by Rosie Thomas
‘Good game. For girls, that is.’
Laura’s swung racket narrowly missed him and he sprang away, taunting them as he went with, ‘Dinner at eight, I hope?’
Amused by Laura’s irritation Angharad slid her arm through her friend’s. They walked slowly away past the draped nets of the court and through the lengthening shadows. The lake surface was dimpled with the rise and fall of tiny insects. Under the verandah the scent of honeysuckle hung powerfully on the still air.
In Laura’s pretty bedroom there were twin beds, with Angharad’s bag standing at the foot of one. There was a bathroom adjoining the room and Angharad followed Laura into it.
‘Is this your own bathroom?’
‘Sure. Do you want to shower first, or shall I?’
‘You.’
‘Stay and talk, then.’
Angharad sat down on a low stool. Through the glass shower partition she watched the shape of Laura blurring under the stream of water. Laura was almost as tanned as Harry, except for the narrow white strips of her bikini. She lifted her hands to her hair and Angharad saw the rivulets of foam chasing over her skin.
Then the water was turned crisply off and Laura was stepping out, sleek, brown and black and creamy white.
‘I wish I was as pretty as you,’ Angharad said.
Laura looked at her. She put out her hand for her white bathrobe and only when she had enveloped herself in it did she answer.
‘You are. You’re like … a piece of china. A very rare piece, painted by hand somewhere a long time ago. Angharad?’
‘Mmm?’ The sudden urgency in Laura’s voice surprised her.
‘Don’t change, will you?’
‘Don’t get more motivated at tennis after all, d’you mean?’
She knew that that wasn’t what Laura meant at all, but a kind of shyness, and reserve, stopped her from acknowledging it.
‘No. Or yes, if you like.’
The moment was past. ‘Come on, have your shower. We’d better go and rustle up something for supper.’
They ate grilled trout from the lake in the polished, formal expanse of the Cottons’ dining-room.
Laura had put on a dress and found one for Angharad too. Harry had whistled through his teeth when he saw them and gone away to change out of his jeans. When he came back he was wearing a white jacket, trousers, a pleated white shirt and a black bow tie. There was a red rosebud in his buttonhole. With his hair slicked back behind his ears he looked older, from another generation. He leant in the doorway, one eyebrow raised, waiting for their reaction.
‘Very nice,’ Laura said coolly. ‘Are you going to sing, “Give Me the Moonlight”?’
But she was smiling, and her eyes were bright. Angharad suddenly felt too shy of him again to say anything, but she acknowledged to herself that he looked very beautiful.
The room grew dim as they ate and Laura leaned gracefully over to light the candles in the branched candelabrum in the centre of the table. Pools of golden light reflected back from the polished wood. Outside, the last of the daylight lingered on the slopes of the hills and the lake water lay as black and as still as a mirror.
Angharad put down her knife and fork with a sigh of happiness.
‘It’s so beautiful here. You’re so lucky. What does your father do, to have a house in a place like this?’ It was the first time, since the beginning, that she had mentioned him to Laura.
There was a tiny silence.
Then Laura said ‘Property.’ It was Laura’s way to give the necessary information and then, if it didn’t interest or displeased her, to turn herself away from it as if it didn’t exist.
But Harry was different. He picked up his glass and tilted it sideways in the candlelight.
‘Yes, property. You’ve read about the sort of glamorous thing he does, I’m sure. He buys houses and parcels of land from people, old ladies mostly, for a few hundred pounds. Then he sells them again, for lots of thousands. And if the old ladies don’t want to sell, he manages to buy anyway. Somehow or other.’
‘Harry …’
He turned sharply to Laura. His face had turned dark.
‘You deal with it by refusing to think about it. But that doesn’t make it any less true. He’s a profiteer. Yes, all this is beautiful.’ He waved at the room, and the still water beyond. ‘But it’s tainted.’
Angharad listened, wishing that she didn’t have to. She was frightened by the sudden rawness in Harry’s voice, and unwilling to believe that he could think so badly of his father. Love for her own father touched her, and the thought that just by sitting here she was deceiving him. Harry’s father, Laura’s father, had cheated him. And very soon, in a few hours, she would have to meet the same Joe Cotton as a guest in his house.
For the first time, she wished that she had never come to Llyn Fair.
‘You profit from the profiteering,’ Laura was saying, wearily, as if they had thrashed over this ground together a thousand times before. ‘You live here, don’t you? You didn’t refuse to accept that car a month ago. You don’t look as if you think it’s tainted when you polish it and fondle it. It’s the same for all of us. We take from Joe, so we’re as guilty of whatever it is as he is himself.’
No, that isn’t true, Angharad thought.
Harry leapt to his feet with a violent gesture that sent his wineglass skidding across the polished table.
‘I won’t be for any longer than I have to. A few more months. Once I’m at college I’ll be through with it.’
Angharad suddenly saw that the veneer of his sophistication had melted away. Harry was an angry boy, confused by his own anger.
As soon as she knew it, she loved him.
There was none of Harry’s confusion in Laura.
‘Taking your Morgan with you?’ she asked him, softly now.
Harry stood still for a second, staring at her. Then he jammed his hands into the pockets of his beautiful white jacket and walked away.
Laura sighed and began calmly to gather up the plates and glasses.
‘It’s painful, being an idealist rather than a realist. Do you think Harry and I quarrel all the time? We don’t, as it happens. We reinforce each other. What he hasn’t got, I can give him. And what I lack, I find in Harry.’
There was a quiet, satisfied glow in her face, and when she saw it Angharad felt the first, disturbing clawings of anxiety.
Perhaps Laura’s fierce devotion to Harry wasn’t ordinary, or healthy. What would happen to them both when they were grown up, when someone tried to come between them?
A shiver, gone as soon as she had felt it, brushed cold wings over her. But who could help admiring Harry, she asked herself. Laura, myself, everyone he meets, probably.
‘Hadn’t you better go after him?’ Angharad asked aloud.
‘I know what he’s doing. He’ll be across in his room. We can go when we’ve finished here.’
Half an hour later they were crossing the little brick-paved kitchen yard. Over the stable block at right-angles to the house was a row of lighted windows, with a flight of wooden steps leading up to a door. Laura ran up the steps and the door swung open on the latch.
Harry’s room was long and narrow, bisected by low beams. The walls were painted red and the floor was strewn with books, record sleeves, discarded clothes and tennis rackets. In the midst of the confusion Harry was lying back in a deep sofa with his eyes closed, strands of his dark hair spread across the cushions behind him. A long cigarette dangled in his fingers. As they came in his eyes snapped open.
‘Bitch,’ he said to Laura.
‘Dopehead,’ she countered, equably. Harry smiled crookedly and stretched out one hand. Laura took it, and folded herself into the corner of the sofa beside him. Harry patted the cushions on his other side.
‘Come on,’ he ordered.
Angharad felt for an instant that she couldn’t move, and couldn’t be so close to him. But he raised one eyebrow, cynical, at her hesitation and she fell awkwardly into t
he place beside him. With his arm around her shoulders she didn’t dare to move, although her legs were crushed uncomfortably beneath her.
Laura took the long, fat cigarette from Harry’s fingers and drew deeply on it, then exhaled on a long, slow breath. Angharad stared in amazement, and her eyes opened still wider when Laura held the cigarette out to her. She shook her head, suddenly understanding. Dopehead, Laura had said.
‘Go on. It’s nice.’
‘Don’t push it at her, if she doesn’t want it.’ Harry’s voice startled them with its sharpness, and Laura shrugged.
To Angharad a gulf had suddenly opened between her and them, mocking their physical closeness. The two of them took drugs together, did dangerous things. They were older, and knowing. All their shared years excluded her. Angharad felt isolated, and excluded from their partnership.
As if he sensed it, Harry’s arm tightened around her shoulders.
‘Will you choose a record for us?’
Gratefully she slid away from him and began to flip through the albums littering the floor. The hectic graphics puzzled her and most of the names meant nothing. Who or what were The Doors? Pretending that she couldn’t find what she wanted, Angharad went on searching.
‘What about something classical?’ she ventured at last. Harry pointed to a loaded shelf and at last she chose some Beethoven late quartets. She knew that Laura liked those. The sonorous music soared up to the beams.
‘Clever of you,’ Harry said, and she felt a little glow of pleasure. She ventured back to the sofa and his arm circled her shoulders again. She tried to memorize exactly how it felt, so that she could remember it again whenever she wanted.
A quick glance told her that Laura and Harry both looked peaceful and content, busy with their own thoughts and the private pictures behind their eyelids. She let her head fall back against Harry’s shoulder. Suddenly she felt as she had done in the boat on the lake. At home, and happy. Harry.
His name reverberated in her head, and all through her. He was so like Laura, and all the things that Angharad admired and loved in her friend. The thought of them together as they had been today made her mouth curve into a smile. Being with her brother softened Laura’s sharpness, as if she wanted to be at her best for him.
And who wouldn’t want that? Angharad asked herself. I do. I want him to like me.
For there was something about Harry, in the way he looked a challenge at her, that was nothing like Laura at all. It made her want to meet the challenge and it set off a hundred different, dizzy sensations inside her. It made her want to jump up and down to attract his attention, and at the same time to hide, and cover her confusion.
Angharad turned her head, so gently that she was sure he wouldn’t feel it, but far enough for her cheek to rest against the white stuff of his sleeve, and far enough for her to be able to look from under her eyelashes at his black hair, the corner of his mouth, recalling the supple way he moved and the easy, arrogant manner.
Yet, across the dinner table she had seen him angry, a confused and vulnerable boy. Not cool, like Laura, but passionate. Unknown, and with a fascination that confused her with its power.
Of course he was different. Harry was a man, and the first she had known. The significance of what she suddenly felt struck home to Angharad. What would Laura, jealous Laura, say if she discovered that Angharad might fall in love with Harry?
As if to answer her, and reassure her, Harry turned his head and smiled straight into her eyes.
Laura heard the car first, but she didn’t move an inch. Harry stopped smiling and his eyes slid away from Angharad’s. She felt his muscles tense under her cheek, and then he cocked his head to the sound.
‘Smashed again,’ he said bitterly. ‘Listen to him taking that bend. He must be doing eighty.’
‘You can talk.’ Laura was mild, relaxed against her brother’s quivering tautness.
Angharad knew that the dreaded moment had come. Joe Cotton was back. The car stopped with a squeal of brakes somewhere beyond the house. A door slammed and everything went quiet, but the silence was oppressive where it had once been tranquil.
Without looking at each other, Laura and Harry moved deftly around the room. The ashtray was emptied and carefully polished, and the cigarettes and a little twist of paper were locked away in a drawer. Then Laura turned the record over and they sat down again, still in silence, clearly waiting for something.
The moments ticked by. Angharad could just hear the water running over the dam. Laura hadn’t lifted the pick-up arm and the only sound in the room was the faint swish of the record revolving on the turntable.
Then the door slammed in the kitchen yard and a man’s voice shouted, ‘Harry? Laura? You up there?’
Angharad sat nervously upright but the others didn’t move. Footsteps came across the brick paving and up the steep flight of wooden steps. When the door to Harry’s loft was flung open, Angharad saw a tall, bulky man with the flattened features of a boxer. As he looked from one to another of them, she saw that his eyes were not quite focussed.
‘So here you are,’ he said. ‘You might have come down to see your mother, at least.’ When his children didn’t answer, he stepped forward, stumbled against a low table, and his face contracted with sudden anger. The red flush over his cheeks and forehead deepened. ‘It stinks in here,’ he said. ‘What the hell have you been doing?’
Harry stared at his father as if he had momentarily forgotten who he could be. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said very clearly. ‘But I don’t remember asking you to join us. If you don’t like it in here, why not just go away again?’
‘Harry.’ Laura spoke under her breath, imploringly. Angharad sat frozen, wishing herself a thousand miles away.
Like an enraged bear, Joe Cotton swung around to his son. The jacket of his blue suit rode up his broad back in wrinkles as he reached out for Harry. He seized him by the lapels and hauled him to his feet, shaking him like a puppy.
Harry’s mouth curled in contempt.
Then Joe drew back one heavy fist and struck him in the face. Every tiny muscle in Angharad’s body tensed ready to run to him, but shock and fear held her motionless.
‘Joe? Joe!’
Someone was running up the steps. A woman in a red dress stopped in the doorway and her hands flew to her mouth. Harry had fallen back into his seat, but his eyes were open and fixed on his father. Blood was running from his nose and on to the front of his white jacket. Laura slid to her knees and held her handkerchief up to his face. He took it without looking at her and then dabbed at the blood.
Joe ran his hands wearily over his forehead. The red flush had subsided, leaving him unhealthily grey.
‘Little bastard,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m your father, remember that. Everything you’ve got, you owe to me. Look at it all.’ He swung his arm clumsily.
Angharad, with her eyes on Harry, understood the tense lines in his face. Why do the ways that people love each other hurt so much, she wondered? Sadness enveloped her like a shroud.
‘Hush, Joe,’ his wife said. ‘Not now. That’s enough for tonight.’ She took his arm and guided him towards the door.
‘I’m coming, Monica,’ he said. But he looked straight at Angharad. ‘Who are you?’
Laura lifted her head from Harry. ‘This is Angharad Owain, my friend from school. I told you she was coming to stay the night.’
‘Owain? Any relation to William Owain?’
‘Yes. I’m his daughter.’ Her voice sounded reedy, as if she hadn’t used it for days.
Joe Cotton turned heavily away again. ‘I thought so. You’ve the look of your mother.’ He went away without a backward glance at any of them.
Monica hovered behind for a moment. ‘Are you all right, darling?’
Harry nodded, smiling lopsidedly. ‘Me, yes. My jacket, probably not.’
‘Don’t make him angry when he’s had a few drinks,’ she whispered. Then, with an attempt at brightness, ‘Have you all had a nice day t
ogether? Good. See you in the morning then, darlings. And Angharad. How nice to have you here.’
Monica’s children had inherited her neat features, but their colouring and the set of their eyes was all Joe’s. His own black hair was bristled with silver and his brown skin was blotched and reddened, but he had set his looks on both of them like a stamp.
As soon as they were alone again, Harry hauled himself upright and came over to Angharad.
‘That wasn’t a very pretty display,’ he said, looking candidly at her. Angharad felt a pulse beating in her throat, and her limbs began to shake with the aftereffects of shock. ‘Don’t look like that. I’m sorry. Will you forgive us?’
She nodded blindly, thinking that she would forgive Harry anything.
‘Every time,’ Laura said bitterly behind them. ‘You just can’t let it go, can you? You have to bait him like a boy with a bear. Why?’
‘Because I can’t ignore him, like you can.’
They looked at each other for a moment and Angharad studied their profiles. The same, but different, she thought again. Then Harry put out his arms and Laura hung back for only a second before letting him pull her close. Her head bent and her hair swung forward, showing the white nape of her neck.
‘I love you,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘I could kill him for hurting you.’ And she brushed the angry red mark on his face with her mouth. All her coolness was gone, and she was shaking with passion, anger and resentment.
Angharad bit her lip and looked away. No wonder their closeness excluded her, commanding intensity like that from Laura.
‘I know,’ she heard Harry say, low-voiced. ‘I know that. At least he doesn’t touch you. If he laid a finger on you, I would kill him.’
Their vehemence frightened Angharad. It was Joe who had drawn it out of them, and Joe was frightening. She remembered the heaviness of his movements, the big hands, and the stare that didn’t quite see. You’ve the look of your mother, he had told her. Angharad shivered. When she looked at Harry and Laura again they were standing a little apart, remembering her presence. Harry dabbed the handkerchief to his nose, looked at the blood, and attempted a casual shrug.