The Old Devils

       Watching Gwen refill her glass and also send a minor stream down its outside, Rhiannon wondered what, if anything, she told herself she was doing. Did she just not know what she was really doing? As any wife of Alun's would have had to be, Rhiannon was almost as used to people getting drunk as she was to them having a drink, but she had learnt too that there was a stage beyond that. It was a little discouraging to find, a couple of hours after arriving to live among them, that everybody round the place seemed to be getting there regularly if they were not funny in some way. Or (Muriel) had a touch of both.

       Gwen was turning serious and inquisitive all over again.

       She said, 'How did you actually react to the idea of settling down in these pans?' This had not got to be another bit of maundering; it was a trick of Gwen's to keep coming back to a point until her curiosity was either satisfied or else knocked firmly on the head - a very minor improvement on the maundering option if you asked Rhiannon.

       'Thrilled,' she said rather loudly.

       'You don't mind my asking? I suppose the two of you discussed it pretty thoroughly before you took the decision.'

       'Not really, no. Over in a moment.'

       'Oh yes. Which of you in fact got the idea first?'

       'We found we'd both been thinking about it for some time.'

       'But who was the first to mention it? Was it you? Just interested. '

       'No, it was Alun. He came out with it one morning at breakfast. '

       'And you fell in with it straight away.'

       'Yes. I seemed to have my mind already made up. I don't really know why.'

       'Oh. I expect you had a lot of friends in Highgate.' Rhiannon nodded from the waist upwards. 'Yes, I was quite firmly fixed there. Look, old thing, if you're trying to get me to say Alun was the one who wanted to come and he managed to browbeat me into it then you're wasting your time. He was keener than I was to start with but I was keen enough. Not that that would have made any difference in the end to whether we came or not.'

       'Have you always done what he wanted?'

       'Yes, of course I have, in anything like that. He earns the money.'

       'You let that man walk all over you, Rhi. I told you he would.'

       'Did you? Well, this is one time he hasn't.'

       At this Gwen seemed to give up. She scrumpled bits of cigarette-wrapping and stowed them in vacant parts of her ashtray and carefully blew some ash off the table-top. With a quirky smile she said, 'How is Alun?'

       That sounded really nice for about half a second, like an easy exam question: anything you feel like saying on the subject will do. Rhiannon half wanted to answer with a run-down on Alun's medical check-up last month, featuring the part where the doctor had told him, rather coldly, apparently, that his liver as well as his hean and lungs was in excellent condition. But she felt she had to be a little more forthcoming than that. She saw that Gwen had switched to a smile with raised eyebrows. What a lot of expressions she knew.

       'He's just the same as ever,' said Rhiannon. 'Always jolly and lively except when I don't want him to be. That's the chief thing about him as far as I'm concerned.'

       This went down less than well. Gwen got up quickly and toddled to the litter-bin behind Rhiannon. There, having let the empty bottle rustle and thump down inside, she was to be heard knocking out the ashtray on the edge of the bin. Silence followed while she presumably regrouped. When she spoke it was clear from the acoustics that her back was turned. Rhiannon shifted uneasily on her chair.

       'You know, Malcolm was absolutely knocked sideways when your letter came. We'd heard talk but nothing definite. Knocked him completely sideways.'

       'Not with horror, I hope.'

       'Of course not with horror. With delight. With joy.' A loud smacking pop indicated what Gwen had been up to while out of sight. 'But something else as well, Rhi, you know that.'

       Gwen came into view again with the new bottle and the emptied but still dirty ashtray and rather flung herself down in her seat at the table.

       'You were his first love,' she said matter-of-factly.

       'That's nice to hear. He's one of the sweetest men I've ever met.' Rhiannon meant what she said, and could not understand why she so much disliked speaking the words. 'He never talks about it,' said Gwen, looking at her watch. 'Never says what happened.'

       'Gwen, really, there's nothing to talk about. _Nothing__ happened.'

       Rhiannon felt what was almost admiration for her friend and at the same time wanted to hit her a certain amount for the way she accepted the message without any nonsense about believing it or even somehow not believing it. She finished nodding her head and sat for a time fiddling with her glass, which she had refilled, and moving her eyebrows about, as much as to say that here came the punch. At the instant she drew in her breath to deliver it the door-bell rang, a peremptory, office-type sound. When a moment later Rhiannon heard Dorothy's voice she sniggered to herself.

       Then Dorothy came in, embraced Rhiannon at length, apologized for being early, asked to hear all her news and listened, or at least stayed quiet and watching, while she told some of it. This startling behaviour intrigued Rhiannon and obviously disconcerted Gwen, who twice at least seemed on the point of breaking in to protest that the whole thing was a put-up job, meant to bring her into disrepute, most unsporting and certain to wear itself out soon. On the last point at any rate she would have scored, for Dorothy sent her first glass of wine down in a little over ten minutes and her second in a little under, and not before Alun, Malcolm and Percy got back from the Bible, but well before the end of the evening, she started telling them all, and then telling just Gwen, about a tribe in probably New Guinea she had been reading about who built houses in trees that they never occupied and had perhaps at some distant era intended for the spirits of their ancestors to live in, but perhaps not, and other things like that. When the time came, however, she went off quite meekly, taking less than a quarter of an hour to move from just inside the front door to just far enough outside it. More than once in that time she had invited Gwen and Rhiannon to coffee at her house the following morning.

       'Is she like that all the time now, did you gather?' asked Alun as he and Rhiannon were undressing in the little guest bedroom. 'Malcolm said something.'

       'Quite a lot of it, evidently, but I think some of it tonight was the excitement of seeing us.'

       'Seeing you, more like. She's never had much time for me.' He stood on one leg and shook the other with tremendous force to rid it of that pan of his trousers. 'I can't think why not.'

       Rhiannon got into bed and started on the considerable routine necessary to shape her pillow correctly. 'She was sober when she arrived.'

       'Yeah, well when you're knocking it back like that all day every day you get a sort of float, or do I mean balance. You only need a bit of topping-up and you're off, gone. A plateau.'

       'Poor little thing.'

       'Poor little thing be buggered,' said Alun musically, also getting into bed. He turned the light out, lay down and put his arms round Rhiannon as he did every night, or rather every night he was there, with her. 'We're the poor little things having to take it. And poor old Percy's the poorest littlest thing of the lot.'