Love and War (19 page)

All in all, I’m in a turmoil of love and anxiety and guilt ‘How are you?’ my mother asks when I get home. ‘Me? Oh I’m fine.’

My mother is well again and very busy with six calves, thirteen piglets and several broods of chicks and ducklings.

Alfredo has forged ahead with his English by this time reading and understanding newspaper headlines and talking well. Unfortunately it’s much more difficult for him to get out in the evenings; the friend who covered for him having been transferred to another camp. However he seems to find it necessary to give Gino and Martino some help and advice several times a week, so we still see him fairly often.

On the Saturday after Easter, I watch him and my mother mending a fence. He’s several inches shorter than my father was, but he has the very same way of tackling a job, the same unhurried way of walking round, studying the problems from every angle, the same economy of movement when he gets started, the same easy grace. Every time I see him I’m reminded of my father.

When the fence is finished, my mother goes to feed the calves in the upper field and he comes up to the house alone.

I offer to make him a cup of tea but he says he wants only my company in talk.

‘The war is over already in six months,’ he says, ‘and then I must go to my country to see my sons.’

‘How old are they?’

‘In between boy and man. Not old enough for the army.’

‘Do they work on the land?’

He shrugs his shoulders. ‘I have no letters for many months. Perhaps they work, perhaps not.’

‘They’ll be very glad to see you.’

He frowns. ‘Glad? I don’t know glad.’

‘Happy. They’ll be happy to see you.’

‘Yes. Also, they’ll be happy and glad to see your mama.’

Does the poor deluded man imagine that my mama is going to go with him to Italy? She’s never been out of Wales except on a day trip to Shrewsbury. Which she didn’t enjoy.

‘Is she going with you to Italy?’

He smiles at this ridiculous notion. ‘No, no. After the war is all over, my sons will come here.’

‘Good.’

‘To see my wedding and my home.’

Gwynn was right. He said they’d marry when the war was over.

‘Of course. Very good. Perhaps one of them will stay here with you?’

‘No. I think this country is too cold for young men to be happy and glad.’

‘But not too cold for you?’

He lifts his chest and throws out his arms. ‘But I have a wife and much work, I think.’

‘I hope you like my idea,’ he says then.

‘Oh, I do.’

I go for a walk in the afternoon. It’s sunny, but the wind is cold. The buds on the sycamore trees are shell-pink and almost ready to burst open. The hedges are a faint delicate green and there are violets and celandines everywhere.

I feel as emotional as I used to when I was fifteen. Then, I knew that the word for the mood threatening to overwhelm me was ‘yearning’, but what I was yearning for, I was never quite sure. For love I suppose; I certainly never wanted adventure or travel or money or to get away from home. Now at least I know why I’m so close to tears; I love Gwynn and can’t have him. I bang my fist against the trunk of a tree. We could be happy together. We’re well-suited, with similar backgrounds and ideas and ideals. We’re moved by the same things. The same things make us laugh.

He says he loves me. Perhaps it’s a love a man feels for a younger woman when he’s been married for twenty years, something essentially trivial which he’ll indulge in just as long as it doesn’t threaten his marriage. I don’t think so. When he says, ‘I love you. You love me,’ there seems a weight of truth in his words. I choose to believe in his love, but I must also accept that he can’t leave his wife. Ay, there’s the rub.

I know I could leave Huw, but that’s different, because he’s young enough to start a new life. I’m sure that I’ll never live with him again. That makes me sad, too; sad and angry at the mistake we made, at the sheer stupidity of it all; the way we let one day and another day follow a first almost unconsidered meeting, until the stranglehold of all those days led to our marriage. I’ve felt bitter about it often enough, but here on home ground, in the shelter of this round-backed mountain, I feel at my lowest ebb.

Last term, I contrived to see Gwynn for a few moments every day; his loving glances sustained me. We had a longer time together every Monday after the portrait-painting and every Wednesday evening he met my bus and walked home with me. It was something – a great deal – though much less than I wanted. I wanted to risk an out-and-out affair with him, I admit it, but I accepted that he had more to lose, and of course, admired his loyalty even while suffering for it.

Next term, he’ll be in the army and I’ll lose contact with him. It will be his wife he’ll write to, and how will I bear it? I close my eyes against the sudden dazzle of tears.

My self-pity sickens me and I make an effort to switch my thoughts to my mother’s affairs, to get some pleasure from the fact that her life now looks full of promise; Alfredo seems hard-working, warm-hearted and uncomplicated. If only his prediction – that the war will be over in six months – comes true. Everyone is waiting for news of the invasion. Ilona has a school-friend living in Worthing who says the whole South Coast is swarming with American soldiers.

Down by the brook, the ferns are unfurling their golden-green and a robin sings a full-throated courting song.

When I walk home the wind has dropped and the rain is full of melting sunshine.

We have bacon and eggs for supper. Rationing, for my mother, means going short of tea and sugar, which we’d always gone short of because of the cost. Of eggs, butter, cheese and meat she has plenty and plenty of home-grown fruit and vegetables. She gives me little quick, sideways glances as she eats, but as usual, says very little.

‘I like Alfredo,’ I say, when I realise that she’s not going to broach the subject. ‘He’s a good worker and he’s interesting and lively.’

‘Your father was an exceptional man and a poet,’ she says, as though to bring the conversation to an end before it has a chance to begin.

‘I know that. That’s not in question. I knew him for years.’

She closes her eyes against my flippancy.

‘I know he was,’ I continue, more seriously. ‘But Alfredo is exceptional too. For instance, he’s learnt English very fast.

She frowns at this, as though what she wants from me is greater loyalty to my father. ‘He already knew more than he admitted to you, girl. You made him nervous, that first time.’

‘I must say, I’m quite taken by him. But of course, if you’re not, that’s the end of it. You’re the one, after all, who’s got herself involved with him.’

I finish eating, lay my knife and fork neatly together as she likes me to, and try to look as though the conversation is now closed. ‘I’d like a piece of cheese, please. Or is there pudding?’

‘When did you or your father ever go short of pudding?’

‘Never.’

‘Rice pudding, bread and butter pudding, rhubarb fool, egg custard, Eve’s pudding, jam sponge, blackberry tart and cream.’

‘Your blackberry tart! That alone is worth coming over from Italy for.’

‘Whatever are you talking about, now?’

‘Those sons of his. He said something about them coming over on a visit.’

She flings her head back. ‘That’s all a lot of nonsense. When the war is over, the man will go back to his own country where he belongs.’

‘Yes. But he intends to come back here afterwards. He may find there’s more for him here than in his own country.’

She goes to the pantry to fetch me some bread and butter pudding left over from our midday meal. It smells of vanilla and eggs.

‘It’s your cooking he’ll come back for,’ I tell her. ‘My bread and butter pudding tastes like soggy bread and butter, but yours is angel food.’

She doesn’t eat pudding – she never has – but enjoys watching me eating mine and doesn’t speak until I’ve finished.

‘On the other hand,’ she says, ‘I don’t think your father would want me to be lonely for the rest of my life.’

‘He wouldn’t. When he was ill, he was terribly concerned about all the extra work you had to do.’

‘He was concerned about you, too. Don’t ever forget that.’

‘I won’t.’

‘And don’t scrape your plate like that, girl. It’s not good manners.’

‘Why not? It shows appreciation.’

‘It seems as though you’re hinting for more.’

‘I am.’

‘Tch, tch, tch.’ She loves it when I behave like a child.

‘Also,’ I say, ‘he wouldn’t like the thought of the farm being neglected. How could you possibly manage here on your own when Gino and Martino go back to Italy?’

She doesn’t answer, but studies her small work-worn hands.

‘I couldn’t get married in a Roman Catholic church,’ she says after a long silence. ‘That’s definite. It’s something I couldn’t bring myself to do. It wouldn’t be a marriage for me.’

‘You wouldn’t have to. You could get married in chapel.’

‘Oh no, I don’t think chapel would be a proper sort of marriage for a Roman Catholic.’

‘I’m sure it would. You might both have to go to his church for some sort of ceremony afterwards, but that wouldn’t kill you. Not if you were already married. Properly married.’

‘And I suppose he’d have to go to confession, too, because of marrying a Christian.’

I look hard at her. Yes, she’s completely serious.

‘It’s been a lovely day today, anyway,’ she says. ‘Spring again after so much death and destruction. And Gino planted two rows of potatoes this morning and Martino carried manure and dug a trench for the runner beans and the new hens have settled and we’ll be able to let the calves out now that the fence is mended. It seems silly to live in the future when April is here and all May untouched.’

After washing-up, we go out to watch the resident owl.

People who claim that it rains every day in Wales may be fairly accurate, but they never comment on how fine the evenings are, when the clouds open and the hills are bathed in a warm apricot light and oak and alder and ash are claret and copper.

‘Mam, shall we call the new calves, Claret and Copper?’

‘No, no, they’re Meg and Daisy. Claret and Copper indeed.’ We watch the owl gliding, silver-white and silent, against the sickle moon. We watch him pouncing on some little creature and rising up again in one continuous movement. ‘Look. Now he’ll go onto that ledge on the cowshed roof and watch, now, how he’s shifting the mouse from his claws to his beak, so that he can make a tidy landing back in the nest. There. Beautiful. It’s a funny thing, but he doesn’t mind me one bit. I could climb up the ladder and have a good look at his wife and chicks, but if you went near he’d probably have your eyes out.’

‘You’ve been telling me that for years and I’ve been telling you for years that nothing would induce me to climb up to see his old nest.’

‘That’s all right, then.’

We come into the house again, blinking and shivering. My mother sits by the lamp mending stockings for an hour and then goes to bed.

I stay up until eleven – very late by country standards – and when I finally go upstairs, I’m not at all sleepy. I look through my old school books trying to find something to read, but fail to get interested in anything.

I get undressed and when I’m in my nightgown, sit in front of the small brown-flecked mirror brushing my hair. By candlelight I look interesting, my face bony and shadowed. A woman very nearly beautiful. I think of Celine’s portrait. She said she wanted ten sittings; she’s already had seven.

I’ve still not been allowed to see it. Gwynn says the painting of the dark blue dress is excellent, but that my face and body are rather lifeless. Perhaps that’s how she wants to see me: a dummy. I wonder if she’s jealous of me? The thought makes me tremble.

Last night, I dreamed about the war, a frightening dream which seemed to be full of smoke and rotten smells so that when I woke I had to rush to the window to take in gulps of the cold mountain air. I think I was in the trenches of the last war – what account had I read to make it so vivid: the grey mud, the grey corpses, the rats? – but the wounded man I was fighting to save wasn’t Huw, but my father. ‘Air,’ he was saying. ‘Give me air,’ and I, with my bare hands, was trying to dig the clayey earth away from him, knowing that he was dying and that I was helpless to save him. My father wasn’t in the last war, though Llew, his younger brother was, and died on the Somme in 1916.

I can’t eat any breakfast this morning, thinking of the men, the many men so beautiful, who are living my sulphurous dream, with no waking from it. ‘Pray for Huw’, I tell my mother as she sets off for chapel.

‘I always do,’ she says, ‘And for you, too.’

All day, my dream is more real than real life. I listen to ‘Forces Favourites’ from some undisclosed place in the South of England. I feel awed and humbled by the bravery of the soldiers, by their cheerfulness as they face the certainty of battle, the possibility of death or mutilation.

I’m sick at heart and full of pity for Huw. But I can’t love him.