It was nearly eight o'clock when Bethan left.
There was no moon. It was very dark.
"Where's your car?" Giles asked.
"I left it at the school, it's only three minutes walk."
"It's pitch black. I'll come with you, bring a torch."
"Thank you. but I used to live in this village, there's no—"
"There is." Giles said firmly, grabbing his green waxed jacket from behind the door, switching his heavyweight policeman's torch on and off to make sure it was working.
"Well, thank you." Bethan said. Oh god, she thought. I don't really want to be alone with Giles now. I don't need this.
Following the torchbeam. they walked down the hill and over the bridge, the river hissing below them. There was an anguished silence between them until they reached the entrance to the school lane.
"Christ," Giles said.
"Look—" Bethan put a reassuring hand on his arm.
"Don't worry, all right?"
"Huh—" Giles twisted away like a petulant schoolboy then immediately turned back, apologetic. He expelled a sigh, full of hopelessness, and rubbed his eyes.
"You will soon get the hang of it."
It was too dark to see his face.
"But you don't understand." Giles said desperately. "I thought I was getting the hang of it. I've been working at it for weeks. Before we even came. I used to spend all my lunch hours swotting. I mean, you know — I really thought I was getting pretty good. It's just so bloody embarrassing."
"Don't worry." Bethan said. "Everybody has days like that. When they're beginning. A few weeks really isn't very long, you know."
"All right then, what about Claire? I mean, she hasn't spent anywhere near as much time on it as me."
"Look," Bethan said, as they reached the Peugeot. "The very worst thing you can do is worry."
"But I couldn't put together even the simplest sentences! I mean things I know!" Bethan heard Giles punching the palm of his hand in bitter frustration. The violent movement seemed to hurt him more than he'd intended because he gave a small moan of pain.
"Mr. Freeman, are you sure you're all right?"
"Giles. Please. I hate being Freeman, so bloody English. Yes I'm fine. Well, I've got a headache, but that's nothing unusual. I'm sorry. I'm being ridiculous."
"I know it means a lot to you." Bethan said gently. She felt terribly sorry for him. He wanted so badly to be a part of this culture. It had been awful watching him agonisingly entangled in the alien grammar, tongue frozen around words he just could not say, getting stuck on the same ones again and again, stammering in his confusion. Sometimes — his hands gripping the edge of the table until the knuckles were white as bone — it seemed almost as if his facial muscles had been driven into paralysis by the complexity of the language.
"Look," Bethan said. "Get a good night's sleep. Don't think about it. Don't look at any books. I'll see you again tomorrow. Maybe… Look, maybe it's something I am doing wrong. I'm so used to teaching children."
"But what about Claire?' he cried. "I mean, for God's sake, how do you explain that?"
Chapter XXIX
Berry Morelli had not long been in the office when his boss threw a newspaper at him.
"For your private information," Addison Walls said.
Newsnet's London bureau chief was a small, neat, precise man with steel-rimmed glasses, a thin bow tie that was always straight and an unassuming brown toupee. It was Berry's unvoiced theory that Addison possessed a normal head of hair but shaved it off periodically on account of a toupee was tidier.
"Your buddy, I think," Addison said and went back to his examination of the Yorkshire Post. He was a very thorough man, arriving at work each day somewhere between 8:00 and 8:03 a.m. and completing a shrewd perusal of every British national newspaper and five major provincial morning papers by 9:15 when his staff got in.
The staff consisted of a secretary, a research assistant and three reporters including Berry Morelli. Although there would usually be orders for the major stories of the day, Newsnet specialised in features dealing with peripheral issues of American interest which the big agencies had no time to mess with. Occasionally, compiling his morning inventory of the British press, Addison Walls would suddenly zap an item with his thick black marker pen and announce, "This is a Newsnet story."
Berry noticed the item flung at him had not been zapped, although the paper had been neatly folded around an inside-page feature starkly headlined,
THE ANGRY HILLS
Above the text was a photograph of a ruined castle which resembled the lower plate of a set of dentures, two walls standing up like teeth. The view was framed by the walls of more recent buildings; a for sale sign hung crookedly from one.
Underneath the picture, it said, Giles Freeman, of our political staff, reports on what's shaping up to be a dramatic by-election battle in wildest Wales.
Berry smiled and sat down and lit a cigarette. So Giles had pulled it off. They'd let him cover the Pontmeurig by-election. Filing his stuff, no doubt, from his own cottage, probably over the phone from the judge's study. Two weeks had passed since Berry had fled that place. Two weeks in which to consider the possibility that he'd been overreacting. Him and old Winstone both.
He started to read the feature, thinking Giles would be sure to hype up the issue to persuade his editor that this election was worthy of intensive on-the-spot coverage.
It was not the usual political backgrounder. Giles had gone folksy.
Idwal Roberts smiled knowingly as he laid out his leather tobacco pouch on the bar of the Drovers' Arms.
This." he said, "is going to be a bit of an eye-opener for a London boy. I imagine you've reported a fair few by-elections, but I can tell you — you won't have seen one like this.
"Oh. I know they've had them in South Wales and the Borders in recent years. But this time you're in the real Wales. A foreign country, see."
Idwal Roberts, a retired headmaster, is the Mayor of Pontmeurig, a little market town at the southern end of the range of rugged hills called in Welsh something long and complicated which translates roughly as "the Nearly Mountains."
This is the principal town in the constituency of Glanmeurig, which recently lost its long-serving Conservative MP, Sir Maurice Burnham-Lloyd and is now preparing for its first ever by-election. Local people will tell you that the last time anything really exciting happened in Pontmeurig was in the fifteenth century when the Welsh nationalist leader Owain Glyndwr (or Owen Glendower, as they call him east of Offa's Dyke) set fire to the castle.
The gaunt remains of this castle still frown over the cattle market and the new car-park. The fortress was actually built by the Welsh but subsequently commandeered by the English king Edward I. One story tells how the wealthy baron in charge of the castle offered to support Glyndwr's rebellion, but Owain set light to the place anyway on the grounds that you could never trust the word of an Englishman.
The Mayor of Pontmeurig (an "independent" like most councillors hereabouts) reckons opinions have not changed a great deal in the intervening years.
Giles went on to outline the problem of comparatively wealthy English people moving into the area, pricing many houses beyond the range of locals, often buying shops and pubs and post offices and conducting their business in English where once Welsh had been the language of the streets.
"What say we take a look at this?" Berry said casually, and Addison Walls gave him a wry smile that said no way.