The old devils: a novel (34 page)

2

Alun went out early the next morning and got newspapers. On his return he stood facing the bay in pale sunlight, took some deep breaths and thought to himself, if a waft of industrial pollution had ever been perceptible here there was no question of any now. When other thoughts, to do with time and age and all that, started to occur to him he rather consciously went indoors to breakfast, a scheduled fatty's flare-up presenting two boiled eggs turned out on to fried bread and fried potatoes as well as bacon and tomatoes. While he ate it he worked animatedly at the
Times
crossword.

'You
fiend,'
he said, writing in a solution. 'Oh, you ... you
swine.'

At the typewriter afterwards he got through another half-page of dialogue, very rough, almost token. It had turned out hard for him to concentrate: he felt fit, the sun was shining on the water and Sophie and Charlie were on their way. Several times he glanced up from his table, fancying lie heard or saw them. When they finally appeared he ran out on to the path with whoops of welcome, snatched their suitcases from them, chivvied them indoors. Some who knew him used to say that Alun never came nearer convincing you he meant it than when he was being glad to see you. Like other enthusiastic hosts he had definite ideas about how the party was to be organized. Coffee and drinks went round in the front room while the Norrises'

offerings - a fresh sewin picked up in Hatchery Road that morning, a 57% Islay malt whisky - were brought out and admired. The women were not hindered from going off on their own, for -the moment only as far as the kitchen. Alun refilled Charlie's glass and said, 'I want you to do something special for me if you would.'

'I'll have you know I'm a respectable girl and never touch kinky stuff.'

'No, it's ... ' Alun had rehearsed this part but he still had to squeeze it out. 'The thing is, I've started a sort of novel, it's supposed to be a serious novel, a proper one, you know, with no ham or balls or flannel about it, look you to goodness boy
bach,
but it's hard for me to tell. So if you could just sort of glance through the first pages of the thing, not bothering about merit or the plenteous lack of it, but just seeing if ... '

'If I can give it a free-from-bullshit certificate.’

‘Exactly.'

'Well ... ' Charlie's glance was uneasy. His familiar battered look seemed intensified without actual bruising or laceration, as though he had been perseveringly beaten with padded cudgels. 'Unless I give you my honest -'

'I'm not asking for a bloody bunch of roses - of course you must speak as you find. Please, Charlie. Go on, you old bugger, you're the only one.'

'As long as you ... All right. Where is it?'

'Here, but don't look at it now. In a few minutes I'll herd the females into the village, where booths and bazaars of hideous aspect and degraded purpose display wares of varied and arresting squalor. But - they are useless, and they are for sale. What merit more demands the female heart? I'll go up to White's and see you in about half an hour or three-quarters. If you run out of water there's plenty in the tap.'

Wearing among other things the new cashmere pullover Alun did much of what he had promised, but before making for White's he looked in at Brydan Books. He told himself that it could do no harm and that he had never much cared for sitting about in pubs on his tod. But as soon as he was fairly inside the shop he was recognized and plurally shaken hands with. Customers were introduced and all asked for his autograph, a copy of his old
Celtic Attitudes
miraculously appeared and received his uninhibited inscription, and an elderly lady in a Brydan Books, Birdarthur, Wales apron who had no other obvious connection with the trade was brought from the back of the premises simply in order to have sight of him. He left bearing a newish book on the Rebecca riots that nobody would take his money for and telling himself now that the whole concern was a lot of bloody nonsense.

The bar at White's Hotel was filling up, but he achieved the same seat as the previous evening. He looked round quite eagerly but in vain for the white-hatted sod, whom in his— present mood he would have thoroughly enjoyed seeing off, doing so with a minimum of exertion, furthermore, like a whatever-it-was Black Belt. Just as he was starting to wonder whether it had been such a good idea to shut Charlie away like that with a bottle of whisky, in he came. His face seemed to have smoothed out slightly in the past hour or less, no doubt through assisted abatement of hangover. Nothing was to be read from his expression.

'Well, fire away,' said Alun briskly when, they were settled with their drinks. 'Let's have it.'

'You did ask for my honest opinion ... '

Alun's glance fell. 'Which you have now made clear enough. How much did you manage to struggle through?'

'I read twenty pages carefully, then skipped to the end.' Charlie spoke with a hesitancy unusual in him. 'I must emphasize that this is just my personal -'

'Spare me that if you will.'

'Sorry. Well now. I can see here and there what you're trying to do, and I think it's worth doing, and you've probably made the best attempt at it you can, but I'm not sure if it can be done at all, very likely it can't in the 1980s I don't know. But you haven't done it, that's to say you weren't doing it in what I read.'

'What about the bullshit?'

'The whole tone of voice, the whole attitude is one that compels bullshit. If I say it's too much like Brydan I mean not just Brydan himself but a whole way of writing, and I suppose thinking, that concentrates on the writer and draws attention to the chap, towards him and away from the subject. Which I suppose needn't be Wales in a way except that it always
is,
and somehow or other it's impossible to be honest in it. Now I'm sure you've tried your hardest not to put in anything you didn't mean or you thought was playing to the gallery, but it all gets swallowed up and turns into the same thing.'

Alun was still looking down. 'Nothing to be salvaged?’

‘Nothing I saw. I'm sorry.'

'You're saying I've got to the stage where I can't tell what's bullshit from what isn't bullshit any longer.'

'No. I don't think I am. I'm saying if you want to talk seriously about that place of yours and the people in it you'll have to approach the thing in a completely different way, as if you've never read a book in your life - well no, not that exactly, but ... '

Before Charlie had spoken a word Alun felt as if he might have been going to faint, only never having fainted before he found it hard to tell. The feeling had passed after a few seconds, since when he had had a good half of his attention on keeping his head from wobbling about, another sensation new to him. He had also been distracted by suddenly remembering who Bleddyn Edwards was, namely a man who came on at the end of the six o'clock news on Taff TV and spent a couple of minutes trying to be comical about piquant Welsh happenings of the preceding twenty-four hours. Another man did this turn-and-turnabout with him at a slightly lower level of wit and sensitivity, a man called something like Howard Hawell about thirty years younger than Alun Weaver and of less refined appearance but, all too plainly, confusible with him just the same. Cheers
yn fawr.
With quite enough competing for his notice he saw with brief amazement that Charlie had not yet touched his drink. Quietly, trying as hard as he could to make it sound right, Alun said, 'Well, it looks as though I'll have to junk what I've done and have a totally fresh stab at the whole affair. Simple as that. I do agree, one can get horribly inbred in Wales without realizing it.'

Now Charlie did drink. 'Sorry, Alun,' he said again.

'Oh, come on, what are you talking about, you've just saved me several months at least of wasted work. Do you think I'd rather have been given the green light for a load of crap? In case you're wondering, the answer's no. Well, now we've got that out of the way we can get down to the serious business of the occasion. Knock that back and have another.'

'I'll make room for it first if you don't mind.'

Left alone in the pew, Alun relaxed and prepared to let his head do its worst, but it had cleared up now. Other things had not, though, not quite, and he sat there telling himself to stop swallowing like a fool and to breathe normally and to come out and admit he had had a sneaking suspicion all along that the stuff was bloody useless, so it ought to be a relief in a way to be told so in no uncertain terms. Soon Charlie came back carrying two large whiskies. 'Well, the bog hasn't changed,' he said. 'Even to your pee hanging about instead of running away properly. Did I hear something about Percy and Dorothy coming down?'

Alun knew just what to say to that, but when he came to say it he found he could not get the words out, nor any others that he tried. He opened and shut his lips and blinked at Charlie.

'Are you feeling all right?'

Laying his hand flat across his upper chest Alun nodded vigorously and did some more swallowing. He kept trying to push words out with his breath. His head was perfectly stable as an object and clear inside, but he was beginning to feel a little frightened. Then, with an effort no different from the previous ones, he found himself saying, 'Yes, Charlie, to answer your question, Percy and Dorothy are indeed coming down, some time in the late afternoon or early evening if my information is to be relied upon. Hey. Bloody hell. What was that? Phew. Quite enough and to spare, thank you.'

'Can I get you anything?'

'It's here,' said Alun, grabbing his drink and taking a swift pull. The sights and sounds of the pub, really full now and noisy with pitched-up talk and laughter, rose about him as if for the first time. 'Well, whatever it was we don't want any more of it, right? - however popular a Weaver-suppressor might prove in certain quarters of Lower Glamorgan and beyond.'

'You've gone a bit pale. Or you had.'

'No wonder, with the rare and deadly
dorothea omni1oquens ferox
poised to descend on our peaceful and happy community. Now there's one who could do with a few fits of silence visited upon them if you like. Can you remember, who was it who said about Macaulay's conversation ... '

Charlie still had a look of concern and compunction and Alun worked on driving it away. By the time he had done so he had restored his own spirits too to the extent that, provided he kept the thought at arm's length, he could believe he was going to have a whole proper new crack at
Coming Home
after the holiday - keep the tide and also the typescript, which was bound to have some material in it that could be rescued with a bit of imagination, or nerve. He continued satisfactory through the pub session, another couple back at the cottage, and lunch off the pickled fish with plenty of gherkin and chopped onion, the whole firmly washed down with aquavit and Special Brew and tamped in place with Irish Cream. By a step of doubtful legitimacy the men thinned their glasses of the heavy liqueur with Scotch.

After that there was a natural break. The women went off for a walk, Rhiannon grumbling that she ought to have brought the puppy after all. Charlie threw himself by instalments up the stairs and was heard all over the building, and perhaps further, dropping on to the bed in the back room. Alun took to the armchair as on the previous afternoon and dreamt Mrs Thatcher had told him that without him her life would be a mere shell, an empty husk, before jerking awake to find the image of a bearded man mouthing at him (the sound having been turned down) and frenziedly drawing cartoons on the postcard-sized screen of the little Sony they had brought down with them.

Hardly a minute later the women were back from their walk, pink-cheeked, brisk of step, determined at any price to get the tea. He sat on and listened to them shouting and laughing to each other in the kitchen and the minor thumps and crashes they made as they shut cupboard doors or set up crockery. At one point Sophie burst out of the kitchen and ran up the noisy wooden stairs, calling over her shoulder to Rhiannon as she went. Her glance passed over Alun as if they were unacquainted guests at a hotel. The same happened in reverse when she charged down again with a packet of biscuits in her hand. He knew it was not done to annoy, to set up an offensive contrast with male lethargy: it was just an illustration, more vivid than some, of the old truth that women were drunk half the time without benefit of alcohol. (Children over the age of about two were of course drunk all the time when not asleep.) Queers aside, men above twenty-five or so were never drunk however pissed they might be. Rather the contrary, he said to himself, hearing now some widely separated footfalls above his head.

When Charlie appeared he stared mutely at Alun in mingled appeal and reproach, as if covered with blood after a plucky lone fight against oppressors. So far from being in any such state he looked rather well, whatever that might mean applied to him. Comparatively, again, he had so far been restrained in his intake, not urging the rounds along in the pub, sitting behind an empty glass for long periods like ten minutes on end. If he went on like this he could just find himself still on his feet quite far into the night. Alun felt it might be done for his benefit and was touched. Tea was brought in, with anchovy toast and Welsh cakes featured but not Sophie's biscuits, which she and Rhiannon had presumably wolfed in the kitchen. The meal was eaten, finished, cleared away and then nightmarishly reanimated when Dorothy arrived with Percy and brought out scones from a paper bag, strawberry jam, Devonshire cream and chocolate éclairs. After greeting all four in POW -reunion style she could likewise be seen to be well in arrears of her usual state at five on a weekday afternoon. This meant that she would also likewise stay around longer than usual, but on the other band she would presumably take longer to become unbearable, and might always fall down dead before that stage was reached.

Not many people unacquainted with Wales or the Welsh would have found it the easiest thing in the world to reconcile Dorothy as she would be later with Dorothy as she behaved now, when the tea-things were removed for the second time and a bottle of white Rioja was brought from the kitchen. Far from clear at first, it seemed, about what was in the wind, she watched with a slight frown while Rhiannon took out the cork and poured three glasses .