A String in the Harp (3 page)

But here David was all they had, and Jen felt rather bleak as she remembered Peter’s words. She’d missed her family far more than she’d expected to once they’d gone. Her first semester at school hadn’t been particularly successful. Even Aunt Beth had seen that. Everyone made allowances in the beginning: Jen had so many adjustments to make. But it didn’t get better; it actually got worse, and she had finally admitted to herself she needed her father and Peter and Becky more than she needed home.

By November Aunt Beth was running out of patience, and when Jen had come down with ’flu and then a particularly violent cold, which sank her into depression and made her nearly impossible to live with, Aunt Beth had thrown in the towel. She wrote to her brother suggesting that his eldest daughter might like to be invited to Wales for Christmas vacation. And David had dutifully sent the invitation in one of his regular letters, those letters full of a determined cheerfulness and almost nothing else. They gave away very little. Jen realized what a sketchy preparation she’d had for Borth.

And for Peter. What in the world was wrong with him?
But she knew—he was every bit as miserable and bitter now as he had been before they’d come. At least Becky seemed to be her usual, cheerful self. Thank heaven for that! Jen wished suddenly and desperately that her mother was here and fell asleep, finally, wondering what it would be like if she were.

***

A cold, gray daylight filled the room when Jen woke, and Becky’s bed was empty. The clock on the little night table said ten past ten, and everything in the room was unfamiliar: the shape of the windows, the white curtains, the cracks in the ceiling. Jen lay for a minute feeling depressed and unwelcome. Life at Bryn Celyn had started as usual this morning as if she weren’t there. But that’s silly, she told herself firmly, they’re just letting me sleep because they knew I was tired.

Before she let herself go any further, she struggled upright to find the air beyond her bedclothes bitterly cold. She grimaced as her feet touched the icy floor and she dove for the pile of clothes she’d left out last night: jersey and jeans, her blue wool pullover and wool socks.

Bathroom’s the door at the top of the stairs, she muttered, and remembered it was in two rooms—toilet and sink in a narrow little closet with a frosted glass window, tub and sink in the huge room next to it. The floor was a vast expanse of cold, pebbly linoleum and the bathtub stood on curved claw feet. When she turned on the hot water to wash her face, she was immediately enveloped in a cloud of steam, and the cold water could only have been a degree or two above ice. On her way out, Jen almost fell over a strange cylindrical object in the middle of the floor. It was about three feet high and balanced on little legs and she glared at it crossly.

“Damn,” she said with feeling.

Peter and Becky were sprawled comfortably at the kitchen table surrounded by the usual Sunday morning debris of cereal boxes, jam jars, plates covered with toast crumbs, sticky knives, and mugs of milk and tea. An extra place had
been set next to Becky, and Jen cheered up to find proof that she really was expected.

“Good morning!” Becky greeted her. “You must have really been asleep—you never even moved when I got up. Do you want some orange juice?”

Jen nodded. “Thank heaven it’s warmer in here!”

Peter looked up from the book he was reading. “Noticed the cold, did you?” he said pleasantly.

“Isn’t the heating on upstairs?”

“What heating?”

“But—” said Jen.

“Oh, there is some in the bathroom. You probably saw the paraffin heater? When Dad bought it, the man in the hardware shop told us it was the very newest model—you can even boil a kettle on the top if you need to.”

“Paraffin heater?” said Jen blankly.

“Mmm. What we’d call a kerosene stove. You fill it with pink stuff, light the wick, and in ten minutes if you haven’t blown up you have a room full of what they call ‘pink warmth.’ ” Peter was gauging her reaction. “You have to be a little careful about asphyxiation, though, the man warned us.”

“That’s the heat?”

“That’s it.”

“But what about in the bedrooms?”

“Another tremendous advantage of that heater—you can move it from room to room, you see.”

“Dad said we could get another one before Christmas,” Becky broke in on Peter’s relentless explanation. “And we really aren’t in our bedrooms much except to go to bed.”

“I can see why.” Jen shivered involuntarily.

“Oh, you get used to it,” Peter assured her. “At least that’s what they
say.”

“What about the rest of the house, the downstairs?”

“The kitchen’s nearly always warm because of the stove
and the hot water heater, and there’s a gas fire in Dad’s study and a coal fire in the lounge.”

“Very
efficient,” said Peter, returning to his book.

Becky made a face at him which he didn’t see. “You really do get used to it. It just means wearing more clothes,” she said.

The kettle was boiling on the back of the gas stove, and Jen made herself a mug of instant coffee, half filling it with milk and sugar.

“Is there any toast?”

There were two slices, both stone cold. Jen sighed and said she’d make more, where was the toaster? But the toaster was a grill under the top of the stove, which Becky wasn’t allowed to light and Peter claimed he didn’t know how to, so Jen had to content herself with a couple of slices of bread and jam.

“Where’s Dad?”

“He ate long ago,” said Becky. “He’s in his study.”

“Working?”

“Grading papers.”

“He hates being disturbed,” warned Peter.

“This is ridiculous,” said Jen looking around the kitchen. She felt a mixture of desperation and helplessness. This wasn’t what she’d imagined, not at all.

“I’ve been saying that ever since we got to this awful place, but all
he
does is get furious.”

“But what about meals? How do you manage?”

“Mrs. Davies,” Becky said. “She lives next door and cleans and makes us supper, and dinner on weekends. She does cleaning for another professor down the way, too.”

“Thank goodness for that! Is she nice?” Jen was relieved to find it wasn’t quite as bad as she had, for a black moment, thought.

“Mmm. She is quite,” Becky sounded a little cautious.

“She’s a perfect witch,” contradicted Peter.

“No, she isn’t. Mr. Davies drives one of the buses, and
everyone calls him Hugh-the-Bus because there are so many other people named Davies, so you tell them apart by what they do, like Billy-Davies-Taxi. Hugh-the-Bus knows absolutely everyone and he tells me all about them when I go next door for lunch on school days.”

Jen grinned with grudging admiration at her sister. Trust Becky to have stored away lots of information about people already. She always took great interest in whoever was around.

“. . . and she has three children, but they’re grown up now and only one’s at home. Her daughters are married and one of them lives in Bow Street, which is very close. The other’s gone to Birmingham, and Mrs. Davies says
she
can’t see why anyone would want to live there. Gwilym’s the one at home—he’s still in school. You’ll see Mrs. Davies when she comes to fix dinner.”

“Well,” said Jen, “what do you do on Sundays?”

“Homework,” Peter said gloomily. “Try to keep warm. There isn’t much else.”

“I’ll take you to get the newspapers,” Becky volunteered. “You can see the shop.”

“Don’t get too excited,” Peter advised.

“What about the dishes?”

“Leave them for Mrs. Davies.”

Jen looked doubtful. “I don’t think we should.”

“We always do,” said Peter irritably. “She gets paid for it anyway.”

Becky shrugged. “It won’t take long.”

“Not me,” said Peter, picking up his book. He paused at the door to say, “She’ll expect us to do them every week now.”

“No one will expect
you
to do anything,” retorted Jen, flinging a handful of knives and forks into the dishpan.

***

Borth certainly was a peculiar-looking town. Jen had to agree with Peter. She’d never seen anything like it either. Becky paused in front of the house to point out the landmarks before
they walked down to the shop, and Jen stared out over the cliff in fascination. Borth was, indeed, one street wide and about two miles long, shops and houses strung out on the street like beads on a cord. To the west was a wide margin of sandy beach and the cold-looking sheet of Cardigan Bay; to the east, the strange, desolate expanse of Borth Bog: dull patches of tan and wind-bitten green. She wondered if the town were there simply to show where the sea ended and the Bog began.

“And at the end is the Dovey River,” Becky said, pointing. “You came along it in the train. The mountains are on the other side of it.”

Today they were only a vague outline, lost in the gray, damp air. Jen began to realize just how far she was from Amherst. This was all outside her experience utterly. Wildness and isolation swept in over them on the salt-smelling wind.

“What’re you thinking?” said Becky at last.

“I don’t know. That it’s awfully big and empty, I guess.”

Becky nodded. “I felt that way, too, when we first came. I still do sometimes, and I don’t think I’d like to stay here forever.”

“But Dad never said you would.”

“It would be a lot easier—” Becky hesitated.

“If what?” Jen prompted gently.

“Oh, if Dad and Peter didn’t go at each other so much. Peter won’t even try to get along. He just complains, and Dad gets really cross, then shuts himself up for hours and hours in his study, which doesn’t help.” She sighed.

“And what do
you
do?”

“Well, it’s not so bad for me. I can go and visit Mrs. Davies, and Gwilym takes me for walks sometimes. He knows an awful lot about birds and plants and he doesn’t mind if I go along when he goes looking for them. And there’s school, too. I know a lot of people there.”

“Does Peter? Know anyone, I mean?”

“Not that he ever talks about. He’s as bad as Dad; he spends most of his time by himself reading.”

“Peter?” said Jen in surprise. “That’s new.”

“I know, but he does.”

Oh, help, thought Jen, what
is
happening? Back in Amherst, Peter had loads of friends, so had their parents. There were always extra people in the house and too many things to do. Peter had never been one for sitting still and reading; he hadn’t been happy unless he was in the middle of some furious activity. And she could remember countless evenings when the living room of their house had been full of her father’s colleagues deep in heated conversation. She wondered if Becky was as cheerful as she seemed. Her own thoughts were apprehensive.

The shop was at the bottom of the cliff road, a whitewashed building set on a crossroad and it announced with a sign over its door that it was both a shop and the Borth Post Office. Inside was a maze of little aisles between shelves piled high with the oddest assortment of stuff Jen had ever seen. Packages of biscuits and bins of apples and oranges stood next to piles of men’s shirts and tennis shoes, jigsaw puzzles, flashlight batteries, paperback books, tins of soup, jars of jam and cases of milk bottles. Wellington boots, spades, and buckets hung from rope overhead, and in one corner was a little window covered with a grill that said “Closed” and gave the Post Office hours. How on earth do you find anything, Jen wondered, incredulous. But Becky had already sorted out the papers they wanted and was introducing her sister to Mr. Williams, the shopkeeper.

The shop was busy with people, half of whom were dressed somberly in what Jen guessed were church clothes: dark suits and coats, the women with hats and gloves on; the other half in jeans and jackets and old boots, rumpled-looking and chilly. Students, Becky told her when they were outside.

“There are lots of them in Borth. They rent the summer
cottages down by the railroad tracks or live in guest houses. There aren’t very many dormitories at the University. Gwilym says they live in digs, but I’m not quite sure what that means.”

“Sounds odd,” Jen commented.

“Gwilym wants to go to the University himself when he finishes school, only he told me his mother doesn’t see why he should.”

Jen was shocked. “But she should
want
him to if he’s smart enough.”

“She says it just means three more years before he can get a job and earn some money. Hugh-the-Bus never went, neither did Gwilym’s sisters.”

“What does he want to do?”

“There’s a place near here called the Plant Breeding Station.”

“Plant Breeding Station?” Jen repeated. She felt a sense of unreality.

“It breeds plants.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.” Becky sounded a little impatient. “It’s back in the hills, and there are a lot of botanists there who experiment with growing all kinds of crops, like clover and different kinds of grasses, to find out which are the best for feeding animals. Gwilym says crops discovered here are grown all over the world.”

“And he wants to do that?”

“Mmm. But his mother thinks it’s silly.”

***

Mrs. Davies was in control of the kitchen by the time they got back. She was an angular woman with a sharp face and wiry gray hair, struggling out of a knot at the back of her head. She was scrubbing potatoes into submission at the sink.

“Hello,” said Becky. “What’s for dinner?”

“Roast, potatoes, and sprouts,” said Mrs. Davies
shortly. She fixed Jen with pale blue eyes. “You’ll be Jennifer then. I expect you can help out a bit now that you’re here. Look after things once I’ve got them started, you can.”

“Yes,” said Jen, wondering what looking after things would involve. After all, this was her vacation.

“We did the dishes for you,” Becky informed her, sitting on the edge of the table.

“So I noticed. Shouldn’t think that brother of yours had much to do with it,” she said tartly.

“He had homework.” Becky covered for him.

“Shouldn’t wonder,” snorted Mrs. Davies. “I’ll get the veg on”—it took Jen a moment to realize she meant “vegetables”—“then leave, if you don’t mind. I’ve me daughter coming for dinner and your roast’s in the oven. It’s planned for one o’clock and all you need do is take it out when it’s done.” She dumped the potatoes, thoroughly subdued, into a pot of boiling water.