by Rosie Thomas
At the old fountain she said, ‘I’ll walk from here.’
‘No, you won’t.’ His voice was firm. ‘Not on your own, in the middle of the night.’
‘I’ll be quite safe. I’ve wandered these lanes at all hours. And I’d like a walk now.’
Harry turned her chin and kissed her again, then reluctantly let her go. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to you.’
Angharad said lightly, ‘You’ve happened to me. That’s enough for one day.’
Their fingers were still locked together and she was afraid that she couldn’t let go, even for a few hours. But at last her hand dropped.
‘Tomorrow,’ Harry said as she turned away into the blackness under the tunnel of trees. She knew that he was watching her and before the road took her out of his sight, she turned to wave, hoping that he could see the white glimmer of her hand in the dark.
The night air was very sweet and still. Angharad could see nothing but she knew the road so well that she trod unthinkingly, aware of nothing but the happiness inside her. Harry’s strange withdrawal was forgotten, and she had accepted his explanation as part of this perfect, transforming day. There were no lights showing as she came along the village street, and the low line of the rooftops showed only as deeper blackness against the sky. Even in midsummer there was the faintest drift of coal smoke. Angharad felt that she had never loved the place so much. As her hand closed on the front door latch she heard quite clearly, although it was more than a mile away, the low throb of Harry’s van as he drove off. He had waited until she must be safely home. Angharad smiled as she let herself into the quiet house. The grandfather clock ticked steadily, its face a white circle that reminded her of the moon in the millpond.
She had imagined that she would never sleep, but as soon as she lay down and closed her eyes it claimed her, and she slept dreamlessly until morning.
For two more evenings she met Harry beside the fountain. On the first she cooked for him on the gas ring in his cottage, and they sat opposite each other at the table to talk, greedy for the details of the hours that they had spent apart. Harry had been filming the old man out on the hillside with his dogs, rounding up the sheep for the dip.
‘Intricate patterns,’ he said, ‘spreading in skeins across the hill. The man and the dogs, working perfectly together. Christ, I hope I caught it. I’m no good if I didn’t.’ She saw how fierce he was about his film, and understood how much of himself he was investing in it. She felt proud and anxious, equally.
‘All I did was make pies,’ she said ruefully.
‘Exquisite pies, I bet.’
The next evening they went to a tiny pub halfway up a mountain, and sat in the bar under the fairy lights, hand in hand.
In all their hours of talk there was only one topic that jarred between them. Angharad found that Laura’s name came easily, too easily. For six years Laura had been her mentor and guide, as well as her best friend. Everything she had read or seen she had talked about with Laura, and every opinion she held had been formed alongside Laura’s. More than that, with Harry’s face in front of her, it was impossible not to see Laura too. She might almost have been there with them. Sometimes Angharad believed that she really was.
But Harry didn’t want to hear Angharad talking about his sister. Whenever her name came out, he would lightly change the subject, looking away so that Angharad couldn’t see into his eyes.
Alone in bed at night, or as she sliced vegtables in the kitchen at Y Gegin Fach, Angharad tried to puzzle out why.
The prudence that had made her hide her feelings from Laura was consumed by the flame of her new happiness. As she looked back, she was amazed that she had never given away how much the thought of Harry meant to her. And now, with calm optimism, she looked forward to sharing her happiness with Laura. All three of them were grown up now. The very fact that Laura was away, living her own life, proved that. It’s Nice here. When she came home, after her first surprise, she would surely accept that Harry would not be exclusively hers for ever. The three of them would just draw closer together, Angharad thought, staring wide-eyed into the future. Her love for Laura wouldn’t change. It had been like a gentle initiation for this new, fierce, and compelling feeling.
I’m grown up now, she told herself. Ready to be really in love.
But for all the luminous clarity with which she saw the future herself, she couldn’t convey it to Harry. He wouldn’t talk about Laura, and she didn’t attempt to press him. She excused him by calling it loyalty, to Laura and to her friendship which he was taking over for himself while she was away. If Laura was here, Angharad thought, forgetting the possessive light in her friend’s eyes, it would all be quite simple. But even so her shadow began to lengthen between them, out of place in the brilliance that bathed everything else.
On their third evening together, Angharad told him, ‘I have to work tomorrow, and on Sunday evening. It’s our busy time, and they need extra hands in the kitchen.’
Harry frowned. ‘Two days without you? And after that what happens?’
‘Two days completely free.’
At once he pressed her hands between his. ‘Wonderful. Do you think you could get away from home for just one night?’
Angharad’s heart leapt into her throat. The time was coming, and she knew that they were both ready. Each evening it was harder to part, and each evening it seemed less reasonable to try. Now she looked at Harry and saw his slow, interrogative smile.
‘Yes.’
Her friend could come back from France just as unexpectedly as she had gone away.
‘That’s good. You can come with me to the August Meeting.’ Angharad stared at him, astonished. She knew about the August Meeting, but she had never been. At dawn on the first of August, people came from miles around to a tiny tin chapel at an isolated crossroads. Crammed into the chapel and overflowing into the rough paddock around it, they listened raptly to singing and verse-reading and passages from the Bible. There was no programme. Those who felt like contributing simply stood up and did it. Angharad’s father said that the festival had ancient, pagan origins and had only borne its mild religious significance for the last two hundred years.
She bit the corners of her mouth to hide her smile. It could hardly have been more different from what she had imagined Harry was going to say.
‘That would be nice,’ she said innocently. ‘But I don’t need to spend the night away from home just for the August Meeting. I can be up out of my own bed, if I must, in plenty of time for the dawn.’
Harry grinned.
‘So you could. But you’d miss the fun beforehand, wouldn’t you?’
The parties held locally before the Meeting were equally legendary. The most dedicated revellers didn’t bother to go to bed, and their head-on meetings with the sober early risers at the chapel contributed to the electric atmosphere.
Angharad was beginning to see. Reluctantly she said, ‘I’ve just thought of something. There’ll be all kinds of people I know there. I can’t go with you.’
She wished that she could have put it differently, and Harry brushed aside her objection irritably. He had little patience with Angharad’s insistence on secrecy. ‘If we take care and time it right, no one will know or care who the hell you’re with the night before. And at the chapel the preacher says I can film, so I’ll be prowling around the edges. You can sit by yourself and pretend to be alone, if you like.’
And so it was agreed.
On the last night of July, Angharad went to bed as usual. She lay wide awake in the darkness and listened to her father moving heavily around downstairs. At last the wooden boards of the landing creaked and the door opposite hers opened and closed. As she waited, counting the minutes until he must be asleep, she promised herself that soon, somehow, she would tell him about Harry and Laura. They had come like a wedge between William and herself, and every lie that she told now drove the wedge deeper. And again, for the thousandth time, she came up short against the blank wall
of her ignorance. There was no way to prise the old secrets out of the past, and with every day they went on breeding new ones.
At last a faint snore told her that William was asleep. Silently she slid into her clothes and, treading softly to avoid the familiar creaking board, she padded downstairs and let herself out into the midnight air. Harry was waiting for her and she saw the white glimmer of his smile. He enveloped her in a hug and she felt a prickle of excitement nudge away the guilt.
‘Thank you for coming. I love you.’ His breath was warm against her ear. She didn’t answer, but she took the words and hoarded them.
As they drove away from Cefn they might have been the only people awake in the world. Even in the village nearest to the chapel, there were only two or three lighted windows, and the front door of the old square pub was shut and barred. But the car park was full, and the curtains glowed red at the windows.
‘In full swing,’ Harry murmured, ‘and still three hours until dawn.’ With his camera case in one hand he guided Angharad round to the back door. He tapped casually, and waited.
‘Yes?’
‘Harry Cotton. That you, Daffydd?’
The door opened at once. Warm light and the clamour of talk and singing swept at them like a tidal wave. The bar was packed. Harry’s friend was huge. He winked at them, red-faced and with wet black curls clinging to his forehead.
‘Iechyd da. Pint in the pump for you, Harry boy.’ To Angharad he said, ‘Hello, love. Mind yourself with this one, won’t you? Come straight to Daffydd if he’s any trouble.’
The party swallowed them up at once. Harry seemed to know everyone, and he was greeted like an old friend by a dozen people.
‘How?’ Angharad asked breathlessly in a moment’s lull. As far as she could see, she recognized no one. ‘I thought I belonged here. And you said you lived like a hermit at Heulfryn. Or is that only one half of a double life?’ Harry rocked back against the bar and lifted his drink. He looked as at home here as she had ever seen him, with his lean dark features softened by good humour. Only the camera case, carefully guarded at his feet, distinguished him.
‘They’re good people. I like to be alone when I’m working. Except for you.’ Angharad only just caught the last words before he swept on. ‘But I can’t work all the time. Can’t film in here without lights. And you’d never see my man in here. Early to bed and straight to the chapel, for him.’ He broke off to wave across the room to Daffydd, who was staggering up on to a low dais with a microphone stand. ‘I used to come to places like this a lot, when I couldn’t stand Llyn Fair any more. And just lately, when I got so lonely without …’ He said something else, but this time the words were completely lost. Angharad could have cursed the cheerful babble around them. Had he said without Laura? It would be the first time he had spoken her name without prompting. But then his eyes turned down to her, and she was certain that he couldn’t have done. His look, that look, could be for no one but herself and it isolated them in all the clamour. ‘And now I don’t need to,’ Harry said softly, ‘Because I’ve got you. But shall we enjoy ourselves just the same?’
Angharad did enjoy herself. It wasn’t the several drinks, although they blurred the edges of the room forgivingly and took away her shyness. It wasn’t even being with Harry, although the warmth of that underlaid all the other sensations of the night. It was just that the simple determination of everyone in the room to have a good time swept her along.
She jigged to jukebox music with beaming men she had never seen before, then found herself beached beside friendly women who gave her slices of pickled egg and peanuts before the dancing grabbed her back again. When Daffydd mounted the dais to sing against a storm of clapping, she joined in the choruses of the old songs, and when they came to ‘Ystlys wen a chynffon, wen, wen, wen!’ she banged her glass on the table for emphasis like everyone else.
Much later, when the heat and noise were at their height, an anonymous-looking young man in a collar and tie, with two layers of knitted waistcoat showing under his suit jacket, leapt up on to the dais. At once the clapping and stamping settled into an encouraging rhythm. The man unknotted his tie and waved it over his head. His collar stud pinged into the crowd and then his jacket sailed with spread arms over their heads. The knitted waistcoats followed. The barmaid caught one and waved it like a trophy. When the shirt was unbuttoned the cheering became a roar. From behind Angharad two old ladies, with identical iron perms and white cardigans, came elbowing their way forward. One of them grinned toothlessly at Angharad. ‘Might as well see what there is to see, eh?’
‘She doesn’t need to. Stands more chance of a close-up at her age.’
A wave of laughter rose inside Angharad and threatened to choke her. Across the throbbing room she saw that Harry was watching her. I love you too, she shouted inside herself, and she knew that he heard. His laughter met and matched hers.
‘Off! Off!’ The impromptu stripper unzipped his trousers and they fell around his ankles, hobbling him. He lurched, grabbing at the toe of one black sock in an attempt to wrench it off. Daffydd was at the piano now, crashing thunderous climactic chords. The young man’s trousers were off and were hauled from the stage by the turn-ups. In one sock and his underpants he struck a pose before the lights flashed off, on again, and the underpants were stripped away as he capered naked, and hopelessly innocent, into the arms of his cronies.
‘Is that all?’ howled one of the old ladies. ‘Duw, then things have changed since my day.’
The pub was rocking with laughter. Then there was another chord at the piano and at once, with no hint of incongruity, the singing soared up again. Out came the old, loved hymns and Angharad knew without looking at her watch that it was the still, waiting time just before dawn.
Without warning, tears pricked behind her eyelids.
Out of the crowd Harry’s hand reached for hers, and gently he drew her away. The back door clicked shut behind them and the singing was swallowed up at once.
‘I’m glad you enjoyed it,’ Harry said softly.
She saw behind him that the sky was streaked with lemon and gold.
On the road to the old tin chapel, the people were straggling along in twos and threes. They filed in through the rusty gate and were swallowed up by the dark porch. Angharad left Harry to his camera, and joined the line of people. The inside of the chapel was gloomy and bare, undecorated except for a varnished board at one end with a forbidding text. The light coming through the plain glass windows in the whitewashed walls was only dully grey. She took her place in a high wooden pew and waited. Within minutes the chapel was full, and still people pressed inside. There were coughs and shuffles, and discreet waves. Facing the main body of the chapel were the black suits and stern expressions of a full male voice choir. To her surprise, Angharad picked out amongst them the red faces of some of her friends from the party. After a moment she saw Harry deep in the shadow of an aisle, whispering to the silver-haired preacher. The old hill farmer had come in and found a place, sitting with his knobbed stick between his knees.
As the light strengthened, the murmuring died away. There was a moment of total silence. Then, through the line of east windows, came the first rays of the sun.
Out of the corner of her eye Angharad saw Harry lift his camera. Like a long black ripple the choir stood up. The leader gave a single, pure note and the tenor voices rose like a perfect instrument over the bass humming.
It was ‘Ar Hyd Y Nos’, and sung more perfectly than Angharad had ever heard it. There was no accompaniment, and the acoustics were wretched. But it was singing for the joy of it and it held her, the fine hairs raised at the back of her neck, until the last low note fell into silence. At last she turned her head and saw that the old farmer had a starched white handkerchief at his eyes. And she knew, without looking further, that Harry held him in his camera’s black eye.
After the choir the preacher stood up in the plain wooden box under the text at the end and read from the Bible. An anguish
ed teenage boy forgot the words of a complicated Welsh poem. He stumbled back to his seat, to be followed by an angelic-faced band of tiny children with recorders and tambourines. Everyone joined in the singing.
Angharad was enchanted. It was neither a service nor a concert, but an unselfconscious celebration for all of them. Heads bobbed happily up one after another to perform in their own ways. She lost track of the individual items and drifted away on the tide of her own thoughts, watching the specks of dust as they whirled in the wedges of light from the window shafts. The sun was fully up now, and it struck across the chapel to the old man, sitting with his head bent and his hands clasped over his stick.
A boy of eight or nine stood up, snub-nosed and stiff in his Sunday-best suit. The crowd rustled expectantly, and Angharad’s attention focussed again.
The child lifted his head and began to sing.
Early one morning,
Just as the sun was rising,
The piercing, exquisite soprano cut through the stillness.
I heard a maiden singing
In the valley below.
The clear light was gilding the bare corners of the chapel. Angharad saw beyond the whitewashed walls to the valley under The Mountain, and over the other side across the rocks to Llyn Fair.
Oh, don’t deceive me,
Oh, never leave me,
How could you use a poor maiden so?
At the last, quivering note Angharad shivered. Harry had been standing close to the child. Now he stepped backwards and slowly padded down the side aisle, tracking away until the frame held all of the congregation. With one movement they were on their feet. The Meeting was over, and the Welsh anthem was hammering at the dusty beams of the old roof.
Afterwards she waited in her place on the uncomfortable wooden bench through the clapping and cheering that followed, and the babble of talk and greetings as the people pushed out into the sunshine. At last she was the only person left, and the chapel felt hollow and cold. Angharad shook herself, frowning. The child’s solo had left her with a chill feeling that she couldn’t explain.