The old devils: a novel (30 page)

'Airs and graces at her age.'

'I mean she's fine on the chit-chat level, nobody better for a good chinwag, oh, I'll give her that, it's just all rather run-of-the-mill. You know, humdrum. Of course, I'm not asking for a discussion of Wittgenstein over the coffee and gingernuts, nothing like that, but it's all very agreeable and chummy and then at the end you ask yourself what has she actually
said.
Nobody's demanding a coruscating shower of wit ... '

This speech had given Muriel time to do some catching-up. 'Always found her a bit of a bore, quite frankly.'

'Well, I don't think I'd ... '

'Look, wasn't she ... didn't you ... weren't you ... ‘

‘Wasn't I what, pet?'

'You know, at the ... place along the road, the ...
you
know, the poly is it?'

'The university,' said Gwen a little stuffily.

'Yeah, that's right, well weren't you there together about a hundred years ago, you and her?'

'As a matter of fact we were, yes, way back as you say.' Gwen tried to remember what sort of place Muriel had been at. Surely if it had been another university or any other proper seat of learning then Muriel would have impressed it upon her many times over. So it must have been a teachers' training college or some other lowly institution where they had envy dinned into them. She realized she felt pretty vague on the whole topic. 'If the matter is of the smallest interest.'

'Sorry, I was just wondering what sort of showing she made as a student, you know, from the academic point of view.’

'Oh.'
In the interval, not long but extended by a couple of soft interpolated belches from Muriel, it had returned to Gwen's mind that the place in question had been a school of art named after one of the industrial towns in the North of England and presumably responsible, to some degree anyway, for Muriel's taste in pictures as seen in her house. This made Gwen feel comfortable enough to go on, 'Well, actually now you come to mention it, er, it is quite interesting. She went to all her lectures, well that's sensible if you're not too sure of your own capacity to shine, as it were, and did all her essays, good girl, and would probably have ended up with a pass degree which was all she was going for, "if she hadn't ... '

'Right. What was she, what was she studying?'

'She was reading -' said Gwen with some weight on the word, then carried on all offhand, '-biology main with botany subsidiary or the other way round, I can't remember. Some English in her first year I think.'

'Not a very distinguished career do I gather?'

'She was a conscientious student but she didn't seem to take any interest in her subjects the rest of the time. Did her work and that was that, then off out. No shortage of offers as you can imagine. She, er, she never took much part in the swapping of ideas, midnight discussion side of university life.'

Muriel made a backhand gesture putting off consideration of that side of life indefinitely. 'Popular enough with her teachers I dare say.'

'Well: if you mean by that there was any -'

'No no, nothing improper, I'm not suggesting that at all. A girl doesn't have to go anywhere near that far to make herself agreeable to her pastors and masters. Winning ways'll do it.'

'Well,' said Gwen again, and stopped. She wanted quite strongly to oppose what was being insinuated without much idea of why, except that the vertical furrows along Muriel's top lip struck her all of a sudden as most unattractive. They had shown up extra clear in the last half-minute, which was just about when Gwen had found she was no longer being borne along by the thrill of disloyalty. She had talked and drunk herself off the heights of her revolt, though that was not at all the same thing as saying she wanted to go home. And it was miles and miles away from saying she was beginning to grow reconciled to what had taken place, what had almost failed to take place, between herself and Alun. It had been
all her fault
-for not having learnt her lesson years before, for being drunk too early in the day to be allowed for, for chancing her arm with a contemptible sod like that. In the past she had never quite made up her mind whether Alun was on balance to be despised or to be regarded as some sort of engaging rogue. Well, if nothing else, the events of the early afternoon of the day in question, that of the unveiling at St Dogmael's, had settled that one for good and all. But no point in going over it again now, if ever. Evidently it had been the right moment for Muriel too to take a break. Sitting hunched over the table, she was making patterns with a matchstick in the loose ash that half filled the roomy blue-glass ashtray in front of her and hissing quietly through her teeth, perhaps in search of a new topic, if so in vain, as soon appeared.

'It doesn't make any odds whether you're bright or stupid or anywhere in between,'

she said. 'They don't care what you think, what you say, or what you're like at all.'

'They don't even notice.' Gwen reckoned she ought to be able to hold her own here.

'You thought so at first, mind you. At least I know I did. Tell us what you think, love - no go on, I really want to hear. And then when you did tell 'em, well it was quite a long time before I started noticing the glaze in their eyes. They were being good about you talking. You can say what you please because it doesn't matter what you say. It's like, I was reading about one of these Russian satellite places, was it Hungary, anyway wherever it was, what you say's neither here nor there just so long as you don't set about bloody
doing
anything, it might have been Poland. And then they wonder when you start screaming and chucking things at them. Hey, that's like, dead funny isn't it, I never thought of it like that before, but it's like when somebody like a dissident or a minority finds they can't get anywhere through the legal ch8nnels so they go round blowing up power-stations. Of course I don't hold with people actually literally doing that, but by Christ I promise you I know how they feel.'

'And then they're never angry back.
You
get angry but
they
don't on purpose, so as to show how silly and childish you are and how mature and marvellous they are. Objective too.'

'It's all right for them to be fed up first, don't forget, like when you're late or they're late. You might be cross when they're late when what they've been up to
matters,
see?

When you've not batted an eyelid.'

'And they go off to the club as if they don't love it.' Gwen had started to enjoy herself.

'As if we
don't know.’

‘
Why we bother to talk to them passes my comprehension.'

'Ever. I often wonder.'

'They're all shits,' said Muriel. 'And the ones who pretend not to be are the worst of the lot.'

'I suppose so. Sometimes I think we're a bit hard on them.'

'Serve the buggers right, I say.'

It was very quiet in Sophie's kitchen. Even in the 1980s South Wales still kept industrial hours: early to work if any, early home, early in the pub, early to bed. The tendency gave sitting up an extra relish. Muriel poured wine with a mention of one for the road, and Gwen accepted some with a cautionary hand lifted, as at every previous pouring. Then, as if struck by sudden inspiration, Muriel snatched up a cigarette and lit it.

'This may not be a very edifying way of carrying on,' she said judicially and with a demonstrative jerk of the hand, 'but it's a long sight more fun than anything my poor old female parent had a chance of getting up to in her declining years. No cars or parties or telly then. In those days you had your chair and your stick and your cat and that was it.'

'Oh come off it, Muriel,' said Gwen, sharply enough to make Muriel twitch a little. 'I met your mother a couple of times, and one of the times I remember she was waiting for somebody to come and pick her up and drive her somewhere to play bridge. And I'm not at all sure she hadn't got a gin and tonic in her hand while she waited. Stick and cat indeed.'

Apart from the twitch, soon suppressed, Muriel showed not the smallest discomfort or sign of regrouping at this contradiction. 'All right, she was lucky. Thousands weren't. I'm thinking of the days pre-war now, you understand. A different world in all sorts of ways. Altogether different attitudes.' Muriel was talking faster and with more concentration than before, like somebody determined to get through a number of remarks already in mind, more than one perhaps long in mind. 'About marriage for instance. Now we're supposed to think that that generation never discussed anything like that. Well that's probably right enough and they didn't
discuss
it, go into the bloody business in every mortal detail-but you see you can discuss a thing till you're black in the face and end up knowing less about it than when you started. Understanding it less, less well. My mother,' said Murie1 forcefully and quickening up further - 'my mother used to talk about the unpleasant— side of marriage. No she didn't, she didn't talk about it, she referred to it, that was how she referred to it when she did. Now just you try and imagine the kind of roasting you'd get if you called it that these days. From everybody. But I wonder how many women would disagree with you in their heart of hearts.'

When Muriel did let up, plainly not out of any shortage of material, Gwen looked encouraging and prepared to pay close attention. Whatever was to follow she would pass on to Rhiannon at the first opportunity, not only on intrinsic grounds but also to offset earlier treacheries. Besides, any informed account of relations between Muriel and Peter, long suspected of being bad enough to be interesting, would win no small kudos among the other wives.

Even at prevailing speeds of thought Gwen was quite ready when Muriel went on, in no less of a rush than before and just where she had left off, 'Because they never had time to get used to it, to adjust . .It's supposed to come naturally and I expect it does for a very great many, it must do, but not for all. But it's no use saying anything because they don't notice, and then when they do notice they think it's just a female acting up or asserting herself or getting back at them for something else in the way everybody knows they do. So then it's either a huge set to or hoping it'll be better next time, and funnily enough it always seems to turn out the same way, isn't that striking?

And
then .
.. it gets to be too late, very natural that, just like when you're talking to someone and you don't know their name, and you hang on because you're hoping they're going to say it or you'll remember, and then before you know where you are it's too late to ask them. Well, when you've got that far it's no time at all to when it's really too late.

'Some people seem to manage quite okay to keep up with their old buddies after not seeing them for twenty years. Sian was telling me she's still in touch with a mate of hers who went to Toronto I couldn't tell you when but a hell of a long time ago.'

Gwen still said nothing. Very reluctantly, and feeling fed up as well, she saw that she would not after all be able to tell Rhiannon what Muriel had let out, could at most drop a hint or two along with a plea of amnesia. That amnesia might easily turn out to be genuine enough, and even the hint or two might stretch her morning self too far. It could be that Muriel had been half rationally counting on something like that, trying out an unusual form of self-revelation, one that popped back into the box overnight. Certainly her last couple of sentences had been just the sort of thing you expected to hear on coming round from a fit of extreme apathy in the small hours. No harm in passing that on.

'Would you very kindly telephone for a minicab on my behalf?' said Muriel after a minute of complete silence. She spoke with rather better control than before from much further out. 'The number can be found in my handbag which is somewhere.'

More of the same, thought Gwen, picking up the handbag from within reach. But she made up her mind to be less bothered in future when Muriel seemed to her strange or loud, if she could remember the reason, of course.

6

'Was it baby Babs whose hideous crabs distressed Father Muldoon?

Oh no, it wasn't baby Babs, it was Mrs Rosenbloom ... ' Alun sang quietly not out of any ordinary precaution, for he was alone at the wheel of his car, but to avoid giving way to anything in the nature of vulgar triumph. On leaving Malcolm's in a mood of heavily qualified satisfaction he had happened to find himself passing, or as good as passing, the house of an old friend. Until the party at the Golf Club they had not met for something like twenty years, met even then hardly long enough for him to tell her she was obviously in terrific fettle and how sorry he had been to hear about Griff. In his day Griff had been a successful and venturesome doctor, unstinting with the early pep pills, master of a sizeable red-brick villa on the Beaufoy road. Alun had just had time to ask where she was living now - same place actually, good old Griff, trust him to see her right. Alun had notified himself, more or less as he turned into that road, that if a light happened to be showing there at this hour then he would pull in for a moment and give a toot, or perhaps better a quick ring, just on the off-chance. And there had been a light and the chance had come up.

To take a fresh step in that general direction so soon after nearly coming a cropper over a previous one, while not yet out of that danger in fact, might have seemed foolhardy to some. It certainly did to Alun, or had until the moment he was invited in for a couple of minutes. After that, and especially now he was driving away, it felt more like having successfully gone up in his own light aeroplane immediately after a bit of a spill. That of course made it no less foolhardy in the undertaking. No, well there it was.

At the age of twenty-six or so, having noticed that he was obviously not a particle more grown-up or less reckless than he had been at thirteen, he had been greatly relieved to come across a newspaper article by some fashionable psychologist saying that adolescence among human males could be a drawn-out process, lasting in some respects and cases until the age of twenty-five or even thirty. This assurance had given him intermittent hope and comfort of a sort until about ten years later, when it had come back to him in a moment of what had been, even for him, an outstanding act of goatish irresponsibility. Thereafter he had clung to the consolation that there was nothing he could do about it.