The old devils: a novel (44 page)

'I gather you're going to be seeing something of my mother,' she said. Her ears had fuller lobes than Rhiannon's.

'Am I? I mean of course I am, but how do you know?’

‘She told me.' Rosemary looked him in the eye and said not altogether seriously, but quite seriously enough, 'Now you behave yourself, right?'

'What? How do you mean?'

'I mean don't misbehave.’

‘What? How could I do that?'

'Any pal of Alun's could find a way. On today's showing - no problem. No, I mean severely misbehave. Like let her down. If you do, William and I will kill you, okay? Oh Peter, I don't think you've met Catriona Semple, also reading law at Oxford. Catriona, this is my father-in-law.'

Ten - Malcolm

'How's she getting on up there?'

Gwen turned one of the neatly written pages. 'Oh, having a whale of a time, it appears. Dinner-parties every night, house never empty, weekends in the country. Country? What country?'

'It's quite a big place, actually, the size of here. She must still know a great many people locally, some of them pretty well off I shouldn't be surprised, even in these days of industrial havoc.'

'Muriel never kept up with them much as far as I heard.

Anyway, there she is. The theatre, what's she talking about? In Middlesbrough? It can't be the theatre as
civilized folk
think of it. Racing? Is there a course somewhere in that region?'

'Sorry, no idea,' said Malcolm, smiling and spreading his hands. 'Not my department.'

'No, I realize that, no, I just thought you might happen to know. Whippet-racing perhaps she means.'

'Well, it's good to hear that she seems to be doing reasonably well.'

'It says something for her pride that she exerts herself to give that impression.'

'I'm afraid I'm not quite with you.'

'If you want my opinion, she's protesting too much.

Life's not turning out to be much fun, how could it in a hole like that, but she's buggered if she's going to let anyone think she's made a mistake. Very roughly.’

‘Maybe, I suppose.' Malcolm tried to sound about half convinced. 'What does she say about Peter?'

'Nothing very much. She's surer than ever she was right to make the break when she did, exactly what she said before, er, oh and if you see Peter tell the lazy sod to drop her a line. Underplaying it there, you see.'

'She must miss him a lot in spite of everything.'

'It's not him she misses, for Christ's sake, it's having a husband as a social seal of quality. And then, well, she doesn't like him not being there in another way, because he still belongs to her really. Some women don't like parting with anything on their inventory even when they've no further use for same.'

'You're amazing, the way you see things. I'd never have been able to penetrate that far into her motives.' He missed the sharp look these remarks drew from Gwen and went tentatively on, 'But you don't visualize her coming back.'

She gave a restrained sigh and said, 'Peter's more likely to go there than she is to admit she was wrong in letters nine feet high, and that's it. Mind if I take first knock in the bathroom?'

'You go ahead.'

Left alone, Malcolm poured a last cup of tea and lit his daily cigarette. Putting aside the
Western Mail
for later he noticed a section headed 'Welsh News', a mere quarter of a page or less, and that in the daily newspaper of the capital of the Principality. That, he considered, was coming out into the open with a vengeance. But it was hard to go on feeling indignant for very long, especially after having just spent a good ten minutes reading about a police scandal in South London and not much less on the prospects for England's cricketers on their Australian tour.

As strongly as ever before, the conversational dealings at his breakfast-table had reminded Malcolm of those at another, the one at 221B Baker Street. There, as here, the first party regularly offered well-meaning provisional explanations of bits of human behaviour and the second party exposed their naivety, ignorance, over-simplification, non-virtuous unworldliness. But there, unlike here, the exposures were sometimes softened with a favourite-pupil tolerance or even varied with an occasional cry of 'Excellent!' or 'One for you, Watson!' Nor was it recorded of Holmes that half of what he said came in aural italics or bold or sanserif. Had Gwen started piling this on recently? Or had she only started doing it so's-you'd-notice recently? Well, they had been married a long time.

He picked up Muriel's letter. The firm, spacious hand, which he could not remember having seen before, impressed him and made him wish, vaguely and momentarily, that she had made more of herself than she had. Scorning the small change of inquiries after health or other sociability, the text launched itself
in medias res
with a fully dramatized but not very lucid account of some visit to somebody somewhere. The more factual stuff came later. Among it Malcolm noticed a piece of information, or supposed information, that Gwen had not passed on: in alliance with two friends and the daughter of one of them, Muriel proposed to open and run what she called a coffee-shop in a suburban shopping-centre. The way she talked about it sounded to him quite unlike part of a brave or overdone attempt to hide boredom and loneliness, whatever bloody Sherlock might say.

Malcolm cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher and set it going. Of late the steady humming it made had been reinforced by an irregular drumming and it shuddered violently every few seconds. With no one repairing anything any more the best plan was probably to let it run until it blew itself up.
Western Mail
in hand he strolled to the cloakroom. Some delay, but no real bother there, in fact all was well-as far as he knew. No, all was well. He had started telling people who asked him how he was keeping that he was all right as far as he knew, and then stopped when he realized that that was as much as was meant by just saying you were all right. As if it mattered. Gwen had about finished at her dressing-table, squirting anti-static fluid on her tinted lenses and preparing to follow with the impregnated cloth. He thought the movements of her hands made them look slightly fat.

'All right if I take the car? You'll be looking in at the Bible, will you?'

'Might as well, I thought.'

'If Peter's there you could give him Muriel's message, perhaps.'

'Eh? Oh yes. Actually he hasn't been in for a week or two.’

‘One can't help wondering ... ' She sat facing him on the oblong padded stool, her spectacles held up to the light. 'Has he ever said if he hands over any cash for his bed and board? Makes any contribution to the household?'

'Well no. Nobody's asked him, not even Garth. Putting up at Rhiannon's for a bit is what it's called.'

'For quite a bit - what is it, three months? Fascinating.

In Wales. Under the same roof as an unprotected female in Wales. And her a widow too. You'd think you were in the twentieth century.'

'Good luck to them is what I say.'

'Oh, do you really? It's certainly what I say. I also say it to or with reference to the representatives of the younger generation. I imagine the lad can practise his trade no less profitably in London than hereabouts. Anything to get out of this dump.'

'You can call it that if you like,' said Malcolm. 'Personally I feel that any place where two people can manage to fall

in love can't be as bad as all that.'

.

'Meaning who? Meaning who?’

‘Well-William and Rosemary.'

'Ah. Well, of course. Malcolm dear, I was just - I meant that's how William might think of it, as a dump to get out of. I'm very nicely set up here, thank you.' And she smiled at him. 'Sorry,' said Malcolm. He had forgotten to include sonic inverted commas in his run-through of Gwen's special voice-effects.

She got to her feet after that and brushed down her chequered front. 'Well. Give my love to Charlie.'

'I will if he's there. He hasn't been in for a bit either.’

‘I'm worried about Charlie, I really am. That evening at Dorothy's, you noticed nothing out of the way but I thought he looked awful. Awful.'

One of Gwen's things was not only to know better in general but to know better than you did about the people you were supposed to know better than she did in particular. Or so it had more than once seemed to Malcolm, who now said, 'He told me he hadn't been sleeping well for a year or more.'

'Right, I'm off. Smarty-pants Eirwen could do with some critical comments on the exhibition of alternative Welsh culture at the Dafydd ap Gwilym Arts Centre' - some system of tonal notation would obviously have to be developed to handle stuff like that - 'and then it's coffee and perhaps a glass of lemonade at Sian's. See you.'

Malcolm went and brushed his teeth in a glancing style, an even less demanding exercise than formerly, now that the lower-jaw one with a hole in it had fallen to pieces on a mouthful of ham at the wedding in the spring. While he shaved he thought about the fact that since the moment when he had brought her the news of Alun's death Gwen had not mentioned him in any way. At first he had put this down to shock or other temporary state, but it had long since been too late for that. For months he had been able to close a conversation with her by an oblique reference, or would find he had done so, not that he had much use for such a weapon. What kind of punishment or self-punishment her silence was meant to inflict he had very little idea, but if she had wanted to remove any doubts he might have been trying to hang on to about whether she had had some son of affair with Alun - well, she had pulled that off in fine style. He had not quite lost the hope that one day a casual pronouncement of the name would touch off an equally casual allusion to that affair, and he could tell her that that was of no consequence and never had been. But he judged it very unlikely. And it was odd how a taboo on a single, less than all-important subject had seemingly turned out to impose a blackout on so much else. When he had finished in the bathroom Malcolm fetched his jazz records from the sitting-room, where they had been lying about for ages, and put them back in the white cabinet in his study on the first floor. Before settling down at his work-table he glanced out of the window. What he could see of the sky past various roofs was overcast, promising rain, real Welsh autumn weather. He had an hour or more, before leaving for the Bible, to work on his translation of a long poem by Cynddelw Mawr ap Madog Wladaidd (c. 132o-?1388),
Heledd Cariad
-more of an adaptation, actually, for among other adjustments he had altered the physical characteristics of the central figure to correspond with Rhiannon's. If she had found love with Peter he was glad, because he had nothing to give her himself. But she had given him something. The poem, his poem, was going to be the best tribute he could pay to the only woman who had ever cried for him.