The old devils: a novel (39 page)

'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.'

At this Garth moved the calculator aside, though not far. 'I regard that as distinctly uncalled for, Alun,' he said in a sorrowful tone. 'If not downright gratuitous. Those first drinks were not a
round
in any sense of the word. They were my freely offered hospitality. Good God, man, do you take me for some kind of Scrooge?'

Instantly Alun choked on his large first sip of whisky and water. Coughing with marked violence he shakily clunked his glass back on the sideboard, strolled a pace or two and went down sprawling with most of his top half across one of the sofas and his legs spread out on the thin carpet. This seemed even for him an unusually thorough imitation of a man collapsing with rage or revulsion. So at least Charlie considered. Since he was the nearest he stooped down over the sofa. Peter' followed him.

Alun was breathing loudly and deeply through his mouth in the guttural equivalent of a snore. His eyes were wide open and to all appearance focusing, though not on Charlie or Peter, nor on Garth when he too bent over him. In a low voice but quite distinctly he said a couple of meaningless words and his mouth moved. Then his eyelids drooped and he stopped doing anything at all.

'I think that's it,' said Garth.

'What?' Charlie felt utterly bewildered.

'I think he's dead,' said Garth, continuing none the less to loosen Alun's tie and unbutton the neck of his shin. 'Yes, I'm afraid he's gone.'

After a few moments Peter asked where the telephone was and on being directed went out into the hall, closely followed by Malcolm. Charlie helped Garth get Alun into a more or less natural position lying on the sofa. By now he seemed quite unmistakably dead.

After less than a minute Peter came back into the room. 'On their way,' he said.

'Malcolm's trying to find Rhiannon. Well now . Well indeed.' He stood uncertainly by the door.

'Have a drink.' Garth sat and continued to sit on the arm of the sofa beside Alun.

'And Charlie. On the house. There's an irony for you ~ you like. Go on, help yourselves.'

'What was it? Any ideas on what it was?' Charlie looked over at Alun's body from where he had instinctively moved to, the furthest possible corner of the sideboard.

'Was. Christ.'

'Heart. Or stroke. Perhaps not heart because he didn't seem to be in any particular pain as far as I could see. Of course it was only those few seconds. But they don't usually go off just like that, not with heart, not as a rule.'

Charlie missed Alun's being able to say, I suppose you mean sheep and bloody bullocks don't. Not as a rule. His glass was empty and he poured himself a treble, or another treble.

'Do you know if he'd had any funny turns recently?' asked Garth. 'Or headaches or ... '

There had been something a couple of weeks back, but Charlie could not call it to mind. He shook his head. Malcolm came in and said he had not been able to find Rhiannon or learn where she was. If the others agreed he proposed to travel down to the hospital in the ambulance and go on trying to reach her from there. Before they could even think of any other option the ambulance arrived. Its crew declined to pronounce Alun dead but they would not say he was alive either. With almost too much speed they had him on to a stretcher, out of the house and away. Malcolm had said good night briefly and hurried after them.

'To think not ten minutes ago he was standing there as alive as you and me,' said Garth. 'A breath of fresh air is quenched for ever.'

Charlie responded. He wanted very much to get Peter away and to leave himself, but as things were they could hardly go stalking out just yet. Peter, he guessed, felt this too. So they hung on, keeping to the same spot by the sideboard as before.

'Good little drinker he was,' said Garth. 'You can say that without fear of contradiction. Good little pourer too.’

‘He what?'

'He kept pouring. Drinks. He was always one who was calling for more drinks. Very characteristic almost his last words were ordering up more drinks. He'd have liked that.'

Whereas absolutely his last words were pissing on you for asking for money for drinks in, according to you, your own house, which he'd probably have liked even more, thought Charlie. Then he relented a little: Garth had just refilled the glasses without question. But, again, it would have taken some strength of character to ask who was going to cough up now Alun had defaulted. 'Do you think whatever it was could have been brought on by that row with Tare?'

'No.' Garth fingered his chin. 'No, I don't. No, that sort of thing only happens in films. No, he had it coming. In fact that's the one great comfort of the whole sad tale. There wasn't a damn thing he or anyone else could have done about it. Not a thing.'

'Oh, fabulous,' said Peter, breaking a long silence. 'Well, that certainly softens the blow and no mistake. Blessing in disguise, really, looked at in that light.' He paused to allow the mantle of solemnity to become resettled, no doubt hoping to be excused from making any definitive pr0nouncement in farewell. 'We'll be off, then,' he said weightily. 'If that's all right with you. Thank you for the drinks.'

Garth gave a sonorous sigh and clasped both Peter's hands in his own. With sudden awful clarity Charlie foresaw he was going to call upon them to salute the passing of a great Welshman. But before another word was said there was a low sound from outside the room, hardly a sound, more like a tremor. Whatever it was Garth turned his head, dropped Peter's hands and compared his watch with the wall-c1ock, an instrument unnoticed until now, disquieting in appearance but only to a minor degree, about right for the billiard-room or butler's pantry in Castle Dracula. The three waited as if for an explosion until the door opened and Angharad was to be seen. What with one thing and another Charlie found it really hard not to give a shudder or a groan of dread and despair at the sight of her. She wore unnameable dark garments high at the neck and long in the cuff, topped by a waterproof of some sort which she very slowly unbuttoned, took off and draped over one arm as events proceeded. Her general aspect reminded Charlie, after a moment's utter blankness, of the photographs he had been looking at not long before, perhaps even an individual one. By the look of her eyes and mouth she had aged perceptibly since last seen. At no time did she send the least glance in his or Peter's direction.

'You're back early, love,' said Garth, smiling at her. Angharad said crisply in her out-of-keeping voice, that of a woman half her age or less, 'There was no point in hanging about - it was quite obvious she didn't know me. IT you remember, it's been coming on for some time. I told her clearly and repeatedly who I was, kept saying my name, going on I was her daughter, and she heard me but she didn't take it in. No idea in the world. So I came away. That woman, Mrs Jeffreys is it, she was seeing to her perfectly well, and I wanted to watch that Great-Gardens-of-England programme, which you really do need colour for and she's only got black and white. Not that I could have concentrated on it properly anyway.' She too looked at the time and added,