by Rosie Thomas
When Angharad put down her knife and fork at last, Laura ground out yet another cigarette.
‘And what shall we three do now?’ she asked, flicking her little gold lighter again.
‘Go back to Llyn Fair,’ Harry said. To Angharad he explained, ‘My mother and father are leaving tomorrow for a month’s holiday. Laura will have gone up to Cambridge by the time they get back, and I … have to leave soon, too.’ He gestured at the pile of film cans in the corner. It was no more than Angharad had expected in her heart, but she went cold. What would he say, when she told him? What could they do?
Harry made a quick, wry face. ‘We’re expected. Why don’t you come back too, and help us out?’
‘Yes,’ Angharad said firmly. ‘I’ll come.’
Laura gave no reaction. She was rolling her lighter idly across the table.
They drove to Llyn Fair pressed together in the front of the grey van. Laura smelt of some exotic, musky scent, and the bare skin of her arm against Angharad’s felt hot and dry. Angharad’s thoughts went back to the morning two years ago, when they had sat like this in Joe’s Jaguar, laughing and singing to radio music. Had they all been happy, then? It was hard to believe that it was Laura who had been her friend. Had she really known this hard, bright stranger as well as she knew herself? Or as well as she knew Harry, now?
They came to the crossroads where she had first seen him, long-haired at the wheel of his gleaming car, and had mistaken him for Laura. As they began the climb up to Llyn Fair where he had shown off his driving and she had refused to be frightened, she saw his head turn a fraction and knew that he was thinking of it too. They passed the white barred gate, under the dripping tunnel of trees, and came out into the grey light at the end of the valley. The lake was flat and hostile, pockmarked with falling rain. The rain had darkened the slate and stone of the old house too, so that it looked grim against the black hillside. Harry stopped the van and in the silence that followed the rain drummed against the roof.
Laura looked sadly out at the grey veils. The brittle armour dissolved for an instant.
Almost in a whisper she said, ‘Why does everything always have to change for the worse? Even us?’
Harry looked past Angharad to Laura’s shadowed eyes and the melancholy twist at the corner of her mouth. Gently he said, ‘Laura. Of course there has to be change. How could we stay here in this valley for ever?’
There was no answer, and the three of them sat imprisoned by the insistent rain.
‘How could we? You’ll go to Cambridge, and Angharad will go off too, and there’ll be a thousand new faces and new things for both of you. All of us.’ His voice was hollow, empty of its usual firm conviction. ‘And you know that I have to leave. If I stay Joe will try to suck me into his disgusting business. Just by being here I’m condoning it …’
Laura interrupted him savagely, and Angharad knew that for the moment she was forgotten. ‘Don’t try to pretend that’s why.’
‘Everything changes,’ Harry repeated. ‘It has to.’
Laura’s hands fell to her sides and her shoulders sagged. Her voice was so low that Angharad barely caught the words. ‘If only it didn’t.’
She climbed out of the cramped space and walked away with the wind tugging at her pale, elegant clothes. Harry’s fingers tightened on the wheel. He was looking after Laura and Angharad couldn’t read his face, but she caught the impression of intense frustration and despair. Tentatively she put out her hand and touched his arm and at once he turned to her, his face softening.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, attempting a laugh, but Angharad knew that whatever the truth was it couldn’t be laughed away.
The implications frightened her, but she simply said, ‘Harry, why didn’t you tell her?’
‘I think you know why.’ His voice was low. Then, with a sudden challenge that made him like Laura, ‘Tell her exactly what, anyway?’
Only that we love each other. Only that I’m as important to you as she is. I must be. Especially now. Angharad could have cried out, but instead she kept her voice even and answered, ‘About me. It wasn’t fair to let her guess for herself. It hurt her.’
Harry tore the keys out of the ignition and flung the door open so that a damp gust of wind blew in at them.
‘Nothing’s fair. Do you still expect it to be? And I don’t think, now, that there’s any way to avoid hurting. Perhaps we should have thought of that earlier. Perhaps I should.’ Then he was walking away from her, his shoulders hunched.
‘Harry, she’s only your sister!’ Angharad shouted after him, but he gave no sign that he had heard her.
Joe Cotton came out of the house and stood on the verandah under the yellowing leaves of honeysuckle. Harry was standing beside him when Angharad reached them, inches taller than his father. Joe seemed to have shrunk, and spread sideways, and the grey of his flannel suit reflected up into his face. A little of his prosperous vitality had ebbed away, but Angharad thought it made him seem more rather than less threatening. Her fear and dislike of him was as intense as ever.
Joe took his cigar out of his mouth and stared at her. ‘Mary Owain’s daughter. Tell me, does your father know you’re here this time?’
Coolly she told him, ‘He does, as a matter of fact.’ Harry turned sharply to stare at her but she passed them both as if they were standing aside to let her into the house. In the hallway was a huge, overblown arrangement of flowers, chrysanthemums and teasels and sprays of copper beech leaves. Monica Cotton was tweaking the last leaves into place, her head on one side. She greeted Angharad with ordinary civility, and it seemed out of place in this distorted day. Behind her mother, Laura was pacing up and down as if in a cage.
‘I think, as it’s so vile everywhere,’ she said suddenly, ‘we should play bridge. Don’t you?’
‘If you like, darling,’ Monica said.
Harry was sharp. ‘No, we won’t.’
‘I’m sure Angharad will make up a four?’ Laura’s voice was sweet. Angharad hated the game and played it badly, but her protestations were ignored. She was propelled to the table, and to her horror found herself partnering Joe. As she sat and watched Laura dealing the cards with deft, snapping movements, she was swept by bewilderment and panic. Suddenly she had lost all clue as to what she was doing here, so clearly unwanted and out of place. The nausea of the morning came back, and her chest and throat tightened so that she could hardly breathe. These people were strangers.
‘Angharad?’ The three faces were looking inquiringly at her. She stared down weakly at her cards.
‘No bid.’
‘Really?’ Laura was silky. ‘No bid at all?’
The game moved jerkily. Angharad became conscious of Harry to one side of them, standing with his arms outspread along the marble mantelpiece. She looked pleadingly towards him, but couldn’t see his face through the nauseated blur around her. All she could sense was his eyes on her and then the movement as they turned to Laura. He was watching them both, held here in this civilized tableau. She wondered wildly how they looked to him, whether he was making comparisons. Her hair against Laura’s. Her skin against Laura’s. What she meant to him, against what his sister meant. She felt suffocatingly, sickeningly jealous, and convinced that Harry never would be hers. Never had been.
The conviction settled like a black knot in the pit of her stomach. You’re on your own, now.
She had been wrong to come here. Mistaken determination to hang on, to go on being with Harry. Trying to prove something. She longed to escape, not to run home because there was nothing there, but to get outside, into the fresh air and emptiness.
The rubber came to an end and they started on another. The afternoon would never, ever be over. She would have to go on sitting here, like a butterfly pinned to a cushion, for the rest of her life.
But then Joe was totting the scores up on his pad. He was an excellent player, but Angharad’s partnership had defeated him. Laura and Monica won easily. Laura leant back in her seat an
d said, ‘That was fun.’ In her relief that it was over, the sarcasm washed over Angharad.
The relief was short-lived. The day went dragging on, and she had no idea how to get away. At tea-time Joe began drinking whisky and Harry measured glass for glass with him. Laura made complicated cocktails for herself and her mother, clinking the glass and the silver shaker with little, icy noises. Angharad refused everything. Once she excused herself and went into the little cloakroom off the hallway to press a cold towel against her forehead. Her face stared back at her from the mirror, dead white and filmed faintly with sweat. Her eyes looked twice their normal size.
Dinner came next, around the table where she had sat and looked through the candlelight at Harry in his white jacket. She had thought that she understood his anger, and his confusion, and had fallen in love with him. What did that mean, now?
Watching the four of them, Angharad saw with unwilling fascination how the balance between them had changed. Harry and Laura held all the strength now. They sat opposite each other, as alike as reflections in a glass.
Angharad put down her knife, and her hand was shaking. Somehow, she would come between them. She must do. Not for herself, or even for what was happening inside her. But for Harry’s sake. Even if he couldn’t see that for himself.
‘Are you all right, Angharad?’ He was asking her again, and his eyes were concerned.
With an effort she said, ‘I’m very tired. Perhaps after dinner you could take me home?’
‘Of course.’
Down the table she saw Laura smile, a little, tight smile.
At last the meal was over. Joe had drunk a bottle of wine with his food and his eyes were half shut now, embedded in puffy flesh. He wouldn’t look at Angharad as she said goodbye, but repeated, ‘So like your mother. Aren’t you?’ She jerked her head away, not wanting to hear any more. Monica said something absently, her eyes on her husband.
Laura came out with them on to the verandah. The rain had stopped and the air was cool and damp. The two women stood and faced each other.
‘Good night, Angharad. We must have a long, long talk before I go to Cambridge. And you to – where is it?’
Angharad reminded her of her unfashionable redbrick university.
‘Oh, yes. Before that.’
What a snob she is, Angharad thought. And how unhappy they all are, with their affluent life in their lovely house. No wonder Harry needed to escape so badly. How can he let himself be caught up in it again now? Of course he must go away again. Except that now there was the baby. Their baby. Harry’s baby.
They were walking towards the van. Laura called after them, ‘I’ll still be up when you get back, Harry.’ Then Angharad heard the crunch of her heels turning on the gravel. She sank into her seat, shivering.
The van was noisy and Harry was driving it too fast. There was no point in trying to shout over the engine roar. Angharad sat huddled in her place, trying to rehearse in her head how she would tell him.
Harry, I …
At the old fountain Harry stopped and they faced each other in the spreading pool of silence. He rubbed his hands over his face and the tight lines showed clearly.
‘You told your father?’ he asked gently.
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘He was very angry. He wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t ever see you again. I told him that I couldn’t, and if he made me choose between you I wouldn’t choose him. And so he told me I’m on my own, now.’
Harry was looking away, out into the dark. ‘Families.’ He almost spat the word. ‘For perfect isolation. Poor Angharad. At least I had Laura to be lonely with.’
‘We haven’t been lonely this summer. We’ve had each other …’
But Harry didn’t hear her. He was staring into the blackness beyond the windows with a driven look that she had never seen before. He drew a deep, ragged breath, and then, surprisingly, began to talk, the words tumbling out as if he had kept them dammed up all through their weeks together.
‘Angharad, listen to me. You’ve given me the happiest summer of my life. It’s been a kind of happiness that I don’t deserve. I’ve taken it because it was so perfect I couldn’t stop myself. And because I saw that it was making you happy too, and I kept putting off this moment. I love you, Angharad. That’s not very much, but I do. I’d do anything not to hurt you.’
Angharad tried to break in, to tell him that she loved him too and that together they could face anything the future held, but he pressed his fingers against her lips.
‘Please listen. I have to go away now. Right away, for quite a long time, I think. If I stay here any longer, I’ll never be able to leave, and that terrifies me more than anything. I’d lose you, anyway.’
He turned to her and took her face in his hands, and kissed her so hard that her lips were bruised against her teeth. ‘Love. My love, Angharad. It’s for your sake too, don’t you understand?
‘I’ve got to ask you for two things I don’t deserve, but I believe you’ll still do them for me because you’re the truest and most generous person I’ve ever known. I can’t bear to leave you because I know it will hurt you. But I must, or it will hurt you more.’
Angharad saw the glitter in his eyes, and knew that Harry was on the edge of tears. There was a pain inside him that she had only half guessed at, and the mystery of it rose up around her more terrifyingly than all the other fears besetting her. With the fear came the certainty that she loved him deeply, and that she would never love anyone else in the same way.
‘Two things.’ Harry’s voice had thickened with emotion, and his hands gripping hers were shaking. ‘First, trust me. I haven’t done anything to make you believe you should, I know that, so I can only ask. I promise I will come back. When everything is clear and honest again, I’ll come back to you. It may be that you will have somebody else, and you’ll be so happy that I’ll be completely forgotten. That will be my loss, my darling. But I will come back to you, and then you can decide whether you still want me.’
Again, he moved to silence Angharad before she could interrupt him. ‘The second thing. To forgive me, if you can.’ Harry was staring into her eyes, and holding on to her as if he would never let go. ‘Do you understand why?’
Numbly Angharad looked back at him, trying to find the words to tell him that she didn’t. All she knew was that she was going to have his baby, and needed him with her.
The sweeping headlights of a passing car caught something that still glittered at the corner of Harry’s eye. He turned away from her to hide it, and then buried his head in his arms cradled against the steering wheel.
‘Oh God, I don’t think you do. I can’t tell you why. I can’t tell you, Angharad. Just believe that I wouldn’t leave you if I didn’t have to.’
His insistence was terrifying, and inexplicable. Angharad heard herself say ‘Don’t go. I need you. I want to tell you …’
‘Please.’
Harry’s passionate desperation overtook her own. Heavily, Angharad’s hands dropped from his arms. They folded together in her lap, over her stomach. Harry wouldn’t look at her now, and as she watched the loved angles of his profile and head, Angharad felt the walls of isolation sliding around her like thick sheets of glass. Harry wasn’t part of herself, after all. He was just somebody else, another person. She really was alone.
Angharad couldn’t have told him about the baby now, even if she had been able to find the words.
‘All right. Whatever you want. Go, then.’ She said it mechanically, her attention devoted to the movements that would take her out of the van, away from here, and up the hill to Cefn and the watching eyes. She groped, and found her way. Harry lunged after her, and his mouth burned against the back of her neck. She thought she heard him call her name as she ran, across the road and into the shelter of the trees. But it didn’t come again, and as she half ran, half stumbled up the steep hill, she heard him drive away.
It was the worst week of her life. Someti
mes Angharad thought that she was going mad as her mind circled round and round the same treadmill. Harry had withdrawn from her. Not forever, perhaps, but until he and Laura had learned to live without the unhealthy dependence that they all recognized. Angharad saw the sense of it, and would have loved him for his strength of mind. If only they hadn’t begun by being so careless together. And now she was pregnant. Her thoughts rolled on around the mill to dwell on the comma of tissue growing irrevocably inside her. What was it like now? When would it have fingers, and toes? Eyelids, and eyelashes? Brutally, she made herself think about abortion and the lurid imaginings made her physically sick. How could she do that? Even if she knew where to go. Didn’t it take money, lots of money, and she had none? Perhaps Harry could help her with that, at least. And so on, round and round interminably. A week went by, and then one morning she woke up with the conviction that she must go and see Harry, to try once more to talk to him before he went away and it was too late. She had no way of knowing for sure, but somehow she thought that he hadn’t left yet. Perhaps it would be a way of precipitating something. Anything. Better than going on like this, with only her own thoughts and her father’s angry averted face for company. They had hardly spoken to each other. Even Gwyn looked at her with a puzzled, anxious expression and said nothing. Aunty Gwyn was on her father’s side, of course. Why should she not be?
Angharad pulled her clothes on and looked out of the window. It seemed as if it had been raining all week, and it was raining again now. It hardly mattered.
Once she had decided that she would see him, she could focus on nothing else. Briefly she wondered how to get to Heulfryn, and then thought of Gwyn’s bicycle. Immediately she went up to the old schoolhouse and tapped on the studio door. There was no answer. Gwyn must have gone shopping on the early bus, but her old black bicycle stood propped up against the school wall. With only the thought of seeing Harry in her head, Angharad snatched it up and rode away. The fine rain misted in her hair and over her clothes but she ignored it. She swooped down the village street and the long hill beyond with a sudden sense of freedom. The road wound away and she leaned forward, feeling the wind keen in her face. Someone hooted and waved at her, but she swerved away and pedalled on blindly. Almost at once, it seemed, the wide sweep of land where Mr Ellis and his dogs herded the sheep rose in front of her. Beautiful patterns, Harry had said.