Candlenight (45 page)

   
"Sure, yeah, but—"

   
"I know, that was years ago.
But they are doing it again. Only this time they're flooding us with people and
they're drowning our language and our culture."

   
Berry put his fork down.
"You know," he said. "You're beautiful when you're defending
your culture."

"Sir, with my hand on my heart, I can tell you that even if you
were prepared to sleep standing up in the third floor broom-cupboard. I would
not be able to accommodate you.

   
The proprietor of the Plas
Meurig Hotel (two-star) was short, plump Englishman in a double-breasted
fawn-coloured suit which matched the walls of the hotel lobby.

   
"I'm prepared to pay over
the odds, if necessary," George said.

   
"Sir, I've turned away
Conservative members of Parliament who are prepared to pay well over the odds.
I've turned away a senior editor from Independent Television News with a
chequebook as thick as the New Testament. I swear if I could get an extension
block put up in five days I'd call in the builders now and apply for planning
permission later. I could be making a fortune. But I am utterly full and
there's nothing I can do about it."

   
"Well, where else would
you recommend?'

   
"In this town, to be quite
honest, there's nowhere I'd actually recommend. But I seriously don't believe
there's anywhere you'd get in anyway."

   
"Let's not be stupid about
this." George said to Elinor outside. "It's going to be a damn cold
night. I think we should ring Claire."

At the top of the wide street, on the same side as the restaurant, was a
very old building with flags protruding from its deep grey stonework.

   
Bethan said. "This is
where Owain Glyndwr convened the first Welsh parliament in 1403. By that time
he was in control of most of Wales—the nearest we ever came to ruling
ourselves."

   
Inside, there was a tourist
reception area with books about Vales and about Owain Glyndwr, including Guto's
paperback.

   
"I bought one, you
know," Berry said. "Still in the car."

   
"It's really very good,"
Bethan said. "You should make time to read it."

   
They saw a replica of Glyndwr's
parliament table, pictures of the man himself, one of him sitting solemnly in state.
The only real distinctive thing about him, Berry reckoned, was the fork in his
beard, like somebody had tried to cleave his head apart from underneath.

   
"Hold on," he said,
as they emerged onto the street. "I just realised who this guy is. He's
Owen Glendower, from Shakespeare. Henry the Fourth Part One or Part Two, I
can't
remember. The point being—"

   
"Part One. I think,"
Bethan said.

   
"The point being that Owen
Glendower was a horse's ass, pompous, full of shit—"

"The point being." Bethan snapped, "that Shakespeare was
biased. The real Owain was a fairly modest, cultured man who studied law in London,
had many English friends and would never have gone to war with England if he
hadn't been faced with a completely untenable—"

   
"OK, OK." Berry held up
his hands. Few other people were in sight on the wide, cold street. Bethan was
facing him on the pavement, small lips tight, fists clenched by her sides. This
was not about the rights and wrongs of Welsh nationalism or whether Owain
Glyndwr was full of shit.

   
Her fists unclenched. She
looked small and alone and without hope.

   
"I think," she said
slowly. "I think I am ready now to have my nervous breakdown."

Chapter LI

The Rhos Tafol Hotel was a white-painted former farmhouse about six
miles west of Machynlleth. It overlooked the placid Dyfi estuary, beyond which
mountains lay black, pink and gold in the last light of the last day in
November.

   
The Rhos Tafol dated back to
the seventeenth century and had a suite with a four-poster bed. OK, a
reproduction
four-poster. But four posts
were four posts.

   
Tenderly, he kissed a small,
pale left breast. "How would you feel," he said, "about
another
nervous breakdown?"

The sky over the inn was like bronze tinfoil, the cottages around it
coloured ochre and sepia and clustered together like chocolates.

   
Yes, it was beautiful. She had
to agree. It cast its spell.

   
And inside the beauty it was
only a village, only houses with front doors and gardens and electric cookers
and televisions. It could not harm her.

   
This was because, before
leaving Pontmeurig in the Land-Rover, Elinor had taken two valium.

   
Claire steered them casually,
one-handed, over the bridge. "You never know, having to come back here—it
might be destiny."

   
Destiny, Elinor thought.
Dessss-tinnny. Fated to see it like this, in what passed for sunset. To
understand why they were all so attracted to it.

   
"Or it might simply be incompetence
and inefficiency," George growled, trying to hold a match to his cigarette
as they jolted to a halt in front of the inn. "Can't for the life of me
understand how they managed to send the wrong damn parts."

   
Destiny and fate and beauty,
Elinor thought, drifting. I shall leave tomorrow and still look back with a
degree of hatred.

   
"Perhaps we should have taken
it to Dilwyn's," Claire was saying. "Dilwyn is very good at
improvising."

   
"Don't want a Mickey Mouse
job." George said, opening his door, peering out. "Don't know why you
can't have a proper car, Claire. Hell of a way to the ground from these things."

   
"You said that yesterday,"
Elinor said, opening her own door, putting a foot into the air, giggling.
   
"Mother, wait . . ."

   
But she fell into the gravel.
She was crying when Claire went to help her to her feet. "Don't mind me,
darling," she said miserably, clutching her handbag to her chest.

Night came and they did not leave the reproduction four-poster bed, did
not go down to dinner.
   
She clung to him for hours.

   
He woke intermittently, hearing
voices from the bar below. Mainly voices speaking Welsh. Local people, farmers.
He and Bethan must be the only guests.

   
It occurred to him that in only
a few hours' time he was going to be out of a job. He could, of course, steal
quietly out of bed and drive like hell through the night, reaching
London by dawn, just time to shower and shave and change and present himself at
Addison's desk by nine-fifteen. Then again ... He hugged Bethan lightly. She
moaned softly. Her body was slick with her own sweat, nothing to do with the
sex. He hoped she was sweating out all the pain.

   
He slept.

   
Woke again. No noise from the
bar now. Bethan stirring in his arms, mumbling, "Which of us is
sweating?"

   
"Don't wish to be
ungallant," he said, "but I think it's you. I also think"—licking
moisture from her shoulder—"I also think I love you. Is this
premature?"

   
"You don't know what you
are saying."

   
"Do too."

   
"We've talked so much, you
think you've known me for a long time, but it was only yesterday. What I
think—"

   
"Don't care what you
think. No, yes I do. I care."
   
"I think having so much to talk
over, things we'd never told anyone . . . that is a great stimulant."
   
"Like Welsh lovespoons,"
Berry said.
   
She kissed him. "What are you
talking about?"
   
"Those lovespoons. The long
wooden ones. Aren't they some kind of Celtic dildo?"

For maybe a couple of seconds, because they'd pulled the curtains around
the bed and it was too dark to see her face, he had the impression she thought
he was serious.
   
Then a small hand closed around his
balls.
 
 
"No,
hey ... I didn't mean it . . . Bethan, geddoff . . .I'll never . . .
Bethan!"

   
After a third, rather more
languorous nervous breakdown, she said, "I have
got
to have a shower."
   
"OK."

   
"Alone! You stay and read
Guto's book. It is the least you can do for him now."
   
"Because I went off with his
woman?"
   
"I am
not
his woman."
   
"Well, he obviously—"
   
"Shut up and read the book."

   
He looked at his watch on the
floor by the bed. It was three-fifteen in the morning. They'd been in bed since
about four-thirty yesterday afternoon.

   
Hell, he'd left all his stuff
at Mrs. Evans's. What was she going to think? More of a problem, what was Guto
going to think?

   
As they'd had no cases—and not
wishing to make anything
too
obvious—they'd carried everything they could find out of the Sprite's trunk.
Bags full of useless stuff lay under the window, on top of them the two
books—Guto's
Glyndwr
and the red
notebook George Hardy had given Bethan.

   
Berry switched on a bedside
lamp with pictures of Tudor houses on the shade. He heard the rush of the
shower. He began to read, the way journalists read official documents when they
have only twenty minutes to extract the essence.

   
She was right about Glyndwr. He
was an articulate, educated guy who'd probably had no ambitions to rule an independent
Wales. This had been a lost cause since the last official Prince of Wales, Llywelyn,
had bought it in the thirteenth century. All the same, people in Wales—where there
seemed less of a social gap between the peasants and the landowning
classes—felt they were getting a raw deal from the English king, Henry IV. And
Owain Glyndwr had been pushed into confrontation when some of his own land was
snatched by one of Henry's powerful supporters, one Reginald de Grey, who
seemed to have had it in for
Glyndwr in a big way.

   
Guto's style was
straightforward, fluid and readable—and maybe as biased as Shakespeare in its
way. But Berry was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt as he read the
enthusiastic account of Glyndwr's rebellion which, at one stage, had put almost
the whole of Wales under his control. Guto implied that a Wales under Glyndwr
and his
parliament would have come closer than anywhere else in Europe to some kind of
medieval democracy. It was an appealing theory.

   
The book was fairly dismissive
about Glyndwr's reputation as a wielder of supernatural forces—a side of him which
had certainly caught Shakespeare's imagination. The only lines Berry could
remember from Henry IV were Glendower claiming,

         
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Oh, sure, somebody had replied, or words to that effect. But are they
really gonna show up when you do call for them?

   
Dr. D. G. Evans quoted
Shakespeare some more, Glendower boasting,

         
. . . at my birth

         
The
front of heaven was full of fiery shapes.
         
The goats ran from the
mountains, and the herds
         
Were strangely clamourous to the
frightened field.

         
These signs have mark 'd me extraordinary;
         
And all the courses of my life
do show
         
I am not in the roll of common
men.

There had been claims, Guto wrote, that Glyndwr had been trained in Druidic
magic and could alter the weather—a couple of his victories were put down to
this ability. All crap, Guto said: the English view of the Welsh as wildmen from
the mountains who, having no military sophistication, needed to put their faith
in magic.

   
None the less, Guto conceded,
all this stuff added to Glyndwr's charisma, put him alongside King Arthur as
the great Celtic hero who never really died and one day would
return to free his people from oppression.

   
Prophecies. Signs and portents
and prophecies.