Band of Angels: A Novel - Softcover

Julia Gregson has worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent in the UK, Australia, and the US. She is the author of East of the Sun, which was a major bestseller in the UK and won the Romantic Novel of the Year Prize and the Le Prince Maurice Prize there, and Monsoon Summer. Her short stories have been published in collections and magazines and read on the radio. She lives in Monmouthshire, Wales.

Chapter 2

Poor Mother looked excited when Catherine got home. She had left the door to the parlor slightly ajar so that she could hear her coming. A fire crackled in the grate, the beaded lamp was lit. She had the Caernarfon and Denbigh Herald on her lap.

“I’ve been making a list of all the things we can do now I’m feeling better,” she said.

Her face, pretty and flushed, had taken on the rose and amber colors of the lamp beads. “Look!” She handed over the newspaper. “There is sea bathing in South Wales. Sea bathing! We can take the coach from Caernarfon at”—she peered at the advertisement—“at the Uxbridge Arms. It leaves at seven o’clock in the morning. We really could swim and eat ice creams and walk along the beach and be back on the following day. I’m also determined on you and Eliza having a new dress each,” she prattled on gaily, “something in satin I fancy—Father’s hay crop was so good he will not object—you are old enough now for puff sleeves, at least I think you are.”

She looked over the newspaper for Catherine’s reaction.

“Oh my darling.” She held out her arms. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.”

“It is not,” wept Catherine. “I am glad you are so much better and we will have fun.”

“I should have gone and explained myself.”

“But you do not know them like I do.”

“Did you say how extremely grateful we have all been, how highly we esteem them as neighbors. I should not have left it all to you. I shall write to them myself.”

“She can’t read in English,” said Catherine forlornly, “so there is no point.”

“Oh Weddy Bloodstairs!” Weddy Bloodstairs was Mother’s all-purpose Welsh swear word. Usually it made her laugh, for Father was very solemn about them learning Welsh and it was deliciously sacrilegious, but today, at this precise moment, the memory of Mother halfheartedly toying with her Welsh lessons like a child forced to eat its greens annoyed Catherine.

“It is too difficult,” Mother would protest, after her teacher, the small and bossy Miss Davies, had left the house. “The sounds are awful, like a cat about to be sick.” Father had been humorless about it, but he was right. You could not live in a place and ignore its language—or you could, but you could expect to be, as Mother had been, lonely. “Well, it is done now and I don’t want to think about it.” Catherine tried to sound cheerful. “I’ll draw the curtains; we can have tea by the fire.”

And so their lives took on a new routine. In the mornings, she and Mother and Eliza helped Mair in the kitchen with household tasks: they made butter, washed dishes, waxed, bottled, and cooked. Eliza, dear Eliza, so gentle and blond and lovable, performed these tasks with a grave absorption that sometimes wrung Catherine’s heart. Eliza wanted nothing more from life than to be a farmer’s wife and to have as many healthy children as possible. Why was she so different? Why, in the middle of polishing silver or podding peas, did she feel at times a wild surge of outrage that life, after all, was nothing more than a series of endlessly circulating, footling tasks that made you feel like a donkey tied to a wheel.

And what about Mother? Once, long ago, when Father had talked and laughed, he’d described his moment of magic: seeing Mother, aged nineteen, in the moonlight on the veranda of his parents’ house in the foothills of Snowdonia. He’d remember what she’d worn: a long silver dress with a row of pearl buttons down the front. It was a summer ball; there was money for such things in those days. She was the daughter of a friend of his father’s, a land agent. Her name was Felicia. She’d come from London. And Catherine, forever after, had imagined her sitting there in the moonlight under the dark of the mountains, a transplanted creature like a mermaid.

Now, she watched her mother’s long dreamy fingers patting butter in the dairy, or folding up the umpteenth sheet on washing days. How did she stand it, and how did Mair? Mair, who believed that the fairies would come if you left your kitchen clean. You could hear her at six o’clock in the morning singing as she cleaned out the hearth. Did she never want to throw her brush down and shriek, at the top of her lungs, “I need more.”

In the afternoons, Father took them on short outings—somehow the longer trips had not materialized. Catherine, who was still angry with him, suspected that the trips were really only for him. He was helplessly in love with Juno, his dark bay cob, and the spanking little governess cart he kept in the cowshed that, with its brasses and gleaming mahogany sides, was a relic of grander days. He almost smiled at Catherine as he brought the horse to a halt, knowing that normally she would have shared this moment of pure pleasure at the perfection of the horse. The carriage jingled faintly as her mother put her foot on the step. She tried to smile back but already felt the claustrophobia of a family outing. The sun was out, the waves danced in the distance; just the kind of day to gallop full pelt down the beach at Whistling Sands.

While the carriage made its way through the high hedgerows she glanced at her father’s back and wondered what had happened to them. Father, with his red whiskers and faint smell of tobacco, had once been the rock her life was built on: a permanent statement of power and intent, like the sea, like Snowdon. He had lifted her onto her first pony, plucked her from the apple tree when she got stuck, walloped her one afterward and cheered her up later with a peace offering of a barley sugar. He kept them in a tin in his smoking cabinet, and distributed them to his children with a grave impartiality so much more thrilling than mother’s nervous, open-handed generosity.

Catherine had loved him once, and hoped to love him again in spite of the cold draft of dislike she sometimes now felt as she watched him chewing or sitting reading Farmer’s Almanac by the fire or talking—or usually not talking—to Mother. Now you had to watch him as carefully as you might watch an aggressive dog or a stallion too free with its heels, or perhaps it had always been so but she was only starting to notice. Now when he walked into the house, you had to watch his heels: laugh at his jokes, pick up on his few-and-far-between remarks, not forget his strictures about closing doors or leaving dogs out or not coming to the table with dirty hands, or else the reaction would be swift and sure and Mother would get sad and pale and sometimes have to go to bed for the afternoon.

Father dropped them off in the small seaside town of Pwllheli. The plan was a short walk to a shop where they were to search for bonnet trimmings. At Siop Sion’s, the haberdashers, they had not got the precise shade, “almost a robin’s egg blue,” as Mother said to an assistant whose head was shaking almost as the words came out. “Thank you anyway,” said Mother. The jangling bell at the door of the shop seemed to mock them as they left. Mother and Eliza seemed quite content as they swung arm-in-arm down the cobbled street that led to the harbor, but Catherine felt quite dizzy with futility. How could some doodle on a hat take up the entire morning for three grown women?

Father was irritable with them as they drove home. The beautiful day had not lasted and a faint mizzling rain was making him anxious about the haymaking planned for the next day. When the door of the governess cart was shut behind them and the green rug settled over their knees, he set off toward home without a word. A mist had rolled in off the water, blurring the point where sea met sky and making the occasional farm, glimpsed through a wet hedge, look dreamlike; nothing seemed real except the small enclosed world of their cart and the clip-clop of Juno’s heels. The sound was soporific, and Catherine, leaving her parents to their awkward communications, dozed for a while. When she woke, they had reached the main road to Aberdaron. The countryside had darkened around them, and in one or two of the houses up on the hill lights flickered uncertainly like fireflies.

Catherine’s spirits were so low that she missed the sound that made Juno’s ears prick and Father sit up straighter. Then she heard it, “Hip Hop Tro,” at first faintly, then louder, “Hip, Hop Trooooh!” Then a burst of singing, and the metallic clatter of horse’s hooves.

Out of the mist came the shapes of two dozen or so Welsh Blacks, then two men on horseback, whose song came to a ragged halt. Deio’s father, Lewis Jones, tipped his hat briefly toward her and Mother. Deio’s brother, Rob, pointed an imaginary gun at Father in a joking, oddly debonair gesture.

“Off tomorrow lads, is it?” said Father, smiling and talking to them in Welsh. “Not a bad life, eh? Where to?”

“Gloucester, Northleach, Redland, Thame, Hampstead, Pentonville, Smithfield,” Lewis recited.

“Don’t drink all your money on the way home then,” said Father.

“What about you, neighbor?” said Rob. “Watching your weeds grow?”

“I’ll be here,” said Father, with a patient shrug that made Catherine recoil.

Then Deio rode out of the mist, and came alongside her. He did not look at her but sat loose-limbed on his horse, a damp wind playing with his hair. He was close enough to touch and Mother saw the look that passed between them. “My dear,” she said to her husband, “I’m feeling rather tired, could we . . .”

She could have jumped on his horse from where she sat.

“Aye aye.” Father dragged himself back into the world of tiresome women and afternoon teas. “We’ll go home and have tea by the fire.” He was gentle with his daughter who had grown quite pale. He could afford to be now he’d won that battle. She did not hear him; her eyes had locked with Deio’s. “Take me away,” they said.

The year passed. She heard through the grapevine that the drovers were much in demand and away most of the time. It was easier when they were gone. She also preferred the winter months when the wind blew off the Atlantic and bent the trees on the Lleyn like little old men and it got dark an hour or so after lunch and there was no possibility of going anywhere. Then the light died, first in the wet trees outside their windows, then in the distant peaks of the mountains beyond. They’d build up a fire in the parlor and close the shutters, and Mair would bring them tea and toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. Mother seemed so happy. Sometimes, her eyes would fill with tears and she would look at them as if for the first time and say, “I have wonderful daughters. I have done nothing to deserve them.”

At other times, after tea, she would make them laugh by dragging out what she called her Road to Hell box, a small carved box full of spools of cotton and tangled skeins of silk and her pile of unfinished projects: a tray cloth that only needed a handful of stitches to be finished; the tapestry for a footstool that had waited three years to be mounted. Sometimes she would hold up these items and attempt a serious lecture on the importance of finishing things, but her nature was too fluid and subtle for sermons and she often ended up making them hoot with laughter. It was something about the disparaging way her long fingers held up the trolley cloth and the beaded tray, the way her voice tailed off as she tried to work up enthusiasm for the idea that God was up there, waiting impatiently for the beaded tray.

What they most looked forward to was the moment when Mother’s needle dithered over the canvas and she began to tell stories. One afternoon when it was pelting with rain and the mountains just a gray blur in the distance, she told them, Catherine was never to forget it, in a voice steely with self-control, about her own mother who had died of tuberculosis. She was seven years old. She’d been in trouble the day before, she’d torn her dress and been whipped severely, three times on each hand. Mother held out both her hands, and such was her power as a storyteller that both Eliza and Catherine leaned forward, mingling their red and fair hairs in the lamplight, sure the marks would still be there. Mother had been naughty, she’d been attempting to fly with an umbrella over the henhouse and she was sure it was her fault when, a few days later, the sanatoria’s gray cabriole arrived at their door. She remembered everything: the coachman’s umbrella swooping down like a terrible bird. The sound of rain on the tarpaulin. The flutter of her mother’s hand as she drove away. The look on Mother’s face as she told this story, pierced Catherine to the heart. Normally, Mother tried so hard to make her stories have happy endings and to tell them only about nice things. Sometimes, when they were young, this had ludicrous consequences. “Don’t look, my loves,” Mother would say if they passed a squashed squirrel or a rabbit on the road. “It’s sleeping, it was going to a party and it is having a sleep.” And Mair, if she was with them, would look at her in astonishment and say, “That ain’t asleep, Mrs. Carreg, that’s dead as mutton.”

Silly as these attempts were, her determination not to inflict her own sufferings on her children was heroic. For her spirits were either very high or unfathomably low. She swung on a seesaw that seemed to get higher and lower as the years progressed, and later she was quite unreachable in her sadness, sometimes for months on end. There were one or two terrible “cures,” many afternoons in darkened rooms, and yet Catherine, when young, had had very little understanding of her mother’s nerves, which, to say the least, were permanently strained.

Later, Catherine wished she had known more about the bad things. About pain and loss and sorrow. If she had, she would have been more prepared for what happened next.

© 2004 Julia Gregson