The old devils: a novel (25 page)

'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.

'So it seems I can safely assume you are not possessed by an overwhelming desire to immerse yourself in the ocean,' he said when they got moving.

'Yes indeed you can.'

'Nevertheless I take it you'd have no strong objection to a small sightseeing trip to a part of the coast of the island?’

‘Oh no, lovely idea. Whereabouts?'

'That will emerge in due time.'

They drove back to the coast road and moved south again into the more countrified area that had mostly farms and woods and an occasional large house inside a park. After they had skirted the boundary wall of one of these with its fancifully bricked-up gateway, Rhiannon began to pick up small landmarks: an old-fashioned milestone showing the distance to Carmarthen, Cardiff and 'Brecknock', the momentary sight of a castle among whose ruins, it had been said, there grew a flower found nowhere else but in the Pyrenees, a National Trust plaque about something, the gable of perhaps a barn with the tom irregular triangle of bleached poster still stuck there as always and finally, unmistakably, the sudden steep turning that led down to Pwll Glin and, further along, to Britain's Cove. It was obviously Pwll Glin that Malcolm was making for, the only bay with a Welsh name of the score all round that coast, if not the finest then, all would have agreed, the most unusual, and known to Rhiannon from plenty of visits in the past ..

For the first couple of hundred yards the slope was so extreme that right of way on that narrow twisting road went automatically to people driving up, and twice Malcolm had to pull into the side and stop. The second time, on a right-angle bend, brought Rhiannon a view of the half-mile or so of flat before the beach itself and then of most of the bay, the low curving arm to the south, the long almost straight stretch of sand and, on the far side, the tree-covered headland where the church was. The road took them to the foot of the escarpment and through the marshes, formerly salt, freshwater now for many years and grown over with reeds of a peculiar and beautiful pale orange-yellow. At the end they turned along the top of the shore, where shabby greenish plants were scattered, and drove finally into the extensive car-park, unseen from above, unexpected almost until reached, but a matter of course after that, full of familiar things like people eating and drinking and making a lot of noise while they walked about.

Malcolm lost no time in .leading the way out of it and down crosswise towards the sea, to an empty part where the sand was strewn with unattractive seaweed and broken by patches of bare rock. By chance it was also just about the part where, one far-off night, Rhiannon and Dorothy had tried to catch flounders in the shallows, or rather not to hinder too much the two, possibly three, young men who were supposed to know how and, for all Rhiannon could remember, had succeeded. There had been nobody about then. There was nobody about now, not at least up this end towards the headland, nowhere to bathe, nowhere to sit or lie or throw a ball, nowhere for the kids to run to and fro. Not saying much, but keeping a close eye on her, Malcolm took them across a stretch of quite rugged rock on to the path that led up to the moss-stained wall of the churchyard-.

On the far side of the gateway here no sound could be heard from the shore, just waves. They were on a narrow granite promontory less than a hundred yards long, with the sweep of Pwll Glin bay on their left as they faced out to sea and another bay on their right too small to have a name, more of a creek really, heaped with stones of various sizes and always empty - well, in the past Rhiannon had seen a couple of fishermen there, serious ones in oilskins and thigh-boots standing into the sea, but it would have been safe to say that nobody went there now for any reason. There was room on the promontory for not much more than the church itself, three or four lines of graves and dozens of mature trees, sycamores mostly, tall and flourishing even in the salt air and at this season deeply shading the ground underneath. Nobody came here either in a manner of speaking, but the two of them were here today, and somebody else had been here not long before to take a bit of care of the graves and make the place seem not quite desolate, though hardly a single stone remained in one piece or uneroded. But some names and dates could still be read easily enough, Welsh names, English names, none that she saw later than 1920. The church was very thoroughly shut up and impossible to see into from anywhere at ground level.

'It's still a church,' said Malcolm, having let the matter rest for quite a long time.

'That's to say it hasn't been deconsecrated. '

'But they can't still be using it.'

'The last service was held here in 1959. Longer ago than half the people on that beach can remember.' He smiled and went on confidingly, 'I looked it up. Perhaps they think there might be something left here some day.'

'Who? What son of thing do you mean?'

'Well ... I don't know,' he said in a gentle tone. 'At the moment it's too far for anybody to come, you see. Too far by car, that is. How many years would it be since it wasn't too far to come on foot, with that climb for most of them to face after? Eighty-four in congregation the nave held, according to what I read.'

'Do you believe in it yourself, Malcolm?'

'It's very hard to answer that. In a way I suppose I do.

I certainly hate to see it all disappearing. I used to think things would go on round here as long as anywhere in the kingdom, but do you know I doubt if they have?'

'Well, there's nothing to be done about it, that's for sure.’ Rhiannon tried to sound gentle too. 'One thing, it's too far for vandals to come too, by the look of it.'

'Yes. Small mercies. I like to come here occasionally. It helps me ... no, it's impossible to say it without sounding pompous. Anyway, it's a wonderful spot. Peaceful. Solitary.'

'A bit lonely, though. Windy too.'

'I'm terribly sorry, Rhi, are you absolutely -'

'No, no, I'm fine.' She looked about. 'It certainly has an atmosphere. '

'You remember coming here before?' he asked eagerly.

'Oh yes, of course.'

She would have added 'lots of times' but he hurried on.

'What about that terrible concrete hut, I think it was concrete, just where the road stopped? That's gone too now, of course. Ha, one's quite glad to see the back of some of what they pull down. It was the only place to eat, though.'

'That's right, and the lady washed up so loudly you couldn't hear yourself speak, and kept the key of the lav in her apron.'

'Do you remember having lunch there?'

'Oh yes,' she said in the same spirit as a moment earlier. 'We took what we were given

- sausages and chips and OK sauce.'

'M'm. There was a hopeless cat there too, that when you stroked it, it looked at you as though you were barmy.’

‘I'd forgotten about that. You drank Mackeson stout, didn't you? It was your regular

"tipple in those days.’

‘So it was. You never seem to see it now.'

'And the two of us went for a stroll after.'

She felt she probably should have spoken then but she could not think how to say it, just smiled and waited and crossed her fingers in her head. He stepped a pace back from her before he went on, still with insistence, 'When we got up here we found there'd been a storm a night or two before and there were leaves and bits of twigs and branches and stuff all over the place, and the sea was still very rough. And we went right up to the end there where it jutted out over the water just there, remember? - quite dangerous it was, I suppose, but we do these things in our youth, actually I think most of it's fallen away now. And I said, I know I'll never mean as much to you as you mean to me, anywhere near, and I'm not complaining, I said, but I want to tell you nobody will ever mean as much to me as you do, and I want you to remember that, I said. And you said you would, and I think perhaps you have, haven't you, Rhiannon?'

If it had been too early a moment ago to contract out of his recalling of that day, it was obviously much too late now. Not sure that she could have spoken in any case, she nodded.

'Wonderful. Oh, that is lovely.' The tautness departed from his manner . 'Well, an awful lot of things seem worth while after that, I can tell you. Thank you for remembering me, with so much else in your life.'

He sent her a smile of simple affection and indicated they should move. As they began strolling down the slight incline towards the gate he put his arm chummily round her waist.

'Yes, I'd got my pal Doug Johnson to lend me his car for the day. It was the first time I'd taken it out and I was a bit nervous, I hope it didn't show.'

'I didn't notice anything,' she said.

'We stopped for petrol and the surly bloke wouldn't change a fiver, remember?'

'Oh yes of course.' With the heat off, Rhiannon would have agreed that she remembered General Tate's landing at Fishguard.

'And we'd hardly gone ten yards after when that terrific cloudburst started and I had to stop because the windscreen-wiper wasn't working properly.'

'That's right.'

'Ah, now I think I can almost fix the date. The Australians were playing at Cardiff and in their -'

He stopped walking and stared ahead of him. She knew something awful had happened. Her eyes skidded away to a horizontal stone gone almost black and read helplessly of Thomas Godfrey Pritchard who departed this life 17th June 1867 and was sorely missed. When she looked at Malcolm again he was still staring, but at her now.

'Doug Johnson was away in France the whole of that summer,' he said, 'doing his teaching prac. He certainly wasn't around to lend his car to me or anyone else. So that must have been a different day altogether.'

'M'm.' She forced herself to go on looking at him.

'We must have taken the bus down. You couldn't have remembered it like that, the way you said you did.'

'No.'

'You don't remember any of it, do you? Not having lunch or walking up to St Mary's or what I said or anything.'

It was not to be got out of or away from. Coming on top of the little tensions of the day the unashamed intensity of his disappointment was too much for her. She hid her face, turned aside and started to cry.