The Line Between Us (11 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I remembered the day that Jenny and I were married and how I allowed myself to believe that she would have the healing of me: she’d be my refuge, my forgetting. It was a piercing April morning, cold and bright, with cherry blossom splashed against a clear sky. The clarity of the light threw everything – the chapel, our two families, Jenny in her homespun dress – into sharp relief, and I saw it all with horrible lucidity.

Your finishing took three whole years, Ella. Two years at the school itself, and then all the European travel with your mother after that. You came back once, flitting home to see your father who was still living out his days in the asylum, fighting a war of attrition between the present and the past more remorseless than any conflict in the trenches. You came to back Nanagalan, you emptied your suitcases and packed them for the coming season, saw friends, wrote letters – I know because Brown passed them on to me to post; once, you turned to wave at me as I was working in the Herbar – he was driving you into Monmouth in the motor and your head craned round as the car lurched past and you lifted your hand, then half retracted it, converting the gesture into an adjustment of your hair. You were wearing grey gloves that buttoned at the wrist and your face was lost in the reflections on the window. You were becoming a blur to me in any case: if I tried to picture you I couldn’t, but if I didn’t try, occasionally I saw you at the periphery of my vision as if you were on your way somewhere: the flick of your skirt, the sense of onward motion, sometimes it was not much more than the intuition of colour in the air.

Being without you was familiar territory; I thought I’d got the measure of it long ago. Yet I missed being able to tell you things: when a tidal wave filled the moat at the Tower of London, I wanted you to know; I wanted to hear what you thought about Amy Johnson flying all the way to Australia; when
The Times
started publishing a crossword, I wanted to do it with you instead of with Brown; I was sick of hearing Ted’s views when the number of jobless hit two million and the government cut unemployment benefit – I wanted to know what you thought, sitting on the deck of your cruise ship, or on your hotel balcony, or in your cocktail bar; I wanted to hear your justification; I wanted you to see the hunger marchers; I wanted to hear how you would vote now that women had been granted suffrage; I wanted to give you a copy of the
Oxford English Dictionary
which took forty-nine years to complete, full of all the words and words and words I’d never say to you; I wanted not to be bitter; I wanted you, Ella, it was how I lived my life.

I met her at the Booklovers’ Library run by Boots the Chemists; she was an assistant there and she noticed I was reading Walter Scott. She asked if I had come across Hugh Walpole and when I said no, she suggested that I try
Farthing Hall
. She went and found it for me.

“I think you’ll like it,” she said, stamping the date in the front of it then handing it to me, and I was struck by the fact that she had formed an opinion about my tastes. I glanced at her with a tic of curiosity, but she was already serving someone else. After that, she put me on to Galsworthy and I raced to the library late in the afternoon, straight from work, to return the book before it was overdue. I borrowed the second volume of
The Forsyte Saga
and was the last to leave and as she was locking up she asked me if I ever read any verse. “Try Masefield,” she said and the thought of talking to someone who liked poetry made me set aside the weight that I was carrying for a moment and I felt a small sweep of relief pass through me: the claustral tightness in my chest – the clench of missing you – felt looser.

I berated myself afterwards. You were my every point of reference, my distant star. I felt that I deserved every day of your absence. I didn’t return to the library for several weeks and I had to pay a thrupenny fine.

When I did go back, she had put the collected works of Rupert Brooke on the reserve shelf for me, “But perhaps you’re fed up with anything to do with the war?”

I shook my head and then I nodded and the smile she gave me was a kind of balm and I was sore and susceptible.

“Did you …? Did you lose a loved one?”

“We lost my father and my elder brother.”

“Then Brooke is the best medicine,” she said.

I looked at her for the first time, properly: her knot of dark hair; the way her short-sightedness tightened the muscles around her eyes, making her seem interested and intent; the deprecating tilt of her head. There was a reserve about her, a diffidence which summoned something inside me. “Did you?”

She scrutinised the spine of the book, running her thumb along it as though testing the quality of the binding. “My cousin.”

A queue was forming behind me. “Would you like to have a cup of tea?” I said, thinking the law of cure dictates that pain heals pain, “After work, perhaps? One day this week? Or not?”

She appeared to be uncertain, as though she wanted to, but wasn’t sure. She opened the book and stamped it. “Read the one about the busy heart,” she said, and gave a shy nod. “Yes please,” she added, “I think I would.”

We went to the Kardomah Café and talked about the books we liked and whether Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë was the better writer, although she thought that George Eliot trounced them both and I’ve always been a Hardy man. I found talking to her easy. There was no freight, no undertow; just chat. The coffee machine blared in the background and the windows steamed up and she made patterns in the sugar with her teaspoon and the ordinariness of it was sweet and unexpected.

We went for a walk on Sunday across the hills surrounding Nanagalan, skirting the edge of the estate.

“Wet strong plough lands, scarred for certain grain,” she observed, her hands on her hips as we paused to catch our breath, gazing down at the corrugations of the field below. It was from the poem that she recommended. “The Busy Heart?” I said, so she would know that I had read it. The two of us stood there, the path of Offa’s Dyke discernible, fingertips of wind combing the meadows as cloud shadows played different greens against each other. It was a moment of shared solitude, new to me; I only knew the kind of loneliness you couldn’t share.

“Have you ever had a girlfriend?” she asked, putting up a hand to shade her eyes, still looking at the view.

In love with you for as long as I could remember, I didn’t know how to answer. “Not really,” I said in the end, recoiling inside, my words a painful truth and the better part of a lie, “I’ve – no.” Then, in a scrupulous attempt at honesty, I added, “I’ve never kissed anybody.”

“I walked out with someone for a while,” she said and her hand dropped to her side, and I wondered what other hand had held it and, briefly, how it would feel to take it, to slip her fingers between mine. “His father was laid off after the crash and the family moved away to find more work.”

“Then we’re both of us walking wounded,” I said, turning to look at the route ahead, where the path snaked off into an alley of brambles and alder.

“Well, you’re not,” she pointed out. “And I’m not, really. It was a long time ago.”

I smiled: a smile of several syllables – defensive, awkward, solicitous, and I remembered another line from that poem. “I have need to busy my heart with quietude,” I said haltingly and it was she who slipped her hand into mine and we walked on like that, the two of us, our grip hesitant and unpractised.

She courted me with books and I read to be obliterated, plunging myself into any narrative other than my own which so confounded me. When I wasn’t reading, I let the stories take root inside my head, so when I was out in the gardens, picking apples in the orchard, cleaning the press, digging over, pricking out, I was living other people’s lives and it helped me, in some small measure, not to think of you. But in the cold sting of a winter’s morning leaning on my spade, or in the evaporating heat of a summer’s afternoon when I stopped to wipe my face, you seemed so close to me I could have reached out and caught you by the sleeve to stop you leaving once again.

Ma found out from Mrs Parry, who spotted us holding hands together in Monmouth on Jenny’s half day.

“What’s this I hear?” she said. “About to you and a certain young lady?”

It was a Sunday morning and we were walking along Front Street on our way to chapel. I blushed to the roots of my hair. “We’re just,” I began, “I mean, we’re only–”

I had never seen my old Ma being arch before. “Will you be bringing her home to meet me?” she asked with a sideways glance.

“Of course, I was going to,” I stammered, and a train of events that I hadn’t begun to consider was set in motion.

I did take Jenny home to meet her: tea and bake stone cakes taken in the parlour and when I returned from walking her home, my mother darted out from the kitchen before I could make it to my room.

“Is she the one, then?” she asked. I made a study of her tremulous face, seeing all the small erosions of the life she had lived worked into it, the weathering of the steam from the laundry and the weathering of loss, too.

My gaze flickered. I remembered you sitting beside me on the wall of the well before you went away, all salty with the smoke from the bonfire. I remembered you telling me that you would have feelings for me if … “I – haven’t asked her.”

“You will though, won’t you?”

“Ma, what if –?” I began. What if things were different? What if you were here? What if I, if I …?

“Well?”

Love, in the conditional tense.

“She’ll be the making of you, Ifor. All that learning – you like that kind of thing, don’t you? And she’s a local girl, what’s more.”

I knew the fact that Ted lived in Mynydd Maen more than twenty miles away preyed upon her; it was as good as abroad as far as she was concerned. He and Delyth were still saving to get married: the longest engagement in the history of the world and Ma was dreading the day. I glanced at her again, and the loss of Glyn’s promise hung in the air between us. She seemed to swell with the waiting, her breath held. I bowed my head.

Events took on a momentum of their own, after that: the chapel and the April morning and the cherry blossom splashed against the sky. I proposed to Jenny and in the moment that I asked, I loved her. I loved her gravity, her integrity, her simplicity; I loved the fact that she loved me without any ifs. We were married without any fuss, though anything she set her heart on I would have given her. Perhaps she knew my largesse had a taint to it. I was attentive, I was kindly, and I tried to anticipate her wants and needs. There were times when I felt her eyes upon me, her earnest and myopic gaze, and once she asked me straight, “This is what you want, isn’t it, Ifor? All of this?”

We were at Ma’s, where we would be living after the wedding. Jenny spent most of her free time there already. I looked blankly round the parlour. “This,” she said, clasping her hands and then, when I was slow to respond. “Us.”

“It’s what I need,” I said, taking care to speak the truths I could to her and she stood there, rubbing at her palm as though the texture of her own skin was of absorbing interest.

“As long as it is,” she whispered and with a horrible awareness of what it feels like to be second best I reached out and held her, burying my face in her black hair.

She and her mother made her dress, a sensible cream wool shift with a coat to match which would do for later on as well. I gathered the flowers for her bouquet myself: narcissi, white tulips, ranunculus and some tiny, early lily of the valley I found beneath a hedgerow on the edge of Dancing Green. Delyth tied them up with a piece of lace into the prettiest bunch that a girl could wish for. Mrs Brown made our wedding cake, her lips pursed knowingly, and Samuelson gave us a bottle of Nanagalan Blanc de Blanc 1930 to drink the toast at our wedding breakfast.

The night before, Brown took me out for a drink at the Fleece in Morwithy. A few lads were playing shove ha’penny at the far end of the bar and somebody’s lurcher was stretched out by the fire, keeping watch. We found a table by the window and Brown squeezed into his seat, carrying two pints of cider and some pork scratchings.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” he said without beating about the bush, setting the glass down on the mat in front of me. “If your heart’s not in it.” He took a swig of cider and smoothed the ends of his moustache with his finger and thumb, then added with feeling, “I’m saying this as a married man myself.”

I didn’t know how to answer him. He was opening the packet of pork scratchings, shaking them out for us to share, his face set with the unbreachable stoicism that the older generation had made its own. He looked over at me, his gaze probing and I suddenly understood that he knew more about my secret life than I thought I knew of his and I was mortified to think that I had contrived to keep from him knowledge of Mrs Brown and Samuelson, never mind the rest of it, when there was nothing that he hadn’t seen or guessed or suffered. I was a green lad indeed, with my heart waving about on my sleeve for all to see. I could feel myself turning a painful shade of red.

A bead of condensation trickled down my glass. At the far end of the bar somebody whacked a halfpenny right off the board and it spun in circles on the flagstones until it came to rest. There was a scrabble to retrieve it. The lurcher yawned and worked its jaw.