Resistance (2 page)

Turning away from the window, she pulled her nightdress over her head. Again she felt the cold air on her skin. The dress’s neckline held her hair for a moment, then let it go all at once so it fell heavily about her shoulders. She sat on the edge of the bed, put on her knickers, a vest, and began balling a pair of woollen stockings over her hand, her forehead puckered in a frown. Catching herself in the dressing-table mirror she paused and ran a finger up the bridge of her nose between her eyebrows. A slight crease was forming there. She’d only noticed it recently; a short line that remained even when her brow was relaxed. Still sitting on the edge of the bed she gathered up her hair and, turning her profile to the mirror, held it behind her head with one hand, exposing her neck. That crease was the only mark on her face. Other than that her skin was still smooth. She turned the other way with both hands behind her head now. She should like a wedding to go to. Or a dance, a proper dance where she could wear a dress and her hair up like this. That dress Tom bought for her on their first anniversary. She couldn’t have worn it more than twice since. Tom. Where was he? She dropped her hair and pulled on her stockings. Reaching into the dressing-table drawer, she put on a blouse and began doing up the buttons, the crease on her forehead deepening again.

Bad news had been filtering into the valley every day for the last few weeks. First the failed landings in Normandy. Then the German counterattack. The pages of the newspapers were dark with the print of the casualty lists. London was swollen with people fleeing north from the coast. They had no phone lines this far up, and apart from Maggie’s farm, which sat higher in the valley, the whole area was dead for radio reception. But news of the war still found its way to them. The papers, often a couple of days old, the farrier when he came, Reverend Davies on his fortnightly visits to The Court, all of them brought a trickle of stories from the changing world beyond
the valley. Everyone was unnerved but Sarah knew these stories had unsettled Tom more than most. He rarely spoke of it, but for him they threw a shadow in the shape of his brother, David. David was three years younger than Tom. He’d had no farm of his own so he’d been conscripted to fight. Two months ago he was declared missing in action and, while Tom maintained an iron resolve that his brother would appear again, the sudden shift in events had shaken his optimism.

For Sarah news of the war still seemed to have an unreal quality, even when a few days ago the names of the battlegrounds changed from French villages to English ones. There were marks of the conflict all about her: the patchwork of ploughed fields down by the river once kept for grazing; the boys from her schooldays, and the farmhands, many of them gone for years now. But unlike Tom she didn’t have a relative in the fighting. Her own older brothers had been absent from her life ever since they’d argued with her father and broken from the family home when she was still a girl. They’d bought a farm together outside Brecon, large enough to have saved them both from the army. So Sarah didn’t possess that vital thread connecting her to the war that brought the news stories so vividly to life for so many others. There were women here, in the valley, who had lost sons, and in the early years she’d seen other mourning mothers and wives in Longtown and Llanvoy. But even these women, with their swollen eyes and dark dresses, seemed to have passed into a different place, a parallel world of grief. The sight of them evoked sympathy in Sarah, sometimes a flush of silent gratitude that Tom was in a reserved occupation, but never empathy.

Only once in the last five years had the war really impacted upon her. When the bomber crashed up on the bluff. Then, suddenly, it had become physical. She’d been woken by the whine of its dive followed by the terrible land-locked thunder of its explosion. Tom held her afterwards, speaking softly into her hair, “Shh, bach, shh now.” In the morning they’d all gone up to look. Tom and she took the ponies. When they got there the Home Guard and the police
from Hereford had already put a cordon around the wreckage so they just stood at a distance and watched, the thin rope singing and whipping in the hilltop wind. Beyond the crashed plane she’d glimpsed a tarpaulin laid over a shallow hump. “One of the crew,” Tom had said with a jerk of his chin. She’d agreed with him. “Yes, must be,” although she’d thought the hump looked too small, too short, to be the body of a man. The ponies shifted uneasily under them, pawing the ground, tossing their heads. They were disturbed by this sculpture of twisted metal that had appeared on their hill, by this charred and complicated limb half embedded in the soil as if it had erupted from the earth, not fallen from the sky. And so was Sarah. She’d heard about the Blitz, and about Liverpool and Coventry, its cathedral burning through the night. She’d even seen their own bombers out on training runs. But she’d never seen an enemy plane before. Usually they were just a distant drone to her, a long revolving hum above the clouds as they returned from a raid on Swansea or banked for home after emptying their payloads over Birmingham. But now, here was one of them, on the hill above her farm. Massive and perfunctory. So ordinary in its blunt engineering. And under that tarpaulin was a real German. A man from over there who had flown over here to kill them.

She dressed quickly in a long skirt and cardigan and went downstairs to pull on her boots in the porch by the kitchen door. As she bent to lace them, she noticed Tom’s weren’t there. Not just his work boots but his summer ones too; both pairs were missing. She stared for a moment at the space where they’d been, four vague outlines in a scattering of dust blown in under the door. Leaning forward on her knee, she touched one of these empty footprints as if it could tell her where he’d gone. But there was nothing, just the cold stone against her fingertips. She shook her head. What was she doing? She stood up, took her coat from the hook on the back of the door, pushed her arms through its sleeves, and drew its belt tight about her waist. Lifting the door’s latch she stepped out into the brightness of the cobbled yard where the day fell in on her with a cool wash of air. She breathed in deeply, feeling the first metallic
tang of autumn at the back of her throat. Shards of sunlight reflected off the stones. The dogs barked faster and louder to greet her. She moved towards them and they settled back on their haunches, stepping the ground with their forepaws, quivering with anticipation as if a voltage ran under their skins.

The dogs, let loose of their chains, wove and slipped about her as she walked up the slope across the lower paddock and through the coppiced wood behind the farm. The extra hours of restraint had charged them with a frantic energy and they raced ahead of her, ears flat, before doubling back, their sorrowful eyes looking up at hers, their heads low and their coats slickly black in the dappled sunlight. Sarah, in contrast, felt her legs heavy and awkward beneath her. She took the slope with more pace, pressing the heels of her palms into her thighs with each step. Twice she found herself stopping to rest against the trunk of a tree. She was twenty-six years old, worked every day and was usually through this wood before she knew it, but this morning it was as if one of the dogs’ chains had snagged around her feet and was dragging her back down the hill with every step she took.

Ten minutes of this stop-start walking brought her out of the wood and across their upper land until she stood on the edge of the top field where the cultivated valley gave to the hill, the mapped countries of bracken tapering to meet the sheep-cropped grass. She sat down with this bracken at her back. Picking at a few fronds, already rusting at their tips, she looked out over the valley.

When Sarah was a girl her mother had once described this range of long hills as a giant outstretched hand. It wasn’t an original description—Sarah had often heard people refer to the “Black Mountains Hand”—but then her mother was a cautious woman who’d rarely said anything that hadn’t been tested in the voice of someone else first. She’d had a deep fondness, a belief almost, in such figurative language. As she got older these phrases became her handholds, a semiotic map by which she navigated her way
through the days, weeks, and seasons. Her mother had died two years ago, but Sarah had inherited this map, and she still found herself repeating her sayings nearly every day. This weather for example. Despite the high mackerel clouds and the brightness of the day a soft rain had begun to fall, folds of moisture turning the air milky. “The devil’s beating his wife today,” that’s how her mother would have translated such weather; one hand on her hip, nodding at the view out the kitchen window, “Yes, my girl,” she’d say, turning to Sarah at her side, “the devil’s beating his wife for sure.” Sarah had never understood what connection there could be between these autumn showers and the devil beating his wife, but she knew what her mother meant. There was something odd about this kind of rain, as if the calibration of the seasons had slipped, become unbalanced. Something unnatural about it, something wrong.

She looked out over the valley, hoping to see Tom somewhere in the view. But there was nothing. The whole valley was still, much stiller than it should have been at this time of day. William Jones usually had his tractor out by now. It was the first and only one in the valley and he was always finding an excuse to use it, petrol rationing or not. But she couldn’t see it anywhere in his fields. Or hear it. Viewed through the gauze of the sunlit rain the valley looked like a painted landscape.

Sarah called the dogs. “Fly! Seren! Cumby!”

Fly came and sat nervously at her side. Sarah stroked her, drawing a hand across her head, over her ears, and down her damp neck. She could feel the dog’s muscles bunched tightly over the bone.

“Shh, cwtch ci,” she said, trying to relax her.

Maybe Tom had gone into town. But what for? They’d been told not to hoard or stock up on supplies, and they had everything they needed on the farm anyway. She still couldn’t remember anything of last night; why was that? She tried to picture herself in the house. She remembered cooking their meal. She’d burnt her calf on the oven door. She could still feel the tightness of the burn mark under
her woollen stocking. They’d taken tea by the fire in the front room. Tom hadn’t spoken much, but then he often didn’t.

Fly slipped away from under her hand and trotted over the field to find Seren. Sarah watched her go then looked out at the valley once more, as if by looking hard enough she could conjure Tom from its fields and trees. Drawing a deep breath, she called his name into the morning air.

“Tom!”

Her voice echoed off the facing valley wall and immediately she felt stupid, childish, calling for him like that. The dogs pricked their ears and began running back up the slope towards her, their tongues hanging out the side of their mouths. She listened, but there was just the fading of her own voice and then the sticky breaths of Seren and Fly panting on either side of her. She stood to rise above the sound of them and called for Tom again, straining to hear a reply beyond her own echo. But again there was nothing. Just the intermittent bleat of a ewe, a blackbird mining its notes in a nearby tree, and underscoring everything, the distant rustle of the river running its course through the valley below.

Tom didn’t hear Sarah call for him but Maggie Jones did. She was standing in a field beside the river, one hand resting on the angular rump of a cow, when she heard Sarah shout from higher up the valley. Like Sarah she too was out looking for her husband. She’d checked the barn and the outhouses, the toolshed, but found no trace of him. The tractor was still in the yard, fresh soil stuck to the cleats of its wheels, but William was nowhere to be seen. She wasn’t worried. There was always work to be done somewhere on the farm. But then she came to the field by the river and found the cows. The three of them and their calves were crowded around the gate that opened onto the lane, licking at their nostrils, their breath
steaming in the cold morning air. Their unmilked udders swung heavily between their legs.

In thirty years of marriage, Maggie had never known William to leave the cows unmilked. His father had been a dairy farmer and William had inherited his habit, if not his herd. Through sickness, holidays, bad weather, even on the morning of their wedding day, he’d been up with the dawn to usher them through the lane to the milking shed, then back again two hours later. A jostling, shitting, pissing ebb and flow you could set your watch by, as regular as any tidal chart.

Lifting the gate off its latch, she shouldered the two heifers at the front back a few steps, their hooves sucking in the mud as she pushed through to look over the rest of the field. It was empty. She sighed. She’d have to do the cows herself. She’d planned to go into Llanvoy this morning, and take some butter up to Edith. There were potatoes to be dug. But now she’d have to do the milking. William knew her back was playing up. Where the hell was he? She tried another sigh, heavier this time, but it was no use, her irritation lacked conviction. A more worrying thought was welling beneath it, draining her exasperation of its usual energy. She looked out at the open field again, retracing the last few days as she did; things William had said, things he hadn’t. The thought welled larger in her mind. She tried dismissing the possibility as ridiculous. William simply wouldn’t do that and she would surely have known about it if he did. But then Maggie heard Sarah call for Tom, her voice carried down the valley on the still air. It was all the confirmation she needed, and standing there among the cows with their swollen udders the thought broke within her. She knew with a terrible and sudden certainty that her husband wasn’t just up on the hill checking the sheep or out in the fields patching a hedge. She should have known as soon as she’d seen the cows, she realised that now. Known that wherever William had gone he wasn’t coming back.

“You stupid bugger,” she said under her breath, hitting the flank of the cow beside her with the heel of her fist. “You daft, stupid bugger William Jones.” The cow shifted its weight and she felt its hip
joint move under her hand. She rested her forearm along its back and her head upon her arm. “At your age. You bloody stupid bugger.” The trees beside the river blurred and multiplied in her vision. She blinked and brought them back into focus. Sarah’s voice filtered down to her a second time, calling for Tom again. She looked up the hill in her direction. It was a beautiful day, a blue sky despite the light rain, the berries clustered red and thick in the hawthorn. Just a few high clouds. Up on the hill Sarah called a third time. The cows would have to wait. Everything would have to wait. Maggie pushed her way back through the small herd, opened the gate, and, closing it behind her, started walking up the lane towards Upper Blaen. She’s still young, she told herself as she went, still a girl really. She’d have to break this to her gently. But she wouldn’t lie to her either, she promised herself that. To lie to Sarah would be the worst thing she could do, to tell her it was going to be all right. Because it wasn’t, Maggie knew that now. She’d heard the news on the wireless these past days. It wasn’t going to be all right. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be; they could still be prepared, they could still carry on, however long the men were away.