by Rosie Thomas
It was a long, tiring drive. At first William had bounced up and down in his seat, exclaiming and pointing. But as they moved steadily north he grew bored, and then irritable, and finally dozed in his corner.
Angharad wasn’t sure that she wanted to be left with only her own thoughts for company.
At the first arrow on the motorway, North Wales Resorts, Angharad felt her throat tighten.
They left the triple stream of northbound traffic and turned westwards across the flat, fertile Cheshire fields. Angharad thought briefly of school, close to here, and with the memory came Laura’s oval face and dark, arched brows. And then, Harry. She had no idea where he was, probably thousands of miles away. But every mile that she drove was bringing him alive again for her. Angharad forged on, with their son asleep in the seat behind her. She was as afraid of all the memories almost as much as she was afraid for her father, but still she was drawn back by a thread that had never slackened its hold since she had left Cefn, a lonely girl carrying a suitcase much too heavy for her.
Suddenly, to the west, she saw a long blue line. Immediately it grew, defining itself into receding peaks against the sky. It was the mountains.
‘Look, William,’ she murmured. ‘There’s Wales.’
But William slept on without stirring.
The road that she had travelled so often with her father was different now. A huge bypass had been thrown up around Chester. Angharad lost her bearings in the concrete tangle, and when she found herself again she was home. ‘Croeso i Cymru’, the sign at the border flashed at her, with the red Welsh dragon arching its claws and tail. The hills were all around her now, bare-crowned and dark with conifers under the thin sunshine.
It was colder up here. The trees were barely dusted with green, and the high hedges were still winter-brown.
Angharad swallowed to quench the dryness in her throat. Her chest ached, and her fingers were stiff on the wheel.
The road was climbing now, through scattered villages with names as familiar as her own. They came out of a dark tunnel of conifers on to a stretch of bare moorland dotted with limestone outcrops, then they swung to the crest of a hill where the ground dropped sharply away.
Angharad had been expecting it, leaning forward to catch the first glimpses, but still the sight brought a low, involuntary cry. Ahead was the brooding grey-brown profile of The Mountain.
Angharad leaned back, intending to call over her shoulder to William, but he forestalled her. She felt the child’s warm breath at the back of her neck as he leant to look over her shoulder. In the mirror she saw his wide eyes, still filmed with sleep, but fixed on the majestic outline as if he recognized it.
‘Are we there?’ he asked quietly.
‘A mile or two more.’
They came down the valley road. At the junction where the road turned up to Cefn was the old stone fountain. Angharad looked at it, and then away again. William was breathing evenly, unusually quiet, his breath still fanning the hair over her collar.
‘Nearly home, Willum.’
Under the old trees, the dry stone walls might have been gappier, shrunk farther under the encroaching moss, but nothing else had changed. A tractor chugged past in the opposite direction and Angharad knew without a second glance which of the hill farms it came from. The driver raised his arm in an automatic wave. Everyone knows everyone on this road, Angharad remembered. At the top of the steep hill she saw the oval of sunlight through the trees. The car passed the old oak, still leafless, and she remembered the exact tracery of the bare branches. Ahead of her lay the village street, drowsy, deserted, and just as it had always been. Then they were sliding past the low grey houses. Her eyes sharpened, Angharad saw here and there a splash of fresh paint, a different gate, and the brash new frontage on the village shop. And there at the end was her father’s house, so small, almost low enough for her to reach out and touch the sills of the upper windows.
As a child, she had been proud of its square separateness from the tiny terraces.
Beyond it was the stark white geometry of the new estate. No wonder her father had been saddened by it.
The car drew up and Angharad stepped out, cramped and aching from the drive. William tumbled after her. The air was as sweet as milk, and silent except for the high, thin note of the wind off The Mountain. The heavy door of her father’s house opened, and the click of the old latch was amplified in the quiet afternoon. Am I so used to endless noise, Angharad thought, that this silence seems so wonderful?
Gwyn was standing on the step, wiping her hands on her crossover apron, beaming at them. With William bobbing between them, the two women held out their arms to each other.
‘Aunty Gwyn. I’m so glad we’ve come home.’
Inside the little house the grandfather clock was still ticking under the oak beams, and in the warm kitchen the afternoon sun was shining on the polished range, the old, uneven red tiles, and even the busy lizzies on the windowsill. Only the white cat had gone from the rocking chair.
A sense of peace and strength flowed back into Angharad, as if she had touched solid ground again after too long adrift. It gave her the courage to look into Gwyn’s face, and see that it was lined with anxiety. But it was accustomed anxiety, and nothing new. There was no more bad news about her father waiting to greet her, then.
Angharad stooped so that her face was on a level with William’s. The boy was standing quietly, taking in the room with his clear, wide eyes. How like Harry he is, Angharad thought, and then pushed it to one side. Her concern should all be for her father and Gwyn, now, and in drawing little William as gently as possible into this different world.
‘This is your home, as much as our house in London is,’ she told him. ‘I used to live here when I was a girl, and in a way I still belong here. You too, William, if you want to. It’s your grandfather’s house. He isn’t here, because he’s ill. In a day or two, we’ll go and see him together.’
She touched his cheek with her fingers and he brushed them aside, reassured, and impatient to explore this new place. ‘Can I go outside?’
‘Of course you can, pet lamb,’ Gwyn said. ‘Off you go.’
‘Mind the road,’ Angharad said automatically, and Gwyn smiled.
‘He’ll be quite safe. Everyone will watch out for him, just like they did with you at that age.’
‘But nobody knows him.’
‘They do now, love. Haven’t they just seen him come here with you?’
Of course. But the scrutiny seemed benevolent now, not irksome as it had done long ago. William would be safe here.
When they were alone, Angharad said, ‘How’s Dad?’
‘About the same. They’ve put him on some new treatment and they have to wait for him to settle to it.’
‘Treatment?’
‘Oh, some kind of new drugs.’
Questions brimmed in Angharad, but she would wait to put them to the doctors.
‘I told him you were coming, love. He didn’t say much. But I know he’s pleased, deep down.’
Or does my coming tell him how ill we think he is, she asked herself? No. William’s uncomfortably sharp eye wouldn’t allow deception, by others or himself. He would know his own condition.
Gwyn was putting the finishing touches to a meal. It was five-thirty, Welsh high tea. The memory of it made Angharad smile, and the sophisticated little dinners in London seemed to have ended years ago, instead of just yesterday. She moved deftly around the kitchen, taking the worn, initialled silver cutlery out of its drawer, laying three places at the table as she had done a thousand times before.
‘When did you leave the schoolhouse?’
‘A month or two ago. He needed more help than I could give him from up there.’
Angharad closed her eyes briefly, seeing her father infirm, humiliated by his inability to do simple things for himself. ‘If – when he comes out, he’ll need me here still. I thought you and the boy might want to take the schoolhouse? Your Jamie will want to come up
, and you won’t want to be crammed in here.’
She wants me to stay, Angharad realized, and see it all through. Whatever it is. And I want to be here. I couldn’t think of being anywhere else. The implications were too far-reaching to be thought about now, that was all.
‘That old place is too much for me,’ Gwyn said. ‘I thought I might make you a present of it. You can turn it into something really grand, your own place up here. And your Dad and I will rub on here into our dotage.’ Angharad nodded, as comfortingly as she could.
Gwyn was slicing the ham when the front door banged open again. Two small boys ran through the house and arrived panting at the table. They stood side by side, eyeing the fruit cake.
‘Meat first, please,’ Gwyn said.
The little boy with William was brandishing a wooden sword and wearing a tin colander on his head, but under it Angharad could see that he had carrot-red hair and a mass of freckles.
‘This is Teck,’ William told her. ‘He said I could play.’
‘Tecwyn is Jessie Williams’s eldest,’ Gwyn said. ‘You can stay and have tea with William, love. Hands washed first, please.’
‘I can see who he is,’ Angharad said softly. The memories of her childhood came flooding back so vividly that she might have been a child herself again. The memories were especially comforting because they were safe. They were of the days before she had known Harry. Jessie and she had played just like this, up and down the street and in and out of the houses all day long. William, coming from his world of well-mannered birthday parties, and children brought to play by appointment and collected again by mothers in their Volvos, knew nothing like it. And suddenly she wanted him to know it. At least, to share it, just for a little while.
Later, in the early evening, Angharad drove to the hospital. William was in the general infirmary in the seaside town a dozen miles away. She followed the road mechanically, every bend familiar although she had never driven herself along it. The Mountain was left behind her, and the road dropped sharply from the high ground where the view of the sea sprang suddenly forward, grey brightening to beaten silver in the west, and on down to the coast road. Inside her head she was busy with her thoughts, working around the bitterness and sense of loss that had crystallized, rock-like, since her estrangement from her father. She wanted to go back, beyond the harshness and the mutual pain of her last months at home. She wanted to find, somewhere, the father she had loved – unquestioningly, even if fearfully – before the Cottons and their history had come between them. To find him again before it was too late was suddenly more important than anything else. She had no idea how he would receive her, but oddly she was no longer afraid.
It had felt so right to come home at last, and it had given her a kind of peaceful strength. She would put it right between her father and herself, somehow. The main street of the seaside resort opened in front of her, lined with souvenir shops and holiday cafés, still boarded up for the winter. The promenade was bare and windswept, with the edge of the deserted roller rink still garlanded with strings of coloured bulbs blown backwards by the gale off the sea. Thudding green and white waves pounded against the little pier.
Angharad left her car in the shelter of the pier theatre and crossed the road, stunned by the cold but breathing in the salt air with grateful gulps. The red-brick Victorian hospital faced the sea, its rows of windows looking out over the grey and white water.
She followed a trickle of visitors in through the main doors. Inside were the immutable hospital smells of disinfectant and ancient radiators. Only at the door of William’s ward did she stop short, afraid as much of what she would find as of the memory of their last parting. But it was only a second’s hesitation.
Her new determination carried her into the ward, and she saw him at once. At first she thought that he was asleep. He was lying propped up against pillows, very still. His skin was grey, and drawn tight over the prominent bones. Then, as she came closer, she realized that he wasn’t asleep at all. He had been watching the door from under heavy eyelids, and now he was watching her.
Angharad stopped at the foot of the bed, and father and daughter looked at each other for a long moment.
Her courage almost failed her before William lifted his hand, very slowly, as if it taxed him to do it, and held it out to her. With a quick movement Angharad took it, and put her arms around him so that her face was against his. His skin was dry and hot, and his bones felt brittle. She understood at once how sick he was.
‘Thank you for coming,’ William said. Only his voice, light but firm, hadn’t changed at all. He was still looking at her, greedily but with a dawning satisfaction. Angharad thought that his illness had stripped away the bitterness, and querulousness, of the last years, to leave the more important realities of the father she had loved. She prayed quickly for the generosity within herself to respond to him.
‘I wanted to come. I don’t know why it hasn’t been before … this. I’m sorry, Dad.’
He shook his head with a trace of impatience. ‘Don’t waste time apologizing.’ Was there so little time left, then? ‘You look very lovely, Angharad. You’ve grown up a beauty, like your mother. London must agree with you. I couldn’t stand it, myself.’ There was a touch of the old asperity there. ‘Are you happy?’ Through all the uneasy years of her growing up, that would have been an unthinkable question.
‘I’m happy to be home.’ The evasion troubled her, but William appeared to accept it. There was a queer, half-anxious, half-diffident light in his eyes now, and his fingers tightened briefly on hers.
‘Did you bring him? The boy?’ With an ache of pity, Angharad saw suddenly how much it mattered to him.
‘He’s at home with Gwyn,’ she said gently. ‘Would you like to see him?’
‘Yes,’ William’s voice was very low. ‘I’d like to see him. If. If you think that would be appropriate.’ They sat without speaking for another moment. Angharad was conscious of the bustle and clatter of visiting time around them, but William seemed to have retreated somewhere within himself.
‘William Owain,’ he murmured, and then added so softly that she had to bend forward to catch it, ‘I’m glad.’
His eyes closed, and he was still for so long that Angharad thought he had fallen asleep. Then he stirred a little and said, ‘He’s dead, you know.’
The breath froze in her chest. The ward, cream curtains and iron bedsteads and polished floors, swayed giddily before her eyes.
‘Who?’
‘Joe Cotton.’
It was a moment before the blood began to flow again and the world righted itself. William was still talking. She caught the words without, yet, taking them in. ‘Very suddenly. Not all that long ago. Couldn’t take any of it with him, could he? I wonder if, in the end, he would have changed places with me? Perhaps not. Neither of us made a very brilliant job of anything, did we?’
He didn’t expect an answer. Angharad saw that he really was nearly asleep now. She stood up and took something out of her bag.
‘I brought you this edition of Donne.’
Remembering her father’s admiration for the old poet’s tough, unsentimental verse, and hoping that it might comfort him now, Angharad had found time in the last hectic days to hunt for the volume in an antiquarian bookshop off the Charing Cross Road. William’s fingers closed avidly on the smooth leather binding.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very clever of you. Jack Donne or Doctor Donne. Which best, for now?’ He had lost her, but suddenly his eyes snapped open and he complained. ‘Gwyn will keep bringing me detective stories. Has she ever, in seventy-odd years, ever seen me read Agatha Christie?’ They were both laughing. She knew that it was the right moment to leave, with this glimpse of the old, impatient William. She kissed him, and saw that he was already sinking back against the pillows, exhausted.
‘Don’t forget,’ he called after her, and she promised, ‘I won’t forget.’ To bring him his grandson, she added for herself, and the tiled corr
idors swallowed her up again.
It was dark as she drove home again. The car window was rolled half down and as she climbed the air lost its salt sharpness and took on the milky sweetness of the mountains, still startling to her.
Angharad was thinking fiercely.
The weary houseman she had found in the sister’s office had told her little more than Gwyn, but it was enough. The disease was advanced when they discovered it, and it was spreading. They were treating him with chemotherapy, a complicated ‘cocktail’ of drugs. There were the normal side-effects, the doctor told her, weight loss and nausea and so on. But they were hopeful. And it was, of course, an unpredictable malady. There were remissions. Even complete cures.
As she left the hospital Angharad resolved briefly to take her father away with her to London. To the best doctors, specialists, second opinions, the best treatment available. But almost at once she discarded the idea. Why take him away, now, from the place where he had chosen to live all his life, on a tenuous thread of hope?
William was dying, and she was certain that he knew it. If he wanted anything he would ask her. And if he chose to stay where he was, in dignity, that was more than enough. Angharad’s fingers gripped the wheel and she stared ahead at the headlights slicing across the twisting road. She would stay here with him.
Penetrating her sadness came anxiety for Jamie, and the realization that she ought to be worrying about Le Gallois. She wasn’t, but the thought of Jamie troubled her deeply. Whether she was to stay here, or go back to him, it wasn’t simple any more. Coming back had changed it, as she knew that he had feared.
And for herself, to stay here where every line of the horizon, every sound and scent and unfolding vista, breathed Harry to her?
Dizzily, Angharad knew that she wanted it to. Embracing after so long, even the hurt, was bringing her alive again and the breath of reality, after so much insulation, was poignant, exquisite to her.
It was no use hiding any longer.
As she came up into Cefn and saw the little cluster of lights a wild, enticing plan was beginning to dawn on her.
