Sunrise

by Rosie Thomas

  Angharad’s voice broke off.

  Behind her the door swung open, and the waitresses came in with the first orders. There was work to be done, even though Harry Cotton was there, a few yards away, and had changed everything with a single glance. With jerky, mechanical movements Angharad pulled on her kitchen whites and turned to the long table.

  Jessie watched her for a moment, thinking that it was inevitable that Angharad had made a success of her career. Her determination was utterly unwavering. Yet for all her stubbornness she had an extra degree of sensitivity too. And Jessie wondered what that would mean for her and the dark-faced, alarming man outside. She had seen the look that passed between them. And she had seen Jamie Duff’s smooth mask drop for a second too.

  ‘Jessie. Would you garnish these for me, please?’ Angharad’s voice was calm. At once Jessie set to work beside her.

  The kitchen ran like clockwork. No one looking in at it would have guessed that Angharad was fighting to keep her hand steady, and her eyes on the succession of dishes in front of her instead of the door and beyond it.

  Jamie came in a little later to report the success of the evening. His hand rested for a moment on Angharad’s shoulder but their eyes didn’t meet.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he murmured. ‘Everyone has enjoyed every mouthful so far. Atmosphere perfect. Except at your friends’ table, perhaps. The women are being very animated, but neither of the men has said more than two words.’

  Poor Harry, Angharad thought. An odd complicity flickered within her, beside the anger. Laura had contrived this, somehow, and from the brief glimpse of her, she guessed that she had done it out of malicious curiosity. Laura looked rich, and spoiled, and not very happy.

  When the last main dishes had been served, Angharad judged that it was time for her to go out and circulate between the tables. Jessie and the waitresses between them could deal with the puddings.

  Angharad went out to the tiled washroom and shook her hair free of the confines of her cap. She stripped off her overall and the gaiety of her red dress mocked her. She didn’t want to look into her own face. She made sure that the black smudges had gone, then turned deliberately away from her reflection and went out into the restaurant.

  It looked beautiful, she thought with detachment, full of people and muted lights and the ripple of talk and laughter.

  She slipped from table to table, accepting the compliments and the well-fed, well-lubricated badinage, conscious all the time of the last table she would reach. At length she had to turn to it, and Harry’s stare dragged her eyes to his.

  Mystified, she saw the fierceness in his face had melted away. Now there was laughter in it, challenging and as intimate as if he had hugged her to him. It drew her right back across the years to their intoxicated summer together, and she felt her own smile rising to answer his. The confusion fell away and she was left with a beat of happiness. He was here. After she had watched vainly for him for so long.

  I’m deranged, she thought. Not in control of myself.

  ‘… so clever,’ Robina Gwynedd trilled. ‘We’ll come every night, Lucian darling, won’t we?’

  ‘Not unless Miss Owain lets me design the next five restaurants in her empire to make up for passing me over for this one …’

  Although Lucian’s fingers were ostentatiously linked with Laura’s, the brother and sister were ignoring their companions’ nonsense.

  Harry’s low voice cut through it. ‘Won’t you sit down with us?’ he asked.

  The laughter was still quivering between them and Laura was watching, cat-like.

  The cool amusement in her face had faded to alertness.

  ‘Thank you, but no. There are too many things to do tonight. I’m glad you enjoyed it.’ She walked away from the table with her red skirt swirling around her.

  Only when she saw Jamie’s bulk across the room did the smile die inside her.

  The sleek diners sat late over their coffee and the posies of petits fours in their lacy wrappings. The blackness outside the windows was impenetrable, and once or twice a fat grey moth batted against the glass.

  Jamie tapped his watch discreetly, and Angharad nodded at him, knowing that it was time for Jessie’s little sister to go home. Jamie went, leaving Angharad with her head bent over her sheaf of bills.

  Going home to watch over another man’s child, she thought, pain swallowing up her happiness again. It was Harry’s gaze that followed him to the door. The waitress filled Laura’s brandy glass for the third time.

  ‘Time to teeter home, darling?’ Lucian said to her. ‘Why? When we’re having such fun?’

  Harry stood up abruptly and drew her chair back for her. His hand was at her elbow when she almost stumbled. Robina and Lucian guided her towards the door. But Laura stopped dead as they passed Angharad. Close to, Angharad could see that there were fine lines beginning to show at the corners of her eyes under the sheen of make-up.

  ‘Must talk soon,’ Laura said. ‘Friends, like we used to be. Too few in life. Too bloody few.’ Her voice was slow and clear. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Luce?’

  ‘Yes, love.’ He was soothing, clearly used to her. The eyes of the other diners were beginning to slide curiously towards them. With her head held high, Laura let Robina and Lucian steer her away.

  Angharad knew that Harry was standing beside her, waiting. Robot-like she followed him out into the lobby. Briefly she was conscious of the cold prickle of stars in the summer sky, and Robina Gwynedd’s tipsy laugh from somewhere in the darkness. Then Harry blotted out everything as he bent to kiss her. Their lips grazed together and she felt the lift of his crooked smile before his hands tightened on her.

  ‘Angharad. At last.’

  Her mouth opened beneath his. It was Harry, the reality of muscle and bone under the familiar skin, and she felt the force of her need for him. It took the greatest effort Angharad had ever made to draw away again.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Because I’m happy to have found you again. Just to see you …’

  Brutally she cut him short. ‘You haven’t found me again. Do you think that you can just stumble back, Harry, and pick everything up again? I’ve got …’

  ‘I know that. Do you think I can’t see what you’ve got? I’m sorry, darling, I’m sorry.’

  There was a new gentleness in Harry, she saw, as if it had taken all his success and self-indulgence to humble him.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he whispered to her.

  ‘No. I can’t.’ Angharad struggled for conviction. He mustn’t come anywhere near here. Nowhere near William, and her father. The old, old restrictions, a thousand times more complex now.

  ‘Yes. You must.’

  Outside they were calling him. ‘Harreeee, the keys … come on …’ He turned away from her, the arrogant Harry again whom she knew so well. ‘Until tomorrow.’

  Angharad fled back into the restaurant, only checking her headlong rush when she saw the stares of the last lingering customers. Jessie was writing out their bill, and behind her the waitresses were clearing the last table. There was a smell of hastily snuffed candles in the air, the deflated feeling of the evening’s end.

  The room was empty, except for Jessie and Angharad sitting exhausted in the sofas in front of the hearth, when the door swung open again. It was Laura.

  ‘Gave them the slip,’ she said with a shrug, and a sudden grin that made her look almost a schoolgirl again. ‘Came back to have a nightcap with you, Angharad.’

  Jessie unfolded her legs from the cushions. She was looking with distrust at Laura, and Angharad smiled inwardly in gratitude for her loyalty.

  ‘I’ll be off home then, if there’s nothing else that needs doing.’

  ‘Jessie? You were wonderful tonight. Thanks. For everything.’ She wanted to stop her going, to keep her here as a shield against Laura, but she resisted the impulse. Laura couldn’t hurt her. And Angharad looked unwaveringly back into the eyes that had once seemed so like Harry’s.

>   As soon as they were alone, Laura snapped the two diamond droplets from her ears and dropped them without a glance on the nearest table. Then she ran her fingers through her smooth hair, tousling it until she stood in front of Angharad looking exactly like the girl she had grown up with. For a moment there was no resemblance to Harry at all.

  ‘A long time,’ Laura said meditatively. She seemed to have pushed her drunkenness aside, without effort. ‘Mayn’t I sit down?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Laura slid into Jessie’s place on the sofa and stretched like a cat.

  ‘And what sort of nightcap would you like?’

  ‘Oh, brandy I think. Thank you.’

  Angharad brought the bottle and glasses and set them out between them. When Laura’s drink was in her hand she asked, as lightly as if they were old acquaintances who had just bumped into each other at a party, ‘What have you being doing, since?’

  Since. Angharad put the too-vivid image of the red room at Llyn Fair out of her head. She would allow Laura to guess at none of the pain of that. And she knew that she was self-possessed enough now not to let the extremes of tonight’s feelings show in her face.

  ‘Working, mostly. Cooking, and learning this business.’ The pretty, empty restaurant but with the warmth of a successful evening still lingering in it.

  ‘I envy you that. Work. Your own domain. I married straight out of Cambridge, like a fool. Can’t think why. Or yes, I can, but it didn’t help anything. I’ve never done a thing except be a wife, and not a lot of that.’

  Wife to Jeremy Argent of London SW1, according to the yellowing Times cutting in Angharad’s hidden folder.

  ‘Where’s your husband?’

  ‘Japan, right now. Making deals, or so the story goes. Oh, it doesn’t matter. I used to go with him. You know, successful man with his dedicated wife ever at his side. But have you any idea how bloody boring it is, sitting through dinner after dinner in Japan, or South America, or some godforsaken country whose name you can’t even remember, understanding one word in a hundred and smiling, smiling, like a puppet? And during the day, while he’s in the meetings, nothing but shopping and salon appointments?’

  Laura took a cigarette out of her silk purse and lit it with little, staccato movements. ‘No. Well, I don’t go any more. Jerry takes one of his pool of PAs or whatever they masquerade as. And I stay here. All mod cons, of course. Flat in Eaton Square, house in the country and another in Switzerland, and so on.’ Suddenly she ducked her head and Angharad couldn’t see her face. ‘Jerry wanted kids. So did I. But I can’t have any, as it turns out. So, we keep on keeping busy, in our own ways. Jolly, isn’t it?’

  Poor Laura. Angharad thought of William, down the village street, asleep in his little room with the Superman comic crumpled beside him. And of her own mixture of joy, pride and anxiety in having him, reinforced by the primeval desire to keep him safe at all costs. Only one emotion that she had ever experienced came close to touching the intensity of that, and Laura, with all her riches, would never know it.

  ‘And what about you?’ That was the old, intuitive Laura, probing dangerously close. ‘The nice-looking man in the grey suit. He’s your husband?’

  ‘My partner. Jamie and I have been together for years, but we aren’t married. It’s a business relationship as well. We’ve got two restaurants in London …’ Keep on talking. About anything so long as it isn’t children.

  ‘Duff’s and Le Gallois,’ Laura interrupted her. ‘Pretty name, that. You know, I hadn’t connected Anne Owain and you until I saw your picture in Harper’s.’ That was a little giveaway. Perhaps Laura had her secret folder too. ‘And this place?’

  ‘My own gamble. Jamie’s not sure about it. But my father’s very ill. I wanted to come back home for a while.’

  Laura flicked the ash from her cigarette and Angharad caught the flash of sapphires and diamonds on her finger. ‘Oh, it’ll be a huge success. I’m an infallible judge of it in everyone but myself.’ She looked around the room and then back at Angharad. Their eyes met, level and appraising. The sudden, vulnerable twist to her mouth surprised Angharad.

  ‘So. Which of us d’you think has come out ahead?’

  ‘It isn’t a competition,’ Angharad whispered.

  ‘Isn’t it? I’ve been competing. If not with you, then with him. For him.’

  Delicately, like the first pawn brought into play, Laura had placed the thought of Harry between them again. But the events of the evening had left Angharad too raw, and the questions they raised were too towering, for her to have been able to respond, even if she had wanted to.

  Instead, quickly, she said, ‘With me? I was never competition for you, Laura. I just came along behind.’

  Laura was laughing. She put her hands out and Angharad almost flinched, then felt relief that she hadn’t because there was real warmth and affection in Laura’s face. ‘Your biggest fault always was underestimating yourself. Then. I don’t believe you can possibly still be doing it. When I walked in here tonight and saw you in that red dress, a poppy instead of a windflower, I knew you were winning. I felt quite afraid of you.’

  Their hands were still linked. Wondering, feeling the cool weight of Laura’s fingers over hers, Angharad said, ‘Don’t be. Why should you?’

  And was that her own pawn being withdrawn, out of danger?

  Smiling a little, Laura disentangled her hands. She picked up her brandy glass and drained it, poured herself another measure, and then began to talk. At first she was the flippant, cynical Laura who had come back from her summer in France. She talked about Cambridge and her effortless success there. She had been one of the innermost coterie of clever, spoilt young people with plenty of money and nothing to do except be more fashionable than one another.

  ‘Amusing for quite a long time,’ Laura said with a wry lift to the corner of her mouth, ‘But not quite long enough.’

  In her last term, Jeremy Argent had appeared like a promise of salvation. Twenty years older than Laura herself or any of her friends, rich, powerful and attractive, he had carved her effortlessly out of a crowded party and, she told herself, she fell in love with him at once.

  It was the time of Harry’s brief marriage to Bibi Blake.

  Laura never sat for her degree. Within weeks she was Mrs Argent. Watching her face as she talked, Angharad saw the flippant mask slide away. Laura described the early disappointments of her marriage, and the humiliating realization that she had made a bad mistake, with a bitter simplicity that touched Angharad’s heart. She knew that Laura was telling her what she had told no one else, and she felt the cords of friendship between them vibrate and grow taut again.

  Laura was unhappy, and lonely. She had nothing, not the vividness of motherhood or even the steady, unpassionate warmth that Angharad shared with Jamie. Angharad put her arm round Laura’s shoulder and kissed her cheek. She was wearing a heavy, musky perfume that was too old for her and Angharad saw that the lobes of her ears were reddened by the dangling weight of the heavy earrings.

  ‘Couldn’t you divorce him?’ she asked, gently.

  Laura looked down at the jewels that she called Jerry’s rocks on her fingers. ‘What for? I’ve got all this, and all the freedom I could ask for as well. Jerry likes me to have affairs. It makes him feel better.’

  ‘You might fall in love again. You could marry again.’

  Without warning Laura’s head jerked upright. Angharad felt the irrelevance of her arm around her shoulders.

  ‘You’re not a fool,’ Laura whispered. ‘You know I couldn’t do either of those things. Harry is all I’ve got. And all I’ll ever want. Nothing has changed, and nothing ever will. Because I won’t let it. You should know that.’

  The words hung between them, tangible with threat, and Angharad knew that they were the stark truth. Slowly, stiffly, she withdrew her arm. The room tilted a little around her and then righted itself. All she could focus on was Laura’s stare, her eyes burning brighter than the jewels on h
er fingers. Wildly she thought, clever, dangerous Laura. To pull the threads tight between us, to disarm me with honesty and draw my sympathy, and then to strike. The same old, immutable warning to stand clear. And so quickly. Before the thought of Harry had quieted enough in me for me to know my own reactions. Laura would have calculated that, too.

  And what about Harry himself? He was hardly a pawn to be pushed to and fro between them. Angharad stood up, bright in her red dress, and looked down at Laura. She saw that unhappiness and vulnerability still showed in Laura’s face, overlaid with challenge and unwavering determination.

  Angharad turned away in confusion. Keeping her voice cool and steady, she said, ‘I’m going to lock up now. You’d better leave, if you don’t want to spend the night in here with tomorrow’s lunches.’

  Shrugging, Laura stood up too. She swept the diamond earrings off the table and into her bag without looking at them. Only in the doorway did she pause and, without looking round, she said, ‘I suppose we couldn’t meet again as friends? I need a friend more than I’ve ever done in my life.’

  Angharad was glad that she couldn’t see her face. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t see how we could.’

  There. She had admitted it. To Laura and to herself simultaneously. No stepping down. For all the obstacles that loomed around them she couldn’t walk away from Harry now.