Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

The word rings off the house behind her, a word she doesn’t know but understands.

She tries to run then, but he catches her wrist, drags her into the barn. She shakes loose, but by then he’s blocking the door. She moves to dart past him and he’s before her and she springs back, panting, about to scream. No! she thinks. Not again.

“Wait!” he calls. “Wait. Please! I’m sorry.” He slumps down on one of the hay bales, a hand up to placate her. “I tried. You hear. There is nowhere to go. But I tried.”

She takes in his matted hair, the salt stains on his tunic.

“You swam—”

“Swam! I almost drowned! Might be better if I had.” He shakes his head mournfully. “You can’t know what it is to lose your honor.”

She has taken a step forward at the thought of his dying. “Yes, I can.”

“How?” he starts, and she cuts him off: “I just can.”

He searches her face, then slowly nods, not that she’s told him something new, but that he’s finally understood something. He holds out his hand and she takes it, and he pulls her down beside him on the bale, and for a moment they sit very still between the glinting dusty bars of light.

“You’re the only one I’ve told.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the enemy.”

He presses his lips together.

“ His enemy, at least. He was one of the ones who built your camp. Left the day you came. Off to France.”

“Then it doesn’t matter,” he says. “No one else knows.”

“They will,” she says. “Soon enough.”

He opens his mouth, closes it.

“What will you do?”

She shrugs, and he nods as if she’s answered, finally bows his head.

This close, she can smell him, and the scent is surprisingly familiar. It takes her a moment to realize, he smells like the mountain after sleeping on it.

“You must be starving,” she says presently, and he raises his eyebrows. She clasps his hand and leads him towards the house.

He hesitates at the threshold as if fearing a trap.

“How do you like your eggs?” she asks.

“Very much,” he says, looking about, and she doesn’t correct him, but fries them as fastest.

She sets them before him, two lace-edged eggs, looking oddly naked on the plate, and steps back, suddenly shy of him. He falls on them, eating the first methodically, lapping the sluggish yolk — she’d compromised between hard and soft — with the rubbery white, before he thinks to look up. He swallows hard and gestures to the chair across from him.

He eats the second egg more slowly, smiling and nodding between mouthfuls. Afterwards, she pushes a napkin towards him and he dabs at his beard.

“Thank you!”

“You’re welcome.”

They both fall silent, as if overhearing their own conversation for the first time.

“I want you to know, I would never have told them about this.”

She nods.

“How have you been traveling?” she asks, to change the subject.

He rubs his face. “I just follow the sheep. I thought they would know to keep away from any soldiers.” He laughs. “I envy them! If only I could live off grass, I could be free.”

“Not so free,” she says, thinking of the cynefin. “They don’t stray far.”

“Maybe it’s a kind of freedom too. To stay home.”

She gives a short laugh. “I never thought of it like that.”

He shrugs.

“How much longer do you think until they find you?”

“A few days, perhaps, if I’m lucky. But I think I will give myself up. End my holidays.” He smiles crookedly.

“For me, you mean.”

He purses his lips. “I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

“No trouble,” she says. “I could feed you, find you clothes.”

“Even if I never escape?”

She nods slowly.

“Thank you,” he breathes. “But no.”

“When will you do it?”

“Soon. Today.” His face clouds, and she knows he’s thinking of it, of surrendering again, raising his hands.

“Surrender to me,” she says suddenly.

He smiles, shakes his head. “They’d never believe it.”

“You’re too proud,” she says, “to surrender to a woman.”

“And you? Who would you surrender to?”

She studies his face. The beard, she thinks, becomes him. True, he looks a little like a castaway, but also older, as if he’s coming into himself.

“It’s why you kept coming back, isn’t it?” she asks, and he grins. “I was starving.”

She’s silent for a long time and then he raises his arms, palms out, and she steps forward, takes his hands, draws them down around her.

SHE HAS LED him out of the house, gripped by a sudden claustrophobia — it’s her father’s house, her mother’s — to a sheltered corner of the field behind the barn. Now she lies beneath him, buoyed by the thick bed of uncut grass at her back, staring at the sky, the clouds ebbing across it. She fears she might recall Colin, but instead it’s Rhys he reminds her of, with his gentle, gingerly fumbling, and she wonders suddenly if Rhys died a virgin; hopes not, for his sake. She presses her face to his neck, tastes salt— the sea —watches the clouds slide together, then slowly and silently tear themselves apart.

Afterwards, lying side by side, staring at the sky, he asks, “So, did I surrender to you, or you to me?”

“Can’t you tell?”

He turns his head in the grass. “No.”

“Me neither,” she says. “Not everything is war, after all, I suppose.”

She stretches. “What would you be doing now if there were no war?”

“The same, I hope. You?”

“Not likely.”

He rolls onto his side and stares at her.

“I’d make you… woo me.” She giggles.

“How?”

“Ask me to the pictures?”

“Of course! Would you care to join me?”

“Why, how ever did you know? I love the pictures.”

He holds his arm up, crooked, and she slips hers through his, and they lie there staring up at the bright screen of the sky, arm in arm. After a few minutes their breaths are so steady they seem to fill the clouds, blowing them away. Like filled sails, she thinks.

“How on earth do you get the ship in there, anyway?” she asks suddenly, and he laughs.

“No, really. I want to know the secret.”

“No secret. You just ask the bottle very nicely!”

She joins him then, the two of them in each other’s arms, stifling their laughter against each other.

When she finally sits up she feels lightheaded, as if she’s just rolled down the hillside, the way she used to when she was a girl.

“WHAT WILL YOU DO?” he asks a little later, and she knows from his tone what he means. She may have been thinking of Rhys, but he was thinking of Colin.

“I don’t know.”

She feels the tears drawing up from somewhere so deep inside she’s sure they’ll be ice cold.

And then he breathes, “I wish I could marry you.”

She stares at him, shoves the tears aside with the heel of her hand as if to see him better, finally starts to laugh.

“What? What is it?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not sure that would help exactly!” Then she sees his face. “But I wish you could, too.” And she does. Her second proposal, she thinks, stroking the long grass.

And then he whispers, “Keep it.”

Her fists tighten on the stalks. “What business is it of yours?”

“I might have shot him,” he says, “your soldier. If I hadn’t been captured, I mean.”

“I wish!”

“Or he me.”

“Don’t say so.”

“I’m the enemy, remember. I shot others not so different to him. I don’t even know how many.” He looks at her, and her eyes flick away. “Keep it,” he says. “For me.”