The Line Between Us (4 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

I remembered my first ever staff Christmas party. Samuelson worked me like the devil throughout that autumn, tidying up the vegetable beds in the kitchen garden: crab grass, prickly lettuce, carpet weed, cocklebur, lamb’s quarters, ragweed (it turned out that I was a bit of a maniac when it came to weeding), though the common purslane I would have left in place, I rather liked those waxy leaves and little yellow flowers, but rules are rules. My back hurt like billy-oh from all the bending, but if I straightened up for a moment or wiped my forehead on my sleeve, Mr Samuelson was out of the tool shed before you could say Jack Robinson, roaring, “Boy!” He took every opportunity to exercise his power. I’d made up my mind that he went up to the house, after lunch at about three o’clock, to have a drink with Mrs Brown, for I could smell alcohol on his breath of an afternoon. I mentioned it to Ma and she gave me one of her looks. “Ask no questions,” she said tartly, “tell no lies.”

The work done, I belted home. I was third in line for a wash in the leftover water at the bottom of the copper, the steam still clinging to the kitchen windows, Delyth squawking as she changed into her Sunday Best as instructed by our mother, and then rebelliously changing out of it again.

“They’re no better than they ought to be, that family, and our pandering to them just makes them think that they are.”

“We won’t have any of your Bolshevik nonsense in this house, my girl, you mark my words,” said Ma, who was rummaging inside the wooden chest that stood against the wall in the kitchen alcove. She lifted out a suit of navy wool and the smell of naphthalene turned the steam toxic. Poor moths, I thought, but I didn’t say anything, because I knew the suit had belonged to my brother Glyn and maybe to Dad before him, and we no longer talked about our dead. At the sight of it, Delyth left the room and came back wearing her Sunday dress once more.

“Do the buttons for me will you, Ifor?” she said without looking at our mother.

At the last moment, Ma decided not to come. “There’s the ironing,” she said, staring at me in the navy suit, then she buried her face against my shoulder and I just stood there as she inhaled, my arms holding the air around her. I remembered opening a book from the library once and there was a pressed flower someone had left inside it and as I turned the page the petals went fluttering onto the floor as dry and colourless as paper, unlike anything you’d ever see growing in a garden. Sometimes I worried that this was happening to my memories of my brother and I used to tell them over to myself to preserve them: Glyn showing me how to make tea cigarettes and the two of us trying to smoke them up at the bus shelter; Glyn stealing cheese from the larder and me getting the blame; Glyn rubbing his hands together with the uncontainable physical glee of being alive – he sometimes did that; Glyn making an eye patch for me out of chewing gum when Delyth and I were playing pirates and Ma having to pick it out of my eyebrow with a pair of tweezers; Glyn crowing that no matter how much I tried I’d never catch up with him, he’d always be older. I touched the lapel of his suit, now handed down to me. He was wrong about that.

Delyth whistled ‘The Red Flag’ all the way to Nanagalan. She was a bit of a caution in those days, with her copy of
Das Kapital
, and those views of hers. I was inclined to think it was an act, a pose. People always noticed Delyth.

“Ring off, will you?” I said, as we trudged round to the servants’ entrance near the kitchens. I didn’t want them noticing her now, not when I had enough on my plate with the suit to contend with; it was two sizes too big for me and scratchy into the bargain. I thought of Ma and the snatch of a wave with which she’d sent us on our way. I wanted her to be waiting in the doorway for me whenever I chose to return, her large, chapped hands clasped across her apron. I wanted her still to be valiant; I wanted her to be as she was before the war.

“Ooh, get you –” my sister said, but she subsided into silence as we rang the bell and waited, although when Mrs Brown opened the door and led us through the corridors past the still room and the pantry, she started up a defiant little hum.

Tea was served in what had been the servants’ dining hall, back in the glory days. I couldn’t imagine having a house with whole rooms that you didn’t need to use, when our cottage was splitting at the seams with so much stuff crammed in there was hardly space for the three of us as well. There was brown linoleum on the floor and brown paint that reached as far as the porcelain tiles which lined the walls. The shutters had been thrown open the week before for the annual airing and Mrs Brown had taken a desultory swipe at a few cobwebs with her feather duster. We had decked the hall after a fashion with holly from the gardens and on the long pine table in the centre of the room were arrangements of fir cones tied with red ribbon. My sister and I sat ourselves on one of the benches running up either side, taking the places of members of staff long gone, and for a moment I tried to picture our Dad having his dinner here, subdued mealtimes at which people spoke only when they were spoken to.

Half the village was gathered – most of us had connections with the big house through trade, or services provided, or as tenants. You and your mother served us tea as was the custom and to begin with you didn’t even look me in the eye; you were nodding at my sister Delyth with the kind of smile that seemed to have been pencilled in place a little carelessly before you came down from your room. Your hands were trembling though, ever so slightly – perhaps it was the weight of the teapot – and some of the tea went in the saucer and both of us noticed and neither of us said a thing.

We ate cheese and pickle sandwiches with the crusts cut off – I couldn’t imagine what Ma would say about such waste – followed by mince pies in fluted pastry and fruit cake covered in marzipan with drifts of sugar icing and people slipped what they couldn’t finish into their jacket pockets, as their due. When it was time for us to go, we lined up by the door so that the mistress could shake our hands and gave us each our Christmas box. I got five bob, but that’s not what I remembered most.

You were standing by your mother and you offered me your hand automatically and then you must have realised it was me, because you said “Oh!” before you could stop yourself, colouring slightly as you looked further down the line. Then you darted a glance in my directions and said, “Happy Christmas, Ifor.”

I held out my hand for you to shake just as you withdrew yours. You fiddled with one of your earrings, tightening the clasp, then just as I shoved my own hand in my pocket you held out yours again, then straight away you tucked it behind your back. You stood on tiptoe for a moment, awkwardly, and the stain of your blush spread down your neck.

“Happy Christmas, Miss.”

You turned your attention to one of the tenant farmers lining up behind me, but as your mother said my name and called me forward you shot me a glance I wasn’t meant to see, and the dark flare of your pupils softened before you looked away.

CHAPTER NINE

I remembered how you used to pass me in the back of the motor car when I was on my way to work or going home, Brown in his uniform, his face set in tense lines as he negotiated the bends in the driveway that led up out of the valley. He was a nervous driver. When he first came to Nanagalan the family still had a brougham, a gig and several horses. Now only the Master’s hunter was left. Most evenings I used to see Brown standing by the loose box, the old gelding’s head resting on his shoulder and he was smoothing and smoothing the horse’s neck, smoothing and smoothing, until I couldn’t tell if it was an act of affection or obliteration, and what it was that he would want to wipe away. “You’ve got to stay ahead of the game,” he used to say to me, with the air of someone struggling to keep up. “You’re lost if you don’t.” The Daimler would make unsteady progress up the drive with you sitting in the back and I’d stand on the verge to let you pass and you’d be gazing straight ahead, but once you stared in my direction and I knew it was to make sure I had seen you; then the car seemed to move backwards a fraction before it moved forwards as Brown changed gear, and you made a show of surveying the valley towards Long Leap and I was left at the side of the road wondering if you were going on an errand to the village, or to the shops in Monmouth, or just out for a spin. I’d construct itineraries for you as I dug over the potatoes in the kitchen garden or cut the grass on Dancing Green. I’d imagine chance encounters.

That spring, as a few rays of convalescent sunshine streaked into the valley making the buds sticky and drawing the greenness up from the ground, I was working in the Herbar that my Dad designed, years before the war, mulching the borders and dividing the perennials. The birds, back from their travels, were deep in conversation all around me and I’d made a good start on the astilbe and was moving on to the phlox when I stood up for a stretch. You must have been out for an early walk, for I could see you making your way back through the wildflower meadow. You were heavy-limbed, listless rather than tired, and I watched you pulling a frond of tall grass from its sheath then swiping the air with it, the thin blade such a weight in your hand, and in that instant I had a glimpse of what a burden privilege might be: the obligation to fill one’s time, but the lack of necessity to do anything at all. I thought of Ma, scarlet-faced over the copper at home doing the laundry for the big house and anyone in the village who could afford to pay, picking her way through other people’s dirty washing, and I knew she wouldn’t see it like that. I began working my fingers into the clump of Phlox Paniculata, unthreading the roots, trying not to tear them as Samuelson had shown me, and a handful of earth went crumbling onto my boot. When I looked again, you were wandering through the nut tunnel, trailing the length of grass behind you, the canopy of branches forming a knotty frontier between us. You opened the wrought-iron gate in the waist-high wall and rather than follow the brick path to the front door, you hesitated. The sweep of heat that went through me! I crouched down and shoved the phlox into the ground, dug another hole with my trowel and shoved more in and I’d got the peonies in the row behind within my sights, puce as a peony myself, when you looked up briefly at the high windows, then strolled towards me.

You laid the frond of grass across your palm, tracing of the seed heads with your finger. “What are you doing?” you asked me.

You were like a flower growing in my garden, slender-stemmed in your loose coat, your hat tilted sideways and I was so taken over, so awash, that I had no idea where to start with my answer.

“Are you doing anything?” You sounded quizzical.

“Just some gardening. Miss. Ella.”

“Yes …” you said dryly.

High above us, a blackbird loosed a few notes of song and I glanced up and around until I located him on the ridge of the house roof. You followed my gaze and we listened for a moment to the full-throated, complicated melody, silent ourselves.

I wondered if I was required to account for myself. “The flowers in the herbaceous border have to be divided at the start of the season, so that’s what I’m doing.” Then with a burst of confidence I added: “Next I’m going to put some compost on.”

You nodded. You let the frond of grass fall to the ground and I wondered whether I should pick it up for you, but you were feeling in your pockets. You produced a silver cigarette case and a lighter that matched. They were monogrammed and to me that was a terrible sight: your initials, E.W. Privilege writ large.

“Do you smoke?”

I had done, on and off and not just tea cigarettes either. Sometimes I had one with half a pint on pay day. Nothing regular, though.

You took my silence for a no. “You should do.” You slid a cigarette from your case and tapped it on the lid, then you put it between your lips. You waited. By the time I had twigged that you expected me to take the lighter and light it for you, you had done the job yourself. “It’s supposed to be awfully good for you,” you said as you breathed in. “Some scientists in Paris have proved that it has antibacterial properties.” I watched the smoke cloud from your mouth. “So it protects you against infections.” You smoked with the speed of the inexperienced: in, out, in, out. I thought of Samuelson with his drawling drag that seemed to go on forever, as he drained the nicotine right out of his fag.

“Do you like it here?”

I nodded, tongue tied, and you gave me a smile so slight you can have had no idea of the transfiguring effect it had. I felt like running through the vines towards the Drowning Pool with my arms outstretched like aeroplane wings.

“Do you?” I asked politely, but you were careful not to answer. You were studying the nails of the hand that held your cigarette.

“Would you do something for me?”

I hoped my jaw didn’t drop at that, although it might have done. “Yes,” I said, thinking that I would do anything at all.

“Next time you’re in the village, would you mind popping into Lewis’s to get me a packet of Benson and Hedges? You can put it on account. Get a packet for yourself as well, if you like.”

Gardener’s lad. Errand boy. “Of course,” I said. I stared at the serried ranks of the perennials, from the tiny bloodroot at the edges of the border to the lanky irises leaning against the wall, thinking that there was a hierarchy even in the planting. When I looked up again, you were walking back towards the house.