by Rosie Thomas
Harry hooked his arm through the back of his chair, trying to relax, and smiled his famous smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Blame the restaurant. The name of it reminded me, and I was thinking about the first film I ever made, years ago, when I was a kid. I had one creaky camera, and enough ideas to bust a billion dollar budget. The opening scene had to be a tracking shot across a mountain …’
Harry launched himself into the story. It was richly amusing, and at his own expense. His audience was laughing, and the atmosphere thawed into appreciative warmth.
It was a convivial meal, and the deal was done.
At the end, Harry excused himself briefly from the table. One of the women, a new actress with hopes of a plum part, turned to the other. ‘Tasty guy, wouldn’t you say, Dinah?’
The second woman was an agent, enjoying and cultivating her reputation for hard-bittenness. She raised her eyebrows a fraction.
‘If you like that sort of thing. A little too perfunctory for my tastes, and chilly behind the spectacular charm. But go ahead and join the queue. There’s been no one for longer than a week since Bibi.’
‘Why did he marry that birdbrain?’
‘Bibi decided to marry him. She just went right ahead and did it. I knew Harry pretty well in those days, and it was just as if he didn’t give a damn either way. My theory is that he did it out of boredom, or apathy. Or perhaps to escape something.’ Dinah glanced around the table and saw that everyone else was busy talking. She bent her head and whispered, ‘I hear that Harry is a man with a past. There is a sister. I met her once. Ve-ery beautiful and glittery. Married to a millionaire. Well, rumour has it that Harry and his sister are as close as this.’ Dinah held up her fingers, twined around each other. ‘Closer, even. Juicy, no? Hardly surprising it didn’t last with Bibi.’ The younger girl’s head jerked back. ‘I don’t beleive that. It’s disgusting.’ Dinah shrugged and leaned back to light a cigarette.
Harry returned to the table. He stood behind Morty’s chair and said easily, ‘Okay, people, everyone ready? Two cabs outside. Claridge’s for you, Morty. Will you drop the girls in Knightsbridge? And a very reluctant driver to take the rest of the party to fashionable Limehouse. Right, Hugh?’
Out on the pavement in front of the lighted windows emblazoned ‘Le Gallois’, the pretty actress wound her arms around Harry’s neck and kissed him. ‘Can’t we go dancing? Or at least come back and have a drink.’
Gently, Harry disentangled her arms. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said.
The evening was over at last. He had no intention of prolonging it. The two taxis chugged away.
Harry stood for a moment on the pavement. Then he began to walk slowly away, a lean man huddled into an anonymous raincoat, staring into the bright windows, thinking.
The intercom buzzed on Angharad’s desk.
‘Anne, will you speak to Gregory Hunt? He wants to book for a private party on the twentieth. I told him it was unlikely, but he wants to talk to you direct.’
Angharad pushed her pile of accounts to one side, sighing, and turned the pages of the restaurant diary.
‘The twentieth? Not a chance. But put him through, Louise, will you?’ Angharad flicked the intercom switch and leant back in her chair, swivelling it from habit to look out of the window, although the limited view was masked now by the slats of a blind.
‘Hello, Gregory. Yes, fine, thanks. Yes, the family too. Yours? Good. Look, I’m so sorry, but the twentieth is tricky. We’ve got two other private parties booked, and the restaurant nearly full already …’
As she talked, Angharad listened mechanically to herself. Apologetic, placatory, and then tactfully suggesting another evening. Perhaps the twenty-first? She was efficient, experienced at her job, coolly pleasant. She knew that she was good at it, but her heart wasn’t in it. Every hour of the afternoon spent in her office over the Le Gallois dining-room, instead of in the kitchen, was an hour wasted. But as the time passed, and the restaurant’s reputation grew, it seemed that she did less and less cooking and more and more administration. She had a brigade of young chefs to assist her now, and she felt that they had all the fun while she did all the dull things up in the office.
Angharad sighed again as she wrote the new booking up in the diary and then transmitted the instructions through to Louise.
‘Ready for a cup of tea?’ the secretary asked. Angharad glanced at her watch, the Victorian one on the black silk strap that Jamie had given her for their first Christmas together. She had another, a tiny wafer of gold, but she preferred this one.
‘No, thanks. I think I’ll go home and have tea with William when he gets back from school. Will you tell them downstairs that I’ll be back about eight?’
Angharad preferred the evenings. There was more cooking, less business. On her way out of the room she paused, briefly, at a long mirror to look at herself. Angharad’s fair hair was discreetly blonde-streaked, now, and fashionably cut. Clever make-up made her wide eyes wider, and her perfect pale skin was left to speak for itself. She was wearing a loose, collarless shirt over a calf-length pleated skirt and expensive black leather boots. A thin gold chain around her neck was her only jewellery.
She looked, Angharad thought, just what she was. A busy, successful career woman in her mid-twenties. From her calm, assured appearance, no one would have guessed that she was increasingly restless, and increasingly heavy-hearted.
She felt that somewhere, not so very long ago or so that it was even noticeable at the time, she had taken a wrong turning. And now, with every day that passed, it grew harder to remember, let alone to recapture, her old self. That in itself wouldn’t be so hard, Angharad reflected, if she didn’t feel so disengaged from everything that turning had brought to her. It was pleasant, of course, to be successful and not to worry any more about money. She recognized her luck, and was grateful for it, in having friends, the opportunity to travel, and the close partnership with Jamie. But yet she felt isolated by the thick glass walls, which let her see everything but prevented her from joining in completely.
In the mirror she saw the sadness in her own eyes and wondered if maturity was insidiously deforming her from within. Could it be that she was turning into the emotional amputee that she knew, and pitied, in her remote father? Only her son, William junior, had the power to cut her with fear, or irradiate her with happiness.
Angharad shivered, and turned away from her reflection in the glass. Looking at her watch again, she saw that it wasn’t yet four o’clock. If she hurried, she could be home before William and they could spend a few precious hours together.
She snatched her coat from the hanger and ran down the stairs. There would be no one left in the restaurant at this time of day, and it would be quicker to leave by the front door.
As soon as she slipped into the restaurant, she saw that she was mistaken. There was a boisterous group of six or seven men at a table near the door, with brandy glasses ranged in front of them and a blue pall of cigar smoke hanging over their heads. Two bored waiters were hovering at a little distance, and they straightened up when they saw Angharad. She nodded at them, acknowledging their impatience without complicity, and prepared to walk discreetly past the extravagant lunchers. One of the waiters had his hand already on the door to open it for her, when someone touched her sleeve.
‘Angharad? Be ti’wneud?’
She stopped dead. One of the men at the table had turned round to look at her, and now he was smiling up into her face.
The Welsh voice spoke with complete familiarity, as if they had only seen each other yesterday. Still in Welsh, but less confidently now, the man said, ‘It is Angharad Owain, isn’t it?’
The waiters were staring at her in surprise, but she took no notice. The musical content of Welsh, and her own name, had come as such a shock in this distant, citified dining-room.
‘Yes,’ she answered. The face came back to her: a cheeky little boy with dark eyes and round cheeks. ‘You’re … you’re one o
f the Williams twins, aren’t you? Dicky, or Gareth?’
‘Da iawn. Gareth. Well, Angharad, it’s a long time, isn’t it?’
A very long time. Another life. She remembered the wide, fragrant spaces of Cae Mawr, and the open field and slopes of The Mountain she had explored side by side with the boy that this red-faced, prosperous-looking man had once been. This expense-account Le Gallois luncher had once lived in a little lopsided house down the street at Cefn. He would remember the same cadences of the Sunday church bells, and the ridge of The Mountain against the sky.
She wanted to put her arms around him and beg him, ‘Talk to me about it. Anything about it. Won’t you, please?’ Instead she invited him, ‘Won’t you join me for a drink, Gareth?’
He waved expansively and began to protest that she must join him, but Angharad raised her eyebrows a fraction at one of the waiters and at once a fresh cloth was smoothed over a table across the room, and the chairs were held out for them. Gareth excused himself to his party, saying that he had met an old friend. A ribald murmur followed him as he walked away. Angharad had placed them already. They were salesmen, celebrating a big contract.
Gareth sat down opposite her and Angharad asked the waiter, ‘Some more coffee and another cognac, please, for Mr Williams, and perhaps you would bring me some tea.’
Gareth’s eyebrows had lifted so far that they tangled with his black curly hair. ‘You must be quite a regular?’
Angharad smiled. Mischief and pleasure mingled in it. To Gareth Williams, her sophisticated air vanished and she was the skinny nine-year-old tomboy of Cefn again.
‘You haven’t changed a bit.’
‘Oh, yes I have.’ For all her vague dissatisfaction, Angharad was proud of her achievement. ‘This is my restaurant. What d’you think?’
He whistled admiringly.
‘You can’t be doing too badly yourself.’
‘Computers. It’s a Cheshire-based company. I live in Chester now, but I’m in London a good deal. We’ve just made a sale that’ll see us right for a year. Calls for a celebration, you see. Fancy it being your place, Angharad.’ They looked at each other appraisingly, and it was Angharad’s eyes that dropped first.
‘Do you ever go back to Cefn?’ she whispered. ‘What’s it like now?’
‘Why didn’t you ever come home?’ Straight to the point, with native sharpness. No sophisticated verbal fencing at Cefn.
Angharad bluffed quickly. ‘Oh, I will. Very soon. I’ve meant to go back for ages.’ Her voice sounded defensive, and she knew it. Gareth was still looking at her. What did they all say about her, back home?
‘It’s just the same. I was there on Sunday. Trevor the Wagon asleep on the bench outside the Chapel porch, and all of them filing out with their hymn books and pretending he was invisible.’
Angharad sat back in her chair and laughed as if she was fifteen again. Old Trevor drove a scrap-metal wagon, and his inability to stay on it, literally or metaphorically, was the basis of a not-very-subtle local joke.
‘Remember when we asked him for a ride down the valley?’
‘And Dicky sat on the top of an old wash-boiler, and fell off and broke his nose? Dicky married Jess Rhys, you know. Two kids, now, and a bungalow on the new estate.’
Freckle-faced Jessie Rhys, with her orange-red hair and wide, gappy smile. A wife and mother now, and last time Angharad had seen her she had been a schoolgirl. She knew what had happened, from Gwyn, but she felt the isolation of the exile sharper still.
‘The new estate?’
‘Don’t you know about that? Twenty bungalows on that bit of land beyond the church. There was a lot of fuss when they started going up. Your Dad was the main opponent. Said they ruin the view he’s been enjoying for twenty years and had hoped to enjoy for one or two more.’ There was a small silence before Gareth said, ‘Not too well, now, your Dad, is he?’
Cold fingers of fear touched her. Gwyn had said nothing in her last letter, except that William was tired. Could it be that her aunt was hiding something from her?
‘He’s been tired lately,’ Angharad said quickly. She wasn’t sure how much Gareth Williams or anyone else knew about their estrangement, and her instinct was to conceal as much as she could. ‘He’s not so young, any more.’
To her concern, Gareth looked surprised and unconvinced. ‘Ah. Glad it isn’t anything more serious.’
To change the subject, she asked for news of other contemporaries from the village. Obligingly Gareth plunged into a stream of stories and gossip. In spite of her sudden anxiety, Angharad listened with fascinated pleasure. The names and the places were so familiar, as were the very cadences of Gareth’s voice. Her home came flooding back to her, like a long-closed cupboard door being opened to release a tumble of dusty but precious mementoes. Gareth didn’t speak of it, because it wouldn’t have occurred to him, but his talk brought back the physical reality of the place too. With sudden clarity, as if she hadn’t thought about it for years, Angharad saw the long street with its uneven paving stones, the sun on the grey slate, and the broken line of the old rooftops against the hillside.
‘Miss it?’ Gareth asked her.
‘Yes.’ I hardly know how much. Or even why.
She had been so absorbed in their talk that she hadn’t noticed that Gareth’s companions had called for the bill and paid it. Gareth’s brandy glass and coffee cup were empty again, and behind him one of the waiters was yawning covertly.
‘You ought to come back.’
Angharad collected herself with an effort and gestured at the dining-room, all chic greys and creams, so different from what she knew and what Gareth knew.
‘Not easy,’ she smiled at him.
‘You should, just the same.’
The cold fingers clasped a little tighter. He was warning her of something. They said their goodbyes in the restaurant doorway.
‘I’ll give your love to Dick and Jessie, shall I?’
‘Of course.’
Gareth was on the point of turning away to his impatient colleagues when Jamie arrived. He kissed Angharad and said, ‘I hoped I’d catch you. I rang home, and guessed you were still here.’
Angharad had to introduce them. The juxtaposition of the two men struck her as incongruous. ‘Jamie Duff. My partner.’ Gareth’s eyebrows went up once more into his curly black forelock. The two men exchanged pleasantries before Gareth turned away again.
‘Goodbye, love,’ he said to Angharad in Welsh. It made her feel their bond, and their complicity against the smooth bustle of the King’s Road. ‘Don’t forget your old friends, will you? At least you’ve got the name to remind you.’ And he looked up at the sign of the Gallois, half winked at her, and was gone.
Painfully, she shook her head. Jamie was already steering her away to where his car was sitting on a yellow line.
‘Face from the past?’ he asked mildly, and they drove away together.
Angharad sat in silence, unseeingly staring out as the car crawled past the brightly-lit windows of Peter Jones, and through the clogged traffic in Sloane Square. It was all invisible to her. She was imagining her father walking down the street in Cefn. He was walking painfully, with a stick, and his skin was waxy-yellow. Aunty Gwyn, Jessie Rhys, Dicky Williams, and the rest were watching him, and shaking their heads. The vividness of the picture shocked her. It was like a premonition.
Angharad was gripped by a violent, panicky impatience. It grew so fast that it threatened to suffocate her, so that it was torture to go on sitting still in the almost-stationary car. Jamie was whistling and drumming his fingers lightly on the wheel.
If she jumped out now, into the Sloane Square traffic, what could she do? Gwyn had no telephone. Angharad could hardly rush to the station and catch the next train home after an absence of seven years. All she could do was write to Gwyn, ask her for the truth, and wait for the post.
But Angharad knew, with utter conviction, that she must go home. For years she had been closing her mind to the thoug
ht, and had expunged it so successfully that, now it had come back to her and she had admitted it, the force of it was doubled. She was afraid for her father, and her fear overcame all the years of silence.
She wanted to see him again. In case he was going to die.
They reached home. Jamie and Angharad were joint owners of their own white-painted terraced house now. The late afternoon spring sunshine shone on daffodils and grape hyacinths in tubs on the steps that led up to the white front door.
Angharad was still silent, preoccupied with her own thoughts, as they went inside together. The latest in the line of successors to Susie greeted them, and William came tumbling down the stairs after her.
In spite of everything, Angharad’s face broke into smiles when she saw him.
At six, William was a very normal little boy, dark-haired and with an unusually direct clear blue gaze. Like most mothers, Angharad was fascinated and touched, now, to see her son hovering on the brink between the attachment of babyhood and a trenchant independence that would be all his own. William was growing up with startling speed. Could she take him, too, before it was too late?
Not your Cotton bastard, his grandfather had said.
‘Mum! Jamie! Come and see what I’ve done!’
As he turned to run back upstairs she saw his dark hair over his collar, and the paint stains on his dungarees, and felt the potency of her love for him. All the thwarted love that she had allowed to focus on him. They owed it to Jamie’s influence, the two of them, that William was so happy, so unconcerned, and ordinary.
Side by side, they followed the child up to his room. And what about Jamie? What could she say to him, about going home? Not now. She needed to think, first, before too many layers were peeled away.
In William’s room they saw that he had rearranged the layout of his model trains. He was a passionate and indiscriminate enthusiast, and models of modern diesels shared the track with replicas of nineteenth-century American wood-burning locomotives. This afternoon he had built an engine-shed, a lopsided gluey edifice of cardboard boxes and tubes.