The Line Between Us (18 page)

CHAPTER FORTY

I remembered when the great day dawned at last and Ted and Delyth tied the knot. After all the waiting and the saving, I think Ma was a little aggrieved that they chose to be married in a registry office: no chapel vows, no fairytale dress, everything plain and simple – Ted abhorred any fuss not of his own making. He looked well-scrubbed with his pale hair plastered to his head, though I couldn’t help noticing that his great mastiff’s frame put the seams of his suit under considerable pressure. My defensive, opinionated sister was in thrall to her new husband, hanging on his every, bullish word. After the ceremony I kissed her on both cheeks. “I hope you’ll be very happy together,” I said and I found myself praying he’d be good to her, then wondered what kind of a husband I was myself, to offer up that prayer. Jenny, normally so restrained, put her arms around Delyth and held her briefly, without saying anything.

The wedding breakfast took place at the Fleece in Morwithy. There were drinks and a cold collation laid out downstairs, while upstairs the tables and chairs had been pushed back for the dancing. Most of the villagers put in an appearance and a number of grey-faced factory folk made it over from Mynydd Maen, so there was a good turnout and things became pretty lively once the beer began to take effect. I tried to do right by Delyth’s guests, greeting her friends and her new family and agreeing what a lovely day it was, but a bit of me was longing to retreat to the corner to nurse my pint, not being a great one for the chitter-chatter. I glanced across the room at Jenny, who was hard at work with one of Ted’s elderly relations. Her new dress was a strange confection, made from lilac-coloured lastex silk – she showed me the label, it’s the latest thing, apparently. There was a design of geometric pink roses at the waist and it clung in a way that I suspected made her feel self conscious – she kept smoothing it while she was talking. A few notes from a song I didn’t know filtered down from above and when she heard it, my wife returned my glance, raising her eyebrows in an invitation to me to go upstairs with her and listen to the music. I was halfway through responding that I needed to finish my beer and circulate some more, all of this conveyed without a single word being spoken, for in some respects we knew each other intimately, when the door opened and you slipped unaccompanied into the pub, self-conscious in your own way, too.

You were abroad when Jenny and I were married and unable to fulfil the long established custom which dictated that the local gentry should stand the happy couple a round of drinks on their wedding day. The landlord hurried round and offered to take your coat, turfing Parry the Paint off his bar stool so you could have a seat and when you handed him two five-pound notes he touched his forelock to you, at a stroke making all of us appear inferior and ingratiating.

I knocked back the remainder of my glass. The bar seemed as close as a tight-fitting jacket and I could have done with some air. I ran a finger around the inside of my collar and moved a few paces towards the door thinking that no one would notice if I absented myself for a moment or two, when Ted’s best man, a foreman at the factory, jumped up on a chair and shouted for everyone to go upstairs for the speeches and the cutting of the cake.

I fell into step with you – how could I not – as people drifted towards the stairs.

“I know that suit,” you said appraisingly. You were carrying a gin and tonic and you took a sip from it, contemplating me over the rim of your glass.

“It’s had a good few outings,” I squinted down at it, “with me, and my brother before me, and our Dad before him. It’s as close as we get to an heirloom in our family.”

You smiled, tilting your head to one side, then mounted the staircase ahead of me, leaving a slipstream of gardenia in your wake that could easily have gathered me up after you, but I turned back at the last minute to look for Jenny, seeking the protection that she offered. Perhaps I already sensed the danger I was in. In the crush upstairs I found a place of safety between my mother and my wife.

Ted seemed overly serious for a man on his wedding day – I think he’d have launched into a speech about the socio-economic context of marriage during the first part of the twentieth century given half a chance, but he managed a few brief remarks about Delyth, saying that from the moment he first saw her, he thought she had the makings of a good wife. My sister stood beside him in her sober linen dress with matching jacket, a brooch of seed pearls which Ma had worn on her wedding day pinned to her lapel, her blunt face suffused and sentimental; perhaps she had inherited our mother’s virtue of making a little go a long way.

When the cake was cut and the toasts were drunk, Ted’s best man wound up the gramophone and the bride and groom opened the first dance together, Ted doggedly manoeuvring Delyth round the floor until the song was finished. He gave a plausible performance of a newly married man. I couldn’t fault him, but I didn’t quite trust him, it seemed just that: a performance, done, I hoped, for my sister’s benefit and possibly for ours. Perhaps there’s something about marriages – all that expectation – that makes a fellow melancholy as he gets older.

They changed the record and a few adventurous couples edged their way onto the floor. Jenny leaned against me, her feet tapping to the rhythm of the music.

“Another drink?” I asked, aware that she would like me to set both our glasses down and lead her off in the rumba, or whatever it was they were dancing. I’m a two left feet man, myself.

Ma’s gaze rested meaningfully upon me.

“Or would you like to dance …?” I enquired doubtfully, scratching my head.

“Oh, Ifor – would you?”

“I – er – yes – why not?” I swallowed. “Though I’m not much good at this kind of–” but before I could finish Jenny had towed me to the middle of the room and put one of my hands on her shoulder and another on her hip. I stood there floundering for a moment.

“You put your left foot there, like that, then follow through with your right. Count the rhythm in your head, it helps. One, two, three, four. That’s it … Now your left foot there again … One, two, three, four.”

I tried the counting, I honestly did, but I was always about half a beat behind her. I tried to follow her instructions, but I was a bit of a clodhopper: my knees kept striking hers and I trod on her foot and in the end I started laughing, “I’m sorry, Jenny. I don’t know my left from my right. You’d best give up on me …”

Instead, made uncertain by my laughter, she burrowed close and buried her head against my chest and we stood like that, shifting our weight to the music, more or less content to dance on our own terms. She grew heavy in my arms as she leaned into me and although I didn’t feel the burden of her, I felt the care.

“Shall we –?” I asked, when Ted’s best man changed the record, glancing towards the table where we’d left our glasses. She shook her head, holding me tighter, and we kept up our strange, conjugal swaying. Other couples started dancing and there was a press of bodies all around us, so that the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke and the cellophane tang of cologne wiped out any tell-tale traces of gardenia which might have put me on my guard.

Before I knew it, you tapped Jenny on the shoulder.

My wife, drowsy with the dancing, lifted her head.

“Excuse me,” you said. “May I?”

Jenny blinked at you. “I’m sorry?”

“May I dance with your husband?” you said. It crossed my mind that you had had another gin.

“Oh.” Jenny’s arms dropped to her sides.

“I don’t know anyone else here.”

“I was going to sit this one out,” I said, but you wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“If you don’t mind …” You slid between my wife and me and slipped your arms around my waist. I thought you must be very drunk indeed. I twisted to look back at Jenny, who stood on her own in the middle of the jostle, but then you leaned so close it felt as if we were merged together and I could think of nothing but your thigh against mine and the peril of our hips, touching, so that I doubted I had it in me to protect you from yourself, or from me, or to protect Jenny either.

You were like running water, rippling in my grasp. I forgot all about my clumsy feet: when you moved, I moved; when you arched, I arched with you. You wound me round the dance floor and for a moment I sensed how it might feel to be one flesh, one heart.

“Wouldn’t it be heavenly to dance like this all night?” you said.

I answered you inside my head: yes to the dancing, to the closeness, to the changing pressure of your body again mine, to the aching subtlety of touch; yes to the holding you all night. I made myself listen to the music. I made that my lifeline. The song was about Capri.

“Have you ever been to the Isle of Capri?” I said, trying to tamp down the wild elation I was feeling.

“Of course,” you looked up at me, your flawless face so close that I could taste your breath. “Mama and I went, on our travels.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, clutching for anything to say.

“Oh, you know, the usual – lovely beaches, fishing villages, blue sea – that kind of thing.”

An image of the shoreline at Barmouth flashed into my head. In order not to look along the length of it, at the retreating figure in the distance, I scanned the wide reach of the room. Amongst the blur of shapes I caught a glimpse of clinging, lilac-coloured lastex silk.

You drew me to you, resting your cheek against mine.

“I don’t think …” I pulled back a fraction.

“What don’t you think ...?”

“I don’t think we should …” It felt like the beginnings of an admission. I held my tongue.

“What?” you pressed me. “Dance like this?”

I couldn’t answer you. This was the stuff of which my dreams were made. Distantly I could hear the siren insistence of your whisper.

“Why not?”

“Because …” I said reluctantly.

“Everybody else is …”

I glanced sideways at the other couples. It was true. They were as interlaced as we were. “But they’re not …”

“Like us?” your pupils flared black, your eyes glistening; “No, they’re not.” Then you said my name, Ifor, with the long history of wanting in your voice, so that I couldn’t help myself, I placed my finger against your lips to stop you, an irresistible act of trespass, and suddenly the record ended.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

I remembered the walk home on that beautiful, bruising evening, my wife and I making our way back to Nanagalan through the unstable darkness, the night sky as volatile as we were, its blackness lanced, from time to time, with moonlight. I couldn’t always see Jenny; I could hear her footsteps and was alive to the simmer of the air around her. Once, her sleeve brushed mine and she snatched her arm away as though I’d burnt it. I was seething in my own way, too; full of a kind of broiling joy, and guilt and mortification as well, but mostly the surging, breathless flight of happiness.

We followed the curve of the hillside down. At the sight of the big house biding its time in the depths of the valley, Jenny came to a halt. There was light enough to see the agitation in her features. She was chewing at her lip remorselessly.

“It isn’t what you think,” I ventured.

“What do I think, if you’re such an expert?”

I hung my head. We walked a few minutes in silence until she stopped again, covering her face with her hands as if she were rinsing it clean with cold water.

“You have no idea of the daily hurt you do me.”

“Jenny –” I said, her accusation winding me. “It was just a – dance. She asked me. She’s my employer. I couldn’t refuse her.”

“Employer?” she exclaimed, turning on me, the sarcasm in her tone making me flinch, but I stood my ground, all that happiness leaching away as though some vital artery had been cut.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” I began.

“In front of everyone – the whole village.”

“It was just a dance –”

“I’ve never been so humiliated.”

“It’s not what you think …”

She took me by the shoulders, untenderly. “What is it, then? You tell me what it is.”

“We’ve known each other on and off since we were both fifteen. There weren’t any other young people on the estate. We –” I broke off. In the distance I could hear the intermittent thrum of the Daimler. High above the clouds parted, sending moonlight sifting down on to us, enough for me to see the acceleration of understanding in Jenny’s expression.

“On and off …?”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

As the car’s headlights threaded through the dark towards us, growing larger, she lowered her hands. It lumbered past and our heads swung round, as one: Jenny as stricken as if the vehicle had hit her, while I strained to see your darker shape in the darkness of the interior. You left lipstick on the tip of my finger when I pressed it to your mouth, which I couldn’t bear to wipe away. Further down the valley the tail lights of the motor glimmered like hot coals; I watched until they flickered and went out.

“You see?” I said, struggling to keep the sadness from my voice. “How could it possibly be anything at all?”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

I remembered how shorn and vulnerable the hillside seemed once we had cleared the remnants of the beech wood during the spring following the fire; how tender the folds of the landscape appeared, all revealed. I remembered how unprotected Jenny and I were, shorn and revealed in our own way too, the fact that she guessed my feelings underwriting every glance and every silence I could see you were a subject she wanted to come back to: she’d turn her head and draw a breath to speak, then look away and the quietness would thicken between us until it became too dense for us to penetrate. The closest she came was after one interminable evening meal, when we had chewed our way through our food and she was washing up. She stood at the sink with her back to me. There was a plate in her hand and she peered at it, scratching at some dirt with her nail. The scratching stopped.

“You and she,” she said, her words sheathed in a whisper I could hardly hear. “Has anything –? Have you –?”

The cool March air in our kitchen heated with the shame of such a question. “No,” I said swiftly.

She let the plate slide back into the sink, resting her hands in the water. She stood for a moment, considering my reply with her head bowed. “Will you?” she said, unable to swallow the asking.

“Jenny – it was just a dance, that’s all.”

From then on, we closed our embassies. We circled around each other, making small, barbed weapons out of jealousy and guilt. We slept in exile in our big bed.

It was at the time of the great replanting that Jenkins started as my boy. The restlessness contained in his wiry frame obliged him to walk on the balls of his feet: he seemed to be permanently on the brink of running off and I hadn’t quite realised that my role would be to contain as well as employ him. That wasn’t the only revelation that I had.

The first morning he turned up all clean and tidy and he stood to attention as though he’d been drilled, waiting for my instructions.

“You haven’t had much practical experience, have you?”

“None, Mr Griffiths,” he answered, blithe as can be.

“There’s no need for any of that Mr Griffiths malarky,” I said mildly. “You can call me Ifor …”

“I can’t do that, Mr Griffiths,” he asserted, without explaining why. After a pause, I asked him what he would like to call me and following a brief and unlikely debate, we compromised with Mister and having settled on it, he used it all the time.

“It won’t take long to show you the ropes.”

“Yes, Mister.”

My plan was to set him to work in the gardens while I attended to the new trees, so we were in the Herbar getting him started on planting out some of the hardy annuals that I had brought on in the greenhouse. We’d carried several trays of them across in the wheelbarrow, which was parked on the pathway close to the central ornamental bed.

“You’d best watch me to begin with,” I said, as I showed him how to dig the holes and space them far enough apart to give the seedlings a chance to grow. Taking me at my word, Jenkins stood inches from me and made a study of my every movement.

“Fetch me that tray of Rhodanthe Chlorocephala, will you?” I jerked my head in the direction of the barrow.

He stood on one foot, then the other. I remembered him feeding the brim of his hat through anxious fingers at his interview. “Otherwise known as helipterum,” he stated.

“That’s the one,” I said, housing my trowel in the earth.

“An attractive, long flowering bloom.”

“It is.”

“With …” he was staring at the wheelbarrow with wide, hectic eyes, “…white flowers.”

“That’s right.”

There was a pause. Jenkins clasped his hands behind him as though to draw a line under our discussion.

“Will you fetch them, then?”

There were trays of Ammi Majus, Nigella Damascena and Layia Glandulosa scattered along the path, all of them purest white. I watched him dart across with his distinctive, springing step, launching himself from one to the other. He looked at the Layia, then circumspectly in my direction, then he snatched it up and hurried back and set it down in front of me. After that he stood very close, watching to see what I would do.

I scratched my head. “I had other plans in mind for the Layia,” I said carefully. “Perhaps you could fetch me the Rhodanthe?”

Jenkins face turned a miserable shade of red. He made a close inspection of the lacing on his boots. Thoughtfully, I sat back on my heels.

“Although the practical stuff’s the easy part, really,” I said. “It’s all those long Latin names that get me.”

He licked his lips. He started up a jiggle with one of his feet. I could see the energy rising like sap in him. I thought he might be off at any moment.

“Maybe you could help me with the complicated names and I could show you what the flowers look like? Match them up. We could work something out in that way,” I said casually.

“Maybe.” Jenkins was following the flight of some invisible insect through the air. I wondered if it was a moth that he was after, but I had a feeling he was searching for somewhere more comfortable to put himself.

“Let me fetch the Rhodanthe Chlorocephala for you to see,” I clambered to my feet. “And you can tell me everything you know about it.”

“They can be annuals, perennials, or sub shrubs,” he said hesitantly as he followed me over to the wheelbarrow. He began to warm to his theme. “With simple, narrow, alternate leaves ...”

“Like this,” I lifted a clump of them to demonstrate. “Look – here ...”

“... and daisy-like flowers,” he said, which concluded the arrangement between us to the satisfaction of us both.