Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“What?” Schiller had wailed, but Sulzer had just turned away, and Karsten had marveled, He knows.

They’d called him all the old names then — turncoat, coward — and he’d spat at them.

“You think it would have made a difference to fight to the death. What would it have meant? A minute’s delay for the British, two maybe.” He stared at Schiller. “Our deaths might have prolonged the Thousand-Year Reich by five minutes.”

“Traitor!” they howled. Karsten had known what was coming, but he leaned over the table and said it anyway: “Before long they’ll all have surrendered, all our countrymen. Will they all be traitors? Or just Germans?”

“Why, you,” Schiller began, and Karsten struck him in the face. It felt so good. He’d been dying to hit Schiller for weeks, he thought. And then he hit him again in the middle of his bloodied, surprised face, and this time Schiller went down. It’s a favor, Karsten had thought viciously. Now they won’t think we’re friends. But then the others were on him, as he knew they would be. He tried to stay upright as long as he could under the flurry of blows, tried to remain conscious until he heard the whistles of the guards.

IN THE INFIRMARY, he has begged, through his split and swollen lips, for a window bed, and the orderlies have taken pity on him, laid him down where he has a view of the fence and the trees and the hillside, where he can keep watch for her. The Welsh girl. The pregnant girl. It’s growing dark now, though — the flame of his candle reflecting in the dark pane — and he knows she’s not coming tonight.

He wonders about her baby, wonders if he should have said what he did. What business is it of his? And yet when she told him about it, he’d had a sudden impulse, I can save it, that same impulse, he thinks, that he felt towards Heino and even Schiller just before he surrendered. And he’d welcomed it.

Rotheram has been to see him that afternoon, but he seemed taken aback by Karsten’s injuries, asking his questions gently and not pursuing them. He thinks they did this to me because I talked to him, Karsten realized. “You’ll get no more out of me than they did,” he said, and Rotheram replied, “I see that now.” When he was done and packing his bag, Karsten told him, “I never knew you,” and Rotheram barely glanced at his ruined face, then nodded.

Before he left, Karsten asked him for paper and pencil. Rotheram had slipped a pack of cigarettes under the lined sheets, which Karsten appreciated but hadn’t meant to ask for. It’s time to write his mother again, he thinks. There are questions he wants to ask her about his father — how he was after the last war, how he was before. But first he must tell her the truth, tell her of his surrender. He thinks of passing down that long, dark tunnel out of the bunker, the blood pulsing hot in his ears, pushing himself on into the blinding light. And he pictures himself, at last, holding up his hands, though now as if he were waiting for someone to grasp them and pull him out. Like a second birth, he thinks.

He starts to write. In the swaying candlelight the lines on the paper look like strips of bandages, and he has the strangest impression of his writing hand, unwinding them as it moves across the page, revealing the words beneath.

MRS. ROBERTS OPENS her door at the first knock, almost as if she’s been waiting behind it. She seems old and frail in the evening light. Esther remembers her as a tough, bosomy woman in school. They were all a little afraid of her bustling energy. Now her previously round face is drawn, and her eyes bulge. She brings Esther through to the parlor, the best room, and insists on making tea. Esther’s never been here before, and she feels self-conscious, left alone with Mrs. Roberts’s fine things: the gleaming brass carriage clock on the mantel, the etched mirror above. Beside the clock is a framed photograph, and it takes her a long moment to recognize Mr. Roberts, stern beneath the bowler cocked low over his brow. And then she spots the familiar gap between his teeth. The walls, she sees, are covered with family pictures, rank after rank of faces peering down at her. Rhys is everywhere. He’s rarely smiling — shy, for once, of his gap teeth, or perhaps advised not to by photographers, conscious of customer satisfaction — and his stiff features make him seem from another time, a contemporary of his ancestors. She hunches on the stiff horsehair sofa where she’s perched, listening to her old teacher in the kitchen, trying to avoid their eyes. Instead, she meets the glassy glare of the stuffed and mounted robin on the sideboard, it’s beak gaping, breast puffed, but silent under it’s bell jar. She wonders if she can go through with this. “Mrs. R,” she calls, “Mrs. R!” But the shrill cry of the kettle interrupts her, and when Mrs. Roberts calls back, “Did you want something, dear?” her nerve fails her. “No. Nothing.”

The whispered thought comes to her that there might be a baby picture of Rhys on the wall, and she steels herself to look up, glancing around wildly, filled with a sharp desire to see it, as if it were the future somehow, her fate. But there’s nothing, and then Mrs. R bustles back in, steam puffing from the spout of the teapot on the tray before her.

There’s a lull while they stare at the tray between them, at the silver pot and solitary Eccles cake beside it, as the tea steeps. “Oh, I couldn’t,” Esther says at last, as if the cake has just materialized before her, but Mrs. Roberts waves dismissively. “‘The funeral baked meats,’” she says almost gaily. “I’ve been getting more food than I can eat. You’d hardly know there was rationing.” And after another pause Esther cuts the cake in half and says they’ll share. She stares at the little speckled pastry on the Willow Pattern plate before her, the knife pressed to it, and tells it, as much as Mrs. Roberts, that she’s carrying Rhys’s child. Spoken in English the lie seems more abstract, easier, as if someone else is telling it.

There’s a moment when she thinks Mrs. R doesn’t believe it, a second of calculation when her features seem smudged in the lamplight, her expression indeterminate. She examines Esther with wary appraisal, as if they’ve never met, and the girl braces herself for judgment. But all she says at last is “You’re long-waisted. I see it now, of course. Don’t know how I missed it.” She shakes her head. “But that’s always the way, isn’t it? Never see what’s right under our noses.” Her face tenses and then relaxes.

“ Duw, ” the old woman breathes. “Thank God.” She is up, with her arms around Esther where she sits on the sofa, knife still in hand, shaking against the plate, and Esther finds herself weeping.

“There, child, there. You thought I’d be angry, didn’t you? Disappointed, even.” She shakes her head, pulls a clean little hankie from her sleeve, touches it to Esther’s cheeks. “Truth is, I never thought you’d have him. He was so… well, a good boy, but not quick. Still, one never reckons with love, does one? Anyhow, don’t cry. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, not much. I know the fault isn’t only on your side.”

Esther tries to pull away from her, but the old woman holds her tighter, puts her lips to the girl’s ear.

“It’s not the end of the world. Oh, there’ll be talk and some jokes at your expense, it’ll be hard for a bit, but it’s not as if you’re the first as ever fell.” She leans back, nodding. “You might as well say it’s a tradition in these parts. ‘The Welsh way,’ the English used to call it. ‘Welsh courtship,’ if you read your Mrs. Gaskell. This is a hundred years ago now, but back then it was a winked-at practice, a betrothed couple who couldn’t yet afford to marry sharing a bed before the wedding day. I dare say the practice isn’t entirely dead, although there’s some what abused it, reneged on the deal, which gave it a bad name. That’s why they call it ‘welshing,’ you know. That’s where it comes from.”