The Line Between Us (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I remembered the walk back to Morwithy after that, a terrible incantation of regret going round and round in my head: what have I done, what have I done, what have I done? Ma was pegging out some sheets in the yard when I got home, a gathering breeze twining them round her in a damp cotton embrace.

“Ifor?” she called, but I wasn’t about to do her bidding either. The shame of what I had done made me feel too complicated for my own skin.

“Yes, Ma,” I stood at the back door, slumping against the jamb.

“Watch out, or the wind will change and you’ll be stuck with that face forever.”

I didn’t answer. I chewed at some skin inside my mouth. She busied herself pegging out a row of pillowcases with lace around the edge of them.

“You’re home early,” she said, her voice a mite too casual.

I stared with hostility at that lace. “Yes.” I had a ludicrous picture of myself setting off for work tomorrow, with no work to go to, because I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. Could I pretend the day after? And the day after that? And what would I do when pay day came? “Samuelson was off with the strikers. There wasn’t much for me to do.”

“He’s a fool, that man,” Ma said curtly.

“Where’s Delyth?” I asked, thinking that Samuelson wasn’t half the idiot that I had been.

“It would appear that she’s a fool as well,” she swiped the washing basket and the peg bag off the ground. “She went off with a placard she had made. I didn’t ask.” My mother sighed and the heaviness of the sound singed my conscience till I felt burned up round the edges with it, sick at what I’d done.

“Oh Ma, I’m so –”

“You can lose your reputation in this village overnight and then it’s a life’s work to get it back again.” The basket was made of sea grass which was unravelling at one edge. She started worrying away at it with her thumbnail, splitting the loose stalk. “People are very swift to judge round here. They might be your neighbours, but …” She took a breath, then buttoned it up somewhere inside her. “I don’t know what your father would say. He’d be very –”

“Ma, I’ve –”

“ – disappointed.”

The silence was broken by the clicking sound of the latch and Delyth breezed her way through the yard and into the kitchen. “I’m starving,” she ranged around from cupboard to cupboard. “I’ve had the most thrilling time – there were about twenty of us.”

“Thank you, Delyth,” Ma crisply closed the cupboard doors. “Your tea will be at half past five, the usual time, and not a minute sooner.”

“Ifor?” My sister deigned to notice me. “Your boss was out with us,” she said with emphasis. “For a short while, anyway. He’s got principles, at least. Oh,” she started, recalling something. “Are these yours? I found them on the doorstep. You must have dropped them.”

She handed me my secateurs.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I remembered going to work the next day in trepidation. Samuelson was looking green around the gills and I waited for him to ask me why on earth I had bothered turning up, but he made himself comfortable on a pile of sacks in the fermentation shed and waved me away as if I were the chief cause of his evident headache. His rough rawness rose from him like civet. “What are you staring at?” he asked, opening one bloodshot eye. “Finish off the tying in, boy.”

I didn’t need telling twice.

I made my way to the vineyard, the late spring singing like a hymn around me. At the top of the slope the knuckled walls of the old part of the house gleamed white as bones in the sunlight. Brown once told me that the nuns made wine here back in the fourteenth century. They supplied the bishops of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester. He said that Nanagalan meant women, singing, in Old English and if you were a lad green in the green world like I was, when the wind stirred the leaves on the vines and whispered through the arches of the beech trees soaring round the Drowning Pool, you could almost believe it was ancient voices you could hear, raised in plainsong.

I pulled my secateurs out of my pocket and weighed the meaning of their return in my hand. I was full of all the things that it might signify. I set to work at double quick time to make up for what I had not completed the day before, steaming my way along the rows all morning. Perhaps it was the heat unfurling round me, or the smallness of my lunch, but after a while I began to imagine that I could hear music. I stopped to listen. It wasn’t a ghostly Gregorian chant, but fragments of something fraught and feverish. I snipped at a side shoot, then another, but all the while these ragged phrases tugged at me, my head full of the jangle of them until I couldn’t help myself. I climbed the hillside then skirted round Esther’s Garden to the front of the house. The music was coming from one of the downstairs rooms and I stood there, not quite comprehending the jittery, jaunty heart break of it. The record slowed, slurring the notes until someone, I knew it must be you, wound the gramophone again. I inched closer, at an oblique angle to the window, hovering, until I saw you.

You were dancing the Charleston on your own, your eyes closed, your arms jerking, your feet snapping, caught endlessly in the private compulsion of the beat. The sight was somehow pitiful to see. On and on you danced, with your head thrown back, imprisoned by the music, until I thought you might do yourself an injury. The record slowed and you unwound yourself for long enough to crank it up again, then off you went with your solitary dancing and I stood watching you, a lonely dervish, whirling round and round and round. When the record slowed again you kept on spinning, a little out of kilter, your orbit suddenly uncertain. You opened your eyes and stretched out your arms to steady yourself. And then you saw me.

I don’t know which of us was the most mortified. You were giddy still, your chest working, your pink face gone pale. You took a few skittering steps and on a reflex I held out my hand to support you, though I was outdoors and beyond your reach. I let my arm fall to my side. You moved closer to the window, casting your net, drawing me in. I was caught in the slow tide of the look you gave me, walking forward until I was so close I could see the cirrus featherings of your breath upon the glass.

You ran a single finger down the pane, tracing the outline of my neck and then my collarbone with one stroke, all the while considering me. I raised my hand and put it to the window to capture yours and you traced that too, the tip of your finger searching and intent. Through the glass you pressed your palm to mine and the two of us stood, like that. In a distant room the telephone began to ring. You took your hand away, curling it closed and holding it to your lip, hesitating, before you turned, taking your bearings, then headed back to your own world, and the brief sketch of me you’d started was erased.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I remembered the first ever cricket match I played in, on an irretrievably golden afternoon in the summer of that year. Brown told me that before the war there were enough staff at Nanagalan for the house to form an eleven of its own, but with the names of so many fine batsmen carved in stone on the village memorial, it was all we could do to muster a single team from the whole of Morwithy. That year we played Llancloudy, the pitch laid out on Dancing Green, Samuelson’s contribution to roll it assiduously day after day. He was touchy about the lawns, territorial; his hypothesis that if you came up trumps with the things that people noticed, the rest could go hang. He never played in any of the matches, he lurked at the back of the marquee, a pint of cider in his hand, a cigarette in his mouth and another tucked behind his ear for later. There was something fugitive about him.

Brown broached the subject of the match when I went to pick up the newspaper from him on my way home from work. The coach house and the stable block, which formed one side of the courtyard, had been converted into a garage for the Daimler, a workshop and two cottages, one for the Browns and one for Mr Samuelson. There were some loose boxes as well and I fished a couple of carrot tops out of my pocket and fed them to the master’s hunter, his muzzle whickering for more until he had the button of my jacket in his teeth and I was caught up in a proper tug of war when Brown appeared. He freed me with the assistance of a lump of sugar.

The workshop was his private kingdom. All the doings for the motor were up one end: a mechanical ramp for lifting it, wrenches and pumps, cans of oil and tubs of grease, valves, filters and plugs for which I could never quite muster an understanding, although I did try, in order to please him. His snug was up the other end. Sectioned off with a rough timber partition, Brown had imported a few sparse creature comforts: a varicose old armchair whose springs formed unpleasant contours no matter where you placed your weight, a threadbare rug, the same paraffin stove that Samuelson and I had in our shed, an Aladdin, its glass shade holding captive a sliver of blue flame which, with some strange, superstitious sense of continuity, he never allowed to go out. He had nailed some wooden wine crates to the partition to make a rudimentary set of shelves, which were lined with scrapbooks and manuals, a collection of different types of tobacco tin (one or two of them older than me) and a row of stubby yellow books.

“Wisden,” he said, following my gaze. “I’ve got every single edition they’ve ever printed, starting in 1864. Do you play?”

The first cup of tea I drank there, a whiskery, bristly brew made on a tiny primus stove, was my rite of passage into manhood. There was a whiff of the dugout about the place, its makeshift appropriations a male redoubt without the flanking defences of domesticity.

“Play?” I asked.

“Cricket,” he said, stirring his tea, tapping his spoon on his mug, then handing it to me so that I could do the same. “Your father was a very fine wicketkeeper, in his day.”

“Was he?” A sudden glimpse of my Dad, unanticipated, always hit me, throwing an unsparing light over all that I didn’t know about him. I couldn’t picture him playing cricket; I could barely summon the sound of his voice, though a brief image of the way he could twist an apple in half with his bare hands flashed into my mind and I recalled him teaching me how to make fountains with a clench of my fist in the water butt in our yard, wet-sleeved, my chin on a level with the rim. “A wicketkeeper?” I remembered him not sitting in his chair in the parlour, after he went to war. I remembered his absence, as much as anything about him.

“A very fine one.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know how to play.”

“We’ll soon put that right. There’s six weeks until the match. Plenty of time.”

Every day after that, when work was done, Brown took me up to the wildflower meadow where we wouldn’t be disturbed and bowled at me, ball, after ball, after ball: bouncers, beamers and indippers; inswingers swiftly followed by outswingers; leg cutters, off cutters, slow balls, reverses, yorkers and just to fool me, the odd full toss. He spared me nothing and in my turn, I failed to catch most of them.

“Let’s have another go at this,” he’d say, thundering through the long grass towards me, launching the ball so that when it went spinning to the left I was at the limit of my reach in the opposite direction, and when it bounced to the right I was lunging forwards. I rolled and dived and flung myself after the blasted thing until I was black and blue all over. “You’ll learn,” he’d say imperturbably, rotating his shoulder, preparing to bowl at me again. “There’s plenty of time.”

The weeks rattled past and Brown explained the rules to me, then tested me on them during breaks which were becoming shorter and shorter, our tea growing cold while he talked at me. Then it was up to the meadow for more catching practice, more question and answer sessions, more bowling and rolling, more hurling and curling. When I mentioned batting, he brushed my question to one side.

“We’ve got batsmen,” he said. “It’s a wicketkeeper that we need. First team practice on Saturday, Ifor. You watch the others. Best way to learn. The sound of leather on willow,” he sighed. “Life doesn’t get much better than that.”

Our team was full of elderly men and lads like me: the oldest was Gwlym Jones the Ancient, then there was the watchmaker Dick the Tick, Tom Ten Bricks Pritchard, not known for his speed as a builder – ten bricks a day was his limit – Iwan the Milk, Parry the Paint and Ianto Pryce. Not a single one of us could be said to be in his prime. Tom started calling me Green Fingers Griffiths and it stuck. He also showed me how to hold the bat, where to put my feet, how to lean into the ball, though he was noncommittal about my progress.

“You’ll probably do,” he said, scratching his jaw, then he added as an afterthought, “you might put in a bit of practice after work, though. If you’ve the time.”

The night before the match when I dropped by to pick up the paper, a heaviness had settled on Brown. He was at the business end of the workshop, still in his overalls, when I stuck my head around the door. He looked up when I came in, then wiped his hands on an oily rag.

“Nervous, are you?” I said, all eager for the pre-match pep talk.

He shrugged. He was slow to put the kettle on the primus stove.

“What’s the matter?”

He let the tea sift from the spoon into the pot. “It gets you down a bit,” he said, staring at the small accumulation of leaves at the bottom. “Politics, and suchlike. That’s what.”

“Politics?” I repeated, wondering if he’d got wind of something Delyth had been up to. My sister, the activist.

“World affairs,” he said, pouring the boiling water into the teapot and sliding a gnarled old knitted tea cosy over the top of it, the wool stained with tannin. “You think they won’t affect you, but look what happened last time.”

“Last time?”

“I don’t like the cut of that fellow’s jib.” He jerked his head in the direction of yesterday’s newspaper, lying open on the worktop. I peered at a grainy picture of a man with black hair geometrically slicked across his forehead and a repressed little black moustache.

“German fascist.” Brown said with distaste. “Adolf Hitler.”

I shook my head. “Never heard of him.”

“Out of prison on parole after an attempted putsch. Nasty piece of work. Head of the National Socialist Party. Not socialists as you or I would recognise them, mind you. Very right wing, Ifor. Very right wing. Calls himself Fuhrer – that’s leader to the likes of you and me.” He subsided into his armchair, making the springs heave. “You pour the tea there, will you?”

He nursed the mug when I handed it to him. “Never trust a Hun,” he said quietly. “That’s one thing I have learned.” He sat there, brooding, out in no man’s land beyond the wire, on the recce in a landscape known to him and alien to me, sniffing the cordite in the air. “The war to end all wars,” he said, picking at some skin fraying round his thumbnail, worrying it back to the quick. “That’s what they promised us,” he licked his thumb, the pinprick of red blood. “We’ll see what Mr Hitler has to say about that.”

Ma went berserk with all the washing and enlisted Delyth too: the men’s flannels, the women’s summer dresses, the tablecloths and napkins – the borax and the corn starch were rife in our kitchen, the irons in constant rotation heating on the range and my sister in a state of collapse over the mangle, but walking onto Dancing Green that Saturday, the marquee up and the bunting flying and the sunlight shining linen white on all their hard work, was a sight to behold.

Llancloudy won the toss and put us in to bat. Tom Ten Bricks opened for us and he was a hungry man, absolutely ravenous for runs and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I made such a study of the man, the artistry of the angular shapes his body made as he swung and struck, each movement so calculated, so precise. He scored a four in the first over and I jumped several feet in the air from purest joy and we were off. I was hatching all kinds of bargains in my head – let him make fifty, let him make fifty – then Gwylm Jones was bowled out for eleven and Dick the Tick came in and made a useful twenty until the butcher from Llancloudy, I didn’t know his name, he was a big bloke, caught him at short leg and it was Parry the Paint’s turn. My ears were full of the sound of gloved hands clapping and the clink of ice in lemonade. I glanced around, at the gardens in my care, at the big house on the far side of the lawn, at Brown analysing Llancloudy’s tactics with his elbow resting on his arm and his chin cupped, and I wondered if I would have the courage to fight to defend it all, the village and the valley and our way of life, as he had done, and Dad, and Glyn; whether I would be able to rise to the occasion if I were ever called upon to do so.

When my turn came we were seven for eighty-three: Tom Ten Bricks out for thirty-eight, Iwan the Milk out for nine and now it was up to me and Ianto Pryce. I walked up to the crease with the bat under my arm, as I had seen the others do. I knew exactly where you were sitting, at a table in the centre of the marquee with your mother and the vicar and some other toffs I didn’t know and I glanced in your direction as I placed my bat in front of me, just like Tom, and adjusted the angle of it, and shifted my weight, and squinted onto the light, as he had done. Out of the corner of my eye I saw you set your cup back in its saucer and lean forward.

The bowler came for me with his hooves pawing the ground and much spittle flying, at least that’s how it felt, and loosened the ball from his meaty grip and it went scything through the air towards me and if you hadn’t been there I might have ducked. I stood firm though, and swung the bat as Tom had shown me and heard the sweet, astonishing sound of leather on willow and felt the shock of the impact shoot through my fingers, making them sting. The ball looped uncontrollably high into the air and Ianto charged in my direction, so off I bolted, thinking that Brown was right, life doesn’t get much better than this. The ball began to descend gracefully through the streaming light, and I was racing with my bat outstretched to claim my run, when with a casual cupping of his hand one of Llancloudy’s fielders caught it and I was out. For a duck.

Polite applause is one thing, but laughter …

“What a hit! What a hit! Just go faster next time,” Brown hurried over and slapped me on the back as I walked off the field. I couldn’t look in your direction. I handed the bat to Iwan and part of me wanted to keep on walking, right away from Nanagalan, but the lads were clustering round me, grinning.

“Move over Jack Hobbs, Green Fingers Griffiths is coming through,” said Tom Ten Bricks and they all joined in after that, with their banter and their jokes, until I began to see that this was another rite of passage, and found the balm in that.

We were all out for a hundred and forty, no thanks to me.

All those evenings in the wildflower meadow with Brown bowling at me fit to bust seemed to pay off in the end, though. I took my place behind the wicket with my pulse in full flight round my body, ticking in my throat and my belly, even in the pads of my thumbs. As I crouched down waiting for the first ball, reminding myself to breathe out as well as breathing in, I was conscious of the other blokes around me – Tom and Parry within earshot at short leg, comfortingly close, Jones and Dick further out towards the boundary – and that sense of being a part of a team kindled inside me, so that anything seemed possible.

When Brown bowled the first over it was as if we were out in the meadow, just him and me, flattening the cowslips and the dandelions with our efforts, the batsmen an afterthought getting in the way. They scored two runs. After we had changed ends Brown came at me again and I could hear the wrenching noise he made as he let loose the ball; I could see the spin on it, the wily curve which lured the Llancloudy man way beyond the crease and before I knew what I was doing, I was up in the air, catching it and breaking the wicket and there was a whooping sound which might have come from me, or Tom, or Brown, or Ma, or any one of us and the patter of applause echoed like my pulse in every part of me and I had never felt more alive in all my life.

I caught five men out that day. Five men. The last off an atrocious throw from Gwilym Jones who, frail but enthusiastic, lobbed the ball through almost a hundred and eighty degrees towards the marquee rather than in my direction. I threw myself after it, my eyes fixed on the stitching, the red leather beyond the furthest reach of my fingers. I almost achieved lift off, I ran so fast. I caught the blighter, held onto it and broke the bales and we beat Llancloudy by nineteen runs.