Resistance (38 page)

“Get out,” Mary had said again, looking him in the eye, her fingers still hooked on the latch of the door. “What d’you think you’re protecting us from, anyway? It’s you as should be worried, boy. Not us.”

Gernot had felt himself blush. He stood up but Mary didn’t move, just held the door open, looking at him as if he were a child. Through the open door he saw the top of the valley, the sweep of its curve, the bareness of its slopes over which this woman had sent Bethan away. His embarrassment turned to anger. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. He was waiting for Bethan to return, to fulfil the promise of that kiss. Until then nothing should be changing. This is what they’d agreed, this is what the captain had promised. They’d seen too much of war, known too much of its stench and pain. They were all waiting for it to be over, but now the captain had ordered them into their uniforms and told them to carry their weapons again. Why? Because they were being threatened; because everything they’d hoped for was threatened. Well, if it was, and he had to be a soldier again, he wasn’t going to stay here guarding women and children. He wanted to defend what he cared for: his chance to
be here when Bethan came back, the chance for them to sit in the bracken once more, watching the evening light compress and darken over the hills.

Gernot walked up to Mary, holding her stare, and stood before her. He could feel the fear emanating off her, the fear of him, of everything. He’d recognised it because he’d felt it too. His knuckles were white on the stock and body of his rifle. “Get out,” she’d said again, her voice smaller and cracked. Breaking her stare, Gernot looked out at the bare hills, turned back to meet Mary’s eyes once more, then walked out into the valley. He heard Mary close the door behind him, but he didn’t look back. His mind was suddenly clear. He would track down whoever shot the horse, and he would kill him. And then they could go back to living in the valley as before. They could take off their uniforms and he could go back to waiting, to watching out of his bedroom window for Bethan to appear at the thorn tree above him.

After leaving Mary, Gernot had gone straight to the paddock at the back of the house where Bethan’s pony was grazing. He’d watched her ride it up on to the hill before the winter, and again after the thaw, so he knew where she kept the saddlery in the lean-to in the yard. He’d never ridden much himself, but several times over the past few months he’d been out to check the flock with Alex, riding one of the two old cart horses kept at The Court. The captain had sent Otto to The Gaer, from where he was observing the mouth of the valley. The rest of the patrol were sweeping the woods and fields lower down. If there was anyone still there they’d be driven up onto the hills. So that is where he would go, up onto the plateaus that surrounded the valley.

Swinging his rifle across his back, he’d caught Bethan’s pony by its forelock and begun leading it down towards the yard, keeping an eye on the side door of the farmhouse in case Mary should try and stop him.

B
ethan had been walking since midmorning. At first, when Helen Roberts had called at her aunt’s house just before curfew last night, she hadn’t believed what she’d said. But Helen was adamant. Margaret Jones in Llanthony, clear as day, and her mother wanting her back, soon as possible. Once Bethan was convinced Helen was telling the truth, she hadn’t needed any more persuading. She’d left Hay-on-Wye this morning, carrying just the same bag over her shoulder with which she’d set out from the Olchon six weeks before.

Bethan recognised her pony long before she could see her properly. She’d ridden her since she was a girl and would have been able to identify her outline against the sky even if she’d been standing with a herd. It was only when she got much closer, however, that she saw Gernot, lying on his back in the distance. She went to the pony first, picked up the reins and led her over to where Gernot lay. Letting her go to graze, she went and knelt beside him.

At first, when Gernot opened his eyes and saw Bethan looking down at him, he thought he was delirious. But then he felt the touch of her fingers at the back of his neck as she lifted his head.

“Here,” she said, holding a bottle beneath his chin. “Drink this.”

Gernot opened his mouth and let her tip the bottle to his lips, which were dry and parched. He drank thirstily until she pulled the bottle away. “Thank you,” he said, his voice hoarse in his throat.

Bethan stood up and looked about her. She’d been away for less than two months but it felt like a lifetime. During her stay in Hay-on-Wye she’d witnessed another occupation to the one she’d experienced in the valley. Before she’d left for the town her mother had
made her swear on the family Bible to remain silent about the missing men. But that oath had been unnecessary. She knew now, all too well, after what she’d seen and heard in Hay, about what happened to families found to have links with the insurgency.

Her second cousin, Eve, whom Bethan had known only vaguely before the war as a childhood playmate at family gatherings, had become her guide through the realities of life under occupation. They’d shared a bed at the top of the house above her aunt’s grocery shop. Every night, before they went to sleep, Eve would tell Bethan another story about what the Nazis had done in the town, and in other towns and villages too. It was only recently, however, when she could no longer hide the swelling of her stomach from her roommate, that Eve had told Bethan her own story. Finding Bethan’s hand in the dark, she’d guided it onto her distended belly. She was, Eve told her, carrying the child of a German soldier. She had no way of knowing which one because there had been two of them. At this point Eve’s voice had wavered and broken. Bethan had stroked her hair and said it was all right, she didn’t have to tell her if she didn’t want to. But Eve said she did want to, very much, and so she’d continued.

It was early on, a few weeks before Christmas. There had been more sabotage attacks and all the men, including her father, had been rounded up in the town hall. That’s what they’d said, anyway. Eve didn’t believe them. She thought it was planned, that the commanders wanted to give their troops a Christmas present. Because she hadn’t been the only one that night.

The two soldiers were drunk. She and her mother were closing the shop, but the soldiers wouldn’t leave. Her mother understood a little German and she’d leant over the counter, straining to make out what the two of them were saying. “They say,” she’d said slowly to Eve, “what they want isn’t on the shelves. That they want … something from behind the counter.” It was only when she heard herself translate their words that her mother went suddenly pale, and that was when the dark-haired one flipped up the counter flap and led Eve out the back of the shop and up the stairs. She’d tried
struggling but he held the barrel of his rifle jabbed into her hip. The fair one had stayed behind, watching over her mother, then later, when the dark-haired one had finished, they’d swapped. It was a small building above the shop, a cheap conversion with thin walls and floors. Her mother would have been able to hear but she’d never said anything to Eve since, except, that same night when she’d come and stood at the door to her bedroom. “Don’t tell your father,” her mother had said quietly, the streetlamp outside Eve’s window casting a sodium glow across her face. “It would kill him if you did.”

Even now Eve’s mother refused to acknowledge her daughter’s swelling bump. Eve said she was planning to go away, to Hereford. She’d heard they had places there where you could have your child, then leave it. That, she said, is what she planned to do.

Everything Eve told her made Bethan disgusted with herself. She felt like a child who’d only just woken to the adult world. The curses that had softened with her visits to the thorn tree above The Court hardened again, and every time she passed a group of soldiers in the street she muttered at them under her breath, energised with real venom once more.

During her time in the town, Bethan had also become disgusted with the other women in the valley; women older than herself who should have known better. Just the other day she’d heard that David Lewis, Tom’s brother, had been confirmed killed in action during the counterattack. And there was his sister-in-law, Sarah Lewis, allowing that German captain to visit her every day, taking walks with him beside the river, even letting him play her music records while her husband was missing and his brother had died fighting the fascists. She hated the world she’d discovered outside the valley, but she still wanted her mother to leave the Olchon and come back with her to Hay. Better by far to live in the truth and know it, however bad it might be, than hide yourself away behind ignorance and habit.

Bethan put the bottle of water back in her bag, slung the bag over her shoulder, and walked away from Gernot towards where
the pony was grazing. When she reached her the pony nuzzled at her pockets, hoping for a treat of some oats or calf nuts. The reins were tied at her neck to stop them falling to the ground. Bethan undid them, then swung them over the pony’s head to lead her back to where Gernot lay among the bilberry bushes, his right leg angled awkwardly from his hip.

Gernot had closed his eyes again, the last of the evening light playing under his lids in bursts of orange fragments, just as it had across his vision that day he’d climbed the hill to find Bethan waiting for him beside the thorn tree. When he opened them again it was in time to see the pony’s legs passing his head. One of her hind hooves caught the back of the opposite foreleg with every step, punctuating the steady rhythm of her walk with the faintest of metronome ticks. He turned his head slightly and the pony’s legs swiped their shadows across his face as the tick, tick of her overreach passed by his ear, then faded away as Bethan led her back onto the track that dropped down towards the valley’s head. As she led the pony on down the slope away from Gernot, a pair of crows circled above her, cawing and tumbling in the last amber light of the day.

S
arah was sitting alone in Maggie’s kitchen with William’s shotgun loaded on the table before her. Maggie lay asleep upstairs, her pale cheeks sunken, breathing thinly through her open mouth. It seemed as if she’d aged years since last night when Sarah had watched her treat the colt’s cut in the stable. As soon as she’d seen her like this, looking small and fragile in the sidecar of the motorbike, she’d handed the note Albrecht had written back to Sebald and, closing the door of Upper Blaen behind her, told him to take them both to Maggie’s farm. Eventually Sebald had understood her, and with Sarah mounting the motorbike behind him, he’d driven them back down the rough track, Seren and Fly straining on their chains, barking behind them.

It had been much harder, once they’d settled Maggie in her bed, to persuade Sebald to leave them completely. But Sarah had pleaded with him; he couldn’t stay, not now, not after what had happened. Something in her expression, a note of desperation in her voice must have finally connected with him.
“Ja, ja,”
he’d said, nodding his head and picking up his rifle from beside the door.
“Ich verstehe.”
Sarah stood in the hallway with her back to the door and listened as the motorbike engine gunned into life then faded out of the yard and on down the lane.

Since then Sarah had been alone with just her confused thoughts for company. She’d checked on Maggie regularly, given her water when she could, but the woman she knew was no longer there. For the rest of the day she’d sat downstairs in the kitchen and waited, for what, she didn’t know.

Sarah felt she was to blame. Someone had shot the colt. Someone
from outside the valley, and because of what had happened at the show. But Maggie would not have known about the show if Sarah hadn’t brought that poster back from the priory and shown her. She hadn’t even needed to go down to the priory; they could have filled the water bottle in the streams. But she’d had to get away from Albrecht, that was why she’d gone. For her own sake, she’d had to get away from him then, and she’d had to see the chapel and the priory too. Not just see them either, but touch them, smell them. That chapel was where she’d married Tom and she’d hoped, she supposed, that the place would still hold a resonance of that day. That somehow, standing within its bare walls, looking up again at the high, simple windows, she would have been able to gather the echoes of how she’d felt then; Tom’s forearm contracting under her touch, the smell of starch on his collar, and the wind picking at her veil. But she’d found no memory and heard no echo other than her own footfalls over the worn gravestones laid in the flagstone floor. All she’d brought back with her was that poster, taken from the chapel’s notice board, which had led to this: Maggie lying upstairs, no more than a husk of herself, and her, sitting in the kitchen as the day darkened at its window, not knowing whether to be terrified or joyful at her husband’s possible return.

As Sarah lit one of Maggie’s oil lamps, she heard Maggie’s two dogs moving outside, their chains dragging on the cobblestones of the yard. They began barking, the younger bitch’s thin yelps over the older bitch’s less regular, deeper growls. She replaced the glass chimney over the wick and the flame grew inside, its illumination expanding and growing within the lamp. Standing there, motionless with the lamp in her hands, she listened hard. She could hear faint footsteps getting louder, quick footsteps, then the front gate opening and closing. Someone was coming into the yard. The dogs settled as the footsteps approached. Sarah put the lamp on the table then reached for the shotgun and went out to stand at the back of the hallway, pointing the gun at the closed front door. The hallway was dark. Whoever opened the door wouldn’t see her straightaway. She would have a second, maybe more, to decide.

At first, when Albrecht stepped into the hall, Sarah didn’t recognise him. She’d grown used to seeing him almost every day, but not like this. For the past few months he’d been wearing clothes from The Court like the rest of the patrol. Now, however, he stood before her wearing the same full uniform as he’d worn that night when she’d first mistaken his footsteps for the tread of her husband. The bulky leather holster of his pistol hung at his hip and his tunic was undone, as were the upper buttons of his shirt beneath. His hands were stained with earth and soil.