Free Past Remembering by Catrin Collier

her and decide to stay with her, I will be all right here. But please, Charlie, I beg you, let me know you’re alive. That’s all I ask. Don’t let me go on believing you’re dead, if you are alive and happy somewhere.’
    Charlie drew on his cigarette, and exhaled thoughtfully. ‘If by some miracle I do find Masha, I think that after twelve years, she, like me, will have a new life.’
    ‘And if there’s room in it for you?’
    ‘How do you expect me to answer that? I don’t know what Masha and I will think of each other after twelve years. Yesterday you felt like a stranger after only a year’s separation.’
    ‘But we’re not strangers now,’ she whispered, curling her body around his and burying her fingers in the hair on his chest.
    ‘If I don’t come back, you’ll be free to marry again.’
    ‘Free, maybe, but I won’t marry.’
    ‘You can’t say that.’
    ‘I can. Just look at Ronnie. There was only one woman for him, now she’s dead he’ll go on living, but all the joy has gone from his life. He’s a broken man. He’ll never marry again.’
    Charlie turned aside and tapped his cigarette into the ashtray at the side of the bed. Alma wholeheartedly believed in what she was telling him, but no one knew better than him that ‘never’ was a long time. Ronnie was heartbroken – now. If he didn’t return he knew that Alma would be too – for a while. Just as he had been when he’d returned to his village and found his pregnant wife and entire family gone. The pain of that loss was with him still, but it was a grief that he had learned to endure and live with. His sorrow hadn’t prevented him from marrying Alma and finding happiness a second time. Just as he suspected Alma and Ronnie might if he was killed. They had been lovers once, why not again? And why did the idea of Ronnie and Alma taking solace in one another, and building a future together, hurt him so much? He hardly had the right to object when he wouldn’t even be around to see it happen.
    It was after ten o’clock when Diana Rees walked up the steps to the front door of her father-in-law’s substantial, semi-detached villa in Tyfica Road. Like every other house in Pontypridd since the influx of evacuees and munitions workers, it was full, only in their case with family. She and her husband, Wyn, shared a bedroom with their six-month-old baby. Her mother Megan, and Wyn’s spinster sister Myrtle each had a bedroom that was more like a box room, and her invalid father-in-law slept downstairs in what had been the front parlour.
    Occasionally, she would have given a great deal to have been able to walk through the door and retreat into a space that was wholly and solely hers. Especially after a hectic day like today, when she had divided her time between watching over Alma’s mother’s deathbed, and checking on Alma’s shop, takings and staff. But peace, quiet and privacy were luxuries that existed only in the memory, like bananas and slab chocolate.
    ‘You look as though you’re sleeping on your feet, love.’ Wyn greeted her at the front door.
    ‘I am. How did you manage without me?’
    ‘You’re not indispensable yet.’ He said as he helped her off with her coat.
    ‘You ready for your supper now, Wyn?’ Megan called from the kitchen.
    ‘Both of us are. Diana’s just arrived.’
    Diana removed the pearl-headed pins from her black velvet hat and hung it on the stand before following Wyn into the back kitchen where Megan was presiding over a simmering pot of cawl.
    ‘How has he been?’ Diana leaned over the day cot pushed into a corner next to the range.
    ‘As good as gold.’
    ‘He didn’t notice you’d gone,’ Wyn’s father added from the depths of the sofa. He pulled the blanket that covered him to the chest higher, and shook the rocker on the cradle as the baby began to snuffle. ‘He knows his grandfather.’
    ‘Then you’ve terrified him into silence.’ Wyn had meant the quip to sound light-hearted, but