by Rosie Thomas
‘Well …’
‘Oh, don’t worry. Susie’s got a string of qualifications as long as your arm. Much better with my kids than I am myself.’
‘It’s not that. It’s just that I can’t afford to pay for a nanny.’
‘Oh,’ said Caro airily, ‘no need to worry about that. Susie’s paid anyway, because we still need her for our three. You’d be doing her a favour by lending her your baby. He’s her passport back to all the toddler clubs and sandpit sprees her friends go to. I’m not proposing to provide her with another baby myself, so you’d be doing me a favour too.’ Caro smiled, a smile so totally disarming that Angharad smiled back at her in acquiescence.
‘We-ell …’
‘All settled, then. What say we pop round now and introduce them? We only live around the corner.’
There was nothing for it but to follow meekly in Caro Gould’s wake.
The Goulds’ house was spruce, white-painted and discreetly opulent-looking. In the nursery suite on the top floor, stocked with as many playthings as the toy department of a medium-sized store, they found Susie waiting. Caro’s nanny was a plump, freckled Scots girl who pounced on William with cries of delight.
‘Oh, the wee thing.’
William, slightly to Angharad’s chagrin, gurgled back at her in evident delight. Caro bore Angharad away for coffee and Black Forest gâteau.
‘Disastrously fattening. Have a really big piece. A puff of wind would blow you away. I kept on feeding my babies for months because it was such a good excuse for eating like a horse. Not that you need to worry. You know, I’m so glad you’ve moved in with Jamie. He needs a calming influence.’
‘I only share the flat,’ Angharad protested. ‘Our paths don’t cross, except at Duff’s.’
‘No?’ The stream of inconsequential talk stopped as Caro looked at her. Angharad suddenly thought that Jamie’s sister was much sharper than she had given her credit for.
Godolphin Mansions, when Angharad and William reached home at last, seemed very quiet indeed.
When Jamie came in, he looked at her with a trace of anxiety.
‘Did Caro call?’
‘She did.’
‘And did she organize you?’
‘Organize? I’ve only just got my breath back.’
They laughed. ‘Charles Gould is one of the City’s top investment analysts. But at home, the man’s a mouse beside Caro. You agreed to her suggestion?’
‘I’ll start again whenever you like.’
‘And your training course?’
‘The course too.’
Jamie beamed at her, suddenly very like his sister, as if it was Angharad who was doing him all the favours.
She watched him cross the room to pour himself a drink, loosening his starched shirt collar as he went, and wondered how she was ever going to thank him. William was asleep in his bright nursery. Susie had sent him back with a box of Gould baby clothes, tiny outfits with White House and La Cigogna labels, layered in tissue paper. Angharad herself had a job she enjoyed, and was about to embark on a course under a master chef that could turn her job into a career. She had a home. Even, she thought, remembering Duff’s and Caro, friends.
‘Jamie?’
‘Yep?’
Uncertain of how to say it, Angharad went to him and kissed his cheek. He smelt faintly of cigars and cologne, and he felt firm and solid. With a sharp stab Angharad remembered Harry’s leanness, and the way that his bones moved under the skin. Harry.
‘Thank you,’ she said, very softly, turning away to hide the sudden shadow in her face.
‘Be careful. Won’t you?’ Jamie said, just as softly. His hand brushed her hair and then fell again. Angharad nodded. She owed it to him to be careful of them both.
Angharad went back to Duff’s.
The first time, she took William in his basket. The staff crowded round, with Mario at the front.
‘Che bello bambino,’ he whispered, and Pierre snorted in derision. But the chef had made a cake, an exotic pagoda of meringue and spun sugar, with ‘Bienvenue’ lettered on it. Angharad cut it and handed it round, feeling almost as if she had come home.
Slowly a routine was established. It was very hard work, but she flung herself into it avidly. Work helped her to stop thinking, and it dammed up the memories.
So long as William was well, and happy, as he so obviously was, Angharad could go on from day to day. She let all her love focus on the baby, and he absorbed it and rewarded her with smiles. The rest of her energy and attention went into work.
Most mornings and lunchtimes she worked at the restaurant, and then went to her classes in the afternoon. As soon as it was over she rushed to the Goulds’ and William, and took him home for a precious hour before his bathtime. On the evenings when she had to work at Duff’s, Susie or one of her friends would come when he was asleep and babysit.
At first Jamie was at home in the evenings only rarely. But slowly, as William grew, Angharad noticed that he appeared more regularly. He would perch beside the bath and play with him, and then feed him his yoghurt with mock-distaste as the baby’s fat little hands grabbed for his silk ties. Jamie’s first question on coming in changed from ‘How many lunches today?’ or ‘Did the salmon arrive?’ to ‘Where’s Will’m?’
Angharad loved her son fiercely, and it seemed perfectly natural that Jamie should be devoted to him too. William was the thread that linked her back to the real world as his dark hair grew and his eyes took on the same clear stare as Harry’s. But he was part of this world too, the featureless rhythm that centred on the Goulds’ nursery, class, Duff’s and Godolphin Mansions, and in that he belonged to Jamie as well as to Angharad.
The baby’s first syllables, as he stood up in the cot rattling the bars, were ‘dadadada’.
‘No,’ Jamie said gently. ‘I’m Jamie.’
He never asked Angharad again about William’s father. She realized, as his attachment to the baby grew, that he didn’t want to know any more.
The weeks turned into months, and they were almost a family. Almost.
Angharad was increasingly visited by the eerie sensation that they were all waiting for something – Caro and Charles, Pierre, Jamie himself, even William. Waiting and watching. She began to wonder whether it was worth standing her guard any longer.
At length, Aunty Gwyn was persuaded to pay them a visit. She arrived by train in a nervous flutter of bulging carrier bags, carrying enough food for the journey to supply half an army. Angharad saw from the other end of the platform that she was still wearing her ankle socks, and she ran to her half laughing and half crying.
‘Cariad, you look so pretty and well. Give me a kiss, there, now.’
‘Aunty Gwyn, it’s so wonderful to see you. Come on, William’s waiting at home for you. You’ll love him. He’s the most perfect baby in the world.’
It was Gwyn’s first visit to London in twenty years, and she exclaimed in amazed excitement all the way back to Chelsea. She exclaimed at the Godolphin Mansions flat, too. Her innocent pleasure made Angharad smile, and made her realize at the same time that she was growing so used to this life that she didn’t think about it any more. There was comfort in that, of a sort, but there was a bleak sense of loss too.
‘Angharad, where is he?’
It was wonderful to hear her real name again. Anne was changing into somebody else, someone quite different, but Angharad would be the same for ever.
‘Through here.’
Susie was playing with him on the nursery rug. William knocked down a tower of bricks with a gurgle of triumph before turning his wide stare on his great-aunt. Gwyn hugged him and kissed him, and told him that he was beautiful, but when Angharad and she were alone together again, she said, ‘I don’t see anything of you in him at all. It’s uncanny.’
‘I’m glad he looks like Harry.’ Angharad’s voice was barely audible.
Inside her head Angharad listened to his name, still hanging in the air between them. If she co
uld talk to anyone about him, she could talk to Gwyn. But she had grown so used to silence that she couldn’t find the words now.
Gwyn watched her niece’s averted face, and waited. If Angharad had asked, even mentioned him once more, she would have told her, with relief. Harry had come again to the old schoolhouse.
‘Where is she?’ he asked again.
‘I don’t know.’ This time Gwyn was lying, but she did it because she believed it was what Angharad would have wanted.
Harry left an envelope. ‘I’m leaving Wales. If she needs me – ever, for anything at all – a message will reach me from here, wherever I am.’ It was an address in New York. Gwyn put the envelope carefully away. But Angharad had never spoken of Harry, and here she was, pretty and happy, building a new life for herself. To Gwyn, the thought of Harry Cotton was a black shadow in this bright, elegant flat. The moment passed.
‘Shall we give William his bath?’ Angharad asked brightly. ‘Jamie comes back at seven, and he likes to play with him before he goes to sleep.’
It wasn’t surprising, Gwyn thought. Angharad was happily installed here, with her London friends around her and her job, doing the thing she enjoyed most in the world. And there was this Jamie Duff, too. If she had put it so successfully behind her, why should she want to think back to a dead love affair that had given her so much pain? Harry Cotton’s letter could stay where it was, half-forgotten in the recesses of Gwyn’s memory.
Gwyn’s face brightened, and they went off together to the baby’s room.
The visit was a huge success. Jamie and Aunty Gwyn took to each other at once. He treated her with a kind of teasing gravity that made her giggle like a schoolgirl.
‘Why didn’t you come before?’ he asked. ‘I’ve always felt rather cheated in the aunt department, and you fit the bill perfectly.’
‘Now that I know how comfortable it is here,’ she retorted, ‘and how charming you are, Jamie, I shall probably close up the schoolhouse and move in for good. Then you’ll be sorry.’
‘On the contrary. It will mean that Anne will have to move out to make room, of course, but that’s only a minor consideration. Unless you’re proposing a more intimate arrangement?’
They both roared with laughter. Angharad thought that Jamie seemed more at ease with her aunt, these days, than he did with herself. It was as if there was a conspiracy of happiness and normality around her, from which she was excluded only by her own stubbornness.
That’s a streak of Dad in me, she told herself grimly.
Gwyn’s news of her brother was no different from the few words in her letters. Angharad pressed her, anxious for even a nuance of regret or relentment, but Gwyn shook her head.
‘I’m ashamed of him,’ she said, ‘and so sorry for him, too. He’s cut himself off with bitterness, even from me. I know he misses you, love, but he won’t give in. It reminds me of how he was after your mother died. Rigid with sorrow and anger and hatred of everything. It took you growing up to break through to him again. That won’t happen again, will it? He’ll die a lonely, unhappy old man.’
‘Die?’ Angharad said sharply. ‘He isn’t ill, is he?’
Gwyn said, gently, ‘We’re both getting old.’
Angharad rubbed her aunt’s knobbly old hands and pressed them against her face, silenced.
When the week’s stay was over, Angharad went back with Gwyn to the station to see her off. She stood on the platform and Gwyn, fussed with the anxiety of departure, leaned out of the window to kiss her.
‘Give a last hug to the little one from me, won’t you? Take care of him.’
‘Of course I will. I love him more than anything in the world.’
Gwyn smiled at her, forgetting the train and the clamour around them. ‘Yes, my love. You were right to do what you did. I’m proud of you.’ The doors were slamming down the length of the train. ‘And that nice Jamie, too. You take care of him. You’re a very lucky girl, Angharad.’
The guard’s whistle blew. In a second the train would be moving, and she would have to shout.
‘Jamie and I don’t belong to each other, Aunty Gwyn. But I owe him a great deal. And yes, I know how lucky I am. Do you think I should be happy?’ Her last words were lost as the train hissed and rolled forward. Gwyn was waving and blowing kisses from her window.
Angharad waved until the train had gone, and then turned to walk towards the Underground. Do you think I should be happy? she repeated to herself. Do you?
Christmas came.
Angharad and William were invited, with Jamie, to spend it at the Goulds’. In return she had offered to cook the Christmas dinner, and had been pleased and amused by Caro’s delighted acceptance. The puddings were already made, and were resting in the larder at Godolphin Mansions. In the brief intervals between the pre-Christmas rush at Duff’s, Angharad bought her Christmas presents and wrapped them in bright paper. The preparations made her think back to last year, when she had huddled alone in her bedsitter longing to have William for company. She had imagined themselves looking in at the shop windows, watching the lights, alone in their own world.
It hadn’t turned out like that at all.
They were caught up in busy, congenial family lives. Angharad found herself going to parties, at Duff’s and elsewhere, and meeting dozens of new people. Suddenly she owned pretty clothes, and a diary, and an address book.
Jamie came home bearing a Christmas tree, and they decorated it and turned on the lights before Jamie brought William in to see it. The baby’s mouth and eyes opened in wide, amazed circles and he set off towards the miraculous apparition in his lurching, drunken new crawl.
‘Look, Anne! Look at him!’
Watching him, Angharad felt a moment of pure wistfulness. She longed to be Angharad again, not busy, cheerful Anne. She was sharing her precious baby. And she was losing, slowly, slowly, her hold on the old world. Cefn, and The Mountain, and Harry.
She didn’t even know if she loved Harry any more. She had his face, in William, but every day William was more his own self. Not his father. Nor should he be.
‘Where’s the camera? We must get a picture.’
Angharad went for it, fighting to put the wistfulness behind her, cursing herself for being so stupid. There was no old world to cling to any more. She didn’t have Harry, or her father. It was all memories.
This was what she had now.
Bright lights, warmth, company, interests, a happy and contented child. And a little, cold core of numbness that would never go away.
On Christmas Eve Angharad came home late from Duff’s. She turned her key in the lock and breathed in the unmistakeable Christmas scents of spices, tangerines and pine needles. Jamie had stayed at home with William. He was sitting reading, the lamplight shining on his familiar profile. His face lit up when he saw her.
‘At last. I thought you were going to stay there all night.’
‘Eighty covers. Everyone determined to have the time of their lives.’
‘Wish they’d all stayed at home. I’d far rather have had you here.’
Jamie settled her in a corner of the sofa, took off her shoes and rubbed her feet. Angharad smiled at him, and then reached to touch his cheek where a patch of fine, blond hairs caught the lamplight. He looked up at her at once and caught her hand, so tightly that the knuckles grated.
‘Jamie,’ she said, very softly. She thought, suddenly, how simple it would be. What else was she clinging to?
The gold carriage clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour.
‘It’s midnight,’ Jamie said. ‘Happy Christmas.’ He leaned to kiss her and from habit she offered her cheek. But with his forefinger at the point of her chin Jamie turned her face and their mouths met. Angharad held her head very still, feeling the hairs prickle at the nape of her neck.
Everything hung in the balance.
Decide for us, Jamie, she begged him silently. Don’t make me do it.
He drew back a little and she noticed the length of his bl
ond eyelashes. Jamie was feeling in the pocket of his jacket.
‘I want to give you your Christmas present,’ he said. He drew out a little, flat package wrapped in gold paper and a curl of gold ribbon. Angharad held it, then shook it to see if it rattled, her eyes sparkling like a child’s.
‘What is it?’
‘Open it and see.’
Inside the box was a ruff of tissue paper, and under that a little Victorian dress watch. It had a smooth gold case and a round white face with tiny, curly blue enamel numerals, on a narrow black satin ribbon.
‘Oh, how beautiful. It’s perfect.’
Jamie put the watch on her wrist, tightening the old-fashioned ribbon so that it sat snugly. Then he kissed the inside of her wrist and she felt his tongue against the thin skin where the blue veins showed through.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
Angharad was still wearing her kitchen dress that left her arms bare. Jamie kissed her again, in the warm crook of her arm. His eyes were shut, and she felt that he was shaking. The last of her careful defences fell.
Angharad laid her cheek against his hair. ‘It’s all right. Jamie, it’s all right.’
At once his arms were around her and he was lifting her to her feet. They stood face to face in the glow of the tree lights. Jamie’s head bent to hers and he kissed her, reaching for her, with his tongue against hers so her mouth opened and her head fell back. Angharad shut her eyes on the other faces and made herself think only of Jamie, because she knew that he loved her and she wanted to love him back.
His hands were at the neck of her dress, slowly undoing the buttons.
‘Come to bed.’ His breath felt very warm against her cheek.
Angharad thought back to the night when William was tiny, when she had so gauchely rejected an advance that Jamie hadn’t even tried to make. Instead he had waited, and he had been right.
Her hand caught his wrist. ‘Let’s go and look at William first.’
There was a trace of wistfulness in Jamie’s teasing smile. ‘Mother first and lover second, is that it?’