Love and War (35 page)

Ilona’s grandmother is a small, fierce-looking woman with dark skin and yellowish eyes. She’s nearly bald so she always wears a knitted cap even in the house, and whenever I’m there pulls it down over her eyes and goes to sleep, her chin on her chest. She’s eighty-eight. Ilona is worried because she hasn’t made a will. She’s always said that her cottage is for Ilona, but with no legal proof, Ilona’s afraid that her elder sister, who has three children and an errant husband, may decide to claim it. It’s a very old cottage, dark and tiny, the windows no bigger than pocket handkerchiefs.

My mother writes me a long letter every week. There’s heavy fighting again in Italy, between the Germans and the Allies this time, and Fredo is very worried for his sons. Someone from her chapel ran in to Huw’s mother in Llanfair and was told that Huw is in the thick of the fighting, probably in Holland. My mother begs me to write to him, but somehow I’m not able to. I’m pleased, of course, to have news of his safety, but I can’t write to him.

Mr Churchill says the war will be over by next summer.

I go home for Christmas: a ten-hour journey it turns out to be, three crowded short-distance buses with long waits in between. I have a really deep and dreamless sleep in my own little room and wake refreshed and ready for anything. Which is just as well because in the middle of the afternoon a telegram arrives for me: ‘Please return. Nain serious stroke. Ilona.’

‘Dear, dear, what a pity,’ my mother says, starting to pack my things again, taking it for granted that I’ll be going back immediately.

‘But it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow. I can’t leave you alone for Christmas.’

‘I won’t be alone, though, girl, not exactly. You see, Fredo is allowed to be here for the day. Yes, they’re not nearly as strict as they were. His chaplain has been to see me, you know, and we had a long chat about religion. He’d never heard of the Congregational sect, mind, but I explained how it meant all the people in the congregation being equal before God with no bishop or senate and he said it wasn’t so different from their religion, except of course for the Pope and the cardinals and the bishops. But it’s the same laws of Moses, he said, and the same Christ the Saviour, so that we mustn’t let small differences stand in the way. So I think I’m doing right, aren’t I, and I’m sure your father would say the same.’

‘I’m sorry not to see Fredo. I’ve brought him a Christmas present, look. Two pairs of hand-knitted socks. My landlady knits. They smell awful, but it’s only the oil from the sheep.’

‘They’re beautiful. They’ll last for ever, too.’

And I’ve brought you some material for a new costume, a ready-made blouse, new gloves and a new hat.’

‘Good gracious me! And whenever am I going to wear all this finery, girl, at my age?’

‘I thought you might have a wedding to go to, some time next year.’

‘Oh dear, dear.’ And she blushes like a girl.

Next day the buses are even more crowded with people travelling home for Christmas, but apart from me, everyone seems happy; the war news is good, food more plentiful this year and the weather is sunny and bright. When I arrive in Caernarfon, the last bus for Brynteg has already left, so I have to take a taxi: another fifteen shillings on top of the bus journey.

I find that the old lady is in a coma and not likely to recover consciousness. Ilona is weeping; the tiny house is crowded with relations, all weeping. And I’m so tired and angry that I was called back that I start weeping too. It gets later and later. No one thinks of leaving, no one thinks of going to bed. We take it in turn to make sandwiches and cups of tea, endless cups of tea. At midnight someone switches on the wireless and we hear the bells chiming for Christmas and almost immediately Ilona’s mother comes downstairs saying, ‘She’s gone, she’s gone,’ and we all troop up to see her and start weeping again.

Then everybody sits round the fire drinking whisky and telling wildly disrespectful stories about the old lady who seemed to have lied and cheated her way through life in great style. Nobody had ever got the better of her, it seems. They can hardly believe that she’s dead now, silent and defeated. They drink to her memory until it’s time for Tommy’s first feed.

We spend a strange Christmas Day. The family has left, but in the afternoon we have a visit from the minister, a very shy young man who assures us of Christ’s welcome in Heaven for Theodora Owen, the stray sheep, the beloved sinner, and then has a piece of my mother’s cake and dandles Tommy on his knee.

Ilona and I are too tired to cook either dinner or supper, but we light a good fire and watch Tommy kicking on a rug and have sandwiches again. In the evening we listen to a ghost story on the wireless and then we’re almost afraid to go to bed because of the dead woman upstairs. We’re really ashamed of ourselves in the morning.

Greta, Ilona’s eldest sister, agrees to forfeit her claim to the cottage on condition that she has the twenty-seven pounds in their grandmother’s Post Office book and the other sisters and sisters-in-law settle for a pair of jugs each from the dresser.

Ilona invites me to be her lodger next term and I accept.

After the funeral, I go home again for the last week of the holiday.

My mother tells me that Jack called the previous day, wanting news of me. ‘Yes, he trudged up Hewl Fach in all that snow we had yesterday and when he realised you’d had to go back to North Wales, he returned on the next bus, wouldn’t even stay for a spot of dinner. He seemed very disappointed, girl. A nice man, I thought him, and so did Fredo. He told me to tell you that he’s applying for the deputy Headship, now that Mr Talfan Roberts is retiring. Perhaps that’s all he had to say – but I don’t think so, somehow.’

‘He’s got my address in Brynteg, he can write to me if he wants to.’

‘They still miss you at school. Mr Cynrig Williams is giving the woman they appointed to your job a hard time, it seems.’

‘He gives everyone a hard time.’

‘There’s no need to bite my head off, girl. What’s Mr Jones done to offend you? I thought you were friends.’

‘Let’s not talk about him, all right?’

My mother’s prepared a beautiful dinner to celebrate the New Year: a roasting fowl with potatoes and sprouts and all the trimmings, followed by the Christmas pudding which Fredo, who’d tasted some the previous year in camp, had insisted should be kept for me. The table is beautiful: the lace tablecloth, made by my great-grandmother and shown in the Great Exhibition in 1851, two tall red candles in a pair of heavy brass candlesticks which are always on the table for any celebration but never lit, and the best dinner service, a wedding present, grey leaves on a white background, which comprises in all thirty-six plates, four meat plates, two tureens with covers and two gravy boats with ladles, which no one but my mother has ever been allowed to wash or dry.

‘Is it still complete?’ I ask my mother, ‘this dinner set?’

Other families might boast a wireless set, an indoor lavatory or the electric; we had a complete dinner service.

‘No, not now, girl. I broke a plate on the day of your father’s funeral and then poor old Davi Blaenhir broke another as he was putting it away for me.’

‘Nothing lasts for ever.’

‘Nothing lasts forever except longing.’ I sing the old song as she brings the dinner to the table:

‘Derfydd aur a derfydd arian, derfydd melfed, derfydd sidan,

Derfydd pob dilledyn hiraeth ond er hyn, ni dderfydd hiraeth.

Nothing lasts except grief.

The start of a new year makes everyone introspective, I suppose, and I can’t help being aware of how much I’ve changed, of how bitter I’ve become. Whenever I read a newspaper these days I’m on the look-out for those paragraphs describing personal tragedies: the young couple killed on their honeymoon, the soldier killed on the very day his girlfriend accepted his proposal of marriage, such happenings seem to help me feel reconciled to my loss, whereas any picture of sweethearts reunited and looking at each other with love and longing makes my loneliness more terrible to bear. I’m ashamed to be so self-absorbed.

‘It’s a wonder to me, Rhian,’ my mother says, ‘how you can be so unselfish. There you are, spending your hard-earned money on an outfit for my wedding, when your own life is in tatters. Well, you take after your father, he was just the same. Your father could always rejoice in other people’s good fortune, even when we were scraping round for ha’pennies. I only wish I could be that sort.’

‘So do I. I’m not like that, I can tell you. Of course I’m happy about
you
, but I don’t care a jot about anyone else.’

‘No? What about that Ilona? Aren’t you feeling annoyed with Jack Jones because you think he’s letting her down? To me, he seems very sensible, thinking things through before committing himself. It’s not his baby, you told me that.’

‘People can be a bit too sensible.’

‘Really?’

‘As Christ said.’

‘Christ?’

‘When they were complaining about that poor widow who’d spent all her money on the precious ointment for his head.’

‘I know the Bible, my girl.’

‘Don’t be too sensible,’ he told them. ‘Follow your instincts a bit more. Bend with the wind. And thus ye shall enter the kingdom of Heaven.’

‘Rhian, that’s a very free interpretation of the Scriptures, it seems to me.’

It proves difficult to tell Mrs Thomas that I’m leaving her. ‘And there was I thinking of you as a daughter,’ she tells me in her timid little squeak of a voice. Anyway, I order a pram suit for Tommy, bobble hat, double-breasted coat and leggings with feet, so she forgives me and says I can call in any time for a cup of tea.

At the beginning of term, Miss Perkins, our Headmistress, breaks her leg on the slippery pavement outside school and we have a peaceful couple of weeks before she returns, more short-tempered than ever.

During a snowy period at the beginning of March, when the buses can’t get through to Brynteg, I have to stay two weeks at a boarding house in town and I’m so lonely that I cry myself to sleep every night.

The day I get back to Ilona’s, I find that she’s had a letter from Jack asking her to marry him. ‘How wonderful,’ I exclaim. ‘Oh, I
am
pleased.’

But she’s furious with him. ‘I’m all right now. I’ve got over him. I’ve got over him and bloody Ifor Meredyth too. I’m really happy, if you want to know the truth, all the bother is over with. I’m looking forward to spring-cleaning Gran’s bedroom and whitewashing the house and the shed and digging the garden and planting potatoes and onions. All right, it might seem strange to you, but I’m looking forward to it. I’m all right now. I’ve got a bit of money saved and with what you give me for your keep and what bloody Ifor Meredyth gives me for Tommy, I’m doing all right. How dare he spend six months summing me up, weighing me up. If he’d written asking whether he could come on a visit, it wouldn’t offend me so much – it wouldn’t offend me at all, it would show he missed me and wanted to see me again and maybe start something. But to send me this proposal of marriage, making it so cold and business-like. He doesn’t even say he loves me, only that he doesn’t think he’s good enough for me, that he’s hesitated so long, aware that he isn’t good enough for me. Of course he isn’t good enough for me. What man is ever good enough for a woman? Women are always tougher and braver and much nicer as well. But I was in love with him last summer and I’d have had him then, given half a chance. But how do I know it wasn’t my body leading me astray? When your body is being flooded with all these maternal feelings, how can you be sure of anything? Perhaps all I wanted was a daddy bear with me in the cave, something like that. Anyway, he’s bloody well had his chance mate, and now I can’t decide whether to send him a postcard with a very short’ scathing message or not reply at all for six months. What do you think?’

I don’t say anything. I’ve felt disappointed in Jack, good ness knows, and I don’t think he’s being honest even now. I think his long hesitation is because he’s not certain he can cope with Ilona. He’s nervous of her, not because she’s unconventional and an unmarried mother, but because she’s not the type to give him the whole-hearted approval he’s always looking for. He needs someone to boost his confidence and he realises that Ilona is too honest to give him any reassurance she doesn’t feel.

‘You’re not really interested, are you?’ she asks me after a few moments.

‘Of course I’m interested. I don’t feel able to advise you that’s all.’

‘Oh, get on with your marking. You simply don’t care about my problems.’

We sit in silence for the rest of the evening, each of us sighing from time to time. She goes to bed much earlier than usual, complaining of a headache and looking martyred.

I can’t sleep and at two o’clock I hear her moving about so I go to her room to see if I can get her anything. She’s sitting up in bed suckling Tommy and looking remarkably contented. ‘Perhaps I ought to write to him,’ she says quietly. ‘He must mean something to me or I wouldn’t get so angry, would I? I’m certainly not going to marry him, but I wouldn’t mind spending a weekend with him now and then. I don’t suppose I’m really cut out for a nun, am I? Being without all the fuss and bother has been very peaceful, but perhaps there’s plenty of time for that later on. Oh, for pity’s sake, say something, Rhian. Don’t just stand there, your feet cold as clams on that lino. Come under the quilt for a bit.’