A String in the Harp

by Bond, Nancy

  “I don’t see how, even if they drain Nant-y-moch for it.”

  Jen said, “Then you think he’s buried there—under the water?”

  “No,” Peter corrected her quietly, “I know he is. I saw the cairn—there was a stone for him. Not at Bedd Taliesin, but not far from it after all. This is his country, Jen, that’s why he’s so strong here.”

  “I’m glad,” said Becky. “Then he’ll always be strong here.”

  Jen went back to what lay heaviest on her mind. “Then you don’t have to worry about seeing Dr. Owen this afternoon. If the Key’s gone, you can’t give it to him. Can you convince him you don’t have it?”

  “Bound to. It’s the truth.” Peter’s grin returned. “Of course, if he ever finds out what I did with the Key last night, he’ll have me put in an institution! But he won’t, so it doesn’t matter. You know, I’m absolutely starving!”

  “Sit down, and I’ll get you some toast. Becky, pass the cornflakes, will you? You must have been out half the night.” Jen sounded brisk and parental.

  “Not really. Did you hear me go?”

  “Nope,” said Becky. “Not a sound. Did you go on Gwilym’s bike? I guessed you had. Was it great?”

  Peter nodded vigorously, his mouth full. “Gwilym took me himself.”

  “Your clothes look rather slept in,” said Jen critically, handing her brother a mug of cocoa.

  “I bet it was exciting to go off like that in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t have minded if I’d had someone to go with me,” Becky continued.

  “You should have heard Gwilym when he saw the reservoir wasn’t there,” said Peter.

  “I hate to interrupt,” Jen said, “but you aren’t the only problem we’ve got right now, Peter.”

  “I’m not a problem,” Peter objected. “Not any more anyway. What else?”

  “Dad. He’s made up his mind about next year, I know he has, but he won’t tell me what he’s decided.”

  “I thought he’d made it pretty clear: he’s going to take us all back to Amherst.” Peter’s voice was curiously flat.

  “He hasn’t told us straight out. And he hasn’t asked any of us what we think, either.”

  “Well, he ought to ask, of course,” declared Peter, “but he didn’t the last time, so why do you expect him to now?”

  “It’s different. We didn’t know enough to understand, when Dad brought us, but we’ve learned a lot.”

  “Do you want to go back?” Becky asked Peter suddenly.

  “Doesn’t matter. Dad’ll do whatever he wants to.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Jen. “He’s terribly afraid of doing the wrong thing for all of us. I don’t think he’s even considered what he wants to do. I don’t believe he wants to go back yet himself.”

  “What about you?” Becky asked.

  “I don’t know what I want.” Peter sighed. “It used to be so easy—I just wanted to go home. I suppose I still do, but it isn’t the same, it doesn’t hurt.”

  “I want to go home, too,” said Jen. “Eventually. Not next year.”

  “There’s a lot to lose if we go,” said Becky. “We’ve started to belong, even you.”

  Peter emptied his mug. “I suppose I have,” he admitted. “But what does it all prove? If Dad’s already made the decision, do you really think he’d listen to us?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Jen. “We all listen a lot more than we used to.”

  “But he’s got some awfully good reasons for taking us back,” Peter pointed out. “School and Aunt Beth and his job.”

  “If we can convince him he wasn’t wrong to come here in the first place, we’d have a better chance.”

  Peter pulled a wry face. “I suppose that’s my job—I was wrong and he was right.”

  “Not wrong,” said Becky. “You’ve changed your mind. If we could just get him to talk to us before he does anything final. Jen’s right, he oughtn’t to do it by himself.”

  Peter rolled his eyes and said resignedly, “Oh, well, what’s another year of rain and freezing cold houses and a language that’s got no vowels and a bunch of kids who don’t know how to play football. It’s all part of my education.”

  Becky cried triumphantly, “You will! You’ll help!”

  “I’ll try,” Peter cautioned. “It’s not very likely, you know, but we might as well all be in it together.”

  “We are all in it together,” said Jen. “That’s the point.”

  ***

  Peter wasn’t nervous. He crossed the same dim, hollow-sounding hall that Jen and Becky had crossed months ago when Jen had been searching for an answer Dr. Rhys was unable to give her. Peter came unafraid, ready to meet Dr. Owen.

  Becky had offered to come with him as far as the building and wait on the Prom—she knew her father wouldn’t want her to go in with Peter. But Peter had told her not to, he was all right.

  The clock in the great hall broke the silence into echoes as it struck the half-hour.

  “Come,” said Dr. Owen’s voice in answer to Peter’s knock.

  “My father said you wanted to see me.”

  “Indeed yes, Peter.” Dr. Owen stood with his back to the window, blotting out the sky. “Sit down, won’t you?”

  Peter sat on the straight-backed chair in front of the desk.

  “Good of you to interrupt your afternoon for me,” said Dr. Owen, continuing to stand. “You must have a great many things to do after school.”

  “No, sir. That is, I don’t mind coming.” Peter returned the man’s gaze composedly.

  “Well, there’s no point wasting time in any event, is there? I’m sorry you weren’t with us on Saturday when I had tea with your father and sisters. I now gather you’re the one I’m most interested in seeing. You know, don’t you, why I’ve asked you here? I think you’ve found something I ought to examine, and I trust we can reach an agreement on it. I’m not quite clear why you feel such reluctance about coming forward with it, but I’m prepared to ignore that. Of course, you realize that I’m here on behalf of the Museum, not myself?”

  He waited for Peter to speak. Peter said nothing, it was all up to Dr. Owen.

  “You do understand why we’re here?” said Dr. Owen, with a touch of impatience.

  “Yes, I do, sir.”

  “Good. There’s no need to feel awkward—provided you do the right thing now. No one will be cross with you. I would hardly expect you to recognize the value of the object you’ve found, you simply fancied it and put it in your pocket without thinking. In fact, it’s probably a very good thing for us that you did instead of leaving it. But now I’m sure you’re a clever enough boy to see that you must give it to me—you’ll actually be giving it to Wales, you know. It’ll do far more good in Cardiff than in your pocket.”

  Instead of resenting Dr. Owen’s patronizing words and tone, Peter found himself being slightly sorry for the man. He would obviously far rather be dealing with David than a schoolboy of twelve, but David had granted his son the responsibility, and Dr. Owen had no choice.

  When he saw Peter wasn’t ready to respond, Dr. Owen went on, “Can you appreciate that the Museum is vitally important, Peter? Wales is a very small country and frequently overlooked, but there is a great deal of history in it. Those of us working in the National Museum are trying to pull the history together, as it were, to make real sense of it and preserve it. There are so few of us, really, and so much still to be uncovered. It is essential”—he paused for emphasis, leaning toward Peter across the desk—“essential we each do whatever we can, for the sake of the country. We can’t afford to lose any part of it.” Peter caught a glimpse of someone else behind the smooth, cool facade, a man who really did care and for whom he felt a sudden sympathy. But he had nothing to give that man, or Dr. Owen either.

  “Now.” Dr. Owen straightened, sitting on the edge of Dr. Rhys’s desk, determinedly casual. “May I see the object? Do you have it with you?”

  “No,” said Peter, “I don’t.”
r />   “But you said you knew why I wanted to see you this afternoon,” said Dr. Owen impatiently. “I’d have expected you to bring it.”

  “I couldn’t, I don’t have it at all.”

  “Oh, come, Peter, that’s a bit unreasonable, don’t you think? Gwyn Rhys, your father, your sister, all as good as told me you have it.”

  Peter shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I never have possessed it.” He chose his words with care: the plain truth for Dr. Owen, spoken with conviction. The Key had possessed him, never the other way around.

  “There is an object. One of your sisters—? No, I can’t believe that.” Dr. Owen stared thoughtfully at Peter, as if trying to read his mind.

  “None of us has it.” Peter’s mind was clear, his face open. There was absolutely nothing for Dr. Owen to discover. Silence overwhelmed the room.

  Aren’t there times, Peter wanted to ask, when it would be wrong to lock a thing away from its own world, keep it prisoner in a museum case to be stared at by strangers? What about the history in the hills and rivers and cliffs; how could that be collected and labeled and dated? It couldn’t, you had to go into the country itself to find it. Couldn’t it be more wrong to break the ancient unfinished pattern than to keep a bit of history from the scrutiny of men like Dr. Owen who meant well but didn’t understand that? It was the country that had reached Peter, not the rows of brooches brought out of the Dark Ages, the shards of pottery and carved stones on display in Cardiff. It was the country he’d remember.

  At last Dr. Owen turned back toward the window with a baffled frown. From his chair, Peter could see only a rectangle of bright blue, crossed now and then by shining gulls. To himself, Dr. Owen said, “There was something . . . Gwyn was excited about something. I’m sure . . .”

  “But there isn’t,” said Peter quietly. Dr. Owen must believe him because he told the truth. “Honestly, we haven’t got anything you would want to see.”

  “Yes, so you keep saying, and I don’t think you’re lying.” He looked down at his hands, examining the fingernails with concentration. “Such a pity, too. It would have been quite a find. Too good to be true, I suppose. A harp key. Well, I’ve finished. I’ll be on the bus to Cardiff tomorrow—I can’t afford to take more time here, particularly if there’s no reason. Time.” He shook his head. “There’s so little of it and so much that needs doing. There are thousands of years still to work on, but I don’t suppose you’ve any concept of thousands of years, have you?”

  “Does it matter so much though?” Peter sat forward urgently. “Do you have to fit it all together? I think it would be enough just to touch a piece of it and find it’s real.”

  “No, I didn’t think you’d have any concept,” said Dr. Owen.

  But I do, thought Peter. It mattered to him terribly, but they were on different paths and they would never meet each other. Which was right? Or were they neither? Or both? These were questions Peter couldn’t ask Dr. Owen. They didn’t understand one another and likely never would.

  “No matter. If not today, we’ll find it tomorrow, somewhere else. Persistence. We must simply go on trying and we’ll succeed.” He came back to Peter. “No point in keeping you any longer. Give my regards to your father, will you?”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you,” said Peter sincerely. In an odd way he rather liked Dr. Owen. He could afford to now; the Key was safe. “Um, could I just leave a note for Dr. Rhys?”

  Dr. Owen nodded absently, his thoughts gone on to something else as he collected a pile of papers.

  On a blank index card he found on the desk, Peter wrote: “Everything all right. Peter Morgan” and propped it against Dr. Rhys’s penholder. “I’ll just go now.”

  “What? Oh, of course.” Thankfully, Peter slipped out of the office; it was done and finished. In his eagerness to get away to the wind and sun, he didn’t even see the man standing just outside the door until he bumped into him.

  “Ooop!” He checked himself. “Sorry, I—Dad!”

  “You’re dangerous,” remarked David. “I’ve felt it often recently.”

  “I wasn’t looking.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  “Were you waiting for Dr. Rhys? He’s not there yet.”

  “No. You.”

  “Were you?” Peter was surprised.

  “Mmm. You seem to be in very good shape for someone who’s just come off the rack.”

  “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “One or the other of us has changed a great deal in a few months,” David observed. “Or both of us, perhaps. Come on, I need a cup of coffee.”

  ***

  The strange, twisted monkey puzzle trees along North Parade were covered with a green haze of new shoots, the wide pavements beneath them crowded with University students and professors, mums with prams and small children hanging like fringe off the hems of their coats. The long afternoon sun still had some warmth in it, though it was past four o’clock. The shabbiness of Aberstwyth was familiar and no longer depressing: the cracked plaster and blistered window frames of the row houses, the chipped paint on doors and smell of frying from the guest houses, the gray net curtains.

  How would it seem in the holidays when the students were done with exams and gone and the streets were full instead with people on vacation from the smoky industrial cities of England—Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Sheffield? They’d all walk up and down the Prom and breathe the sea air and buy postcards and ices or lie on the pebbly beach if the sun shone. Hugh-the-Bus said you would hardly know the place, so different it was with all the shops and cafes and cottages open, and the caravan sites along the coast bursting with tourists. Odd to think of strangers walking where Peter and David were walking now, living in Bryn Celyn. Unsettling.

  They found seats in the window of a small cafe, where they could sit across from each other and watch the business of the street. David got them two white coffees and Peter loaded his with brown demerara sugar, crunching it on the bottom of his cup with the spoon.

  “What happened?” asked David finally. “Will you tell me?”

  “Nothing much,” answered Peter. “He wanted to know if I had anything he’d be interested in, and I said no. I didn’t lie to him; I haven’t.”

  David frowned a little. “Is that the end of it? Was he satisfied?”

  “He had to be. I told him the truth and he believed me. He was very disappointed.” Peter tasted his coffee, winced, and spooned in more sugar.

  “Sorry. I don’t suppose you really like coffee, do you? I wasn’t thinking. Want something else?”

  Peter shook his head. “I was sorry for Dr. Owen, he wanted it so much.”

  “So it’s over—with him, and with you.”

  “That part is. Dad?”

  “What?”

  “If we didn’t go back to America this summer, what would happen?”

  “Did I hear you right?”

  “Suppose we stayed another year?”

  David sighed. “You needn’t worry, Peter, I’ve made up my mind to take you back.”

  “No,” said Peter. “Jen and Becky and I talked about it this morning after you’d gone.” He hesitated, knowing what he was going to say, but not knowing how it would be received. “We don’t think it’s fair for you to decide for all of us without discussing it.”

  David sat very still for a long moment, head bent, his hands with their square, capable fingers quiet on the table top. “You don’t?” he said at last.

  “It’s our family, too, Dad. Jen’s been running the house for months—managing money and cooking. And Becky’s been helping; she’s doing well enough with school. They ought to be allowed to say what they think.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m part of the family, too, even though I have made a mess of things. Some of it’s my own fault, but some I couldn’t help. I’m sorry.” It wasn’t as hard to say that as Peter had thought it would be.

  There was just a hint of a smile in David’s eyes when he looked up at hi
s son. “It’s much easier for one person to decide than for four to agree,” he said.

  “Then you get all the blame if you’re wrong.”

  “Or all the credit,” David added.

  Peter shrugged. The coffee in the cups between them got cold. What was David thinking? That he, Peter, had no right to talk this way after the way he’d behaved all year? But David had been waiting outside the office. He had bought him a cup of coffee. He was listening.

  “School’s the worst,” said Peter. “But I can make it up.”

  “I know you can,” said David dryly. “I’ve been saying that for months.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know how to explain . . .”

  “Then don’t try yet. Later, if you need to. Peter, how can I expect all the answers from you when I don’t have them myself? The questions aren’t easy: what do I do about Jen’s school if we stay? She can’t have another year like this. What do I tell Beth? And the English Department at Amherst? What are the reasons for staying here?”

  “What about wanting to?” asked Peter.

  “Even you?”

  He nodded. “No matter what we do though, we want it to be our decision, not just yours.”

  Unreadable thoughts flickered across David’s face. “You’re all so young,” he protested mildly. “I can’t help thinking of you as my children!”

  “We’re getting older.”

  “Almost too fast. You’re very persuasive, you know. I’m not at all sure I have much chance against the three of you. There’s a tremendous lot to be considered.”

  “We’ll all consider it,” Peter pleaded.

  “Well,” said David. “I spent the afternoon writing this.” He took a letter out of his pocket. “I worked hard on it; I was going to walk up the hill and deliver it on the way home. It explains why I have to turn down the University’s offer for next year. Now you tell me I can’t do it that way.”

  Peter waited, holding his breath.

  “I guess we have to take it back to Bryn Celyn with us and discuss it first.”

  “Oh.” The word escaped involuntarily.

  “If we go now, we’ll just make the 5:10 bus. Ready?”