Candlenight (9 page)

   
He found her making her way
across the car park below the castle ruins. She was carrying her briefcase and
a pile of exercise books to the little green Peugeot.

   
"What should I do then,
Bethan?" Guto demanded without preamble.

   
"Now," said Bethan
thoughtfully, leaning into the car. "Do you think I should put all these
hooks into the boot or will they stay on the back seat without falling
over?"

   
"Do I phone anybody or do I
wait for them to contact me?" said Guto in agony. "Don't want them to
think I'm pushing, see."

   
"I think what I shall
do," said Bethan. "is put them on the back seat and prop them up behind
the briefcase."

   
"I've got to be well
placed for it. I mean. I'm pretty well known locally."

   
Bethan straightened up. She was
wearing a black cardigan over a white cotton dress, and big gold earrings. Guto
felt a pang of something not connected with politics.

   
"Well Guto." she said.
"There you have identified the problem. You are
exceedingly
well known locally."

   
They stared at each other
across the roof of the little car.

   
"What are you getting
at?"

   
"Well, who in this town
has not heard you ranting on at length about the English and what we should do
to keep them out? Ah, they say to strangers, you know who that is don't you?
That is Guto Evans the famous extremist."

   
"Well, good God, woman,
they all
agree
with me."

   
"Of course they don't, and
neither does the party. Guto, the one thing you must never suggest these days
is that Welsh Nationalist means anti-English."

   
"I know that, but . .
."

   
"And a by-election! In-depth
scrutiny by the media of all the candidates, especially ours. Muck-raking. Well,
think about it—can Plaid credibly be represented by a man who once had a homing
device attached to the underside of his van so the police could keep track of
his movements?"

   
"Oh, now, that was a
mistake. They thought I was—"

   
"But it will come out. So
will the pub brawl—"

   
"I was never charged, for
God's sake—"

   
"Only because all your friends
lied through their teeth. Now Guto. I'm not saying that, in one respect, a man
of your talents would not be the best hope in a by-election. But you have a lot
of work to do. Have to change your image, Guto. People must get used to seeing
you around in a smart suit and a tie. And er—" Bethan smothered a giggle "—kissing
babies."

   
"Aaaargh." growled
Guto in disgust.

   
"English babies too."
Bethan slid into her car.

   
Guto watched her drive away,
dragging a cloud of early-morning exhaust across the Pontmeurig bypass and on to
the mountain road to Y Groes. Though still warm, it was the first grey morning
in three weeks. There was rain in the air and mist on the hills.

   
"Damn it. Bethan." Guto
mumbled wistfully, shambling back into the town, past the castle destroyed by
his hero, Owain Glyndwr. "If I could have you, they could stuff the bloody
nomination."

   
Impossibly, as Bethan drove out
of the forestry, the mist appeared to evaporate and the church tower of Y Groes
shimmered in a shaft of gold. It's a blue hole, this place. Bethan thought, but
she took no great pleasure in the thought these days.

   
The school was on the other
side of the river in a little lane of its own. screened from the village by a
row of elms which had somehow survived successive epidemics of Dutch Elm
Disease when nearly all the others for miles around had succumbed.

   
Bethan liked to get to school
at least ten minutes before the first of the children, but Guto had delayed her
and there was a small group of them around the wooden gate, chattering in
Welsh. They stopped when they saw Bethan and chorused dutifully, "
Bore da
, Mrs. McQueen."

   
"
Bore da, blant
,' said Bethan, shouldering the gate open, arms full
of briefcase and books. The children followed her in, all good Welsh-speaking
children from Welsh-speaking families, not a single English cuckoo. Which
disappointed Bethan in a way, because she used to enjoy the challenge of taking
a handful of children from London or Birmingham at

the age of five and then sending them on to the secondary school
completely fluent in Welsh, even starting to think in Welsh.

   
The school had been lucky to
survive so long with only twenty-four pupils. Twice the education authority had
attempted to close it down and transfer the children to Pontmeurig. But that
would have meant an eight-mile journey for them along a mountain road that was
often impassable in winter, and the local councillors had won the day.

   
Bethan waded into the school
through a puddle of children, the smallest ones pulling at her skirt to attract
her attention. She never discouraged them. The school had a warm family
atmosphere.

   
"
Bore da
, Mrs. Morgan." the children sang, as Buddug entered,
the deputy head teacher or Bethan's entire staff, depending on how you saw it.
Buddug, a big woman in her middle fifties, a farmer's wife with red cheeks full
of broken veins, like a map of the London Underground, had taught at Y Groes
for over thirty years and was regarded as the head of the school by everyone
except the county education officials who'd appointed Bethan.

   
"
Eisteddwch
!" Buddug commanded, and the children squeezed into
their seats and snatched a final few seconds of chatter as Buddug strode across
to the piano for the morning hymn which was only changed once a week and was
limited to the three tunes Buddug could play, except at Christmas when carols
were sung unaccompanied.

   
"Buddug," said Bethan
in her ear, "can you spare me a couple of minutes during playtime?
Something is bothering me."

   
Buddug beamed and nodded and
crashed her stiffened fingers down on the keyboard like a butcher cleaving a
side of beef.

   
"It's this," said
Bethan determinedly, and opened the child's exercise book to reveal the drawing
of the corpse and the corpse candle over the grave.

   
"Yes, isn't it good?"
said Buddug. She turned over the exercise book to read the name on the front.
"Sali Dafis. Her writing has improved enormously over the past few weeks, and
look at the detail in those drawings!"

   
"I'm not objecting to the
quality of it." said Bethan. "It's more the content. I asked them to
pretend they were working for the
papur
bro
and to write about something which had happened in the village."

   
"Excellent," said
Buddug. "And were any of the others as good as this one?" She stared
insolently at Bethan out of dark brown eyes.

   
"Oh, Buddug, what are you
trying to do to me?"

   
"I don't understand. What
are you objecting to? What sort of ideas have you brought back from the city?
Would you rather the children wrote about one-parent families and lesbians?"
Buddug laughed shrilly.

   
Bethan snatched back the book
and turned away, blinking back angry tears. Seeing, out of the window, the
children in the playground, seeing a certain corruption in their eyes and
their milk-teeth smiles.

   
"I accept," she said
carefully, still looking out of the window, her back to Buddug. "that a
child has to learn about death. I don't believe that being taken to view a
neighbour in her coffin and being informed that her dying was foretold by the
corpse candle is a particularly healthy way of going about it."

   
She gathered her resolve and
whirled back at Buddug, who was wearing an expression of mild incomprehension now,
like a cow over a gate.

   
"I don't believe."
Bethan said furiously, 'that little children should see the woods not as the
home of squirrels and somewhere to collect acorns but as the place where the
Gorsedd Ddu
hold their rituals. I don't
believe that when they hear the thunder they should think it's the sound of Owain
Glyndwr rolling about in his grave. I don't want them looking at storm clouds
and not seeing formations of cumulonimbus but the Hounds of Annwn gathering for
the hunt. l just don't believe—"

   
"You don't believe in anything!"
Buddug said, smiling, eyes suddenly alight. "And this is not a place for
people who do not believe in anything. Playtime is over. Time to bring them
in."

She rang the brass handbell with powerful twists of an old milkmaid's
wrist.

Chapter XI

ENGLAND

The rolling countryside of the Cotswolds was turning out to be good
therapy for Berry's car, which had been a mite bronchitic of late.

   
He drove an old Austin Healey
Sprite of a colour which, when the Sprite was born, was known as British Racing
Green. He loved this car. It coughed and rattled sometimes and was as
uncomfortable as hell, but it was the fulfillment of a dream he'd had since seeing
an old detective show back in the States called Harry O, whose hero drove a
British MG sports car and was, even by Californian standards, very laid back.

   
The Cotswolds, also, were laid
back, often in a surprisingly Californian way: rich homes sprawled languidly behind
lush foliage which was not so lush that you couldn't admire the beautiful
bodies of the houses and their gorgeous Cotswold tans. Was this what remained
of olde England: a burglar alarm and a Volvo estate car outside some cottage originally
built for farm workers who couldn't afford their own cart?

   
Touch of therapy for Berry too,
to be out here. Distances were negligible in Britain. Couple of hours ago he'd
been in the office, the combination of events and Miranda ensuring that by the
time he arrived at work he was already feeling overtired. This had cut no ice
at all with American Newsnet's London bureau chief, Addison Walls, who'd
ordered
him to go at once to Gloucestershire, where the Government's Energy Secretary
had his country home. The Minister was to give an unofficial Press conference
explaining why he'd chosen to resign over the Oil Crisis.

   
"Anybody in the States give
a shit about this?" Berry had asked, and Addison Walls looked at him like
he was crazy.
   
"Morelli, watch my lips. The Oil
Crisis. O-I-L."
   
"Yeah, yeah, OK. Just tired, is
all."

   
"Get outta here."
muttered Addison Walls. "Fuckin' radical."

   
When he finally arrived at what
turned out to be quite a modest Cotswold farmhouse—barely an acre of land around
it—Berry learned he'd missed the Press conference by a good twenty minutes. He
found two reporters chatting by their cars in the lane. One was Shirley Gillies
of the BBC with a black Uher tape recorder over her shoulder. The other was
Giles Freeman, his wheat-coloured hair uncombed and grey circles under his
eyes.

   
"Don't worry about it.
mate." he told Berry, waving a weary, dismissive hand. "Wasn't worth
coming. Terse statement, nothing new in it. Wouldn't answer questions. Posed for
a few simpering pictures with his wife. Didn't offer us coffee."

   
"Giles rebuked him for wasting
our time." Shirley Gillies said. I'm afraid if I spoke like that to a
Government minister, the next farewell piss-up would be mine, but he as good as
apologised to Giles. Who can be quite impressive when he's sober."

   
Giles, who was wearing a
crumpled cream suit, shrugged in a what-the-hell kind of way. The attitude of a
guy who wasn't planning to be around much longer. Berry thought.
   
He hesitated then said. "Ah,
talking of farewell piss-ups. I suppose you . . ."

   
Giles sighed. "It was all
round the office. What can I say? I feel awful. Easy to say, 'if only I'd
known.' I mean, God—"

   
Berry wondered if this might be
the time to fulfil his obligation to put the arm on Giles. He couldn't,
however, say anything with Shirley around. Couldn't think, anyway, how to
start. Suppose Old Winstone was simply paranoid?

   
"Still, I suppose if he'd
had a choice of where to snuff it," Giles said, "he'd probably have
opted for the pub."

   
"I gather you were still
there. Berry," Shirley Gillies said brightly, "when it
happened."