The Old Devils

Trips, up to and including ones directed at funerals, had always heartened Alun, livened him up in prospect, and not just because you never knew what you might run into even in Blaenau Ffestiniog. It was admittedly getting a touch late with him for breaking new ground, however cruelly he might ravage the old. In addition, this coming trip was not a fit occasion for any of that, and besides there was nothing under Birdarthur in the for-his-eyes-only address book. A big part of the thrill could probably be put down to nothing more than anticipating a journey by car, by no means an everyday experience in the South Wales of the I930s and later, as he had been known to remind his London friends. But with all that said he got through the first part of the loading in fine breezy style, as also the second and duller part involving actual luggage and bedclothes and pillows assembled by Rhiannon after managing to get hold of Dai at the shop. The third part slowed him down.

This part began with a typewriter, not the one from his study upstairs, the noble Japanese office-pattern needless-to-say electric job, but the lowly Italian portable, an acoustic model, as he would express it when he had the energy. Another carton followed it, not nearly such a nice one as the one full of drink, containing books and papers. The books included the _Concise Oxford__, a collapsing Roget's _Thesaurus, Y Geiriadur Mawr__ - The Big [Welsh – English / English-Welsh] Dictionary to him, a compilation notable for its _golygydd. ymgynghorol-__ the Rev Tydfil Meredith's _Courcey and Its Churches__, Sefton-Williams on Celtic mythology and the Brydan Complete Poems. Out of simulated personal need as well as feigned piety he took the lastmentioned volume with him everywhere he went within reason, pointless at best this trip perhaps with only Charlie and Sophie and possibly Peter to bowl over, but there it was. The papers in the carton consisted of typing paper and forty-six pages of a novel of whose existence only Rhiannon knew, together with a few notes.

Doing some more work on this novel was an unstated reason for going to Birdarthur, already present somewhere in his mind before he blurted out the suggestion a couple of weeks before. He had knocked off the dreaded forty-six in six days in the spring, when a little bastard in BBC radio had tardily cancelled the definitive talk on the Welsh nonconformist conscience he had engaged to prepare and record, and he had not looked at them since. Now, under the Self-imposed pressure of a measured length of time in semi-confinement with no excuse for shirking, he was to apply himself to the hideous task of adding to them. As they stood, or with some minor surgery, they were supposed to be, he had striven to make them, his devout hope was that they were, the opening section of the only really serious piece of prose he had written since his schooldays. In more sanguine moods he softened this to his most serious, etc. But anyway a great deal, including the prospects for the whole undertaking, hung on whatever he would make of those forty-six in two or three hours' time.

No wonder then that his demeanour was staid as he settled the creative container into place. And yet he felt an obscure excitement, nothing to do with any literary burgeoning except very remotely, just an internal squaring-up to a tiny bit of a leap in the dark. '1 was ever a fighter,' he muttered defiantly, continuing in a milder tone, 'or perhaps more accurately ever a medium-range light bomber designed for night operations and low-level reconnaissance. Thank you.' He reckoned he had it about as near right by now as he was ever going to get it.

After that it was a cakewalk to shuttle the bloody puppy round to the char's daughter's, cancel the papers and fetch the ordinary suitcases and the rest of the gear out to the car. Last to go in were the heavy waterproofs and gumboots indispensable to the visitor to rural Wales at any season. The weather for the moment in fact was clear without being bright, though scattered showers were unadventurously forecast. Rhiannon turned up for the off at blokes' time as usual, wearing a dress with some sort of pattern; also shoes, or so Alun assumed. Likewise as usual on any journey she reached over and squeezed his hand when the wheels started turning.

On Courcey the roads were practically empty, flushed of visitors by a lightning revolution in taste or nuclear accident. Even the streets of Birdarthur itself were unobstructed, with no obvious tourists to be seen. Brydan Books, dimly viewed by Dai as a pillar of greed and also as unethical competition, held no customers for the moment, nor was any Continental bus stuck on the acuteangled turn up to St Cattwg's church, in whose shadow the poet slept. There was some activity in the approaches to the Brydan Arms, though that had been just as true at mid morning when the place was still called the White Rose. With the end of its function as a port and the closure of the metal works and the silica quarry, Birdarthur had shown marks of unemployment, but none were visible now that the town had been designated or turned into an enterprise zone and the unemployment had gone away somewhere else.

Alun took them round the corner by the Brydan Burger Bar and into the road - unmade for centuries, metalled now to suit visiting traffic - that ran above the foreshore and the larger and deeper part of the bay. The tide was full, near the turn, the sea flat calm and ginger-beer grey touched with green and yellow. The sight of the sun going down here had been a special favourite of Brydan's, people were always saying, and indeed he had been well placed physically to witness it from his cottage near the start of the row facing the water, though how often he had been up to taking it in, even when technically conscious, was another question. After extensive refitment to mend the devastations of his tenure, the building had been converted into a museum and gift shop, especially gift shop, and the one next door a little later into a coffee shop and refreshment bar 'that, excusably in the circumstances, sold no strong drink. From the secured outer door of this a lone elderly female in a parachute jacket, of necessity an American, was turning away in bafflement just as the Weavers passed.

They passed along to the end of the line of cottages where there was a rough triangle of waste ground spread with refuse old and new. A cinder-path led on from here, signposted Brydan's Walk, though again local opinion doubted whether you would ever have got boyo to set foot on it, there being no pub or free-pound-note bloody counter at the other end. By prearrangement Alun sent Rhiannon on foot down the walk while he turned the car round and backed it after her for eighty yards or so, until the path was too narrow for him to go on. So he stopped there and more or less watched her unload all the stuff through the hatchway. Then he drove back to the triangle and parked arse-first up a muddy and precipitous lane and hurried to rejoin her.

'There must be an easier way of doing this,' he said, catching her up actively with the case of booze clasped in his arms, 'but I can't seem to think of one.'

'Oh, I can. You climbing over and out of the back and taking the whole lot out and carrying it to the cottage and putting it all away.'

'Strange the way 'things come back to one. Before we left I could hardly have told you which direction Dai's place was, and now we're here I haven't even had to hesitate.'

'Whereas I remembered this bit perfectly. Very strange.'

'Put those down and I'll come back for them, go on. Oh, all right, suffer then. What's for lunch?'

'Pork pie and baked beans.'

'Did you bring the mustard?'

'Yes, and Spanish onion and sweet pickle.'

'Little genius.'

They had reached Dai's place, not the prettiest or best-situated on this side of Birdarthur but by no means the dampest or the smelliest, a two-up-two-down affair with a sliver taken off one of the two up to form a narrow bathroom-lavatory, so narrow that only someone with thighs rather on the short side could have expected to use it in full comfort. Rhiannon went to and fro opening all the windows.

'No trouble round here guessing who was brought up in a bloody town,' said Alun. 'Say the word and I'll knock a hole in the kitchen wall for you.'

'You can take these out to the bin,' said Rhiannon, passing him a trayful of elderly foodstuffs. 'How long has anyone not been here?'

'Hey, some of these are all right, aren't they? What about this pot of - '

'You eat what you fancy.'

When he had checked in with the Gomers and established that no dollar-laden commissions had materialized in the last couple of hours, Alun cleared a space for his typewriter at one end of a smallish table by the front-room window. Doing this entailed shifting a number of uncommonly horrible china dogs and other creatures. Their surfaces were· blurred, with a buggered-about look as though someone, perhaps under Muriel Thomas's influence, had caused a flame-thrower to play upon them at some stage of manufacture. Their colours were off too. He bundled them away in a cupboard, thinking it was a bit hard to have come all the way out to south-west Courcey and walk into a bunch of boldly innovative china dogs at the end of it.

To put off the evil hour he ran his eye over Dai the Books's books and soon saw there would be nothing worth even short-listing for removal. The works of Brydan, on the other hand, were present in all sorts of editions, rendering his own copy of the poems an even more superfluous piece of luggage than before. Like everybody else in middle South Wales over the age of thirty, not to speak of many further off, Dai had his Brydan connections. On the wall there was a framed blow-up of the famous almost pitch-dark photograph of the two of them he kept in his shop. He used to say he had had Brydan in there to lend him a hand once or twice in the school holidays - liked to think he had done a bit to help the lad out. In fact Brydan's main association had come rather later, when he used to drop in on his way to the station to steal a few pieces of new stock for subsequent resale, or rather sale, in that second-hand joint off Fleet Street. Alun shook his head at the memory. A great writer, he sometimes thought to himself and had often said in non-Welsh company, but in too many ways a sadly shabby human being.

Almost in the act of turning away from the shelves he caught sight of a strip of jacket he recognized, that enwrapping _The Blooms of Brydan__, a selection by Alun Weaver. Some alchemy, compounded of a nervy literary agent, a gullible publisher, a matter of coincidence with the date of Brydan's death and a historic review in _Time__ magazine, had turned the produce of three weeks' work into a quite decent and lasting annuity: 5,000 last year in hardback in the USA alone and _Brydan's Wales__ still very much alive. Whenever reminded of this Alun was tempted to think of himself as quite good at making money in his line, better than at pushing himself forward, not enough of a power man for that, too much of a sensual Celt. And in recent weeks he had been wondering rather about how he was doing, how he was making out as the organ-voice of Wales in Wales. Perhaps after all he had been more audible in England, where competing strains were fewer and less clamorous. He had never quite got over the paucity of his welcome home at Cambridge Street station. So be it: here squarely in front of him was a chance to do something about that all round.

He was sitting at the table looking out of the window at the seashore when Rhiannon came in wearing - well, he was nearly sure she had changed her clothes.

'Sorry, are you - '

'No, just wool-gathering. Can't think how that's got itself a bad name, can you? Pricey stuff, wool. Getting it for free, too.'

'I thought I'd just take a look round the town. I haven't set eyes on it for donkey's years.'

'Fine, see you later, love.'

'What did you make of Ingrid?'

'Ingrid?'

'Ingrid Jenkins or whatever she's called. You know, Norma's daughter.'

'Who's - of course, the char, the char's daughter. To be sure. Well.'

'M'm, what did you make of her?'

'I don't know, I don't know that I made anything of her.

Seemed perfectly pleasant, I only saw her for a moment. Why, what should I have made of her?'

'Oh, nothing. Did she seem the sort to look after Nelly properly, did you think?'

'Christ, Nelly's the puppy, right? Yes, fine. Well, I mean the whole place looked respectable enough. Clean. Things like that I mean... '

'Oh, good.' Rhiannon's manner changed. 'I couldn't have brought her here, could I?'

Alun thought he saw now where this conversation was designed to lead. 'No, no,' he said, frowning at the idea. 'No, out of the question.'

'You can't leave them on their own for a minute when they're that age. I'd have had to be taking her out the whole time or else stay indoors with her here. Or make you.'

'Cheers. No, of course. You couldn't have brought her along and have any kind of proper break yourself. Out of the question.'

'M'm. Are you going to look at that stuff of-yours?'

'Just glance at it, you know.' He always kept her roughly abreast of what he was up to in the writing part of his life. About broadcasting, with the sudden excursions here and there it might require, he was sometimes less informative.

'Good luck, dear. Be about an hour.'

She was gone. Yes, what she had wanted was moral support for farming out the pooch. Normal and understandable. He made to pick up the horrendous buff envelope in front of him, then paused with a groan. There had been something crappy about what had gone before that. What the bugger had it been? Something to do with Ingrid. He had barely glanced at the girl - well, female, pushing forty he had supposed,. smallish, pale; nothing else. So obviously there could be no question of...

He gave a muffled cry, then, remembering he was alone in the house, unmuffled it. His glance dropped to the floor at his side, to the carton of books there, to the scuffed green cover of the paperback _Thesaurus__. Absurdity, he subvoca1ized: stuff and nonsense, fiddle-de-dee, bosh, bunk, rats. _Fjwlbri__. Tell it to the Marines. _Credat Judaeus Apella__. If Rhiannon had been stirring the pond to catch him betraying an interest in this Ingrid, if she really thought 'he might have in mind getting off with the charwoman's daughter, then she was barmy. Unless that kind of suspicion, suspicion of stuff at that level, though unfounded in this case, was not unreasonable in general, was no longer unreasonable, in· which case he was the barmy one. Was that the way it was going to take him - not willingness or ability but judgement, nous?

Several unalluring trains of thought presented themselves at this juncture. He found himself in pursuit of the one about anybody of any sense knowing when he was well off with Rhiannon. But he had not got any sense, or enough sense, or... But he had got this far a thousand times without ever having got any further. He hoped his unpreparedness for the Ingrid question had let his innocence show through, because if not there was nothing he could say about it; it was much too late for any of that, ever. Almost eagerly he picked up the envelope.

Before he had got as far as pulling the contents out his demeanour changed to a frenzied casualness. Head on one. side, eyebrows raised and eyes almost shut, mouth turned down at the corners, he condescendingly turned back the flap, exposed the top half of the first sheet and allowed himself to let his glance wander over the typewritten lines there before he actually fell asleep as he sat. What he read woke him up with a start and set him doing what he had very, very nearly done a minute before: leap out of his chair and go glug-bloody-glug with the Scotch, not forgetting to top up his glass before returning whence he had come. There he slumped and stared out at the bay and tried to reason with himself.

_Of course__ the first couple of sentences had reminded him of the opening passages of dozens of stories and novels by Welshmen, especially those written in the first half of the century. That was the whole point, to stress continuity, to set one's face against anything that could be called modernism and to show that the old subject, life in the local villages, in the peculiar South-Wales amalgam of town and country, had never gone away, in fact had a new ironical significance in these days of decline. Worth doing, agreed, but had he done it, any of it? Well, he might have. Like Socrates now, who when his time came (he remembered reading) had quite willingly and cheerfully drunk off the hemlock, he laid the typescript down on the table just like that and began at the beginning.

After five minutes or so he began to relax his rigid bomb-disposal posture. From time to time as he went on he winced sharply and made a correction, screwed up his face in pain or goggled in disbelief, but several times gave a provisional nod and even laughed once or twice without mirth. At the end of an hour Rhiannon came back and found him at the typewriter with four lines and a bit along the top of the paper. When he looked up she spoke.

'How did it go?'

He scowled ferociously at her and held his hands in the air with the fingers crossed. 'It may be remotely conceivable,' he stage-whispered with precise delivery, 'that not every single syllable is absolutely beyond all hope of redemption. '

'Oh, good.'

'No no no, not good, nothing more than a bare possibility. It needs a lot doing to it. But I thought I'd better press on while I felt like it, rather than go back and start tinkering. No, keep your distance, girl,' he said as she seemed about to close in and deal him a congratulatory hug. 'Later, if ever.'

'All right, though, isn't it?' She went on standing near the foot of the stairs. 'There's just... '

'What?' he asked ill naturedly.

She made a crying face. 'Dorothy rang while you were taking Nelly to Ingrid's... and she asked us over for tonight... and I couldn't not tell her why we couldn't go... and then she asked if she and Percy could drive down tomorrow evening... and I couldn't tell her they mustn't... sorry... '

Having filled all the gaps in Rhiannon's speech with strong language or wordless howls, Alun waited till it was a theatrical certainty that there was no more to come and said, 'Is there more to come? Sian or Garth or old Owen Thomas or bloody fishface Eirwen Spurling or... Because if there is... '

'I couldn't help it, honest.'

'No, of course you couldn't, dull,' he said, embracing her. 'You'd need a tank division with close air support to fend off the bag in question. No, we'll manage. Think yourself lucky the work of words went all right this morning, mind. Now drink - gin and tonic coming up. Go on, _myn__, you're on holiday.'

He finished his paragraph in the few minutes it took her to put the lunch out in the kitchen. When they had eaten and, quite freely in his case, drunk, Rhiannon declared she would never have thought getting shut of the puppy would be so much like getting shut of the girls years ago and disappeared for a rest. Alun found on Dai's shelves a book of short stories about Cardiganshire life in the 1930s by a Welshman whose name he barely recognized - right up his street, especially at this stage- and an old Alistair McAlpine paperback about a raid on a Gestapo HQ in Holland, now a feature film, it said, and by the time he fell asleep in Dai's beaten-up armchair by the midget fireplace the colonel (Richard Burton) and the wing-commander (Trevor Howard) were already synchronizing their watches for the drop. On awakening he fell asleep again with no trouble at all, but on reawakening took Rhiannon a cup of tea. Then he wrote a dozen lines of dialogue while she Pottered about overhead, and then they went out for a stroll.

The land and sea were quite boringly normal to look at, mousey grey at any sort of distance, but there were some yellow and slate-blue patches of sky that might once have meant something to the locals. They went along Brydan's Walk to the far end where it petered out among scruffy bushes and long pale grass, down a cliff path to the beach and back along the foreshore. A part of this was in the process of being flattened for something to be built on it. Half a dozen birds were wandering about near the water's edge, herons or oystercatchers; Brydan would have known which, or would have said. A few sailing dinghies heaved sluggishly in the harbour. At its corner they took a shallow flight of steps up to the main level and walked up the High Street with the· name Birdarthur to be seen on shops, offices, posters, postcards wherever they looked. At the beginning of the narrow part, opposite what had been a bakery on their last visit, stood the pub, almost unchanged since longer than that except that it looked somehow newer. The sign, White's Hotel, was brilliant gold on navy-blue.

The inside looked much newer still and was not at all unchanged, so little so that Alun could have sworn he had never been in there in his life, but he was used to that by now and took comfort from the forbearance of the music, generic sleepy-lagoon muck full of swirls and tinkles. On a window-sill next to a fat potted plant there rested an object. without a name in his vocabulary, a kind of video-screen on which streams of sparkling coloured light flowed through clouds and bands of steadier illumination. In some equally undefined but still horrible way a connection with the music seemed to be suggested. He would make a note of the phenomenon for putting into the _In Search of Wales__ file, but first he sat Rhiannon down in a kind of medieval pew against the opposite wall and went to the bar. Here the order of white wine produced a glass of white wine instead of the stare of gloomy triumph that could once have been counted on in these parts, and he was asked which whisky he preferred instead of settling for what was planked in front of him, as fond memory would have it.

Rejoining Rhiannon he found an old man had settled himself on a padded stool facing her and was going on as if he was a great friend of them both by all means short of speech. Seen from in front he looked a really very old man, fit to give Alun himself a good four to five years, the precise model of the kind of sturdy, self-reliant Welshman who bad tilled the neighbouring acres and fished the waters since time immemorial, and also one of the kinds of bloody _lossin__ and berk he would dearly have liked to hit in the eye straight off with a jet of soda-water in the days before syphons went out. On his white head the fellow wore a white bat, though it was not obvious what this signified or how it had arisen.

Seating himself next to Rhiannon in the pew, Alun conversed with her for a few moments about the place and the people until he was sure that this was no previously undeclared uncle of hers. Then, telling himself he was buggered if he was going to be diverted, he brought out his ring-spine notebook and started on a pen-picture of the sparkling-light facility as intended.

If the white-hatted sod had missed anything that had taken place in front of him in the last couple of minutes it could not have been by much. He said now, in a bass voice that sounded to Alun like a close imitation of a dance-hall proprietor he used to know, 'Yes, well, you're a writer, aren't you?'

'Yes,' said Alun when Rhiannon had banged him in the ribs..

'Yes. Here after Brydan, are you?'

'What? Well no, not exactly!

'A lot of them comes after Brydan. Brydan was a famous poet used to live here in Birdarthur. He used to come into this pub quite frequent, with Americans. He used to call.. it White's Club. Because it was like a club, he said. He was a Welshman, Brydan, but he wrote in English, see.'

'Yes, I know! Alun's life was coming to consist more and more exclusively of being told at dictation speed what he knew.

'Brydan was a Welshman himself, but he wrote... his poetry... in the English language.'

'Indeed he did, in fact - '

'But he was a Welshman through and through. Don't you go thinking you can understand Brydan,' boomed the old sod, rocking back and forth slightly on his stool and smiling, but making it three parts plain he meant Alun rather than the world in general, 'that's _understand__ Brydan, eh? - not being Welsh yourself.'

'For your information I am Welsh myself. I was born and brought up not twenty miles from here.'

'No, no, I say _not__ being Welsh yourself you can't understand Brydan. It's Welsh people can, right? Appreciate. Appreciate is better. Yes, appreciate. Fully appreciate.'

'But... ' Alun could think of nothing to say. His awareness that Rhiannon was sending him furtive hushing looks did nothing to loosen his tongue. Actually of course he could think of an enormous number of things to say, though none at all that would not make him seem to have lost some argument or other. 'But... '

'A writer, you say. For a paper, is it?'

'No. Yes. Sometimes.'

The sod seemed to think this a full and satisfactory answer, or at least one worth thinking over before moving on. He had got as far as stretching out a finger in Alun's direction when a young man with very short, almost colourless hair hurried in from the street and came over. As well as having pale hair he had a large face and was slightly moist about the nose and eyes. Looking at Alun and Rhiannon he lifted his head sidelong in consternation or apology.

'You're late, Grandad,' he said loudly. 'Tea'll be on the table now. On your way, Winston Churchill.' Without lowering his voice much he added, 'I hope he hasn't been too much of a pest.'

Alun could only think of saying, at the cost of some damage to his sense of justice, that he had had a most pleasant chat.

'No kidding?' The youngster looked more closely at him and his large face broke into a smile. 'Hey, I know you. Seen you on television, haven't I? What IS it, the Welsh something, the Welsh side of things? Tell me now, that, what's he called, Bleddyn Edwards, is he a great mate of yours?'

'No, I don't think I've even - '

'Well, I'm no expert but it's perfectly obvious to me he's not up to the job - you are. All the difference in the world,' said the young sod with an authority his alleged ancestor would have had to acknowledge. 'No comparison.'

'That's very nice of you.'

'Get away, marvellous to have met you. Good luck, and thanks for putting up with old buggerlugs here.'

'Well, that was all right,' said Alun as he and Rhiannon came out of the pub a little while later. 'Not like life at all.'

She squeezed his arm against her. 'Good boy for not going for that old fart.'

Whit with one thing and another he felt quite pleased with life for the rest of the evening. Pre-eminent among the things there featured prominently and foreseeably the provisional clearance, or seven out of ten, he had awarded the existing portion of _Coming Home__ - the sterling anti-trendy title for the complete work he had somehow captured over the last hours. The elevated mood lasted long enough to prompt him to make love to Rhiannon when in due course they got into the surprisingly cosy little bed.

They stayed lying there for a few minutes with the light on uttering contented mild animal sounds as they had done at such times for thirty-four years. Something about the bedside lamp was setting up a bit of a hoarse sort of screaming noise, but it was quiet enough in general to hear the waves breaking on the beach, not all that far away because by now the tide had come in again nearly to the full.

'Lovely day it's been,' said Alun. 'I'd forgotten how nice it was here. '

'Jolly good about your work.'

He shushed her and made disclaiming faces but with less conviction than earlier. 'They haven't managed to bugger the place up totally yet.'

'You must be tremendously relieved, or a bit relieved rather. It must be all right to say that.'

'What? Oh yes, I'll have another look at it in the morning.'

'Do you good to stay in one place and put your feet up for a couple of days. '

'Yeah, well... '

'I thought you were looking a tiny bit peaky, you know, just one per cent. There's nothing worrying you, is there?'

'No.' He was not going to let on about bloody Gwen, not now, not with no exterior limit on the discussion. He would have to see if he could pick a spot like three minutes before the arrival of a television team. 'No, not a thing. Bar wondering how long they'll go on making Scotch the way that suits me.'

'... Good,' she said without much sense of relaxation. After more silence, he said, 'What time are they due tomorrow?'

'Twelvish. Evidently Charlie doesn't want to start drinking too early. '

'Oh I see. Well I'd better get some shut-eye if I'm to do any good before they turn up.'

The thought of television had set going something he had left unexamined in the meantime: the identity of Bleddyn Edwards, said by the young sod in the pub to be inferior to him, Alun, but still mentionable in the same breath. The name was not unfamiliar, the face and everything else stayed out of view. What a pissy poser to be stuck with at this time of night. He fell asleep before he had got anywhere with it.

2

Alun went out early the next morning and got newspapers. On his return he stood facing the bay in pale sunlight, took some deep breaths and thought to himself, if a waft of industrial pollution had ever been perceptible here there was no question of any now. When other thoughts, to do with time and age and all that, started to occur to him he rather consciously went indoors to breakfast, a scheduled fatty's flare-up presenting two boiled eggs turned out on to fried bread and fried potatoes as well as bacon and tomatoes. While he ate it he worked animatedly at the _Times__ crossword. 'You _fiend__,' he said, writing in a solution. 'Oh, you... you _swine__.'

At the typewriter afterwards he got through another half-page of dialogue, very rough, almost token. It had turned out hard for him to concentrate: he felt fit, the sun was shining on the water and Sophie and Charlie were on their way. Several times he glanced up from his table, fancying lie heard or saw them. When they finally appeared he ran out on to the path with whoops of welcome, snatched their suitcases from them, chivvied them indoors. Some who knew him used to say that Alun never came nearer convincing you he meant it than when he was being glad to see you.

Like other enthusiastic hosts he had definite ideas about how the party was to be organized. Coffee and drinks went round in the front room while the Norrises' offerings - a fresh sewin picked up in Hatchery Road that morning, a 57% Islay malt whisky - were brought out and admired. The women were not hindered from going off on their own, for - the moment only as far as the kitchen. Alun refilled Charlie's glass and said, 'I want you to do something special for me if you would.' 'I'll have you know I'm a respectable girl and never touch kinky stuff.'

'No, it's... ' Alun had rehearsed this part but he still had to squeeze it out. 'The thing is, I've started a sort of novel, it's supposed to be a serious novel, a proper one, you know, with no ham or balls or flannel about it, look you to goodness boy _bach__, but it's hard for me to tell. So if you could just sort of glance through the first pages of the thing, not bothering about merit or the plenteous lack of it, but just seeing if... '

'If I can give it a free-from-bullshit certificate.'

'Exactly.'

'Well... ' Charlie's glance was uneasy. His familiar battered look seemed intensified without actual bruising or laceration, as though he had been perseveringly beaten with padded cudgels. 'Unless I give you my honest - '

'I'm not asking for a bloody bunch of roses - of course you must speak as you find. Please, Charlie. Go on, you old bugger, you're the only one.'

'As long as you... All right. Where is it?'

'Here, but don't look at it now. In a few minutes I'll herd the females into the village, where booths and bazaars of hideous aspect and degraded purpose display wares of varied and arresting squalor. But - they are useless, and they are for sale. What merit more demands the female heart? I'll go up to White's and see you in about half an hour or three-quarters. If you run out of water there's plenty in the tap.'

Wearing among other things the new cashmere pullover Alun did much of what he had promised, but before making for White's he looked in at Brydan Books. He told himself that it could do no harm and that he had never much cared for sitting about in pubs on his tod. But as soon as he was fairly inside the shop he was recognized and plurally shaken hands with. Customers were introduced and all asked for his autograph, a copy of his old _Celtic Attitudes__ miraculously appeared and received his uninhibited inscription, and an elderly lady in a Brydan Books, Birdarthur, Wales apron who had no other obvious connection with the trade was brought from the back of the premises simply in order to have sight of him. He left bearing a newish book on the Rebecca riots that nobody would take his money for and telling himself now that the whole concern was a lot of bloody nonsense.

The bar at White's Hotel was filling up, but he achieved the same seat as the previous evening. He looked round quite eagerly but in vain for the white-hatted sod, whom in his· present mood he would have thoroughly enjoyed seeing off, doing so with a minimum of exertion, furthermore, like a whatever-it-was Black Belt. Just as he was starting to wonder whether it had been such a good idea to shut Charlie away like that with a bottle of whisky, in he came. His face seemed to have smoothed out slightly in the past hour or less, no doubt through assisted abatement of hangover. Nothing was to be read from his expression.

'Well, fire away,' said Alun briskly when, they were settled with their drinks. 'Let's have it.'

'You did ask for my honest opinion... '

Alun's glance fell. 'Which you have now made clear enough. How much did you manage to struggle through?'

'I read twenty pages carefully, then skipped to the end.' Charlie spoke with a hesitancy unusual in him. 'I must emphasize that this is just my personal - '

'Spare me that if you will.'

'Sorry. Well now. I can see here and there what you're trying to do, and I think it's worth doing, and you've probably made the best attempt at it you can, but I'm not sure if it can be done at all, very likely it can't in the 1980s I don't know. But you haven't done it, that's to say you weren't doing it in what I read.'

'What about the bullshit?'

'The whole tone of voice, the whole attitude is one that compels bullshit. If I say it's too much like Brydan I mean not just Brydan himself but a whole way of writing, and I suppose thinking, that concentrates on the writer and draws attention to the chap, towards him and away from the subject. Which I suppose needn't be Wales in a way except that it always _is__, and somehow or other it's impossible to be honest in it. Now I'm sure you've tried your hardest not to put in anything you didn't mean or you thought was playing to the gallery, but it all gets swallowed up and turns into the same thing.'

Alun was still looking down. 'Nothing to be salvaged?'

'Nothing I saw. I'm sorry.'

'You're saying I've got to the stage where I can't tell what's bullshit from what isn't bullshit any longer.'

'No. I don't think I am. I'm saying if you want to talk seriously about that place of yours and the people in it you'll have to approach the thing in a completely different way, as if you've never read a book in your life - well no, not that exactly, but... '

Before Charlie had spoken a word Alun felt as if he might have been going to faint, only never having fainted before he found it hard to tell. The feeling had passed after a few seconds, since when he had had a good half of his attention on keeping his head from wobbling about, another sensation new to him. He had also been distracted by suddenly remembering who Bleddyn Edwards was, namely a man who came on at the end of the six o'clock news on Taff TV and spent a couple of minutes trying to be comical about piquant Welsh happenings of the preceding twenty-four hours. Another man did this turn-and-turnabout with him at a slightly lower level of wit and sensitivity, a man called something like Howard Hawell about thirty years younger than Alun Weaver and of less refined appearance but, all too plainly, confusible with him just the same. Cheers _yn fawr__. With quite enough competing for his notice he saw with brief amazement that Charlie had not yet touched his drink. Quietly, trying as hard as he could to make it sound right, Alun said, 'Well, it looks as though I'll have to junk what I've done and have a totally fresh stab at the whole affair. Simple as that. I do agree, one can get horribly inbred in Wales without realizing it.'

Now Charlie did drink. 'Sorry, Alun,' he said again.

'Oh, come on, what are you talking about, you've just saved me several months at least of wasted work. Do you think I'd rather have been given the green light for a load of crap? In case you're wondering, the answer's no. Well, now we've got that out of the way we can get down to the serious business of the occasion. Knock that back and have another.'

'I'll make room for it first if you don't mind.'

Left alone in the pew, Alun relaxed and prepared to let his head do its worst, but it had cleared up now. Other things had not, though, not quite, and he sat there telling himself to stop swallowing like a fool and to breathe normally and to come out and admit he had had a sneaking suspicion all along that the stuff was bloody useless, so it ought to be a relief in a way to be told so in no uncertain terms.

Soon Charlie came back carrying two large whiskies. 'Well, the bog hasn't changed,' he said. 'Even to your pee hanging about instead of running away properly. Did I hear something about Percy and Dorothy coming down?'

Alun knew just what to say to that, but when he came to say it he found he could not get the words out, nor any others that he tried. He opened and shut his lips and blinked at Charlie.

'Are you feeling all right?'

Laying his hand flat across his upper chest Alun nodded vigorously and did some more swallowing. He kept trying to push words out with his breath. His head was perfectly stable as an object and clear inside, but he was beginning to feel a little frightened. Then, with an effort no different from the previous ones, he found himself saying, 'Yes, Charlie, to answer your question, Percy and Dorothy are indeed coming down, some time in the late afternoon or early evening if my information is to be relied upon. Hey. Bloody hell. What was that? Phew. Quite enough and to spare, thank you.'

'Can I get you anything?'

'It's here,' said Alun, grabbing his drink and taking a swift pull. The sights and sounds of the pub, really full now and noisy with pitched-up talk and laughter, rose about him as if for the first time. 'Well, whatever it was we don't want any more of it, right? - however popular a Weaver-suppressor might prove in certain quarters of Lower Glamorgan and beyond.'

'You've gone a bit pale. Or you had.'

'No wonder, with the rare and deadly _dorothea omni1oquens ferox__ poised to descend on our peaceful and happy community. Now there's one who could do with a few fits of silence visited upon them if you like. Can you remember, who was it who said about Macaulay's conversation... '

Charlie still had a look of concern and compunction and Alun worked on driving it away. By the time he had done so he had restored his own spirits too to the extent that, provided he kept the thought at arm's length, he could believe he was going to have a whole proper new crack at _Coming Home__ after the holiday - keep the tide and also the typescript, which was bound to have some material in it that could be rescued with a bit of imagination, or nerve. He continued satisfactory through the pub session, another couple back at the cottage, and lunch off the pickled fish with plenty of gherkin and chopped onion, the whole firmly washed down with aquavit and Special Brew and tamped in place with Irish Cream. By a step of doubtful legitimacy the men thinned their glasses of the heavy liqueur with Scotch.

After that there was a natural break. The women went off for a walk, Rhiannon grumbling that she ought to have brought the puppy after all. Charlie threw himself by instalments up the stairs and was heard all over the building, and perhaps further, dropping on to the bed in the back room. Alun took to the armchair as on the previous afternoon and dreamt Mrs Thatcher had told him that without him her life would be a mere shell, an empty husk, before jerking awake to find the image of a bearded man mouthing at him (the sound having been turned down) and frenziedly drawing cartoons on the postcard-sized screen of the little Sony they had brought down with them.

Hardly a minute later the women were back from their walk, pink-cheeked, brisk of step, determined at any price to get the tea. He sat on and listened to them shouting and laughing to each other in the kitchen and the minor thumps and crashes they made as they shut cupboard doors or set up crockery. At one point Sophie burst out of the kitchen and ran up the noisy wooden stairs, calling over her shoulder to Rhiannon as she went. Her glance passed over Alun as if they were unacquainted guests at a hotel. The same happened in reverse when she charged down again with a packet of biscuits in her hand. He knew it was not done to annoy, to set up an offensive contrast with male lethargy: it was just an illustration, more vivid than some, of the old truth that women were drunk half the time without benefit of alcohol. (Children over the age of about two were of course drunk all the time when not asleep.) Queers aside, men above twenty-five or so were never drunk however pissed they might be. Rather the contrary, he said to himself, hearing now some widely separated footfalls above his head.

When Charlie appeared he stared mutely at Alun in mingled appeal and reproach, as if covered with blood after a plucky lone fight against oppressors. So far from being in any such state he looked rather well, whatever that might mean applied to him. Comparatively, again, he had so far been restrained in his intake, not urging the rounds along in the pub, sitting behind an empty glass for long periods like ten minutes on end. If he went on like this he could just find himself still on his feet quite far into the night. Alun felt it might be done for his benefit and was touched.

Tea was brought in, with anchovy toast and Welsh cakes featured but not Sophie's biscuits, which she and Rhiannon had presumably wolfed in the kitchen. The meal was eaten, finished, cleared away and then nightmarishly reanimated when Dorothy arrived with Percy and brought out scones from a paper bag, strawberry jam, Devonshire cream and chocolate éclairs. After greeting all four in POW - reunion style she could likewise be seen to be well in arrears of her usual state at five on a weekday afternoon. This meant that she would also likewise stay around longer than usual, but on the other band she would presumably take longer to become unbearable, and might always fall down dead before that stage was reached.

Not many people unacquainted with Wales or the Welsh would have found it the easiest thing in the world to reconcile Dorothy as she would be later with Dorothy as she behaved now, when the tea-things were removed for the second time and a bottle of white Rioja was brought from the kitchen. Far from clear at first, it seemed, about what was in the wind, she watched with a slight frown while Rhiannon took out the cork and poured three glasses.

After some thought she picked up the bottle in a gingerly, furtive way and, head craned forward, read the label from beginning to end through her black-bounded spectacles. Then, carefully following the movements of the other two women, she· lifted her glass, drank, and looked interested and rather tickled: so this was wine.

Alun watched all this in some professional distaste. He knew he overdid that side of life a bit himself, but in his case it was just high spirits, buggering about, derived from an only child's self-entertainment, whereas old Dot was seriously trying to create an effect. Well, hardly that, perhaps, at her time of life, in front of this mob; though the present carry-on would have had to be descended from the beginning of her career of piss-artistry, when she could still pretend she got sloshed out of not knowing about alcohol. Sort of a ritualized version.

'Let's go and pay our respects at Brydan's tomb,' said Sophie.

'It was more of a grave when I last saw it,' said Charlie. 'Of course they may have shifted him to a mausoleum since then. Or a cromlech, on account of him being Celtic and all.'

'Grave is fine with me,' said Alun.

Percy turned to Dorothy. 'Would you like to go, darling?'

'Lovly idea. It must be twenty years since I was last there. When I've finished this.'

'I think they shut the churchyard at six,' said Rhiannon. The way she said it dispelled any lingering doubts about the unspontaneity of Sophie's suggestion. Alun would have loved to know whether the idea had come from her or Rhiannon in the first place- quite liked to, anyway. Whichever it was, Dorothy was hooked, about to be irresistibly sundered from the wine-bottle not only for the period of the respect-paying but later too. There were the shops that would be staying open late or late enough, shops no doubt marked down earlier as ones she could not in conscience pass by. (The chaps would be safely in the pub for that part.) With luck and further good generalship she might not be recoupled with the bottle for getting on for two hours. But after that...

As the company rose to leave there was talk of how they might as well be getting along if they were going, only a few minutes' walk and such while a couple of sets of facial signals were exchanged. Charlie wanted to know if Alun had anything to do with this obnoxious plan and Alun tried to indicate not. At his side, Percy watched Dorothy stoutly knocking back her drink in one so as not to keep the, stage waiting. Sophie and Rhiannon left theirs. Rhiannon's glance at Alun admitted complicity and also managed to plead that it would have been no good trying to keep the wine away from Dorothy in the first place. Granted, and indeed he could just imagine her wonderment at happening upon the bottle in the refrigerator or, if things had gone that far, the gauche impetuosity with which she would have pressed upon her hostess the funny wine-bottle-shaped gift parcel she had nearly forgotten having shoved into her luggage at the last minute.

Defying local odds, the summer sun shone brightly up the gentle slope of the churchyard, which at this time of the year proved to stay open till seven, a pleasant spot with carefully tended brilliant green turf between the graves. That of Brydan lay towards the end of a row of newish ones in the south-east corner. It was no different in arrangement from any of its neighbours: a stone, a grassy mound enclosed in a stone border, some fresh flowers in glass vases. The inscription was severely factual except for a single appropriate line from the writings. The nearby ground had been only a little marked by intruding feet, as if word had gone about that there was not much to be seen up in the churchyard.

The party stood apart from one another in silence, almost as if trying to show respect. Only Dorothy looked recognizably like someone standing by a grave in a film. At least Alun hoped so, feeling Charlie's eyes on him as he bowed his head and tried dutifully to think of Brydan, whom he had run into on several occasions and once spent most of an evening with. He had several times compared the poet's character to an onion: you successively peeled away layers of it, with frightful shit and quite decent old bloke alternating, until you got to the heart. The trouble was he could not at this stage remember, and certainly not decide off the cuff, which of the two you ended up with. There was something of the same difficulty with the works: talented charlatanry, or deeply flawed works of genius? Or perhaps they were just beside the point.

Imperiously giving a lead, Dorothy swung away and led off down towards the gate with Rhiannon and Sophie in attendance. To one side stood the low mound called Brydan's Knoll, formerly and less tastefully called Brydan's _twmp__ or tump, though never much called any such thing outside print. The poet was half-heartedly feigned to have spent untold hours squatting on it and gazing over the town and the bay, well worth while perhaps if there had been nowhere else to see them from. Some support for the feigning was given by a passage in one of the late poems, and now the erstwhile _twmp__ was sure of its place in the indexes of learned works as well as in guide-books.

Percy gave the spot a friendly wag of the hand. 'Rather agreeable up here, isn't it?'

'Somebody's fought the good fight,' said Alun, and went on quickly, 'not letting them turn the whole thing into a tourist attraction. Full marks to that man.'

'Oh yes of course, I remember now, you were at school with Brydan, weren't you?'

'Well, there must be a thousand people who could-'

'Ah, but the personal link is there. It must give you a feeling of special intimacy when you read the poems. Adding, I mean, to your sense of kinship, being a poet yourself. Something to be profoundly grateful for. Aren't you aware, perhaps keenly aware, of a peculiar insight into the man's mind? Into his soul?'

'I don't know, I suppose so,' said Alun, resolutely not looking at Charlie on Percy's other side and far from being inclined to look at Percy.

'Oh, for God's sake, Alun, don't speak self-deprecatingly about a thing like that.' Percy intensified the mournful solemnity of his tone and expression, which managed to save him from being picked up and thrown over the lofty privet hedge they were passing just then. 'It's a miraculous privilege. Not your own doing.'

'No, I do see.'

'Because let's face it, you are Brydan's artistic heir. Not in any obvious, reminiscent way, but... Surely at least you're conscious of being part of the same stock, sprung from the same root?'

'Well, there's obviously something inescapable in the blood of every Welshman that unites him... ' Alun tried not to panic as he heard his voice relentlessly modu1ating into the old practised tones. He let it die away.

Percy did not press him. 'Well, these things will be as they will be,' he said, steadfastly accepting the duty to move on now with the round of mundane affairs. 'See you in the pub later, then? Right.'

'Dry-ballocked bugger, that,' said Alun as he and Charlie watched Percy's tall white-haired figure hurrying down the hill to catch up with the women. 'I mean I assume he was taking the piss?'

'No idea.'

'For Christ's sake, Charlie, he must have been. Miraculous bloody privilege. He did it well, I grant you.'

'What about it? I've never seen enough of him to say, but there are plenty of people about who talk like that for real, or semi-real, as you may have observed. And not only in Wales, either.'

'What? It's probably something to do with being married to Dorothy. That must bring out any dormant piss-taking proclivity, don't you think?'

'I don't know.'

'And why's he so brown? I know he's a builder, but surely that doesn't have to mean he's on the site all the hours God sends. And it can't be Morocco because he'd have had to take Dorothy with him, and if she'd been there we'd have heard by now. Sun-lamp. But why?' Alun finished in chapel style, 'In God's name, my friends, why?'

Charlie shook his head with9ut replying. The group of four ahead of them had reached a shopping street, with Percy walking on the inside. That was so he could block Dorothy off if she tried to go into an off-licence. It was to forestall that that he had joined the group a minute earlier. If she made a dash across the road his superior physique and condition would, from so near, enable him to overhaul her. Something deterred Alun from putting this rationale to Charlie, who presently spoke up.

'Mind you, the last bit of what he said was a bit too close for comfort, intentionally or not.'

'Oh, but-'

'I don't know what you think of Brydan's stuff these days, and I dare say you don't yourself, and I'm sure you'd deny indignantly or even sadly that you were his successor, but it's his influence that makes that stuff of yours you showed me so awful. Well, I don't say you're not capable of making it awful without assistance from anyone, but you see what I mean.'

Now Alun said nothing.

'I didn't put it strongly enough in the pub, but if you want _Closing Time__ or _Coming Home__ or whatever it's called to be any good at all, you must scour Brydan right out of it, so that not a single word reminds me of him even vaguely. Whatever you think of him, you must write as if you hated and despised him without reserve. You said you wanted my honest opinion, well, now you've got all of it.'

Alun said nothing to that either, but by then he and Charlie had come up with the others, who had halted on the pavement, to gaze, none more intently than Percy, at a stationer's window. Actually it was that of a stationer in the extended sense, with not only writing materials and accessories visible there and in the shop behind but also framed photographs of local sights (including guess-who's cottage), mantelpiece ornaments including manufactured _objets trouvés__, mugs, ashtrays, scarves and tea-cloths with generally Welsh or specifically Birdarthur matter printed on them.

'Well, what of it?' asked Alun when everyone else seemed speechless at the sight. 'Somebody want to buy something?'

'We thought perhaps you might,' said Dorothy, smiling artlessly at him.'

'Me? What, what the hell would I be buying at a little shithouse of a place like this?'

'Oh, all sorts of things.' She switched slightly to a humouring tone. 'What about a nice tea-towel to help you with all that washing-up you do?'

At a better time Alun would probably have recognized these remarks as attempts, tiresome no doubt but far from malicious, to egg him on, to bowl the local funny man an easy one, and he would probably have responded. But now he was silenced yet again, seeing Percy with an expectant look, Rhiannon's mind on a hot bath and putting her feet up, Sophie no more than ticking over, and Charlie of course there too. He made to walk on, but his way was barred.

'Or perhaps some typing paper. I noticed you'd been tip-tapping away.'

This found him his voice all right. 'You need a drink,' he very nearly snarled at Dorothy, adding just in time, 'we all do. Now for Christ's sake let's get moving. Come on, _move__.' Then he turned on Percy. 'And if you were thinking of asking me if I feel like dropping in at the cottage to commune with the shade of my poetical progenitor, my advice to you would be to relinquish the venture.'

There was some laughter at this, not much, but again just enough. Alun took a stealthy but far from nominal punch in the small of the back from Rhiannon for getting cross. Outside White's, Percy said he thought he would look round with the girls for a bit before joining the session.

'Having seen Dorothy safely on her homeward way,' said Alun after carrying the first two drinks over. 'Towards Dai's I mean.'

'Where there's enough booze to float a battleship,' said Charlie. 'A light cruiser anyway.'

'It wasn't my idea, you know, that cultural expedition.'

'Well, it's over now and no bones broken.'

'It did cross my mind that I might have been getting a spot of stick here and there for having turned the party out of doors.'

Charlie looked at him. 'Don't be ridiculous,' he said.

3

Most of the evening was all right as far as it went. When eating came to be discussed it was felt but not said that Dorothy might consider she ought to hold back a bit in a public place, while what was said was that of course Rhiannon must not be allowed to cook, so no sewin tonight. Either half-sensing the unsaid part or out of simple awkwardness, Dorothy argued for a takeaway. Alun objected that the food was certain to be vile anyway, but if you ate it on the spot at least you could insult them for it, not much of a point perhaps, sufficient though to carry that assembly. Off they sped in the twilight past the Brydan Burger Bar and up the hill, the six of them hardly filling Percy's Swedish limousine, which smelt unexpected but all right, rather like a cough-medicine factory.

When it was just too late the restaurant they chose turned out to have some sort of formal dinner going on in it, with toasts and speeches. Dorothy was subdued, talking barely half the time and making Alun reflect that they might have been too hard on her in the past and could afford to have her expire painlessly after all. The meal itself proved to be of no more than common-or-garden vileness, below the threshold of insult-incitement. Both Alun and Charlie were noted for grabbing the bill on these occasions, but tonight Percy got there first. The party spent almost the entire journey back arguing about what the place had been called. Or some of them did; others - Rhiannon first, then Sophie and Charlie - fell asleep or relapsed into silence. Percy said nothing much either, driving at ferocious speed but with great concentration. And nobody seemed to feel like going on after Alun had asserted that Welsh cooking was nothing more or less than bad English cooking, or possibly just English cooking.

It might have been anything from New Zealander income-tax allowances to the future tense in colloquial Russian that Dorothy got going on in the pub; nobody could remember afterwards, nor cared to try. Whatever it was, she made up for lost time and went critical within a few minutes. Percy got her to her feet and Sophie gave him a hand. Together they urged her towards the door, a troublesome business among the crowded and slow-reacting peasantry.

'Quite comforting, really,' said Charlie. 'Makes me feel no end posh.'

'I'd better go along too or Sophie'll never get away,' said Alun. 'Should be fun to watch too.'

'Do you really think so?'

'I find the whole thing absolutely fascinating. Somebody who-'

'No accounting for taste, is there?'

'See you in a few minutes.'

Alun had taken it for granted that Dorothy was to be loaded with what speed was possible into the limousine and whisked back to town. So clearly had Percy, but it was not to be. First she insisted on fetching the cardigan she had left in the cottage. Dragged off that, she refused to leave without wishing her hostess good night, and short of disablement there was no obvious way to drag her off _that__. So the end of it was she led the other three back to Dai the Books's, beating off assistance the couple of times she stumbled on the uneven, unlit ground of Brydan's Walk. The moon was hidden behind the high ground on the landward side.

There was a light in the front room but no occupant, and no light upstairs. As asserted many times in the last few minutes, Rhiannon had gone to bed. Oddly in view of her previous firmness of purpose, Dorothy rather passed this over. With a preoccupied look she went out to the kitchen, came back with a bottle of Banat Riesling, looked slowly but briefly about for the corkscrew and went out again.

'You can get off back to the pub now, you two,' said Percy. 'I can handle the next stage. You really shouldn't have bothered to come this far.'

'Are you sure you can manage?'

'Oh yes, after another glass or two she should go torpid quite fast. Piece of cake.' .

'Well, I'm going to have a quick one,' said Alun. There was not much chance of any real money's-worth but he would hang on a moment in case. 'That pub Scotch, it's all very well when you're not used to anything better.'

'Suit yourself.'

Percy, head bowed, had been edging along the bookshelves. Now he gave a satisfied grunt, straightened up and moved away carrying a paperback called, Alun saw, _Kiss the__ _Blood Off My Hands__. This he opened and began to read attentively while he established himself in the battered armchair with more contented noises. When Dorothy reappeared and handed him bottle and corkscrew in meek silence, he successfully eased apart the binding of his book and spread it fiat on the arm of the chair so that he could continue to read during his operation on the bottle. In due course Dorothy sat down on a stray dining-chair next to the table and got stuck into a glass of wine. Her silence had attained a serene, meditative quality.

After a sample of this, Sophie turned to Alun. 'I think we ought to be getting along to Charlie - you know.'

'Yes, yes, let's be off.' He was quite keen to leave now there was no mileage in staying. 'Er - are you sure you'll be all right?'

'Yes, thank you, Alun,' said Percy, turning a page and looking up. 'Nice evening. See you soon.' Then, after just the right hammy interval, he half-ca1led, 'Oh, Alun.'

'Yes?' said Alun without parting his jaws.

'Don't, er, don't forget what I said about Brydan now. And your heritage.'

'I won't, never fear.'

'See you stick to it, boy. Good night both.'

As soon as he and Sophie had taken five paces outside Alun said, not loudly but violently, 'That man is a _shit__. And a fucking _fool__. A _shit__, a _shit__, a _shit__.'

'What? What's the matter with him? What did he say?'

'Well, you heard him... It was what he said earlier. Anyway, never mind. He's just a _shit.'__

'What did he say earlier?'

'Oh for Christ's sake forget it, I can't start on all that now,' said Alun, angrily increasing his pace. 'What did he say about Brydan?'

'Never _mind__. It's not worth going into.'

She pulled him to a halt. 'It's not worth going into anything, is it, not with me,' she said at top speed and sounding pretty angry herself. 'You think I'm a fucking moron, don't you, Weaver? Always have done. Can't even be bloody bothered to pretend. Just another stop on your bloody milk-round. Another satisfied bloody customer. Well, thanks a million, mate.'

'Keep your voice - '

'And I thought you thought I was special. That's bloody foolish if you like.'

'You know very well I - '

'When you can't even put yourself out to give me the bloody time of day. '

Dodginess, a display of temperament from old Soaph was of course nothing new, nor its headlong onset. What was new was the last bit or the bit before and the tears under it. After no great struggle he got his arms round her.

'You silly little bag,' he said gently.

One thing led to another, or went some way there. Near where they stood there was a very serviceable little grassy hollow between Brydan's Walk and the edge of the cliff. He remembered it well, remembered it as if it had been yesterday without any memory at all of whether or not he had any time acquainted Sophie with the place. Leading her to it now and then coming across it by chance would need care, though for the moment that was looking ahead rather.

'What about a spot of num-num?'

'Don't talk so soft.'

'There's been not a drop of rain for weeks.'

'_No__.'

Matters had reached an interesting pass when the two heard a loud thump or crash in the middle distance, not so much loud when it reached them as obviously loud at source, clearly audible anyway above the sound of the waves quietly breaking on the beach below them. The disturbance had come from somewhere in the row of cottages, perhaps seventy or eighty yards from where they stood in shadow. As they looked in that direction, a light came on upstairs in one of them: Dai's, no question. After a quick glance at Sophie, Alun set off towards it.

'We ought to be getting along to-'

'Leave it for now,' he said urgently. 'Come on - Christ knows what's happened there.'

She hesitated a moment but followed him. They arrived back at the cottage not so very many minutes after leaving it. What had happened there was essentially simple and needed no thought to be found likely too: Dorothy had come out of the lavatory and fallen down the stairs, giving the noise added resonance by overturning a chair next to the front door with two empty suitcases on it. Far from being visibly hurt or in any way reduced by the experience, she seemed invigorated, toned up, though ready to agree she needed a drink.

When it was clear that all was well and nothing needed doing, Sophie said to Alun, 'We really must go back now to Charlie. He'll be wondering what the hell's kept us.' Alun looked at his watch. 'You know, now I come to think of it, by the time we get there it's hardly going to be worth it. Fifteen minutes, if that.'

'What time do they shut round here?' asked Percy, who had not also asked how Alun and Sophie had come to be in earshot of the great fall. 'Country hours are different, aren't they? Earlier.'

'Well, he'll be on his way back then.'

'He doesn't like the dark,' said Sophie. 'And it's very dark, that last bit.'

'If he gets into a tizzy he could ring up, couldn't he?' Alun had an air of cheerful puzzlement. 'I can't see what's so - '

'He can't ring here, only the neighbour,' put in Rhiannon. In her towelling dressing-gown and knitted slippers, she had been present all along. 'He wouldn't have that number.'

'It's only a few yards, for Christ's sake, and there are bound to be people - '

Dorothy had heard everything too, and had evidently taken some of it in. 'I'll stroll back with you,' she said, topping up her glass and draining it. 'I could do with a breath of fresh air. It gets quite stuffy in here, doesn't it, in the hot weather.'

'What about this neighbour?' asked Percy, after a longing glance at his book. 'If he really is a neighbour I could go there and ring the pub.'

Rhiannon explained and he went out after Dorothy and Sophie.

'I don't care for that fellow at all,' said Alun. 'Nasty piece of work, if you want my opinion. Malicious. Well, we had to get her out of the pub, you see, and then she wouldn't go in the car, kept saying she wanted to say good night to you, so we had to bring her along here. Then Sophie and I were just on our way to the pub when we heard the bang and saw your light go on, so we rushed back.'

It sounded absolutely terrible, and he wondered in passing whether everything he had ever said when he had anything at all to hide had sounded like that. Remarking affably that he supposed another one might well not kill him, he poured himself an unwanted drink. He saw that Rhiannon, on the chair lately occupied by Dorothy, was fiddling in a preoccupied way with a small irrelevant object like a shampoo sachet.

'What made you change your mind?' she asked. 'What about?'

'Going back for Charlie.'

'Oh, I just hadn't noticed the time before. Everything was a bit confused. Just popping up for a pee.'

While he was up there he thought about the things he could not say, all manner of them, most of them true, most of them already known but still unsayable. There had been a case for simulating concern for Charlie and going along with Sophie and Dorothy, but that would have looked to Rhiannon like evading her. Oh bugger, he thought wearily, and a stupendous yawn almost clove his skull in two. He wiped his eyes on lavatory paper and went down.

Although he knew well enough that inside those walls Rhiannon could hardly have blown her nose, let alone gone anywhere, without being heard all over the place, he was none the less disagreeably surprised to find her still sitting there. Then he thought of something and took himself to the chair he had sat on to do his typing.

'Amazing Dorothy managed to follow that conversation when you think how much she'd had. In the restaurant alone she must have - '

'Well, she'd have heard before about Charlie's troubles about being afraid of the dark and all that. Like most of his old friends must have done, including you.'

'Why including me particularly?'

'Because you're the only one that doesn't seem to care.

Look at Percy off to telephone like that, no questions asked, and he hardly knows him compared with you.'

'I honestly can't see what all the fuss is about. Good God, if he's scared of the dark it's bright street lighting all the way to where the cars are, and after that, well even then it's not _dark__, and it's what, two hundred yards. Less.'

'Quite far enough if you're afraid. Remember how it was when you were a kid.' .

'What? He's supposed to be a grown man. My observation tells me old Charlie makes a bloody good thing out of being scared of this and that. Gets himself picked up and shifted to and fro and generally feather-bedded wherever he happens to bloody be.'

'He may do that too, I hadn't thought of it.' Rhiannon put the sachet in the waist pocket of her dressing-gown. 'Did you show him that stuff of yours?'

'Yes, he thought it needed pretty hefty revision, which was much what I thought, you remember.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Good. I'm going to make a cup of tea.'

'Marvellous, I'd love some.'

Alun grabbed his whisky, telling himself he needed it after all, and started to relax, but he had not had time to do much of that before he heard the sound of voices approaching outside. For a moment he thought they were those of strangers, but he soon recognized Sophie's, then Dorothy's, in a tone he had never heard either use before. There was a third voice, a high-pitched whining or wailing that varied in intensity. When Alun realized it must be Charlie's voice he could hear he sat up straight and felt quite frightened. Rhiannon hurried in from the kitchen, opened the front door and stood on the step. Alun got to his feet and waited.

Charlie had turned a curious colour, that of a red-faced man gone very pale. His eyes were tightly screwed up and he was pressing hard with both hands on a grubby handkerchief that covered his mouth, in spite of which the wailing noise was quite loud at its loudest. Saying comforting things to him, Sophie and Dorothy got him into the armchair, and Rhiannon knelt down beside him and stroked his bald head. When he seemed comparatively settled, Sophie dashed upstairs and came down with a box of pills and gave him one. Alun stood about and tried to look generally ready for anything within reason. Dorothy, whose words of comfort far outdid the others' in range and inventiveness, was obviously having a whale of a time distinguishing herself in fields like responsibility, compassion, etc. So he said to himself. He also tried to consider fully the question of how much of this she would remember in the morning. But it was hard work driving off the thought that whatever Charlie might be going through, and however it had come about in detail, he, Alun, was to blame.

Now and then Charlie took the handkerchief away from his mouth and got out a word or two in a brief squeal before stuffing it back again. Several times he said he was sorry, twice perhaps that he had thought he was all right or could make it, and once, 'Get Victor.' That came just as Percy reappeared to announce no success with his call to the pub. He had hardly had time to take in the scene before Sophie bundled him off again whence he had come with instructions to telephone the Glendower.

Nothing surprising or of consequence happened after that for half an hour or so. Percy soon returned and said Victor was on his way. Charlie had two or three calmer and quieter spells but relapsed after each. Dorothy, sitting on the floor next to him, fell asleep or into a stupor, head down. Sophie told the others that when found he had been crouching by the corner of a wall at the edge of the part where the cars were, apparently unable to move. Rhiannon handed out cups of tea, not looking at Alun when she came round to him or at any other time. He just went on standing about.

Finally Victor arrived. He was wearing a dark jacket and trousers and a ribbed black shirt with a polo neck and his face, closely shaven, was quite expressionless. Looking neither to left nor right he walked straight across the room and held Charlie tight in his arms for a minute or so. Then he straightened up and ordered everyone else but Sophie from the room, taking a leather or plastic case about the size of a spectacle-case out of his pocket as he did so and starting to open it.

In the kitchen, where the ejected party found themselves with notable speed, Percy suggested to Dorothy that they would only be in the way if they hung about now and should slip out by the back door. When she had taken in the proposal and vetoed it, he readily produced _Kiss the Blood Off My Hands__ and settled down with it directly under the ceiling light. Now Rhiannon did look at Alun, only once and for a moment and telling him only what he knew already, but it was enough to make him suddenly interrupt his breathing. He knew there was nothing he could ever say or do that would change her mind. She had gone straight on with piling the cups in the sink and now went quietly outside, leaving the door half open behind her, perhaps to invite him to follow, more likely just because she had always been rather inclined to leave doors open. Alun decided it would be best to follow her. There was still nothing useful he could say but sooner or later he would have to say something.

There was no breeze, and the air seemed to him to be of exactly the same temperature as that in the kitchen. The moon had come round a corner of. the hill and lit up those parts of the neighbouring ground that were not shadowed by small trees and straggling bushes, more or less everywhere Rhiannon might have been expected to be. He took a few indecisive steps up the garden path between huge clusters of weeds and rank grasses, half-way to a low fence beyond which the slope began to rise too steeply to be taken on without some serious reason. Nothing moved anywhere. He was trudging down the narrow strip at the side of the cottage when a larger wave than usual broke audibly down on the beach, and at the same time he noticed that Charlie's voice could no longer be heard, at least through the wall and then the front door. Alun stepped on to where he could see up and down Brydan's Walk: still nobody. After more hesitation he quietly lifted the latch and went in.

Victor and Sophie were talking in-low tones, but they broke off now and looked up at him expectantly. Between them Charlie sat sprawled and apparently asleep.

'Is it all right to come in?' asked Alun.

Neither spoke in reply, but Victor nodded.

'He seems quite peaceful now, doesn't he?' Alun went nearer Charlie but still not very near. 'What have you what have you done for him?'

'Largactil it's called,' said Victor in his clear tones and staring rather at Alun with his clear eyes. 'A powerful tranquillizer. Injected intramuscularly.'

'Really.'

'Yes really. Yes, you can learn how in two minutes.

Charlie and I arranged that I should keep the stuff by me. He was afraid if he had it he'd start trying to inject himself when he was pissed. Very sensible of him.'

Alun had just enough wit not to ask why Sophie had not been deputed to keep the stuff by her. 'What was the matter with him?'

'He's not mad, if that's what you were wondering. An attack of depersonalization. Panic brought on by being cut off from the possibility of immediate help and then self-renewing, as it were. Very frightening, I imagine. Well, we haven't got to imagine, have we?'

'Will he be all right now?'

At this point Victor suddenly stood up. 'Yes. Thank you. Is there anything else you'd like to know?'

'I feel responsible.'

'Yes,' said Victor warmly. 'M'm. You had heard about Charlie's dislike of being alone after dark and so forth.'

'Are you asking me? Not in detail, no.' Poofter, thought Alun shakily to himself. Ginger-beer. Brown-hatter. 'I mean I hadn't heard in detail.' Taxi-driver.

'But a bit, from what... ' Victor's jerk of the head did no more than allude to Sophie. Nothing in his glance touched on her connection with Alun.

Finding himself expected to go on, Alun said, 'Yes, I'd heard enough. Enough to have a good idea I might fuck him up by leaving him to come back here on his own in the dark. I wanted to do that because I was angry with him for saying that something I'd written was no good, just copied from Brydan. Who does he think he is, I thought. I wanted to pay him out for... '

He stopped because neither of the others gave any sign of paying attention.

Victor turned his head and said with exaggerated suavity, 'Oh, yes, well, of course, absolutely, I do very much appreciate that. Now I suggest we get things moving.'

The first thing he or anyone else got moving was Dorothy and Percy, cordially and shortly thanked for their help and sent on their way, an unaccustomed mode of departure for them as some might have thought. Then Victor told Sophie she was to drive the Norris car while he travelled in the back with Charlie - who all this while had sat perfectly quiescent in the armchair - and would later arrange for the collection of his own car. Finally, at the front door, with Rhiannon now present, he said, rather less smoothly than earlier, 'Mr Weaver - we met, if you remember, at the restaurant owned by my brother and myself. I'm afraid I wasn't able to give you a very nice meal on that occasion, and I had been so much hoping to give you a better one. Well, I'm afraid various problems like supply and staff, and as you may have heard our new stove has had teething troubles - all that has rather got in the way. In fact I shouldn't advise you to venture into the place at all until further notice. We just can't offer you what you're used to in London. I'm sure you understand. _Nos da__.'

'It's the worst thing I've ever done,' said Alun a minute later. 'No need to tell me it doesn't make any difference but I'd like you to believe I realize it.'

'Oh, I don't know about that,' said Rhiannon. 'Do you mind sleeping in the spare room now it's free? That bed in the front's rather narrow and I want to get a good night's rest.'

After another minute he walked over to the table where his typewriter and papers still were, idiotically trying to do so in no particular way at all, took _Coming Home__ out of its envelope and held it up to be tom in half, thumbs tip to tip, elbows lifted. Then he thought it could look good to make a present of a couple of pages of it to the next little non-paying bastard to write in for a contribution to a student magazine or an item to be auctioned for charity or something - anyway, you never knew. Having spared his own work he could see no overriding case for going ahead with his next project, the destruction of the Dai/Brydan photograph, which after all would not have been the original. Nor did he as intended finally push his copy of the Complete Poems in among the books on the shelves where he would never have to see it again. He would quite likely need it for reference the very next time he wrote a piece or prepared a talk or whatever you bloody well like that involved the master. He could always stop doing that, of course. But of course he never could.

Eight - Charlie

'It boils down to this as far as I'm concerned,' said Garth. 'Pink gin. Thank you, Arnold: - Oh yes: is a man for Wales or is he not? Simple as that.'

'With all respect, Garth, I'm afraid it isn't as simple as that,' said Malcolm. 'A man can be for Wales in such a way as subtly to denigrate the country, and that's what I'm sorry to say and rather surprised to have to say I thought Alun was doing. He - '

'Excuse me interrupting,' said a thickset man with a heavy moustache and the Turkish or even Assyrian facial appearance to be seen in some Welshmen, in fact a quantity surveyor from Newcastle Emlyn and old Arnold Spurling's guest. 'Didn't you use to be the English teacher at St Elizabeth Grammar? Years ago?'

'No,' said Malcolm rather curtly, as if he had been taken for a schoolmaster once too often. 'Not at any time.'

'Sorry if I've made a mistake,' said the guest, not sounding or looking at all satisfied that he had.

Malcolm went on with a touch of gameness, 'To write a newspaper article about the Eisteddfod in a humorous and entertaining style is one thing. To portray those taking part as figures of fun is quite another. In my submission.'

'I accept that,' said Garth. 'Certainly.'

'When did this... article appear?' inquired the guest.

'A couple of weeks back, possibly more. It was one of a - '

'But, I mean surely the Eisteddfod is an occasion for old friends to meet and exchange news and gossip.' The guest's lustrous dark eyes moved round the circle, canvassing support for this obvious view of the matter. 'I haven't been to one now'" I don't know how long, but I used to attend quite regular, and in those days I was _constantly__ running into people I hadn't seen at least since the previous year. _All the time__. Or were you thinking of the International Eisteddfod?'

'_No__,' said Malcolm more curtly. At the same time he seemed bewildered.

'Tony Bainbridge,' said the guest straight away and shoved out his hand as he sat. 'I don't think you caught the name before.'

Malcolm gave his· own name without impetuosity, especially at the second time of asking.

'Ah,' said Tony Bainbridge, narrowing his eyes now. 'M'm.'

He stopped short of actually arresting Malcolm, which Charlie, on the other side of Garth, had been half preparing for. One of Malcolm's troubles, and many others' too, was that he expected not only to follow conversations himself but that those around him should do the same, without any allowance for their being bored, mad, deaf, thick, or drunk without having been seen by him personally to set about becoming so. There he was now, as Charlie watched, looking furtively at Tony Bainbridge's glass, considering, looking at his own, wondering. And this after sixty-odd years in Wales, or just on the planet.

Before the silence had stretched too far Arnold Spurting reappeared with six drinks on a tray. The sixth went to Peter, who had said nothing since arriving, though he had snorted a couple of times when the Eisteddfod came into the conversation. The Bible had not been open all that long but, with the low cloud and heavy rain outside, the twilight seemed to be closing in already. Never mind that by the calendar it was still summer, the local weather had always had its own ideas on that.

Charlie had not found much to say for himself either.

Today was only the second time he had left home unaccompanied since returning from Birdanhur a fortnight previously. For over half of that period, home had meant the Glendower, a sofa-bed in the flat there and the close proximity of Victor. What had happened on the evening in question was far from clear and without any detail in Charlie's memory, but he was quite decided that Sophie had not been there when he needed her. He also remembered, however, having taken a bad gamble on his own account, having thought he could manage without her, and he bore her no resentment. Nevertheless, rebuilding his confidence in her would take time. He wondered now and then how much time.

'I heard,' said Garth, lowering his voice but not quite talking behind his hand - 'I heard you'd had a little spot of trouble down at Birdanhur.'

'Just a bit of a dizzy spell. Nothing to worry about, Dewi said.' Dewi had said several times over that Charlie's case was not uncommon and that actually he had nothing to be afraid of after all. 'Got to take things easy for a bit.' This was to explain his restricted movements.

'Has he given you anything for it?'

What you would have to have the matter with you before Dewi would consider it necessary to give you something for it was a good question; not he but an unnamed friend of Victor's had been the true supplier, once upon a time, of the Largactil and syringe. It was a far cry from the days of Griff, who was said to have had half the infant population of Lower Glamorgan groggy with opium as a matter of course in furtherance of soothing their chests in a hard winter. But then Griff had belonged to the vanished breed who saw it as part of their job to make their patients feel better.

Garth interrupted this rather Peter-like train of thought by asking, 'Had he anything to suggest about your weight problem?'

'Dewi, you mean? No, not a word. I was reading a - '

'Still, I imagine you'll be making arrangements off your own bat, as it were.'

'What?'

'Thing like that, dizzy spell or whatever you call it, that's a warning. Nature's warning. Reminding you you won't be able to go on in your old ways for ever. Did you know that being just _half a stone__ over weight measurably reduces your life-expectancy? Seven pounds. Seven pounds avoir- dupois. My metabolism my good luck... your metabolism... your bad luck poor Roger Andrews... fat... sugar... salt... '

Others had been known to find Garth's homilies bothersome, even offensive; never Charlie. Just a part, an insignificant part of the great fabric. Life was first boredom, then more boredom, as long as it was going your way, at least. Charlie made these and other representations to himself while Garth quacked indefatigably on. In a comfortable half-listening state he let the whisky do its work on him and ran over in his mind the bomb-proof security of his next few hours: more drinks here; safe conduct to the Glendower in the charge of Peter, who knew the story; Victor eventually driving him home; Victor assuring him that Sophie would not leave him alone in the house. At the moment Peter too seemed content to let matters proceed while they showed no clear signs of worsening. Beyond Garth, who had now veered into autobiography, the other three pursued some Welsh topic.

So it trickled along until Alun arrived. He too had somehow failed to come up to scratch that evening in Birdarthur as Charlie recalled, or more as Victor had once or twice implied to him - well no one with a titter of wit had ever relied on him for more than the way to the Gents.

Having passed over the stranger, Alun's glance returned and stayed. Charlie saw with placid horror that Tony Bainbridge was smiling with his lips pushed up so that his moustache was squashed between them and his nose. His eyes were half closed again too.

'Hallo, Alun,» he said with awful quiet confidence, chin raised.

After a count of three Alun went into an equally awful but very watchable sequence of slow-motion Grand Guignol, from incredulity that came to border on naked fear through dawning recognition to joyful God-praising acceptance with double handshake. 'Who the fuck are you?' he asked at this stage, but it was clear to all present that he quite likely did remember and given a moment might even have come up with the name. 'What is it, thirty years?'

'Oh, not that. Fifteen more like.'

'Oh. Tell me, where are you ~ now?'

Tony Bainbridge told him that and more besides, receiving information in return. The others sat in silence, cautiously shifting position in their chairs as if a sound-recording was in progress.

'Now you had, what, two girls you had, wasn't it?'

'Spot on.' Alun gave a respectful nod. 'One married, one at Oxford.'

'Oxford. There. Well, that's what time does, no question. It goes by.'

'I'm afraid I can't - '

'So you've got a girl at Oxford. I haven't. I haven't got anybody. What are you drinking, Alun?'

'No, my shout.'

At this point the door opened and Tare Jones advanced into the saloon lounge. He wore the heavy cardigan that, for all anyone knew, he never took off, and carried an unfolded sheet of paper printed in green, evidently an official form of some sort. This he planked down on the table some of them were sitting round, in front of Peter as it happened. There was silence while he stared accusingly from face to face.

'So this - this is the kind of slough into which our democracy has declined,' he said with much bitterness and gigantic quotation-marks where needed. 'Have any of you any idea of what has just reached me through Her Majesty's mails?'

Evidently none of them had. Garth did a slow wink at Tony Bainbridge to let him know that he was not really expected to be able to throw any light on the question.

'The Lower Glamorgan Water Authority,' went on Tarc without mending his pace at all, 'desires to be informed within twenty-eight days, date as postmark, how many rooms in this establishment possess water facilities, of what nature these are in each case and their main uses and the approximate volume in gallons per day of water so utilized. For external appliances see back. Approximate. There I detect and welcome a ray of sanity and a spark of common human consideration. They might well have required measurement to three places of decimals. No. No. They drew back from that. Approximately is good enough. To the nearest gill is deemed to suffice.'

His listeners, even Alun, seemed completely demoralized by this show. Nothing was attempted or said while Tarc glanced this way and that and crouched forward over the table.

'Power,' he said in a whisper that was like a puma snarling. 'That's what it's all about. Some little jack-in-office is having the time of his life, drawing up forms and chucking them round the parish and generally trying to put the fear of God into the rest of us. How am I to deal with it, I ask you? What am I to do?'

Now Alun twisted round in his seat to look at him. 'What are you to do? If you really don't know what to do then God help you. But I'll tell you what you don't do, so at least you'll know that much for next time, all right? You don't go on as if they've told you they're coming round to take you to a gas-chamber and you don't hold the floor for half an hour with a bloody music-hall monologue when you could just be boring us stiff about the price of booze like anybody else. That's what you don't do, see.'

As well as visibly infuriating Tarc this caught him off balance. With a jerky movement he snatched up his paper from the table and started asking Alun how he dared, what he meant by it, who he thought he was talking to and similar questions. He, Tarc, sounded uninterested in the answers and also, compared with previous form, altogether under-directed. But he came back strongly towards the end. While he spoke and during what followed he doggedly, almost obsessively scooped away with a middle finger at the resistant deposit in the corner of one eye.

'I don't' have to take that shit from anyone/ he said with returning assurance. 'Least of all from a second-rate bloody ersatz Brydan.'

Afterwards Charlie always wondered in what measure Tarc understood and intended this remark. The grin of anticipation with which Alun heard him out remained in place.

'Just to take you up on who I think I'm talking to. Not just a miserable idiot but the kind of idiot who's ruining Wales.' Charlie had heard Alun pronounce two or three different kinds of men to be that kind of idiot. 'Turning it into a charade, an act, a place full of leeks and laver-bread and chapels and wonderful old characters who speak their own highly idiosyncratic and often curiously erudite kind of language. Tourists sometimes-'

'He's having you on, Tarc,' said Garth. 'Pay no attention.

Fellow's idea of a joke. '

Tarc ignored him. 'Out,' he said, extending arm and forefinger horizontally to demonstrate his meaning. 'Out, the bloody lot of you. Off you go now. Go on. Now.'

'Take it easy, Tarc, for Christ's sake. I don't know what's got into him. Have a drink.'

'The bloody lot of you. Starting with you, Squire Weaver. And this also applies furthermore and notwithstanding to you, Professor pissy pernickety thick as two planks Cellan-Davies. And you, little Garth, on your way, brother. And this pair of bloody soaks by here.' This seemed most unfairly to mean Peter and Charlie. 'And you, Spurling and whatever your name is. No, sorry, I withdraw that, no fault of yours, sir, but you'll oblige me by leaving too. If you'll be so good.'

Garth made one last effort. 'can't we just - '

'_Out__. If you're not gone in two minutes I'll send my lads in and then you'll know all about it. And you can take this squash-club pathetic bullshit with you. Every bloody scrap of it - I'll bum anything you leave, I promise you. I've been dying to get rid of you buggers for years and now's my chance. On second thoughts one of you can come back in the morning and pick up the junk then. That's if you think it's worth the bother. Now get moving, the lot of you. Two minutes, mind.'

Under his louring eye they filed out and assembled ridiculously in the passage that led to the front door, embellished as it was with speckled greenery and dismal old photographs and littered with the remains of packages that might have held footwear or clothing. Here tongues broke loose.

'That was a disgraceful piece of behaviour,' said Malcolm. 'On your part, Alun. Quite indefensible. You're supposed to know better.'

'I'm sorry, I just can't stand that kind of posturing,' said Alun.

'Whereas other kinds you've no rooted objection to,' said Peter. 'Anyway, thanks for destroying our pub for us.'

'I'll have a word with Tare tomorrow,' said Garth. 'We're off,' said Arnold Spurling with decision, and he and Tony Bainbridge left at once and were not soon to be found in those parts again. At the same time a great general roar of laughter sounded from the bar and Charlie saw Doris the barmaid at the hatch peering at them through her upswept glasses.

'It's shocking that an educated man should descend to downright verbal brawling,' said Malcolm. 'I said I was sorry.'

'Oh, that's all right then,' said Peter.

'Tell you what,' said Garth: 'it's early yet to pack it in and we could all do with a drink and what shall I say, a pause for consideration. Why not come up to my place? It's only just round the corner. Angharad's away seeing her mother,' he added. 'Ninety-one, she is.'

There was a pause there and then, for consideration of Angharad, perhaps, or her mother. Eventually Alun said with a touch of defiance, 'Yes. Why not? I certainly fancy a drop. Thank you, Garth.'

'What about you, Peter?' asked Charlie. 'Unless you feel you..!

'No. Let's go along. Why not indeed.'

'I ought to be getting back,' said Malcolm.

'Oh for heaven's sake,' said Garth. 'Never even seen the inside of the Pumphrey domain, have you?'

'Go on, move, you old pests,' bawled Tarc's voice from up the passage, booming and resounding in a frightening way. 'Outside, the pack of you, you're making me nervous.'

Without a rearward glance they hurried out into the rainy, windy gloom where what light there was came mostly from shops and houses and re1lections in the roadway. Charlie had a close impression of heavy bodies piling into cars, the lights of the cars coming on suddenly, loud grunts and door-slamming and the whinnying of starters. Now was a time for the years to roll back. But no, they stayed where they were. Beside him, Peter gave a whistling sigh arid pushed the car into gear.

'You all right, Charlie?'

'Full of fun.'

'Well bugger me.'

'Absolutely. '

They said no more for the moment. Charlie's mind drifted off to one side. The ancient sanctuary of the Old Gods, he thought. No: when. the primeval fastness of the Ancients is, is menaced by unknown powers, its guardian, the giant Tarc (bass) comes before them with a moving plea for counsel _('Ach, was muss ich?')__. In response, the most illustrious of the Ancients, Alun (baritone), haughtily rebukes Tarc for his presumption _('Vergessen nun Sie')__. A stormy exchange between the two, which the fool Garth ( counter-tenor) tries vainly to quieten, introduces an elegiac portrayal of desolation and defeat. In a climactic... In a ritualistic monologue of great power and beauty _('Heraus Sie alles sofortig')__, Tare invokes his immemorial right to banish the Ancients from their refuge, ordains and salutes their passing one by one and compels the removal of their age-old trophies. The Act closes with an Ancients' chorus of...

'Wake up. We're there. I think.'

The Pumphrey house, which Charlie could not remember ever having seen before, was unlit within. There were slippery wet leaves on the flags of the garden" path and he nearly stumbled over the trailing stem of a rose-bush or something similar. The two clambered up half a dozen rounded stone steps to a Victorian Perpendicular porch with stained glass to be faintly seen. Charlie stamped his feet rhythmically on the tiled floor.

'Is this right?' he asked. 'If it is, where's Garth?'

'I think he took a lift with Malcolm. Even he isn't going to walk it in this, I mean Garth.' - 'Oh well, there we are then. Be here till midnight. Well no, er, eh? Unless Garth doesn't know the way either. Brilliant of you knowing. I suppose this _is__ right, is it? It certainly feels right, it's giving me the shivers before I've even crossed the bloody threshold. Like a house of the dead.'

Peter pulled his raincoat more closely round him. 'Here they are. And Alun. Do you think he's mad, by the way?'

'No, just fed up because... I'll talk to you later.' "

At once upon entering, Garth turned on the lights, first startlingly overhead in the porch, then two in the hall. Both of these seemed of low wattage, not doing much to cheer up the heavy parental or even grandparental furniture or help to identify the wide-mounted engravings that covered large parts of the walls. Charlie noticed a cylindrical stand full of superannuated umbrellas and walking-sticks. When everyone was indoors Garth switched off the porch light, switched on a staircase light to indicate the lavatory on the landing, switched it off again and led them into a room at the back of the house.

It was cold in here, in a settled way that suggested it had not been warm for some time. Garth activated a small mobile electric fire, from which a smell of scorching dust soon began to issue and loud clangs were heard from time to time as the metal warmed up. Some large armchairs and a sofa were theoretically available, but none looked very inviting. The party clustered round the sideboard of some unpolished black wood on whose top a number of bottles and glasses were arranged.

This display had attracted Charlie's attention on entering and almost immediately thereafter his disquiet as well: all the liquor-bottles, which included, he saw, ones containing port and sherry as well as gin, Scotch, brandy and vodka, had optic measures like those used in pubs fitted to their necks. Then he brightened up again at the thought that Angharad would not have been the first or the last wife to try to limit her husband's drinking, heavy-handed as this particular scheme might appear. No cash-register was on view and" when his turn came Garth served him a double whisky and passed on without delay.· Water came out of a half-empty plastic bottle beaded on the inside with air-bubbles of unknown antiquity.

'Welcome to my humble abode,' said Garth as soon as they all had drinks. When nobody said what a nice place they thought he had or anything else, he went on, 'Rather sad to think it took a dust-up at the Bible to get the gang of you along here. I don't think we need be too despairing about that, by the way. I'll pop round in the morning and see how the land lies.'

Whether or not his words had any cheering effect, resentment of Alun's conduct seemed to have cooled or petered out in apathetic acceptance; anyway, no more was expressed. After a few minutes Charlie glanced at Peter and led the way towards a grand piano which showed every mark of having been _in situ__ since about the time of the death of Brahms. Photographs of various sizes stood along its lid or hung from the wall behind it.

'God, what a shower,' said Charlie, moving on from the likeness of one staring bearded fellow in a high-collared jacket to another. 'They can't be Garth's or Angharad's parents or uncles et cetera - too far back.'

'In their comparative youth perhaps. That would be quite far back.'

'Oh, but not... Look at this old bitch here. Are those ostrich feathers, would you say? What would that make it? Not even the Boer War, more like the Zulu wars in when, the 1880s?'

'Well... '

'You know, I don't think this lot are anything to do with the Pumphreys. I think they must have come with the house, like the carpets and the curtains. And the furniture too by the look of it. There's something... Don't you get a funny feeling in here?'

'How do you mean, Charlie?'

'I can't see any sign of anybody actually living here. No bits of possessions. Of course it could be this room's just kept for visitors. Not such a ridiculously antediluvian idea in these parts, after all. But it's more like a time I remember when a bloke from round here called Lionel Williams, - perhaps you came across him, anyway he took me home once in Kinver Hill for a nightcap after the pub, and it was quite a bit like this. Very much like this. It turned out, I'd naturally assumed it was, you know, the marital domicile, but it turned out his wife had divorced him, oh, fifteen years before and he'd gone on living in the house as a lodger, her house it was. And it was very much like this, the atmosphere. Imagine that. You don't suppose it could have happened here by any chance, do you, Garth living here as, er, as Angharad's lodger?'

'No I don't,' said Peter rather sharply. 'That's absurd.'

'What? Well, of course it is. Not meant to be a tremendously serious suggestion. But it was very odd at Lionel's that time, you know. The atmosphere.'

Drink in hand, Charlie moved from the piano-top to the dozen or so photographs on the wall. Over by the sideboard Alun had coaxed a rather reluctant smile from Malcolm and got a falsetto squawk of laughter out of Garth. Willingness to amuse Garth was to Charlie a sign of great humility. Or perhaps above-average vanity. Nevertheless he was glad of Alun's presence and of the others' too. There was no such thing as a good room to be shut up alone in, though the one at Birdarthur where he had read Alun's typescript had been not too bad, tolerable enough to have given him false confidence in himself. This one here could never do that. He pulled himself up and passed over an elongated coloured print of a desert sunset or dawn, complete with camels, palms and pyramid, that he would have laid a thousand quid he had seen a clone of in seaside lodgings in Porthcawl fifty years before. What he came to next made him stop and stare.

'By Christ, what's this? Hey, I could have done her a bit of no good in days gone by. Proper little bugger too, you can see with that mouth. Nobody made that one do what she didn't want to do. Ever. Who the hell would that be?'

He noticed now that Peter had sat down on a nearby sofa and was looking at the floor. 'That would be Angharad. I never thought... It never occurred to me... '

'What?'

'Angharad as she was before her illness.'

Charlie lowered himself beside Peter and put his drink on a small polygonal table of Oriental suggestion. The leather or synthetic material of the cushion-cover at once struck cold, even damp, to the backs of his thighs. 'What?'

'Serves me right for coming here. It doesn't do her justice, what you see there. Not to what she was when I first saw her. It was her I left Rhiannon for, not Muriel - Muriel was later. I didn't want to give Rhiannon up... '

Peter's face had grown dark red and he was pressing his hand against his chest. He breathed in and out noisily a couple of times, as if he was going to cry.

'Can I get you something?' asked Charlie.

'If you could just sit back, that's right, so they can't see me.' Quite briskly Peter took out a small tubular bottle and from it a white pill. 'Could you just sit with me, it'll go off in a little while.'

Not swallowing the pill, keeping it under his tongue, Peter held himself rigid in his seat with his eyes shut. Now and then he winced sharply, once so sharply and with such a screwing-up of his face that Charlie thought he was going to die the next moment. Charlie also stayed still, with his hand ready in case Peter should want to hold it, and listened for any pause in the others' talk or any stir of interest, though he had no ideas about what to do in that event. The electric fire hummed away. It was not really so long before Peter's colour improved and he began to breathe more normally. After another minute he opened his eyes, smiled a little without parting his lips, as he always did now to keep his teeth out of sight, and sipped his drink. This was whisky and water, lately his preferred tipple in place of the old gin (which he had said he thought made him depressed) and slimline (bound to retain some baneful calories however rigorously pruned).

'Well, that's it for this time round. Where was I?'

'What? Well, you were on about Angharad. Are you sure you want to - '

'Yes, I'm all right. Thanks for sitting there, Charlie.

Yes. Angharad said - please let me ten you this - she insisted I had to give Rhiannon up completely if I wanted· ever to see her again. She was the insisting type, as you astutely perceived from that photograph. Well, a girl like that, you can understand it in away, and understand it even better if you allow for the bloke being a selfish shit who's rather thrilled to be the object of it. Then not so very long afterwards Angharad was doing some more insisting, but what she was insisting on this time was that I shouldn't see her any more. Some other fellow had... well... '

When he broke off and gazed at his empty glass, Charlie said, 'Can I get you another?'

'No. Don't go, Charlie. Can I finish yours? Just for this minute.'

'You're not to regard it as a precedent, mind.'

'Thanks. Then, of course, I should have gone back to Rhiannon, or tried to. But I couldn't face her. A bit hard to understand now, perhaps. And there was cowardly stuff about my job which is much easier to understand, I'm sorry to say. It's all so obvious really, but I'd met Muriel by then. She was a friend of Angharad's, if you can credit· such a thing.

'All this was well before Angharad got ill. Cancer of the womb it was, or that was what it boiled down to in the end. Quite rare at twenty-nine. They took out the whole works, gave her a total pelvic clearance I believe it was called. Plays hell with the hormonal system and the rest of it, or it can. I didn't see anything of her for four or five years, and when she did turn up she looked within shouting distance of how she looks now.

'So there we are. They didn't know a hell of a lot about these things in those days. I don't say they know much more about them now, but then they thought that kind of thing was brought about by excessive sexual indulgence, as they would have phrased it. Or anyway helped on by it. Well, even then I could see it would have been altogether too funny for words if I'd done all the damage myself, but I could have done my bit, along with one or two others. Yes. No doubt that's something you dismiss from your mind if you've got any sense, and also if you happen not to have grown up with a lot of bloody Methodists and Calvinists and Calvinistic Methodists.

'Anyway, thanks for listening, Charlie. At least I suppose a lot of it you hadn't heard before.'

'Some of it, yes. Everybody was wondering but there were things nobody knew.'

'People always say you can't keep a secret in Wales, but there's no problem if it's nasty enough. They know all too well what they're like, what talkers they are. And hypocrisy's good too. Comes into its own, you might say.'

'But Muriel knew.'

Peter actually laughed. 'Oh yes. When I look back, me marrying her is about the hardest thing to believe of all. Next to her marrying me. She was keen, of course. She wasn't quite a virgin but near enough not to count. She may even have thought she honestly didn't mind coming third to Angharad and Rhiannon. If so the scales fell from her eyes with... '

'Prodigious precipitation.'

'And comprehensiveness. And irreversibility. And everything else. Well, it's done me good to get that off my chest.' Peter was breathing naturally now and just with this mention of his chest he finally removed his hand from it. 'How long I can expect it to last is another matter. Oh, God, there I go - moan, moan, moan. It is a time for the recharging of glasses. '

As they got up thankfully from the sofa Charlie asked, 'How much of the story does Rhiannon know?'

'All of it, I should think. Well, not everything I've told you. I haven't discussed it with her since.'

'No, I can see how you wouldn't.'

Charlie tried to set it all in order in his mind. He told himself he could not be expected to manage the whole thing straight away. There was quite enough for an old josser to take in in one evening. Whatever the time might be he was beginning to feel like moving on - after another here he would suggest to Peter that they should drift along to the Glendower for a bite and a swallow. The fire had failed to warm the room appreciably and a headachy reek of damp had emerged, with a touch of stale flower-water thrown in. But if Garth was not living in the house then where was he living? Or could he really be a lodger after all?

Peter and Charlie came up to hear Garth saying, 'Well, whose shout is it, then?'

As if by pre-arrangement first Alun and Malcolm, then Charlie and Peter looked at each other. It fell to Malcolm, as sometimes in the past, to say what everyone else was thinking and not saying.

'Sorry, Garth, I'm not with you. How do you mean, shout? We're not in the pub now.'

'No, boy, of course not, of course not,' said Garth, laying his hand reassuringly on Malcolm's arm. 'Just with the prices things are these days we simply can't afford unrestricted hospitality. Of course we'd like to, but we can't. So?' He sent round an interrogative glance.

'All right, if it's shouts we're on to, I'll shout first.' Alun still looked very much astonished.

'Good for you. Double Scotch, is it?' Garth tipped the bottle twice while the rest of the company paid close attention. 'Right. Help yourself to water or soda.'

'You don't mean to say they're free? Oh, goody bloody goody, what?'

Garth nodded without speaking, his eyes on a pocket calculator that had appeared on the sideboard before him. 'Mind you don't forget to add on the cost of the first round.'

At this Garth moved the calculator aside, though not far. 'I regard that as distinctly uncalled for, Alun,' he said in a sorrowful tone. 'If not downright gratuitous. Those first drinks were not a _round__ in any sense of the word. They were my freely offered hospitality. Good God, man, do you take me for some kind of Scrooge?'

Instantly Alun choked on his large first sip of whisky and water. Coughing with marked violence he shakily clunked his glass back on the sideboard, strolled a pace or two and went down sprawling with most of his top half across one of the sofas and his legs spread out on the thin carpet. This seemed even for him an unusually thorough imitation of a man collapsing with rage or revulsion. So at least Charlie considered. Since he was the nearest he stooped down over the sofa. Peter' followed him.

Alun was breathing loudly and deeply through his mouth in the guttural equivalent of a snore. His eyes were wide open and to all appearance focusing, though not on Charlie or Peter, nor on Garth when he too bent over him. In a low voice but quite distinctly he said a couple of meaningless words and his mouth moved. Then his eyelids drooped and he stopped doing anything at all.

'I think that's it,' said Garth.

'What?' Charlie felt utterly bewildered.

'I think he's dead,' said Garth, continuing none the less to loosen Alun's tie and unbutton the neck of his shin. 'Yes, I'm afraid he's gone.'

After a few moments Peter asked where the telephone was and on being directed went out into the hall, closely followed by Malcolm. Charlie helped Garth get Alun into a more or less natural position lying on the sofa. By now he seemed quite unmistakably dead.

After less than a minute Peter came back into the room. 'On their way,' he said. 'Malcolm's trying to find Rhiannon. Well now. Well indeed.' He stood uncertainly by the door.

'Have a drink.' Garth sat and continued to sit on the arm of the sofa beside Alun. 'And Charlie. On the house. There's an irony for you ~ you like. Go on, help yourselves.'

'What was it? Any ideas on what it was?' Charlie looked over at Alun's body from where he had instinctively moved to, the furthest possible corner of the sideboard. 'Was. Christ.'

'Heart. Or stroke. Perhaps not heart because he didn't seem to be in any particular pain as far as I could see. Of course it was only those few seconds. But they don't usually go off just like that, not with heart, not as a rule.'

Charlie missed Alun's being able to say, I suppose you mean sheep and bloody bullocks don't. Not as a rule. His glass was empty and he poured himself a treble, or another treble.

'Do you know if he'd had any funny turns recently?' asked Garth. 'Or headaches or... '

There had been something a couple of weeks back, but Charlie could not call it to mind. He shook his head. Malcolm came in and said he had not been able to find Rhiannon or learn where she was. If the others agreed he proposed to travel down to the hospital in the ambulance and go on trying to reach her from there. Before they could even think of any other option the ambulance arrived. Its crew declined to pronounce Alun dead but they would not say he was alive either. With almost too much speed they had him on to a stretcher, out of the house and away. Malcolm had said good night briefly and hurried after them.

'To think not ten minutes ago he was standing there as alive as you and me,' said Garth. 'A breath of fresh air is quenched for ever.'

Charlie responded. He wanted very much to get Peter away and to leave himself, but as things were they could hardly go stalking out just yet. Peter, he guessed, felt this too. So they hung on, keeping to the same spot by the sideboard as before.

'Good little drinker he was,' said Garth. 'You can say that without fear of contradiction. Good little pourer too.'

'He what?'

'He kept pouring. Drinks. He was always one who was calling for more drinks. Very characteristic almost his last words were ordering up more drinks. He'd have liked that.'

Whereas absolutely his last words were pissing on you for asking for money for drinks in, according to you, your own house, which he'd probably have liked even more, thought Charlie. Then he relented a little: Garth had just refilled the glasses without question. But, again, it would have taken some strength of character to ask who was going to cough up now Alun had defaulted. 'Do you think whatever it was could have been brought on by that row with Tare?'

'No.' Garth fingered his chin. 'No, I don't. No, that sort of thing only happens in films. No, he had it coming. In fact that's the one great comfort of the whole sad tale. There wasn't a damn thing he or anyone else could have done about it. Not a thing.'

'Oh, fabulous,' said Peter, breaking a long silence. 'Well, that certainly softens the blow and no mistake. Blessing in disguise, really, looked at in that light.' He paused to allow the mantle of solemnity to become resettled, no doubt hoping to be excused from making any definitive pr0nouncement in farewell. 'We'll be off, then,' he said weightily. 'If that's all right with you. Thank you for the drinks.'

Garth gave a sonorous sigh and clasped both Peter's hands in his own. With sudden awful clarity Charlie foresaw he was going to call upon them to salute the passing of a great Welshman. But before another word was said there was a low sound from outside the room, hardly a sound, more like a tremor. Whatever it was Garth turned his head, dropped Peter's hands and compared his watch with the wall-c1ock, an instrument unnoticed until now, disquieting in appearance but only to a minor degree, about right for the billiard-room or butler's pantry in Castle Dracula. The three waited as if for an explosion until the door opened and Angharad was to be seen.

What with one thing and another Charlie found it really hard not to give a shudder or a groan of dread and despair at the sight of her. She wore unnameable dark garments high at the neck and long in the cuff, topped by a waterproof of some sort which she very slowly unbuttoned, took off and draped over one arm as events proceeded. Her general aspect reminded Charlie, after a moment's utter blankness, of the photographs he had been looking at not long before, perhaps even an individual one. By the look of her eyes and mouth she had aged perceptibly since last seen. At no time did she send the least glance in his or Peter's direction.

'You're back early, love,' said Garth, smiling at her. Angharad said crisply in her out-of-keeping voice, that of a woman half her age or less, 'There was no point in hanging about - it was quite obvious she didn't know me. IT you remember, it's been coming on for some time. I told her clearly and repeatedly who I was, kept saying my name, going on I was her daughter, and she heard me but she didn't take it in. No idea in the world. So I came away. That woman, Mrs Jeffreys is it, she was seeing to her perfectly well, and I wanted to watch that Great-Gardens-of-England programme, which you really do need colour for and she's only got black and white. Not that I could have concentrated on it properly anyway.' She too looked at the time and added, 'I did telephone, but the line was engaged.'

'Yes, well... '

'So we're having a party, are we?'

'Not exactly.' No relish or any other tinge of ill will could be heard in Garth's tone. 'Alun Weaver fell down dead just about where you're standing now, it would have been, well when you rang you'd have run into Peter dialling 999. And... there we are.'

'Ah.' She acknowledged the objection and continued, 'More like a wake, then.'

'Sort of.'

Charlie wished Malcolm had been present to list some of the ways in which what had just been taking place could not fairly be said to have constituted a wake. He watched Angharad while, the removal of her outer piece of clothing now accomplished, she stood between him and the door pulling her cuffs down over the backs of her mottled hands and casting her eye over the sideboard top, perhaps in quest of the cash Garth should have taken off his patrons. Finally she gave this up and turned towards him again. 'Well,' she said with an upward, munching movement of her jaws, 'I'll be getting on,' and made to leave the room.

'I'll be going for my usual,' said Garth with a kind of wink at her in his inflection.

Five-mile jog? Aberystwyth BA (Hons)? Chicken and chips? Without staying to consider, Charlie got Peter out through the hall and on to the porch as soon as the coast was clear. The rain had packed up and there was a great tapping and plopping as what had already fallen dripped off the trees and the eaves of the houses. With the sky mostly clear now there was if anything more light than when they had arrived.

'Charlie,' said Peter as they stood at the top of the steps. 'I simply-'

'Yes, I know. Listen: I'm too drunk to drive and you're too, er, drunk to drive. As you mayor may not have noticed there's a pub on the top corner where we turned off. However gruesome its appointments it must sell drink and possess a telephone. While you're working on a very large whisky I'll mobilize Victor. Then sandwiches and our own bottle in the fiat at the Glendower and your car fetched. How about that, Major?'

'Oh... fine. I mean coming on top of... '

'Of course. Tell me later. Left at the gate, then eighty yards or so along to the corner. Not more.'

Nine - Peter

1

'That was Wi11iam,' said Peter. 'Not dressed yet. He says we're to go on and he'll see us at the church.'

'Hardly a bolt from the blue.' Muriel was moving a hat about on her head in front of her dressing-table. 'I can't remember having this out of the cupboard since the day the lad took his degree.' She turned lingeringly away from her reflection. 'Well, what do you think, then?'

Peter thought in general that most people seeing the two of them as a married couple would wonder what cruel fate had landed such a comparatively presentable female, still slim and well taken care of as to skin and hair, with such a bloated, beaten-up old slob. More to the purpose, he thought that the subtle fore-and-aft groove or corrugation in the crown of the hat gave it a slightly sat-on look. But that was not called for either. He concentrated his attention. 'Fine,' he said, widening his eyes and giving a succession of little nods. 'Fine.'

'Or there's this one. I'm not sure I've ever even had it on till now since the bloody shop.'

It was like a sturdy cake-frill in pale pink with a reinforced gauze or netting top. He nodded at it more slowly and judicially, finding no words.

'Which do you think is better?'

After a moment of the usual attempted clairvoyance he reminded himself sharply that the day might have come when, in defiance of all history, she was asking him what he thought because she wanted to know. Still no help. Trying not to smirk at his own cunning, he said, 'I suppose some of the women will be wearing hats, will they? I thought even for weddings it had more or less faded away. Of course I'm not much of a - '

'Oh, it's a dead duck in England, wearing hats. Never see them in London.'

'Well then... '

'Ah, but we're not in England.'

'I'm sure it would be perfectly all right. Nobody would object.'

'Well, I don't want to offend the native wives by flouting ancestral taboos.'

He bad thought that line quite funny on its first appearance about the time of Suez. 'I don't think you need worry. ' Rather to his regret she took off the cake-frill piece and laid it on the dressing-table. 'How do I look without it? Go on.'

'All right,' he said soberly. 'You look all right.' Yes, she had been going to do that all along.

'Good. That's settled that. Well, we'd better be getting...

'Oh, we've got a bit of time yet.'

'There's a case for being in position when you're expected to be.'

To hear this sentiment on Muriel's lips marginally astonished Peter, but he said nothing more than, 'Okay, well I'll go and bring the car round.. You come down when you're ready.'

As he almost ran down the stairs he affirmed internally that he must put top priority on pulling himself together. If he went on in that kind of strain, going off at tangents, giving brilliant imitations of a man who really wanted his wife to look her best and things like that, he would soon come to grief. From the moment early in the year when William had announced his intention to marry Rosemary Weaver, Peter had been given a new lease of life. Every time he thought of it he felt as if he had been reading a communiqué announcing a catastrophic defeat of the shits.

In the hall now, moving with exemplary speed for one of his weight and condition, he climbed up on the pseudo-Chippendale chair by the telephone and swung about just in time to fart with a kind of gulping sound into an enormous green and mauve face, rendered in a mixture of paint and filth, that hung from the side of the stairway. On descending, much elated, he spotted the necessary bottle of Famous Grouse in its place on the dresser in the kitchen. Spotting it was all that was needed. Without bothering about surely on this day of all days, etc., he took just one small quick nip and then just one more small quick nip. Irrelevantly, he remembered Charlie once informing him that ghillies or crofters or some such persons in the Scottish Highlands would drink regularly, as a matter of routine, a tumbler of whisky before setting out on the day's round, so at least Charlie had said as he put down a similar quantity to see him through their twenty-minute car-journey to a lawyers' piss-up in Welsh St Hilarys.

It was a fine bright morning in early March of the sort much more often recalled in these parts than actually met with, the air calm and mild along the whole of the coastal plain and inshore waters. On days like this gardeners recently in London, but not gardeners alone, would say how much further forward everything in Wales seemed to be: daffodils, rhododendrons, azaleas, even the sticky-buds on the chestnuts were two or three weeks ahead of what you saw in the London parks and squares. Low in the sky still, the sun made long shadows, casting a light no stronger than that on a summer's· evening, clear but not vivid, with a softness that would be gone by May. Cwmgwyrdd gleamed gently in the sunshine, and Peter, who had noticed the good weather, felt for a few moments that it was not such a hopelessly bad place to live as he let himself into the garage.

'Am I all right?' he asked Muriel when she came down into the hall.

'Quite suitable for the occasion.'

'I was thinking really of stains, you know, custard, chocolate, that kind of thing. There's not much else I can do anything about at this stage.'

'No, all clear. Tie could be tighter.'

Tightening it, he looked her over summarily and said, 'Much better without the hat, no doubt about it.'

They got into the car and drove towards town. He considered their exchange in the hall and some bits, at any rate, of the one in the bedroom just before. They had talked like that a good deal in past weeks, with studious normality, like an English couple in a socialist country, fearful of being eavesdropped upon, conspiring to be dull together. But there was a lot underneath that. When she asked him about the hats she had not looked at him, not really, not properly, any more than he had looked at her when he answered. His enjoyment of pans of the charade was r~ enough but had something hysterical in it. Time to play safe now.

'They couldn't have wished for a better day,' said Muriel.

'No rain forecast before tomorrow.'

'I think it's warm enough to sit out.'

'We'll have to see how it goes.'

And this little piggy cried wee, wee, wee all the way home. A run-through, thought Peter suddenly. A series of rehearsals for being parents-in-law, the very image or images of a decent, comfortable and above all ordinary old couple rather unexpectedly turned back into part of a family some time after anything of that sort had perceptibly lapsed. And of course merely to put on an in-law style when it seemed called for would be very slipshod and insecure; something more fundamental was required. To adapt the concept of the couple in Eastern Europe, this was the period of pre-drop training. On his mind's television screen Peter could see an MI6 man, one of the fashionable aloof but hot-eyed sort, saying he would have them thinking, feeling, dreaming like Darby and loan before they were through. And yes, the new style of talk, which was really only new in quantity, in proportion, had begun to be noticeable just about when or after William had told them he and Rosemary were going to get married.

'Well, now the day's here at last the whole thing seems to have happened rather suddenly,' said Muriel.

'Yes, I suppose it does in a way.'

'And isn't it extraordinary, we've hardly discussed it at all.'

'No, there wasn't a hell of a lot to discuss, really, was there?'

'And now it's too late, whatever conclusion we might come to.'

. For Peter, that exactly defined a signal superiority of this day over its predecessors. He said nevertheless, and not in pursuance of any intention of playing safe, 'Oh, I wouldn't be too sure of that. You'll agree we're still in Wales.'

'What are you talking about?'

'There were some people called Ungoed-Thomas over in Caerhays, related to a cousin of my father's I think. Anyway, there was a daughter there called Gladys, a couple of years older than me. Now Gladys had got hold of an American, can't think how she managed that in Caerhays in those days, but she had - this would have been 1937 or so. Well, it got to the point where Gladys was going to marry her American, and indeed it was all fixed up, ready to go. Haven't told you this story before, have I? No, so the night before the wedding a call comes from Gladys and my parents nip on the train for Caerhays - you could do that in those days. I wish I'd gone too. Would they use their influence to stop Gladys's mam stopping the wedding.'

'And did they?'

'Yes. Marvellous, those two being on the progressive - '

'What could she have done anyway, the old girl? How could she have stopped it?'

'I agree she couldn't have stopped it indefinitely, even in Caerhays in 1937, 'but she could have caused a large upset instead of just a small one. What was interesting was her reason for being against the American. He was an American.'

'I heard you.'

'No, I mean that was the reason. Why the old girl was against him, according to her anyway. Not that it isn't a pretty serious charge in general, but in fact this one was hilariously proper. Name of Foster, Ralph Foster. Funny how you remember things that are nothing to do with you. Professor of physics at Yale University he was. God knows what he'd find to do in Caerhays in 1987, let alone 1937. He was so proper he fell down dead of excitement at a baseball game not many years later, but Gladys was well settled in the States by then.'

After saying she heard him, Muriel had begun wriggling her torso over the back of her seat, arm extended from the shoulder towards a blue-and-white box of tissues on the rear shelf. Having captured it she pushed herself forwards again by degrees, almost rolling over laterally when the car took a fair-sized curve, and twisted round into her original position just as he finished with the baseball game. 'I'm listening,' she said.

'That's it.'

'What?' She pulled down the shade over the top part of the windscreen in front of her and stared at her reflection in the oblong of mirror there while she picked repeatedly. at the tissues. 'What, what's interesting about that?'

'Well. Scene from Welsh life. I thought you liked them. Caption, in Wales you never know.'

'You mean if I could think of something like that I'd try to put a stop to William marrying, what's-her-name, Rosemary, if there was just something I could come up with. Otherwise what's the point?'

'Oh, no. No, no. Of course you're as pleased as I am. Still, she was born in London, and I've noticed you've been getting really quite noticeably Welsh in your old age. I was staggered, quite frankly, when you said just now it was a good thing to be seen in your place on time. You couldn't hope for anything more Welsh than that, not off the cuff. Chapel you'd think we was going to.'

Beside him Muriel suddenly opened her mouth as wide as possible consistent with keeping her lips stretched over her teeth, perhaps in unspoken comment but more likely so as to get those parts of her face lined up for the application of the tissue she had now managed to wrest from its box. She still said nothing.

'Oh, er, what line would you have taken if we had discussed the marriage before today?'

'Nothing very much,' she said, going on peering, 'and after all there's no sense arguing about it now.'

Well no, no more than five minutes ago, and he had not really expected to hear how much she felt like killing him at the idea of a son of hers and her only child marrying the daughter of a woman her own husband would rather have married, and that just for a start. But he realized· that asking the question had been the latest spurt of the dangerous euphoria that had again possessed him. Take it _easy__, for God's sake. _Watch__ it.

After doing something undetectable to her mouth she put the tissue away and said, 'You've got quite saucy these last months. You know, cheeky.' She spoke in a tone of measured approbation more suitable to telling him he had shown signs of becoming well read or kind to animals.

And interfering with the body after death more than cursorily to pay him out for being pleased at something that displeased her. 'Yes, I probably have been a bit full of beans seeing William looking so happy.'

'It's not just that. It started before that. It was in full swing by Christmas.'

'Was it really? I can't think of anything to explain it,' he said without trying to at all.

If Muriel could think of something she kept it bottled up. They drove in silence over the old bridge, repaired now, past the rootless smelt-houses, through St Advent, past Victoria Station, up the Strand, past the Trevor Knudsen Fine Arts Museum, Marks & Spencer, the Glendower, the Royal Foundation of Wales, the cricket and rugby ground and the university and round by the hospital towards Holland.

'Peter,' said Muriel when they were a couple of minutes from the church: 'I'm selling the house.'

'What?'

'This time I mean it. Now William's settled, that's my last reason or excuse gone for banging on any longer round here. Yes, it's back to Middlesbrough for me, and if you care to come along too there'll be a bed for you at the end of the road. Now it could so be, sooner than shift to sunny Yorkshire or Cleveland or whatever it's called these days you'd prefer to go it alone here, under your own steam as it were. Well, I dare say that can be arranged. Entirely up to you.'

So much for the parade of cosy domesticity. Muriel had spoken with all her usual matter-of-factness, even perhaps a little more. It occurred to Peter that the presence of William and his best man-as first arranged would have made no real difference; she would have seen to it that he got the lot, or enough, some time or other before entering the church. This was now just round the corner and the early guests were on their way to it. He caught sight of old Owen Thomas and his family getting out of their car.

'There's no more to say,' she began again. 'These people may be good, they may be bad, and I'll not say I'm not fond of one or two of them, but they're not _my__ people, and I mean to do something about that while I've still time. So I'm checking out. The house goes on the market first thing Monday morning. And that's that. Okay? Understood? No appeals, no conditions, no stays of execution, no compromises, no practical alternatives. Final. Now I may be completely wrong again and you've been bursting to get shut of the place since whenever, but if I'm not wrong I'll give you one piece of advice. Start getting used to the idea right away. If I were you I'd go left here and park in the Holland Court car-park.'

'Go and...'

'Nobody uses it much this time of day.'

So it turned out, but Muriel had barely had time to take up groom's-mother station at Peter's side before they were fairly among old Tudor Whittingham and his wife and son and daughter and son-m-law and two grandchildren and married sister and niece whom he hoped it was all right for him to have brought along only they were staying with them. There was more, much more, all the way to the church and on the broad asphalted walk surrounding it. Some, like Percy and Dorothy, Malcolm and Gwen, old Vaughan Mowbray and his arthritic lady-friend, a few dimly remembered figures from university, industry, Golf Club, various youngsters identifiably or presumably connected with William, came and went; others, like Garth, Sian Smith, Arnold and toffee-nose Eirwen Spurling and two quite independent funereally-dressed couples, unknown, silent and demoralizing, came and stayed around. No family of either parent were to be seen. Muriel's of course were all in England, and evidently staying there; Peter had two brothers living, but these days he hardly knew as much as where.

Grimly, with an air of putting down any nonsense about celebration, an attendant removed the two of them and escorted them inside - at the last moment Peter spotted Rhiannon coming in at the churchyard gate and waved, but was not sure if she saw. The small delay provoked the man into an impatient jerk of the head, a bit of a risk in view of the glossy pudding-basin wig he wore on it. His general bearing suggested that he thought he had come to a funeral. If he did he was not deviating all that far from the spirit of a good slice of the congregation, who stared pessimistically at the groom's parents as they passed, on full alert for hiccup or tell-tale stumble. They reached the front pew without offence, though, shuffling in beside Charlie and Sophie.

As far as he could remember, Peter had never been in here before. Enough sun came through the unstained parts of the stained glass to make the place look bright and very clean, like new, in fact. The light-coloured woodwork seemed familiar, personal to him in some way, and presently he realized that it reminded him of the kind of furniture, said to have been Scandinavian in inspiration, that had been fashionable when he and Muriel got married.

Having reached him by a side route, thoughts of that time and what had followed it, up to and including today, proved impossible to drive off. They were not so much thoughts as a confusion of memories and feelings. The memories were powerful but misty and spread over, with Angharad and Rhiannon in them as well as Muriel and a mass of all-but-forgotten faces and places he could not have named. Of his feelings the two foremost ones were remorse and self-pity. Well as he knew them both, he had never learnt how to deal with them, and he stood and sat in his place now vainly trying to see past them to his son's marriage ceremony, which he had been looking forward to a dozen times a day since first hearing it was to come about, and which he had determined to take in and value minute by minute. Instead, what was happening in front of him took the short cut and went straight into the past to blend in with everything else. As usual in these last years.

He went through most of the service in a state similar in important respects to boredom. At the same time, screened off as he was from the centre of the picture he still managed to catch on to details at the edges. So he heard the congregation singing - no choir, naturally, because somebody was on holiday or had just thought of something better to do and found it puny, thickened by men singing the air, some of them an octave low half the time, the whole performance to be defended only as far as it showed any English present how wrong they would have been to expect anything out of the ordinary from singing Welshmen in the flesh as opposed to on television. Or so he might have said if he could have been bothered. Charlie stood out quite a bit from the mess, in tune and probably accurate with the bass in the hymns and making a good shot in the psalm - much more testing. Peter found he could remember him years ago sneaking off to practices with some secular choir in Harriston or Emanuel, promising to be back by half-nine at latest to sink propitiatory pints.

He noticed that the ceremony was performed by two or more clerics and that they wore embroidered vestments of some white material, not cotton. Parts of the service were chanted. Peter had started to welcome these touches of High as likely to affront some parts of the congregation when he saw that a subordinate figure he had mistaken for an effeminate boy was actually a female, a young woman, not a bad-looking one either. Oh _Christ__. He had come to think that almost the whole point of Wales these days was that you were going to be spared that kind of thing, for the time being at least. He was overcome by a great weariness, a longing to be done with everything, but in a couple of moments that too passed. Then right at the end, when William and his bride were supposedly being blessed, he found Muriel's hand groping for his and made out a tear-track on her averted cheek. He put this down as all part of the performance, but it was impossible not to grasp her hand, and to be on the safe side he at once ran up a we1l-dis~ look in case she should turn her head, though this soon turned out not to be needed.

2

The organ sounded out with Mendelssohn: there in the loft was one man (or of course woman now, bugger it) who had not taken the day off. As he passed down the aisle William glanced towards his parents. Without seeming to do anything at all with any part of his face he conveyed unmistakably to Peter a cheerfully hangdog confession of surrender but of surrender none the less; Peter wondered suddenly what he thought his mother thought of his marriage and his wife. Rhiannon gave a smile, too friendly to be called impersonal and yet still not personal. It was time to move. Those still in their pews stared at Peter as before, with no hint of having been appeased by what had taken place in the meantime.

'Well, I reckon we done the young couple very tasteful,' said Charlie. 'I don't know about you, I wouldn't presume to presume, but I could do with a' drink.'

These words, or the manner in which they were spoken, made Peter look at him for a moment. He said, 'Yes, me too.'

Charlie grinned briefly. 'Bad as that, eh? It's these bloody new sleeping-pills of Dewi's. Finest thing out, he says, no systemic effects, you know, like actually getting the system off to sleep. Well, we'll get it off tonight all right. Look, if you want to slip away later we could have a couple down at the Glendower. I'll be there in any case. Just one stipulation. Don't bring Garth. On this happy day... this day of typically Welsh family feeling and good fellowship... our thoughts naturally turn... to stringing up Garth Pumphrey, FRCVS, outside the Bible. Jesus, there he is.'

'Somebody's got to say all those things.'

'Oh no they haven't. Well wait a minute, perhaps they have. There's an awful lot of filling-in to be done in life, isn't there?'

'Anyway he has one great virtue, young Garth, as you pointed out some time ago. When he's around you know for a certainty you're not going to run into Angharad.'

'When did I say that? I hope at least I said it lightly. I'm sorry, Peter.'

'Nonsense, you were quite right. You spoke better than you knew. And never more applicable than today.'

'I suppose so.' Charlie looked seriously at his feet as they halted in the porch. 'She'd have been nothing but a... ' He started on another word and stopped.

'Skeleton at the feast, yes. Oh dear. Once again, very well put. You know, it's a funny thing... '

'What is? I think I can - '

'Just, ever since that evening at Garth's I've had the-'

'I'll see you down at the house. But... '

They were being borne onwards and outwards into the sunshine among hurrying or resisting bodies and there was not going to be much more of this conversation. Sophie and Dorothy were near, Sophie not looking at anyone, silent, possibly tearful, Dorothy clutching a leather handbag that might have held a baby's cricket-bat and pads and wearing something of which it could be said with certainty only that it was lime-green and that she had made it herself. Charlie backed Peter into a minor angle of the stonework and gave a muted yelp as his ankle hit a boot-scraper.

'Er... there's something it would be good if you'd say to Rhiannon if you get a chance to talk to her alone.'

'Yes?' said Peter, pretty sure he knew what it was, his mind still on the events at Garth's.

'You know Victor and I are doing the reception, well for one reason and another we want to charge her the full rate on paper, so to speak, but she'll get a rebate in the post next month which she needn't acknowledge, okay?'

'Oh, marvellous,' said Peter, laughing a good deal at the imaginative poverty of his guess. 'Absolutely spiffing.'

'I mean Victor, we thought it might come better from you. If you would.'

'I'll make a point of it.'

'Cheers. See you there.' Charlie reached for a passing lapel and was gone.

Alone for a space, Peter had time to look without much engrossment at the dozens of people hanging about on the well-kept lawn and paths, searching for one another with heads raised or drifting uncertainly away, William standing with friends of his, Rosemary with friends of hers, younger couples being pulled this way and that by children, older couples consisting usually of a more or less apathetic old boy and vigilant, questing old girl with glasses and hat yes, hat, nothing to do with the wedding as like as not, just part of the uniform - solitaries wondering what on earth had possessed them to come, Rhiannon in grey with whit~ collar and cuffs along by the gate next to Alun's very fat and unsmiling brother who had come down from London to give the bride away, and hemmed in by Breconshire aunts and cousins and such, but at the moment speaking hesitantly into a microphone held out by a squat man in a white raincoat while a photographer circled round her - all this, as far as it went, Peter contemplated, until a well-known voice was heard.

'Tell us now, when's the baby coming then?' Although Garth's voice was quite well known in some quarters he sounded at the moment more like a Welsh comedian than usual.

'There isn't one, I mean not yet as far as I know,' said Peter, wishing he could drop easily into character like Charlie and the others.

'Awh! Reely! Well, there's posh for you.'

'There's _swank__,' corrected Tudor Whittingham at Garth's side. Tudor had somehow managed to shed his followers for the time being and kept looking round to make sure they stayed shed. His amazing lack of surplus flesh allowed full visibility to the spare, narrow frame that had stood him in such good stead as a squash player in the remote past. Its narrowness was extended upwards to his skull, which all generations had pronounced inadequate for an adequate amount of brain without compression of some sort. He had been Tudor Totem-Bonce in the form above Peter at the Grammar.

'Posh or swank, same difference,' said Garth. Then his manner changed abruptly and he went on to Peter at reduced volume, 'Tare was saying last night he hoped you'd come in today for a bit if you had the time. You haven't been in much since poor Alun went, have you?' He rolled a mournful bardic eye at Peter.

'No. No, I suppose I haven't.'

'No, well we miss you there, Peter. I know Tare does particularly. He feels rotten about that evening still, throwing us all out neck and crop. It's not that he feels responsible at all for... what happened later; I think I've talked him out of that. It's more that it grieves him that he and Alun parted for the last time on such bad terms. Was that your impression, Tudor?'

'No question. No question whatever.'

'Of course he never seriously meant we should take all our gear away. Temper, that was. He as good as admitted it when I went round the next morning. Perhaps I told you.'

Addressing Peter, but obviously reproaching Garth for the omission as well, Tudor said, 'I thought it was a lovely service and the young people looked absolutely radiant and I hope they'll be very happy.'

'Oh yes. Oh yes.' Garth intimated that between him and Peter that side of things was taken for granted. 'Yes, old Tarc really respected poor Alun. I reckon everybody did. Mind you, there's not a man who's ever walked this earth who didn't give those around him something to put up with. But taking him for all in all he was the best of fellows really, wasn't he?'

Somebody has to say it, thought Peter. 'Yes, I suppose he was.' The words drew a look of puzzled incredulity from Tudor.

'Actually,' Garth went on, 'actually not everybody did respect him if the truth were told. Remember that article in the _Western Mail__, that so-called appreciation? Nasty. Curmudgeonly is what I'd call it. Thoroughly curmudgeonly. Oh, and did you see that reference in a _Times__ review, was it, the other day? Oh yes - wait a minute.' His hand moved towards his breast pocket but stopped before it got there. 'No, I've filed it. Er... he could be called a follower of Brydan if that were not taken to imply a certain degree of strength and vital... something. Very nasty. I'll get it copied and send it you.'

Tudor said with some determination, 'William and Rosemary going away for a bit, are they?'

Though ready and willing with a reply Peter never gave it, being instantly hiked off to be photographed. He hoped Tudor thought he was getting his money's-worth out of having dumped his family.

There was a line-up in the sunshine with backs to the church wall. Peter had been for sidling into his place at the end next to Muriel, but embraces were called for, not of course with the unsmiling brother, who unsmilingly nodded and that was that, nor with Muriel. She smiled, though, but not for long, which was just as well. He was not going to start digging all that over. There was one thing to be said at any rate: neither he nor anyone else could have done anything about it, probably ever. Who had used almost those very words to him not so long ago, and about what or whom?

For some minutes three or four photographers, one a woman or girl, all showing in their clothing and hair structure what some might have seen as an unhealthy disrespect for stuff like weddings, huddled the six principals together with no result, spread them apart again, brought some forward, waved others away with sudden backhand sweeps. Nor was it lost on Peter that advances in science meant they took ten times as many photographs as would once have been found necessary and shaped up to take twice that number. It was easier for them like that, he inferred, more fun too, licitly buggering a set of strangers about. Quite understandable. Do it himself if he had the chance.

Eventually the consensus emerged that it would be unnecessary or perhaps futile to prolong the photographic session, which faded away without anything being said on either side. Soon afterwards removal to the Weaver house was set going, a matter of a couple of hundred yards on foot. As if the manoeuvre had been organized beforehand Muriel drifted across, thrust one arm through William's and the other round Rosemary's waist and seemed to swing them both through a semicircle towards the gate. With an advance six or more abreast pretty well ruled out, Peter found himself in a second rank between Alun's brother, said on their very brief first meeting the previous night to be called Duncan, and his suddenly manifest wife, who had glasses and a hat with the best of them and very red lips and abnormally long teeth thrown in.