Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

And she has. Only a couple of brief, dutiful notes, to be sure, but Jim has written too, and all they’ve had back is a measly picture postcard of the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square, addressed to “Mr. Evans, Esther, and Jim,” saying how friendly the English were, how dingy London was, and that he’d been assigned to the kitchens — news that managed to disappoint or annoy all three of them.

Not that his mother has heard much more herself. “It’s embarrassing,” Mrs. Roberts confided to Esther with a little laugh, over the counter at the post office. “Here I am, the postmistress, and my own son a poor correspondent. Not that he was ever much good at his English when I was his teacher, as you know. And it’s because he has to write in English, you see. The censors can’t read Welsh.” She shook her head. “Can you imagine! Strangers reading a boy’s letters to his mother.”

It’s just as well that Mrs. Roberts is a talker, Esther thinks. She’s always a little tongue-tied around her former teacher (still scared that Mrs. R, as they called her in school, will criticize her grammar), but more so when the subject is Rhys. The first time she saw his mother after the rejection, she kept her hands clasped behind her back, as if afraid she’d get a rap across the knuckles with a ruler. Thankfully, though, it seems Mrs. R doesn’t know of the proposal.

“Last known location,” Jim is saying now, resting a finger on the head of the pin representing Rhys, twisting it back and forth to press it home. Esther’s eye wanders to Rhys’s postcard of the picture palace, propped up between two lead soldiers on the deep windowsill that serves as Jim’s desk. The last word Mrs. R had from him, over a fortnight ago, was that he was awaiting orders. But to Esther, it’s almost as if he might still be inside the grand cinema, sitting in the stalls.

It miffs her, that one postcard. She’s wanted to share Rhys’s escape somehow, or better yet, have it instead of him, if he’s too cloddish to enjoy it. (He told her when he left he’d be back just as soon as the war was over. “But why?” she asked crossly, thinking him a mother’s boy, and he blinked and coughed and told her, “For you.”) Esther has promised Mrs. R, good student that she is, that she’ll write regularly — faithfully, she almost said. But whenever she starts another letter, her own news about the village or the farm — the gathering, the washing, everything the same as every other year — seems so drab she can’t go on. Besides, it makes her feel foolish, as though she’s encouraging him, or worse, chasing him.

And once she’d started stepping out with Colin, she could hardly write Rhys.

“Course, he could be anywhere by now,” Jim says. “Probably not allowed to tell us.”

“I’m sure he’s safe.” But she’s misread the boy.

“Safe!” he scoffs. “I bet that was a cover, about being a cook. He couldn’t very well say if he’s a secret agent or something. He’s probably already behind enemy lines.”

She tries to seem serious. “Sounds dangerous.”

“Not half!”

She sees how much he misses Rhys then, how his longing, too, is etched with envy, his desperation for an escape of his own, from childhood. From her, she thinks with a start. Rhys and Jim shared this small box room when Rhys worked at Cilgwyn, and the two of them became thick as thieves — Rhys as patient with Jim’s childishness as Jim was with Rhys’s ponderous English. Rhys had even taught the boy to whistle. She remembers them, last summer, bouncing around the barn like a pair of mad things, trampling down the hay pile.

“Why don’t you write him another letter?” she suggests. “I bet he’d like that.”

“If he can even get letters where he is,” Jim says, but after a moment he gathers paper and pencil, bends over his desk, and she leaves him to fetch another lamp.

Rhys, a spy? Rhys dangling under a parachute? She wants to laugh, but for a second the romance of Jim’s vision seduces her. The boy loves him, she thinks, and she feels a pang of envy. If only she could. It seems so suddenly attractive, a way of turning back the clock. She thinks about writing to Rhys herself. Could she still accept him? Could she just pass it off as a mistake, a confusion. “Oh, you mean you want to marry me!” He looked so smart in his uniform. Well groomed, she thinks, turning the words over in her mind, as if she’s just understood something.

And yet when she imagines kissing him, her tongue flinches from that dark gap between his two front teeth.

When she checks back later, Jim is staring at the line of marbles running along the edge of the window, each balanced in a little scallop of putty.

“What have you got?” she asks, leaning forward to look at the paper, but he hunches his shoulders.

“Come on,” she says, and reluctantly he pulls away and she sees that the paper is blank, the whiteness stumping him.

“Why don’t you let me help,” she says, her voice taking on a teacherly tone.

He shakes his head.

“You could tell him about the bike.”

“I was gonna!” He glares at her reflection in the dark window.

“I’ll check your spelling if you like.”

He ignores her.

“Well, tell him I say hello.”

“He’s my friend,” Jim rounds on her with sudden heat. “Not your boyfriend.”

She chokes out a laugh. “You can have him!”

Lying in bed later, she thinks of the nights last summer when she heard them, down the hall, chattering away in their mongrel mix of Welsh and English, whispering and laughing. About her? she wondered.

“Shh,” she’d hissed at them. Rhys was no better than a child, she’d thought. Yet now it occurs to her that perhaps she’d been jealous. Not of Jim, but of Rhys and his easy rapport with the boy.

She stares into the darkness, tossing and turning. She feels so… full somehow, filled with feeling, throttling on it, but with no way to let it out. The words lie curled and heavy in her belly. She can’t write to Rhys: if she put pen to paper, she doesn’t know what would come out, how she’d ever control the words. She has an urge to confess, feels it pressing behind her teeth, swallows it down, but also gnawing on her is the desire to blame someone — Colin, of course, but also Rhys. If he hadn’t been so… dull, she might have fallen in love with him, mightn’t she? So wasn’t it his fault as much as hers?

Now that she thinks of it, she pictures him home on leave after finishing his basic training, coming into the pub the evening before she saw him off at the station. He’d been with a group of other young people, including a couple of local girls, Mair Morris and Elsie Pritchard, all of them underage. Esther refused to serve them at first, but Jack had intervened, smiling. He glanced over at the constable in his accustomed corner, who nodded indulgently, and told her, “I think we can make an exception just this once.” Esther had watched Rhys get drunker and drunker, Elsie braying with laughter at his jokes, Mair running a hand down his uniformed arm. Esther had had to wave Jack away when he asked if she wanted to knock off early and have a drink with her pals. It had dawned on her that Rhys was right, that people — Jack, PC Parry, and, if those two, then half the village — thought him her swain, and a furious shudder swept through her.

And that was the first night she’d talked to Colin, it seems to her now.

IN THE LAST WEEK of June, Esther pulls a cardigan on to go down to Williams the butcher with the new month’s ration coupons. She’s been stretching the meat portion out all week, day after day of lobscau, the thin, salty stew of mutton, leeks, and swedes that she serves with onion cake. Arthur tolerates it with a kind of grim pride — it’s a national dish — but Jim hates it with an expressive passion, making faces, claiming it’s made of some unholy mixture of lobster and cow, hence the name. If only! Esther thinks. She pines for the old days, when during the shearing or haying the men of the village would descend on each farm in turn for a day, and the woman of the place would feed them lunch in exchange. It was a fierce competition among the wives to see who could set the best table. Esther’s mother had been a famous hostess — the old-timers would tell her so on quiet nights at the pub, licking their lips at the memory of her mother’s stewed blackberries — and Esther wonders now if, in her own clumsy efforts to emulate such hospitality, despite rationing, she might not have encouraged Rhys when he worked at Cilgwyn. She’d certainly practiced her baking on him, and he’d swallowed down the sourest rhubarb crumbles, the tartest gooseberry pies, with a fixed smile. Mistaking her pride for love, she laments.