Malcolm did that, pulling on the hand-brake with a rasping flourish. 'Well,' he said, turning to Rhiannon and smiling at her with his eyes crinkled up - 'here we are.' He was behaving as' though he had given her a costly present which only he in his sensitivity could have chosen for her, and looked very sweet and sitting up and begging for a smart clip round the ear.
'Marvellous,' she said.
He got out of his seat and came round to open her door, moving quite fast but not as fast as she did to forestall him. These days she never liked people 'helping' her out of or off things unless she could do a crone imitation with it, and not much even then. He arrived a second after she had got both feet to the ground, but in the nick of time to alert her against leaving behind the shoulder-bag she was just picking up. As they strolled towards the pub he put his hand round her elbow in case she started to fall over or tried to walk into a wall. She could just about recall him using this instant this-one's-mine-you-see indicator once or twice when he had taken her out in the old days. Actually this time it came in useful for stopping her from going ahead and heading into the pub just like that.
He glanced at her again and said, 'Hasn't changed a lot, has it?'
'Doesn't seem to have done.'
'Apart from the rebricking along under the roof there and taking the lean-to part into the main structure and paving over where the old well was. Not to mention the wall round the car-park. And wasn't there a hut in that corner?'
Rhiannon had no answer to that. She nodded her head slowly and mumbled to herself.
'And obviously the tables. Still, it is very much as it was.
In essentials you might say.'
'M'm.'
'The rubbish-bins aren't very pretty but at least they're practical. '
After a last satisfied look around he made to steer her through the doorway, but again she was too quick for him, thinking that it - being too quick for a man - was not something she was often called upon to be any more. Inside, she looked round with a show of interest. Whether it was very much as it had been she had no idea, but anyway it was not crowded yet and not noisy. The only thing she noticed was the little brass rails or railings round the tops of some of the tables, to keep you on your toes when you - no, rubbish, she told herself, off a ship, ten to one, a point Malcolm might well be just going to clear up for her. He kept quiet on that, though, saying only that of course. he had no idea whether the place was any good these days, a whopper if ever she had heard one.
The place, as regards food and drink, which he called victuals, was good enough, but with him there that counted as no more than a start. Of all the men she knew, he was right out in front the likeliest to be ignored at the bar, given a table the kitchen door banged into, brought his first course while later arrivals were drinking up their coffee, overcharged. However, he escaped without so much as a dab of butter on that cravat of his. By the end of lunch, sipping cautiously at a small glass of green Chartreuse, her treat drink, she felt quite relaxed. Parts of the action, like him finding a speck on a wineglass and waving it slowly to and fro to get it changed, or calling for a 'proper' peppermill and keeping on the lookout till it came, were telling Rosemary material rather than good fun at the time, but the dialogue, or rather what he said, was unimprovable, boring almost to a fault. She forgot her misgivings as he took her through the histories of more people whose names meant nothing to her. They even got on to Wales, of all topics; well, friends in England had taken to going on a bit about England. When Malcolm said you got very unpopular for saying Wales was in a bad way, she thought at once of his nose and how he had had it bashed in the pub at Treville. It looked absolutely all right now, though of course no nearer his mouth than ever.
After finishing at last with Wales he said rightly that it was still early, called without too much urgency for more coffee and invited her to tell him about herself. So she told him a bit about Alun and the girls. She went carefully on them because of what Gwen had said, or rather not said when asked, about their own two boys now in their thirties. If Malcolm had something to get off his chest in that department he kept it to himself. Although he was paying her polite attention it became pretty clear after a few minutes that she was on some son of wrong tack.
'Would you like another sticky drink?' he offered, as soon as she stopped speaking.
'No thanks dear.'
'Well, from what you've been saying you're very much content with your life as it is now.'
'Oh yes. Much more than I was with my life as it was then.'
'Oh really?'
'Considering I had as good a time as anyone it's funny how often I catch myself being bloody glad to think, well whatever happens I haven't got to do _, ha__, any more,' she said, 'going on the beach or going dancing or going out, going out to dinner that is,' and one or two more along the same lines until she noticed he was not listening much, smiling away and nodding now and then, his eyes on her face but in a kind of spread-over way.
For a man not to be listening to what she said had always struck her as a sound scheme whichever way you looked at it, and nowadays its corresponding drawback was greatly reduced. Whereas in the past such a man would have had that much more chance of noticing a patch of surplus powder or a pimple pit, failing sight in age would probably have ruled that out, unless of course he unsportingly put his glasses on, which Malcolm had not done. But it struck her now that the ear-shutting thing was part of not wanting her to have changed into just one of his mates, preferring her to stay on out of his ken, so to speak, where he could go in for whimsy-whamsy about her. That, seeing that, rather cramped her style for the time being.
While he was asking one of the waitresses for the bill another of them was putting it in front of him. 'Not too bad, I thought,' he said after calculating the tip for a couple of minutes in his head, on paper, and then in his head again.
'Oh, very good. Proper food.' She had not managed the prepared-by-someone-else gravy dinner she had rather been counting on, had had to pass up the beef curry because of the rice, had steered clear of the lamb ragout on account of possibly lurking tomato seeds and had settled for the chicken pie, the meat moist enough but the pastry definitely waxy, pappy almost, needless to say fatty, but as against that she· had eaten up all her lettuce and watercress and some of the green pepper, which with a good squeeze of lemon had hardly tasted of catarrh at all.
Alone in the very nice Ladies she tried to relax as far as she could and took a few deep breaths before getting down to work on her falsies. While she was doing so she straightened to her full height, shook back her hair and did her best in the way of putting on an important, haughty expression. The general effect might have struck Malcolm as bursting with poise, but the idea was to give herself a head start, an improved chance of facing down anyone who might presume to come barging in and find the sudden sight of an old girl with her teeth in her hand somehow remarkable, or embarrassing, or in any way out of the ordinary, unless in the experience of very common persons. As it turned out, no sweat: the miniature of Dentu-Hold was safely in her bag well before a harmless little thing, in jeans anyway as it turned out, sidled in and vanished into the WC. Rhiannon left in a flurry of self-assurance.
Outside, the sun had left the front of the building but the day was still bright and quite hot. Over near the car Malcolm was standing with his back almost turned, his head slightly on one side, just admiring the view by the look of him, and yet there was something calculated in his casualness that warned her of what was on the way. As she came up he edged into position by the passenger door. Yes, he was going to do it. At some figured-out moment he threw the door wide, stood extra upright with his chin in the air and did a tremendous juddering salute like a sergeant in an old movie. Feeling her cheeks turn hot she sketched a gracious Queen-Mum-type smile and lift of the hand and scurried into her seat. Performances like that were supposed to show how relaxed the two of you were together, but actually they brought out your awkwardness and almost your resentment of each other, or some of it. Well, at least Malcolm had not thought to bring that tweed cap into the act.