Candlenight (15 page)

   
"You expect my pity?"

 
He smiled coldly, putting down a
scuffed attache case. Then he straightened up and looked at the bed, at a spot
just above the pillow.

   
"You can't stay
here," he said. "You are over. The air's too strong for you, the
light's too bright."

Chapter XVIII

When they drove at last into Aberystwyth, the coloured lights were on at
the entrance to the pier. Green and yellow lights, rippling up and down in a
sequence. It wasn't Coney Island, but it made Berry feel a little happier.

   
"Giles, I— You ever talk
to anybody about the house? Anybody local?"

   
"How d'you mean?"

   
"—'bout its history.
Anything."

   
"No, not really. We didn't
like to go round asking questions. Nosey newcomers. Why?"

   
Berry took the first left after
the pier and found a parking space in a side street, a block or two away from
the hotel. He could see its sign and an illuminated advert for Welsh Bitter. He
switched off the engine and lay back in his seat and let out a sharp breath.

   
"Look, what's up. Berry?
You're behaving pretty bloody strangely tonight."

   
"Giles, you're gonna think
I'm crazy—'*

   
"I always have."

   
"Listen," Berry said.
"You remember old Winstone Thorpe—?"

   
"Oh no!" Giles snapped.
"We're not going into that again."

   
Berry had come out the way he'd
got in, landing this time less easily, on a gravel path, ripping a hole in his
jeans and grazing a knee.

   
Giles had found him on the
lawn. He must have looked like hell, but Giles didn't seem to notice.

   
"Berry, you cretin,"
he'd said when Berry told him he hadn't been able to open either the front door
or the back door. "Why didn't you shout? There's a back door key in the

bottom of an old vase in the scullery. I remember seeing the solicitor
put it there when he was showing us round. You'll just have to get back in
through the window."

   
Berry was already shaking his
head. Uh huh. No way. No time now. Gonna be dark soon. Anyway, had plenty time
to look around. Let's go, OK ... ?

   
"Well, go on." Giles
snapped, "Say it. Say what you've got to say."

   
His lean, freckled face, lit up
by the headlights of a passing car, looked aggressive, affronted and defiant,
all at once.

   
A girl with luminous green hair
and a man in a light silver jacket, as worn on the Starship Enterprise, walked
past the car, laughing at each other, but probably not because of the jacket
and the hair. They went into the hotel.

   
"C'mon. let's go in."
said Berry. "Get a drink."

   
The hotel bar was quite
crowded, but they managed to find a table, one people had avoided because it
was next to the men's room. Giles went to get the drinks and Berry leaned back
in his chair and closed his eyes, letting the voices wash over him, soporific,
like surf. He could hear people speaking in English and in Welsh and even, he
was sure, in Japanese. University town. Kind of a cosmopolitan town. He liked
that. Made him feel secure. Like New York, except if you closed your eyes in a
New York bar you'd open them half a minute later to find you'd lost your wallet
or your watch or, where applicable, your virginity.

   
There was a crush of people
around the bar; it took Giles a while to get served. Berry sat quietly,
half-listening to the multilingual voices and half-hearing his own voice
talking to him, saying all the real obvious things.

   
. . . you dreamt it, it was
your imagination, you're making it up . . .
   
No way.

   
Something had been in there,
something heavier than the desk, harder than the oak beams, blacker than the
books.

   
"Here we are," said Giles.
He put down two beers. "I know how you like to try local brews, so this is
. . . dammit, I've forgotten the name, but it was in a bottle with a yellow
label with a red dragon on it."

   
Thanks, pal." He hated local
brews. "I was just thinking, I could quite get to like this town. Good mix
of people here, you know?"

   
"Yes." said Giles.
"But what about Y Groes? What about my cottage?"

   
"Hell of a place,"
said Berry. "
Hell
of a
place."

So, OK. he thought, let's work this out rationally, bearing in mind that
at the end of the day. this is not your problem. Tomorrow you drive out of here
and you don't come back. Let Giles find out for himself. It is his problem.

   
So you didn't like the cottage.
No, get it right, there was nothing so wrong with the cottage, it was the room
you didn't like. You didn't like the furniture. You couldn't understand the
books. You were inexplicably disturbed by a photograph which, in other
circumstances, might have seemed faintly comic, bunch of old men in christening
robes.

   
So how come you were squeezing
out that window like some guy breaking jail. Grown man, smooth-talking wiseass
reporter, scampering away like a puppy, oh, Jesus, this
can't be happening, too bewildered to crank up the mental machinery to attempt
to analyse it.

   
"Berry, are you going to
come on like the rest of them. Like Winstone Thorpe— 'But you're an Englishman,
old boy, you don't belong there.'"
   
"No," Berry said
uncertainly. "That's not how I—"
   
"Fuck 'em all, that's what I
say." Giles stared into his beer. "I've had it with all these smug
London bastards. They're the ones who're out of touch, you know. Had it with Westminster
too. And newspapers that try to tell the public what's important in life, what
they should be concerned about. This is a place where you can't bargain on
London terms. Listen to this—I wasn't going to say anything about this, I
thought you'd snigger—"

   
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?"

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."