by Rosie Thomas
The car stopped in front of the last house in the street.
‘Home,’ Angharad said, savouring the word.
Angharad had always been pleased that she lived in one of the grey stone houses, with a door in the middle and two windows on either side like a house in a child’s drawing. It had once been the vicarage, and it was a shade larger than the other houses. Angharad had always considered this appropriate too, because, after all, her father was different from the other men in the village. Beyond the house was the low wall of the churchyard, a fat yew tree, and the grey church tower rising among the gravestones. The Methodist chapel, hideous in red brick, sat trenchantly at the opposite end of the village.
Beyond the houses and the church were open fields, dipping and rising to the skirts of The Mountain. It was only one of the range that ran from the sea down into the heart of mid-Wales, but it was The Mountain in the village, to Angharad and everyone else, and its homely outline dominated the horizon. The summit of it was brown now with dead bracken, and the lower slopes were dark squares of symmetrical Forestry Commission conifers.
‘Home,’ her father repeated. ‘Are you pleased to be back?’
‘Yes.’ Angharad forgot the constraints of the drive. ‘Oh, yes.’
The car door slammed open and she scrambled out, transformed back into the child who had been driven so reluctantly away in her scratchy school uniform. The air surprised her with its milky sweetness, overlaid with the distinctive drift of coal smoke. For a second it was so quiet that Angharad could hear the stream trickling in the hollow beyond the churchyard. She ran the few steps to the front door, clicked the old-fashioned latch and it swung open. It was never locked.
‘It may be 1965, but you’d never know it in Cefn, thank God,’ her father was fond of saying. ‘When it’s time to lock the doors against your neighbours, it’s time to move somewhere else.’
The door opened straight into the square room that was the centre of the house. Her father’s study was off to the right, but this room was where they lived. It looked smaller to Angharad after the echoing linoleum spaces of school, but otherwise just the same. The rugs and the few pieces of battered but solid furniture stood in the same places on the flagged floor. The alcoves were lined with books and a grandfather clock with the sun and moon painted on its face ticked solidly. The scrolled top touched the black beams of the ceiling. A new fire smelling of freshly chopped sticks crackled in the stone hearth.
Angharad listened to the sounds of the old house for a moment and then shouted, ‘Aunty Gwyn, are you here? I’m home!’
Gwyn Owain came out from the kitchen at the back of the house. Angharad beamed at the sight of her in her perennial tubular tweed skirt, snagged pullover and laced-up brown shoes worn with man’s grey socks. Her intelligent face was lined and puckered, and her faded hair was cut short with a firm consideration of convenience and none of style.
Angharad had never known her own mother, and her father’s spinster sister had mothered her uncomplainingly from birth. Gwyn Owain was too independent to live as part of her brother’s household, even for the sake of his orphaned daughter, but she lived close enough for Angharad to love her and depend on her as if she were her real mother. She had taken her aunt’s forthrightness, and her occasional eccentricity, for granted for the whole of her life. Gwyn wiped her hand absently on the best white tablecloth she was holding and then wrapped her arms around her niece.
‘Welcome home, pet lamb.’ Then she blinked, and looked at her again. ‘What’s happened to your lovely hair?’
Angharad’s hands flew up to her bare ears, and back came the memory of the bleak school bathroom and the knot of giggling, jeering girls around her.
It had been her dormitory initiation.
‘Plaits?’ they had said incredulously. ‘No one wears plaits any more.’ There had been a metallic click as the scissors were lifted, and two jagged bites that wrenched her head back as the twists of hair were cut off. In the sudden, slightly awed silence that followed she heard the tiny crinkling noise as the hair unwound from the stumps of her plaits and frizzed into abandon.
‘I cut them off,’ she said quickly. ‘None of the girls had plaits, Aunty Gwyn.’
After they had gone away and left her alone, another girl, a tall girl with very clear eyes, had come in and found Angharad staring at herself in the mirror as if at a stranger.
‘What did they do?’
‘They said it was my initiation.’
The image in the glass in front of her, her own round face with the ridiculous sawn-off hair and the dark, oval one above it, had blurred with tears. The dark girl had made an impatient noise and gone to fetch her own scissors. She had made Angharad sit on a bathroom stool, and with her black eyebrows drawn together in a frown, she had evened up the ragged ends. She snipped and trimmed decisively until she had turned Angharad’s ravaged hair into a smooth bell.
When Angharad dared to look at herself again she stared in disbelief and then in dawning gratitude.
‘How wonderful. You’ve made me look just like everyone else.’
The dark girl had said, drily, ‘Well now, aren’t you lucky.’
To their surprise they found themselves laughing.
The dark girl’s name was Laura Cotton, and Angharad had loved her from that moment. Somehow, the awkward scholarship girl and the elegant, aloof Laura, seemingly older by years than her contemporaries, had become friends. Laura had made the lonely privation of school endurable for Angharad.
Gwyn was clicking her tongue in disapproval.
‘I’m surprised at you. Why do you have to look like everyone else? What do you think about it, Will?’
William Owain looked vaguely surprised. ‘I hadn’t noticed. She always looks nice to me. Surely she’s old enough now to decide about her hair for herself?’
Angharad went to him and kissed him. As her lips touched his face, she felt how the skin of his cheeks was loosening into folds. Her father was getting old, here on his own without her.
A sudden touch of grown-up fear came to her. Everything was changing, and she couldn’t stop it. Angharad hugged her father with a fierce, possessive love. Their separation made her see him more clearly. Externally he was a mild, preoccupied man, uninterested in conventional achievements and happy in his beloved Welsh countryside. But Angharad knew that her father’s mildness was deceptive. There was a passionate streak in him that could make him flare into anger, sometimes irrational, and it made her afraid of him as well as loving. Angharad understood too, without ever having explored the idea, that her father had never overcome his bitterness and grief over his young wife’s loss. His daughter had always known that his feelings for her were shadowed by that memory, and that her physical likeness to her mother was a pain as well as a pleasure to William. Her cautiousness towards him had taken her running instead to Aunty Gwyn with all the problems and pleasures of her childhood.
Yet it was William she had missed, painfully, in the weeks away from Cefn village.
Her father stroked her smooth hair now and said, ‘Go and help your aunt with the tea. I’ve got some work to finish. You can tell us everything about school while we’re eating.’
The last sun of the afternoon was striking through the kitchen windows at the back of the house. Angharad saw that her busy lizzies on the windowsill had been faithfully watered, and were a mass of bright scarlet flowers. There was a fire here too, in the old tiled range, dulled to a sullen red glow by the bright sunlight. A fat white cat was asleep in the rocking chair.
‘Eirlys.’ Angharad pressed her face into the soft fur and the cat stretched lazily in its sleep. ‘I have missed you all.’
Gwyn had taken a pot out of the oven and was prodding at the contents.
‘Lamb hot-pot,’ she said unenthusiastically. ‘Nothing like as good as yours.’
Neither her aunt nor her father was interested in cooking, but Angharad had been fascinated for as long as she could remember. She took the dish
from her aunt, with a sudden memory of herself as a solemn eight-year-old, sitting at this same square scrubbed table. She had had a recipe book propped up in front of her while she wrestled with a mass of dough for puff pastry.
‘It’s fine,’ she said now, tasting the hot-pot. ‘Needs more salt, that’s all.’
‘I’ll do it, if you lay the table.’
Angharad went automatically to the drawer in the dresser and took out the cutlery. She set three places, touching the thin silver gently as she laid it down. She was dimly aware that these delicate spoons and bone-handled knives, and the forks engraved with the entwined ‘WO’, were somehow part of her father’s past, and didn’t properly belong here in the little stone house any more than her father did himself.
Her new, uncomfortable perspectives made her suddenly aware of how little she knew, and how little she understood.
‘Is Dad all right?’ she asked abruptly.
‘What, lamb? Your Dad? Oh yes, I think so. He’ll be finished with his book soon, and he’s been lucky with other work lately.’
William was an historian, once a teacher, but he had retreated years ago to his study to write scholarly books on remote Welsh history. The negligible income from that was supplemented with book reviewing, and occasional pieces on Welsh culture or characters for magazines. There had never been any money, and Angharad had never thought about it until confronted with her shaming lack of it by her new contemporaries. They had laughed, not quite behind her back, at her clothes and her unsophisticated tastes. Except for Laura, who had told her that clothes were peripheral – although her own were beautiful – and that she should be proud of having won her free scholarship.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Angharad said now, frowning. Nothing was simple, any more. ‘I meant … what will happen to him while I’m away? When I grow up, and he gets old?’
‘He’s younger than me,’ Gwyn said cheerfully. ‘I notice you’re not worried about your poor old aunt. Quite right too, and you shouldn’t worry about your father either, because he can look after himself. You enjoy yourself while you can. Now, go and call him in for his tea.’
So I’m still not old enough for a serious answer, Angharad thought, as she walked through to the study. Old enough to go away on my own, old enough to cut my own hair, but not old enough to know anything about anything.
None of the questions that were beginning to ferment inside her would be answered yet.
‘Not tea-time already is it?’ her father said, as he always did. It was getting dark outside, and Gwyn drew the check curtains at the window. They sat down in their accustomed places at the best white tablecloth.
‘Well then.’ Her father peered over his spectacles and his eyebrows drew up into peaks. ‘Let’s hear all about it. You didn’t say much in your letters.’
Angharad looked from one face to the other.
They were proud, and expectant, and anxious for her happiness. The words of complaint dried up on her tongue, and she swallowed the truth back hurriedly. ‘It was strange to begin with. It’s so big, and noisy, and there are so many people.’ She was careful to keep her voice light, as if none of these things mattered to her now. ‘And my uniform, and books, aren’t quite the same as … everyone else’s. Not that it matters, of course.’ Her free-scholar’s books and uniform were second-hand, and bore the marks of it. In spite of Laura’s dismissiveness she still minded. Angharad rushed on before she gave herself away. ‘The lessons are okay, quite easy really, and I’ve started to do Latin …’
‘Good. You’ll need that to get a University place.’ Her father nodded approvingly.
‘… And French, and European History. The only thing they don’t have is proper cookery classes, only stupid lessons where you learn about flower arranging and table setting and how to make tea. Home management, it’s called.’
‘You can’t earn your living at cooking,’ her father said briskly. ‘You concentrate on your Latin instead.’
Aunty Gwyn winked at her.
Angharad cast around for something else to say that wouldn’t betray her loneliness, and her bewilderment, and her hatred of the whole ugly, strange-smelling turmoil of school. Except for Laura. Of course, she could tell them about Laura.
‘There’s a girl I’ve made friends with. Different from all the other stupid ones.’
Laura led, and Angharad followed without question. Laura had an uncompromising intelligence that Angharad admired, and if she was sometimes sharp-tongued, Angharad understood it was because her cleverness made her impatient. Angharad was clever in her own, much gentler way, and that was a bond between them. But their closest link was forged when Angharad discovered that Laura was from Wales too, and that under her cool exterior she was as homesick as herself.
‘I wish I was proper Welsh, like you,’ Laura had said once. ‘Not just born there, but from Welsh people for generations. My father came from Lancashire. Do you think I count?’
‘Of course you do,’ Angharad said, in all the security of her own firm roots. ‘If you believe that you’re Welsh, then you are.’
‘Talk some more Welsh to me,’ Laura commanded, and Angharad did as she was asked, teaching her simple words and laughing as Laura tried to get her stiff tongue around the soft, liquid sounds.
Gwallt, Laura repeated doggedly, llygad, trwyn. Angharad taught her to pronounce her own name with the soft, throaty ‘r’ that spoke so clearly of home.
In her turn, Laura talked of her own home. She came from a place called Llyn Fair, describing it as ‘an old, old stone house, beside a secret lake in a hidden valley.’
Angharad had never heard of it, although it was not many miles from Cefn.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Laura told her. ‘The most beautiful place in the world.’ And after a little pause, when Angharad judged that she was being evaluated all over again, Laura said, ‘You must come and see it. You’ll meet my brother. He’s … my best friend. The only friend I wanted, until you. You’ll like him, Angharad. It would be odd, and nice, to be three instead of only two at Llyn Fair.’
Laura’s eyes shone, and her face glowed, and she looked beyond the clamorous school dining-room to somewhere Angharad couldn’t follow. Jealousy bit at her.
‘What’s his name?’ she asked, not wanting to know. She didn’t want to share Laura with anyone.
‘His name is Harry.’ Angharad had seen the pleasure that it gave Laura just to say his name aloud, and she had turned away, biting her lip.
She became aware now that William and Gwyn were waiting, watching her with curious expectancy.
She smiled at them happily.
‘Her name’s Laura. She’s older than me, and much cleverer. She’s going to go to Oxford after she’s left school, and then to London to be a television producer. The best thing is that she’s Welsh too. Only honorary Welsh, she calls it. She lives quite near here, at somewhere called Llyn Fair.’
There was a sudden, icy silence.
The chill of it spread from the circle of light bathing the table out into the shadowy corners of the room. Startled, Angharad looked from one face to the other. Gwyn, after her first shocked gasp, was looking away from her, down at the edge of the tablecloth. She lifted the corner of it and began to pull so fiercely at the hem that Angharad was sure she would tear it. When she turned to William, she saw that his face had darkened with anger, and there were sharp lines beside his mouth. It was an expression she knew, and feared.
‘What did you say her name is?’
‘Laura.’
‘Laura who?’
‘Dad? Laura Cotton …’
Her father’s cup smashed down into his saucer. The force of it made the spoons and plates rattle. Angharad stared at him, bewildered.
‘How many girls are there at your school?’
‘Why? What …?’
‘How many, Angharad?’
‘Six hundred and twenty.’
‘And out of six hundred and twenty girls, you have to choose to make frie
nds with a Cotton child?’
The sarcasm in his voice bit into Angharad and she shrank into her chair.
‘William, she couldn’t know …’
‘Be quiet, Gwyn. Listen to me, Angharad. When you go back to your school, you will make friends with someone else. Anyone else you please. I don’t want to hear you mention anyone called Cotton from Llyn Fair again. Understood?’
‘But …’
‘You heard what I said, Angharad.’
Her father jerked to his feet and swung away from the table. They heard the door to his study close behind him and silence fell again. There was a brown stain on the best tablecloth where William’s tea had slopped over. Angharad stared dully at it for a moment and then raised her eyes to her aunt’s.
‘What have I done wrong?’
‘Come here, my lamb.’ Her voice sounded heavy. Angharad stumbled to her and buried her face against the knobbly grey shoulder. Tears of shock came welling into her eyes and she shook with fright.
‘It isn’t your fault,’ Gwyn soothed her. ‘Your father isn’t angry with you. He’s angry about something that happened long ago, before you were born, and your friend’s name and … and the place where she lived reminded him of it.’ Gwyn’s hands tightened on Angharad’s arms, and her voice grew firm, and stern in a way that Angharad had never heard before. ‘But he’s right. You should find yourself another friend. There must be dozens of nice girls to choose from.’
‘There aren’t,’ Angharad sobbed. ‘They are all horrible except Laura. They only talk about clothes and boys and kissing.’
She would have gone on, if she hadn’t felt that her aunt’s thoughts were elsewhere. She was thinking about something so cold and unwelcome that it took all the kindliness out of her face.