by Rosie Thomas
‘He’s dead,’ she said blankly.
Harry’s arms tightened, supporting her. Angharad shook her head a little, dazed, but in the bleak dawn suffused with gratitude that he was there.
‘I’m sorry.’ She had never heard his voice so soft. The roughness of his unshaven jaw grazed hers. He was so close. She saw the soft stuff of his collar, a tiny unravelled thread in his sweater and the pulse at his neck under the angle of his jaw.
‘Harry.’ The bewilderment was growing. ‘How did you know, to be here?’
‘I heard. If you would like me to go away, just say.’
She shook her head and felt his arms tighten again.
‘Come on.’ Gently he led her out of the hospital and into the sea-grey light. The sky to the east was the colour of pearls with a thread of palest pink laid where the sea met the sky. The only sound was the cry of the gulls as they swooped over the pier.
Harry guided her to his car at the kerb. As she sat in the passenger seat and stared out at the red-brick height of the hospital, the first sense of loss dawned on her. She had left her father in there, and he would never come home again. A sob filled her head and broke out of her mouth.
At once Harry’s arms were around her again and her face found the angle of his shoulder.
‘Cry,’ he ordered her. ‘Cry, my darling.’
After the first grief had worn itself out, Angharad looked up at the low roof of the car and felt it imprisoning them.
‘I want to go outside,’ she said.
Harry made her walk across the promenade to a white-painted shelter facing the sea. They sat down side by side on the narrow bench. In front of them the waves spilled over the shingle and the gulls dipped and circled. Angharad drew the cool salty air into her lungs and felt the desperate fingers of the hospital hours loosening their hold. Harry had brought a rug from the car and he wrapped it around her. Now he was fumbling in the bag he had carried with him and she smelt the fragrance of coffee. She realized at once that her mouth was parched, and she was hollow with hunger. Harry broke off squares of chocolate and fed them to her, and before he would let her drink her coffee from the Thermos cup, he uncapped a brandy bottle and tipped the spirit into it.
They ate and drank in silence, listening to the waves and the seagulls.
At last Harry said, ‘I wish I’d known your father.’
‘He was talking about you, just before he died. About when you were a little boy.’
Harry’s stare met hers, and she saw the unchanged blue depths of his eyes.
‘He told me why. All the reasons why he visited his bitterness on us. He made me understand.’
Angharad was thinking, remembering the effort it had taken him to tell her, and the understanding and sharp love and pity that the story had brought. It was a moment or two before she saw that Harry was waiting, not moving, with his head bent.
‘And will you tell me?’
Angharad felt herself the strong one as she picked up his hand and looked down at the shape of it. Clearly remembered, with so much else.
‘Yes.’
As she talked, she felt that Harry was listening to her with every particle of himself, but he was looking away from her and out to sea. When she glanced at him she saw the old, impatient lines of his profile that she had loved and clung to in her memories for years overlaid with something new. Perhaps uncertainty. Perhaps the resignation of hoping without expecting. At the end of the long storm, Angharad felt her own exhaustion. Telling it had been William’s last effort, and gratitude beat inside her again.
At length Harry’s eyes met hers and they looked at each other with a little of the numb fear of children discovering the blackness of adult secrets.
When Harry spoke, she saw that his lips were stiff.
‘Your home,’ he said. ‘All those times and years. Your father and mother. Oh Christ, Joe. He killed your mother. That’s what it means, doesn’t it?’ His voice cracked, and he moved to shade his eyes with one hand, but Angharad caught his wrist and touched her fingers to his mouth.
‘Of course it doesn’t mean that. Neither of us must think that. She was very ill, and she died. What does matter now is that we should understand why there was so much bitterness. For Dad’s sake.’
There was a wildness in Harry’s face now as he pulled her to him and kissed her eyelids, the bones of her cheeks and then her mouth, bruising her, laying her open to him as no one had done in all the years they had been apart.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know it properly then, God help me, but I know now. I’ve known it since that terrible day. I want you, Angharad. It’s possible, isn’t it? Tell me it’s possible?’
Angharad broke away from him. She was too numb, too new to the grief for her father and mother, and too frightened of the insistence that Harry triggered off in her.
‘I don’t know. Not now. Perhaps not ever.’
William, she was thinking helplessly. Your son, Harry. Then Jamie. And Laura.
‘Your grey-flannel lover?’ There was a touch of the old arrogance there, and she flared up at it as she would never have done before.
‘Yes, Jamie’s my lover. And my partner, and my friend. For seven years, through difficult times. Where were you then, Harry?’
He caught her hand, alight with passion.
‘I tried to find you. I came to London, not knowing but just believing that’s where you would be. I made lists of restaurants, street by street and area by area, and I walked those streets in case I might see you. Have you any idea how many eating-places there are in London?’
Angharad shook her head, numbed. She had been right, then, all those times in London when she had felt him close. How sad, and how wasteful.
‘Thousands. It was hopeless, but I couldn’t think what else to do. I kept seeing your face, white, like it was … that day. I couldn’t let you go, and I’d already been a selfish fool and let it happen. I went to your aunt, and begged her to tell me where you were, but she wouldn’t. If you asked about me, she said, or ever mentioned me, that would be different. Last time I saw her, she said that you never had. She looked at me as if she hated me. I understand why, now. I gave her an address. Put it into her hands. You could have reached me through that address within hours, any time in the last seven years. I made sure of that.’
Angharad looked sadly away. The sun had come up, a circle of molten colourless light over the burnished rim of the sea.
‘I didn’t know that,’ she said in a small, toneless voice. ‘Gwyn never told me.’ The heat of anger rose in her, and then she remembered her father and Joe Cotton, and Harry’s shocked voice saying He killed your mother. Of course Gwyn had hated Harry. Why should she have acted as his messenger? She had been wrong to keep all the secrets, and never to have mentioned Harry, but Angharad understood why she had done it.
And she herself had never spoken of Harry. There had been opportunities and she had let them pass out of a kind of perverse pride. The anger against Gwyn flickered and died, replaced by a knot of frustration. ‘I explored every avenue I could think of to find you,’ Harry said. ‘But you had vanished. Evaporated. I thought I understood, in the end, that you didn’t want to be found. And who could blame you, after all.’
Angharad could barely hear the last words, they were spoken so low.
‘What about Laura?’ she asked, knowing that if all the truths were to be drawn out they should come now.
‘Laura, Laura.’ With a jerk Harry pulled away from her and stood in the mouth of the shelter, a black silhouette against the sun’s glow. ‘Do you think I wanted to let you disappear like that? Your last sight of me, screwing my own sister? Not making love, Angharad, do you remember that? Listen. Laura has made sad, bad mistakes and so have I. We pull each other back, and down, and inwards. We can’t go on for ever, chewing each other up. If you were mine, Angharad, you could help us both.’
Angharad thought back to the restaurant, and Laura in her diamonds. I don’t believe that,
Harry, she repeated to herself. I want to, but I can’t.
Harry turned back to her and his face had changed again. There was a new tenderness in it, and it tugged at her.
‘If you were mine,’ he repeated.
‘I don’t know.’ It was the only answer she could give him. Too much had happened to take in so quickly, and none of the old problems had melted away.
‘I understand,’ he said at once and brushed the hair back from her face to kiss her forehead. Then he swung her round to look at the sea. ‘Look at the sunrise. Do you remember the August Meeting? And the child, singing Early One Morning?’
It was as clear in her head as if the notes were soaring around them now. Angharad let her hands fall and walked out of the shelter into the dazzle of light.
‘I have to go home,’ she said simply. ‘To see Gwyn. There are things I have to do, now.’
‘I know that,’ Harry reassured her. ‘When you are ready, I will come back again.’
He took her hand and led her back to his car, and she felt in that moment as clear and certain as she had done seven years ago.
Eleven
The meadow over the grey stone churchyard wall was fringed with the foaming lace of cow parsley. Beyond it the ground sloped down to Cae Mawr, where the Cefn children always built their Guy Fawkes bonfire, and then rose once more to the bracken folds of The Mountain. The humped back of it stood dark against the brilliant blue sky.
Angharad looked back again, to the sweet dark earth at the gravemouth and the vicar who was reading her father’s burial service in his slow Welsh cadences. He had christened her in the same tiny church. Around her was the silent crowd of her father’s neighbours and friends, dark compact people, their heads respectfully bent and forgetful for a moment of whether they were Church or Chapel. Jamie Duff in his sleek dark suit towered above their ranks like a being from another world.
The slow, momentous words were balm to her spirit. Angharad felt the sun hot on her head, and the peace spreading from the churchyard to encompass the village and the hills beyond. She could even believe that a little of it settled on Harry and Laura, side by side yet not together, at the far edge of the group. Laura had stopped twisting the rings on her fingers, and Harry stood very still, his face intent, looking into the dense shade under the yew trees.
Angharad understood why they had come. They had done no more than murmur a word to her at the church door. It was for her father’s sake, and after all the years, for Joe.
The service was over. The moist earth fell back again as the sexton bent to his work. Angharad knew him as the cowhand from Tyn-y-Caeau farm. The mourners were beginning to turn aside from the grave in twos and threes. Without looking, Angharad was aware that Harry and Laura had already slipped away. She turned to Gwyn. Her seamed face was wet with tears but she was scrubbing them away with her folded handkerchief. Firmly she told Angharad, ‘We’d best get back. Everyone will be wanting something to eat and drink.’ The expectations were distinct. As soon as the cards on each of the wreaths had been read and their appropriateness commented upon, there would be an eddy of people back to the house. There should be sandwiches, bara brith and cake, tea and whisky, and the atmosphere would lighten perceptibly until it became almost jolly again. Only then would people consider it appropriate to leave.
Angharad knew that her father would have attended dozens of such gatherings, and she knew too that for all his cynicism, it was what he would have wanted for himself. She had done all the preparing with due care.
Now she walked back down the street to her old home, flanked by Gwyn and the vicar. In the window she glimpsed little William’s pale, serious face. He had been left in the care of Jessie’s mother who was cutting the obligatory triangular sandwiches. Angharad went quickly in to him, but he met her at the door.
‘Will Grandpa come home now?’
‘No, William. He won’t come back. But he’s safe. We shouldn’t be unhappy any more.’ She watched the transparency of emotions in the little boy’s face. At last the one she had been waiting for broke through. It was impatience, with the muffled quiet of the house and the sombre days just past. William looked out of the window and saw the blue sky.
‘C’n I go and find Teck?’
‘Of course you can.’
He was gone at once, ducking between the groups of his grandfather’s friends at the front door, and away up the village street. Watching him, his head tucked down and his bare legs flying, Angharad thought she might have been seeing herself twenty years ago.
She turned back to the little room, lined with her father’s books and possessions, and crowded with the cluster of friends who would remember those days too. They came to shake hands or put their arms around her shoulder, restrained in their sympathy, perfectly at home with emotions that the day demanded. They were comfortable with her too, because they could place her exactly. How could it be like this in London, Angharad thought? I belong here. Amongst these dark, dignified people.
Her old Sunday school teacher had just come in.
‘A sad day,’ she murmured to Angharad. ‘But beautifully done. A lovely service.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Parry. Will you have some tea? Or something stronger, perhaps?’
‘Well, I don’t know that I should. But William always was a whisky man, wasn’t he? Perhaps just a very small one, in respect, mind.’
Angharad looked round at the little community, drawn tight around Aunty Gwyn, and herself if she should need it. Her own generation were here too, Jessie and her husband, and Gareth Williams whom she had last seen in Le Gallois. He looked much more natural here. The faces were brighter now. Over by the window, where the late sunlight was strongest, she heard the first low laugh muffled by a discreet cough. Jamie was plying the whisky bottle. Angharad smiled to herself. The gathering was proceeding exactly as it should.
Her father would have enjoyed it.
How can I leave? she thought with a sudden pang. I don’t want to go away again. This is my home.
It was well on into the evening when Angharad and Jamie at last made their way back to the rented cottage with its whitened step and discreet lace curtains at the window. They had left Gwyn sitting in the darkening room with a trio of friends, the grandfather clock ticking securely behind them. William had begged to spend the night at Teck’s house, and had been dispatched to Jessie’s cheerfully elastic household. Angharad and Jamie were alone for almost the first time since she had come home from the hospital four days ago.
Angharad knew that Jamie was watching her and, aware of her own cowardice, she busied herself with the preparations for a meal rather than face him at once. In spite of the hot weather, a low fire was kept burning in the old range to heat the water. Angharad checked and found that the old bread oven was hot. She would make a soufflé, and they could have a simple salad. While she whisked up the egg whites, Jamie stood half-turned away from her, his head almost touching the black oak beams, looking through the curtains down the deserted street. She could sense his taut impatience. He had already given her more time than he could easily afford.
They ate the meal in almost unbroken silence. At last Jamie put his plate to one side.
‘Anne?’
It sounded very strong now, that London name.
‘I know. Jamie, I …’
‘Wait. I want to ask you, first. I miss you, Anne. I understand, of course, that you wanted to be with your father, and that it was natural and good that you and William found a way of staying here with him until he didn’t need you any longer. I could see how happy it made you, and I even recognized it in him. You were right, and it was astonishingly generous of you.’
Selfish, as much as generous, Jamie. You are the generous one.
‘But now, will you come back with me? To our life? I love you, Anne, and I love William too. I want to take you both home again.’
Home? Oh, Jamie, I know how much you love us. If only, if only.
‘Will you come?’
&
nbsp; Angharad thought of their pretty Chelsea house with its careful antiques, blue-and-white china, and the flowers blooming in the tubs on the steps. Her office over the Le Gallois dining-room, with her appointment book beside the telephone and the brigade of people downstairs doing all the things she had enjoyed herself. None of it, not a single thing, seemed as real or important as this little rented house and the street beyond it.
Prevaricating, and hating herself for it, she said, ‘There’s The Schoolhouse. It’s been closed for four days. I want to open it and start it working properly again. I can’t just leave it now, Jamie.’
‘There’s also Le Gallois.’
‘I don’t cook there any more. Any efficient manager could do what I do. I’ll come back and appoint one.’ She was looking down at the tablecloth, not wanting to see his face. ‘It isn’t just The Schoolhouse. There’s Aunty Gwyn …’
‘Gwyn can come and live with us, of course.’
Generous Jamie, city-rooted. He couldn’t understand what it would be like to be torn away from this gentle, powerful place.
The silence gaped between them.
‘Tell me the truth, Anne,’ Jamie said.
And what was that? Layers of truth, corroded and fused and tangled together.
The truth that now she had come home she couldn’t sever herself from it again? Or the other, where Harry’s dark height fell between them and Jamie, and which she couldn’t look into herself, yet, because of the ache it set off in her heart?
‘I want to stay here in Cefn. Will you let us do that, Jamie?’
Perhaps she should have cut the ties between them then, but she couldn’t find the strength to do it altogether. Part of herself still clung to him, the vulnerable self that had been so painfully exposed when she first came to London. And now habit and familiarity clung to their years together, and to the times that they could go on spending in just the same way. Jamie was kind, and good. She could never be in love with him. But was love what she needed? If it was the agonizing wrench that she felt for Harry, her spirit was beginning to tell her that she did not. The steel core of independence strengthening within told her that what she needed now was peace, and solitude, and her son alone.