The Welsh Girl (24 page)

"At school they said I joined the wrong air force." "They're any planes you want them to be."

"No! You
made
them. What did you mean them to be? It

doesn't matter what I think; it's what you meant them to be. You were thinking of German planes, I bet."

Karsten begins to deny it, and stops. Of course he'd been thinking of German planes. But what he really wants to say is that he'd been thinking of freedom. The freedom he'd heard in the planes overhead, the freedom he'd felt thinking of the toy planes, something from the camp, something he made there, existing outside of it, outside of his reach, his sight.

"Anyhow, they're gone now," the boy says with a sigh. "I chopped them up with the hatchet and stuck them in the fire."

Karsten pictures the brass propellers twisting in the heat, blackening, falling through a sooty grate.

"They called me a traitor," the boy chokes out.

"I'm sorry," Karsten says softly, overwhelmed by a wave of grief. He begins to say he'll make him something else, but he can't think what.

He lies in his sagging bunk that night, long after the barracks grows still, staring up at the coarse timber joists of the roof, impatient for sleep to ambush him, yet constantly vigilant. He was never this alert on guard duty. The hut stinks of men, of sweat and feet and damp wool and arseholes, and he rolls over to catch the sporadic scent of the sea. He can make out the smell of the damp trees on wet days, or of dry heather on fine ones.
Nights are the worst
, he thinks. He dreads nine o'clock, when they're ordered off the parade ground and herded back to their barracks. The evenings, once it gets too gloomy to play football, once the dusk deepens and the white dots of sheep on the hillside vanish, are a slow, anxious prelude to this confinement. It makes him feel like a punished child, no older than the boy, sent to bed early, and he dreads the winter when the days will get shorter and they'll be locked in even earlier.

He wonders if his mother is punishing him by not writing.

She considered it unladylike to strike a child--that was a father's place. Not that she didn't hit him on occasion, but more commonly she would give him the silent treatment if he disappointed her.

Recalling his childhood and her punishments, he's reminded that he did once see her turn away a suspicious couple from the pension. He'd have been just seven or eight. This was before he understood the nature of trysts. He remembers it because he overheard her telling them there was no room, and when they mentioned the Vacancy card in the window, she said her son must have forgotten to take it down. He'd thought it was a mistake and hurried out to tell her that no, there were vacancies, but when she persisted, he

grew indignant, as if he were being blamed unfairly. The man, he remembers, became impatient.

"Are there rooms or not, madam?" And his mother shook her head adamantly. "The boy is mistaken."

"But
Mutti
," he'd cried, and she snapped at him to shut up,

and he burst into tears, the injustice of it too much to bear. "It's not fair," he sobbed, and the young woman had crouched down beside him, taken his hands in her soft ones. "There, there, little man." Her head of brown hair was as glossy as a fresh chestnut, and he'd reached out for it. But then he felt his mother's hand on his shoulder, pulling him to her. "Don't you touch him!"

The woman had stood stiffly and told the man they should leave. "Otto, please." She put a hand on his arm, and as Karsten watched from his mother's skirts, the woman stroked the man's sleeve lightly. "Don't make a scene," she said softly, as if it were just the two of them, and the man turned to her then, and without another word they'd left.

His mother had gone to the parlour window and snatched up the Vacancy sign, as if she'd rip it in two, and then stood there trembling, just behind the curtain, until they were gone.

"But there
are
rooms," Karsten growled accusingly, actually

stamping his foot. And she nodded curtly, slipped the sign back in the window. "Not for them."

"You lied!" It was the first time he'd ever caught her. "They lied to me first," she said. "Herr and Frau
Wagner
,

indeed. Very funny! As if I was a fool, a bumpkin! They'd never have tried it if there was a man about the place." She hadn't spoken to him for the rest of the week.

They were Jews, of course, he thinks now--probably married, in truth, something about the way the woman had touched the man told him so even then--but trying and failing to pass. Except, as a child he'd not known them.

The next evening, the boys are back, all of them, even the little one. He'd not expected to see them again. As he approaches the fence, they hold out their hands through the wire as if for a toy, a gift. But when Karsten raises his own hands, empty, they hurl abuse, and the night after they're gone again, the little loner too, and Karsten feels oddly abandoned.

In the dusk, the full moon opens above him like the mouth of an impossibly distant tunnel.

He wonders how his father handled his own captivity all those years ago. He never spoke of it much, or of the war in general. Indeed, when Karsten thinks of him, he can barely remember his voice. His father had been gone so much of his young life, sometimes for days at a time if the fish were running, and then gone for good before Karsten turned seven. All he recalls are glimpses--his father bent over the model of a ship in a bottle at the kitchen table, patiently explaining what he was doing. Karsten had asked him how he'd learned all that, and his father had told him a fellow prisoner had taught him. His last model had been unfinished at the time of his death, and Karsten had whiled away the long, still hours of mourning finishing it.

sther can hardly believe it was her, running down to the wire like that, scattering the boys, confronting the Germans. The

thought of it, in retrospect, makes her heart race. What had she been thinking? What was it about the boys' mean joke?

And it comes to her that it wasn't what they said, but what she thought they might say next. She'd imagined it rising in Pinkie's throat, forming wetly on his tongue. That's what she'd had to stop. That word Colin called her.

Cunt.

It's such a furious-sounding word, so low and guttural, like a grunt. She rolls it around her mouth like a salty pebble, saying it, harsh and fast, under her breath. It's a word you can rush through, over almost before it's begun. It starts to slip out of her now in moments of anger or pain. When one of the hens pecks her foot, when the axe jars her arm as she splits kindling. It reminds her of Colin, but each time she says it she feels a little stronger, as if the odd male power of the curse accrues to her with each utterance. When Pinkie jeers "Jerry- lover!" in the queue for the pictures the next week, she leans close and calls him the name, and when she steps back, he's beet red under his shock of snowy hair, as though she's bloodied his face.

She had feared he might call her it, but she's struck first, the word like a fist.

She has no idea what it means, of course. What it actually means. Just its emotional meaning--fury, contempt. She has never heard anyone else use it, and not only, she thinks,

because it's an English word, but perhaps also because it's a secret word, unspeakable. She's so used to the secrecy of Welsh, the cloak of it that the villagers draw around themselves at the pub, or in the high street if a stranger passes, that it thrills her a little to know a secret English word.

She thinks of the great dictionary in Mrs R's classroom. Is it still there? she wonders. But the way Mrs R handled it, carrying it into class at the start of a lesson like the tablets of the Ten Commandments, letting it topple with a slam on her desk to silence them, Esther guesses it must have been Mrs R's own volume. More likely it's in her house now, behind the counter of the post office, or perhaps in the parlour, where all the ladies in town kept their best things--stuffed songbirds under bell jars, burled mahogany mantel clocks, and the massive dictionary with its winking golden spine and tissue- paper pages. Esther imagines looking up the word, but would such a profanity be there?

She pictures a blank space on the page, a gap in the record. She has the idea, fixed from the schoolroom, that Mrs R knows all the words in the dictionary, but she can't imagine her knowing this one. Not that her old teacher hasn't been known to swear. "Dash it all!" she would cry if the chalk broke, or sometimes, more softly, "Dash it, girl," if Esther disappointed her. It seemed at once so unladylike to curse, and yet the phrase had a kind of tough elegance, so much less crude than her father's 'blast's and 'bloody's. Looking up the word one night, when she had stayed behind to clean the board and Mrs R had been called to see the headmaster, Esther was pleased to see the meaning. To smash, to throw down. She pictured a teapot, for some reason, swept on to the slate flags of the floor, shards flying in all directions. She'd snapped the book closed on the rest of the definition before Mrs R had bustled back into the room. Her teacher had dismissed her then, thanking her solemnly, and in this way

Esther had known the headmaster, Dr Lock, had told her that Rhys was failing in another class. She only stayed behind in the hope of walking home with Mrs R, talking to her about some book she'd borrowed (something by the Bronte's, say, whose works she devoured her last year in school, fascinated by the doings of the English gentry, though she knew Arthur would disown her if he knew). But on days when Rhys had got into trouble, Mrs R would send her on ahead, sit in the schoolroom for a while, and walk home alone. She looked so beaten down those evenings--a mother suddenly, no longer a teacher--Esther wanted to hear her swear, "Dash the boy!"

Only months after leaving school, reading one night, she came across a passage of dialogue, a character cursing, the line printed only as--"--!" and it dawned on her.
Of course!

What a dashed fool she'd been to miss it. Suddenly it seemed the most literary of swear words. Not a word at all, really, but the absence of words, words too awful to print, to speak.

Except now, she thinks, she knows some of those words, those awful English words.

And then, at the start of August, Esther misses something else. It must be the second time, she thinks when she works it back, the weeks, the months, and yet somehow she had ignored the first time, missed the missing, like a dash in her own life. The absence of blood.

I should have known
.

She'd count herself cursedly unlucky--pregnant her first time!--if it didn't make her feel such a fool. She pictures herself: the pregnant girl sent to sit on the stool in the corner with the dunce's cap on, 'Spoke English' round her neck on a loop.

Her whole life living on a farm, her family's whole livelihood dependent on breeding and birthing, tupping in the autumn, lambing in the spring, and it's taken her weeks to realise she's

pregnant. She's seen her father mix the raddle, the oily red pigment he daubs on the belly and legs of the rams every September, watched him take the count each night of ewes with red tails, smeared rumps, where the raddle has transferred. And like a ewe in heat, no better than a dumb beast, she's taken the tup at the first time of asking. A fool, she thinks hotly. She would laugh if it were anyone but herself.

And then too, finally, she feels as if she might really have been raped. All this time, thinking she's escaped Colin, thinking she's escaped with her life. Yet she'd been right to start with, when the word had sprung to her mind as he'd pressed her against the mildewed tiles of the pool. He had wounded her, she thinks, and not a small wound, the drops of blood in her drawers, but something deeper and stranger.

What a wound it is that stops you bleeding
. And in her heart

there's a morbid fear that what he's given her is a lingering death, nine months long, that she won't survive childbirth, that she'll die and he'll have raped her after all.

She takes the heavy scissors out of her pocket at last and sets them back in her sewing basket, impaling a ball of wool. She'll be needing her knitting and sewing soon enough, she thinks. But in the meantime, there's nothing to be protected from any more.

She's subdued for days. Even the pictures, where she goes to escape, no longer feel like a refuge. Outside, the

marquee's lights seem to wink at her, 'Now Showing, Now Showing'. Inside, she sits at the very front of the stalls, shrouded in the blue fog of cigarette smoke that settles beneath the stage, as far away from the courting couples in the back row as possible. But with the screen looming over her she finds herself dreading a glimpse of Colin in the

newsreels, finds her eye drawn to a shock of curly black hair, a trim moustache, a certain rakish angle to a forage cap. This close she can feel the rumble of the Allied tanks rolling through

French or Dutch or Belgian villages; she recoils from those girls on the screen throwing flowers and beaming, dancing in the streets.

Afterwards, she can barely recall the news when Arthur asks her. She has thought of writing to Colin, telling him, but she doesn't have an address for him, and even if she had, she can't imagine how to put it.
I've missed
, she tries, but all that comes is
I've missed...you
. And she recoils, first from the lie of that, and then even more from the truth within the lie, the truth that if she tells him, she'll be asking him to come for her, to put it right. So is it shame that's stopping her writing, she asks herself, or pride? Both, perhaps? Either way, she

refuses to give him the satisfaction of an appeal. Belter by far not to ask than to be refused.

Instead of going to the pictures, she takes to spending her free evenings, and then any time she can escape from her chores, in the trees above the camp, smoking to keep the midges off, staring at the men.

She wonders what will become of the Germans now. The war has gone on so long--her whole life, it feels to her sometimes--it's hard to imagine it ever ending, despite the victories. They'll be there for the rest of their lives, she thinks, studying the men, until they'll have lived here longer than they ever did in Germany.