Candlenight (10 page)

   
"Yeah," Berry said. "Tell
you about it sometime"

   
"Yes," Shirley said,
clearly meaning no. "Look. I must go. See you around, Giles."

   
Giles and Berry stood in silence
in the Colswold lane as Shirley loaded her gear into her car. It was a soft,
dull summer morning, still moist from last night's rain.

   
"Bloody awful smug place, this,"
Giles said. "Not exactly nature in the raw. is it? Not like—" He
broke off.

   
"You gonna give me the
Minister's statement?"

   
"Sure. Let's find a pub.
You don't have to rush back?"

   
Berry shook his head. Giles
said abruptly, "We're nowhere near bloody Painswick, are we?"

   
"Now how would I know
that?"

   
"Claire's mother lives near
Painswick. Wouldn't like to run into the old bat. Not just now. I wouldn't be
responsible."

   
Berry followed Giles's silver
BMW in his beat-up Sprite. They motored through shimmering ochre villages
before pulling up at Hollywood's idea of an olde English pub, outside which
Giles had detected an obscure Real Ale sign. They sat on upholstered wooden
stools at the bar, the first customers of the day. On Giles's recommendation.
Berry ordered two halves of something even thicker and murkier than Hollywood's
idea of English beer.

   
"Hair of the dog."
Giles said. "Bloody animal."

   
"He'd hate you to feel bad
about this, Giles. He was very fond of you and Claire. Winstone, I mean."

   
Giles found a lop-sided smile.
He told Berry a couple of funny Old Winstone anecdotes from way back. Berry had
heard both before, but he chuckled over them anyway, for Giles's sake, assuring
him again that Winstone had in no way been offended by the way he'd stormed out
of the bar and no, there was no way it had caused any stress which might have
hastened the stroke.

   
"That story he told."
Berry said, fishing for a reaction.
   
"About the domestic murder and
the Welsh landlady and all. I guess it was kind of a Winstone parable. He'd
been hearing about how bad things were over in Wales. Folks feeling their
heritage was being ripped off. Dumb foreigners on a back-to-nature trip
stampeding the sacred cows."

   
"Yes." Giles said.
"But, don't you go thinking we're going to be like that. Claire and me. We
aren't going to march in like bloody yuppies on the make. We'll learn the
language, the whole bit. Go, er, go native. Well . . .I . . . You're not really
interested in hearing this, are you, Berry?"

   
"I am, Giles."

   
"You sure? I think people
were bored last night."
   
"No way, Giles. Jealous, is
all."
   
"You think that?"

   
"Sure. Tell me about Wales,
Giles."

   
Giles shrugged and had a slurp
of Real Ale. "Well, for a start, even though she'd never even been there
before this, Claire has very strong family links with this village. Y Groes. So
we feel we're . . . reviving something. And reviving ourselves in the process.
Do you know what I mean?"

   
"When I was a kid."
Berry said, "they used to tell me my great grandpa made the best pasta in
Venice. That doesn't mean that to find eternal fulfilment I have to be a
fucking gondolier"

   
Giles gave him a warning look
and started rocking on his bar stool. "Look, poor old Winstone struck a
nerve when I was pissed. I'm sorry about that, but it doesn't change anything.
You hear about Burnham-Lloyd?"

   
"Who?"

   
Giles told Berry about the
impending by-election. It seemed to restore his mood. "Brilliant timing,
don't you think? Not just another midterm by-election, old son." He was
holding his beer to the light and nodding appreciatively at tiny specks in the amber
fluid.
     
Berry pushed his own glass
away in disgust.

   
"Burnham-Lloyd."
Giles said. "Tory, OK? Held that seat for over thirty years on the
strength of being a local chap, well in with the farmers, all that. But Plaid
Cymru—that's
the Welsh nationalist party—have been slowly gaining on him for years. The
other parties haven't much support, so it's a two-horse race. Going to be a
cracker. Gives me a chance to go in there as a reporter, meet the local people,
discover all the key local issues. So when we move we won't be going in
cold."

   
Berry nodded. Maybe Giles
wouldn't get along with the local people, would discover he was out of sympathy
with the local issues. Well, maybe . . .

   
"What about you. Berry?
Has it got Newsnet potential? I'll tell you—mass-immigration by English people
is sure to be a major issue. And the one that could give the seat to Plaid. Absolutely
fascinating."

   
"What are we looking at
here Giles? Beginnings of an Ulster situation?"

   
"Oh, good God no. They're
just after devolution to begin with, power to run their own affairs. Then to
become a free state within Europe. Not a huge step for Wales—or Scotland, for
that matter. And in spite of the odd bits of terrorism, it's not a nation
inflamed by anti-English passions, whatever Old—whatever people say."

   
"Yeah," Berry said
non-commitally. Most Americans didn't even realise Wales was a separate
country. If they mentioned it at all they talked about "Wales,
England." like it was some district.

   
"We were going to drive
out there this weekend," Giles was saying. "Make a few political
contacts and have a little drool over our cottage at the same time. Won't be
ours for a couple of months yet—legal red-tape—but it's a wonderful feeling,
just standing in the lane gazing at it through the trees, making plans."

   
Berry noticed the grey circles
under Giles's eyes had shrunk and his freckles were aglow.

   
Look,
you put the arm on young Giles
.

   
"Only we can't go because
Claire's saddled with this job for the
Observer
in East Anglia—"

   
"Too bad." Berry
said.

   
"Unless . . . Hey look. Berry,
what are you doing next weekend?"

   
Playing with Miranda.
"Nothing fixed," Berry said.

   
"Feel like taking a drive
out there?"

   
"To Wales?" She'll
kill me, he thought.

   
"You could get it on exes,
surely? Bit of research?"

   
"Well, I—"

   
"And you could come and
see our cottage, see Y Groes—and then you'd realise why we're so excited about
it.

   
Persuade him to get the bloody place sold.

   
"Come on. Berry, WW be
fun."

   
Not meant to be there, the English
.

   
"What do you say?"

   
Stop him. I mean it
.

   
"Yeah, OK," Berry
said. "Why not?"

Chapter XII

WALES

"Miss Sion!'

   
Bethan turned at the school
door, the key in her hand.
   
"You decided you'd better come
back then, did you Sali?"

   
She was small for her age, Sali
Dafis, and looked more fragile than other members of her family. Her father, Dilwyn,
and her
nain
had coal-black hair, but
Sali's was wispy brown. A legacy from her mother, the secretary from Essex whom
Dilwyn had met on holiday at Butlins, Pwllheli.

   
"It's a bit late now,
though, isn't it?" Bethan said. "And I'm not Miss Sion any more,
remember?"

   
They were alone in the yard. It
was a gloomy afternoon now. Overcast. A reminder of how rapidly the days were shortening.
Locking the school door. Bethan had heard a child's shoes tripping across the
yard towards her and wondered if it would be Sali.

   
"See me after school,
please," she'd finally written in the exercise book, but Sali had gone off
with the others half an hour ago. Now she was back, alone. An indication that
she didn't want her friends to know she was seeing the teacher.

   
"But Miss Sion, your
husband is dead."

   
Bethan breathed in sharply, as
if stabbed. Children could be vicious.

   
"Mrs. McQueen, if you
don't mind. I won't tell you again. We don't go back to our old names just
because—" Bethan had a thought. "Who told you to start calling me
Miss Sion again?'

   
Sali Dafis looked at her feet
and said nothing.

   
"Never mind," Bethan
said. "I think I can guess. Look, why don't we talk to each other
tomorrow. We don't want your
nain
wondering where you are." Or the old hag will put a curse on me, she
thought, then decided that wasn't funny.

   
Sali looked up at Bethan very
solemnly and seemed about to say something.

   
"Well?"

   
"Mrs. McQueen." said
Sali innocently, "would you like to see a dead body?"

   
Bethan put the key in her bag
and snapped it shut. "All right, we'd better have our talk right now. You
wait there while I put my things in the car, then we'll go for a walk."

   
She was definitely not in the
mood for this.

They followed the river from the rear of the school towards the oak
woods, most of which were coppiced by Meirion, the forester whose father had
done it before him. It was like entering a huge, entimbered medieval cathedral.
Awesome in the right light, but dim and heavy now, the trees immense and
gnarled, prickly bushes in the shade of some of them. The river entered the
woods and then went off on its own. away from the path.

   
"So whose was the dead
body—the one you thought I might like to see?"

   
Bethan knew very well that
nobody had died in the village recently, except for the antiquarian at the
Tafarn
and Mrs. Tegwyn Jones, Ty Canol,
over a week before that.

   
"Don't know." Sali
said.

   
"Why would you think I might
even want to see this . . . this dead body?"

   
"Don't know." Sali
said.

   
They were approaching the thick
wooden gate draped with creepers that said on it one word.

   
Rheithordy
.

   
The rectory. It was the only
house in the wood. Well, not quite in the wood: the house itself was in a green
clearing, but the encroaching oaks had claimed most of its garden, heavyweight
sentinels around it. The rectory was itself hugely timber-framed, and Bethan
found it all a bit ominous, as if the beams in the house's skeleton had only
been
borrowed from the wood.

   
Hurrying the child past the gate,
because the rector also tended to give her the creeps. Bethan said, "'You
know what a dead body is, don't you Sali?"

   
She saw the child nod without
looking up. This was not going to be easy. Why did she feel, uncomfortably, that
the big trees were listening to her with more attention than Sali?

   
"Do you really know what a
dead body is? It's nothing to do with the person who used to be in the body.
That is why we bury them—because they are no use to anyone anymore. What people
are is nothing to do with their bodies. The really important part is something
that just uses the body to get around in. And when it's too old or badly damaged,
we discard it, throw it away."

   
Bethan felt inadequate to the
task of explaining to an eight-year-old the things that few adults claimed to
understand. This was no time to be trite or patronising.

   
"When someone brings an
old car or a Land Rover into your dad's garage, he ... he mends it. If he can.
And if it's just too old and tired out, then he has to send the car to
the scrapyard. And the driver gets a new one. That's what happens to our bodies
when we've used them up—we get rid of them and then we get a new body—a
heavenly body."
   
This is pathetic, Bethan thought.

   
"I know
that
," Sali said scornfully,
kicking at the dirt. "My
nain
can
see people in their heavenly bodies."