Band of Angel Read Free Page B

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 hadto 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