The Welsh Girl (33 page)

typical of the way men would ask for love. No, not even ask. Demand, as a duty.

"Do you?" "I think so. Yes."

She feels upbraided somehow, defensive, and then she recalls what Mrs R said on the hillside the day the Germans arrived:

Fatherland! Howdid the women ever let the men get away with that one?

"And if it were called motherland-love?" she asks.

He stares at her as if she's asked something else, then slowly nods. More in thought than in agreement, she thinks, but what he says eventually is "I do trust you."

He still sounds like he's trying to convince himself, but she nods in turn.

"It's just safer for you not to know," he adds. "In case of questions."

"But you do have a plan?" "Of course."

She feels a flutter in her stomach. "It's Ireland, right? That'd be best, I think." She can't look at his face as she says it. She turns and stalks to the barn door.

"Is that what you'd do?" he asks softly, following her.

She raises an arm without looking at him, points downhill to the lacy fringe of surf along the coast. "On a clear day you can see the Wicklow Hills from here." She nods. "That's where I'd go."

There's a long silence, and it occurs to her that he might ask her to go with him, the two of them swimming to Ireland, Johnny Weissmuller and Esther Williams, matching each other stroke for stroke. Could he pass as Irish? she wonders. Could she? The thought is somehow seductive. And from there, where? Germany? Could she learn German, act German? She doubts it. America, then--yes! Who knows, in

America he might even pass as Welsh, with her help. What did they know of Welshness there? She'd be free to invent it. They'd travel as far as it took, find some place where the people had never heard of Wales. And not to escape Wales, she thought, but to
be
Welsh, him too, because no one else would know otherwise.

She gazes at him, waiting, but the question he asks at last is "Do you want me to go?" and she breathes, "Yes." It's the only answer, though for a second, such is the earnestness with which he asks, she imagines she's replying to that other imagined question.

He stands there for a moment, swaying slightly on his heels as if in a breeze, and then he leaves her, stooping against the dusk as if the descending dark might crush him. She watches him go with a sense of release, as of a secret finally spoken.

That night, she tells herself she'll be glad to be rid of him. Yet there's some misgiving nagging at her, nibbling at the edges of her satisfaction. She tries to concentrate on it, isolate it in her heart, and then it comes to her. She's jealous, of course. She wants him to escape, but most of all she wishes he could have taken her with him.

It makes her remember Rhys, her jealousy at his leaving. Is that why she didn't stop him? she wonders. Did she want him to go, to go for her? And suddenly it seems as if the Rhys who left, the Rhys who went--why, she'd have married that Rhys.

Poor thing, she thinks, he couldn't win.

But then it occurs to her that that Rhys, the Rhys who left, might not have wanted her any more.

The next day, she doesn't see the German, or the next, or the next, and by the fourth day--watching Arthur cutting the rams out of the flock and penning them for another season-- she concludes he's gone at last. But instead of filling her with the expected relief, the thought only makes her despair. She dreams of him that night, imagines him on a little boat out at

sea. The boat's oddly familiar, and it comes to her that it's the ship in a bottle he gave to Jim, and then she's on board herself, looking up at the frayed grey sail overhead, which reminds her of the hole in his shirt, and she wonders where it is. And then her hands are moving over his chest, his arms, looking for that little hole. He's stretched out before her on the sand now, waves lapping at their feet, and she's kneeling over him, lifting his limp arm, hunting for the hole in the folds and creases of his wet shirt, thinking,
I can mend that for you, I can mend it, if I can only find it
.

scape, it has come to Karsten, is as complicated as surrender. Not one act, one moment, so much as a

process. Escape followed by escape followed by escape, just as one surrender succeeds another and another. It's exhausting to think of.

From within the wire, he recalls, freedom always seemed so limitless, so infinite in its possibilities. The men in the

barracks would while away the sleepless nights talking of what they'd do after their release--the beers they'd drink, the schnitzel they'd eat, the baths they'd take. Freedom in their minds was silk sheets, pressed shirts, obliging women.

Karsten loved to listen to them, imagining them as guests at the grand hotel he'd manage one day. But of course, like his fantasy of a hotel, their dreams weren't of any life they'd lead, but of a life they promised to themselves after release. They were dreams of escape from the camp, to be sure, but also from their old lives. More than that, he thinks, lying in a ditch by a deserted lane, they were the dreams of conquerors, of the spoils of war. None of them had come close to such things at home--only briefly in France, for forty-eight hours at a time.

In fact, escape, the here and now of it, is poverty, not luxury.

It's being cold and wet and hungry. Oh, there'd been a brief moment of elation: the breeze in his hair at the top of the fence, the lurch in his stomach as he'd dropped to the ground, the look of naked astonishment on the faces pressed to the wire. And then Karsten had bolted into the night, dodging the guards and following the boys, bumping against them,

laughing with them, unrecognised in the night. Around the bend they'd scattered in the darkness and he'd gone his own way. He'd climbed at first, with some idea of getting to higher ground, some faith in his ability to move faster in mountainous terrain than anyone he knew.

There'd been no sign of pursuit, the guards charging after the boys if they could be bothered to go after anyone, and he thought that if the other prisoners kept quiet, he might not be missed until the next morning. But he'd been idle for so long, his muscles felt stiff and tight as he strode up the dark slope, and dropping down the far side, he began to realise that he had no food, no shelter, no idea what he was doing. He might have broken his ankle, even his neck, that first night, sliding down a long slope of scree in the dark, but he'd been lucky, had stumbled upon what he thought was a cave mouth, and pulled himself inside. He'd lain there that night, and only then had it come to him, what Jim had whispered at the wire, a name, her name. Esther.

Why of course!
he'd thought, laughing at the perfect

dreamlike inevitability of it. And then, miraculously, he'd slept, his deepest night of sleep in months, and on a bed of stone at that, only to be woken by the baying of dogs on the breeze, wondering if he'd merely dreamed her name. He'd drawn back into his lair and discovered that the cave he'd imagined

was no cave at all, but a tunnel, a mine shaft. Praying the dogs couldn't track his scent over rock, he'd retreated underground, only to get lost in a series of galleries. He'd stumbled around in them for hours, maybe a day or more, until he'd made out a dim light, hurried towards it, to find an old man snoring at the foot of a tall ladder, a bottle beside him.

Karsten had waited, starving, terrified his rumbling stomach would give him away, until the old fellow roused himself, and then Karsten had followed him, trusting him to know the way out. Karsten should have left him then, of course, struck out in

the opposite direction as soon as he emerged, blinking, into the grey dawn, but his stomach was now his compass, and instead he followed the fellow to his farmhouse.

It had seemed like fate to find the girl again, the coincidence, more than anything else, making him trust her that first morning. But afterwards, gone to ground again, he couldn't stop thinking about her, couldn't get away from the sense that talking to her was the closest thing to freedom he'd tasted since his escape.

But now she has told him to go.

Talking to her about his father has reminded him that his father never wanted him to go to sea. Karsten had been aggrieved by that; all his friends, sons of other fishermen, were expected to follow in their fathers' footsteps. But when

he'd pushed his father, all he'd say was "Have you ever seen a drowned man?" It had made Karsten think his father afraid, though later, after he was lost but his body never recovered, it occurred to him that his father was trying to spare him something, protecting him even in death.

He's not sure why he hasn't tried for Ireland, but once she says it, he wonders if he is afraid of drowning. If he returns to her, perhaps she'll think him a coward, and he can't bear that.

He leaves the mountains and climbs down to the coast, one foot pulled after the other, not using the lanes but crossing the fields, pushing through clumps of sheep or cattle, once outrunning a bull, squeezing himself into hedges to sleep. In the darkness he feels the slope flattening, and an hour later he's on sand again. He hates the feel of it underfoot, the yielding. He retraces his steps to the wrack line, following the dirty path of seaweed and jetsam in the starlight, until up ahead in the watery predawn gloom he sees the jumbled lines of tipped masts.

The boats are beached in the sucking mud, waiting for the tide to lift them, but he knows that with the tide will come their

owners. He can't move any of the larger vessels, but he manages to haul a dinghy through the mud, alternately pushing and pulling it to the water, his ankles sinking in the muck.

He shoves it through the surf, and when he feels his feet being lifted from the bottom, he scrambles over the stern and collapses in the bilgy bottom, breathing hard, letting the current pull him down the shore until the boat scrapes bottom again--a sandbar--and he unships the oars, begins to pull for the dark horizon. After what seems an hour, he looks up and sees a streaky brightening. He's heading west, at least, though over his shoulder, where he's_making for, is still pitch. And when the sun conies up, he can't see the shore, the beach, just the mountains behind it, rising up smokily into the clouds.

He thinks he's rowed the whole day when the sky darkens again, but looking up he sees storm clouds pressing down, feels the wind begin to pluck at him. He's drenched with rain first, and then the inky black waves start to slap the boat, break over it, the water so dark he thinks he must be stained by it. There's nothing to bail with, and in the gloom he feels his feet, then his ankles, then his calves grow cold.

Finally, in one slow, rising toss, the boat bucking beneath him like a live thing waking, he's in the water, the little vessel snatched out from under him like some joke. He's going to drown like his father and for a fleeting moment he is at peace. Died escaping, he thinks. Died trying. Died at sea. Honour restored. He thinks of his mother receiving the news, wonders if his body will ever be found. A splintered oar flies end over end above him, impales the surface with a great gulp not a yard from his head. It might have killed him on the spot--and in that second, gazing at it bobbing before him, he realises he doesn't want to die, clutches for the oar. He clings to it through the afternoon, and then the night, alone and yet feeling his father close to him, watching him, and some time in the

darkness it comes to him: it wasn't drowning that his father was afraid of, but seeing men drown. How many must he have watched over through his periscope. In the morning the misty curtain of dawn lifts over a line of grey peaks and he kicks for them, lets the tide shove him in.

The WicklowHills
, he thinks, licking the salt off his lips.

Relief breaks over him like a wave.

He lies on the beach, where water meets sand, for a long time, letting the surf lift and lower him. He drifts off to sleep like that, and when he awakens he's high and dry, the sand beneath his hands warm from the sun. The last time he went in the water was in France, before the invasion. It tastes the same, he thinks.

From his prone position he seems to see a pair of wide, dark eyes hanging over him, watching him, and then he focuses, sees that they're the firing slits of a bunker cemented into the cliffside. He lies very still, feels the morning sun warm as blood on his brow. Before him, then. To the east.

So, not Ireland after all.

He squints up at the bunker, staggers to his feet. No point in running. He walks towards the emplacement, hands up, waiting for the cry, waiting for the flash. It reminds him of the walk out of his own bunker, the wait for death, and it comes to him suddenly that it was the bravest thing he's ever done, surrendering. Only when he's staring point blank into the slit does he see that the bunker is empty, unmanned, disused, and he sinks down against the concrete and wraps his head in his hands.

Later, shivering in the wind, he lowers himself through the gun slit. Where better to hide while he recovers his strength? No one will think to look for him here. The bunker smells so familiar, it feels like coming home.

he's feeding the hens two mornings later, swinging her arm in long arcs to scatter the grain, skipping slightly to avoid

their pecking, when he walks out of the barn. Her fist tightens reflexively
on
the handful of feed in her grasp. He's smiling through his beard but stumbling a little, staggering--it takes her a moment to realise he's swaying, dancing, imitating her

steps with the hens. "Did you miss me?" he asks, reaching for her closed hand, raising it as if to twirl her, before she jerks away.

"Get off!"

He tries again, smiling, as if she's just a clumsy partner, and she flings the grain at his feet.

"What are you still doing here?"

She sees his smile waver, sees how forced it is, how fixed.

He looks like he might laugh, but hysterically.

The hens dart between them, and he nudges them aside. "I've nothing else for you," she tells him, though more than once since he's left, she's wished she'd cleared out the pantry for him. "No food," she repeats, enunciating the words slowly as if the problem is only one of language. It comes to her that