Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

At least Arthur doesn’t seem to notice anything, but he’s been distracted of late by the prospect of work at the quarry. Old Twm Tudur is retiring — lumbago finally getting the best of him — so there’s an opening for a new dangerman and Arthur covets the job, sees it as his great chance, a foot back in the quarry. He’s already been down there, learning the ropes, nagging the old fellow to put in a word for him. “Twm got his start as a young rubbler on my father’s bargain, so he owes us that much.”

It isn’t much of a job, in Esther’s opinion, tramping through the dark galleries with a little torch, but at first she encourages him. Anything to keep him out of the house, anything to draw his attention off her.

“It’s a serious business,” Arthur assures her proudly after he gets it. “Checking the shafts for flooding, gas, signs of cave-in.” When the men went on strike all those years ago, Tudur had stayed on and the strikers hadn’t objected. He was keeping the place safe for when they went back, as they saw it. Arthur’s father, who never saw a scab without crossing the street, would always give Twm the time of day.

It’s only when Arthur brags to her about going up the long, lashed-together ladders, forty or fifty feet into the moist blackness at the roof of the caverns to dislodge the loose slates that might in the past have fallen on the men below, or now on the crates of artworks, that she starts to have second thoughts. He tells her of swaying through the chilled dark, touching the black sky of the roof, chipping slates out as if they were stars. It’s the moisture leaching down through the mountain that erodes the caverns. She can smell it on his clothes after his stints in the quarry, the dankness of rain that fell on the hillside above, where their own sheep now graze, a thousand years earlier.

She’s always known Arthur wanted to get back underground, to reclaim his father’s place. He’s never put chisel to slate, and yet on black days when he’s lost lambs, or when the debts are due, he sees Cilgwyn the way his father did, as a form of exile. “Slate’s in the blood,” her grandfather used to say, and Arthur’s always maintained that the farm killed the old quarryman, ever since he found him slumped in the pasture, surrounded by cropping sheep. “In the lungs, more like,” her mother had suggested once; the only time Esther ever saw her father raise a hand to her.

Esther’s mother had always been impatient with his dreams of the quarry. “King Arthur,” she’d scoffed. “You and your blooming birthright!” Perhaps she took it personally when he grumbled, “Slave to sheep, I am. A flock of females, at that.” As a child Esther had once asked if the quarry was her birthright too, but her father had just laughed. Quarry’s no place for girls, he’d said, and something about the way he’d looked at her had made her burst into tears. You wouldn’t want it, her mother told her, drying her eyes with the frayed hem of her apron. Dark, dripping place. But since her mother’s death, Esther realizes now, Arthur has been talking about getting back to the quarry more and more. Without anyone to mock him, it’s stopped being a joke.

Rhys’s loss has reminded her of how precarious the lives we take for granted are, and she’s suddenly terrified of losing her father. He works nights in the quarry, reasoning, “It don’t make no difference, day or night down there,” and claiming that this way he can still put in his time with the flock, but she can’t sleep for worry. She’s more solicitous towards him than she’s been in months — makes his favorite, milk jelly, for Sunday breakfast — though she knows that somehow this care is calculated, a hoard of love she’s storing up in the hope she might draw on it later, if he finds out about the baby. Not that her concern seems to soften him any. If he’s not expressing impatience with it, she suspects he enjoys it, the look of fear on her face when he tells his stories. And yet she knows she’s not the only one who’s afraid. He stops in the pub every night before he goes down the quarry, and though she begs Jack not to serve him, please, he’s taken to enjoying a shot with his beer. Arthur says it helps him relax, find his balance on the ladders. That if he’s too tense, he’s more likely to take a spill than otherwise. “Nothing to fear,” he tells her expansively. “Slate’s in my blood too.” Dutch courage, she thinks it, though she could never tell him that. Instead, she reminds him that all he’s protecting are some crates of artworks from the National Gallery. He’s said it himself: National bloody Gallery? How many Welshmen in there? And when even that fails to move him, she tries to assure him they don’t really need the few shillings he makes. But that’s a mistake. He bridles at the mention of money. “All I mean is, the war will be over soon,” she says. “Paris liberated and all. Things’ll get better.”

“But that’s just it,” he tells her. They’re in the kitchen late one warm August afternoon. “You mark my word, before we know it, the quarries will be producing again, and there’ll be proper work for Welshmen once more. You didn’t think I was going to go running up and down those ladders like a monkey for the rest of my days. That’s just a start.” She’s relieved, yet he must see some skepticism in her face because he presses on. “It’s the war, isn’t it? Someone’s got to put new roofs on all those houses smashed in the Blitz. Hundreds of thousands of homes, in England and France, now Germany. Think of it! It’ll be a heyday for them ’as got a foot in the door. My father always said a slate roof will last a hundred years, but that was the very problem. They put a roof on the world from these mountains and then the demand dried up. Until now. It’ll be over soon, and when the rebuilding begins they’ll need Welsh slate again. Why, the nation will rise right along with those roofs!”

He gives a little nod, as though he’s won some argument, but he’s mistaken her look: she isn’t skeptical, not any longer, just appalled by his logic. Thinking of Eric, of Jim. Too late, he senses her dismay. “It’s an ill wind,” he offers, shrugging on his mac, but when he sees her hardening, he withdraws even that hint of concession. “And all thanks to the war. To bloody Hitler and his cronies.” He pauses, framed in the door, and all at once she sees his nationalism for what it is, selfishness, and more than that, a kind of licensed misanthropy.

“And the farm?” she wants to know. “The flock?” What’ll become of them if he’s working full time in the quarry? He’s already begun to neglect his duties, lying in while she milks the cow in the morning, catnapping in the late afternoon stillness of the barn.

“Them?” He squints at the distant white bodies on the hillside. “Know what they look like to me sometimes? Maggots.”

She shudders as she watches him stride out, his long shadow stretching up the hill.

She remembers how he’s always talked about the cynefin, with a kind of solemnity, which she recognizes now as resentment. Preserving the flock, preserving the cynefin passed down through the ages, the weight of all that time, is more responsibility than he wants. They’re a burden to him, the flock, the land. Maybe even her.

Isn’t this my birthright, she wants to cry, watching him leave. But the word sticks in her throat.

KARSTEN FACES the blank page again, once more unsure what to write his mother. No word from her since that first letter, but he’s decided to swallow his pride. And yet, what to write? The problem, he thinks, is nothing ever happens in the camp. There is simply nothing to report. He squints at the white page fluttering in his hand, it’s blankness dazzling in the late August sun, the only marks on it the translucent smudges of sweat left by his thumbs.