Candlenight (22 page)

   
After all, one wrong decision
and they could easily ruin what was undoubtedly the most interesting room in
the house. Again, he found himself groping for the light switch before remembering.

   
"Unbelievable," he
said. "How the hell did the old boy manage without any power in
here?"

   
Wrong there, Giles, he thought.
There's certainly power in here. Shelves full of it. But how did he read
without a light?

   
He almost bumped his head on
the answer, a big oil lamp of tarnished brass Claire had found in the pantry.
It was now hanging from the central beam—she must have done that
this morning. He tapped the lamp and gave it a swing, trying to find out if
there was oil in it. It didn't sound as if there was. The lamp just rattled. It
needed polishing up, too.

   
"OK, memo: buy paraffin.
Also chase up that electrician."

   
It was darker in here than
anywhere else in the house, and yet the room was facing west. Must be all the
books, no light reflected from the walls. He wondered if the books were
valuable. He wondered how he was going to make space in here for his own books
when he brought them up from London. OK, they'd look a bit odd, glossy
paperbacks among the stark black spines of Judge Rhys's library. But if it
eventually was going to be his office, the judge would just have to move over a
bit.

   
It was chilly in here too. Giles
wondered if they could run a radiator from the kitchen stove; it wouldn't be
far to bring a pipe. First things first though: let there be some bloody
light.

   
"Suggestion," he said
to the tape. "What about removing some of the shelving in the middle of the
two side walls and installing some wall-lights? Have to be tasteful ones of
course. Convert a couple of antique oil lamps or something."

   
He glanced up at the framed
eisteddfod photograph, full of dignified, white-clad bards and shivered pleasurably,
remembering how this room seemed to have spooked Berry Morelli. Great. That
picture was definitely going to stay. He wondered which of the bards, if any,
was his grandfather-in-law.

   
The picture seemed dusty and
unclear in the dim light and he look a tissue from a hip pocket of his jeans
and rubbed at the pale faces of the bards, thinking perhaps he might catch an
image of Claire in one of them. Peering at the picture, he felt a dull throb
behind his eyes. Bloody headache again. The strain of trying to make out
details in semi-darkness.

   
He backed off. rubbing at his
eyes. The room was all shadows now and the only light seemed to be coming out
of the picture, out of the white robes of the bards, who appeared to be walking
slowly towards him in solemn procession, as if they were about to drift out of
the picture and into the room to stand around Giles like a chalk circle and
then to melt into the blotchy air.

   
Back in the picture, meanwhile,
the bards had turned black.

"Aspirin," Giles mumbled. He left the study and closed the
door behind him and gave it a push to make sure it really was shut.

Where was she?

   
Giles looked out of the window
and it was utterly black, he couldn't even see the lights of the village. How
could she take pictures in this? He was pretty sure she hadn't taken a
flash unit with her. He looked at his watch and saw it was nearly eight
o'clock—she'd been back by seven last night.

   
He felt a pang of anxiety,
unable to shake the ludicrous image of Claire being absorbed by the trees or
the village or the night or some numinous combination of all three. And
then thought: of course, somebody must have asked her in for a cup of tea,
that's what's happened. A bit bloody silly worrying about her being out after
dark in Y Groes when she'd survived the streets of Belfast and photographed call-girls
on the corners and junkies in the darkened doorways of the nastier crevices of
London.

   
All the same he went out to the
porch to wait for her and found the night wasn't as dark as it had seemed from
inside.
   
There was a moon, three parts full,
and the tallest village roofs were silvered between the two big sycamores.
Giles moved out onto the dampening lawn and the church tower
slid into view, the lip of its spire appearing to spear the moon, so that it
looked like a big black candle with a small white flame.

   
Giles's heart thumped as a
shadow detached itself from the base of the tower and came towards him. as if a
piece of the stonework had come alive. But it turned out to be Claire
herself, camera hanging limply from the strap curled around a wrist.

   
"Bloody hell." Giles
said. "I didn't know you were going to be so long. I mean, all right,
muggings are decidedly uncommon in this area, but all the same—"

   
"Darling." Claire
said briskly. "Go back inside, will you, and put all the lights on for me.
All the lights."

   
"People will think we're
extravagant." Giles protested— half-heartedly, though, because he was so
pleased to have her back. "I mean, not a good image to have around
here."

   
"Oh. Giles—"

   
"All right, all right—"
Giles switched on everything, even the light on the little landing upstairs,
thinking: we'll change some of these old parchment shades when we get time,
they're more than a touch dreary. All the upstairs windows were open and he could
hear Claire darting about, aperture wide open, shutter speed down. Thock . . .thock
. . . thock. A great tenderness overcame him, and when she came in he kissed
her under the oak beams of the living room, next to the inglenook where they'd
have log fires all through the winter. His headache had receded and with his
arms around Claire's slim functional body he felt much better.

   
"Sweetheart, where precisely
have you been? Your hair feels all tangled."

   
Claire laughed and Giles heard
a new boldness in that laugh, all the London tightness gone. Earthy too.

   
He joined in the laughter.

   
"You're really happy,
aren't you?" he said.

   
Claire pulled away from him and
went to stand by the window.

   
"Yes," she said.
"I'm very happy."

   
Giles said. "Did you find
your tree?"

   
"Yes." said Claire.
"I found my tree."

   
And then, without a word,
switching lights off on the way, she led him up to bed . . . where they made
love for the first time since their arrival, the first time in the new bed. And
it was really not how Giles had imagined it would be in this pastoral setting. Nothing
languid and dreamy about it at all; it was really pretty ferocious stuff, the
old
 
fingernails-down-the-back routine,
quiet Claire on the initiative, hungry. Nothing distant now.

   
Giles told himself it had been
very exciting.

Chapter XXVII

He was exhausted and slept like the dead and woke late next morning.
Woke with another headache and this one was a bastard. Eyes tightly shut, he
ground his head into the pillow. It was as if somebody were slicing his skull
down the middle with a chainsaw.

   
"Change of air,"
Claire diagnosed. "You're just not used to it yet."

   
She swung both legs
simultaneously out of bed and walked naked to the door.

   
"Yeah, sure, air like bloody
wine," Giles groaned into the pillow. "Air that gives you a bastard
hangover."

   
A few minutes later, he was
slowly pulling his trousers on, the sight of the pink vinyl headboard making
him feel queasy, when Claire returned from her bath, still naked, tiny drops of
water falling from her hair onto her narrow shoulders. She seemed oblivious of
her nakedness which for Claire, was unusual: to be nude, in daylight, when
Giles was obviously feeling too lousy to be turned on.

   
"I may stop rinsing my hair,"
said Claire, looking out of the window. "What do you think?"

   
"I think I need a cup of strong
tea," Giles said.

   
"There's no point in being
artificially anything around here." Claire said.

   
Giles looked up, a pinball of
agony whizzing from ear to ear with the movement.

   
"I like you blonde,"
he said. "I always have."

   
Claire just went on gazing out
of the window, across the village to the Nearly Mountains and the neutral sky.

   
In a bid to lose his headache,
Giles took a couple of paracetamol tablets and went for a walk down to the
village where autumn, it seemed, had yet to begin—even though tonight would see
the end of British Summertime.

   
"
Bore da
," he said, as cheerily as he could manage, to Glyn,
the angular historian chap, doing his Saturday shopping with a basket over his
arm.

   
"Good morning. Mr. Freeman,"
said Glyn with a flash of his tombstone teeth.

   
"Wonderful weather."
Giles said, not failing to notice that Glyn, like everyone else he spoke to in
the village, had addressed him in English. He'd never learn Welsh if people
kept doing that.

   
"Well, yes." said
Glyn, as if warm weather in October was taken for granted here. Perhaps it was,
thought Giles.
   
He walked across the river bridge,
past the entrance to the school lane and on towards a place he'd never been
before: the great wood which began on the edge of the village. Sooner than he
expected he found himself in what seemed like an enormous wooden nave. He was
reminded of the ruins of some old abbey. It was almost all oak trees, freely
spaced as if in parkland. Oak trees bulging with health, with the space to spread
out their muscular limbs, no decaying branches, no weaklings. Some of the oaks
were clearly of immense age and had a massive, magisterial presence.

   
Giles wondered if this was what
Claire had meant when she talked of "my tree." Had she come up here
alone at dusk?

   
It occurred to him that he was
standing inside a huge ancient monument. Most of these trees were centuries
old, some perhaps older than the castles the English had built to subdue the
people of Wales. And this was what most of the Welsh forests used to be
like, from pre-medieval days to the early part of the twentieth century, until
the now-ubiquitous conifers had been introduced—quick to grow, quick to
harvest, uniform
sizes. Drab and characterless, but easy money for comparatively little work.

   
This wood was awesomely
beautiful. This was how it should be. Giles felt a sense of sublime discovery
and an aching pride. He fell he'd penetrated at last to the ancient heart of Y
Groes. Surely this was where it had all begun— the source of the timber-framing
of the cottages, all those gigantic beams, the woody spirit of the place.

   
Giles felt, obscurely, that
this place could take away his headache.

   
He wandered deeper among the
trees, which were still carrying the weighty riches of late summer. The woods
seemed to go on and on, and he realised it must form a great
semi-circle around the village.

   
He came upon two great stumps,
where trees had been felled. Between them, a young tree surged out of the black
soil. The wood, obviously, was still being managed, still being worked as woodland
had been in the old days Whereas, elsewhere in Wales, it sometimes seemed as if
all that remained of the great oak woods were knotted arthritic copses used by
farmers merely as shelter for their sheep devoid of new growth because the
sheep ate the tiny saplings as soon as they showed.

   
No sheep in here. No people
either, except for Giles.

   
He'd heard talk of foresters in
Y Groes and assumed they were blokes who worked for the Forestry Commission in
the giant conifer plantation along the Aberystwyth road.
   
Obviously they were in charge of
maintaining this huge oak wood, selecting trees for unobtrusive felling,
planting new ones so the appearance of the place would never change
from century to century. He also knew there was a carpenter - a Mr. Vaughan—or
Fon. as it was spelled in Welsh — who made traditional oak furniture. And Aled
in the
Tafarn
had
mentioned that a new house was to be built near the river for Morgan's eldest
son and had laughed when Giles expressed the hope that it would not look out of
place. "When it is built," Glyn had said, "you will think it has
always been there."