by Rosie Thomas
Angharad said nothing, and her eyes were on the door in the fear that Laura might come back again.
Slowly, slowly, Harry turned away. ‘Kiss my son goodnight for me,’ and he was gone.
With trembling hands Angharad slid the bolts at the top and bottom of the door. She went into the kitchen and searched for the key to the back door, which she had never locked. She found it at last hanging from one of the hooks on the dresser, and the lock grated as she secured it.
Only when she had made sure that all the curtains were drawn so tightly as not to permit a chink of light to escape, did she allow herself to go upstairs. William was fast asleep, his knees drawn up to his chest and one fist clenched against his cheek.
She bent over him to listen to his even breathing, and brushed the tangle of sleep-damp black hair away from his face. Deliberately she made herself see only the sleeping child, her son alone. She closed her eyes to his innocent likeness to the other two faces which had vanished now for ever.
Angharad crossed the little landing to her own room and sat down in the low chair beside the window. She was numb, and cold, and unable to think or even to move. She was still sitting, motionless, when the incongruous sun came up and the little street below her came to life again.
It was her stubborn sense of independence that saved her in the end. In the first terrible days after the numbness wore off, when wild, aching longing for Harry alternated with the fear that Laura would somehow discover William and come slipping into the cottage for him in the dark, she had clung weakly to the thought of Jamie.
Jamie meant safety, and she could turn tail and run away back to London with him. Back to the burglar-proofed walls of his Chelsea house, and the ranks of protective minions at Le Gallois.
Change the name, first.
Then Jamie came, as he had promised, sliding up outside the cottage in his Porsche and stepping out in his grey suit with a silk tie she had once given him as a present. She wanted to run to him like a child, asking for shelter, but she could not. She felt too cold and still, and too aware, like an unhealed gash in her flesh, of the heat Harry had reawakened in her. With the memory of that carried within her, turned bitter by Laura’s poison, everything that followed was dim and remote. Talking to Jamie, she heard her voice coming from somewhere outside her head, muffled by distance. She saw him watching her strangely, and saw the good-humoured stranger’s face stiffen and turn away from her. She wanted, but it was no use, and yet she didn’t want. To be alone was her truest need, to learn to live with the emptiness and to answer the demand for survival for herself and William. When the numbness ebbed away and the pain that followed would allow it, that was her paramount thought. To cling to anything else was wrong. Hopeless, and wrong.
The inevitable time came when Jamie made her sit down to face him. He talked with all his old gentleness, and it warmed her face into a sad smile.
‘You haven’t smiled, Anne, for do you know how many weeks? Do you know how much that hurts me, and William?’
‘I’m sorry.’
It cut her like a knife, and she knew that it was true. But William and she would survive together. The little boy had edged a little closer to the reality of his mother, and to a dim understanding.
Jamie was rubbing his broad face wearily. ‘I don’t understand why, Anne. But I think we both know that it’s the end. It hurts me too much that we should go on pretending.’
He picked up her hand and looked at the fingers. ‘I won’t come back to Cefn again.’
Then the bright blue eyes met hers, and acknowledgement stole between them. Acceptance, and the relief of honesty, lifted the veil that had blurred their sight of each other. The stranger became Jamie again, and Jamie and she were friends. Or would be friends, when Anne was forgotten and replaced and Angharad had learned to live whole again. They smiled at each other, and Jamie laid her hand gently back in her lap.
‘Will you let William come and stay with me in London?’
‘Whenever you want. Whenever he wants. Much too often for you, I should think.’
‘Don’t cry, Anne.’
‘Jamie. Thank you.’
The time came for her to stand with William in the little street, when Jamie had kissed them both and strapped himself into his sleek car. They lifted their hands to wave, and Angharad couldn’t see his last look at her because her eyes were full of tears. Then he was gone, and they were left alone.
William had watched the car until it was out of sight. Then blindly he turned to Angharad and buried his face in the soft stuff of her skirt. She smoothed his head, and blinked back the burning tears for him, and knelt down to enclose him in the circle of her arms.
‘William?’ she said softly.
He jerked his head up, and she saw the tear-marks on his face. ‘I can look after us,’ he told her, and she smiled at him.
‘You could, I know. But there isn’t any need. Jamie is our best friend, and we have Aunty Gwyn, and all our other friends here, where we belong, and Cefn. We’ll be quite safe together, you and me. Shall we go inside, William?’
They went in, and Angharad made sure that the door was quite secure, as she always did.
Angharad had cut herself free, with surgical precision, and as the days began to slip past, her ability to survive reassured her. While she worked she could forget, and when she was not working, tiredness helped to foreclose the memories and keep the fears at bay. The demands of the restaurant became her bleak comforter, and she met them and rose to confront fresh ones.
The Old Schoolhouse was an outstanding success, and the slow weeks passing piled up security and even a kind of resignation. She began to laugh again with Jessie, and Gwyn stopped watching her covertly and waiting for the break in her composure that never came.
She was working in the kitchen one afternoon, utterly absorbed, when the young waitress came in and leant across the table to her.
‘Gentleman in the restaurant would like to see you for a moment, if that’s convenient.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Mr Lang.’
Angharad frowned, unable to place him, but she dried her hands and went out into the restaurant. At a table by the window Lucian Lang was sitting in a buttercup-yellow shirt. At once Angharad remembered who she had seen him with, and stepped back so quickly that she almost stumbled.
Lucian smiled crookedly, acknowledging it. He held out a chair for her and she sat down, her hands cold.
‘I saw our friends,’ he told her pleasantly. ‘Just a few days ago. Harry is filming in Hong Kong, and Laura is with him.’
Half a world away. No need to lock the doors tonight, then. Harry, true to his protective promise. Angharad’s hand went colder at the thought of what it must cost him.
‘How are they?’
Lucian’s face tightened a little. ‘Laura is not very well. But she is quite safe. You know, Harry has never struck me as the most generous or unselfish of men. But he is generous to Laura.’ Delicately Lucian added, ‘Who hardly deserves it, as I think you know.’ And in a low voice that she could barely hear, ‘Whether she is responsible for her own actions or not.’
Angharad bent her head. ‘Thank you for telling me. Did … did he ask you to?’
‘Not in so many words. But I told him that I was coming home, and I think that was his oblique intention.’
‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘I’d … better go back to work.’
Lucian nodded at her, and turned gracefully to stare out of the window.
In the kitchen she bent over her work again.
Generous, she heard Lucian’s light voice.
Harry was so far away, and he could never come back. The certainty of their love for one another had never left her.
Angharad pushed away the pretty whorls of vegetable that she had been preparing, the sharp knife and the plates that were waiting for her, and laid her head down on the table.
Painfully, unpractised, she began to cry, for herself and for what H
arry was bearing, and for the bitter, immoveable wedge of Laura driven between them.
Twelve
‘It’s been a year,’ Jessie said.
Angharad sighed, and slid her glasses down to the end of her nose so that she could peer at Jessie over the top of them. It was one of the best times of the day, when the last diners had left the restaurant and she and Jessie sat down at opposite ends of one of the sofas to make plans for tomorrow before going home.
The glasses were new. They were glamorous ones with grey smoked lenses, but Angharad felt that the glasses more than anything else marked the change in her. She was quiescent now, with her path marked neatly out for her. Its boundaries were William, and Cefn, and the restaurant. And she suddenly needed spectacles for reading. She played up to them, taking them out of their case with a flourish and peering exaggeratedly over the rims, but she still needed them.
‘A year,’ Jessie repeated firmly. ‘More or less.’
Easter was later that year, and although it was a month past, it was still cold enough to keep the log fire burning in the hearth, and the sofas drawn up close to it.
‘Eleven months,’ Angharad corrected her automatically, ‘since we opened.’ And since her father’s death, and almost eleven months since Harry had gone. Not long ago they had held William’s eighth birthday party here in the restaurant.
‘You should take a holiday,’ Jessie persisted. ‘Why not? I can manage perfectly well. I might not have been able to at the beginning, but I can now.’
Angharad smiled at her. Then she pushed the glasses back into place before looking down at her notepad. ‘I know you can, Jess. It’s just that I don’t want a holiday, that’s all. William is going to Jamie in London tomorrow for half-term. I’ll do a bit less this week.’ She began scribbling at the marketing list for the next day. It still gave her pleasure to buy vegetables at the Beast Market, although it was no longer strictly necessary.
A holiday? Where could she go, and for what?
‘Angharad.’ Jessie was persistent. ‘Do you think it’s altogether … balanced for you, living here alone …’
‘I’m not alone.’
‘You know what I mean. Unvaryingly. Working all the time, and living just for William. If you went on holiday you might meet new people. Feel different.’
Angharad smiled again. It was a new, crooked smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes behind the smoked lenses. ‘Meet a man, d’you mean? Do you think that’s what I need?’
‘It might just help.’
The smile deepened the lines at the side of Angharad’s mouth. ‘I don’t want a lover. I don’t want anyone else for company except William, and Gwyn, and you and Dickie, and all the people here.’
Jessie looked at her for a long moment, trying to see her friend’s eyes behind the pale grey shields. ‘For ever? Won’t he come back?’ she dared to ask.
Angharad stood up abruptly and turned away to the windows. She shook out the folds of the curtains, and stood back to look at them as if the effect was important. ‘It isn’t that he won’t,’ she said at last, almost to herself. ‘He can’t. That’s all.’ The tone of her voice made clear that the subject was closed.
Then she was circling the restaurant, searching for anything out of place that she could put right, anything to focus her attention upon. At the little bar she stopped and picked up a bottle. ‘Shall we have a nightcap?’
Jessie looked at her watch. ‘I ought to go, really. Dickie …’
She could have kicked herself for her thoughtlessness. Jessie saw the cloak of loneliness around Angharad, although Angharad was assuring her at once that there was nothing more to do and she could close up alone. There was no possibility of staying to keep her company for just a little while longer. Their goodnights were muted and soon done. When she was alone Angharad looked down at the bottle on the bar, and then slammed it into the cupboard and locked the door. She moved quickly round the restaurant, checking the locks and the lights, and then closed the front door and double-locked it.
The air outside was cold, and clean, and still, and she breathed it in gratefully. Sometimes, just sometimes, she felt that her flourishing business was no more than a yoke and harness that kept her treading round and round the same flat, well-worn and familiar path.
A holiday, Angharad thought again, and once more. Where, and for what? Heavily she turned for home, and the air seemed to have lost a little of its sweetness.
The three of them, Gwyn and William and Angharad, had moved back into her father’s old, square house that had once marked the end of the village. Now Cefn straggled on beyond it into the cluster of new estate houses that old William had hated so much.
Angharad let herself into the silent house. Gwyn and William were asleep, William with his bag, ready-packed for the enchantment of a week in London, beside his bed.
In the dimness Angharad saw the white moon-face of the grandfather clock, and listened for a moment to a steady ticking. Eleven months. No time, and it felt like forever. Time to try to sleep again, and it was market day tomorrow. Angharad climbed the steep stairs, stepping over the one that creaked as she had done ever since she was a little girl. She felt too sad tonight even to go into William’s room and whisper goodnight to him. Instead she went and sat down on her own bed, and shook the sleeping tablet from the phial into the palm of her hand. Just one, never even a quarter more, even if sleep didn’t come at all.
Before she lay down she turned the hands of her alarm clock. Market day tomorrow. The uninterrupted, even, unbreakable and yet vulnerable edifice of her life.
What for? she asked herself just once, before the set replies came trotting back at her and she closed her eyes wearily on all of them and turned to the pursuit of sleep. She dreamt of the Beast Market, and of Harry waiting for her in the angle between light and shade, reaching out to take her heavy basket.
When the shrill alarm fractured her dream and Angharad got up to grope around the silent house, pulling on her boots and a thick sweater against the morning chill, and then sat down with a mug of tea in the cold kitchen, she was still possessed by the sense that he was close to her. She tilted her head, listening to the silence, trying to imagine his nearness.
And Laura.
She put her mug down. Quickly she went upstairs and saw that William was still asleep. Only a dream, she told herself, the kind of just-before-waking dream whose fingers reach out and try to cling on to the stronger day. She put the mixture of wild hope and fear that it aroused in her as far behind her as she could. Before she left the house she glanced at the secure lock on the back door. The front door lock clicked solidly behind her.
The Beast Market was alive with people. In the soft grey light the vegetable stalls were beacons of colour behind the dun-coloured crowds. Angharad slipped among them, nodding to her acquaintances. Her network of contacts was fully established and she bought most of her supplies direct from source, choosing the pick of the produce before it came anywhere near the stalls. But the Beast Market was her earpiece now, and she used it to the full. It was here in the cobbled square, casually talking, that she heard which farmer’s wife had started making her own creamy butter again in the old-fashioned dairy, and which reclusive old man was growing exquisite apricots against the south wall of his overgrown kitchen garden, and might well be willing to part with a couple of baskets. It was here too, rather than in the confines of The Schoolhouse, that inconspicuous men approached her with news of fine salmon, or fat pheasants and the occasional deer, into whose antecedents she didn’t want to enquire too closely.
Today she walked slowly, but she didn’t fall into conversation with anyone. When she had crossed the square she made herself look round, slowly but deliberately, into the corner where she had stood with her market basket. It was empty. In the place where she had seen Harry behind the black eye of his camera, and where she had dreamt him this morning, old Mr Ellis the Bwlch was standing with his black and white sheepdog at his feet.
Harr
y’s film, with the skeins of sheep making beautiful patterns over the hillside, and the man and his dog tiny specks behind them. Angharad had never seen the old man at the Beast Market, in all the months since she had opened The Schoolhouse.
Coincidence, she told herself, and went through the physical motions of turning away, even finding a taut smile. But she was shaking. Harry felt as close to her as if the dark hairs on his arms brushed against her bare skin. She was hot, and at the same time there was another cold breath, chilling her with fear and sadness, and she thought of Laura. Suddenly she was possessed with a violent need to get back to William. She swung round in the crowded place and almost stumbled.
A hand touched her arm, then steadied her. ‘Up too early, is it? Or too late last night?’
It was another farmer, a young man who worked the opposite side of the hill from Mr Ellis. Angharad bought eggs from his wife’s hens, little speckled eggs with thick shells and orange-yellow yolks.
‘A bit of both, I think.’ She was still shivering, and the farmer’s arm had the reassuring solidity of a rock.
‘You don’t look too good. Come on in the pub now and we’ll get something to put you right.’
The pub was busy, with condensation running down the old engraved glass and spilled rings on the bar. Angharad’s rescuer found her a seat and put a glass in her hand. The whisky warmed her and she sipped gratefully at it, wedged into her place between the corduroy legs and ancient tweed shoulders. Angharad listened to the blurred cadences of Welsh all around her, and breathed in the thick, warm atmosphere compounded of beer and cattle cake, damp wool and tobacco. She blinked, and the dream’s fingers released their hold. The eerie sensation was gone, and the sight of Mr Ellis was no more than what it really had been, a coincidental glimpse of an old farmer in a place where she might have expected to see him any day. Relief surged through her, and she smiled around the little bar.
Market day, market people, homely and safe.
‘Feeling better?’
‘Much. Thank you for the drink.’