by Rosie Thomas
‘I’m shooting what I can, very slowly, in black and white because I can’t afford colour stock. So, to answer your question, that’s what I was doing this morning in the Beast Market. D’you think I’m being completely absurd?’
Angharad shook her head. Her eyes were very bright. ‘No. I think it’s just what you should be doing.’
Harry didn’t answer, but she didn’t miss the flash of gratitude in his face.
After a moment Angharad said, ‘Joe and Monica don’t know you’re here?’
‘No. I don’t want to be part of that, any more.’
‘Does Laura?’
‘Nope. Not even Laura. She’s joined the fat-cats, hasn’t she? Swanning around Cap Ferrat with decaying European royalty?’
‘She has, rather.’ Laughter bubbled between them again. Harry took her hand and held it between his own.
‘So,’ he said very softly, ‘that just leaves you and me.’
Angharad thought that perhaps she should look away, defuse the moment in some modest way, but she didn’t want to. She went on meeting Harry’s stare, suddenly electrically conscious of the sun edging into the room with the beginning of warmth, the smell of coffee, the red blur of the blanket seen out of the corner of her eye.
Harry was still talking. ‘… in the Beast Market, of all places. All those dun-coloured men, piles of carrots. Then, suddenly, in a shaft of light, there you were. In a blue shirt with a ridiculous basket, like a woman in a primitive painting. I fell in love with you there and then, did you know?’
He was only joking. His eyebrows were raised, the cleft between them smoothed away by a smile. But Angharad didn’t care. She wondered what he would say if she told him, I’ve loved you for two years. I’ve loved you, through your sister, all that time. The memory of Laura came like a shadow, but she pushed it aside. Laura was a thousand miles away.
Instead she asked, ‘And will I be in the film?’
Harry laughed. ‘Oh, yes. I shall have to find some way to work you into the story. I couldn’t waste a shot like that. Or perhaps I won’t need to. I think you’re already part of it.’
Again the soft silence in the room, and the sunlight on the homely breakfast things on the table between them. Harry touched her wrist lightly with his finger.
‘It’s still very early. Shall we go for a walk? I’ve been walking a lot, mostly when it’s just light, when the world’s empty. It would be a treat to do it with you. Will you come?’
‘I’ve been walking too,’ Angharad told him. ‘Up and down the side of The Mountain, looking down to the sea, and over the top towards Llyn Fair. Thinking that you and Laura were so far away that it was stupid to be looking at it.’
Harry drew her chair back for her. ‘I wonder why we never met each other? We’ll go together now.’
As they walked down the lane Harry drew her arm through his. The sun sloped through the leaves overhead, and threw sharp early shadows in front of them. It felt quite natural to be walking side by side, shoulders and hands touching, unthinkingly in step. Angharad felt less shy of Harry than she had ever been with anyone, even Laura. Laura could sometimes silence her with a cutting word, but she knew that Harry would not. He listened intently, as if anything she could tell him was important. Secure in his attention, the floodgates lifted. Angharad talked and talked, as if she had been in solitary confinement for months. She described the last bleak times at school for him, the mechanical submission to exams and dim plans for the future. He nodded when she told him of her isolation at Cefn, and the unshakeable depression that had threatened to swamp her.
‘That’s over now, isn’t it?’ he asked, and she said, simply, ‘Yes.’
At the top of the bare hill, the wind drove in from the sea and Angharad shivered. Harry wrapped his arms around her shoulders at once and turned her to face inland, sheltering her. She felt the weight of his chin resting on her head, and his warmth at her back. The short turf was springy under her feet, and she thought that she could easily jump, and fly. Nothing was heavy, or solid, any more.
‘What shall we do now?’ His breath was warm against her hair.
‘Nothing,’ she said lazily. ‘Anything you like.’ But then with a jolt she remembered her basket, and the busy Beast Market. As soon as she thought about it, it seemed incredible that she could have forgotten. ‘Harry. The auction. I was supposed to buy aubergines, and tomatoes, and strawberries for flans … and get them to the restaurant in time for lunch …’
Already he was pulling her by the wrist. ‘Quick then. Run. We’ll go and blitz the market. I’ll find you the best aubergines in Wales.’
Yours to command, he had said once, in the kitchen at Llyn Fair. Angharad’s heart lifted almost into her throat, and blindly she followed Harry in their headlong rush down the hill and back to Heulfryn cottage. She was only just getting her breath back by the time they whirled into the market square again.
The auction was long over, but Harry was undeterred. He led her from stall to stall, bargaining fiercely, determined to secure prices as good as those at the auction. Her basket was full and she begged him to stop.
‘No more. I’ll never be able to come and face them again, on my own.’
‘Don’t come on your own,’ he said seriously. ‘Don’t do anything without me.’ He drove her to the road that led down to Y Gegin Fach, and before the last bend she put out her hand to stop him.
‘Drop me here,’ she said.
He looked at her, the cleft between his eyebrows deepening again.
‘What are you ashamed of?’
She bit her lip, anxious at once. ‘I’m not ashamed. It’s because of my father. And yours.’
‘Angharad, I don’t live at Llyn Fair any more. I haven’t seen Joe for months. Can’t I meet your father? Stop being treated like a pariah because of Joe?’
Angharad knew William well enough to understand that it wasn’t possible.
‘Please, Harry.’
He softened at once. ‘If it matters so much.’
He helped her out, and delivered the loaded basket into her charge. ‘What will you do now, for the rest of the day?’
Laughing at his interest in her trivial doings, she told him.
‘And after you’ve done all that?’
Angharad looked straight up into his eyes and said, ‘I’ll wait to see you again.’
‘You mean that there’s no muscular swain waiting to sweep you off to live the high life in Rhyl or somewhere?’
‘Nobody at all.’
‘In that case, count on me. Eight o’clock.’ He leant over her briefly and she thought that his kiss just brushed the top of her head.
‘By the old fountain,’ she called after him. ‘At the bottom of Cefn hill.’
She turned and walked down to the restaurant only after the little grey van had wound out of sight. She hummed as she unloaded the vegetables, handling them as if they were precious because Harry had touched them. Through new eyes, she saw that the looped gingham curtains with their red ribbon bows looked pretty rather than affected. She smoothed the tablecloths as she laid them, and brought posies of sweetpeas in from the back fence for the tables. She beamed over the interminable pies as they shuttled in and out of the ovens.
‘Won the Pools, have you?’ asked Old Lil the washer-up, already at the sink in her wellingtons.
‘Something like that, Lil.’ How many hours until eight o’clock? What was he doing now, this minute? The day’s change had been so dizzying that it was too early to question it. It’s not a dream, she reassured herself, over and over. Harry was here, a mile or two away. He wanted her too. She had nothing to do but count through the hours until the evening brought him back again.
‘I’m going out tonight,’ she told William when she got in from work. ‘Just with … some friends.’
William barely looked up from his book, and she realized with a wave of relief that so long as she seemed respectably occupied, she could do as she liked. Gwyn called in just as she
was leaving the house, and took in Angharad’s glowing face with a single keen glance. ‘Have a good time,’ she said. ‘Anyone we know, by the way?’
‘No. Look, I don’t want to be late. See you both tomorrow.’
Gwyn watched her go, but William only had eyes for his work.
Angharad slipped out into the deserted street. There was no one to be seen, but she knew that half a dozen pairs of eyes would be watching her from behind the lace curtains. Smiling to herself, she supplied the commentary. Angharad Owain, going off walking again. Strange girl, that one. There was no harm in going for a walk, she thought. But it would be wise not to be seen with the striking figure of Harry anywhere near Cefn. Within hours, everyone would know about it.
The sky was the fragile pinky-grey of summer dusk, but beyond the village where the road sloped under a tunnel of old trees, it was already twilight. It was only twenty to eight. Angharad walked slowly, intensely aware of the small, sharp stones under the thin soles of her shoes, the rustle of a small prowling animal in the dry leaves on the other side of the wall, the muted night scents already rising from the earth. She had never felt so vividly alive, or so aware of everything around her, as if each of her senses had been separately sharpened. The beating of her own heart sounded unnaturally loud, and it was impossible not to measure her steps in time to it.
It was exactly eight o’clock when Angharad came out of the trees and saw the triangular stone of the old drinking fountain. A little to one side of it was Harry’s grey van, almost invisible in the shadow.
She ran, everything else forgotten. Harry came to meet her and they stopped in the middle of the wide road. His arms came round her and she buried her face against him, laughing and talking incoherently, all at once.
‘Hey,’ he said, lifting her chin with one finger. He kissed her, as lightly as a butterfly grazing the corner of her mouth, and then they looked into each other’s eyes. Then Harry’s smile teased the question away. ‘Shall we stand here in the middle of the road until the next motorist mows us down? Or shall we move on?’
‘I don’t think I care,’ Angharad said. But she followed him, and they rattled away in the old van. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To eat the most exotic celebratory dinner that the west can command. In other words, not exotic at all. We shall have to use our imaginations to supply whatever’s lacking.’
‘What are we celebrating?’
Harry’s gaze didn’t waver from the road ahead. ‘Finding each other,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘Yes,’ Angharad answered. ‘But I wanted to hear you say it.’
In the dim light she saw the white flash of Harry’s teeth as he laughed. ‘Don’t ever change, Angharad, will you? You’re unbelievably honest, and you are so clear that every ripple of feeling shows up in your face.’
That wasn’t true, she thought. She had been dissembling successfully to her father for years, ever since she had known Laura. Another recollection came to her at the same moment. Laura had said exactly the same thing. Don’t ever change.
I won’t, Angharad promised herself. If I don’t change, perhaps nothing else will either. And nothing could ever be more perfect than now, this minute. As she looked sideways at the straight lines of Harry’s profile, she felt happiness and excitement so strong inside her that she could taste them on her tongue.
Later, when she tried to recall their first evening together, she could see it only in a series of static images, like stills from Harry’s film. In one of them they were leaning towards each other across a white tablecloth, foreheads almost touching. In another, Harry was pouring a silver froth of champagne into her glass, with the glow of candlelight deepening the hollows of his eyes and cheeks so that he looked broodingly serious. In yet another they were outside under a high, white moon that made a perfect reflection of itself in the black water of a millpond. Behind them were the tangled lights of a car park, but they were alone in their own world.
By contrast, the memory of their talk ran through her head like an uninterrupted soundtrack. She had never talked so much to anyone, or believed that anyone could listen so minutely. She wanted Harry to know everything, and she craved just as much to know the smallest detail of his life. He made her laugh until she almost choked with bizarre stories of his American journey, and she reciprocated with stories of the people of Cefn.
Delightedly, she found that he was just as diversely well-read as Laura, but where Laura would deliver her razor-sharp judgement of anything and leave no room for disagreement, Harry would listen gravely and then say with his eyebrows raised an inch, ‘Well, that’s an interesting perspective. Completely unhinged, of course, but interesting …’ which would send her off into peals of laughter again. Another of her still-memories of the evening was of surprised and faintly envious faces turned towards their table as they dissolved into their private merriment again.
It was only at the end of the evening that the still-pictures jerked and began slowly to move again. They turned reluctantly away from the luminous reflection in the millpond and Harry said, ‘It’s midnight, Cinderella. What time does your father expect you back? Or no, not Cinderella. Juliet, perhaps?’
It was an oddly sombre note, but Angharad brushed it lightly aside. ‘Oh, no, not Juliet. What about Cinders in reverse?’ She patted the grey roof of the van. ‘At the twelfth stroke this will turn into a white Rolls Corniche, and this,’ she pointed to her plain cotton dress, ‘into a glittering creation starred with a million sequins.’
‘I’ll take the Rolls. The sequins are your department. And what about me? Transformed into a handsome prince, as wealthy as he’s wise and witty?’
As Angharad shook her head, Harry saw the roundness of her cheek, and the curve of her eyelashes over it. He tightened his grip on her wrist so that she looked up into his face to answer him.
‘No, thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I’d rather have you just as you are.’
‘Do you mean that?’ He was turning her to face him, drawing her closer so their hips met, and their feet fitted between each other like the smooth pieces of an ancient puzzle.
‘Yes.’
Harry’s dark head blotted out the moon. His mouth jarred against hers and his tongue between her teeth was an instant’s violence before she met it with her own. She had a confused impression of the hardness of his jaw, and all the complex bones knitted under the taut skin. He felt rough, and foreign, and so exciting that she was giddy with the strangeness of it.
She had never kissed anyone except Laura.
Under his insistent weight and her own dizziness, Angharad swayed backwards. She felt the ridges of the van’s side at her back, digging into her flesh as he pinioned her against it. Her eyes opened and she saw the moon, sliding away now, and the thick powdering of stars. Harry’s tongue teased insistently at her own, drawing it from her mouth so that it probed between his teeth, answering him. She felt that she wanted to drink him in, draining every last drop.
Then, through the thin fold of her dress as he rolled against her, she felt his erection. Angharad knew her biology. She could have recited the Latin names, and described the processes with clinical exactness. But the size, and the insistent hardness of this, was utterly surprising. In response she felt a startling mixture of pride and elation. Her mouth curved in a smile and Harry’s face rubbed hers as he made a small groan deep in his throat. Angharad’s hands fluttered, helplessly at first, and then moved to touch him. Harry’s eyes were shut and she felt how his face contracted fiercely as her fingers brushed him. His mouth moved from hers to the arch of her throat, and he drew the skin between his lips as if he was tasting it. His hands slid from her shoulders and over her small, hard breasts, then spanned her ribs. She felt him draw in his breath, sharply, against her bare neck and then his hands dropped heavily to his sides. His head lifted and he was blinking, not seeing her any more.
Angharad drew back her hand as if it was burnt.
‘What is it? Shouldn’t I d
o that?’
Harry seemed to be groping for his bearings: ‘I’m sorry. Something reminded me …’ But the words were bitten off before they came out. In a second more he had collected himself. When he smiled again it was crooked, and not quite convincing. ‘Brrr. Must have been someone walking over my grave. Anyway we shouldn’t be doing this in the car park like a couple of kids. I’d better take you home before it’s too late.’
Angharad bundled herself into her seat, humiliation silencing her. She was afraid that she must have done something shockingly inappropriate, and she stared in bewilderment at the darkness as the headlamps sliced into it. They had gone several miles before Harry put his hand out and touched her.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Did I do something wrong?’
‘Wrong? Of course you didn’t.’ He pulled into the side of the road again and hugged her, kissing her eyelids and the tip of her nose. ‘I told you. Someone walked over my grave. Doesn’t it ever happen to you?’
‘Yes,’ she lied, wanting very much to believe him.
‘Well, then,’ he coaxed her. ‘Can we forget it? In fact it was rather neat timing on the part of whatever passer-by in the cemetery. Without him, I would have ravished you, there and then, in the car park of the Mill Restaurant. And that would have been uncomfortable, and not very romantic. I don’t want it to be like that, do you?’
He disarmed her utterly with his mixture of arrogance and humility. Angharad smiled at him, and the cold moment was forgotten. They drove on with his arm around her, and her head against his shoulder.