"Those stories," Berry said. "All shit, right? Kind of, let's put the frighteners on ole Giles."
"Yes and no. old boy." Winstone Thorpe said. "Yes and no."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning, probably, that nobody poisoned Charlie Firth. Can you really see that man dining on unlicensed premises?"
At close to midnight, old Winstone and Berry Morelli were the only two left. Berry because he thought he had nobody to go home to tonight and Winstone because — as he'd told them all earlier-he suspected that when he walked out of the bar this time he'd never come back. People had been shaking his hand and promising to look in on him sometime. Berry didn't think any of them ever would.
"And no?"
"No what?"
"You said yes and no."
"Ah." Winstone finished off his last Glenfiddich. At this hour even he wouldn't get served again. "I suppose… Well, I was drinking with our property chap the other day. Do you know how many English people have bought homes in Wales over the past few years? Tens of thousands, apparently. Mind boggles. Got them cheap, you see — well, cheap compared with the south-east. Plenty of spare cash about down here these days. So it's holiday homes, retirement homes, views of the mountains, views of the sea."
Winstone put his glass down, sat back. "Backs to the wall, now, the Joneses and the Davieses. Getting driven out, along with what's left of their language, by all these foreigners searching for the old rural idyll bit."
Like Giles.
"Very pretty and all that, apparently, this cottage of Claire's. They're so enchanted with the place, they're talking about leaving London altogether and trying to make a living out there… or even commute, for God's sake."
Winstone shook his head sadly. "Pretended I was asleep but really I was the only one listening to him. Oh dear… Bad news, old boy. Going to get ugly. Seen it before. Nothing drives people to loony extremes more than religion and national pride."
"We never learned much about Wales at school, back home."
"A hard and bitter land, old boy. Don't have our sensibilities, never been able to afford them. We go there in our innocence, the English, and we're degraded and often destroyed. I'm talking about North Wales and the West where they've always danced on the edge of the abyss. Look, this is most unlike me. but is there some club we could go on to?"
Berry smiled. "It isn't the end, Winstone. They said you could freelance for them, right?"
"Not the same, old boy. Wife gone, kids abroad. Paper's been my family" Winstone put a hand on Berry's arm and the ancient eyes flickered. "Look, you put the arm on young Giles. Persuade him to get the bloody place sold. Soon as he can. We're really not meant to be there, you know, the English. Stop him. I mean it. You have to do this for the boy. He won't survive. Listen to me. this is not the drink."
Berry met Winstone's urgent, bloodshot gaze and saw some long-buried sorrow there. "C'mon," he said. "I know somewhere." He thought Winstone was suddenly looking too old and too sober. "Anyway, you try and talk Giles out of something, he just gets more determined."
"He's a decent chap, compared to most of us," Winstone said. "But naive. Innocent. Throw everything away if somebody doesn't stop him. You see — as an American you may not understand this, but the thing is, Giles made the big time too soon. What's he now, thirty-three, thirty-four? My day, you were lucky if you'd made it to the Nationals at all by that age. So now Giles is looking around and he's thinking, where on earth do I go from here? What's there left to do? Sort of premature mid-life crisis, everything comes younger these days. And of course he can see all the editors getting alarmingly younger too. One day his copy's being handled by some chap who only shaves twice a week. Or worse still," Winstone got unsteadily to his feet and reached for his raincoat, "not shaving at all, if you see what I mean."
"Women." Berry said.
Winstone scowled. "So he's looking for a new adventure, But he thinks — fatal this — he thinks he's looking for his soul."
"In Wales?"
"Insanity." Winstone paused in the doorway, took a last look around the almost deserted bar. His face was pale, his jowls like tallow dripping down a candle. "The boy was right. I talk too much nonsense. So now nobody believes my stories anymore."
"Winstone, Giles was smashed."
The old journalist smiled wistfully and walked out into the street, where the night was warm but rain was falling. "You know, old boy," he said after a moment, turning and looking around him in apparent confusion. "I must say I feel rather odd."
"It's gonna pass, Winstone, believe me, it's gonna pass, You just got to find a new… Hey—"
Winstone gripped the lamp-post which Giles had hugged in his drunken excitement. "Do you know what, old boy?" he said conversationally. "I'm think I'm having another stroke."
Winstone Thorpe quietly slid down to his knees on the wet pavement, as if offering a final prayer to the old gods of what used to be Fleet Street.
"Shit," Berry breathed. He stared down at Winstone in horror. The old man smiled.
Berry dashed back and stuck his head round the pub door. "Somebody call an ambulance! Listen, I'm not kidding. It's ole Winstone!"
He rushed back to the old man. "Hey, come on, let's get you back inside, OK?"
But, as he bent down, Winstone toppled — almost nonchalantly, it seemed — on to his face. As if his prayer had been answered.
Chapter VIII
"Dead?" Giles said. "But that's wonderful."
Claire passed him his coffee. "Oh, Giles, let's not get—"
"I know, I know, I'm sorry, it's the beer. Bit pissed. But it is rather wonderful, isn't it? Not for the old boy, of course, but we've all got to go sometime and, bloody hell, he couldn't have chosen a better time for us, could he?"
"You can't say that yet," Claire said. 'They might not even let you do it."
She'd been waiting up for him with the news, that mischievous little tilt to her small mouth; she knew something he didn't. It was as near as Claire ever came to expressing excitement.
Giles had both hands around his coffee cup, squeezing it.
"Let them try and stop me," he said. "Just let the bastards try. Did it say on the news what his majority was?"
"I don't think so. They may have. It was still dawning on me, the significance of it, you know."
"Right then." Giles sprang to his feet. "Let's find out."
"Will you get anybody? It's nearly one o'clock."
"No problem." He was already stabbing out the night desk number on the cordless phone. Standing, for luck, under the framed blow-up of Claire's first photograph of the cottage, the one taken from between the two sycamores at the entrance to the lane. They'd taken down a Michael Renwick screenprint to make space for it on the crowded buttermilk wall above the rebuilt fireplace.
"Peter, that you? Oh, sorry, look is Peter there? It's Giles Freeman. Yes, I'll wait."
There were blow-ups of five of Claire's photographs on the walls. None of the award-winning Belfast stuff, nothing heavy. Just the atmosphere pics: the old woman collecting driftwood on the shore, the shadowed stillness of a cathedral close at dusk, that kind of thing. The picture of the cottage was the only one that hadn't appeared in a paper or a magazine. Giles loved it. He was still amazed by Claire's ability to move at once to the right angle, to link into a scene.
"Peter. Listen, sorry to bother you. but I've just heard about Burnham-Lloyd, the MP for Glanmeurig. Was there time for you to run it in the final?" Giles sniffed. "Well I think you should have. Peter. I really do, even if it is only Wales." He and Claire exchanged meaningful glances.
"Anyway, listen Peter, what was his majority?"
Giles waited. Claire perched on the edge of the sofa and cupped her small face in her slender hands, short, fair hair tufting through the fingers. She wore a cream silk dressing gown and wooden sandals. Giles, re-energized by the news, eyed her lustfully.