Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Still, through the day she checks herself for guilt, as if for a pulse, but there’s nothing. Without it, the encounter hardly seems real, as if it were the dream she’d first imagined it to be. Me Tarzan, you Jane! But then she remembers his name, Karsten. She’s never heard it before; couldn’t have imagined it. She says it over and over to herself as she goes about her chores.

She’s almost giddy in the pub that night, can’t recall the last time she felt so unburdened. Harry winks at her, crosses his eyes and lolls his tongue, but she doesn’t care. A few of the guards, George and Les among them, straggle in before last orders and she teases them, asks them if they think their man’s in the pub somewhere—“In a barrel, maybe? At the bottom of a glass?”—makes a little skipping show of looking behind the bar. It’s reckless, she knows, yet how are they to catch her if they can’t even catch him?

It’s a quiet night and Jack lets her go early. The constable offers to walk her home, but she tells him to save his legs, and when he starts to object she simply takes to her heels, hitching up her skirt and running up the lane into the darkness, leaving him to call her name over her ringing footsteps and laughter. When she pulls up breathless around the bend, she can’t believe how easy it is to get away. Though for all that, she’s caught by a sudden pelting downpour before she gets home.

IT’S ALMOST A LETDOWN the next morning when she looks into the barn and there’s no one, just the cow eyeing her moistly. Esther fidgets as she milks, craning over her shoulder, staring into the shadows, pausing to listen to the rustle of mice. Ridiculous! She’d laugh at herself if there were anyone to share the joke. He must be miles away by now, and moreover, she reminds herself, she hopes he is. Isn’t that why she helped him, after all?

She sees Jim off to school and Arthur over the ridge to survey the rams’ progress through the flock. Only when she’s alone does she allow herself to think of the German again. She wonders if he’s thinking of her, worried that she’ll raise the countryside or marveling that she hasn’t. She tries to picture his movements. East across the mountains, or west, down to the coast and Ireland? She wishes she’d asked him, but she doubts he’d have told her. The latter, she hopes. East is England, and she shudders at the thought of crossing all that hostile ground.

But when she goes to look for eggs, she finds him crouched in the lee of the barn, as if he never left. She swallows back a scream, less of fear than surprise. She’s imagined him so vividly gone, her first thought is that he must have forgotten something. You’re going to be late, she almost cries, as if for a train.

“Good morning.” He grins.

“What are you doing here?” she hisses, though even in the midst of her shock, she thinks, I brought the dogs in last night. As if she were expecting him.

He smiles crookedly, touches his stomach. “Still hungry,” he tells her, with a little wince at the understatement.

“You can’t hang around here. What if someone sees you?”

She wants to fly at him, shout Shoo, shoo, as if he were a particularly bold or starving fox (the same thing, really, she reminds herself).

“I’ll go if you feed me,” he says simply.

Or not a fox, she thinks, but a lamb, one of those motherless ones she’s nursed with a bottle who keep following her around all summer. The ones she weeps over when they’re sent to market.

She crosses her arms. “How do you know I won’t raise the alarm?”

“You threaten?” He smiles, but tightly, his eyes narrowed as if trying to make out something in the distance.

“Warn,” she says.

He nods. “You are correct. Perhaps I’m trusting too much.” He thinks for a moment. “You know, if they catch me they will interrogate me, yes?” He gives the barest of shrugs. “They will want to know everything. Where I hide. How I ate. Who I meet.”

“Now who’s threatening?”

He smiles. “Warning.”

“At least you didn’t bring your pistol today,” she says tartly.

He smiles at his hand, holds it out to her to shake.

“They’d never believe you, you know,” she says.

“You know better than I, of course.”

His open palm hovers between them like a taunt, and just as he lets it fall, she grasps it.

“I do.” She gives his hand one firm, swinging pump and pulls away before he can exert any pressure.

“Wait here, then. And for God’s sake keep out of sight.”

She returns with a thick heel of bread, a flaky wedge of cheese. It’s not much, just all that won’t be missed. She bundles it up in her skirts, afraid it won’t be enough, that he’ll demand something more. She thinks of young Pip in Great Expectations, making off with a whole pork pie for his convict, and envies him. But when she spills out her offering on the straw floor of the barn, the German falls on it greedily. She’d meant to make him take it and go, but she can’t bear to make him stop once he’s started. Besides, he finishes the meager meal very quickly. He’s picking a last flake of cheese off his chest before he thinks to look up at her. “Thank you.”

And perhaps because it’s so poor a meal, and his gratitude so sincere, she takes the pack of cigarettes she has stuffed in her pocket and offers him one. Even in the gloom his eyes light up. He fumbles out a smoke, scrabbles with the matches, and only after he’s taken a long drag does he relax. He catches her staring at him, and she looks away.

“Please,” he says, gesturing to the pack, inviting her to join him, but she shakes her head. Something about his face when he drew on the cigarette. It was as if she recognized him, saw him as a young man, a boy, really, like any other, lighting a cigarette at a bus stop, in the queue for the chippy.

“Where did you learn English?” she asks, to change the subject.

“Cinema,” he tells her.

“It’s lucky,” she says.

He gives a stiff little hike to his shoulders. “Lucky for my comrades. There was so much smoke in our bunker we couldn’t find anything white enough for a flag. So they sent me out, because of my English. Now some call me Weisse Fahne —White Flag — behind my back.” He laughs, as if daring her to join in, but instead she feels a shiver pass through her, as though a distant door has been opened and a draft slipped in.

“I meant lucky because we can talk,” she says carefully.

“I suppose,” he says, and then simply, “Yes. That’s so.”

“So you did surrender?” she asks shyly, and he winces as if she’s touched a wound.

“We were overrun. We had no choice. Or so it seemed at the time.” He tips his head back to blow smoke at the sky.

“Do you wish you hadn’t?” she whispers.

“I’d be dead.”

She nods. “But still. Do you wish?”

He sucks deeply on the cigarette, his cheeks hollowing. “Every day.”

“But now you’ve escaped.”

He snorts. “Do I look so free?”

“That’s why you must go,” she urges. “Go and don’t come back.”

As if for emphasis, she presses the crumpled pack of cigarettes into his dry hand. But when he’s halfway out the door, she runs after him and holds out the matches.

She watches him go then, trotting through the long grass, body bent low, her heart rattling like the box of matches in his shirt pocket.

SHE SPENDS the rest of the day wondering if he’s left, looking up at every flicker of movement, every stirring in the breeze. At lunch Arthur asks her, “What is it?” and she stares at her plate, waiting for him to read her guilt in the part of her hair, until he goes out again. It comes to her that the German must have been watching them, waiting for Arthur and Jim to leave, and she goes about her afternoon chores, self-conscious as an actress. It’s thrilling at first, this sense of being observed, as if she’s never alone, but as the day wears on and he doesn’t show himself, it begins to feel oppressive, as though he’s spying on her.