Love and War (20 page)

Eleven

TODAY WAS A DREADFUL DAY. Over the week-end, the Deputy Head, Talfan Roberts, had had news that his son, Owen, had been shot down over Germany: missing, presumed dead.

He was a brilliant boy who’d won a State Scholarship to Oxford. I remember him at school. He was the Head Prefect when I was in the First Form, so tall and remote that he already looked like one of the masters. Everyone who knew him liked and respected him.

Talfan Roberts teaches Chemistry. He’s not a very good teacher; vague and absent-minded, late for classes, sometimes forgetting them altogether, a bit of an old woman – I suppose he must be well over sixty – terrified of draughts and fresh air. Mrs Lewis, History, is always flinging windows open, urging children to take good deep breaths, while Talfan shudders and complains very loudly of the cold and damp. Everyone has a a soft spot for him.

We have a service at the end of the afternoon as we always do after the death of one of the old boys and this time even the Third Formers are quiet and attentive.

The Head begins with a very long account of the Russian victories in the Ukraine, the number of miles they’ve advanced, the rivers they’ve crossed, the railways they’ve blown up, the number of Germans they’ve killed and taken prisoner, and at the point when we’re all certain that he’s had his much-heralded brainstorm, he stops and explains himself. ‘I have to give you all this good news,’ he says, ‘before I can bear to face what is for me the greatest personal tragedy of the war.’ And then he gives a very simple and moving account of his friendship with Mr and Mrs Talfan Roberts and his pride in their son. At one point his voice cracks, he loses the thread of his sentence and has to begin again. He finishes very quietly without his usual burst of rhetoric.

I know I’m small-minded, but when people I despise behave well, it makes me feel really uncomfortable. I expected the Head to bellow and roar about the iniquities of the entire German race, not to speak quietly and poignantly about the tragedy of war.

It’s my usual policy never to speak to him except to answer a question, but this afternoon I brace myself to go to his room to tell him how moved I was by his address.

To my embarrassment, Mr and Mrs Talfan Roberts are there with him having a cup of tea. He insists on my joining them and because Mrs Roberts is red-eyed, I start to sniff as well. And then the Head puts his arm round my shoulder and says how well I’m bearing the strain of my husband’s absence and Mrs Roberts smiles damply at me and passes me a handkerchief.

Short and dumpy, with little round dimpled face and curly grey hair, she doesn’t look cut out for tragedy. Even now she looks bewildered; someone who’s managed to mislay her spectacles again, rather than a woman who’s lost her only son. Mr Roberts, looking even more absent-minded than usual, pats her hand from time to time.

I’m the first to leave. Mrs Roberts asks me to call on her one afternoon after school and I promise to do so – and perhaps I will.

As I walk home, I feel like an old woman conscious of the frailties of her body; the heart labouring, the thinning blood. There have been many casualties, even in our small community, but I can’t seem to accept Owen’s death; he’s always been one of the golden young men everyone talks about. This time the local papers will be right when they pay tribute to a popular local hero. My eyes are burning. If I feel like this, how can his parents survive? They’ll never be the same, they’ll never get over it, but how will they manage to get through the rest of their lives? How will they even manage to go home this afternoon and think of getting a meal together?

The walk home – just over a mile – has never seemed so long. I unlock the front door, put down my bag of books, pick up a letter – for Ilona – from the doormat and lower myself into an armchair, too tired to see to the fire.

I can’t face any supper. Ilona makes herself some chips and a fried egg. I take a few chips, to please her, but I can hardly swallow them.

After supper, Ilona brings out her knitting, a coral pink cardigan which she’d started before she came here over a year ago. She’s a hopeless knitter and she loses her temper whenever anything goes wrong.

The knitting is just one thing too much. ‘Aren’t you going out tonight?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Jack said he might call, but I don’t feel like going out tonight.’

‘When did you see Jack?’

‘He called round in his dinner hour. Why?’

‘I was wondering whether he’d seen Mary, that’s all.’

‘Yes, he did. He stayed in Fronilltyd for three days – in some bed and breakfast place. One day he took her for a three-mile walk by the river, another day to a football match. She’s feeling much better and she’s got a job in a solicitor’s office. The money’s poor, it seems, but the work is quite interesting. What else? Carlo has passed on and her father’s thinking of getting a fox terrier.’

‘You had quite a chat.’

‘Yes. We had lunch at Glyn Owen’s. Steak and kidney pie. You know, brown bread and onion with Bovril gravy. Quite nice.’

‘I suppose he mentioned Talfan Roberts’s son?’

‘Of course. They were in the same form at school. You can imagine how upset he was. Kept on quoting poetry at me. I didn’t think Jack was the type to know any poetry. He’s full of surprises, don’t you think so?’

For a time she concentrates hard on the coral pink knitting. Once again, I have to show her how to decrease.

‘I still haven’t had a word from that oaf Denzil.’

‘Perhaps he’s been sent overseas.’

‘They’d have given him time to send a letter. Oh, I don’t trust anyone any more, I really don’t.’

‘You said you didn’t care for him, anyway.’

‘I don’t
care
for him, no. All the same, I expect him to send me the occasional letter.’

A knock on the door. ‘That’ll be Jack,’ Ilona says, without much joy.

I can hear her at the front door. ‘No, I don’t think I’ll come out tonight, Jack. I know I said I would, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m a bit down, to tell you the truth, and so is Rhian. Well, you can come in if you want to, but we’re not good company. I’m knitting and she’s marking books and moaning.’

‘Hello Jack,’ I say, as he follows her in. ‘Isn’t it awful about Owen Talfan?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’m going to get very drunk tonight. I was hoping Ilona’d come out to keep me company.’

He’s wearing a dark suit with a dark, sombre tie. ‘You’re dressed for a prayer-meeting,’ I tell him.

‘That’s what my landlady said. But I think sinking seven or eight pints will do me more good.’

We’re all silent. Ilona takes up her knitting again. ‘You deserve to be miserable,’ she tells Jack.

I stare at her. I suppose she’s angry that he hasn’t broken off his engagement to Mary. ‘We’re both miserable,’ Jack tells me.

‘You and Mary?’

‘No. Ilona and me.’

I look from one to the other for an explanation. Jack studies his black shoes as though seeing them for the first time.

Ilona sighs and puts her knitting down. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘He’s promised to marry Mary Powell at the end of July and I’m having a baby in September.’

We all fall silent.

I feel stunned, quite unable to get to grips with this last shock. ‘What a way to let me know,’ I manage to say after a few moments.

It’s typical of her, though. Not to have involved me in any of the initial doubts and fears; to go through all that on her own, and then to tell me about it as casually as if it’s a kitten or a puppy she’s decided to have. I feel angry as well as shocked and frightened.

‘And fancy telling Jack before you tell me.’

‘Well, he makes me so mad, that’s why. He thinks he’s the only one with problems. Anyway, I didn’t want to worry you.’

‘I thought friends were supposed to share their worries.’

‘You’ve got enough of your own, I can manage mine. I won’t be any trouble to you, I promise. I’ll be leaving here soon, taking my dreadful secret with me.’

‘Don’t be melodramatic. You don’t have to go anywhere.’

Even as I’m saying it, I know it’s not true. My mother-in-law would raise hell if she realised Ilona was pregnant. In her mind it would be as bad as if I was keeping a brothel.

‘Have you told Denzil?’ I ask her.

‘Denzil?
Denzil
? It’s nothing to do with Denzil. Do you think I’d want to marry Denzil? I don’t want to marry anyone, to tell you the truth. I’ll have my Gran’s little house when she dies and perhaps I’ll open a shop in the front parlour. I can look after myself. Don’t waste time worrying about me.’

‘You can’t be as brave as you pretend, Ilona.’

‘Why not? It hasn’t come as a complete surprise, girl, has it? It’s something I’ve been half-expecting for years. No-one can go on being lucky for ever. Don’t look at me like that, Jack. I’ve never pretended to be a boring little virgin, have I? If you think I’m common, just walk out and leave me alone.’

‘Of course I don’t think you’re common,’ Jack says. ‘What’s the matter with you? I spend all my time telling you how very... uncommon I think you are.’

Is he now hankering after Ilona? He notices me staring at him.

‘Have you had a letter from Huw?’ he asks me. ‘You hadn’t heard from him last time I was here.’

Ilona doesn’t let me answer. ‘Why do you come round here bothering me?’ she asks him, real anger in her voice. ‘You’ve got Mary, haven’t you? I should think that woman would be more than enough for anyone.’

‘Everything is so sad,’ I say. I’ve recently had two letters, but nowadays they only make me realise how little Huw and I have in common. ‘Is anybody happy? I’d like to think that someone, somewhere is really happy.’

‘I’m happy,’ Ilona says. ‘Honestly I am and I’ve only just realised it. Yes, I’m happy. I’m twenty-five years old, I’ve got a bit of money saved and I’m going to have a baby. How bloody marvellous. I’ve always been a rebel, people have always prophesied that I’ll end up badly, so they’ll be delighted to be proved right. But perhaps they’ll end up envying me. Oh, it’s not going to be easy, I realise that. People who find they can’t make me feel ashamed of myself will try to make me feel guilty for the baby’s sake. “The poor little mite. Have you thought of his struggles, an outcast from civilised society?” I’ll have to put up with all that sort of thing.’

‘I think the war has made people a little more tolerant,’ Jack says.

‘Dr Samuel wondered whether I might consider adoption, whether I might consider making a childless couple happy. “Do I look like a Charity?” I asked him. “Do I look as though I care a damn about any childless couple?” He wondered, then, whether I realised how narrow-minded people could be to women in my position. Of course I realise it. Those wives who have such a hell of a life, a houseful of children, no money and husbands who get fighting drunk and beat them up every Saturday night; the most powerful emotion they’ve got left is anger for any woman who doesn’t conform.’

‘Marriage isn’t always like that,’ Jack says. ‘It doesn’t have to be like that.’

‘No, that’s the extreme. But even at best, it’s an unequal partnership. You’re going to get married, or so you say, to a woman you already know to be totally unbalanced. How long is it going to take you to feel enormously proud of yourself and contemptuous of her? Your marriage is doomed before it even begins. What you want to do, Jack, is take stock of yourself and decide what you really want out of life.’

‘There are plenty of marriages where it’s the man who suffers,’ Jack says. ‘When a woman constantly belittles a man,
he’s
the one bound to suffer.’

When I married Huw I’d hardly considered the problems of marriage. It was simply what two people did, usually when they were in their early twenties; got married and then had children.

‘You can’t believe any good of any man, can you?’ Jack asks. ‘You can’t believe that I, for instance, have an earnest desire to be a good husband and to make a woman happy. And I feel I stand a chance with Mary. She’s vulnerable and insecure and I think I’ll be able to restore her self-confidence.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Ilona says. ‘She won’t respect a man she’s been able to manipulate.’

‘Anyway, I’ve already bought her an engagement ring. It would kill her if I broke with her now.’

‘Kill her? Great Heavens, why should it kill her?’

Jack looks even more miserable. ‘Oh, it’s not that I think I’m God’s great gift or anything like that. Far from it. But Mary’s already suffered enough and it would be another blow wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? What do you think, Rhian?’

‘Yes, it would, I’m sure. But I still think it’s what you should do. After all, it’s what you want to do. It’s obvious. You’re sitting here now because you want Ilona to go on persuading you to give her up. If you were really intent on marrying Mary, you’d think Ilona was a great busybody and have nothing more to do with her.’

By this time Ilona has started growling at her knitting. ‘Look, I’ll finish that cardigan for you,’ I tell her. ‘The part I do will look a bit different because I’m a decent knitter, but the strain of watching you mauling it about is too much for me.’

‘Thank you,’ Ilona says, handing it over to me as though it were a dangerous animal.