The old devils: a novel (27 page)

He reached out to lower the volume as requested, but Percy Morgan held up a demurring hand and indicated that he should attend closely to the music. A clarinet solo was in progress. 'You wouldn't call that melodic invention, would you, seriously?'

asked Percy at the end of the chorus.

'No. I wouldn't call it anything in particular. Except perhaps bloody marvellous.'

'He was just running up and down the arpeggio of the common chord with a few passing-notes thrown in.' Not a vestige of complaint or dissatisfaction coloured Percy's tone. He seemed perfectly resigned, seeing it as quite out of the question that the performance could ever have been different.

'Was he now.' This time Malcolm did manage to turn down the sound. 'No doubt he was, I don't deny it.'

'Oh, don't turn it down, Malcolm,' said Garth in real protest. 'I love these old Dixieland hits, they really swing, don't they?' He mimed a bit of simplified drumming, hissing rhythmically through his teeth. 'Which lot is this?' Malcolm passed him the sleeve. 'Oh yes. Papa ... Oh yes. Have you got any, any Glenn Miller-discs?'

'I'm afraid not.’

‘Any Artie Shaws?’

‘No.'

Malcolm was as close as he usually came to being angry at the way his quiet drink and unburdening chat with an old friend had been turned, without anywhere near as much as a by-your-leave, into a jazz discussion group. Not that he would in the least have minded the right son of attention being paid to his records: a respectful, if possible attentive, silence broken only by a personnel inquiry or so and one or two - not over-frequent - appreciative cries of 'Yeah!' He realized he had been half hoping for this son of outcome ever since the three had arrived and longer than that in the case of Alun. Yes, and where the hell was Alun?

He was on the doorstep a couple of minutes later with Charlie at his side, crying out in loosely intelligible greeting and apology, pressing on his host an unopened bottle of Black Label - like old times, except then it would have been a flagon of John Upjohn Jones nut-brown.

'I hope you don't mind me bringing these boys along,' said Alun. 'Only Tarc was calling stop-tap and they all seemed to feel like another.'

'I see. No, that's all right. Of course.'

Charlie crossed the threshold with real dignity. 'Or even him sending them on ahead. Known as the advance-guard or covering-patty tactic.'

'I'm sorry,' said Malcolm, 'I don't-'

'Ah, the old righteous sound!' cried Alun, hurrying over to the Playbox. 'Surely I know this one, don't I? Wasn't there a Louis version with, with Johnny Dodds? On the back of, was it "Skip the Gutter"?'

'It was "Ory's Creole Trombone" actually.’

‘
Thats
right - on the old Parlophone 78, correct?’

‘Correct,' said Malcolm, beginning to smile.

Alun set about vivaciously looking through the pile of records. Percy Morgan glanced briefly and without hope at the rubric of every third or fourth one he came to. Malcolm went off for more glasses. Charlie turned to Peter and nodded to him in a pleased way, as though the two had not met for some weeks.

'Cheer up,' said Charlie. 'Cheer up and enjoy the music.’

‘I'm afraid the effort of cheering up sufficiently to enjoy this music would be beyond me.'

'What's wrong with this music more than any other?’

‘Not much, I suppose. When I look back, you know, music's like chess or foreign coins or what, folk tales. Something that only interested me when practically everything else interested me as well.' ,

'I wouldn't have gone to the Bible in the first place if the Glendower hadn't been shut.'

'While they fit the new stove. You said.'

'Where are these bloody drinks?' Charlie gave a searching look round. 'And where's bloody Garth? I thought he was meant to be here.'

'He was and is. As you came in he was going up the stairs, in all probability on his way to the lavatory.'

'Hey, there's one very good thing about Garth,' said Charlie, including in this announcement Percy, who had finally given up on the records, and repeating it for Malcolm's benefit as he approached with the promised drinks. 'Mark me closely. Whenever you see, er ... What?" He frowned and looked from face to face. 'Oh, whenever you see
Garth
you get the most wonderful feeling of security. You can relax. You know, m'm? - you
know
you're not going to suddenly run into Angharad. No chance of it. You can relax. Eh? And a very much more minor benefit of seeing
Angharad .
.. is knowing you're not going to suddenly run into
Garth.
Well.'

Peter had looked away sharply at this, but the other two at least showed they understood the reference, namely to the frequent observation or supposed fact that the Pumphreys never both appeared at once. It gave rise to regular good-natured speculation about the homicidal-maniac uncle or two-headed son who needed attention of some sort at all times. Anyway Charlie was on well-trodden ground.

'You know I was thinking about that pair the other day,' he went on. 'Now: if they were in a detective story there'd only be one of them. See what I mean? Only be one of them really. One of them would have knocked off the other 'years ago and now whichever one it was would be going round posing as the other. As well, I mean. Just some of the time. They're about the same height, aren't they?'

'Why only some of the time?' asked Malcolm, glancing at Percy, who shook his snowy head very slowly from side to side.

'What? Well, Christ, because the rest of the time he'd. be going round being himself, wouldn't he? Or herself if it was Angharad, of course.'

'I don't seem to have given Alun a drink,' said Malcolm, and moved off. Alun had that moment slid a record out of its sleeve and was peering at the label in a vigilant way but, without his glasses, surely in vain. 'Ah,
diolch yn fawr,
dear boy. I can't make out, I can't make out whether this is a remake or the original-'

'Could I just have a quick word?'

'Sir, a whole history.' He sighed briefly. 'I mean take as long as you like.'

'Thanks, Alun. I wanted to ask you ... Well, something Gwen said gave me a really nasty shock.'

2

'Well, I treat the whole thing as a joke,' Muriel was saying. 'Which I can just about manage to do most of the time if I keep my teeth well and truly gritted. Take it easy, lass,

I tell myself when the adrenalin starts to flow - you've seen it all before and you've come through without a scratch. Well anyway you've come through. Say it slowly and calmly: you're in Wales, land of song, land of smiles, and land of deceit. Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief all right, and by Christ boyo Taffy has been keeping up the old traditions indeed in a bloody big way oh yes now look you.' The last couple of dozen words were delivered in an accent that sounded as much like a West Mrican one as anything else, Ghanaian, possibly, or Ibo. 'I thought counting the spoons was just an expression till I came to live down here. Nothing more than a colourful catch-phrase.'

Dimly recognizing this as the end of a section, and even more dimly aware of having heard something rather like it before, Dorothy Morgan looked up. She had lost the initiative a minute or two earlier. Astonishingly, she had found herself out of immediate things to say about New Zealand, the adopted home of one of the Morgan sons, a whole country gloriously unknown to anyone she was ever likely to run into round here and in many other parts, serving her as a magic wand or spell for reducing great assemblies to silence. Now, she missed her chance of coming in with alternative unanswerable stuff on what Percy had said to the County Clerk, or what she remem-bered of a magazine article about DNA she had recently happened to read. It was not of course that she was actually listening to what Muriel was saying, just that the continuous sound of another voice distracted her, put her off even the unexacting task of knocking one of her starters into shape.

What Dorothy had looked up from was the stylish Scandinavian table, made of different sorts of wood, in Sophie's apparatus-packed kitchen. It, the table, was strewn with the debris accumulated in twelve hours of drinking wine, smoking cigarettes and not eating all manner of biscuits, sandwiches, portions of cheese, little plastic zeppelins of pate. Muriel and Dorothy were the only two still present and active: Sian Smith was thought to be asleep somewhere upstairs and Sophie herself, never a keen partaker, had gone off to her sitting-room TV quite a while before, though at the moment she was in the hall on the telephone trying for the second 'or third time to get hold of the much-needed Percy.

'I think I may have told you about a long-service warrior I ran into in Monmouth,'

said Muriel now, sounding in no doubt whatever on the point. 'Twenty years up-country in the thick of it, doing something to do with reservoirs and pipes among the Welsh hill-tribes. Normally, of course, at home that's to say, Yorkshire people don't think a lot to Derbyshire folk, but it's different when you're abroad. Anyway he and I got on all right, and he was very knowledgeable about, you know, what makes Johnny Welshman tick. Quite fascinating. One day, he didn't explain how but I imagine it involved showing tolerance for local rituals and such, one day he found himself among those present when the village man of God preached a sermon in Welsh. Which no doubt would have meant plenty to you ... '

Here Muriel made an audacious pause, confident that she could gauge Dorothy's coming-round time to a nicety, and resumed on the dot, ' ... but, as far as he was concerned, the fellow might just as well have been rabbiting on in Apache. But one thing he did notice, did my chum. The fellow, the Welsh fellow, kept using a word that sounded like the English word truth. As in veracity, honesty and such. There'd be a flood of bongo-bongo chatter, and then, suddenly, truth, and then more monkey language. Apparently, when he asked afterwards, apparently it was, it had been, the English word he'd used. Why not use a Welsh word, he asked him. Well, he said,' and Muriel's accent shifted again to the Gulf of Guinea, 'there isn't a Welsh word with the same connotations and the
force
of the English word. And if that isn't funny enough for you, he said, there is a Welsh word
truth,
same word, spelt the same anyhow, and it means falsehood. Mumbo-jumbo. As you well know. Talk about coming out in the open. I've often meant to check that in a Welsh-English dictionary. After all there must be such things. Just a matter of knowing where to look.'

Sophie had come into the room in time to hear the last part of this. The sight of her went down remarkably well with Muriel, who liked holding the floor as much as anyone living but preferred a more normal audience, one that could safely be allowed a turn now and again. It would have been good if Dorothy had been listening too, especially to the yam just recounted, but then she had heard it, had had sound-waves bearing it strike her ear-drum, a couple of dozen times before, so there was a chance of its entering her mind by some route or other, perhaps by-passing the conscious part of it. As it was, talking to Dorothy, or rather in her presence, was a bit too close for comfort to being that type in the story who found himself shut up in a prison cell somewhere nasty with a mad murderous Arab for company, not a lot in the way of company because you very soon found that the only way of keeping him quiet was by staring him in the eye: take too long about blinking, let alone nod off, and you were for it. Muriel lit a cigarette in one continuous operation rather than as when addressing Dorothy - piecemeal, like somebody driving a car at the same time.

'Any luck with Percy?'

'Still no reply - it's not like him. I had Gwen on just before, phoning from that Eyetie joint in Hatchery Road. '

'Oh, Mario's, I know. What had she got to say for herself?'

'Fed up she was, according to her,' said Sophie, who had actually been prepared to pass on this information unprompted. 'Malcolm given her a big row.'

'No, really? That doesn't sound the gallant Malcolm's style at all. I can't imagine him giving any size of row to a cocklestall proprietor.'

After a short pause, Sophie said, 'Well, you know. She asked if she could come up, so

-'

'And how did you respond?'

'I thought why not, more the merrier.' Sophie glanced at Dorothy. 'Right?'

'Oh, every time. I couldn't agree more.'

'Maybe she'll have something to tell us about the great day trip.' Malcolm's excursion with Rhiannon had been speculated about earlier.

'Very possibly. I must say our Rhiannon has been
going it a bit
recently. She can hardly have recovered from her piss-up with my old man.'

This time Sophie paused a little longer. 'I always think, the way you feel about the Welsh, Muriel, it must be fantastic, you and Peter seeing absolutely eye to eye on a thing like that.'

'I must go,' said Muriel. 'Well actually not as much as you might think. It's perfectly possible to go a long way with somebody on some point or other and then suddenly find you and the other chap are literally rolling over and over on the bloody
floor
about it. Easiest thing in the world.' She picked up a nearly full bottle of Corvo Bianco with a slight clunk against an unopened tin of laver-bread (from Devon), got a no-thanks from Sophie and poured unstintingly for herself. 'But of course it doesn't go very deep with me. More a matter of being a little bit naughty among friends.' This, driven home at need with a where's-your-sense-of-humour gibe, was her standard retort to any Welsh person who might take exception to being categorized as a liar, cheat, dullard, bully, hypocrite, sneak, snob, layabout, toady, violator of siblings and anything else that might strike her fancy . 'Yes, I'm a long way from getting my official invitation to join the Peter Thomas Anti-Welsh Brotherhood, and not only on grounds of sex, which I dare say the chairman's prepared to waive these days. No, it'll take a -'

'Oh, and there's another way you don't qualify, Muriel,' said Sophie with a bright smile. 'Only Welsh people can join. Born Welsh. Peter must have told you, surely. I remember him going into it one time after Christmas dinner at Dorothy's. Very particular he was on the point. Two non-Welsh grandparents was too many, he said.'