Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“For my enemy?”

“Your prisoner.”

She starts to deny it, stops. He’s right. These are the very last moments of his freedom. It would be easy to promise him, but instead she turns away, stares down the long slope beyond the house to the wavering shore, the breakers flipping and churning like the sheets of a restless sleeper, studying it all as if she’ll never see it again.

THEY DRESS in silence, not looking at each other.

“Well,” she says at last.

“Yes, sir.” He comes to attention and she shakes her head.

“Please don’t.”

“May the prisoner make a request?”

“What?” she asks warily.

“A last… cigarette?”

“Of course. They’re in the kitchen.”

“It might be my last for a long while.” It takes her a moment to register his sly grin, and then she shoves him, turns, and runs for the house.

SHE’S IN THE YARD, still in the lead just, before she sees the figure emerging from the barn.

“Get away from her!”

It’s Jim, shotgun in hand.

She pulls up and Karsten runs into the back of her, grasps her.

“Run,” she whispers. Jim looks like he’s about to topple over from the weight of the gun. “Oh, please run.” But Karsten just squeezes her, whispers in her ear, “It’s better like this. To give myself up to him. I owe him something.” And slowly he releases her, turns towards Jim, his hands rising as if weightless.

Jim is squinting at the bearded figure, then he beams with delight. “I knew it was you!” and Karsten nods ruefully.

THE BOY stands guard over him until Arthur appears for supper, and then the two of them lead Karsten away.

She watches them go over the hill together, Karsten in front, his hands on his head; the boy behind, now clutching a pitchfork; Arthur in the rear, the shotgun over his arm, his cap tipped back, where he pushed it in consternation when he’d first come upon them.

She asked to go with them, but Arthur had shaken his head, and she’d not known how to insist. “It’s a lucky escape you’ve had, my girl,” he said, his face stricken, when she told him the story of Jim’s rescue.

She’d looked at Karsten, but he refused to meet her eye, as he had ever since Jim appeared. What else could he do, she thinks, and yet seeing him square his shoulders as the men left, she couldn’t help feeling he was relieved somehow, and she feels cheated. And it comes to her, watching her father’s grim face, that perhaps it wasn’t escape she’s been lusting after these past few days, but capture. Could that be it? Was all her recklessness just a desire to be caught red-handed? How many times this past week has her heart raced at Arthur’s appearances, how many times has she felt a kind of anger at him for being so dense? Is that why she’d driven Karsten away so vehemently? Because, if she were caught, so would he have been? But now he is caught, she thinks, and she envies him almost as much as if he’d gotten away. He’d been protecting her by not looking at her, not speaking to her, as she paced back and forth across the yard, but now she wishes he’d just embraced her, or she him.

This is what men will never understand, she realizes, watching the distant figures breast the ridge, Karsten’s hands thrown up against the sky for a final moment, then sinking out of sight, followed by Jim’s silhouette, Arthur’s. Their dishonor, men’s dishonor, can always be redeemed, defeat followed by victory, capture by escape, escape by capture. Up hill and down dale. But women are dishonored once and for all. Their only hope is to hide it. To keep it to themselves.

THAT EVENING THE PUB is filled again, as if the village has breathed out. The guards are back too. She hasn’t seen it so full since D-day.

Even Jim is allowed in, a signal honor. Arthur hoists him on the bar, patiently lets him tell his story in English, while the other lads can only cluster at the doors and windows. Jim’s glowing, Esther sees, burning with heroism (or at least the beer Harry’s been letting him sip). It’s another gift the prisoner has given him, she sees. One man’s loss, another’s gain.

“Why, I thought he was going to prick Jerry like a sausage with that pitchfork!” Arthur is telling them in Welsh.

When it’s her turn to speak up, she plays her part, albeit mutedly.

“Thank goodness for Jim here.”

“Ah, there was nothing to be scared of,” George, the guard, says. He’s drunk, Esther sees, making up for his lost nights’ drinking.

“It’s not like you caught him,” she hisses.

“Lucky for him, or he might not have walked back to camp, but been carried. Trouble he put us to.”

“Can’t blame him for trying to escape,” Arthur calls from the other side of the bar.

“Enemy sympathizer, is you now, Evans?”

Esther starts guiltily, but the constable is glowering at her father, jealous, she sees, that Arthur is the one to have brought the fugitive in. “Your enemy’s enemy, is that it?” It’s an old gibe. The constable likes to needle the nationalists by reminding them that some of their leaders had spoken up for Germany before the war.

“There’s no dishonor in serving your country, I think,” Arthur growls in Welsh. “Wouldn’t you agree, officer?” he adds, switching to English, which shuts Parry up. “Like to think I’d do the same,” Arthur goes on. “Like to think we all would.”

They carry Jim home, asleep and snoring heavily.

Arthur lays him in his bed, and Esther tucks him in, and the two of them stand over him for a moment, watching him sleep.

Later, as she lies awake in her own bed, she envies Jim his deep, even breathing. She wonders if it’s the German’s fate that’s troubling her. She could have fed him, she thinks, perhaps hidden him for months. But when she thinks of it now, she feels the burden of it, the responsibility, pinning her to her bed. She didn’t want his life in her hands, she realizes, not even after they’d made love. Otherwise she’d have insisted on concealing him.

Her hands steal over her belly. The escape has distracted her, delayed her. But now she feels her stomach growing heavier, a weight pressing her deep into the mattress, deeper, until it seems like the weight of a man covering her, and she sits up with a cry.

THE SUN, WHICH SHE’D thought gone for winter, comes out again briefly in mid-September, swelling from behind the clouds, drying out the grass, to Arthur’s delight, but making Esther melt beneath her sweater and heavy coat.

She knows there are ways to get rid of babies, but she doesn’t know what they are. All she knows, from the farm, is how to save lambs. It frightens her, the thought of losing the baby, but then she looks at Mrs. Roberts, back at work behind her counter the very day after the telegram — calmer now than before the news, as if the worst is over — and she thinks, If she can stand it, a grown child, all that wasted love, so can I. Esther hasn’t seen her cry once since the day of the telegram; the circles under Mrs. R’s eyes look leathery as scales.

On Jim’s thirteenth birthday, the week before, she’d appeared at Cilgwyn with a present for him, a box of lead soldiers. “Cor!” he cried, falling on them like treasure, and Mrs. R gave a twitchy smile and told him they were Rhys’s. “He’d want you to have them, I expect.” Esther had seen the torn look on the boy’s face as he fingered the little figures, how much he wanted them for himself. But then he thrust the box out. “Rhys will want them… when he gets back.” It’s Jim’s latest hope that Rhys has escaped from some German camp. The box had swayed there in the air for a long moment. “Well, you look out for them until then, eh?” Mrs. R told him softly, and Jim declared, “I will!” in his new baritone, as if she’d just entrusted him with a life.