The Protagonists Read online

  Olwen Hughes was born in a village called Coed Bell (Blue Wood) on the west coast of Wales, not far from the large seaside town and holiday resort of Bar Quay. The inhabitants of the village worked hard and lived frugally and righteously. If a woman put out washing on a Sunday, they regarded it as sinful. If a boy took a girl over the hill against which the village leaned, it was almost certainly a sin; at any rate, explanations were demanded and both parents informed by witnesses. In theory these tendencies should have made Olwen suspicious of the behaviour of others; but in fact she was not inclined to be suspicious. It may be that among all the other incidents and accidents which led her to death was the accident of birthplace. If she had grown up in the town it is possible that the over-emphasized approaches of the holiday-makers along the promenade and in the cheap dance halls would have taught her to identify those men whose desires were for bodily satisfaction from the few who really loved her (although the man called Harrison had deceived others, more astute than she). For in the village was genuine quietness and peace. All the inhabitants spoke Welsh more easily than English. A few widows took in English visitors for the summer and were forgiven for it; but the main local occupations were dairy farming and quarrying. Olwen’s visual memories during her first seventeen years were on a backcloth of green fields. In childish eagerness she watched the first lambs of February stand on their mothers’ backs; the long, solemn processions of swollen cattle through the mud each afternoon; the patient response of the sheepdog to his master’s whistle and the silly meanderings of sheep through gates and across railway lines: the activities of an equal innocence. She cycled to school in the cold gusts of October, through the dank smell of hedges, past the squashed dead toads and the mutilated hedgehogs, buffeted by winds at every corner, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, never afraid, because she was where she belonged. And always at the end of the lane there was the sea to watch: cold and empty and eternal in winter, a hot, blue bath for visitors in summer. While the civilized world seemed to be drawing to a close, and sophisticated talk became sour with the inevitability of destruction, here was absolute peace. In the same hot summer afternoons when the vapour trails over London and the faint crackle of cordite and cupro-nickel decided the first victory of those who did not really believe in glory, a hundred and a half miles away the twelve-year-old Olwen was not participating. She was to die in another, older war, and in that splendid summer she lay in the long grass and dreamed, or gathered flowers, or climbed through the gorse to the top of the hill to see the horizons spread around her. The sounds she heard were not hostile: the wind through the corn; the crash of the incoming waves; the sleepy lowing of cattle and the futile conversations of sheep; the faraway bark of a dog; the once-an-hour bus; the caw of the slow, flapping crows, black and manoeuvrable as Heinkel bombers, although the distant thump was not a bomb, but work proceeding in the quarry. Talk, her own contribution to sound, was of school, of friends, of parents, of God; never of war or art or sin. When she met the man Harrison, Olwen was ashamed of her own lack of certain types of knowledge. He talked so intimately of the theatre and books and of the indoor things that she was embarrassed, because these seemed more real than the reality they imitated. Yet despite her discomfort, she never disowned the reality; it was her wish to take the man Harrison ‘when they were married’ to share with him the value of silence and nature.

  The Hughes family lived in a small old house surrounded by an untidy garden and a crumbling brick wall, beyond which was the lane that sloped down to the village. One street-lamp shone at night a quarter of a mile down the lane; there was no electricity or gas in the house, and water came from a pump. From her bedroom window Olwen could see the lane where it emerged beyond the trees, church spire and cottages of the village and wound several times in its mile and a half to the sea. Olwen and her brother Tom, two years older, would watch the lane to see a small bus which came along the coast road five miles from Bar Quay and then turned at tight angles away from the shore and travelled into the village. The bus, a small vehicle that held twenty passengers, was driven by their own father, William Hughes, who also acted as conductor. His wife Nancy took in washing. The whole family led decent, quiet lives, worked hard, went regularly to chapel and read their Bible without being self-conscious or ashamed about it.

  Olwen’s colouring, unlike her brother’s sallow skin and dark hair of the typical Welshman, was unusual as well as beautiful. She had auburn hair of fine colour and texture, blue eyes and the excellent complexion that sometimes accompanies them. For a Welsh girl she was unusual in that she was quite tall. As a woman she had a wonderful body, with fine shoulders, long arms and legs covered with enough flesh to make her sensuous without being heavy. Her only awareness of her own beauty was instinctive, and showed in her rather clumsy gait, the typical walk of the shy girl, which is usually overcome or replaced after the teens. The cynic might well feel that such a girl was only created for physical love, but Olwen merited kinder attention than that. She had temper and physical courage, laughter and compassion; the willingness to work hard; she was devoted to her parents and brother, and later, as a nurse, to patients who were neither beautiful nor pleasant. In the face of other nurses’ apathy she retained religious belief. She was the sort of girl who would sacrifice her life for a child, as, in a way, she did. Her faults, which were not serious, included the usual female ones of indifference to the arguments of the mind, to politics; the unawareness that sin is not something you only talk about in church; it has to be recognized and fought when it is encountered; and recognition is not always easy. Sin does not come to a young woman in the form of intelligently and persuades until she has convinced herself that any sacrifice for love is a good choice, and probably a right and beautiful one.

  As a child Olwen made friends easily. She was affectionate, energetic and full of conversation. She walked over the fields and hills and along the shore with her girl friends, played tig with her particular friend Peggy around the rambling, white-washed farm where Peggy lived with her three sisters and her parents; learned there to love animals; on Saturdays would travel round in a milk-float delivering milk with Peggy or her sisters; and on Sundays the same young girls would meet at and after Sunday School to ramble along the hillside picking flowers. After some years at the village national school Olwen proceeded to the county school at Bar Quay, which Tom already attended. She was always better on the playing-fields than in the classroom. In school she was attentive, but some subjects, particularly algebra, trigonometry and Latin, she could scarcely understand at all. She was better at geography, history, art, the Scriptures and botany – things which depended on common sense and memory rather than progressive deduction. She could be thrown quite easily into a panic by sarcasm or anger from the teachers, a panic in which she could only stand silently, going scarlet and trying not to cry.

  If the onlookers could have approached Olwen’s vicar they might have expressed a different opinion about her (for that it was only an opinion, and an opinion by implication at that, is obvious; the girl was dead and therefore not available for cross-examination by newspaper reporters or the police). But the vicar, old even when Olwen was a child, was dead years before the man called Harrison encountered Olwen. Whatever may have been her behaviour towards the end of her life, Olwen took her religious beliefs seriously when she was a child and a teenaged girl. She accepted God emotionally, which is to accept Him always. Never did she make the pseudo-scientific discovery that He could not exist. On the contrary, she was always quite positive of His existence. Sometimes, when she had committed a small wrong, she would feel an enormous fear and unhappiness, as though He was there, waiting for an explanation. She would even look fearfully over her shoulder …

  Chapter Two

  Olwen Rosemary Hughes, thirteen years and ten months, four foot eight inches, six stone two pounds, blue eyes, auburn hair, occupation schoolgirl, moles on left arm and right shoulder, Protestant, single, nat
ionality Welsh – Olwen, precocious, with a zest for life, in excellent health, aware that there was a mystery ahead that she would have to solve, probably alone, returned from the village school to find her brother talking to another boy at their own gate. It meant nothing; it had happened before; but this time Tom’s friend stared at Olwen. He was about Tom’s age, fifteen, pale and thin, sad in appearance, defeated perhaps, or aware of defeats in the world, and in his encountered eyes she saw astonishment, wonder, reverence and embarrassment all confused together. Her own heart thumped in curious, unexpected excitement, she blushed as much as the boy did, and hurried with hanging head into the house. From her bedroom window she peered cautiously to watch the boy and her brother, and with inexplicable disappointment saw him cycle away.

  At tea she said, ‘Who was your friend?’

  Tom, deep in food, said, ‘Oh, that was Leslie. Why?’

  Not knowing the reason for her evasion, scarcely aware that it was only a half-answer, Olwen said, ‘What a funny face he has. Sad.’

  Tom gave the matter his momentary consideration. ‘You’ve got a face like a pudding,’ he said. A long half-minute later he delighted her by adding, ‘Although he didn’t think so.’

  ‘What did he think?’

  ‘What does that matter to you, since he has a funny face?’

  ‘Was he rude about me?’ she asked, indirect still in her first feminine subtleties.

  ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘He seemed to like you.’ Another pause, while he negotiated bread and jam, and then his explanation: ‘He’s a fool, anyway.’

  ‘Why is he?’

  ‘He reads poetry.’

  Olwen thought: Another six months and I shall be at the county school, able to see him. She was prepared to wait, to carry the thought of him about with her in tenderness, and, if necessary, pain, for six months, perhaps to have it destroyed at the end. Her love belonged to the other, more tender side of puberty. It belonged to the most painful of all, and the most harshly dealt with; that which has to fit in with the whimsical plans of older people; which is laughed at, scorned as juvenile and ended arbitrarily by the plans of parents. Yet which is infinitely more tender than anything that follows. It became unnecessary for Olwen to wait. Ten days later the boy came on a Saturday afternoon. He brought a great number of photographs of aeroplanes cut from magazines – perhaps he had no need for them any more – and since it was a rainy day the two boys spent the afternoon with the pictures spread on the floor of the front room. This was the one room of the house regarded as especially valuable. It contained faded, framed photographs of Olwen’s grandparents; cabinets that lent the room part of its stuffy smell; plates along the frieze; plush, heavy furniture; an old gramophone; and a completely valueless, dark, heavily framed oil painting of a great-grandparent. Such was the naïve regard in which this painting was held that Olwen was brought up to understand that it was like ‘one of Rembrandt’s’ in a tone that implied that it was without doubt the work of one of his contemporaries.

  It was difficult to obtain an excuse to enter this room, but Olwen did so once or twice. The boy Leslie stared at her in obvious regard, but Tom ignored her altogether and had clearly forgotten, if he had ever known, the implications of the previous tea-time dialogue. The boy stayed to tea, but did not eat well. This was so unusual in either Tom or his friends that Olwen concluded jubilantly that Leslie’s lack of appetite had some association with her own presence. In her delight she became boisterous, even facetious, until Tom in irritation asked, ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re like a damn wasp buzzing about.’

  ‘Now, Tom,’ his mother scolded at once. ‘No bad words. Olwen can talk if she wishes.’

  ‘Well, she talks tripe,’ growled Tom.

  ‘Not everybody wants to talk about silly aeroplanes,’ Olwen said. The boy Leslie blushed and Olwen, realizing that she had included him in this criticism, rushed on, ‘I’m sure Leslie’s sick of hearing you talk about them.’

  During the whole long, exasperating afternoon and evening there did not seem to be a single moment for Leslie and Olwen to talk to each other. He was so overcome that even in the general conversation at table he did not address her directly. Because the evening was wet and cold, the two boys stayed in the rear room of the house with Olwen and her mother; Mr Hughes being at work. A few occasions arrived in which Olwen and Leslie were alone, but they seemed unable to use them; each time a suffocating silence spread between them, so that the return of others was a relief. Just before he departed, Leslie, in a moment together, said with visible effort, ‘I go for a ride on my bike along the shore on Sunday mornings.’

  Olwen said, in the depression of the evening, ‘Do you?’ and the dialogue withered altogether.

  Later, in the warm, comforting wishful-thinking of near-sleep, Olwen thought with tenderness of the boy who had in silence conveyed such a lot to her. She analysed his every gesture and blush, and in the morning asked permission to go to chapel later in the day.

  Outside the house it was bitterly cold and her tenderness seemed foolish. She could scarcely recall what Leslie looked like; she might bicycle along the shore for miles and see nobody; she could miss him by being too early or too late; and if she met him he might conclude that she had wished to see him; and this, although true, did not seem at all desirable. Nevertheless, she rode the mile to the shore, and since Leslie went to the school at Bar Quay she rode on the hard sand towards the pier on a horizon some miles off. The sky and the sea were grey; the strong wind was in her face; the sand blew grittily about; her eyes and nose moistened; she had to bend her head, and would not have seen Leslie at all if she had not heard his bicycle bell.

  In the cold Leslie looked paler than before; his nose and eyes watered too; he was not altogether attractive, but Olwen liked him. It was the gentleness, his sadness, that stirred her. She did not know why he was awed by the sight of her, although he evidently was, treating her with something near to reverence.

  They did not know what to say to each other. They desired to speak the truth, and were unaware that love has to have ordinary moments; it is prolonged and sustained by the usual lies and hypocrisy, the tedious, everyday conversations about time and place.

  ‘Shall we go somewhere?’ Leslie asked, happier with something to do.

  ‘Let’s visit the lighthouse,’ Olwen suggested. It was in fact the only place to go unless they were to remain on the featureless shore in what amounted to a small-scale sandstorm. They cycled about three miles to the lighthouse, which was not really a lighthouse, but an observation tower erected during a previous war. Inside, away from the wind, they glowed. ‘It’s warm,’ said Olwen in astonishment.

  ‘We could always come here,’ said Leslie. ‘Until the summer,’ he qualified; for in the summer the lighthouse was surrounded by visitors, children, dogs, caravans and other, more furtive lovers.

  They stayed for half an hour, not talking much, half-silent in awe of each other. The touch of sleeves was like a physical contact, a kiss of clothes, almost unbearable. It did not take long to examine the tower, its entrance, the stone steps and the observation room; there were empty cigarette packets, some old newspapers, and the rest was dust and cobwebs. They stared out of the narrowed windows. Sandhills for miles each way; nobody about; the grey sea crashing itself into foam; seagulls poised in the face of the wind, eyes and heads turning, observing too, to swerve away gracefully.

  As they walked down the stone steps Leslie said, ‘You have dust on your coat.’

  ‘Will you brush it off?’

  But to do that would be like striking her. Leslie could not do it. ‘What’s the matter?’ Olwen asked. She was as nervous and fidgety as the boy; like all new lovers, they were so much in apprehension of each other and that thing they had found, that it was not until about to depart that they ventured to share it.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Les
lie. ‘I like you,’ he added. It was an explanation.

  ‘But I mustn’t go home with my coat dirty,’ Olwen said.

  It was her excuse for the same event. He dusted the whitewash from her shoulders and then touched her auburn hair. They kissed clumsily and softly, and in that contact was born the love and compassion that led Olwen to her death.

  They met many times that spring, always on the shore. Leslie never came to the house again, for Tom, having obtained the photographs, ended the friendship in that careless, capricious way that schoolboys do. Olwen waited with longing for the summer which she could share with him – they would walk through the hills, leaving the shore for the visitors – and for the end of the summer, when she would be a younger pupil at the same school.

  It ended as it began, in tenderness, with a dream-like quality of sadness. He met her one Saturday afternoon and his mouth was down-turned in genuine gloom. ‘I’ve got to leave,’ he said. ‘To London.’

  ‘How exciting!’ said Olwen.

  ‘I mean for good,’ Leslie complained. ‘I shan’t see you again.’