Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

She sits with her former teacher for another hour and then walks her home via the pub, where she makes Jack open early and pour Mrs. Roberts a brandy on the house. When she comes back, after seeing the woman into the care of her neighbors, she finds the pub somber. People are trading memories of Rhys. The guards have started it, asking about the lost man, and she sees that he’s claimed by both sets of drinkers, the soldiers and the locals, fostering a new rapport between them. The soldiers order their drinks from her so softly, almost demurely, that she knows they’ve already heard about her and Rhys.

“D’you remember the time…,” the constable says, and people nod, even Esther, though she doesn’t. She listens to her father describing Rhys as a strong back, a fine boy, and she looks in his face for a trace of a lie, but can’t find one. “Always good with the dogs,” Arthur is saying. “Small wonder,” he used to add, “with that space between his teeth he should have the loudest whistle in the county!” But tonight she waits in vain for the punch line. It reminds her of Rhys’s father, how Arthur had never missed a chance to vex Mervyn Roberts, calling him all manner of names, belittling his job in the quarry — rockmen being less skilled than slate splitters and dressers like Arthur’s father and grandfather — and envying it at the same time. Yet as soon as Mervyn was dead, Arthur had gone round to the house and set about helping his widow, and Esther never heard him speak another ill word about the dead man. It’s a matter of honor for him, she thinks, but it requires him to forget Rhys, the real Rhys, the Rhys who once tossed a cigarette in a haystack, the Rhys who liked to sleep in the sun, the dogs curled against him. Rhodri Rhys Roberts, the telegram named him, and for a second she’d thought it meant someone else. She’d never known him as anything other than Rhys. Now it’s as if he’s been rechristened in death, as if Arthur and the rest have created a Rhys they can mourn.

And what about me? She tries to feel something, but she finds where her grief should be a kind of impatience that Rhys’s troubles should intrude when she’s in the midst of her own, and a jealousy, too, that in death — if he is dead — he’s been scrubbed clean, even by the constable he tormented as a boy. They want to believe he’s dead, she thinks. They like him better this way. That, and the fact that he’s the first village boy lost. They’re a proper part of the war at last, just as they’d hoped when the camp was being built. They can hold their heads higher and stiffer on market days now that there’s a name to add to the plaque in the chapel listing the losses of 1914–1918. At the end of the evening, Jack gives the bell a strike, and in the silence afterwards, rather than announcing last orders, he asks them to join him in a toast, “For a local hero.” Even the English drink.

She walks home, hands in pockets, gripping the cold eggs waiting there.

That night she sits up with Arthur, mending clothes and listening to the radio. When they came in and went to check on Jim, she found him awake, red-eyed, his hands clutching the white sheet, filthy, his nails bloody. She fetched a basin and washcloth and sponged them, and he told her he’d been prying stones out of the lane to throw at the Germans. “They just watched me,” he said. “Stepped back from the fence where I couldn’t hit them.” She thought of the one she’d planned to throw the eggs to, pictured his face. Jim had gone on hurling stones, and mud, and sticks, whatever he could lay his hands on, cursing in earnest this time, until they’d gone indoors. “But I never cried,” he told her fiercely. Her eyes drifted to the map on the wall, trying to see if the pin for Rhys was still there.

When she comes out, Arthur sets a cup of tea beside her, and when Jim’s sobs start, he puts a hand on hers, turns the radio on low. Harry and Mary are doing one of their “Lil and Bill” numbers.

BILL: I just met an old soldier, told me he’d not had any since 1930.

LIL: Poor dear!

BILL: Oh, I don’t know. It’s only twenty-one hundred hours now.

Esther stares at her lap, blushing, but it’s not clear Arthur has even got the joke. When she looks up, he’s staring at her, as if waiting for something, and she thinks how dry her eyes are.

“I’m very sorry,” he tells her awkwardly, and she nods.

“For you, I mean, love. I know you were friends, like.”

“He’s just missing,” she tries, not out of any real hope, but to deflect his sympathy, and when she sees the look of pity cross Arthur’s face anyway, she reminds him sharply, “You thought he was a fool to go,” and she can see he’s stung.

“Perhaps,” he says after a pause, “you were a bigger one to let him go.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He shrugs. “Maybe you could have stopped him, is all.”

She picks up her sewing basket and leaves him then, but lies in her bed, eyes wide, the tears tumbling from them at last.

IN THE DAYS that follow, the queue at the post office, whenever Esther passes it, seems to stretch out the door. Everyone wants to admire how well Mrs. R’s holding up, assure her that Rhys will turn up. “Like a bad penny,” the postmistress braves. Esther keeps her company for the first day or two, then withdraws, queasily embarrassed to be included—“you too, dear”—in the sympathy.

At first Mrs. R nods at the hopes expressed, but increasingly she hitches her shoulders, shakes her head brusquely. Before long she’s stooped from shrugging, but still she puts up with the well-wishers, murmuring “No, no word, thank you” as often as she licks stamps and with the same sour face. And then, one sweltering afternoon in the last week of August, the little PO packed with bodies, she finally loses patience with their pity. “I’m a mother, not a fool,” she snaps at yet another hushed assurance, and Esther, waiting in line, winces almost as much as the unfortunate customer. In her mind’s eye, she pictures Mrs. R furiously smudging the heel of her tiny fist across the board, changing “console” to “condole” as if it were a stupid spelling error.

The next morning Rhys’s mother takes to wearing black.

ESTHER CAN’T bring herself to return to the camp after the news about Rhys. The boys are back, she hears in the pub, joined by some of the local men, even a few women, hurling abuse or simply booing the prisoners. Jim, she guesses, is there with the rest, shouting himself hoarse. She found him jabbing a stick into the ship in a bottle the day after the telegram and snatched it away from him. But he’d already knocked the mast askew with his poking, smashed the little wheelhouse. “What are you doing?” she’d cried, straining for calm, and he’d told her defiantly, “Getting it out!”

“Does it make you feel any better?” she asks one night when he returns from the camp, and he tells her, “Yes!”

“You could come,” he adds more softly, but she shakes her head.

Arthur is right, she realizes. She could have stopped Rhys from going to war. And that’s why she can’t go back to the camp with Jim. It’s hard to escape the feeling that she, more than any of these Germans, is to blame for his loss. If only she’d accepted him, he’d be alive, and Colin would never have been more to her than another customer. And it seems to her that if she’s to blame for Rhys’s loss, she’s just as culpable for her own woes.

WITHOUT THE CAMP to escape to, and shy of the village, where she’s still the object of a cloying sympathy, the house begins to feel very small, as if the walls are closing on her. Or as if she’s growing, she thinks in a panic. Each morning she tries to gauge the change in herself in the small hand mirror she inherited from her mother, sucking her stomach in and studying herself in it’s bright oval. At lunch and supper she picks at her food, but stuffs herself hungrily with bread when the others are out, sometimes not even waiting for it to rise fully, but burning her fingers on the still sticky dough. In one week, she eats half the pickled eggs in the jar behind the bar, until she catches Jack staring at her, shaking his head: “Never could stand the things meself.”