A String in the Harp (4 page)

“Ah, Mrs. Davies. You’ve met Jen already. Good.” David Morgan came in.

“Yes, Mr. Morgan. I was just saying that perhaps with your daughter here now I might be able to leave odds and ends to her if you don’t mind.”

David said he didn’t see why not. “Dinner at one?”

“Yes, Mr. Morgan.”

Jen’s fate was sealed. She and Becky left Mrs. Davies to her inferno of boiling vegetables and followed David back into his study. That room at least looked more familiar, Jen found with relief; the same clutter of books and papers and notebooks and pencils she was used to in her father’s study at home. Instead of a desk, he had covered what looked like a dining room table with his work and filled a small bookcase with volumes he’d brought from Amherst.

“Well,” he said, as they all sat down. “Are you settled yet? Have you caught up with yourself? The time change is a bit hard to get used to.”

Jen nodded. “It’s funny to think how far I’ve come so quickly.”

“I know, but you’ll adjust. What’s become of Peter? Did he go down to get the papers with you?”

“No,” said Jen.

David frowned. “I don’t know what’s the matter with him for the life of me! He’s been impossible since we got here. In fact, I’ve been hoping that with you around he might begin to show some sense again, but as it is, I can’t talk to him without losing my temper completely.”

Dinner was a determinedly cheerful meal. Peter turned up in time. Jen and Becky had got the roast out and the vegetables and potatoes off the stove just when they were supposed to, but the whole dinner was overdone. The sprouts were mushy, the potatoes fell apart, and the meat was leather-brown clear through. Jen was on the verge of apologizing when she realized that she was the only one who’d noticed. Everyone else ate without comment.

By the time the dishes had been cleared away, rain had closed like curtains across the windows, making it impossible to go out. David made up a fire in the room across from his study, which Becky called the lounge, and left his three children there to amuse themselves. Jen disliked the room on sight—it was a dreadful jumble of colors and patterns and ghastly furniture. The walls were papered in ships-and-harbors of green and blue, the carpet on the floor was wall-to-wall flowers of orange, brown, and black, and the sofa and two chairs were slipcovered in green and yellow. Over the green-tiled fireplace was an impressive collection of china horses and a large ashtray that said “Isle of Man” on it in gold. A large television set, an imitation wood coffee table, and one floor lamp completed the decor, leaving Jen breathless.

Becky followed her gaze around the improbable room. “It’s the way they do things,” she said with a giggle. “You should see Mrs. Davies’s lounge.”

“I don’t think I’m ready.”

“There’s a fire, though.” Becky settled down with her school books in front of it and Peter sank into one of the armchairs to read. Jen sat uneasily in a corner of the sofa and set herself to writing Aunt Beth and Uncle Ted the letter she’d promised. But from time to time she couldn’t help looking up to convince herself the room really did look like that.

I
F
B
ORTH WASN’T
what Jen had imagined, her arrival wasn’t exactly what Peter had hoped for either. He’d been foolish enough to expect everything to change when she came. She would, of course, be horrified at what their father had brought them to: a cold, bleak, comfortless country. Even David would have to see it then and he’d have to admit he was wrong to make them stay. Then they could all go home together. Peter had been counting on it, but it wasn’t happening.

It was all very well for Jen, of course. She could go home after Christmas, Peter thought bitterly, watching her over the top of his book. She didn’t have to stick it out for months and months. He stared drearily out the window at the rain. You wouldn’t have thought there was that much water in the sky, but it came endlessly; he couldn’t remember a day without some rain in it. He wished he could have swapped places with Jen—gone home while she came here, but
he
didn’t have any choice.

No one understood how lonely and frustrated he was. Becky had already found friends of her own, and David was preoccupied with work. Peter hadn’t made any friends at all. Many of the boys at school went straight home afterward to
work in their fathers’ shops or on their farms, and the ones who didn’t all played games he didn’t know, like cricket which looked silly, or more often something they called football that wasn’t football at all. Peter stayed aloof and continued to feel strange.

And there was nowhere to go, nowhere at all. The house, Bryn Celyn, was cold and unwelcoming. No one was waiting there for him after school to give him a snack and hear how his day had been. Like as not Becky would be off at Mrs. Davies’s or down in the village with girls her own age, and David never got back until suppertime. Then he shut himself away immediately afterward until time for Peter and Becky to go to bed.

If Peter didn’t return to Bryn Celyn after school, he had the dismal choice of either wandering the sodden countryside, going nowhere in particular, or of hanging about the local shops, none of which amounted to anything.

School was no better, he reflected gloomily. Those subjects he knew weren’t taught the way he was used to, and there were endless lessons in handwriting and dictation. They did what they called “maths” and read bits of Shakespeare and learned British history, which was full of kings and queens with the same names and hundreds of battles whose dates had to be learned by heart. And worst of all, they were taught Welsh. Peter simply could not get his father to see what a horrible waste of time it was for him to learn a language that meant absolutely nothing to anyone outside of one very tiny country. David only got cross and said that Peter and Becky were in the county schools in Borth, and for the year they were here they would participate in those schools and learn as much from them as possible. Peter hated it, every minute.

Often homesickness came upon him in great black, devouring waves, making him wretched, and he would hate everything and everyone: the bleak, wet country, the desolate village strung out along its one road, the cold sea, the people
who ignored him, the boys who played their own games without him, Becky because she was adjusting, Jen for being home in Amherst, his mother for having died and let this happen, and most of all his father, who had brought them to this place and condemned them to a whole year of life in it.

Becky kept telling Peter it would get easier for him, but it didn’t because Peter wouldn’t let it. He had to hang on to his hardness and hate or he couldn’t survive. Without the hate, there were only the intolerable homesickness and the desperate longing for his mother. These hurt far too much for him to bear alone.

Midway through the afternoon, Peter retreated from the lounge, leaving it to the two girls, and holed up in his own little room off the kitchen. He had, in all the world right now, one small comfort: a secret that he had kept from everyone so far. He had found it only about two weeks ago and he was still a bit scared of it, unsure of what it was doing, but it fascinated and attracted him and he didn’t like to be too long without it.

In the top drawer of his bureau, hidden between his two good shirts, as safe a place as any, he had decided, because he never wore them, he kept what he called the Key. He called it that because that’s what it looked most like to him and he didn’t really know what it was.

Three Saturdays ago—the usual leaden, overcast sort of day—Peter had found himself on his own. Becky had disappeared after breakfast and David was buried under stacks of first year essays in the study. Peter was feeling restless, so he pulled on his jacket and went out, down to the point of land where the War Memorial stood, beyond the houses on the Morgans’ dead-end street. He sat for a while, aimlessly throwing pebbles over the cliff at the gray roughness of Cardigan Bay. Finally he turned his collar up against the chilly wind, and thrusting his hands in his pockets because he’d forgotten gloves, he started out along the overgrown path that ran south
along the sea rim toward the town of Aberystwyth. He had no special destination in mind, no thought of walking to Aber, as Aberystwyth was called, which was seven miles over rough country. He just walked, shoulders hunched. He found he had to concentrate on where he put his feet. Under the rank grasses and dead bracken lay stones and holes and unexpected roots, and there were brambles that tore at his trousers. He had to be alert just to stay upright.

Once Peter had turned his back on Borth and gone around a bend in the path, he might have been on the edge of the world. To his left was a slope of grass, bracken, and gorse, to his right, the cliff with the sea at the bottom.

There is nothing, Peter thought a little desperately, nothing. A handful of gulls drifted past on the wind, their cries underlining the loneliness. The dampness blew up around him. He caught his foot under a tough, knotted gorse root and tripped. “Damn!” he said aloud and felt suddenly relieved. His father did not approve of swearing one bit. “Damn, damn, damn!” shouted Peter into the wind with conviction. It made him feel very much better. “I don’t care,” he called to the gulls. “I don’t care
what
you think, dumb birds! You can go anywhere you want, but I’m stuck here. Don’t you know how much better America is?” He stuck his tongue out at them.

Whenever he stopped walking, the wind cut through his jacket and made him shiver, so he kept on. No point in going back until he’d used up a good part of the day. Then he came over a rise and found himself looking down into a perfect little cove. A narrow valley, worn by a stream, lay below. On the near side was a small whitewashed house; on the far side, across a wooden footbridge, a stone hut with an overturned boat in the doorway. And spread like a yellow fan lay a triangle of sandy beach down which the stream ran to the ocean. He stood staring at it for a long moment it was so unexpected, and for just an instant Peter forgot how much he disliked the world. He was drawn to the cottage. But it was dark and
empty, the door padlocked. No smoke wisped from its chimney; its curtains were drawn. Peter tried, but he couldn’t find a crack to peer in. Someone must live here, though, Peter reasoned, the track down the valley by the stream looked well-used and he could see that the boat was in good repair.

He crossed the footbridge and walked out on the sand, which gave unpleasantly under his feet and got into his shoes. Toward the water it was firmer and damp. The tide had left a line of rubbery brown seaweed, bits of waterlogged wood, and odds and ends like light bulbs and disintegrating milk cartons. Peter looked without much interest. Beyond the sand, at the far edge of the cove, a tumble of rock stretched out into the waves: great chunks of stone, dropped at random from the cliff, Peter thought at first. They were bearded with green weed and crusted with barnacles, limpets, and snails. Peter climbed among them and gradually something peculiar about the rocks filtered through his mind. They hadn’t been dropped at random at all: they ran out into the sea in a straight line. They must be a neglected causeway or a breakwater. Someone had deliberately piled them here, and in spite of himself, Peter felt a flicker of curiosity. Why? Had it been the man from the cottage? It seemed a strange place to go to so much trouble.

He chose a dry stone on the top of the breakwater and sat down. His interest was gone, he squelched it relentlessly. How long he stayed there he didn’t afterward know, but when he began to feel chilled through, he got up and clambered gingerly out onto the rocks toward the sea. Between the dark, slimy stones were cracks and pools, dark places inhabited by heaven knew what ugly creatures. But out among the stones at the end that the sea was beginning to reclaim, Peter caught sight of a small dark object between two rocks. It was too regular in shape to be a pebble, and something made him look at it twice. It wasn’t wood. Curious, Peter stooped and reached. It was cold and hard to the touch and wedged in securely. It was
metal of some sort. He tugged and almost lost his balance, grew determined and pulled hard. With a sudden gritty, scraping sound, like fingernails being dragged across a blackboard, the thing came free in his hand.

Peter looked at it, frowning fiercely. He had no idea what it was, but he was sure it was old. It was shaped like a capital letter Y, about four inches across. Each arm of the Y was a hollow, six-sided shaft, and each had a slightly different diameter. There was a hole through it where the three arms came together, and it reminded Peter of an old-fashioned roller skate key. It was blackened and scratched, but not broken. He liked the feel of it. His fingers seemed to know its shape and curl around it by themselves. He crouched, looking at it, until a wave broke on the rock, splashing his shoes. Then he retreated along the causeway, holding the object firmly. He took it back to Bryn Celyn safely in his pocket.

A few days later, he had been sitting at the base of the War Memorial, where he came from time to time, with the Key again in his pocket, his right hand cupped around it. Without warning, he felt it begin to hum, a peculiar, tingling sensation like his hand falling asleep, which was what he had thought at first. But the humming had gotten stronger and a song had come to him, sweet and piercing, out of the air, nothing he could describe afterwards.

There had been a sudden, brilliant glimpse of something—sun on water, the sound of voices chanting—and Peter had pulled his hand out of his pocket as if he’d been stung, his heart thumping wildly. He was more frightened than he wanted to admit. Perhaps he was truly going crazy in this place. But a few days later, when it happened the second time—he was alone in the kitchen—he had managed to hang on a little longer. Yes, it
was
water, and the sun
was
shining. The water was all around—there was an island and there were boys on it. They were chanting . . .

Then Peter lost his nerve and put the Key down.