Candlenight, page 10
Giles leaned back, drew in a breath and said.
"R'wyn dysgu Cymraeg."
Berry stared at him, expressionless.
"Means 'l am learning Welsh.'" Been working at it for several weeks now with cassette tapes. When we move in here I'm going to take proper lessons. What d'you think about that?"
"Let me get you another drink." said Berry.
He pushed his way through to the bar and said to the barman. "Gimme a couple of those beers with the dragon on the label."
It was worse than he'd thought.
So Berry said casually. "Listen. Giles, that . . . study. You didn't feel it was a mite depressing in there, all that heavy furniture, those old books?"
Giles put down his glass and laughed in amazement.
"Depressing? That study has to be absolutely the best part of the house. Super atmosphere. Real old Welsh. Stark, strong—"
"Yeah but, Giles, what it . . what if it was, you know . . . "
He couldn't say it. He just couldn't bring himself to say it. "So you're learning Welsh, huh?' he finished lamely.
"We have these cassettes," Giles said. "We play them in the car. Claire and I try and talk to each other in Welsh, over breakfast. R'wyf i eisiau un siwgwr. I should like one sugar."
"Could be real useful that. Giles, you have to use a teashop making so much money they can refuse to serve people who don't place their order in Welsh. What else can you say? How about, 'Don't spit in my beer. I can't help being English.'"
"You're not into this at all. are you. Berry?"
Berry smiled sadly.
"Cwrw, that's beer. Peint o gwrw. Pint of beer. The C in cwrw mutates to G after a vowel. More or less everything mutates in Welsh; once you grasp that you can start making progress."
Berry lost patience with him.
"OK, then, Giles, ole buddy. You go over lo the bar and order us up a couple half pints of whatever it was, guru, right?"
"I could do it. I expect." Giles said. "If I really had something to prove."
"Ten pounds says you won't go through with it."
Giles, eyes flashing, pushed back his chair and rose decisively to his feet.
"Right." he said. "Put your money on the table."
Berry pulled his wallet out of the hip pocket of his newly torn jeans and placed a ten pound note under the ashtray.
Giles put on his stiff-upper-lip expression. "Right, you listen carefully."
Aw, hell. Berry thought. Can't you ever keep a hold on your mouth, Morelli?
Through his fingers, he watched Giles march to the bar. Two men in front of Giles who'd been conversing in Welsh ordered a pint of lager and a whisky and soda in English. Berry saw Giles stare down his nose at them. When it was his turn he said loudly.
"Hanner peint o gwrw, os gwelwch yn dda."
Lowering his voice and pointing at the bottle with the dragon on it, he added. "Er, make that two."
Berry thought he'd never seen so many wry smiles turned on at once. It was like a chorus of wry smiles. You had to feel sorry for Giles; he was a brave man and a born fall-guy.
He was still cringing on Giles's behalf, when, at the adjacent table, the young man in the Starship Enterprise jacket nodded towards Giles and said laconically to the girl with the luminous green hair.
"Sice."
Berry spilled a lot of beer. He felt himself go pale.
Within a minute Giles was back, red-faced, slamming two glasses on the table and snatching the tenner from beneath the ashtray.
"Bastard." he said.
"I'm sorry, ole buddy. I didn't plan to set you up."
"You're a bastard." said Giles. "I think I'll go to bed."
"What about your beer?"
"You drink it." said Giles. "I'll see you at breakfast."
"Giles, what's 'sice' mean?"
"Piss off," said Giles.
"Come on, Giles, I'm serious, what's it mean?"
"Piss off, you know what it means."
"Aw, for Chrissakes, Giles, if I knew what it meant would be asking you?"
"Sais," Giles hissed. "Sais."
"Yeah, right, sice."
"English," said Giles. "It means English. Often used in a derogatory way, like the Scots say Sassenach. Satisfied now?"
"I don't know," said Berry. "Maybe, I ... I don't know."
"I'm going to bed," said Giles. "OK?"
Part Four
CROESO
Chapter XIX
ENGLAND
Four or five times Berry had picked up the phone, intending to call Giles, each time pulling back. In his head, he'd almost had it figured out. "See Giles, I've always been sensitive to atmospheres and I just had the feeling there was something badly wrong in there. Humour me, OK? Have a priest take a look." Every time he heard himself saying that, he chickened out. A priest! Had he really been about to say that?
From the Newsnet office, the day after they'd got back from Wales, Berry had called Giles's paper and asked if he was around. "It's Gary Willis here," a guy said. "Giles has taken some leave. Gone to move some of his stuff out to this place he's got in Wales."
"When's he gonna be back?"
"I don't know, mate, and Roger's not here at the moment. But it can't be more than a week or two."
Berry stood at his apartment window, looking out at the block from which you could see the Thames. He clenched his fists.
All the way home from Aberystwyth, he and Giles had discussed their respective careers in journalism, the differences between the British and American media and even the rift between Berry and his dad and what had caused it, the ethics of the job, all this stuff.
Everything, it seemed, except the cottage in Y Groes, Giles's future there, Berry's feelings about the place. It was clear that Giles, having brought Berry to see the house without getting the expected result—"Gee, Giles, this is just amazing, you're a lucky guy, I can't tell you how jealous I am"—had been studiously avoiding the issue.
While Berry . . . Well, what was his excuse?
You asshole, Morelli. he told himself. You blew it again. All ways, you blew it.
This was three days ago. It was now Wednesday night. It was well into October. It was dark. He had nobody to talk to.
Miranda had landed a part in a TV commercial for perfume. Although the perfume was made in Wolverhampton, they were making the commercial in Paris. She'd left a message on his answering machine to say she might be back by the end of the week if she didn't run into any vaguely interesting Frenchmen looking for a little fun.
Berry sat down and tried to watch a re-run of an episode of Cheers. Even that didn't lift him out of his private gloom. When it was over, he switched off and lay down on his bed.
missing Miranda, haunted by the same crazy question. Am I psychic or just neurotic?
"The kid's neurotic," Mario Morelli had said. It was the first time he was conscious of hearing the word. He'd been—what? Nine, ten? The year he went to summer camp and was so unhappy they sent him home, scared—he heard his dad telling his mom—that he was going to walk off on his own and drown himself. After that, Mario took no chances; he wasn't having a son of his bringing down scandal on the family.
His career. Really, he was afraid of what it would do to his career.
In subsequent years they reluctantly took him with them on vacation, which was how he first saw London. He'd been happy then, although he knew things between his parents were not good. He'd pretended he was there alone, pretended it was his town. Felt the history of the place; imagined he was part of it, not part of his dad's vacation, which seemed to be full of inefficient service and lousy Limey food.
How long after that was The Gypsy?
Whenever, that was the year the vacation coincided with his mom being in hospital having this Ladies' Surgery—he never did find out whether it was a hysterectomy or new tits—and his dad had to take custody of the kid.
Berry had spent this dismal fortnight down in Florida, where Mario—already a high-profile newsman with NBC—had borrowed a beach house from a friend. Come to think of it, this friend had been a senator, the bastard already getting too close to politicians for a guy who was supposed to be ruthlessly impartial.
Anyhow, that had been the summer of The Gypsy. He didn't know if she was a gypsy, but that was how he always thought of her. He didn't know, either, if she was a phoney. Just always hoped she was. Better to be a basic neurotic than what she said.
He remembered the nights spent holding the pillow around his head to muffle the sound of Mario humping Carmine, his mistress, in the next room. One night he didn't go back to the beach house, just walked until dawn, a night of spinning pinball and hard coloured lights and cheap music.
And The Gypsy.
She was this mid-European lady, with a sign over her door covered with coloured moons and stars. He couldn't imagine now how the hell he'd found the courage to walk in there with his five dollars.
She'd said. "You not a happy boy, you mixed up." He thought she was about to use the word neurotic, like his old man. But she went on, "It affect you more on account of you sensitive, right? Have eyes inside, yes?" Berry staring at her blankly. "One day something happen to you. Wow! Crash! Boom! And then you know what you got."
Crazy. The lights, the hot music, and The Gypsy. Sometimes—occasionally in the years before The Gypsy and increasingly afterwards—he'd gotten feelings about things or places. Small things, stupid things. Feelings that said: don't get closer to this, back off. And The Gypsy's words would come back to him, and he'd laugh. Try to laugh, anyhow.
She'd been called Rose-something, weren't they all? She'd taken his money, but afterwards given it back to him. "You and me, we in same shit. You find out. Good luck, huh."
Most likely, she was neurotic too.
The thing that really got to him was old Winstone. Put the arm on young Giles, stop him, not meant to be there, all that crap. The sequence of events leading up to him standing in a dark, cold room permeated by hatred.
Or maybe simply a perfectly ordinary room with a certifiable neurotic standing in it.
On Friday night Miranda called Berry from her mother's house in Chelsea to say she was home.
"Did you get my message?" she asked him.
"Did you get a Frenchman?"
"They all tried too hard." Miranda said. '"I wanted one who really didn't want to know, but they all tried too hard. I'm afraid Paris has become rather tedious."
"As tedious as Wales?"
"Do me a favour. How did you get on. anyway?"
She seemed to have forgotten about telling him not to bother coming back.
"Oh, you know, OK." Berry said. "Interesting place, good scenery. Crazy language."
"And you spelled it out for him? As stipulated in the dying wish of old what's-his-name?"
"It was complicated."
"Complicated. I see. What you're saying is you didn't sort it out. You didn't, did you? You really didn't tell him. You spent the whole weekend poncing around with a lot of Celtic sheep-shaggers and you didn't say a word."
"That isn't quite fair. Miranda. What happened . . .Listen, can I see you?"
She hung up on him.
Angrily. Berry broke the line and tried to call her back.
Then he changed his mind and called Giles at home. This was it. The end. He'd lay the whole thing on him, the whole Winstone bit, the bad vibes in the judge's study, everything.
Giles's phone rang five times and then there was a beep.
"This is the London home of Claire and Giles Freeman. We 're not here, so you can either leave a message after the tone or ring us on Y Groes 239."
Beep.
Berry put the phone down.
Y Groes 239.
"Shit," he said, dismayed.
Giles had complained it would be months before all the legal stuff was complete, what did they call it, probate.
"They're living in that goddamn house," Berry said aloud. "They moved in."
He'd blown it. He'd let everybody down again. Giles, Winstone. Even Miranda.
You're a waste of time, boy. You know that?
Mario Morelli's words, of course.
You got no guts is the problem.
CHAPTER XX
WALES
One of the first things they did was to go into Pontmeurig and choose a bed.
Nothing else. Not yet, anyway. Any changes, they had agreed, should be dictated by the cottage itself. They felt that after they'd spent a few weeks there they would know instinctively which items of new furniture the judge's house might consider permissible.
But a new bed was essential. There was only one in the place, an obvious antique with an impressive headboard of dark oak which was possibly Claire's grandfather's deathbed. Hardly be seemly for the pair of them to spend their first night in Y Groes squashed into that.
So they ordered the new bed from Garfield and Pugh's furniture store in Stryd y Castell, Pontmeurig. It wasn't the kind of bed they would have bought under normal circumstances— it had a headboard of shiny pink vinyl—but there were only three to choose from and Giles was adamant that they should support local traders.
"We can soon pick up a new headboard somewhere." he whispered to Claire. "I mean, it'd look pretty bad if we walked out now without buying one."
Young Mr. Pugh. son of one of the partners, was standing no more than four feet away with a contemptuous smile on his pale, plump face. He had obviously heard every word and was not bothering to conceal the fact.
"I cannot see us having anything that would suit you," Mr. Pugh had told them bluntly. "No brass bedsteads here. No pine. Nothing—how can I put it —nothing cottagey. Have you tried Aberystwyth or Lampeter?"
"We'd rather shop locally," Giles had replied stiffly. "Now we're living here." He was furious. This youth was treating him like one of the mindless incomers who wanted to turn Wales into an English colony. He imagined a headline in the local paper.
SNOOTY LONDONERS SNUB LOCAL BEDS
"We'll have this one," Giles said. "Nice cheerful headboard."
Mr. Pugh shrugged. "We can't deliver until Monday."
"That'll be fine." Giles said, wondering where the hell they were going to sleep over the weekend.
"Blaen-y-cwm, is it?" Mr. Pugh asked.
"What?"
"Mrs. Harris's old place. Where you're living?"
"No," Giles said. "We've taken over my wife's grandfather's house at Y Groes. Judge Rhys."
"Oh, I see." said Mr. Pugh. with a little more interest. "Siarad Cymraeg?"
"I'm afraid not." Giles said. "But we hope to learn."
"They don't speak much English in Y Groes." Mr. Pugh said with a smirk.
"Good," said Giles.
When they left the shop. Claire said. "Not very friendly, are they? He didn't particularly want to sell us that bed."
"He's probably sick to death of posh English people buying things and then seeing something better and cancelling their order."
"They weren't very friendly in the Drovers' Arms either."
"They were OK. They didn't all start speaking Welsh or anything when we walked in."
"Oh yes, most of them were speaking English," said Claire. "But not to us."
"For God's sake—" Giles snapped. "Give them a chance, can't you?"
Claire's small face was solemn, and Giles's mood softened. He knew she was looking for reasons not to stay here. Not because she didn't want to, but because she did want to
very badly.
"Look," Giles said. "We can't expect them to rush out and welcome us with open arms. We're just another English couple in love with a dream. They've seen us before. That's what they think."
Claire smiled. "I doubt if anyone has seen you before Giles." she said.
Giles ignored this. "We've got to persuade them we're not the usual kind of pompous self-satisfied shits who come in and throw money about until they get bored and move to
Provence or somewhere the weather's better." He put an arm around Claire. "Come on. let's go home."
He loved the sound of that. Home.
Y Groes was home now.
Giles had taken a fortnight's leave to coincide with the move, which had become possible far sooner than they imagined. It turned out that the usual six months' probate period did not apply in the case of property bequeathed to a close relative.
Suddenly the judge's house was theirs. The weather was still warm, the travelling was easy. There'd never be a better time, Giles had maintained, freckles aglow, hustling Claire.
So they'd done it.
As they were retaining their London flat—for the time being, at least—and the cottage was already furnished, there wasn't a great deal to bring, and the removal firm had used its smallest van.
Now, as they drove back from Pontmeurig with groceries and things in the boot of the BMW, Giles was once again aware of the difference in atmosphere as they came out of
the Nearly Mountains.
It wasn't simply the transition from the bleak forestry to the broadleaved haven of the village. It was the striking difference between Y Groes and Pontmeurig—a town Giles had never actually visited before today.
He tried to explain it to Claire. "A definite air of depression. I don't mean the people. The shops weren't exactly overstocked. And there was quite a lot of, you know, not exactly dereliction, but peeling paintwork, that sort of thing."
"Not a prosperous town." Claire conceded.
"Dying on its feet, if you ask me. All right, there were a couple of shiny new shop fronts—the bookshop and that awful pizza joint. But you get the feeling they won't be there this time next year—or they'll be replaced by other experiments in the area of retailing."
"Not enough money." Claire said. "Because there aren't enough people. I bet ... I bet all the incomers get their provisions from the supermarkets in Aberystwyth. They're used to travelling a fair distance on shopping trips back in England—big discount furniture places and hypermarkets."
