Sunrise

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Clothes and boys?’ Gwyn repeated at last, with a visible effort. ‘Darling, that’s normal and natural. Girls of your age are starting to be interested in things like that, and so should you be. It’s part of growing up. You’ve been too much on your own here with only your father and me for company. Being with all the other girls will be good for you. You’ll see, you’ll soon start to like them.’

  Angharad knew, with unshakeable conviction, that she never would.

  ‘But I’ve got friends here,’ she said desperately. The thought of going back to school, with even the solace of Laura’s friendship mysteriously denied her, was unbearable. ‘Friends I’ve had all my life.’ She counted the names off on her fingers, children from the village who had sat next to her at primary school and who lived behind the doors down the street. She knew everything about them, as they did about her. Weren’t they good enough any more? Why was the world suddenly so complicated?

  ‘I know, I know.’ Gwyn was smiling. ‘And they’ll stay your friends, I’m sure. But truly, you’ve always preferred your own company, or ours, haven’t you? You see, your father doesn’t want you to stay here all your life. He’s proud of you, and he wants you to make something of yourself. You’ll learn things at your school, in classes and out of them, that you’ll never learn here.’

  That’s true, Angharad thought bitterly. About French kissing, and pop records.

  Laura was the only person who had shown her anything she really wanted to know. She thought back over them, all kinds of things.

  ‘Haven’t you read Jane Eyre?’ Laura had said. ‘You should.’

  Angharad had dutifully picked it up, and it had swept her into another world for three whole days.

  ‘Yes, the Beatles are good,’ Laura had agreed. ‘But listen to this.’ It was the Pastoral Symphony, and Angharad was entranced. There was music at home, but listening to it with Laura made it quite different.

  Laura had even shown her how to tame the elastic tentacles of her suspender belt so that Angharad’s blue woollen stockings were as smooth as her own. She had wound the ends of her hair on to big spongy rollers for her, so that they curved elegantly inwards to frame her round face.

  And now their friendship was forbidden.

  Why? It made no sense. And Angharad liked to have answers to things. Her deep-seated instinct was to obey her father, but the rest of her cried out against it.

  ‘Aunty Gwyn,’ she said carefully, ‘why can’t I be Laura’s friend? You’d like her, and Dad would too. I know you would.’

  Gwyn sighed and stared over Angharad’s head. At last she said, ‘I’m going to tell you this because suddenly it seems to affect you. There would have been no need otherwise. Old bitterness is best forgotten. It happened a long time ago, just after your mother and father were married. A man called Joe Cotton, your friend’s father, cheated our family out of something that was important to us. And as a result of that, something else happened that hurt your father and me deeply. That’s all you need to know. Your father has never forgiven him, and it hurts him still to this day. Hearing those names again, and from you, was a shock to him. Do you see?’

  Angharad said nothing. She was struggling to take in Gwyn’s words. Laura’s father? Laura was real to her, vivid and important, but her father was less than a shadow. Angharad couldn’t recall Laura even having mentioned him. She frowned, trying to remember. Laura talked about her mother, in passing, and about her brother in moments which flattered Angharad with their intimacy, even though jealousy still pricked her. But never her father. What could he have done, so long ago but so damagingly, to cause so much turmoil now?

  ‘Cheated us out of what?’ she asked.

  Gwyn shook her head. Her lips were pressed together.

  ‘That doesn’t matter now. It’s all past. Just do as your father says, and make friends with someone else. For his sake, Angharad.’ Clearly the conversation was at an end. Angharad pulled away from her aunt and mechanically set about clearing the tea-table. The leftovers were put away in the cold stone pantry, the dirty dishes stacked beside the deep, old-fashioned sink, just as always. She knew that Gwyn was watching her but she kept her face averted. She felt heavy, and cold, and cut off. It was strange to feel lonely in this warm, homely place.

  ‘What is it, lamb?’ Gwyn asked at last. ‘Is this girl so important to you? Aren’t you happy at your school?’

  Something in Angharad, a little secret reserve of pride, as well as anger that her aunt wouldn’t trust her with her father’s story, kept the truth locked inside her.

  ‘Of course I am,’ she said stiffly. ‘I love it. It took a little bit of getting used to, that’s all.’

  They finished the washing-up in silence. Angharad, staring into the greasy water, felt the first ache of her dilemma. Part of her wanted, and needed, to obey her father. But another, the new Angharad who was emerging out of the shell of being a little girl, dictated differently.

  Laura was her own friend. Neither of them owed anything to the distant past. It doesn’t matter, she thought fiercely.

  But Dad … She remembered how she had felt the loose skin masking his face like an old man’s. And he had never asked her for anything before. Nothing that would cost her anything to give. The realization settled around her like a heavy weight. Of course she would have to do as he asked. Somehow, when they sent her back to the brass bells, and the dust and chalk smells, and the relentless unprivate monotony of school, she would have to turn her back on Laura too.

  Unfair.

  Hot tears stung her eyes again and Angharad had to duck her head to hide them from her aunt.

  Gwyn opened the back door and the sweet, damp night air spilled into the kitchen.

  ‘I think I’ll go back home,’ she said. ‘Unless you’d like me to stay and keep you company?’

  Angharad knew that she could still have called her back, and let herself be comforted, but she didn’t.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m just going to read for a while.’

  The house was very silent after Gwyn had gone. Eirlys, the white cat, was still asleep in the rocker. Angharad walked through and looked at the closed door of her father’s study.

  She thought of running in and climbing up on to his knee, as she might have done years ago, and telling him that it was all, all right. She would do whatever he wanted, however mysterious or hurtful it seemed, because she loved him.

  But the study door stayed shut, and after a moment Angharad turned away. Up in her bedroom, with the little square sash window looking out over the street, Angharad stared at the shelf of battered children’s classics over her bed. Alice in Wonderland. The Wind in the Willows. What Katy Did. There was nothing to solace her there now.

  Angharad ran back downstairs to the alcove shelves. Towards the top, on the left-hand side, under her father’s meticulous classification, she found something that drew her hand. Next to Jane Eyre there was a fat book with a worn, brown spine. She peered at the dim gilt title. Wuthering Heights. Angharad took the book upstairs with her, undressed, and drew the blankets over her head to make a protective cave. The book fell open at the first page and she began to read.

  In the morning, when he came down, William said nothing about the night before. Angharad didn’t expect that he would. The storm had subsided, for this time, and provided that he was obeyed her father was his normal, calm, kindly self again.

  Angharad laid the breakfast table and they sat down together.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ William said. ‘What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Angharad had got up early, her eyes still gritty with reading late. She had stood barefoot on the stone doorstep, looking away down the street. The day was clear and sharp, smelling of leaf-mould and damp earth. The sky over the shiny, wet slate roofs was duck-egg blue, unsmudged with smoke before the day’s fires were lit. Elfed the Milk rattled round the corner under the oak tree in his pick-up loaded with crates, and he had
waved to her as he began clinking the bottles in pairs on to the doorsteps. As she had watched him, she had asked herself the same question, what she should do and had been disconcerted by it. She had never needed to think about filling her days at Cefn before.

  ‘I’m going to St Winefride’s Well,’ William said. ‘Would you like to come with me?’

  William was not the man to put his arms around his daughter in an open attempt at reconciliation. This invitation was his own way of putting things to rights. It took Angharad back at once to their times together before she had been banished to school. They had often gone off on expeditions to historical sites, and she had stood at his side half-understanding his explanations and wholly enthralled by his company. Those were the best times with her father.

  She weighed it up now, balancing her pride against her unhappiness at being at odds with him.

  ‘Yes,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I’ve never seen it. I’d like to come.’

  The well was half a dozen miles away, and they drove through the narrow lanes at first in silence and then, slowly, picking up the threads of inconsequential talk.

  Angharad wondered if this was what being grown-up was like, talking about things that didn’t matter while all you could think about were the things that did.

  But when they reached their destination on the outskirts of the little local town, the awkwardness between them fell instantly away. William left his old car just where it stopped, at an angle to the kerb, and strode across the narrow street into the shadow under the wall of the old monastery. Angharad scrambled after him, at once a child again, ready to enter into the world that he was always able to recreate for her.

  ‘Look,’ William said, pointing up to the façade that Angharad had passed dozens of times yet somehow had never seen before. She saw the simple Norman arches and the solid pillars within, and the hollows in the stone steps worn so deeply that the centre of the step was almost gone.

  ‘Can you imagine the pilgrims, columns of them, with their cloaks and bundles and their dusty feet, shuffling patiently up these steps? There has been a holy place here since the twelfth century.’

  Angharad followed him in under the round arch, and into the cold dimness of the shrine. They came down some more hollow steps and ahead of them was a column of light. The shrine opened to the sky and Angharad saw green water enclosed by mossed grey stone, and on the slabs at the bottom of the pool the glitter of coins. William looked down at them.

  ‘This is where the pilgrims came. Look, there are votive offerings to the saint, even today. Pennies thrown in with a wish, just the same as lighting a candle with a prayer.’

  They sat down on the steps and Angharad felt the chill of centuries-old shadow, and the invisible press of pilgrims all around her. It was her father’s special talent to bring such places alive for her.

  ‘Do you know the story?’ William asked.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Winefride lived in the seventh century. She was the daughter of well-to-do parents, and the niece of Saint Bueno. Winefride was a devout girl, promised to a nunnery when she came of age.

  ‘One day a local princeling came to her home, hot and thirsty from a day’s hunting. It would have been Winefride’s special responsibility, as the daughter of the house, to offer the welcome of their home to any traveller who needed it. That was the Welsh tradition. She would have brought the prince the best food they had, and offered to wash his feet or play the harp for him. Can you see her, bringing the dishes in, in her white veil over her dark cloak, with plaid wraps over her shoulders?

  ‘She would have kept her eyes on the floor, never looking once directly at her guest. But the prince saw at once how beautiful she was, and he wanted her. Perhaps there was a struggle. Maybe the veil was torn off, ripped between them and trampled in the mud from the hunting field. Somehow Winefride broke free and ran to sanctuary in the church. But the prince caught up with her on the threshold, drew his hunting sword in his rage, and hacked the girl’s head from her body.

  ‘Saint Bueno came out of the church and saw his beautiful, mutilated niece at his feet. He cursed the murderer, and the ground opened at once at their feet and the prince was swallowed alive. The saint knelt and prayed for the girl’s life to be restored, and it was. She came back to life, and the only sign was a thin white line around her neck. On the spot where her head had fallen, a fountain sprang up. Just here, Angharad.’

  Angharad looked down into the water and saw the tiny crystal bubbles rising. Winefride was as real as herself.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Winefride lived for fifteen years. She became a nun, as she had promised. Her shrine here slowly gathered a great reputation as a holy place. The sick came on pilgrimages, and so did hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. Great men came too, even Kings. Henry V was one, and Edward IV. James II was the last King to come here. And Henry Tudor chose Winefride as one of the stone saints who guard his tomb in his chapel at Westminster.’

  They sat in the little square of light within the thick walls. The bubbles rose endlessly from somewhere deep in the rock, up through the still water, and escaped at last.

  Twelve hundred years, Angharad thought.

  The unimaginable time had the effect of sharpening her own small fear and loneliness instead of diminishing it.

  She turned and rested her head against the comforting solidity of her father’s knee.

  ‘I miss you,’ she said. ‘Can’t I come home again?’

  Her father stopped looking at the old stonework and the crude decorative carvings over the arches and smiled down at the top of her head.

  ‘Do you think that I don’t miss you?’

  ‘No,’ Angharad said, and then corrected her sulky tone at once. ‘Yes, I know you do. That’s why it doesn’t make sense. Let me come home again.’

  ‘It will take you a little while to get used to being away,’ William said, in the unarguable voice that Angharad dreaded. ‘But it is the best possible thing for you. You need the company and influence of other women because you’ll be a woman yourself soon. We can’t go on here on our own together.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked, mulishly.

  ‘Because it isn’t suitable, that’s why.’ Angharad could see that her father was smiling, but it was a thin smile, devoid of happiness. ‘Don’t argue with me, Angharad. And do one more thing to please me. Find yourself another friend. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?’

  Yes, she wanted to say. Impossible, because I know that there isn’t anyone like Laura.

  ‘Mayn’t I know why?’ she asked, with a meekness that she didn’t feel.

  There was a long pause, and Angharad counted the bubbles as they soared upwards. William’s thin smile cut bitter creases into his face, and he made a defensive gesture over her head as if to fend something off.

  ‘It’s past. There isn’t any need,’ William reiterated.

  Angharad didn’t answer, and she felt the divide between them as thick as the old walls themselves.

  At last William said heavily, ‘I’ll just go and collect the documents I need.’ They left the green light behind, and the brief moment of closeness that Winefride had brought them, and went out into the traffic once again.

  Back home once more, Angharad wandered through the little house. She had the chilly feeling of not belonging anywhere, any more. As soon as the thought came to her, she frowned and shook herself. She would go out somewhere, just as she would always have done.

  Angharad found her wellingtons, still caked with the mud of the last rainy days of the summer holidays, and her old coat with the darned woollen gloves in the pocket. She scrambled over the low point in the churchyard wall and swished through the long grass between the headstones. The short-cut led to the back lane that wound in turn towards The Mountain. As she came down the lane she could see that there were children moving round a huge clump of red-brown brushwood in the centre of the field. They were her friends from the village street
, building the annual Guy Fawkes bonfire. Angharad could see the tangle of orange-red curls belonging to Jessie Rhys, and the Williams twins beside her, Dicky and Gareth, and the others she had played with across these fields for as long as she could remember. She hesitated, and then stopped. Once she would have run to join them, but now she felt that she didn’t belong here any more than she fitted in at school. Angharad stuck her hands in her pockets and turned away, staring up instead at the long summit of The Mountain. Beyond it, somewhere, was the mysterious place Llyn Fair. She wondered what Laura was doing, and thought that Laura wouldn’t care about being left out of the building of a stupid bonfire.

  I wish I was like Laura, Angharad whispered.

  A heavy, cold weight pressed on her, as it had done ever since last night. It was much worse than not being part of the Guy Fawkes preparations, and worse than not knowing what to do with herself now. Almost as bad as being at odds with her father. On Sunday night she was going to have to find some way of telling Laura that they weren’t friends any more. She pictured Laura’s cool, inquiring stare, then miserably shut her eyes on it.

  There was nothing to be done.

  Angharad went for a long walk. She followed the deserted lane and pushed herself harder as it petered out into the track past Pendre Farm and began to rise with The Mountain. There were deep tractor ruts in the dried mud, and a ridge of coarse grass between them. The slope grew steeper and Angharad found herself panting for breath. She strode on, frowning unseeingly at the path in front of her, deliberately thinking of nothing but the effort of climbing on upwards.

  It grew very still and silent as the avenues of dark conifers closed around her, then suddenly they dropped behind and she was out on close springy turf with the wind clawing her hair back from her face. This was open grazing land, and a flock of wiry, grey sheep scudded away in front of her. Angharad kept her eyes on the skyline until she reached a little hollow just below the high point of The Mountain. She sank into its shelter out of the wind, and turned to look at the view.