by Rosie Thomas
There was the cottage. She dropped her bicycle into the hedge and ran towards the door. An empty space where the van usually stood. The brown door was shut, and a chained padlock held the hasp to the staple in the frame. Almost sobbing with frustration, Angharad pressed her face to the smeared windows and looked inside. The flagged floor was swept bare, the room completely empty. Harry had gone.
Angharad sank down against the wet bank and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Llyn Fair. He must be there, alone with Laura. Of course. Joe and Monica had gone away. She didn’t stop to think. She picked up the bicycle again and wheeled away.
The road stretched on interminably. She would never have believed that Llyn Fair was so far away, and she was moving at a snail’s pace. Her clothes were wet and cold, but she was sweating and the palms of her hands slid on the handlebars. All thoughts of what she would do when she got there drained away, and she focussed grimly on the simple struggle to keep moving. Lack of food and sleepless nights had taken their toll, and she felt as weak as a child now.
It seemed to take a lifetime, but at last she was at the crossroads. The hill was steep here and her breath came in painful gasps. She lifted her hand to push the hair back from her face and found that it was streaming with wet.
She had driven along here with Harry, laughing, dazzled by him. How long ago?
Now, here. Llyn Fair in black letters on the white gate, and the avenue of trees before the open sky, the splash of falling water and ducks skimming over the still silver reaches.
Angharad looked and saw with a throb of relief that Harry’s grey van was neatly parked beside a new red Mini. That would be Laura’s, of course. The tame goose came waddling over the pebbles towards her, honking, but the house looked silent and closed. Angharad let the bicycle fall with a crash to the gravel. Her legs and head felt as if they would float apart, and an agonizing stitch stabbed at her side. With her hand pressed to it, she stumbled to the front door under the dripping white metalwork of the verandah. Locked.
Angharad stood for a moment in the shelter, biting her lip and thinking. Then she remembered Harry’s old room over the stable block. That’s where he would be, not in the confines of Joe’s house. She walked round the end gable of the old house and across the little brick-paved yard. Over there in the kitchen garden, Harry had picked herbs for her on that very first day.
At the flight of wooden steps leading up to the loft door, Angharad reached out to the handrail to steady herself. She was shaking as if in the grip of a high fever, and she had the sensation of being outside herself, watching detachedly as she padded up the steps to the door. It was on the latch, and swung open to her touch. In the middle of the floor were boxes, labelled and packed. Bare patches on the walls showed where pictures had hung. Angharad turned her head to the arch that led through to the bedroom. Silently she walked across to it.
Harry and Laura were in bed together.
At first she thought it was Harry alone, horribly distorted, but then she saw.
They were making love. Their skin was exactly the same colour, and the black hair tangled together. Harry’s eyes were shut and his face was twisted, baring his teeth, as if he was in terrible pain. Sometimes when he had made love to Angharad he had been violent, but he had always turned to gentleness again. With Laura there was no tenderness. He was driving himself savagely into her like a weapon, as if he longed to hurt her. Angharad saw the sweat gather on his shoulders and then run down his back. He was groaning, and the groans sounded as if they were being dragged from him under torture. Laura’s hands were at his hips, drawing him deeper into her. His back was scored with the long tracks of her nails. Her head was flung back and her arched throat was exposed to Harry’s mouth. The crimson marks of his kisses stood out on it like livid scars.
Angharad’s hand flew up to her mouth to stifle a scream, but they were oblivious of her. Harry was covered in sweat now. He moved faster and more desperately and Laura’s mouth opened in a soundless cry. And then he moaned and buried his dark face against his sister’s breasts. His body bucked over hers, and then drove down a last time with such force that it must have torn her. Laura’s scream of release answered him, curdling in her throat, and her eyelids fluttered before her eyes snapped open.
For long seconds they shivered in each other’s arms. The stillness in the room seemed to spill outwards to envelop the whole world. Then, with an abrupt movement, Harry rolled away. He wouldn’t look at Laura but Angharad heard him whisper,
‘I love you. Oh God, I hate you.’
Laura was looking past him. As soon as her eyes opened, she saw Angharad and the sight seemed to double the intensity of pleasure that swept through her. When it was done and Harry slid away from her, she smiled, and the smile was pure exultant triumph.
You see? it said. You see? Did you ever think that you could compete with me? With this? Did he ever do it to you like this?
Now Harry’s eyes were open. He stared in disbelief and then Angharad saw the film of anger clouding them. He pulled himself upright and faced her with such venom that she believed he hated her as well.
‘How dare you? I told you not to come prying here into what doesn’t concern you. Well, and are you happy now that you really know? Oh Christ, you must be so stupid.’ Angharad backed away, her fingers still pressed into her mouth. Harry called after her. ‘Don’t get yourself wound up in this, do you hear me? Stay away from it, keep yourself clean.’
His hand came up to his face, white-knuckled, and in an instant Angharad understood the rage and revulsion tearing at him. She almost ran to him, crying that she didn’t care, that she knew Laura’s power in just the same way, and that together they would win out over her.
But then, fatally, her eyes left Harry’s haunted face and she saw Laura still smiling her triumphant smile. Her thin brown fingers curled on her brother’s bare shoulder and her tumbled black hair fell against him. She hadn’t spoken a word.
Angharad swung around, and once her back was turned to them, she couldn’t bring herself to look back again. A wall of hateful silence rose behind her as she ran away, thudding down the wooden steps and over the warm red bricks. Gwyn’s bicycle lay where she had left it, one wheel still quivering. Angharad lifted up the heavy frame with a wrench that jarred her bones and rode out of the valley as if it were the jaws of hell. Behind her the grey water lapped on expressionlessly at the jetty and the house stood, blind-eyed, against the high dark hill.
Six
The rain slashed cruelly into her face. Angharad felt the sopping weight of her clothes pulling at her as she struggled against the wind. Yet in a way it helped, and mutely she thanked the driving rain and the gale that fought to throw her sideways. By giving everything she had to the effort of moving doggedly onwards she could close the eyes inside her head against what she had just seen.
Keeping going was enough, so long as it was away from Llyn Fair, enough to block the knowledge that she had no idea where she was going, or why. She didn’t think about it, but simple habit took her back towards Cefn, and at last she saw the stone fountain at the bottom of the long hill. The last stretch of road defeated her and she got off the old bicycle to push. Her legs were as heavy as lead, and she was shaking with long uncontrollable shivers. The soaking strands of hair clung to her cheeks and her fingers were too numb to push them back.
At last, as she came up the village street, she heard people calling cheerfully to her.
‘Not much of a day for a bike ride,’ and ‘You’d be better off in a rowing boat.’
Angharad was too exhausted and too stunned with shock even to look up. All she saw was the familiar contours of the street and the glittering, rotating spokes, sending out little cascades of spray as they turned round and round. Outside the old schoolhouse she was propping the bike up against the wall once more, still without a conscious motivating thought, when the studio door opened. Gwyn stared out at her.
‘Dear God, Angharad. Get inside here at on
ce.’
Angharad stumbled in after her and the cosy warmth struck her like a blow. Robbed of the drive to keep moving, to go on making her escape, painful awareness washed over her.
Harry and Laura. The arch, neatly framing the low bed against the warm red walls. Rain drumming against the windows, making a safe, secret world inside. Harry and Laura, locked together like two halves of a puzzle, and herself with her hand jammed against her mouth to stifle a scream that never came.
Years – how many years? – of deluding herself. She hadn’t known, yet she had always known. She had herself so nearly fitted with them both. And what else, in truth, could their perfect closeness ever have meant? Angharad closed her eyes and felt herself swaying. All summer, then, Harry had been cheating her. Playing with her, to pass the time until Laura came back and he could turn in again to their shared secret landscape. A landscape that was blacker and more violent, but yet more fascinating, than anything she could have shared with him herself. The terrible, potent excitement of taboos, Angharad thought. She had tasted just a little of that herself, with Laura. But while their relationship had indeed been innocent because it had hurt or threatened nobody, this one was different. She had been the victim of it herself.
No.
Even in the saddle of her shock and despair, another part of Angharad sprang to Harry’s defence. He hadn’t deceived her. She hadn’t asked him for the truth, even though she had felt Laura’s shadow falling coldly between them. Harry had never lied to her. He had never promised anything, and he had taken nothing except what had been freely given because they loved each other.
And now, because of that … Unthinkably, assaulted by so much else, Angharad had almost forgotten about the baby.
Gwyn caught her before she fell. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ Her aunt’s voice was harsh with anxiety. Angharad shook her head wearily, but she clung to Gwyn as her aunt’s arms came around her. Gwyn had comforted her just like this after all the tiny bumps and shocks of childhood. At least, she thought, she still had one friend left. Until Gwyn found out, of course, as she would have to.
Angharad let herself be led into the bathroom. Gwyn made her strip off the wet clothes and sit in a steaming hot bath. Her hair was briskly towelled dry, and she dressed herself again in the dry clothes that Gwyn handed to her. When she was sitting in the chair by the old coke stove, which was burning unseasonably early, Gwyn brought her a mug of hot milk. Angharad tasted it and found that it was liberally laced with whisky. The warmth spread hypnotically through her, and with an edge of hysteria, Angharad almost laughed. The old nursery standby topped up with invisible reserves of potent spirit. It was a perfect symbol for Gwyn herself. Of course she could talk to Gwyn. She had been a fool not to do it before now. Gwyn swung the heavy coke hod into the red mouth of the stove and fed it with a dusty rattle of fuel. Then she replaced the hod and brushed the dust sharply from her hands.
‘Harry Cotton?’ she asked.
‘Dad told you?’
‘Not at all. But I’m glad you had the courage to tell him yourself before he found it out. It must have been hard for you. I know what he’s like now, but it’ll make the difference in the end.’
I wouldn’t have done, Angharad thought bitterly, if the other thing hadn’t prompted me.
‘Poor duck, did you think you could keep it a secret up here? Cath Jones saw you at the Mill, and told me. And you were with him in the Pandy Inn on the night of the August Meeting, weren’t you?’
Of course the eyes had seen her. She had been too busy being happy to notice them.
Escape. She couldn’t stay here, to be watched and judged. Where to? And to do what in the world, without Harry?
Angharad looked up at her aunt, and Gwyn winced to see the strange mixture of bare hurt and steely determination in eyes that only a few weeks ago had been clear and untroubled.
‘I’m pregnant,’ Angharad said. ‘And I can’t see him again. Ever. Don’t ask me why.’
Never, she would never tell anybody why. The thought came to her that the hateful secret was an unbreakable yoke that held her to the Cottons for ever, even if she never set eyes on them again. They did belong together, the three of them, in their misfortune.
Gwyn flexed her old hands on the high guard around the stove and stared down at the knobby red joints.
‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘My poor Angharad. I wish …’ But Gwyn had learned to be too practical to indulge herself with wishing. Instead she said, as matter-of-fact as if it was something that she discussed every day, ‘It needn’t be the end of the world for you, you know. We’ll see if we can work something out together. No good thinking about Dr Hughes, of course. Now, where should we go?’
Angharad saw that Gwyn had seized gratefully on the most obvious answer. She tried it out for herself. Abortion. Quick, sterile, and utterly final. The little mistake gone, and soon forgotten about. For all the world to see she would be clever Angharad Owain again, back on the well-oiled tracks, parcelling up her books and papers before setting off for college as they had all expected that she would. The whispers about Harry Cotton would soon die away again.
But to herself, inside, it wouldn’t be like that at all. Hideous images rose up in front of her again, of blood and silent screams that never would be heard. Little fingers that would never uncurl, because of her cowardice. She couldn’t let them rip Harry’s baby out of her. It was all she had left of him now, the only thing that she could allow herself out of her love for Harry that was still the most potent and most beautiful thing in the distorted world.
She wanted the baby. As she sat huddled in the big chair beside Gwyn’s purring stove, she felt the first primeval stirring of love for her son.
‘I won’t have an abortion. I want to keep the baby.’ The tone of her voice left no leeway for persuasion.
‘I think I can understand that.’ Tolerant, liberal, but deeply moral Aunty Gwyn. ‘You’ll give the baby up for adoption, you mean?’
She didn’t mean that at all, but she would cross that hurdle when she came to it.
‘I can’t stay here. I couldn’t bear it, for Dad’s sake or my own, with everyone looking and talking. I’ll have to go away. Stay away.’ The hugeness of the decisions she was making towered ahead of her. She knew that she was cutting herself off, severing herself from everything in life that had promised happiness and normality.
‘And so what will you do?’ Gwyn was very gentle with her.
‘Go to London,’ Angharad improvised desperately. The farthest, biggest, most anonymous place possible. She could lose herself there. ‘Find somewhere to live, a bedsitter. Get a job of some kind. I can cook for someone. Be a housekeeper, perhaps.’
‘Can you, with a baby coming?’ She was still so gentle that Angharad wanted to cry. It felt like the first gentleness anyone had shown her for so long, and she knew it would be almost the last.
‘I can work until I have to stop. After that there are places you can go to, aren’t there? Anything will be better than staying here.’
‘I can help you a little. I wish it was more. I can give you two hundred pounds now, and I’ll send whatever else I can. There just isn’t a great fortune in siwgr and llaeth pots.’
The two women stared at each other, and Angharad saw the unfamiliar sparkle of tears in Gwyn’s eyes. Her aunt’s tears swept away the last of her own defences and she cried too, with her face pressed against the knobby wool of Gwyn’s old cardigan and with Gwyn’s hand stroking her wet hair.
‘You have chosen the hardest way,’ Gwyn said, but Angharad shook her head.
‘No. It isn’t a choice. It’s the only thing I can do. What … what shall I tell Dad?’
Gwyn sighed. ‘You’re asking me for advice that I shouldn’t try to give. But, if you want it, I think you should just go quietly away. Leave your father to me, and when the time is right, I’ll tell him what has happened. You know, he’s always been a victim of his own sense of failure, rightly or wrongly. You
must see that he will think of your choice as an extension of that, if you confront him with it now. It will only make him say, and do, things that he will regret.’
Angharad nodded dumbly, thinking of William on the evening when she had confessed to loving Harry.
‘But he loves you very much, and he will miss you equally. Once the shock and anger are over, he’ll want you back as much as I do. And the child, too. When you are ready to come. I hope that’s what will happen, Angharad.’
Angharad was looking out of the tall schoolroom windows into the rain. She had the chill sense that all her boats were burned. Gwyn’s advice did no more than confirm her own feelings but, in her secret heart, she might have been hoping for something else. An escape loophole that would mean not having to confront the loneliness yawning in front of her. But there was nothing, and she would have to face what was coming.
‘Well,’ she said dully, ‘it won’t take me long to get ready. The sooner the better, I suppose.’ It will be easier not to be here, where everything shouts Harry at me, she added silently.
Gwyn stroked her hair and said again, ‘Poor love. Are you quite, quite certain that you want to carry this baby?’
Angharad’s chin lifted, firmly pointed. ‘I want him.’
She was leaving Cefn, the grey and blue huddle of houses against the long brown back of The Mountain, with its sharp mixture of loved familiarity and dull constriction. She was leaving Harry and Laura, and the thought of that wrung her heart more than the memory of what they had done to her. But she was carrying Harry’s baby with her. She wouldn’t, after all, be quite alone. Angharad was no fool. She knew that it would be a hard struggle. Yet, somehow, she would make it work for both of them.
