The Welsh Girl (42 page)

Rotheram thought doing one's bit was overrated, but he nodded, asked about the couple. "Girl know what she's doing?"

"Reckon so," the constable said mournfully. "Won't be talked out of it at any rate."

"And the fellow--?" But they were interrupted by a bustling in the hallway, and the constable jumped to his feet with a whispered, "You tell me."

Rotheram had half expected to recognise the prisoner when he met the applicants, but the man was a stranger to him: a brawny, thick-necked Thuringian, marrying a roly-poly called Blodwyn. Rotheram had no illusions about the role of love in these unions--they owed more to desperation and loneliness--but he was inclined to approve them anyway--he couldn't quite say 'bless' them--provided they seemed founded in equal need. Why not after all? Who was he to judge? If he couldn't be sure who was lying, how was he to know who was in love?

The Thuringian and his Blod weren't much different from the rest he'd vetted. He saw them separately and then together,

and they sat on the polished wooden bench in the policeman's hall and clutched each other's fat little hands. "Oh, thank you, sir," they'd chorused when he'd signed the paperwork. He asked the Thuringian if he didn't miss home, and the other frowned and told him, "Yes, sir. Only it's not there anymore, is it?" And Rotheram nodded. "If I'm going to start all over, might as well begin here as there," the big man added, warming to his theme. "You love him?" Rotheram had asked the girl, and she'd blushed deeply, which he took for a yes. Afterwards he heard the pair of them chattering away in a language he didn't understand--Welsh, it dawned on him at last.

Only when he handed over the paperwork did he realise that the constable and the girl shared the same name.

"Your daughter?"

The other gave a slight nod. "When they started working, I wanted to keep an eye on them, stand guard, in a manner of speaking, and she used to bring me my lunches." He shook his head. "Looks like we caught a Jerry after all."

Rotheram offered a cigarette, and they smoked in silence for a while.

"He's all right."

"Better bloody be, if he knows what's good for him."

Rotheram left him then. He'd parked outside the pub, and he walked that way now with a thought of getting a drink, but when he reached the door, he found it was closed. Not yet opening time. He asked around instead for the farm he'd

heard Karsten had been assigned to, the same one he'd been captured on. Cilgwyn. The name had stayed with him. It meant 'white hill', apparently, though to Rotheram's eye it seemed as green as the rest. Still, it had struck him as an appropriate

spot for surrender.

There'd been a girl there too, Rotheram thought, but when he knocked on the door, an old woman answered and told him the German was 'gone home'. Not 'surprising, really, he told

himself. Most of the prisoners had been repatriated by then, but still, it disappointed him somehow.

There was a small child staring at him from the barn when he turned around, and he smiled and gave her a little wave. She took an uncertain step forward and he called, "Hello there!" which only made her run back into the shadows. He was deciding whether he should follow when a woman--it was immediately apparent she was the mother--emerged from the barn, one hand raised against the light, to squint at him.

Rotheram began to apologise for startling the child, but she told him it wasn't his fault.

"She thought you were someone else at first."

The woman was wearing an embroidered blouse, tucked into men's trousers, cinched at the waist with a broad belt, a combination that seemed to accentuate her figure.

"Can I help you?"

"You had a German prisoner here," he said. "I wonder if you have an address for him?"

"You knew him?"

"In a manner of speaking." She searched his face, took in the uniform. "Do you have an address?"

"Why do you want it?"

"I'm going over there," Rotheram told her, and as he said it, he thought,
Why yes
. That's what he must do next. "To help with the reconstruction. I thought I might have a job for him.

Heard he was a good worker."

"Oh, he is!" And she recited the address there and then, her accent flawless. "His mother's place. I'm not sure it'll do you any good, though," she said sadly. "He's not replied to anything we've sent."

It was the East, he knew. Soviet control. "I'll make some enquiries."

She nodded.

"Well..." He shifted his weight.

"If you do contact him..." "Yes."

"Could you tell him, Esther said...that the flock's well." "The flock?"

"Only, he put his heart into saving them. After that winter we had. We lost a lot, too many, really, to keep going. But he told us to beg and borrow stock from other farms--pastured them in return for the lambs--and then he stayed with them on the mountain. They'd have strayed, new sheep, if someone didn't go up"--she jerked a finger over her shoulder to the jagged hilltop--"and shepherd them. And he did that, almost eighteen months, in all weathers, until the new ones knew their place." Her voice wavered slightly, and Rotheram didn't know what to say.

The child had crept out of the barn and now ran to her mother, rubbing her face against her leg, but then looking up at Rotheram with a boldness that seemed beautiful to him.

"It's all right,
cariad
. Mam's fine." She smoothed a hand

over the child's silky head. "My guardian," she told Rotheram.

He smiled, and she swiped her eyes.

"Sorry. Only, there've been sheep here for hundreds of years, and it'd have been a shame to let them die out."

Rotheram nodded slowly. "I'll tell him."

"In truth, I think he rather liked it up there," she said, turning to stare up at the hillside, and Rotheram looked with her to where the sheep were drifting across it like a white cloud.

"My sheep," the child whispered, and her mother laughed and pulled her close.

Later, in the pub, he heard her story: the father fallen to his death in the quarry, and the lover who never came home from the war. "Local hero," the chatty barmaid told him. "Tragic, really, though the boy's mother's been a great help to Esther. Don't know what they'd have done without their German, mind."

The barmaid was a big, blowsy girl, friendly in an oblivious way, and he was happy to listen to her. Down the passage, in the public bar, he could see a man's back moving to and fro, the same man, he guessed, who'd refused him service three years earlier. But when the old fellow limped past him to ring up an order, he looked at Rotheram without a flicker of recognition.

The couple from earlier in the day were at a corner table, and as Rotheram finished his pint, the barmaid asked, "Another? It's on them." Rotheram nodded to them.

"Young love," the barman, who'd lingered, sighed, and Rotheram wondered what he disapproved of--the generosity, perhaps, or something more?

On the ceiling, Rotheram noticed a line of hooks screwed into the wood.

"Must have lost a lot of men hereabouts."

"Just that one to the war," the fellow said. "Other lads never came back from the factories or the coalfields. Lost 'em to work, you might say. Been losing them that way for fifty years. Got so bad that now the girls are running after them."

"Jack!"

"Well, it's true, Hattie."

"You make it sound like it's not decent," she cried. "I'm engaged," she said to Rotheram. "Met him when he was an evacuee during the war. Now he's working in Liverpool." She gave the barman, Jack, a stern look and busied herself at the other end of the counter.

"Looks like you've one fellow who's staying here," Rotheram said.

"Who? Jerry? He ain't so bad." The barman dropped into a whisper. "Told me he never even got a shot off. Said he was on the shifter when he got captured. Didn't know whether to put up his hands or pull up his drawers."

Rotheram grinned with him.

"What are you two whispering about?"

"Nothing, nothing," Jack cried, retreating down the passage.

"Congratulations," Rotheram told her, raising his glass. "Thanks!"

"You think she'll marry?" He bobbed his head towards the hills.

"Esther?"

The other shook her head. "That's another story. Dead man's a hard act to follow, I reckon. None of the boys around here have the gumption to marry a hero's widow."

She wiped the bar down, working in decreasing circles. "Ashamed, isn't it? What did they do during the war, after

all?"

"What about her German?"

The barmaid gave him a narrow look. "Not that there wasn't talk, mind. Even went to the pictures together once before he left. But how would it have looked? And her with the dead man's daughter on her apron strings. Dead man's mam in her home. Besides, he was a right respectful bloke, that Karsten. Handsome and all." She giggled, then went on more soberly as Jack approached. "Hard worker, too, by all accounts. Lads used to call him 'the German shepherd'! Said he took to it because it was just like guard duty. But he never liked that, said he'd rather be a bad shepherd than a good guard any day."

"You don't mind serving them, then?"

"Not if they're good looking!" Hattie cried, but Jack gave her a look and she drew back, miffed.

"Frankly," Jack confided, "I need the business. Besides, they can drink, you know!" He waggled his eyebrows. "And they keep the English away, to boot."

He stared at Rotheram for a moment. "No offence."

"And none taken," Rotheram told him, holding the barman's eye over the rim of his glass as he drained it.

"Another?"

Rotheram shook his head. He set his glass down in the wet circle it had made on the bar, and made sure to wish the young couple luck on his way out.

EOF