The Line Between Us (9 page)

A small table was placed at the edge of the pitch and the two teams lined up, forming a triumphal arch with their bats held aloft and the spectators were garrulous with chatter as Brown marched up – and he did march, his arms impeccably in line with the seams of his trousers – for the presentation. Your mother handed him the cup and the vicar hovered in attendance seizing the opportunity to pass it to her.

“And now,” the mistress said in her hot house voice, all cultivated vowels, “I will call upon my daughter to make the award for the Man of the Match.”

You stepped forward and with the slow dispersal of conversation, the garden filled with the tiny sounds that make a silence – footsteps falling on close-mown grass, the creak of a branch, the swish of a cat’s tail at the perimeter of the lawn. There was a medallion on the table, a tinny little thing, its brass too bright, and you picked it up and twined the ribbon round your fingers. I glanced along the line at my teammates and then at our opponents, wondering who the lucky man would be.

And then you said my name. Ifor Griffiths. I was watching the progress of the ribbon and it was as if I didn’t hear you, I was so lost in the gaudy red and gold. Iwan the Milk, who was standing next to me, jabbed me in the ribs,

“That’s you, lad.”

I came to, and ducked under the archway made of bats, oblivious to the catcalls and the whistles and the stamping. I couldn’t look at you. I turned my gaze upon your mother instead.

“Congratulations, Ifor,” you said and as you gave me the medallion and shook my hand, I was close enough to see the stealthy flight of colour cross your features. “It’s for your batting skills,” you added with the twitch of a smile, “obviously,” and then, on impulse, when all of us were unprepared, you stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek.

As I turned round, swallowing, casting a wild glance at my teammates, I saw Tom and Parry nudging one another, making sardonic little clicks with their teeth. I felt more full of shame than elation to be the butt of other people’s ribaldry, but when I checked to see if you had noticed I caught sight of your mother standing as stiff as a ramrod, frowning. That air of distraction, of wishing that she was in, if not another place, then certainly another time, was gone. She fixed her corvine eye upon me, her dark sheen ruffled, and hawk-like she jutted out her chin.

As I returned to my place in the line I touched my skin where you had kissed me, to see if your mouth had left a mark.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I remembered the first time Delyth brought her fiancé Ted to meet us, the tight fist of winter gripping the village, and how, from the start, he was a difficult man to like, not just because I was her brother and had a vested interest in her happiness. He was a literal fellow, too full of explication to have any room for humour, too condescending in his righteousness, with his pale, belligerent eyes and his mastiff’s build, all shoulders and no neck, so I couldn’t help feeling some antipathy.

They’d been courting since the end of the war and my sister regarded him as if he were God’s Own, seated on the edge of the sofa in our front parlour, the anti-macassars washed in his honour and a fire blazing in the swept hearth, and I wanted to lean across and give her a good shake to bring her to her senses, but she was so fizzing with nerves she would have popped if I had done so.

Ma was muted, the inside of her lip caught between her teeth in a way that made me think there was a good deal she wasn’t saying. She seemed distracted, as though she were awaiting the arrival of someone else with a kind of sad expectancy. “Where did you say you met?” she asked, surfacing, back in the conversation, ready to atone for any absence noticed.

“I told you, Ma,” said Delyth, still looking at Ted, “at the miners’ fundraising social in Mynydd Maen.”

“Mynydd Maen?” said Ma. “Ah yes, you said. I remember.” She nodded. “Mynydd Maen …” she repeated.  “More tea, Ted?”

While we drank our tea and ate our bake stone cakes, Ted embarked on a detailed account of the organisation and aims of the miners’ social club, having convinced himself that we liked the sound of his voice as much as he did. On and on he went about workers’ rights and though I’m not opposed, far from it, I did find myself retreating into my own thoughts from time to time. I was struck by how we misconceive what makes us happy, wondering what life Delyth imagined for herself, what she would be left with when she no longer took Ted at his own value, the complex bargain which must be struck between compromise and self deception. Then I fell to thinking about my own happiness and I could only picture you. A prospect with no future, I thought, looking at my sister and wondering if both of us were done for.

In the end, (it seemed to take hours and hours and a whole new pot of tea – fresh leaves, I noticed) Ted put the world most thoroughly to rights for us and judged it time to head off on his bike to Monmouth station. Delyth saw him off the premises and I remembered the icy blast of air as they left the house. Ma and I exchanged a look. She opened her mouth to say something, but thought better of it. Circumspectly, she began stacking the best china onto a tray. After a few minutes Delyth came gliding back into the parlour, her feet several inches off the ground.

“You do like him, don’t you?” was the first thing she said. “He’s so deep. He’s such a thinker. I never dreamed –” she broke off and her odd, blunt face was as soft as I have ever seen it. “I never dreamed I’d be so lucky,” she breathed. She held out her hands for me to take, offering me all her joyful expectation, but I put an arm around her and hugged her instead.

“I hope you’ll be happy,” I said, choosing my words, but all the while I was thinking that she’d get her heart’s desire, which would be her curse, and I wouldn’t, and that would be mine.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I remembered, oh, how I remembered hearing about the accident at the pit in Cwm; the Marine colliery was far enough from Morwithy for none of our families to be involved, but it still felt personal, the shock of the loss: fifty-two men. That’s a whole generation in a small village. All those cold spaces in half-empty beds, those places at table not taken, those clothes still holding the shape of the departed, hanging unworn in the cupboard. With so many men gone from the valleys because of the war, we couldn’t afford to be losing any more. Gas and coal dust, that’s what caused it, the explosion. Fifty-two men. Even Ted was reduced to silence.

We all went to the memorial service, of course we did, held on a merciless March morning, the chapel full of people thin with grief. I stood next to a man with a hacking cough, a proper a pair of miner’s lungs he had on him and looking back, that was probably where I caught the influenza.

The onset was ferocious: one moment I was cleaning the green furze from the flagstones in Esther’s Garden, one of my favourite spots at Nanagalan; it was tucked into the lee of the house and laid out in the Italian manner, with a small pool and an ornamental fountain, and stone seats lined up against the wall beneath pleached trees. Whenever I thought of Nanagalan I thought of Esther’s Garden: the bristling velvet brown of the bulrushes fringing the pool, the pale limestone, the little cupid gurgling into his bowl, the golden light that shed itself over everything until the long shadows of evening fell.

The flu nearly did for me. One moment I was working in Esther’s Garden with a stiff brush and the hose, scrubbing at the algae and then sluicing it away, my trousers sodden, the marrow of my bones turned to iron with the cold, then I had the touch of a headache, and before Samuelson could shout out, “Boy!” I was flat on my back in bed under two eiderdowns, my teeth chattering, and Ma hunched beside me bathing my forehead with wet flannels.

She never left my side, sitting at the bottom of my bed, keeping vigil. At first I was vaguely irritated. I kept rolling into the dip her weight created and I believed her presence made me hotter, but then the fever got a grip of me and I set off into the sweltering darkness of the inside of my head, in a state too restless to be sleep, but even across the ocean of my illness I sensed her nearness. I’d fling myself awake, drenched and shuddering, startled to see the wisp of her, white-faced, close by. She stroked my forehead, her chapped hand catching my dry skin and I drifted off with my eyes closed, miles and miles I went, my only link with the mainland the pressure of her fingers soothing me.

The doctor came and I remembered thinking I must be dying, for how would we afford the expense of his visit otherwise? His glacial fingers tapped against my chest and he listened with his stethoscope. “There’s quite a rattle down there,” he said, not telling Ma the half of it. “Both lungs. The best thing you can do is get a kettle boiling next to him. The steam will help to clear it.” He unclipped his stethoscope and folded it up and put it in his bag. “He’s still quite young,” he observed and I couldn’t work out if that was a good thing or not, and to be honest, I was past caring.

Ma took to spooning sips of water into my mouth because I didn’t have the strength to swallow. The heat was tropical, moisture running down the walls as the kettle steamed on a primus stove beside me, but I was still in spasms with the cold. Ma wiped her own forehead with the flannel and our eyes met as she folded it into a tidy pad and everything we needed to say was in that look: I can’t hold on / You mustn’t leave me / I’m doing my best / Hold on / What if I can’t hold on? She leaned over and took me by my shoulders, “Ifor,” she said, and I remembered that tone of voice from when I was a child, the unarguable command of it and in that instant I could have believed that I was all that mattered in the world to her. My eyes slurred shut.

When I came to, I knew I was hallucinating because there you were, I could see you plain as day, wrapped in a coat with a fur collar, carrying a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray with your gloves on. Ma was hovering, her hands hesitant in mid air, caught between taking you by the arm to lead you away, although she would hardly have dared to touch you, or pulling up the quilt and generally setting the room to rights.

“Is he awake?” I thought I heard you say.

The Ma of my overwrought imagination was in an agony of distraction. “Maybe. Yes. He comes and goes. Best not stand so close, miss, ma’am.”

“He’s so thin.”

“Yes.”

“I hardly recognised him.”

“I know. Shouldn’t you be –?”

“A thousand people died of it last week. It said in the paper.”

The spectre of my mother didn’t answer that.

“That’s why I came. He won’t –?”

She didn’t answer that either.

“– will he?”

Ma slid her hands in the pocket of her apron, then realising she was wearing it, she whipped it off and folded it, then stood there holding it, not knowing quite where to put it.

My eyelids fell shut and you went fleeing from my dream.

The fever broke, almost breaking me with it, and I was left with the cough to contend with: the machine gun hack, hack, hack of it at me day and night. Ma hauled me upright and held a bowl for me and I was halfway to heaving up my lungs when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a purple box sitting on the windowsill.

“Chocolates,” Ma said, following my gaze. “From the big house.” She didn’t say your name.

The first day I was well enough to come downstairs, Ma boiled an egg for me and there was chicken broth for tea.

“What about the money?” I wheezed. “For the doctor. For all of this.”

“You need to get your strength back. Money’s not important. Money’s the last thing ...” She took my hand and traced the veins too raised, too blue. “I don’t know what I’d have done –” She broke off and made much of clearing her throat. “We’ve had lots of help, in any case,” she said, changing a subject that wasn’t quite broached. “Delyth has mucked in with the laundry. Ted sent ten bob over. People rally round.”

“Will you have the Milk Tray, Ma?”

She didn’t want them. I could tell as soon as I made the offer that the chocolates were an awkward gift. She turned my hand palm up and searched the length of the lines on it. “Give them to your sister,” she said.

The spring came and went without me. It was a month before I was back on light duties. Samuelson didn’t look at all pleased to see me, keeping himself at a distance as though I were still contagious, his aggrieved little gestures – a sigh here, the martyred droop of a shoulder there – making it plain what a burden my absence had been.

I was sitting in the tool shed filling out an order for the seed merchant; it was undemanding work and my boss was uncharacteristically coy about his handwriting. The table, a rickety, bowed old thing green with damp, wobbled as I wrote. I had the door open and the muffler which Ma held out to me as I left that morning to protect my chest sat in a heap beside me on the bench. Every now and then I raised my head and inhaled the mineral scent of air fresh from the valley, savouring the healing traces of all the different elements: loam and leaf and spring water and lingering winter wood smoke. I was engrossed in the catalogue, cross checking my order against last year’s invoice – I’d begun a rudimentary filing system gleaned from the thick clot of screwed-up papers Samuelson stuffed in one of the drawers. He had been digging over some of the beds in the kitchen garden ready for planting out, with much sighing and drooping of shoulder, for the work was too demanding for me to tackle yet. He had left his spade stuck into the earth – it must have been three o’clock, or thereabouts – and I glanced up to see if the jay which I had noticed earlier had returned to its perch on the handle. Instead of its thieving, glinty blackness, I saw you coming towards the shed, with the same fretful compulsion I had seen on your face that day when you were dancing.

“Ifor,” you said with a start. “No, don’t get up,” for I had half risen from my seat, and then after a pause that lasted several moments, “May I come in?” You slipped inside the door. Briefly, you leaned against the jamb. “I heard that you were on the mend.” Your gaze fell upon my muffler on the bench. Irresolutely you picked it up, kneading the thick yarn between your fingers and I realised too late that it was a prelude to sitting down beside me. You wound the muffler around your neck. “Does it suit me?” you asked with a woeful smile.

“Yes,” I nodded, glancing at the rough navy wool against your skin.

“It smells of you,” you said and your voice sounded sad, which made me feel intolerably anxious. I was on the whetted knife edge of wanting everything about you. I nodded more slowly, once, twice, thinking that I ought to stand up and make my way towards the door, to a place of safety. Sitting side by side the way we were, our thighs almost touching, we created a seam of private warmth between us. I couldn’t move.

“You came to see me,” I said in the end, “when I was ill.”

You were staring at the floor. “It’s what we do,” you answered. “When our people are sick. You know – Lady Bountiful.”

The jay alighted on the spade outside. I watched it settle its feathers, the lethal action of its beak tempered for grooming. “Look at him,” I whispered. “He’s a beauty.”

Under your breath, as though you had thought about it long and hard, you said my name. I kept my eyes fixed on the jay, black and white and blue in all its wickedness.

“What I said just now … that wasn’t … it wasn’t why I came …” you stammered, “I came because I heard that you were dying.”

I didn’t move. I didn’t stir. I thought I’d frighten you off.

“I came because I couldn’t –” You hesitated as if your mouth were dry, “… not.”

We moved to the beat of the same wing, turning to face each other, drawing closer, drawing closer until I could feel the rough navy wool at your neck graze against my beard. I was mesmerised by the texture of your skin, the line of your jaw, the contour of your cheek, all the twisting mysteries of your hair.

Perhaps I could have kissed you; perhaps I could. I don’t know, now. Maybe each of us was waiting for the other. We stayed like that in tense proximity, almost touching. After a minute you lowered your head and you unwound the muffler as though the effort was exhausting. With both hands you held it over your nose and mouth, breathing in, and above the navy wool your eyes were narrowed blue. You set the muffler on the table and stood up, then walked to the door, where you remained for a moment with your back to me, resting against the frame. The jay flew upwards in alarm, its wings clattering, and you straightened up and without looking round you set off for the house.