A String in the Harp (21 page)

“Did I?” David allowed himself the merest hint of a smile. “And who’s going to explain to your aunt, Jennifer? She will not be pleased, I can tell you. I was irresponsible enough to have brought Becky and Peter here. I can just hear her, if I write to say you’re staying, too.”

“I could write and say it was my idea to stay.”

“You’d have to! I’m not going to take the blame!” He rubbed his chin. “And I’m not going to decide this now, either. We’ll talk about it in the morning when I’ve had a chance to think. If you want to change your mind you’re free to say so then.”

Jen could hardly believe he meant he was actually going to consider the idea. She had expected him to dismiss it altogether as nonsense.

“Have you got any other bombshells, or is that it for the evening?” David asked.

There was a tentative knock on the study door.

“Yes?”

“Me.” Becky stuck her head around it. She was in pajamas and bathrobe. “I just came to say good-night.”

David looked from Becky to Jen and back. “Did you?”

“What have you been talking about?”

“As if you didn’t know,” said Jen tartly.

“Were you really? And?”

“This sounds like a conspiracy,” declared David. “I should have known. And nothing. Nothing’s been decided and nothing will be tonight. It’s long past your bedtime, Becky.”

“Are you cross?”

David suddenly grinned. “No. Not yet, anyway. But if you don’t go to bed and let me think, I will be! Go on.” He pulled the papers across in front of him again. “Good night.”

“Good night!”

“What did I tell you?” whispered Becky, once the study door was closed. “He wants you to stay!”

“Shhh,” warned Jen sternly. “He didn’t say yes. Not yet. I can’t believe he’ll really let me do it, Becky. Don’t count on it.”

“No,” said Becky, “but you asked. I’m glad. Let’s go tell Peter.”

“There isn’t anything to tell,” objected Jen.

“No, but . . .”

Peter was in the kitchen, chin on hands, absorbed in a little brown book propped open on the table in front of him. He only dragged himself out of it reluctantly when Becky insisted and listened with annoying indifference to the news that Jen might be staying in Borth the rest of the year.

“I don’t see why you’d want to,” he said bluntly. “If you don’t even go to school, what is there? But it’s your funeral.”

“Thanks.” Jen glared at him. Peter didn’t rise; he went back to his reading.

Jen spent a restless night going over and over the day’s events, wondering how she could be so sure of herself one minute and so scared the next. She ought to have waited and given the matter more thought before going to David. She shouldn’t have let Becky push her so fast.

***

By morning Jen was convinced that her father would have decided to send her home. The whole idea was impossible. She could afford to feel regret now: too bad she wasn’t going to be allowed to help. After all she was fifteen and quite sensible, and her father ought to treat her as an adult. She was especially nice to Becky, especially confident with the stove, especially efficient with breakfast.

When they’d all finished, with nothing more said than, “Looks like rain, Peter, take your mac,” and, “Don’t be late after school, Becky,” Jen and David were left alone. Becky reluctantly followed Peter out the front door, hoping in vain for some sort of sign from her father.

“Well,” said David at last. “I don’t have to guess your Aunt Beth’s reaction to all this—we ought to be able to hear it in Borth with no trouble.”

Jen’s stomach gave an unpleasant lurch. He couldn’t. . .

David went on. “I spent most of last night thinking over what you said. I can’t agree with all of it, Jen, but you were quite right about one thing: your mother would have made us
stay together. She would have thought that was more important than all the rest of it. I’m not certain that’s right, but if you’ve honestly made up your mind to stay, we’ll make the arrangements.”

Jen had no words. She couldn’t turn around and tell him she’d thought about it too and come to just the opposite conclusion. She felt panic.

“You understand that this has got to be a working agreement, Jen. It’s not going to be easy. I have a hunch there’s more to housekeeping than you think, but we all have to learn. And I don’t expect you to take over the whole business, of course. We’ll work out a plan with Mrs. Davies. And if you’re going to miss half a year of school, you can at least keep up with your reading. I’ll give you a list.” He hesitated. “Jen, I never did like leaving you in Amherst last fall, but Beth persuaded me it was right, and this may be all wrong. I’d like to have you here, but are you quite sure you want to stay?”

He was giving her a last chance. He was being honest with her, she knew he was, he did want her to stay. And she heard herself saying, “It’s only six months. Lots of kids miss school because they move or get sick or travel.”

David nodded. He seemed to be thinking hard. “We’ve had problems this year I’d never expected, all of us. I’m afraid I’ve gotten pretty wound up in my own, and I don’t know as much as I should about yours and Becky’s and Peter’s, that’s obvious.” He searched carefully for the right words. “I’ve hedged myself in with work, and I think I seem to you too busy to listen when you need me. But I’m not—I don’t want to be. If you’ve got something to say, just come and shout at me until I hear you. I don’t have lots of answers, Jen, but I’ll do my best for you. Please don’t count me out.”

“No,” said Jen in a strange, tight voice.

“I suppose the thing to remember is that if we’re together then none of us has to be alone. Pretty heavy stuff!” He smiled at her. “Cheer up—I almost think the worst part’ll be telling
Beth and Ted. Beth’s opinion of me can’t get much lower! I’ll cable them and phone the Sullivans in London, and your first chore can be writing that letter.”

Jen was still at it when Becky burst in at noon. Rejected beginnings littered the kitchen table.

“I
knew
he’d agree! I knew he would! I told you he wants you to stay.” Becky beamed at her in delight.

“He’s going to expect a lot,” said Jen.

“That’s all right. I’ll help, I promised. I’m
so
glad!”

Jen had to smile at Becky’s enthusiasm.

After lunch they went down the hill together, Becky back to school, Jen to post the letter she’d finally finished to Aunt Beth. She hoped it sounded properly grateful, apologetic, and reasonable, but she was afraid it mainly sounded awkward. She stuck it quickly through the slot in the post office, and it was gone. There was no way to get it back again.

Mrs. Davies’s reaction was down to earth and practical. “It’ll make a difference to me schedule, of course,” she said. “I shall have me hands full between you and Susan, shouldn’t wonder. Good thing it isn’t summer, too.”

Jen had enough sense to realize that she must stay on the better side of Mrs. Davies; she needed her help if she was going to succeed. More than once she only just saved herself from making an unfortunate remark, when Mrs. Davies criticized or pointed out jobs that had to be done.

It was agreed that Mrs. Davies would continue to supervise Bryn Celyn until Jen and David both decided it wasn’t necessary. Jen would learn shopping and the fundamentals of cooking, and Jen vowed to herself she’d learn as fast as she possibly could.

Mrs. Davies wanted no nonsense. Housekeeping was her vocation and she was a tyrant about square corners on beds and dust on mantels and sand on the kitchen floor. She made a tidy income from bed and breakfast at Ty Gwyn, and this was her business. It didn’t take Jen long to learn that the
depressing part of housework was that it never stayed done. You never finished a job and then forgot it. You washed breakfast dishes, made beds, straightened the bathroom, swept the floors. Then the sink was full of lunch dishes, and someone had tracked mud in from the back garden or had taken a bath and left puddles of water on the floor. Work came undone almost as fast as you did it, and people only noticed what wasn’t done, not what was.

Jen’s nervousness wore off quickly. She suffered a morning of real homesickness the first Monday, when she suddenly realized she ought to be in Amherst, starting school again that very day, instead of changing beds and sorting laundry. Becky was as good as her promises, though. She could be counted on for help with anything, and her delight in having Jen still in Borth was flattering.

But Becky’s enthusiasm couldn’t quite make up for Peter’s aloofness. Jen was cross with herself because she let it bother her, but she couldn’t help it. Peter made it clear he didn’t care what she did, so long, he stated flatly, as she didn’t try to give him orders. She didn’t have the right to do that. She must leave him alone.

“He is the most uncooperative—!” she exploded frequently to Becky.

“Och,” said Rhian with a shake of her head. “They’re all like that—men.”

“Peter’s hardly a man,” contradicted Jen irritably. “He’s behaving like a little boy!”

Rhian shrugged. She often came up to Bryn Celyn for lunch with Becky. The smoky Welsh dusk crept into the afternoons so early that it was dark by the time school was out. She had to get home, and there were farm chores at Llechwedd Melyn. But she took a lively interest in Jen’s domestic struggles.

“Why you should be
wanting
to do all that, I can’t see. Me, I am never wanting to learn!”

Jen gave up trying to answer Rhian. Secretly, she wondered herself sometimes. There were days when it rained and she forgot the laundry on the line in the backyard, and the Washeteria was full of squalling babies and mums gossiping about whose daughter was seeing whose son, and why Mrs. Thomas had left her husband
this
time. She had even burst into tears one gloomy afternoon when she couldn’t get the clean socks to match.

It was so easy to forget that the toothpaste was almost gone or that they were out of cornflakes until it was too late. And she hated lugging groceries up the hill. But she had her own share of pride and stubbornness. She gritted her teeth and kept at it. Admitting she was wrong to her father was bad enough, but admitting defeat in front of Mrs. Davies was unthinkable!

Gwilym Davies began coming round in time for tea two or three times a week. Jen was too preoccupied with supper to think much about it at first, but after a while she grew curious. He never said much, just sat with the three of them, content with a cup of tea. His ears turned quite pink whenever anyone took notice of him.

“But why does he come?” Jen asked Becky one evening.

“He likes being over here, he told me,” Becky replied. “He thinks we’re peculiar.”

Jen snorted. “I suppose we are.”

“Besides,” Becky added shrewdly, “it keeps his mother quiet.”

“Oh?”

“Mmm. She thinks he ought to have friends his own age.”

“But he never opens his mouth except to swallow tea, unless he’s excited about some bird,” Jen exclaimed.

“She
doesn’t know that, does she? Haven’t you noticed that she’s always in a better mood when she finds him here? Not that it matters anyway. I like him, and even Peter’s interested in that motorbike of his.”

T
HAT
S
ATURDAY
, on the wet shoulder of Foel Goch, the shape of Peter’s life had begun to alter rapidly. It had been shifting ever since he’d found the Key among the rocks of Sarn Cynfelin, the ancient sea wall—
if
you chose to believe it was a sea wall—but after seeing Taliesin, and incomprehensibly
being seen by him
across thousands of years, the sensible part of Peter’s mind had gotten lost in the other, darker part. The Key consumed him, it demanded his whole attention, and he awaited its songs impatiently, absorbing their images like the great, gaunt hills absorbed the endless winter rain.

Jen’s stubborn refusal to accept the Key no longer bothered Peter. Becky’s willingness to be persuaded didn’t matter. His father’s preoccupation with the University didn’t irritate him. Bryn Celyn, school, Borth—all became a flat, remote background, unimportant behind the rich patterns of light and dark that the Key wove him into.

For the first time since he’d arrived in Wales, Peter opened his eyes and his heart to the ancient country of the Cymraeg around him. He felt its quickness and strength and knew, without having to learn, the mysteries of its buried past.
The
hafod
on Foel Goch, the vast, checkered expanse of Cors Fochno, the Dyfi emptying into the sea: these were suddenly more familiar to him than his own backyard in Amherst had ever been.

It was so much easier to be left to himself—he need not bother about what people thought. Jen had her hands full, learning the routines of Bryn Celyn and satisfying Mrs. Davies’s rigid standards; Becky divided her time between school and helping Jen; and David was kept busy with university work and his own study of the Welsh language in the twentieth century. What little spare time he had he spent with Jen, planning her studies. Even Gwilym was lost in schoolwork.

So Peter was free to wander with the Key. Taliesin had taken upon himself the education of this other Elphin, the son of Gwyddno Garanhir. The Bard was older, more thoughtful now than he had been with Elphin Rheged. He taught Elphin the secrets of the high russet hills and the shadowed
cwms.
Together they tended the fish weir on the river and walked the long, silver beach. Life was not so easy here; everyone, even Gwyddno himself, king of what was left of his drowned land, worked hard for food and shelter. But there was a satisfaction in it Taliesin seemed not to have known before.

Whenever the Key called Peter, no matter where he was—at Bryn Celyn, at school—he went with it. And he thought, when he bothered to, that no one noticed he was gone. After all, the outer part of Peter Morgan stayed wherever it was. He was wrong.

One gloomy Thursday, not long after the beginning of the new term, Mr. Griffith, Peter’s schoolmaster, kept him back after school. Mr. Griffith only did it with the greatest reluctance. He wanted to give Peter every chance, but at last he’d had to admit to himself that he could get no response from Morgan.