by Rosie Thomas
At last Jamie said coolly, ‘Of course, let’s not talk about it, if you think that’s the sensible way to deal with whatever it is. I won’t look at you, so I won’t ask myself what it is that’s made you cry. Would you like a drink? No, you’ve got one. Well, and how was today? Apart from whatever it is, of course.’
She had hurt him, and she wanted to run to him and rub it away. But she didn’t, and she felt the silence between them like the glass wall that she had feared.
It was a grey, cold afternoon and the rain came in sudden gusts, sending scudding patterns over the flat face of the river. Angharad crossed by Hungerford Bridge, looking down into the olive green water below her. A train clattered past from Charing Cross and the black iron of the bridge rang dully under her feet. At the steps she walked slowly down, still with her head bent. The concrete heights around her brought welcome shelter from the sharp wind.
At the foot of the steps she looked left and right, taking her bearings. The concrete walls and pillars were stained with grey legs of rain damp, and the fitful eddies of cold air carried drifts of litter into the neglected corners. Her eyes stung with the grit in the air. Angharad blinked and read a sign. The Film Theatre was over to her left, and she turned like an automaton towards it.
She had come to see Harry’s film. Unwillingly but inexorably she was drawn even to such a tenuous link with him.
‘Young Directors,’ the placards read. Angharad paid her membership subscription, bought a ticket, and found her way into the dim warmth of the cinema. It was almost empty. The few faces that she could see in the bluish light were turned intently to the screen. Would-be Young Directors, she realized. Painfully she was reminded of Harry as he had been two years ago. He had come a long way since then. He was on his way up the ladder now.
The first two films were uneven, uninteresting to her. Angharad sat in her seat immobile, mesmerized by the suspense of waiting. Then, without warning, the screen flooded with light. Against the brilliance a long silhouette rose, unbearably familiar. It was The Mountain, from the east, against the rising sun. The glowing rim of the sun edged over the rocky crest and light spilled into the foreground. It revealed the grass close-cropped by sheep, and the few trees licked into humps by the endless wind.
Somewhere behind Harry with his cumbersome camera was Llyn Fair. And ahead, framed for him by the viewfinder, the view of his childhood. Over the top of The Mountain and away.
The simple title credit rolled up the screen.
As the Sun was Rising. Harry Cotton.
Angharad drew her lower lip between her teeth and bit into the flesh so sharply that the blood rose. But she was oblivious of it, and her eyes never left the screen. Above the low music of the soundtrack another sound swelled. It was a lark, singing, a black dot somewhere in the blue overhead. It was the very sound of The Mountain. Angharad had heard it a thousand times, a hundred times with Harry.
The music dropped away altogether and there was only the lark’s song, and the wind in the grass. The stuffy darkness of the cinema dissolved around her, and Angharad was at home again.
The camera was moving now, over the grass, gathering speed as if it was flying. (How had he done that? Impressions and sensations flooded at Angharad from all sides.) Then it stopped short, at a height somewhere, and looked downwards. A slow skein of sheep fanned out and then began to fold together again, like a pack of cards in a conjuror’s hands.
(Beautiful patterns, Harry had said, and Angharad recalled the fierce light in his face. I’m no good if I haven’t caught it. But he had caught it. He was good, without question and his talent had taken him as far away from this film, and from herself, as it was possible to be. To Bibi Blake, and Love All.)
Behind the sheep was a busy black shape, the sheepdog. And behind the dog, a tiny figure toiling up the steep slope from the gate in the dry stone wall. The old farmer, Mr Ellis the Bwlch.
Harry’s film was utterly simple. It was as if he had simply set up his camera and let it run, capturing the painful rhythm of the old man’s days with unobtrusive accuracy. Even Angharad, with her rudimentary knowledge of film techniques, knew how difficult it must have been to achieve that bare simplicity.
The camera’s eye saw the littered farmyard, and the few scratching hens. The tattered cockerel fluttered resentfully backwards, displaced by the shiny length of a new car. One of the farmer’s sons came visiting, and the shiny shoes crossing the barren yard were left to make their own statement. The slow movements of the farm’s life, circumscribed by ancient machinery and the unyielding hill land itself, were echoed exactly by the old man’s hobble to the farm gate in his market day corduroys.
The camera saw him in a corner of the Beast Market, hemmed in by other old men with critical eyes on the produce and livestock. Then it moved aside, as if drawn by a shaft of light. With a pain burning in her chest, Angharad saw herself, standing with her market basket balanced on her hip. The sun shone through the bell of hair that Laura had shaped for her, long ago grown out, now, to please Jamie. The girl’s eyes were very wide, startled by something as they looked past the camera’s unexplaining eye. Angharad felt the gulf between the girl, hardly more than a child, and herself. The old Angharad confronted her for a fleeting second or two. Yet Harry had kept her there, instead of shearing her out. Why? She felt him close again, almost convinced of the warmth of his shoulder next to her, as the rest of the film unrolled in front of her.
It brought a wave of homesickness that was almost suffocating.
Every vista was familiar, even the trees and stones. Harry’s touch had given everything a kind of elegiac beauty that she knew didn’t truly exist: his film sentimentalized the hillfarmer’s life, but it was so exquisite a picture of her home that it stabbed her to the heart. She had had no idea, until this moment, how much she missed it, and how she ached to see it again.
There on the huge screen was the little tin chapel at the crossroads, and the lines of people filing inside. She had left Harry at the gate, and gone in with them. There, inside, was the line of plain glass windows with the morning light strengthening behind them, the severe whitewashed walls, and the rows of stiff Sunday suits. In the middle was the old man, not moving, his hands clenched on his stick.
Angharad’s heart was thumping as it all flooded back. She could smell the dust in the chapel, and the faint whiff of boiled sweets and mothballs. Under the forbidding text at the end of the chapel the choir stood up. The hairs at the nape of her neck prickled, just as they had done when she first heard the singing on that August morning.
There was almost no sound recording on the film, but she realized that somehow Harry had recorded this.
Ar Hyd Y Nos. Then, closing on him so that he filled the screen, the old farmer with his handkerchief at his face.
Harry knew how to drive his point home.
At once there came a sharp cut to the contrast of the child’s face, the snub-nosed soloist singing Early One Morning. Night and morning, old and new. Optimism, and dead ends. Angharad found herself crying with the old farmer. As the solo ended the camera tracked away until it held the whole congregation in such sharp focus that the dancing specks of dust were almost visible in the shafts of light. The last notes died away and they stood up, the long line of dark backs obliterating everything. The screen went black, and there was only the triumphant singing of the anthem.
Mae hen Wlad fy’Nhadau, yn anwyl i mi …
The old land of my fathers, the words ran in Angharad’s head, is beloved to me.
The intrusive lights came up and her hands flew up to shade her eyes. Angharad was protective of her secret, even in this anonymous place. She glanced sideways along the row of seats, and saw that her nearest neighbour was nodding, and scribbling notes.
Yes. Harry could make films. That talent had taken him a thousand miles, a world away.
Angharad made her way out into the bleak daylight, oppressed by a double sense of loss. She stared around at the stained concrete toweri
ng over her, the coils of windblown dust and litter, heard the buses grinding overhead along Waterloo Bridge, and hated it all. She couldn’t go back home, to The Mountain and the sweet air, however much she longed to. And Harry was even further beyond her reach. The odd feeling of closeness, the sense that he was more real than anything else, was no more than an illusion. Angharad began the trek back across Hungerford Bridge, pulling her jacket around her to shut out the cold wind.
She would go on as she was. For William’s sake, and because she could think of no other way to go. She was repaying Jamie’s love and generosity with subterfuge, but she could think of no gentle way out of that, either.
‘Why this sudden interest in soft porn?’ Jamie teased her.
‘It’s supposed to be a good film,’ Angharad answered. ‘Lots of people have talked about it. I meant to see it when it first came out.’ She hoped that her approximation of carelessness was convincing.
With the feverish secretiveness of an addict she had tracked down Love All in the cinema listings. She had to see that, too. Testing the imaginary links, drawn by the painful threads of curiosity.
‘It’s miles away,’ Jamie grumbled.
‘I don’t mind going on my own. I don’t want to drag you …’ The film was only showing in the evenings, otherwise she would have slipped away alone.
‘No, of course I’ll come. Might pick up a few ideas. Is that what you think?’
‘No.’ Angharad was laughing in spite of herself, and with the laughter she was relieved to see the appraising look fade out of Jamie’s eyes. He had been looking very closely at her, lately.
The film couldn’t have been more different from As the Sun was Rising. It was glossy and pretty in a soft-focus way, with irritating pretensions to seriousness overlying the real reason for its existence, which was to display as much as possible of Bibi Blake.
Harry was clearly being perfectly professional in his climb up the ladder. He was ready to make bad films as well as good ones, if they helped him in any way. Marrying the star couldn’t be a hindrance, either.
His name came up, in small letters, in the credit list and Angharad stared at it with the sense that she was pursuing a stranger. She felt disgusted and disorientated. Harry’s betrayal was complete. He was betraying himself, as well.
‘Oh dear,’ Jamie said as they filed out with the seedy-looking crowd, ‘I don’t think that that warrants anything more than a pizza.’ It amused him to grade films on a scale of meals to be eaten afterwards.
‘That’s fine,’ Angharad said dully.
Over the meal Jamie looked across the table at her and said, ‘You know, she looks just a little bit like you.’
‘Who?’
‘Didn’t you see enough of her? Booboo or whatever her name is, in the film.’ Click. The vague familiarity that had nagged at her when she saw the newspaper photograph. Under the pout, the heavy eyelids and the direct stare, Bibi Blake’s face did indefinably resemble her own.
‘She doesn’t.’ Angharad’s knife dropped with a clatter and faces at the nearby tables turned around covertly to stare. ‘She looks nothing like me. Don’t ever say that again.’ The idea was repellent. It was horrible to think of being one in a line of look-alikes.
Another unwelcome thought dawned on her. Perhaps their very attraction, her own and Bibi Blake’s with their fair hair and skin, was their physical unlikeness to Laura. Harry’s denial of his sister.
‘Do you feel ill?’ Jamie’s voice was gentle, but the sharp eyes missed nothing. Angharad did feel dizzy, and the table seemed a long way down as if she was peering through the wrong end of a telescope. But she steeled herself and picked up her knife again.
‘No. I’m fine. Don’t tell me I look like that horrible girl, that’s all.’ They finished their meal, and the thick glass wall of silence had slid between them yet again.
Eight
‘Why do we have to come all this way?’ one of the girls complained in the taxi. ‘Aren’t there enough places to eat in Soho? I’m completely ravenous.’
‘Harry’s idea,’ someone answered, as if that was sufficient explanation.
Harry was wedged into his corner, silently watching the London streets slide past the cab window. He might have been miles away from the noisy group of people with whom he had been watching the rough cut of a new film at a Wardour Street preview theatre.
‘You a Londoner, Hal?’ asked the man from the Coast who had money to invest in a new project.
Harry shook himself out of his reverie. Seeing the tangled ribbons of London streets like this reminded him of the weeks he had spent endlessly looking for Angharad. Millions of faces, jostling and crowding, and never a hope of finding her.
‘Me? No, Morty, I’m a Welshman.’
Le Gallois. The Welshman. The name of the new restaurant had sprung out at him from a flyer, and he had decided at once to visit it. It took him back to the days of searching when he had followed up the slenderest connecting threads, like this one, in case they led back to her. How long? Five, six years ago. So much had happened since then, but in another sense nothing had happened at all.
‘We’re going to Le Gallois,’ he had said to the party outside the preview theatre, not caring whether they came or not. They had come, of course, all of them, and now Harry found himself wishing as he did too often nowadays that he was alone.
The taxi pulled up abruptly and the girls fell forward, laughing and exclaiming. Harry put out a steadying hand to one of them and felt the pressure of it returned, too eagerly. He was frowning as he paid the driver and shepherded the little group into the restaurant.
The foyer was cool and wide, and a greeter came hurrying forward, American-style. Morty began to look more cheerful.
‘Harry Cotton,’ Harry said briefly. ‘A table for seven. My office booked it.’
The girl ran her finger down the list in her book, shaking her head. ‘I hope there hasn’t been a mistake, Mr Cotton. We’ve been very full since we opened, and this last week …’
Harry leaned over her and pointed. ‘That’s it. Parallax Productions. I’m sorry, I didn’t know my secretary had given the company name.’
Angharad had taken the call, and had written the film company’s name in the book herself.
The greeter was smiling, relieved. ‘Not at all. This way, sir.’
There was a round table laid for seven in the middle of the room. Harry saw that his guests were seated before looking around him. Cream tablecloths, neutral walls and carpets, a comfortable room full of fashionably dressed people who could equally well have been in New York, or Rome, or Los Angeles. Le Gallois, Harry thought wearily. There was nothing Welsh here at all. It was exactly like a hundred other good restaurants he knew across the world. There was no connection at all with anything that mattered to him. Or rather, anything that had once mattered before life became a numbing matter of working too hard for oblivion’s sake, and playing too hard in an equally vain effort to compensate for that.
The Welshman, indeed. Why should he think there was anything significant about that, any more? He had stopped looking for Angharad Owain long ago. Stopped thinking about her, even, except in odd, anachronistic moments that caught him off his guard like this one. There had been the weeks when, believing that he knew her so well that he knew what she would do, he had come to London, lived on his hunches, and tramped from restaurant to restaurant in an attempt to find where she was working. She loved cooking. That would be her natural choice.
There had been no trace of her, of course.
Harry smiled an involuntary, cynical smile at the futility of his efforts. He must have been hopelessly in love with her. The old lady, her aunt, had never budged an inch. Harry had gone back again and again, begging now to be put in touch with her. But Gwyn Owain’s face had remained stony, averted from him.
‘If you knew the truth about our two families, boy, you’d understand why I don’t want you here. Angharad’s never asked for you. Never, ever asked for yo
u. If she had, that would be different. Go away, and forget her because she has forgotten you. She looks prettier and happier than I have ever seen her. She’s safe, and secure, and that’s the best way for it to be.’
Harry turned away again, trying to blunt the bitterness of having lost her with the knowledge that she was happy.
The last time he had seen Gwyn was years ago, now. She had held firm until the last. ‘Angharad has someone to take care of her now. They aren’t married yet, but I’m sure they will be. Why don’t you leave us alone?’
After that, Harry had stopped searching. Of course Angharad wouldn’t need or want him. After what she had seen, knowing what she knew, why had he deluded himself that she still might?
Laura had won. As always, she had been clever enough to see the real threat.
Laura didn’t change. Not after her own marriage, not after his own, undertaken in despair and apathy and so soon over. Harry hated himself for that. It was, he reflected at the round table in Le Gallois, one more thing to add to the list that had begun with Laura.
After Angharad, he had denied her, but the responsibility of loving hadn’t changed. Laura was wilder now, and sadder. He could do no more than care for her, mitigating her self-destructiveness as gently as he could, but the weight of Laura hung round Harry’s neck as heavy as a stone. It was the effort of bearing that weight, not the excesses of his own life, which had drawn the premature lines in Harry’s face and feathered the grey streaks in the black hair at his temples.
At the thought of Laura, Harry’s fist clenched, the wineglass in his fingers juddered and spread a red stain on the tablecloth. As the waiter swooped behind him Harry heard Morty say, ‘You okay? You’re kind of quiet.’
In an instant Harry collected himself. He was neglecting his guests at the clinching point of a big deal, the wrong moment to allow his reputation for moodiness to gather weight. If there was no work, there was nothing.