Love and War (21 page)

I take the almost-finished left front, undo a few rows, pick up the stitches and carry on. I’m suddenly bored with Jack’s problem. I realise how little I care for Mary. We were always considered friends because we were the only two young women on the staff, but I never felt much warmth for her and all I feel for her now is contempt and pity. I must be looking quite fierce because I notice both Ilona and Jack staring at me.

‘What’s the matter?’ I ask them. ‘I saw your portrait last night,’ Jack says. ‘I was having supper with Gwynn and his wife and she showed it to me. It’s a good likeness.’

‘Is it? I haven’t been allowed to see it. Gwynn told me that my dress is good, but that my body is wooden and my face blank. Well, perhaps my face
is
blank.’

‘I’m not saying anything,’ Ilona says. ‘I’m certainly not going to risk offending you till you finish that cardigan.’

‘Gwynn’s got his medical next week,’ Jack says. ‘He’s not at all keen to join up. On the quiet, I think he’s a bit of a rebel like you, Rhian. He kept saying how he’d like to be English with no doubts about the rights and wrongs of the war. I don’t think he’ll be a very enthusiastic soldier.’

‘I suppose he’ll only be a sort of teacher anyway,’ Ilona says. ‘Something in the Education Corps, a different sort of teacher. He won’t be a fighting soldier. Not at his age.’

‘He’s fit enough,’ Jack says, ‘and he’s not much over forty.’

‘I didn’t see him in school today. I went up to his room at dinner-time, but he wasn’t there. Perhaps he went home.’ To my embarrassment, my voice is high and unsteady.

‘I don’t know. Anyway, he’s calling here later on. He’s got some holiday sketches he wants to show you. I saw them last night. They’re very good.’

He’s calling here later on. I want to fling my arms about and shout. I go on counting stitches very carefully.

‘I will come out for that drink, Jack,’ Ilona says, ‘I think perhaps a pregnant woman needs something stronger than tea.’

Oh, bless you, Ilona.

She puts her jacket on and goes to look at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece. ‘Hey, why didn’t you tell me I’d got a letter?’

‘I’m sorry. I was so upset, I forgot about it.’

‘It’s from that idiot, Denzil. At last. And just half a page, look. He’s hopeless. “We had a terrible journey with lots of – something” – a word I can’t read. “Everyone says there’s going to be a party soon” I suppose that means the invasion. “I’m quite looking forward to it” What a fool. “I hope it doesn’t get too noisy.” It will, boy, it will. “If you marry me, I’ll come back to effing Wales and find work in those effing quarries.” He can’t spell quarries after three attempts. “I bet we’ll have some good times. What do you say? Love and all that, Denzil.”’

‘He’s going to make an honest woman of you,’ I tell her.

‘An illiterate barrow-boy from Liverpool,’ she says. ‘Is that all you think I deserve?’

‘You’re delighted to have heard from him, anyway. Look at you, grinning away like a cat.’

‘Of course I am. We got on very well. I liked him, I certainly didn’t want to think he’d forgotten me after a couple of weeks. On the other hand, the last thing in the world I want is to marry him. Get that into your thick skull.’

‘He could help you with that little shop.’

‘You just want me to be tied up like you are.’

‘You’re already tied up, my girl. Good and proper.’

While we’re teasing each other, I happen to catch sight of Jack who’s looking completely distraught. ‘Let’s go,’ he says quietly. ‘I really need that drink.’

Gwynn arrives almost as soon as they leave.

My heart is thudding, but I try to remain calm. ‘I’m glad you could come. Hasn’t it been a terrible day? I tried to see you in the dinner hour.’

‘I’m sorry. I felt I had to call on Mrs Talfan. How are you?’

‘Better now. Much better now. Did you have a good holiday?’

‘No. Did you?’

‘No. How could I be happy?’

‘How was your mother?’

‘Quite well again, thank you. How is Celine?’

‘She’s well, too. Have you heard from Huw?’

‘Yes. Two letters. He’s all right.’

‘You’re pale. Are you eating properly?’

‘I’m always pale. Especially when I’m happy.’

That’s as much as we have to say. For the next half-hour we look at each other and sigh. I feel the same peace as I sometimes do when I stare out at the hills. I don’t tell him how unhappy I’ve been. He doesn’t show me his holiday sketches. 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.’