by Rosie Thomas
‘Goodnight, then, Angharad.’ Laura rustled away into the darkness. Angharad listened to the throaty roar of her car as it swung away, too fast, in the narrow road.
She moved around the restaurant mechanically, locking the windows and snapping off the lights. Her hands were shaking. At last the door closed behind her and she turned down the dark street. A heavy dew was falling and she shivered in her thin dress, but the air was as sweet as honey. A thin veil of cloud had drawn raggedly across the stars, and the darkness, in the last hour before the summer dawn, was at its deepest. Treading unerringly over the old stones, alert to the tiniest sound of the pebbles under her feet, Angharad made her way home. For all the sharpness of her senses, her head was a racing turmoil. She was sick and afraid, and heavy in her heart for all of them, but yet she was buoyed up with a wild happiness. It was as if a heavy grey blanket had been lifted and left her free to the air again.
Beyond that, tonight, it was impossible to think.
In their cramped bedroom Jamie was asleep. As she undressed in the dim light, Angharad thought that in the creases around his closed eyes there was a shuttered defensiveness that she had never seen before. But when she turned out the light and slipped under the covers he stirred a little. His breath was warm on her cheek, and in the darkness he reached out for her. Angharad turned blindly to him, wishing that he could shut out with his warmth the images that danced in front of her. But that would never be possible. Now or ever. The hot tears squeezed beneath her eyelashes, and in his sleep Jamie kissed them away.
Someone was knocking at the door. Gently at first, and then with growing insistence. From a sleep that felt as deep as if she had been drugged, Angharad struggled towards consciousness. The room was bright, but the coolness of the light told her that it was very early. She groped for her watch on the night table and saw that it was not quite five to six. The banging grew still louder and then someone was calling her name.
‘Angharad. Cariad, wake up. Angharad.’
Gwyn. Awake immediately, Angharad flung herself out of bed and across the room. The early morning chill struck through her thin nightdress and the linoleum was icy to her bare feet. Gwyn was standing in the empty street, framed by the early sunlight. She looked frail in her old dressing-gown, and her face over the reassuring plaid was grey.
‘It’s your Dad, love. He was taken bad in the night. Dr Hughes came, and he rang the ambulance right away.’
‘What time?’
‘One o’clock.’
When I was sitting in my restaurant playing Laura’s complicated game.
‘Why didn’t you come for me then?’
‘He wouldn’t let me. He said there was no need, on your important night. But the hospital have just rung. They think you should be there.’
The words struck at her like blows, but Angharad felt herself ducking them and already moving single-mindedly. The important thing was to get to him as soon as possible. Behind her Jamie was coming down the stairs, his face still confused with sleep. Past Angharad’s shoulder he saw Gwyn still in the street and he read her expression at a glance.
‘Shall I come with you?’
From the stairs, Angharad answered. ‘No. Stay here with William. I’ll go on my own.’
The miles to the hospital had never seemed longer, yet they flashed past her at dreamlike speed. The deserted seafront was beautiful in the pearly light, with the sun shining back off the flat silver sea.
The main doors of the hospital were locked, and it seemed hours before Angharad’s fingers pressed to the night bell brought a slow porter to open them. Unthinkingly she brushed past him towards the stairs and the old ward, and she was halfway up the first flight when he called her back, waving a list.
‘This way, Miss. Gwynedd Ward.’
She turned and ran back, and saw the discreet blue and white lettering, ‘Intensive care unit’. Beyond the double doors was a quiet world of silent, purposeful feet and ticking machines. A sister in a plain white overall led her past cubicles where other people were fighting their solitary battles amongst the tubes and dials.
In William’s cubicle a nurse was sitting at his shoulder. He looked shrunken with pain but his eyes were undefeated. He looked straight at Angharad, and at once they acknowledged the truth to each other. Not very much longer. The nurse stooped to adjust the machinery and then moved silently away.
‘I don’t know why they’re bothering with all this,’ William said at last.
‘They have to. It’s their job.’ Banal words, acknowledging the effort, and the truth that William didn’t need it. Angharad bent over the high bed to put her arms around him, turning her face away so that he couldn’t see her cry. But then the thought came, why hide it? There has been too much hiding between us. So she took his hands and, sitting in the nurse’s chair beside him, she looked into his face through the blur of tears. For a long time neither of them spoke, then William said, ‘I’m proud of you, you know. And of the boy. Thank you for bringing him home.’
Behind her father’s head Angharad saw the blip, blip of a monitor. It reminded her of the machine’s strong, urgent trace when little William was born. But this one was weaker, and slower. So much slower.
‘What about his father?’
‘I saw him last night,’ Angharad told him simply, ‘for the first time since … I left home.’
William’s head turned a little on the pillows. ‘I thought from your face that something had happened.’
So obvious, even here?
William seemed to be gathering his meagre reserves of strength. ‘I want to tell you that I was wrong. To try to cut you off from those children. Trying to prolong the griefs and hatreds of my own life into yours. Visiting the sins of the fathers, eh? It must have … given you a lot of pain that you didn’t understand or deserve. It didn’t lessen mine, either.’
‘I shouldn’t have deceived you.’
‘No, you shouldn’t have done that.’ William was quiet again, thinking. ‘Would you like me to tell you the story? I think you should know. For the child’s sake. It might help you to – decide, if you need to.’
Angharad smiled at him, with all the certainty and reassurance that she could muster. ‘Only if you want to. And if it won’t tire you.’
‘What do I need to rest for, now?’ That was so much her father that a true smile broke through and he answered it with his own. Then, looking a little to one side and out past the glass partitions to a distant view that Angharad couldn’t see, he began to tell her the old story.
Mary Parry was a fragile, shell-like beauty, the only child of a phthisic farmworker and his tiny wife, when she fell in love and married Will Owain. ‘They were pleased with her. They thought I was a catch, God help them, even though I was almost old enough to be her father myself. A scholar, you see, as well as living up in the big house, me and the Owain family for long before that. Your family, Angharad. Yours, and the boy’s!’ But William checked Angharad’s little questioning start with the pressure of his hand, and she sank back again. She was struck with confusion, but she would have to let him tell his story at his own pace.
‘They were good people. Within months, they were both dead in the flu epidemic. Mary was never strong, and the shock of that nearly killed her.’
Yet after the first grief was over, Mary and William found that it had knitted them together and they discovered themselves more deeply in love than they had ever been before their marriage. William had been a solitary child and lonely in adulthood, when even Gwyn had been kept at bay, and his delight in Mary doubled. Intense happiness flowered briefly between them. Soon Mary was pregnant. William knew that the child would be a boy and overnight the focus of their happiness changed from the immediate to encompass the future as well.
William’s father had not expected to have to work for his living, and had not been trained for it. His only expectation had been to manage the family estate, as his own father had done before him. But years of mishandling had reduced i
ts value almost to nothing. By the time William left home to fight in the war, he had no more than his lieutenant’s pay to live on, and when he came home again he had inherited the property and the weight of debts that it had accrued. But now, with an adored wife and a son to be born, he felt galvanized to put his affairs in order. Somehow the debts and mortgages would be paid, and his son’s rights restored to him.
Then, in the midst of the happiness, Mary fell ill. It seemed certain that she would lose the baby, but it was as if she hung on to its life with her own.
As he talked, William was still looking past Angharad and back at faces that she couldn’t see. She sat with his hand folded in hers, watching him and waiting for him to marshal his strength again.
The sister rustling past the glass wall looked at him and came abruptly to the bedside. Angharad felt her unspoken reprimand for allowing her father to exhaust himself, but William had no attention to spare for anything beyond the goal he had set himself and he said, ‘I want to talk to my daughter. Please.’
The sister left them alone again and William’s hand tightened briefly on hers. Mary was growing weaker every day. William would have sacrificed himself, the baby, anything to restore her, but it seemed that there was nothing to be done. Then, miraculously, they were offered a straw of hope. A London doctor was specializing in the rare form of anaemia that Mary was suffering from, and was developing a new drug treatment. It was almost untested, and had never been used on a pregnant woman, but William telephoned him and he agreed to see Mary. They left for London at once.
‘Money,’ William said bitterly. ‘We needed money. The treatment was hugely expensive. I told the doctor, and Mary, that I would find it. He had agreed to treat her, and that was all that mattered. I left her there in his clinic and came home to Llyn Fair again.’
Angharad’s start jolted William and his eyes closed for a moment against the pain.
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I was born at Llyn Fair. So were your grandfather, and great-grandfather. All that side of the valley belonged to the Owains, once.’ Angharad had a sudden crystal-clear vision of the lake, green and silver in its sheltering cup of hills, the fringe of black pines, and the old grey house drowsing in the sunshine.
Home? No. Impossible to think of it like that. It would forever mean Laura and Harry, dark heads bent together and the identical texture of their silky brown skin. Angharad thrust the image out of her head and looked down at the blank white sheet over the bed, struggling to reconcile her father’s words with the fact of her own childhood in the little house in Cefn.
‘That evening, I saw Joe Cotton. We’d met him half a dozen times before, your mother and I. We liked him. He was very vital, invigorating company. A bright boy, too. He was doing a little building, a little buying and selling land here and there. Determined to get on, and doing quite well at it, I’d half-heard, and not thought very much about it. He lived with his wife and two little children in a house over the hill from Llyn Fair. And I met him that night, when I was walking up and down the lanes, reckoning how to find the money for Mary’s doctor. He was standing at the gate to Llyn Fair, looking down towards the lake. There was something fierce in his face that I should have recognized. Covetousness.’
William’s voice was fading a little, as if he doubted he would be able to finish the story. Angharad bent her head and willed him to, because he clearly wanted to so much.
‘We started talking, there at the gateway. Then he asked me to walk back over the hill with him, to his house. I didn’t want to go … home, with Mary not there, so I went. And as we walked I found myself telling him about what had happened. I had just a glimmer of an idea. There wasn’t much land left by then, but there was one patch up at the head of the valley beyond the lake. It had been grazed for years, no good for anything else, but I suddenly thought that Cotton might be interested in it. There’s a fine view from up there. He could put up some jerry-built bungalows. We got back to his house, and there were his wife and the two children. A little black-haired girl, and the boy. Looking … like William does now.’
Angharad saw that there was no bitterness or anger in her father’s face. Instead there was an infinitely weary amusement that brought cold fingers of fear because it meant that he was slipping away from her.
‘Sitting there beside his fire, with his daughter on his knee, Joe Cotton made me a proposal. He didn’t want the land himself, he said, but he assured me that I would be able to dispose of it, given time. In the meantime, he would lend me the money I needed. Interest free. He would take the house and lake as security, mortgaged as they were, just as a formality of course. I accepted his offer. I thought he was doing it out of human kindness, because he had his own wife beside him and his pretty children, and I thought he wanted to help me save mine. Within a day he came round to Llyn Fair with the papers, and I signed them out on the verandah while he admired the sunset reflected in the water. By signing those papers I undertook to repay the cost of Mary’s medical treatment in full within three months, or to lose our home, worth about forty times as much. Not very clever, was I?’
Angharad couldn’t trust herself to speak.
‘Desperation makes a poor adviser,’ William said softly. ‘Mary had her treatment. She was much better. Quite soon I was able to bring her back home. I even learnt how to give her her injections, so that we didn’t need to have a nurse. It was a very hot summer, the year you were born, and we would sit together by the lake for hours, not talking, just watching the shadows on the water. It should have been the happiest time, but it was made wretched for me by the struggle to get Joe Cotton’s money. I couldn’t sell the piece of land. It was unsuitable for building, for some technical reasons, as Cotton understood perfectly well. I couldn’t raise the money.
‘The deadline came, and I had to go and tell him that I couldn’t pay. I thought he might extend the time. Perhaps start charging me punitive interest. But not Joe Cotton. He wanted Llyn Fair. To live there himself, in my house. He was courteous, regretful even, but he said that our agreement was quite clear and he must hold me to it.
‘Too late, I got our old solicitor to look at the papers. They were watertight. Joe Cotton was entitled to turn me out of our home. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of sending his men to do that. I found a house in Cefn, far enough away, I thought, but not so far that it would mean digging up all our roots. Gwyn helped me, making it as homely as she could. It wasn’t much, after Llyn Fair, and neither of us could find it in ourselves even to pretend it was. Then I had to tell Mary. That was the hardest thing of all, Angharad. She loved Llyn Fair more than I did. And I couldn’t make her believe that it wasn’t her fault, her fault just for being ill.’
The tears were standing out in William’s eyes now, and his voice was so low that Angharad had to strain to catch the words.
‘The day after, she went into premature labour. You were born a healthy little girl. Mary had a haemorrhage and died in less than an hour.’
At last, after so long, Angharad understood all the pain and grief, and the pent-up bitterness that had shadowed the corners of her childhood, and that had gnawed endlessly at her father until he became the seemingly cold and cruel man who had denied herself and her baby son.
Behind the ache of unshed tears, and the ache of never having known or understood, flickered the flame of gratitude that she and William had not left it too late to come home.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me, you and Gwyn?’
‘It was past,’ William said simply. ‘Perhaps we should have done. I don’t know. It all seems so long ago, now. So unimportant, when it might have meant you not being here. When it might still mean your being denied your … happiness. Don’t let my mistakes rob you of that, will you?’
Angharad understood that William was giving her his blessing, whichever path she chose to follow, into whatever future was waiting for her outside this glass-walled room with its unsleeping machines watching them and counting the minutes away.
‘I’ve got William,’ she whispered. ‘And you, and Gwyn. That’s all that matters.’
The ghostly smile, frightening her, still clung around her father’s mouth. He knew, and understood, something that she couldn’t.
When she looked again through her tears, she saw that William’s eyes were shut. She had to lean right over him to hear what he was saying.
‘I think I’d like to go to sleep now.’
Angharad kissed the corner of his mouth, and felt the coldness of his skin. William had already drifted away into sleep. For a long time she sat watching him, and then she gently disengaged her fingers from his grasp and laid his hand down on the white sheet. She found the sister writing at her desk. ‘My father’s gone to sleep.’
The sister ran to him, too quickly, and then turned to her dials and instruments. Another nurse came, and then a doctor, and their rubber soles squeaked as they swooped emotionlessly around his bed.
Angharad sat in her corner, too drained of emotion to move or even to think. The doctor loomed in front of her and said gently, ‘Your father is slipping into a coma. He doesn’t feel anything, now. He may or may not regain consciousness.’
Angharad nodded, knowing already. ‘May I stay with him?’
‘Of course. There may be no change for quite some time …’
‘That doesn’t matter. I want to be here.’
Soon they were alone again. She took up his hand and held it, listening to the lullaby of the humming machines.
It was a long, long day and night.
Gwyn came and sat beside her, then Jamie. He took her home to Cefn for an hour, and she played with little William and put him to bed. Then she came back to the hospital, and she and Gwyn sat on into the night in silence. The doctor came back and told them that there was no change. Gwyn let Angharad persuade her to go back home for a few hours’ sleep.
Towards dawn the note of the machines changed, then stopped, then faltered on again. The night sister was at the bedside in a second with her silent cohorts and then the doctor, grey-faced with sleep. When the bleep bleep stopped for the second time, it didn’t start again. Without seeing him, Angharad knew when the doctor shook his head, just once.