Band of Angel Read Free Page A

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