by Rosie Thomas
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea how much?’
There was dappled light on the floor and stairs, and tiny specks of dust dancing in it. With her head close to his chest Angharad could hear his heart beating.
‘Let’s go outside,’ Harry said gently. ‘I don’t want to be in this house.’
The late afternoon was warm with the first hint of summer. With their hands clasped Harry and Angharad turned to the path that led around the lake, under the lee of the hills and into the trees. At the far point of the little cup of valley a long stone lay half-buried in the grass. Harry stopped beside it, stooping to touch the pockmarked surface where the yellow lichens grew.
‘It was here,’ he said softly, ‘that we first kissed.’ He looked up at her, and his eyes were washed an intensely clear blue. ‘Angharad, I want to tell you this because it is important, and then I don’t want to talk about it ever again. It’s finished. Thank God, it’s finished. It was September, hot, with thunder in the air. We must have been twelve and ten. We had been picking blackberries. Laura had a long bramble scratch on the cheek, and her mouth was purple. She was sitting on the stone, looking up at me and laughing, and her tongue was like a red flower. I kissed her, and she tasted of fruit and grass.’
A mayfly skimmed past them, low over the water. There was a plop, and spreading ripples, as a trout rose to it inches away from them.
‘It was the most delicious fruit, for both of us, and we understood that it was poisoned but we couldn’t stop eating it. It took a long time, years, but the end was inevitable. It’s important that you should understand it was my fault. I led her into it. The cruellest part is that by the end, when you found us out, it was Laura who was trapped. I knew it, and there was nothing I could do. Somehow I was free, and she couldn’t be.’ Harry spread his fingers and looked hopelessly down through them. ‘It’s my fault she’s dead. I might as well have killed her myself. I couldn’t love her in the way she wanted, and she wanted nothing else.’
Angharad snatched at his hand, wrenching her own fingers in her urgency. ‘It was an accident. Don’t blame yourself, ever, do you hear me?’
Harry’s face was stiff, and when he spoke again it was as if the words cut at his mouth.
‘It wasn’t an accident. She wrote me a letter. I was in LA, did Lucian tell you that? I guess it was Lucian?’
Angharad nodded dumbly, shock rippling within her all over again.
‘The bitterest letter. There was no threatening, any more. The end was a simple statement. She said that if she couldn’t have me, she didn’t want anything. I was ready to leave for Hong Kong again within an hour, and it was as I was leaving that I got Lucian’s call. She was … already dead.’
There was a long, long silence while the water lapped into the soft edge of the bank. So Laura had taken herself away.
Angharad wondered what had happened, in the end, to the sharp sight and vivid intelligence that she had loved as a girl and had learned to fear in the last months.
As she lifted her head to look out over the water again, Angharad breathed in, very slowly, as if trying to detect the scent of corruption and decay. But there was nothing. It had drifted away, to leave only scoured emptiness. By contrast she became acutely aware of Harry and herself, warm skin over the breathing network of veins and nerves, unfairly living in the sunlight. She saw Harry more clearly than she had ever done. The cuffs of his faded blue shirt were rolled back, and she saw the knobs of his wrists, the sinews on the backs of his hands. She saw his bent head, and it was as if she looked right through it into the suffering. She knew in that instant by the lake what it had been like for Harry to live with Laura, and what it had cost him. He had paid, if it was necessary to pay, for the blackberry afternoons of long ago.
Angharad reached for his hand and felt its warmth, the ridge of the knuckles in her palm and the tiny movements beneath it, the pulse of blood and the twitch of muscle.
They were alone, now.
The sadness that had possessed her ebbed away for a moment, and although she knew that it would come back, that there would always be times when the loss of Laura would reclaim them, she was filled now with a sense of completeness. She loved Harry herself, and she was certain that he loved her in return, and it was right that they should love each other.
She turned to face him, putting her arms around him and drawing his head down so that it rested against her. The strength was hers now, and it would bring them both through.
‘Tell me,’ she whispered, ‘about the rest of it.’
With his face still hidden against her, Harry talked of the last, hunted months. Laura had come on location with him, and while he worked she sat in his trailer behind the drawn shades. At night she would come into his room with a glass in her hand, her eyes burning hard and bright or softened by the glaze of tears. And he would sit with her, talking and holding her, until she fell asleep. When Harry was not working they drifted between hotels and luxurious borrowed houses, sometimes with Lucian and sometimes alone, waiting for they didn’t know what.
‘I thought of you and William all the time,’ Harry said. ‘I could see you quite clearly, here in the mountains. It was like staring into the background of a Renaissance picture. Very beautiful, exquisitely detailed, but a long way off. And untouchable. I didn’t write, or telephone. What could I have said?’
Angharad laced her arms around him. ‘I love you.’
‘After all the horrible things that had to be done … afterwards, were over,’ Harry went on, as if he had a last, important thing to say, ‘Lucian and I took a boat one evening, out of Hong Kong harbour. It was teeming with life, a great ant-heap that had spilled out over the water, under one of those dull, beaten-copper evening suns that they have out there. We slid between the boats, through the cooking smells and the music and shouting, and a little way out to sea. The sun was vast, almost touching the horizon, and the mainland was a scribbled line behind us. They gave us a little box, at the ugly British chapel. We dropped it into the sea. There were tiny ripples, and after that nothing.’
Harry turned his head away from her, looking out over the lake water, and at the ripples there of fish rising to the mayfly.
‘I asked myself if I could come back, walking into the beautiful picture background, and expect you to face up to that with me.’
He was asking her, and not looking at her because it was so important that he couldn’t bear to.
Angharad thought. There must be no mistake now, for there would be no going back over it.
The completeness was still with her, a seamless circle enclosing ecstasy as well as pain. They were grown up now, whole people for better or worse. Harry and she would have to learn to live together, and part of that lesson would be the shadows of the waste, and loss of Laura, in the corners of their sunny house.
Their eyes met now. Angharad saw her son’s gaze looking back at her, and more. There was a certainty that she had never dared to hope for, a counterweight to her own, love and need and knowing all together.
‘Who else?’ she asked him softly. ‘Yes. I’ll face it with you. Laura, and those ripples on the sea, and whatever else comes. So long as we’re together. It’s been so long, Harry. It’s been so long.’
Harry moved, a flash of blue and black, and his arms swallowed her up and there was no need to say any more, or to tell any more, because they had found one another and they had come home.
He kissed her eyelids, and the angles of her cheeks, and they took possession of each other as they had never done before.
‘I hadn’t even hoped,’ he told her, and she remembered the arrogant boy in his Morgan, and the thoughtless young man she had first loved. The knowledge of how the change must have been brought about hurt her for his sake.
As the sun dropped behind the pine trees and the jagged edge of shadow moved over the water’s surface, they walked on around the lake, into the shade and out again to the splash over the dam where the green weed tangled l
ike hair in the silvery spray.
It was cool when they reached the house again, but they turned away from the open front door, reluctant to go into the silence. Instead they sat on the verandah where the new leaves were beginning to cast the familiar waving patterns over the white table-top.
‘Your home,’ Harry said. It was a mark of the peace between them that there was no compulsion for him to add, with bitterness, ‘Until Joe took it.’ Instead the memories spooled backwards, silently. Angharad tried to see her father here, and her mother pregnant with herself, down at the lake-edge perhaps where the old bench sat beside the jetty. But the picture refused to form itself. Too many fresher images overlay it. And Llyn Fair was too neutrally elegant now, with its pale walls and cool Italian furniture, for her to imagine old William here amongst his books. Even the sense of belonging here in the quiet valley that she had felt on her first visit was gone. It was no more than a beautiful, faintly sad house beside a secretive lake.
Beside her Harry stood up. His basket chair creaked and she looked at its emptiness as he went quickly into the house. She didn’t want to lose him for even a moment. He came back almost at once with a thick wad of cracked, yellowing paper in his hand. The papers were tied with a dark ribbon. He put the bundle down on the table-top in front of her.
‘What is it?’ she asked. To stop looking at him and focus on anything else was an irrelevance.
‘The deeds,’ he said simply. ‘I was sorting through the papers when you came.’ Seeing the uncomprehending stare he said again, ‘The deeds, to the house and the lake. All the property. A fair acreage of useless land. It’s yours, of course.’
Angharad heard the crackle of the old papers on the table, and she smiled at him. The smile made Harry draw in his breath, and see afresh the colour of her skin and the fine down of hair on her forearms.
‘Do you love Llyn Fair?’ Angharad asked him.
Harry shook his head violently. ‘No. Too much has happened here. But you know that isn’t why I want you to have it. It belongs rightfully to you.’
Too much has happened here.
Angharad thought of the unhappiness that the old house had visited on their two families. It was like a dark knot, coiled in the valley in defiance of the hills’ ancient shelter. If there was to be another family, regenerated in herself and Harry and little William, it would never be here.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want to keep it. I don’t want to be anywhere except with you, and how can we be here?’
His hands found hers and folded them together. They sat and listened to the water and the sighing wind in the trees.
‘Sell it, then,’ he answered her.
‘We could give the money to a good cause. Perhaps that would lay it to rest.’
‘Which one do you have in mind?’ he asked her, only half-attending.
‘Unmarried mothers?’ she answered him innocently. She was rewarded by the first glimmer of laughter in his eyes.
We shall be happy, you and I. Not yet, how could we be, but one day we’ll be happier than ever we could have hoped or dreamed.
‘I think that would be a very appropriate way to dispose of your house. I admire you, Angharad. I don’t deserve you, and I love you and I want you. You, and the boy.’
He kissed the angle of her neck under the warmth of her hair. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’s gone to stay in London, with Jamie, for a week. They’re still very close.’
The clarity that was important, now, in everything between them.
‘I’m glad. Can I see him, when he comes back?’
She loved him again for his tentativeness, and for letting her see his vulnerability.
‘He’s your son, Harry.’
The silence wrapped round them again as they looked at each other.
At last Harry said, ‘Does that mean that you don’t have to go away anywhere, now, this minute?’
Jessie was at the restaurant. She would have told Gwyn.
‘I don’t have to go anywhere.’
Harry stood up and walked to the old front door. He swung it closed and then as an afterthought he posted the folded deeds in through the letterbox. Then he held out his hands to lift Angharad from her chair. She followed him unquestioning across the gravel sweep to his anonymous car. He opened the door for her and she climbed in, watching the realness of him as he settled into his seat beside her. As he turned she saw the challenge in him, the challenge that he had always offered to her and which she had wanted nothing more than to meet, and answer.
‘Come with me, Angharad. Away from here. Anywhere, I don’t care where it is. We need to be together. No, that isn’t the truth. I can’t bear to be alone any more, and I am alone, without you.’ His voice grew softer and he reached out to touch the curve of her mouth with the tip of his finger. ‘Haven’t we lived for long enough without each other?’
He was tired, and his face was hollow with exhaustion, but the old crackle was still alive in him. Angharad smiled, and the crookedness had gone.
‘I’ll come. I want to go somewhere in Wales, a long way from everything, like the last time we saw each other.’
The shadow fell at once, as it would do often and many times yet. Gently she said, ‘Before that. Under the pine trees, do you remember, where there was no one else at all?’
‘I remember.’
The car was moving, rolling across the gravel. Without a backward glance they slid under the tunnel of trees and then away through the white gates for the last time.
They were alone where once they had been three, joyriding in the white Jaguar with Laura’s hand on the radio dial. The sadness came again, dropping its folds over them like a cloak. And they would learn to live with that, as they had already learned to live with so much else.
They turned down the steep road to the valley and Angharad thought that they might almost collide with themselves ten years ago, racing upwards with Harry laughing at the wheel and his black hair blown back from his suntanned face.
If we could go back, she thought, and then she checked herself. There could be no going back. We shall be happy, you and I. There would be time for that, and time, when they were ready.
Angharad looked at him once again, to make sure that it was really Harry and that he was truly there, and then turned resolutely to face the empty valley road.
They reached the crossroads. The car turned west, away from Llyn Fair and the lake basking in its remote cup of valley.
FOLLIES
Rosie Thomas
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 1983 by Fontana
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1988
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2014
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © FEB 2014 ISBN: 9780007560592
Version: 2015-06-20
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Michaelmas Term
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Christmas
Six
Hilary Term
Seven
Eight
Nine
Easter
Ten
Trinity Term
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Summer
Fifteen
Michaelmas Term
One
In a moment, she would see it.
The train swayed around a long curve, and then rattled over the iron arches of a little viaduct. Helen pressed her face against the smeared window, waiting.
Then, suddenly, it was ahead of her. The oblique sun of the autumn afternoon turned the spires and pinnacles to gold, and glowed on the rounded domes. The light made the stone look as soft and warm as honey, exactly as it had done for almost four hundred years.
The brief glimpse lasted only a few seconds, then the train shuddered and clattered into an avenue of grimy buildings and advertisement hoardings. But when Helen closed her eyes she saw it again, a sharp memory that was painful as well as seductive. She loved the place as she had always done, but she was a different person now. She shouldn’t have come back. Home was where she was needed now, not here under these honey-gold spires. Yet her mother had insisted, her face still grey with strain. And Graham, with all the sudden maturity that had been forced upon his thirteen years, had told her that it would break their mother’s heart to see Helen give up now. So she had repacked her cheap suitcase with her few clothes, the paperbacked texts and the bulging folders of notes, and she had come back.
Helen opened her eyes again as if she couldn’t bear to think any more.
