Chapter 48
In the early hours of the morning a pistol shot jerked Cora awake from a deep sleep. She sat up in bed, the noise ricocheting through her dream.
She could hear shouting, men’s voices, and she got out of bed and opened the window.
A man was screaming in the icy darkness and the sound carried over the open fields and into the night. She flinched at the pain in it. It was followed by the roar of commotion. Steady, she told herself. It’s not an escape. The alarm isn’t sounding. If it was an escape, there would be an alarm.
And then the alarm did sound, wailing mournfully through the night as if she had provoked it, and she could hear movement from the bedroom next door and Dio’s agitated voice. She dressed quickly and met him on the landing, his troubled sooty eyes puffy with sleep.
‘They’re out,’ he said, his voice tight, and he went back into the bedroom to pull his trousers on over his pyjamas.
Jane was putting on extra clothes against the cold. ‘This is it,’ she said through gritted teeth, buttoning up her cardigan.
‘Don’t go.’
Jane laughed, and her face was flushed and animated. ‘Don’t be stupid, girl! It’s what we’ve been waiting for! Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’
‘It won’t bring Owen back, will it?’
Jane gave a hungry grin. ‘A life for a life.’
She wasn’t listening, Cora knew that. Their thoughts were running along different lines. She ran downstairs to the kitchen and pulled her coat on over her nightdress. Jane was picking up the shotgun propped against the dresser and emptying cartridges into her chapel coat pocket.
Cold with dread, thinking of the shot, the scream, Cora sat on the doorstep pulling on her wellingtons. Out of two thousand prisoners, there was no reason why it should be Frank, she told herself sensibly.
She hurried down the lane and into the night with her torch, flashing the small circle of light onto black shapes merging against the silver fields.
Bedlam. Men were shouting, dogs barking.
Guards standing on the roofs of the huts directing flashlights at the fields, and shapes converged in beams of light, the gleam of gun barrels, the howl of the hunt.
In the camp the prisoners were banging their spoons against their metal plates.
It was a frenzy of chaos, and in the din, Temperance was yelling: ‘Spread out, men!’
Cora saw Idwal standing alone on the path, shoulders hunched, watching it all from a distance. She shone her torch on him. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked. ‘I heard a gunshot.’
‘The guards shot one of them,’ he said.
‘Dead?’
‘No, no. Thankfully. Go home, Cora. Go home,’ he repeated, turning to face her. ‘You shouldn’t be here. There are killers on the loose.’
‘Not all Germans are killers,’ she said, thinking of Frank.
‘I’m not talking about the Germans, am I,’ Idwal said. ‘Our lot, I mean. Bloodlust, that’s what it is.’
The search party was spreading out across the fields, men shouting, dogs barking, flashlights playing, and her mother screaming victory amongst them.
Cora flashed her torch across the scene.
She heard her mother’s voice, pitched high with adrenaline: ‘Murderers!’ and Temperance shouting in his football hooligan’s voice: ‘Spread out! Don’t let the devils get away!’
‘How many have got out, do you think?’ she asked Idwal.
‘The first ones left before midnight, according to May,’ Idwal said. ‘They’ll be well away by now. These are the stragglers, the opportunists. Poor blighters.’
She felt a surge of relief. Frank would be long gone. For him the important thing was to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible. ‘Thanks, Idwal.’
She switched her torch off and turned to go home, keeping close to the entangled hedgerows at the edge of the field, away from the barking dogs and the roaring crowd.
So that’s that, she thought hollowly. It was over.
Frank had gone. She was glad for his sake that he’d gone.
At the same time, the thought of not seeing him again broke her heart.
Behind the knotted branches, a thin streak of a flashlight lit her up.
She heard a dog bark and Shep was by her side, panting, his tongue lolling. She bent and rested her hand for a moment on the dog’s head. The loud report of a shotgun reverberated across the field.
Frank, she thought in panic, and in the time it took to think his name she felt a blow, a sharp sting of shot like a swarm of bees in her scalp. She crouched in shock, hugging herself. ‘Don’t shoot me!’ she screamed, as if the shock waves of the plea would hold her mother back.
Her fingers were sticky with blood, the pellets embedded as little bumps. The blood was hot as it rolled down her neck.
There was a babble of voices, and the loudest was her father’s.
‘No-no-no-no-no!’ Dio was yelling as he ran, as if it wasn’t too late to stop what had happened.
Cora’s head burned with pain, and her knees buckled. Dark shapes were running towards her, guns down, but her father reached her first and fell on his knees beside her.
‘Oh, my girl.’
She hurt, and her head pulsed with hot and fiery agony. The night had gone quiet, and the noises from the camp ceased. She heard her name passed around, spoken softly.
Dio put his arms around her and lifted her up and he pressed her forehead against his rough tweed overcoat. ‘My dear girl,’ he said with abject pity, his voice so low that that she couldn’t hear the words, only feel them vibrating through his chest, as if he’d only now remembered she was his child.
The house was still and strange when Dio carried her in.
He took a teacloth out of the kitchen drawer and put the kettle on and filled a bowl with water, murmuring to himself all the while with his back to her.
‘And forgive us our trespasses,’ he whispered urgently, pausing on the words as though it was a strange language only he could understand, ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us.’
As he dabbed her hair, Cora saw that he was crying.
‘Don’t worry, I’m all right,’ she said, sad to be causing him pain and scared for his pride’s sake to wipe his coal-black tears.
He poured the hot water into the kitchen sink and helped her out of her coat, shiny with blood. ‘Come here.’
Cora bent over the sink and stared into the water, watching the swirls of pink as he poured gushing jugfuls over her head.
The towel was rough as he wrapped it around her head. ‘Cup of tea?’ he asked gently.
‘Yes, please.’ Cora touched the towel. ‘What will happen to me?’
‘The pellets will work their way out in time. Better than having them cut out, in my view.’
‘Oh.’ She stared at the tea shimmering in the cup and looked up at him, her heart aching for Frank. ‘I’m scared.’
Dio fell back on old comforts. ‘“Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” I don’t know. It’s something to hold onto, Cora,’ he said desperately, like a man swimming to a leaking life raft.
Cora was lying in bed awake. The noises from the fields behind the camp had died down.
She was praying to move beyond the pain in her head and the bigger pain in her heart, to a time when Frank would be like Gladdie’s GI, Charles: a name which brought a momentary sense of happiness and regret and nothing more.
Cora heard raised voices and she got out of bed and stood listening as Dio let his anger loose.
‘You shot your own daughter! You bloody fool!’
Cora wanted to hear her mother’s reply. Her head felt huge and hot.
‘Not on purpose as you very well know!’ Jane snapped back at him, unrepentant. ‘I thought I’d got one of them,’ she added, and the disappointment was thick in her voice.
That very evening the anti-escape committee met at Temperance’s house for the final time, just to tie things up, like.
Temperance put Cora in his own chair.
Her father had bandaged her head and it was like a white flag reminder to them all that the escape hadn’t gone the way they’d envisaged it. There was no getting away from that.
It had the heaviness of shame about it, as well as failure. Despite their plans and their meetings, they had behaved like a wild rabble of barbarians. Guilt shimmered in the cold room.
Not only that, there was the awkwardness of Jane turning up to join them, tight-lipped and defiant. She sat on the lowly tapestry footstool and no one could look at her, not even Dio.
They glanced at each other over her head and didn’t condemn her or sympathise, but no one understood it really, how Jane could have shot at a shape in the dark when it could have been any one of them.
Temperance cleared his throat and read from his final notes.
‘The tally so far is sixteen German prisoners arrested locally and twelve further afield. Two only got as far as Llanharan, they must’ve walked in a circle, and one got caught trying to find the port in Port Talbot.
Not to worry, though. They’ll round them all up eventually. ’
There was an awkward atmosphere in the chilly front room.
And then Jane spoke up. ‘I want it noted that after all these months of talk, I was the only one with guts enough to shoot them,’ she said.
They all turned to look at her as one, like cats.
Jane jutted her chin, as though in her mind she had shot a German with undimmed justification and it was Cora’s fault that she hadn’t.
‘But you didn’t, Jane,’ Idwal spoke out, stating the obvious on behalf of them all. ‘You shot your own daughter!’
It crushed Cora. She said quickly, trying to catch her breath and dampen down the explosion, ‘It doesn’t matter, it could have been worse, a miss is as good as a mile.’
Silence. No one pointed out that actually Jane hadn’t missed, but they were all thinking it.
Cora felt saliva sweeten her mouth. She was going to be sick with sheer misery. She swallowed hard and jumped to her feet. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said. ‘I left—’ She was in too much of a hurry to invent the lie any further. ‘Sorry,’ she said, covering her mouth.
Out in the quiet street she put her hands on her knees and doubled over. She spat the sourness into the gutter. The blood rushed to her head and she straightened, feeling the scabs throb.
Never a word of apology from her mother, she thought bitterly, and it was hard to face that she meant so little to her. She took a few deep breaths, pulled herself together and went back into Temperance’s house.
Her mother was talking, justifying herself. ‘I did it for Owen,’ she said, flushed. ‘You might have forgotten what they did to him but I haven’t and I never will.’
Dio gave a twitch of the head like a horse ridding a fly.
‘Hey, come on, Jane,’ he said, ‘we haven’t forgotten him, not for a moment.’ He frowned at the outrageous unfairness of her words because each of them carried a small lump of grief for Owen that they only felt in the dread of a restless night.
‘Well, that’s that, anyway. It’s over. With the best of intentions we went out to fight the Germans in our own land,’ Temperance said. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and blinked. ‘I can’t see that any good came from it, mind. Any other business before I call our final meeting to a close?’
There being no other business they got to their feet and left for home, heads bent, glad to be out of there in the silent and uneasy manner of the guilty.