Chapter 7
Elisavet’s face was white, white as her hairband.
Kneeling next to the fireplace, Cora’s eyes were blind with tears. She struggled to her feet awkwardly and carried the broken bits of china to the coffee table. At last she looked up at Elisavet.
‘My little brother was an evacuee.’ The words stuttered on her lips. ‘His ship was sunk by a U-boat.’
She heard herself say it.
It was the first time she’d spoken the words aloud and they tasted hideous, like filth in her mouth. They cut open a solid seam of dread in her guts. Oh, Owen bach.
He’d gone through it all by himself, little boy.
The torpedo struck late at night, noise, smoke, fire and chaos, the ship listing, the lifeboats swinging, dropping into the tilting sea and scooping up water, splashing and wild screams like joyful children in a paddling pool and then the fading silence as they all went home to bed, floating listlessly over the lifeboat seats in their sea-filled pyjamas.
Owen’s last frightened thoughts would have been about his family, how he was sent away from home on a sinkable ship, a paper boat with its precious cargo of children on a journey to an unknown land of strangers with false promises of safety.
The heaviness of it was a rock on Cora’s chest. None of the twelve Welsh children survived… No, not one.
Elisavet crouched by the green slate hearth, her face cloaked by her dark hair, picking up the remaining shards of china. ‘I can fix it,’ she murmured through gritted teeth. She put the bits on the table and sucked her finger.
Cora saw drips of blood on the slate.
She gave a shuddering sigh and looked sorrowfully at the broken pieces. Fix it? No. There was nothing to be done with them. They were recently produced, these commemoration china figures. She could buy herself another.
The thought didn’t make her feel any better.
‘I’ll get you a plaster for your finger,’ she said as she went to the bathroom cabinet for an Elastoplast and antiseptic wipes, blowing her nose into toilet paper.
Her head was hot and throbbing and she swallowed two ibuprofen with water from the tooth mug, feeling storm-battered and vulnerable.
Back in the sitting room, Elisavet had wrapped her duster around the cut and was cleaning the windowsill.
‘Give me your hand.’
Elisavet’s fingers were slender and cold and Cora wiped away the blood and yellow fluff that stuck to the wound. She lost herself in the gentle task and when it stopped bleeding she applied the plaster firmly. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’d rather stop work for today,’ she added hopefully.
‘For today? No. It’s fine.’
‘Well, I’ll leave you to it then.’ Cora went into the kitchen, picked up her bag and put Elisavet’s money in the white envelope. She pressed it flat on the table.
That was it. They couldn’t carry on employing her after this, now that she had seen this destructive side of Elisavet.
It wasn’t something you could turn a blind eye to; after all, it was her fault, she was responsible for answering the advert in the window and introducing her to Megan and Gladdie, even though, as they’d warned her, she knew very little about the sort of person Elisavet was. She’d taken her on trust.
Cora felt again the wind of fury of Elisavet’s sweep of the arm, the muscles moving under the skin. Of course she would tell them.
But she still felt the chill of Elisavet’s passive fingers in hers.
When she left the house she wasn’t ready to talk to Gladdie about it. Her face was puffy and flushed. Once Gladdie knew, the news of Cora’s upset would spread, it always did around here, and be made much of. Did you hear about Cora’s cleaner smashing her place up? Broke her heart, it did.
The tears rolled slowly. She was heavy with grief. You need a plumber, girl, not a hankie.
Without making a conscious decision, she headed down the alley which backed on to the open fields behind Island Farm, keeping her head down and her shoulders hunched, hoping she wouldn’t meet any friendly neighbours on the way.
Lodged firm in a place of misery, she needed to have space around her, so that she could feel small and pointless and inconsequential again.
She stopped on the path and lifted her face to the fragrant westerly wind blowing across the fields behind the camp, letting it dry her cheeks.
The expanse of yellow blossoms shimmered against the familiar, unknowable hills lying prone and lazy on the horizon. To get that upset about the china boy…
In the past, see, you didn’t dwell on things. You moved on. No one spoke about Owen afterwards, and the rip in their hearts was invisibly mended, no one’s fault, no, indeed, because no one deliberately puts their son in harm’s way.
But it was Dio’s fault and everyone knew it.
Dio’s hair turned milky white, not overnight but gradually over the next three weeks. And he gave up preaching. It was his fault for playing God, for lacking faith in the Almighty’s ability to look after them.
As it happened, the munitions factory, that peach of a target, never did get bombed, and Bridgend was never blown to kingdom come and them with it. Miraculous, it was.
Owen would have been safe at home in their arms, as it turned out.
So they never spoke about him, neither with love nor reproach.
You make sense of things however you can. You decide that Owen was always destined for a bad end. That he knew it in his ancient soul, and the knowledge was the source of his constant fear. He was a homing missile for fate.
He had left them willingly, bravely, a scapegoat, label flapping, small suitcase gripped tight in his small hand, he left them to go on that voyage to a distant land without a fuss so that he could save them, and his sacrifice caused the armaments factory to be miraculously shielded from the enemy’s bombs.
Why not? Who was to argue otherwise? And what was the point?
Life was all myths and legends anyway.