Band of Angel by Julia Gregson Page B

guaranteed to set Catherine’s teeth on edge.
    Now, when Father came in from the fields looking numb and exhausted, Gwynneth, who treated men like backward invalids, drew her chair up close and asked her brother lots of questions: “You were haymaking today were you, Huw? That’s nice,” or more archly, “I know I’m a silly goose but how can you tell a Charolais cow from a Freesian?” Or “Tell me in
detail
now. How is it you make your lovely Lleyn hedges?” He’d never been much for talking, and now she’d listen to his slow, reluctant answers in a bright and bobbing way, like a bird ravenous for the merest crumb of information. Mealtimes had become a particular strain, beginning withGwynneth straightening her back and reading in a tremulous voice from her Bible. Then she’d poke through the pots, fussing about “nourishing titbits” for Father—“For a child milk, and for a man meat,” she was fond of saying, passing him the sweetest pieces near the bone while ostentatiously reserving for herself and the girls scraps of wing and gristle and skin.
    Now Mair sulked and clashed pots in the kitchen and Eliza, poor Eliza, who tried so hard to find nice things to think and say about everyone, sat and burbled helplessly, trying to fill in the gaps. For Catherine loathed the woman and the feeling, as far as she could make out, was mutual.
    This tension between them found an outlet in the question of the front parlor. In Mother’s day it had been a delightful room—a little jackdawish and untidy, perhaps, with its china jugs and gewgaws, its papier-mâché inkstands and watercolors, but that was Mother. Gwynneth had taken against it from the start.
    “How on earth your poor dear mother found anything in here I’ll never know,” she’d said, removing the odd picture and occasional table, saying it would make it easier to clean. These were preliminary forays. Then, after two weeks in the house, she’d made her frontline attack: dragged a large tin trunk into the parlor and unpacked a pile of antimacassars, a collection of brittle-looking butterflies inside a glass box, and some books. The books, dun-colored, damp to the touch, had various inspirational titles such as
The Strength of My Life
and
One Day at a Time.
They were on loan, she said, from the Methodist church to help them all through this Terrible Time. They were to take a particular care not to get them dirty. Catherine shuddered at the very sight of them.
    Gwynneth was also a snob. In reduced circumstances herself (her dead husband had owned a failing tanning works near Pistyll), she made it known, at first obliquely and later with needling remarks of the “you can stoop and pick up nothing” kind, that while it was a very great shame that her brother had turned his back on the life of a gentleman, it was by no means irreversible. So began a new campaign to upgrade the status of this branch of the Carreg family, and thus endless conversationsabout manners and social niceties and what sort of persons it was proper to consort with, and although Gwynneth’s Methodist leanings did not entirely square with the more frivolous philosophies of women’s magazines, such as the
Welsh Woman’s Domestic Magazine
or the
Ladies’ Treasury,
several appeared in the parlor.
    These magazines, stuffed with hints on how to make jam, to dress one’s hair, to dress well, and how to become a stimulating conversationalist, made it crystal clear that the capture—and the continuous captivation—of a man was the point of a woman’s life, and Eliza read them, from cover to cover, with a grave absorption that wrung Catherine’s heart. Her sister so much wanted a husband.
    Catherine had no words yet for the despair she felt on reading these feeble magazines, and had no wish anyway to spoil the experience for Eliza, who still cried herself to sleep. But at night, often rigid with sleeplessness, she thought of the dream she’d had on the night Mother died: of herself