The Old Devils

       'Take up with Gwen _again__ all of a sudden like that, but it doesn't really make any - '

       'Oh, I didn't realize they were - '

       'Oh yes. Funny, I never thought he was very keen. In fact I wonder a bit who took up with who, either time. Of course it was more all right for her then, not being exactly the only pebble on the beach. She had other things in her life then.'

       'Like Malcolm,' said Sophie. 'Yeah.'

       That was all for the moment. Sophie sat with her arms round her knees, shapely sleek dark head towards the thick shaggy rug as if she was following a train of thought, not a thing she often gave any sign of doing. Rhiannon lit a cigarette, holding the flame as usual a couple of millimetres inwards from the tip. She had wondered a little at the time what had brought Sophie along to her so late, nearly too late to find her up. Something to do with Alun, it had soon emerged; saying she hoped he was settling down all right after the move from London, not saying what she could well have been thinking now, that she also hoped his recent goings-on did not mean she had lost her special bit of hold on him, however lumpy that bit might have looked to the outside world. For various reasons Rhiannon too hoped as much, but felt that here in Wales that was not the sort of thing you could really say. So with no particular intention she asked how Charlie was, rather less inquisitively than when she had asked after Gwen.

       'That bugger knocks it back like a fool,' said Sophie without looking up.

       'Yes, I thought... '

       'I never realized how much he drank till the night he came home sober. A revelation, it was. '

       'Not even nice at the time, I don't suppose.'

       'What had happened that day I'll never know. Anyway it was a hell of a night after that. He made me sit up with him till he was asleep which wasn't till after two, and then it couldn't have been much after four he was cootched tight up to me, stiff as a board and breathing in and out, in and out as if he was doing it for a bet. And he wouldn't say what it was, what the matter was. I went on and on asking him but he wouldn't say. Next day he was paralytic by six, Victor said.'

       'If he's going to make you sit up and all that, he really ought to "say.'

       'He's never said, except being alone makes it worse and the dark isn't good. I've given up trying to get him to try and say what it is. All he's ever said is it's nothing to do with anything and it doesn't mean anything. I'm fed up. He ought to say _something__. I mean about _something__. It gets depressing when a bloke never says anything. There's not as much difference as you might think between him pissed as a lizard and him passed out. Not when he's with me there's not. I quite like him, old Charlie, or I used to, and I miss him, sort of. '

       Rhiannon took her time about finishing her cigarette. 'Sounds as if the two of you could do with a nice break.

       You will come to Birdarthur, won't you? You and I can have a proper gas. Alun'd like you to be there too. He's always complaining he never seems to see enough of you.'

       Now Sophie did look up. 'Oh, he doesn't, no, does he really?'        , '_Yes__, always going on about where's Sophie these days.'

       'Oh no, really?'

       'Won't do him any harm either to get away for a bit.

       Now there's a bloke who says something if you like. If only the silly little thing would learn to leave it at that.'

Seven - Alun

1

Soon after eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning Alun lifted the hatch at the rear of what he occasionally called the family car, or even our family car, though not in Rhiannon's hearing. The two were off to Birdarthur shortly. It had been agreed that Charlie and Sophie should follow them out the next day in time for lunch, with all four set to return late on the Friday. Alun's move to let the Cellan Davieses know of the impending trip had consisted in full of ringing their number once the previous noon, a foredoomed venture seeing that Gwen was expected at Sian Smith's for coffee, etc., and Malcolm strongly presumed to have left for the Bible, but it counted as not having been able to get hold of them. Peter had been told he really must come down, pick any time to suit himself, just turn up, and after a word or two about a bloody Welshman's invitation had conceded he might try. First categorically disowning any responsibility for anybody or anything, Tare Jones had consented to write down the number of the people called Gamer who lived two along from the telephone-free abode of Dai the Books.

       Alun had not so much lifted the hatch of his car as flung it boyishly upwards, which was something he would have done with no more and no less vivacity if he had thought he was being observed, and in that event whether by jobless school-leaver or high-ranking TV executive. First into the cargo-space went, in quick time, a carton of drinkables; twelve-year-old Scotch, classy spring water to put in it, gin, tonics, a rare bottle of Linie-Aquavit from Oslo, a much commoner bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream, ostensibly for Rhiannon, in fact no more than chiefly for her, one each of Asti Spumante and Golden Sweet Malaga absolutely solely for her, four large cold Special Brews in wet newspaper for him, and a spot of coffee liqueur and other muck he could not quite face simply throwing out of the house. Next he stowed a box of hand-picked groceries, featuring soused herring fillets, allegedly smoked oysters, German lump fish roe and other dainties thought to be proper to accompany the aquavit. He laid on top of this a flat paper bag containing a new pullover in yellow cashmere and two sports shirts still in their packaging.

       Trips, up to and including ones directed at funerals, had always heartened Alun, livened him up in prospect, and not just because you never knew what you might run into even in Blaenau Ffestiniog. It was admittedly getting a touch late with him for breaking new ground, however cruelly he might ravage the old. In addition, this coming trip was not a fit occasion for any of that, and besides there was nothing under Birdarthur in the for-his-eyes-only address book. A big part of the thrill could probably be put down to nothing more than anticipating a journey by car, by no means an everyday experience in the South Wales of the I930s and later, as he had been known to remind his London friends. But with all that said he got through the first part of the loading in fine breezy style, as also the second and duller part involving actual luggage and bedclothes and pillows assembled by Rhiannon after managing to get hold of Dai at the shop. The third part slowed him down.

       This part began with a typewriter, not the one from his study upstairs, the noble Japanese office-pattern needless-to-say electric job, but the lowly Italian portable, an acoustic model, as he would express it when he had the energy. Another carton followed it, not nearly such a nice one as the one full of drink, containing books and papers. The books included the _Concise Oxford__, a collapsing Roget's _Thesaurus, Y Geiriadur Mawr__ - The Big [Welsh – English / English-Welsh] Dictionary to him, a compilation notable for its _golygydd. ymgynghorol-__ the Rev Tydfil Meredith's _Courcey and Its Churches__, Sefton-Williams on Celtic mythology and the Brydan Complete Poems. Out of simulated personal need as well as feigned piety he took the lastmentioned volume with him everywhere he went within reason, pointless at best this trip perhaps with only Charlie and Sophie and possibly Peter to bowl over, but there it was. The papers in the carton consisted of typing paper and forty-six pages of a novel of whose existence only Rhiannon knew, together with a few notes.

       Doing some more work on this novel was an unstated reason for going to Birdarthur, already present somewhere in his mind before he blurted out the suggestion a couple of weeks before. He had knocked off the dreaded forty-six in six days in the spring, when a little bastard in BBC radio had tardily cancelled the definitive talk on the Welsh nonconformist conscience he had engaged to prepare and record, and he had not looked at them since. Now, under the Self-imposed pressure of a measured length of time in semi-confinement with no excuse for shirking, he was to apply himself to the hideous task of adding to them. As they stood, or with some minor surgery, they were supposed to be, he had striven to make them, his devout hope was that they were, the opening section of the only really serious piece of prose he had written since his schooldays. In more sanguine moods he softened this to his most serious, etc. But anyway a great deal, including the prospects for the whole undertaking, hung on whatever he would make of those forty-six in two or three hours' time.