The Old Devils

       He noticed now that Peter had sat down on a nearby sofa and was looking at the floor. 'That would be Angharad. I never thought... It never occurred to me... '

       'What?'

       'Angharad as she was before her illness.'

       Charlie lowered himself beside Peter and put his drink on a small polygonal table of Oriental suggestion. The leather or synthetic material of the cushion-cover at once struck cold, even damp, to the backs of his thighs. 'What?'

       'Serves me right for coming here. It doesn't do her justice, what you see there. Not to what she was when I first saw her. It was her I left Rhiannon for, not Muriel - Muriel was later. I didn't want to give Rhiannon up... '

       Peter's face had grown dark red and he was pressing his hand against his chest. He breathed in and out noisily a couple of times, as if he was going to cry.

       'Can I get you something?' asked Charlie.

       'If you could just sit back, that's right, so they can't see me.' Quite briskly Peter took out a small tubular bottle and from it a white pill. 'Could you just sit with me, it'll go off in a little while.'

       Not swallowing the pill, keeping it under his tongue, Peter held himself rigid in his seat with his eyes shut. Now and then he winced sharply, once so sharply and with such a screwing-up of his face that Charlie thought he was going to die the next moment. Charlie also stayed still, with his hand ready in case Peter should want to hold it, and listened for any pause in the others' talk or any stir of interest, though he had no ideas about what to do in that event. The electric fire hummed away. It was not really so long before Peter's colour improved and he began to breathe more normally. After another minute he opened his eyes, smiled a little without parting his lips, as he always did now to keep his teeth out of sight, and sipped his drink. This was whisky and water, lately his preferred tipple in place of the old gin (which he had said he thought made him depressed) and slimline (bound to retain some baneful calories however rigorously pruned).

       'Well, that's it for this time round. Where was I?'

       'What? Well, you were on about Angharad. Are you sure you want to - '

       'Yes, I'm all right. Thanks for sitting there, Charlie.

       Yes. Angharad said - please let me ten you this - she insisted I had to give Rhiannon up completely if I wanted· ever to see her again. She was the insisting type, as you astutely perceived from that photograph. Well, a girl like that, you can understand it in away, and understand it even better if you allow for the bloke being a selfish shit who's rather thrilled to be the object of it. Then not so very long afterwards Angharad was doing some more insisting, but what she was insisting on this time was that I shouldn't see her any more. Some other fellow had... well... '

       When he broke off and gazed at his empty glass, Charlie said, 'Can I get you another?'

       'No. Don't go, Charlie. Can I finish yours? Just for this minute.'

       'You're not to regard it as a precedent, mind.'

       'Thanks. Then, of course, I should have gone back to Rhiannon, or tried to. But I couldn't face her. A bit hard to understand now, perhaps. And there was cowardly stuff about my job which is much easier to understand, I'm sorry to say. It's all so obvious really, but I'd met Muriel by then. She was a friend of Angharad's, if you can credit· such a thing.

       'All this was well before Angharad got ill. Cancer of the womb it was, or that was what it boiled down to in the end. Quite rare at twenty-nine. They took out the whole works, gave her a total pelvic clearance I believe it was called. Plays hell with the hormonal system and the rest of it, or it can. I didn't see anything of her for four or five years, and when she did turn up she looked within shouting distance of how she looks now.

       'So there we are. They didn't know a hell of a lot about these things in those days. I don't say they know much more about them now, but then they thought that kind of thing was brought about by excessive sexual indulgence, as they would have phrased it. Or anyway helped on by it. Well, even then I could see it would have been altogether too funny for words if I'd done all the damage myself, but I could have done my bit, along with one or two others. Yes. No doubt that's something you dismiss from your mind if you've got any sense, and also if you happen not to have grown up with a lot of bloody Methodists and Calvinists and Calvinistic Methodists.

       'Anyway, thanks for listening, Charlie. At least I suppose a lot of it you hadn't heard before.'

       'Some of it, yes. Everybody was wondering but there were things nobody knew.'

       'People always say you can't keep a secret in Wales, but there's no problem if it's nasty enough. They know all too well what they're like, what talkers they are. And hypocrisy's good too. Comes into its own, you might say.'

       'But Muriel knew.'

       Peter actually laughed. 'Oh yes. When I look back, me marrying her is about the hardest thing to believe of all. Next to her marrying me. She was keen, of course. She wasn't quite a virgin but near enough not to count. She may even have thought she honestly didn't mind coming third to Angharad and Rhiannon. If so the scales fell from her eyes with... '

       'Prodigious precipitation.'

       'And comprehensiveness. And irreversibility. And everything else. Well, it's done me good to get that off my chest.' Peter was breathing naturally now and just with this mention of his chest he finally removed his hand from it. 'How long I can expect it to last is another matter. Oh, God, there I go - moan, moan, moan. It is a time for the recharging of glasses. '

       As they got up thankfully from the sofa Charlie asked, 'How much of the story does Rhiannon know?'

       'All of it, I should think. Well, not everything I've told you. I haven't discussed it with her since.'

       'No, I can see how you wouldn't.'

       Charlie tried to set it all in order in his mind. He told himself he could not be expected to manage the whole thing straight away. There was quite enough for an old josser to take in in one evening. Whatever the time might be he was beginning to feel like moving on - after another here he would suggest to Peter that they should drift along to the Glendower for a bite and a swallow. The fire had failed to warm the room appreciably and a headachy reek of damp had emerged, with a touch of stale flower-water thrown in. But if Garth was not living in the house then where was he living? Or could he really be a lodger after all?

       Peter and Charlie came up to hear Garth saying, 'Well, whose shout is it, then?'

       As if by pre-arrangement first Alun and Malcolm, then Charlie and Peter looked at each other. It fell to Malcolm, as sometimes in the past, to say what everyone else was thinking and not saying.

       'Sorry, Garth, I'm not with you. How do you mean, shout? We're not in the pub now.'

       'No, boy, of course not, of course not,' said Garth, laying his hand reassuringly on Malcolm's arm. 'Just with the prices things are these days we simply can't afford unrestricted hospitality. Of course we'd like to, but we can't. So?' He sent round an interrogative glance.

       'All right, if it's shouts we're on to, I'll shout first.' Alun still looked very much astonished.

       'Good for you. Double Scotch, is it?' Garth tipped the bottle twice while the rest of the company paid close attention. 'Right. Help yourself to water or soda.'

       'You don't mean to say they're free? Oh, goody bloody goody, what?'

       Garth nodded without speaking, his eyes on a pocket calculator that had appeared on the sideboard before him. 'Mind you don't forget to add on the cost of the first round.'