The Line Between Us (10 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I remembered how your mother bundled you off to Scotland for the summer after that and you didn’t find time to say goodbye, and I spent long days making up excuses for you to soothe myself. The bank holiday that August was the wettest one since 1879, which summed up just about everything. Samuelson had me cleaning out the glass houses ready for the winter planting and the rain sluiced down the window panes unceasingly and I felt utterly submerged.

All afternoon the colours of the garden leached together, the greys and browns and greens stippled in the downpour and I kept hard at it, scrubbing the terracotta tiles on the floor, wiping down the slate-topped work benches, sorting out the pots and trays. Around teatime the weather lifted, a few raindrops falling from time to time as an afterthought, scattering over the glass like broken beads. I had taken to running to recover my fitness and I made up my mind to run the long way home around the perimeter of the estate. I set off through the beech wood down to the Drowning Pool, the rope swing hanging still above the water, my life defined by absences, and was halfway up the hill the other side when the rain came scumbling down all over again. Within minutes I was drenched, my shirt sticking grittily to my skin and my boots waterlogged. I took shelter under a tree, but there was no sign of it letting up, so on an impulse, wet through, I decided to run up through the vineyard and take cover in the fermentation shed. I sprinted past the rows of vines laden with dripping fruit and skidded to a halt outside the shed. Panting, I hesitated, my lungs raw with the exertion. I slid the huge door open, stepped inside and pulled it closed behind me.

A bruised beam of light filtered through the windows high beneath the eaves. I leaned against the wall to recover myself, taking my bearings in the half darkness. Rainwater was trickling from my hairline and I shook my head, sending the drops flying. I wiped my forehead on my wet sleeve then searched for my handkerchief, but couldn’t find it. The breath was quieter in my chest, but as it subsided, I started to hear other breathings. I peered deeper into the interior, my eyes adjusting to the pewter gloom. Nothing. Then, in the quietness, I heard the shudder of a pent up exhalation. I made my way around the great oak vat and there I saw them: Samuelson and Mrs Brown, coupling on a pile of sacks. He was reared up over her, she had her legs gripped around his waist, and her skirts flung back so far I could glimpse her stocking tops. She twisted her head round and saw me, but she was already far beyond herself, hurrying and hurrying, her face stretched wide and her teeth bared. I leapt back as if I’d been scalded, stumbling over the ladder propped against the vat, as Samuelson roared himself inside her. I got myself out of the shed I don’t know how, out into the rain, and all I could think of was Brown sitting in the dugout with his mug of tea, and what the Bible said about adultery, and three o’clock, when lunch is over. What would I say when I went to get the paper? How would I look him in the face? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had witnessed enough living in a rural valley – the dogs in the village, the sheep tupping – to have a rough idea, but I never pictured anything quite like that. The abandonment of it. The disregard for everything.

I walked back through the vineyard with the wind gone from my sails, past the shuttered house and along the driveway up the hill away from Nanagalan, oblivious to the falling rain. I couldn’t rid myself of the sight of Mrs Brown’s mouth, so distorted; it went round and round inside my head. I couldn’t forget what I had seen of the thrust and snarl of love.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I remembered it seemed the longest summer of my short life, although I knew nothing of long summers then: the summer of rectitude, of saying nothing and thinking everything and how polite we all were to one another, Brown and Mrs Brown and I; how considerate, how treacherous. Samuelson was a law unto himself: with the family away, he did the minimum, so that moss grew in the lawns and the vines stooped with unpicked fruit and I fought on every front to keep things tidy for when you came home. I couldn’t picture what Scotland would be like and got a book out of the library and then, feeling abject, I took it back unopened. I read Walter Scott instead,
Ivanhoe
and
Waverley
and to my running I added a programme of self improvement – I took an evening class in social history to give myself a chance of besting Ted and busied myself with doing jobs at home for Ma – the steam from the kettle when I was ill had lifted the paper in the bedroom so I redecorated for her. I bought a box of old maps second hand from the thrift shop and pasted them over the walls and lay in bed imagining all the journeys I might make, but in spite of all that, in spite of it all, I was eaten up with thoughts of you, a consumption of the heart, when the whole point was not to think: not to fall sicker, but to recover.

Most of the cricket team came up to help with the grape harvest, except for Gwilym Jones, whose back was bad. Late summer eased into autumn with a perverse alchemy that turned gold to bronze and I made a bonfire on the cinder patch in the corner of the kitchen garden, not far from the well in case of unforeseen eventualities. I wheeled over barrow loads of clippings and prunings, the dry stalks of the runner beans, cabbage stubs, old roots; all the leavings. After the wet weather it took a while to light and I had to borrow some paraffin from Brown. There was as much steam as smoke, the salt smell dissolved to almost nothing in the air and I had to search for the scent of it. I leaned against the stone wall of the well, listening to the distant workings of the water far below and the gunshots sounds of the fire as branches cracked and seeds exploded. The wind shifted and the smoke reshaped itself and I saw you in the shimmer of it. I screwed up my eyes to be sure. You hurried towards the tool shed and peered inside, then turned and scanned the walled enclosure and my heart performed the trick that it had learned: contracting and expanding at the same time, so that I was full of you and empty too. Happy and sad, bitter and sweet, the contradictions obvious and complicated. You saw me, and you came towards me and I searched your face for signs of the stifled joy that I was feeling and saw an embarrassment that I didn’t know how to read.

“Hello,” you said.

“Hello.” I examined the corduroy covering my knees in minute detail, scratching the nap in one direction and then the other with my thumbnail.

“I’m back.”

“Yes.”

“From Scotland. We’ve been staying in the Highlands. Near Inverness. My father has relations …”

“Yes.” I couldn’t look at you. I traced the brittle lace of some lichen clinging to the mortar of the well: green and silver, gold and green.

“I was looking for Samuelson,” you said, “actually.”

“He’s somewhere,” I shrugged, thinking of the fermentation shed, the pile of sacks, although in fact Samuelson had been working like a demon for the last week or so, getting everything ready, making up for lost time. “Would you like me to find him?” I stood up.

“No – don’t go –” you spoke in a rush that you might have thought revealed too much, for you added, “I can find him myself. It’s not urgent. Mother wants to know about the vendange, that’s all …”

Cautiously, I allowed my gaze to switch to you, to the neckline of your dress, a thickly woven cream material that I guessed was silk. I could see the stitching, tight and straight. “How was Scotland?”

“Oh, you know …”

I kept my thoughts to myself about that, because of course I didn’t know.

“We stopped in Birmingham on the way home. Mother took me to the Rep. To see a play. It has a very good reputation, the Birmingham Rep. She said it was a part of my education.”

“What did you see?”

“I thought my education was just about over and done with, but it seems not,” you said, biting your lip. “Something called
Bird in Hand
.” You came and perched on the well beside me and fished out your cigarettes and this time I lit one for you.

“Was it good?” I handed you back your lighter. “The play?”

“It was all about class, Ifor,” you said. “I think she particularly wanted me to see it.” A piece of wood in the bonfire split open sending out a fusillade of sparks. A fleck landed on your sleeve and you started brushing at it. “Boy meets girl,” you said. “Rich boy meets poor girl – not like –” You broke off and gave a small, evasive sigh. “I know that she won’t be happy if she gets tangled up with a man out of her own station.” One of the characters said that – her father, I think. The message came over, loud and clear.” You drew on your cigarette and then exhaled, in your own, swift way, glancing at me through the filmy, smoke-edged air. “If only you were –” you said, but you ducked your head and didn’t finish.

I reached for the fork to stoke the fire, making the flames flinch then leap with a bitter sense of the lack in myself, a lack I had learned at my mother’s knee. “All I want is for you to be happy.”

You contemplated your fingernails. “Do you think I’ll be happy in Switzerland?”

“Switzerland?” I said, at once alert.

“My mother’s sending me to finishing school. It’s what we do, apparently. In Lausanne.”

I mouthed some kind of a reply and there was a stumbling silence and then I looked at you and your eyes were liquid bright, brimful. “I’m sorry,” you whispered, “I do – I would have –” you said, your voice so small, so folded up and tucked away inside you that I could hardly hear it, “feelings, if …”

I stared at my boots while my heart performed the trick that it had learnt. “Lausanne,” I echoed and then I nodded. I could feel a terrible charring inside me. “A finishing for both of us,” I said.

*

All at once the momentum of my jump seemed to spend itself and I started to rise, struggling to scale the black wall of water. My boots were so heavy I thought there must be dying men gripping them, dragging me down deeper in order to save themselves. They were laced so tightly I couldn’t kick them off. I kicked and kicked and kicked; I started tearing my uniform instead, ripping the buttons off my jacket, clawing the jacket off my back. I surfaced, inhaled a wild gasp of diesel, and went under again. On the cusp of life I was, right on the cusp. I knew it was now or never. I kicked; I pounded the water with my boots made of lead and came up again, throwing my head back to breathe, gulping and gulping the greasy air. Through a smear of oil I could see the sea all silver around me: thousands of tiny fish like litter, everywhere. I thought it was the fuel that had killed them, but then I heard the knife blade sound of bullets hitting the water. The Jerry planes were back, gunning the dying. We were dead men anyway and they were firing at us with their machine guns. What kind of world is this, I thought; what kind of world?

One little lapse like that and death will get you. In a second I was back under the water again, but as I spiralled lazily, spread like a leaf, drifting down and down, so tempted to let go, some words from the Bible, dinned into me at Sunday School when I was a little lad seeped into my head: “I will bring thee again into this land …” If ever I needed some chapel comfort, it was now. “I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest. I will not leave thee.”

I breached the surface once again with someone’s boot in my face and I was knocked backwards. I steadied myself in the black soup. The bloke was floating with his head off at an angle; dead. He was wearing a lifejacket. Loads of men jumped and their rigid cork lifejackets broke their necks when they hit the water. I knew I’d never get it off him, my fingers were rope-burnt and raw, so I clambered up as best I could and half straddled him. His eyes were open with the surprise of it all and I put my skinless hand across his face to stop him staring at me.

The
Lancastria
was almost gone, the steel petals of her propeller in silhouette against the sky. On the wedge of her hull were maybe a thousand people. I was still so close that I could see a fellow pat his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter and settle for one last smoke. A woman took off her life belt and threw it to a young lad in the final stages of drowning, his arms scissoring the waves each time he went under. Someone else started singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’ – you could tell from the ripeness of his voice that he was a Taff and soon other men were caught by the thread of his song. The ship was sliding further into the water. I could feel the suck of the sea pulling her deeper. I knew I wouldn’t survive being swallowed again. I began to paddle the raft of the dead man beneath me. I didn’t look back.

I must have been in the water for three hours; it might have been more. The slick of oil was burning in places and through the smoke I could see a lifeboat going round and round in circles, crazily, because the men were too stunned to row in time. A lone voice was singing, “There’ll Always Be an England”, a fine tenor voice, he had. Above us the seagulls were keening in the desolate sky. There was so much wreckage that the ship didn’t take down with her – chairs, boxes, a ladder, planks of wood of every shape and size, a broken piece of banister, all of it jostling for space with endless bodies in the huge sea. People were dying every minute. A few yards from me was a table; I thought I’d paddle my way across to it, but one of the Tommies said in all politeness that there was only room for the wounded to hold on.

All I could think of was getting myself home to Nanagalan so I could put right the wrong between us. It was the only thing that mattered. It was what saved me from drowning.