The old devils: a novel (12 page)

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

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

Three - Charlie

1

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

He could hear Sophie breathing quietly in the bed across the way and started to throw the covers of his own bed back before going on to scramble in beside her and nestle up to her. Then he worked out that he had done that twice in the last ten days or so and a third time now would be too much. She always woke up at his arrival however careful he was, whether he nestled up or not, and though she always said later that she dropped off again in a couple of minutes he doubted it. And after all, he had not found himself at the edge of one of those huge, brilliantly lit stretches of grassland with ruined pillars and water flowing uphill and changing its course as it went, nor had to deal with small things, small unrecognizable animals or machines behaving like animals. So for the moment he stayed there leaning on his elbow. It was not really dark. He could even see part of Sophie's outline in the light of the hooded lamp next to him. Other gleams came from the passage doorway and its reflection in the tall mirror by the window. An early car receded towards the town. He was quite safe, also no less thirsty in the real world than in the unreal and standing in need of a pee. Not till he was back tucked up after supplying these wants did he look at his watch: 5.10. Not too bad. He felt as if about two-thirds of his head had recently been sliced off and his heart seemed to be beating somewhere inside his stomach, but otherwise he was fine, successfully monitoring his breathing over about the next hour until he fell into a kind of doze, not a very nice kind, admittedly. It was light when he came out of that and he was not at all fine, nowhere near. As usual at this time, his morning self cursed his overnight self for having purposely left the Scotch in the drinks cabinet downstairs. Without that sort of help it was quite out of the question that he should ever get up. A mug of tea and a plastic flask containing more tea stood on the bedside table. He would in no sense be committing himself to getting up if it so turned out that he drank some. With this clear all round he got on his elbow and drank some, drank indeed the whole mug's worth in one because it was half cold, and dropped flat again. Before very long the liquid had carved out a new and more direct route to his bladder. He rolled over and fixed his eye on the stout timber that framed the quilted bed-head, counted a hundred, then, with a convulsive overarm bowling movement, got a hand to it, gripped it, counted another hundred and hauled with all his strength, thus pulling himself half upright. In this position, still clutching the frame, he paused again, said 'With many a weary sigh, and many a groan, up a high hill he heaves a huge round stone,' and plunged a foot to the floor. Of course it was understood that if he ever got to the bathroom he would dive straight back into bed the moment he got back in range. Having got back he went and laid his hands flat on the dressing-table either side of Sophie's chased-silver hand-mirror and looked out of the window, looking but not seeing. With a conviction undimmed by having survived countless previous run-offs he felt that everything he had was lost and everyone he knew was gone. Only because there was nothing else to do he stood there assembling the energy to move, to start dressing, rather in the spirit of a skier poised above a hazardous run. Ready? Right ...
Go.
Up. Round. Off.

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

After ten minutes Charlie had made it all the way from the breakfast-room table to the refrigerator in the kitchen. Here he stood and drank a great deal of apple-juice and crunched a half-burnt, holed piece of toast Sophie had rejected; making his own toast

- bread-bin, toaster, all that - was unthinkable. Along with it he swallowed a couple of spoonfuls of marmalade straight from the pot. The sight of a coffee-bag out in the open near an unused mug was not quite enough to make up his mind for him, but finding the electric kettle half full turned the scale. He saw the thing through and even got some sugar in, stirring with the marmalade-spoon. When a speck of saliva caught at the back of his throat he managed to lay the mug down before the father and mother of a coughing-fit sent him spinning about the room and landing up face to face with Mr Bridgeman, round the back now, eighteen inches away on the other side of the window-pane. Then the telephone rang as it always did at about that time of the morning.

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

'About the same as usual.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care of yourself, Charles.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And at that accursed name the whole assembly fell silent.

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

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

There was a silence that probably came less from horror than sheer bafflement, then a sudden rush of applause. The presumed sculptor, a little fellow covered in hair like an artist in a cartoon, appeared and was the centre of attention for a few seconds. Another youngster, who said he represented the Welsh Arts Council, started talking about money. It came on to rain, though not enough to bother a Welsh crowd. On a second glance, the object on the plinth did look a certain amount like a man, but the style ruled out anything in the way of portraiture, and Charlie felt he was probably not the only one to wonder whether some handy abstraction - the spirit of Wales, say - had pushed out the advertised subject. Those close enough, however, could see Brydan's name on the plate along with just his dates, 1913-1960. Alun's turn came. He played it low-key, avoiding a display of emotion so long after the event, sticking to facts, facts like Brydan being the greatest Welsh poet that had ever lived and also the greatest poet in the English language to have lived in the present century, together with minor but no less certain facts like his utter dedication to his art, though leaving out other ones like his utter dedication to Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey and
Astounding Science Fiction.
Llywelyn Caswallon Pugh evidently thought he could afford to do without some of this. He stepped up the frequency of his glances at Charlie and slowly edged closer. He had a considerable power of instilling dread, in Charlie at least. When he spoke it was a little less loud than before.