Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

And now Esther does fight free, looks at her with frank astonishment.

“You didn’t think I knew that, did you?” Her former teacher smiles. “But I could hardly tell you in school. Some definitions you have to wait for until you’re a grown woman.”

She means it all as a comfort, but when she looks at Esther’s face, she seems to recoil, and Esther wonders what she sees there. Anger, perhaps. It’s your fault, she wants to shout. You taught me to speak the language. And somehow the flash of hatred steels her in her lie.

“There, now,” Mrs. Roberts says, groping for something more to offer. “But my boy’ll make an honest woman of you, mark my words.”

Esther hangs her head, almost gagging, puts a hand to her mouth, presses her eyes closed. But even in the darkness the words appear before her— honest woman —scratched out on a schoolroom slate. It’s as if the English words are mocking her now, flinging her lies back at her like a hollow echo, as if the very language is laughing at her. She dare not speak.

“Oh, I know,” the older woman cries, panicked by Esther’s despair, and then, “Here, here.” And when Esther looks up she finds Mrs. Roberts wringing her hands — no, twisting at her finger, pulling at a ring. “See!” she says, beaming triumphantly. “This is the ring his old father gave me. Welsh gold, it is. It’d be yours soon enough, so why not now? Yes! That’s the ticket. I’d have given it to Rhys for you if he’d only asked. We’ll say he wrote me. In his last letter. To give it to you. You won’t have to feel a bit ashamed.” She nods rapidly and holds it up before Esther, a little golden O, and Esther feels her lips slowly forming the shape.

She should make fists of her hands, jam them in her pockets, sit on them, anything. But when Mrs. Roberts takes her hand ( takes my hand, Esther thinks, shying more from the phrase than the touch), it feels limp, numb, not her own at all, and she watches in horrified fascination as the older woman slips on the ring, pressing it gently over her knuckle.

“There!” She turns Esther’s hand back and forth in admiration. “You’re a Mrs. R yourself now, and it’ll be a proper little Welsh babby, and no one can say any different.”

Esther is still staring at the ring when Mrs. R says, “May I?” And it takes her a slow moment to realize she wants to touch her. Esther nods minutely and submits, leaning back and watching Mrs. R smooth her hands over her belly, like a Gypsy over a crystal ball. She wills herself not to flinch under the span of the dry fingers, looks away as they slide over her, imagining Mrs. R’s hands still dusty with blackboard chalk, stares at her rapt face instead. The swollen crescents beneath the old woman’s eyes look like blisters in the half-light, and for a moment it seems to Esther as if they’ve finally split. She’s crying, she thinks, and yet there’s a gleam of light in Mrs. R’s eyes. It’s the light of inspiration, and something more, Esther sees.

“There, now. It’s going to be all right. He’ll come now,” Mrs. Roberts says vehemently. It’s her classroom voice. The voice that will brook no more dullness. For all her stoicism, Esther sees with astonishment, a current of hope has been coursing through Mrs. R like an underground stream. “He’ll come back now, mark me. We just have to have hope, girl. Do you have hope?”

Esther looks at her through her tears and nods slowly. She does have hope, she realizes. All this time she’s thought Rhys dead, and now she hopes, prays, that he is.

And then she does gag, cupping her mouth, her eyes wide with panic as she looks around the parlor, at the polished wood, the lace antimacassars, the cut glass. But in the end it’s only tea she spills, bumping the low table as she rushes out, down the tiled passage, and out the door, to the yard and the privy. And by then she’s swallowed it down again, the bile searing her throat, so she can only spit, over and over, in an effort to get the taste from her mouth.

After a few moments she hears the door to the yard open, and she’s sure she’s given herself away. She pictures Mrs. R, ruler in hand, stalking between their desks during tests, ready to smack the knuckles of cheats. Once she’d actually broken her ruler across a boy’s shoulders. Esther had been too afraid to cheat, she thinks now. That’s why she’d always worked so hard. It wasn’t so much the ruler, but the shame of being caught in front of the whole class. And it occurs to her that it wasn’t just some boy whose back Mrs. R snapped her ruler over. It was Rhys. Trapped in the tiny cell of the privy, amid the stink of bleach, Esther wishes she had cheated all those years ago, had been beaten for it.

There’s a soft knock at the door. “All right, dear? Never mind. It’s only natural, morning sickness.”

And perhaps because it’s dark out, just a powdery moonlight sifting through the high window of the privy, Esther misunderstands her, hears her say “mourning sickness,” before Mrs. Roberts adds: “Silly name for it, really. It can come over you anytime.”

IT’S A LONG, dark walk up from the village, pushing the bike, the night wet and windy. Mrs. R’s ring is too big for her, rolling loose around her finger. She’d take it off, but she feels faint at the thought of losing it, so she makes a fist until the ring stands up like a new knuckle. What she’d give for a cigarette to take away the taste of sick on her tongue. She’s calmer now, trying to decide how she feels about what she’s done, probing the lie, testing it. How bad has she been? She feels a wave of tiredness, totters from it. It’s been an endless day, but she takes her exhaustion for relief, though she can’t quite shake the nagging sense that she’s completed Colin’s work, dishonored herself finally and irrevocably. In the end, though, she’s a farmer’s daughter, and it’s pragmatism that wins out.

Her mind turns to the last lambing season. It’s her favorite time of year, she and Arthur working closely together, his fierceness tempered by tenderness for the lambs, but the previous spring had been a hard one. Too many stillbirths, and too many of those females. The male lambs, the wethers, meant money; they’d be sold off after a year for meat. But the females, the ewes, were what the future of the flock depended on, the carriers of the cynefin.

Towards the end of the lambing, they’d both been sitting up through the night, nursing two of the last ewes to deliver. Around three, Arthur’s lamb had been stillborn, the mother circling it for a few minutes, sniffing at it lugubriously and then withdrawing to a corner of the makeshift pen of hay bales, crumpling with exhaustion. A half hour later, Esther’s ewe gave birth to a healthy lamb, but the mother hemorrhaged within moments of the delivery and swiftly bled to death, despite their best efforts. They’d tried setting the orphaned lamb in the pen with the bereaved mother, but she wanted nothing to do with the newborn, turning away when the lamb tried to press it’s head against her flank, kicking out when it followed shakily behind. Esther had to lift the lamb out of the pen to save it from being trampled. She’d gone in search of a bottle, thinking to hand-rear it, though she’d never managed to with one so young.

When she came back into the circle of yellow lamplight, Arthur was cradling the dead lamb in his big hands, it’s head flopping over his wrist. He watched as she touched the snout of the bottle to her lamb’s mouth. It licked the teat once, twice, then twisted away, struggling feebly in her arms, and Arthur shook his head. He’d pulled a knife from the hay bale beside him and set about the lamb in his hands, skinning it swiftly and neatly, and she watched, horrified as he tugged the fleece from the filmy blue flesh of the body with a soft tearing sound, the bloody carcass emerging, almost as if it were being born a second time. He set it gently beside him when he was done, came towards her with the wet fleece, and numbly she held the tiny kicking beast while he plastered the dead lamb’s skin over it, tying the strips that had been it’s legs beneath the warm, trembling belly. By the end of it their hands were slathered with blood. They’d set the lamb on the floor of the pen and stood back as it tottered under the new weight. It had looked piteous, grotesque, the butt of a cruel joke, but the ewe had roused herself, recognizing the scent of her own lamb, and approached, and this time when the lamb nosed against her, she stood fast.