A String in the Harp (7 page)

Only one of the handful. They would have cast sidelong glances at each other if they could have looked away from the eyes of Caridwen, eyes that seemed to see them all without looking at any one of them.

Slowly the old man called each boy’s name, pausing after each.

“Gwyn.”

Silence.

“Elvan.”

Silence.

“Huw.”

Silence.

“Owain.”

Silence.

“Gwion.”

At this name Caridwen smiled a distant, triumphant smile and held out her hand. The boy who must be Gwion could not but step forward. That it was he whom she had chosen, there could be no question. The blind man called no more names, he too knew.

In Caridwen’s outstretched hand was a silver tuning key, a harp key that shone in the light, and she said, “You are Gwion no longer. Henceforth you shall be Taliesin.” Her voice filled the waiting air. It reached the listeners from within, it was felt rather than heard.

The island, lake, and sky spun together in a dizzying spiral, the wind rose over the song of the Key in Peter’s ears, and he was a perfectly ordinary boy standing shivering in his flannel pajamas in his dark bedroom with a curious tarnished object in his hand. Even after he’d gotten back into bed under the covers he lay ice-cold, eyes as blind as the old man’s, sure he had learned something important, but not yet able to grasp what.

P
ETER WOKE
to hear someone banging around in the kitchen. Through his window he could see a rag of the same gray sky that had hung over them all day Monday. His mouth tasted even worse this morning. He got up and dressed and went out to find his father rummaging for breakfast. David looked rumpled and sleepy, as if he’d spent a restless night.

“Morning,” said Peter noncommittally.

“Good morning. You’re up early, aren’t you? For vacation? No one else is stirring yet.”

“Felt like getting up.”

“Good enough reason. Have you got anything special planned for today?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe you and the girls would like to come in to Aberystwyth and meet me for lunch somewhere.” He glanced at his son, but Peter’s face was carefully blank.

“All right,” he said without enthusiasm. David sighed.

Often, when he was alone, Peter imagined sitting down and really talking to his father. He would tell him why he was unhappy and explain why he had to go home. David would listen to him sympathetically and reasonably and would offer
help. They would be friends and they would understand each other. But somehow, whenever he was with his father, it didn’t happen. Peter couldn’t make himself say the right words and David wouldn’t listen properly, and they’d end by getting furious with each other.

Jen and Becky arrived after the gas for the grill was safely lit and the kettle boiling, Jen still shivering from her stint in the bathroom.

“I never would have thought you could take a bath in steaming hot water and still get goose-pimples while doing it! The bathroom is unquestionably the coldest room in this house,” she declared.

David smiled at her. “That’s to keep you from staying in it too long. Do you all want toast? I was suggesting to Peter before you came down that you might come into town this morning and I’ll take you to lunch.”

“Good,” said Becky. “We need money for Christmas decorations. We don’t have any at all.”

“Money,” asked David, “or decorations?”

“Either one.”

“All right. You can show Jen the sights and shop while I’m working.”

“That should take about five minutes,” muttered Peter, out of his father’s hearing.

They caught the bus at ten past ten. There was a stop outside Mr. Williams’s store. Jen was beginning to think Mr. Williams’s store was the hub of Borth. Hugh-the-Bus was driving, cap tilted to the back of his head, whistling through his teeth. He was a big, gentle-faced man with snow-white hair, a wide, amused smile, and very blue eyes. “Morning,” he said to Jen when Becky introduced them. “Going to town, is it? Good day for that.”

“I’d like to see them all together,” Jen whispered as they sat down. “Gwilym and Mrs. Davies and Hugh-the-Bus, I mean.”

“And Susan and Sheila,” added Becky with a giggle. “I know. It’s too bad Gwilym doesn’t look like Hugh-the-Bus.” She voiced Jen’s own thought. “Hugh-the-Bus is real Welsh, but Gwilym’s only half Welsh because his mother’s English.”

“So?” said Peter.

“It makes a difference,” Becky informed them. “He doesn’t quite belong, and she doesn’t at all. Oh, she fits in, but she doesn’t belong.”

Under the low sky the air was clear and the feet of the mountains stood out in sharp detail though their shoulders and tops were shrouded in thick rolls of cloud. Jen hardly glanced at the little bungalows that lined the road out of Borth. Her eyes went instinctively to those dark, wild slopes, scattered with sheep and boulders. She listened with half her mind to Becky, who was listing all the decorations they needed, and said, “Yes” and “I don’t see why not” at the right moments, but she was watching the hills.

In twenty minutes they reached the top of Penglais Hill in Aberystwyth. The hills were gone, and Jen paid attention to Becky who was pointing out the landmarks.

“All the buildings on the left are the new University buildings where Dad teaches. His office is down in the old building, though. You’ll see it later.”

“Inspiring, aren’t they?” commented Peter.

Jen had to admit they weren’t really handsome. They were gray concrete and still raw and new looking. Below the University was a big, fortresslike building that, Becky told her, was the National Library of Wales. Very grand. No, they’d never been inside, but their father had. But what really fascinated Jen, as the bus paused, shuddering, at the top of the hill for passengers to get on and off, was the town of Aberystwyth below them: a cluster of buildings, spread across the mouth of the River Rheidol, like flotsam carried down to the sea by the river and left stranded on the fan-shaped estuary. Thousands
of years the Rheidol had worn its way among the hills, weaving back and forth across its valley, and now it was invisible, lost among the tumble of slate roofs and steeples, channeled away among the railway sidings and bridges and stone walls of the harbor.

“And that?” asked Jen, pointing across the town. “What’s that tower?”

“Pen Dinas,” Becky answered. “It’s a monument of some sort. Dad says there’re the traces of an ancient hill fort near it.”

Pen Dinas stood like a sentinel guarding the southern side of Aberystwyth, a dark, straight finger pointing at the sky on the crest of a rounded hill.

Jen shook her head wonderingly. “It sure isn’t like home.”

“No,” agreed Peter.

They got out at the Aberystwyth railway station. “You can go and do what you want. I have an errand,” Peter announced.

“What kind?” Becky wanted to know.

“Private.”

“Well, I only asked. Anyhow, I have private shopping to do, too. We’ll meet you at Woolworth’s in an hour for the decorations.”

Peter was about to say he didn’t care about the decorations, then changed his mind and walked quickly away.

Jen and Becky spent a happy hour poking about in the little shops that lined the narrow streets. Aberystwyth was much livelier than Borth; none of the buildings seemed to be closed for the winter and the sidewalks were full of people. Jen had a great deal to see for the first time and Becky was quite content to wander.

The main street was very broad, with shops at the top and guest houses and flats at the bottom. A sign on the corner pointed down a side street and said simply, “To The Sea.”

“But not now,” said Becky. “It’s time to meet Peter. We can go out on the Prom after lunch.”

Peter was already at Woolworth’s, looking impatient. “I’ve been waiting ages. What took you so long?”

“We said an hour and that’s what it’s been,” Jen declared. “It’s not our fault you got here early.”

It was after twelve when they’d settled the problem of decorations to Becky’s satisfaction. They had to decide whether to buy inexpensive lights or the ones that blinked and whether to have a star or an angel for the top of the tree. In the end they got blinking lights and a star and colored balls and icicles and red plastic bells.

When it was all paid for, it was nearly time to meet David, so Becky struck out at a brisk trot for the old University building with the other two following close behind. David was leaning against a pillar at the entrance when they got there.

“Sorry we’re late,” said Jen breathlessly.

“You’re not—I’m early.”

He took them to a little cafe nearby where he said he often had his lunch. It was dark and crowded with tables and there were artificial flowers in the windows.

Peter dared Jen to order oxtail soup, and she accepted his challenge. When it came, it was thick and dark brown like gravy and steaming hot. Peter and Becky and David all had plates of savory mince, which looked like spaghetti sauce, and baked potatoes.

“Well?” asked Peter, when Jen had tasted her soup.

“It’s good. What’s it made of?”

“Oxtails.”

When Jen looked at him blankly, David laughed. “He’s quite right, it is.”

Jen swallowed another spoonful carefully. “I guess so long as I don’t have to see them it’s all right,” she conceded.

“Hello, Mr. Morgan. I had not expected to see you at College this vacation.” A thin little man in a well-worn suit
had come to stand by their table. He wore wire-framed spectacles, pushed down on his nose.

David got hastily to his feet. “Dr. Rhys! I thought actually that with the students away I could get some of my own research done.”

“Ah, yes.” Dr. Rhys gave a thin, quick smile. “Welsh language, isn’t it? Yes, indeed, it’s blessedly quiet now without them cluttering up the libraries and interrupting with questions every time one settles down to work. I quite agree. It is so difficult to do research in term time.” He spoke quickly, but Jen could detect the cadences she was beginning to identify as Welsh. He seemed to notice the three younger Morgans for the first time. “And this must be your family, is it?”

“Yes, of course. Forgive me. Peter, Jennifer, and Becky.”

Dr. Rhys shook hands with each of them gravely. His grip was light and dry.

“But you should not let me keep you from your lunch now, please.”

“Won’t you join us?” David invited him, and the three children held their breath. But Dr. Rhys shook his head. “Oh, no, no, thank you very much. I, too, have much to do this vacation, you see. I shall read this report”—he indicated a massive sheaf of paper tucked under his left arm—“while I have my lunch. I really must. So nice to meet you.”

He left them and settled at a narrow table at the back of the room. There he bent to his report like a thin crow roosting on it.

“Should think he’d get indigestion,” muttered Peter rudely. Luckily David didn’t hear him, but Becky giggled.

David looked at her severely. “Dr. Rhys is a well-respected member of the University faculty and he’s been very helpful to me these past months. If you ever know one-half as much as he does, I’ll be very proud of you,” he said, carefully pitching his voice so it wouldn’t carry beyond their table.

“What’s his subject?” asked Jen.

“He’s the head of the Welsh Studies Department, and he’s written several very good books on language and folklore.”

“He doesn’t look like the sort of person who’d know fairy tales,” observed Jen, looking at Dr. Rhys with more interest.

“Fairy tales isn’t the right term, really. I think he’d quarrel with you on that. It’s more mythology.”

“Greeks and Romans,” said Becky. “We have to read that stuff at school.”

“Too bad they never teach you the Norse myths—the Celtic ones, which include the Welsh, are much closer to those. Very exciting, some of them.”

“Have you read them?” Peter asked, interested in spite of himself.

“Some,” David admitted. “Trouble is, there’s too much to read. Now, what do you want for dessert.”

“Something very sweet,” said Becky at once.

***

After lunch, David went back to his office, and Jen, Becky, and Peter walked out to the Prom, as Becky had promised. It was a long, curving walk that ran from one end of Aberystwyth to the other along the sea. Only a few mothers with prams and small children were out on it in the watery sun, and here and there a clump of older boys or girls—always one or the other, never both together—stood talking by the rail, eyeing each other. Some of the boys smoked cigarettes, their hands cupped expertly around the butts, ready to flourish them or hide them depending on who approached.

Jen couldn’t help feeling foreign, but Peter was lost in his own thoughts and not talking, and Becky was humming to herself unselfconsciously. Somehow Jen had pictured winter by the sea as stretches of deserted white sands under a cold sun and dunes scattered with fishermen’s shacks, boats upturned beside them like giant turtles, men mending nets and smoking pipes. She smiled ruefully to herself. Whatever she’d
imagined hadn’t been this. And yet in its own way, she supposed it wasn’t bad, just rather a shock.

Beyond the University, a point jutted out from the town, green grass sloping down to a war memorial and back from it the ruins of Aberystwyth Castle.

“Not much there,” said Peter, but Jen had to see it when she was told what it was. “I’ve never seen a real castle before.”

It had been landscaped into a park, with sand paths and benches supported by crouched, wrought-iron dragons. All that were left were ragged chunks of wall and one tower that they couldn’t go into.

“Well, it does look old anyway,” said Jen, when they’d seen all there was to see.

“Thirteenth century.”

“Peter, how on earth do you know?”

“Well, don’t believe me then!” He sounded annoyed.

“I didn’t say I don’t believe you. I only asked how you knew.”

“I read it. I told you I had a lot of time for reading.” Peter glared at her meaningfully.

“Sorry,” said Jen with a trace of sarcasm; then to Becky, “Had you ever met Dr. Rhys before?”