Where was she?
Giles looked out of the window and it was utterly black, he couldn't even see the lights of the village. How could she take pictures in this? He was pretty sure she hadn't taken a flash unit with her. He looked at his watch and saw it was nearly eight o'clock — she'd been back by seven last night.
He felt a pang of anxiety, unable to shake the ludicrous image of Claire being absorbed by the trees or the village or the night or some numinous combination of all three. And then thought: of course, somebody must have asked her in for a cup of tea, that's what's happened. A bit bloody silly worrying about her being out after dark in Y Groes when she'd survived the streets of Belfast and photographed call-girls on the corners and junkies in the darkened doorways of the nastier crevices of London.
All the same he went out to the porch to wait for her and found the night wasn't as dark as it had seemed from inside.
There was a moon, three parts full, and the tallest village roofs were silvered between the two big sycamores. Giles moved out onto the dampening lawn and the church tower slid into view, the lip of its spire appearing to spear the moon, so that it looked like a big black candle with a small white flame.
Giles's heart thumped as a shadow detached itself from the base of the tower and came towards him. as if a piece of the stonework had come alive. But it turned out to be Claire herself, camera hanging limply from the strap curled around a wrist.
"Bloody hell." Giles said. "I didn't know you were going to be so long. I mean, all right, muggings are decidedly uncommon in this area, but all the same—"
"Darling." Claire said briskly. "Go back inside, will you, and put all the lights on for me. All the lights."
"People will think we're extravagant." Giles protested— half-heartedly, though, because he was so pleased to have her back. "I mean, not a good image to have around here."
"Oh. Giles—"
"All right, all right—" Giles switched on everything, even the light on the little landing upstairs, thinking: we'll change some of these old parchment shades when we get time, they're more than a touch dreary. All the upstairs windows were open and he could hear Claire darting about, aperture wide open, shutter speed down. Thock…thock… thock. A great tenderness overcame him, and when she came in he kissed her under the oak beams of the living room, next to the inglenook where they'd have log fires all through the winter. His headache had receded and with his arms around Claire's slim functional body he felt much better.
"Sweetheart, where precisely have you been? Your hair feels all tangled."
Claire laughed and Giles heard a new boldness in that laugh, all the London tightness gone. Earthy too.
He joined in the laughter.
"You're really happy, aren't you?" he said.
Claire pulled away from him and went to stand by the window.
"Yes," she said. "I'm very happy."
Giles said. "Did you find your tree?"
"Yes." said Claire. "I found my tree."
And then, without a word, switching lights off on the way, she led him up to bed… where they made love for the first time since their arrival, the first time in the new bed. And it was really not how Giles had imagined it would be in this pastoral setting. Nothing languid and dreamy about it at all; it was really pretty ferocious stuff, the old fingernails-down-the-back routine, quiet Claire on the initiative, hungry. Nothing distant now.
Giles told himself it had been very exciting.
Chapter XXVII
He was exhausted and slept like the dead and woke late next morning. Woke with another headache and this one was a bastard. Eyes tightly shut, he ground his head into the pillow. It was as if somebody were slicing his skull down the middle with a chainsaw.
"Change of air," Claire diagnosed. "You're just not used to it yet."
She swung both legs simultaneously out of bed and walked naked to the door.
"Yeah, sure, air like bloody wine," Giles groaned into the pillow. "Air that gives you a bastard hangover."
A few minutes later, he was slowly pulling his trousers on, the sight of the pink vinyl headboard making him feel queasy, when Claire returned from her bath, still naked, tiny drops of water falling from her hair onto her narrow shoulders. She seemed oblivious of her nakedness which for Claire, was unusuaclass="underline" to be nude, in daylight, when Giles was obviously feeling too lousy to be turned on.
"I may stop rinsing my hair," said Claire, looking out of the window. "What do you think?"
"I think I need a cup of strong tea," Giles said.
"There's no point in being artificially anything around here." Claire said.
Giles looked up, a pinball of agony whizzing from ear to ear with the movement.
"I like you blonde," he said. "I always have."
Claire just went on gazing out of the window, across the village to the Nearly Mountains and the neutral sky.
In a bid to lose his headache, Giles took a couple of paracetamol tablets and went for a walk down to the village where autumn, it seemed, had yet to begin — even though tonight would see the end of British Summertime.
"Bore da," he said, as cheerily as he could manage, to Glyn, the angular historian chap, doing his Saturday shopping with a basket over his arm.
"Good morning. Mr. Freeman," said Glyn with a flash of his tombstone teeth.
"Wonderful weather." Giles said, not failing to notice that Glyn, like everyone else he spoke to in the village, had addressed him in English. He'd never learn Welsh if people kept doing that.
"Well, yes." said Glyn, as if warm weather in October was taken for granted here. Perhaps it was, thought Giles.
He walked across the river bridge, past the entrance to the school lane and on towards a place he'd never been before: the great wood which began on the edge of the village. Sooner than he expected he found himself in what seemed like an enormous wooden nave. He was reminded of the ruins of some old abbey. It was almost all oak trees, freely spaced as if in parkland. Oak trees bulging with health, with the space to spread out their muscular limbs, no decaying branches, no weaklings. Some of the oaks were clearly of immense age and had a massive, magisterial presence.
Giles wondered if this was what Claire had meant when she talked of "my tree." Had she come up here alone at dusk?
It occurred to him that he was standing inside a huge ancient monument. Most of these trees were centuries old, some perhaps older than the castles the English had built to subdue the people of Wales. And this was what most of the Welsh forests used to be like, from pre-medieval days to the early part of the twentieth century, until the now-ubiquitous conifers had been introduced — quick to grow, quick to harvest, uniform sizes. Drab and characterless, but easy money for comparatively little work.
This wood was awesomely beautiful. This was how it should be. Giles felt a sense of sublime discovery and an aching pride. He fell he'd penetrated at last to the ancient heart of Y Groes. Surely this was where it had all begun— the source of the timber-framing of the cottages, all those gigantic beams, the woody spirit of the place.
Giles felt, obscurely, that this place could take away his headache.
He wandered deeper among the trees, which were still carrying the weighty riches of late summer. The woods seemed to go on and on, and he realised it must form a great semi-circle around the village.
He came upon two great stumps, where trees had been felled. Between them, a young tree surged out of the black soil. The wood, obviously, was still being managed, still being worked as woodland had been in the old days Whereas, elsewhere in Wales, it sometimes seemed as if all that remained of the great oak woods were knotted arthritic copses used by farmers merely as shelter for their sheep devoid of new growth because the sheep ate the tiny saplings as soon as they showed.