Candlenight, page 4
"OK." Berry said. "Hypothetical, right? If you had friends aiming to move to Wales, what would you say to them?"
Miranda's mouth twitched impatiently. "I'd probably say au revoir rather than goodbye because most of my friends wouldn't even survive in Dorking. Morelli, what is all this about?"
Berry sighed. "Listen, forget the hypothetical shit. What it's about is there's this guy moving to Wales and I find myself in the position of having to try and prevent that. I mean, Christ. I never went there, I don't plan to go there, but I got to talk this guy out of it. Guy who wants to make his home there more than anywhere else in the world, however bizarre that sounds to you. That's it. That's the situation."
Under the duvet Miranda ran a hand across his thigh and back again. "Nothing doing, then?" she said, affecting a squeaky East End accent.
"Gimme a break."
"Morelli, I'm sure there's an awfully interesting story behind all this but I don't somehow think I want to go into it after all. It sounds frightfully complicated, and"—she reached over to her teacup on the bedside cabinet and tipped her cigarette into it half-smoked—"quite honestly, I find the whole subject of Wales the most awful turn-off."
Miranda snuggled down, poking her bottom into Berry's right thigh and within a minute was asleep, leaving him to switch off the light and stare uncertainly into the blotchy dark, trying to figure out how this situation came about.
Chapter VI
That evening, seeing Winstone Thorpe flick open his ancient hooded eyes, Berry had thought of an old tomcat on a back-porch alerted by the flutter of wings.
"Where's that then?" Winstone had asked in that tired, diffident way he had."
"It's a smallish country sort of welded onto the side of England, Winstone," Giles Freeman explained, and he giggled drunkenly. "It's where the M4 peters out. They've got mountains there. Play rugby. Sing a lot."
"Oh . . ." old Winstone Thorpe chuckled and his chins wobbled. "You mean Wales. Sorry old boy, must've misheard."
Sure you did, you old bastard. Berry thought affectionately. He looked at Winstone across the pub table. Then he looked at Giles, who was clearly too drunk to realise he was being set up. Several of the other journalists, who knew Winstone of old, glanced up from their drinks and grinned.
"Wales, eh?" Winstone said. "Oh dear."
There he goes. Berry thought.
"All right," Giles Freeman said testily. "What's that supposed to mean?" Giles had drunk maybe five pints of beer, and he wasn't used to it. His fair hair was in disarray and his long face was hot and shiny, freckles aglow. He was too drunk to realise how bored they all were with hearing about his incredible piece of luck—well, Claire's actually, her inheritance. But an utterly amazing old place, splendid countryside, absolutely terrific atmosphere. Just being there made you realise how totally cardboard and artificial your urban environment was.
So Giles had fallen heavily for some backwoods shack.
And now old Winstone Thorpe, who had retired that day after more than half a lifetime on the Daily Telegraph, was blinking lazily beneath eyebrows like thatched eaves and saying "Oh dear."
"Well, come on, Winstone," Giles was leaning aggressively across the table now. Berry had never seen him like this before; somebody had hit a nerve. "If you've got something to say, just bloody say it."
"But. dear chap . . ." Winstone put down his empty whisky glass and looked around vaguely until Ray Wheeler of the Mirror slipped him a replacement. "Ah, a fellow Christian. Thank you. No, you see—am I stating the obvious here? You're an Englishman, old boy." Somewhere a clock chimed. It was eleven o'clock, and there was a momentary silence in the battered Edwardian bar of what old Winstone Thorpe maintained was the last halfway decent pub in what used to be Fleet Street.
Berry found himself nodding. Aside, perhaps, from old Winstone himself, Giles Freeman was just about the most English guy he'd ever met. even here in England.
"Now look, Winstone." Giles took an angry gulp of his beer. "That is just incredibly simplistic. I mean, have you ever even been to Wales? Come on now. tell the truth?"
Wrong question, Giles, thought Berry. You just walked into it. He leaned back and waited for Winstone Thorpe's story, knowing there had to be one.
"Well, since you ask . . ." The venerable reporter unbuttoned his weighty tweed jacket and lifted his whisky glass onto his knee. "Matter of fact. I was in Wales once."
"No kidding." Berry said and then shut up because there were guys here who still had him down as a no-talent asshole on the run. Things had changed since his last time here, as a student in the seventies. People had gotten tighter, more suspicious—even journalists. They were coming across like Americans imagined the English to be—stiff, superior. And they were suspicious of him because he wasn't like Americans were supposed to be—didn't drink a lot, never ate burgers. They weren't programmed for a vegetarian American hack who'd come up from the Underground press and dumped on his distinguished dad. Berry looked around the three tables pushed together and saw complacent smiles on prematurely-florid faces. These were mainly Parliamentary reporters like Giles. In this job, after a while, after long hours in the Westminster bars, journalists began to look like
MPs.
"Early sixties, must've been." Winstone said. His face had long gone beyond merely florid to the colour and texture of an overripe plum. "Sixty-two? Sixty-three? Anyway, we were dragged out to Wales on a Sunday on the son of story that sounds as if it's going to be better than it actually turns out. Somebody'd shot this old fanner and his son, twelve-bore job, brains all over the wall. Lived miles from anywhere, up this God-forsaken mountain. Turned out the housekeeper did it, sordid domestic stuff, only worth a couple of pars. But that's beside the point."
Berry glanced over at Giles who was trying to look bored. Giles caught the glance and rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. Berry got along OK with Giles, who was less clannish than the others.
"Point is," Winstone said. "Locals treated us as if we were lepers. Here we are, sitting in this grim, freezing so-called guest house like the lost bloody patrol—Sunday, so all the pubs are closed, can you imagine that—and all we can hear is the rain and the natives jabbering away at each other in Welsh, which is just about the world's most incomprehensible bloody language. We try to quiz the landlady: Are you sure you didn't know them, Mrs. Davies, they only lived two hundred yards away, surely you heard the shots, didn't you?" Everybody in Wales is called Jones or Davies, terrible interbreeding. 'Will you take your tea now?' she says. 'It's nearly time for the chapel.' Then she waddles out on us. And she'd been to chapel twice that day already!
"And we're there for hours and bloody hours, Freddie Payne of the Express, Jack Beddall of the Sketch, and me, knocking on the doors of these broken-down farmhouses, trying to drag a statement out of Chief-lnspector-bloody-Davies-no-relation. Trying to cultivate the local reporter who didn't even drink, even when it wasn't Sunday. Getting absolutely nowhere. Dreadful times, old boy."
Giles Freeman sighed. "Look, that's . . ."
A restraining hand went up. Nobody deflected old Winstone Thorpe from his punchline.
"So, what I did in the end. I went over to the local chapel and picked a name off a bloody gravestone. Emrys Lloyd—never forget it. And I wandered back to the pub and button-holed one of these local shepherd-types. 'Look here, I suspect this is a long-shot, old boy, but I don't suppose you knew this great-uncle of mine. Emrys Lloyd, his name. Told he used to live in this neck of the woods . . .'"
He paused while everybody laughed, except Giles. 'Told 'em my name was Ivor Lloyd and I'd been born in Wales but moved out at an early age, always regretted I'd never learned the good old language, all this bullshit . . . Well, dammit, you couldn't stop the sods talking after that. Gave me everything I wanted. No longer one of the enemy, you see. I could be trusted. They even felt sorry for me because I was a bloody exile in England, can you believe that?"
"No," said Giles Freeman loudly, something catching fire behind his freckles. "It's utter bollocks. You made it up. You've always made things up, you old bastard."
Winstone Thorpe looked hurt. "Not a bit of it, old boy, that was precisely what happened. And the thing is—"
"Utter balls." Giles said contemptuously. He glared across the table at Winstone. "You're just a boring old con-man."
And that, Berry perceived, was the point at which the other guys decided that Giles, irrespective of the amount of booze he'd put away, had overstepped the mark and should be dealt with for pissing on a national monument.
Giles didn't notice the guys exchanging glances. "You know why the Welsh are suspicious of the English?" he demanded, slapping the table, making waves in all the
glasses.
"Actually." said Shirley Gillies, one of the BBC's political reporters, "I once—"
"Just hang on a minute, Shirley. Listen. I'll tell you why. Because we're so . . . bloody . . . smug. We think we're the greatest bloody race on earth. We think we're great by tradition. And the idea of people here in Britain, in our island who don't want to speak English . . . we think that's a joke. Because ours is the language of Shakespeare and Keats and Barbara bloody Cartland . . ."
"Actually." Shirley Gillies repeated, as if Giles was some stray drunk who didn't really belong in their comer. "I had rather a similar experience of being frozen out in Wales. Only I wasn't as clever as you. Winstone. I rather left with egg on my face."
And this mention of egg reminded Charlie Firth, of the Mail, of the time he and his wife had gone into this Welsh snack bar for a meal just as it was about to close. The waitresses had muttered to each other—in Welsh, of course—and eventually served Charlie and Mrs. Firth a couple of scrambled eggs which had left them both with seriously upset stomachs. "Had to stop off at about seven public lavs on the way hack." Charlie said. "Like, you expect it in Spain, but . . ."
"Poisoned." said Max Canavan, of the Sun. "They poisoned you on account of you was English, yeh?"
Voices had risen, everybody grinning, suddenly having fun thinking up horror stories about Wales. Or more likely, Berry figured, making them up as a communal putdown for Giles. Other hacks in the bar, not part of Winstone's farewell pissup, were gathering around, sensing that electric change in the atmosphere, noses almost visibly twitching. The pack instinct was always strong among British national journalists. Guys from papers which were bitter rivals hung out together like a street gang.
"Oh dear me. look." Old Winstone said. "I didn't want to start—"
"Always been like that," said Brian McAllister of the Press Association. "I remember once I was in Colwyn flamin' Bay . . . Anybody ever been to Colwyn Bay?"
"Called in once, but it was closed." Charlie Firth said.
"Bloody Welsh," one of the newcomers said. "Frogs, Krauts, Eyeties—I can get along with all of 'em. but the bloody Welsh . . ."
"Right." Giles was on his feet, swaying. freckles ablaze. "I've fucking had enough of this." He was very angry and began to extricate himself from the table. "Bigoted, racist
bastards . . ."
"No, mate, they're the racists," Ray Wheeler of the Mirror said gleefully. "The Welsh. Ever since we beat the brown stuff out of 'em back in, when was it, I dunno, Edward the First and all that."
"Piss off" Giles snarled, and slammed his glass down so hard that it cracked in two places. Giles being Giles, he paid for it on his way out.
Berry hesitated a moment, then followed him.
Chapter VII
Giles had been pacing the pavement under a mild summer drizzle. As Berry came up behind him he swung round murderously. Berry swiftly put a lamp-post between them.
"Who the hell's that?" Giles said.
Berry stepped out from behind the post.
"Oh," Giles said. "You."
"Yeah."
"If it was that fucking Firth I was going to—"
"Sure."
Giles grinned, white teeth flashing in the headlight of a Bentley whispering somebody home. "Bit pissed. Those bastards." He pushed fingers through his heavy fair hair. "Feel a bit of a prat now, actually. Shouldn't have let them wind me up. Shouldn't have gone for old Winstone like that. Not like me. Am I very pissed?"
Berry looked him up and down. "Smashed outta your skull," he said.
Giles laughed. "You're probably quite a decent guy, Berry, for an American. You didn't say anything bad Wales."
"That's because I never went there, Giles. It most likely is the armpit of Britain."
"Bastard."
"Sure."
The pub door opened and Giles swung round again in case it was somebody he felt he ought to hit. Ted Wareham, of the Independent, came out grasping a bottle of Scotch and didn't notice them.
"So you're leaving us, Giles," Berry said.
Giles said, rather wearily, "I don't know. Don't know what to do. For a while I've been looking around thinking it's time I moved on. Where do you go? It's a trap."
"Trap?"
"The money for one thing," Giles said. "We moan sometimes, but, bloody hell, where else can you collect on this scale in our job? Plus, it's an addictive sort of life. Policing the Great and Good, or whatever it is we do. But the thought of spending another thirty years around this bit of London, drinking with the same blokes, getting older at shabbier and ending up, at best, as some lovable father figure with a face full of broken veins and a knackered liver . . ."
"That wouldn't happen to you. Giles." Berry said, meaning it. "You're not in that mould."
"What's that mean?"
Berry shrugged.
"Anyway I reckon we've been thrown a lifeline, Claire and me. To pull us out of our complacency. Just came out the blue. Something we'd just never thought of. We drove out there—couple of weeks ago—first thing in the morning. Quite a grey morning, everything really drab. But by the time we got there it was a gorgeous day, and it got better and better. And we found the cottage almost straight away just as if we were being guided. Up the street, over the bridge, past the church, along this shady country lane and there it was. I felt—"
Giles hugged the lamp-post in a burst of passion, then pulled away. "Bloody beer. This is not like me, not like me at all. You'll go back in there and tell them what I said and all have a fucking good laugh."
"Aw, Giles, come on . . ."
"Sorry, sorry ... an injustice."
"Those guys didn't even notice me leave, 'cept for Winstone. So what did you feel?"
"What?"
"When you saw the place. What did you feel?"
"Look, here's a cab. I'll have to grab it. OK? Excitement, Berry. Only more than that, much more. I didn't want to come back. Course it was all locked up. we couldn't get in that day, just peering through the windows like Hansel and bloody Gretel. It was enchanting. I'd have stayed there all day and slept on the grass when it got dark." Giles got into
the taxi. "Tell the buggers that, why don't you. I don't care."
Berry watched the cab's tail-lights vanish into the traffic along what used to be Fleet Street.
Then he went back into the bar.
"Those stories," Berry said. "All shit, right? Kind of, let's put the frighteners on ole Giles."
"Yes and no. old boy." Winstone Thorpe said. "Yes and no."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning, probably, that nobody poisoned Charlie Firth. Can you really see that man dining on unlicensed premises?"
At close to midnight, old Winstone and Berry Morelli were the only two left. Berry because he thought he had nobody to go home to tonight and Winstone because—as he'd told them all earlier-—he suspected that when he walked out of the bar this time he'd never come back. People had been shaking his hand and promising to look in on him sometime. Berry didn't think any of them ever would.
"And no?"
"No what?"
"You said yes and no."
"Ah." Winstone finished off his last Glenfiddich. At this hour even he wouldn't get served again. "I suppose . . . Well, I was drinking with our property chap the other day. Do you know how many English people have bought homes in Wales over the past few years? Tens of thousands, apparently. Mind boggles. Got them cheap, you see—well, cheap compared with the south-east. Plenty of spare cash about down here these days. So it's holiday homes, retirement homes, views of the mountains, views of the sea."
Winstone put his glass down, sat back. "Backs to the wall, now, the Joneses and the Davieses. Getting driven out, along with what's left of their language, by all these
foreigners searching for the old rural idyll bit."
Like Giles.
"Very pretty and all that, apparently, this cottage of Claire's. They're so enchanted with the place, they're talking about leaving London altogether and trying to make a living out there ... or even commute, for God's sake."
Winstone shook his head sadly. "Pretended I was asleep but really I was the only one listening to him. Oh dear . . . Bad news, old boy. Going to get ugly. Seen it before. Nothing drives people to loony extremes more than religion and national pride."
"We never learned much about Wales at school, back home."
"A hard and bitter land, old boy. Don't have our sensibilities, never been able to afford them. We go there in our innocence, the English, and we're degraded and often destroyed. I'm talking about North Wales and the West where they've always danced on the edge of the abyss. Look, this is most unlike me. but is there some club we could go on to?"
Berry smiled. "It isn't the end, Winstone. They said you could freelance for them, right?"
"Not the same, old boy. Wife gone, kids abroad. Paper's been my family" Winstone put a hand on Berry's arm and the ancient eyes flickered. "Look, you put the arm on young Giles. Persuade him to get the bloody place sold. Soon as he can. We're really not meant to be there, you know, the English. Stop him. I mean it. You have to do this for the boy. He won't survive. Listen to me. this is not the drink."
Berry met Winstone's urgent, bloodshot gaze and saw some long-buried sorrow there. "C'mon," he said. "I know somewhere." He thought Winstone was suddenly looking too old and too sober. "Anyway, you try and talk Giles out of something, he just gets more determined."
