Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

She should be more worried about the scrutiny of others, she tells herself. That night she keeps her head down as she goes about her work. So preoccupied is she that it takes her a while to sense the change in the place. The local men are back, for the most part. The German’s been loose almost a week and his threat seems to have dissipated, the consensus being that the fellow’s long gone. But it seems to her that the new ease in the pub isn’t due just to the German’s being gone. It’s because the guards are largely absent — out on the search still, or stuck at the camp (the major has doubled the guard since the escape) — and for the first time in months there are more villagers in the pub than strangers; Welsh is the loudest language. Looking round, she can see it in the men’s eyes. It’s their pub again, their local. It’s not until her father comes in an hour later — ruddy-faced from the wind, but grinning, so that he seems to still glow with the pride of having driven the guards and their dog off his land — that she recognizes the same look on the other men’s faces. Why, even the constable looks happy, despite the escape, or perhaps because of it, vindicated in his warnings and somehow elevated, better than the guards he’s been chumming up to lately, his own man again.

Jack’s telling a story about throwing out a soldier who came in late the night before: “Some joker — a captain, mind you — but he was no captain of mine, I told him when he started banging on the bar for service, and then he got all up on his high horse, said he’d get better service if he was the escaped Jerry himself, or some such rot.”

“Said he was a Jerry!” the constable cries. “I’d have shown him the door meself if he hadn’t taken himself off to the Prince.” And Esther laughs with the rest, as if by some miracle of nerve it had actually been him, here.

Perhaps, she thinks, looking around in wonder, the German’s done them all a favor, drawn off the English, freed them in some modest way even as he’s freed himself. They should raise a glass to him, she thinks, feeling better about helping him, when another thought overtakes her: This is what it’ll be like after the war ends. But the sudden glimpse of the future makes her stomach tighten, as if she were seeing it not from behind the bar but from behind a closed window.

The next morning, she goes to the barn with two hard-boiled eggs tied in a hankie, but there’s no one, and she thinks, Well, good for him, though not without a pang — she’d hopped back and forth while the eggs boiled, as if she were the one in hot water — and immediately hurries to town in case there’s any word of his having been captured.

That afternoon, though, he’s waiting for her again, and she finds herself beaming as she sees him. She produces the eggs — she’s saved them, even thought to wrap a little salt in a twist of newspaper — and he closes his fists on them tightly.

“You know, you really have to go,” she tells him again.

He’s rolling one of the eggs gently between his palms, as if afraid to smash it, and he doesn’t look up until the white starts to show through the cracks.

“What are you waiting for?” she asks. “Why stay here?”

He bites down on the shining egg, and she looks away. Between swallows, he tells her, “To let the search pass.”

It makes sense, she supposes. It’s as good a spot as any, wild, remote, and the guard dogs can’t track him. But more than anything she feels relieved — he’ll come again. As for Mott and Mick, she gives Karsten slivers of bacon rind to feed them until they know his scent.

He sleeps in the quarry, and she realizes that he must have followed Arthur home one morning. Now he creeps up on them each day, watches the comings and goings, and then when she’s alone, he appears.

One afternoon she’s looking out for him when she sees the clothes on the line dancing wildly, bucking and writhing in the gusty wind. As she watches, one of the pegs pops off and her navy dress pulls free, streams downwind, leaping and twisting. She should hurry to catch it, a breeze like this could carry it, soaring, out to sea, but all she can do is labor uphill, wading through the long grass. Breathless, she makes it at last, buries her face in the bundle in her arms, and when she looks up, he’s there behind her, chasing after a billowing scrap of white. He snatches it out of the air, holds it overhead where it snaps like a pennant as he brings it on to her. It flies in his face — her silk slip, she sees — and she grabs it from him, blushing.

“Someone will see!” she cries, not sure if she means him or her slip.

He comes three more times that week, fleeting visits — the first interrupted, along with her heart for a beat, by Arthur, rising early and calling for his breakfast — and each time she resolves to send him away, to refuse him food. If she keeps him here, he’ll be caught, she’s sure. And yet she can’t stop herself.

When she heard Arthur’s cry, she pressed her hand over the German’s mouth. He was in the middle of saying something, and for a second she felt his breath on her palm, the odd softness of his lips in the midst of his stubble. Then she saw his eyes widen, and she drew her hand away, and they listened together.

“I have to go,” she’d whispered, and he’d nodded, licked his lips.

“Where were you?” Arthur had asked. She looked away at first, but when he asked again, she looked into his eyes, told him, “Nowhere,” and he just shrugged.

Only later, pouring her father’s tea, did she recall the German licking his lips, realize she’d felt his tongue, too, for a flickering second, slipping between her fingers.

The second visit, there are no interruptions, and after she’s fed the German there’s an awkward, desperate silence until she asks him what it’s like under the water.

“I’m not a submariner,” he tells her with a slow shake of the head. “My father was.”

He’s silent for a moment. “I did go aboard one once. A friend smuggled me on during a training drill. Cold.” He shudders. “And wet — from all the leaks, I mean! Everything drips, everything tastes like salt and oil.” He makes a face.

“But are there no windows?”

He laughs, and then, seeing her disappointment, recovers himself. “We heard a whale — singing, you know. My friend said it thought we were another whale. And sometimes, I swear, I could hear schools of fish swim past us, a fluttering sound like… stroking the hull.” He halts, embarrassed. “The others said it was only kelp, or bubbles.”

“I wish it were fish,” she says, and after a moment he nods.

Only at the end of the week, sitting in the gloom of the barn, watching the dust float like stars through the sunlight slipping between the gaps in the wood, does she ask him his plan.

He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you.”

“You don’t trust me!” She stares at him. After all this! Just that morning Jim had asked for another egg, and she shook her head. “The guards,” she tells the German icily now, “have reduced their patrols. They’re back at the bar. This is your chance. Isn’t it your duty?”

“And your duty?” he asks sullenly. “Why do you betray your country?”

Why indeed, she wonders. But then isn’t it her second betrayal? Perhaps it comes easier. But no, she knows that’s not so. It’s that the second betrayal, so much larger than the first, overshadows it, almost erases it.

“Would you rather I didn’t?” she manages. “Besides, it’s not my country, not in the way you mean.”

He frowns. “You do not feel this… die Vaterlandsliebe? Fatherland-love. Der patriotismus. ”

Patriotism? She’s never seen before how love of country is so wrapped up in the love of fathers, but it suddenly seems so typical of the way men would ask for love. No, not even ask. Demand, as a duty.