The old devils: a novel (26 page)

He forgot his own feelings at once. 'What is it? What's the matter?'

'I'm so stupid, I'm so hopeless, no good to anybody, I just think of myself all the time, don't notice other people. It's not much to ask, remembering a lovely day out, but I can't even do that.' She had his arm round her now and was resting her forehead against his shoulder, though she still kept her hands over her eyes. 'Anybody who was any use would remember but I can't, but I wish I could, I wish I could.'

'Don't say such ridiculous things. You don't expect me to take them seriously, do you?

It's sweet of you to worry about it just slipping your mind like that, but I didn't remember it very well myself, did I, confusing those two times? Anyway you remember coming down here? To Pwll Glin?'

'M'm.'

'And perhaps me bringing you? You know, sort of vaguely?'

'M'm.' Perhaps she did. 'Even this bit? Just ... '

Suddenly it went impossible to say yes, even to this bit. 'Not ... ' She shook her head wretchedly. 'It's gone. Sorry.'

'I can't have you apologizing to me, my dear Rhiannon.

Honestly, now.' He gazed "Over the top of her head in the general direction of the land. 'Well, put it this way, the fact you minded so much about not remembering, that's worth as much to me as if you had remembered, very nearly.'

That set things back a bit, but in the end it was only the clearing-up shower. She got to work with her tissues and comb and he wandered about making suitable points like the church being
probably
twelfth century and having effigies of a member of the de Courcy family and his lady in the south wall of the chancel and a battlement round the top of the tower, exactly what she wanted to hear just then, no sarcasm. When he saw she was ready he gave the bay a final going-over.

'It was all houses there once, before the sea came up,' he said. 'A whole village.'

Rhiannon thought she had heard that the sea had once been over the marshes and then gone back, but that must have been another time. 'I suppose they can tell.'

'At low tide twice a year when the water's calm you're supposed to be able to see down to what were streets. Houses even. I think another church.'

'Do you still do your poetry?'

'You remember that.' He smiled with pleasure. 'Indeed I do, yes. And I mean to go on. I'm lucky enough to have a few things to get off my chest still.'

Before he could get on to what they were she found herself saying, with a sense of instant inspiration that amazed her, 'There used to be a lovely rose-garden with brick walls - and, you know, pergolas along the paths belonging to some grand house somewhere. You could look round it ID the afternoon. I don't know whether you still can.’

‘Let's see, would that be Mansel Hall? Over by Swanset?' No prizes for not rushing in this time. 'I'm not absolutely ... '

'No, I know where you mean - er, now, Bryn House, that's it. Bryn House, of course. Local stone with brick facing. Not far from here. Anyway, you'd like to go there, would you?'

'M'm. Didn't we go there once before, one summer, not a very nice day?' The not very nice day had stuck in her mind all right, not actually raining but chilly and dark.

'I think so,' he said, as he more or less had to. 'Yes, I'm sure we did. Come on, let's go and have a look. Might bring all sorts of stuff back, you never know.'

'It may have just gone, the garden, like a lot of things.’

‘Let's go there anyway.'

He spoke dreamily again, as if he felt that he or they had started on some semi-fated course, and glanced at her in a way that suggested the lip of the frying-pan was still not too far off. Well, she would have to let him say what he liked now. She reached out and took and squeezed his hand as they walked down to the churchyard gate and took it again on the far side, in comfort or apology or what she hoped would pass as understanding, or perhaps like one person letting another know that whatever it was they were facing they would face it together. He squeezed back but kept quiet after all until they were on their way inland through the marshes, and then for once in his life he talked about nothing in particular.

Six - Malcolm, Muriel, Peter, Gwen, Alun, Rhiannon

1

'Bible and Crown Hotel, Tarquin Jones speaking.'

It was characteristic of Tare to refer to his house in this way although, more likely because, the place was not and never had been a hotel in any bed-and-board sense, nor even called one by anybody until he came along. So much could be readily agreed but, as Charlie had once pointed out, or alleged, it was much less easy to say what characteristic of Tare's it was characteristic of. And that was very Welsh, Garth had added without running into opposition.

At another time Malcolm would surely have been ready to consider such matters, especially the last, but not now. With strained clarity he gave his own name in full.

'Who?' - an unaspirated near-bellow with no fancy suggestion of actual failure to hear or recognize.

After an even clearer repetition Malcolm asked if Mr Alun Weaver was on the premises and met immediate total silence, relieved fairly soon by distant female squeals of pretended shock or surprise and what sounded like a referee's whistle indiscriminately blown. Malcolm waited. He took a couple of deep breaths and told himself he was not feeling at all on edge. After some minutes Alun came on the line with the kind of featureless utterance to be expected from someone wary of unscheduled telephone-calls.

Once more Malcolm introduced himself, going on to ask, 'Many in tonight?'

'They've mostly gone now. I was more or less just off myself as a matter of fact. Don't often come here at this time, you know.'

His tone held a question which Malcolm answered by saying, 'Rhiannon, er, mentioned where you were.'

'Oh did she? Oh I see.' This time Alun spoke with all the artless acceptance of a man (perhaps Peter would have specified a Welshman) getting ready for a bit of fast footwork.

'Look, Alun, I was wondering whether you might care to drop in for a nightcap on your way home. No great piss-up or anything, just
un bach.'

There was a faint sound of indrawn breath over the wire. 'Oh, well, now it's kind of you, boy, but it's getting late and I think if you don't mind ... '

'Actually I'm on my own tonight. Gwen's been in a funny sort of mood, I don't know what's got into her. Not like her to pop out on the spur of the moment. Well, I say popped, she told me don't wait up for her.' This was rounded off by a light laugh at feminine capriciousness.

'Well now, that being so, the case is altered beyond all recognition. Of course I'll be delighted to alleviate your solitude. Taking off in about five minutes.'

The simple prospect of company made Malcolm feel better for a moment. He picked up his glass of whisky and water, not a habitual feature of his evenings, and carried it into the sitting-room. This was so full of unmasculine stuff, like loose covers and plates not meant for eating off, and so narrow in proportion to its quite moderate length that some visitors had taken it for Gwen's own little nook where she might have held tea-parties, very exclusive ones, but in fact there was nowhere else to go or be outside the kitchen but Malcolm's study, and even he never went there except for some serious reason.

Tonight a small masculine intrusion was noticeable in this Sitting-room, not in the obvious form of the gramophone or record-player itself, which was of course common in gender, but of actual records fetched earlier from their white-painted deal cabinet in the study. The machine, called a Playbox, black with timid Chinesey edging in a sort of gold, now faded, had been pretty advanced for the mid 1960s. The records were from the same period or before, deleted reissues of micro-groove 'realizations' of even more firmly forgotten 78s made in the 19408 in a style said to have been current two or three decades longer ago still. M9St of the performers were grouped under names like Doe Pettit and his Original Storyville Jass Band, though individuals called Hunchback Mose and Clubfoot Red LeRoy were also to be seen, accompanied here and there by an unknown harmonica or unlisted jew's-harp.

Malcolm had been meaning to play some of these to himself as a means of recapturing more of the past, going on, so to speak, from where he had left off with Rhiannon earlier that day. He had put the project aside when Gwen said her piece and flounced out of the house; now, it seemed possible again. Only possible: first he must visit the bathroom, or rather the WC, and check how matters stood in that department. They had not been too favourably disposed that morning, and once or twice he had had to fight quite hard not to let the thought of them overshadow the outing. His left ball had played up a bit as well, but he was learning to live with that. He set down his drink and went upstairs and 10 and behold it was all right. As he was finishing up he thought to himself that on this point at least he was two people really, a bloody old woman and worryguts and a marvellous ice-cold reasoning mechanism, and neither of them ever listened to the other. Actually a
real
split personality, one fellow completely separate from the other, would have had a lot to be said for it: every so often each of them could get away from himself a hundred per cent, guaranteed. In the sitting-room again he at once switched the Playbox on and took out of its cover a recording attributed to Papa Boileau and his New Orleans Feetwarmers. They looked back at him from the sleeve photograph, a line of old men in dark suits and collars and ties, six, seven faces about as black as could be, sad and utterly private, no imaginable relation to those Malcolm was used to seeing on his television screen. He arranged the disc on the central spindle and in due time it plumped down on to the already rotating turntable where the pick-up arm, moving in a series of doddery jerks and overshoots, came and found its outermost groove. Through a roaring fuzz of needle-damage the sounds of 'Cakewalkin' Babies' emerged. Malcolm tumed up the volume.

The stylus was worn and the playing-surface too, but this bothered him not at all, any more than he cared that the recording was poorish even for its era, the clarinet slightly fiat, the comet shaky in the upper register; he was gripped by the music from its first bars. As always he listened intently, trying to hear every note of every instrument, leaving himself when it came to it no time to reflect on the past or anything else. Too excited to sit down, he stood in front of the Playbox and shifted his weight from one foot to the other in time with the music. At appropriate stages he took a turn on an invisible banjo, beating out a steady equal four, did all any man could in the circumstances with a run of trombone smears and punctually signalled a couple of crashes on the Turkish cymbal. Precisely at the end of the number, which came without warning to the uninitiated, he went rigid and breathless, coming to life again at the start of ‘Struttin' with some Barbecue'.

By now he was thoroughly sent, as he would have put it in the old days. He had heard that a barbecue had to do with cooking out of doors, but had always assumed that this here was a different use or even a different word, perhaps a corruption, and that

'some barbecue' meant a fine fancy woman and no mistake. Seeing such a one pass by, people would say in wonder and admiration, 'Now that's what I
call
a barbecue!'

Malcolm had never strutted or, assuming to strut was to dance, danced in any fashion with such a woman, nor was he really pretending to now, just going off on a heel-and-toe shuffle round the small circuit of the room.

Breaking his stride when the doorbell pealed made him stagger. Until he saw that yes, he had pulled the curtains, he was afraid he might have been observed from outside some treat for the neighbours, an oldster capering about on his own like a mad thing. He straightened his jacket, wiped his eyes, squared his shoulders and went out to the hall. Voices could be heard from the far side of the door.

When he opened it, two persons at once entered with all possible certainty of being expected. One of them was Garth Pumphrey, the other a taller, perhaps younger man Malcolm half took at first to be a stranger. This second visitor had a full head of white hair, very neatly cut and combed, and a tanned skin. The combination gave him something of a look of a photographic negative, or perhaps just of an old cricketer; in any case his wide brown calm eyes made the negative idea worth forgetting. He turned his head when he caught the music from the sitting-room.

'Hold the door a minute, Malcolm,' said Garth - 'Peter's on his way now.'

'Oh, right.'

'You remember Percy, don't you, Malcolm?'

Of course he did immediately: Percy Morgan, builder, husband to Dorothy, to be seen from time to time dragging her out to the car after the end of a party, encountered less often, not for about a year indeed, up at the Bible. Garth's occasional usefulness with this sort of reminder was to be set to his credit, against his rather more fluent and famous senility-imputing introductions of Charlie to Alun, Alun to Malcolm, Malcolm to Tarc Jones, etc.

After a short interval marked by awkward standing-about in the hall Peter toiled up the garden path, groaning and muttering as he came, and the party moved into the sitting-room. The Feetwarmers sounded very loud in here - they had started on 'Wild Man Blues' by now - and Malcolm reduced them somewhat before offering drinks, wondering as he did so how far his just-over-half-bottle of Johnnie Walker would go among four - five, rather, which raised a point.

'Alun's coming, is he?' he asked Peter.

'Is he, I've no idea. I say, do you mind turning down that noise?'

'I thought you used to like that old New Orleans stuff Jelly Roll Morton, George -'

'If I ever did I don't now. If you don't mind.'

Percy Morgan looked up from turning over some of the records when Malcolm approached.

'Have you any Basie or Ellington? Or conceivably Gil Evans? Thanks.' The thanks were for an offered glass of whisky and water. 'I can see it's no use asking for Coltrane or Kirk or anybody like that.'

'Not a damn bit of use, boy,' said Malcolm with slight hostile relish. 'And my Basies stop in 1939 and my Ellingtons about 1934. And no, no Gil Evans - I seem to recall a baritone man of that or a similar name playing with somebody like Don Redman, though you obviously don't mean him.'