The old devils: a novel (15 page)

'It was done in the interests of efficiency.' Malcolm was nothing if not fair-minded.

'That's where you're wrong. It was done in the interests of my bum.'

They plunged from the rain into the dark, echoing tunnel or underpassage that led to a side entrance, sometimes in the past scattered with boozers' muck, immaculate now and with its old cobblestones tom up and replaced by concrete. Indoors the continuing gloom was relieved by what looked like, and indeed proved on closer inspection to be, old-fashioned lamp-posts. More light, treated so as rather to resemble daylight, came from or through the glass ceiling. The walls were got up as shop-fronts, brick-pillared gateways, a park with railings, plastic shrubs and a white planking pavilion. The vast shape of Peter Thomas could be made out towards the back, sitting on a green-and-white-striped canvas chair near a stone-and-wrought-iron well-head. As the arrivals closed in on him the stuff they walked on changed from tiles to gravel.

'The affluent society,' said Peter. 'In the bad old days only very rich people could hope to enjoy surroundings like these. Now they're within the reach of all.'

Charlie went to the polygonal bar in the middle of the concourse and called for service.

'Be there now,' called a voice from out of sight, so not everything had changed. When drinks had been dealt out Malcolm said, looking about him, 'Well, they've certainly transformed this place.’

‘You can't even see where anything was,' said Charlie.

'Can you remember where the bar in the back room was? Where the door into it was?'

'I suppose everywhere's like it now except for a few backwaters like the Bible,' said Malcolm. His expression grew serious and withdrawn. 'It reminds me very strongly of somewhere I went a little while ago. Now where the hell was it?'

Peter had started to breathe heavily. 'Everywhere is not like it. I came up on the bus in a leisurely fashion and stopped on the way at the old Pendle Inn '-remember? It's all metal now, would you believe it? Walls, floor, tables, chairs, bar, the whole thing. Bare metal. Matt, not shiny. Including the fast-food device. Naked metal. Except for a dozen or so television screens for the rock videos. I freely grant you may think the differences between that and this can't be considered substantial.'

This was a long speech for Peter, but Malcolm answered up readily enough. 'I expect it appeals to the young people. Same as here.' It was true that as far as could be made out through the murk most of the others present were under thirty or so. Some were under ten and ran about crashing into pieces of furniture.

An expression of ineffable loathing swept over Peter's face but he offered no remark.

'It's not meant to appeal to anyone,' said Charlie. 'That's not the idea. It comes to the brewer's turn to give his pubs a face-lift, and of course he hates forking out a couple of million quid on that, but he can just about face it if he grits his teeth and needn't ever think about it again. So he picks a noted designer and tells him to get on with it. A noted designer gets noted through having photographs of things he's designed published in Swedish magazines and stays noted through winning prizes from international committees sitting in Brasilia. And that's that. The poor old ... '

His voice faded out as Peter, who had been looking from him to Malcolm and back again with increasing speed, was evidently driven into speech. 'Where's Alun?' he demanded. 'I thought he was supposed to be coming with you.'

'He was,' said Charlie. 'He is. Coming, I mean. Later, though.'

As he spoke a telephone-bell sounded and a youngster with a fearsome slouch moved from behind the bar towards what was apparently a fully furnished old-style red GPO

telephone-box standing on its concrete base near the centre of the area. Peter said with some rancour, 'But it seems he was present, even active, at the ceremony to honour Brydan, which I gather from Malcolm unluckily went through without the gross humiliation of all parties.'

'Yes to all that, but something suddenly came up.’

‘What son of thing?'

'I don't know.'

The way Charlie said this made Peter glance at him sharply, then at Malcolm warily. But all three sat there in silence under an orange-and-white beach umbrella while they rather helplessly watched the crouching youth advance on them.

'One of you Mr Cellan-Davies?' he asked, pronouncing the first element of the name in a way no Welshman would have done.

Charlie hoped with some earnestness that Malcolm would not issue' a correction, but it was all right: he responded after no more than his standard interval for uptake.

'Your friend says he's on his way.' A rearward jerk of the head went with this, to allay any doubts about its source.

For no reason that Charlie could define, the information failed to cheer them up, producing instead a condition almost of gloom, certainly one in which no further talk seemed possible for the foreseeable future. It was good old Malcolm who rose to the occasion with details of the event at St Dogmael's, as seen by him, and some account of Pugh for Peter's benefit while Charlie came comfortably near nodding off in his cabana chair.

Alun turned up rea1Iy quite soon, striding vitally towards them over the tiles and gravel, grimacing apologies and deprecations of the decor, fetching fresh drinks. Though full of assorted prattle he had no information to offer about the preceding hour or so of his life. Charlie, now roused again to somewhere near full consciousness, found that the s1owingdown of his intake and the general relaxation of recent minutes had combined to advance considerably his feeling that he might be drunk. He waited (or Alun to finish going on about how today might or might not have been the first time for God knew how long since the four of them had been boozing together, and then said to him, 'I thought what you said at that do this morning was quite good.'

'Oh, well one just has to -'

'Except for that stuff about although Brydan couldn't actually understand Welsh he could nevertheless
understand
it.'

'For Christ's sake that's only what they -'

'I want to get this over to you while I remember and before I have too many drinks. When somebody tells you in Welsh that the cat sat on the mat you won't be able to make out what he's saying unless you know the Welsh for cat and sat and mat. Well, he can draw you a picture. Otherwise it's just gibberish.'

'Well, strictly no doubt -'

'The point is it's unnecessary. They'll be just as pleased to hear how Brydan wrote English with the fire and the passion and the spirit of this, that and the bloody other only possible to a true or real or whatever-you-please Welshman, which if it means anything is debatable to say the least, but whatever it is it's only bullshit, not
nonsense.
Stick to bu1lshit and we're all in the clear.'

'How many of the people there could appreciate the distinction?'

'I don't know, but I can, and so can you.'

Alun sighed. 'You're right, Charlie. I didn't think. I was careless.'

'Look to it in future, good boy.'

'Hey, Alun.' Malcolm was leaning across and grinning rather. He went on in seriously incompetent but this time intelligible American, 'Would you say, Mr Weaver, that this here is a typical or characteristic Welsh pub?'.

There came a noise that began rather like a fart of heroic proportions but soon proved to be made by the exhaustive ripping of the canvas seat of Peter's chair under his buttocks. Luckily he was too fat to fall the whole way through to the ground, remaining - clasped round the hips by the metal frame of the chair, his drink intact in his hand. Before he or anyone else could move, a piece of rock music, with the compulsory s’ap on the third beat of every bar, started up all around them at enormous volume, giving the effect of an omission handsomely redressed.

'Out!' bawled Alun. 'Down drinks and out.'

Having downed his own drink he went over and held the torn chair in position while by fits and starts Peter heaved himself upright and was free. They hurried out after the other two. Nobody looked up at any of them.

'That was a near one,' said Charlie as they assembled at the mouth of the tunnel. The rain had of course grown heavier.

'Well.' Alun was glancing to and fro. 'Lunch. There we are, the very thing. Bengal Tiger Indian Bistro and Takeaway. Well, nearly the very thing. Hang on a minute, lads. Case the joint.'

He dashed across the road in full athletic style, marring the effect hardly at all by holding a newspaper over his head. The three left in the tunnel turned morosely to one another.

'Got to watch him, you know.’

‘What's he lined up for us?'

'I'm not quite clear. There was something said about a trip to Courcey.'

'Bit late for that, isn't it? Most of the way back and out again.'

'Not half-past one yet.'

'Do I look all right?' This was Malcolm.

'Yes, you look fine,' said the other two. 'Why, don't you feel all right?'

'Yes; I feel fine. I just wondered if I look all right. Looked all right.'

'No, you look fine.’

‘Christ, here he is already.'

Making washout signals as he came, Alun hurried back and joined them in the tunnel.

'Bloody awful. You can't even get -I'll hold it for now. We'd better be moving. I don't think we'll find anywhere bearable round here, so let's head for Courcey right away. There's all sorts of tourist spots there now. Where's your car, Malcolm?'

'Haven't you got yours?'

'Came by minicab. More fun if we all go together.'

It was certainly more crowded than it might have been, but really quite pleasant in the warm damp and the half dark. Charlie was comfortable enough in the back, with Peter's bulk next to his seeing to it that, although Malcolm's car was not particularly small, staying unbudged on corners was no problem. As number one, Alun had naturally secured the front passenger seat, and he was soon twisted most of the way round in it to push on with conversation.

'Nightmare place back there, you know. Like a seaside boarding house hung with fairy lights and log-cabin music playing. Completely empty, of course, in fact no sign anybody had been there ever. A nice-enough female appeared and what could I have, well, I could have a cooked dinner, that's beef dinner or lamb dinner with cheese after, or I could have chicken salad, but you gets the Indian chutney-stand with that if you wants it, and pickled onions. And cheese after.'

'As served in Chittagong,' said Charlie.

'Couldn't I have a curry? No, sorry, it's only English till the evening. The Indian, he don't come on till six. She didn't like telling me, poor little thing. I rather cantankerously pointed out that it said Indian-Continental cuisine outside, which she agreed was the case. And then ...
then
... I asked her who owned the joint, and oh, she looked bloody uncomfortable. And what do you think? Arabs own it. '

There was a united cry of rage and disgust, given extra punch by the effect of the bump in the road that shook the car at that moment.

'I mean my God,' said Alun, glaring seriously. 'Arabs owning airlines, Arabs owning half London you can sort of ... But Arabs owning the Bengal Tiger Bistro in a clapped-out industrial village on the edge of a mouldering, rotting former manufacturing centre and coal port in a God-forsaken province, it makes you, well I don't know what it does, it makes you sweat. Or something.'

'It's not only the province's fault,' said Malcolm. 'Perhaps not even chiefly.'

'Nobody said it was, boy, nobody said it was.'

Silence fell in the car. Malcolm drove it perhaps a trifle faster than his habit but safely enough, and they ran into little traffic. For some minutes Charlie dozed. When he woke up it was to hear Alun singing to himself in the front.

'Was it little Nell whose nasty smell diffused general gloom?

Oh no, it wasn't little Nell ... '

Anyone in a position to compare Alun's style of rendering these phrases with his effort on leaving Sophie's might well have noticed a falling off, a downturn in force and conviction. Charlie hardly took them in. It seemed to be shaping into one of his good days. The rain had stopped, or just as likely they had moved out of it as they approached sea level, and there was watery sunlight. Courcey came up on a signpost. Everything was peaceful and safe.

Before people stopped bothering about such things at all, Courcey Island was widely considered to have received its name from the Norman family of de Courcy who had been lords of nearby Locharne. Various authorities had seen that name as actually a corruption of Corsey, from Welsh
COTS,
'bog, fen' and Old English
ey,
'island', or possibly from an eponym
Kori
with
ey,
or again had derived it from English
causeway
or
causey
or from the Welsh borrowing of the latter,
cawsai
or
cawsi.
In the manner of authorities anywhere they had never reached agreement, though it remained true that a substantial causeway, last rebuilt in the 1880s, carried traffic the thousand yards or so between mainland and island on a fine broad road. It had only been about half as broad until 1965 , in which year Courcey's three goods-and-passenger railway stations had been closed and the single track taken up.

Parts of this had once been known to Charlie, and more than those were no doubt still fresh in Malcolm's mind.

How he would have enjoyed imparting them to such as Pugh, and how lucky it was for everybody else that it was not happening. What might it not have done to Peter, fast asleep as he was and from time to time giving what sounded like a grunt of brutish consternation.

Once on the island and through Holmwood, the famous grove of ancient oaks once quite mistakenly thought to have druidic associations, Malcolm took the road to the left. East Courcey was always said to be the Welsh half of the island and its place-names suggested as much, including one or two anglicized ones like Treville, where they were making for. The western side had been English or largely English since Henry 11 planted settlers there in the 1160s. The former port of Birdarthur and nearly all the beaches of the island, overflowing with visitors in summer, lay on that coast. Along this one there ran for the most part a series of dark-coloured cliffs falling to narrow banks of pebbles or straight into the sea. In places they rose to a couple of hundred feet, their highest point being not far off the highest on Courcey. Hereabouts Malcolm stopped the car by agreement, and the occupants set about hauling themselves into the open, for a breath of air, they said, as well as a pee. Charlie's first breath or sniff of air brought some redolence or other - salt, heather, pine-bark - that was gone before he could give it a name. He peed conscientiously into a grassy drain at the roadside. It was very quiet, or so he had just started to think when a small scarlet aeroplane— picked out with yellow came buzzing over his shoulder in the direction of the Swanset strip. He fought his way up a short damp tussocky slope to the inconsiderable summit, which was marked by a fake Celtic cross of some antiquity, flecked with lichen, and a more recent tablet in a purplish material. Although he had known right away the spot to make for he had no recollection of having stood here before. He had certainly forgotten how the land dropped gently off on almost every side, giving a view of the mainland through a clump of Scotch firs and in the opposite direction an unsteady blur, if that, where Devon and Cornwall must be, but hiding most of the island itself. There was just one clear outlook down a small twisting valley on to the top of a straggle of bushes and low trees, a band of grey rock and a sunlit stretch of turf so dense and green it made him think of the cloth on a snooker table. He found the whole thing a most agreeable sight. At one time he had thought that there must have been more in such sights than he could merely see, perhaps not in them at all, behind them or beyond them but somehow connected with them, and plenty of poems had seemed to tell him the same story. But although he had stayed on the alert for quite a long while to catch a glimpse of what could not be seen, nothing answering remotely to any of his guesses or inklings had ever looked like turning up. Still, if he happened to stroll about in the country or to come across one of the poems he often found the experience appealing, even today. He started back down the slope.