The Line Between Us (23 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I remembered walking all the way up to Long Leap, the fusillade of my heartbeat making me dizzy. If there was sanction for Jenny and Emlyn, then why not for Ella and Ifor? I was wanton with the thought of you and me. I was reckless with plurals. Us. We. Our. I could hear the keening sound of blood pounding in my ears. Oh my Ella, my Ella. Part of me wanted to go hammering over to the house, bursting with this extenuating news which could change everything, which offered absolution. Things would have been so different, if only I had.

The next time I saw you was at our weekly meeting. I’d made up my mind that I would explain everything and I had been awake for half the night, lying in bed beside Jenny, planning what I would say. Over and over again I pictured you hearing what I had to tell you, that we had licence of a kind: your hand fluttering to your neck, your pupils dilating before your eyes slurred shut as I kissed you. For all my weight of years, in some ways I was a green lad still.

You were working away at your desk with the thin northern light at your back. “Please sit,” you said, although normally I took my place without you asking.

I sat in my usual chair, suddenly wary. A pulse ticked at the base of my throat and my breath felt tight in my chest.

“I’ve had a letter from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries,” you said without preamble. I should have felt a prickle of alarm at this, but I was studying your expression intently, trying to work out if the edge I sensed in you was anger or anxiety. There seemed to be a polite brutality to the way that you were speaking. “They’re sending me six girls from the Land Army.” You picked up the letter opener from your desk and turned the slim sheath of it over in your fingers and your nails were as translucent as the mother of pearl. “As part of the preparations for the war …”

“Well, that’s good news,” I said uncertainly, “Isn’t it? It means we’ll be able to expand …”

“It’s so the men can start training, for when the time comes.” You appeared to scrutinise me and the blue of your dragonfly eyes was cooler than I was used to. “For when the war comes.”

“Of course,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“It means,” you said, switching your gaze to the still life painting on the wall behind my head – the dead birds, the plucked fruit, the clay pipe, “It means there will no longer be … a position … for you at Nanagalan.”

It seemed as if I was falling from a great height and I kept falling and the ground never came any closer. From a distance I could see you run your finger round a string of pearls you were wearing, as if they were constricting you, as if, for a moment, you couldn’t breathe.

“You can keep the cottage, of course,” you said, swallowing, “for the same rent. But it means that you’ll be free to enlist.”

“What do you mean – enlist? What are you talking about?”

“We must all do our duty,” you said and the words on your lips were a punishment and I shook my head in disbelief at the reproof, your lips that I had pictured kissing. “The Land Girls will be arriving at the end of the week.”

“But I’m an agricultural worker,” I began and as I spoke I thought of my old Ma and the promise that I’d made her and whether the breaking of that promise would be the end of her. Then I thought of Jenny, stranded in our marriage with someone else’s baby. “I could claim an exemption.”

You placed the letter opener on the blotter and drew a pile of correspondence towards you. “I can’t imagine you’d do that,” you said, as if that settled the matter.

“No.” I felt as if I’d been struck from behind by a blow that I couldn’t have anticipated. “Don’t think I don’t know about duty,” I added as an afterthought. I levered myself up out of the chair. I felt dazed and I blinked to try and focus my eyes in the lamenting, northern light. Then, wakening too late to the urgency of the situation, I asked, “Has something happened …?”

You took a letter from the top of the pile and started reading. “I’m expecting a telephone call in a moment,” you said without looking up. The paper in your hand was shaking.

I had often wondered how men said their goodbyes and took their leave of everything they loved, and now I had the answer. They say very little and they go as quickly as they can and like my Dad, they don’t turn to look back.

“You’re the one with all the news, in any case,” you said as I reached the door. There was a serration in your voice, the drawing of a sharp, uneven blade. “I heard from the vicar that Mrs Ifor is expecting a baby. My felicitations to you both.”

I stopped in my tracks. I would have answered you. I would have put this terrible misapprehension to rights, although I was still so stunned I could hardly form the words. I was on the point of turning round to explain everything: about Emlyn, about Jenny, when the telephone started to ring.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

I remembered being sent for military training to a depot near Newport. At the age of thirty-two I was considered too old for frontline action, though they put me through eight weeks of PT and digging weapons pits, for which, it was observed, I had a natural talent: all those years and years of gardening not entirely wasted, though I would have given anything to have been planting out a new border at the edge of Dancing Green – I’d had a mind to create a camellia hedge for you between the garden and the drive, something I would never have the chance to do, not now. When we weren’t digging and doing star jumps, press-ups and square bashing, we were at lectures. I went to bed each night with my mind full of maps and compass bearings and drill movements and military law and the theory of small arms fire, but my heart was full of you and the possibilities we had squandered; it was full of my old Ma too, and even Jenny’s baby, whom I might not live to see. My past in echoes, which like the lost songs of Nanagalan I could almost hear, if the wind was blowing a certain way and there was time to stop and listen.

We were given twenty-four hours’ leave before we sailed to France. I sat through the final lecture about petrol and carburettors, thinking that Brown in his oily overalls would have made short work of the subject, but our chap made a right meal out of it: on and on and on he went, with no sense that we were soldiers who had homes to go to. Then it was a long queue to see the MO for a shot of tetanus and a shot of typhoid, before we were given our passes.

I went to visit Delyth and Baby Gwynne first, because they were closest, Gwynne stomping around the confined flat barking orders to her dolls like some tiny sergeant major. She eyed me speculatively, through Ted’s pale lashes, weighing me up as suitable material to join her alphabet class. “Sit in the corner over by there and I’ll be with you shortly,” she said, reserving judgment.

Delyth had volunteered to join the WAAF and was learning to type, so we were all of us doing our bit. “It’s good news about Jenny, you must be –”

I was still watching my niece, waiting to see if I passed muster. “Yes,” I said, keeping my voice level, “I’m very pleased. We both are.”

“Bad timing, though, what with the war and things …”

“You could say that.”

My sister had cooked a Patriotic Pudding in honour of my departure, a grey entity made from grated potato and oatmeal with a tiny speck of jam and we pushed it around our plates for a few minutes.

“I’m sorry, it isn’t very nice,” she said with a grimace.

“It’s … tasty. I’m just not very hungry. Army rations. They’ve been feeding us up, getting us ready for the fight.”

“Don’t you anything foolish, will you, Ifor?” she blurted out. “Don’t get it into your head that you have to be a hero. We can’t afford …”

“No.” Our family’s brief roll call of names remained unvoiced between us. “I know.” I finished my tea and set the cup back in the saucer. “Best be getting along then. There’s Ma to see, and …”

“Ifor –?” There was a detaining note in Delyth’s voice. “Before you go, I wanted to ask, you see –” She wasn’t looking at me. She was making a ferocious study of the little Lloyd loom table she’d set the tea things on, working at the weave of the beech stems with the pad of her thumb. “There’s someone on the RAF base, a mechanic, wants to take me to the pictures.” Her movement stilled, her eyes straying to her daughter who was pressing palm prints of Patriotic Pudding onto the window panes, making overlapping, sticky patterns. “Would it be very wrong?”

“Nothing wrong in going to the cinema,” I answered, stealing a look at my sister’s upturned, earnest face.

“Because of Ted?” she persevered. She bit her lip. “I don’t want to be disloyal … to forget him …”

“Then don’t forget him,” I said, struck by the simplicity of other people’s problems. Mindful of the time, I stood up and my sister rose to her feet as well, “But take your happiness where you find it, because it can be very hard to find.”

She stood beside me, nodding, twisting her fingers round each other, “And it would be much better for little Gwynne, in the long run, to have some kind of father figure – wouldn’t it?”

“Delyth!” I said, landing a soft blow on her upper arm. “He’s only asked you to the pictures – don’t you be getting married yet.”

I don’t think I’d ever seen my sister blush so deep.

I sat on the bus to Morwithy, watching the landscape lose its blackened, industrial angularity and soften into curving green. I saw the first snowdrops of wartime, unrationed, along the banks next to the road. When I climbed off the bus beside the covered market I walked back to the edge of the village to pick some for Ma, a whole fistful as a peace offering.

It was late afternoon and the cottage was dark as widows’ weeds, no light shining in the window, no fire burning in the grate. I walked up the path to the front door, my footsteps slowing, my hand reluctant on the latch.

“Ma?” I stuck my head into the parlour, then looked in the back room and the kitchen. “Ma? It’s me!” I climbed the stairs, listening to the familiar creak and ease of each tread. I remembered the sound – the comfort – of my mother’s footsteps as she came up to kiss me goodnight, the distracted rustle of her apron, the carbolic scent her movements revealed, the loose silk weave of her skin against my cheek, the roughness of her hands as she tucked the sheet beneath my chin.

“Ma?” I tapped on her bedroom door before I went in, glancing at the flowers I had picked; they seemed poor recompense. “It’s me.”

She was lying on her side in bed, her arms and legs bent as if she were in the act of walking away from me. There was a momentum about her even as she faced the wall, so that I wasn’t sure which of us was doing the leaving. Her eyes were shut and her breathing shallow. I touched her shoulder and she stretched her head back then opened her eyes and blinked as if she were coming up for air.

“I’ve brought you these,” I said. “It’s me.”

“Ifor?” she exclaimed, turning, attempting to lever herself up on her elbow.

“I’ve brought you these,” I held the snowdrops out for her to see. “Are you not well?” She was struggling to sit upright and I placed the flowers on the table beside her bed, so I could plump the pillows for her. “There,” I said.

Ma considered the breathless little blooms I’d brought and then glanced in my direction, as though there was a connection between the flowers and me that troubled her. She searched my face. “Is it you?” she asked, peering at my uniform, and for a moment I wondered which one of us she meant – my father, my brother, or me. Her hands were resting on the bedclothes and she stared at them as though she’d suddenly remembered they were there. She fumbled with the buttons at the neck of her nightdress, touched her dishevelled hair, but the effort seemed to exhaust her and she subsided into the pillows. “There’s tea in the kitchen,” she said, her eyes closed. “You’ll have to light the stove, though.”

The house was freezing, the flare of condensation turning to frost on the windows. It wasn’t like the iron grip of winter out of doors, the cold had a domestic delicacy: the ice inside was thinner. I lit the stove downstairs to make some tea, and later I carried up a shovelful of hot coals to warm the grate in her bedroom.

“Are you not feeling well?” I said again. Her sunken features belonged to somebody I barely knew, some old lady in a photograph, an ancestor from long ago, not my Ma. Her cheeks weren’t ruddy with the steam from the washing, the hoar fronds of her hair no longer curled in ways she couldn’t predict or curb.

“I’m tired,” she said. “That’s all.” The weight of the cup was too much for her to hold and it slipped in her grip, splashing some tea onto the bedspread. “We’ll never get that out,” she wailed in alarm. “It’ll never come out.” I held the cup to her mouth for her and she took a tiny sip, but wouldn’t drink any more.

“Are you eating properly?” I asked. I had seen a shrivelled apple in the bowl downstairs and the heel of some cheese in the larder. She chose not to answer me, closing her eyes, breaking off negotiations. “Delyth comes to see you, doesn’t she? With little Gwynne?” She didn’t answer that either, crumpling into something smaller in the bed. “And Jenny …?” I mentioned my wife’s name uncertainly.

She reached out her hand at that, groping for mine. “I’m glad about the baby,” she whispered. “You took your time.”

“We’ll call it Glyn if it’s a boy,” I said, “And Angharad for you, if it’s a girl.” I smoothed her swollen knuckles with my finger, tracing the long hawser of each tendon, the blue corrugation of her veins, then I pressed her hand to my mouth to guard my secrets. “I couldn’t keep my promise,” I said, after a moment. “About enlisting. I couldn’t be a man and keep my promise.”

Our hands still locked, she let them fall one way, then the other, shrugging off all the things that might have mattered once.

“I will come back, though. That’s a promise, Ma. I’ll get home, whatever it takes.”

I stayed beside her until she was fast asleep, the sound of her breathing as familiar as my own, my heartbeat a memory of hers, then I banked up the fire in her grate and loaded the stove downstairs with coal and drew the curtains to keep the night at bay. I found a glass and put some water in it for the wilting snowdrops, which I placed beside her bed. I stood looking down at her, with only the flickering embers to light the room: the mother who had loved me so and not loved me enough, then I stooped and kissed her forehead one last time.

Parry the Paint had done a good job with the blackout, for the village was in darkness and I blundered home to Nanagalan by the weak light of indifferent winter stars. I knew the valley though, and had the glimmer of the house to guide me. I could see the shutters were up in all the windows, which meant that you must be away somewhere. My boots sounded loud on the drive as I passed the Herbar’s waist-high wall. Scotland, maybe; though the truth of the matter was that I had no idea where you might be and my heart tightened in my chest at the thought. The old clock chimed the quarter and as I rounded the corner and walked beneath the arch, I could just make out my ancient Beeston Humber propped up in the corner of the courtyard. For a moment I thought of cycling back up the valley, straining forward with the night in my face, through Morwithy and onwards, keeping going, keeping going.

Jenny was expecting me, but I knocked on the cottage door, all the same, a guest in my own home, a visitor to my old life.

“Good gracious,” I said when she answered, though I had schooled myself for the sight of her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t – it’s just that you’re …”

She dipped her head. “Only a few weeks to go now.”

“Yes.” I said. “I didn’t mean –”

“Come in,” she said.

There seemed to be a convention, only just established, that we should have no physical contact, so navigating my way past her swollen size and into the kitchen was an awkward manoeuvre executed with diffident politeness. Both of us were relieved to reach the table. She’d made a stew from some root vegetables and I wondered, briefly, if they were ones that I had planted months ago.

Jenny ate mounds of it. “Got to keep my strength up,” she explained. “And besides, you can’t waste anything, these days.”

I slid the food around my plate. There was so much that could have been said, but we continued in silence, glancing at each other from time to time, then glancing away, and the weird impropriety of us dining together seemed to be hard to overcome.

After she’d told me about the baby, one afternoon when there was a break from training I made my way to the Book Lovers’ library. I hadn’t been for years – Jenny always brought home any books I wanted – and I removed my hat with an instinctive respect for all the learning and stood in the entrance hall staring at the notice board. Having come this far, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go any further. There was a sign saying, “Drimpton Potato Day, 7th February”, the minutes of the most recent WI meeting and an advertisement for something called Music and Movement with Angela. A woman came through the swing doors carrying a basket and I shrugged my jacket around my ears and peered more closely at the patchwork of announcements. There was an open letter about obtaining quotations for the repair of the library notice board, which was said to be exhibiting the familiar symptoms of condensation, a stained pin board and a sticking lock, although it looked alright to me. I felt full of the mercy of the world’s small preoccupations.

Eventually I did go in, the grind of the turnstile as I passed through disrupting the library’s particular peacefulness – the quietness of endeavour, the receptive hush of industry. I glanced around me, searching out my wife. Neon lights hung on long chains from the ceiling, shining the beam of knowledge into every dark recess. Jenny was sitting at the central desk, talking on the telephone in an undertone, an expression of bored impatience on her face. “Perhaps I could get back to you … yes … yes … by Wednesday … yes.”

I’d imagined skulking in the corner of a stack, getting my bearings, scenting my rival while I was still upwind of him, but when it came to it I walked straight across the room in open view. The back office was partitioned from the main library, its window made from reinforced glass whose frail wire intersections chequered my first sight of Emlyn.

He wasn’t what I expected, not some dark-browed, rumpled sybarite in glasses, the intellectuality palpably rolling from him. He was a thin-haired clerk in a suit as threadbare as my own, typing up a reference card on an old machine. From time to time the type bars clashed together and he squinted upwards and released them. I could see ink on the ends of his fingers.