Chapter 24
Since their conversation in the dark, Frank had occupied a lot of space in Cora’s thoughts.
She had gone over their conversation obsessively, word for word, because he didn’t seem like a dangerous man.
Mind you, there were some English people in the public eye who would vouch for Hitler being a decent enough chap, once you got to know him, and good impressions couldn’t always be relied on.
‘Stop talking about him. You’re asking for trouble,’ Gladdie said.
‘I feel sorry for him, digging on his own in the dark. I don’t know why he bothers, nothing’s going to grow there. I want to get his cap back to him. I want to make his face light up.’
On Saturday night she talked Gladdie into going with her to a pub with a bad reputation where no one knew them.
It was dimly lit for safety reasons and blue with smoke.
It was where the guards went, and they were the main cause of the bad reputation – they were looking after Nazis so they tended to get angry about it in drink.
Nazis were for killing, not for cosseting.
In the gloomy blue light of the bar of the New Inn, she and Gladdie got their stout and sat at a small table feeling conspicuous and needing to find a guard to talk to.
‘This is a stupid idea,’ Gladdie grumbled, lowering her head and sitting hunched. ‘Everyone’s looking at us.’
‘We’ll just have one drink and try to enjoy ourselves.’ Cora folded her arms. ‘Why shouldn’t we?’
Gladdie looked at her sceptically. ‘Why shouldn’t we? Arguing with yourself, are you now? I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘I’m arguing with my mother in my head, I am.’
‘Well, tell your mother to apologise to him then.’
Cora picked up her glass and saw movement out of the corner of her eye.
One of the guards had got to his feet. Bingo! He was young, cocky-looking, and he limped over to their table and sat down heavily. It was his limp that she recognised.
‘Good-looking girls like you shouldn’t be drinking alone,’ he said cheerfully. He held out his hand. ‘The name’s Arthur. Budgies, are you?’
‘Yes. I’m Cora and this is Gladdie.’
‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ Gladdie asked him abruptly.
‘Got my calf shot off,’ he said. He sounded apologetic.
Gladdie recoiled. Ever since visiting her GI she had been repulsed by war injuries.
‘You want to see it?’
‘No thanks,’ she said, waving her hand, ‘you’re all right.’
But he was already standing and rolling up his trouser leg to show them. His sock was held up with a rubber band for a garter. ‘I bet you’ve never seen a leg like this before,’ he said, resting his foot on his chair.
It looked as if a predator had bitten a chunk out of it, Cora thought.
The gouged scar tissue where his calf muscle had once been was pink, puckered and totally hairless.
He stared down at it, baffled, as if it had only just happened to him.
He tugged his trouser leg down to cover it again and looked at them, trying to read their expressions.
He sighed. ‘That’s me done for, isn’t it,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I used to have a way with the ladies.’
‘You’re not doing too badly, you know,’ Cora said to him.
‘Aren’t I?’
‘We’re talking to you for starters.’
He gave a fleeting, wistful smile. ‘Aye, you are. Don’t mind me, I just wanted the company. I’m not looking for a date. I’ve got a girlfriend, see.’
Cora took a sip of her drink. ‘You’re a guard at the camp, aren’t you?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘We’ve seen you as we walk past.’ She didn’t tell him how she recognised him. She took another sip of her beer, wondering how to get to the point. ‘What are they like, the prisoners?’
He shook his head wearily. ‘Don’t ask. The Nazis won’t accept being told. They want to be in charge. They are in charge. Live and let live, I say. They might not rule the world but they rule the camp all right. They’re welcome to it.’
Cora looked into her beer, dark as honey.
The conversation wasn’t going the way she hoped.
There must, after all, be some good and decent prisoners in amongst them but that was the wrong way of thinking.
It was Them and Us. But this was her chance and she was going to take it.
‘Arthur,’ she began hesitantly, ‘there’s a man digs in the garden. ’
‘And the singing,’ Arthur groaned. ‘Don’t talk to me about singing.
It’s enough to drive you bloody mad, but we don’t stop it because it’s good for camp morale, keeps the violence in check.
’ As if her statement had taken its time to arrive in his consciousness he said, ‘A German? What are you asking about a German for?’ Arthur sat back in his chair, studying her.
He gave a slow smile, understanding. ‘Taken a shine to him, have you?’
‘No, of course not, it’s just – I want to give him something.’ It sounded more mysterious than it was, so she added, ‘He dropped his cap at the station and I’d like to return it to him.’
‘No, you don’t, take it from me, you want to burn it.
It’ll be riddled with lice.’ Arthur’s expression altered, hardened and there was a gleam in his eye.
He leant forward on the table, his face inches from hers.
‘It’s illegal to fraternise, didn’t your mama tell you that? ’ he asked in a mocking tone.
Cora sat forward too and met his dark eyes close up and almost out of focus. ‘I know.’
‘Thought you did. What’s it worth to you,’ he asked, ‘if I give him the cap?’
The men in Cora’s life were good men, hard-working, chapel-going. They feared the wrath of God in the hereafter, and in the here and now, the wrath of their wives.
But she had also come to know the men in the factory, a different type of person altogether, rough, more like Arthur.
She was conscious of Arthur’s size. He was bigger than she was, with an aggressive confidence that implied he knew all about her, knew her better than she knew herself.
‘It depends on what you want, doesn’t it,’ she replied.
He dragged his thumb along his lower lip. All his bluster seemed to leave him and he looked away from her. It was a few moments before he spoke again. ‘It’s my leg. You think it’s ugly. I could see it in your face.’
‘I wasn’t—’
Gladdie chipped in helpfully, ‘Don’t worry about her, she always looks like that.’
‘It’s true, I do,’ Cora agreed. ‘It’s just my eyebrow, nothing to do with you.
’ It was instinct that had made her recoil from his mutilation but she hadn’t been repulsed, just shocked.
She’d felt sorry for him with that rubber band holding up the sock on his skinny, half-eaten ham hock of a leg.
‘It doesn’t look too bad at all, really,’ she said.
He squinted at her. ‘I’m scared for my girl to see it. It’ll put her off me.’
‘No, it won’t. She’ll be all right.’
‘You think so?’ Arthur asked desperately, rubbing his hands over his face, his voice momentarily muffled.
‘Yes.’
‘Prove it,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for any funny business. Just touch it for me. Put your hand in the hole.’
She didn’t like the way he put it, but it wasn’t a big thing to ask.
It wasn’t a date, or a kiss. She’d told him his injury didn’t look too bad and it was true.
It wasn’t the mutilation that made her hesitate, it was the intimacy of it, the shabbiness of touching this stranger in return for a favour. It made her feel bad for both of them.
The dim light of the bar outlined his face blue, and she realised she’d hesitated too long. His face had closed up again as if the night had fallen over him.
‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Roll up your trouser leg.’
He did so, keeping his eyes lowered as he crossed his leg over his knee. He carefully eased the rubber band around his ankle and pushed the sock down.
She hesitated. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked him.
‘Not really.’
Cora hovered her warm palms above his puckered skin, full of pity for his embarrassment.
She laid them down on the gouged skin. There.
It was not such a big deal as he seemed to think.
It was only a big deal to him, and to no one else.
She felt sorry for him now. She could feel his leg warming up beneath her hands and presently she put her fingers into the dent where the skin was baby soft.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Your girl won’t care about it, I’m sure. You don’t have to worry.’
Arthur pulled up his sock protectively and smoothed his trouser leg down. ‘Have you got the cap?’
She took it out of her bag and noticed for the first time the doodles inside it, like a jigsaw.
She looked at it more closely.
‘Checking for lice?’ Arthur asked with a laugh.
Cora saw it was a map of South Wales: Newport, Cardiff, Bridgend, Port Talbot, Neath written and marked neatly.
And a vertical line to the left, with a lot less detail, had the word Eire written next to it in large letters.
Cora realised with a lurch of alarm why the prisoner had been so keen to get it back.
Can’t go far without a map, can they? she thought.
It also meant that Temperance was right, it was the prisoners’ mission to escape.
And theirs, as locals, to stop them, not to help them get away.
Her skin stung with the chill of the knowledge.
No wonder Frank was so happy to see her!
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said, putting the cap back in her bag.
‘I don’t blame you, it’s asking for trouble.’ Arthur tilted his head thoughtfully. ‘Makes no sense though. You’re filling the shells to blow them up and at the same time you’re worrying about a cap?’
‘I know it doesn’t, you don’t have to tell me.’ Cora finished her beer. ‘Thanks, anyway,’ she said.
‘Toodle-oo.’ He waggled his fingers as they left.
Back outside in the chilly air, Cora turned up her collar and tried to make out Gladdie’s expression in the frosty dark. ‘What?’
‘Why did you change your mind?’
Cora shrugged, her heart still pounding hard because the map was a huge deal and she’d promised Frank she would give it back to him.
But she couldn’t, now. Because Frank didn’t know they were anticipating an escape, and ready, at the first wail of the siren, to give chase with dogs and pitchforks and shotguns in the deadly tally-ho of a human hunt, getting their own back at last for all the grief and agony and destruction that they’d endured over the last years.
‘Arthur might burn it because of lice or forget about it, or give it to the wrong man,’ she said.
‘I told you that you were taking a risk, didn’t I?’
‘You did.’
‘He’s right, too. We’re hypocrites, happy to kill them when it suits us.’ Gladdie sounded depressed.
‘We’re not exactly happy about it. It’s our job, what’s hypocritical about that? It’s only temporary and when the war is over the factory will close and we’ll go back to our normal lives: housework, marriage, children.’
‘Will we? You’re assuming there will be some able-bodied men left for us to marry,’ Gladdie said, blowing warmth into her cold hands. ‘They’ll all be like Charles. Broken.’
Cora was thinking about the German again, the way his serious face had lit up suddenly so that she’d responded without thinking. Like when someone waves from a train and you wave back even if you didn’t know them. It was what people did.
They were on the bridge when they heard the singing, and the sound was echoing into the night. His voice was one of them, and it was a strange thought.
She was glad she still had his cap. Part of her wanted to keep it, like a souvenir of his bright smile, and the smell of him.