Candlenight (56 page)

   
They held each other and then
he kissed her moist and beautiful eyelids as if for the last time.

   
"How about I go to Y Groes
alone?" he said. "Nobody there knows me. It makes sense."

   
She surprised him. "All
right," she said.

   
"OK." He got up, pulled
his jeans and fisherman's sweater from a chair.

   
"We'll go separately,"
she said. "You go in your car. I'll go in mine — if it will start after
two days in the car park in this weather."

   
'That's not what I meant."
   
"It's the best you'll get."

   
They dressed, went out to the
kitchen. It was three-thirty. Soon the light would fade.
   
"Tea?" Bethan said.

   
"Let's go to that teashop
by the bridge. I'll buy you a lovespoon."

   
She smiled. "I don't think
I can look at another lovespoon after what you said about them. Hold on a
minute, I'll be back."

   
She went back into the bedroom
and he heard her opening the wardrobe. She returned in seconds and said,
"It's snowing again. Try this for size."

   
It was a fleece-lined flying
jacket of brown leather, as worn by fighter pilots in the Second World War.

   
"Robin's?"

   
"It's the only thing of
his I kept. He'd always wanted one. I bought it for him the Christmas before he
died. It cost me almost a week's wages."

   
Berry said. "I
can't."

   
"Please . . ."

It was not a perfect fit, but it was close. Bethan adjusted the
shoulders and arranged the huge, fleecy collar. "It's to say all the
things I haven't felt safe in saying. Well, not in
English anyway."

   
"You said them in
Welsh?"

   
Bethan shrugged. "Maybe.
Come on, let's go."

There was nobody else in the shop. They ordered a pot of tea, no milk.
Sat down, but not in the window. Berry was still wearing Robin's flying jacket,
which was kind of bulky and too warm in here, but he didn't feel he should take
it off.

   
They looked at each other in
silence for maybe half a minute, and then Berry said, getting down to business.
"You see any point in confronting Claire? I met her a couple times, but I
can't say I know her well enough to raise something like this."

   
"It might be worth talking
to her," Bethan said. "There are things she ought to know by now.
She's been brainwashed, of course."

   
Literally, Berry thought,
remembering what she'd told him about Claire's head in the writhing Meurig.

   
"I would have to go alone,"
Bethan told him.

   
"Why?"

   
"Because I doubt she'd
speak English to you."
   
"That far gone?"

   
"That far gone,"
Bethan said. "However, I should like to try someone else first. I have a
feeling."
   
"Someone in the village?"

   
Bethan was nodding as the
teashop door was flung open and a young woman stood there and gazed at them.
She was frowning at first, but then a slow, delighted smirk spread
over her finely sculpted features.

   
She wore a bright yellow coat
and a very short skirt. Her hair was vividly red.

   
"Oh my God," she said,
looking Berry up and down. "Bloody Biggles flies again."

Bethan thought she'd never seen anyone look so astonished—gobsmacked,
Guto would have said—as Berry Morelli when the elegant red-haired girl walked
over to their table
and sat down.

   
"Ugh." Inspecting the
contents of their cups and wrinkling her nose. "Not one black tea, but
two
black teas. If it wasn't so
revolting it would be almost touching."

   
Berry said. "This, ah,
this is Miranda. She's full of surprises. I guess this must be one of
them."

   
"Isn't he wonderful when
he's embarrassed?" Miranda said, holding out a hand tipped with alarming
sea-green nails. "You must be Bethan. I've heard lots about you from Guto.
Do stop squirming. Morelli."

   
"And I a little about you,"
Bethan said guardedly, shaking the hand.

   
"Now don't you worry your
little Welsh head, darling," Miranda said. "I haven't come to take
him away." She was the kind of woman, Bethan thought, who, if she did plan
to take him away, would be entirely confident that this would pose no long-term
problem.

   
"Pardon me for asking,
Miranda," Berry said. "But what the fuck are you doing here?"

   
"Gosh," Miranda said.
"I think he's regaining his composure. All the same, not the most gracious
welcome for someone who's come to assure him he may not be bonkers after
all."

   
"Coffee, Miranda?"

   
"No thank you, I can see
the tin over the counter," Miranda wrinkled her nose again. "I'll
come straight to the matter on which I've travelled hundreds of miles in
appalling conditions. Have you by any chance heard of one Martin Coulson,
former curate of this parish?"

"I didn't know that," Bethan said. "About the difficulty
he had speaking Welsh."

   
"Like you were saying
about Giles," Berry filled their cups from the pot: Miranda winced at the
colour of the tea.
"Inside that village the language becomes a total mystery to the English,
no matter how well they were picking it up before. Like a barrier goes
up."

   
"It was very good of you
to come and tell us," Bethan said. Thank you."

   
"How many coincidences can
you take?" Berry shook his head. "Clinches it, far as I'm
concerned."

   
"And what are you going to
do about it?" Miranda demanded.

   
"The bottom line,"
Berry said. He lit a cigarette, watched her through the smoke, wondering where
she'd go from here.

   
"I think it's all rather
exciting," Miranda said, and they both looked at her, Berry with a rising
dismay. He might have known she wouldn't have come all this way just to tell him
about the death of an obscure country parson. She'd realised there was
something intriguing going down and she wanted in.

   
"Listen, I realise it
isn't my place to—But keep the hell out of this thing. Please." Realising
even as he spoke that this was just about the last way to persuade Miranda to
back off.

   
"He's right," Bethan
told her seriously. "It's not exciting. Just very sad and
unpleasant."

   
"Well, thanks for the warning."
Miranda smiled sweetly at them both, abruptly picked up her bag and sailed
towards the door. "I'll see you around, OK?"

   
She walked away down the street
without looking back. Welsh snowflakes landing tentatively, with a hint of
deference, in her angry red hair.

They cleared most of the snow from the Peugeot, chipped ice from the
windscreen. "It's terribly cold for December," Bethan said, patting
gloved hands together to remove the
sticky snow. "We rarely see much of this before New Year."
   
It was coming down in wild spasms, the
white-crusted castle looking almost picturesque against a sky like dense, billowing
smoke.

   
"You're right, of course,"
Berry said. "One of us gets stuck, we at least have a second chance."

   
The engine started at the fourth
attempt. Bethan let it run, switched on the lights, pulled her pink woolly hat
over her ears. "OK," she said. "You follow me. When we get
there, we
park behind the school, out of sight."

   
The equipment was in the Sprite,
behind the seats. Early that afternoon they'd been to see Dai Death who, in
turn, had consulted his friend, the local monumental mason, supplier of
gravestones over an area stretching from Pont down to Lampeter. Dai had been
suspicious, but he'd done it—for Bethan.

   
"But first," Berry
said. "We go see this friend of yours."

   
"I doubt I have any actual
friends
there," Bethan said. "This
is just the one person I can think of who won't bar his door when he sees me
coming."

Chapter LXIV

Up in the Nearly Mountains, headlights on, the snow was all there was.
It came at the windscreen at first in harmless feathery clouds, like being in a
pillow fight. Could send you
to sleep, Berry thought.

   
The higher they climbed, the
denser it became. Cold cobs, now, the size of table-tennis balls. The two
small, red taillights of Bethan's Peugeot bobbed in the blizzard.

   
"Get me through this, baby,
I'll buy you an overhaul," he told the Sprite, pulling it down to second
gear on a nasty incline, wheels whirring. Ice under this stuff up here.

   
At least the snow was a
natural
hazard.

   
we in same shit, you find out . . .

Like all his life had been propelling him into this. Leaving the US with
his ass in a sling, so to speak. The disillusion of London and an England full
of yuppies and video stores and American burger joints. Old Winstone dying on
him. Giles.

   
All this he saw through the
snow.

   
No family. No job. Now
everything he had was out here in this cold, isolated graveyard of a region
where people saw their own mortality gleaming in the darkness.

   
Everything he had amounted to a
geriatric little car and—maybe—a woman who needed the kind of help he wasn't
sure he had the balls to provide.

   
But if all his life was converging
on this woman, it had to be worth walking into the graveyard, just hoping the Goddamn
corpse candle wasn't shining for him.

   
For the first time since
putting on Robin's flying jacket he went into a hopeless shivering fit, scared
shitless.

Only five-thirty and Y Groes was midnight-still and midnight-dark.

   
Berry parked next to the
Peugeot behind the school and got out, closing his driver's door just as
quietly as he could, and looked around, disturbed.

   
"This is weird," he
said and wondered how many times he'd expressed that opinion in the past week.

   
But, yeah, it
was
weird. No snow falling any more,
only a light covering on the ground, a passing nod to winter, an acknowledgement
that the season was out there but wasn't
permitted to enter without an invite.

   
"The blue hole,"
Bethan said, taking off her woolly hat, shaking her hair; it was warm enough to
do that. "It might be quite natural. One of those places where the
arrangement
of the hills—"

   
"You believe that?"

   
"No," she said.
"Not entirely."

   
The sky was clear; you could
even see stars, except for where the black tube of the church tower rose in the
east. But only a few meagre lights in the houses. Power cut maybe.

   
He breathed out hard.
"Beth, listen, from now on, we have to start believing all this other
stuff is real. The corpse candles, the bird of death, the whole cartload of
shit. Because in this place it
is
real.
We left the civilised world behind, we don't play by those rules any
more."

   
"I think I always did
believe they were real," she said.

   
"Beth, before we go in
there. I just wanna say—"

   
Bethan put the pink hat back
on. "Save it. Please."

   
"But if—"

   
"I know," she said.

Aled looked far worse than she remembered. Perhaps it was the light from
the oil lamp in the porch which yellowed his skin, made his eyes seem to bulge.
His white hair was stiff- no spring to it, and his Lloyd George moustache
misshapen and discoloured.

   
"Bethan."
Disappointment there, but no real surprise; even his voice sagged. "Why do
you have to do this to me?"