The Line Between Us (12 page)

“Have one of these,” said Brown, more kindly, nudging the packet of pork scratchings in my direction. I helped myself to one, politely; it had a single orange bristle protruding through the rind.

“I’ll break my teeth on this,” I said, starting to chew. “I’ll be at the dentist’s tomorrow, not the chapel.”

Brown sipped his drink. “You might think,” he said, “that hearts and loaves are one and the same, with a half being better than none at all.”

I swallowed. I picked up my glass, slippery with condensation and some of the cider splashed on to the table. I was about to wipe it with my sleeve, but he rummaged in his pocket and produced a handkerchief.

“But you’d be wrong. Half a heart isn’t enough for anyone to live on, not properly, not in the long run.” He regarded me steadily and I stopped dabbing at the table and gave the handkerchief back to him. He stowed it away in his pocket. “I know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m very fond of Jenny,” I began, but he shook his head vigorously as though I ought to know better.

“Fond doesn’t begin to cover all those promises you’re about to make: for better, for worse, in sickness and in health. It doesn’t come close.” He drank several gulps from his glass and wiped his mouth. “Fond isn’t worth the paper that it’s written on, if you want my opinion.”

“I love her, in my own way, and I’ll be a good husband,” I said. “I’ve made up my mind. I will.”

“Ifor –” he exclaimed. “If you were my boy, I’d –” He tailed off and fell to looking out of the window with its blackened metal frame and its thickened glass and its bleary view of the street beyond, his eyes hooded and remote. “If you were my boy …” he said again, more benevolently this time; wistfully, almost. He reached across the table and held his hand out to me gruffly and I laid mine in his for a second or two.

“You be sure that you are a good husband,” he said, giving my hand a shake. We picked up our glasses with faint embarrassment, then drank our cider and nothing more was said.

I remembered the photographs more than the day itself; the proof that I had married Jenny there in black and white. The images seemed to overlay my memory, reducing our wedding to a series of snapshots: the confetti captured as it fluttered through the air, Jenny flinging her flowers towards Delyth so that she would be the next to marry, the way our families flanked us in the formal pictures, not just witnesses but reinforcements.

I was vehement in the taking of my vows and Jenny’s eyes were round with hope and I could feel her sensible presence soften beside me as I said them. I knew that I could honour her and I wanted to believe that all the rest would follow. I made my heart hard to any thought of you: you were not present. That was my relief and all my sadness too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I remembered how I loved her on our wedding night, in bewilderment and release; and how I held her afterwards, filled with anguish. When she turned to me the following night, her face uplifted and her eyes closed, I placed my mouth against her parted lips and neither of us moved.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m a bit tired, if that’s all right. After yesterday. The excitement …”

The following Saturday night we lay side by side, not quite certain how to reach across and touch each other. “I do love you, Ifor,” my wife whispered. “You know that, don’t you?”

I took a stabbing little breath, bracing myself to answer her, but the words wouldn’t come. I leaned up on one elbow, trying to discern her features, the night dark and diplomatic around us. I wanted to be gentle. I was conscious of all the harm that I could do to her. “You’re the best girl,” I answered and I rested my head on her shoulder. “And I’m a lucky man.” The cotton of her nightdress creased against my skin and she held me in her arms, uncomprehendingly.

In my bones I knew that if we didn’t have relations the following weekend, then we probably never would again: the journey back would be beyond us. Saturday night was bath night and the four of us took turns in the zinc tub in front of the range: Ma first, then Jenny, then Delyth, then me. After my bath, wrapped in a towel, I climbed the stairs. I was still glowing from my scrubbing in the tub as I closed our bedroom door behind me. A single candle stood lighted on the chest of drawers, scattering indolent, gauzy shadows across the room. Jenny was sitting on the bed in her dressing gown, brushing her hair with meticulous strokes, counting the numbers defensively under her breath, “… Eighty-four, eighty-five …”

“Let me do that,” I said, reaching to take the brush from her.

“You’re meant to do a hundred, morning and night.”

“I’ll do two hundred, if you want.”

She darted a glance at me, as if she wasn’t sure that she had heard me right. “Though it’s probably some old wives’ tale …”

I started brushing, her thick hair black as an oil slick spilling through my fingers.

“Eighty-seven … eighty-eight … eighty-…” her counting tailed off, but I kept brushing.

“It’s the first thing I noticed about you, your hair,” I skeined the soft rope through my fingers until I had made a coil of it, a little hesitantly. “What’s a young wives’ tale, then?” I asked.

She tipped her head back; in the half light shed by the candle I studied her inverted features, the topography upset and strange. I kissed her chin, upside-down, and waited. “A young wives’ tale,” she whispered, sliding her arms around my neck, “involves a man and a woman, and a warm night, and a dark room, and a soft bed.” She released me, standing up and twisting round to face me and we stood for a moment, alert to each other, primed yet unmoving. “And a dressing gown that slips open, just like this; and a towel which falls …” We were guarded in our nakedness, our innocence pretty much intact in spite of our wedding night. “Touch me,” she whispered. Cautiously, I ran my finger down her forearm and she circled my wrist and drew me close. “Kiss me.”

I felt a terrible sorrow for Jenny; and guilt, as well. My thing was limp with it. I hadn’t thought that it would be like this. I hadn’t thought – that was the truth of it, because I had no experience to frame the complication of it all. I wrapped my arms around my tentative, supplicating wife, who shouldn’t have to ask for love. She sought my mouth and desperate for the scent of gardenia, I closed my eyes.

I kissed her lips, but it was you I tasted, Ella: my tongue travelled the slow escarpment of your throat, following the swell and curve of you, of you, of you. I lowered you onto the bed and lay beside you, coursing the length of you: nape, nipple, spine, hip. I covered you with my longing. Your thighs, your bush, my cock: the annihilating tangle of you and me.

Afterwards, the candle extinguished, I lay stretched out on my back staring up at the ceiling, moonlight mapping the cracks in the plaster. For a long time I studied the fine, illuminated fault lines, conscious of Jenny lying beside me, her black hair in straggling disorder over the pillow. All that brushing, I thought, all that brushing. I listened to the sound of her breathing, its intimate tempo so private, so vulnerable. I shifted my head so I could see her. Her face had lost its intentness, her myopia hidden behind closed lids, her skin a drowsy, newborn pink.

I couldn’t sleep, for the shock and the shame at what I’d done. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. It was my first, hard lesson in infidelity, and I was unsure whom I had betrayed the most: you, or Jenny, or myself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I remembered the day Brown told me the family was returning. “For good,” he said, and I could hear the reproof in his voice, the almost indiscernible note of accusation. “It’s official.” Germany had just walked out of the World Disarmament Conference and Jenny had brought back from work a copy of the bestseller that everyone was talking about,
Brave New World
and all at once the world seemed neither brave nor new. I swallowed.

“Just so you know,” said Brown.

I didn’t go straight home after work. I made my way up to Long Leap, the ground loamy with fallen leaves beneath my feet and autumn streamers strung out from tree to tree as though to welcome you. I found a cool lip of granite to sit down on and stayed there, staring back along the valley the way that I had come, not seeing the winding path or the downward flight of the slope. The darkness settled around me and the cold from the rock I was sitting on entered my bones and I could just pick out the pale outline of Nanagalan and the gardens, all expectant, and I kept my vigil.

I trimmed the creeper on the old wing of the house for three days in a row and you didn’t seek me out. I asked Samuelson if I could give Dancing Green its final cut of the year, a task he normally reserved for himself because it provided easy evidence of work done while requiring less effort than say, digging, which was my job. He shrugged and rolled his eyes, though he always wanted me out from under his feet. I razored perfect stripes into the lawn and lost myself in the green rhythm of the back and forth, until I looked up and saw you standing by the morning room window. Your hair was cut short, something I hadn’t prepared myself for, and you looked straight through me so that I knew that you knew. Your hair was cut short and I couldn’t quite believe that you’d come home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I remembered that your mother brought oranges and grapefruits back from Spain, your final port of call apparently, and gave one to every family on the estate as a Christmas box. Our orange still had leaves on it and it was wrapped in tissue stamped with a coloured picture of a tree in a landscape which could have come from a Bible story.

“You have it,” Ma offered, handing the fruit, rare and beautiful, to Jenny. “It’ll be good for you,” she said meaningfully, impatient for signs of a baby, a new little Griffiths to dandle: a tiny Glyn, preferably; or an Angharad, perhaps. She smoothed the tissue with her elbow until it was flat, and then put it by to keep. “That’ll come in handy, sometime,” she said. “Everything does,” while Jenny watched her, levelly.

It was a staff Christmas party with a difference that year. The King was to make his first broadcast to the nation at three o’clock on Christmas afternoon, a time convenient for the far corners of the Empire. Ted came over for dinner and we stuffed ourselves on roast chicken and a plum pudding with all the trimmings; Ma did us proud. Delyth was civil to Jenny, putting the resentment she felt at her married status to one side for the occasion: Jenny had everything my sister wanted – a respectable job and a husband, though she wouldn’t have envied her that, if she had known. They took an artificial interest in each other’s doings while Ma looked on with anxious encouragement and Ted and I talked politics.

We walked from the village to Nanagalan, the vicar and one of the tenant farmers falling into step beside us. Ted was sounding off about the fact that a tiny percentage of the population owned a vast proportion of the country’s wealth, most of it unearned and in the end the vicar quickened his pace so that he arrived several minutes before us. I wasn’t listening. I was concentrating with all my might on the feel of Jenny’s hand in mine, holding it as a reminder: I will be a good husband, holding it like a talisman.

It was the custom for the family to wait upon their tenants and employees and you were standing on the threshold to welcome us, with a cool poise I didn’t recognise. You had … deportment, with your pale yellow dress of continental jacquard silk and your endless string of pearls, your bobbed hair, your neck which, now that I saw it, took my breath away. Ma and Delyth and Ted, who was still talking about class warfare, went in first and I stood stock still on the path, looking back at the plants in the Herbar crimped and folded up for winter, as though I had forgotten something, as though I might just have to leave, because –

“Hello, Ifor.”

I turned to face you and you held out your hand with a spontaneous politeness that someone had taught you, not the quizzical impulsiveness I used to know. I took it as though it would burn me and shook it, conscious of every slant and tilt and shadow in your face. You smelled of gardenia, still, and the scent of it cut me to the quick.

You turned to Jenny without a flicker, “And this must be … Mrs Ifor,” you said with your head on one side, the blue blade of your gaze unsheathed.

“Jenny,” I said, seeking her hand and holding it, “Jenny Griffiths, my –” I held her hand for dear life, while you waited for me to say it and I couldn’t.

You pointed languidly across the hall. “Tea will be served in the drawing room.”

We perched on upholstered antique chairs and grappled with bone china so thin it let the light through, us rude mechanicals making conversation with each other as though we were strangers meeting for the first time: What did you get for Christmas? An apron? That’s nice. What do you think the King will have to say? Your mother served us mince pies not much bigger than my thumbnail and Jenny eyed hers disdainfully.

“I’m on Ted’s side,” she said in a low voice.

“They’re not so bad, when you get –” I broke off.

“To know them?”

I didn’t answer. At a signal from your mother, you crossed to the table radiogram and switched it on.

“That’ll be a Marconi 42,” Brown said confidently. “It shares a chassis with the HMV 501.” Samuelson was picking mincemeat from his teeth.

The vicar rose to his feet and cottoning on, we all stood too.

“It wouldn’t be respectful for the likes of us to be sitting while the King is talking,” Ma said approvingly, folding her hands in readiness.

Then, out of the ether, as if by magic, “I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them …”

“Rudyard Kipling wrote the words for him,” Jenny murmured. “They’re not his own.” I glanced down at her and gave her a smile, a proper one. I wanted to be tender with her. I wanted it to be alright. I looked the length of the room. I often thought of you standing in doorways, staying and going all at once, and there you were, leaning against the frame, while hanging above your head was a bunch of mistletoe tied with a Christmas ribbon.

Men and women, I thought. So cut off …