by Rosie Thomas
Then someone gently touched her shoulder.
‘Come on,’ Harry said. ‘Let’s go home to bed.’
Angharad smiled at him, and the moment was forgotten. ‘I couldn’t sleep now.’
Harry’s fingers knotted fiercely in hers. ‘Who said anything about sleep?’
Heulfryn Cottage looked as it always did, as if it might finally decay at any moment and melt back into the landscape. Angharad had half expected that this morning it would look different. More significant, because of what was going to happen there.
Inside it was just the same too. Her eyes flickered over the books, yesterday’s unfolded newspaper, an empty coffee mug and the red blanket on the narrow bed.
Harry poured something into a glass and handed it to her. She sipped, and the brandy warmed her.
‘You look frightened,’ he said. He turned her to him so that she looked up into his face. ‘Angharad. I love you and I want to make love to you. But only if you want it too.’
With odd detachment she looked at his mouth, thinking that the slightly crooked smile was Laura’s, too. But where Laura would have gone straight on, Harry was waiting. Looking up into his eyes Angharad saw the clear blue irises, rimmed with a darker circle. She felt a band tighten around her chest. Slowly she moved her cheek against his and felt the rough prickle of beard. It was easy now to put the memory of Laura out of her head. She closed her eyes and answered.
‘I do want to.’
The kiss he gave her was almost brotherly. ‘I want to look at you,’ he whispered.
She felt absurdly like a little girl as her fingers fumbled obediently at her buttons. She wore no bra under her shirt. Her breasts seemed to vanish under Harry’s big hands, and when he kissed them, she stared down into the dark points of his hair. Gently he peeled off the rest of her clothes. Angharad stood unmoving, so electrically conscious of her skin that she felt the sun shining right through it to show the nerves and bones underneath.
Harry’s mouth brushed across her belly, touched the hollows beside her hips where the blue veins showed, and the tuft of pale blonde hair.
‘You’re so fair,’ he said.
He lifted her up and laid her on the bed. The red blanket brushed all along the length of her spine. Not afraid any more, and with a languid confidence that surprised her, through half-closed eyes she watched him undress. Dark hair curled across his chest, and a narrow line ran over his stomach to the inverted V beneath it. From it his – and she stumbled over the word in her head – his thing lifted. The impatient profile startled her, as if it was something not part of Harry at all.
‘I’m not as pretty as you,’ he said, seeing her face. Unwelcome into her mind’s eye came Laura’s sleek body, like a photographic negative of her own.
‘I think you are,’ she told him, and held out her arms.
He lay down beside her. The brush of curling hair and the hardness of muscle beneath was different, and much more urgent. Angharad felt the first slow shudder of impatience begin to gather under her skin.
Harry propped his head on one hand to look down at her. The fingers of his other hand traced over her until they came down between her legs.
‘Is it the first time?’ he asked gently. She was half lost in the sensations stirred by his hand.
‘Yes. The first time,’ she whispered. ‘And you?’
From the smile in Harry’s eyes, she read the idiocy of her question. Two years since they had first met. Two years in which he had lived in London and ranged all over the States.
‘No. Do you mind very much?’
‘I’m glad. One of us should know what we are doing.’ She smiled lazily, and her fingers knotted in the hair on his chest.
Suddenly Harry reached over her. His tongue searched for hers and as she answered it, her hips lifted from the mattress to meet his. The expected weight nudged against her belly.
‘Touch me,’ he ordered her, ‘like this.’ His hand guided hers until her fingers closed around him. The heat and the hardness was both fascinating and frightening.
There isn’t room inside me, she thought, panic fluttering over the impatient circles summoned by his hand. Harry’s fist over hers showed her how to stroke, long smooth movements. When he took his hand away she went on, not thinking about herself any longer, but overflowing with love for him as she watched the fierce lines deepen in his face. His head fell back and she kissed his throat, where she had seen the pulse beating. Once she looked down and saw a single bead of moisture on the purple tip between her fingers.
Harry rolled so that he hung over her. He lifted his hand and she wanted to say, No, I like it like that.
Instead his knees forced hers apart until he knelt between them. His hands came underneath her and lifted her to meet him. She felt the intrusive pressure hard enough to bruise the fragile skin.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he whispered. There was an instant of sharp pain so that she almost cried out, but then it was gone. When she looked down she saw that her own blonde hair was tangled with his blackness, and the length of Harry was buried inside her
Crazily she wanted to laugh, and say, So that’s what happens. But Harry was moving again, no more than an inch at first, but then deeper so that the long, slow strokes built up again. Angharad looked over his shoulder at a damp blotch on the old wall, to match her rhythm to his. But the sensations inside her were confused now, warring with each other. She felt that Harry was rushing away from her, and she was falling behind him. She saw that his black eyelashes were glued into sweaty spikes, and she twisted her head to kiss them.
But then she felt the muscles bunch all along his back, and he moaned something that she couldn’t hear. It wasn’t her own name. They rolled together, and she hugged him, surprised at how vulnerable he felt in her arms.
Angharad found herself laughing in spite of her own disappointment.
After a long moment Harry opened his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, contrite. ‘That wasn’t very clever of me. Next time …’ But she put her fingers over his mouth. She watched the angles of his face, and thought how simple and how inevitable it was to be in love with him.
Almost at once he was the leader again.
‘I’ll show you something else,’ he said, and there was a teasing note now. She looked down, and saw that a thin thread of pale blood hung between them. That’s all it was, she thought distantly, but then she felt Harry’s black hair brush over her skin. Gently his tongue moved. Angharad gasped. The confusion disappeared, swallowed by certainty. She heard someone cry out, not in her own voice at all.
At last, when the world reassembled itself into its component parts of warm skin, prickly wool and sunlight, she opened her eyes. Harry was watching her, his head propped on one elbow again.
He smiled, and she felt that they knew each other perfectly. There was no need for any more questions, because they could see clearly into one another. Harry kissed the corner of her mouth, greeting her.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said, and she knew that she had arrived somewhere important, somewhere that she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to leave. With the knowledge came the realization that she was exhausted. The sunlight on the stone floor blurred, and the red blanket made a rainbow fuzz in front of her eyes. She let her eyelids fall, just for a second, and at once fell asleep.
She dreamed of Laura. They were playing tennis on a grass court shaded by the long arms of copper beech trees, and Laura was winning effortlessly. Every so often she would wave her racket and call out ‘Come on. You aren’t trying.’ And Angharad would try harder, biting her lips and pushing the sweat-damp hair out of her eyes, but always with the knowledge that she couldn’t match Laura’s score.
When she woke up again and saw black hair on the pillow beside her and olive-brown skin, it was with the thought that it was Laura. She lay very still because she didn’t want her to wake up. Then, with clearer consciousness, she remembered that it was Harry.
The rush of relief and happin
ess was so strong that she tightened her arms around him, nuzzling up against him like a child, willing him to wake up and share her pleasure with her.
‘Harry.’
He yawned and smiled at her, catching her happiness.
‘Mmmm. Mmmm. Well, what do you think?’
She opened her mouth to tell him, but he kissed her mouth to stop her and said, ‘Don’t tell me until next time. I really meant, do you think I should get up now to make us some coffee, or later?’
Angharad wound her arms around his neck. ‘Later.’
‘How wanton.’ Then, simply, ‘You are lovely, you know.’
Everything was much slower now. It was as if they had time to stop and look at each other, memorizing every detail as they went, and to listen, as well as just to touch and taste.
Afterwards she asked him humbly, ‘That was nearly right, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ His face was so close to hers that she could see herself reflected in his eyes. ‘I think, if we practise enough, we shall do quite nicely.’ They fell back against the pillows, laughing together.
Later, when they got up, they sat across the little table watching each other and drinking coffee, in quietness that was as companionable and untroubled as if they had been together for a hundred years.
Five
William was waiting for her.
Angharad clicked the front door latch and walked into the dimness of the house. Her father was sitting in the chair under the grandfather clock, waiting, not even with a book in his hands.
Angharad stopped short, disorientated by the sameness of everything here when all the world outside had changed so radically.
‘Where have you been?’ William’s voice was dangerously quiet. Her answer came quickly, and she forced nonchalance into it so that it wouldn’t sound as if she had been rehearsing it all the way home.
‘I got up in the middle of the night to go to the August Meeting. I thought I ought to do it, just once.’
Could he see that her mouth looked bruised? Surely she must look as different as she felt, as if there was light and not blood in all her veins?
‘Ah.’ William took off his spectacles and rubbed his hands over his face. ‘That was one thing I hadn’t thought of. I was worried about you.’
Remorse hit her. Forgetting herself, she knelt down beside him and rubbed his hands, seeing that his spectacles had left deep crimson marks beside the bridge of his nose.
‘I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me. But what could happen to me here? And it was fun …’ She rushed on, self-dislike nudging at her. ‘Someone I know, the brother of a friend of mine from school, is making a film about Mr Ellis the Bwlch. He was filming him being at the Meeting.’
William laughed suddenly. ‘A film about old Ellis? Good God, they’ll be wanting to make one about me, next.’
‘I went to have lunch with him afterwards as it’s my day off. The film man, I mean, not Mr Ellis. I didn’t think you’d mind,’ she added humbly. ‘You’ve been so busy, lately.’
William’s smile faded as he stroked her hair. ‘I know. Not much of a father to you, am I?’
A better father than I’m a daughter. She almost said it aloud, but instead she rested her head against him and said, ‘You are. You work too hard, that’s all.’
I’ll tell you everything, she promised inside her head, just as soon as I can. Old, forgotten things won’t matter any more. You’ll like Harry too. I want you to.
‘Don’t be out half the night again without letting me know, will you?’ William ordered, and she nodded. Be careful, she warned herself, but at once her thoughts went back to Harry and she felt that even her bones were melting.
‘Make me a cup of tea, love?’ William asked, and she rushed to do it, glad to hide her face and glad to do something for him, however tiny.
I’ll make it up to you, she promised her father’s bent head as she handed him his cup. William’s attention was already wandering back to his work. And it can’t be so wrong, can it? To love someone like this? Because if it is, the whole world’s wrong. And I don’t care.
The grass under the willows was lush green. Dragonflies zipped over the stream in sudden darts of colour and the trickle of water over the stones was an endless, low accompaniment to Harry’s voice. He was reading aloud to her and she shut her eyes, only half listening, letting the words of the poem weave patterns in her head.
‘That is no country for old men. The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees …’
Harry read on and Angharad thought that’s us, lying here listening to the birds. The image of old men and time passing made her shiver. It seemed ever more important to seize all these minutes, somehow to stop them escaping from her forever. Their first days together had seemed eternal, resonant with every touch and every word they exchanged. Now they had a bloom like a ripe apricot, and were just as short-lived.
‘Sad?’
Angharad opened her eyes. ‘A little. Only because it’s a sad poem.’
‘It’s not meant to be. It’s about finding compensations in growing old.’ Harry smiled as he looked down at Angharad in the grass. Her thin dress was caught up and the stalks made waving shadows over the skin of her thigh. ‘Although I must agree that, looking at it from this angle, it isn’t all that convincing.’
Angharad laughed and put her arms around his neck. With Harry, it was impossible to be sad for long.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Don’t go,’ she responded, suddenly greedy for him. Over the last days Harry had unlocked something inside her that surprised them both. Now as she fastened her hands behind him, she felt her eyes losing their focus and the warm summer afternoon its physical reality.
‘Never,’ he whispered, with his mouth against her neck. The word reassured her. He was stroking the smooth skin of her inner thigh and she felt hot and constrained.
He was still smiling at her, challenging her a little, as he lifted her dress over her head. The sun warmed her shoulders and the grass was deliciously cool and sappy underneath her.
‘I think,’ she teased him, ‘you think I’m going to be embarrassed about doing this out of doors.’
‘I wouldn’t think anything of the kind. You’re far too original.’
‘Anyway, I’m not embarrassed. I want you too much. Besides, there’s no one for miles.’
Laughter swept over them.
‘You’ve worked it all out already?’
‘Of course I have.’
Harry took off his clothes and knelt beside her in the grass. The long stalks tickled and the sharp scent of grass sap rose around them. The air felt cool and silky over their skin. Angharad reached out for him. She was learning how the hard muscles moved under her fingers, and to recognize the changing lights in Harry’s eyes as he guided her. The strangeness had gone, replaced by intrigued pleasure that deepened every day.
Harry drew her down into the green hollow in the grass. Dreamily she watched a tortoiseshell butterfly folding its wings for a second on a curving stem.
Harry. Harry.
His hand was searching for her, and then the dreaminess was driven away by a harder edge. Angharad rolled fiercely so that she was above him, with her hair hanging over his face, and then with her tongue traced the shape of his mouth. She was ready not to be led any more.
One of her hands reached for his wrists and held them until he fell back into the green shadow, mock-yielding. Gently Angharad slid over him until she found him and then, reversing what he had wordlessly taught her, began to lift herself and sink back over him. It was exciting suddenly to taste her own power and to play with the currents that she generated between them. She could take him deeper into her so that the sensation jarred between pleasure and pain, and then draw away again until he frowned and reached back blindly for her. There was no sense of being outrun, any more. They were equal and opposite, and they belonged together.
She bent again to kiss him so that her hair brushed over him, then
leant away with her back arched to see the complete bowl of the sky. Confidence suffused her, and with it came a deeper throb of pleasure than she had ever known before.
‘Now,’ she whispered to him, and in answer Harry caught her hips and plunged, once, so that the shock spilled through them both like the flame of the same fire.
Gasping, they rolled together through the plumes of grass, and they lay still while the minute world of petals and fronds and gaudy insects composed itself again in front of their eyes. Angharad found that she was laughing softly, and she felt the warm breath of Harry’s response against her neck.
‘Unmanned,’ he teased her.
‘Be quiet, or I’ll attack you all over again.’
‘Please.’
Angharad felt a slight breeze stirring the fine hairs at the bare nape of her neck. On a sudden impulse she scrambled up and ran to the bank of the stream. The water was no more than a silver trickle over the fronds of weeds but she splashed into it so that rainbows of spray sparkled behind her. A hump of weed was like a soft pillow as she half-fell against it and the water ran with icy fingers over her hair and face.
‘Ouch.’ Angharad jumped up again, the shock of the cold water taking her breath away. She looked to the bank, just as the first of a procession of tall clouds sailed over the sun. A wall of shadow swept over her, and over Harry who was sitting in the grass, arms wrapped around his knees, watching her. Angharad shook herself, her hair darkened with water and clinging to her skin. The sudden shade had drained the colour out of everything.
‘Come on, love-in-idleness,’ she called to Harry. ‘Into the water.’
He stared at her, seeing her slick and dark with the water, and then turned sharply away.
‘Don’t call me that.’ The jagged edge to his voice shocked her. With the surprise a little window of memory opened up. Laura had used the same words once to her, love-in-idleness, as she lay drowsing in the narrow bed in their school room. It sounded just like her, pretty and veiled in mockery. Shivering, Angharad ran the few steps and dropped beside Harry in the grass.