Candlenight (29 page)

   
"She hires one from Dilwyn
when she needs to go somewhere."

   
"And I doubt if anything
of Guto's would fit you."
   
"This Guto," Giles said
slowly. "Guto Evans by any chance?"

   
"Shhhhh," said
Bethan. "He was not involved, all right? You did not see him."

   
Giles tried to smile. "Thank
him for me anyway. I'd have been half dead if he hadn't—hadn't been involved.
Who were those guys, anyway, d'you know?"

   
Bethan said. "'Dai—that's
Dai Williams who was with us—he thinks they work in the kitchens at the Plas
Meurig. They are not local boys. I am thankful to say."

   
Sitting on the edge of the
treatment table, looking down at his stockinged feet, Giles told Bethan how it
had come about, how the whole thing had developed from one swift
hanner peint o gwrw.

   
"I'm confused." he
said. '"I thought if one was making the effort to learn Welsh . . . That's
what you want, isn't it?"

   
Bethan gave a frustrated
half-laugh. "Most likely those boys are not Welsh speakers anyway. Some
Welsh people are very aggressively opposed to the language. It's not black
and white, you must realise that by now."

   
"I'm getting better again,
Bethan. With the language. I've done a lot of studying."

   
"Good. Listen,
Giles—"

   
"I don't know what came over
me before. Tired, I think. Headaches. But I'm much better now."

   
"Giles, can I ask you a
question?"

   
"Ask away. What have I got
to lose?"

   
"Everything," said Bethan.
That is just it. You have everything to lose. You are a successful journalist
with a— She hesitated. "—a good marriage. A good career, plenty of money,
I suppose."

   
"Well, you know, enough to
be going on with."

   
"So why do you want to be
part of this mess?" she asked bluntly.

   
"Mess?" Giles moved
along the plastic sheet lo detach his sodden trousers which were sticking to
it. "I don't think it's a mess. Politically, it's very stimulating. I
mean, in England most people just vote for whichever party they think is going
to benefit them financially. To be in a place where the main issues are
cultural and linguistic—national identity at stake . . . Hey, listen, I'll tell
you one thing—" Giles grinned like an idiot, through his pain. "I bet
I'm the first ever English guy to get his head kicked in for speaking Welsh in
public."

   
"Oh, Giles." Bethan
said. "It isn't fair, is it?"

   
How could she tell him that tonight's
fracas was probably the least of his problems?

   
Her face must have become
overcast, because he said,
   
"Look. Bethan—we should have a
proper talk sometime, you know."

   
The doctor came back before she
could fashion a reply.
   
"Mr. Freeman, we've prepared a
bathroom for you. The nurse will help you. How does your head feel'.'"
   
"OK. Just cold. Quite cold "
   
Giles dropped to the floor and winced.
   
"Do you have pain anywhere
else?"
   
"Nothing much."

   
"I think," the doctor
said, "that you should go to Bronglais tomorrow—"

   
"No! No bloody way!"

   
"—if not tonight. We
should have X-rays."

   
"For Christ's sake,"
Giles snapped. "It was only a fall. It doubtless looks much worse than it
actually is."

   
"All right," the
doctor said. "We'll talk about it tomorrow. Now come and get cleaned up.
Would you excuse us, Mrs. McQueen?"

   
"Of course " Bethan
went to the door and looked back at Giles. "I'll be back early in the
morning."

   
"You've been
wonderful." Giles said. "I think I'm in love with you, Bethan."

   
"Join the queue," the
doctor said.

   
When Bethan got back to her
flat over the bookshop, the phone was ringing. Guto. She told him how it had
come about that Giles Freeman had been assaulted in the car park.

   
"Bastards." Guto
said. "Ought to have handed that bugger over to the cops, but Dai said I
could wave goodbye to the candidacy if I was linked to another assault, even as
a witness. A minefield, it is, politics."

   
"You didn't harm that one,
did you?"

   
"Well, the odd tweak, kind
of thing. Nothing that will show. I quite enjoyed it, to be honest. Tell your
English friend that when I am MP for Glanmeurig I shall recommend we erect a
monument on the Drovers' car park to commemorate his historic stand on behalf
of the language."

   
It was an ill wind, Bethan
thought. Guto seemed to have cheered up considerably.

   
She switched on lights, plugged
in the kettle and sat down to telephone Claire, wondering what the reaction
would be.
   
Perhaps this would bring Claire down
to earth again. Giles would need some looking after.

   
In Y Groes the phone rang five
times. Then there was a bleep, a pause and Claire's recorded voice said,

   
"
Y Groes dau, tri, naw. Dyma Claire Rhys .
.

   
The message, in near-perfect
Welsh, said Claire Rhys was not available to come to the telephone but the
caller could leave a message after the tone.

   
Bethan's own answering machine
had a message in Welsh, followed by a translation. Thousands of answering machines
in Welsh-speaking areas of Wales now carried
messages in Welsh, almost invariably with a translation; nobody wanted to lose
an important caller because he or she, like the majority of Welsh people, spoke
only English.

   
Claire's message was given only
in Welsh. Bethan hung up, troubled.

   
Three times a week now, she
went to the judge's house for the Welsh lesson—with Claire alone, of late,
because Giles had been in London. One to one. The oil lamp hanging from the
beam in the judge's study surrounded by the judge's black books. Sombre yellow
light. Deep, deep shadows.

   
And Claire, face gaunt in the
oil-light, hair drawn tightly back, showing the dark roots.

   
A student so brilliant it was
unnerving.

   
She dialled the number one last
time.

   
"
Y Groes dau, tri, tune. Dyma Claire Rhys
. ..."

   
Not the kind of problem you
could explain to an answering machine. She would get up very early and go to the
judge's house.

   
Bethan put the phone down.

   
The rain and wind attacked her
window.

Chapter XXXIV

Like some spurned, embittered lover, the wind-driven rain beat on
Bethan's bedroom window all night. She got little sleep; every half-dream seemed
to feature Giles's wet and bloodied image. Its screams were frenzied but
inaudible, as if it were separated from her by thick glass—a windscreen or a
television screen.

   
Before six o'clock, Bethan was
up, making strong, black tea, peering out of the window and half expecting to
find Pontmeurig's main street under two feet of water. Ironically the rain,
having deprived her of sleep, had now stopped, there were no signs of flooding
in the street, although the river must surely be dangerously high.

   
It looked cold too. Bethan put
on her white raincoat, with long red scarf and a pink woolly hat which she
pulled down over her ears as she stepped out into the street.

   
By six-thirty she was collecting
the Peugeot from the car park under the castle's broken tower. She looked down,
with some trepidation, into the ditch below the outer ramparts, as she might
see a rigid, clawing hand emerging from the watery mud in which its owner had
drowned. On the eve of the selection meeting, it would be just Guto's luck.

   
Before leaving she had
telephoned the hospital, where the sister in charge reported that Giles had had
quite a painful and restless night.

   
But yet, she thought, unlocking
the car door, if Giles were writing a report of last night's incident he would
deal seriously and sympathetically with the dilemma of the non-Welsh-speaking
Welshman.

   
That English sense of fair
play.

   
The town was quiet, cowed—as
though people were deliberately lying low, apprehensive about getting up to
find their gardens underwater or their chimney pots in pieces on the lawn.
Driving over the Meurig Bridge in the steely-grey dawn, Bethan saw that it had
indeed been a close thing. Trees sprouted from the water, where the river had
claimed its first meadow.

   
Allowing for weather problems,
storm debris on the road, it would take about twenty minutes to get to Y Groes.
Bethan knew Claire rose early and guessed she might waiting for the light to
see what pictures she could obtain storm damage. If she was still actually
taking pictures. She'll probably want to come back with me to the hospital,
Bethan thought. Another lost opportunity to talk to Giles.
   
Part of Bethan said it was not her
problem, she should keep out. Another part said Giles was a decent man who needed
saving from himself. Too many English people had given up their jobs and come
to Wales with new-life dream, many of them to start smallholdings on
poor-quality land from which they imagined they could he self-sufficient. She saw
a parallel here with Giles, who seemed about abandon a highly paid post to
spend his life ploughing the infertile place for news, in the naive belief that
the public over the border cared as much about Wales as he did.

   
In Bethan's experience, the
only immigrants who really could be said to have fitted in were those who came
to take up existing, steady jobs. Like Robin, her husband, who had worked with
the British Geological Survey team near Aberystwyth.
   
Bethan's eyes filled up.

   
Stop it! Her hands tightened on
the wheel. The Nearly Mountains rose up before her, tented by cloud.

Bethan had experimented with a number of different methods of tackling
these sudden rushes of grief. Anger, the least satisfactory, had usually proved,
all the same, to be the most effective.
   
So she thought about Buddug.

   
Yesterday Huw Morus, aged
seven, had wet himself in class. Bethan had led him into the teachers' toilet
and washroom to get cleaned up.

   
Huw had been very distressed.
Bethan had taken him back into her office, sat him on a chair by the electric
fire and asked him if he was feeling unwell. Huw had started crying and said he
wanted to go. Again.

   
Bethan had sent him back to the
teachers' toilet and then said, "OK, we'll take you home."

   
"I am sure he'll be happy
now," Buddug commented. "Now he's got what he wanted."

   
"It seems likely to me that
he has some kind of bladder infection." Bethan said.

   
Buddug had sniffed
dismissively. "Lazy. He is lazy."

   
Huw lived in the village where
his father was a mechanic, the sole employee at Dilwyn Dafis's garage.

   
"Did you ask Mrs. Morgan if
you could go to the toilet?" Bethan asked, as the boy trotted beside her
past the
Tafarn
and the post office
to a timber-framed terrace of cottages at the end of the street.

   
It emerged that Huw had asked
Mrs. Morgan at about half past nine by the classroom clock and she had allowed
him to go. Then he'd asked her again at about a quarter past ten and she'd told
him he could wait until break. He'd barely made it in time.

   
At about twenty minutes past
eleven Huw had again raised his hand and sought permission to go to the
lavatory and Mrs. Morgan had shaken her head and told him he must not try it on
with her again.

   
Ten minutes later Huw, by now
frozen to the chair with his legs lightly crossed, had appealed again to the
teacher. This time Mrs. Morgan had walked over and bent down and
whispered in his ear.

   
Bethan questioned the
seven-year-old boy in some detail, because she wanted to be sure about this.