Almost in the act of turning away from the shelves he caught sight of a strip of jacket he recognized, that enwrapping _The Blooms of Brydan__, a selection by Alun Weaver. Some alchemy, compounded of a nervy literary agent, a gullible publisher, a matter of coincidence with the date of Brydan's death and a historic review in _Time__ magazine, had turned the produce of three weeks' work into a quite decent and lasting annuity: 5,000 last year in hardback in the USA alone and _Brydan's Wales__ still very much alive. Whenever reminded of this Alun was tempted to think of himself as quite good at making money in his line, better than at pushing himself forward, not enough of a power man for that, too much of a sensual Celt. And in recent weeks he had been wondering rather about how he was doing, how he was making out as the organ-voice of Wales in Wales. Perhaps after all he had been more audible in England, where competing strains were fewer and less clamorous. He had never quite got over the paucity of his welcome home at Cambridge Street station. So be it: here squarely in front of him was a chance to do something about that all round.
He was sitting at the table looking out of the window at the seashore when Rhiannon came in wearing - well, he was nearly sure she had changed her clothes.
'Sorry, are you - '
'No, just wool-gathering. Can't think how that's got itself a bad name, can you? Pricey stuff, wool. Getting it for free, too.'
'I thought I'd just take a look round the town. I haven't set eyes on it for donkey's years.'
'Fine, see you later, love.'
'What did you make of Ingrid?'
'Ingrid?'
'Ingrid Jenkins or whatever she's called. You know, Norma's daughter.'
'Who's - of course, the char, the char's daughter. To be sure. Well.'
'M'm, what did you make of her?'
'I don't know, I don't know that I made anything of her.
Seemed perfectly pleasant, I only saw her for a moment. Why, what should I have made of her?'
'Oh, nothing. Did she seem the sort to look after Nelly properly, did you think?'
'Christ, Nelly's the puppy, right? Yes, fine. Well, I mean the whole place looked respectable enough. Clean. Things like that I mean... '
'Oh, good.' Rhiannon's manner changed. 'I couldn't have brought her here, could I?'
Alun thought he saw now where this conversation was designed to lead. 'No, no,' he said, frowning at the idea. 'No, out of the question.'
'You can't leave them on their own for a minute when they're that age. I'd have had to be taking her out the whole time or else stay indoors with her here. Or make you.'
'Cheers. No, of course. You couldn't have brought her along and have any kind of proper break yourself. Out of the question.'
'M'm. Are you going to look at that stuff of-yours?'
'Just glance at it, you know.' He always kept her roughly abreast of what he was up to in the writing part of his life. About broadcasting, with the sudden excursions here and there it might require, he was sometimes less informative.
'Good luck, dear. Be about an hour.'
She was gone. Yes, what she had wanted was moral support for farming out the pooch. Normal and understandable. He made to pick up the horrendous buff envelope in front of him, then paused with a groan. There had been something crappy about what had gone before that. What the bugger had it been? Something to do with Ingrid. He had barely glanced at the girl - well, female, pushing forty he had supposed,. smallish, pale; nothing else. So obviously there could be no question of...
He gave a muffled cry, then, remembering he was alone in the house, unmuffled it. His glance dropped to the floor at his side, to the carton of books there, to the scuffed green cover of the paperback _Thesaurus__. Absurdity, he subvoca1ized: stuff and nonsense, fiddle-de-dee, bosh, bunk, rats. _Fjwlbri__. Tell it to the Marines. _Credat Judaeus Apella__. If Rhiannon had been stirring the pond to catch him betraying an interest in this Ingrid, if she really thought 'he might have in mind getting off with the charwoman's daughter, then she was barmy. Unless that kind of suspicion, suspicion of stuff at that level, though unfounded in this case, was not unreasonable in general, was no longer unreasonable, in· which case he was the barmy one. Was that the way it was going to take him - not willingness or ability but judgement, nous?
Several unalluring trains of thought presented themselves at this juncture. He found himself in pursuit of the one about anybody of any sense knowing when he was well off with Rhiannon. But he had not got any sense, or enough sense, or... But he had got this far a thousand times without ever having got any further. He hoped his unpreparedness for the Ingrid question had let his innocence show through, because if not there was nothing he could say about it; it was much too late for any of that, ever. Almost eagerly he picked up the envelope.
Before he had got as far as pulling the contents out his demeanour changed to a frenzied casualness. Head on one. side, eyebrows raised and eyes almost shut, mouth turned down at the corners, he condescendingly turned back the flap, exposed the top half of the first sheet and allowed himself to let his glance wander over the typewritten lines there before he actually fell asleep as he sat. What he read woke him up with a start and set him doing what he had very, very nearly done a minute before: leap out of his chair and go glug-bloody-glug with the Scotch, not forgetting to top up his glass before returning whence he had come. There he slumped and stared out at the bay and tried to reason with himself.
_Of course__ the first couple of sentences had reminded him of the opening passages of dozens of stories and novels by Welshmen, especially those written in the first half of the century. That was the whole point, to stress continuity, to set one's face against anything that could be called modernism and to show that the old subject, life in the local villages, in the peculiar South-Wales amalgam of town and country, had never gone away, in fact had a new ironical significance in these days of decline. Worth doing, agreed, but had he done it, any of it? Well, he might have. Like Socrates now, who when his time came (he remembered reading) had quite willingly and cheerfully drunk off the hemlock, he laid the typescript down on the table just like that and began at the beginning.
After five minutes or so he began to relax his rigid bomb-disposal posture. From time to time as he went on he winced sharply and made a correction, screwed up his face in pain or goggled in disbelief, but several times gave a provisional nod and even laughed once or twice without mirth. At the end of an hour Rhiannon came back and found him at the typewriter with four lines and a bit along the top of the paper. When he looked up she spoke.
'How did it go?'
He scowled ferociously at her and held his hands in the air with the fingers crossed. 'It may be remotely conceivable,' he stage-whispered with precise delivery, 'that not every single syllable is absolutely beyond all hope of redemption. '
'Oh, good.'
'No no no, not good, nothing more than a bare possibility. It needs a lot doing to it. But I thought I'd better press on while I felt like it, rather than go back and start tinkering. No, keep your distance, girl,' he said as she seemed about to close in and deal him a congratulatory hug. 'Later, if ever.'