The Welsh Girl (38 page)

Karsten watched the ash on his cigarette grow longer and longer, until it seemed that if he moved it would tumble, that he was sitting still in order to save it. Then Rotheram pushed his empty teacup forward. Karsten tapped the ash into the saucer, took a long last pull on his cigarette, and slowly shook his head.

"I'd do it again," he said quietly, and when Rotheram opened his mouth, Karsten whispered, "And you would too. It's all right."

Rotheram had bent across the table, frowning. "Do I know you? I mean from before, from home?"

And then there'd come a hammering at the door.

"Yes!" he'd cried in annoyance, and a guard hurried in, bent down to him and muttered something.

"The major sent you?" Rotheram demanded angrily. "The major?" He seemed about to say more, but then glanced at Karsten, composed himself. "Well, it seems there's going to be a brief interruption to our conversation."

They'd congratulated him at first, the camp leaders, called him a hero, an inspiration. Schiller was with them; he'd probably begged to come along.
He's my friend
, Karsten could imagine him crowing. He'd actually winked at Karsten at one point, and he'd seen it then: The slate wiped clean. A way back into the fold. Welcome home.

But then they'd wanted to know what he'd seen, as if he'd

been out on reconnaissance.
He
couldn't see how to tell them without talking about the girl, and if he mentioned her, even in passing, he knew it would spread, embroidered with rumours, beyond this little room, beyond these men, to the rest of the camp, and eventually to the guards. So he'd hesitated, and they'd seen it and become suspicious. How had he managed to elude capture so long? Luck, he suggested, but they shrugged it off. He wasn't the lucky kind, was he? It made them wonder, they said, wonder what he'd really been up to. Talking to the British, maybe?

"I'm no traitor," he said, and they sneered at him. "Did you really not learn anything out there?" Schiller

pleaded, and Karsten nodded. "Well?"

What
did
he learn out there? Nothing new, exactly, nothing

the rest of the men didn't know. He'd realised it in the empty bunker, but it had come to him not as something new but something old, something recognised. He'd known it in France, on the beach, only he'd not been able to face it then.

What had so amazed him there was that the invasion, so vast in scale, could have been kept a secret. He'd heard, and discounted, the rumours of invasion all spring, just like the rest of them, yet still he couldn't fathom it. How had that time, that place, been kept so close? How had those thousands of men been kept secret, training at bases, massing in camps, produced now, as if by magic? He suddenly imagined the whole of Britain--not just the leaders, the soldiers, but the civilians, the families with sons and husbands and fathers in uniform--knowing, or at least suspecting, but somehow not breathing a word. A million people keeping a secret. It was almost more astounding than the sheer force of arms, that force of will. He had wanted to ask someone about it, but around him the men in the stockade hadn't breathed a word about the invasion to each other, just stared out through the

wire as if they couldn't believe their eyes, as if it were all invisible. And yet there was nothing else to talk about. It was as if, he thinks now, we were keeping the secret ourselves.

He remembers, amid the long line of men moving past him, focusing on the small white cross on a chaplain's helmet as it bobbed along in the column, coming closer and closer, and then as it passed he saw the man's pale face, the fear on it, and something about a priest's fear moved him. He wished he could comfort him somehow. He wanted to offer tips--tell him about the baker in the next village who sold passable wine from the back of his shop. He wanted to tell him not to worry, Father, that he'd make it, that he'd live.
You're going to win
, Karsten wanted to cry, and recoiled at once from the thought.

So he'd known it then.

The war was lost. Not quite over, but lost. That was the secret. The deserted shore defences he'd slept in had only confirmed it. But no, that wasn't quite right either. Really, it had been the girl who'd convinced him, or helped him accept it, rather. He'd felt such astonishment slipping inside her, as if he'd never quite believed it possible. It had seemed, even to him, the amateur conjuror, like true magic. He thought of a shining coin palmed snugly in the fleshy fold beneath his thumb; a still-warm pocket watch ticking in his hand beneath a silk handkerchief. Gone, disappeared. Just like that.

For a moment, he had thought the whole war had been waged for that purpose only; he had felt such peace, he was sure it must be over, that they'd separate and rise to the bright news of armistice. An end to the war that was neither victory nor defeat, just peace.

"What do you want to know?" he'd asked the camp leaders.

"Anything. Everything!"

"We're going to go home," Karsten said. "The war's almost over."

"How do you know?" Schiller asked hopefully, and then another voice, sterner, daring him, "Who's winning?"

He looked into Sulzer's face. "They are."

"What?" Schiller had wailed, but Sulzer had just turned away, and Karsten had marvelled,
He knows
.

They'd called him all the old names then--turncoat, coward-- and he'd spat at them.

"You think it would have made a difference to fight to the death. What would it have meant? A minute's delay for the British, two maybe." He stared at Schiller. "Our deaths might have prolonged the Thousand-Year Reich by five minutes."

"Traitor!" they howled. Karsten had known what was coming, but he leaned over the table and said it anyway: "Before long they'll all have surrendered, all our countrymen. Will they all be traitors? Or just Germans?"

"Why, you," Schiller began, and Karsten struck him in the face. It felt so good. He'd been dying to hit Schiller for weeks, he thought. And then he hit him again in the middle of his bloodied, surprised face, and this time Schiller went down.
It's a favour
, Karsten had thought viciously.
Nowthey won't think we're friends
. But then the others were on him, as he knew they would be. He tried to stay upright as long as he could under the flurry of blows, tried to remain conscious until he heard the whistles of the guards.

In the infirmary, he has begged, through his split and swollen lips, for a window bed, and the orderlies have taken pity on him, laid him down where he has a view of the fence and the trees and the hillside, where he can keep watch for her. The Welsh girl. The pregnant girl. It's growing dark now, though--the flame of his candle reflecting in the dark pane-- and he knows she's not coming tonight.

He wonders about her baby, wonders if he should have

said what he did. What business is it of his? And yet when she

told him about it, he'd had a sudden impulse,
I can save it
, that same impulse, he thinks, that he felt towards Heino and even Schiller just before he surrendered. And he'd welcomed it.

Rotheram has been to see him that afternoon, but he seemed taken aback by Karsten's injuries, asking his questions gently and not pursuing them.
He thinks they did this to me because I talked to him
, Karsten realised. "You'll get no more out of me than they did," he said, and Rotheram replied, "I see that now." When he was done and packing his bag, Karsten told him, "I never knew you," and Rotheram barely glanced at his ruined face, then nodded.

Before he left, Karsten asked him for paper and pencil. Rotheram had slipped a pack of cigarettes under the lined sheets, which Karsten appreciated but hadn't meant to ask for. It's time to write to his mother again, he thinks. There are questions he wants to ask her about his father--how he was after the last war, how he was before. But first he must tell her the truth, tell her of his surrender. He thinks of passing down

that long, dark tunnel out of the bunker, the blood pulsing hot in his ears, pushing himself on into the blinding light. And he pictures himself, at last, holding up his hands, though now as if he were waiting for someone to grasp them and pull him out. Like a second birth, he thinks.

He starts to write. In the swaying candlelight the lines on the paper look like strips of bandages, and he has the strangest impression of his writing hand, unwinding them as it moves across the page, revealing the words beneath.

rs Roberts opens her door at the first knock, almost as if she's been waiting behind it. She seems old and frail in

the evening light. Esther remembers her as a tough, bosomy woman in school. They were all a little afraid of her bustling energy. Now her previously round face is drawn, and her eyes bulge. She brings Esther through to the parlour, the best room, and insists on making tea. Esther's never been here before, and she feels self-conscious, left alone with Mrs Roberts's fine things: the gleaming brass carriage clock on the mantel, the etched mirror above. Beside the clock is a framed photograph, and it takes her a long moment to recognise Mr Roberts, stern beneath the bowler cocked low over his brow. And then she spots the familiar gap between his teeth. The walls, she sees, are covered with family pictures, rank after rank of faces peering down at her. Rhys is everywhere. He's rarely smiling--shy, for once, of his gap teeth, or perhaps advised not to by photographers, conscious of customer satisfaction--and his stiff features make him seem from another time, a contemporary of his ancestors. She hunches on the stiff horsehair sofa where she's perched, listening to

her old teacher in the kitchen, trying to avoid their eyes. Instead, she meets the glassy glare of the stuffed and mounted robin on the sideboard, its beak gaping, breast puffed, but silent under its bell jar. She wonders if she can go through with this. "Mrs R," she calls, "Mrs R!" But the shrill cry of the kettle interrupts her, and when Mrs Roberts calls back, "Did you want something, dear?" her nerve fails her. "No.

Nothing."

The whispered thought comes to her that there might be a baby picture of Rhys on the wall, and she steels herself to look up, glancing around wildly, filled with a sharp desire to see it, as if it were the future somehow, her fate. But there's nothing, and then Mrs R bustles back in, steam puffing from the spout of the teapot on the tray before her.

There's a lull while they stare at the tray between them, at the silver pot and solitary Eccles cake beside it, as the tea steeps. "Oh, I couldn't," Esther says at last, as if the cake has just materialised before her, but Mrs Roberts waves dismissively.

"The funeral baked meats," " she says almost gaily. "I've been getting more food than I can eat. You'd hardly know there was rationing." And after another pause Esther cuts the cake in half and says they'll share. She stares at the little speckled pastry on the Willow Pattern plate before her, the knife pressed to it, and tells
it
, as much as Mrs Roberts, that she's carrying Rhys's child. Spoken in English the lie seems more abstract, easier, as if someone else is telling it.

There's a moment when she thinks Mrs R doesn't believe it, a second of calculation when her features seem smudged in the lamplight, her expression indeterminate. She examines Esther with wary appraisal, as if they've never met, and the girl braces herself for judgement. But all she says at last is "You're long-waisted. I see it now, of course. Don't know how I missed it." She shakes her head. "But that's always the way, isn't it?

Never see what's right under our noses." Her face tenses and then relaxes.

"
Duw
," the old woman breathes. "Thank God." She is up,

with her arms around Esther where she sits on the sofa, knife still in hand, shaking against the plate, and Esther finds herself weeping.

"There, child, there. You thought I'd be angry, didn't you?

Disappointed, even." She shakes her head, pulls a clean little hanky from her sleeve, touches it to Esther's cheeks. "Truth is, I never thought you'd have him. He was so...well, a good boy, but not quick. Still, one never reckons with love, does one?

Anyhow, don't cry. There's nothing to be ashamed of, riot much. I know the fault isn't only on your side."

Esther tries to pull away from her, but the old woman holds her tighter, puts her lips to the girl's ear.

"It's not the end of the world. Oh, there'll be talk and some jokes at your expense, it'll be hard for a bit, but it's not as if you're the first as ever fell." She leans back, nodding. "You might as well say it's a tradition in these parts. "The Welsh way," the English used to call it. "Welsh courtship," if you read your Mrs Gaskell. This is a hundred years ago now, but back then it was a winked-at practice, a betrothed couple who couldn't yet afford to marry sharing a bed before the wedding day. I dare say the practice isn't entirely dead, although there's some what abused it, reneged on the deal, which gave it a bad name. That's why they call it 'welshing', you know.
That
's where it comes from."

And now Esther does fight free, looks at her with frank astonishment.

"You didn't think I knew that, did you?" Her former teacher smiles. "But I could hardly tell you in school. Some definitions you have to wait for until you're a grown woman."

She means it all as a comfort, but when she looks at Esther's face, she seems to recoil, and Esther wonders what she sees there. Anger, perhaps.
It's your fault
, she wants to shout.
You taught me to speak the language
. And somehow the flash of hatred steels her in her lie.

"There, now," Mrs Roberts says, groping for something more to offer. "But my boy'll make an honest woman of you, mark my words."

Esther hangs her head, almost gagging, puts a hand to her

mouth, presses her eyes closed. But even in the darkness the words appear before her--
honest woman
-- scratched out on a schoolroom slate. It's as if the English words are mocking her now, flinging her lies back at her like a hollow echo, as if the very language is laughing at her. She dare not speak.