Candlenight (32 page)

   
"I'll bleep him,"
said the receptionist. "He'll want to talk to you, I imagine."

   
Bethan went cold. "Is
Giles all right?'

   
"No, he's not all
right." the woman said smugly. Bethan could tell that, as she spoke, she
was busy fabricating an interesting relationship between the schoolteacher and
the Englishman. "Not for me to say, though, is it?'

   
The doctor was more
forthcoming. He led Bethan to his office in the new wing and closed the door.
"Delayed concussion, fractured skull, brain haemorrhage, you name
it." he said. "It could be any, it could be none. But how are we to
know? I don't particularly want to know precisely how he came by his injuries,
but I do want him to be fully examined. Call it selfishness. Call it protecting
my own back. I don't care."

   
"Hold on." Bethan
said. "You are saying he's gone?'

   
"Your friend discharged
himself half an hour ago. There was nothing I could say to stop him. We don't,
unfortunately, have powers of arrest."

   
"Oh God," Bethan
said.

   
"I don't know how much you
are in a position to influence him. but if he blacks out and runs his car off
the road . . ."

   
"All right." Bethan
said, looking at her watch. Twenty past eight.

   
She ran down the hospital
corridor and did not look at the receptionist on her way to the door.

Chapter XXXVII

Tired. Desperately, desperately tired.

   
He had thought the fresh air
would revive him, but walking to the car park was like he imagined it would be
for a deep sea diver staggering across the ocean bed, the air heavy on his
shoulders, powerful currents pulling him this way and that. In reality the wind
was not so strong anymore and the sky all rained-out.

   
Stepping from the kerb, Giles
lost his balance and fell sideways across the bonnet of a parked car. People
stared at him, as though he were some rare species of breakfast-time drunk.

   
When he got into his own car,
the new Subaru, it felt strange, as if he hadn't driven it in years. When he
pulled out of the car park below the ruined castle, his hands on the wheel
seemed a long way away, as if he were driving from the back seat.

   
He steered stiffly across the
Meurig bridge and on to the bypass. The Nearly Mountains were above him now,
wispy grey clouds around the tops like smoke-rings.

   
Just hadn't realised what complete
fatigue could be like. Except this was more than fatigue: his whole body
aching, bloated, lumbering. His head feeling as though it were
encased in some huge metal helmet, like the Man in the Iron Mask.

   
A truck blasted its horn behind
him as he swung the car off the bypass and on to the mountain road, and he
realised he'd forgotten to signal.

   
After three miles, Giles began
to see double. Twin roads snaked into the hills, two wooden fences sealed off
the forestry. He pulled into a lay-by. Switched off the engine, sat back, and
the seat pulled him in and his eyelids crashed down.

   
He remembered Bethan then. How
she was going to fetch him some clothes. He'd forgotten all about that. He must
stop her, tell her he was going home. He sat up, hands scrabbling at the car
phone. He would call home, tell Claire, get her to ring Bethan or something. Or
something.

 
 
His
fingers kept pushing all the wrong numbers. The car phone squeaked impatiently.
He saw the message NO SERVICE printed out across the illuminated panel on the receiver.
Giles groaned. He must have passed the point at which the Vodaphone signal
faded out. Perhaps it would return. He must remember to try again. Must
remember . . .

   
 
Really he felt like stumbling off into the
forestry and curling up on the brown carpet of dead needles, knowing he would
fall asleep there instantly. But he heaved his body into position on the seat,
switched on the engine again and drove very, very slowly over the crest of the
Nearly Mountains, where the snow snuggled into the crags and hollows. He could
have stopped and walked out and gone to sleep in the snow, like Captain Oates.
Just going out. May be some time.

   
 
He didn't have to analyse why it was so vital
for him to get away from Pontmeurig and back to Y Groes. Couldn't have managed
any heavy thinking in his state anyway. But he knew why it was. It came down to
this: the first seriously unpleasant thing had happened to him in Pont, the
thing that backed up everything they'd said, the hacks, at Winstone Thorpe's farewell
session. While in Y Groes, everything disproved it. The warmth, the open
friendliness, the generosity, the feeling that here were people who were
confident enough of their heritage, their place in the world, not to suspect
everyone with an English accent of trying to rip them off.
   
 
Something like that.

   
 
He glanced back at the phone. NO SERVICE it
said still, NO SERVICE. Why should it just say NO SERVICE in English? Why not in
Welsh, too?
Dim
. . .
dim
whatever the hell service was in Welsh.

   
Down now, into the forestry's
gloom. Sitka spruce stamping in dispiriting symmetry down the hillside,
stealing the land and the light. Giles clung to the wheel of the Subaru, wipers
scraping at the spray thrown up as the car slogged through a roadside river
left by the storm. The rhythm of the wipers wafted waves of sleep into his
head.

   
soon-be-home, soon-be-home,
soon-be-home.

   
Only when his chin hit his
chest did Giles awake to his peril, violently jerking himself upright, a bumper
scraping he forestry fence as he swerved back into the middle of the road.

   
Breathing hard, he wiped the
palm of his hand across the windscreen and smeared cool condensation into his
hot, hurting eyes.

   
Presently, the sky brightened.
He pulled down the sun visor then flung it up again, tears in his eyes, realising
this was the brightness heralding home. He saw the church's two-tiered belfry,
and he stepped the car his heart tugging weakly but triumphantly.

   
The church was a symbol for
Giles of what this village was about. Not some grey chapel behind back-street
railings, but a great, soaring tower stabbing the sky, announcing Y Groes. The
cross, Y Groesfan. The crossing place.

   
He had never been to a service
at this church, never been to any kind of service since his wedding, but he
told himself he must go this Sunday. Renew his faith, give thanks to the
village and to its people and to the Almighty for bringing him here.

   
Battered, beaten-up,
bedraggled, Giles wrapped both arms around the steering wheel and wept. And
looked up and saw, through his tears, two towers, two bridges, two roads. But
he would make it now. Back home to sleep. Sleep until church on Sunday. Sunday.
When was that? What day was it? Was it Sunday tomorrow?

   
The car rolled out of the
forestry as if someone else were driving it. Giles's senses somewhere around
the rear parcel shelf.

   
Across the bridge, up the hill,
past the lych gate of the church, a couple of hundred yards then right, between
the two great sycamores in full autumnal glory.

   
Oh God, thank you, thank you.

   
Giles almost fell out of the
car, heedless of the pain, and breathed deeply of the soft air. The metal gate
was open for him. They must have told Claire he was on his way. What he wanted
most in the world was to fall into bed, holding her to him, and sleep. Sleep
for ever.
   
"Claire . . . darling Claire . .
."

   
He realised he'd said that
aloud as he staggered up the path. The judge's house — no his house surely, his
house now —sat before him, grey stone under a milky sky. The front door also was
open for him. He stumbled gratefully over the step. "Hello, darling, I
tried to phone . . ."

   
There was no Claire waiting for
him in the little stone-walled hallway.

   
Giles went into the living room.
It was silent. No fire in the hearth, no cups on the table.
   
"Claire?"

   
He shouted out,
"Claire!" His voice almost breaking into a wail of disappointment.
She wasn't here.

   
But the gate open, the front
door. Couldn't have gone far, surely.

   
Giles went back outside, looked
around the garden, called out. "Claire!"

   
The wind brought only a sheep's
bleat back to him from Morgan's field.

   
He returned to the house, upset
and angry now, feeling deserted. And terribly, terribly tired. Too tired to
think sensibly

   
"I'm going to bed."
Giles said thickly. "Sod you, Claire. I'm going to bed."

   
He staggered through the
passage to the bottom of the stairs, still clinging to the hope that he would
meet Claire coming down, smiling with welcome and sympathy and a hot cup of
coffee.

   
Three doors in the passage, the
one to the judge's study hanging open. But no light leaked out of the gap into the
already dim passage. Irritably he pulled the door closed, but it swung open
again as he turned away.

   
Angrily he spun round and
snapped it shut.

   
In the passage he stumbled over
something that should not be there, could not lake in at first that this was
the pink vinyl headboard, cheap and brash, from Garfield and Pugh in hostile
Pontmeurig. What was the bloody headboard doing at the foot of the stairs?

   
"Claire? Claire!!" He
began to climb the stairs. It was too bad. Just too bloody bad of her. Not even
a fire lit.

   
Halfway up the stairs he looked
back and saw that the door of the judge's study was hanging open again. He
turned
away from it and carried on to the upstairs landing.

   
He went into his office and
looked around. Aghast.

   
His office had gone.

   
It was a bedroom.

   
His office was a bloody bedroom
again!

Giles squeezed his aching eyes with trembling fingers. Illusion,
fatigue, hallucination?

   
Let it be that. Please let it
be that, God.

   
But when he opened his eyes. It
was still a bedroom, and now he recognised the bed. Two green mattresses and a frame
of light pine. It was the bed which had come into the house with the ghastly
pink vinyl headboard.

   
"Claire!!" he
screamed, his throat choking on the word. He began to cough.

   
He backed out of the room and
threw open the door of their own bedroom, his and Claire's, knowing in an icy
part of his stomach what he would find there. Whose bed, with
its frowning headboard of carved oak.

"Thank God," Bethan said, seeing Giles's car parked in the track
between the two sycamores.

   
She'd driven straight out of
the forestry and into the village at close to sixty miles per hour, knowing
that at this time there'd be no children in the road—they'd all be in school by
now, wondering where their head teacher was.

   
At seven minutes to nine, the
head teacher had been shattering a wing mirror on the parapet of the bridge as
the little Peugeot whizzed across like a frightened squirrel.

   
All the way across the hills
she'd been peering nervously over walls and hedges and fences, expecting to see
a car on its side somewhere, or bits of wreckage.

   
Well thank God he'd made it.
Thank God for that, at least.
   
For what it was worth.

   
Bethan thought, on reflection,
that perhaps the best thing that could have happened would have been a minor
crash, something to get Giles towed back to Pont, deposited safely in the
hospital with a broken leg, something minor but incapacitating.

   
For a few seconds she debated
going up to the house to ask if Giles was OK. But really it was none of her
business. All right, a bruised and beaten man and an increasingly loopy woman.
What could she do about that? She was a primary school teacher, not a
psychotherapist or a marriage-guidance counsellor.