Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Esther has taken her lead from Mrs. R’s stoicism, trying to be equally brusque with well-wishers offering sympathy after her encounter with the German. Truth be told, she knows she’d crumple at the first hint of kindness over her real woes.

At the pub each evening, she watches Mary across the bar, not listening to her but watching her lips, trying to imagine her saying, “Oh, luv, I know just the remedy.” Then, in late September, Harry announces they’ll be off soon—“Called back to London, now things aren’t so hot”—he and Mary and the whole BBC contingent. Numbly, Esther rings up his order and stares at the pair of cigarette cards from the Wireless Wonders series, autographed by Harry and Mary, that hang in frames behind the bar. She can hardly recognize the impossibly young Harry doffing a homburg to reveal a lush head of hair, or the silkily airbrushed Mary in pearls and a marcel wave, wouldn’t believe they were the same people if she hadn’t seen them sign the cards—“Cheers, big ears,” followed by Harry’s scratchy autograph, and “Kisses! MM,” the rounded M ’s, one above the other, tracing the line of Mary’s perfect décolletage. She listens to the show that night (Harry doing a skit about two German POWs caught digging a tunnel: “Ach du lieber, Fritz. Next time, vee need to hide zeh dirt.” “But vere, Hans?” “Vee vill dig another toonnel and hide it in zere!”), thinking, I’ll never see them again. Yet she still can’t imagine telling Mary.

And then, on the fifth evening after Karsten’s capture, she hears George and Les laughing. When Harry wants to know what the joke is, they tell him, “Not so much a joke as a pratfall, you might say. Bit of slapstick. Seems our Jerry runner took a tumble, slipped on a bar of soap—”

“Oh, it might have been a banana peel,” Les volunteers to renewed laughter, none of them having seen bananas for months.

“Or perhaps a patch of ice,” George continues. “Anyhow, seems he broke his leg, snapped like a stick of rock, I hear.”

Esther puts a hand to her mouth. So this is what it is to be caught.

“Oh, it’s all right, luv. Luckily he wasn’t going anywhere for a while.” She’s grateful that George seems more interested in Harry’s reaction. “Now don’t tell me that don’t tickle your funny bone. Don’t tell me it don’t crack you up.”

But Harry just sits stone-faced among the laughing men.

“Thought you’d appreciate it, specially like,” Les says, and the others quieten down.

Harry takes a sip of his drink. “How’s that then?”

“Why, on account of you’re a… joker, of course. A jester? Ain’t that what you are? Harry Hitch? Hairy Itch, more like!”

“Fuck me, if it isn’t Oscar Wilde,” Harry says pleasantly.

“All right, gents,” Mary weighs in. “Amateur hour is over. Don’t call us, eh?”

“Don’t call you what?” Les leers.

“That’s enough!” Esther sticks a finger in Les’s face. “Or you’ve had enough. The lot of you.” She glares around at the guards, who smile, look to Jack and the constable—“Listen to the lady, lads”—and finally shrug.

“Hecklers,” Mary is saying. “Radio’s made me soft, or I’d have had his guts for garters. But thanks, luv.” She smiles approvingly. “Grown right up, you have. Anyhow, I owe you one.” Behind her, Harry nods over his beer.

It comes to Esther later, on the slow walk home, that she’s been clinging to some shameful, superstitious hope of the German’s seed driving out Colin’s, of the war being fought in her womb. Of bloodshed.

The next night she summons the courage to follow Mary out to the privy, telling her of the pregnancy in the shadows behind the pub, not ten yards from where she first kissed Colin four months ago. The thought of that somehow makes her laugh, and Mary tells her, “Oh, luv. That’s not one little bit funny.”

Yet perhaps it’s the laughter, the hysterical edge to it, that convinces Mary.

“Aren’t you the dark horse,” she says sadly. “So that’s your secret.” But Esther shakes her head.

“I’m not saying who the father is, so don’t ask.”

Mary gives her a sidelong look.

“You don’t know him, anyway, so don’t think you do,” Esther snaps.

“Why are you telling me?”

“I want to keep my secret.”

“Just not the baby,” Mary says a little fiercely, and Esther nods, head bowed. But when she replies, it’s with steely bitterness.

“It’s all right for you. You’re free. You’ll be leaving soon. The war’ll be over and you can go anywhere, do anything. And don’t tell me the world’s not all it’s cracked up to be— you stay here!” She struggles to get her anger under control, offers a last tight plea: “I’ll do anything.”

“That’s what worries me.”

But after a long, appraising pause, Mary tells her she knows a fellow.

“Doctor in Liverpool. Used to look after girls on the boards if they got into… difficulties.” She studies Esther closely. “Well, luv, ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’”

Esther nods.

She’s restless all the next day, until in the afternoon she calls to Arthur where he’s working in the barn that she’s going black-berrying. She’s halfway there before she realizes that the best bushes scraggle along the lane behind the camp. She hasn’t been back since the escape, and she’s shy now, bending over hedges, concentrating on her picking until she reaches the shadows of the trees. Only then does she let herself look up, tarry. The men below her seem even more lackadaisical than usual. She’s heard he’s gotten two weeks in solitary, but there’s no knowing how long he’ll be in the infirmary while his leg is set. She can make out the cellblock from here — the same cells Jim was locked in the night of her rape, a prison within a prison. Men are playing football in front of it, and she winces as they slide into tackles, imagines the sickening pop of bone, and suddenly she can’t bear to look, crouches low over her basket, staring into it at the dark berries and then at her fingertips, stained with juice as if with ink. She gets up slowly and climbs away, never looking back at the camp.

THAT EVENING, Mary comes up with some cock-and-bull story about a visit to an ailing friend in Liverpool—“Old Miss Bunbury”—and spreads it round the pub. Harry makes a fuss about missing her, but Mary tells him to give over. Then she says, “’Ere, Esther, you’re always on about seeing the big city. Why don’t you come along with me. Miss Bunbury won’t mind, and I could use the company. Even treat you to a ticket, I will.”

It seems so transparent to Esther, but Jack thinks it’s a capital idea — he has a bit of a crush on Mary, Esther realizes — and Arthur can’t keep up with Mary’s rapid English long enough to object. Stubborn as sin, Arthur is nonetheless abashed by Mary, for once in his life embarrassed by his slow English, too proud to let this woman see she knows more than him. He knits his brows in concentration, his shaggy eyebrows curling like fish hooks. “Forecast’s for rain,” he says with a shrug. “I suppose I can spare her.” And for a moment Esther feels sorry for him, even though every day since she’s realized she’s pregnant, she’s lived in fear of him finding out — not so much that she’s pregnant, but by whom, her own private shame suddenly a shared national one.

That night, she lies awake thinking of him at the last lambing, hands red from a basin of steaming water, tying a noose in a waxed cord, telling her to steady the shuddering ewe between them — it’s breath coming in hot, grassy snorts while he reached into it. But that lamb had lived, she tells herself.