What would you be doing now if there were no war?"

"The same, I hope. You?" "Not likely."

He rolls on to his side and stares at her. "I'd make you...woo me." She giggles. "How?"

"Ask me to the pictures?"

"Of course! Would you care to join me?"

"Why, however did you know? I love the pictures."

He holds his arm up, crooked, and she slips hers through his, and they lie there staring up at the bright screen of the sky, arm in arm. After a few minutes their breaths are so steady they seem to fill the clouds, blowing them away. Like filled sails, she thinks.

"How on earth do you get the ship in there, anyway?" she asks suddenly, and he laughs.

"No, really. I want to know the secret."

"No secret. You just ask the bottle very nicely!"

She joins him then, the two of them in each other's arms, stifling their laughter against each other.

When she finally sits up she feels lightheaded, as if she's just rolled down the hillside, the way she used to when she was a girl.

"What will you do?" he asks a little later, and she knows from his tone what he means. She may have been thinking of Rhys, but he was thinking of Colin.

"I don't know."

She feels the tears drawing up from somewhere so deep inside she's sure they'll be ice cold.

And then he breathes, "I wish I could marry you."

She stares at him, shoves the tears aside with the heel of her hand as if to see him better, finally starts to laugh.

"What? What is it?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's just that I'm not sure that would help exactly!" Then she sees his face. "But I wish you could, too." And she does. Her second proposal, she thinks, stroking

the long grass.

And then he whispers, "Keep it."

Her fists tighten on the stalks. "What business is it of yours?"

"I might have shot him," he says, "your soldier. If I hadn't been captured, I mean."

"I wish!"

"Or he me."

"Don't say so."

"I'm the enemy, remember. I shot others not so different to him. I don't even know how many." He looks at her, and her eyes flick away. "Keep it," he says. "For me."

"For my enemy?" "Your prisoner."

She starts to deny it, stops. He's right. These are the very last moments of his freedom. It would be easy to promise him, but instead she turns away, stares down the long slope

beyond the house to the wavering shore, the breakers flipping and churning like the sheets of a restless sleeper, studying it all as if she'll never see it again.

They dress in silence, not looking at each other. "Well," she says at last.

"Yes, sir." He comes to attention and she shakes her head. "Please don't."

"May the prisoner make a request?" "What?" she asks warily.

"A last...cigarette?"

"Of course. They're in the kitchen."

"It might be my last for a long while." It takes her a moment to register his sly grin, and then she shoves him, turns and runs for the house.

She's in the yard, still in the lead just, before she sees the figure emerging from the barn. "Get away from her!"

It's Jim, shotgun in hand.

She pulls up and Karsten runs into the back of her, grasps her.

"Run," she whispers. Jim looks like he's about to topple over from the weight of the gun. "Oh, please run." But Karsten just squeezes her, whispers in her ear, "It's better like this. To give myself up to him. I owe him something." And slowly he releases her, turns towards Jim, his hands rising as if weightless.

Jim is squinting at the bearded figure, then he beams with delight. "I knew it was you!" and Karsten nods ruefully.

The boy stands guard over him until Arthur appears for supper, and then the two of them lead Karsten away.

She watches them go over the hill together, Karsten in front, his hands on his head; the boy behind, now clutching a pitchfork; Arthur in the rear, the shotgun over his arm, his cap tipped back, where he pushed it in consternation when he'd first come upon them.--

She asked to go with them, but Arthur had shaken his head, and she'd not known how to insist. "It's a lucky escape you've had, my girl," he said, his face stricken, when she told him the story of Jim's rescue.

She'd looked at Karsten, but he refused to meet her eye, as he had ever since Jim appeared. What else could he do, she thinks, and yet seeing him square his shoulders as the men left, she couldn't help feeling he was relieved somehow, and she feels cheated. And it comes to her, watching her father's grim face, that perhaps it wasn't escape she's been

lusting after these past few days, but capture. Could that be it? Was all her recklessness just a desire to be caught red handed? How many times this past week has her heart raced

at Arthur's appearances, how many times has she felt a kind of anger at him for being so dense? Is that why she'd driven Karsten away so vehemently? Because, if she were caught, so would he have been? But now he
is
caught, she thinks, and

she envies him almost as much as if he'd got away. He'd been protecting her by not looking at her, not speaking to her, as

she paced back and forth across the yard, but now she wishes he'd just embraced her, or she him.

This is what men will never understand, she realises, watching the distant figures breast the ridge, Karsten's hands thrown up against the sky for a final moment, then sinking out of sight, followed by Jim's silhouette, Arthur's. Their dishonour, men's dishonour, can always be redeemed, defeat followed by victory, capture by escape, escape by capture. Up hill and

down dale. But women are dishonoured once and for all. Their only hope is to hide it. To keep it to themselves.

That evening the pub is filled again, as if the village has breathed out. The guards are back too. She hasn't seen it so full since D-day.

Even Jim is allowed in, a signal honour. Arthur hoists him on the bar, patiently lets him tell his story in English, while the other lads can only cluster at the doors and windows. Jim's glowing, Esther sees, burning with heroism (or at least the beer Harry's been letting him sip). It's another gift the prisoner has given him, she sees. One man's loss, another's gain.

"Why, I thought he was going to prick Jerry like a sausage with that pitchfork!" Arthur is telling them in Welsh.

When it's her turn to speak up, she plays her part, albeit mutedly.

"Thank goodness for Jim here."

"Ah, there was nothing to be scared of," George, the guard, says. He's drunk, Esther sees, making up for his lost nights' drinking.

"It's not like
you
caught him," she hisses.

"Lucky for him, or he might not have walked back to camp, but been carried. Trouble he put us to."

"Can't blame him for trying to escape," Arthur calls from the other side of the bar.

"Enemy sympathiser, is you now, Evans?"

Esther starts guiltily, but the constable is glowering at her father, jealous, she sees, that Arthur is the one to have brought the fugitive in. "Your enemy's enemy, is that it?" It's an old

gibe. The constable likes to needle the nationalists by reminding them that some of their leaders had spoken up for Germany before the war.

"There's no dishonour in serving your country, I think," Arthur growls in Welsh. "Wouldn't you agree, officer?" he adds, switching to English, which shuts Parry up. "Like to think I'd do the same," Arthur goes on. "Like to think we all would."

They carry Jim home, asleep and snoring heavily.

Arthur lays him in his bed, and Esther tucks him in, and the two of them stand over him for a moment, watching him sleep.

Later, as she lies awake in her own bed, she envies Jim his deep, even breathing. She wonders if it's the German's fate that's troubling her.--She could have fed him, she thinks, perhaps hidden him for months. But when she thinks of it now, she feels the burden of it, the responsibility, pinning her to her bed. She didn't want his life in her hands, she realises, not even after they'd made love. Otherwise she'd have insisted on concealing him.