by Rosie Thomas
‘Tell me the truth,’ Jamie said again, very quietly. ‘The man at the opening night. Harry. He was Harry Cotton the director?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he is William’s father.’ Not a question. A long breathed-out sigh of despair.
‘Yes.’
‘Does he know you have his son?’
‘No.’
‘You can’t keep that a secret, Anne. Not up here. He’ll find out, and he’ll want him as well as you, and he won’t let go easily. What man could?’ The first bitterness she had seen in Jamie, and she had bred it. The pain stabbed at her. ‘I saw him looking at you in the restaurant. I know the Harry Cottons of this world. They’re single-minded, and they’re hard, and they are never quitters. Don’t let him devour you, Anne. Don’t you let him smash you back to the girl you were when you walked into Duff’s and asked for a job. And don’t let him do anything of the kind to William. Even if he is his real father.’
Jamie swung back to the window and stared out at the mild little view as if he hated it. Angharad went to him and put her hands on his sleeves. Soft flannel, hand-tailored for him, the very familiarity biting at her now.
‘I won’t let him,’ she whispered. ‘If I never do anything else, I will keep William safe and happy. I loved Harry Cotton when I was a girl of eighteen. I didn’t know anything or understand anything. His father had cheated mine, a long time ago, and I was forbidden even to know him and his sister. But I loved them both and they loved me, in their own way. Harry was very young and wild, then. I was pregnant, and I ran away. The rest you know. I didn’t see him again until the night of the opening.’
Angharad lifted her head to look into his eyes. ‘I’m grown up, now, Jamie. I’m a mother, and I’m myself. I’m not afraid of Harry Cotton. You asked for the truth. The truth is that I don’t know what I feel for Harry. Whether I hate him. Or love him. Or whether he doesn’t matter any more. It’s so tied up with many other things. With my father. With this place, and another called Llyn Fair. Where … Harry used to live.
‘But I do know what I want, and need. I want to stay here in Cefn, living with William and seeing him grow up with the people and the way of life that I knew. We’re not going anywhere, Jamie. We’re still here, if you want us. I’m sorry about London.’
The paucity of the words struck her, but she could find no others.
He smiled at her, reaching out to touch her cheek and then kissing the corner of her mouth with his old gentleness.
‘I know you are,’ he said. But Jamie couldn’t disguise the sadness in his eyes, and he turned away to the dim little room because there was nothing else for them to say.
In the dark night Angharad sensed that Jamie was as wide awake as she was herself, watching the black square of the window soften at last with grey light. But he didn’t whisper Are you awake? as he had done so often in the past, nor did they turn inwards to try to find again the warmth that was fading away between them. Angharad tasted regret in her mouth, and impotence, and when Harry’s dark face slid in front of her eyes, she closed them against him as if he was an intruder.
Jamie was to leave very early the next morning for London, and she sensed the relief when it was time for them to get up. They moved awkwardly to and fro, bumping into each other in the confined spaces of the cottage. Jamie carried his suitcases out to the Porsche while she made coffee and toast, and then they sat facing each other in the back kitchen in what seemed to Angharad a cruelly painful parody of all their other mornings together.
‘I’ll go up to Jessie’s and say goodbye to William,’ Jamie said tonelessly. Almost as he spoke they heard flying feet along the pavement and William erupted into the house.
‘I was afraid you’d be gone,’ he said, clambering up into Jamie’s lap and leaning back so that his black hair fanned out over Jamie’s smooth shirtfront.
Jamie stroked it lightly and said, ‘Of course I wouldn’t go without seeing you. What are you doing today?’
‘It’s the best day. Football after school. When will you be coming back?’
A pause, fractional, hovering between them all. Angharad turned to the dishes with her throat tight.
‘I’m not sure. William, your mother and I have been talking about things. Trying to decide how best to arrange everything because I have to work in London and now we have The Schoolhouse here, and Aunty Gwyn as well. Which would you like better, to live here or in London?’
Angharad rounded on him. Don’t ever use William between us, her eyes flashed at him, but then she checked herself. Jamie loved William too. He was simply asking him, as it was fair to do.
William was thinking, serious-faced. She saw, and knew that it was the beginning for him, the first sight of adult paths with their divergences and mysterious turnings. Questions would begin to loom for him as they had done in her own childhood. How would she avoid his grandfather’s mistakes when already she was hiding so much?
Looking from one to the other of them, William said with a puzzled face that roused her fierce protectiveness, ‘I’d like to stay here. But only if you can too, Jamie.’
With the utmost gentleness he answered, ‘I can’t do that.’
‘Teck’s Dad works here. Why can’t you?’
‘I couldn’t do my kind of work in Cefn. William, I’m not your Dad. I thought you understood that.’
‘I want you to be.’
Angharad was shaking, her hands clattering the lid of the butter dish. Was this what she really wanted, this wanton destructiveness of her child’s secure world? Yet they had never, ever tried to pretend. From the very first, when William’s stumbling syllables had formed ‘dada’ they had corrected him, with gentleness. Not Dada. Jamie. How long would it be, now, before the question came, ‘Where is my Dad? Where has he been?’ And how would she answer that?
Jamie had smoothed William’s hair once more and now he set him down squarely on his feet. ‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘But I’m Jamie. Same as always. And I’ll be back next weekend. As often as I can.’
‘Promise?’
‘Of course I promise.’
There was gratitude in Angharad’s eyes as she looked over his head, and William was years too young to interpret the hollow effort at conviction in the two faces important to his world.
They followed Jamie out to the car, and waved until he had swept around the corner under the oak tree and vanished from their sight.
You did it to him, and yourself, Angharad told herself savagely as she steered solemn William to the school bus. You did it, as she walked up the little road to the restaurant, tore the apologetic notice from the door and once inside took the explanatory tape from the answering machine.
You, yourself. And Harry. Harry, will your fingers dig into my flesh for the rest of my life?
Jessie came in in her apron, took one look at her face and brewed coffee so strong and black that it puckered Angharad’s mouth, but stopped her hands shaking at last.
‘Talk?’ she asked, but Angharad smiled crookedly and shook her head.
‘You know everything,’ she said. ‘Let’s work. Just work.’ But the brief pressure of her old friend’s arm around her shoulder comforted her, and helped her to cling to the flickering conviction that she was right. She had to be right.
They worked.
The restaurant was open again for lunch that day, although there were only five customers. There were nine for dinner, more the next day, and on the third they were booked up again. Angharad flung herself into it as she hadn’t done since the early days at Duff’s with Pierre’s eyes on her and the mysterious unfolding force of the baby inside her. The difference was that all she carried now was the weight of her thoughts and memories, and the reverberating, endless questions.
Should she, after all, hack through the little totem of her independence and take William back to London, marry Jamie and be his Anne for the rest of her life? Or stay here in Cefn with her son, living as simply and with the happiness they found in spite
of so much, as they were doing now? Or go to find Harry? Seek him out as she hadn’t done years ago, and say, This is your son? And me, can I explore the way that you still hold me, taut and braced against the pain of it, whatever comes?
No.
She wouldn’t do that. The answer came back clearly every time.
Angharad rigidly ordered her days so that the precious hours between the return of the school bus and William’s bedtime were spent uninterruptedly with him. She found a pleasure in his company much stronger than the busy, distracted love that had reigned in London. They read books together, and then played long, involved imaginative games based on the stories that then had to be repeated exactly the next day. On Sundays and Mondays the restaurant was closed, and on their first Sunday alone together Angharad drove them west to the great stone castle at Caernarfon. They ran up and down the battlements with the wind in their faces and the jackdaws tumbling in the air below them, and huddled awestruck at the foot of the great cliffs of towers.
William avidly soaked up all the meagre information about the place that she had absorbed from her own father, and begged for more.
‘We’ll look in Grandpa’s books. And then there’s Harlech, and Conwy as well …’
‘Can we go now? Today?’
His eagerness surprised and delighted her. ‘Too far today. Next Sunday we’ll come, with all the books and a picnic, and the camera, and we’ll make a castle scrapbook, if you like.’
William fell asleep in the car on the way home, exhausted with the air and exercise. Looking back at him, Angharad felt pride at the success of the day healing a little of the rawness of anxiety.
On other afternoons they went walking. Walks in London had meant the Embankment, or Kensington Gardens to look at the ducks and sailing boats on the Round Pond. But in Cefn they could strike past the church and over Cae Mawr, and up on to the springy turf of The Mountain. Once they were dawdling up the rutted track over the lower slopes, looking at the wildflowers sheltered in the mossy ditch.
‘Herb Robert,’ Angharad recited to him, ‘crosswort, vetch, celandine and campion.’ Delightedly she spotted the curved green spires of wild arum in the coolest hollow. ‘Look, lords and ladies. See, inside their green cloaks, the lords in purple and the ladies in cream.’
William bent to examine them, and the ferns sprouting from the bankside brushed their intent faces. Then he straightened up again as something else caught his attention, and he was scrambling over the gate and running exuberantly away from her in a wide diagonal across the bracken-crisp slope.
Angharad heard the crackle of a footstep in the dry undergrowth. She felt his closeness even before she looked up, and then his eyes drew hers and she stared into Harry’s face.
Atavistic terror gripped her.
‘What do you want?’ Her instinct, surprising her even in that split second, was to turn aggressor. She wanted to drive him back, away from here and her playing child, as if he were a predator. She moved like a cat to block the gate, and his view over it to the mountain slope.
Harry stepped back, unbalanced by the fury in her face.
‘To see you. To ask how you are. Is that so very terrible? What’s wrong, Angharad?’
‘You’ve been following me. Spying on me.’
Gently, as if to soothe a child, he said, ‘Of course I haven’t. I was walking up there.’ He gestured to the ridge. ‘And I saw you coming up. Remember how we used to walk together? Miles and miles, talking.’
‘I don’t want to talk now.’
His face was concerned, eyes measuring her. Angharad fought the impulse to turn and run. ‘Of course not, if you don’t want to.’
You can’t keep it a secret, Anne, not up here, she heard Jamie warning her. Harry was much taller than her, and he could look over the gate.
‘Who’s that? A local kid?’
The blood roared in Angharad’s ears and the innocent blue sky turned threatening and dark. She reached out for the gate’s support and held it, and heard her own voice come through cracking lips.
‘That’s right. A local kid.’
Then, as high as the cry of a curlew on the wind, she heard William calling as he flew back down the slope. ‘Mummy. Mummy, look at me.’
The mountainside went very still. There was only the little boy with his black hair blown back as he ran, and then his laughter, and his panting breath as he reached the gate and scrambled over. She put her arms around him and felt the sharpness of his shoulder blades and the firm straight line of his backbone. Healthy and strong, happy and well-loved, an ordinary little boy. What now?
‘William,’ she turned him round, ‘this is Harry. An old friend of mine.’ Only with the child’s shy smile did she look from his clear face to Harry’s, and at once the likeness struck her like a thunderclap. She had always known it, but not until she saw them face to face did she recognize how close it was. And in Harry’s eyes she saw something that frightened her, yet made her want to hold him just as she held William now.
William sensed the atmosphere between them and wriggled awkwardly.
‘Can I go down the hill? There’s a stream at the bottom.’
‘If you stay where I can see you,’ she said automatically, and he was off again. Angharad could not look to see, but Harry’s eyes were fixed on the dark, bobbing head.
The silence welled between them, as unbroken as if the rustle of wind in the grass, the skylarks and the throaty complaint of the distant sheep belonged in another world, light-years remote from theirs.
Angharad had braced herself, expecting the iron grip of his hand at her wrist, or the pressure of his fingers on her shoulder. But Harry hadn’t moved. She could see his right hand hanging at his side, loose, almost helpless.
At last he said, ‘He’s mine, isn’t he?’
Bewilderment, sadness and loss in his voice, with none of the anger or aggression she had steeled herself for. ‘Yes. You are his father.’
‘Angharad.’ There was a break in his voice. ‘Why?’ Harry moved to lean on the gate, his head bent, the loose hand up to shade his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were having a child? I have had a son, your son, for all these years and never known him. Years of Hollywood. Years of nothing. While you … and he … have been alone …’
She wanted to reach out and touch him now, but knew that she couldn’t dissipate the shock reverberating through him. Not yet. And if ever they were to draw close again, this moment must stand clear and undistorted by half-truths.
‘I came to tell you, that day, and to ask for your help. The day that I found you and Laura together.’ Too clearly, she saw the flicker of pain lick upwards in him. ‘After that I ran away. I hid in London. I didn’t want you to find us, and yet I did. So badly. I thought that you could find us if you wanted to. I didn’t know that Gwyn was trying to protect me.’
‘I tried. God help me, if I’d known I would have moved the earth to find you.’
As it had always done, Laura’s name quivered between them. Angharad waited for him to say it, admitting it, but cruelly he would not. Instead he turned to her and took her in his arms, lifting her face up to his and examining it minutely as if he had never seen her properly before. She knew that he was searching for words, discarding them. She had never seen bewilderment in Harry until this moment. The arrogance and impatience that had marked him were cracking, dissolving before her eyes, and she looked back at him as if it were for the first time too. She saw the clefts that his bitter-edged smile had dug at the corners of his mouth, and the weary lines around his eyes. He looked older than his years, and yet at this moment younger and more at a loss than she had ever known him.
‘I feel,’ he said uncertainly, ‘as if a slice of time has been taken away, and handed back translated into a dimension I don’t recognize.’ He drew her closer still so that she felt his heart beating. ‘Tell me what he’s like.’
Angharad half-smiled at the impossibility. ‘He likes trains, and football. He wakes up too e
arly and disturbs the whole house. He’s very rational, in the most irrational ways. Harry, he’s a little boy …’
‘… And he thinks that your grey-flannel lover is his father?’
‘Jamie. His name is Jamie.’
‘He thinks that Jamie is his father?’
‘No. He hasn’t asked, yet, why his friends have fathers and he has Jamie.’
‘And when he does?’
As gently as she could, she said, ‘I don’t know, Harry. That’s a decision that Jamie and I have to make.’
He’ll find you out, Jamie had said, and he’ll want William as well as you, and he won’t let go easily. Angharad waited tensely, but Harry did no more than drop his arms and turn silently away. They looked across the slope and saw William climbing towards them.
‘Look what I’ve found!’
He came rolling over the gate and held out his treasure for them to examine. It was a sheep’s jawbone with all the teeth and fragments of gum clinging to it, smelling ripely. Nothing could have been more fascinating for William. Angharad took a deep breath and gamely bent over it. She was aware of Harry hesitating for an instant and then kneeling down too. His hand reached out, wanting to touch the child’s shoulder, and then withdrew again. William was rattling his jawbone, absorbed, and it was Harry who was struck with shyness. Angharad watched the hunger grow in his face, checked by diffidence, and felt the tremor of old judgements and old values sliding aside to make room for new ones. Perhaps she didn’t know Harry Cotton at all.
‘I’m not very well up on sheep,’ she mumbled in reply to an urgent question of William’s. It was Harry’s hand that reached out for the gruesome object and turned it for the child’s inspection.
Dark heads, close together.
‘Sheep eat grass, don’t they?’ Harry said. ‘See, all the teeth are flat for chewing it, with all the ridges running that way.’
Even their hands are the same shape.
‘Our teeth, and all meat-eating animals’, are pointed for tearing at our food.’