by Rosie Thomas
‘Yes.’ She answered him seriously, because she wanted to be honest with him from the very beginning.
They went down the corridor to William’s room hand in hand.
William was upside down in his cot, one leg thrust through the bars and his arms spread wide in total abandonment to sleep. Angharad picked him up and hugged him, smelling the baby smells of talcum powder and warm skin. He nuzzled against her cheek and made a small, contented sigh.
‘I love him, too, you know,’ Jamie said as she laid the baby under the covers again.
Angharad nodded, acquiescing.
Then Jamie turned her around and they went away together to his room, where the thick curtains shut out the noise of late-night revellers in the streets and where the door, left ajar for William, showed the coloured glow of the Christmas tree lights that they had left burning across the hall.
Angharad didn’t know that love-making could be so gentle. That first time with Jamie was almost dream-like.
In her brief time with Harry she had met his incandescent passion with her own, and they had driven each other on, and further. They had bruised each other, sometimes, but the sweetness had obliterated everything.
But Jamie’s touch was as light as if he was afraid of breaking her, and for all his bulk he didn’t overpower her. Instead he stroked her skin, gentling her until she felt herself unfold to him. It had been a long time, and her body felt stiff and unfamiliar. Jamie whispered to her, loving secretive things in the dimness of the room, and she smiled against his cheek, feeling its smoothness. He was as gentlemanly and determined in bed as out of it. Yet part of Angharad wanted to be driven, not coaxed like this, and she felt impatience alongside the languor. Harry had been iron and electricity, every muscle and bone apparent under her fingers.
Nothing like this.
But Jamie’s way was right, now. The stiffness and impatience vanished together, at last, and the sensations that she thought she had forgotten forever came back to her.
She heard herself cry out, and then Jamie’s mouth was hard on hers as he came inside her, urgent for the first time.
‘I love you,’ he told her, and her fingers dug into the smooth breadth of his back because she was suddenly afraid. But at once pleasure drove away the fear, and she forgot it.
‘Anne. Anne, my darling.’
That’s right. This was Anne, nobody else, any more.
Afterwards she lay with Jamie’s arms wrapped round her, feeling the security of his warmth all through her.
‘Jamie?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘Happy Christmas. To both of us.’
‘Oh, I think so. Don’t you?’
In the morning when Angharad woke up she was alone again, and she had time to roll over, confused, before Jamie came back. He was carrying a tray with a champagne bottle and glasses, and a big jug of orange juice. There were croissants wrapped in a napkin, and the smell of fresh coffee wafted in with him.
‘Champagne in bed? The decadence of it.’
‘What else, on this of all mornings? Christmas, I mean, of course.’ He handed her a glass of Buck’s Fizz with a flourish and they raised their glasses to each other, smiling at the memory of the night before.
‘Before you ask, William is fine. Clean, dry, and playing in his cot with a revolting comfort rag and a teddy or two. Now, close your eyes, please. I’ve got another present for you.’
She did as she was told, and felt a sheet of paper in her hands. She opened her eyes again, laughing and puzzled. She saw that it was an estate agents’ circular. The smudgy picture showed an empty shop-front in a row of prosperous-looking frontages. The caption beneath read ‘Ripe for development/conversion’. Angharad scanned the rest of the copy, and whistled at the price.
‘Not bad for what it is,’ Jamie assured her. ‘Just off this end of the King’s Road! Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘It’s our new restaurant. Your own kitchen. What do you say? Will you be my partner?’
Angharad caught her breath. It was a dazzlingly generous offer. She was still only an inexperienced chef, and it would give her an unprecedented chance to make her name. It was a daunting thought, but Angharad knew that Jamie’s faith in her was justified.
She could do it, if he’d back her.
Partnership, Jamie had said. Angharad took a deep breath and asked, as lightly as she could, ‘Is this a business proposition?’
‘Yes, darling, that’s exactly what it is. The premises will be mine soon. The contracts are almost ready for exchange. You can work for me on the old basis or, if you prefer, you can buy yourself into the business over a set period of time until you own fifty per cent of the shares. I’d have told you about it before this, but … well. I wanted to find out a bit more about how our personal partnership stood, first.’
‘And does its new standing make any difference? Or if it had stayed just as it was?’
Jamie’s blue eyes met hers squarely. ‘Not a jot. You are simply the best chef for the job, that’s all.’
Angharad smiled her gratitude, and her relief. ‘I don’t think you’ll be sorry,’ she said quietly.
‘Neither do I.’ Jamie took her glass out of her hand and lay down beside her.
‘You’re asking me to dally here in bed while my son sits alone in his cot?’
Firmly he said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m asking. Demanding, even.’
It was a very happy Christmas.
When the three of them arrived at the Goulds’, Caro took one look and crowed, ‘Oh, I say. About time, too.’
‘Caro, really,’ Charles admonished her. But he was beaming as he produced more champagne.
Angharad groaned. ‘How can I possibly organize dinner?’
William sat among the romping Gould children, chewing a piece of purple tissue from the piles of discarded wrapping paper, and smiled his enchanting, reassuring smile at her.
There wasn’t any reason, Angharad told herself, her fingers tightening around the stem of her glass, for being alone any longer.
Alone?
Eerily, she heard Harry’s voice repeating the word, more clearly than all the voices in the room. The old sensation, half forgotten, that he was somewhere very close at hand came back to her. Close. Closer than any of these people.
‘Are you all right?’ Jamie’s question broke through to her and she shook herself.
‘Of course. Of course I am. Can I have some more champagne, please?’
There was a last-minute hitch over the contracts, and it was spring before the shop was finally theirs. Then came the long period of consultation with Jamie’s architect and designer, and the attendant devastation in the wake of builders and plumbers. Spring turned into summer, and the first cold breath of autumn was in the air before they were ready to decide on the fine details.
‘What are we going to call this place?’ Jamie asked. ‘We must decide, and do it now. The stationery and china have to be designed, and the sign-painters are waiting to work on the frontage.’
They had debated the question all summer. ‘Anne’s’ was dismissed as too dull, ‘Jamie’s’ as too fey. Other suggestions had seemed pretentious, or cute, or uninteresting.
‘I did have one last idea,’ Angharad said, hesitatingly.
‘Then let’s hear it. Time’s getting short.’
‘What do you think of … Le Gallois?’
‘Le Gallois? The Welshman?’
Angharad waited, a little breathlessly, while he turned the idea over in his mind. The name seemed suddenly important, a talisman.
‘For William, you mean? He’s still a little Celt, for all the impeccable metropolitan upbringing you’re giving him. Oughtn’t it to be the Welshwoman?’
‘No,’ Angharad smiled at him. The name wasn’t for William. She wanted it for Harry. It was a sort of tribute, she thought wryly, an acknowledgement of the private fact that he wasn’t forgotten. She wasn’t hurt, any more. At least, Anne wasn’t hurt. Smart London A
nne shared everything with Jamie now, even loved him in an unhurried, tranquil way. She wasn’t vulnerable, she believed, and she could afford the private memorial of ‘Le Gallois’.
‘I like it,’ Jamie said. He was already doodling the words, tracing out a swooping ‘L’ and ‘G’. ‘Yes. I definitely like it. Le Gallois it shall be.’
As if the name was all that was lacking, the last preparations seemed to take no time at all. The new restaurant emerged like a butterfly from the chrysalis of planks and plaster. The walls turned smooth cream, the rough floors disappeared beneath a layer of taupe carpeting. Cream linen cloths and napkins arrived and Angharad smoothed them experimentally over the new tables, smiling to herself as she remembered the riot of hated red and white gingham inside Y Gegin Fach.
She spent less and less time at Duff’s, more in the kitchens at Le Gallois working on the new menu. The chic understatement of the restaurant’s decor was deliberate. The food was to be paramount. Angharad spent hours, with absorbed fascination, honing her new skills at la nouvelle cuisine. The sharp greens of a vegetable terrine gave her more pleasure than a complicated sauce, and the beautiful juxtaposition of the best and freshest ingredients more satisfaction than the most technically demanding traditional dish. Le Gallois was to be a considerable innovation. Angharad was exhilarated by the challenge. In the moments when she had time to think, and was gripped by panic, Jamie was there to reassure her.
A week before the opening party for Le Gallois, when the plane trees were beginning to show brown patches and the tired summer air smelt cold and sharp, reminding her of her early days in London two long years ago, Angharad’s defences were tested. She had thought them invulerable, but to her horror they crumbled at once.
She had spent the afternoon at Le Gallois, and on her walk home to the Goulds’ to pick up William, she bought an Evening Standard from the newsvendor on the corner of Sloane Square. She pushed the folded paper into her basket and hurried on, all her thoughts with William. Their early evenings together were the most treasured part of her day.
William greeted her at the nursery door, shouting ‘Mamma! Mamma!’ Then he toddled away to where Ned, the youngest Gould, was playing with a line of toy cars. William snatched one up and brandished it.
‘See lorry! Lorry!’
Susie and Angharad laughed at him with delighted pride. Every day, it seemed, there was a new word or achievement to enjoy, and to relay to Jamie.
‘What did he do today?’ Jamie would ask, when he came in.
Tonight William was persuaded reluctantly to climb into his pushchair after the nightly ritual of kisses for all the Goulds. Angharad pushed him back to Godolphin Mansions by the familiar route, stopping as they always did to peer through the basement railings at a fat ginger cat asleep on a windowsill, and at the corner for William to gaze at the colourful blaze of a flower stall.
Once home, the rituals of supper and games in the bath were exactly the same, and as happy, as they always were. At last, William fell asleep in his cot with one fist clenched against his cheek.
For a moment Angharad leaned over him watching the black hair and the dark curve of his eyelashes. Then, sighing with contentment, she walked back into the sitting-room and poured herself a drink.
In an armchair, with her feet drawn up beneath her, she unfolded the newspaper. Immediately, on the Diary page, a picture caught her eye.
It was a stereotyped film publicity shot of a girl in a thin shirt, wet from the sea. Drops of water shone on her skin and the clinging fabric showed off her small breasts. She was looking straight into the camera lens with a practised stare, half smiling, half pouting. She looked young, and pretty, and taunting. The faintest flicker of a resemblance to someone else, unplaceable, nagged at the back of Angharad’s mind. Idly she glanced at the accompanying paragraph.
‘Bibi’s backing Britain,’ she read.
‘Bibi Blake, star of the recent talked-about movie Love All, is backing Britain in a big way. She’s just announced her engagement to the film’s assistant director, who’s British through and through. The lucky man is Harry Cotton and that, by the way, is a name to watch as carefully as his wife-to-be’s.’
Angharad’s arms felt like lead, as if there was lead in all her veins, solid to her fingertips so that they stiffened with the newspaper clenched in them and the words dancing smudgy black in front of her eyes.
His wife-to-be.
Angharad wanted to drop the paper, but she couldn’t. She wanted to stop reading, but she couldn’t.
‘Cotton cut his directing teeth on New York commercials, but he reached the West Coast as assistant to Dale Preger on Love All. Now his name is whispered by those in the know as director of the low-budget, high-profile remake of Fool’s Paradise. Starring Bibi, of course. For a man only in his early twenties, Cotton already has an enviable reputation as a hell-raiser in the old Hollywood style. But he told me tonight by telephone from the West Coast, ‘Of course I shall be settling down. With Bibi. What more could a man ask?’ What, indeed? Congratulations to them both. By the way, you can catch Cotton’s early British-made short As the Sun was Rising in a programme of similar features this week at the NFT. If you like that kind of thing. Me, I’ll be waiting for Fool’s Paradise.’
The diarist’s next piece was about Prince Charles’s latest girlfriend.
Slowly, concentrating very hard, Angharad unclenched her fingers and let the newspaper fall. It drifted from her lap on to the carpet and the picture of Bibi Blake pouted up at her.
Of course I shall be settling down. What more could a man ask?
Harry had forgotten, then. He had gone away to get all the things he had been so hungry for, and he had forgotten her as completely as if she had never existed.
Harry? Angharad shut her eyes, suddenly swept away by the vivid intensity of her memories. Two years since they had been in Wales together, watching the weather sweep in from the sea to the slopes of The Mountain. Two years since they had sworn, and known, that they loved each other. Two years since she had stumbled on him making love, and hate, and black confusion, with Laura.
Harry had walked away from that, and a world of otherness had swallowed him up. Just as it had done for her, even though she had met it with reluctance, changing Angharad into Anne. It must be happening to Laura too. Laura would be at Cambridge, almost certainly as much of a star in her own world as Harry promised to be in his. At least, Angharad thought, as she looked down into the pert face in the paper, he must be free of Laura now. He must be free, and happy.
Hell-raiser Harry Cotton. Yes. That was how he would be. And then finding what he wanted, settling down. The bitterness rose in Angharad’s mouth and she tasted it like bile on her tongue.
What about me? Me, and his son? She stood up stiffly and picked up her drink. Looking down, she was surprised to see that the ice was unmelted. She felt that she had mixed it hours ago. I’ll never be free, she realized. Never free of them both. As quickly as it had come, the bitterness vanished. It was replaced by a simple conviction as painful as a stab in the heart. She would never love any man but Harry. No one would ever break through to her again. She would stay as Anne for ever, and Angharad would be lost even to herself.
For the very hopelessness of it she didn’t want to cry, but the tears came just the same. She fought against them for a moment, and then let them fall.
She saw how fragile her equilibrium had been, and how misguided. Somehow, without even acknowledging it, she had let herself believe that Harry had gone to cut himself free. To break out of the tangled net that he and Laura had woven for themselves. And she had let herself hope that once he was free Harry would come back for her, and William. He had promised, long ago at the foot of Cefn Hill. A single paragraph in a newspaper had torn holes in that hopeful shroud. Suddenly she understood, with perfect clarity, that Harry had forgotten her. He had made his glib, meaningless promises to disentangle himself from a dull, local girl he had had enough of. Anger was fuelling her tea
rs now. He was nothing to do with herself, or with William, except for the stamp of his features on the child’s face. She hated him for his arrogance, and selfishness, and for the way that he had taken what she had to give and then rejected her.
And she loved him.
With the anger came a wild desire to do something, to hit back at Harry in some way that would hurt him in return. She had never tried to find him, and she cursed herself for her passivity. Yet she could try now, surely? Hollywood seemed a million miles away. But a letter to Llyn Fair, or to his film company, might reach him. She could even go to Cambridge, and ask Laura. Laura, where is he? I want him back.
No. She couldn’t see Laura.
And even if she found Harry, what could she say?
Don’t marry your starlet. Marry me instead, remember me? By the way, you’ve got a son, too. Just like you. Only not like you at all, please God.
No.
The anger melted away and she stared down at the picture of Bibi Blake, cold with the shock and the utter absence of hope.
Behind her she heard a key turning in the lock and Jamie came in. She didn’t look up and he came to her, holding out his hand so that she saw his striped shirt cuff, the gold signet ring on his little finger, the dark stuff of his jacket.
‘What is it? Is it Gwyn? Your father? Not the baby?’
Blindly Angharad shook her head, hearing the sudden fear in his voice.
‘Tell me then. Please, darling. You look like you used to look, at the beginning. I thought it was all over.’
Angharad could find nothing to say. And by not telling Jamie now, Angharad was shutting him out for good. She wanted to tell him, to let the whole story come spilling out, but the leap from this close-carpeted, elegant flat to Heulfryn, and Cefn, and Llyn Fair, was impossible to make. And her silence now would stay between them like a thick glass wall.
Angharad breathed in, a long, jagged breath. The struggle to hide her shock and grief gave her something to focus on.
‘I heard something about someone I used to know. I didn’t expect it, and it upset me. But it isn’t important. Believe me. Let’s not talk about it.’ He didn’t believe her, and Angharad knew that he didn’t. She watched the reckoning in his sharp blue eyes.