The old devils: a novel (21 page)

Peter saw what she meant almost before they entered Mario's, clearly a former shop converted some short while before at no great outlay of cash or imagination. The front part held a few rows of flimsy tables for four laid with very clean red-and-white check cloths and napkins and a central line of bottled sauces and mustards. Long sticks of bread or biscuit in red-striped transparent plastic lay on every side-plate. A plump, heavily moustached waiter in a tartan jacket was serving, vocally and with great sweeps of his arm, plates of rather British-looking meat and veg to a quartet of silent youngsters. Their wary, first-date look made Peter feel a good hundred and fifty. He saw that Rhiannon was watching him to gauge his reactions, so he smiled and nodded brightly.

There hastened forward another plump man with a moustache and a notable jacket, one resembling an abbreviated dressing-gown. He too cut the air a good deal, proclaiming himself generally to be the proprietor, and of an Italian restaurant too. His greeting to Rhiannon fell short of kissing her hand but not by much. If he was not Italian himself by blood, which in this part of South Wales and in the catering trade he might quite well have been, he was the next best thing, even perhaps one better: a Welshman putting it on all-out. Peter got something different from him, the graver reception appropriate to a senator or international operatic tenor. 'Mario' or very possibly Mario led them through a curtain of hanging strips of shiny vari-coloured stuff into the back-of-the-shop part of the premises. Here, in a kind of boarding-house interior, a couple of groups of soberly dressed middle-aged people were drinking reddish or yellowish liquors out of glasses with a band of sugar round the rim or chock-a-block with straws and stirrers. Rhiannon and Peter sat up at a walnut table with barley-sugar legs and found it most handy for their drinks when they came, white wine for her, slimline tonic for him: he wished he had done without his last one or two at the club.

'Not too awful, do you think?' whispered Rhiannon. 'You'll have to speak up if you want me to hear you - deafer by the day. No, it's fine, I could enjoy a drink in a coal-shed as long as there was no music.'

In fact for the first time in his life he felt he could have done with some to take the edge off the silence. It had been all right in the car, but there they had had the driver not to say anything much in front of. After three seconds Peter felt he was never going to speak again. Then he brainily remembered that, except of course for Muriel, mothers liked talking about children and approved of fathers who did too, so he started on William, which allowed him to work in a lot of the necessary crap about houses, neighbourhoods and such. Rhiannon came back along the same lines with bits of Rosemary. Then they got on to the party and she said in a special offhand voice, 'I reckon William quite took to Rosemary, didn't you? Stayed close, anyway.'

'I was impressed by her myself,'-said Peter. He meant it, in fact the sudden oblique reminder of the youthful Rhiannon had almost made him catch his breath, but he had to admit it came out sounding like hell. 'She struck me as, as ... '

'I told you she's going to be a barrister? Arguing in a law-court. She's always had a way with words. Like Alun, I suppose.' She gave him a cautious, measuring look she probably thought he missed. 'William got a girl, has he?'

'I don't really know. I think not at the moment. He has, you know, had girls.'

'Oh, and Rosemary's had boys. Well, I say
had,
I just assume.'

'That's all I can do with William, assume. He's perfectly normal and perfectly fit and he goes about with girls. He's also thirty. And there we are.'

'Yes, and he's sure of himself in a good way. I think that's enough really. To be going on with, I mean. From your point of view.'

'I suppose so.' He went on without thinking much, 'I'm pretty sure my old man had a much better idea of what I used to get up to than I have about my son.'

'I wonder. If he had I doubt if he was any better off in consequence, your dad. But you can't help comparing, I catch myself doing it all the time. And things are much better now. Infinitely better than they used to be.'

'You and Rosemary, you're pretty close, I expect, aren't you?' asked Peter. Now he sounded sickly as well as fatuous. To improve matters he added, 'People say it's easier for mothers and daughters.'

'No great confidences, just a few little remarks she's dropped from time to time.'

'That make you think that ... things have got better.’

‘M'm. Yeah.'

That seemed to be that for the moment. Peter was not at all sure where this was leading but he could tell it was somewhere, if only from the look of slight tautness about the corners of Rhiannon's mouth that he had seen before. Then he noticed that she was goggling for his benefit at the nearest of their fellow-customers, who he was sure were too far off to hear them and not interested anyway. Oh Christ - Wales for ever, he thought: thirty years in London and further parts and when it came to
certain
subjects
you still kept mum when strangers were present, or visible, so as to be on the safe side now, see. He smiled; after a moment of mild astonishment she did the same. At this very juncture the Mario-figure came bustling up and brilliantly announced to the party in question, 'Your table is ready whenever you like,' making about thirty syllables of it. Just as obligingly they started to move at once. Rhiannon had evidently used those few moments to decide it was all right for her to go ahead. Not before the diners had well and truly departed, she began, 'What I meant about comparing, mostly anyway, what they don't seem to have now is all that awful routine you had to go through every time. I don't say they actually do any more of, you know,
it,
or less of it, or it's any better or worse when they get there but at least they're spared that. Sometimes when I look back, for a moment I can't credit it. It was like following an instruction manual-well, that's what it
was,
for goodness' sake. Stage one, arm round; stage two, kissing; stage three, more kissing; stage four, hand up top, outside; stage five, same thing, inside; stage six, really rude, not there yet but on the horizon. At one stage per date, max. It's like what some tribe in Africa used to get up to to make it rain before they learnt better. Only this used to goon for months often. And usually never get there. Same for everyone and no exceptions. Or am I exaggerating, do you think?'

'No,' said Peter, who in the last half-minute had found out he had not forgotten everything after all. 'Not in the least. And there were terrible sorts of tips on how to get round the rules.'

'Oh, and we had ours on how not to let them get round the rules. Phew. Could it have been a class thing?'

'I don't know.'

'No, unless it was just the aristocracy did different, because there were plenty of girls from the valleys in Brook Hall - you remember, and they were just the same. A bit nastier about it they were, I used to think, some of them. More cynical. I am exaggerating because it wasn't as clear-cut as that, couldn't have been. But there wasn't much that didn't more or less fit in with it in the end. I remember thinking once or twice at first it might all be Welsh, because of the chapel and everything, but I soon found out it was English as well. In a big way. So then I thought, well if I thought about it at all I thought it must be British. Couldn't be French. Didn't know about the Irish. The last thing was, do you remember those books by an American chap called Oh-something? Charlie was very keen on him. And the Sahara came into it somehow.'

'O'Hara. And the book you mean is
Appointment in Samarra.
I used to have them all at one time. John O'Hara. Good God.'

'That's the chap, but I'm not sure it was that book.

Anyway, I started reading whichever it was and I nearly jumped out of my skin, it was exactly the same. That side of life, I mean. And they were meant to be ordinary average people, not millionaires or actresses but not hillbillies either. There was this guy and the dame he fancied, and first time out nothing, he may have kissed her goodnight, I can't remember. Then second time out you were expecting it to be here we go, but it wasn't at all, it was so far and no further the whole way. It was a good deal quicker than it would have been here, but then it's a book, isn't it? But it was the
same .
..
thing.
In
America.'

Peter still had little idea of what was expected of him, if anything. 'Could you call it the old Victorian ideas on their way out?' he suggested, trying not to feel like an exam-paper and failing soon enough. 'How did we ever agree to go along with it?'

She nodded absently and squared up her cigarette-packet and matchbox alongside one of the ornamental grooves that ran the breadth of the table-top. 'Not making yourself cheap, that's what it was all in aid of. Anyway that's what it was called.'

'A charade, in fact.'

'In a way, yes, but it was not-a-charade as well. That was the whole trouble. One moment you said it very, well, cynically and then a second later you'd find you'd said it completely seriously.
Cheap.
I expect the chaps called it something too, didn't they, that whole system?'

'Probably. I think they mostly took it as just part of existence, something you had to put up with, like getting up in the dark to get the bus to go to university. And it was a comfort to know that everybody else was in the same boat. Or you thought they were, which was just as good.'

'Oh, we had that too. Tell me something now, Peter: say a chap's girl had said all right straight away, would that have made him think she was making herself cheap?’

‘Not unless he was a shit - he'd have been delighted.

After he'd got over his surprise. But then I suppose if she started going round -'

'That's
right. You can't make yourself cheap just with one person. Still, mustn't take it too seriously. As well as awful bits there were funny bits too, weren't there?' But apparently no funny bits came to mind for the moment. She lit a cigarette and when she went on it was at a reduced speed. 'So I'm glad that whatever Rosemary gets up to or might be going to get up to she's not going to not make herself cheap. It took too much out of people, that way of carrying on. Made them concentrate on the wrong things. And it was easy enough to go off the track without that. And what I saw was only half of it. The chaps' half must have been much worse.'

'We behaved much worse,' said Peter. 'On average.'

'A lot of it, some of it anyway wasn't your fault. I know you think you treated me tremendously badly, love, but you didn't, not really.' For the first time he got a look straight from those grey eyes and now he did catch his breath. 'It's more it sounds bad before you go into what actually happened, which was just we had an affair, not a very long one, though it would have been longer if I'd thought to do different, and you started to be attracted by someone else and we broke up. And it was after that, don't forget, I found I had a bun in the oven, and you took care of things, and
after
that ... You were in love with someone else. I couldn't have expected you to walk out of it and come back to me, how could I at that stage?'

'I wish I had.'

'That's another matter. I'm sorry, I know we seem to have got on to this rather fast, but it could be ages before we're on our own again when I've had four glasses of plonk. And these days you never know how much time you've got. I wanted to tell you this before anyone starts dying. Just, it was lovely.'

He put out his hand across the table and she took it. 'Yes, it was.'

'So you'd better try and realize that some of the other bits aren't quite as bad as you thought.'

Not much later they were standing in the street outside the Glendower, he with his arm around her waist, she leaning her head on his shoulder. In the minicab, which waited near by now to take him on home, they had held hands all the way but barely spoken.

After about a minute she said, 'Would you like to come in for a drink?'

'No, I'd better be getting back. Unless it would make it easier?'

'No, don't worry about that. Look, I hope you don't think anything I've been saying was to do with anything that happened at the party. Or anything else.'

'No, no trouble there, love. I didn't take in everything about you during our thing together, not as much as I should have done, but I did get that far. So no, I don't think that.'

'Good. There's no reason why we shouldn't go out to dinner, you know.’

‘I'll be in touch.'

'Rosemary goes back on Thursday. After that.'

She gave him a quick kiss on the mouth and went. He hung about a little longer, walking to and fro on the pavement with his head turned down and his hands clasped behind his back, not seeing what his eyes were trained on. Then he straightened up and went over to the car and got in the back.

'Cwmgwyrdd now, is it?' asked the driver, an oldster wearing what looked like his grandson's recent cast-offs. 'What part do you want?'

'I'll tell you when we get nearer.'

'Well, it makes a difference to how I go, see, with them shutting the old bridge over the -'

'Just take me there, will you, by any reasonable route.' The man's head, white and unshorn, slewed intolerably round. 'Are you feeling all right, sir?'

'I'll live. Now kindly do as you're told.'

'Duw, duw,
sorry I spoke. Not from round here, are you?'

'No, I'm from ... from ... '

'If you ask me, all the proper Welshmen are leaving Wales.'

'I say, are they really? Well, that's splendid news, by George. Over and out.'

But then when they drove up and the house was in darkness he remembered that Muriel was in Cowbridge, dining and staying the night with English friends she had told him he obviously had no time for, so he was free for over twelve hours.

Five - Rhiannon

1

The next morning Rhiannon and Rosemary sat at breakfast in the new house; Alun had only a moment before driven off for West Wales, there to see over a location for something or other. Through most of the carpetless, curtainless ground floor step-ladders stood, their summits linked by heavy old planks, in the midst of opened drums of paint and other applications, silently awaiting the return of the contracted decorators from wherever they had been these last weeks. It was possible to sit in part of the sitting-room, though it helped if you were quite tired out before you started, and to cook and eat in the kitchen. Here the poppies-on-white cotton curtains were up but, for instance, a couple of boxes of plates and saucers had yet to have their contents deployed on the dresser shelves. Nelly, the new black Labrador puppy, lay stretched out in her basket, idly chewing the side of it from time to time in preference to her purple plastic bone.