The Old Devils

'A charade, in fact.'

'In a way, yes, but it was not-a-charade as well. That was the whole trouble. One moment you said it very, well, cynically and then a second later you'd find you'd said it completely seriously. _Cheap__. I expect the chaps called it something too, didn't they, that whole system?'

'Probably. I think they mostly took it as just part of existence, something you had to put up with, like getting up in the dark to get the bus to go to university. And it was a comfort to know that everybody else was in the same boat. Or you thought they were, which was just as good.'

'Oh, we had that too. Tell me something now, Peter: say a chap's girl had said all right straight away, would that have made him think she was making herself cheap?'

'Not unless he was a shit - he'd have been delighted.

After he'd got over his surprise. But then I suppose if she started going round - '

'_That's__ right. You can't make yourself cheap just with one person. Still, mustn't take it too seriously. As well as awful bits there were funny bits too, weren't there?' But apparently no funny bits came to mind for the moment. She lit a cigarette and when she went on it was at a reduced speed. 'So I'm glad that whatever Rosemary gets up to or might be going to get up to she's not going to not make herself cheap. It took too much out of people, that way of carrying on. Made them concentrate on the wrong things. And it was easy enough to go off the track without that. And what I saw was only half of it. The chaps' half must have been much worse.'

'We behaved much worse,' said Peter. 'On average.'

'A lot of it, some of it anyway wasn't your fault. I know you think you treated me tremendously badly, love, but you didn't, not really.' For the first time he got a look straight from those grey eyes and now he did catch his breath. 'It's more it sounds bad before you go into what actually happened, which was just we had an affair, not a very long one, though it would have been longer if I'd thought to do different, and you started to be attracted by someone else and we broke up. And it was after that, don't forget, I found I had a bun in the oven, and you took care of things, and _after__ that... You were in love with someone else. I couldn't have expected you to walk out of it and come back to me, how could I at that stage?'

'I wish I had.'

'That's another matter. I'm sorry, I know we seem to have got on to this rather fast, but it could be ages before we're on our own again when I've had four glasses of plonk. And these days you never know how much time you've got. I wanted to tell you this before anyone starts dying. Just, it was lovely.'

He put out his hand across the table and she took it. 'Yes, it was.'

'So you'd better try and realize that some of the other bits aren't quite as bad as you thought.'

Not much later they were standing in the street outside the Glendower, he with his arm around her waist, she leaning her head on his shoulder. In the minicab, which waited near by now to take him on home, they had held hands all the way but barely spoken.

After about a minute she said, 'Would you like to come in for a drink?'

'No, I'd better be getting back. Unless it would make it easier?'

'No, don't worry about that. Look, I hope you don't think anything I've been saying was to do with anything that happened at the party. Or anything else.'

'No, no trouble there, love. I didn't take in everything about you during our thing together, not as much as I should have done, but I did get that far. So no, I don't think that.'

'Good. There's no reason why we shouldn't go out to dinner, you know.'

'I'll be in touch.'

'Rosemary goes back on Thursday. After that.'

She gave him a quick kiss on the mouth and went. He hung about a little longer, walking to and fro on the pavement with his head turned down and his hands clasped behind his back, not seeing what his eyes were trained on. Then he straightened up and went over to the car and got in the back.

'Cwmgwyrdd now, is it?' asked the driver, an oldster wearing what looked like his grandson's recent cast-offs. 'What part do you want?'

'I'll tell you when we get nearer.'

'Well, it makes a difference to how I go, see, with them shutting the old bridge over the - '

'Just take me there, will you, by any reasonable route.' The man's head, white and unshorn, slewed intolerably round. 'Are you feeling all right, sir?'

'I'll live. Now kindly do as you're told.'

'_Duw, duw__, sorry I spoke. Not from round here, are you?'

'No, I'm from... from... '

'If you ask me, all the proper Welshmen are leaving Wales.'

'I say, are they really? Well, that's splendid news, by George. Over and out.'

But then when they drove up and the house was in darkness he remembered that Muriel was in Cowbridge, dining and staying the night with English friends she had told him he obviously had no time for, so he was free for over twelve hours.

Five - Rhiannon

1

The next morning Rhiannon and Rosemary sat at breakfast in the new house; Alun had only a moment before driven off for West Wales, there to see over a location for something or other. Through most of the carpetless, curtainless ground floor step-ladders stood, their summits linked by heavy old planks, in the midst of opened drums of paint and other applications, silently awaiting the return of the contracted decorators from wherever they had been these last weeks. It was possible to sit in part of the sitting-room, though it helped if you were quite tired out before you started, and to cook and eat in the kitchen. Here the poppies-on-white cotton curtains were up but, for instance, a couple of boxes of plates and saucers had yet to have their contents deployed on the dresser shelves. Nelly, the new black Labrador puppy, lay stretched out in her basket, idly chewing the side of it from time to time in preference to her purple plastic bone.

'Didn't I give you that mug?' asked Rosemary.

'When you were a tiny thing. It's really quite a nice piece of china.'

The vessel referred to was of a rounded many-sided shape that widened at the top, with gilt round the rim and on the built-up handle, apple-blossom portrayed on the sides and 'Mother' in florid cursive lettering. At the moment it held some tea made from lemon-flavoured powder and a slice of real lemon floating on top. Also before Rhiannon were a plate that had an orange and a banana on it and a bowl of tinned pineapple pieces.

Rosemary ran her eye over these materials. 'Is that all your breakfast, just what I see in front of you? Wouldn't you like me to scramble you some eggs?'

'Of course I would, but they're terribly bad for you, eggs. Full of that stuff, you know, gives you heart-attacks. Fatty stuff.'

'And what you've got there is - supposed to be good for you, is that right?'

'Yes. Oranges and bananas are full of potassium, which is very important for your liver.'

'Who says so?'

'Dorothy. She knows a lot about it. She's read all sorts of books on it. She sort of keeps up with it.'

'You mean as if it were something like nuclear physics.

Nothing to stop her, I suppose. Surely there can't be much potassium left in that,' said Rosemary, nodding at the bowl of pineapple.

'It must be a bit all right, though. It's still fruit.'

'Well yes, I quite see how you must feel your liver needs all the help it can get after a night on the tiles like you've just been on.'

'I wasn't awful, was I?'

'I've never known you awful. Good time had by all, I hope.'

'Well, I had a nice chat with Peter. I think I told you, he's always felt bad about what happened years ago.'

'As well he might,' said Rosemary, but gently.

'No need to go into it all now. Anyway we cleared one or two things up between us.'

'Good, now mind you get a proper lunch. Something cooked, not snacks.'

'No, it'll be a proper lunch all right. You can always rely on old Malcolm to take care of a thing like that. Rather too much so, in fact.'

'How do you mean, Mum?'

'Oh nothing really. I say, talk about living it up. Drinks with one boy-friend last night and a lunch-party and tour with another one today. Dirty little stop-out.'

Unseen, Rosemary smiled for a moment at her mother with no great amusement, even with some sadness, but said only, 'Go over my duties while you're gone.'

'The main thing is that creature there, obviously. Take her out every two hours. And some men are ringing at eleven about an estimate for the roof.'

'I'll get them to ring again later. What time will you be back?'

'I don't know. Could you tell them - '

'Tomorrow morning, then.'

'The thing is, we've already accepted another lot's estimate which is lower, and these ones need to be told we don't want them. So could you tell them? You'd just be passing on a message.'

'Whereas if they found they were talking to the Party who'd actually taken the decision not to have them they might fly into a rage. I see. Yes of course. Anything else?'

'Not really. It doesn't seem much to keep you in half the day.'

'Never mind, there's plenty round here that needs putting straight.'

And that puppy to impress, to make sure of being remembered by on future visits, and very sensible too, thought Rhiannon, but revised her thought at the quiet speed with which. Rosemary left the room to answer the telephone.

A tabloid newspaper lay open on the breakfast-table, folded back at the horoscope feature, which was quite good fun to read, not that there was anything at all in it, in astrology, whatever Dorothy might say. It was the style of this feature, the clear lay-out and central position of the television programmes, the young-marrieds strip and the twice-weekly political column by old Jimmy Gethin that years ago had given the paper the edge over its rivals as far as Rhiannon was concerned. She still took it even though poor old Jimmy's liver had packed up once for all in the meantime, whether for lack of potassium nobody had said. In fact he had been Alun's pal more than hers, and she had never read his column unless its first paragraph happened to catch her eye by promising an attack on one or other of the couple of far-left politicians whose activities she fitfully noticed. That was about as far as her interest in politics went, and she was not much better when it came to literature: she only paid attention when Alun's concerns came up and, to be quite honest, not very closely even then: At university, under Gwen's and Dorothy's guidance, she had done her best to put this right by reading or trying to read books on the two subjects and also on art, where some of the pictures had been nice, though not by any means all. But it had never taken, and at about the time she left there she had given up the attempt with relief and shame at the same time. The shame had lasted; it still troubled her to remember the time she had been taken out by a rather small chap doing German Honours, and at the end of the evening he had said wonderingly, 'But you're not interested in anything at all.' She had had no answer then or since; the things that did interest her were too small and spread-over to add up to a subject you could sit an exam in. And that was that, but it would never do to feel all right about it, ever.

She heard Rosemary at the door, and guiltily stuffed back into the packet the cigarette she had started to take out. Pretending to be absorbed in the horoscopes she read that for Leo subjects (like herself) this would be a good day for clinching business deals provided they managed not to let rip with their famous roar.

'That was William. You know, William Thomas.'

'Oh yes,' said Rhiannon, trying to get the right amounts of interest and surprise in.

'It's his day off apparently, so I asked him if he'd like to come over. I hope that's all right.'

'Oh yes of course, good idea. That'll - ' She stopped herself from going on '- give you something to do with yourself and substituted '- be nice' rather feebly and only just in time.

'More tea?'

'No thank you dear. I think I'll go on up now.'

'Give me a yell when you want me.'

In the bathroom Rhiannon hung up her good roomy man's-fit towelling dressing-gown, originally a birthday present to Alun, but after a week or two he had gone back to his Paris one in chartreuse watered silk. Her slippers, knitted by Dorothy in red wool with a green R on each like the colours of the flag, were on the tight side, especially over the left instep, and it tended to be a relief to get them off. The nightdress rather played safe by being just white cotton with broderie-anglaise trimming.

On the glass shelf beside the basin there sat a fresh plastic bottle of natural-herb shampoo with a cardboard thing round its neck. Six such things, she saw on reaching for her glasses, would if sent in get you an absolutely free hanging basket for indoor plants and greenery, so she carefully removed this one and stowed it away in the cabinet. These days almost any special offer found her wide open. Going in for them was at bit like betting on the Derby: you could lose for instance, like that set of chefs kitchen-knives (eight pork-pie seals and cheque for £8.55 incl. p&p) that had stayed sharp for about twenty minutes.

She stepped into the shower, a glassed-in job featuring a massive control-dial calibrated and colour-coded like something on the bridge of a nuclear warship. Along with the central heating and parts of the kitchen it was understood to have been newly installed by the previous owner, a garage-proprietor who could not have had anything like his money's-worth out of it before driving his Volvo into a wall - dead of a coronary before he hit, they soothingly said. Rhiannon was still not really used to the shower and kept falling back on trial and error, though no longer seriously afraid of smothering herself with ice-water or saturated steam. The shampoo, which said it was mild enough for her to use it every day, went on, off, on again, staying on for the essential two minutes while she soaped herself, finally and thoroughly off before a burst of cold all over to tone up the skin.

As she stood on the self-drying mat she got going with the bath-towel while gauging the intensity of the sunlight coming through the frosted pane. Arriving at a decision she carefully pat-dried her legs and while they were still damp spread make-up from a tube evenly over them, thus among other things covering up any unattractive veins. A drop of Sure here and there, a dab of talcum top and bottom and then on with the dressing-gown and slippers and across the landing with a call down to Rosemary on the way.

Apart from a couple of bulging black sacks by the window and a frock and suit or so the bedroom was in order, centring on Rhiannon's wonderful old Victorian marble-stand dressing-table with the heavy oval freestanding mirror and a tall jug, itself painted with rose-buds, holding roses from the garden. Here she combed out her hair, telling herself as always how lucky she had been in this department, thick as ever, easy to manage, even now only needing a little touching up. She was still at it when Rosemary came in.

'What's that on your legs, Mum?'

'Sheer Genius. I mean that's what it's called, I noticed particularly. Max Factor. I got it for my face but it turned out too dark. Honey Touch it says as well. I suppose that's a colour, is it?'

'All right, but what's it doing on your legs?'

'Well, it was that or stockings, and the weather's too nice for stockings, I thought.'

'You realize they don't match your hands?'

'Yes of course I do, but men don't think of things like that. Not as a rule.'

Rosemary gave up the matter. During its discussion she had been sorting out the drier and now she began to wield it on her mother's hair, no great test of skill or devotion but pursued steadily enough. As she worked away with blower and comb she glanced round the room, taking particular notice of the female garments on display, but before she could say anything the door was barged aside and Nelly the puppy came running unskilfully in. She seemed not so much thankful at having found the two women as indulgently gratified by the joy and relief her arrival must bring them. After a quick circuit for form's sake she went straight under the bed, starting to growl furiously somewhere in the alto register.

'I should have shut her in downstairs,' said Rosemary.

'She's all right. She's got to learn her way round the house.'

'Wouldn't it be better if she learnt that after she's trained?'

'Well, it's all part of the training, learning not to go when she's up here.'

Rosemary leaned over to see what the now emerged puppy was doing. 'You know she's got your slipper, do you?'

'That's all right,' said· Rhiannon after checking that the Dorothy slippers were safely on her feet. 'She can have that one.'

'You can't just let her chew away at anything she happens to fancy. That's no way to train her.'

'It'll sort itself out.' Rhiannon considered telling her daughter that she might feel differently about such questions when she had had a couple of children of her own, but let it go. 'You can't watch them all the time. Right, that's fine, dear, thank you. I like it a little bit damp.'

'What, er, what outfit were you proposing to wear for this jaunt, Mum?'

'I thought the blue denim suit - yes, there.'

'M'm.' The accompanying nod was non-committal. 'What else?'

'There's a white cotton sports-shirt with long sleeves that come down out of the cuffs of the jacket. Then if it gets hot I can take the jacket off and roll the sleeves up. Only when he can't see my legs, of course.'

'Hey!' shouted Rosemary at Nelly, who in full view was carelessly lowering her hindquarters towards the carpet. 'Oogh! Urhh!' she added, scooping the puppy up and hurrying her out of the room.

'Don't forget to tell her - '

'I know, Mum, I know.'

Left alone, Rhiannon sat pushing her hair into place at the mirror. She wished very much she could look forward wholeheartedly to the coming excursion. The way Malcolm had sounded over the telephone when he invited her originally, and still more so his manner as he confirmed the arrangement at the Club the previous evening, had puzzled her, troubled her, nothing to do with his old awkwardness which had never been a problem. No, there was something, perhaps the way he had kept pausing as he talked, that had suggested to her that there might be going to be more to this half-day outing than met the eye. Still sitting, she crossed fingers on both hands.

The sound of her daughter's voice from below, duly raised in tones of unreserved triumph and admiration, got her moving again. By the time Rosemary came back to the bedroom she was in pants and bra at the dressing-table mirror putting on foundation.

'Just you think yourself lucky she didn't drop that lot up here is all I can say.'

'I will, I do. Thank you, dear.'

'Right, well now let's just take a look at this, this _suit__ we've heard so much about, shall we? Tell me, you like it yourself, do you?'

'Well, I feel nice in it.'

'M'm.' Rosemary accepted the point. 'Any ideas about shoes at a1l?'

'I thought these,' - lace-ups in the same or much the same blue denim.

There was a bit of a hiccup over the shirt, with an alternative in frilled terracotta silk considered and briefly tried on, but in the end everything went through all right and, after a final squirt of Christmas-present cologne, Rhiannon trooped off downstairs carrying her linen-look sand-coloured shoulder-bag. She wore no jewellery, just her wedding ring.

In the kitchen again Rosemary made coffee and the contents of the bag were gone over in a comparatively relaxed spirit. Compact, spare handkerchief, purse with window showing essential telephone numbers on card, toothbrush - all passed in lenient silence. But then 'What's _this__ for God's sake?' asked Rosemary, sounding at the end of her tether.

'Plastic mac. Rolled up.'

'I'm not blind, you know. _Honestly__, Mum. _Christ__. Why haven't you got an umbrella?'

'I keep losing them. Leaving them in places.'

'There are ones that fold which you clearly haven't seen, and go in your bag and don't cost the earth.'

'Well, I haven't got one.'

'M'm. I suppose there's a hat to match, is there?'

'No, there's a hood attached to the collar that hangs over my eyes. I'll wear it all through lunch if you don't look out.'

Rosemary peered into the bag. 'Funny, I can't find any wellies here.'

'You wait, I'll fetch Dad's galoshes in a minute.'

'I'd better get you my umbrella.'

'No, I'll lose it. And there's no need to treat me as if I'm fourteen years old.'

'Oh yes there is, because that's all you are. When I was that age you were much older, but now you've gone back. You are fourteen years old. Aren't you?'

'M'm,' whined Rhiannon, cringing and trotting her feet on the floor.

The telephone rang. Rosemary was there first and asked who was calling. With a face of stone she passed her mother the handset. 'Gwen.'

'Hallo Gwen.'

'Rhiannon dear, this is old _Gwen__.' These words and the way they were spoken were enough to banish expectation that any sort of genuine apology or voicing of regret might be at hand. 'Thank you for a super party. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, in fact it rather seems a bit too thoroughly towards the end and got sort of carried away. Over the top I believe you're supposed to call it nowadays. I hope it wasn't too embarrassing for you.'

'That's all right.'

'I'm afraid I do tend to get ever so slightly cross with poor dear Alun from time to time over, well what the hell is it over, I suppose you'd have to call it _Wales__ I'm sorry to say. The thing is that, you know, according to me there's a touch of the stage Welshman about him, he says so himself, fair play, but perhaps it's more than a touch - still, and he thinks I'm a dried-up schoolmarm. Well, there we are, and it's all right until I drink too fast because I'm having a good time and Alun says something to do with I don't know what and then I find I've - '

'That's all right, dear. All forgotten.'

'Well... It wasn't very seemly, I'm afraid. Turning nasty in my drink. Alun about?'

'No, he's away all day today.'

'I'll talk to him again. It really was a fantastic party. I'll ring you later.'

'Good-bye, love.'

'There's lucky you've got a fine day for your excursion now. Young Malcolm's on pins. Cheers.'

Rosemary, who after some hesitation had stayed in earshot, gave her mother what could not but be an inquiring look and got a kind of mock-doleful one back.

'She got cross about something Dad said about Wales.'

'Oh I _see__. Golly, what a terrific help. Must have cost her a bomb to come clean like that.'

'Well it is quite, a help I mean. One of us had to work out a way of us going on being friends.'

'Had to? She's not nice enough to be a friend of yours. '

'She's not so bad. When it's been long enough that sort of thing stops mattering.'

'You let her down too lightly.'

'It's much too late to start letting people like Gwen down heavily. Let's go outside. Malcolm's obviously on his way.' Rhiannon picked up her shoulder-bag. As they moved Rosemary put an arm round her waist.

'Don't you mind about, well, any of it?'

'What are you talking about, of course I bloody well mind. But that's all I do, I stop myself doing any more than that. Like brooding or going back or joining things up, no point in it. As long as I don't _know__. And this isn't knowing.'

'Mum, I wish you'd let me - '

'Let's not say any more about it now.'

The garden in front of the house was not large but it had the bright green grass often to be found in this part of the world and a few flowers in half-overgrown beds, including an unexpected treat in the shape of a large clump of Canterbury bells. Nelly crashed into the side of it, then doubled back up the path effortlessly surmounting the obstacle presented by each three-inch-deep step. A good view stretched almost due south, over woods and shadowed lawns down over an unseen cliff to a wide stretch of sand shining wetly in the sun and, about as far out at the moment as it ever went hereabouts, the sea with half a dozen small boats sailing. Some cloud was drifting near the horizon but not much and none of it dark. There was nothing ugly or dull anywhere.

'You are looking forward to this do, aren't you, Mum?'

'Oh yes. Well... yes.'

'What's the not-so-good part?'

'Well, he's... He's a very sweet chap without a nasty or unkind thought in his head but he's a bit wrapped up in himself. He's liable to say things when he hasn't thought how they'll affect other people, just because he wants to say them. Just sort of blurts them out.'

'Such as he's never loved anybody but you in all his life?'

'Sort of thing, yeah.'

'Well if it's no worse I don't think you have much to worry about. Surely you can manage that. Yon must have had plenty of practice.'

'Oh, come on, dear.'

Rosemary looked at her mother for a moment before she spoke again. 'Of course, I suppose he might embarrass you about Gwen and so on.'

'No, he understands about not doing things like that, and besides he won't think anything happened.'

'How do you mean, Mum?'

'She'll have made him believe her version.'

'_Made__ him?'

'Yes, nothing to it with him if she sticks to it, and she will.'

'Well, I dare say you'd know.'

Turning to address the dog, who watched her with an air of stark terror, Rhiannon said, 'You're not coming today. I'm sorry, but you're not.'

'Oh my God,' said Rosemary. 'You don't seriously imagine she can understand you, I hope.'

'It wouldn't do to be too sure of that. Probably not now, but she'll understand everything like that by the time she's grown up, and there's no knowing when they start. All part of the training.'

'Well, she's your dog... Is this him now?'

'I think... Yes.'

'Mum, if you're going to go out looking as nice as you do now I'm afraid you'll just have to grit your teeth and face up to him saying he loves you. Now... '

Mother and daughter proceeded to stand to. Without waiting for orders Rosemary went and dragged the puppy out from the laurel bush she had bolted under and held her in her arms. Rhiannon turned and put her hair right by her reflection in a sitting-room· window, then nearly snapped off the half-open yellow rose she had had her eye on all along but had left on the plant as long as possible. Finally the two moved a little apart from each other so as not to look too lined-up and organized.

When he had got out of his very shiny bright-blue car and at a second attempt shut its driver's door, Malcolm revealed himself to be wearing a hacking jacket in dark red, green and fawn checks that were too large by an incredibly small amount, cavalry-twill trousers he must have been uncommonly fond of, a pale green I'm-going-out-for-the-day-with-my-old-girl-friend cravat or ascot and, thank goodness, a plain shirt and ordinary brown lace-up shoes. Seen closer to, he proved to have an ample shaving-cut on his cheek, about like a boil on the end of his nose to him and not worth a second glance to anybody else. He carried a florist's plastic-wrapped bouquet of a good forty-quid's-worth of red roses and pink carnations which he handed over to Rhiannon fast and at arm's length.

'Lovely to see you,' he muttered, obviously discarding on the spot an earlier draft, and called 'Hallo' with unmeant abruptness to Rosemary, whom he had met more than once before but never for long, and had not bargained on seeing now. Then he took in the puppy and loosened up a little. 'Ah, now here's a splendid fellow and no mistake.'

'Hallo, Malcolm,' said Rosemary, 'female fellow actually,' and went on with exemplary stuff about how he would not have said that if he had been on the spot just earlier, the awful chewing, etc. Rhiannon fixed the yellow rose in his button-hole and passed the bouquet to Rosemary, who had set Nelly down on the grass as now to be considered defused.

'Put them in that pretty Wedgwood jug - they'll look marvellous in there - and find somewhere in the cool for them.' Rhiannon was too shy herself to embark on a full-treatment head-on thank you. 'We'll decide on a proper place when I get back. That won't be before five at the earliest - I've got one or two things to see to in town first.' The last bit was said looking over her daughter's shoulder.

2

Immediately· upon getting into the car beside Malcolm, Rhiannon noticed a peaked cap in nearly the same pattern as his jacket folded up on the shelf in front of him. All she could do about that was hope he had already tried this and thought better of it, rather than that he was keeping it by him to spring on her later. Anyway she sighed comfortably, or tried to. There was a faint pleasant smell hanging about and the whole interior told of hours of tidying and cleaning. In a way she hardly understood, it was like something she remembered from years ago: she had complimented Malcolm on his clear neat handwriting and he had thanked her and said, well, he reckoned however boring or no-good what he wrote might be, at least whoever it was would be spared the extra chore of deciphering it. Like a lecturer's duty to be audible, he had said.

The first few minutes passed easily enough with chat about Rosemary, then Alun briefly, then Gwen no more briefly - Rhiannon's idea, that, to rub in that the subject was ordinary. The next few went even more easily with taking notice of the approaches to Courcey and after some delay the island itself. She had been along here quite recently with some of the crowd for a Sunday-lunchtime drink at the King Arthur just off the causeway, a brief or single drink as it had turned out, because the one huge bar had been full of fat young left-wing activists from a weekend school ordering things like blue curacao with passion-fruit juice. But they were soon past there now and on to where she had not been for at least ten years, probably a good deal more.

To Rhiannon the greenery looked greener and also thicker than it had, the hill-tops perhaps not as high, but it was hard to notice when the whole place was so tremendously more crowded. Approaching Chaucer Bay down the west road they ran into traffic like a Saturday morning in town: cars, buses from Cardiff and - she was nearly sure - Hamburg, bikes and of course caravans, of which some hundreds were stationed in lines like those of a military cantonment across the whole width of the furze-covered slope that faced the bay.

'Sorry about this,' said Malcolm as they came to another halt. Far from sorry, he looked cheered up by the thought of how much worse matters would have to get before he had to decide or do anything.

'We've got plenty of time.' With a qualm she realized how much.

'I'm glad I allowed for it. But it is remarkable, eleven-thirty midweek and still in school term.'

Rhiannon mentioned the marvellous weather and said to herself that that was good old Malcolm for you: it would simply never have occurred to him to start going on about where did all the money come from was what some of us would have liked to know, and so this was what a recession meant, and the black economy and minimum-wage agreements and the closed shop and who ever cared a curse for the pensioners. Everybody else she could think of for the moment except Rosemary would have been well into that by now. And Alun unless there had been other people around too.

They moved on a few more yards and round a bend. Malcolm was keeping fussily closed up to the car in front, but she had plenty of room to see the shingly, littered way on to the beach through a gap in the cliff and the half-naked people hurrying along it, all loaded with food and drink containers, tents, boats, sports kits, games, anything and everything for children - plenty of them about, school term or no school term. When they drove past a minute later Rhiannon got a squint at the sort of village of plastic stalls and booths that had sprung up to screw the visitors in every available line, cosmetic, decorative, educational, you name it, some of them not so plastic, but surely... A beach-boutique on the beach? In South Wales? Now?

Then the lights changed and they started squeezing their way up the hill on the far side between the groups of young men straggling down from the car-park with no shirts on, satisfied with that being all right and not bothering about looking horrible, being it too for not bothering. From the top Rhiannon had a view of the whole of the long, wide expanse of sand scattered over with moving or still figures as she had never seen it before. Some had wandered along as far as Rundle Bay, which they would have to move back from when the tide came up or face a steep climb up to the road, all right in the day, she remembered, but not much fun after dark with a pushy chap trying to give you a hand.

'Seems a long time ago, doesn't it?'

For Malcolm, this bit of advanced thought-reading was uncanny. She gave him a special look of appreciation before saying, 'Yes, thank God.'

'What? I meant, you know, going on the beach and bathing and what-not the way everyone used to.'

'That's what I meant. Yes, everyone did use to, didn't they? Coming for a swim?' She speeded up before he could think he was being asked to come for a swim now. 'Coming out to Courcey with us, and you just went along without thinking. Like, well, like a lot of things then. I never really liked swimming.'

'As I remember you were pretty good at it.'

'Not bad, and of course it was lovely in the water once you'd survived going in, but awful being out. Hoping you looked wonderful with wet hair and feeling it standing out in the wind and starting to go like straw.'

'Surely, didn't girls wear caps in those days? Bathing caps I mean.'

'Only if you didn't mind your face going the size of a nut. It's amazing thinking of it now, I can hardly believe it. Sort of half sitting with your legs out to the side and smiling and trying to feel if half your bottom was out of your bathing-costume. And it wasn't just me either - Gwen was the same, Sian, Dorothy, everyone. We used to - '

'But you all seemed so absolutely marvellously... '

'Poised? You should have seen us. All that awful tanning. I remember a serious discussion in Brook Hall about how red in the face you could afford to let yourself get at a time. And what you did about the hair on your legs and arms. Choices to be weighed up there. Snags to all of them.'

'But I mean you did enjoy it,' said Malcolm anxiously. 'Parts of it.'

'Oh yes. You noticed things like your hair and what horrible stuff sand is but you didn't really take it in. You were wondering how it was going and what would happen next and whether you could handle it. We weren't poised really, just trying not to give anything away. Of course, I don't suppose it was all plain sailing for the chaps,' she wound up thoughtfully.

'No.' He took a vigilant look at the now-empty road ahead. 'No, it certainly wasn't,' he added.

After waiting for a moment she started again. 'It wasn't only going on the beach, not being poised. It was a big one, the beach, but it didn't really touch dancing.' When she saw Malcolm smiling and blinking uncertainly she went on, 'You know, going to a dance. With a band and partners and quick-steps and all that. Sticking together was the thing. Dorothy used to get us on parade in Brook and make sure we'd all been to the lav before we started so there'd be no sneaking away later. Then you'd stand in a bunch waiting to be asked for a dance and wanting to bite your nails and hoping the bra-strap you should have pinned was still behind your dress-strap. I was, anyway. Didn't you worry about things like that?'

'Yes, I suppose I must have done.'

She thought to herself she might have another try later.

So far she had obviously not been going the right way about getting him to say he had gone through the same little agonies as she and all the others had, which might have helped him to see that it worked the other way round as well, that she in her way had been as embarrassed and incompetent as he in his. The idea was to show him that she was not the curious creature, something between Snow White and a wild animal, that he had seemed to take her for, but an actual friend of his, and by now quite an old one. Well, there was still a lot of time.

'Those days, you know,' he said now, with a hint of wisdom coming up. 'All I can say is I hope there were certain, shall I say mitigations.'

'Oh _yes__ Malcolm, don't get the wrong idea. How awful, I was only-'

'Because this today, after all, we are, well, taking a stroll down _Memory Lane__.' He said this as if he thought he had just invented the expression, or at least was betting she had not come across it lately.

'That wasn't there before,' she said, so promptly that it took him a moment to see she meant something real, something in a field they were passing, a kind of cabin or pavilion with a factory-built look and talkative notices done in very aggressive lettering about things to eat in the basket or in the bag. There was a mass of tyre-tracks round it but nobody in range just then. Seen like that in the unexpected strong sunlight it seemed the son of place you were meant to admire without wanting to go there, like a piece of new housing project in Mexico.

'How vile,' said Malcolm with feeling. 'New to me too, I think. Just spring up behind your back. Same everywhere you go these days.'

That last phrase kept coming up in Rhiannon's hearing, often along with another one about it being a waste of breath. It seemed to hit them all sooner or later, even someone like honest old Ma1colm who never wondered where all the money was coming from. Once he got into this one the conversation would at least stay out of harm's way a bit longer. But nothing followed, and when he went on it was in anew, dreamy son of tone, not much of a good sign with him.

'They say people change over the years,' he began, and seemed set to end too for a while before hurrying on, 'and indeed it does often happen. You remember a fellow called Miles Garrod? Used to act a lot. Quite good he was. He played Marlow in _She Stoops to Conquer__ in the Arts Theatre. '

'Oh yes,' lied Rhiannon. When it was not going to make a difference she always did that except with Alun; it seemed fussy and cocky not to and you were going to get the rest of it anyway. This was a general policy of hers. People sometimes wondered gratefully how it was that she had never heard any stories before.

'Well, you wouldn't recognize him now, Rhi, that I guarantee. I bumped into him just a few months ago, at a wedding in Caerhays. Or rather I didn't bump into him, praise be, a fellow said there's old Miles Garrod, I said where, the fellow said there, and there he was, totally different. A different person. Not specially old-looking or unprepossessing. Just altogether different. A different individual.'

Having shown that one who was in charge he could have afforded to throw in something about what Miles Garrod was up to these days, but no. Returning to the dreamy tone and unmistakably starting paragraph 2, Malcolm said, 'But some people haven't changed, or only imperceptibly. You, Rhiannon Weaver, you haven't changed, not you. You're still the same person as the one I knew, well, let's call it _then__, shall we?'

'What nonsense, I've put on at least - '

'No, no, basically you're quite unchanged. The way you move, your glance, everything. The first sight of you that very first evening... '

She let him run on, but stayed alert for any wandering off into dodgy territory. Sudden blurtings of the type mentioned to Rosemary could not be guarded against, only watched for.

'... last glimpse of you eight years ago... '

A bit longer than that, but he had put it down very firmly, and what of it anyway. Not far now, surely.

'... never more than a few minutes at a time... '

Well, there again she seemed to remember proper evenings, even a weekend visit or two, in fact, certainly one thorough enough to have included a couple of chats with Gwen about the forthcoming arrival of what had turned out to be Rosemary's elder sister in 1959, but if he preferred to see it like this, well, fine with her.

'... I was seeing you for the first time since _then__. Ah, when I used to read about people feeling the years dropping away I thought it was just a phrase, just a fancy. But it's what _happened__.' He looked at her a little bit wildly but quite briefly out of the corner of his eye. 'And I'd known all along it would. Don't ask me how,' he told her, to be on the safe side.

STOGUMBER I

PETERSTOW 2½

the signpost said, and Peterstow was where they were scheduled to have lunch. How many minutes did that mean? Five? One and a quarter? Rhiannon crossed the fingers of her left hand. It was awful to think the thought in this way, but hopeless not to: if things got no dicier than at present, then no problem. They had got as far as they had pretty fast, true, and unassisted by drink, but he might have been encouraged by not having had to meet her eye any of the time because of driving, and he had not actually _said__ anything yet and it might all blow over.

The car came to the crest in the road a hundred feet or so above Stogumber village and from the sea on their right, limitless now, to the dense greenery on their left nothing showed that time had gone by.

'I don't just mean of course you're unchanged on the outside,' said Malcolm, dashing what could never have been more than a faint hope. 'Anybody with half an eye can see that.' He paused and drew in his breath. 'I mean on the inside too. But then I don't think anybody changes there much, do you? On the inside?'

She tried to consider it. 'No, I shouldn't think so probably.'

'Now I know I've changed a lot on the outside. A decrepit old bloke is what I've become. No complaints but that's how it is.' He wagged his head from side to side as he sat behind the wheel.

'I'm not having that,' she said indignantly. 'Decrepit is the absolute opposite of what you are. You're in jolly good nick and fit-looking and you've kept your hair and everything. You could pass for, for a much younger man.'

It had never been Malcolm's way even to try to hide things like pleasure at compliments, and here was one department in which he had certainly not changed. Another was making it very easy for the other person to tell when a compliment was called for and roughly how it should go, and then still enjoying it when it came. 'Oh, honestly, Rhi,' he said now a couple of times, continuing quite soon, 'anyway, I'm still pretty much the same on the inside.'

Dumbly-dumbly-dumbly-dum on the inside, she thought to herself, waiting to hear how, dumbly-dumblydumbly-dum on the outside, but crossing her fingers again. But then when it came it was· fine, in the same style as before, covering rather more ground, not much though: incurable romantic - always tended to expect too much from life - rather envied practical man who just got on with things - triumph of hope over experience - incurable romantic - count your blessings - help us get through life - never really wanted to be one of the down-to-earth sort that just stuck to the job in hand - too old to change now, he maintained firmly. Matters took a slight turn for the worse after that with him saying how much he had been looking forward to today and how he still had his hopes for the future, but he stayed vague on that and quite soon stopped. The end of the beginning, with luck.

They were in and out of Stogumber itself in not much more time than it took to notice a jumble of flags, posters and stickers coloured lime-green, yellow, pinky-red and black and white. Then having turned up left along the further edge of the little valley they came to another signpost, one of a new sort in dark green with a picture of a wigwam on it and thin white print which was quite easy to read from close to. This lot said Peterstow 0.8 kin; and no doubt if you went the way it pointed you got there in the end.

Rhiannon had been hoping and expecting to recognize the village when they came to it, but she failed to do so. There was a raised stretch of grass with some lumps of grey-white stone here and there, and an old drinking-fountain sort of built into the side of the slope, the remains at least of such a thing with a place where a chained cup might once have been joined on. Next to it she made out four or five names carved on a tablet and realized she was looking at a local war memorial. Here and there were hefty cottages in a darker stone or in a dark brick behind low white gates, and on the far corner a larger building done with beams and tiles. A sign said it was the Powys Arms and also mentioned old-fashioned things like finest ales and ciders. Although there were other cars about, it was still possible to park near the front door.

Malcolm did that, pulling on the hand-brake with a rasping flourish. 'Well,' he said, turning to Rhiannon and smiling at her with his eyes crinkled up - 'here we are.' He was behaving as' though he had given her a costly present which only he in his sensitivity could have chosen for her, and looked very sweet and sitting up and begging for a smart clip round the ear.

'Marvellous,' she said.

He got out of his seat and came round to open her door, moving quite fast but not as fast as she did to forestall him. These days she never liked people 'helping' her out of or off things unless she could do a crone imitation with it, and not much even then. He arrived a second after she had got both feet to the ground, but in the nick of time to alert her against leaving behind the shoulder-bag she was just picking up. As they strolled towards the pub he put his hand round her elbow in case she started to fall over or tried to walk into a wall. She could just about recall him using this instant this-one's-mine-you-see indicator once or twice when he had taken her out in the old days. Actually this time it came in useful for stopping her from going ahead and heading into the pub just like that.

He glanced at her again and said, 'Hasn't changed a lot, has it?'

'Doesn't seem to have done.'

'Apart from the rebricking along under the roof there and taking the lean-to part into the main structure and paving over where the old well was. Not to mention the wall round the car-park. And wasn't there a hut in that corner?'

Rhiannon had no answer to that. She nodded her head slowly and mumbled to herself.

'And obviously the tables. Still, it is very much as it was.

In essentials you might say.'

'M'm.'

'The rubbish-bins aren't very pretty but at least they're practical. '

After a last satisfied look around he made to steer her through the doorway, but again she was too quick for him, thinking that it - being too quick for a man - was not something she was often called upon to be any more. Inside, she looked round with a show of interest. Whether it was very much as it had been she had no idea, but anyway it was not crowded yet and not noisy. The only thing she noticed was the little brass rails or railings round the tops of some of the tables, to keep you on your toes when you - no, rubbish, she told herself, off a ship, ten to one, a point Malcolm might well be just going to clear up for her. He kept quiet on that, though, saying only that of course. he had no idea whether the place was any good these days, a whopper if ever she had heard one.

The place, as regards food and drink, which he called victuals, was good enough, but with him there that counted as no more than a start. Of all the men she knew, he was right out in front the likeliest to be ignored at the bar, given a table the kitchen door banged into, brought his first course while later arrivals were drinking up their coffee, overcharged. However, he escaped without so much as a dab of butter on that cravat of his. By the end of lunch, sipping cautiously at a small glass of green Chartreuse, her treat drink, she felt quite relaxed. Parts of the action, like him finding a speck on a wineglass and waving it slowly to and fro to get it changed, or calling for a 'proper' peppermill and keeping on the lookout till it came, were telling Rosemary material rather than good fun at the time, but the dialogue, or rather what he said, was unimprovable, boring almost to a fault. She forgot her misgivings as he took her through the histories of more people whose names meant nothing to her. They even got on to Wales, of all topics; well, friends in England had taken to going on a bit about England. When Malcolm said you got very unpopular for saying Wales was in a bad way, she thought at once of his nose and how he had had it bashed in the pub at Treville. It looked absolutely all right now, though of course no nearer his mouth than ever.

After finishing at last with Wales he said rightly that it was still early, called without too much urgency for more coffee and invited her to tell him about herself. So she told him a bit about Alun and the girls. She went carefully on them because of what Gwen had said, or rather not said when asked, about their own two boys now in their thirties. If Malcolm had something to get off his chest in that department he kept it to himself. Although he was paying her polite attention it became pretty clear after a few minutes that she was on some son of wrong tack.

'Would you like another sticky drink?' he offered, as soon as she stopped speaking.

'No thanks dear.'

'Well, from what you've been saying you're very much content with your life as it is now.'

'Oh yes. Much more than I was with my life as it was then.'

'Oh really?'

'Considering I had as good a time as anyone it's funny how often I catch myself being bloody glad to think, well whatever happens I haven't got to do _, ha__, any more,' she said, 'going on the beach or going dancing or going out, going out to dinner that is,' and one or two more along the same lines until she noticed he was not listening much, smiling away and nodding now and then, his eyes on her face but in a kind of spread-over way.

For a man not to be listening to what she said had always struck her as a sound scheme whichever way you looked at it, and nowadays its corresponding drawback was greatly reduced. Whereas in the past such a man would have had that much more chance of noticing a patch of surplus powder or a pimple pit, failing sight in age would probably have ruled that out, unless of course he unsportingly put his glasses on, which Malcolm had not done. But it struck her now that the ear-shutting thing was part of not wanting her to have changed into just one of his mates, preferring her to stay on out of his ken, so to speak, where he could go in for whimsy-whamsy about her. That, seeing that, rather cramped her style for the time being.

While he was asking one of the waitresses for the bill another of them was putting it in front of him. 'Not too bad, I thought,' he said after calculating the tip for a couple of minutes in his head, on paper, and then in his head again.

'Oh, very good. Proper food.' She had not managed the prepared-by-someone-else gravy dinner she had rather been counting on, had had to pass up the beef curry because of the rice, had steered clear of the lamb ragout on account of possibly lurking tomato seeds and had settled for the chicken pie, the meat moist enough but the pastry definitely waxy, pappy almost, needless to say fatty, but as against that she· had eaten up all her lettuce and watercress and some of the green pepper, which with a good squeeze of lemon had hardly tasted of catarrh at all.

Alone in the very nice Ladies she tried to relax as far as she could and took a few deep breaths before getting down to work on her falsies. While she was doing so she straightened to her full height, shook back her hair and did her best in the way of putting on an important, haughty expression. The general effect might have struck Malcolm as bursting with poise, but the idea was to give herself a head start, an improved chance of facing down anyone who might presume to come barging in and find the sudden sight of an old girl with her teeth in her hand somehow remarkable, or embarrassing, or in any way out of the ordinary, unless in the experience of very common persons. As it turned out, no sweat: the miniature of Dentu-Hold was safely in her bag well before a harmless little thing, in jeans anyway as it turned out, sidled in and vanished into the WC. Rhiannon left in a flurry of self-assurance.

Outside, the sun had left the front of the building but the day was still bright and quite hot. Over near the car Malcolm was standing with his back almost turned, his head slightly on one side, just admiring the view by the look of him, and yet there was something calculated in his casualness that warned her of what was on the way. As she came up he edged into position by the passenger door. Yes, he was going to do it. At some figured-out moment he threw the door wide, stood extra upright with his chin in the air and did a tremendous juddering salute like a sergeant in an old movie. Feeling her cheeks turn hot she sketched a gracious Queen-Mum-type smile and lift of the hand and scurried into her seat. Performances like that were supposed to show how relaxed the two of you were together, but actually they brought out your awkwardness and almost your resentment of each other, or some of it. Well, at least Malcolm had not thought to bring that tweed cap into the act.

'So it seems I can safely assume you are not possessed by an overwhelming desire to immerse yourself in the ocean,' he said when they got moving.

'Yes indeed you can.'

'Nevertheless I take it you'd have no strong objection to a small sightseeing trip to a part of the coast of the island?'

'Oh no, lovely idea. Whereabouts?'

'That will emerge in due time.'

They drove back to the coast road and moved south again into the more countrified area that had mostly farms and woods and an occasional large house inside a park. After they had skirted the boundary wall of one of these with its fancifully bricked-up gateway, Rhiannon began to pick up small landmarks: an old-fashioned milestone showing the distance to Carmarthen, Cardiff and 'Brecknock', the momentary sight of a castle among whose ruins, it had been said, there grew a flower found nowhere else but in the Pyrenees, a National Trust plaque about something, the gable of perhaps a barn with the tom irregular triangle of bleached poster still stuck there as always and finally, unmistakably, the sudden steep turning that led down to Pwll Glin and, further along, to Britain's Cove. It was obviously Pwll Glin that Malcolm was making for, the only bay with a Welsh name of the score all round that coast, if not the finest then, all would have agreed, the most unusual, and known to Rhiannon from plenty of visits in the past..

For the first couple of hundred yards the slope was so extreme that right of way on that narrow twisting road went automatically to people driving up, and twice Malcolm had to pull into the side and stop. The second time, on a right-angle bend, brought Rhiannon a view of the half-mile or so of flat before the beach itself and then of most of the bay, the low curving arm to the south, the long almost straight stretch of sand and, on the far side, the tree-covered headland where the church was. The road took them to the foot of the escarpment and through the marshes, formerly salt, freshwater now for many years and grown over with reeds of a peculiar and beautiful pale orange-yellow. At the end they turned along the top of the shore, where shabby greenish plants were scattered, and drove finally into the extensive car-park, unseen from above, unexpected almost until reached, but a matter of course after that, full of familiar things like people eating and drinking and making a lot of noise while they walked about.

Malcolm lost no time in. leading the way out of it and down crosswise towards the sea, to an empty part where the sand was strewn with unattractive seaweed and broken by patches of bare rock. By chance it was also just about the part where, one far-off night, Rhiannon and Dorothy had tried to catch flounders in the shallows, or rather not to hinder too much the two, possibly three, young men who were supposed to know how and, for all Rhiannon could remember, had succeeded. There had been nobody about then. There was nobody about now, not at least up this end towards the headland, nowhere to bathe, nowhere to sit or lie or throw a ball, nowhere for the kids to run to and fro. Not saying much, but keeping a close eye on her, Malcolm took them across a stretch of quite rugged rock on to the path that led up to the moss-stained wall of the churchyard-.

On the far side of the gateway here no sound could be heard from the shore, just waves. They were on a narrow granite promontory less than a hundred yards long, with the sweep of Pwll Glin bay on their left as they faced out to sea and another bay on their right too small to have a name, more of a creek really, heaped with stones of various sizes and always empty - well, in the past Rhiannon had seen a couple of fishermen there, serious ones in oilskins and thigh-boots standing into the sea, but it would have been safe to say that nobody went there now for any reason.

There was room on the promontory for not much more than the church itself, three or four lines of graves and dozens of mature trees, sycamores mostly, tall and flourishing even in the salt air and at this season deeply shading the ground underneath. Nobody came here either in a manner of speaking, but the two of them were here today, and somebody else had been here not long before to take a bit of care of the graves and make the place seem not quite desolate, though hardly a single stone remained in one piece or uneroded. But some names and dates could still be read easily enough, Welsh names, English names, none that she saw later than 1920. The church was very thoroughly shut up and impossible to see into from anywhere at ground level.

'It's still a church,' said Malcolm, having let the matter rest for quite a long time. 'That's to say it hasn't been deconsecrated. '

'But they can't still be using it.'

'The last service was held here in 1959. Longer ago than half the people on that beach can remember.' He smiled and went on confidingly, 'I looked it up. Perhaps they think there might be something left here some day.'

'Who? What son of thing do you mean?'

'Well... I don't know,' he said in a gentle tone. 'At the moment it's too far for anybody to come, you see. Too far by car, that is. How many years would it be since it wasn't too far to come on foot, with that climb for most of them to face after? Eighty-four in congregation the nave held, according to what I read.'

'Do you believe in it yourself, Malcolm?'

'It's very hard to answer that. In a way I suppose I do.

I certainly hate to see it all disappearing. I used to think things would go on round here as long as anywhere in the kingdom, but do you know I doubt if they have?'

'Well, there's nothing to be done about it, that's for sure.' Rhiannon tried to sound gentle too. 'One thing, it's too far for vandals to come too, by the look of it.'

'Yes. Small mercies. I like to come here occasionally. It helps me... no, it's impossible to say it without sounding pompous. Anyway, it's a wonderful spot. Peaceful. Solitary.'

'A bit lonely, though. Windy too.'

'I'm terribly sorry, Rhi, are you absolutely - '

'No, no, I'm fine.' She looked about. 'It certainly has an atmosphere. '

'You remember coming here before?' he asked eagerly.

'Oh yes, of course.'

She would have added 'lots of times' but he hurried on.

'What about that terrible concrete hut, I think it was concrete, just where the road stopped? That's gone too now, of course. Ha, one's quite glad to see the back of some of what they pull down. It was the only place to eat, though.'

'That's right, and the lady washed up so loudly you couldn't hear yourself speak, and kept the key of the lav in her apron.'

'Do you remember having lunch there?'

'Oh yes,' she said in the same spirit as a moment earlier. 'We took what we were given - sausages and chips and OK sauce.'

'M'm. There was a hopeless cat there too, that when you stroked it, it looked at you as though you were barmy.'

'I'd forgotten about that. You drank Mackeson stout, didn't you? It was your regular "tipple in those days.'

'So it was. You never seem to see it now.'

'And the two of us went for a stroll after.'

She felt she probably should have spoken then but she could not think how to say it, just smiled and waited and crossed her fingers in her head. He stepped a pace back from her before he went on, still with insistence, 'When we got up here we found there'd been a storm a night or two before and there were leaves and bits of twigs and branches and stuff all over the place, and the sea was still very rough. And we went right up to the end there where it jutted out over the water just there, remember? - quite dangerous it was, I suppose, but we do these things in our youth, actually I think most of it's fallen away now. And I said, I know I'll never mean as much to you as you mean to me, anywhere near, and I'm not complaining, I said, but I want to tell you nobody will ever mean as much to me as you do, and I want you to remember that, I said. And you said you would, and I think perhaps you have, haven't you, Rhiannon?'

If it had been too early a moment ago to contract out of his recalling of that day, it was obviously much too late now. Not sure that she could have spoken in any case, she nodded.

'Wonderful. Oh, that is lovely.' The tautness departed from his manner. 'Well, an awful lot of things seem worth while after that, I can tell you. Thank you for remembering me, with so much else in your life.'

He sent her a smile of simple affection and indicated they should move. As they began strolling down the slight incline towards the gate he put his arm chummily round her waist.

'Yes, I'd got my pal Doug Johnson to lend me his car for the day. It was the first time I'd taken it out and I was a bit nervous, I hope it didn't show.'

'I didn't notice anything,' she said.

'We stopped for petrol and the surly bloke wouldn't change a fiver, remember?'

'Oh yes of course.' With the heat off, Rhiannon would have agreed that she remembered General Tate's landing at Fishguard.

'And we'd hardly gone ten yards after when that terrific cloudburst started and I had to stop because the windscreen-wiper wasn't working properly.'

'That's right.'

'Ah, now I think I can almost fix the date. The Australians were playing at Cardiff and in their - '

He stopped walking and stared ahead of him. She knew something awful had happened. Her eyes skidded away to a horizontal stone gone almost black and read helplessly of Thomas Godfrey Pritchard who departed this life 17th June 1867 and was sorely missed. When she looked at Malcolm again he was still staring, but at her now.

'Doug Johnson was away in France the whole of that summer,' he said, 'doing his teaching prac. He certainly wasn't around to lend his car to me or anyone else. So that must have been a different day altogether.'

'M'm.' She forced herself to go on looking at him.

'We must have taken the bus down. You couldn't have remembered it like that, the way you said you did.'

'No.'

'You don't remember any of it, do you? Not having lunch or walking up to St Mary's or what I said or anything.'

It was not to be got out of or away from. Coming on top of the little tensions of the day the unashamed intensity of his disappointment was too much for her. She hid her face, turned aside and started to cry.

He forgot his own feelings at once. 'What is it? What's the matter?'

'I'm so stupid, I'm so hopeless, no good to anybody, I just think of myself all the time, don't notice other people. It's not much to ask, remembering a lovely day out, but I can't even do that.' She had his arm round her now and was resting her forehead against his shoulder, though she still kept her hands over her eyes. 'Anybody who was any use would remember but I can't, but I wish I could, I wish I could.'

'Don't say such ridiculous things. You don't expect me to take them seriously, do you? It's sweet of you to worry about it just slipping your mind like that, but I didn't remember it very well myself, did I, confusing those two times? Anyway you remember coming down here? To Pwll Glin?'

'M'm.'

'And perhaps me bringing you? You know, sort of vaguely?'

'M'm.' Perhaps she did. 'Even this bit? Just... '

Suddenly it went impossible to say yes, even to this bit. 'Not... ' She shook her head wretchedly. 'It's gone. Sorry.'

'I can't have you apologizing to me, my dear Rhiannon.

Honestly, now.' He gazed "Over the top of her head in the general direction of the land. 'Well, put it this way, the fact you minded so much about not remembering, that's worth as much to me as if you had remembered, very nearly.'

That set things back a bit, but in the end it was only the clearing-up shower. She got to work with her tissues and comb and he wandered about making suitable points like the church being _probably__ twelfth century and having effigies of a member of the de Courcy family and his lady in the south wall of the chancel and a battlement round the top of the tower, exactly what she wanted to hear just then, no sarcasm. When he saw she was ready he gave the bay a final going-over.

'It was all houses there once, before the sea came up,' he said. 'A whole village.'

Rhiannon thought she had heard that the sea had once been over the marshes and then gone back, but that must have been another time. 'I suppose they can tell.'

'At low tide twice a year when the water's calm you're supposed to be able to see down to what were streets. Houses even. I think another church.'

'Do you still do your poetry?'

'You remember that.' He smiled with pleasure. 'Indeed I do, yes. And I mean to go on. I'm lucky enough to have a few things to get off my chest still.'

Before he could get on to what they were she found herself saying, with a sense of instant inspiration that amazed her, 'There used to be a lovely rose-garden with brick walls - and, you know, pergolas along the paths belonging to some grand house somewhere. You could look round it ID the afternoon. I don't know whether you still can.'

'Let's see, would that be Mansel Hall? Over by Swanset?' No prizes for not rushing in this time. 'I'm not absolutely... '

'No, I know where you mean - er, now, Bryn House, that's it. Bryn House, of course. Local stone with brick facing. Not far from here. Anyway, you'd like to go there, would you?'

'M'm. Didn't we go there once before, one summer, not a very nice day?' The not very nice day had stuck in her mind all right, not actually raining but chilly and dark.

'I think so,' he said, as he more or less had to. 'Yes, I'm sure we did. Come on, let's go and have a look. Might bring all sorts of stuff back, you never know.'

'It may have just gone, the garden, like a lot of things.'

'Let's go there anyway.'

He spoke dreamily again, as if he felt that he or they had started on some semi-fated course, and glanced at her in a way that suggested the lip of the frying-pan was still not too far off. Well, she would have to let him say what he liked now. She reached out and took and squeezed his hand as they walked down to the churchyard gate and took it again on the far side, in comfort or apology or what she hoped would pass as understanding, or perhaps like one person letting another know that whatever it was they were facing they would face it together. He squeezed back but kept quiet after all until they were on their way inland through the marshes, and then for once in his life he talked about nothing in particular.

Six - Malcolm, Muriel, Peter, Gwen, Alun, Rhiannon 1 'Bible and Crown Hotel, Tarquin Jones speaking.'

It was characteristic of Tare to refer to his house in this way although, more likely because, the place was not and never had been a hotel in any bed-and-board sense, nor even called one by anybody until he came along. So much could be readily agreed but, as Charlie had once pointed out, or alleged, it was much less easy to say what characteristic of Tare's it was characteristic of. And that was very Welsh, Garth had added without running into opposition.

At another time Malcolm would surely have been ready to consider such matters, especially the last, but not now. With strained clarity he gave his own name in full. 'Who?' - an unaspirated near-bellow with no fancy suggestion of actual failure to hear or recognize.

After an even clearer repetition Malcolm asked if Mr Alun Weaver was on the premises and met immediate total silence, relieved fairly soon by distant female squeals of pretended shock or surprise and what sounded like a referee's whistle indiscriminately blown. Malcolm waited. He took a couple of deep breaths and told himself he was not feeling at all on edge. After some minutes Alun came on the line with the kind of featureless utterance to be expected from someone wary of unscheduled telephone-calls.

Once more Malcolm introduced himself, going on to ask, 'Many in tonight?'

'They've mostly gone now. I was more or less just off myself as a matter of fact. Don't often come here at this time, you know.'

His tone held a question which Malcolm answered by saying, 'Rhiannon, er, mentioned where you were.'

'Oh did she? Oh I see.' This time Alun spoke with all the artless acceptance of a man (perhaps Peter would have specified a Welshman) getting ready for a bit of fast footwork.

'Look, Alun, I was wondering whether you might care to drop in for a nightcap on your way home. No great piss-up or anything, just _un bach__.'

There was a faint sound of indrawn breath over the wire. 'Oh, well, now it's kind of you, boy, but it's getting late and I think if you don't mind... '

'Actually I'm on my own tonight. Gwen's been in a funny sort of mood, I don't know what's got into her. Not like her to pop out on the spur of the moment. Well, I say popped, she told me don't wait up for her.' This was rounded off by a light laugh at feminine capriciousness.

'Well now, that being so, the case is altered beyond all recognition. Of course I'll be delighted to alleviate your solitude. Taking off in about five minutes.'

The simple prospect of company made Malcolm feel better for a moment. He picked up his glass of whisky and water, not a habitual feature of his evenings, and carried it into the sitting-room. This was so full of unmasculine stuff, like loose covers and plates not meant for eating off, and so narrow in proportion to its quite moderate length that some visitors had taken it for Gwen's own little nook where she might have held tea-parties, very exclusive ones, but in fact there was nowhere else to go or be outside the kitchen but Malcolm's study, and even he never went there except for some serious reason.

Tonight a small masculine intrusion was noticeable in this Sitting-room, not in the obvious form of the gramophone or record-player itself, which was of course common in gender, but of actual records fetched earlier from their white-painted deal cabinet in the study. The machine, called a Playbox, black with timid Chinesey edging in a sort of gold, now faded, had been pretty advanced for the mid 1960s. The records were from the same period or before, deleted reissues of micro-groove 'realizations' of even more firmly forgotten 78s made in the 19408 in a style said to have been current two or three decades longer ago still. M9St of the performers were grouped under names like Doe Pettit and his Original Storyville Jass Band, though individuals called Hunchback Mose and Clubfoot Red LeRoy were also to be seen, accompanied here and there by an unknown harmonica or unlisted jew's-harp.

Malcolm had been meaning to play some of these to himself as a means of recapturing more of the past, going on, so to speak, from where he had left off with Rhiannon earlier that day. He had put the project aside when Gwen said her piece and flounced out of the house; now, it seemed possible again. Only possible: first he must visit the bathroom, or rather the WC, and check how matters stood in that department. They had not been too favourably disposed that morning, and once or twice he had had to fight quite hard not to let the thought of them overshadow the outing. His left ball had played up a bit as well, but he was learning to live with that.

He set down his drink and went upstairs and 10 and behold it was all right. As he was finishing up he thought to himself that on this point at least he was two people really, a bloody old woman and worryguts and a marvellous ice-cold reasoning mechanism, and neither of them ever listened to the other. Actually a _real__ split personality, one fellow completely separate from the other, would have had a lot to be said for it: every so often each of them could get away from himself a hundred per cent, guaranteed.

In the sitting-room again he at once switched the Playbox on and took out of its cover a recording attributed to Papa Boileau and his New Orleans Feetwarmers. They looked back at him from the sleeve photograph, a line of old men in dark suits and collars and ties, six, seven faces about as black as could be, sad and utterly private, no imaginable relation to those Malcolm was used to seeing on his television screen. He arranged the disc on the central spindle and in due time it plumped down on to the already rotating turntable where the pick-up arm, moving in a series of doddery jerks and overshoots, came and found its outermost groove. Through a roaring fuzz of needle-damage the sounds of 'Cakewalkin' Babies' emerged. Malcolm tumed up the volume.

The stylus was worn and the playing-surface too, but this bothered him not at all, any more than he cared that the recording was poorish even for its era, the clarinet slightly fiat, the comet shaky in the upper register; he was gripped by the music from its first bars. As always he listened intently, trying to hear every note of every instrument, leaving himself when it came to it no time to reflect on the past or anything else. Too excited to sit down, he stood in front of the Playbox and shifted his weight from one foot to the other in time with the music. At appropriate stages he took a turn on an invisible banjo, beating out a steady equal four, did all any man could in the circumstances with a run of trombone smears and punctually signalled a couple of crashes on the Turkish cymbal. Precisely at the end of the number, which came without warning to the uninitiated, he went rigid and breathless, coming to life again at the start of 'Struttin' with some Barbecue'.

By now he was thoroughly sent, as he would have put it in the old days. He had heard that a barbecue had to do with cooking out of doors, but had always assumed that this here was a different use or even a different word, perhaps a corruption, and that 'some barbecue' meant a fine fancy woman and no mistake. Seeing such a one pass by, people would say in wonder and admiration, 'Now that's what I _call__ a barbecue!' Malcolm had never strutted or, assuming to strut was to dance, danced in any fashion with such a woman, nor was he really pretending to now, just going off on a heel-and-toe shuffle round the small circuit of the room.

Breaking his stride when the doorbell pealed made him stagger. Until he saw that yes, he had pulled the curtains, he was afraid he might have been observed from outside some treat for the neighbours, an oldster capering about on his own like a mad thing. He straightened his jacket, wiped his eyes, squared his shoulders and went out to the hall. Voices could be heard from the far side of the door.

When he opened it, two persons at once entered with all possible certainty of being expected. One of them was Garth Pumphrey, the other a taller, perhaps younger man Malcolm half took at first to be a stranger. This second visitor had a full head of white hair, very neatly cut and combed, and a tanned skin. The combination gave him something of a look of a photographic negative, or perhaps just of an old cricketer; in any case his wide brown calm eyes made the negative idea worth forgetting. He turned his head when he caught the music from the sitting-room.

'Hold the door a minute, Malcolm,' said Garth - 'Peter's on his way now.'

'Oh, right.'

'You remember Percy, don't you, Malcolm?'

Of course he did immediately: Percy Morgan, builder, husband to Dorothy, to be seen from time to time dragging her out to the car after the end of a party, encountered less often, not for about a year indeed, up at the Bible. Garth's occasional usefulness with this sort of reminder was to be set to his credit, against his rather more fluent and famous senility-imputing introductions of Charlie to Alun, Alun to Malcolm, Malcolm to Tarc Jones, etc.

After a short interval marked by awkward standing-about in the hall Peter toiled up the garden path, groaning and muttering as he came, and the party moved into the sitting-room. The Feetwarmers sounded very loud in here - they had started on 'Wild Man Blues' by now - and Malcolm reduced them somewhat before offering drinks, wondering as he did so how far his just-over-half-bottle of Johnnie Walker would go among four - five, rather, which raised a point.

'Alun's coming, is he?' he asked Peter.

'Is he, I've no idea. I say, do you mind turning down that noise?'

'I thought you used to like that old New Orleans stuff Jelly Roll Morton, George - '

'If I ever did I don't now. If you don't mind.'

Percy Morgan looked up from turning over some of the records when Malcolm approached.

'Have you any Basie or Ellington? Or conceivably Gil Evans? Thanks.' The thanks were for an offered glass of whisky and water. 'I can see it's no use asking for Coltrane or Kirk or anybody like that.'

'Not a damn bit of use, boy,' said Malcolm with slight hostile relish. 'And my Basies stop in 1939 and my Ellingtons about 1934. And no, no Gil Evans - I seem to recall a baritone man of that or a similar name playing with somebody like Don Redman, though you obviously don't mean him.'

He reached out to lower the volume as requested, but Percy Morgan held up a demurring hand and indicated that he should attend closely to the music. A clarinet solo was in progress. 'You wouldn't call that melodic invention, would you, seriously?' asked Percy at the end of the chorus.

'No. I wouldn't call it anything in particular. Except perhaps bloody marvellous.'

'He was just running up and down the arpeggio of the common chord with a few passing-notes thrown in.' Not a vestige of complaint or dissatisfaction coloured Percy's tone. He seemed perfectly resigned, seeing it as quite out of the question that the performance could ever have been different.

'Was he now.' This time Malcolm did manage to turn down the sound. 'No doubt he was, I don't deny it.'

'Oh, don't turn it down, Malcolm,' said Garth in real protest. 'I love these old Dixieland hits, they really swing, don't they?' He mimed a bit of simplified drumming, hissing rhythmically through his teeth. 'Which lot is this?' Malcolm passed him the sleeve. 'Oh yes. Papa... Oh yes. Have you got any, any Glenn Miller-discs?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Any Artie Shaws?'

'No.'

Malcolm was as close as he usually came to being angry at the way his quiet drink and unburdening chat with an old friend had been turned, without anywhere near as much as a by-your-leave, into a jazz discussion group. Not that he would in the least have minded the right son of attention being paid to his records: a respectful, if possible attentive, silence broken only by a personnel inquiry or so and one or two - not over-frequent - appreciative cries of 'Yeah!' He realized he had been half hoping for this son of outcome ever since the three had arrived and longer than that in the case of Alun. Yes, and where the hell was Alun?

He was on the doorstep a couple of minutes later with Charlie at his side, crying out in loosely intelligible greeting and apology, pressing on his host an unopened bottle of Black Label - like old times, except then it would have been a flagon of John Upjohn Jones nut-brown.

'I hope you don't mind me bringing these boys along,' said Alun. 'Only Tarc was calling stop-tap and they all seemed to feel like another.'

'I see. No, that's all right. Of course.'

Charlie crossed the threshold with real dignity. 'Or even him sending them on ahead. Known as the advance-guard or covering-patty tactic.'

'I'm sorry,' said Malcolm, 'I don't-'

'Ah, the old righteous sound!' cried Alun, hurrying over to the Playbox. 'Surely I know this one, don't I? Wasn't there a Louis version with, with Johnny Dodds? On the back of, was it "Skip the Gutter"?'

'It was "Ory's Creole Trombone" actually.'

'_Thats__ right - on the old Parlophone 78, correct?'

'Correct,' said Malcolm, beginning to smile.

Alun set about vivaciously looking through the pile of records. Percy Morgan glanced briefly and without hope at the rubric of every third or fourth one he came to. Malcolm went off for more glasses. Charlie turned to Peter and nodded to him in a pleased way, as though the two had not met for some weeks.

'Cheer up,' said Charlie. 'Cheer up and enjoy the music.'

'I'm afraid the effort of cheering up sufficiently to enjoy this music would be beyond me.'

'What's wrong with this music more than any other?'

'Not much, I suppose. When I look back, you know, music's like chess or foreign coins or what, folk tales. Something that only interested me when practically everything else interested me as well.' , 'I wouldn't have gone to the Bible in the first place if the Glendower hadn't been shut.'

'While they fit the new stove. You said.'

'Where are these bloody drinks?' Charlie gave a searching look round. 'And where's bloody Garth? I thought he was meant to be here.'

'He was and is. As you came in he was going up the stairs, in all probability on his way to the lavatory.'

'Hey, there's one very good thing about Garth,' said Charlie, including in this announcement Percy, who had finally given up on the records, and repeating it for Malcolm's benefit as he approached with the promised drinks. 'Mark me closely. Whenever you see, er... What?" He frowned and looked from face to face. 'Oh, whenever you see _Garth__ you get the most wonderful feeling of security. You can relax. You know, m'm? - you _know__ you're not going to suddenly run into Angharad. No chance of it. You can relax. Eh? And a very much more minor benefit of seeing _Angharad__... is knowing you're not going to suddenly run into _Garth__. Well.'

Peter had looked away sharply at this, but the other two at least showed they understood the reference, namely to the frequent observation or supposed fact that the Pumphreys never both appeared at once. It gave rise to regular good-natured speculation about the homicidal-maniac uncle or two-headed son who needed attention of some sort at all times. Anyway Charlie was on well-trodden ground.

'You know I was thinking about that pair the other day,' he went on. 'Now: if they were in a detective story there'd only be one of them. See what I mean? Only be one of them really. One of them would have knocked off the other 'years ago and now whichever one it was would be going round posing as the other. As well, I mean. Just some of the time. They're about the same height, aren't they?'

'Why only some of the time?' asked Malcolm, glancing at Percy, who shook his snowy head very slowly from side to side.

'What? Well, Christ, because the rest of the time he'd. be going round being himself, wouldn't he? Or herself if it was Angharad, of course.'

'I don't seem to have given Alun a drink,' said Malcolm, and moved off.

Alun had that moment slid a record out of its sleeve and was peering at the label in a vigilant way but, without his glasses, surely in vain. 'Ah, _diolch yn fawr__, dear boy. I can't make out, I can't make out whether this is a remake or the original-'

'Could I just have a quick word?'

'Sir, a whole history.' He sighed briefly. 'I mean take as long as you like.'

'Thanks, Alun. I wanted to ask you... Well, something Gwen said gave me a really nasty shock.'

2

'Well, I treat the whole thing as a joke,' Muriel was saying. 'Which I can just about manage to do most of the time if I keep my teeth well and truly gritted. Take it easy, lass, I tell myself when the adrenalin starts to flow - you've seen it all before and you've come through without a scratch. Well anyway you've come through. Say it slowly and calmly: you're in Wales, land of song, land of smiles, and land of deceit. Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief all right, and by Christ boyo Taffy has been keeping up the old traditions indeed in a bloody big way oh yes now look you.' The last couple of dozen words were delivered in an accent that sounded as much like a West Mrican one as anything else, Ghanaian, possibly, or Ibo. 'I thought counting the spoons was just an expression till I came to live down here. Nothing more than a colourful catch-phrase.'

Dimly recognizing this as the end of a section, and even more dimly aware of having heard something rather like it before, Dorothy Morgan looked up. She had lost the initiative a minute or two earlier. Astonishingly, she had found herself out of immediate things to say about New Zealand, the adopted home of one of the Morgan sons, a whole country gloriously unknown to anyone she was ever likely to run into round here and in many other parts, serving her as a magic wand or spell for reducing great assemblies to silence. Now, she missed her chance of coming in with alternative unanswerable stuff on what Percy had said to the County Clerk, or what she remembered of a magazine article about DNA she had recently happened to read. It was not of course that she was actually listening to what Muriel was saying, just that the continuous sound of another voice distracted her, put her off even the unexacting task of knocking one of her starters into shape.

What Dorothy had looked up from was the stylish Scandinavian table, made of different sorts of wood, in Sophie's apparatus-packed kitchen. It, the table, was strewn with the debris accumulated in twelve hours of drinking wine, smoking cigarettes and not eating all manner of biscuits, sandwiches, portions of cheese, little plastic zeppelins of pate. Muriel and Dorothy were the only two still present and active: Sian Smith was thought to be asleep somewhere upstairs and Sophie herself, never a keen partaker, had gone off to her sitting-room TV quite a while before, though at the moment she was in the hall on the telephone trying for the second 'or third time to get hold of the much-needed Percy.

'I think I may have told you about a long-service warrior I ran into in Monmouth,' said Muriel now, sounding in no doubt whatever on the point. 'Twenty years up-country in the thick of it, doing something to do with reservoirs and pipes among the Welsh hill-tribes. Normally, of course, at home that's to say, Yorkshire people don't think a lot to Derbyshire folk, but it's different when you're abroad. Anyway he and I got on all right, and he was very knowledgeable about, you know, what makes Johnny Welshman tick. Quite fascinating. One day, he didn't explain how but I imagine it involved showing tolerance for local rituals and such, one day he found himself among those present when the village man of God preached a sermon in Welsh. Which no doubt would have meant plenty to you... '

Here Muriel made an audacious pause, confident that she could gauge Dorothy's coming-round time to a nicety, and resumed on the dot, '... but, as far as he was concerned, the fellow might just as well have been rabbiting on in Apache. But one thing he did notice, did my chum. The fellow, the Welsh fellow, kept using a word that sounded like the English word truth. As in veracity, honesty and such. There'd be a flood of bongo-bongo chatter, and then, suddenly, truth, and then more monkey language. Apparently, when he asked afterwards, apparently it was, it had been, the English word he'd used. Why not use a Welsh word, he asked him. Well, he said,' and Muriel's accent shifted again to the Gulf of Guinea, 'there isn't a Welsh word with the same connotations and the _force__ of the English word. And if that isn't funny enough for you, he said, there is a Welsh word _truth__, same word, spelt the same anyhow, and it means falsehood. Mumbo-jumbo. As you well know. Talk about coming out in the open. I've often meant to check that in a Welsh-English dictionary. After all there must be such things. Just a matter of knowing where to look.'

Sophie had come into the room in time to hear the last part of this. The sight of her went down remarkably well with Muriel, who liked holding the floor as much as anyone living but preferred a more normal audience, one that could safely be allowed a turn now and again. It would have been good if Dorothy had been listening too, especially to the yam just recounted, but then she had heard it, had had sound-waves bearing it strike her ear-drum, a couple of dozen times before, so there was a chance of its entering her mind by some route or other, perhaps by-passing the conscious part of it. As it was, talking to Dorothy, or rather in her presence, was a bit too close for comfort to being that type in the story who found himself shut up in a prison cell somewhere nasty with a mad murderous Arab for company, not a lot in the way of company because you very soon found that the only way of keeping him quiet was by staring him in the eye: take too long about blinking, let alone nod off, and you were for it. Muriel lit a cigarette in one continuous operation rather than as when addressing Dorothy - piecemeal, like somebody driving a car at the same time.

'Any luck with Percy?'

'Still no reply - it's not like him. I had Gwen on just before, phoning from that Eyetie joint in Hatchery Road. '

'Oh, Mario's, I know. What had she got to say for herself?'

'Fed up she was, according to her,' said Sophie, who had actually been prepared to pass on this information unprompted. 'Malcolm given her a big row.'

'No, really? That doesn't sound the gallant Malcolm's style at all. I can't imagine him giving any size of row to a cocklestall proprietor.'

After a short pause, Sophie said, 'Well, you know. She asked if she could come up, so - '

'And how did you respond?'

'I thought why not, more the merrier.' Sophie glanced at Dorothy. 'Right?'

'Oh, every time. I couldn't agree more.'

'Maybe she'll have something to tell us about the great day trip.' Malcolm's excursion with Rhiannon had been speculated about earlier.

'Very possibly. I must say our Rhiannon has been _going it a bit__ recently. She can hardly have recovered from her piss-up with my old man.'

This time Sophie paused a little longer. 'I always think, the way you feel about the Welsh, Muriel, it must be fantastic, you and Peter seeing absolutely eye to eye on a thing like that.'

'I must go,' said Muriel. 'Well actually not as much as you might think. It's perfectly possible to go a long way with somebody on some point or other and then suddenly find you and the other chap are literally rolling over and over on the bloody _floor__ about it. Easiest thing in the world.' She picked up a nearly full bottle of Corvo Bianco with a slight clunk against an unopened tin of laver-bread (from Devon), got a no-thanks from Sophie and poured unstintingly for herself. 'But of course it doesn't go very deep with me. More a matter of being a little bit naughty among friends.' This, driven home at need with a where's-your-sense-of-humour gibe, was her standard retort to any Welsh person who might take exception to being categorized as a liar, cheat, dullard, bully, hypocrite, sneak, snob, layabout, toady, violator of siblings and anything else that might strike her fancy. 'Yes, I'm a long way from getting my official invitation to join the Peter Thomas Anti-Welsh Brotherhood, and not only on grounds of sex, which I dare say the chairman's prepared to waive these days. No, it'll take a - '

'Oh, and there's another way you don't qualify, Muriel,' said Sophie with a bright smile. 'Only Welsh people can join. Born Welsh. Peter must have told you, surely. I remember him going into it one time after Christmas dinner at Dorothy's. Very particular he was on the point. Two non-Welsh grandparents was too many, he said.'

After the sound of her name had triggered her dinosaurian reflexes, Dorothy lifted her head for the second time in ten minutes. The talk between Sophie and Muriel, animated to begin with, had lost its impetus and that too might have percolated through her nervous system. Behind the black-framed lenses her eyes steadied and focused. With majestic deliberation she drew in her breath. The other two struggled wildly to think of something to get in ahead with, but it was like trying to start a motor-bike in the path of a charging elephant.

'Of course you know in New Zealand they celebrate Christmas just the same as here,' she said, showing a notable sense of continuity. 'Roast turkey and plum pudding and mince pies in the middle of the antipodean winter.' She pronounced the penultimate word correctly and clearly, as she did every other, as she invariably did while she could speak at all. 'I mean summer. Imagine roast turkey and stuffing and hot mince pies in July.

Howard and Angela have got some friends in Wanangui, that's in what they call North Island... '

'I think I'll try Percy again,' said Sophie.

3

'I'd just like an explanation,' said Malcolm. 'Just the merest hint of an explanation. That's all.'

'You're the feeblest creature God ever put breath into,' said Aloo. 'Why any woman should have spent thirty-three minutes married to you, let alone thirty-three years, defies comprehension. You've no idea in the world of what pleases a woman: in other words' - he seemed to be choosing these with care - 'you're not only hopeless as an organizer of life in general, you're a crashingly boring companion into the bargain and needless to say, er, perennially deficient in the bedroom. Correct?'

'That about sums me up. Oh, I'm also cut off.'

'Cut off?'

'Cut off from real people in my own little "pathetic fantasy world of dilettante Welshness, medievalism and poetry.' Malcolm drained his glass.

'_Poetry__? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a great big hulking fellow like you. What are your other shortcomings?'

'That's all I can remember for the moment. And as I say I'd love to know the explanation. There'd been no row before, no upset, nothing. It's most odd. Anachronistic in fact. She hasn't spoken to me in that strain for God knows how long.'

'M'm.' Alun pursed his lips and blinked at the wall, as if reflecting upon one or two mere theoretical conceivabilities, preparing to eliminate them for form's sake. He said, 'She didn't happen to, er, mention anybody else, I suppose, _refer__ to anybody who in any way might have...?'

'Not a soul. I'd have remembered if she had.'

'Yes.' Now an expression of considerable relief appeared for an instant on Alun's face before he added quickly, 'That's a, that must be a considerable relief to you. Well, quite a relief.'

Malcolm nodded and sighed. His neck was aching and he wriggled his shoulders around to ease it. 'But of course what's bothering me, what I'm trying to work out is the connection between this and the way she flew off the handle at you. Which I may say I'm very sorry ever happened.'

'The...?'

'Last night in the Golf Club,' said Malcolm, himself starting to blink slightly.

'Oh. Oh yes. Yes. Yes, I wondered when we'd get round to that. Yes, quite a little hatful of words, wasn't it? What did she say to you about it?'

'Well, I had to drag it out of her. But I wasn't going to let it pass.'

'Quite right, it doesn't do. Never. Anyway...'

'Well, she was tired, she'd had a few, she was a bit under the weather, and the rest of it was, quite frankly, Alun, I mean I'm being quite frank now, she was furious with you, no not furious, annoyed. Irritated. Some linguistic point which I must confess I didn't really - '

'Oh, I know. She grew up in Capel Mererid speaking Welsh and I didn't. I know. To be frank with you in return, Malcolm _bach__, she thinks I'm a fraud, and worse than being a fraud I peddle Wales to the Saxons, so of course I irritate her. No no, don't... We won't argue about it, it's not the topic under discussion. Talking of which... ' Alun leant forward and said emphatically, but in a lowered voice, 'Don't take what she said at its face value, not any of it. There's something more basic at work there, and yes, you're right, it's connected with what she said to you this evening. Now, the whisky's in the front room.' He spoke to the purpose, in that he and Malcolm had retired to the kitchen for this part of their talk. 'Can I freshen that? Come on, it'll do you good.'

'Do you really think it will? All right, just a small one.

Thank you.'

After getting up, Alun laid his hand gently on Malcolm's arm. 'It's all right, boy. I'll explain it to you now. It's not easy but it's all right.'

Malcolm sat on alone. He realized he must be drunk even if only slightly, a state unfamiliar to him for over thirty years, in fact about as long as he had been married to Gwen, until Alun had come back into his life. He felt confused but not dejectedly so, half reassured about Gwen, keeping Rhiannon at the back of his mind for later, not making any connections between the one woman and the other or what each might signify for him. Decent of Alun to come along and listen and, the chances seemed good, sort out what there was to be sorted out. And yet somewhere he felt an apprehension that faded away whenever he started trying to account for it and came creeping back again as soon as he stopped.

Since moving out to the kitchen he had intermittently heard a mumble of voices from the sitting-room, the music first faint then inaudible, once or twice Garth's laughter. Now Alun's voice was raised in some flight or other and more genera1laughter followed. No, he was not cracking a joke at his, Malcolm's expense - nonsense, paranoid even to think of it. And here he came straight away, not lingering, bustling responsibly back with the two drinks. All his movements were as lively as they had ever been.

Stem-faced, intent on seeing the thing through, he pulled his chair up to the table, which incidentally Malcolm had cleared earlier of most of the odds and ends of supper and earlier meals and nibbles Gwen had left there. He sat up specially straight in his own chair.

'Right,' said Alun in a military bark. 'Right. I'd give it to you in one word. Jealousy. Plain old-fashioned jealousy. Also envy, which isn't by any means the same thing, but no better. I was reading where someone made that point recently - envy's worse for a marriage than jealousy. Welsh writer too. Can't think who for now. Anyway. Something nice, something a little bit romantic has come your way, to wit, Rhiannon. Nothing like that has come her way, poor old Gwen's,' he said, staring quite hard at Malcolm. 'You have a nostalgic day out, you come back in triumph, she punishes you. Simple as that. Don't think hardly of her. Happens all the time wherever there are women. Like a reflex.'

'But I wasn't in triumph, I thought of that, I'm not a complete fool, I guarded against that. I said it was quite fun, food nothing much, bit chilly and so on and so on.'

Foreseeably, Alun had started shaking his bead before the 'last was half over. 'Listen, you come back after that son of jaunt anything short of minus your head and you come back in triumph, got it? That's how they all... oh Christ.'

'But you're saying she was just trying to hurt me.'

'Check.'

'But I wasn't trying to hurt her.'

A fervent groan suggested the hopelessness of any kind of answer to that one. 'But she... '

'She'd have forgotten she said it by tomorrow morning.'

'But I won't.'

'Yes you will, not by the morning but eventually, and the sooner the better. Repeat after me - no, you needn't literally but pay attention. She didn't mean what she said. She used words instead of howling and screaming. She was upset - rightly or wrongly doesn't matter. And you swallow it. That's an order.'

'Well, you'd know, I suppose.' Malcolm sighed again. 'All right, I'll do my best. Anyway, how's it meant to fit in with what she said to you?'

'M'm... ' Alun had whisky in his mouth, in front of his teeth actually, and he held up a finger while he put it out of the way. 'More of the same, only pointing in the other direction. I mean seeing Rhiannon, probably seeing her talking to you, that did it. Gwen wanted to bash her but she couldn't bash her direct because they're old buddies and all that, so she got at her via me, not that she didn't get at me _con__ bloody _amore__, what? No problem. Jealousy... and envy. More sort of direct envy in this case because it was one female's of another of roughly the same age and circumstances. Plain as the nose on your pikestaff. Happens every day.'

Garth's laughter was heard again faintly, or fairly faintly.

Malcolm said, 'It sounds pretty devious to me.'

'Devious my eye. When you've - '

'Sorry, I think that should be tortuous.'

'All right, tortuous my eye then. Once you've - Christ - relinquished the perverse, pig-headed expectation that women should mean what they say and say what they mean except when they're actually lying, this sort of thing gets to be all in the day's work. Tortuous, or devious, _my__... _eye__. Couldn't be more obvious and straightforward.' Alun's voice softened. 'I know Gwen's different in all sorts of ways, but she's the same in some other ways and this is one of those. Agreed?'

'Yes,' said Malcolm after almost no hesitation. 'Of course you're right. It'll just take a bit of getting used to. Well. Thanks, Alun.'

'All part of the service, boy. Now don't mention it to her again, right? Go on as if it had never happened. And be nice to her - but your own experience and common sense'll guide you there. And hey,' he went on as they rose from the table, 'what did you get up to with Rhiannon on Courcey, you old monster? The bloody girl was treading on air when she got back.'

'Oh no,' said Malcolm, turning his face away.

'_Yes__, honest. Looked about twenty years younger. Now just you watch it, Jack, okay? Sardis and Bethesda have their eye on you, see. Christ,' said Alun with regard to the time. 'Just before I go, it's marvellous to hear some of that old stuff again. Let's have an evening of it on our own without all these philistines and Ornette Coleman fans like Peter. But I was going to say, there was one of that lot used to appeal to me particularly, a trumpeter with a French name, would it be Matt, Nat... '

'Natty Dominique, a great man.. Yes, I've got quite a few tracks with him on. Fancy you remembering him.'

'Perhaps we could hear just a couple before I take off.

Didn't he do a lot with George Lewis?'

'I think Dodds more.'

These last exchanges took place as the two were filing from kitchen to sitting-room, so naturally enough Malcolm missed Alun's transitory but enormous looks of release from tension, thanksgiving to tutelary powers, lubricious glee, etc. They found the Playbox inactive, though its ruby on-light still glowed, and Garth telling the others what he had done or seen on some occasion in the past. From the way he shut up at the sight of them it could be deduced that he had not only been talking for the sake of talking but for once knew it too. Peter sat with pursed-up non-specific displeasure. Charlie faced the blank screen of the television set, if not hoping it might spontaneously jump into life any second then merely happening to have his head pointed in that direction. Percy, half settled on the table where the gramophone was, half propped against it, indicated without word or movement that he was not with the others, in no way ill disposed, just belonging to a different party close by, though about ready for his flight to be called. Nobody seemed to be drinking. After bringing them this far, vitality had given out.

'I thought we might have a last record,' said Alun. 'And perhaps a small one for the road.'

'You have one,' said Percy. 'Of either or both. Thank you for your hospitality, Malcolm. Now I think some of us could afford to be on our way, don't you? Peter, you've got transport... '

Garth drew himself up with a fierce exhalation of breath. 'I'm going to walk,' he said. 'Get some fresh air into my lungs.'

'Yes, well there's only Charlie to worry about and I'll take him home. I've got to go there anyway to pick up Dot.'

'You mean from our place?' asked Charlie, twisting round energetically in his seat. 'How do you know she's there?'

'Dorothy went to Sophie this morning for coffee and drink's.

'I mean how do you know she's still there? Have you rung Sophie?'

'She went to Sophie for coffee and drinks,' said Percy, speaking slightly louder but without in any way changing his placid, matter-of-fact tone.

'But you haven't rung Sophie.' It seemed that Charlie wanted this or something similar put into the file.

'Shut up, Charlie,' said Alun.

'Look now, the sooner we're away,' explained Percy, 'the sooner we can get our heads down.'

They were away very soon after that, all of them, including Alun, who might perhaps have been expected to seize on this capital chance of hearing his couple of tracks undisturbed, but he went off with the others muttering something about having to make an early start in the morning. So, nearly but not quite sure that Alun had come up with the right answer to the Gwen problem, and with his head swimming just slightly, Malcolm poured himself a glass of almost colourless whisky and water and played himself a last record, not all agog and on his feet now but sunk in his uncomfortable little chair.

The choice was what had once been a previously unissued alternate master of 'Goober Dance' (featuring Natty Dominique, comet). He kept the volume good and low for fear of provoking the retaliation, then or another time, of the reggae-loving butcher's assistant who lived on that side. When 'Goober Dance' finished Malcolm thought he might as well hear another couple of tracks, and fell asleep trying to think of Rhiannon but instead wishing Gwen would come home.

4

'I asked this friend of Angela's what it was,' said Dorothy, 'and she told me it was a Maori dish - you know, the people who went there in boats first of all. Very civilized people. They have all their own things. For instance... '

Seated at the far end of Sophie's kitchen-table, her husband looked at his watch. 'Two minutes, darling,' he called.

'What happens in two minutes?' asked Peter next to him. 'I'm afire with curiosity.' Well, he was quite interested, and to tell the truth he felt awkward sitting there and saying nothing. He had not had to explain that his presence was part of a routine, the rest of which embraced going wherever he had last heard of Muriel in case she needed a lift home or elsewhere, this without prejudice to her right to leave at any time by taxi without informing him. Having to do that, and so perhaps saving him an hour's profitless drive, made her feel tied down. Tonight he was lucky, in the sense that she was still where she had gone earlier that day, though not visibly so at the moment.

'You'll see, if you're still around then,' said Percy, helpfully answering his question.

'It's more than likely. Finishing a chat with Gwen might take all night.'

'What? Oh, is that what Muriel's doing?'

'Isn't that what you gathered?'

'I didn't gather anything, Peter, I was busy here, as I still am, but it won't be for much longer. Yes, compared with some I consider myself a pretty lucky fellow, having such an easy-to-cope-with wife.'

Peter could think of nothing to say to that. He had been running into Percy for years and years without ever having had to notice anything in particular about him, and had left it a couple of seconds too late now to scan his face and posture for intimations of irony. Of course the fellow was a Welshman. While he was still considering the point without urgency the door slowly opened and Charlie came slowly in, staying near the threshold for a nimble exit if required.

'I think I'm going to bed,' he announced. 'Okay,' said Peter when no one else spoke.

Sophie, next to Dorothy and now as so often her official auditor, looked round. She said through or over some information about the financing of the New Zealander health service, 'Sian's in the little room.'

'What's she doing there?' asked Charlie in the slightly contentious style he had fallen into at Malcolm's. 'Well, sleeping's what she went there for.'

'Can't she do that at home?'

'She's got nothing to go home for any more. You know.'

'As long as nothing needs doing about her.'

'Just leave her,' said Sophie.

This exchange had caused Dorothy's discourse to falter severely, but the flow was soon reestablished. With a gallantly assumed smile Sophie turned back to her. Charlie wandered halfway down the room.

'Alun in cracking form,' he said.

Percy looked at him brightly and in silence. Peter grunted.

'Rising to the occasion. Just the _sort__ of thing that brings out the best in him, convincing a chap like old Malcolm that any misgivings he may happen to have about his... personal life are quite without foundation. Tones him up. Mind you, I'd love to know what they actually said to each other, wouldn't you?'

'I think you're jumping to conclusions,' said Peter, his eyes flickering towards Percy.

'Maybe. A summons to the telephone followed by what about paying a call on old Malcolm, that notorious nightowl and reveller. M'm. I predict a catastrophe.'

During these last words of Charlie's, Percy had again looked at his watch and now moved at a moderate pace to a position immediately behind and above his wife. 'They've even kept their own cuisine,' said Dorothy. 'A friend of Angela's cooked a Maori dish for us one evening. It had raw-'

Still unhurriedly, Percy leaned forward, put his hands under her arms and hauled sharply upwards, using great but seemingly not excessive force. Dorothy shot to her feet as smartly as a nail responding to a claw-hammer.

'Here we go, darling,' said Percy, pulling and pushing while Sophie at first stood by, then followed their joint progress. After a short interval Peter and Charlie heard him in the hall saying, 'Piece of cake.' Then the front door shut.

'Quite impressive in its way,' said Charlie. 'I hadn't seen it before.'

'Quite impressive. Sometimes she moves under her own steam without waiting to be counted out. No doubt depending on how she feels.'

'Yes, I suppose it must boil down to that in the end.'

'I think I'm going to bed,' said Charlie to Sophie, who had come back into the room.

'You do that, love. Are you all right?'

'Absolutely fine. Yes, really.'

'I won't be too long. Sian's up there.'

'I'll be fine.' Charlie kissed his wife on the cheek and turned back for a moment to Peter with a distant sparkle. 'Be seeing you. Bit pissed now.'

He had hardly gone, and Peter had hardly had time to start wondering how to handle whatever it was he had to handle, before Muriel entered the kitchen, closely followed by Gwen, whom Peter had barely set eyes on since arriving. Both carried empty glasses and the way each moved brought out for the moment a striking physical resemblance: rather short in the leg and moving slowly and softly, shoulders bowed but head well up and forward, rather pointed nose questing for the wine-bottle. None of those immediately on view had any wine in it. Without verbal or other comment Sophie produced a full one, a litre flask of Emerald Riesling, from a carton next to her sentry-box-sized refrigerator. Sharing the work, Murie1 twisted the _in-situ__ cork off the corkscrew in no-nonsense fashion, her head enveloped in cigarette-smoke. Gwen attacked the foil round the neck of the new bottle with a fruit-knife. Neither spoke until liquor was pouring.

'Exit our Dorothy,' said Muriel. 'Not before time let it be added.'

'The sound of the front door shutting was music in our ears,' said Gwen.

Muriel settled herself in her previous place. 'Young Percy didn't exactly fall over himself coming to the bloody rescue, did he?'

'He probably felt like an hour off,' said Peter, who was still rather impressed with Percy's smooth, resolute action and, even more, envious of his air of seclusion in some adamantine sphere of his own. 'That seems very reasonable to me.'

The three women looked at him in silence, Sophie only for an instant while she made for the door, Gwen, seated, rather longer. Muriel's look came over the top of her glass and lasted till she had put it down on the table. Then she said, 'Well, Pete lad, now's your chance for a small break yourself. My friend Gwen and I are just about to settle down for a nice cosy little sisterly chat which I don't honestly see you contributing much to, so you could take off right away, couldn't you? No point in sticking around, eh?' She smiled, or drew back the corners of her mouth and raised her eyebrows.

He had been expecting to be asked to hang on while his wife had one more drink and then to have to hang on while she had one more after that. Under this arrangement he would have been open later on to a charge of having spoilt the drink(s) in question by a display of impatience - this no matter how hard and continuously he might have beamed at everyone in sight - with another in reserve about having dragged her away while she was enjoying herself. She was not an inveterate boozer but when she was on it there was a routine for that too. He was accordingly ill prepared for being ordered out of Sophie's house. 'Oh... that's all right,' he said. 'I can easily - '

'No, no, I wouldn't keep you up, old boy.' Muriel gave I a waggish laugh. 'You look as if you could do with an early night. Granted it's not that early, but every little helps.'

After another tepid protest or two he was driven from the room. Gwen gave him a farewell twiddle of the fingers and stylized simper that made him feel quite sorry for Malcolm, but only in passing. In the hall cloakroom he rejected, as frequently before, that if the Thomases had a second car, which they or rather she could readily have afforded, then all this would never have arisen. _All __ this? A drop out of the ocean. And of course there would still be times like tonight, with her too pissed, or about to become too pissed, to drive. Well, at times like that, when she actually needed him, she could ring him or... What was he talking about? Let herself in for feeling tied down and pass up a giltedged chance of buggering him about at the same time? He must be joking. He must also have got this far almost as frequently before.

Outside in the hall itself he nearly ran into Sophie wearing a turquoise-blue - scarf over her head, which was just unexpected enough to make him say, 'Off somewhere, are you?' Now he remembered, he had heard the 'telephone tinkle a minute or two before.

'Yeah. Why?' Her normal intonation had never needed much sharpening in order to sound snappish.

'Charlie'll be all right, I suppose?'

'Why wouldn't he be?'

'Well... ' Peter shifted his head about in a way intended to remind her that as an old friend he rather naturally knew something of her husband's nervous troubles.

'Should be safe enough, shouldn't he, with three people in the house?'

'Oh yes. Yes of course. '

'If you're worried you can stay around yourself.'

This time he moved his head in a different way, thinking perhaps she had been pulling his leg.

'I like a bit of time off too, you know, now and then.' Before he could give his answer to that, if any, Sophie went back into the kitchen.

5

Gwen and Muriel looked up at the sound of the outside door shutting a second time.

'Peter in a funny mood,' said Sophie.

'You know I don't think drink agrees with him,' said Muriel. 'Never has.'

'Decent of the old boy,' said Gwen, 'to stick up for Percy like that. And shows a great breadth of sympathy too.'

'You'd think he'd realize there's others needs a break,' said Sophie, and went briskly on, 'I'm just off round to Rhiannon's for half an hour. Now you won't be rushing away yet awhile, will you? Stuff in the fridge if you want 'it,' she said further, though there was enough stuff on the table to keep both the other two chewing hard for a couple of hours. 'Stay if you like, mind, 'there's another bed in the - '

Muriel interrupted to say she would get a minicab and Gwen interrupted her to say she would drive her, and the two fought over it briefly until Sophie had actually left, though they each managed to get in their thanks for the party and their sendings of love to Rhiannon. After assuring herself that they were indeed alone Gwen turned to Muriel with an intent frown.

'What we were saying - a tin of a good brand with a spoonful of yogurt stirred in... '

'And a spot of chopped parsley... '

'... and they start asking you just which vegetables you've used, isn't there endive in this, can't I taste celeriac. And wanting to know _how__ you did it, surely you melted them in butter and so on. I just tell them, the old way, m'm, it's the only proper way.'

Muriel laughed with more elation than might have been expected at a simple discussion of kitchen methods. 'Right, there's not much they can say to that. And of course when it comes to chicken or Scotch broth or whatever, well, what is it, it's cubes and booze, that's what it is, cubes and booze. A tin of oxtail soup and a cube and a tablespoon of whisky and that's it. Not only easier, incomparably easier. _Better__,' she said challengingly. 'Better all along the line.'

'When I look back,' said Gwen, resting her chin on a hand that also had a lighted cigarette in it and squinting towards a recent wine-stain on the tablecloth, 'and think of all that carry-on with the wretched stock-pot, never let it leave the stove, in with every scrap of the joint and you'd have thought a chicken carcass was worth ten times the chicken itself and... Do you know, Muriel, would you believe it, time was when I'd go along to the butcher and get bones for the dog, no dog, straight into the bloody pot with the beef-gristle. And for what? What possessed us?'

This time Muriel's response was affectionate as well as appreciative, or at least it sounded like it. In the usual run of things she and Gwen got on no better than all right even when she was not finding Gwen sly nor Gwen finding her loud or strange or both, but midnight could bring some display of amity. Part of this must have come from mere co-survival at the drinks table, as both had re1lected before now. But not all; not this time, at least.

Gwen waited for a moment, then said more or less at random, 'After all, it's not as if anybody in the world's going to notice, let alone appreciate even the most obvious... '

'Don't make me laugh.'

'I mean they don't even _know__.'

'Of course they don't _know__, love. You can only know if you want to know, and they don't want to know. They have other claims on their valuable attention, as I imagine you must have noticed before.'

'I can't bear the way they - '

'What, them bestir themselves to notice how life's lived in their own home, what makes the bloody world go round? Not them. Why should they? They've won.'

By this stage there was little doubt that those now under discussion were not the same as those who asked Gwen just which vegetables she had used. Nevertheless whatever the two women most wanted to talk about had pretty clearly not yet been broached. Give it time, as they used to say in South Wales when an unlooked-for silence descended on the company. Gwen was the one who let it come, that being what you did if you were the one with the luck when everybody present had given it time.

'Of course she still is very striking, I quite see that, I wouldn't call her beautiful, I never thought she was beautiful, but she is very striking.' She left the name out - not through any Cymric instinct of non-committal but because her thoughts were undeviatingly fixed on Rhiannon, as in fact they had been for some minutes past.

Perhaps Muriel's were too: she joined in promptly enough. 'Oh, agreed, with the benefit of a small fortune laid out on facials and massages and health farms and I don't know what all. Plus never having to do a hand's turn in the home.'

'Oh fair enough, but you don't get skin like that out of a tube. And that carriage, you're born with it or you're not. But as for-'

'Not so much as heave a plate on to the bloody rack.'

'It's when it comes to the what would you call it, the social side that I start, um, veering away from the consensus a bit. The conversational - '

'Airs and graces at her age.'

'I mean she's fine on the chit-chat level, nobody better for a good chinwag, oh, I'll give her that, it's just all rather run-of-the-mill. You know, humdrum. Of course, I'm not asking for a discussion of Wittgenstein over the coffee and gingernuts, nothing like that, but it's all very agreeable and chummy and then at the end you ask yourself what has she actually _said__. Nobody's demanding a coruscating shower of wit... '

This speech had given Muriel time to do some catching-up. 'Always found her a bit of a bore, quite frankly.'

'Well, I don't think I'd... '

'Look, wasn't she... didn't you... weren't you... '

'Wasn't I what, pet?'

'You know, at the... place along the road, the... _you__ know, the poly is it?'

'The university,' said Gwen a little stuffily.

'Yeah, that's right, well weren't you there together about a hundred years ago, you and her?'

'As a matter of fact we were, yes, way back as you say.' Gwen tried to remember what sort of place Muriel had been at. Surely if it had been another university or any other proper seat of learning then Muriel would have impressed it upon her many times over. So it must have been a teachers' training college or some other lowly institution where they had envy dinned into them. She realized she felt pretty vague on the whole topic. 'If the matter is of the smallest interest.'

'Sorry, I was just wondering what sort of showing she made as a student, you know, from the academic point of view.'

'_Oh__.' In the interval, not long but extended by a couple of soft interpolated belches from Muriel, it had returned to Gwen's mind that the place in question had been a school of art named after one of the industrial towns in the North of England and presumably responsible, to some degree anyway, for Muriel's taste in pictures as seen in her house. This made Gwen feel comfortable enough to go on, 'Well, actually now you come to mention it, er, it is quite interesting. She went to all her lectures, well that's sensible if you're not too sure of your own capacity to shine, as it were, and did all her essays, good girl, and would probably have ended up with a pass degree which was all she was going for, "if she hadn't... '

'Right. What was she, what was she studying?'

'She was reading - ' said Gwen with some weight on the word, then carried on all offhand, '- biology main with botany subsidiary or the other way round, I can't remember. Some English in her first year I think.'

'Not a very distinguished career do I gather?'

'She was a conscientious student but she didn't seem to take any interest in her subjects the rest of the time. Did her work and that was that, then off out. No shortage of offers as you can imagine. She, er, she never took much part in the swapping of ideas, midnight discussion side of university life.'

Muriel made a backhand gesture putting off consideration of that side of life indefinitely. 'Popular enough with her teachers I dare say.'

'Well: if you mean by that there was any - '

'No no, nothing improper, I'm not suggesting that at all. A girl doesn't have to go anywhere near that far to make herself agreeable to her pastors and masters. Winning ways'll do it.'

'Well,' said Gwen again, and stopped. She wanted quite strongly to oppose what was being insinuated without much idea of why, except that the vertical furrows along Muriel's top lip struck her all of a sudden as most unattractive. They had shown up extra clear in the last half-minute, which was just about when Gwen had found she was no longer being borne along by the thrill of disloyalty. She had talked and drunk herself off the heights of her revolt, though that was not at all the same thing as saying she wanted to go home. And it was miles and miles away from saying she was beginning to grow reconciled to what had taken place, what had almost failed to take place, between herself and Alun. It had been _all her fault__ - for not having learnt her lesson years before, for being drunk too early in the day to be allowed for, for chancing her arm with a contemptible sod like that. In the past she had never quite made up her mind whether Alun was on balance to be despised or to be regarded as some sort of engaging rogue. Well, if nothing else, the events of the early afternoon of the day in question, that of the unveiling at St Dogmael's, had settled that one for good and all. But no point in going over it again now, if ever.

Evidently it had been the right moment for Muriel too to take a break. Sitting hunched over the table, she was making patterns with a matchstick in the loose ash that half filled the roomy blue-glass ashtray in front of her and hissing quietly through her teeth, perhaps in search of a new topic, if so in vain, as soon appeared.

'It doesn't make any odds whether you're bright or stupid or anywhere in between,' she said. 'They don't care what you think, what you say, or what you're like at all.'

'They don't even notice.' Gwen reckoned she ought to be able to hold her own here.

'You thought so at first, mind you. At least I know I did. Tell us what you think, love - no go on, I really want to hear. And then when you did tell 'em, well it was quite a long time before I started noticing the glaze in their eyes. They were being good about you talking. You can say what you please because it doesn't matter what you say. It's like, I was reading about one of these Russian satellite places, was it Hungary, anyway wherever it was, what you say's neither here nor there just so long as you don't set about bloody _doing__ anything, it might have been Poland. And then they wonder when you start screaming and chucking things at them. Hey, that's like, dead funny isn't it, I never thought of it like that before, but it's like when somebody like a dissident or a minority finds they can't get anywhere through the legal ch8nnels so they go round blowing up power-stations. Of course I don't hold with people actually literally doing that, but by Christ I promise you I know how they feel.'

'And then they're never angry back. _You__ get angry but _they__ don't on purpose, so as to show how silly and childish you are and how mature and marvellous they are. Objective too.'

'It's all right for them to be fed up first, don't forget, like when you're late or they're late. You might be cross when they're late when what they've been up to _matters__, see? When you've not batted an eyelid.'

'And they go off to the club as if they don't love it.' Gwen had started to enjoy herself. 'As if we _don't know.'__

'Why we bother to talk to them passes my comprehension.'

'Ever. I often wonder.'

'They're all shits,' said Muriel. 'And the ones who pretend not to be are the worst of the lot.'

'I suppose so. Sometimes I think we're a bit hard on them.'

'Serve the buggers right, I say.'

It was very quiet in Sophie's kitchen. Even in the 1980s South Wales still kept industrial hours: early to work if any, early home, early in the pub, early to bed. The tendency gave sitting up an extra relish. Muriel poured wine with a mention of one for the road, and Gwen accepted some with a cautionary hand lifted, as at every previous pouring. Then, as if struck by sudden inspiration, Muriel snatched up a cigarette and lit it.

'This may not be a very edifying way of carrying on,' she said judicially and with a demonstrative jerk of the hand, 'but it's a long sight more fun than anything my poor old female parent had a chance of getting up to in her declining years. No cars or parties or telly then. In those days you had your chair and your stick and your cat and that was it.'

'Oh come off it, Muriel,' said Gwen, sharply enough to make Muriel twitch a little. 'I met your mother a couple of times, and one of the times I remember she was waiting for somebody to come and pick her up and drive her somewhere to play bridge. And I'm not at all sure she hadn't got a gin and tonic in her hand while she waited. Stick and cat indeed.'

Apart from the twitch, soon suppressed, Muriel showed not the smallest discomfort or sign of regrouping at this contradiction. 'All right, she was lucky. Thousands weren't. I'm thinking of the days pre-war now, you understand. A different world in all sorts of ways. Altogether different attitudes.' Muriel was talking faster and with more concentration than before, like somebody determined to get through a number of remarks already in mind, more than one perhaps long in mind. 'About marriage for instance. Now we're supposed to think that that generation never discussed anything like that. Well that's probably right enough and they didn't _discuss__ it, go into the bloody business in every mortal detail- but you see you can discuss a thing till you're black in the face and end up knowing less about it than when you started. Understanding it less, less well. My mother,' said Murie1 forcefully and quickening up further - 'my mother used to talk about the unpleasant· side of marriage. No she didn't, she didn't talk about it, she referred to it, that was how she referred to it when she did. Now just you try and imagine the kind of roasting you'd get if you called it that these days. From everybody. But I wonder how many women would disagree with you in their heart of hearts.'

When Muriel did let up, plainly not out of any shortage of material, Gwen looked encouraging and prepared to pay close attention. Whatever was to follow she would pass on to Rhiannon at the first opportunity, not only on intrinsic grounds but also to offset earlier treacheries. Besides, any informed account of relations between Muriel and Peter, long suspected of being bad enough to be interesting, would win no small kudos among the other wives.

Even at prevailing speeds of thought Gwen was quite ready when Muriel went on, in no less of a rush than before and just where she had left off, 'Because they never had time to get used to it, to adjust. . It's supposed to come naturally and I expect it does for a very great many, it must do, but not for all. But it's no use saying anything because they don't notice, and then when they do notice they think it's just a female acting up or asserting herself or getting back at them for something else in the way everybody knows they do. So then it's either a huge set to or hoping it'll be better next time, and funnily enough it always seems to turn out the same way, isn't that striking? And _then__... it gets to be too late, very natural that, just like when you're talking to someone and you don't know their name, and you hang on because you're hoping they're going to say it or you'll remember, and then before you know where you are it's too late to ask them. Well, when you've got that far it's no time at all to when it's really too late.

'Some people seem to manage quite okay to keep up with their old buddies after not seeing them for twenty years. Sian was telling me she's still in touch with a mate of hers who went to Toronto I couldn't tell you when but a hell of a long time ago.'

Gwen still said nothing. Very reluctantly, and feeling fed up as well, she saw that she would not after all be able to tell Rhiannon what Muriel had let out, could at most drop a hint or two along with a plea of amnesia. That amnesia might easily turn out to be genuine enough, and even the hint or two might stretch her morning self too far. It could be that Muriel had been half rationally counting on something like that, trying out an unusual form of self-revelation, one that popped back into the box overnight. Certainly her last couple of sentences had been just the sort of thing you expected to hear on coming round from a fit of extreme apathy in the small hours. No harm in passing that on.

'Would you very kindly telephone for a minicab on my behalf?' said Muriel after a minute of complete silence. She spoke with rather better control than before from much further out. 'The number can be found in my handbag which is somewhere.'

More of the same, thought Gwen, picking up the handbag from within reach. But she made up her mind to be less bothered in future when Muriel seemed to her strange or loud, if she could remember the reason, of course.

6

'Was it baby Babs whose hideous crabs distressed Father Muldoon?

Oh no, it wasn't baby Babs, it was Mrs Rosenbloom... ' Alun sang quietly not out of any ordinary precaution, for he was alone at the wheel of his car, but to avoid giving way to anything in the nature of vulgar triumph. On leaving Malcolm's in a mood of heavily qualified satisfaction he had happened to find himself passing, or as good as passing, the house of an old friend. Until the party at the Golf Club they had not met for something like twenty years, met even then hardly long enough for him to tell her she was obviously in terrific fettle and how sorry he had been to hear about Griff. In his day Griff had been a successful and venturesome doctor, unstinting with the early pep pills, master of a sizeable red-brick villa on the Beaufoy road. Alun had just had time to ask where she was living now - same place actually, good old Griff, trust him to see her right. Alun had notified himself, more or less as he turned into that road, that if a light happened to be showing there at this hour then he would pull in for a moment and give a toot, or perhaps better a quick ring, just on the off-chance. And there had been a light and the chance had come up.

To take a fresh step in that general direction so soon after nearly coming a cropper over a previous one, while not yet out of that danger in fact, might have seemed foolhardy to some. It certainly did to Alun, or had until the moment he was invited in for a couple of minutes. After that, and especially now he was driving away, it felt more like having successfully gone up in his own light aeroplane immediately after a bit of a spill. That of course made it no less foolhardy in the undertaking. No, well there it was.

At the age of twenty-six or so, having noticed that he was obviously not a particle more grown-up or less reckless than he had been at thirteen, he had been greatly relieved to come across a newspaper article by some fashionable psychologist saying that adolescence among human males could be a drawn-out process, lasting in some respects and cases until the age of twenty-five or even thirty. This assurance had given him intermittent hope and comfort of a sort until about ten years later, when it had come back to him in a moment of what had been, even for him, an outstanding act of goatish irresponsibility. Thereafter he had clung to the consolation that there was nothing he could do about it.

The house in Holland when he approached it had a light on in the sitting-room, a departure from his expectation that brought mild vexation cross-hatched with foreboding. The vexation went along the lines of here he was, having taken all this trouble to leave people to themselves, give them plenty of time to get themselves off to bed, faced now with God-knew-what hold-up before he could get himself off there after a hard day. The foreboding was less straightforward.

For Rhiannon to be still up and on her own much after eleven, never mind getting on for one o'clock in the morning, was unheard-of, imaginable only in bombshell situations, good news it might be, bad much more likely. Short of that, she would most probably have Rosemary with her, back from her evening out (or somewhere) with William Thomas, who seemed to have been around since first light or thereabouts. It was no trouble at all for Alun to picture the bloody girl looking up alertly this very moment at the sound of his engine, getting into position next to her mother as president of a two-woman court of inquiry into his recent activities and overall behaviour. Or it would be Rosemary on her own, no more alluring an option. Whereas other possibilities hardly bore thinking about: Gwen with an expanded edition of her grievances? Malcolm with a more accurate one of his? The police he ruled out unless a mistake had been made. An incident in Harriston in 1950 involving a woman probationary sergeant and a patrol van might well have seriously displeased them at the time, but at this date could surely be passed over as grounds for a midnight descent on a non-black.

These speculations and others went through Alun's head while he was still driving up to the house. When he got closer he saw there was a car parked outside it, one he was nearly sure he had seen not far away not long before. That was the best he could do: he knew well enough that car recognition was an important proficiency for one who led his sort of life after hours, but he bad been neglecting it, was still dangerously unschooled in local detail. Moving on foot to the front door he let his neck go rubbery and his eyes uninquiring, getting ready to lurch into action as a drunk. Then he sort of remembered it was Rhiannon he would be hoping to fool and went ordinary again, in so far as he now could. After it was too late he started trying to think of a topic to take the initiative with.

When he walked springily into the sitting-room he was faced with Rhiannon in towelling dressing-gown over nightie and Sophie in day clothes; no Rosemary. Neither of the two present smiled very positively or spoke. Without thought, intent only on action, he moved over and kissed each of them in turn, then, as his brain began ticking over once more, he stepped back and gave Sophie a sequence of cheerful interrogative nods.

She responded at once. 'I had Dorothy, I was saying to Rhiannon, and then I had Muriel, she's probably still there. Really one of her nights. Bad as I've ever known her, she was. Cruel. You don't see her like it, you know, Rhi. Gwen dropped in and I left Muriel putting her through it. Just nipped out,' she ended, with a girls-together half-wink at her chum.

'I don't blame you,' said Alun warmly. Good old Soaph, he thought with more genuine warmth - never any need to worry there from the word go. Not really bright as you usually thought of it, but bright as a button when it came to anything that bore on the old ins and outs: the throwaway mention of Gwen was a typical touch. With a quick switch he added, 'Rosemary gone to bed, has she?'

'Just this moment,' said Rhiannon. 'I wonder you didn't bump into William as you drove up.'

'Oh, he just dropped her off like that, did he?'

'Well, yes.'

'I see.'

At no point could Alun have said what he meant by his last question. But whatever it might have been intended to convey - surprise, resignation, outrage, boredom, disappointment, fatherly concern, heartfelt co-masculine approval- he of all people had no business to be asking it in front of these two, or perhaps anywhere on earth. This dawned on him a bit at a time while he stood there taking in the information. Then he suddenly said, 'You know if by any chance this ridiculous weather carries on, we could probably do worse than go down to Birdarthur for a couple of days. Old Dai the Books still keeps up his place on the cliff there. Sophie, you've stayed in that cottage, haven't you?'

'Oh, I'm included in this, am I?'

'Why not, there's two decent bedrooms and Charlie can leave Victor at the tiller for a spell. Not next week because I'm filming then. Dai's only ever there at weekends, he was telling me. I didn't manage to get him at the shop today... '

It would have been miraculous if he had, not having gone within a league of the place, tried it by telephone or even admitted Dai the Books to his thoughts more than a few seconds before pronouncing the name, though the facts were as stated. Anyway, with his talents for persuasion, which had less to do with direct pressure than with making something sound fun for long enough, he soon had Sophie's assent to the Birdarthur project with Charlie's thereby taken for granted. Rhiannon's had been taken for granted from the start.

'Well, I'm off,' said Alun finally. 'Don't break the party up on my account, now.'

'You needn't think you're going to get away like that, _was__,' said Rhiannon.

Into Thy hands, O Lord, thought Alun to himself.

Although he often said where he was going, or might have been going, he never said where he had been, nor did Rhiannon ever ask until... unless...

'You take that creature out, outside, and then settle her down in her basket in the kitchen. And mind you wait and make sure before you let her back in.'

Enfeebled by the exertions of her day, Nelly had responded to Alun's arrival with no more than a couple of paltry thumps of her tail and a lunatic gleam out of the very corners of her eyes. Now, hearing herself referred to, she made a slovenly attempt to sit up and did a thorough squeaking yawn that would have been quite impressive in an animal of any size. He took her away as bidden, but in a style that emphasized his decency in doing so, his detachment from the whole concern. It was not that he disliked the puppy, rather the contrary: he just could not afford to let it be thought that he could be roped in any old time to minister to her needs. Why, next thing he knew he would be rushing back from Griff's or somewhere to give the bloody hound her tea!

7

When the door had shut behind Alun there were two releases of breath of which neither quite amounted to a sigh of relief. Sophie lowered herself to the floor, twisted her head about till it rested comfortably against the arm of the chair behind her and said she must be going. Rhiannon suggested more coffee, adding that it would only take a minute, and rearranged her legs under her on the sofa. They sat in a more or less habitable corner of the room with bare boards and half-decorated walls hardly out of reach.

Sophie had probably missed the coffee proposal altogether. 'You ought to get out more, you know, Rhi,' she said.

'Oh no. It's so lovely not having to after years of not wanting to and having to. '

'It'd be easier if you learnt to drive.'

'Not you too,' said Rhiannon, bouncing upright. 'I can drive as well as anybody if I haven't actually forgotten how. I drove a dry-cleaner's van for eighteen months in London when we were hard up. It's not I can't drive, it's I don't drive. There being no car except the one with Alun in it. Can't afford a second car, he says, at least he'd say if I brought it up again ever. He does all the shopping I can't do round the corner and if I want to go anywhere there's a minicab. Much cheaper than running another car ourselves. And no parking problem. He'd say that too. You try him.'

'Funny, he's never been one to pinch the pennies. I mean... ' Sophie looked about her, but there was little evidence of lavishness except perhaps the only picture so far on display, a large Cydd Tomas over the fireplace, dated 1981 under the artist's signature and yet attractive enough - it very likely showed Dragon's Head from the sea - to be almost worth its place on that ground alone.

'Sure, no trouble there,' said Rhiannon, 'but it's nothing to do with that, the point is with him having the car nobody ever knows where he is, and me not having a car, everybody knows where I am, only that's not nearly so interesting. Take tonight, now.'

'M'm. Any idea where he'd been?'

'Not the faintest, have you?'

'I only hope it was somebody sensible.'

'Oh, me too.' Rhiannon paused before going on. 'How was Gwen really?'

'Oh. Coming round, I reckon. Still a bit shirty but going to be okay as long as he doesn't make any waves for a bit.'

'If only he had the sense to keep it in the family, sort of.'

'I know,' said Sophie, 'I couldn't agree with you more.

Especially now he's down here. It's not like London down here.'

'Absolutely. It's silly of him in another way too. It lands up there are things we can't talk about, him and me. I don't mean important things, I mean unimportant things, but they're still quite important when you add them together. Who was there and how they seemed and what was said... At least it makes it harder.'

'M'm. Is he all right, Rhi, do you think?'

'All right?' repeated Rhiannon in alarm. 'How do you mean?'

'No, nothing, he just seems to have got a bit wild. You'd think he'd know by now not to take up with Gwen all of a sudden like that and then expect to get away with treating her like... '

'Take up with Gwen _again__ all of a sudden like that, but it doesn't really make any - '

'Oh, I didn't realize they were - '

'Oh yes. Funny, I never thought he was very keen. In fact I wonder a bit who took up with who, either time. Of course it was more all right for her then, not being exactly the only pebble on the beach. She had other things in her life then.'

'Like Malcolm,' said Sophie. 'Yeah.'

That was all for the moment. Sophie sat with her arms round her knees, shapely sleek dark head towards the thick shaggy rug as if she was following a train of thought, not a thing she often gave any sign of doing. Rhiannon lit a cigarette, holding the flame as usual a couple of millimetres inwards from the tip. She had wondered a little at the time what had brought Sophie along to her so late, nearly too late to find her up. Something to do with Alun, it had soon emerged; saying she hoped he was settling down all right after the move from London, not saying what she could well have been thinking now, that she also hoped his recent goings-on did not mean she had lost her special bit of hold on him, however lumpy that bit might have looked to the outside world. For various reasons Rhiannon too hoped as much, but felt that here in Wales that was not the sort of thing you could really say. So with no particular intention she asked how Charlie was, rather less inquisitively than when she had asked after Gwen.

'That bugger knocks it back like a fool,' said Sophie without looking up.

'Yes, I thought... '

'I never realized how much he drank till the night he came home sober. A revelation, it was. '

'Not even nice at the time, I don't suppose.'

'What had happened that day I'll never know. Anyway it was a hell of a night after that. He made me sit up with him till he was asleep which wasn't till after two, and then it couldn't have been much after four he was cootched tight up to me, stiff as a board and breathing in and out, in and out as if he was doing it for a bet. And he wouldn't say what it was, what the matter was. I went on and on asking him but he wouldn't say. Next day he was paralytic by six, Victor said.'

'If he's going to make you sit up and all that, he really ought to "say.'

'He's never said, except being alone makes it worse and the dark isn't good. I've given up trying to get him to try and say what it is. All he's ever said is it's nothing to do with anything and it doesn't mean anything. I'm fed up. He ought to say _something__. I mean about _something__. It gets depressing when a bloke never says anything. There's not as much difference as you might think between him pissed as a lizard and him passed out. Not when he's with me there's not. I quite like him, old Charlie, or I used to, and I miss him, sort of. '

Rhiannon took her time about finishing her cigarette. 'Sounds as if the two of you could do with a nice break.

You will come to Birdarthur, won't you? You and I can have a proper gas. Alun'd like you to be there too. He's always complaining he never seems to see enough of you.'

Now Sophie did look up. 'Oh, he doesn't, no, does he really?' , '_Yes__, always going on about where's Sophie these days.'

'Oh no, really?'

'Won't do him any harm either to get away for a bit.

Now there's a bloke who says something if you like. If only the silly little thing would learn to leave it at that.'

Seven - Alun

1

Soon after eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning Alun lifted the hatch at the rear of what he occasionally called the family car, or even our family car, though not in Rhiannon's hearing. The two were off to Birdarthur shortly. It had been agreed that Charlie and Sophie should follow them out the next day in time for lunch, with all four set to return late on the Friday. Alun's move to let the Cellan Davieses know of the impending trip had consisted in full of ringing their number once the previous noon, a foredoomed venture seeing that Gwen was expected at Sian Smith's for coffee, etc., and Malcolm strongly presumed to have left for the Bible, but it counted as not having been able to get hold of them. Peter had been told he really must come down, pick any time to suit himself, just turn up, and after a word or two about a bloody Welshman's invitation had conceded he might try. First categorically disowning any responsibility for anybody or anything, Tare Jones had consented to write down the number of the people called Gamer who lived two along from the telephone-free abode of Dai the Books.

Alun had not so much lifted the hatch of his car as flung it boyishly upwards, which was something he would have done with no more and no less vivacity if he had thought he was being observed, and in that event whether by jobless school-leaver or high-ranking TV executive. First into the cargo-space went, in quick time, a carton of drinkables; twelve-year-old Scotch, classy spring water to put in it, gin, tonics, a rare bottle of Linie-Aquavit from Oslo, a much commoner bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream, ostensibly for Rhiannon, in fact no more than chiefly for her, one each of Asti Spumante and Golden Sweet Malaga absolutely solely for her, four large cold Special Brews in wet newspaper for him, and a spot of coffee liqueur and other muck he could not quite face simply throwing out of the house. Next he stowed a box of hand-picked groceries, featuring soused herring fillets, allegedly smoked oysters, German lump fish roe and other dainties thought to be proper to accompany the aquavit. He laid on top of this a flat paper bag containing a new pullover in yellow cashmere and two sports shirts still in their packaging.