Band of Angel (8 page)

Now, when Father came in from the fields looking numb and exhausted, Gwynneth, who treated men like backward invalids, drew her chair up close and asked her brother lots of questions: “You were haymaking today were you, Huw? That’s nice,” or more archly, “I know I’m a silly goose but how can you tell a Charolais cow from a Freesian?” Or “Tell me in
detail
now. How is it you make your lovely Lleyn hedges?” He’d never been much for talking, and now she’d listen to his slow, reluctant answers in a bright and bobbing way, like a bird ravenous for the merest crumb of information. Mealtimes had become a particular strain, beginning with
Gwynneth straightening her back and reading in a tremulous voice from her Bible. Then she’d poke through the pots, fussing about “nourishing titbits” for Father—“For a child milk, and for a man meat,” she was fond of saying, passing him the sweetest pieces near the bone while ostentatiously reserving for herself and the girls scraps of wing and gristle and skin.

Now Mair sulked and clashed pots in the kitchen and Eliza, poor Eliza, who tried so hard to find nice things to think and say about everyone, sat and burbled helplessly, trying to fill in the gaps. For Catherine loathed the woman and the feeling, as far as she could make out, was mutual.

This tension between them found an outlet in the question of the front parlor. In Mother’s day it had been a delightful room—a little jackdawish and untidy, perhaps, with its china jugs and gewgaws, its papier-mâché inkstands and watercolors, but that was Mother. Gwynneth had taken against it from the start.

“How on earth your poor dear mother found anything in here I’ll never know,” she’d said, removing the odd picture and occasional table, saying it would make it easier to clean. These were preliminary forays. Then, after two weeks in the house, she’d made her frontline attack: dragged a large tin trunk into the parlor and unpacked a pile of antimacassars, a collection of brittle-looking butterflies inside a glass box, and some books. The books, dun-colored, damp to the touch, had various inspirational titles such as
The Strength of My Life
and
One Day at a Time.
They were on loan, she said, from the Methodist church to help them all through this Terrible Time. They were to take a particular care not to get them dirty. Catherine shuddered at the very sight of them.

Gwynneth was also a snob. In reduced circumstances herself (her dead husband had owned a failing tanning works near Pistyll), she made it known, at first obliquely and later with needling remarks of the “you can stoop and pick up nothing” kind, that while it was a very great shame that her brother had turned his back on the life of a gentleman, it was by no means irreversible. So began a new campaign to upgrade the status of this branch of the Carreg family, and thus endless conversations
about manners and social niceties and what sort of persons it was proper to consort with, and although Gwynneth’s Methodist leanings did not entirely square with the more frivolous philosophies of women’s magazines, such as the
Welsh Woman’s Domestic Magazine
or the
Ladies’ Treasury,
several appeared in the parlor.

These magazines, stuffed with hints on how to make jam, to dress one’s hair, to dress well, and how to become a stimulating conversationalist, made it crystal clear that the capture—and the continuous captivation—of a man was the point of a woman’s life, and Eliza read them, from cover to cover, with a grave absorption that wrung Catherine’s heart. Her sister so much wanted a husband.

Catherine had no words yet for the despair she felt on reading these feeble magazines, and had no wish anyway to spoil the experience for Eliza, who still cried herself to sleep. But at night, often rigid with sleeplessness, she thought of the dream she’d had on the night Mother died: of herself twirling and twirling in a sea of organza and lace and satin, of being wound tighter and tighter in choking, confining dresses, utterly panicked and absolutely convinced she was needed elsewhere.

The row, when it came, exploded unexpectedly. It was a mild summer evening and the air from open windows smelled of night-scented stock and new-mown hay. Father was exhausted so they’d gone to bed as soon as it began to grow dark. About ten o’clock, the dogs started barking, at first rhythmically, then hysterically, their noise taken up by a whole circle of dogs around the peninsula. Then she’d heard the thunder of cattle on the move, and the drover’s cry of Hip Hop Tro. It was such an odd cry, not like a song or a greeting or a shout, but a statement of approach and right of way, a determination to exist, as simple and elemental as birdsong. She’d lain on her bed listening in the half light, tears pouring down her cheeks. She’d never felt so lost. It was the wrong time for Aunt Gwynneth, who had moved into the spare bedroom next door, to walk in.

“Catherine, my dear,” she said, walking toward the window. “Shut that window at once, what a
noise.
”

She grimaced in agony.

“
So
inconsiderate of the persons next door.” She leaned over Catherine, with a faint smell of face cream and mothballs.

“Don’t close the window, Aunt,” she said, raising herself on her pillow. “I like it open. Thank you.”

“Oh no, no, no.” (Her aunt pronounced it noo, noo, noo.) “It is not a matter of thank you, or what we want always, it is a matter”—she had to shout now over the noise of the cattle—“of what all of us want in the house.”

“Leave my window open. Leave me alone.” Catherine’s voice was bloody and screaming with rage. She got on her knees and pounded her fists into the pillow.

Aunt Gwynneth stood over her with her arm raised and her teeth bared.

“Nobody speaks to me like that, My Lady.”

Then Father ran into the room.

“I was trying to help,” said Gwynneth, clutching the bosom of her nightdress and bursting into tears. “I am trying to help and she shouts at me.”

Father looked at Catherine and Catherine looked back with a calmness bordering on insolence. He slapped her once across the cheek, making a livid mark.

And then he hit her again.

Gwynneth began to shriek, “Oh no! Poor child!”

He stood at the door, glaring at both of them. “I do what I like in my own blasted house,” he said.

Gwynneth, lopsided and crying, left the room. Father slammed the door behind him. The dogs had stopped barking outside and Catherine lay in the dark with her mouth open, breathing heavily. The indignity of being slapped was unbearable. She felt like a small, soiled, wounded animal, with no pride and nowhere left to run. She wanted to scream, a terrible scream that would make them all dash back into her room and pay attention. To hurt him as he had hurt her. “She was too young to die,” she would have told him. “And you and I killed her.”

* * *

The next morning there was a timid knock on the door. She shuddered in case it was Gwynneth, but it was Eliza.

“I’ve brought you some bread and some jam and some beef tea,” said her sister in the grown-up sensible voice she used whenever she felt a fuss could be averted. She put the tray down and seeing her sister’s swollen eyes said, “Oh dear. What happened?”

Eliza flung her arms around her sister’s neck. They hugged each other tight and Catherine, feeling herself in danger of a flood of tears that would never stop, pushed her gently away and gestured toward the tray. “You are kind.”

“Gwynneth made the tea and Father sent me up with it. He wants to see you after breakfast. Why is he looking so unhappy?”

Catherine squeezed her hand and said in a tiny voice. “I can’t live like this, Eliza. . . . It’s so—I’m so—I shall end up in Clytha.” Clytha was the local lunatic asylum.

“Catherine.” Eliza’s smile was strained. “Don’t be cross with me for saying this, but we are all dreadfully worried for you. You seem so particularly out of sorts, and it’s starting to upset Father and—” A furrow appeared between Eliza’s usually cloudless blue eyes. “
Please
say sorry to him, vex him no further.”

“I’m like a prisoner here,” said Catherine. “I have nothing to look forward to, nothing to do, and everywhere I go that woman is there, changing things and giving advice and talking to us about Nice Young Men, oh surely Eli, you feel it, too?”

“I do, darling,” said Eliza patting her hand. “But I do believe in . . . in . . .” she looked around wildly for inspiration, “‘one day at a time,’ and, it may sound awfully silly to say this, but if you put a smile on your face, you will feel better.”

Oh my God, her poor little sister, reduced to quoting from
The Strength of My Life
. “Oh Eli”—Catherine grasped her sister’s hand—“dear little goose. If only I was as good as you, and as nice.”

“I’m not nice.” Eliza squeezed her hand again, it was quite an effort talking to her older sister like this, Catherine had been her heroine for so long. “I just think what would Mother have wanted?”

“Not this,” said Catherine. “Not for herself or for us.”

* * *

After breakfast, she went downstairs and found Father in the parlor.

“Sit down, Catherine,” he said. He could not meet her eye. He looked around wildly for the green velvet chair Mother had sat in near the window.

“She’s put it near the fire,” said Catherine. “It’s a more
suitable
position.”

He smiled at her, in a bobbing reluctant way. “Sit down there then,” he said in a low voice.

“Thank you.” She sat down and looked straight ahead.

“I was wondering,” he said, stroking his beard, “I mean I know—I have been thinking . . .”

He put his head in his hand and sighed deeply. “What’s wrong, Catherine? Tell me. Get it out.”

She fought an impulse to say the right thing, the loving thing, the thing that would smooth everything over.

“Send her away,” she said softly.

“I don’t want to yet,” he said. “She’s a good woman and you and Eliza won’t be here forever.”

The plain-faced clock over the mantelpiece was ticking, making her feel more nervous than she already was.

“Then send me,” she said in a whisper. He didn’t hear her. When she looked at him again, his own face was working against tears.

“I am working day and night to try and get the farm back on its feet,” he said. “Can’t you see that?” His voice wobbled and died out. “She at least is trying to help, and she is my sister.”

“You didn’t like her when she was little, old snitch, bossy boots,” she thought. She’d heard him say it scores of times.

She longed for him to talk about Mother. Say how he missed her, and how both of them in their own ways might have done more. Anything was better than this numb dislike between them. Then they might have kissed and cried and got this sorrow from them. But he was standing up and sighing and talking about the hay in the top field.

“Cheer up.” Father picked up his hat and walked toward the
door. “You’ve got things to look forward to if you think about it—your grandmother’s party for instance, you’ll enjoy that.”

“In six months time,” she almost shouted. “What am I to do until then?”

“I’ll tell you what you do, madam.” His mouth was quivering with rage, and he had his great hands out, ticking off ideas one by one. “Needlework, shopping, gardening, bottling. It was a good enough life for your mother.”

“It was not,” she shouted inwardly, “she was half mad with boredom and loneliness.”

She saw it suddenly with an inward shudder. They were like two small boats adrift on a huge dark ocean. With her last ounce of self-control, she said, “Father, please let me go out this afternoon. I’ll take Juno for a ride? I’ll help Aunt Gwynneth this morning with the mending and the flowers, but I must have some air.”

He had his back to her but she could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was furious.

“You must do as you please,” he said.

“I will,” a small cold voice inside her said. “I must now.”

After an almost silent lunch, Catherine saddled up Juno for the first time in over a year and rode out. It had rained all morning, and the sun shone on wet grass and shorn fields. She rode in the direction of Aberdaron where Eleri Holdsworth lived in a spartan house overlooking the bay. Catherine had roughly three hours between now and suppertime to carry out the plan that Miss Holdsworth was part of.

It was lovely out, with Juno striding beneath her. Beyond the fields, the sea creased out in silver and pearl folds toward the horizon. Thanks to the horses and to Deio, she knew all the tracks and the fields. She rode past the hollow tree where she and Deio used to play animal doctors with Lily, his spaniel, who adored being handled and who rolled her eyes and swooned with pleasure when they wrapped her in sheets and pretended to bleed her, to lose her, to rescue her. And there, near the stream, was the place where Deio had once made her laugh until she’d nearly wet her drawers, by jumping on a stone and holding out his hat and singing
Ooover tha weengs oh the weengs of a doooove
in the warbly voice of Miss Pitkeathly, who did recitals at the church.

Going down the steep, slippery sheep track that led to Eleri’s house, she was glad of Juno’s sure tread. A foot or so away from the path was a sheer drop down to the beach, and you could hear the sucking and pounding of the surf below. As a child, when sudden moods of voluptuous misery had come without warning, she had loved it up here, where the whole world—the gulls crying in the
empty air, the howling wind off the sea—seemed as lost and lonely as she.