The Line Between Us (7 page)

You were closer to me than I had realised. There was oil on your clothes, which were horribly rumpled, and dirt on your hands from the road. Your hair was undoing itself, a hank of it hanging down over your shoulder.

“Miss Ella!”

You bowed your head and I had an uneasy premonition that you might be about to burst into tears, but instead you said in a muted voice, “I wish it wasn’t like this …”

That stopped me in my tracks.

“I … I don’t know how to be,” you whispered. “When it’s just you and me ...”

“Well, I think you’re –”

“Or perhaps I just don’t know how to be, with you, or any one.”

“Just right,” I gulped.

You gave me a searching look, as if you wanted to believe my stammered protestation.

“It’s just that we’re …” I said, floundering. I couldn’t finish. “You know.” I hauled the bike up and gripping the front wheel between my knees, I straightened the handlebars. “Next time I’ll teach you the other way of stopping,” I said, to give myself cover, “If you like.”

“Mama has told me I mustn’t play with village boys,” you replied and for once I found I could read your expression. I was unexpectedly fluent in your shame and your regret.

“But we’re not playing, miss … are we?” I said judiciously. “I’ve been teaching you to ride a bicycle, that’s all.”

I could see you considering my words until you were – almost – satisfied. You nodded, still testing the weight of them. “Yes,” you said, in the end. “I suppose you were. That’s all you were doing. Teaching me.” You took a step in my direction and your leg buckled.

“You are hurt!”

“It’s nothing; I must have twisted my ankle when I fell.” You limped a few paces further. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

“Here, let me –” Neither of us knew quite what I was suggesting. You brushed one hand against the other, studying a few faint abrasions beneath the dirt on your palm, the blood risen to the surface of your skin. I looked the length of the lane. “It’s a long way back, miss. You could sit on my bike, if you want. I could wheel you.”

“I’m not sure I could …” Dubiously, you flexed your foot. You glanced at me. “I’ll be fine.”

“You could just sit on the crossbar.”

You gave me that same, searching look you had before, as though there was more at stake than I could know. “Alright,” you said. “Just to the top of the drive.”

You hobbled over and warily you perched yourself sideways on the crossbar.

“That’s just the job.” You leaned your weight against me by degrees, and by degrees I put my arm around you to reach the far handlebar. “Rest your bad foot on the pedal, that’s right.” I said hoarsely. “We’ll have you home in a jiffy.”

I wheeled you with agonised concentration along the lane, steering a course between the ridges and the potholes, my cargo the more precious for being salvage.

“Ifor –?” you said, turning so you could see me, making the bike sway. I gripped the handlebars more tightly. You were so close, if you had blinked I would have felt your lashes move.

“What, miss?”

“Nothing.” Dimly I understood that saying my name proved your ownership of me, if it needed proving. My own small act of possession, holding you on my bike and almost in my arms as well, filled me with a kind of sad elation.

At the top of the drive you slipped down from the crossbar, flinching as your foot touched the ground.

“Will you be alright?”

You nodded, bending a little stiffly to reach your trug, abandoned by the wayside. “It’s probably best if I go on ahead,” you said, watching the handful of berries roll from one end of the basket to the other. You picked one out, black and flagrantly ripe and held it between your fingers. For a strained, uncertain moment you looked as though you might slip it into my mouth. “That’s for you,” you said, dropping it into my palm.

I took it and bit into it, fruit not really mine for the tasting. It made me bold, though. I leaned over and with pilgrim fingers which shook a little, I swept the fallen hank of hair from your shoulder and tucked it into place with the tortoiseshell comb which had worked loose. “There you are,” I said. “The Mistress will be none the wiser, now.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I remembered watering the rhododendrons on Dancing Green in the late spring of the following year, making the spray from the hose play with the sunlight, passing the time by creating flashing prisms of colour, when I saw Mrs Brown heading towards me across the lawn.

“Will you pick some cherries for me, Ifor?” She was a handsome woman in spite of her age – she must have been within spitting distance of fifty – only, the fact that she knew it somehow demanded acknowledgement from other people too. “If I don’t make my Brandy Cherries soon, they won’t be steeped in time for Christmas, see?” She watched me training the water into the impenetrable darkness beneath the rhododendrons, where the roots writhed blackly. “I’d do it myself …”

“Oh, we can’t have that, Mrs Brown,” I said, tickled by the thought of her wobbling about at the top of a ladder.

“You’re so tall now …” When her voice went all breathy, you could hear the Welsh in it. She’d been a girl from the valleys, once upon a time. “It’s a fine lad you’re growing into, Ifor Griffiths,” she murmured, so quiet I could barely hear her above the noise of the hose. “You’ll break a few hearts before you’re through.”

I shrugged. This was a kind of grown-up sport I wasn’t used to, like being teased at school when you don’t know how to take it. “How many cherries, Mrs Brown?”

“As many as you can pick, young man. I might even make a pie.” She smiled, allowing her gaze to travel the length of me, from the toes of my boots to my fingertips. “Bring them up to the kitchen for me, when lunch is over. Shall we say three o’clock?”

Three o’clock came and I set off with a basket of cherries in each hand. The back door was ajar, so I walked in without knocking, just calling out, “Hello?”

I hesitated, thinking of the kitchen at home, Ma a ghostly presence looming out of the steam – a wraith of the wash. I took a few steps, fearful of intruding, then collected myself and strode the rest of the way, poking my head into the kitchen. “Hello –?”

With the range on full blast the room was baking hot, even though the windows were thrown up to the limit of their sashes. Mrs Brown had her sleeves pushed back and beneath her apron her blouse was undone I don’t know how many buttons. She was kneading something in an enormous bowl; a dusting of flour hung in the air, the atoms of it radiating out as if charged with energy.

“Ifor!”

“I’ve brought the cherries, Mrs Brown,” I said, hovering at the entrance.

“Put them over by there, will you?” She wiped her sleeve across her forehead, leaving a streak of flour. I wondered if I should mention it. I set the baskets down where she indicated.

“You’ve got a –” I gestured. “On your –”

She put the bowl to one side, covering it with a cloth. “I’ll leave that to prove.” She brushed her sleeve across her forehead once again.

I shook my head. “No … it’s not … it’s –”

There was a lengthy pause.

“You do it.”

I made a start towards her, then I stopped. “It’s just on … where the …”

“I won’t bite.”

“No,” I said, “I should think not,” and then I laughed and it sounded loud in the silence which followed. In the end there was nothing for it: I fairly sprinted over to her, smudged the flour away with my thumb and sprinted back. “If that’s everything …”

“Are you fond of gingerbread nuts?”

I hesitated, “I like ginger cake.” I glanced along the corridor towards the back door, with the vaguest sense of trespass. I knew that I should go, but a part of me was curious to stay. Mrs Brown reached for her reading glasses and consulted her recipe book and the sight of her in her spectacles was oddly reassuring. She began to read the recipe aloud, savouring the instructions as if she could taste them in her mouth.

“You take one pound of treacle and a quarter of a pound of coarse …” she lingered over the word, giving it due consideration, “… brown sugar. Then it’s two ounces of ground ginger, an ounce of candied orange peel, an ounce of candied angelica, and an ounce of candied lemon peel.” I was watching her read, all that sing-song Welsh coming out, the relish of each individual syllable. I liked the way she said “candied”. I found myself mouthing it with her.

“These should be chopped into very small pieces, but not,” she glanced at me, “… bruised.”

I swallowed. Worse still, I blushed.

“I’m going to start by heating the treacle and the sugar together with a little melted butter …”

It was the warmth in the kitchen.

“And when I’ve mixed in all the ingredients …”

It was the ferment of the baking.

“… I’m going to break an egg.”

With a smile that left her lips half-parted, she leaned over to select an egg from a bowl in the middle of the table, and the indolence of her reach afforded me a glimpse of this and that, and the candied scent of her caught me unawares, so that for a dreadful moment I found myself racked with impure imaginings, though she’s the same age as my Ma. Only for a moment, because then I thought of you, and I thought of Mr Brown and our trip to Newland, and then I thought hats off to Samuelson.

And I fled.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I remembered coming home from work one day to find my sister Delyth, back from the factory where she’d been assembling circuit breakers since the war, all hot under the collar. She was in militant mood. “Have you got yesterday’s newspaper, Ifor?” she asked before I was over the threshold.

I handed it to her, gave Ma the half dozen misshapen potatoes the kitchen had rejected and flopped down at the table.

“Tea?” said Ma.

Delyth had this habit of reading things under her breath so you could hear the clicking of the consonants, but not what she was saying and it used to drive me mad. She was ticking away like a clock, taking little sips of outraged air.

“It’s not right,” she said. “It’s just not right.”

I was watching Ma pouring boiling water onto tea leaves that we used this morning and I was sore inside that she should have to live like this and sorer still that somehow, although I was doing the job she wished me to, I was falling short in my responsibilities. A proper son would have made sure there was fresh tea when she wanted it. She felt my gaze and shrugged.

“Did you know,” Delyth leaned both elbows on the newspaper; she brought her face, full of accusations, up close to mine, “that since the war, miners’ pay has gone down from six pounds a week to three pounds eighteen shillings?”

“No, Delyth, I didn’t know that,” I answered, eyeing the grey tea Ma was bearing in my direction.

“Well, you know now,” she said grimly. “The pit owners want to reduce pay even further, on account of Germany giving their coal to France for free because of the war; it’s always because of the war.” She sounded aggrieved, as though she had been cheated of something. “The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain is drawing a line, though. Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day. It says it there, in the paper. I’ll stand by that.”

“It won’t affect many people in Morwithy, will it?” I sipped my tea dubiously. “Ianto Pryce’s family, maybe, but mostly we’re farming folk.”

“Ifor,” my sister upbraided me, “it’ll affect us all, every man Jack of us. They’ll squeeze us till the pips squeak, then they’ll go on squeezing after that.”

“Keep your hair on!”

“You’ve been working up at Nanagalan for too long. You’ve turned native,” she snapped.

That stung me. “Look –”

“Now, now,” said our mother. “Lay the table, will you, there’s a boy.”

Delyth’s words stayed with me. I thought of the hours I worked in God’s fresh air with the weather in my face and the light streaming into the valley. I couldn’t begin to picture the black of the coal face, a darkness so intense that it blinded the ponies who toiled in it. I thought what would happen to our precarious household if our income was docked by a quarter: thin soup a little thinner, meat and two veg reduced to just two veg. And the twice-brewed tea? How far could we make that go?

The day that eight hundred thousand men were locked out of the mines because they wouldn’t accept new terms, a general strike was called. Delyth downed tools straight away and refused to go to work.

“You’re not going up to the house,” she said in disbelief, when I came down in my working clothes.

“Someone’s got to,” I said, hunting for some cheese on the cold shelf, so I could make a sandwich for my lunch. “We’ve got to eat,” I added pointedly, when all I could find was a small piece of Double Gloucester pared back to the rind.

“You’re a scab.”

The words were so quiet I wasn’t certain that I’d heard them. I turned to face her, to be sure. “What?”

She gave me a look of scalding contempt. She didn’t need to repeat herself. I wrapped the sandwich in my handkerchief, making brisk folds in the material and pressing them flat meticulously. “You go your way,” I said when I could fold the thing no more, “and I’ll go mine.”

Samuelson skived off, never one to miss a chance, though his only notion of solidarity was to himself, so I went down to the vineyard to finish off the tying in I’d been busy with the day before, removing the side shoots on the vines and training the principals between the wires so the sun could get at them. I liked the rhythm of it: the snipping and the reaching and the twisting. I worked for an hour or two, making my way along the slanting hillside, up one row and down another, interrupting the bees, humming myself.

At the top of the slope the front door slammed and you came running through the Herbar out onto Dancing Green, another young lady at your side and I could hear the two of you laughing. You had a couple of racquets and some tennis balls and you began knocking them about and I kept my head down and made my way along another row, listening to the thwack and twang as you returned the balls to each other. From time to time I glanced in your direction, following the swallow flight of your run as you darted hither and thither, your hair like a banner in the breeze.

I heard the miss hit, the dull groan of the racquet, before I saw the ball soar down the hillside towards me.

“Ifor,” you called, laughing. You didn’t need to ask. I found the ball in the lumpy grass between the vines a few rows down and made my way up the hillside, tossing it and catching it, tossing it and catching it, until I reached you and I placed it in your palm.

“Thanks,” you said carelessly in front of your friend, who looked at me, then looked at you and simpered.

I nodded, turned on my heel and headed back down to my work. A few minutes later the ball sailed in my direction. It landed several feet away.

“Ifor …?”

I snipped away at the vine in front of me.

“Our ball.” Your voice had a trill in it that I didn’t recognise. “Do you mind …?”

I tucked the shoot between the wires, and then lay my secateurs on the ground with a tense deliberation of which you might have taken heed. I found the ball and with a steely swing I threw it back up the hill. Your friend giggled as you caught it and I couldn’t decide if it was me that you were showing off to her, or your power over me, which was a different matter.

I picked up my secateurs and moved on to the next vine, trimming away more curtly than before. Within minutes there was an eruption of laughter as the ball came flying through the air at me.

“Ifor …?”

More laughter which, poorly suppressed, fed upon itself. I didn’t want to hear it. I clipped at the vine until it was almost shorn.

The two of you were helpless with it.

“Ifor …? Will you get our ball?”

I thought about the eight hundred thousand men locked out of their workplace for asking for a living wage, and the degradation of that, and my own small humiliation seemed, in that instant, to be of a kind. I bent down and placed my secateurs on the ground with all the slow defiance I could muster. When I straightened up, I folded my arms across my chest and shook my head.

Your laughter slowed to a trickle and then stopped. “Ifor …?”

I didn’t answer. I clasped my arms more tightly as though to emphasise the position I had taken, while you fiddled with the strings of your racquet. You turned the leather-bound handle over in your hand.

“Make him get it,” your friend said, less coy now. “Go on, he’s your servant. He should do what he’s told.”

You cleared your throat, not looking at me. “Fetch the ball, will you, Ifor?”

I stood stock still, the anger glinting off me, staring up at you. I would not be a dog to fetch and carry, not for anyone.

“This is the most frightful bore,” I heard you say and you came traipsing down the hill towards me, tripping on a tuft of the rough grass which only made you crosser, so that by the time you reached me, the incident had become more than it was meant to be.

“When I ask you to do something …”

I wouldn’t upset you for the world, not for the world, but I had no option other than to stand my ground. “I’m nobody’s servant,” I said. “I garden here, and I tend your vines. But not this afternoon. This afternoon I’m out on strike.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I could see the unease in your face as you wondered how far you should push this. “Just get me the ball.”

I shrugged. “I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“Alright, I won’t.”

“That’s that, then.”

“You can sack me if you want to,” I said as wretched as I have ever been, and there was nothing left for me to do, but to turn on my heel and walk away, leaving my secateurs lying discarded on the ground.