The Old Devils

'The Don Juan syndrome. Rather a high-flown name, I've always thought. You know what they say? Comes from a desire to degrade and humiliate women. Well, there may be something in it, but if there is you'd have expected me to be particularly hot on women who'd be better off all round for a spot of degradation and humiliation, go round the place bloody well begging for it, like Muriel and fishface Eirwen Spurling. And I tell you frankly they leave me cold.'

Sophie had not listened attentively to this. 'Beats me,' she said, 'why a bloke married to someone like that has to go messing around with· all and sundry.'

'You mentioned homework, well homework or no homework I remember you saying that to me slightly more than twenty-two years ago, and I'll tell you again now what I told you then: like buggery it beats you, you understand it through and through. You know you're right _- has__ to go messing around. No choice involved - necessity. Easier, wiser, kinder... to accept it. But to hell with the years. Forget 'em. No problem where you're concerned. Believe it or not, I can't really remember how you used to look. Whenever I try I keep seeing you as you are now. You're just not different enough. Isn't that amazing, isn't that... splendid, isn't... that... marvellous.... '

Much too late to spoil it the telephone-bell rang on the landing.

'That might be Victor now,' said Sophie.

Left to himself, Alun glanced briefly and incuriously round the capacious bedroom. Large and small, the things in it looked as if getting through money had been a principle of selection, starting with moulded wallpaper apparently encrusted with gems. His mind was traversed by banal, inescapable thoughts about the passing of time. Quite a lot of time had indeed passed, but so far to surprisingly small effect. What he had said to Sophie just now about her appearance and so on was of course untrue, though it would have been much untruer, one had to admit, of most other people he had known that long. But in a general way, applied to experience, it had a bearing. All sorts of stuff, for instance what had been taking place a little earlier, seemed much as before, or at any rate not different enough to start making a song and dance about. This state of affairs might well not last for ever, but for the moment, certainly, the less it changed the more it was the same thing, and the most noticeable characteristic of the past, as seen by him, at least, was that there was so much more of it now than formerly, with bits that were longer ago than had once seemed possible. Alun went for a pee.

When he came back to the bedroom Sophie had returned and was dressing.

'How long have we got?'

'Fifteen minutes minimum,' she said without looking up.

'I've done it in two and a half in my time, and with cuff-links and shoelaces.'

'Not so much talk.'

Tying his tie, Alun saw in the dressing-table mirror what he had not properly seen direct and earlier, that across from the double bed where they had lain there stood a made-up single bed. 'Who sleeps there?' he asked.

'He does. It's where he usually is.'

'Usually is? You mean sometimes he comes and-'

'No, no, it's where he lands up. I kick out in the mornings, see, and he goes over there when it gets too much.'

'What a jolly sensible set-up.'

Something about its description puzzled Alun, but he had never been one to be afflicted with disinterested curiosity and he had long forgotten the matter when, with six minutes to spare, he and Sophie came to say good-bye in the hall. (Six minutes, eh? Not such a marvellous arrangement.)

'Lovely to see you,' she cried as if he had indeed just dropped in for a cup of tea, then changed register and said 'You are a bugger' again, but resignedly this time.

Rejecting a first thought or so he said, 'You're lovely. I'll be along again soon. But I'll ring first.'

A shitty irony hovered when the car refused to start at once, but then it did. He turned it round, something to get done on arrival in future, and slid off down the hill. Clear. Six minutes, eh? Like the old days. Sophie soon slipped from his mind, but as always at. this stage he felt utterly free, not triumphant, just never freer, never so free as now. Softly, shaping the notes, he broke into a pleasing light tenor: 'Was it young Denise who spread disease through all the men in the room?

Oh no, it wasn't young Denise, it was Mrs Rosenbloom... '

He took the road above Beaufoy which brought the sea into sight at a distance and, across the bay, the umber and dark-green stretch of Courcey, with vague industrial shapes half misted over in the background. For the moment the sun was out, strong enough to turn the water into something a bit more rewarding than grey-brown. Flat-fronted terraced houses reached by steep flights of steps gave place to semi-detached brick villas put - up between the wars, a cluster of 1950s two-storey pre-fabs and then, further along and from further back, the spaced-out stone-built residences of the coal-owners and ironmasters of prosperous times.

Hereabouts Alun eased up on the accelerator and caused his face to take on expressions of boredom, dissatisfaction, even disappointment, getting it ready for a going-over by his daughter Rosemary. There was a definite element of the creepy about the way that girl could get the wrong idea about her father's less significant activities and interests. Up to something was what he could reckon on being charged with having been, not a moment ago either, if at encounters like this he showed any more positive feeling than a fairly plucky resignation. The girl was even worse in this respect than her elder sister, now safely married, or rather safely out of the way most of the time on that account. He could not have explained why these challenges of theirs made him so uncomfortable.

In the drawing-room mother and daughter had staked out a little feminine enclave on the fireside rug and a low coffee-table beside it with coffee-cups, biscuit-tin, box of chocolates, box of tissues, handbags, manicure kit, wastepaper basket, local map and dozens of estate-agents' brochures and lists. If he could get through the first minute in one piece, Alun knew he was probably going to be all right. He crossed in safety the twenty feet of minefield from the doorway and embraced his daughter. As always it was a warm embrace.

'Good lunch?' asked Rhiannon when he had kissed her. 'Not really. Quite bearable. We'll go there some time.'

'You saw Charlie? Like some coffee?'

'No thanks. Yes, he was there. And Peter.'

'Oh, was he really?' said Rhiannon, with pleasure and interest in her voice. 'How was he looking?'

'Not very well I thought. He's put on a lot of weight. But he's, you know, recognizable.'

'Oh. Well, he never was much of a bean-pole, was he?'

Rosemary, a darker and more robust-looking version of Rhiannon, had stood waiting for this part to end. She had been told years previously that before meeting her father in the long-ago her mother had had some sort of attachment to a university lecturer called Peter Thomas. What more she might have heard or guessed was unknown and she showed no reaction now. Indicating one of the brochures, she said, 'There's a house in Kinver Hill with attractive Swedish-type sun-room and unusual walled garden Mum and I are looking at at five. You're just in time to run us along there.'

'So I am indeed. Tell me, how would you have managed if it hadn't been for me turning up?'

'Minicab, same as she's been managing all week while you've been driving yourself to the pub and wherever else has taken your fancy. Come on, how many houses have you actually seen?'

'Christ love, I don't know. Not many. As few as possible.

Three was it? Not my kind of thing. There's nothing you can say that'll drive me off the position that that kind of thing's a women's kind of thing.' Alun was busy hiding his relief at not after all being asked to account for himself, despite the unpleasant tilt in his daughter's last speech.

'You mean we've got to do it so we might as well like it. Well, here's one you're not getting out of, boy _bach__. Two, in fact. That's right, the place in Mary Tweed Lane'll be viewable at six, wasn't it, Mum?' Rosemary turned through the leaflets. 'Extensive hall with recessed fireplace and carved Victorian overmantel. Mum tells me you've got some scheme lined up for visiting places of scenic and historical interest in the surrounding vicinity.' She put on a quacking local accent for the last dozen words, efficiently enough though she had never lived in Wales. 'We'll go into the places another time, but of course part of the deal is while you're in Bargeman's Row exploring folkways and getting drunk you can't be in Pedwarsaint and Holland looking over houses. Well, for the next couple of days, Dad, resign yourself to a lot of looking over houses. You're not going to get away with leaving it all to Mum while I'm here. Right? Are you with me?'

Alun nodded without speaking. They always took it out of you for doing anything on your own, without them, however innocent, like glancing at a newspaper. Now he came to think of it, he had seen quite early the avoidance of house-viewing as an extra benefit of going in search of Wales. And by the way four to one was way off - four and a half it was, with Rhiannon, now furtively winking and peering at him, the half and Rosemary the four.

Well, roughly. Far from the least ill feeling the style of her harangue had shown affection of a sort, but the sort that mitigated the sense of her words not at all. She came and linked arms with him when at last they moved off, kissed him on the cheek and gave him a smile that exactly blended fondness and disapproval. It was the best he could reasonably have hoped for.

Three - Charlie

1

When Charlie Norris noticed that the smallest man in the submarine railway-carriage had a face made out of carpeting he decided h was time to be off. By throwing himself about and sucking in air fast and deep he got away and back to his bed in the dark. Intensely thirsty as usual he at once reached for one of the several glasses of water lined up on the low table beside him, but before he found it his hand was grabbed and worried by some creature with very long narrow jaws. It made croaking, creaking noises. He cried out, or thought he did, and pulled his body away like a swimmer surfacing, and then he was really back.

He could hear Sophie breathing quietly in the bed across the way and started to throw the covers of his own bed back before going on to scramble in beside her and nestle up to her. Then he worked out that he had done that twice in the last ten days or so and a third time now would be too much. She always woke up at his arrival however careful he was, whether he nestled up or not, and though she always said later that she dropped off again in a couple of minutes he doubted it. And after all, he had not found himself at the edge of one of those huge, brilliantly lit stretches of grassland with ruined pillars and water flowing uphill and changing its course as it went, nor had to deal with small things, small unrecognizable animals or machines behaving like animals. So for the moment he stayed there leaning on his elbow.

It was not really dark. He could even see part of Sophie's outline in the light of the hooded lamp next to him. Other gleams came from the passage doorway and its reflection in the tall mirror by the window. An early car receded towards the town. He was quite safe, also no less thirsty in the real world than in the unreal and standing in need of a pee. Not till he was back tucked up after supplying these wants did he look at his watch: 5.10. Not too bad. He felt as if about two-thirds of his head had recently been sliced off and his heart seemed to be beating somewhere inside his stomach, but otherwise he was fine, successfully monitoring his breathing over about the next hour until he fell into a kind of doze, not a very nice kind, admittedly.

It was light when he came out of that and he was not at all fine, nowhere near. As usual at this time, his morning self cursed his overnight self for having purposely left the Scotch in the drinks cabinet downstairs. Without that sort of help it was quite out of the question that he should ever get up. A mug of tea and a plastic flask containing more tea stood on the bedside table. He would in no sense be committing himself to getting up if it so turned out that he drank some. With this clear all round he got on his elbow and drank some, drank indeed the whole mug's worth in one because it was half cold, and dropped flat again. Before very long the liquid had carved out a new and more direct route to his bladder. He rolled over and fixed his eye on the stout timber that framed the quilted bed-head, counted a hundred, then, with a convulsive overarm bowling movement, got a hand to it, gripped it, counted another hundred and hauled with all his strength, thus pulling himself half upright.

In this position, still clutching the frame, he paused again, said 'With many a weary sigh, and many a groan, up a high hill he heaves a huge round stone,' and plunged a foot to the floor. Of course it was understood that if he ever got to the bathroom he would dive straight back into bed the moment he got back in range. Having got back he went and laid his hands flat on the dressing-table either side of Sophie's chased-silver hand-mirror and looked out of the window, looking but not seeing. With a conviction undimmed by having survived countless previous run-offs he felt that everything he had was lost and everyone he knew was gone. Only because there was nothing else to do he stood there assembling the energy to move, to start dressing, rather in the spirit of a skier poised above a hazardous run. Ready? Right... _Go__. Up. Round. Off.

'I'm just popping over to Rhiannon's,' Sophie told him in the kitchen. 'They think they've found a house but she wants me and Gwen to go over it with her. One of the ones backing on to Holland woods. You know, where the Aubreys used to live. Er, Dilys'll be along at eleven and Mr Bridgeman's here, round the front he is now, so you'll be all right.' She referred to the daily woman and the ex-docker who tended the garden and cleaned an occasional window and suchlike. 'I'll be here from about half-four on. Hope your do is fun. Expect you when I see you, love,' she ended on a formulaic note, kissed the top of his head and went.

After ten minutes Charlie had made it all the way from the breakfast-room table to the refrigerator in the kitchen. Here he stood and drank a great deal of apple-juice and crunched a half-burnt, holed piece of toast Sophie had rejected; making his own toast - bread-bin, toaster, all that - was unthinkable. Along with it he swallowed a couple of spoonfuls of marmalade straight from the pot. The sight of a coffee-bag out in the open near an unused mug was not quite enough to make up his mind for him, but finding the electric kettle half full turned the scale. He saw the thing through and even got some sugar in, stirring with the marmalade-spoon. When a speck of saliva caught at the back of his throat he managed to lay the mug down before the father and mother of a coughing-fit sent him spinning about the room and landing up face to face with Mr Bridgeman, round the back now, eighteen inches away on the other side of the window-pane. Then the telephone rang as it always did at about that time of the morning.

'Charles, it's Victor. How are you today?'

'About the same as usual.'

'Oh, I'm sorry to hear it.' Sometimes Victor said that and sometimes he said he was glad it was no worse. 'Listen, Charlie, I'm fed up with Griffiths & Griffiths. Fed up to _by here__, my dear,' he said, turning a local vulgarism to his own purposes. 'Half of what they sent up yesterday was unusable. As you remember we talked of experimenting with Lower Glamorgan Products. May I proceed with that?'

'Go ahead.' Char lie had long since stopped wondering why his brother bothered to pursue the fiction of their joint responsibility for the affairs of the Glendower. The boredom of it was therapeutic, though.

'Good, thank you. The other thing is I've taken against the house white. Horrid little ninny of a wine. As regards a replacement I have one or two ideas to try on you. Will you be in later?'

'Actually I'm not quite sure today. There's the ceremony at St Dogmael's with a piss-up at the Prince of Wales after.'

'Don't remind me, I wouldn't have missed it for anything, the ceremony that is, chance to see Mr Posturing Ponce going all out. The trouble is young Chris. The poor boy's picked up some son of bug and I've sent him to bed, no one to leave in charge. But listen Charlie, you round up three or four notables at that get-together if you can and bring them along here for lunch on the house. Only if you can. Ring before if possible. The coq au vin is going to be a positive dream. All right?'

'I'll have to study the ground but I'll try.'

'Oh good lad. You sound a little more cheerful now.

Take care of yourself, Charles.'

The mug of coffee had not got any hotter but Charlie drank it anyway in the interests of rehydration. By and by he also drank a weakish whisky and water, having held off till then because he made a point of avoiding early drinking whenever he could. At seven o'clock a minicab arrived to take him into town. While, yawning his head off, he climbed aboard he told himself, as he always did at this juncture, that he really must sell his old Renault, which sat in the garage unused for years except by Sophie when her own car was laid up. He would set about it tomorrow.

The journey took him past many places, but none of more interest than Lower Glamorgan County Hall, half a dozen times the size of the old Glamorgan County Hall in Cardiff, indeed a miniature new town in itself. Its inmates were said to enjoy the use of uncounted cocktail bars, tastefully lit dining-rooms, discos, jacuzzis, hairdressing salons, massage parlours and intensive-care units while not actually defrauding the populace, all this situated conveniently close to Jenkyn's Farm, otherwise the gaol. Notable too, and further in, were the docks where once Mr Bridgeman had earned a very respectable wage and enriched himself in other ways as well. Now, where once ships by the dozen had lain, bringing timber, ores, pig-iron, fetching coal, coke, spelter, there was just the harbour dredger, looking as if it had not yet been out that year, and a single dirty little freighter flying the blue, white and red of Yugoslavia.

Sophie's image as he had seen her an hour before, brisk and neat in her tightly belted light-blue mack, stayed in Charlie's mind. You only had to look at her to be assured that men with faces made out of carpeting played no part in her life; it took longer to establish that she made every allowance she could for anybody involved with such men. In those twenty-two years of marriage he had not perhaps got to know her very well, but almost his strongest feeling for her, stronger than envy, was respect, even admiration. Provided things were left to her there would never be any trouble, not even over Alun. If Charlie had not felt certain, as early as the moment of sitting down to lunch at the Glendower, where Alun proposed to go afterwards, the clean sheets on Sophie's bed midweek would have told him the score. But let it be. As always, he and Sophie had not exchanged so much as a glance about it. Let it be. Something like half-way through the twenty-two years he had in any case given up a large part of the right to a say in that area of Sophie's life.

St Dogmael's came up on the landward side, another of the town's deconsecrated churches. This one had been converted not into a pornographic cinema but, less inoffensively some might have thought, into an arts centre. The structure had been extensively restored in 1895, though parts of the clerestory were traceable to a fourteenth-century rebuilding by Henry de Courcy. These facts and many more were to be found in a pamphlet sold at the extensive bookstall and information office in the west porch. To one side of the porch entrance there had stood, longer than anyone could remember, a short, dingy stone pillar supporting a life-sized figure too badly battered and weathered to be recognizable even as a man, but always vaguely supposed to have portrayed the saint. Today the whole thing was covered with a great red cloth and seventy or eighty people, some hung with civic and other paraphernalia, were standing close by and producing a loud jabber of talk diversified with the sportive female shrieks prevalent in the locality.

Charlie had cut it fine. He stopped his car several yards short, paid the driver, a Chinese with an alarming Greenhill accent, and stole up to the edge of the crowd. A rather fat man of about fifty, with short white hair, a long doughy face and wide eyes, turned towards him.

'Good morning, sir,' he said loudly in a North American accent.

'Good morning,' said Charlie, and felt like "running there and then. He had taken a turn for the better in the last half-hour, but it was nothing that could not be undone by any sudden bit of strain, such as this chap looked more than competent to provide.

'May I introduce myself? I am Llywelyn Caswallon Pugh.'

And at that accursed name the whole assembly fell silent.

At least that was how it appeared to Charlie for a dazed moment, like something out of the Mabinogion. Then he realized that the hushing agent must have been one or another of the central group of notables and others that, he now saw, included Alun. Throughout what followed, photographers were to be seen and heard near this group and a man wielding what must have been a sort of portable television camera was there too.

A series of semi-intelligible pronouncements began by way of a microphone and one or two loudspeakers. As it proceeded the man Pugh, who now struck Charlie as distinctly deranged, kept sending him purposeful glances, promising him more to come, more to be communicated than just what he was called. Across the way, near the shape under the cloth, a smartly dressed youth who had to be the mayor introduced the, or perhaps merely a, minister of state at the Welsh Office. This man, who seemed scarcely older, spoke some formula and jerked at the end of an ornamental rope or cord that Charlie had not noticed before. With wonderful smoothness the red cloth parted and fell to reveal, standing on a plinth of what looked like olive-green marble, a shape in glossy yellow metal that was about the height of a human being without looking much more like one than the beaten-up chunk of stone that had stood there before.

There was a silence that probably came less from horror than sheer bafflement, then a sudden rush of applause. The presumed sculptor, a little fellow covered in hair like an artist in a cartoon, appeared and was the centre of attention for a few seconds. Another youngster, who said he represented the Welsh Arts Council, started talking about money. It came on to rain, though not enough to bother a Welsh crowd. On a second glance, the object on the plinth did look a certain amount like a man, but the style ruled out anything in the way of portraiture, and Charlie felt he was probably not the only one to wonder whether some handy abstraction - the spirit of Wales, say - had pushed out the advertised subject. Those close enough, however, could see Brydan's name on the plate along with just his dates, 1913-1960.

Alun's turn came. He played it low-key, avoiding a display of emotion so long after the event, sticking to facts, facts like Brydan being the greatest Welsh poet that had ever lived and also the greatest poet in the English language to have lived in the present century, together with minor but no less certain facts like his utter dedication to his art, though leaving out other ones like his utter dedication to Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey and _Astounding Science Fiction__. Llywelyn Caswallon Pugh evidently thought he could afford to do without some of this. He stepped up the frequency of his glances at Charlie and slowly edged closer. He had a considerable power of instilling dread, in Charlie at least. When he spoke it was a little less loud than before.

'Excuse me, sir, but would that gentleman there be Mr Alun Weaver, CBE?'

'It would,' answered Charlie, panting slightly. 'That's him.'

'And would you yourself happen to be personally acquainted with him?'

'I would. I mean yes, I know him.'

'Might you be good enough to introduce me after this ceremony?'

He must be doing it on purpose, thought Charlie, and to no possible benign end. This really was the time to run, or at least walk briskly away - quicker, cleaner, kinder but he was not up to breaking through the thin but solid cordon of bodies that now stood between him and freedom. So he babbled some form of assent and tried to shut himself off from Pugh and everyone else for as long as possible, dreamily looking back on those distant mornings of mere headache and nausea.

Alun was beginning to take a winding-up tone. As he spoke he moved his gaze slowly from one extremity of his audience to the other so that no one should feel left out. 'Too much has sometimes been made,' he said, 'of the undeniable fact that Brydan knew no Welsh, was altogether ignorant of the language. This was a matter of the purest chance, a matter of fashion only. Parents in the South Wales of the era before World War I saw fit to bring up their children to speak nothing but English. But nobody who knows his work and who knows Wales and the Welsh language can be in any doubt that that land and that language live in that work. He had no literal, word-for-word understanding, but at a deep, instinctive, primal level he understood. He felt and he sensed something beyond words...'

When Alun had finished, someone else pronounced a few phrases of thanks or thanksgiving or anyway termination. All present relaxed and looked about, but at first none moved. Charlie was trapped physically and by obligation of a sort, but also by his own curiosity: he was going to be around when this transatlantic Welshman came up against Alun or... Well no, not perish, but know the reason why. This resolve flagged rather when Pugh turned towards him again and drew in air to say more to him. He had been mad not to drop in at the Glendower on the way to a horror like this. Would he never learn?

'May I know your name, sir?'

Charlie gave it and found himself throwing in his occupation like a fool.

'I am an official of the Cymric Companionship of the USA,' said Pugh.

At this point something terrible happened to Charlie's brain. Pugh went on speaking in just the same way as before, with no change of pace or inflection, but Charlie could no longer distinguish any words, only noises. His eyes swam a little. He stepped backwards and trod heavily on someone's foot. Then he picked out a noise he recognized and nearly fell over the other way with relief. It had not been fair to expect an old soak whose Welsh vocabulary started and stopped with _yr__ and _bach__ and to recognize the rubbish when it came at him unheralded in an American accent. 'M'm,' he said with feeling. 'M'm.'

Pugh's wide stare widened further in a way that made Charlie wonder what he had assented to, but that was soon over and more English came. 'A key objective of the Companionship is the forging and maintenance 'of ties with the mother country.'

A capful of rain blew refreshingly into Charlie's face and a seagull passed close enough overhead to make him flinch. 'Sounds a first-rate idea.'

'Ub-hub. In pursuance of which my purpose today is to solicit Mr Weaver to guest-visit with my home chapter of the Companionship at Bethgelert, Pennsylvania for a designated period. Consequentially my desire to make his acquaintance. '

Charlie appreciated this attempt at courteous explanation. He felt he understood the sense of it too; things were coming a little easier now. While he looked round for Alun he found he could imagine with ridiculous ease - he had perhaps even heard - him saying that all he needed was a free invitation over there, never mind to how Godforsaken a part, anything to give him a base, and he would be off and away. Well, the bloody old Welsh chancer's chance had come at last. But hey, those Stateside Taffs must hold an alarmingly high opinion of the said Welsh chancer. How could they have acquired it?

Alun, closely attended by three or four functionaries, had just begun to move in the direction of a line of official looking cars, and in no time there was Charlie with Pugh at his side barring the way and doing the introducing.

'Mr Pugh has something to do with the... '

'Cymric Companionship of the USA. I'm honoured to meet you, sir. I wrote you care of your - '

'How nice to meet you, Mr Pugh. Where exactly are you from?'

'Bethgelen, Pennsylvania, which is situated - '

'Dear, dear, there are Welshmen all over the world, aren't there? Saxons, give up hope of finding a pie under the sun that we harmless folk don't contrive to slide our sly fingers into. Carry my warmest cousinly greetings to the Celts of Bethgelert, Mr Pugh. Now... '

'Mr Pugh wants to invite you there,' called Charlie hurriedly.

The fluid, seamless way Alun converted his unthinking glance towards the waiting car into an urgent request for assistance, for somebody to accommodate his Mr Pugh, was something Charlie was quite sure he would never forget. Good too was Alun's look of measured eagerness to hear anything the fellow might say. Just ahead of them, somebody dissatisfied with some of the arrangements barred their way of departure for the moment.

'Bethgelert is situated in that part of the state containing a large Welsh element. In fact William Penn desired that the Commonwealth as a whole be designated New Wales, but the English government interdicted the proposition.'

Pugh laid special stress on the last few words, but if he had succeeded in whipping up separatist feeling in his hearers they gave no sign, though Alun's air of expectation perhaps waned slightly. But he seemed to cheer up again when Pugh started on his next offering.

'We in Bethgelert have been privileged to welcome many distinguished Welsh persons. We were honoured with a visit from Brydan in 1954. The occasion is memorialized by a plaque inscribed in Welsh and English in Neuadd Taliesin, our meeting-house. There also hangs there a portrait of Brydan in oil paints executed by Mrs Bronwen Richards Weintraub, a member of our council.'

'When were you thinking of - ' began Alun, but Pugh raised a hand, just an inch or two from the wrist, and continued as before.

'Mrs Weintraub relied chiefly on photographs, but visitors who knew Brydan in life pronounced it an excellent likeness.'

There was something final and definitive in the delivery and reception of that remark. Up front, the missing man or car had been found or despaired of and movement was resumed. Alun said thoughtfully, 'Tell me, Mr Pugh, where would I stay in Bethgelert?'

'Why, with me, Mr Weaver. A bachelor establishment, but comfortable enough I assure you. I'll enjoy showing you our neighbourhood.'

'I look forward to it.' Alun stood now by the rear door of his destined car. 'I think the spring of 1995 would be about right for my visit.'

'You must be - '

'No, better say the autumn. The fall. I am very busy just at the moment. Nice to have met you. Good day to you. Charlie, in round the other side.'

At the moment before he ducked his head under the car roof Charlie caught a last glimpse of Pugh, looking not totally unlike an inflated rubber figure out of whose base the stopper had been drawn an instant earlier. Charlie might have felt some pity if he had not been lost in admiration for Alun.

'Bloody marvellous bit of timing,' he told him when they were settled in the back seats.

'Yeah, nice bonus, but on a note like that I could have outfaced the bugger indefinitely. And by the way I reckon bugger is right, don't you? I'd whiffed it even before we got to the bachelor establishment, just in that second.'

'Probably, but I was a bit too overwhelmed with the rest of him to notice much.'

The car had still not moved. Alun squinted forward through his window.

'There he goes, poor dab. I should have recommended him to that Gents by the fire station. Most likely not in business any more, though, like everything else.'

Out of pure devilment Charlie said, 'I suppose he did get the message all right, do you think?'

'What? How do you mean?'

'Well you were frightfully polite to him, you know. Took him very seriously.'

'Perhaps there was a touch of that.'

'I mean you don't want him coming through on the phone asking if he can discuss it with you. Find a way round your objections.'

'No, I don't, do I? My God.'

By now the car had started to crawl along beside the pavement. Again Alun peered through his window, then took a quick glance at the traffic ahead. He started to roll down the window with his left hand and arranged his right with the thumb and first two fingers extended and the other two clenched.

'That's English, what you've got there,' said Charlie quickly. 'Middle finger only for Americans.'

'Christ, you're right, thanks. Well... here we go.' Alun stuck his head and hand out of the opening and Charlie heard him bawl, 'Make it two thousand. The year two thousand. And fuck off.'

The car accelerated nimbly. By a blessed chance Charlie got another last sight of Pugh out of the back window, much reduced now from the comparative equanimity he had shown a minute before. What tale of this would he tell in Bethgelert?

'They do say fuck off in America, don't they?' asked Alun anxiously.

'I'm sure they understand it.'

'And it doesn't mean how's your father or anything?'

'Not that I know of, no.'

'I thought I'd better clinch it, you see. Sort of make assurance double sure.'

'Yes, I can't see him bothering you again.'

Alun laughed quietly for a short time, shaking his head in indulgent self-reproach. The driver, who had the collar of a tartan sports shirt turned down over that of his blue serge suit, spoke up.

'Trying to cadge a lift, was he, that bloke back there?'

'Roughly.'

'Funny-looking son of bloke. He reminded me - '

'Yes, well we can forget about him now and concentrate on getting to the Prince of Wales as fast as reasonable can.' Evidently Alun had no wish just then to pursue the special Welsh relationship with drivers of taxis as mentioned to Rhiannon. He lowered his voice and went on, 'Hey - timing really was important for that. A clear getaway afterwards. I got badly caught in Kilburn once telling a Bulgarian short-story writer, actually he _was__ trying to cadge a lift, anyway telling him to fuck off for two or three minutes while the chap driving the open car I was sitting in turned round in the cul-de-sac I hadn't noticed we were at the end of. Amazing how quickly the bloom fades on fuck off, you know. Say it a couple of times running and you've got out of it nearly all of what you're going to get.'

'And there's not a lot you can go to later,' said Charlie.

'Well exactly.'

'What really got you down about Pugh, made you dump him? One thing more than another. I mean apart from his interest in rugby. Of course he was unstoppably American, I do see.'

'He can't help that, love him. No, I could have taken that. Well, taken it more cheerfully than him being even more savagely Welsh. I've heard about those buggers in Pennsylvania. You know what they are, do you? Bloody Quakers. You're doing well if they let you smoke there. And you know what they get up to? Speaking Welsh. Talking Welsh to each other on purpose.'

'Yes, he talked some to me.'

'Well, there you are then,' said Alun, glaring indignantly at Charlie. 'How can you deal with a bastard like that?'

'I wonder you didn't give him the thumbs-down as soon as you heard where he was from, at that rate.'

'Oh, I couldn't have done that. That would have looked rude. And anyway at that stage I couldn't be sure he wasn't going to, I don't know, say fuck or something and show he was a human being. I think a drink's what I'd like now.'

They went through the hall of the Prince of Wales, which by some reactionary whim had ordinary carpets on the floor and pictures of recognizable scenes on the walls, up in the photograph-infested lift and into the glittering meanness of what was no doubt called a banqueting-room with slender, softly gleaming pillars. But, fair play, it had a bar in it, plus a table serving wine only, which kept a few unserious drinkers out of the road. One advantage of Charlie's trade, now only to be called that in a manner of speaking but for many years an accurate description, was that he tended to know waitresses. Off this one he got, well ahead of his turn, a whisky and water that would have struck some other men as a nice lunchtime session's worth, and quite surprised himself by finding how much he had needed it. Clutching its successor, he made his way straight towards Alun, who had pleaded for moral support in alien territory. The Cellan-Davieses were also close by, in fact Malcolm was in the middle of asking Alun a question.

'Called what again? Llywelyn what Pugh?'

'I'm not clear, Charlie heard it.'

'It sounded like Caswallon. '

'Oh, Caswallon,' said Malcolm, with a tremendous hissing scrape on the double L. 'Better known as Cassivellaunus. '

'Now you're talking,' said Gwen, nodding busily.

'A British chieftain who fought the Romans in-'

'Look, baby, baby, cool it, okay?' said Alun. 'We've had enough history for one morning. William Penn and Cassivellaunus - next, the Patagonians, many of whom, my friends, are bilingual in Welsh and Spanish.'

'I think it's a pity you ditched Mr Pugh,' said Gwen. 'He and Malcolm sound as if they were made for each other. Can't you get him back?'

To Charlie's ear there was a bit extra there, but when he looked up ~t was to see someone of consequence joining the group. Nobody was to ask who he was and he knew all he needed to about who they were. In appearance, including hair-style and clothes, he was like a good average town councillor, from Yorkshire rather than South Wales, in a black-and-white film of twenty-five years before. Two lesser persons were with him.

'Well now,' he said in the kind of husky alto often put down to massive gin-drinking, 'what's the state of feeling about our new piece of sculpture?'

'Oh Christ,' said Alun as if before he could stop himself. 'Er... actually we haven't discussed it, have we? It's not what I'd call my field. Gwen, you're good on art.'

'That's sweet of you, Alun. Well, it hasn't got any holes in it. You can say that much for it.'

A short guessing-game followed and ended with the disclosure that the start-to-finish, all-in cost of having the sculpture there was £98,000.

'Makes you think, doesn't it?' said Alun. 'You could get a couple of torpedoes for that.'

'Oh, surely they're much more expensive,' said Malcolm. 'I was reading - '

'To hell with it - half a bloody torpedo, then. A quarter, I don't care.'

'It's the principle of the thing,' said Gwen.

'If you don't mind,' croaked the questioner, 'could we forget about torpedoes for the moment and get back to the sculpture? You, Mr... " he turned to Charlie, 'you haven't said anything yet.'

'No, well... I thought it wasn't at all figurative,' said Charlie rather complacently.

'Is that all? Has nobody anything more, er, more, er, more constructive to put forward?'

Nobody had.

'So nobody here shares my feeling that the Brydan monument is an exciting breakthrough for all of us in this town?'

Like everyone else, Charlie at once ruled out the possibility of any son of irony being intended. There was general silence, with eyes on the floor, until Gwen said in a voice not intended to carry far, 'If you're going to call that, or anything like that, exciting, what do you call the late-night horror movie? When it's slightly above average?' She frowned and smiled as never before.

Alun nodded weightily. 'Very good point,' he said.

'My colleagues and I had hoped for a little bit of encouragement. Here we are going all out, fighting to bring the best in modem art to the people, to whom after all it belongs and not to any fancy elite, and people like you, educated people, don't want to know. You don't, do you? You're happier with your cosy, musty Victoriana. Safe I suppose it makes you feel. Anything challenging you give a wide berth to. Well, I take leave to doubt whether your reaction is typical. Good day to you.'

The man of position jerked his head at his aides to signal a move in a way that recalled a boss in a different kind of film, returning from a few paces off long enough to add, 'You're entitled to your opinions, it goes without saying, but they're clearly based on ignorance, whereas the artist in question was selected and instructed by a panel of experts. Kindly take due note of that.'

When he was clear, Alun said with great emphasis, his voice shaking slightly, 'It's all right when little turds and turdettes, especially the latter, go on about exciting breakthroughs in advertisements and arts pages, well of course it isn't _all right__ but we're used to it, we've got our defences against it. And it was all right when buggers like that were fighting to stop _Desire under the Elms__ being put on at the Royal and going all out to get Joyce and Lawrence _and T. S__. _Eliot__ off the shelves of the public library. You're too young to remember a bloody old fool and by the bye frightful shit called Bevan Hopkin who called the police in at a Renoir exhibition at the Trevor Knudsen - in 1953, not 1903. That's how he was supposed to behave. Imagine him in favour of anything challenging. Imagine him _knowing the word__. When Labour councillors in South Wales start blathering about taking modern art to the people everyone's in deep trouble. Come back, Bevan Hopkin, all, repeat all, is forgiven. Well, _Iesu Crist__ and no mistake.'

'_Grist__,' said Gwen. '_Iesu Grist__. With the soft mutation.'

'Oh, bugger it. I'm going to give up. Had enough. Oh God here's another lot,' said Alun, turning to Charlie. 'We'd better be off soon.'

'I'm off now but I'll be back.'

Charlie just made it round the flank of the mayoral contingent and, picking up a fresh glass on the way, dodged into the lavatory. Here he waited for the two already present to leave, filled the glass at a basin, locked himself in a compartment and let go the ultimate coughing-fit that had been hanging about him for the last hour. Somebody else came in and used the urinal during it, groaning a lot as if in sympathy. He drank more water and took some deep breaths, feeling much weaker but clearer in the head, like a man in a book by John Buchan after an attack of fever. On departure he noticed that, as he put it later, the place reeked like an Alexandria knocking-shop.

He walked up the corridor, on carpet very luxurious to the eye but somehow disagreeable underfoot, until he reached a row of telephones separated from the outside only by small roofs shaped like Romanesque arches.

Victor answered his ring and sounded pleased. 'How are you, Charles? How reads the latest bulletin?'

'One of the more magical days. Look, er, I'm afraid I shan't be able to manage the lunch idea. There's a pub-crawl thing in Harriston I said I'd go on I'd completely forgotten. Sorry.'

'Charlie, I'm afraid I've no idea what you're talking about. A lunch...?'

'You asked me to try to get some selected shits together and bring them - '

'Oh, that. Never mind, it was just a thought. Another time. How was Posturing Ponce?'

'Quite good, actually. Well, he was terrible at the unveiling thing, but came back stoutly later. There was a collector's-item Welsh-American queer there he brushed off in fine style.'

'Brushed him off? You mean he - '

'No, no. He invited Alun to go and stay with him in his bachelor quarters in Pennsylvania or Philadelphia or wherever it is.'

'I suppose there's no chance of him going? Because that really would be a turn-up for the book.' For a moment Victor's voice went falsetto with laughter. 'PP in Pennsylvania with one of that lot.' That lot stayed in the third person in dealings between the brothers. 'Too much to ask. Well- enjoy your pub-crawl. You'll be in later, will you?'

'Probably, but for once I'm not too sure when.' 'Any time you like, Charles.'

When he got back to it the party seemed to have dwindled a good deal, or perhaps had merely spread out to the edges. At any rate the mayoral squad was on the point of leaving; the chap who had liked the sculpture was nowhere to be seen. An old man with a pink-and-white complexion - pink round the nose and eyes, white elsewhere - stood by the wall opening and shutting his jaws at a great rate. Large oval dishes of uncommonly horrible finger-snacks, a vivid green or orange in colour, lay her~ and there almost untouched, and quite right too, thought Charlie, also quite understandable now that everybody was either too fat or living off chaff and whey.

The drink, on the other hand, had been very popular, so much so that at the moment there was no Scotch available and no one to serve it anyway. Charlie placed himself at the corner of the bar where he could grab the waitress on her return. Two others with empty glasses had taken up the same station, a fellow in his sixties with a small face that seemed the smaller for the elaborately strutted and cantilevered pair of spectacles on it, and a younger, dark-complexioned man of melancholy, thoughtful appearance, not unlike Garth, a common Welsh type not often noted for either quality. Both looked up at Charlie's arrival and nodded to him in a subdued but friendly way, seeming to know him, and quite likely they did know him, had at least seen him more than once in the way of business, at a function of this sort, in a club, in a bar. Round here you had a pretty good idea of who everybody was, which helped on some kinds of contact without doing anything for others.

Accordingly the two pursued their conversation while going out of their way not to exclude Charlie from it. 'You'll find the same everywhere,' the older man was saying, 'not just in our chosen field. Did you see about that ambassador bloke who brought home too much wine?'

'No I didn't see that, I must have missed it,' said the dark man, glancing at Charlie, and Charlie nodded to show he had missed it too.

'Well, you couldn't have a more perfect illustration of the point under discussion. When you retired, you see, from your last ambassadorial post you got a duty-free allowance, known as your cellar, a certain amount of wine you were allowed to bring back to England as a privilege.' The exact number of bottles was never fixed: it was left to your discretion, and everyone was happy. Until one fine day Sir This-and-that turns up with ten, twenty times what was reasonable. And that was it. As from the next day, no more allowance. No more cellar.'

'Ruined it for everyone. What appalling selfishness,'

'Indeed. I hope I needn't ram home the moral. In other areas the custom has grown up over the years of people in certain positions being deemed to be entitled to certain privileges. Of-and this is the point - a modest and limited order. And everyone is happy, until... '

'Until somebody goes beyond what is reasonable.'

'Exactly. Human greed,' said the older man, staring into vacancy through his spectacles. 'Human greed. Well,' he went on with humorous impatience, 'where's this bloody Scotch we've heard so much about?'

'What's the use of sitting in the dispensary when there's nothing for a sore throat?'

'A bit thick, I call it,' said Charlie.

'Ah - wait a minute. Remedy in sight. About time too. Grateful for small mercies. The relief of Mafeking. I knew you loved me, darling.' The three of them said all this and much more, until the glasses were refilled and the water, soda and ice had gone round. Everyone was very relaxed.

'Thankfully,' said the older man - 'thankfully the picture is not uniformly bleak. I'm thinking of one bright spot in particular. Aneirin Pignatelli.' This set the dark man nodding with his eyes closed. 'You know who I'm talking about, of course?'

'Well, naturally,' said Charlie, himself nodding. He was nearly sure he had heard the name somewhere.

'And I take it most people are sufficiently aware of what happened to him.'

Charlie went on nodding.

'He showed himself to be a man of the highest integrity.

When he came out' - the pause here was not really necessary - 'he couldn't get into his front room for the Bowers.'

At this stage Charlie did show puzzlement, slightly, briefly, unintentionally. In an instant the last speaker turned his small face aside. 'From all the people he hadn't brought down with him,' said the other with a hint of vexation.

Charlie hastened to say 'Yes yes' and make a silly-of-me gesture, but it was too late. The spell of something like intimacy was shattered. The interloper took himself off, though not before he had topped up his glass, with a couple of cold stares to speed him on his way.

Looking vaguely about, Charlie saw Alun and Gwen at the far end of the main room. As he came up behind Gwen he heard Alun say in his quick style, 'I try to get out of lecturing whenever I can these days. Would a reading do instead?'

'Oh, er, I should think so,' said Gwen, turning. 'I'll let you know.'

'But don't worry, I'll be there. Charlie, time to be away, old boy.'

'Why aren't you going to the mayor's lunch?' asked Charlie. 'There must be one, surely.'

'Oh, there's a lunch, but I've got a date with my mates, haven't I? Where's Malcolm got to? And even if I hadn't I couldn't face another mayoral do. Had enough officialdom for one day. '

'You've got to remember he's an artist,' said Gwen. 'And, doubtless more plausibly in the eyes of some, the lunch won't be reported, the ceremony will. I'll see you up at the Picton, Charlie - I've got to dash off somewhere first. One of those things that won't keep.'

2

To Charlie waiting at the exit, it seemed to take about as long for Malcolm to get his car out of the multi-storey over the road from Tesco as it would to get the country out of the Common Market. But, having little real alternative, he turned up in the end and drove the two of them through the outskirts on a good old rainy Welsh afternoon. They passed the ruins of the castle and not long afterwards the ruins of the copper-smeltery. Here and there were conical knolls covered with grass and even supporting bushes or young trees, the overgrown spoilheaps of long-vanished collieries. The road led upwards beside the waters of the Iwerne and the walls of the valley began to rise, with bigger hills fuzzily in view further off. Then, just as some sort of countryside seemed about to come into sight, human habitations reappeared, shops, offices, pubs too, all quite as grimy as when the air was thick with coal-dust.

'Here we are,' said Malcolm, steering round a corner. 'Or are we? I can't see any - '

'What's the trouble?' asked Charlie, ducking and peering.

'It just says Streets where the Picton sign used to be.

Streets? What are they talking about?'

'Let's have a look.'

Malcolm parked outside a lilac-painted boutique on a site Char1ie was nearly sure had once been occupied by a Marxist bookshop, only that would have been a bit too good to be true. Everywhere else was apparently selling either electronic equipment or large steakwiches and jacket potatoes with cheese-and-onion topping. A man's voice crying the _Evening Post__ might have been from another world.

As they walked the needful not-very-many yards, huddled up against the thin rain, Malcolm spoke to Charlie, who for the second time in less than two hours had the experience of being addressed with one-hundred-per-cent unintelligibility by someone who had been making perfect sense a moment before.

'I'm sorry, Malcolm, I must be going round the bend, I couldn't follow a single word of that. Could you try again?'

'My fault,' said Malcolm, blushing a good deal. 'It was supposed to be your friend CassiveUaunus Pugh asking about General Picton. I mean I didn't hear him but I assume he had an American accent. I'm afraid I can't have done it very well.'

'Pembrokeshire man, wasn't he, Picton?' asked Charlie kindly.

'Yes, well part of Dyfed as it is now.'

'Fuck the lot of them,' said Charlie in a considered way.

'Who? Fuck who?'

'The London bastards who changed all the Welsh counties about. Even my kind of Welshman resents that. And then gave them all these crappy ancient names.'

'It was done in the interests of efficiency.' Malcolm was nothing if not fair-minded.

'That's where you're wrong. It was done in the interests of my bum.'

They plunged from the rain into the dark, echoing tunnel or underpassage that led to a side entrance, sometimes in the past scattered with boozers' muck, immaculate now and with its old cobblestones tom up and replaced by concrete. Indoors the continuing gloom was relieved by what looked like, and indeed proved on closer inspection to be, old-fashioned lamp-posts. More light, treated so as rather to resemble daylight, came from or through the glass ceiling. The walls were got up as shop-fronts, brick-pillared gateways, a park with railings, plastic shrubs and a white planking pavilion. The vast shape of Peter Thomas could be made out towards the back, sitting on a green-and-white-striped canvas chair near a stone-and-wrought-iron well-head. As the arrivals closed in on him the stuff they walked on changed from tiles to gravel.

'The affluent society,' said Peter. 'In the bad old days only very rich people could hope to enjoy surroundings like these. Now they're within the reach of all.'

Charlie went to the polygonal bar in the middle of the concourse and called for service.

'Be there now,' called a voice from out of sight, so not everything had changed.

When drinks had been dealt out Malcolm said, looking about him, 'Well, they've certainly transformed this place.'

'You can't even see where anything was,' said Charlie.

'Can you remember where the bar in the back room was? Where the door into it was?'

'I suppose everywhere's like it now except for a few backwaters like the Bible,' said Malcolm. His expression grew serious and withdrawn. 'It reminds me very strongly of somewhere I went a little while ago. Now where the hell was it?'

Peter had started to breathe heavily. 'Everywhere is not like it. I came up on the bus in a leisurely fashion and stopped on the way at the old Pendle Inn '- remember? It's all metal now, would you believe it? Walls, floor, tables, chairs, bar, the whole thing. Bare metal. Matt, not shiny. Including the fast-food device. Naked metal. Except for a dozen or so television screens for the rock videos. I freely grant you may think the differences between that and this can't be considered substantial.'

This was a long speech for Peter, but Malcolm answered up readily enough. 'I expect it appeals to the young people. Same as here.' It was true that as far as could be made out through the murk most of the others present were under thirty or so. Some were under ten and ran about crashing into pieces of furniture.

An expression of ineffable loathing swept over Peter's face but he offered no remark.

'It's not meant to appeal to anyone,' said Charlie. 'That's not the idea. It comes to the brewer's turn to give his pubs a face-lift, and of course he hates forking out a couple of million quid on that, but he can just about face it if he grits his teeth and needn't ever think about it again. So he picks a noted designer and tells him to get on with it. A noted designer gets noted through having photographs of things he's designed published in Swedish magazines and stays noted through winning prizes from international committees sitting in Brasilia. And that's that. The poor old... '

His voice faded out as Peter, who had been looking from him to Malcolm and back again with increasing speed, was evidently driven into speech. 'Where's Alun?' he demanded. 'I thought he was supposed to be coming with you.'

'He was,' said Charlie. 'He is. Coming, I mean. Later, though.'

As he spoke a telephone-bell sounded and a youngster with a fearsome slouch moved from behind the bar towards what was apparently a fully furnished old-style red GPO telephone-box standing on its concrete base near the centre of the area.

Peter said with some rancour, 'But it seems he was present, even active, at the ceremony to honour Brydan, which I gather from Malcolm unluckily went through without the gross humiliation of all parties.'

'Yes to all that, but something suddenly came up.'

'What son of thing?'

'I don't know.'

The way Charlie said this made Peter glance at him sharply, then at Malcolm warily. But all three sat there in silence under an orange-and-white beach umbrella while they rather helplessly watched the crouching youth advance on them.

'One of you Mr Cellan-Davies?' he asked, pronouncing the first element of the name in a way no Welshman would have done.

Charlie hoped with some earnestness that Malcolm would not issue' a correction, but it was all right: he responded after no more than his standard interval for uptake.

'Your friend says he's on his way.' A rearward jerk of the head went with this, to allay any doubts about its source.

For no reason that Charlie could define, the information failed to cheer them up, producing instead a condition almost of gloom, certainly one in which no further talk seemed possible for the foreseeable future. It was good old Malcolm who rose to the occasion with details of the event at St Dogmael's, as seen by him, and some account of Pugh for Peter's benefit while Charlie came comfortably near nodding off in his cabana chair.

Alun turned up rea1Iy quite soon, striding vitally towards them over the tiles and gravel, grimacing apologies and deprecations of the decor, fetching fresh drinks. Though full of assorted prattle he had no information to offer about the preceding hour or so of his life. Charlie, now roused again to somewhere near full consciousness, found that the s1owingdown of his intake and the general relaxation of recent minutes had combined to advance considerably his feeling that he might be drunk. He waited (or Alun to finish going on about how today might or might not have been the first time for God knew how long since the four of them had been boozing together, and then said to him, 'I thought what you said at that do this morning was quite good.'

'Oh, well one just has to - '

'Except for that stuff about although Brydan couldn't actually understand Welsh he could nevertheless _understand__ it.'

'For Christ's sake that's only what they - '

'I want to get this over to you while I remember and before I have too many drinks. When somebody tells you in Welsh that the cat sat on the mat you won't be able to make out what he's saying unless you know the Welsh for cat and sat and mat. Well, he can draw you a picture. Otherwise it's just gibberish.'

'Well, strictly no doubt - '

'The point is it's unnecessary. They'll be just as pleased to hear how Brydan wrote English with the fire and the passion and the spirit of this, that and the bloody other only possible to a true or real or whatever-you-please Welshman, which if it means anything is debatable to say the least, but whatever it is it's only bullshit, not _nonsense__. Stick to bu1lshit and we're all in the clear.'

'How many of the people there could appreciate the distinction?'

'I don't know, but I can, and so can you.'

Alun sighed. 'You're right, Charlie. I didn't think. I was careless.'

'Look to it in future, good boy.'

'Hey, Alun.' Malcolm was leaning across and grinning rather. He went on in seriously incompetent but this time intelligible American, 'Would you say, Mr Weaver, that this here is a typical or characteristic Welsh pub?'.

There came a noise that began rather like a fart of heroic proportions but soon proved to be made by the exhaustive ripping of the canvas seat of Peter's chair under his buttocks. Luckily he was too fat to fall the whole way through to the ground, remaining - clasped round the hips by the metal frame of the chair, his drink intact in his hand. Before he or anyone else could move, a piece of rock music, with the compulsory s'ap on the third beat of every bar, started up all around them at enormous volume, giving the effect of an omission handsomely redressed.

'Out!' bawled Alun. 'Down drinks and out.'

Having downed his own drink he went over and held the torn chair in position while by fits and starts Peter heaved himself upright and was free. They hurried out after the other two. Nobody looked up at any of them.

'That was a near one,' said Charlie as they assembled at the mouth of the tunnel. The rain had of course grown heavier.

'Well.' Alun was glancing to and fro. 'Lunch. There we are, the very thing. Bengal Tiger Indian Bistro and Takeaway. Well, nearly the very thing. Hang on a minute, lads. Case the joint.'

He dashed across the road in full athletic style, marring the effect hardly at all by holding a newspaper over his head. The three left in the tunnel turned morosely to one another.

'Got to watch him, you know.'

'What's he lined up for us?'

'I'm not quite clear. There was something said about a trip to Courcey.'

'Bit late for that, isn't it? Most of the way back and out again.'

'Not half-past one yet.'

'Do I look all right?' This was Malcolm.

'Yes, you look fine,' said the other two. 'Why, don't you feel all right?'

'Yes; I feel fine. I just wondered if I look all right. Looked all right.'

'No, you look fine.'

'Christ, here he is already.'

Making washout signals as he came, Alun hurried back and joined them in the tunnel. 'Bloody awful. You can't even get - I'll hold it for now. We'd better be moving. I don't think we'll find anywhere bearable round here, so let's head for Courcey right away. There's all sorts of tourist spots there now. Where's your car, Malcolm?'

'Haven't you got yours?'

'Came by minicab. More fun if we all go together.'

It was certainly more crowded than it might have been, but really quite pleasant in the warm damp and the half dark. Charlie was comfortable enough in the back, with Peter's bulk next to his seeing to it that, although Malcolm's car was not particularly small, staying unbudged on corners was no problem. As number one, Alun had naturally secured the front passenger seat, and he was soon twisted most of the way round in it to push on with conversation.

'Nightmare place back there, you know. Like a seaside boarding house hung with fairy lights and log-cabin music playing. Completely empty, of course, in fact no sign anybody had been there ever. A nice-enough female appeared and what could I have, well, I could have a cooked dinner, that's beef dinner or lamb dinner with cheese after, or I could have chicken salad, but you gets the Indian chutney-stand with that if you wants it, and pickled onions. And cheese after.'

'As served in Chittagong,' said Charlie.

'Couldn't I have a curry? No, sorry, it's only English till the evening. The Indian, he don't come on till six. She didn't like telling me, poor little thing. I rather cantankerously pointed out that it said Indian-Continental cuisine outside, which she agreed was the case. And then... _then__... I asked her who owned the joint, and oh, she looked bloody uncomfortable. And what do you think? Arabs own it. '

There was a united cry of rage and disgust, given extra punch by the effect of the bump in the road that shook the car at that moment.

'I mean my God,' said Alun, glaring seriously. 'Arabs owning airlines, Arabs owning half London you can sort of... But Arabs owning the Bengal Tiger Bistro in a clapped-out industrial village on the edge of a mouldering, rotting former manufacturing centre and coal port in a God-forsaken province, it makes you, well I don't know what it does, it makes you sweat. Or something.'

'It's not only the province's fault,' said Malcolm. 'Perhaps not even chiefly.'

'Nobody said it was, boy, nobody said it was.'

Silence fell in the car. Malcolm drove it perhaps a trifle faster than his habit but safely enough, and they ran into little traffic. For some minutes Charlie dozed. When he woke up it was to hear Alun singing to himself in the front.

'Was it little Nell whose nasty smell diffused general gloom?

Oh no, it wasn't little Nell... '

Anyone in a position to compare Alun's style of rendering these phrases with his effort on leaving Sophie's might well have noticed a falling off, a downturn in force and conviction. Charlie hardly took them in. It seemed to be shaping into one of his good days. The rain had stopped, or just as likely they had moved out of it as they approached sea level, and there was watery sunlight. Courcey came up on a signpost. Everything was peaceful and safe.

Before people stopped bothering about such things at all, Courcey Island was widely considered to have received its name from the Norman family of de Courcy who had been lords of nearby Locharne. Various authorities had seen that name as actually a corruption of Corsey, from Welsh _COTS__, 'bog, fen' and Old English _ey__, 'island', or possibly from an eponym _Kori__ with _ey__, or again had derived it from English _causeway__ or _causey__ or from the Welsh borrowing of the latter, _cawsai__ or _cawsi__. In the manner of authorities anywhere they had never reached agreement, though it remained true that a substantial causeway, last rebuilt in the 1880s, carried traffic the thousand yards or so between mainland and island on a fine broad road. It had only been about half as broad until 1965, in which year Courcey's three goods-and-passenger railway stations had been closed and the single track taken up.

Parts of this had once been known to Charlie, and more than those were no doubt still fresh in Malcolm's mind.

How he would have enjoyed imparting them to such as Pugh, and how lucky it was for everybody else that it was not happening. What might it not have done to Peter, fast asleep as he was and from time to time giving what sounded like a grunt of brutish consternation.

Once on the island and through Holmwood, the famous grove of ancient oaks once quite mistakenly thought to have druidic associations, Malcolm took the road to the left. East Courcey was always said to be the Welsh half of the island and its place-names suggested as much, including one or two anglicized ones like Treville, where they were making for. The western side had been English or largely English since Henry 11 planted settlers there in the 1160s. The former port of Birdarthur and nearly all the beaches of the island, overflowing with visitors in summer, lay on that coast. Along this one there ran for the most part a series of dark-coloured cliffs falling to narrow banks of pebbles or straight into the sea. In places they rose to a couple of hundred feet, their highest point being not far off the highest on Courcey. Hereabouts Malcolm stopped the car by agreement, and the occupants set about hauling themselves into the open, for a breath of air, they said, as well as a pee.

Charlie's first breath or sniff of air brought some redolence or other - salt, heather, pine-bark - that was gone before he could give it a name. He peed conscientiously into a grassy drain at the roadside. It was very quiet, or so he had just started to think when a small scarlet aeroplane· picked out with yellow came buzzing over his shoulder in the direction of the Swanset strip. He fought his way up a short damp tussocky slope to the inconsiderable summit, which was marked by a fake Celtic cross of some antiquity, flecked with lichen, and a more recent tablet in a purplish material.

Although he had known right away the spot to make for he had no recollection of having stood here before. He had certainly forgotten how the land dropped gently off on almost every side, giving a view of the mainland through a clump of Scotch firs and in the opposite direction an unsteady blur, if that, where Devon and Cornwall must be, but hiding most of the island itself. There was just one clear outlook down a small twisting valley on to the top of a straggle of bushes and low trees, a band of grey rock and a sunlit stretch of turf so dense and green it made him think of the cloth on a snooker table. He found the whole thing a most agreeable sight. At one time he had thought that there must have been more in such sights than he could merely see, perhaps not in them at all, behind them or beyond them but somehow connected with them, and plenty of poems had seemed to tell him the same story. But although he had stayed on the alert for quite a long while to catch a glimpse of what could not be seen, nothing answering remotely to any of his guesses or inklings had ever looked like turning up. Still, if he happened to stroll about in the country or to come across one of the poems he often found the experience appealing, even today. He started back down the slope.

'Come on, for Christ's sake,' called Alun rather irritably. 'We haven't got all night.'

'Indeed we haven't,' said Charlie, the last back to the car, though not possibly by much. As advertised, the breath of air had cleared his head. 'Look; I was in some _son__ of torpor or stupor when I let you bring us down this way. You won't find anything in Treville - it's all packed up round there.'

'The pubs'll still be going. '

'And with luck they'll be as nice as the one we've just come from.'

'Let's get going anyhow. No, they won't be trendy there, it's not that sort of place.'

'What are you talking about?' said Charlie as they moved off. 'Everywhere's trendy now unless it's actually starving.'

'I know what he's getting at,' said Peter. 'He means they're more authentic. More Welsh, God help us.'

'More suitable for his television series. Shit, I believe you're right.'

'Where do you want me to go?' asked Malcolm.

'About half a mile along there's our last chance to turn off over to the west side. That must be a better bet, surely. '

'What do you expect to find open there at this time of year?' Alun sounded pained and resentful, as if at ingratitude.

'I don't know, you're the researcher,' said Charlie. 'Hey, I tell you what we could do,' said Alun in an immediately livelier tone that would have revived Charlie's suspicions had they had time to abate: 'we could drop in on old Billy Moger just a bit further on. He'd know all that.'

'I haven't seen him for years. Vanished from sight when he moved out, pretty well. Are you sure he's still living there?'

'Well, he was last week when I rang.'

'Was he now?' Some female connected with Moger drifted up in Charlie's memory, not wife, or if wife then second wife, more likely long-standing lady-friend, but anyway also to do with Alun in the long-ago. 'That's good to hear.'

'I was going through my old address-book.'

'I understand.' Laura something, that was the name. 'Shall I take this right turn or not?' asked Malcolm. Charlie was fully expecting to be swept into the outskirts of Treville, but after no more than a few hundred yards the car pulled up in front of a bungalow built almost at the roadside. It would hardly have been anyone of Billy Moger's era who had required or accepted an original structure on the lines of a cottage in a whimsical book for children, but perhaps he or someone in between had ripped out the old-time twisty windows and goblin's front door and filled the apertures with steel and pine, and in the same spirit had put sensible housingestate chimneys there instead of whatever funny-hat arrangements had cheered up the roof before.

'Nasty place he's got here,' said Charlie when Alun had gone to ring the bell.

'Who is this Moger?' asked Peter.

'For years he had that sports shop in Cambridge Street next to the off-licence. Jolly handy, that. Nice little chap. Played a bit for Glamorgan before the war. You remember him.'

'After, too,' said Malcolm. 'Left-arm over the wicket. Used to bring them back from the off.'

'Right, we're summoned,' said Charlie. 'That didn't take long.'

His squint at the garden at the side of the bungalow showed him a. walled space landscaped like the small-mammal enclosure at some opulent zoo, including the dry bed of an artificial watercourse. But there were no animals in it and little in the way of vegetation either. On the threshold he was met by a strong but not obnoxious perfume, woody and spicy rather than sweet. He and the others got an outstandingly warm welcome from Laura, fully recognizable to him on sight, a small thin woman in a close-fitting black velvet suit, with piled blonde hair and a more than average allowance of jewellery round neck and wrists. Alun really performed the introductions.

Like a lot of people in Wales, though not only in Wales, Charlie had had a much more extensive education in horrible rooms and houses than in attractive or even so-so ones. So he was not much good on detail when, girded for the worst after what he had seen outside, he came across nothing of the interior loathsome to his practised eye, though others perhaps would have drawn the line at the well-stocked bar that filled one end of the living-room. He did notice flowers all over the place, numerous, varied, fresh, bloody marvellous in fact and, as another department of expertise told him, quite expensive in total, like other visible features. Yes, memory added now that at one period Billy had done very well, even too well for squeamish tastes, out of supplying sports equipment to local schools and other educational institutions, including the gaol. Well, that was how he had got his start.

Where was Billy?, Laura rejoined them to say that he would be out in a minute. Charlie had missed her departure, having concentrated on the bar, where at her request Alun had started to deal out drinks. Separate from the others, Peter stood and glanced round with what seemed to Charlie an expectantly censorious air, on the watch for vulgarity, affectation, shoddiness, lingering over a suspect watercolour, moving disappointedly on. Malcolm evidently approved of what he saw, or what he had taken in, was enjoying the party. He still looked fine, though his normal gravity of demeanour had begun to show signs of coming apart, like the descended knot of his tie.

Alun set out to describe the supposed purpose of their call, but as soon as he mentioned eating in Treville or any such place Laura would hear no more.

Her eyes flashed fire as in the nick of time she put a stop to this dangerous, degenerate project. 'Quite out of the question,' she affirmed in her startling deep husky voice. 'I never heard such nonsense in my life. Thank God you mentioned it to me, that's all I can say.'

'We were only thinking of a snack,' said Malcolm. '_Snack__,' said Laura, thereby banishing the topic. 'So let's be practical. Now - bearing time and trouble in mind the answer's obvious. Sandwiches for 'four is nothing to me, right?' Right, said Charlie to himself, and another fragment of recall checked in: Laura Makins, cold-lunch counter at the Three Feathers in Kinver Hill. 'No problem, gentlemen. Round again, Alun, and I'll see to it.'

'We can't let you do that,' said Malcolm, looking about for support.

'Don't you tell me what you can and can't let me do, young man.' For the first time she allowed humour to soften her pronouncements. 'I don't often get the chance to show off my talents. For making sandwiches, that is,' she explained, mischievously waving her beringed forefinger. 'Ah, here we are, darling - come along then.'

A small white-haired old man moved slowly but steadily over to the group, smiling and looking from face to face. He wore a burgundy-coloured silk dressing-gown with small white dots and a similarly patterned scarf high on one side of the neck, where it covered most of a reddened swelling. Alun and Laura between them told him who everybody was, and he shook hands and spoke in a thin voice. She handed him the weak whisky and water she had started preparing at first sight of him. He raised the glass and again glanced round the circle.

'I'm not off it, you see,' he said.

'Well, you've got this one here to keep you up to the mark, Billy,' said Alun. 'I bet she keeps it coming at you.'

'No, I'm not off it.'

'What do you think of the England bowling prospects this season?' asked Malcolm. 'Not much real quality there, is there?'

Billy chuckled and winked and nodded. 'Made an honest woman of her, I have.'

'About time too,' said Laura. 'I thought it was about time.'

She settled him now in a low leather chair with wooden arms and a Thai-silk back-cover in squares of red, green and buff. Close by was a small circular table on which stood a box of tissues, a box of mints, a silver pencil and a bowl of daffodils with their stalks cut short. The others moved round.

Laura said clearly but not loudly, 'Alun's only just come back to live down here. He was telling me he's seen a lot of changes.'

Alun described some of the changes, with accompaniment from Charlie and Malcolm. Pauses were inserted for possible contributions from Billy but he confined himself to a monosyllable or two, though as far as anyone there could judge he followed the drift of what was said. After a few minutes Laura shifted them all out to the kitchen, placing Billy at the far end of the long scrubbed table and Alun and Malcolm on either side of him. Alun was put on to opening and pouring wine. With speed and skill Laura prepared sandwiches - cheese and onion, tongue and pickle - for all except Billy, who very cheerfully ate baked beans and a couple of digestive biscuits and drank another weak whisky. The sandwiches were quite tasty and moist enough to arouse Charlie's professional respect and even to induce him to eat most of two of them. Soon they were all gone. Laura offered coffee and then at once disallowed it.

'You won't have time if you're to have a drink in Treville.'

'To hell with that,' said Alun. 'We'd all love some coffee - wouldn't we, boys?'

'Not now, darling. Some of us get a bit tired.'

'Oh. Right.'

They said good-bye to Billy there in the kitchen. When it came to Charlie's turn it struck him that at no time had he seen in him the Billy Moger he used to know. Laura went out to the car with them.

'Bless you for coming, all of you,' she said. 'Hope it wasn't too much of a shock.'

'Oh for Christ's sake,' said Alun.

'No really, it was sweet of you. He'll be cheered up for days now. He'll go over it a hundred times. Well, I'll go over it with him. You could, er... if you see any of his old mates you could tell them it's not too bad - you know. I think some of them stay away because they're afraid it's worse than it is. Good luck in Treville. I must say I don't fancy your chances anywhere there.'

By common consent they kept quiet well beyond the point where even the most preternatural powers of hearing, or the most sophisticated technology, could possibly have carried their words to Laura.

Charlie opened. 'So it's established that you didn't know what we were in for,' he said.

'I hope so.' Alun again turned to face rearwards, though less jauntily than before. 'Surely you could tell that straight away. Even I couldn't have carried off pretending I didn't if I did. No, she just said drop in when you're passing, we'd love to see you.'

'And what did you say?'

'I said we might make a trip this way today and if we did we might pop in for a drink. I didn't expect her to be expecting us.'

'I wondered about that,' said Malcolm. 'She could have had all that stuff just by her - tongue, cheese, onion. Not that it wasn't delicious and very good of her to do it.'

'Everything bar the bread,' said Charlie. 'Two large loaves. She got that in on the off-chance. Not negligible, I agree. And it's quite possible she primps herself up like that every day.'

'Poor little bugger,' said Peter.

'Yes, no harm in sparing a thought for him.'

'Indeed, but I was thinking of his wife. How many times she must have told herself of course nobody would come. How disappointed she'd have been if nobody had. For half an hour out of twenty-four times God knows what. All right, she smartened the place up a bit for our benefit. In the remote contingency that we came, that is. Not daring to tell him why. But no mere smartening-up could have done that, what we saw. That's years of work, every day.'

'Are you feeling all right, Peter?' asked Charlie. 'Shut up, Charlie,' said Alun.

'Sorry. Well, there seems to be plenty to be said about her. Not a lot about old Billy.'

Nobody was ready to contest this view there and then. 'One consolation, though,' Charlie went on. 'We haven't got Garth with us to say what is appropriate to such an occasion.'

He got quite a good laugh out of that. Other thoughts he kept to himself, for instance that Laura had known her Alun in not saying anything to him on the telephone about her husband's condition. And likewise, if Alun had plotted everything and known everything in advance he could not have contrived a better position for himself: not only full conversance with the situation there but a huge fund of goodwill and a positive duty to return to the scene. Carte bloody blanche at zero cost. Billy must be dead keen for you to have an afternoon off once in away, love. Oh well, there it was.

A few pieces of traffic turned up as they in fact reached the outskirts of Treville. As the car ducked down the last little hill before the village, the motto FREE WALES was briefly to be seen daubed on a brick wall in faded and dingy whitewash. An ironic cheer went up.

'Now would that be - ' began Malcolm in his frightening American accent before Alun shushed him.

'Belt up, you stupid bugger. What's the matter with you? You hardly set eyes on that clown and everything you see reminds you of him. Forget him.'

'Remember what happened the last time you invoked him,' said Charlie.

'Dismiss Cadwallader _Twll-Din__ Pugh from your mind.'

'Hey, I've thought of the thing to say to him about that slogan there. Show me a Welsh nationalist and I'll show you a cunt.'

'He wouldn't say thank you for showing him a cunt,' said Alun reasonably.

'That's my point, you bloody fool.'

'Oh Christ, it's the drink. Fuddling my mental processes. '

'It's certainly fuddling mine,' said Malcolm, wrenching at the wheel. 'Sorry.'

'And mine, thank God,' said Peter.

Despite everything said just now and earlier, expectation mounted as the time of arrival drew near. They passed traces of the railway station and of some of the eleven worked-out pits in the area, reached the shore and turned along it. Here until quite lately cockles and the edible seaweed laver-bread had been harvested. In the village itself rusty galvanized-iron roofs and shop-fronts that needed painting were noticeable. The first pub they went into had in it a half-size snooker-table, a TV set showing a children's programme with the sound turned down and only two people, the barmaid and her boy-friend, who while talking to her fed himself continuously from a dispenser apparently called a Peanut Colonel. There was a move to withdraw at once, but Charlie remarked that there was no guarantee of getting a drink elsewhere. Nobody was sure about local licensing hours.

Twenty years before, Charlie had passed a whole day from rising to retiring without a drink. Rising in fact had very nearly not taken place at all: he had believed absolutely, would have told anyone who asked, that death was on him. In that frame of mind he had nevertheless found himself playing a hard game in the crowd that afternoon at Wales v. France in Cardiff. In the evening Sophie and he, then recently married, had been giving a party - too late to cancel. Orange-juice in hand, he had watched fascinated as one by one, with unbelievable speed and totality, his contemporaries had crumpled into drunkenness, their faces and voices disintegrating between one sip and the next. From rather nearer the fray he saw it happen to Malcolm now as they emptied their drinks by the coruscating fruit-machine, saw his eyes swell in time with some event inside him. He took a sudden half-pace forward.

Charlie stayed at Malcolm's right hand for the two minute walk to the other waterside pub Alun had spotted earlier. The tide was out and a strong, not wholly pleasant smell came blowing off the saltings ahead of them, though there was nothing obvious for anybody to have done about that, nor about the rain that had come back into the air. As far as they could see there were only three or four parked cars about, unusually for any inhabited place in the kingdom. Someone, a middle-aged man, let himself in at a front door and disappeared, the only sign of life, apart from brand-new litter underfoot, at a time when the inhabitants might have been expected to be in full circulation. It seemed as quiet as it had been back there on the hill.

'What do they do here?' Malcolm asked quite distinctly as they crossed a side-road up which nothing moved, not even paper blown by the wind. 'Nowadays, I mean.'

'I don't know. Make lemonade or deodorant I dare say.'

'Some of them must commute to town.'

'No idea.'

'Mind you the unemployment figures for the area are as high as anywhere else in GB, along with Merseyside and parts of north-eastern England.'

'M'm.'

'Well, it's a terrible thing, Charlie, you know. A really... monstrous thing. I mean, imagine yourself stuck in a place like this with no prospects, no future, nothing going on. You can see for yourself. No... no prospects.'

'Ah.'

'I'd like to know, just out of curiosity, whether Maggie Thatcher's ever been out here, Charlie.'

'I shouldn't think so for a moment, not if she's got any sense. Certainly not since she closed down the first colliery in 1910, I think it was.'

More of this sort of thing soon brought them to the door or doors of the Ship Inn, which by appearance might easily as well have admitted them to a public lecture-theatre or bit of local government. But inside it was not at all like any of that, a typical old-style country pub with electric organ, round tables of pitted copper, triple-decker sandwiches and tremendously badly designed and written local announcements. And also a great many people. This was where they all were.

The considerable noise they were making lessened slightly at the entrance of ~e four visitors and some of those in view turned and had a look at them. This seemed natural enough at the sight of a group of obvious strangers in unconventional clothes like jackets and ties and including one or two - Peter, perhaps Charlie - worth a second glance anywhere.- The hum of normality was about restored· by the time they had moved to the further and less crowded end of the room and Charlie had waddled to the counter.

'Nothing for me,' said Malcolm when he was asked.

'Have a soft drink.'

'No I think I'll just go and sit down. You know.'

He sank into an armchair with tangerine loose covers that might have come out of a local auntie's front room, the generic source of most of the furnishings up this end, not least the parchment lampshades. In a moment he seemed to fall asleep. The other three nodded at each other, needing no words.

'That's nice,' said Alun. 'No question about him not driving now.'

'He's not the sort to try and insist,' said Charlie.

'No, but it's good to keep it civilized.'

Having unrestively waited rather longer than strict equity would have entailed, Charlie had his order taken by one of the fellows behind the bar, the one whose locks hung to his shoulders from either side of a bald pate. After unhurriedly assembling the required drinks he in due course uncourteously served them.

'Now we're all right for a bit,' said Charlie. 'More water? Well, how was Gwen?'

'Oh, Christ,' said Alun, and then, almost as differently as possible, 'Oh, Christ.' He stared malevolently at Charlie. 'You bugger.'

'Calm down, old bloke, it's all in the family, won't go any further. Not from me or Peter, that is. One of the reasons I've brought it up while I'm still stone cold sober is to warn you very seriously against letting the slightest suspicion enter Malcolm's head for a moment. He's - '

'Good Lord, what do you take me for?'

The grin lurking in this might not have irritated Charlie if it had not made him want to start grinning himself. 'Don't try and go devil-may-care on me. Listen: no sly quips or digs in the ribs or narrow shaves or delicious hints he couldn't possibly pick up and supposing he did what of it really, eh? He's not as, shall I say resilient as some of those we know.'

Alun betrayed little or none of the embarrassment he might have been expected to feel at this. 'No, of course, don't worry. It was her idea, not mine in the first place. She grabbed me in the Prince of Wales. As I was hoping you hadn't seen but knew you had.'

'But you went along with it. Yes, I saw. Anyway, how was it?'

With this Charlie glanced at Peter in the hope of spreading out the curiosity, making it a little more a matter of public concern, but he was looking here and there in his unfocused way, no bloody use at all.

'Oh, Christ,' said Alun, 'it was a... I just scraped home if you know what I mean. She was great fun in the old days but she's, well, she's gone off rather. Is that enough for you?'

'Just right, thanks. What son of a state was she in when you left?'

'Bit on the subdued side.'

'M'm. I expect she'll liven up when she sees Malcolm, poor old bastard. You know, Alun, it might be a good thing all round if you took in the idea that we've rumbled you. We see through you, chum.'

'If you're talking about Laura... '

'No, I am not talking about Laura. The diaconate has given you a clean bill of moral health there. More than you deserve. I mean in general. Can't you son of concentrate your attentions? Narrow them down a bit?'

'It's all this bloody temptation, you see. Growing in amplitude year by year. The percentage of women between my age-group and puberty, both ends inclusive, is unlikely to rise significantly higher.'

'The lower end doesn't seem to bother you unduly. You saw off that fan in the Glendower without any trouble. Any that I could see. And she was quite a - well, time was when I'd have been a horrible nuisance to her myself.'

'The lower end is largely hypothetical. Rather like the invisible cone that in theory extends upwards from the apex of your ordinary real God-fearing cone. The other way round in this case. More practically the young ones lack the essential security-conferring streak of gratitude to be found in the old ones. No problem resisting that temptation.'

Charlie gazed startled at his empty glass. 'Christ, what's gone wrong with this? Er, from the way you talked about it I didn't think Gwen sounded particularly grateful. I dare say you'll keep your mouth shut, but there's her too. Eh?'

'Yeah, I know.'

Vague Peter might be at times, preoccupied even, but shy on ~s shout never. He took Charlie's place at the counter and produced a pentagonal slice of plastic in which five one-pound coins were embedded: a children's toy, he would say, for children's money. Something between the used glasses and muscular dystrophy collecting box caught his eye and he bent to see better, fumbling for his spectacles. A moment later he gave a kind of snarling bellow, loud enough anyway to cause a nearby head or two to twist in his direction.

'Wouldn't you bloody know,'- he said not much less loudly. '_ASH yng__ sodding _Nghymru. Diolch am__... What kind of madhouse...'

'Never mind, no one understands it,' said Charlie soothingly.

'Not content with trying to stop me smoking they have the bloody cheek to do it in buggering _Welsh__. It's enough to make you... '

He flung out a hand, probably just in contemptuous dismissal, but his fingertips brushed the folded card and sent it fluttering to the floor. Before he could have started to face bending down to ground level the man with the divided hairdo intervened.

'Would you kindly pick that up, please.' He spoke not in any Welsh way but in the thick, unvarying tones of generic middle-north England.

Peter grew flustered, sweat gathering on his upper lip, but still he made no move and it was Alun, as one doubtless used to finding himself the only male in the company capable of bending, who put the notice back on the bar.

'If you want to smoke you'll have to go down the other end.'

'I don't want to bloody smoke,' said Peter, 'that's not the point. I just... '

'And layoff the language if you don't mind.' The barman gave them an assessing stare one after the other. 'Welshmen,' he muttered finally and turned away.

On later inquiry it emerged that Malcolm had not in fact been roused up by the mild disturbance and come to see' about it, but it looked very much like it at the time. His return to action certainly aroused more notice than his withdrawal had. When he reappeared he could not have been said to look fine any more, not too bad though, and his speech was all right too, at least as regards its utterance. But ten minutes' nap could have done nothing very reconstructive for him, and Charlie at once diagnosed a false dawn, being experienced in dawns of that kind if of no other.

Yet Malcolm started off quite well - he was excited, admittedly, but for the moment in a contained way. 'I've remembered what I was trying to remember, it's all come back to me. That awful place in Harriston we were in, with the railings and the lamp-posts. I knew it reminded me of somewhere but I couldn't think where. Well, it was a pub in Chester we went to when we were staying with our son last year. Very similar. Same sort of idea.'

This was obviously no more than a minor shock to the others.

'Don't you see, I'm saying the place in Harriston was just the same as an _English__ pub. That's what they're doing everywhere. Everywhere new here is the same as new things in England, whether it's the university or the restaurants or the supermarkets or what you buy there. What about this place we're in? Is there anything in here to tell you you're in Wales? At last they've found a way of destroying our country, not by poverty but by prosperity. I don't mind so much the decline and the decay, we've faced that before and we've always come through. No, what I abominate is the nauseous fruits of affluence. It's not the rubble I deplore, it's the vile crop that has sprung from it. It spells the end of...'

When he paused, less perhaps for breath than to concentrate on not falling over, Charlie said, 'Come and sit down and have a glass of dandelion-and-burdock.'

'I may be drunk but what I'm saying is very important.'

'There's no point in getting worked up about it,' said Peter.

'Oh there isn't, isn't there? It'll be all right with you, when everything's gone and we're left with a language that nobody speaks and Brydan and a few choirs, and Wales is a place on the map and nothing else? That'll be okay, will it?'

'No,' said Peter.

'Well then... '

'And if I'd talked in that strain you'd have told me I was bullshitting,' said Alun rather sourly.

'Well, you would have been, wouldn't you?' said Peter. 'You're not Malcolm.'

'Cheers.'

Afterwards Malcolm said he thought he had seen some people laughing at him. Again, he went on altogether as if he really had, granted some further temporary transformation of his character. 'You can laugh if you like,' he opened uncontroversially enough, not looking at anyone in particular. 'Pretty funny sight, a Welshman getting steamed up about Wales. Silly old bugger all in a tizzy about Wales going by the board. Specially funny of course to English people. Silly old Welsh bugger. But they'll be laughing on the other side of their faces before long. Because it's going to be their turn next. In fact it's already - '

That was all they gave him time for, not very much, not very offensive, not at all provocative, but it was enough for them to have fatally had a good look at him. Charlie had not taken in that anything much at all was happening till it was half over. Two or three or four men closed in on Malcolm, obscuring him from view. Voices were raised and some rapid movement seen. Malcolm went sideways over a table, an ordinary wooden one, and a glass or glasses dropped to the floor. The barman who had rebuked Peter threw up the flap of the counter with a crash and strolled forward advancing one shoulder at a time.

'Outside the lot of you,' he bawled. 'You too. Go on, you four. Out before I call the police.'

By now Charlie had reached Malcolm and found him bleeding from the nose. There was blood on his face and hand and jacket, not very much, but some.

'Let me clean him up, eh?'

'All right, but out straight after, see. The other two go now. That includes you, Fatso.'

There were no towels in the Gents, only a hot-air blower.

Charlie did what he could with their handkerchiefs. The bleeding had almost stopped.

'I didn't say anything very terrible, did I?' asked Malcolm.

'Not that I heard.'

'So what was it all about?'

'They were rather a rough lot and they reckoned we were misbehaving on their patch.' Charlie decided against a satirical harangue on the demoralizing effects of unemployment and inadequate leisure facilities. 'And we knew you meant no harm but they didn't, or they could say they didn't.'

'A bit unfair, chucking us out like that. It was them, those local fellows.'

'Just as well perhaps.'

'Of course I see it was no use arguing. You know, Charlie, I think I must be a bit tight. Probably hurt more if I wasn't, there is that. No thanks, I can manage.'

'Fine bloody pub-crawl we've had, haven't we?'

'Sorry.'

'Not your fault. I suppose Alun made good use of the time. Some of it, anyway.'

Their way out took them through the· bar where they had spent most of their short time on the premises.

'I could tell what sort they were the moment they came in.'

'Men that age, you'd think they'd have learnt how to behave by this time.'

Four - Peter

1

Peter's getting-up procedures were less taxing to the spirit than Charlie's or Malcolm's but they were no less rigid. They bad stopped being what you hurried heedlessly through before you did anything of interest and had turned into a major event of his day, with him very much on his own, which was right for an oldster's day. Among such events it was by far the most strenuous performance. The section that really took it out ofhim was the actual donning of clothes, refined as this had been over the years, and its heaviest item was the opener, putting his socks on. At one time this had come after instead of before putting his underpants on, but he had noticed that that way round he kept tearing them with his toenails.

Those toenails had in themselves become a disproportion in his life. They tore the pants because they were sharp and jagged, and they had got like that because they had grown too long and broken off, and he had let them grow because these days cutting them was no joke at all. He could not do it in the house because there was no means of trapping the fragments and Muriel would be bound to come across a couple, especially with her bare feet, and that was obviously to be avoided. After experimenting with a camp-stool in the garage and falling off it a good deal he had settled on a garden seat under the rather fine flowering cherry. This restricted him to the warmer months, the wearing of an overcoat being of course ruled out by the degree of bending involved. But at least he. could let the parings fly free, and fly they bloody well did, especially the ones that came crunching off his big toes, which were massive enough and moved fast enough to have brought down a sparrow on the wing, though so far this had not occurred.

The socks went on in the bathroom with the aid of a particular low table, height being critical. Heel on table, sock completely on as far as heel, toes on table, sock round heel and up. Quite recently he had at last found the kind of socks he wanted, short with no elastic round the top. They did his swollen ankles good, not by making them swell less but by not constricting them, and so leaving them looking less repulsive and frightening when he undressed at night. Pants on in the bedroom, heel and toe like the socks but at floor level, spot of talc round the scrotum, then trousers two mornings out of every three or so. On the third or so morning he would find chocolate, cream, jam or some combination of these from his bedtime snack smeared over the pair in use, and would have to return to the bathroom, specifically to its mirror for guidance in fixing the braces on the front of the fresh trousers, an area which needless to say had been well out of his direct view these many years.

There was nothing non-standard about the remainder of his dressing routine except perhaps for the use of the long shoehorn, a rare and much-prized facility he had once mislaid for a whole miserable week, filling the gap as best he might with a silver-plated Georgian serving-spoon from Muriel's kitchen, where it had naturally had to be returned after each application. He had worn the same pair of featureless slipper-types for years now, hoping to die or become bedridden before they fell to pieces and forced him to go to one of these do-the-whole-thing-yourself shoe-shops which he understood were all they had these days.

The part of the course that involved the bathroom hand-basin was less demanding only than the first. The foam went on to his face in two ticks, the sweeps of his razor were bold and swift and he hardly did more with his toothbrush than spread paste over his gums. But even so some bending and stretching and arm-raising was unavoidable, enough to see to it that by the time he was as ready to face the world as he would ever be he was breathing fairly hard and pouring with sweat, especially from his scalp. At one period he had tried to reduce this effect by leaving large parts of himself undried after his bath, but after several weeks of nonstop cold symptoms had surmised a connection and desisted. He went downstairs carrying the sleeveless pullover he would draw carefully over his head when he had cooled off.

Where was Muriel? - this particular morning as every other morning a question to get settled right at the start. Not in her bedroom: its door had stood open and she was an early bird anyway. Not out in the car: he would have heard it. In the garden? Likely enough at the moment, with no rain falling: as she often said, a great deal needed doing in the third of an acre with only Mr Mayhew, who had once worked in the manufacture of metal boxes, coming in to do some of the rough on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At times like this, Peter recalled the brief period when he had magnanimously volunteered now and then to lend a hand himself, and on every occasion had been told off to shift as it might have been five hundred gallon-sized flowerpots from one end of the estate to the other. It was almost as if Muriel would sooner have been able to complain of not being helped than be helped. Well, well, there was no fathoming some people.

Yes, there she was on her knees near the far hedge, getting a place ready to put something into the ground or even actually putting it in. He could not see which from the dining-room windows nor would he have cared at any distance, having disliked gardens ever since having been 'expected to amuse himself in one otherwise than by pulling up the plants. It was one of his earliest memories (he must have been about four) and his parents' garden had admittedly been much smaller than this, but the lesson had stuck, indeed he had been elaborating it off and on ever since. Gardens, he had long ago perceived, were all about power, from overawing you with their magnificence (sneering at your penury) to rebuking your indolence, mean-mindedness, barbarity, etc. Houses were pretty bad too and in the same way, but there was mitigation there, with so many people having to live in them.

The house he lived in himself, this house, had immeasurably more than that to be said about it. Nowadays there were only two people in it constantly, not more than half a dozen had ever come to stay at once and a maximum of twenty or so might turn up for a party, but almost that number could have found beds and a couple of hundred somewhere to sit. In the dining-room, for instance, the twenty mentioned would have had space to breakfast simultaneously while as many more waited their turn on chairs round the walls. These were smothered with pictures, every single one of which Peter thought was absolutely terrible. Either it was not a picture of anything on earth or else it was nothing like what it was supposed to be a picture of. Over the years he had got as used to them as he could, considering new ones were constantly appearing. Muriel would go up to London and the day after her return the two blokes made of purple plasticine would have been replaced by an arrangement of wavy lines and blobs. A new rug or coffee-table might well have turned up at the same time. And there was nothing he could do about any of it, for as many guessed and very nearly as many had been told, Muriel had money, and the house and most of what was in it were hers. He still wondered occasionally how much difference it would have made if things had been the other way round.

His breakfast stood on a tray at the end of the dining-table, prepared and put there by Mrs Havard, who came in every weekday morning. As always it was half a grapefruit, cereal, toast and coffee in thermos flask. He went to work on the grapefruit with the serrated knife, separating the wedges and swearing once or twice as he encountered awkward partitions between them. Digging them out to eat was no walkover either. Some clung tenaciously to their compartments after being to all appearance cut free, others came only half-way out, still joined on by a band of pith. He dealt with such cases by lifting the whole works into the air by the segment and waggling the main body of the fruit in circles until the bond parted and it crashed back on to or near its plate. How different from the accommodating spoonfuls of memory, emerging first go as perfect geometrical segments. The buggers were fighting back, he muttered to himself. Like everything else these days.

The struggle with the grapefruit, though troublesome, had not been really severe, and soon after it was settled he felt he had lost enough heat to make it all right for him to wear his pullover, which was draped over the back of the chair next to him. He muffed reaching for it and the thing slid eagerly to the floor. At the same time he caught a movement through the window and saw Muriel approaching the house. Hurriedly, he bent over in his chair, failed to make contact, got to his feet, crouched down, grabbed the pullover, put it on, sat down again, took three deep breaths. Then a pain, the pain, started up in the left side of his chest.

Try and time them, Dewi had said in a tone faintly suggesting that that would be as good a way as any of occupying himself. Peter uncovered his watch and kept his eyes fixed on it, hoping Muriel would not come into the room. Usually she did not at this stage, indeed he was given his breakfasts in here to be kept out of the way of something or other, but now and then she did, and when she did it was not always with the intention or effect of cheering him up. Describing the pain to Dewi he had mentioned a gripping, squeezing quality and Dewi had said that was characteristic, which was a great relief. He had said too that if things took a turn for the worse he was willing to consider prescribing some pills, adding in a similar spirit that while they would relieve the pain they would not improve his physical state in the smallest degree.

When the pain or series of pains began, a couple of years before, Dewi had asked him about possible sources of stress in his life. Stress? Yes, you know - tension, anxiety, irritation. He had said Muriel was not the easiest of women to get along with and Dewi had not quite managed not to grin, because of course from what the world saw he, Peter, was the difficult one. Well, difficult he might be, difficult he admitted, but not on Muriel's exalted level, surely to God. As to anxiety now, that was good. Fear was the true word for it, simple fear of her tongue, which nothing he had ever thought of would explain away, and specifically an ultimate fear that one day she would carry out her periodic threat to sell the house, which was inevitably in her name, and go back to Yorkshire on her own, leaving him to find a couple of rooms in Emanuel or somewhere.

He acknowledged that there was not much dignity about any of this, but again it was hard to see a remedy.

After four minutes and twelve seconds the pain left off.

Even before opening his diary he knew it continued the down~ trend since Christmas, if that counted for anything. Better ring Dewi later, though, he thought, trying to drive other thoughts away. Well, tomorrow, then.

He had brought himself to start on the cereal, which by his preference was of a resolutely unauthentic type, penurious in things like natural fibre, when he heard the telephone ring in the hall and stop after a few seconds and then Muriel's voice, a wordless mumble from where he sat. After only a few more seconds this too stopped and her heavy footfalls approached the door but stopped just short of it. Peter took a further couple of deep breaths. He had not told her about his chest pains and what Dewi had said about them, because for one thing he doubted whether the news would cut much ice with her, in fact... Another thought to leave unexamined.

But when she had evidently changed her mind for the second time and come into the room he almost smiled. At the sight of her it was hard to believe that this not very large figure with the jaunty manner, son of hemispherical haircut 'and (at the moment) green plastic knee-pads for gardening could make anyone afraid, except perhaps of being mildly bored. Although they were meeting for the first time that day she did not come over, let alone come over to kiss him. They had not touched each other for nearly ten years.

'William,' she announced, meaning their son, their only child, who by no intention of either had turned up in 1955. 'Oh... right.' He gripped the arms of his chair.

'No no, don't bestir yourself,' said Muriel, raising a hand; 'the connection is terminated. Just a tip-off that he'll be collecting some lunch here and might see his way afterwards to shifting a clod or two if the monsoon hasn't broken by then.'

'Oh, great. But it's not Saturday. Or Sunday. How - '

'It's his day off. Estate agents stay open all the time but individual employees have days off. Which has a bearing on the matter in hand in that the said William Thomas is employed by an estate agent.'

Peter nodded wordlessly. The facts had just dropped out of his sight for an instant, but long enough for her to get in.

'I suppose it's easy for people who don't have days on to forget that other people have days off,' she said with an air of illumination. 'I take it you'll be putting your nose in at the Bible later?'

'Yes, I think so, but I'll be - '

'I think so too. He, young William that is, declared his intention of arriving about one so if you roll in pissed at three you won't see a lot of him.'

'Okay, fine.'

'I wonder if you'd mind calling in at that garden centre place off Hatchery Road and picking up some vegetation for me. It's all ordered and ready. Would you mind doing that?'

'No, that's easy.'

'Because do say if you would mind.' Muriel looked gravely at him.

'No, I don't mind a bit. No problem.'

She looked at him a while longer, then, apparently satisfied, flashed a smile (in the sense that it went on and off fast) and clumped out.

He exhaled slowly. There, that had been all right; the smile had been quite well worth having. It was all how she was feeling at any given moment, he told himself, with some conviction for once. She was not too bad really.

He finished his breakfast and went along to the sitting-room, where by now Mrs Havard had been and gone. As usual she had moved every object that could fairly be moved, from matchboxes to sofas, as evidence of her assiduity. When he had as usual shifted everything back where it belonged he settled down with a technical journal and put in a spell of pretending to keep up with his branch of chemical engineering until it was time to he going along to the Bible.

2

Most of those whose marriages have turned out less than well, say, might have been considered to have their ideas of how or why but not to know much about when. According to himself Peter was an exception. If challenged he could have named at least the month and year in which he and Muriel had been making love one night and roughly half-way through in his estimation, what would have been half-way through, rather, she had asked him how much longer he was going to be. He had got out of bed, collected his clothes, dressed in the bathroom and driven over to the Norrises'. He and Charlie had sat up most of the night with a bottle of Scotch while Charlie went on telling him he had not been criminally selfish all his married life and it was not his fault if Muriel disliked it or was indifferent to it. But he had perhaps not managed to take those ideas on board, not quite, then or since.

Anyway, since that night things had accountably never been the same between the Thomases. What it had become inexact to call their lovemaking dwindled in both frequency and duration. After a few years of this it had dawned on Peter that, however strongly Muriel might have disliked it or however deeply indifferent to it she might have been, she expected him to go on going through the motions of providing it in token of still wanting it, and of course not so much it as her. A further decline set in, quite soon followed by the inception of the random verbal punch-ups, and that had been that, rubbed in by separate rooms, no hugs, no endearments. Even perfect love, he used to say to himself, was probably cast out by fear. With all this it was some consolation, though not much, to notice that not even the most colourful punch-ups had anything sexual in them, like references to lovers or what would have been jolliest of the lot, doubts cast on William's paternity, an enormous and surely significant omission.

Peter played back bits of this to himself while he made his way home from the Bible in the middle of a small spinney; he actually managed a new thought on the subject in general. Part of men's earlier average age at death than women's, perhaps a substantial part, might be traceable to wives driving husbands to coronaries single-handed by steadily winding them up with anxiety and rage. Put it to Dewi. But never mind Dewi for now. He focused on the Bible session just over: old Tudor Whittingham, old Owen Thomas, old Vaughan Mowbray and old Arnold Spurling, not to speak of old Garth Pumphrey, who had as good as chaired an impromptu Brains Trust on false teeth, giving unasked a full account of the events leading up to the final installation of his own current set - Peter's mouth tingled at the memory and he clapped a hand over it. But no Charlie, no Alun, no Malcolm. Boding ill, somehow, the last one.

William's smart Audi was thoughtfully parked so as not to block the way to the garage. The time was 1.23, specially selected so as not to do more than brush the fringe of lateness while still allowing mother and son some minutes alone together at the outset. He found them standing by the sitting-room window looking out at the garden and talking about something called mulch or mulching, or rather Muriel was talking about it and went on doing so till a little while after Peter had joined the party. She also remained arm in arm with William throughout, so that on the whole, any kind of Peter/William embrace seemed excluded. William had done what he could in the meantime with waves and cheerful grimaces.

In the end Peter touched his son on the shoulder. 'Hallo, Willie boy, how's it going?'

'Darling, you must have a drink,' Muriel insisted to William. 'Now what would you like?'

'Hallo Dad, fine thanks. Have you got a beer?'

'Sure. What about you, love?'

'Oh, er, anything for me. I don't care. '

'Oh, but you must have a preference. Gin and tonic? Vodka?'

'Is there any dry sherry?'

'I'm afraid not.' Peter never drank sherry himself and he could not remember the last time Muriel had asked for it.

'Oh, well don't bother then.'

'That's no way to talk,' said Peter in his best jocose style. 'Nothing's too much trouble around here. What about a spot of-'

'Is there any wine open?'

'No, but I can easily - '

'Oh, oh, never mind.'

'Come on, Mum, have a glass of wine,' said William. 'If you're going to take that tone,' said his mother, 'what is there for me to do but give in gracefully?'

And of course when Peter got back to the sitting-room with the drinks they were no longer there, they had gone out into the garden. They could have gone out and in half a dozen times while he was looking for something to take down to the basement to open the new case of Muscadet with, and carrying on from there. When he reached them they were strolling, still or again arm in arm, down along the left-hand edge of the lawn with William on the inside, so that to be next to him he would either have to haul the pair of them a good yard to their right or walk on the flower-bed. Neither seemed advisable in the circumstances and he positioned himself instead on Muriel's other side. At the foot of the garden they did not make an about-turn but a right wheel, and stayed in the same relative positions till they were back in the house. It was much the same at lunch: Muriel at the corner of the table, William beside her, Peter at the end on a diagonal from him. They were just sitting down when the telephone rang in the hall and Peter went to answer it.

At his grunt a woman's voice said, 'Is that you, Peter?' He nearly dropped the handset. He had no breath. 'Mr Peter Thomas?'

'Yes. It's me.'

'Rhiannon here, Peter. Just to ask, are you coming to our party tonight at the Golf Club? Your old haunt. I sent you an invitation.'

'I hadn't really thought. I'm sorry.'

'Do come. It's our house-warming, only the house still isn't properly ready yet so we're having it at the Golf Club. Six-thirty onwards. We'd love you and Muriel to come.'

'I'm afraid we can't. I'm sorry.'

'Can you really not come?'

He wanted to lie but could not, nor, he found, did he know how to say what he felt. 'I just don't think it would be a good idea.' .

'Peter, listen. You can't keep out of my way for ever, love. It's incredible we haven't run into each other already by this time. And you think: it'll be much better not out of the blue and with lots of people there, won't it? I can't remember if you've met our daughter Rosemary. She's down from Oxford. Please come.'

'All right. I mean thank you, yes I will. I don't know about Muriel.'

'You turn up anyway then. See you later.'

Peter went on sitting for a moment longer on the pseudo-Chippendale chair by the telephone on to which he had dropped at the first sound of Rhiannon's voice. From there he could see the bottle of Famous Grouse on the kitchen dresser and hesitated. Then he dragged himself to his feet, hurried back to the dining-room and said before he could think better of it, interrupting Muriel to do so, 'That was Rhiannon Weaver inviting us to a party tonight at the Golf Club. Six-thirty.'

'What a merry thought,' said Muriel. 'Just my cup of tea. Two hundred assorted Welsh people standing up talking at the tops of their voices. Right up my street. You go.'

'Yes, I think I will.'

'I wouldn't want to spoil the reunion of two old flames.'

'Six-thirty at the Golf Club did you say, Dad? I've got to be off anyhow about then and it's right on my way, the Club. I suppose there will be females present. Not aged a hundred and fifty I mean.'

'Their daughter for one,' said Peter.

'Great. I can go instead of you, Mum. I can take Dad down and he can get a mini cab back. One more drunken-driving conviction evaded.'

'You must be pretty hard up for a bit of skirt if you think Holland Golf Club is likely country,' said Muriel.

'Pretty hard up for a bit of a lot of things is what you quite soon become out at Capel Mererid,' said William. 'Not boredom, though. No supply shortfalls there.'

Shortly before six-thirty Peter settled himself in the passenger-seat of the Audi. He felt what he had not felt for many years, the sensation of one about to sit an exam. William, serious, dark and already thinning at the temples, wearing a rather ugly tie his father had lent him, got behind the wheel. Peter was fond of him, at least liked him better than anybody else he knew, but was shy when alone with him because he found it hard to think of things to say to him that were not likely to bore him. This mattered much less than it would have done if he had been alone with him at all often or for long at a time. Anyway, he need not have worried on this occasion.

William set the car in motion. 'Seat-belt, Dad.'

'Sorry.'

'I can see you'd like to get out of it if you could. You know you're enormously fat, do you? Fatter than ever? No-joke fat? Well of course you do, you could hardly not. The booze I suppose mostly, is it? I'm not saying I blame you, mind.' , 'That and the eats. Don't let what I ate for lunch fool you. I'm very good during the day, marvellous during the day, a lettuce-leaf here and half a sardine there, and then I'm sitting on my arse with the telly finished and I start stuffing myself. Cakes mostly. Profiteroles. Brandy-snaps. Anything with cream or jam or chocolate. Also cake, Genoa cake, Dundee cake with almonds. Seed cake with a glass of Malmsey. Like some Victorian female only this is one o'clock in the morning.'

'You can't be hungry, not then. Not really.'

'Well, it's partly giving up smoking. Four years now but then I still feel, you know, is this all there is for tonight?

So you start eating. But it's also partly, partly I don't know what to call it. Scared as much as anything I mean. I hope that doesn't sound too much like piling on the agony.' When William said nothing Peter went on. 'Well, there's quite a good selection of things to be scared of when you get to my age, as you may well be able to imagine.'

'And not only then,' said William. 'Yes, I was reading the other day where the fellow said, Welshman too by God, he said carbohydrates, which is what we're talking about, they're tranquillizing, just mildly. Well, that clears that up. But are you all right, Dad? You mustn't mind me saying this, but when I first saw you today I didn't think you were looking very well. Nothing wrong, is there? Silly not to tell me if there is.'

Peter told him straight away, sticking to physical facts, making not even the most indirect allusion to Muriel. When he had finished he felt a little better, but not much because of finding he was forced to listen to his own words as if he had been William, and they had sounded rather daunting like that. They drove in silence for a couple of minutes. Then William said, 'Mum still goes on those trips of hers to London, does she?'

'Oh yes, like mad. Every couple of months or so. In fact she's about due for one now.'

'Right, well when she goes, give me a ring and I'll pop down and we could have lunch or whatever you like. Just give me a ring. When Mum's in London.'

'Fine.'.

'Or you could come up to me if you felt like it. Never been, have you? Not that there's much to see. There's this pad I share with one of the blokes at work. Miner's cottage it was, quite nice really, with a bit of garden at the back. And I'll tell you something about that garden. We've been there two years all but a few weeks and it hasn't had a fork in it the whole of that time. Don't you think that's interesting?'

Rhiannon was the first person Peter saw at the Golf Club when he went in by the side entrance from the car park and entered the large old-fashioned hall where non-members were entertained. She was standing in its opposite corner but seemed to have caught sight of him even before he saw her. At once she smiled with what looked like pure pleasure, pure affection, though how that could have been he had no idea, and hurried over towards him. He realized he had been afraid of not recognizing her after so many years, but when she came in range of his glasses (supposed to be for reading only but kept on most of the time out of inertia) he saw her face had not changed at all- well, a few lines, a fullness under the chin, nothing really, of course her hair was probably a bit touched up. The eyes were the same. Surely she was not going to kiss him but she was, she did.

'This is William,' he said almost without knowing it. 'My son.' He realized something else, that William had not said a word about her, or about Alun either, when he had had the chance. He must know, know something anyway.

'Hallo, William. Rosemary's round the place somewhere.'

The voice was the same too, but he had noticed that already, on the telephone. He said something back and she asked about Muriel. The three talked for some minutes, had drinks, were joined by Rosemary. Peter took in very little: he was too busy looking furtively at Rhiannon and listening to her talking rather than following what she said. Now and then he tried and failed to explain to himself what he hoped to achieve (or perhaps avoid) while present. No sooner was the question sharpened for him by William steering Rosemary away than Alun came up and hailed him with his normal supernormal display of warmth. He was looking disagreeably fit, and well turned out: hair snowier than ever, new pearl-grey suit in some unfamiliar, doubtless fashionable cloth, pink carnation in buttonhole. The effect was in part that of an upper-second-rate actor, one of the sort you wondered about a bit too, which had to be accidental. But it was fair to say that the comic side of this was almost endearing, Peter considered, nearer to it at least than anything he was likely to come up with himself.

'You have the good fortune,' said Alun with all his vivacity, 'or as some would no doubt call it, the misfortune to find me in a state of euphoria. One based moreover not on artificial stimulants but on sober fact. Two facts. Today I received a commission for seven half-hour television programmes, tittle to be agreed but something about Wales, what else, all right Peter, and more important, incomparably more important, I wrote a poem, well, got to the end of the first draft. It's been a long time. I don't know whether it's any good but the point is writing it, getting it written, finding you can still do it. Marvellous bloody feeling. Like finding you can still, er... '

He fell silent abruptly and with seeming finality, blinking at the floor. After a number of seconds he flung up his head in triumph. 'Sing in the choir, sing in the choir. You thought you'd, er... ' Another pause followed, but a much shorter one than before. 'Forgotten the harmony, forgotten how the part went, but you've still got it, it's still there. Very much the... Ah, here we are, there you are, you old devils, you.'

He turned with rekindled enthusiasm to Charlie and Sophie, to Garth, to Sian Smith and Dorothy Morgan, not abating it even for Dorothy; euphoria had been the word all right. When the cries and embraces of meeting were over Dorothy led Rhiannon away in the direction of a grim-faced female who looked like a retired bouncer in drag and shorty silver wig. Somebody's mother, Peter guessed; it had always to be remembered that there were still quite a lot of people about who had mothers.

Garth, quite natty in his usual tweeds, was eulogizing Alun's suit. 'Oh, lovely bit of garment you've got there, boy. Beautiful. Must have cost you a packet.' He reached out and turned a lapel over. 'Of course, I suppose having to look right for all your television 'appearances, this son of thing comes off tax, does it?'

'I shouldn't be surprised. My accountant sees to all that.

Anyway, what - '

'Do you know how long I've had this suit I'm wearing now?' Garth asked them all in a grim, challenging way. 'Thirty-seven years. You see, I've had a bit of sense, I've taken care of myself. Not like some, eh? Well, you're not as bad as these two, Alun, agreed, but you have let yourself go just a wee bit, come on, admit it now. Under here' - he tapped his chin - 'and here and - '

'I can't do anything about your terrible mind, Garth,' said Alun, grinning harder than before, 'I can't help your inability to notice anything that doesn't directly involve your pathetic self,' he continued, starting to shake with mirth, 'but when you start vaunting your supposed moral superiority, you bloody little cowshed mountebank,' and here he started laughing as he spoke, 'then at least I can tell you to shut your blathering trap before I slam your doubtless irreproachable dentures down your fucking throat.'

By now he and Garth had their arms round each other's shoulders, both of them bent in the middle and red in the face, roaring fit to bust, two old mates who had seen things so much in the same light for so long that they could be carried helplessly away together to a region of feeling no outsider could penetrate or understand. Charlie looked on with an unsettled smile, Peter without expression.

Alun was the first to come round. 'Well,' he said, breathing noisily and sniffing, 'that'll show the little bugger, what? Ah. Ah!' And he dashed off across the room to greet old Owen Thomas and his wife who had just come in the front entrance, near which there also stood a photographer.

'Oh dear, dear,' said Garth, 'there was a performance and no mistake. That boy's got a tongue to him, hasn't he? It's a treat to hear him use the language. God alive, I can't think when I last laughed like that.'

'How's Angharad?' asked Charlie.

'Oh, well enough, thank you, Charlie. Er, well enough.'

'I couldn't follow the bit about the cowshed,' said Peter when Garth had moved away.

'He's a vet, or was, at Capel Mererid. Sheep rather than cows, but you get the general gist. I thought everybody knew that. He doesn't give you a fair chance to forget it.'

'I knew. Well, after all, the mind's got to start going some time.'

'Not very nice, that just now, was it?' said Charlie. 'In fact not at all nice. It's odd, that was exactly what you've always wanted to say to him, you hoped somebody would one day and then when they do it's nothing like the treat you'd been banking on. Bloody... bloody little cowshed mountebank was it? M'm. There's trenchant, eh?'.

'You think Garth got it?'

'No. If he told Angharad about it she would, but he probably hasn't told her anything for twenty years. No, if he'd got it, that would mean what he said to us about a treat and the rest of it would have had to be ironical and also played just right, and okay, perhaps you can never be absolutely sure a Welshman's not being ironical, not even that one, but playing something even approximately just right - Garth Pumphrey? No. What gets up my nose is Alun thinking he's got away with it. Like... '

'Or not caring if he has or not.'

'Correct. I don't think he'd have gone quite as far as that in the old days. Anyway, who cares? Let's get another drink.'

'Why not, it might be our last.'

'Cheers.'

3

Recalling his youthful self in this one respect, though not at all in any other, Peter spent some time trying without success to get Rhiannon on her own. Indeed even this much recall was faint: in those days he might well have brought matters to a head before very long by muttering a blunt directive to move elsewhere or, if it came to it, by seizing an arm and pulling fairly gently. Tonight he followed Rhiannon round tamely and, for the look of the thing, only some of the time. Dorothy Morgan appeared, stayed, went, reappeared, and while she was present, and talking, in other words present, the best-case scenario, like Rhiannon and himself spontaneously taking to their heels, would have been no good because she would beyond question have come tearing after them. And when it was not Dorothy it was Percy and Dorothy, then Sophie and Sian again, then Alun briefly again, then old Tudor Whittingham and his wife and old Vaughan Mowbray's lady-friend. Well, Peter kept telling himself, she was the hostess. When he saw Gwen approaching he gave up. She would have rumbled him in a moment and let him know about it in one taking-her-time look. - Glass in hand, hardly drunk at all, he stood or walked here and there a few paces at a time. The heavy furniture, dark panelled walls, faded Turkey carpet in a style once seen all over the place but now disappeared everywhere else, or so he thought, persuaded him that nothing here had changed. The hefty flat-fronted gas-fire at the back of the room presumably concealed an open hearth, but if so it had been concealing it as far back as he could remember, whenever that might have been. He worked on it while he went out to the Gents. Though smartened up a little, this too seemed much the same, even to the fetching-up noises coming from one of the cubicles. Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting. Approximately. Not his genre, more Charlie's.

He went back into the hall trying to recall being in it when he had been round about thirty. It was likely, it was as good as certain that on at least one such occasion, drinking with a mate in the corner there, where you always went if it was unoccupied, or waiting for his father in the bar itself, he had thought of Rhiannon, felt excited about her, looked forward impatiently to seeing her. No doubt, but it had all gone, as finally as his childhood. His eagle two at the sixteenth in 1948 was still with him, though, and the champagne he had stood afterwards in the bar. How awful, he thought.

By this time he had reached the small dining-room that opened off the hall and was also open to non-members, though it was chiefly valued after sundown as a flaking-out facility for members. It was empty and in darkness now. He reached towards the light-switch, then left it and squeezed along the edge of the bare dinner-table to the window. Outside all colour had faded, but there was still a clear view of part of the course, including the pine-woods on one side and, furthest off, the nearly straight line of the cliff-top beyond which on bright days a shimmer was reflected from the sea. Whatever he might have made of this view in the past it looked only bare and desolate to him now, and he had hardly taken a good look at it before retracing his steps and turning the light on after all. His eyes moved half-attentively over the roll of members dead in the two wars: three Thomases in the second, one a cousin from Marlowe Neath, the others unknown to him. He realized he was waiting for Rhiannon to come and join him here. Well, if that sort of thing had ever happened in his life it was certainly not going to do so now. Time to be off.

The throng in the hall had thinned out a little but not much. He bumped into one or two people on his way through, partly because of drink no doubt, his or theirs, more that he had still not really learnt to allow for his increased bulk after the historic escalation of 1984, when he had eliminated all controls at a stroke, bar a few quaint medieval relics like slimline tonic. But he got to the opposite end without knocking anybody down and went to the telephone. Yes, a mini cab would be along in five to ten minutes, or so said a girl's voice that sounded almost demented with satisfaction at this prospect.

While he telephoned he had been aware of some disturbance, of raised voices, on the far side of the solid door that separated him from the party. On his return to it he saw that whatever had happened was just over. There was Rhiannon with her daughter watchful at her side, Alun explaining something with a good deal of head-shaking and hand-spreading, William in attendance too. Malcolm and Dorothy Morgan had their arms round Gwen, who seemed to be in tears, and were accompanying her, perhaps forcing her slightly; towards the side entrance of the Club. Everybody else in the room was making no bones about watching and starting to chatter excitedly.

Charlie turned to Peter and said, 'Quite a performance, eh? Pissed out of her mind, of course.'

'I was telephoning.'

'Your loss. It was all over in seconds but she got quite a lot in. Bloody this and fucking that, what would you, and selfish monster and windbag and hypocrite and broken-down Don Juan and phony Welshman. Nothing at all damaging.'

'The broken-down Don Juan part sounds a bit damaging in the circumstances.'

'Well not really, mixed in with all the other stuff. But the whole... I mean it was clear enough from the general tone and situation that there was or had been something going on. As it were.'

'Clear to Malcolm, would you say?'

'I don't know. That's his choice, isn't it? I warned him, didn't I, Alun that is, that bloody awful time we went down to Treville. You'd have thought he'd have picked up enough experience by this time.'

'He'll have forgotten it,' said Peter. 'A broken date, do you think?'

Charlie dismissed the question. 'That fucking old fool is going to do some real damage before he's finished. Hell-bent on it.'

'Good thing Gwen didn't actually, you know, say.'

'Yes, admirable self-restraint, what? Admirable buggery.

She played it so she can say she didn't say anything any time she feels like it. It's called keeping your options open. Nay, stare not so. Peter, you don't mean you think when a woman loses control she loses control, do you?'

'It's not a settled view of mine, no.'

'Losing control is just another thing they do. Christ, here's another one that doesn't seem to have noticed much what's going on round him. Hey, I'd have given a few bob to be over there a moment ago, Alun saying he hadn't done what no one had said he'd done. Anyway, I think he can be trusted to carry off that part all right. I think I'm a bit pissed, too. You off?'

'I thought I'd just have a word first.'

Charlie glanced over at the Weavers and back at Peter. 'Good luck.'

As Peter joined the group Alun left it, still shaking his head slightly in bewilderment. Face to face with William again, Peter was fully aware for the first time of what his son had said to him in the car and what it meant. The rush of understanding erased from his mind anything he might have been going to say. The girl Rosemary glanced at him sharply, not sure whether he was to be tolerated or not. Rhiannon gave him a little nod and no more, as if acknowledging him at a funeral. He waited. It was all he could think of doing.

'I was just saying, Dad,' said William, 'that crabbed youth, has got to make allowances for the impetuous excesses of age,' - sterling stuff, thought Peter, and much better than anything he could have run up on his own account.

'Stupid old cow, you mean,' said Rosemary with plain indignation. 'I wouldn't mind so much if she didn't think she was being interesting.' She looked over her shoulder with no better-disposed an expression. By now Alun was nowhere to be seen.

'I noticed she'd been knocking it back quite a bit recently.' Rhiannon said this in her factual way, then turned brisk. 'Peter, love, I haven't talked to you at all. Let's go off somewhere and have a gas. Quick before Dorothy comes back.'

'I'm away in a minute, Dad,' called William. 'Be in touch now, right? I mean you with me.'

'Yes. Thanks, Willie.'

Rhiannon finished mouthing and signalling to her daughter from a 'couple of yards off and hurried Peter to the front door, wheeling nimbly round the mother-person he had classified earlier. It was obvious that the old creature was dying to grab her and stop her doing whatever she wanted to do, but she just failed to bring herself to bear in time. He had explained about the minicab and been assured that it would be safer to wait outside. Neither had a hat or coat. As they went down the front steps she took his arm. It was a fine night, overcast but dry and mild and gone altogether dark in the few minutes since he had stood at the dining-room window. There was plenty of light from the windows behind them, and the traffic was quite busy on the new multi-million-pound double-carriageway that curved round towards town.

'That was quick,' said Peter. 'Where are we going?'

'It wasn't awful leaving like that, was it? I had talked to everyone. It just seemed like such a good time to bugger off. I thought we could go and have a drink somewhere. Well, half a drink it had better be for me I've had three glasses of wine already. Have you got a nice place you go when you want to be quiet?'

'I wish I had. Everywhere's so noisy these days.'

'I thought there's that place in Hatchery Road, the Italian joint, Mario's is it?'

'Oh, out to dinner, are we?'

'No, love, Alun's got this table at the Glendower later.

I'll have to turn up to that, but we can have a gas before. You see, there's a little bar place at the back at whatever it's called where you haven't got to be going to eat. Er, Gwen knows them there. We'll talk about her and the rest of it another time. Actually it's not very nice really,' said Rhiannon, suddenly doubtful. 'I mean it's not very classy. Sort of cheap and cheerful, if you see what I mean.'

Peter saw what she meant almost before they entered Mario's, clearly a former shop converted some short while before at no great outlay of cash or imagination. The front part held a few rows of flimsy tables for four laid with very clean red-and-white check cloths and napkins and a central line of bottled sauces and mustards. Long sticks of bread or biscuit in red-striped transparent plastic lay on every side-plate. A plump, heavily moustached waiter in a tartan jacket was serving, vocally and with great sweeps of his arm, plates of rather British-looking meat and veg to a quartet of silent youngsters. Their wary, first-date look made Peter feel a good hundred and fifty. He saw that Rhiannon was watching him to gauge his reactions, so he smiled and nodded brightly.

There hastened forward another plump man with a moustache and a notable jacket, one resembling an abbreviated dressing-gown. He too cut the air a good deal, proclaiming himself generally to be the proprietor, and of an Italian restaurant too. His greeting to Rhiannon fell short of kissing her hand but not by much. If he was not Italian himself by blood, which in this part of South Wales and in the catering trade he might quite well have been, he was the next best thing, even perhaps one better: a Welshman putting it on all-out. Peter got something different from him, the graver reception appropriate to a senator or international operatic tenor. 'Mario' or very possibly Mario led them through a curtain of hanging strips of shiny vari-coloured stuff into the back-of-the-shop part of the premises. Here, in a kind of boarding-house interior, a couple of groups of soberly dressed middle-aged people were drinking reddish or yellowish liquors out of glasses with a band of sugar round the rim or chock-a-block with straws and stirrers. Rhiannon and Peter sat up at a walnut table with barley-sugar legs and found it most handy for their drinks when they came, white wine for her, slimline tonic for him: he wished he had done without his last one or two at the club.

'Not too awful, do you think?' whispered Rhiannon. 'You'll have to speak up if you want me to hear you - deafer by the day. No, it's fine, I could enjoy a drink in a coal-shed as long as there was no music.'

In fact for the first time in his life he felt he could have done with some to take the edge off the silence. It had been all right in the car, but there they had had the driver not to say anything much in front of. After three seconds Peter felt he was never going to speak again. Then he brainily remembered that, except of course for Muriel, mothers liked talking about children and approved of fathers who did too, so he started on William, which allowed him to work in a lot of the necessary crap about houses, neighbourhoods and such. Rhiannon came back along the same lines with bits of Rosemary. Then they got on to the party and she said in a special offhand voice, 'I reckon William quite took to Rosemary, didn't you? Stayed close, anyway.'

'I was impressed by her myself,'- said Peter. He meant it, in fact the sudden oblique reminder of the youthful Rhiannon had almost made him catch his breath, but he had to admit it came out sounding like hell. 'She struck me as, as... '

'I told you she's going to be a barrister? Arguing in a law-court. She's always had a way with words. Like Alun, I suppose.' She gave him a cautious, measuring look she probably thought he missed. 'William got a girl, has he?'

'I don't really know. I think not at the moment. He has, you know, had girls.'

'Oh, and Rosemary's had boys. Well, I say _had__, I just assume.'

'That's all I can do with William, assume. He's perfectly normal and perfectly fit and he goes about with girls. He's also thirty. And there we are.'

'Yes, and he's sure of himself in a good way. I think that's enough really. To be going on with, I mean. From your point of view.'

'I suppose so.' He went on without thinking much, 'I'm pretty sure my old man had a much better idea of what I used to get up to than I have about my son.'

'I wonder. If he had I doubt if he was any better off in consequence, your dad. But you can't help comparing, I catch myself doing it all the time. And things are much better now. Infinitely better than they used to be.'

'You and Rosemary, you're pretty close, I expect, aren't you?' asked Peter. Now he sounded sickly as well as fatuous. To improve matters he added, 'People say it's easier for mothers and daughters.'

'No great confidences, just a few little remarks she's dropped from time to time.'

'That make you think that... things have got better.'

'M'm. Yeah.'

That seemed to be that for the moment. Peter was not at all sure where this was leading but he could tell it was somewhere, if only from the look of slight tautness about the corners of Rhiannon's mouth that he had seen before. Then he noticed that she was goggling for his benefit at the nearest of their fellow-customers, who he was sure were too far off to hear them and not interested anyway. Oh Christ - Wales for ever, he thought: thirty years in London and further parts and when it came to _certain subjects__ you still kept mum when strangers were present, or visible, so as to be on the safe side now, see. He smiled; after a moment of mild astonishment she did the same.

At this very juncture the Mario-figure came bustling up and brilliantly announced to the party in question, 'Your table is ready whenever you like,' making about thirty syllables of it. Just as obligingly they started to move at once.

Rhiannon had evidently used those few moments to decide it was all right for her to go ahead. Not before the diners had well and truly departed, she began, 'What I meant about comparing, mostly anyway, what they don't seem to have now is all that awful routine you had to go through every time. I don't say they actually do any more of, you know, _it__, or less of it, or it's any better or worse when they get there but at least they're spared that. Sometimes when I look back, for a moment I can't credit it. It was like following an instruction manual- well, that's what it _was__, for goodness' sake. Stage one, arm round; stage two, kissing; stage three, more kissing; stage four, hand up top, outside; stage five, same thing, inside; stage six, really rude, not there yet but on the horizon. At one stage per date, max. It's like what some tribe in Africa used to get up to to make it rain before they learnt better. Only this used to goon for months often. And usually never get there. Same for everyone and no exceptions. Or am I exaggerating, do you think?'

'No,' said Peter, who in the last half-minute had found out he had not forgotten everything after all. 'Not in the least. And there were terrible sorts of tips on how to get round the rules.'

'Oh, and we had ours on how not to let them get round the rules. Phew. Could it have been a class thing?'

'I don't know.'

'No, unless it was just the aristocracy did different, because there were plenty of girls from the valleys in Brook Hall - you remember, and they were just the same. A bit nastier about it they were, I used to think, some of them. More cynical. I am exaggerating because it wasn't as clear-cut as that, couldn't have been. But there wasn't much that didn't more or less fit in with it in the end. I remember thinking once or twice at first it might all be Welsh, because of the chapel and everything, but I soon found out it was English as well. In a big way. So then I thought, well if I thought about it at all I thought it must be British. Couldn't be French. Didn't know about the Irish. The last thing was, do you remember those books by an American chap called Oh-something? Charlie was very keen on him. And the Sahara came into it somehow.'

'O'Hara. And the book you mean is _Appointment in Samarra__. I used to have them all at one time. John O'Hara. Good God.'

'That's the chap, but I'm not sure it was that book.

Anyway, I started reading whichever it was and I nearly jumped out of my skin, it was exactly the same. That side of life, I mean. And they were meant to be ordinary average people, not millionaires or actresses but not hillbillies either. There was this guy and the dame he fancied, and first time out nothing, he may have kissed her goodnight, I can't remember. Then second time out you were expecting it to be here we go, but it wasn't at all, it was so far and no further the whole way. It was a good deal quicker than it would have been here, but then it's a book, isn't it? But it was the _same__... _thing__. In _America__.'

Peter still had little idea of what was expected of him, if anything. 'Could you call it the old Victorian ideas on their way out?' he suggested, trying not to feel like an exam-paper and failing soon enough. 'How did we ever agree to go along with it?'

She nodded absently and squared up her cigarette-packet and matchbox alongside one of the ornamental grooves that ran the breadth of the table-top. 'Not making yourself cheap, that's what it was all in aid of. Anyway that's what it was called.'