The Line Between Us (2 page)
Read The Line Between Us Online
Authors: Kate Dunn
I remembered those cheese-paring early years when our little family was cut to the bone, then cut to the bone again: that scraped feeling of loss, the sting of the graze when a telegram came from the War Office, our Glyn first. I was standing on a stool by the draining board turning the handle of the mangle for Ma. She was over by the copper, wielding a pair of wooden tongs almost as big as me, hauling the washing from the scalding water then plunging it back. I remembered the hold the steam had on our clothes and how Ma used to break off from churning the laundry round and round to wipe her forehead against the skin on the inside of her forearm. She must have been wiping at the very moment the post boy propped his bicycle against our wall. I saw him look up at our house and roll his lips tight between his teeth. I kept on turning the mangle, leaning into the handle with as much of my nine-year-old strength as I could muster, watching Mrs Parry’s sheets fall in folds like beaten cream. I could hear the fume of the washing boiling in the pan and a bluebottle doing somersaults along the windowsill, but there was no sound from Ma. I glanced over my shoulder. She’d abandoned the wipe halfway through, but her arm was still pressed against her face as though she were shielding her eyes and counting to ten the way that Delyth and I did when we played murky. The wooden tongs dangled in her other hand. She set them down upon the table and a long-drawn breath seemed to get lost somewhere inside her.
There was a single knock on the door.
She stood gripping the back of one of the chairs.
“Shall I answer it?” I said, but I didn’t jump down from my stool. We never got letters in our house.
Ma made her way across the room as though she were wading against the tide in slow, reaching strides and as she laboured past me I yearned for the comfort of her, so that I stretched towards her without knowing what I was doing, a reflex action to prevent her from answering the door, receiving the envelope from the post boy’s hand, accepting his strangulated offer of condolence, then closing the door and leaning against it. She held the letter in both her fists.
“Open it, Ma,” I said in my ignorance. “Go on.”
“I –”
“Ma?”
“I can’t –”
“Go on, Ma.”
“It’ll be our Glyn,” she said. “I know it will –”
She did open the letter, though, and a moan came out of her, a sound I never want to hear again. I leapt from my stool and flung myself at her and she pushed me away. That’s what I remembered. She brushed me to one side. I was her baby and it was her boy she wanted. She made an empty circle of her arms and wouldn’t let me in.
Private Glyn Griffiths was killed in action during the Somme offensive, 1st July 1916, the telegram said. Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy.
It was a cruel thing to take my brother first and let my Dad go after.
I remembered how my sister Delyth, the middle one of the three of us, went on being Delyth and I went on not being Glyn. They never found his body, so there was no grave, not even some corner of a foreign field to fob us off with. Ma was absent for weeks and weeks after the news came – she was in the kitchen at home with us and at chapel and she kept up the daily round of things more or less, but she wasn’t really there and the further away she seemed, the more my heart hurt with the love of her.
When Ianto Price was married and he and his new missis threw coppers for the village children waiting at the church, I made sure I caught far more than my fair share. Then I went to Wilkes’s in Front Street, the window screened in mysterious yellow cellophane, and I bought three lace handkerchiefs.
“For the crying,” I said in a timid voice, handing her the brown paper package that Mrs Wilkes had wrapped up specially. She tied it with a length of gingham ribbon when I said who it was for. Ma opened the package and she fingered the handkerchiefs, staring at the embroidered corners, then she nodded her thanks, but her lips stayed pressed together with a tremble that was always there. Later that week I put the hankies through the mangle with the rest of the washing, so at least I knew she’d used them.
When I thought of it, coming back from school, I picked some of the wild flowers growing in the verges of the lane: cornflowers and meadowsweet and loosestrife, then I’d run the rest of the way home so that they weren’t too wilted and get them into a jam jar good and quick. Sometimes she’d notice and say something, mostly she’d fall into a deeper silence; once, she looped her arm around me allowing me a whiff of the serge and carbolic scent of her that I missed so much and she said, “You’re a good boy, Ifor,” which I thought was a hopeful sign and I considered myself well rewarded.
We were all of us better when there was laundry to do – it took the place of the conversations that we used to have. Delyth and I would trail our way round to the back door of every house in Morwithy, “Any washing today?” we’d chant, and we’d sing out our price list: flannels for a farthing, towels a penny, sheets tuppence, then Delyth would say “Smalls a ha’penny,” in a loud voice to make me blush. The winter after Glyn was taken, we’d drape ourselves in the linen for the warmth and walk home like ghosts of the children we had been before.
My sister didn’t inherit the good looks of either of our parents, but she had a spirit that lit up her blunt, workaday features and gave her an – air, I suppose you’d call it. When she turned fourteen she left the board school and went to work as a kitchen assistant in the munitions factory in Newport and all of us felt a little richer.
“I’m having the time of my life,” she whispered one evening soon after she started, “But don’t you go telling Ma.”
She was more like a neighbour than a family member after that. Although she still slept in her room upstairs, it was as though she dropped by at the end of her shift if she happened to be passing, to give us the benefit of having our tea with her. She was full of talk, suddenly. She gave me a thrupenny bit from her wages and said I could spend the whole lot on sweets if I wanted, just to underline the fact that she was one of the grown-ups now. She told us about the canaries, the girls at the factory who handled the high explosives and were turned yellow all over by the chemicals and before you could say knife, she’d joined the union and was borrowing a copy of
Das Kapital
from the library. Just for show, mind you. I don’t believe she read a single word. That’s sisters for you.
I remembered our Dad coming home soon after we got the telegram. He had two days of compassionate leave on account of Glyn and arrived before the notification that he was due. I wasn’t around, but Ma told us how she went out to hang some blankets on the line in the yard and there he was, standing by the gate and she said, “Are you coming in then?” and he helped her hang the wash.
I don’t believe they knew where to start with the talking. They were careful with themselves, wary almost, as though a stray word might set something off. A lot of what needed to be said they routed through me: tell your father about, ask your mother if.
“What do you do in France?” I enquired. “Actually?”
Ma had shooed us into the parlour. She wanted the kitchen to herself, she said, while she made tea. I had no idea that sadness could be a kind of internal exile. I thought it was supposed to bring you all together.
“Why don’t you ask your mother if she’d fill a bowl with some of the hot water when she’s done with it,” he said stiffly. “My feet could do with a bit of a soak.” He was stretched out in his chair, his body braced with discomfort as if there wasn’t a part of him that didn’t hurt. “There’s a lad,” he said.
Dutifully, I went back to the kitchen and Ma filled a basin with hot water and added some mustard powder and some baking soda and stirred it round and round more than it needed, so that a lot of the heat was lost and I started to wonder what on earth was going on. It was like living in a house with someone else’s parents. And then I twigged. I was living with Glyn’s parents, that’s what.
I carried the basin into the parlour without spilling a drop and set it down in front of our Dad.
“Digging,” he said. “That’s what I do. I’m a sapper. It’s like gardening up at the big house,” he said, “only different.” He rested one foot on the other knee and started peeling off his sock. The skin was yellowish and lifted from the flesh, as though it had been blistered and the pus had gone. It looked as if it might come away with the wool and the smell of it made me feel queasy, so I hurried off to find him a flannel. When I came back, he was easing both feet into the basin.
“Here you are, Dad,” I said, holding out the flannel. A tremor, like a slow flinch, travelled through him and he leaned forward and put his huge hands on my shoulders so I could feel the weight of them.
“Get yourself an education, son,” he said and the flinch seemed to be working at his features and I glanced anxiously at him, at his black brows and his black moustache. He had a face as wild as a hedgerow with fierce green eyes to match and the tang of hemp and nettle prickled round him. I could see how it stifled him to be at home, though I guessed he didn’t want to be anywhere else. “That’s the thing,” he said, and the words must have been brewing for some time. “Not like Glyn,” he burst out, and a nerve at the corner of his mouth came unravelled so that the skin kept snagging.
“Is it the mustard stinging?” I asked nervously.
After a pause, he nodded. He leaned back and gripped the arms of the chair with his hands, braced again. He closed his eyes and the snagging spread up his cheek.
I knelt down in front of him and I wet the flannel and I washed his knobbly old feet, one and then the other, wiping his rindy heels clean, patting them dry, doing one toe at a time.
“There,” I said. “Is that better?”
He said my name – Ifor – and it came out as a shudder, under his breath, and then he said it again and I’m glad, now, that we had that moment together, while Ma cooked up a storm in the kitchen, banging away with the pots and pans as if she could dent her grief with them. It was the last afternoon I ever spent with him.
The next day he went trudging off down the lane back to the war, the morose hunch of him a dark outline in the July sunshine and the three of us stood at the front watching him go. He never turned round to look at us; he didn’t wave, although I’d sketched half a one ready, which I managed to snatch back and change into a scratch of my head, fearing that Delyth would notice.
“That’s that, then,” said Ma. “I must get a load on. I can’t stand about –” Abruptly, she covered her mouth with her hand and when that wasn’t enough she pressed a corner of her apron over it too. “I must –” she said. Her voice was full of breakages and the tremble was all over her. “I’m sorry,” she said, hurrying up the path. Delyth went bustling after her, shooting me a look that made me feel I was to blame.
I stayed staring down the lane long after Dad rounded the corner. They’d taken our old iron gate to make guns with, or I’d have clutched at that hard enough to leave rust stains on my hands. I was waiting to see if he would turn around for one last sighting of – me: the youngest, the overlooked one. That’s what I was waiting for. I pictured him scrambling back along the lane, his pack jouncing about, stooping to be on a level with me, throwing his arms wide. I thought of what he said about me getting an education. The last lesson he taught me was how to remain behind.
He was killed in the spring of 1917. The post boy propped his bicycle against our wall, but he didn’t look up at the house. He walked up the path with his head bowed and handed Ma the telegram without lifting his eyes to her face.
“He was an artist, your father,” Ma said. “More than a gardener. The Herbar he planted up at the big house was a work of art. I’ll take you to see it one day.”
She stood up. At one end of the over-mantel shelf stood a photo of my brother in his uniform. Beside it was a candle that she always kept burning. At the other end of the shelf was a snap of our Dad dressed in his work clothes, cut from a larger, formal photograph that must have been taken up at Nanagalan. She reached into a drawer and took out another candle which she fixed into a pewter candlestick. She lit one from the other. A thread of smoke curled bluely upwards and I was cast into the shadows outside the halo of light.
I peered at the telegram on the table, wet with the suds from her raw, red hands. His death didn’t touch her like my brother’s had; if anything, it brought her back to herself. When I had done with being brave for her and had made it upstairs without letting myself down, when I had washed and said my prayers and was lying clenched in my bed sobbing my heart out, she crept into my room and slipped in beside me. She tucked the sheets around us both and made a nest of our sorrows and slept with me under her wing.
I remembered how Ma and I apportioned our losses for they were too much for a single soul to bear: the grief for Glyn belonged to her, the grief for Dad belonged to me and I made the burden of his melancholy my own – his lumbering walk away from us, the utter emptiness of the lane when he was gone – as though the weight of his hands was pressing on my shoulders still. Night after night I sat in his chair in the parlour, stretching myself out to fill the space that he had left, as braced as he had been. There’s wanting, then there’s needing and longing, and then there’s yearning. I yearned for my Dad, and I yearned for my brother too. I was insatiably sad.
The three of us got along with a kindly incomprehension of each other’s anguish. One evening, when Delyth was out at a factory meeting and Ma and I had done the dishes after tea, she folded the dishcloth and then on an impulse she took my hands and held them against her cheeks, pressing my palms close. I looked at her face and she looked at mine. Her skin was still tight and shiny and pink, her eyes were the faraway blue they had always been and her hair had that curl from the steam in the kitchen – our house was as misty as a Scottish moor – and I could almost believe that nothing had changed. The hollowing happens on the inside, though. We scanned each other for signs of landslip and erosion. She kissed the top of my head with some of her old briskness and released my hands back to me.
We kept being waylaid by our bereavement so that life lost its predictability: we took one another by surprise. Delyth started courting – Delyth! – though she wouldn’t admit it. She began reading poetry and colonising the tin bath on a Friday night and she asked Ma to cut her hair into a fringe, and that’s how we knew.
Then without warning we received a small parcel full of Dad’s belongings. Ma untied the string and folded back the paper. I watched her steady herself: she smoothed her apron; she took a short breath which choked off at the end. She eased the lid from the box apprehensively. Inside lay his pay book, his Bible, his wristwatch and his penknife. She ran her fingers over each as though there was a Braille for memory that she could read.
“You should have his penknife,” she said. “Being the boy. I’ll let Delyth have the Bible.” She picked up the knife and made a study of the handle. “He was a great one for whittling – do you remember?”
I nodded, eyeing the penknife. I could see him sitting out the back with a cigarette adhering to his lip, paring a stick through the green wood to the white until it had the pale contours of bone, the smoke from his ciggie like a wreath in the air around him.
“There,” she said. “It’s yours.” She closed the lid of the box and made a clumsy attempt to wrap the paper round it once again, until with a spurt of anger that erupted from nowhere she gave up and sat down abruptly in her chair. After a minute or two she dragged the box towards her and her palm hovered over the rough cardboard without quite touching it. “Oh for goodness’ sake go and – do something, Ifor. Will you just –?” she snapped, waving me away.
I found a stick in the lane and went trailing home with it. I sat on the back step with my arms clasped round my knees and waited. There was silence inside the house, but not a good kind. I peeled some bark from the stick with my nail and snapped the twigs off one by one until my fingers were sticky with cobwebs and sap and silvered with insect wings and such a flow of misery was in me.
All at once the door was ripped open and Ma stood there with the ambushed look she had when the sadness was on her. “Where’s that knife?” she said, her voice rising and I hung my head thinking she’d changed her mind and wanted it back. Perhaps she would give me the watch instead, but it wouldn’t be as good as having the penknife, not by a long chalk. I fished it out of my pocket, but kept a hold of it and she lunged forward and snatched it and tried to open it, but it was worse than trying to wrap the paper round the parcel because her fingers were trembling and I could see her face was streaming wet. She kept fumbling with the knife and her thumbnail bent right back to the quick, making her sob out loud, but she unsheathed the steel blade, “Give me your hand.”
I put my hand in my pocket, but she seized my wrist and pulled it out. “Give it,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I stuttered, thinking that this was some kind of punishment, that I was to blame for the box and Dad and everything and that if it had been me and not Glyn things would have been different, they’d have been better and she’d have been happy. “I’m sorry Ma –”
“I don’t ever want you to carry a gun. I don’t ever want you to go for a soldier,” she said and she had hold of my forefinger in one hand and the knife with its glittering blade in the other and she raised it. She raised the knife. “Not you,” she said. “Not again.” She was weeping catastrophic tears.
“Ma –!”
The knife went clattering to the ground, the back door slammed and I was left alone. I tucked my hands under my armpits and eyed the blade from a distance as though it was still a danger to me. The world had gone mad and my Ma with it and I was very, very tired because I could see that no amount of embroidered handkerchiefs or wild flowers picked from the lane was going to put this right; that no matter how good I was, I would never be good enough. I leaned my cheek against the door and let the warmth of the wood enter me. I must have fallen asleep because I dreamt that I was standing on my stool by the sink and Ma was feeding my fingers through the mangle and they came out the other side in thick white folds like Mrs Parry’s sheets. Then Delyth walked up the path home from Newport and shook me awake with a crisp comment about some people having to work for a living.
“Delyth?” I scrambled to my feet, surfacing from my dream to a life that was different from the one I’d known.
“Is that Dad’s knife?” She stooped and picked it up. “You shouldn’t play with things like that. You could hurt yourself,” she observed, snapping the blade shut. “Where did you get it?”
“From Ma,” I said. “She gave it to me,” I held out my hand for it.
“You’re a bit young for a knife.”
“She said you can have his Bible. She said the penknife was for me,” I answered defiantly. “There was a parcel in the post today.”
My sister lost some of her teenage hauteur. “Oh.” Her body drooped. She became a smaller size of herself. She handed me the penknife. “Is Ma …?”
The two of us stood staring up at the door without speaking.
“She’s …” I hesitated. An account of what had happened was thundering inside me and yet, as circumspect as any grown-up, I spared Delyth the details. “Well, you know,” I slipped Dad’s penknife into my pocket and we knocked tentatively on the door although it was our home and we lived there. We waited for a second and then went inside for our tea.