The old devils: a novel (11 page)

4

But when Alun reached his car and set about driving off, the engine fired in a couple of seconds, nor did he go near any garage or repair-shop before parking the machine at the side of the road in a smart residential area. There followed a brisk walk of a hundred yards to a short driveway, at whose entrance he abruptly checked his stride. Standing quite motionless he gazed before him with a faraway look that a passer-by, especially a Welsh passer-by, might have taken for one of moral if not spiritual insight, such that he might instantly renounce whatever course of action he had laid down for himself. After a moment, something like a harsh bark broke from the lower half of his trunk, followed by a fluctuating whinny and a thud that sounded barely organic, let alone human. Silence, but for faint birdsong. Then, like a figure in a restarted film, he stepped keenly off again and was soon ringing the bell in a substantial brick porch. Sophie Norris came to the door in a biscuit-coloured woollen dress and looking very fit. As soon as she had taken in the sight of Alun her routine half-smile vanished.

'You've got a bloody nerve you have, Alun Weaver,' she said in the old penetrating tones. 'I've a good mind to slam this in your face, cheeky bugger.'

'Ah, but you're not going to, are you, love? And why should you anyway? Just dropped in for a cup of tea. Nothing wrong in that, is there?'

Sighing breathily and clicking her tongue, she gave way. 'Ten minutes, mind. Ten minutes max. I've got to go down the shop. Think yourself bloody lucky I hadn't left already.' 'Sure. Charlie not about then?'

There Alun overplayed his hand a little. 'What do you take me for, Weaver, a fucking moron?' she said more indignantly than before, her eyes distended. 'Do you think I don't know you'd never dream of showing your nose here unless you were absolutely certain he wasn't around? You sod.'

'Come on, only joking. Yes, as a matter of fact I've just come from the Glendower. Peter was there too. The three of us had a spot of lunch. Quite good it was. All right if I sit down?'

She conceded this with an ill grace. 'Why didn't you say something the other night at the Morgans'? Or you could have just picked up the -'

'I didn't get the chance. No, no, that's not true. I probably could have. I didn't happen to think of it then.'

'And when did you happen to think of it, may I ask?'

'Well ... this morning. Can't remember what time.

One moment nothing could have been further from my mind and the next I was full of it.'

'And you reckon you can just turn up like this, out of the bloody blue?'

'You could always chuck me out. I'd go quietly. You know that.'

'Still the same old Alun, eh?'

'Pretty much, yeah.' He paused. 'Go for a drive, shall we?'

This— apparently innocent invitation held overtones for them that resounded from thirty years or more back, when their drives had taken them to a convenient spot behind the mental home, in better weather to the woods on the far side of the golf links and occasionally to the Prince Madoc out at Capel Mererid, in whose snug they had more than once behaved in a fashion that had never quite ceased to perturb Alun in retrospect, even today.

'No need,' said Sophie in reply. Her manner was still faintly tinged with resentment.

'There won't be anyone along.'

'What makes you so sure?' 'I'm sure.'

'Yes, but what makes you so sure?' 'I'll tell you later.'

'No, tell me now.'

'All right,' she said. 'When Victor puts him in a taxi he always gives me a ring to let me know. Because once when he stayed very late he pitched up passed out on the stool thing in the passport-photo booth at Cambridge Street station. And it just so happened that old Tudor Whittingham was on his way back from London and spotted him and fetched him home in a taxi, another taxi. He couldn't even remember being put into the first taxi.'

Alun pondered. 'But Victor giving you a ring won't stop him pitching up passed out at the station or anywhere else, will it?'

'No, but it sort of hands over the responsibility, see. I can understand it.'

'Oh, and I can. What does Victor think? About how that arrangement might, er, have a bearing on your own plans for, er, whatever it might be.'

'I don't know. I don't know what any of them think.'

'Who does? Has it come in handy before?'

'If I ever tell you that it's bloody going to be later.' 'Has that arrangement with Victor come in handy before?' he asked later.

'Do you consider you have the slightest right to expect me to answer that?'

'Absolutely not and absolutely none. Presuming on an old friendship.'

'You are a bugger. Well, sort of, just from time to time. Not ridiculous. Not like when

... '

'No, of course not. How much does he know?'

'Same as ever, the whole score and nothing at all.'

'I'd say you and he have a pretty good life together on

the whole.' '

'I don't know about together exactly, but yes, we do really. Most afternoons while he's in town I'm down the shop.'

'Yes, the serviceable shop. I remember well. What do you actually do there?'

'I look at a pattern-book occasionally, and friends come in, and I drink a lot of coffee. I do about as much as he does at the Glendower. All quite relaxed. He knew all about me when he married me, of course. Well, quite a lot about me.'

'You two haven't been married all that terrifically long, have you?'

'No, Not what you'd call terrifically long, only twenty-two years.'

'Good God, is it that much?' said Alun absently. 'Well now, you've never had children, have you? I suppose that's ... '

'Just as well and no one could have put it clearer, and quite right too. You've forgotten, you've only just remembered I've always never had children. I don't know, some men would have done their homework before they barged in for a quick snuggle, or at least a bit of bloody revision.' She was dodgy again for a moment.

'How's your life then?'

'Fine. Never changes.'

'Oh? In that case I suppose you'll be looking up a few old friends round the neighbourhood. Like a couple of dozen. Always been like that with you, hasn't it?'

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

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

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

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

'That might be Victor now,' said Sophie.

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

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

'How long have we got?'

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

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

'Not so much talk.'

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

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

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

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

'What a jolly sensible set-up.'

Something about its description puzzled Alun, but he had never been one to be afflicted with disinterested curiosity and he had long forgotten the matter when, with six minutes to spare, he and Sophie came to say good-bye in the hall. (Six minutes, eh?

Not such a marvellous arrangement.)

'Lovely to see you,' she cried as if he had indeed just dropped in for a cup of tea, then changed register and said 'You are a bugger' again, but resignedly this time. Rejecting a first thought or so he said, 'You're lovely. I'll be along again soon. But I'll ring first.'

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

'Was it young Denise who spread disease through all the men in the room?

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

He took the road above Beaufoy which brought the sea into sight at a distance and, across the bay, the umber and dark-green stretch of Courcey, with vague industrial shapes half misted over in the background. For the moment the sun was out, strong enough to turn the water into something a bit more rewarding than grey-brown. Flat-fronted terraced houses reached by steep flights of steps gave place to semi-detached brick villas put -up between the wars, a cluster of 1950s two-storey pre-fabs and then, further along and from further back, the spaced-out stone-built residences of the coal-owners and ironmasters of prosperous times. Hereabouts Alun eased up on the accelerator and caused his face to take on expressions of boredom, dissatisfaction, even disappointment, getting it ready for a going-over by his daughter Rosemary. There was a definite element of the creepy about the way that girl could get the wrong idea about her father's less significant activities and interests. Up to something was what he could reckon on being charged with having been, not a moment ago either, if at encounters like this he showed any more positive feeling than a fairly plucky resignation. The girl was even worse in this respect than her elder sister, now safely married, or rather safely out of the way most of the time on that account. He could not have explained why these challenges of theirs made him so uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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