Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

His mother had gone to the parlor window and snatched up the Vacancy sign, as if she’d rip it in two, and then stood there trembling, just behind the curtain, until they were gone.

“But there are rooms,” Karsten growled accusingly, actually stamping his foot. And she nodded curtly, slipped the sign back in the window. “Not for them.”

“You lied!” It was the first time he’d ever caught her.

“They lied to me first,” she said. “Herr and Frau Wagner, indeed. Very funny! As if I was a fool, a bumpkin! They’d never have tried it if there was a man about the place.” She hadn’t spoken to him for the rest of the week.

They were Jews, of course, he thinks now — probably married, in truth, something about the way the woman had touched the man told him so even then — but trying and failing to pass. Except, as a child he’d not known them.

THE NEXT EVENING, the boys are back, all of them, even the little one. He’d not expected to see them again. As he approaches the fence, they hold out their hands through the wire as if for a toy, a gift. But when Karsten raises his own hands, empty, they hurl abuse, and the night after they’re gone again, the little loner too, and Karsten feels oddly abandoned.

In the dusk, the full moon opens above him like the mouth of an impossibly distant tunnel.

He wonders how his father handled his own captivity all those years ago. He never spoke of it much, or of the war in general. Indeed, when Karsten thinks of him, he can barely remember his voice. His father had been gone so much of his young life, sometimes for days at a time if the fish were running, and then gone for good before Karsten turned seven. All he recalls are glimpses — his father bent over the model of a ship in a bottle at the kitchen table, patiently explaining what he was doing. Karsten had asked him how he’d learned all that, and his father had told him a fellow prisoner had taught him. His last model had been unfinished at the time of his death, and Karsten had whiled away the long, still hours of mourning finishing it.

ESTHER CAN hardly believe it was her, running down to the wire like that, scattering the boys, confronting the Germans. The thought of it, in retrospect, makes her heart race. What had she been thinking? What was it about the boys’ mean joke?

And it comes to her that it wasn’t what they said, but what she thought they might say next. She’d imagined it rising in Pinkie’s throat, forming wetly on his tongue. That’s what she’d had to stop. That word Colin called her.

Cunt.

It’s such a furious-sounding word, so low and guttural, like a grunt. She rolls it around her mouth like a salty pebble, saying it, harsh and fast, under her breath. It’s a word you can rush through, over almost before it’s begun. It starts to slip out of her now in moments of anger or pain. When one of the hens pecks her foot, when the axe jars her arm as she splits kindling. It reminds her of Colin, but each time she says it she feels a little stronger, as if the odd male power of the curse accrues to her with each utterance. When Pinkie jeers “Jerry-lover!” in the queue for the pictures the next week, she leans close and calls him the name, and when she steps back, he’s beet red under his shock of snowy hair, as though she’s bloodied his face.

She had feared he might call her it, but she’s struck first, the word like a fist.

She has no idea what it means, of course. What it actually means. Just it’s emotional meaning — fury, contempt. She has never heard anyone else use it, and not only, she thinks, because it’s an English word, but perhaps also because it’s a secret word, unspeakable. She’s so used to the secrecy of Welsh, the cloak of it that the villagers draw around themselves at the pub, or in the high street if a stranger passes, that it thrills her a little to know a secret English word.

She thinks of the great dictionary in Mrs. R’s classroom. Is it still there? she wonders. But the way Mrs. R handled it, carrying it into class at the start of a lesson like the tablets of the Ten Commandments, letting it topple with a slam on her desk to silence them, Esther guesses it must have been Mrs. R’s own volume. More likely it’s in her house now, behind the counter of the post office, or perhaps in the parlor, where all the ladies in town kept their best things — stuffed songbirds under bell jars, burled mahogany mantel clocks, and the massive dictionary with it’s winking golden spine and tissue-paper pages. Esther imagines looking up the word, but would such a profanity be there?

She pictures a blank space on the page, a gap in the record. She has the idea, fixed from the schoolroom, that Mrs. R knows all the words in the dictionary, but she can’t imagine her knowing this one. Not that her old teacher hasn’t been known to swear. “Dash it all!” she would cry if the chalk broke, or sometimes, more softly, “Dash it, girl,” if Esther disappointed her. It seemed at once so unladylike to curse, and yet the phrase had a kind of tough elegance, so much less crude than her father’s “blast”s and “bloody”s. Looking up the word one night, when she had stayed behind to clean the board and Mrs. R had been called to see the headmaster, Esther was pleased to see the meaning. To smash, to throw down. She pictured a teapot, for some reason, swept onto the slate flags of the floor, shards flying in all directions. She’d snapped the book closed on the rest of the definition before Mrs. R had bustled back into the room. Her teacher had dismissed her then, thanking her solemnly, and in this way Esther had known the headmaster, Dr. Lock, had told her that Rhys was failing in another class. She only stayed behind in the hope of walking home with Mrs. R, talking to her about some book she’d borrowed (something by the Brontës, say, whose works she devoured her last year in school, fascinated by the doings of the English gentry, though she knew Arthur would disown her if he knew). But on days when Rhys had got in trouble, Mrs. R would send her on ahead, sit in the schoolroom for a while, and walk home alone. She looked so beaten down those evenings — a mother suddenly, no longer a teacher — Esther wanted to hear her swear, “Dash the boy!”

Only months after leaving school, reading one night, she came across a passage of dialogue, a character cursing, the line printed only as “——!” and it dawned on her. Of course! What a dashed fool she’d been to miss it. Suddenly it seemed the most literary of swear words. Not a word at all, really, but the absence of words, words too awful to print, to speak.

Except now, she thinks, she knows some of those words, those awful English words.

AND THEN, at the start of August, Esther misses something else. It must be the second time, she thinks when she works it back, the weeks, the months, and yet somehow she had ignored the first time, missed the missing, like a dash in her own life. The absence of blood.

I should have known.

She’d count herself cursedly unlucky — pregnant her first time! — if it didn’t make her feel such a fool. She pictures herself: the pregnant girl sent to sit on the stool in the corner with the dunce’s cap on, “Spoke English” round her neck on a loop. Her whole life living on a farm, her family’s whole livelihood dependent on breeding and birthing, tupping in the autumn, lambing in the spring, and it’s taken her weeks to realize she’s pregnant. She’s seen her father mix the raddle, the oily red pigment he daubs on the belly and legs of the rams every September, watched him take the count each night of ewes with red tails, smeared rumps, where the raddle has transferred. And like a ewe in heat, no better than a dumb beast, she’s taken the tup at the first time of asking. A fool, she thinks hotly. She would laugh if it were anyone but herself.