by Rosie Thomas
‘Thought you were going to pass out, back there. Have another?’
‘Not if I’m going to drive home.’ Angharad’s smile was for him too, and under the effect of it, he rose gallantly and escorted her to her car.
‘Nancy’s got four dozen eggs for you. Drop them in, shall I?’
‘Any time. I owe you a drink.’
Angharad drove slowly back to Cefn through the dappled light, relishing the calm, puzzled by the intense certainty of something unexplained that had made her skin crawl.
William was sitting at the kitchen table, meekly eating Rice Krispies under Gwyn’s watchful eye.
‘He can’t go to London without a proper breakfast inside him.’
‘Most certainly not,’ Angharad agreed.
William grinned at her, his round face crinkly with excitement. ‘Why’re you so late, Mum? We’ll miss my train.’
‘I’ve been to market. It’s hours till your train.’ She sat down beside him, and began devouring toast as quickly as Gwyn could make it. The kitchen was warm now, with sun on the red tiles and on Gwyn’s knitting folded up in the rocking chair. Angharad licked a blob of marmalade from her fingers. Secure contentment had utterly replaced her anxiety, and she smiled at her own susceptibility.
‘Mum, it’s time.’
On his visits to Jamie in the past, Angharad had taken William down to London herself. Now, with his eighth birthday behind him, he insisted that he could do it on his own. It was a through train, Jamie would be waiting at the other end, and she was reluctant to head off his independence. By making discreet inquiries, Angharad had discovered a neighbour who would be taking the same train. He could be watched over, from a tactful distance.
They reached the station far too early, so that there was time to walk to the far end of the platform and examine minutely the signalling system and the marshalling yard beyond. William’s excitement had mounted steadily until he could barely keep still. He was full of speculation about the week of treats that Jamie would have in store for him.
The train came in and he ran to find a seat, forgetting Angharad in his headlong rush. She was smiling when she caught up, but she was touched by another, plangent sadness now. The little boy was growing up, out of their close circle of two, just as he should be doing. Soon, and she clenched her fists in her pockets, counting the curled fingers, in ten years at the most, he would be gone altogether. Hungrily she reached for him and pulled his warm dark head against her. He suffered the kiss and then wriggled away.
‘Can I sit in this carriage?’
Angharad checked, and saw the reassuring nod of her ally. She helped William in with his suitcase, and kissed his cheek, brown skin, just like his father’s.
Doors slammed, and she stepped back to the platform. William was waving, sliding past her, out of her reach, and then he was gone. Angharad watched the end of the train as it rolled away around the curve, tears sharp in her eyes.
In ten years, when he was really gone, what then?
She lifted her chin and stared defiantly back at the blank tracks. She would occupy herself with her work and with her friends, just as she was doing now. Jessie was all kindness, nudging her gently into looking for more than that, but Angharad knew with cold certainty, lonely certainty, that she would never love anyone in the way that she had loved Harry.
To occupy herself.
Was that the object, then, after so much pain, and such happiness, never to be hoped for again?
Defiantly blinking back the tears, Angharad walked out on to the concourse and found a telephone booth. Jamie answered at once.
‘I’ve just put him on the train, Jamie.’
‘Fine. I’ll be there. Is he excited?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to take him for a weekend’s sailing.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you all right? Is anything the matter?’
Kind Jamie, no longer a refuge, just a friend a long way off now. Her own doing, because she could never love anyone in the way that she had loved Harry.
Angharad smiled her lopsided smile. ‘Yes, I’m all right. It’s a strange day, that’s all.’
‘Take care of yourself, Anne.’
Who? So far away, now.
‘Of course. Enjoy yourselves.’
The booth was stuffy. The big clock over the concourse told her that it was almost midday. The restaurant was waiting for her, of course. Work, to occupy herself. When Angharad came into The Schoolhouse she saw that the tables were all laid up ready for lunch, and a great armful of white-lipped scarlet tulips was arranged on the hearth in place of the winter fire. She nodded her approval and turned to the list of bookings clipped to the table by the door.
1 p.m., Lucian Lang. Table for 3.
Coming again, bringing them with him?
Fear swooped back, prickling along her back and congealing in her throat, tight in her chest. William was almost halfway to Jamie and London now. Safe enough, surely safe enough? Angharad saw Laura’s lifted white hand, and the sharp red nails tipping it.
And with the fear came hope, never disunited, fluttering up through the slough of it. If only Harry were here. If her instincts were right and he was really close. Just to see him for an hour. That would dispel the long, the endlessly long, eleven months, and more.
Angharad walked through the kitchen as if she was hypnotized. Jessie pushed a strand of orange-red hair back under her cap, watching her.
In the washroom mirror Angharad stared at herself. Would he see that she was thin, and that there were lines in her face? Her hands shook as she brushed colour over her cheeks. She put her glasses on, shielding her eyes, and then tore them off again. There was more brightness in her eyes now than there had been for months.
She went to her station in the kitchen and began work, barely hearing what Jessie and the waitresses were saying to her. The red minute-hand of the kitchen clock crept around with painful slowness and then suddenly swept forward with hallucinatory speed.
At one-twenty Angharad told herself that they must have arrived by now. She crossed to the restaurant door and inched it open no more than a crack. Across the room Lucian Lang was sitting at table in a pale cream suit. He was leaning forward deferentially, listening hard. His companions were a middle-aged couple, prosperous-looking, strangers to her. It was only Lucian and some prospective clients, out for a flattering lunch before they engaged him to do a lucrative job.
Angharad let the door close silently. She could have laughed, in bitterness, at her own pathetic hope and her neurotic fear. They were still thousands of miles away, both of them. Real miles or not, it made no difference.
She went back to her place, where they were waiting for her to carve and garnish again.
Once more, Angharad was the last to leave when lunch was over. William wasn’t there, and Gwyn would be having her afternoon sleep. There was no one to hurry home for. The sense of emptiness oppressed her again as she scoured the already spotless kitchen and prowled through the dining-room, moving a vase of flowers, refolding a starched napkin. At length, when she could no longer even pretend to be busy, she saw that it was four o’clock. In an hour or so, she could legitimately come back and start the evening’s work. Reassured by a sense of purpose, Angharad took her jacket down from its peg and went out into the schoolyard. There were tubs of flowers now, and a newly-planted hanging basket suspended over the doorway. It was a clear afternoon, with the hard-edged, chill brightness of the late spring.
Lucian Lang was sitting on the low wall, smoking, waiting for her. He stood up as she crossed to him, and Angharad thought that he had lost his habitual air of modish weariness.
‘Do you have a minute of time to spare?’ he asked her.
‘All the time in the world.’
‘Perhaps we could walk?’ He pointed to the path that led down to the slope of Cae Mawr, and beyond to the track up the side of The Mountain. The idea struck Angharad as incongruous and she laughed.
‘If you don’t mind getting grass-stains and worse on your client-lunch suit.’ Then she saw that Lucian was looking at her, speculative, without a trace of a smile, and the laugh died in her throat. ‘I’m coming,’ she whispered.
They turned in silence down the lane, the only sound the grasses brushing their legs. Lucian was walking fast, stiff-armed, as if he wanted to escape all possibility of being overheard or overlooked. At the stile where little William had told Angharad ‘I love you,’ they stopped. Lucian’s face was stiff too, and Angharad looked at him with fear reawakening within her. A blackbird began to sing, mockingly golden notes.
‘You haven’t heard?’ he asked her, shaking his head, and then answering himself while she still stared at him in frozen bewilderment. ‘You can’t have done. I thought, perhaps the local papers …’
Angharad’s hand reached out. She was aware of her fingers crumpling the pale cloth, digging into his arm. ‘Heard what?’
Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I’m afraid to hear, the words bubbled in her head.
The blackbird finished its song, and the silence that followed it was absolute.
‘Laura’s dead.’
Angharad swayed a little, temporarily dodging the words like a boxer deflecting a blow. ‘Harry?’
Lucian’s arm came round her, pressing her face awkwardly against him. Too vividly she saw the tiny threads in the cloth, the stitching around the lapels. ‘Not Harry. Laura, I said Laura.’
‘Harry’s safe?’
‘Of course he is.’
She let go of Lucian’s arm and stood back, numbly shaking her head. ‘How?’ Following the shock, the floodgates opening, letting out the first of the questions swirling up within her.
Painfully, he said, ‘They … we … think … it was an accident. I was with her. It happened in Hong Kong. Laura liked it there. At least, she didn’t dislike it. She had begun to dislike everything, you know. Harry was away, just for ten days, in LA. Laura wouldn’t go. She hated LA, and tried to stop him going. There was another terrible row, and he left. We had agreed, towards the end, Harry and I, that one of us should always be with her. So I stayed, although I should have been back in London. On the night … it happened, we had been out together. I ate a meal, Laura played with hers, and drank. That was all she did, towards the end. Usually we’d have a nightcap, but that night she went straight to her room. She said she was tired. She … never got up much before midday. The next morning I waited for her at lunch, and she didn’t come. I sat there on the terrace, looking at the view, and suddenly I knew what had happened. I ran to her room. The door was locked, and the houseboy helped me to break it down. She was dead.’
Laura, her childhood defender, unbowed by the stupidity of school. Laura, laughing by the lake. Laura in Harry’s red room, the flare of triumph in her face. Laura, with her white hand raised to tap on the cottage window. Laura, with her challenging, tormented eyes closed for ever. The images danced in front of her, a hundred and then multiplying into thousands, mocking her because the real Laura had gone out of their reach and would never come back again.
Angharad felt the cold wind blowing.
‘It was a mistake,’ Lucian was saying. ‘Do you see? She must have been desperate for sleep. She was drunk, and careless with her pills. Accidental death, that was the official verdict.’
He was asking her for reassurance, and she gave it. ‘Of course. It must have been shocking for you. When did it happen?’
‘A month ago. There were formalities. A post mortem. It took a long time, out there …’
A month, and she hadn’t heard. More questions, surging up, threatening to choke her. She made herself voice just one, clearly, so that there should be no mistake.
‘Where’s Harry now?’
‘I came to tell you.’ Lucian, the messenger between them again? ‘He’s at Llyn Fair.’
So near. Looking at Lucian, anger at his intrusion melted in Angharad. She saw that he loved them both, Harry and Laura, just as she did herself. That was enough. ‘I think …’ he said, ‘I think he needs you.’
She had already turned away from him, measuring the lane in front of her. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ she told him. Then she had to call back over her shoulder, because she was already running, ‘Thank you, Lucian.’
She ran, and ran. Past The Schoolhouse without a glance, and down to the village street with the breath beginning to sob in her chest. Past her home, and between the new estate houses, blind to the trim painted fences and the neat gardens. When she reached Jessie’s she was stumbling, her fist gouged deep into the pain in her side. Jessie’s back door opened before she could hammer on it, and Jessie stood in front of her with her hair wound up in a towel and her cheeks stiff with a face-pack. Her eyes and mouth were round pink circles of concern.
‘What …?’
‘No time.’ The words burned in Angharad’s chest. ‘You said … you’d cover for me. Tonight?’
‘You know I will.’
‘And for as long as it takes?’
Jessie nodded and Angharad was running again. ‘Tell Gwyn for me. Tell her I’ve gone to Harry.’
‘Yes,’ Jessie shouted after her, the smile of delight cracking her white cheeks. ‘And yes.’
Angharad didn’t hear. She reached her car, parked outside the house, and the engine roared at once in answer to her prayer. A glance at the dial told her that there was enough petrol. The little terrace houses slid away behind her, the old oak on the corner, and she was plunging down the tunnel of trees to the valley and the Llyn Fair road.
To get to Harry was her only thought now. There would be time for all the questions, bitter as well as gentle ones, but not yet. Grimly she focussed her attention on the road, willing the car to eat up the miles until she reached him. At the crossroads she remembered the other, terrible headlong rush to Llyn Fair, when she had bicycled there against the slashing rain with the sick weight in her stomach. And had found them, locked together, triumph and torment.
No more.
She swung the car at the crossroads and began the climb up to the remote little valley. Harry had driven her up here, that first sunlit day. A laughing boy in a white shirt, showing off his pretty car to his sister’s friend. What would she find now, behind the white gates?
The gates glimmered ahead of her in the shadow of the trees. They were closed and she had to stop the car and climb out, running to them with her legs heavy and trembling. They swung open smoothly and she was back in the car, revving the car engine so that it shot forward up the gravelled drive. The shade under the trees was lighter, the sharp green leaves overhead not yet fully unfurled. But it slid back in just the same way, like a sun-blind, leaving her blinking against the splinter of light on the windscreen. The lake was smooth green glass, sheltered by the slope of the hills and the pine trees.
Angharad stopped the car by the crescent of clipped grass, and saw that the roses were pruned. Someone was caring for the house and the gardens. A dusty saloon car, unremarkable, was parked beneath the windows.
The wild urgency had left Angharad now that she was here. She walked slowly to the house and stood under the verandah, listening to the endless splash of water. As she stood there a breeze shivered the glassy water, and it carried the scent of the pines across to her. Sharply, back came the dark forest and the silver rocks of her last night under the moon with Harry.
The memory gave her the courage to start walking again. She skirted the end of the house and came into the little brick-paved rear yard. The herb bed where Harry had picked herbs for their first lunch was gone, but everything else was the same. The steps still led up to the long room over the stable block. Angharad climbed them, her feet ringing hollow on the wooden treads and the baluster splintery and warm under her fingers.
She reached out to the latch, waiting for the door to swing inwards under her touch, but the latch clicked uselessly up and down. The door was locked.
Angharad moved sideways to look in through the win
dow. The sun behind her head was bright on the pane, and she had to peer through the dazzle into darkness. Her heart thumped painfully.
For an instant, in the reddish glow, she thought that something moved. She thought she saw black hair, arms and fingers wound together. Chilled to the bone, she leant her face against the glass, shading her eyes with her hand. But the red paint was gone, and so was the low bed and the clutter of possessions. There was a sitting-room now, with neat modern furniture and square cushions. Through the arch Angharad glimpsed a new kitchen. A polished kettle stood on the worktop with a flowered melamine tray behind it.
A housekeeper’s flat. The red room was gone.
Angharad shook her head numbly, but the memory of it in that instant lost its sharpness too. The colour drained from the image that had been printed behind her eyes for so long, leaving it like a sepia photograph of people she no longer recognized.
Of course Harry wouldn’t be there, not in that room any more.
She turned her back on the locked door and walked slowly down the steps and across the yard. The kitchen door opened when she pushed it. The house was quiet, smelling of polish and fresh paint. She walked through the kitchen and into the hallway. The signs of Laura’s and Lucian’s improvements were everywhere. The walls were stippled in pale, clear colours and most of Monica Cotton’s ornate furniture was gone. It was a spare, elegant, showpiece house now, not made for living in.
Angharad walked from room to room, looking. It was as if the Cottons had never been there. She tried to think of her father and mother in these light, bare rooms, and shivered. This was no one’s home now.
Who was left? Harry, and herself.
‘Harry?’ Her voice sounded frightened, high and thin with a quiver in it. ‘Harry, are you here?’
She heard the creak of old boards, then footsteps. She ran back into the hallway. Harry was standing at the head of the stairs, staring downwards.
‘Who is it? Who is it?’
She saw the shadows in the unshaven hollows of his cheeks. The sheet of paper that he had been holding slipped from his fingers and drifted down towards her. Then she was running to him.