The Old Devils

On the far side of the gateway Rhiannon was with an aunt or cousin or so and Peter was stuck, irremovably as it turned out, with these in-laws of hers. He had always thought of himself as a cool head in a situation like that, not for the life of him to be driven into speaking first. Nevertheless after four minutes of total silence, the last three of them spent standing in a row at no particular point on the pavement, there he was asking the wife whether she and, er, Duncan proposed staying over until the following day or whether, on the other hand, they would be returning to London that same evening.

She turned to face him hungrily. 'Oh, we've got to get back, no two ways about it,' she said in an accent from somewhere not very nice in England. 'I tell you, it took all of everybody's time getting him to come away for just the one night.'

'Business responsibilities, I suppose.' Peter dimly remembered something about a finance company or building society.

'You're joking. They're a thing of the past, they are, it's getting on for four years now,' she said with gloomy relish. 'No, it's just he won't be moved if he can help it. What he's doing now, Mr Thomas, he's giving them a chance to get settled where we're going, you see, so he can just sneak in there without any of them saying anything to him.'

'Quite,' said Peter, turning his eyes but not his head towards Duncan, who was making rhythmical puffing noises and rocking to and fro where he stood.

'Or so he thinks to himself. He doesn't like being spoken to because people expect him to say things back. That's why he doesn't look very friendly. I tell him he wants to wear a hearing-aid, everybody knows better than try and talk to a person wearing one of them, but he won't. Just draw attention, he says.' She turned back her gold-inwoven cuff. 'Christ, that's long enough to get your grandmother and Mrs Brown settled.' Facing her husband now, she said in a tremendously loud voice with a lot of facial activity, out of sight from Peter but audible enough in her speech, 'We'd better get moving, Dad. They'll be wondering where we've got to. Come on, old boy. There.'

She did plenty of pointing into the middle distance while she was saying this. Duncan nodded and got moving. The three of them crossed the road to the corner of the lane that led to their destination.

'I don't know why I still shout at him like that. Just habit.

The nerves have gone, you see, both sides, so whatever you do he'll never hear anything. Virus, I think they said. Oh yes. Rhiannon did tell you, did she?' Duncan's wife mispronounced the name without any suggestion that it was unfamiliar to her. 'I mean she did mention it.'

Like enough, indeed. 'Yes,' said Peter.

'There's not a fat lot he can get up to if you follow me. He can't face learning the lip-reading and that sign language, everyone does it different, he says, no rhyme nor reason to it. There's the subtitles though, on TV. He likes his food all right, as you can see from his... ' She paused for the first time but went on firmly, 'You know I feel a pig dragging him all this way and running him into all these people he doesn't know, but I'd go potty if I didn't get a break once in a while.'

'Of course you must,' he made himself say. 'That's quite reasonable and normal.'

At Rhiannon's front gate they halted again, Duncan prompted by his wife's hand on his shoulder. She said, 'Take my advice, Mr Thomas, and don't go deaf. Well, it's been nice talking to you. He's a lovely boy, that William. Now you go off and enjoy yourself. We'll be along in a minute.' Duncan gave a not quite unsmiling nod of farewell and thanks for not having said anything to him.

Inside the house the first person Peter saw was Gwen, her head at an offensive angle as she listened to whatever some tall, dignified old ninny in an injudicious green suit might have been trying to tell her; a cousin of Malcolm's, perhaps. It was easy to imagine her frowning and leering interestedly over the account of the conversation with Duncan's wife she was never going to be given. Peter looked round for Charlie, failed to spot him and made for the bar, a trestle table with a really seriously snowy white tablecloth spread over it and loaded with bottles, an astonishingly high proportion of which seemed to hold soft drinks; not all of them, however. The ruddy-faced girlish youngster from the cocktail bar at the Glendower was doling out the stuff, with great efficiency as it proved. Another class of youngster sat round-shouldered on a folding metal chair against the wall. His face was not at all ruddy and his collar was undone. Good going for the time of day, thought Peter.

His only slightly delayed arrival had in fact given time for a large part of the crowd to get settled here or there, dozens of them in the garden all exclaiming at the warmth of the day and knocking back their drinks at a speed that, if maintained, would quite quickly stretch them out in the herbaceous border. He observed the scene from the step outside the french window and very soon picked up Muriel's rear view by her stooped head and clumping gait. With a couple of William's presumed friends, who stood not less than thirteen foot tall between them, she was strolling along the edge of the lawn and, just as he noticed her, she half turned to run a superior eye over what was growing - nothing very much, perhaps - in the nearby bed. She let her gaze linger, making quite sure things were as bad as they had looked at first glance, then snatched it apologetically away, both in a style he felt sure he would have recognized with an inward yell of loathing at ten times the range. Seeing it, seeing it unseen, catching the old bitch out even on such a puny scale, was as good as a stiff one.

He was turning away to refill his glass, which in the last minute had mysteriously emptied itself, when he caught sight of Rhiannon not far off, nearer than Muriel had been.

She was one of a group of a dozen women and some men apparently in a single noisy conversation, glances switching from one speaker to another, all briskly absorbed. Sophie was among them, Sian too, and a couple more he knew by sight, but who were the others? Well, for God's sake, who do you think they are, you bloody old fool- _friends of hers__, see, he notified himself carefully. What else would they be? But why should it need realizing? Because he had forgotten, if he had ever begun to understand, how small a part people played in others' lives and how little they knew about them, even if they saw them every day. Between Alun's death and this morning he had thought many times, several times anyway, about Rhiannon and her life, about how she managed for company with Sophie, Sian, Gwen, Dorothy, Muriel for Christ's sake - none of them exactly her type, he had thought since much longer ago and no doubt with more besides, her daughters, London friends. What he was looking at gave him some idea. Not much even now. He would have said he had forgotten about love too, but just for the moment he would have had to admit there had been a few weeks once when somebody else had' played a very large part in his life and he had known a great deal about her, until the rest of the world came swimming back.

He had to wait a minute or two at the bar, where Victor now presided, while a wave of refills was dealt with. In the interval he saw a man with a moustache nudge a man with a wholly different moustache and pass the word about himself, a word that must have left out the information that he was the sort of old buffer you could just go up to and say hallo to like that and, you know, that would be fine. Before it came to his turn, Victor reached over someone's shoulder and passed him a major Scotch and water with a flourish that said any possible Alun-related bygones were indeed bygones, and oh by the way don't forget that little message to Rhiannon. The unruddy youngster had departed but he was soon accosted by a different one in the shape of the bridegroom.

'Dad, where have you been hiding?'

'Out in the open. Too big to be seen.'

'Come on, come and meet the blokes.'

The blokes were not far away, about five strides from the drink, in fact, and Peter felt he did pretty well with them, considering. He was touched and impressed by the unobtrusive production William put into this event, letting him feel he was meeting all or most of. them while nursing him through with a couple of talkative reliables. Mter a time William said to him, with no fear of being overheard in the ambient uproar, 'She's a marvellous girl, you know. Or do you know? She says she's hardly seen anything of you over these weeks, I mean before today.'

'Yes, well, there sort of hasn't been a hell of a lot of, er... '

'No. Anyway she is. I expect you've heard it said that it's absolutely marvellous when somebody's very difficult to get to know and to get on with at first, and then when you do get to know them it's somehow much better than, well, if it hadn't been like that. Eh?'

'Yes. I mean I have heard it said.'

'So have I, and I suppose it might be right, but I must say personally it sounds pretty fair balls to me. Anyway, the point is that's exactly how it wasn't with Rosemary and me. Absolutely no snags or problems of any kind at any stage right from the start. My God, I've just realized it was love at first sight. Doesn't that sound ridiculous?'

'No,' said Peter.

There was a short pause while William took a considered sip of champagne instead of alluding to his parents' marriage, then or now. 'Anyway, she's a marvellous girl. You'd better find her quick if you're going to. We're nipping off right after the speeches. Don't want to get caught up with all these drunken bastards.'

'No, you certainly don't want to do that.'

'I think I might be a bit pissed myself actually. Look, we'll see you as soon as we get back. Really we will. I'm sorry I haven't done anything about it before when I said I was going to, just before I first met Rosemary, do you remember?'

'Oh, was that that day?'

'That was rather the point I'm afraid, meeting Rosemary I mean. It sort of drove everything else out.'

'Yes, I know the feeling. Well, I expect you're-'

'How are you, Dad? I've hardly seen you all this time.'

'I'm all right. I'm better. Those pains I mentioned seem to have, well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.'

'I gather you were there then, well, when he went off.'

'Yes. It's an awful thing to say in away, but I absolutely sailed through that bit.'

'Must have been a shock at the time, though. Pretty horrible.'

'It was a rather raw occasion all round.'

William extended his arm with military smartness to present his glass to the circling champagne-bottle. 'Well, at least I shan't have him to deal with.'

'He didn't need a lot of dealing with. Not if you weren't married to him.'

'Well, yeah. Frightful shit, wasn't he? I hardly knew him, of course.'

'I suppose so. The longer I go on the harder it gets to say that about anybody. Himmler, well certainly. Eichmann, that type of chap. Of course he did leave a certain amount to be desired in the way of friendship, Alun, I mean. Bloody Welshman, you see.'

'You really are okay, then? There's really nothing wrong?' asked William., looking hard at his father.

Peter returned the look. 'Nothing whatever, I promise you. Now you're quite right, I'd better track down your wife while there's still time. Have a word before you go finally.'

'Last time I saw her she was in the garden with my mother-in-law. Jesus Christ.'

By now they had moved to the dining-room, where there was an extensive spread of cold ham, veal-and-ham pie, English-style sausages and Continental-style sausage. Also on view were bowls of unadventurous salad and, more to the purpose, an array of pickled onions in three colours, pickled walnuts, pickled gherkins in two sizes, pickled beetroot, four kinds of chutney, three kinds of mustard, six kinds of bottled sauce, in other words a meal plumb in the middle of the genuine Welsh tradition, remarkably complete too barring only the omission of tinned fruit. Banks of sandwiches and uncountable cheeses stood in reserve and most flat surfaces within normal reach carried at least one opened bottle of Victor's special-price red or ditto white. Either or both of these would go down a treat after a few quick glasses of champagne and four or five large gin and tonics and in company with salami, mustard pickle, garlic bread, corona-sized spring onions and watercress. Victor himself stood at the head of the table dealing out plates and cutlery and trying to awaken some sense of order in the talkative rout that had started shambling up to be fed.

After pushing past and through them Peter made his way as indicated to the garden. The general drift towards food had reached back as far as here and the last few figures were slowly converging on the french window. Rosemary was one, but he sent her no more than a glance of apology before almost clutching Rhiannon at her side.

'Can I talk to you privately? I've got a message for you.'

'Nothing awful, is it?'

'No, not in the least. I just want to talk to you for a couple of minutes.'

When they had moved thirty or forty yards away from the house she turned and faced him, smiling but still uneasy.

'Charlie asked me to tell you he and Victor are charging the full price for today but you'll get a refund they don't want you to acknowledge.'

She waited a moment and then said, 'Oh. What's that in aid of?'

'I can't imagine. Something to do with the office, probably. Some fiddle or other. I've no idea.'

'Oh. That's not all, is it?'

'No, it isn't, there's another message. This one's from Alun. No, it's all right - not awful at all, I promise you.' When she just stood very still he went on, 'Immediately before he died, in those few seconds, he said something, only a couple of words, but quite clearly. He said, "Little thing". Charlie must have heard too but I doubt whether he understood, but I feel I did. Alun was thinking of you, he was speaking to you.' Peter wanted to take her hand, but lacked confidence to do so. 'He was sending you his love before he died.'

'Might have been,' said Rhiannon. 'Perhaps he was. He used to call me... ' Her mouth and chin moved in a way that recalled her youthful self to him more sharply and unexpectedly than anything he had yet seen. Then her eyes steadied on him. 'That's still not all, is it?'

'It's all I've got about him, but if you wouldn't mind just…'

'Hang on a minute. Stay there.'

He watched her hurrying back up the lawn to where Rosemary and another young woman still stood near the windows. After a moment he realized this must appear inquisitive of him and quickly turned his head away. The movement brought his eyes to a triangle of grass the sun had missed and left apparently still damp with dew. Beyond it, in the sunlight, a dishevelled brownish butterfly was clinging to the boundary fence and stirring feebly. Much further off, woodland flecked with thin greenery ran from one side to the other and out of sight.

When Rhiannon came back she said, staring over Peter's shoulder and speaking in a monotone, 'Thank you for telling me that. Don't mind if we don't say any more now. Can't really talk about him properly yet. But it was nice of you to tell me.'

She waited again and it dawned on him that he had almost no idea of how to start or where he wanted to get to. 'You are staying on here, aren't you, are you? Or are you... '

'Yes, for a bit anyway. I'll probably have to find somewhere smaller in the end. Round here, though. Rosemary and William'll be moving to London, but I don't - '

'Really? When? He hasn't said anything about it to me.'

'Perhaps he doesn't know yet. In the autumn. It's for the Bar, you see, for Rosemary.' Rhiannon's expression appealed to Peter not to question her about the Bar.

'Of course. But wouldn't it make sense for you to move there too? You've lived there for so many years.'

'Not now I'm back here. Now I'm here again I want to stay. You probably think that sounds silly - I've heard you go on about the awful - '

'It may sound silly but it isn't. You can't explain it.'

'Not to anybody who isn't Welsh you can't, or even talk about it.'

'Not to the Welsh either. Not to them, of all people.

Wales is a subject that can't be talked about. Unless you're making a collection of dishonesty and self-deception and sentimental bullshit. That's all you ever hear.'

She said hopefully, 'But it makes sense when you think about it, to yourself. It's all right then.'

'Yes it is. Indeed it is, but only then.'

'M'm. So you think it's quite sensible' on the whole to hang on. You would if you were me.'

He hesitated. She was looking at him in another special way of hers, affectionate, attentive, troubled, the way she had looked at him just before he told her that final abject lie, that there was nothing wrong between them and she was still the only one for him. Over her shoulder now he saw Rosemary, no doubt under orders, step out and head off the nearer approach of one of the hatted females from indoors, stacked lunch-plate at chest level. In sudden agitation he asked himself how long it would take a particular hatless female to miss him and Rhiannon from the party and scurry to find and fuck up. He said in something of a rush, 'Well, that's really what I wanted to talk to you about. Muriel says William getting married means she can leave Wales as she's always wanted, or does now, I don't know, and go back to Yorkshire. When she said that, she hadn't heard he was off to London either or she'd certainly have mentioned it. Well, I'll have to go too, to Yorkshire. I don't want to, I don't want to leave any more than you do, I've lived here all my life. And it's more than that, as you say. But I just can't think of anything else to do. The house and everything else all belong to her and I haven't got a bean. A pension that would keep me in cornflakes.

It doesn't sound very high-minded, I know, but it's a bit of a struggle being high-minded when you're hard up and pushing seventy.'

'But you wouldn't be able to stand it,' she said in open dismay.

'I'll have to. It's not sort of uniformly appalling. Some of the time we struggle along more or· less all right. Six of one and half a dozen of the other. '

'Oh, really? Funny, I've never known anything to be that. It's just a thing people say.'

'To sound decent. Yes.' .

Rhiannon shook her head impatiently to recall herself to the point. 'She'll change her mind. It's a big step at her age.'

'No she won't. Not after saying it the way she did, with dates and things. I know her. Take it from me, there's nothing for it.' He said with great emphasis and finality, 'I hate everything about it, but I'll have to go.'

'But you can't. I mean I thought we were going to start seeing each other again. You'd said you'd ring me up but you never did.'

'I did mean to but when it came to it I couldn't face it. Me, not you.'

'But I thought by about now you might be thinking it would be all right to. With the children getting married and everything. To each other, I mean. I was so hoping you would.'

'After everything I've done? After the way I treated you?'

'Yes. It was losing you I minded. The other didn't matter really, not after a bit. Didn't I tell you that time, we'd been to the Golf Club party? You can't have been listening. God alive, perhaps I didn't really say it. Anyway, I meant to tell you you'll always be... I can't say it now either.

It used to be so easy. Now, it's like talking about Wales.'

Slowly, to give her time to back off if she felt like it, and furtively, so that Rosemary and the others should not see, Peter reached out his hand. Rhiannon gripped it. Furtively again, he looked at her and saw that she was trying to look at him. Yes, she had changed: not the direct confident glance now.

'Let me try. Though you might well not think so,' he said with care, 'and there was certainly a time when I forgot it myself, I've always loved you and I do to this day. I'm sorry it sounds ridiculous because I'm so fat and horrible, and not at all nice or even any fun, but I mean it. I only wish it was worth more.'

'Ring me up. This time.' With her back half turned she said, 'I'm sorry, but I can't talk any more now.'

'I've got so much to tell you.'

He again watched her retreating, moving hardly any faster than earlier, certainly not running. One of her distinctions from other females had always been that she only ran to catch buses and such, not to let the world know about her wild free spirit or alternatively the coruscating wave of emotion that for the moment enfolded her. At her approach Rosemary released a foolish-looking black dog whose collar she had been holding. It jumped up at her in an ungainly fashion, half fell over itself on landing and followed her into the house.

Peter did the same at a greater distance, feeling very much drunker than he had ever felt in his life before, or something. By the time he got to the food most of it had been swept away, the main body of it at least, but back-ups were still in place. He found the sandwiches excellent, especially the cheese-and-pickle and the egg-and-tomato, more especially still with plenty of Vin Rouge de Pays to help them past his teeth, and he silently undertook never again to underrate Victor, as he was conscious of having done in days gone by. But he commented aloud on the merit of the sandwiches.

'First-rate Sandwiches these,' he said. 'Especially the egg-and-pickle. '

'Don't seem to have come to those yet myself,' said Garth.

Peter had started on Dundee cake and Founders Reserve port when the word came that the speeches would begin in five minutes. Instantly, as intended, all those with elderly bladders, or as many as were capable of responding, made for the toilets. Others went or were there too. From among a small crowd round the one outside the kitchen Peter identified Percy Morgan.

'Marvellously happy occasion,' he told him.

'Oh, I should just about think it is, boy.' Percy was perhaps a little startled to hear· this from Peter about anything. 'Seems very nice, your new daughter-in-law. I've seen a bit of her, you know, with her mother. No nonsense about her, oh no by George. Never took to the father, I tell you frankly. Never much cared, myself, for people who laid it on thick about the Welsh heritage and all that. I don't know whether you agree with me, Peter, but as I see it that kind of thing is, well it can be a trifle embarrassing, you know, if it's overdone.'

'Oh absolutely, I was saying just now - '

'I'll stay for the speeches, of course, and then I think I'll be cutting along. It certainly takes you back, this lot, eh?'

'You mean the - '

'Well, queueing up for a piss. Takes you back to nights out after rugger. Takes me back, anyway. She went off it in a week fiat after one chat with Dewi.'

There had been so little apparent pause between this remark and the previous one that Peter wondered whether he might have passed out on his feet for a few seconds. 'Oh yes,' he said, doing his best to smile encouragingly.

'Liver,' said Percy. 'Another couple of months the way she was going and - ' he passed the edge of his hand across his throat and gave a loud palatal exhalation. 'Of course, her being off it, I'm glad for her, but it leaves me a bit up in the air. I used to be the bloke with this impossible wife who was bloody magnificent about her, that was what I did, so what do I do now she's possible again all of a sudden?'

'Yes, I can see that. I think I'll try upstairs.'

Upstairs Peter found waiting Sian Smith, Duncan Weaver and another man he was nearly sure he was supposed to know, had even perhaps invited. It seemed to him reasonable, and also enterprising, to go up a further flight to the top floor. Here a passage ran the width of the building, at the far end of which he was just in time to glimpse a half-naked white-haired female with a garment or two over her arm dashing across and out of sight. A door shut and a bolt clicked. After a moment another door opened and the face of old Vaughan Mowbray peered out and turned in his direction, and after another moment, occupied by mutual astonishment, drew back again. On the whole Peter felt he might as well go back to the floor below.

He found the situation there unchanged, except that Sian had moved over to the landing window and was leaning across the sill, presumably in quest of fresh air. He presumed otherwise when he was near enough to pick up the noises she was making. Duncan Weaver also had his eyes on her, more casually though; with his deafness he had no call to shift from the fresh-air presumption. Simultaneously the second fart of Peter's day rang out - from Duncan it had to be, unless the other man's start, glare and forceful rattling at the door-handle were the work of a consummate actor. Peter contemplated briefly the strangeness of a world without sound.

There was still a queue near the kitchen, though with different people in it, but now he came to think of it there was a little cloak-room place by the front door which he had not yet tried. In mid-transit he was again perfectly placed to catch old Arnold Spurting and the best man quite turbulently hustling the Levantine-moustached Tony Bainbridge along the hall and out of the house. Before the fellow was lost to view Peter saw him mouthing curses and shaking his fist in an old-fashioned way.

The speeches came and went. Drinking continued until suddenly there was nothing to put in your glass, not even wine. Victor was having the whole lot collected, stowed in cartons, carried out to a small off-white van. One moment Peter was in a group, the next alone with Rosemary - Rosemary Thomas, as she now was and as he addressed her a couple of times.

'I gather you're going to be seeing something of my mother,' she said. Her ears had fuller lobes than Rhiannon's.

'Am I? I mean of course I am, but how do you know?'

'She told me.' Rosemary looked him in the eye and said not altogether seriously, but quite seriously enough, 'Now you behave yourself, right?'

'What? How do you mean?'

'I mean don't misbehave.'

'What? How could I do that?'

'Any pal of Alun's could find a way. On today's showing - no problem. No, I mean severely misbehave. Like let her down. If you do, William and I will kill you, okay? Oh Peter, I don't think you've met Catriona Semple, also reading law at Oxford. Catriona, this is my father-in-law.'

Ten - Malcolm

'How's she getting on up there?'

Gwen turned one of the neatly written pages. 'Oh, having a whale of a time, it appears. Dinner-parties every night, house never empty, weekends in the country. Country? What country?'

'It's quite a big place, actually, the size of here. She must still know a great many people locally, some of them pretty well off I shouldn't be surprised, even in these days of industrial havoc.'

'Muriel never kept up with them much as far as I heard.

Anyway, there she is. The theatre, what's she talking about? In Middlesbrough? It can't be the theatre as _civilized folk__ think of it. Racing? Is there a course somewhere in that region?'

'Sorry, no idea,' said Malcolm, smiling and spreading his hands. 'Not my department.'

'No, I realize that, no, I just thought you might happen to know. Whippet-racing perhaps she means.'

'Well, it's good to hear that she seems to be doing reasonably well.'

'It says something for her pride that she exerts herself to give that impression.'

'I'm afraid I'm not quite with you.'

'If you want my opinion, she's protesting too much.

Life's not turning out to be much fun, how could it in a hole like that, but she's buggered if she's going to let anyone think she's made a mistake. Very roughly.'

'Maybe, I suppose.' Malcolm tried to sound about half convinced. 'What does she say about Peter?'

'Nothing very much. She's surer than ever she was right to make the break when she did, exactly what she said before, er, oh and if you see Peter tell the lazy sod to drop her a line. Underplaying it there, you see.'

'She must miss him a lot in spite of everything.'

'It's not him she misses, for Christ's sake, it's having a husband as a social seal of quality. And then, well, she doesn't like him not being there in another way, because he still belongs to her really. Some women don't like parting with anything on their inventory even when they've no further use for same.'

'You're amazing, the way you see things. I'd never have been able to penetrate that far into her motives.' He missed the sharp look these remarks drew from Gwen and went tentatively on, 'But you don't visualize her coming back.'

She gave a restrained sigh and said, 'Peter's more likely to go there than she is to admit she was wrong in letters nine feet high, and that's it. Mind if I take first knock in the bathroom?'

'You go ahead.'

Left alone, Malcolm poured a last cup of tea and lit his daily cigarette. Putting aside the _Western Mail__ for later he noticed a section headed 'Welsh News', a mere quarter of a page or less, and that in the daily newspaper of the capital of the Principality. That, he considered, was coming out into the open with a vengeance. But it was hard to go on feeling indignant for very long, especially after having just spent a good ten minutes reading about a police scandal in South London and not much less on the prospects for England's cricketers on their Australian tour.

As strongly as ever before, the conversational dealings at his breakfast-table had reminded Malcolm of those at another, the one at 221B Baker Street. There, as here, the first party regularly offered well-meaning provisional explanations of bits of human behaviour and the second party exposed their naivety, ignorance, over-simplification, non-virtuous unworldliness. But there, unlike here, the exposures were sometimes softened with a favourite-pupil tolerance or even varied with an occasional cry of 'Excellent!' or 'One for you, Watson!' Nor was it recorded of Holmes that half of what he said came in aural italics or bold or sanserif. Had Gwen started piling this on recently? Or had she only started doing it so's-you'd-notice recently? Well, they had been married a long time.

He picked up Muriel's letter. The firm, spacious hand, which he could not remember having seen before, impressed him and made him wish, vaguely and momentarily, that she had made more of herself than she had. Scorning the small change of inquiries after health or other sociability, the text launched itself _in medias res__ with a fully dramatized but not very lucid account of some visit to somebody somewhere. The more factual stuff came later. Among it Malcolm noticed a piece of information, or supposed information, that Gwen had not passed on: in alliance with two friends and the daughter of one of them, Muriel proposed to open and run what she called a coffee-shop in a suburban shopping-centre. The way she talked about it sounded to him quite unlike part of a brave or overdone attempt to hide boredom and loneliness, whatever bloody Sherlock might say.

Malcolm cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher and set it going. Of late the steady humming it made had been reinforced by an irregular drumming and it shuddered violently every few seconds. With no one repairing anything any more the best plan was probably to let it run until it blew itself up. _Western Mail__ in hand he strolled to the cloakroom. Some delay, but no real bother there, in fact all was well- as far as he knew. No, all was well. He had started telling people who asked him how he was keeping that he was all right as far as he knew, and then stopped when he realized that that was as much as was meant by just saying you were all right. As if it mattered.

Gwen had about finished at her dressing-table, squirting anti-static fluid on her tinted lenses and preparing to follow with the impregnated cloth. He thought the movements of her hands made them look slightly fat.

'All right if I take the car? You'll be looking in at the Bible, will you?'

'Might as well, I thought.'

'If Peter's there you could give him Muriel's message, perhaps.'

'Eh? Oh yes. Actually he hasn't been in for a week or two.'

'One can't help wondering... ' She sat facing him on the oblong padded stool, her spectacles held up to the light. 'Has he ever said if he hands over any cash for his bed and board? Makes any contribution to the household?'

'Well no. Nobody's asked him, not even Garth. Putting up at Rhiannon's for a bit is what it's called.'

'For quite a bit - what is it, three months? Fascinating.

In Wales. Under the same roof as an unprotected female in Wales. And her a widow too. You'd think you were in the twentieth century.'

'Good luck to them is what I say.'

'Oh, do you really? It's certainly what I say. I also say it to or with reference to the representatives of the younger generation. I imagine the lad can practise his trade no less profitably in London than hereabouts. Anything to get out of this dump.'

'You can call it that if you like,' said Malcolm. 'Personally I feel that any place where two people can manage to fall in love can't be as bad as all that.' .

'Meaning who? Meaning who?'

'Well- William and Rosemary.'

'Ah. Well, of course. Malcolm dear, I was just - I meant that's how William might think of it, as a dump to get out of. I'm very nicely set up here, thank you.' And she smiled at him. 'Sorry,' said Malcolm. He had forgotten to include sonic inverted commas in his run-through of Gwen's special voice-effects.

She got to her feet after that and brushed down her chequered front. 'Well. Give my love to Charlie.'

'I will if he's there. He hasn't been in for a bit either.'

'I'm worried about Charlie, I really am. That evening at Dorothy's, you noticed nothing out of the way but I thought he looked awful. Awful.'

One of Gwen's things was not only to know better in general but to know better than you did about the people you were supposed to know better than she did in particular. Or so it had more than once seemed to Malcolm, who now said, 'He told me he hadn't been sleeping well for a year or more.'

'Right, I'm off. Smarty-pants Eirwen could do with some critical comments on the exhibition of alternative Welsh culture at the Dafydd ap Gwilym Arts Centre' - some system of tonal notation would obviously have to be developed to handle stuff like that - 'and then it's coffee and perhaps a glass of lemonade at Sian's. See you.'

Malcolm went and brushed his teeth in a glancing style, an even less demanding exercise than formerly, now that the lower-jaw one with a hole in it had fallen to pieces on a mouthful of ham at the wedding in the spring. While he shaved he thought about the fact that since the moment when he had brought her the news of Alun's death Gwen had not mentioned him in any way. At first he had put this down to shock or other temporary state, but it had long since been too late for that. For months he had been able to close a conversation with her by an oblique reference, or would find he had done so, not that he had much use for such a weapon. What kind of punishment or self-punishment her silence was meant to inflict he had very little idea, but if she had wanted to remove any doubts he might have been trying to hang on to about whether she had had some son of affair with Alun - well, she had pulled that off in fine style. He had not quite lost the hope that one day a casual pronouncement of the name would touch off an equally casual allusion to that affair, and he could tell her that that was of no consequence and never had been. But he judged it very unlikely. And it was odd how a taboo on a single, less than all-important subject had seemingly turned out to impose a blackout on so much else.

When he had finished in the bathroom Malcolm fetched his jazz records from the sitting-room, where they had been lying about for ages, and put them back in the white cabinet in his study on the first floor. Before settling down at his work-table he glanced out of the window. What he could see of the sky past various roofs was overcast, promising rain, real Welsh autumn weather. He had an hour or more, before leaving for the Bible, to work on his translation of a long poem by Cynddelw Mawr ap Madog Wladaidd (c .132o-?1388), _Heledd Cariad__ - more of an adaptation, actually, for among other adjustments he had altered the physical characteristics of the central figure to correspond with Rhiannon's. If she had found love with Peter he was glad, because he had nothing to give her himself. But she had given him something. The poem, his poem, was going to be the best tribute he could pay to the only woman who had ever cried for him.

The End