by Rosie Thomas
‘Oh. Thank you, Angharad. I wasn’t expecting coffee.’ She poured it out for him and sat down with her own cup.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked cheerfully, wanting and needing to talk to someone. William was immersed in the research for a huge, abstruse history of the last princes of Wales. Angharad was already enough of a historian to know that he was unlikely to finish the task, and even if he did that the work was unlikely to find a publisher. She suspected that William knew it too, and it made his uneven temper even less predictable.
‘Fine,’ he said shortly, impatience gaining the upper hand again. ‘I’m surprised you don’t have work of your own to do, Angharad. I must get on with mine.’ Dismissively he turned back to the typewriter. Angharad picked up her cup and left the room, and the peck-peck started up even before she closed the door. Loneliness gathered around her again. The peace and satisfaction she had once felt in the evenness of life in Cefn with her father had deserted her as completely as if they had never existed.
‘I’ll go and see Gwyn,’ she said, to the unhearing rattle of the typewriter.
Angharad had spent hours of those first few days of unwelcome freedom sitting in Gwyn’s studio. Listlessly she helped her aunt to load her kiln, or packed pots in boxes ready for delivery. In the intervals when she could no longer stand her aunt’s concerned stare or leading questions, she went for long, pointless walks. Often, from the summit of The Mountain, she looked westwards towards Llyn Fair. She had worked out long ago which pleats of rocky hillside hid its sunny hollow, but there was no point even in looking towards it if Harry and Laura were not there.
Today in the studio, as Angharad carelessly pushed aside a teetering pile of pots, Gwyn said with unusual sharpness, ‘Be careful. That represents two days’ labour for me. You may have nothing to do but mope about, but the rest of us have to work.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Angharad mumbled, contrite at once. ‘I just feel … impatient, and lethargic, all at once. It’s horrible.’
‘I know, cariad. What happened about your school friend, the one in Chester, whom you were going to see such a lot of this summer?’
Before Laura’s last letter, Angharad had prepared the ground carefully. Her fictional friend was to be her alibi again.
‘Um. She went to France, unexpectedly.’
The single postcard from Laura, unwittingly handed over by William across the breakfast table, was supposed to have come from the same friend. It showed a view of the Promenade des Anglais at Nice. On the reverse Laura had written ‘It’s Nice here’.
I bet it is, Angharad had thought bitterly.
‘What about getting a job?’ Gwyn asked now. ‘I could ask at Y Gegin Fach, if you like. They’ve got a regular cook, but they might need some extra help now it’s the busy season.’
‘Good idea. Please do,’ Angharad said, without enthusiasm. Y Gegin Fach sold pottery, knick-knacks made out of Welsh slate, dolls in national costume and ‘hand-carved’ love spoons in one room, and had a popular, folksy restaurant in another. Angharad thought that the stock was twee and the food a perfect match for it.
Two days later Gwyn told her the answer. ‘They do need someone to cook a couple of shifts a week, and to do the fetching and carrying for the rest. They’ll have to give you a trial, but I’ve told them what a good cook you are, better than a professional any day.’
‘Oh, Aunty Gwyn.’ Angharad was exasperated at the thought of having to prove her skills in the gingham-festooned cosiness of Y Gegin Fach. But lack of anything better to do took her down to the restaurant.
The proprietor was a canny businesswoman who had, Angharad grudgingly admitted to herself, judged her market to perfection. The customers, mostly elderly, straggled out of the shop laden with their souvenirs of Wales and into the restaurant. They weren’t demanding diners. They wanted something plain, wholesome, and notionally Welsh.
‘Welsh lamb cutlets with parsley butter, mostly, dear,’ said the owner. ‘Can you cope?’
‘I think so,’ Angharad said, smiling in spite of herself.
The little kitchen behind the restaurant was hot, busy and cheerful. The regular cook was a plump, beaming woman whom Angharad had often seen on the local bus. She was making pastry at a marble slab and Angharad admired the light touch of her podgy fingers in the dough. Mrs Price was a natural cook. She winked at Angharad as if to acknowledge that she understood the restrictions of the place too. Angharad felt her spirits rise as she smiled back.
‘Fruit pies are very popular too,’ the owner said. ‘How’s your pastry?’
‘Not as good as Mrs Price’s, I shouldn’t think, but I’ll do my best.’
‘Have a try now, dear, for us, will you?’
Obligingly Angharad demonstrated that she could grill cutlets and make pastry, half-listening as she worked to the two young waitresses clumping in and out and giggling together, and the ancient washer-up sniffing lugubriously in her Wellington boots at the stone sink.
There were people here, she thought, doing things. It helped.
‘Can you start on Wednesday?’ the owner said, and Angharad nodded and thanked her with genuine enthusiasm that would have amazed herself an hour before.
And on Wednesday she went to work, leaving the silent house behind her with relief. For two or three days she watched Mrs Price, trying to copy her deftness, laughing with the waitresses, and preparing endless baskets of local fruit and vegetables. The produce was excellent, she saw. There was scope, definite scope, and it excited her. On the fourth day Angharad made William’s favourite Welsh broth, using a stock base that was one of her own inventions, and the owner and Mrs Price nodded their approval of its savoury richness.
The fifth day was Mrs Price’s day off, and Angharad worked a long, hard shift. The girls had accepted her, and she enjoyed the simple sense of belonging that seemed to have been missing from her life for months. When at last she came home and dropped into bed, she realized that she had hardly had time to think of Laura and Harry, or her own unfair isolation.
As Angharad settled into the routine of Y Gegin Fach, the challenges of professional cooking began to interest her more deeply, and she met them with increasing energy. As the days passed she began to score little victories, persuading her co-workers to leave the beetroot out of the salads, and to reduce the cooking times of the vegetables. They were small triumphs, but she was proud of them and of her employer’s approval. As the time went by she was entrusted with small amounts of marketing, haggling cheerfully with the local butcher, and getting up at dawn to greet the early stallholders in the weekly vegetable market in the nearby town.
Gradually the more interesting buying and planning became Angharad’s job and she spent more time at that, and less churning out pies in the kitchen.
And so it was that she was standing in the old market square at six o’clock on a perfect midsummer morning, watching shrewdly as the produce was unloaded from the vans. She balanced her big, flat-bottomed wicker basket on her hip and waited. One old farmer in ancient corduroys, from whom she always bought carrots and onions in the brisk auction that was the market’s centrepiece, raised his greasy cap to her as he passed. The cobbled inner square began to fill with striped awnings sheltering glistening mountains of strawberries and leafy punnets of early raspberries. Cabbage leaves and wisps of straw spread over the worn stones.
There had been a market in this square for hundreds of years, originally for cattle and the little, spare sheep of the surrounding hills. The rough crates of scraggy hens were the only living relic of that, but the square was always still known as the Beast Market.
Angharad shifted her basket on her hip. The auction wouldn’t start for another half an hour, but now was her chance to earmark what she would bid for. She was planning to slip ratatouille on to the menu for the week and her glance shifted to the tattooed Liverpudlian in the corner who traded in the most exotic vegetables.
The light on the grey walls enclosing the square began to change from
the thin brightness of dawn to the rounder dapple of full daylight. The pub on the corner, open for eighteen hours on market day, was already busy. Angharad caught the snatches of talk around her.
‘S’mae, Dic?’
‘Iawn, diolch. Syda’chi?’
Then, standing no more than three yards away, she saw a tall, spare figure. His face was obscured by the viewfinder of a cumbersome, hand-held film camera. Slowly, as she watched, the black barrel tracked towards her and held her exposed in its sights. The clamour of the square stopped as if turned off by a huge switch. Angharad stood rooted to the cobblestones. The Beast Market vanished, and a hundred splintered images danced in its place. Sun and deep shade on still water, blood on a white jacket. Hands and mouths, barely distinguishable, and a pulse beating at Harry’s throat.
As soon as she had seen him, no more than a glimpse from the corner of her eye, she knew that it was Harry.
Slowly he lowered his camera and looked full at her. The black brows were heavier, and the hollowness of his cheeks made him look older. But then he smiled, and at once she saw the handsome boy at the wheel of his gleaming new car.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if you have any idea how perfect you look, standing there in that blue shirt with your basket, and all that behind you?’ A tiny movement of the camera took in the crowded square.
He doesn’t recognize me, she thought, panic stifling her. I’m just a girl, a frame in his film, whatever it is. Why should he remember a single day, two years ago?
But then in two steps Harry was right in front of her, so close that they almost touched each other. He put his camera down on the cobbles beside them. His hands came out, as she went on staring dumbly at him, and cupped her face.
‘Angharad, I know it’s you. You look just the same, except not a little girl any more. Don’t you remember me?’
His fingers combed through her hair, and he smiled down at her.
Angharad moistened her lips, feeling that they were dry enough to crack, and whispered, ‘Harry.’
‘That’s better. I didn’t believe you could have forgotten.’
She wanted to look away, to say something light, and casual. But her eyes clung to him, seeing that a cleft had developed between his eyebrows, that the long, hippie-ish hair had been cut short, a little raggedly. His eyes were exactly the same clear, dark blue that she remembered. How old was he? She calculated, irrelevantly, nineteen to her seventeen.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked at last. ‘I … heard you were in America.’
‘That’s one more thing than I’ve heard about you.’ His fingers touched the bones of her cheeks as if measuring them, and then let her go. He stepped back a pace and looked at her, his head on one side. She saw that he was wearing light trousers tucked into calf-length boots, and a baggy sweater made of some fine, grey stuff. He was unshaven, and the dark shadow accentuated the sharp, almost feminine points of his top lip. Without looking at it, evidently as familiar with it as if it was part of him, he stooped to pick up the heavy camera and hoisted it under his arm. Then he held out his other hand.
‘Come and have breakfast.’
Angharad forgot the list of things she had wanted to bid for at the auction. She forgot the restaurant, and Cefn, and everything else. She put her hand into Harry’s and followed him out of the Beast Market.
There was a little grey van parked in a side-street. Harry dismantled his camera and nested it in a complicated case, then put her basket in the back beside it. Neither of them spoke, but as they left the little town behind them Harry looked at her, just once. He was rewarded with Angharad’s rarest smile that tilted and then dissolved all the composed angles of her face. Their eyes met, and held each other for so long that the little van wandered and bumped dangerously against the grass verge.
Harry laughed as he pulled the wheel back, and Angharad, with her eyes firmly on the way ahead again, said, ‘Be careful.’ The empty road was white in front of them, and the banks were starred with tiny flowers. It was the most beautiful morning Angharad had ever seen.
A few moments later they turned off the road and followed a track up to the edge of a wood that hung over a low hill. In the shelter of the trees was a derelict stone cottage, hardly more than a shed, with a corrugated-iron roof and a rainwater barrel beside the peeling brown-painted door. At the doorway Harry stood aside to let her pass, sweeping a low bow.
‘Welcome to the Heulfryn Hilton.’
She blinked in the dimness and then saw the single room, bare-floored, with a table and two chairs, a gas-ring, and a narrow bed covered with a scarlet blanket. On a rickety table beside the bed was a tottering pile of books, the only personal touch that she could see. Angharad remembered the cushioned comfort of Llyn Fair, the gleaming Morgan and Harry’s other room strewn with expensive possessions.
‘Why?’ she asked him, and then checked herself. ‘At least, I know why, but …’ Over his shoulder she had caught the view through the open door. The green and sepia fold of the vale lay in front of her, running down in a fertile spread to the invisible sea. In the far distance she could just see the squat grey church tower of Cefn. This was the calm, open side of The Mountain. On the other side lay the jagged rocks and changeable skies over Llyn Fair.
‘The view is one reason,’ Harry said quietly. ‘The other reasons are all negative ones. Won’t you let me give you something to eat, first, before we talk?’
Angharad sat in one of the chairs that he held out for her, and rested her chin in her cupped hands to watch him. He made coffee in a blue jug, and then cracked eggs into a bowl. She thought about the arrogant boy who had assumed that food would just appear at Llyn Fair, and compared him with this different man moving economically around his barren room. She wondered what else had changed in him. He was noticeably thinner, but his shoulders had broadened. The new, short hair accentuated the firmness of his jaw. The fey, whimsical air of two years ago had vanished. Harry looked certain of himself now and, Angharad thought, there was a glitter of danger in him.
‘Why did you cut your hair?’ she asked, and blushed. She wanted to ask him a thousand questions, and had to begin with the silliest. Harry put a mug of coffee into her hand, folding her fingers firmly around it.
‘It was cut off for me, down in Texas. I was bumming around, dreaming about movies and wishing I was Dennis Hopper. I got into an argument and then a fight, ended up in jail, and I was discharged with a free haircut. When I got round to looking at myself, I thought I liked it better this way anyway.’
‘Laura mentioned another fight, too.’
‘Yep. Must be something of Joe coming out in me. I’m trying to give it up.’
Their eyes met again at the mention of Joe, remembering the night at Llyn Fair.
Harry put a plate down in front of her and sat down in the opposite chair. The scrambled eggs and bacon were perfect and they began to eat, ravenously, smiling across the table.
‘You know, you’re the only person I’ve ever brought up here? I’ve been living on my own for weeks.’
‘What were you doing with a camera, at six o’clock in the morning in the Beast Market?’
Angharad’s hand was resting loosely on the table. Harry took it and spread the fingers out flat, studying each one intently.
Angharad felt the small vibrations from his touch spread through her wrist and up her arm. Harry began to talk, still looking down at her fingers, their fingertips touching.
‘Filming. I want to make films. No, I’ve got to make films. I started at film school in London, you know, but it was all pissing little pointless exercises. I stopped that. Bought a one-way ticket to New York and hitched across the States. Got very hungry for a while in LA, then lied my way into a studio job. Hocked everything I owned to get a camera, worked at the studio job during the day and my own stuff at night, popping lots of pills to keep going. It made me very irritable, can you believe that?’ His eyes widened in mock surprise as he looked up at her.
‘You
amaze me.’
‘I thought it would. But, unlikely though it sounds, it wasn’t too long before I fell out with some fat little shit who thought he was Orson Welles. Whereas, of course, if anyone around there ranked with Welles it was me. So, after a brief, colourful interval I found myself at the bus station, my camera bag in my hand. I went south, right down to New Mexico and back. Looking for something, “ideas”, I suppose, God help me. Then I ended up in jail on a vagrancy charge.
‘I thought one morning that if I was going to make a career out of vagrancy I might as well do it back home in Wales. All the time I was away, pretending to think about art, I only had one real idea.
‘There’s an old farmer who lives on the hill across there. Been there all his life, and his father and grandfather, and back before that. Scratching a living out of a few sheep and some vegetables. I kept thinking about him, all that time. The old man’s past seventy now, crippled with rheumatism. He’s got two sons. One works at Massey-Ferguson, and the other down in the steelworks at Shotton. Good money for both of them, nice houses on an estate somewhere. They both drive shiny Fords. So, after the old man goes, the farm goes with him. The end of – what? – a hundred years taken to build up something that never stood a chance of being anything anyway. I’ve no doubt that Joe will come along after he’s gone, pay the old girl a couple of thousand, and do the place up as a holiday home for city folk. I thought I’d come home before it was too late, and make a film about that. The end of a way of life. Flickering out.
‘I’m shooting what I can, very slowly, in black and white because I can’t afford colour stock. So, to answer your question, that’s what I was doing this morning in the Beast Market. D’you think I’m being completely absurd?’
Angharad shook her head. Her eyes were very bright. ‘No. I think it’s just what you should be doing.’
Harry didn’t answer, but she didn’t miss the flash of gratitude in his face.
After a moment Angharad said, ‘Joe and Monica don’t know you’re here?’
‘No. I don’t want to be part of that, any more.’
