Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

She has a spasm of doubt the next morning, tells Arthur she doesn’t think she can spare the time, but he tells her nonsense. “You’ve been… not yourself lately,” he says, and she looks away. He’s sharpening the scythe, following it’s curve with long, whistling strokes of the whetstone, but he sets it aside. “Down in the mouth, I mean. It’s understandable, what with the news about young Roberts and the fright of that Jerry.” He nods as if agreeing with himself, reaches for the whetstone again, sets it singing back and forth along the blade. “Do your spirits a world of good, a bit of excitement.”

The hardest part is telling Jim, who’s instantly jealous. “It’s not fair! Why can’t I go? I’m from there!” And when Arthur tries to hush him, the boy cries, “He was my friend. Why does she get all the sympathy?” He only shuts up when his newly broken voice betrays him, rising girlishly.

In her anxiety, she arrives too early for the bus to Caernarvon, where she’s to meet Mary. She looks up from her watch to see Mrs. R beckoning from the post office door.

“Off to Liverpool, I hear.”

Esther nods, unsurprised.

“An adventure! I remember my first time. I didn’t want to come back.”

The possibility hasn’t crossed Esther’s mind, yet it’s so suddenly obvious she feels guilty as she hastens to deny it.

“Only teasing. You should see a bit of the world. Here, I’ve a map of the city about someplace, might come in handy.” Before Esther can object, she’s popped back inside. “Hang on a mo.”

It’s chilly in the shadow of the post office, and Esther looks longingly towards the bus stop, the green bench shining glossily in the morning sun. The street is momentarily empty, utterly still. Like a photo, she thinks. And then the bus grinds into view around the far corner, it’s maroon flanks scraping the hedgerow. She’s on the verge of bolting when Mrs. R reappears, slaps a yellowing map into her hand.

“There, wouldn’t want you to get lost.”

“Thank you,” she breathes, a little too fervently, but Mrs. R cuts her off. “Better run now.”

Esther opens the faded map on the bus, stares at all the streets spread before her, but the tiny type makes her dizzy so she gazes out the window instead. The trees are still full, she sees, but where they hang over the road, the leaves that flutter against the glass are dull and curling slightly, like hands at rest.

Mary meets her in front of Caernarvon station, a little round valise in her gloved hand, and when she asks Esther if she’s all right, the girl nods and smiles nervously. “I’ve never been on a train before,” she says, and Mary grips her hand.

Once they’re in the compartment, Esther fidgets, craning back and forth, looking around her, her hands stroking the nubbly upholstery. It’s all familiar from the films she’s seen, yet when the train clanks forward she starts and giggles. “It’s so… exciting,” she says, by way of explaining to Mary, and then she hears herself and her face falls.

They pick up speed, the racketing clatter building all the time, and she looks at Mary in alarm. “Is something broken?” And the other smiles and shakes her head.

When they’re settled, just the two of them alone in the compartment, Mary hands her the valise, and Esther, after a moment’s hesitation, springs the catch and opens it.

She sees her own eyes grow large in the vanity mirror set into the satin-lined lid.

“Glad rags,” Mary tells her, leaning back on the seat cushions with a lopsided grin. “For your day on the town.” Esther looks down at herself, her thin gingham dress — Sunday best, though she feels a hypocrite in it — and her long wool coat, too heavy for the season but all she has that’s halfway decent.

“Go on,” Mary says.

Esther pulls out a neat tweed suit with a matching hat and gloves, an ivory-colored blouse—“Silk?” she breathes, and Mary nods — and lastly filmy stockings, a garter belt. She looks up teary, and Mary crosses the compartment, holds her, lets the train rock her through the countryside.

“I thought you might want a… a costume,” Mary says at last. “I don’t know. That’s the actress talking, eh? I know it’s silly, but I bet you feel better if you put them on. For a bit of confidence. You’ll need a change anyway. Why not put these on now and get into your others after?”

A disguise is what she means, Esther thinks. So she’ll look like a city girl. When she fingers the watery blouse, she can’t imagine herself in it, but that somehow seems the point. That in it she won’t be herself anymore, but someone else.

“They’re so lovely,” she says. “I can’t — I’d just get them dirty.”

Mary clasps Esther’s hands in hers and whispers, “Put ’em on.”

And she does. Though not without a shy glance at the windows. The compartment is a noncommunicating one, there’s no danger of interruption, yet there’s glass on all sides of her.

“You’ll just be a blur.” Mary laughs. “A beautiful blur!”

Still, Esther waits until they’re speeding along the coast, flat drab fields on one side and the flashing high tide on the other. The sea looks so inviting, so alive, the waves breathing in and out, she can’t understand why she’d ever preferred a pool. Tawny autumn sunlight glances off the surface, ripples through the carriage, and she pictures herself in one of the gaily striped changing huts along the front at Llandudno or Rhyl, stepping into a new bathing suit, ready to strike out into the waves like Esther Williams. But when she catches a glimpse of her face, hanging ghostly in the window, she sees her own smile is pallid, not the bright bared beam of the swimmer. And what of poor Karsten? He’s not going to be swimming anywhere soon. She visualizes his leg in a heavy cast, dragging him down beneath the waves, like a movie gangster with his feet in cement.

She steps gingerly out of her clothes, putting out a hand to steady herself against the speed of the train, blushing at the state of her underwear, until Mary hands her the new clothes and then she’s lost in the feel of them, the smooth clasp of the silk stockings, so unlike the scratchy woolen ones she’s used to wearing, the softness of the blouse at her neck. She thinks of the stockings Eric had given her years earlier, but she’d slipped them on only once, surreptitiously, in the house, just up and down quickly, too frightened of discovery even to look at herself in the mirror.

Afterwards, Mary comes close, tucks Esther’s hair behind her ears and smoothes rouge into her cheeks—“War paint!”—pats her softly with the downy sponge from her mother-of-pearl compact.

“There,” she says, and positions Esther by the window as they thunder through one of the tunnels along the coast, for her to admire her dark reflection. “Chin up,” Mary whispers in her ear, and when Esther straightens, Mary shrugs the rayon macintosh off her own shoulders and drapes it over Esther’s like a cape. “Bravo!”

Later, after the giddiness has passed and the tracks have turned inland towards the city, Mary asks her gently if she’s sure, and Esther nods, because she is. She’s thought it through. All she can think is that what’s inside her is a little piece of Colin. Mary tries to tell her, “It’s not him, whoever he is, not anymore, luv. Whatever’s in there isn’t responsible.” But Esther just stares ahead, unblinking, at the approaching city, it’s smoking chimneys like a thousand steaming kettles. England, she thinks, wondering when they crossed the border.

MARY HAS THE CABBY they meet at the station drive them around the town. “My pal’s never seen the city,” she says, and he takes them past the docks so that Esther can glimpse the Mersey, the golden Liverbirds glinting dully in the distance. He takes them past the cathedral, detours around streets closed and flattened by bombing, and then Mary has him drive past theaters she’s worked at. The Orpheum, the Apollo, the Regency. “Regency’s gone,” the driver says, and Mary slumps a little. “The old Reg. Got my start there in a dance act, Bean and Bubbles.” She squares her shoulders. “Well, now they can put in those better dressing rooms they was always promising us.”