The Line Between Us (17 page)
Read The Line Between Us Online
Authors: Kate Dunn
I remembered how bad I felt when I told Ianto Pryce, laid off from the mine with the Silicosis, that he couldn’t have the job as gardener’s boy. It was only a few years since we’d been playing cricket together, but his batting days were over and his working days as well.
“But I’ve got two daughters, Ifor. Mouths to feed. The fresh air’d do me good, see?” His face had a hand-crafted look, his features irregular: his nose bent out of shape from some fight or other, his mouth curved mournfully downwards. You could see the clay that he was made from, and the maker’s mark. There was a slick of blue beneath his skin, a pronounced pallor on account of his illness. “Bit of digging …” he shrugged, the action triggering a fit of coughing. His smoking days were not yet over, the nicotine ingrained with the coal dust into the fingers that held his cigarette. “… Nothing to it,” he hissed. Down to his last breath, he sounded. “I could do the pruning, no problem.”
“The thing is, Ianto,” I began, “not sure your chest could take it, see? Out in the gardens in all weathers. It’s a job for a young man. Gardener’s boy …”
“I’m not that old –”
His point was unarguable. He’d not much more than ten years on me.
“I’m sorry, Ianto ...”
You gave over the estate office for an afternoon so I could carry out the interviews, and I installed myself at the gate-legged table with some seed catalogues piled around me for protection. A motley assortment of locals trickled through, the Great Depression written in their long faces and their thin shoulders and their misplaced hopes and by four o’clock I was full of a great depression myself, at the impossibility of helping the people who were most in need – Ianto, and all the others – when a young lad came into the room a little too loud and a little too fast, so that he bumped into the table and sent my copy of
The Fragrant Path
flying. He stood stock still as I stooped to pick it up, pressing his hat to his chest, fingering the brim and as I righted myself and sat back in my chair he maintained his position, staring over my head at the wall behind me.
I ran my eyes over the list I’d drawn up. “You must be … Jenkins?”
He didn’t respond. He stood there with a wide-eyed anticipation, which on closer inspection looked rather like panic, to me.
“So, Jenkins, tell me: do you know anything about plants?”
He passed the brim of his hat through his fingers. He had the blank, angelic face of a chorister as he took a deep breath and opened his mouth, “I know about the Abelia Grandiflora, the Acanthus Hungaricus, the Acanthus Mollis, the Acanthus Spinosus, the Acer Campestre, the Acer Japonicum Aconitifolium and –” he said in a rush, his voice level and unpunctuated, “ – the Acer Palmatum Atropurpureum.”
“Alright, alright,” I interrupted him, wondering how long it had taken him to memorise his list and how far through the alphabet it extended. “Name me a plant beginning with W, then.”
He took another dauntingly large breath, “There’s the Wallflower, the Weigela, the Wisteria Formosa, the Wisteria floribunda “Alba” – I can go all the way to the Zantedeschia if you want, Mister.”
“I don’t think there’ll be any need for that,” I said, blinking. “So, tell me about the Zantedeschia, how would you care for it?”
That set him off. “Commonly known as the Calla Lily, if you’re talking about the Aethiopica varieties then it’s a soggy soil they like, but the coloured hybrids love a sandy, well-drained soil with partial shade.”
I was mesmerised: the boy was an automaton. “What about the – no, don’t bother,” I said as he inhaled mightily, ready to go again. “Which gardens have you worked in?” I asked curiously, as he looked too young to have any kind of experience under his belt.
“None,” he answered promptly. “I learned it from a book.” He had completed a full circuit of the brim of his hat and began to feed it back through his fingers in the other direction.
I was wracking my brains for something else to ask him. “Do you have any hobbies?”
My question seemed to make him nervous. He stopped looking at the wall behind my head and glanced towards the door. Then he read the label on the inside of his hat, frowning. I began to feel sorry for him.
“Things that you enjoy doing …?” I prompted, to help him out of his difficulty.
“Things that I enjoy doing?” His gaze was shooting all over the place; he seemed discomforted. “I’ve an interest in moths.”
“Really?”
“One day I’m going to go to Scotland to see an Argent and Sable.”
I felt a small pang when he said this – that glimpse you get of other people’s dreams, and the certainty they have of their fulfilment. I wondered if he’d ever make it to Scotland, odd lad that he was.
“It’s a Rheumaptera Hastata,” he said, and I sensed another recitation was coming on. “A day-flyer, very rare. A priority species. The female has a wingspan of between an inch and a quarter and an inch and a half, with a beautiful livery –”
“Do you want to come and work for me?” I asked to forestall him and he looked round quickly, to see if I’d made the offer to somebody else.
I remembered visiting your father at the clinic. We drove there in the motor, Brown and me up front and you in upholstered seclusion behind us. He’d recovered something of himself, a semblance of how he was before the fire. The terrible caution was gone: we reached third gear, for a start. He seemed blinkered, barely looking to left or right, as if to do so would be to acknowledge present danger. He drove like someone who can sense the cross hairs of a sniper’s rifle: onward, at speed. He’d done himself up so tight that no one could breach his defences. He appeared the same, he still had the face of an elderly boy, rounded and diffident, with his salt and pepper moustache and his moist eyes, but in fact everything about him was changed. It was disconcerting for him and the rest of us, his otherness. We all had a sense of it and nobody mentioned it. Sometimes, when I was with him, I felt like a bird hitting an unseen window. Goodness knows what he felt.
Thankful to have finished our journey, we parked at the far end of an avenue of lime trees, their sweet scent doused for winter. Punctiliously, Brown climbed down and opened the door for you. I saw you glancing up at what you were careful to refer to as the clinic, but which people in the village called the asylum, or worse. You stared uneasily at the metal bars on all the windows.
Your father was sitting in an armchair in the sun lounge of the house, a room set aside for visiting. There was a weeping fig and an aspidistra standing in an alcove, a collection of yellowing spider plants and a cactus or two lined up on the window sills and heat streamed up through metal grilles set in the tiled floor, so that the inside of the windows seemed to run with rain.
“Lillah!” your father exclaimed, half levering himself up from his chair so that the tartan rug covering his knees fell to the floor. “What kept you?”
“It isn’t Lillah, Papa. It’s Ella,” you murmured, speaking of yourself in the third person, and I wondered if that was how you bore these occasional visits, at one remove. “Lillah’s not – any more, she’s –”
I hadn’t known that Lillah was your mother’s name.
“Sit! Sit!” your father said, clicking his fingers for me to bring a chair up next to his. He couldn’t take his eyes off you. I set it down and he dragged it closer, then he glanced at the rug on the floor and up at me, so that I understood that I must pick it up and tuck it round his knees.
“At ease, at ease,” he said, waving me to one side without looking at me.
“Actually,” you said, “Griffiths has got some questions he’d like to ask you …”
At ease? I could hardly hear what you were saying, as the sound of my surname on your lips sent me into a kind of shock. Who was Griffiths to you? I pictured myself walking to the door, opening it and leaving the room without looking back. I’d settle beside Brown in the Daimler and we’d nurse the silence between us. He’d throw me a crossword clue: in Latin, I stumble over exercise that’s self absorbed, and we’d sit and mull it over and bide our time until we were ourselves again.
“Yes, sir,” I said, not moving. “We’re planning to re-plant the trees on the slope beyond the Drowning Pool …” I wondered if he knew about the fire and if he’d been told, whether he remembered.
“Very good, carry on.”
I don’t think he was listening. “Do you have any … suggestions … sir? Regarding the landscaping?”
“Lillah,” your father said, gazing at you. He fumbled for your hand and held it to his cheek. Awkwardly, as though he couldn’t make his fingers work because they were cold, or perhaps the joints were swollen, he then conveyed it, using both of his, to the inner edge of his thigh.
“We’d replace a number of the beeches, of course,” I said slowly. “And oaks would do well, don’t you think?”
He pressed your palm over the wasted muscle and held it there, then closed his eyes and let loose a long, inflected sigh. “What kept you?”
“Papa!” you said, under your breath. You slipped your hand free and tucked it out of reach beneath your arm.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he whispered without opening his eyes, sixteen years in the madhouse scored into all the gullies of his face. A moan escaped from him; he started to rock, forward and back.
You twisted your head round and threw me a frantic look. “We need to go,” you mouthed, then you said my name aloud, tremulously; not Griffiths, but my God-given name.
I hesitated, contemplating the ruins of a man. I felt a flicker of relief for my Dad and Glyn. They shall not grow old …
“It’s time for us to make tracks, Papa.” You made a small adjustment to the tartan blanket.
Still with his eyes shut, your father reached out a hand in your direction, searching the air for traces of you. He let it fall back in his lap. “Must you go so soon?” he asked with weary politeness, “Won’t you stay for lunch?” Then as we walked towards the door, he added, “I’ve always been fond of elm trees, myself. Very pleasing to the eye.”
I remembered reading that the Nazis were rewriting the Psalms to remove all reference to the Jews. There was altogether too much rewriting and too much removing going on, not to mention dark nights with long knives and on our side of the channel talk of massively expanding the RAF, so that we were starting to wonder where all of it would end. It was the summer of 1934, when Jenny and I went on holiday to Barmouth to celebrate my promotion.
We travelled on a Red and White Services coach – leather seats and chrome fittings and an advertisement for Robertson’s Golden Shred marmalade framed on each side of it, feeling swoony with the excitement and the switchback ride through the Brecon Beacons. I wasn’t sick, but I couldn’t face my packed lunch. Jenny brought a copy of John Masefield’s
Salt Water Poems and Ballads
and she read to me as we bowled along, to take my mind off the lurching the motion of the bus and it felt like old times between us, whatever those old times were.
“Well, I’ll eat that egg sandwich if you don’t want it,” my wife said, she of the cast-iron constitution, but she stopped with it halfway to her mouth at our first sighting of the Mawr estuary. The tide was out and we could see the slip and slither of the river nosing into the mudflats. Pine forests filled the clefts of the hillsides and the grey sky had a feathering of high cloud to act as a reminder that this was summertime, in Wales. Beyond that, silvered right to the horizon, was the sea, which neither of us had ever seen before.
We hobbled off the bus, stiff in our joints from so much sitting and made our way to the Balmoral boarding house on Marine Parade. Our room was five flights up at the back, with a view of rooftops and chimney pots that seemed incomparably urban and I half expected to hear a trickle of jazz being played through an open window, the sound of the saxophone and Elizabeth Welsh, singing. The smoky net curtains and sateen coverlet on the bed in our small room under the eaves were the epitome of sophistication to us country bumpkins and – earthly paradise – there was a flushing toilet on the landing.
After admiring the facilities we went scrambling back down the stairs and out into the town. We retraced the bus’s route across the wooden viaduct, “The longest of its kind in the country,” Jenny informed me, reading from the guidebook, her free hand tucked into my arm.
We leaned on the railing watching the interplay of tide and wind and current, the waves sheering away from one another, creating brief rivulets and crests that curled then disappeared. I bought us ices, chocolate for her and strawberry for me, to see how it felt to be a man with a girl on his arm.
“We’ll remember this,” I grinned, watching her lick her cornet, the guilty part of me aware of the need to store up memories that we could draw on later, as insurance. “Have a taste of mine,” I said, to banish the thought.
That night I did what Jenny wanted me to do, an act of guesswork and compliance in an unfamiliar bed with the lights turned out. There were no stray notes of jazz reaching through the window, although I listened for them. I was conscious all the while of the presence of the ocean, bearing down upon our narrow stretch of coast.
There was a slight air of reserve between us the following morning. Jenny seemed subdued, which made me in turn more eager to please her and we found ourselves acting out being a couple away on holiday, inexperienced and uncertain of our roles. We chatted over breakfast about this and that: where to get our postcards, whether Fred Perry would win the Men’s Final at Wimbledon, papering over any cracks which might appear with well-meant observations. Because it was a sunny day we decided on a trip to the beach, where we rented deck chairs just like proper grown-ups. Jenny had bought a bathing costume specially, made from fine-knit navy wool and I held her towel as she scuffled underneath it, tugging it on while preserving her modesty. I took off my shirt and rolled up my trousers above the knee and the two of us raced down to the shoreline, fingers glancing together, not quite holding hands.
Jenny braved the cold and went in up to her waist, “It’s freezing!” she cried, squealing with laughter.
“Careful,” I said, because neither of us could swim.
“Aie, aie, aie!” she yelped and from the vantage of her greater wetness, she started splashing me, faint-hearted in the shallows, giving me a proper soaking.
“Is this the height of your ambition?” she asked me later, when we were sitting on our rented deck chairs wrapped in towels, blue-lipped from the cold.
“Why not?” I replied, listening to the lazy soundtrack of people having fun. Two lads were playing leapfrog along the beach and I could hear them grunting with exertion; a father was teaching his daughter to fly a kite and the whiplash sound of its tail cracked above us as it changed direction with the wind. “Taking my wife for the holiday of a lifetime because I’ve got a job that means we can afford it?” I rolled my head to one side to look at her. “Why shouldn’t it be?”
She didn’t answer. She lay in the deckchair with the towel swathed right up to her chin, gazing upwards through the gauzy cloud to the glimpse of blue beyond. After a while, she reached into her bag for her book. It was an American novel called
Tender is the Night
. She found her place and read a page or two, then laid it face down in her lap.
“What do you think makes a good book?” she asked, not looking at me but out to sea.
I noticed a glint of green in the pale sand, like a small emerald. I nudged it with my toe. It was a piece of glass scoured by the ocean and I reached to pick it up, then made a study of its salty patina, tilting it this way and that in the palm of my hand. “Strong characters, I suppose.”
“Yes …?”
“And it needs to be well written.”
She waited, seeming to want more from me.
“It’s got to have a gripping story. That’s important … And interesting themes.” I started thinking more about it, my interest caught. “The power to transport … to inspire …”
Jenny raised the novel to her mouth, breathing against the closed pages, making them fripp and whirr together. “What do you think makes a good marriage?”
I hesitated. I examined the piece of glass with its blunted facets, starting to formulate an answer about honesty and tolerance and respect, heedful that there may be a trick in the question. I flicked the glass high into the air and watched it fall, a shooting green star. In spite of my best intentions, I found it hard to speak about love.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Jenny –”
“I sometimes wonder if you’ll wake up one day and see me for who I really am.”
“I do see –”
She stood up and shook out her towel and brushed the sand from her bathing costume. I could feel the flitter of it landing on my skin. Clumsily she dragged on her dress and it snagged against the damp wool of her swimsuit.
I leapt to my feet, holding her by the arm to detain her. “Jenny, please –”
Pressing her fist to her mouth, she had to struggle not to blurt out all the things that she was thinking, then in the absence of words, she hit me with of the flat of her palm several times on my chest, swift and stinging blows. “You don’t know what makes a good marriage because you can’t feel, you don’t know how,” she cried.
I tried to gather her to me, “Hush, Jenny. Jenny – please,” but she wasn’t having it.
“Leave me alone –” she took a few steps away from me, her feet unsteady on the shelving sand. She swept her towel and book into her bag. “I’m going back to the boarding house. Don’t come with me.”
Shaken, I watched her go. The tide was in retreat and some seagulls came swerving down to the shoreline in search of the sea’s leavings. My wife was wide of the mark, it wasn’t that I couldn’t feel: I was too full of feelings that I shouldn’t feel, though how could I ever begin to tell her that? My trousers were almost dry and stiff with salt. I pulled my shirt on, fumbling with the buttons, then staggered into my socks and shoes. I stared the length of the beach to where her figure was disappearing into the distance, the velocity of her unhappiness leaving me way behind.
The rest of the week was spent in some sort of remission: we showed a kind of precarious courtesy towards each other. It took us ages to decide how we should spend our days, each of us deferring endlessly to the other’s wishes, although a series of diffident negotiations helped us agree about a walk to Arthog Falls and we managed to spend an afternoon puffing through the sand dunes on the Fairbourne miniature railway with an approximation of enjoyment. The days passed wistfully and I found myself filled with unfathomable sadness.
One afternoon when Jenny was reading – F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to have got right under her skin – I wandered into the town and bought some postcards and sat myself in a seafront café. “We’re having the time of our lives,” I wrote to Ma. “The Balmoral has all mod cons …” I dashed off a note to the Browns about the food and the weather and then I wrote a card to you all in the conditional tense, if only … if only … I posted two of them, the third I left tucked into one of the wooden groynes on the beach and later I went back and it had gone.
On my way home to the boarding house I stopped at a souvenir shop and bought a present for my wife.
“Is it for someone special?”
I nodded and the assistant wrapped it up importantly in tissue paper. Five flights of stairs later, I tapped on the door to our room and peeked inside. Jenny was sitting hunched in a chair beside the window, not reading.
“For you,” I said, tentatively. I handed her the package. “Go on, open it.”
Tiredly, she undid the wrapping. Inside was a small bell made of white porcelain decorated with tiny pink rosebuds. It had
A Present from Barmouth
in gold letters on one side.
“It even rings,” I said. “Try it and see.”
Jenny gave the bell a listless shake and we listened to the tinkle of it.
I knelt on the lino beside her chair. A strand of hair had escaped from the nape of her neck and I tucked it into place. She turned the bell over in her hand, setting off the tiny china clapper, then she leant forward and placed it on the windowsill, adjusting it so that the lettering showed.
“A Present from Barmouth,” she said, resting her head against my shoulder and we stayed like that for several minutes, looking out over the rooftops.
“I want to make you happy,” I ventured. “That’s the height of my ambition. You’re all I’ve got, you know.”