Eventually the consensus emerged that it would be unnecessary or perhaps futile to prolong the photographic session, which faded away without anything being said on either side. Soon afterwards removal to the Weaver house was set going, a matter of a couple of hundred yards on foot. As if the manoeuvre had been organized beforehand Muriel drifted across, thrust one arm through William's and the other round Rosemary's waist and seemed to swing them both through a semicircle towards the gate. With an advance six or more abreast pretty well ruled out, Peter found himself in a second rank between Alun's brother, said on their very brief first meeting the previous night to be called Duncan, and his suddenly manifest wife, who had glasses and a hat with the best of them and very red lips and abnormally long teeth thrown in.
On the far side of the gateway Rhiannon was with an aunt or cousin or so and Peter was stuck, irremovably as it turned out, with these in-laws of hers. He had always thought of himself as a cool head in a situation like that, not for the life of him to be driven into speaking first. Nevertheless after four minutes of total silence, the last three of them spent standing in a row at no particular point on the pavement, there he was asking the wife whether she and, er, Duncan proposed staying over until the following day or whether, on the other hand, they would be returning to London that same evening.
She turned to face him hungrily. 'Oh, we've got to get back, no two ways about it,' she said in an accent from somewhere not very nice in England. 'I tell you, it took all of everybody's time getting him to come away for just the one night.'
'Business responsibilities, I suppose.' Peter dimly remembered something about a finance company or building society.
'You're joking. They're a thing of the past, they are, it's getting on for four years now,' she said with gloomy relish. 'No, it's just he won't be moved if he can help it. What he's doing now, Mr Thomas, he's giving them a chance to get settled where we're going, you see, so he can just sneak in there without any of them saying anything to him.'
'Quite,' said Peter, turning his eyes but not his head towards Duncan, who was making rhythmical puffing noises and rocking to and fro where he stood.
'Or so he thinks to himself. He doesn't like being spoken to because people expect him to say things back. That's why he doesn't look very friendly. I tell him he wants to wear a hearing-aid, everybody knows better than try and talk to a person wearing one of them, but he won't. Just draw attention, he says.' She turned back her gold-inwoven cuff. 'Christ, that's long enough to get your grandmother and Mrs Brown settled.' Facing her husband now, she said in a tremendously loud voice with a lot of facial activity, out of sight from Peter but audible enough in her speech, 'We'd better get moving, Dad. They'll be wondering where we've got to. Come on, old boy. There.'
She did plenty of pointing into the middle distance while she was saying this. Duncan nodded and got moving. The three of them crossed the road to the corner of the lane that led to their destination.
'I don't know why I still shout at him like that. Just habit.
The nerves have gone, you see, both sides, so whatever you do he'll never hear anything. Virus, I think they said. Oh yes. Rhiannon did tell you, did she?' Duncan's wife mispronounced the name without any suggestion that it was unfamiliar to her. 'I mean she did mention it.'
Like enough, indeed. 'Yes,' said Peter.
'There's not a fat lot he can get up to if you follow me. He can't face learning the lip-reading and that sign language, everyone does it different, he says, no rhyme nor reason to it. There's the subtitles though, on TV. He likes his food all right, as you can see from his... ' She paused for the first time but went on firmly, 'You know I feel a pig dragging him all this way and running him into all these people he doesn't know, but I'd go potty if I didn't get a break once in a while.'
'Of course you must,' he made himself say. 'That's quite reasonable and normal.'
At Rhiannon's front gate they halted again, Duncan prompted by his wife's hand on his shoulder. She said, 'Take my advice, Mr Thomas, and don't go deaf. Well, it's been nice talking to you. He's a lovely boy, that William. Now you go off and enjoy yourself. We'll be along in a minute.' Duncan gave a not quite unsmiling nod of farewell and thanks for not having said anything to him.
Inside the house the first person Peter saw was Gwen, her head at an offensive angle as she listened to whatever some tall, dignified old ninny in an injudicious green suit might have been trying to tell her; a cousin of Malcolm's, perhaps. It was easy to imagine her frowning and leering interestedly over the account of the conversation with Duncan's wife she was never going to be given. Peter looked round for Charlie, failed to spot him and made for the bar, a trestle table with a really seriously snowy white tablecloth spread over it and loaded with bottles, an astonishingly high proportion of which seemed to hold soft drinks; not all of them, however. The ruddy-faced girlish youngster from the cocktail bar at the Glendower was doling out the stuff, with great efficiency as it proved. Another class of youngster sat round-shouldered on a folding metal chair against the wall. His face was not at all ruddy and his collar was undone. Good going for the time of day, thought Peter.
His only slightly delayed arrival had in fact given time for a large part of the crowd to get settled here or there, dozens of them in the garden all exclaiming at the warmth of the day and knocking back their drinks at a speed that, if maintained, would quite quickly stretch them out in the herbaceous border. He observed the scene from the step outside the french window and very soon picked up Muriel's rear view by her stooped head and clumping gait. With a couple of William's presumed friends, who stood not less than thirteen foot tall between them, she was strolling along the edge of the lawn and, just as he noticed her, she half turned to run a superior eye over what was growing - nothing very much, perhaps - in the nearby bed. She let her gaze linger, making quite sure things were as bad as they had looked at first glance, then snatched it apologetically away, both in a style he felt sure he would have recognized with an inward yell of loathing at ten times the range. Seeing it, seeing it unseen, catching the old bitch out even on such a puny scale, was as good as a stiff one.
He was turning away to refill his glass, which in the last minute had mysteriously emptied itself, when he caught sight of Rhiannon not far off, nearer than Muriel had been.
She was one of a group of a dozen women and some men apparently in a single noisy conversation, glances switching from one speaker to another, all briskly absorbed. Sophie was among them, Sian too, and a couple more he knew by sight, but who were the others? Well, for God's sake, who do you think they are, you bloody old fool- _friends of hers__, see, he notified himself carefully. What else would they be? But why should it need realizing? Because he had forgotten, if he had ever begun to understand, how small a part people played in others' lives and how little they knew about them, even if they saw them every day. Between Alun's death and this morning he had thought many times, several times anyway, about Rhiannon and her life, about how she managed for company with Sophie, Sian, Gwen, Dorothy, Muriel for Christ's sake - none of them exactly her type, he had thought since much longer ago and no doubt with more besides, her daughters, London friends. What he was looking at gave him some idea. Not much even now. He would have said he had forgotten about love too, but just for the moment he would have had to admit there had been a few weeks once when somebody else had' played a very large part in his life and he had known a great deal about her, until the rest of the world came swimming back.