by Rosie Thomas
He caught her elbow. ‘Nervous?’
‘A little.’
‘Well. You’ve got what you wanted.’
And you never miss an opportunity of reminding me, Angharad thought unfairly. Yet Jamie was here, supporting her as always. He had moved the earth to free himself from business and the restaurants for a few days. And as always, she felt the mixture of tenderness and guilt.
‘Ready?’
‘Let’s just look in at William.’
William was sitting up in bed reading a Superman comic. He frowned at them both. ‘You look silly.’
Angharad bit the corners of her mouth to hide the smile. He was right, she thought, seeing their superfluous elegance in the little sloping room with its bare boards and iron bedstead.
‘That’ll do.’ She leant over to kiss him and ruffled his hair. William thought that the party, with all its imagined adult delights, was being unfairly denied to him. He frowned harder and turned back to his comic.
After a brief word with their babysitter, Jessie’s youngest sister, Angharad and Jamie ducked out of the dolls’-height front door and stood in the village street. Since the schoolhouse had turned from a home into a restaurant at astonishing speed, Angharad had rented a little house in the middle of the terrace for the summer. She loved its simplicity, the traditional range in the back kitchen and the cotton lace curtains at the windows, but to Jamie it was even pokier and less convenient, if that was possible, than the old schoolhouse had been.
She put her arm through his now and they turned up the street together. The west face of the grey church tower was splashed with late sunshine, and its clockface blazed with reflected light like a mythical shield. As they passed it, Angharad saw and smelt the dense shade under the yews massed by the lych gate, and glimpsed the swallows dipping over the rough meadow not yet enclosed by the sweet green graveyard. The evening air was still, and heavy with the scent of dogroses. A man passed them, his colourless workshirt open at the neck and his throat and chest reddened by the day’s work in the sun. He lifted a massive hand and grinned.
‘Iechyd da. All the best for it, now.’
The tall windows of the schoolhouse were newly white-painted, and the heavy door under the old stone sign Genethod a Babanod stood invitingly open. One of Angharad’s first tasks had been to plant quick-growing stocks in the bed beside the step, and now they sent up drifts of perfume.
Inside the restaurant, everything glowed with freshness and pale, clear colours reflecting one another. They heard Jessie, singing somewhere, over the rippling piano music from the hidden speakers.
Angharad walked the length of her new domain, quickly, her eyes searching for flaws.
Nothing.
Gwyn had filled little clear glass flutes with fresh cottage-garden flowers. The tall white candles stood ready to be lit, the round tables under their long double skirts of apricot and starched white linen were laid with gleaming cutlery and glass. The sofas were drawn up around the stone hearth. In place of the fire, Gwyn had artfully arranged armfuls of flowers, delphiniums and Canterbury bells and rich purple pansies, so that they looked still moist from the garden.
‘You’ve done well,’ Jamie said softly. ‘You’re a clever girl, Anne.’
Jessie came out of the kitchen. She was wearing an overall over her best dress, and she gave a last flourishing polish to the champagne glass in her hand. Behind her were the waitresses, local girls in dark dresses with barman’s plain white aprons over them. Angharad saw past them into the kitchen. Instead of her brigade at Le Gallois she had a boy to help her and Jessie, and the rest of her staff was a washer-up not so very different from Old Lil at Y Gegin Fach, and a genial porter-handyman. But they were all she needed. The food was what she cared about, and she had done it all herself. Now she saw that her knives were laid out ready for her on the long central table. Her kitchen whites were hanging up, ready too. After the next nights, the beginning fanfare, she could retreat into her kitchen and do what she loved best.
‘Here we go, then.’ Angharad looked at her watch and then smiled round at each of them. ‘Good luck.’
‘There was one thing.’ Jessie’s eyebrows were drawn together. ‘Robina Gwynedd called. She’s fratefully sorry, but her party will be four instead of just two. Can we do her a great favah and fit in her deah friends?’
‘It’s a nuisance, but we must.’ Angharad glanced round the tables. They could have filled them three times over from the number of requests. But Lord Gwynedd was the biggest landowner for miles. His daughter Robina made a career out of enjoying herself. She was seldom seen at her father’s draughty fourteenth-century castle, but when she was home, and so far as there was a local society, Robina represented the cream of it. It was a coup to have her at the opening. Local word would make much of it.
‘It will mean two cramped tables, but … Mary, can you change the Gwyn-Jones’s table to there, and lay this one up for four? They’ll just have to rub elbows a little.’
The little waitress rustled to the job with alacrity.
Angharad heard footsteps, painfully slow, and then an awkward, humped shadow fell across the polished slate floor. There was a little silence in the room. Gwyn stood in the doorway with her brother leaning heavily on her arm.
‘Dad. I said I would drive you up.’ Angharad was at his side immediately, but he brushed her away.
‘And did I say that I couldn’t manage to walk two hundred yards? Nice job you’ve made in here. Who’d have thought, Gwyn, looking at it now, what your mucky old studio could be turned into? I’m sure it cost enough to do it.’
They helped him to his seat in the corner and Angharad thought affectionately that that would be all the congratulation that she could expect from William. She settled the cushions behind his frail figure and Jamie leaned solicitously over him.
‘Yes, I’ll certainly have champagne,’ he answered them. ‘Why not?’
A brief remission, the doctors had said. It was as if he had achieved it by determination alone. He wanted to see his daughter’s restaurant open, and he wanted to be with his grandson. There was no telling how long it would be before the disease started up its inexorable progress again, but for now he was allowed to be at home. The old man spent much of his day sitting contentedly under the grandfather clock, his back turned firmly on the study door, watching the comings and goings in the village street. Young William spent a surprising amount of time playing nearby. The two of them spoke little, but they seemed to understand each other.
The room was beginning to fill up now. It was to be a two-tier party. Angharad had invited a cross-section of village people, friends of her father’s and Gwyn’s, Jessie’s family and a handful of others, to christen the restaurant with champagne. Smiling, she saw Twm Ty Coch come in in his rusty suit and make a bee-line for Gwyn. Later, the paying customers, carefully chosen for their publicity potential, would replace them for the inaugural dinner. As Angharad moved among her guests, laughing and talking and seeing that the glasses were filled, her thoughts were gleefully in the kitchen. Soon after, leaving Jamie as host, she slipped away to the soothing greens of her vegetable purees, the mousse of Dee salmon and the tender Welsh lamb already rolled in its shells of rich pâté and puff pastry, waiting to be roasted just long enough to leave it pink and succulent.
Everything was ready.
Preparing to go out and greet the second wave of arrivals, Angharad glanced at herself in the mirror. The vivid reflection was momentarily startling. Her cheeks were rosy and her eyes bright with excitement.
I’m happy, Angharad realized, with a little shock of gratitude. I’m happy. Just for this moment, now and here. If only … nothing happens for a little while yet. A little while.
Back in the restaurant the light was changing. Shadows were gathering in the corners and in the cool space above the beams. The waitresses were moving to and fro lighting the candles, and reflected pools of yellow light sprang out, wavered and then shone strongly back again.
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Gwyn and William were ready to leave.
‘It’s lovely,’ Gwyn said simply. ‘You deserve every success.’
Won’t you stay for my dinner? Angharad was going to ask again, and then she saw her father’s face. He looked drawn and exhausted and she felt the sharpness of guilt at not seeing him home sooner. She kissed him, gentle with the papery thinness of his skin.
Jamie was waiting. ‘I’ll drive you,’ he said firmly, and she glanced at him in gratitude.
‘Not in that infernal machine,’ William complained, but let them lead him away. There was a moment of quiet in the empty restaurant. Later Angharad was to remember the scent of flowers, the velvet summer dusk beyond the windows and the purr of a car in the roadway.
The first customers. Angharad smoothed her hair. Behind her Jessie came out of the kitchen and stood beside her as they waited.
The first arrivals were a local solicitor and his wife. Angharad was greeting them when the next party came in. She glimpsed Robina Gwynedd, overdressed but resplendent in a sequinned jacket over billowing silk harem pants, with a pretty blond boy at her shoulder. Dimly she glimpsed another couple behind them. The solicitor and his wife moved away.
‘So pretty,’ Robina Gwynedd was saying. ‘Who did it for you? Lucian was cross not to be asked, weren’t you, darling? But you must know Lucian Lang, the designer? He’s done such wonders for Daddy at Castell. And now he’s …’
But Angharad was looking past Lucian whoever.
Past him, and into Harry’s eyes.
The blood sang in her ears and she felt the fine gold chain around her neck as tight as if it would strangle her.
Clear blue eyes, just like her son’s, with dark eyebrows drawn close over them. Harry looked back at her without a ghost of greeting, as if they had never been apart, never even stopped looking at each other.
Angharad felt a moment of naked, pure fear.
She stepped back, no more than a single wavering step, and felt Jessie’s fingers firm at her wrist.
Nowhere to run to, even if she could have made her limbs work. Why was she afraid?
Robina had sailed away, fluting her approval of the decor to deaf ears. The designer swayed with her.
‘Angharad.’ Harry’s voice was very low, excluding the room, the world beyond it, everything except herself. She remembered his leanness, and the old taut, eagerness flickering behind the weary lines of his face. He looked older and there were clefts beside his mouth that made him look grim. The confident, arrogant boy was all gone now, grown into this authoritative man with his bleak, powerful stare.
‘Harry.’ As she heard her own voice she knew why she was afraid. She was afraid of the passion within herself, and the power latent between herself and Harry to destroy everything that she, and Jamie, and little William, had so carefully constructed between them.
At a stroke, cold anger replaced the fear.
Why should he appear now, in her place and amongst her friends, to threaten her with her love for him? After so long, when it was so much too late.
Angharad knew that she couldn’t stop the love, rising and choking her now so that she wanted to reach out and draw him down to her. But she could try to fight it into submission.
‘What a surprise.’ The blandness she managed to put into her voice sickened her, and she saw Harry’s rejection of it in his eyes before she looked away from him.
Laura was at his side. She was smiling, very faintly, as if the tableau was being staged for her benefit. There was a peardrop diamond at her throat and smaller ones pendant from her ears shot points of candlelight back at Angharad.
‘It’s been a long time,’ Laura said. ‘Haven’t we all changed?’ She took Angharad’s hand and held it, proprietorial as she had always been, as she looked around the room. She tilted her head back to look up at the beams and Angharad saw the curve of her lovely neck and remembered that she had seen it reddened with Harry’s kisses.
‘You know,’ Laura was saying, ‘I thought it must be you behind this. I made Robina bring us along, to see.’
Angharad had wrenched her eyes from his, and she wasn’t going to look at Harry again. She was oblivious of the mixture of surprise, disbelief and cold dislike in the glance that he gave his sister.
‘Enjoy your meal,’ Angharad said into the air between them. ‘I’ve got a hundred things to do now, if you’ll excuse me. Perhaps we’ll get a chance to talk later.’
Was that the note she wanted to strike, not hostile, but distant, as if neither of them meant more to her than the grey-suited solicitor with his nose buried in the menu across the room? It sounded intolerably false, and she knew too well the sharpness of their perceptions.
She had half turned away from them, sent a flash of a reassuring smile at Jessie, when Jamie came back.
Jamie, too, saw everything with disconcerting speed. ‘Anne. Are you all right?’
‘Anne?’ Harry’s voice crackled.
‘Yes, Anne. This is my London partner, Jamie Duff. Laura and Harry Cotton. We were friends years ago, Jamie.’
‘And do you think Anne suits you better?’ Harry’s voice cut through to her from the polite murmurs of introduction. ‘Better than Angharad.’ He gave it the old, caressing throaty inflection. She quivered again with the sense that he was effortlessly severing them from the rest of the world. Jamie was miles away, diminished, and she fought to get back to him. Jamie’s arm settled around her shoulder like a log of wood.
‘I’ve never been able to pronounce it,’ Jamie said, and Harry turned his blue appraising stare on him.
‘No. Of course you wouldn’t.’ He was equable, smiling even, but there was no mistaking the truth.
The hair at the nape of Angharad’s neck prickled, and all down the length of her spine.
At a glance the two of them hated each other, and she could smell the acrid scent of it between them. She longed to close her eyes and dispel the scene, spiriting herself and Jamie away, but even as she wished it she knew that there was no escape. It would all have to be enacted, step by step, whatever was to come, and the thought of the pain it would cause was like a physical blow.
She lifted her heavy head. ‘I should be in the kitchen. Will you look after everyone for me, Jamie?’ She crossed the room to the sanctuary of the service doors. Behind her Laura said something and followed it with a low laugh.
Jessie was waiting for her in the kitchen, her bright face tight with concern.
‘That was him, wasn’t it? Angharad?’
‘For God’s sake.’ She recoiled from what seemed an intolerable intrusion and then, at once, her defences crumbled and broke. Angharad’s hand came up to her mouth and then covered her eyes to hide the tears. ‘Yes.’ If Jessie, an outsider, saw it so clearly and so quickly, then there was no hope. No hope of keeping all the little structures of their life intact. ‘It’s just the same. Just the same as it always was. I knew it, as soon as I looked into his face.’
Jessie’s hands tightened in sympathy on her shoulders. ‘And so?’ Angharad lifted her head to look at her, showing where the tears had made dark trails through the careful make-up. Her weary, defensive gesture took in the door beyond which Jamie was moving amongst the gathering crowd of diners, and from there to the little house in the terrace where she had left William in bed.
‘So nothing.’
‘Do you still love him?’
Angharad moved away to the table and picked up one of her familiar knives. The handle fitted snugly into the palm of her hand and she thought longingly of her elated mood of the early evening. Moving amongst the calm order of her kitchen, ready to work at what she loved doing.
‘Oh, yes. Yes, God help me. I don’t even know why. I’m not even sure he’s worth loving. Yes, I still love him. But I can’t let that matter, can I?’
‘He’s William’s real father.’ Jessie was gentle, but her persistence surprised Angharad. ‘That doesn’t make it quite a simple choice, does it, to exclude him for the sake of e
quilibrium?’
Angharad turned sharply. ‘His father. Yes. But he hasn’t tried to find me in seven years. Jamie’s been a thousand times more of a father, and to another man’s child. And there’s something else.’
The long red room over the stables at Llyn Fair. Tanned bodies locked together, and black hair tangled on the pillow.
‘Does he know? Does he know you have his son?’
From beyond the door Angharad thought she heard the cadences of his voice. Impossible that he was here, but true, and they were separated by a wider gulf than they had ever been.
‘No,’ she said dully. ‘No. I never told him. I couldn’t have, you see. I never saw him, after … that day.’ Jessie was staring uncomprehendingly at her. ‘I didn’t want to see him, with part of myself. I was so shocked, as if everything had turned upside down. I just ran, as far away as I could, and hid, and went on hiding. I wanted to protect myself, and the baby, from them. Him, I mean. But I wanted him to find me too. Somehow to find me, both of us, and to want me more … more than … But he never came. I used to look for his face in the crowds. I couldn’t make the steps to search for him properly, because I was afraid of him hurting us both. I knew that I shouldn’t see him again, with the rational part of myself. Stupid, loving like that, isn’t it? Doing one thing, and longing for another. You see …’ Jessie was clearly bewildered, for all the concern in her face, and Angharad shook her head. ‘Of course you don’t see. He promised once, before I really understood the truth, that he would look for me again when the right time came. He didn’t, of course. And I told myself that it didn’t matter any more.’
Angharad’s voice broke off.
Behind her the door swung open, and the waitresses came in with the first orders. There was work to be done, even though Harry Cotton was there, a few yards away, and had changed everything with a single glance. With jerky, mechanical movements Angharad pulled on her kitchen whites and turned to the long table.