‘That does it!’ Jane swung her legs off the bed. She was wearing her jeans and her lemon-yellow top. She moved across the bare boards to the door.
Eirion was looking anxious. ‘Look, don’t,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t you just let it go?’
Jane stopped at the door and thought for a moment, then smiled. She crept back and lay on the bed. Eirion was sitting on the side of the bed by now, shoving his bare feet into his trainers.
‘Sioned?’ Jane called out in this foggy, slurry voice.
‘Jane!’
‘Look, would you mind giving us a few more minutes. We’re having sex, OK? Ni’n, er, yn shaggio.’
A wonderfully awed silence.
Eirion kind of crumpled.
‘Again!’ Jane breathed loudly. ‘Harder! Deeper! Oh God…!’
From hell? Oh yeah.
See, most of the ordinary Welsh people she’d met, Jane liked. This might seem like generalized and simplistic, but they seemed kind of classless, no side to them. Contrary to what everybody said, you could have a laugh with them. Look at Gomer Parry.
Look at Eirion, for that matter: chunky, honest, self-deprecating… and this incredible smile that was (as she’d written in a poem she was never going to show him in a million years) like all the birds starting to sing at once on a soft spring morning.
The poor sod. Raised among the crachach.
This was what they were called – the Welsh aristocracy, the top families. A few of them had titles, but most of them were contemptuous of English honours, although – being sharp business people – they were usually incredibly polite to the English people they encountered.
Eirion said his dad, Dafydd Sion Lewis, was some kind of Welsh quango king. He ‘served’ on the Welsh Development Agency, the Welsh Arts Council, the Wales Tourist Board, the Broadcasting Council for Wales. And he was a major executive shareholder in whatever Welsh Water and Welsh Electricity were calling themselves this week. There was a bunch of them like his dad, Eirion said. The names of the organizations and businesses might change but it was always the same people in control.
Dafydd Sion Lewis was plump and beaming and hearty and, according to Eirion in his darker moments, majorly corrupt.
Gwennan was his second wife, about fifteen years younger. She was a former secondary-school teacher of the Welsh language and now – as a result of being married to the quango king – a key member of the Welsh Language Board, which existed to keep the native tongue alive and thriving.
Not that Jane had a problem with this. She was all for having more languages around: Gaelic, Cornish… anything to keep people different from each other, to create a sense of otherness.
At first, she’d thought that Gwennan, with her two cars and her movie-star wardrobe, was a fairly cool person.
It had taken only one day of the holiday for her to realize what Eirion had already kind of implied: that everything had gone to Gwennan’s head – the wealth, the status, the establishment of the Welsh Assembly. She was now a warrior queen of the New Wales, wielding the language like a spear.
‘Except it isn’t a new Wales at all,’ Eirion had said morosely. ‘It’s the same old place, run by the same old iffy councillors, except they’re now known as Assembly Members, supported by the same old bent financiers, but with this new sense of superiority. Suddenly, they’re looking down on everybody…’
‘Especially the English?’ Jane had suggested.
‘Especially the English because the English don’t have Wales’s unique identity.’
Actually, Eirion said, most of the time he found Gwennan quite amusing. She was essentially superficial and quite naive. And she could be very kind sometimes. When she noticed you.
Unfortunately, Gwennan had come with baggage: Sioned and Lowri, eleven and eight, the little princesses. Bilingual through and through. Pocket evangelists for the language and the culture.
‘No, Jane,’ Sioned would say, wagging her little forefinger until Jane wanted to snap it off. ‘I’ve told you and told you, I’m not doing it unless you ask me yn Cymreig.’
‘You know what I’m really doing here, don’t you?’ Jane said to Eirion when Sioned had gone, presumably to wait for her mother and Dafydd to return to receive the shocking facts. (Was there such a verb as shaggio? They seemed to have converted every other English term coined since about 1750.) ‘You know what I am?’
‘If she says anything, we’ll just simply tell her you were joking,’ Eirion said uncomfortably. ‘Kind of a risqué joke to make to an eleven-year-old, mind, but…’
‘I’m the first English au pair in Wales, that’s what I am. Do you realize that?’
Behind the door in the farmhouse kitchen Gwennan had hung an appointments calendar. Every day this week displayed a lunch date for her and Dafydd. Every evening they went out for dinner in St David’s or Haverfordwest, because several of their friends also had cottages in the area. Because the Pembrokeshire coast was becoming like some kind of Welsh Tuscany.
And who had to look after the bloody kids, meanwhile?
‘It’s exactly like being an au pair,’ Jane said with acidic triumph, ‘because I work my butt off for the privilege of learning the fucking language!’
She began to beat the pillow with her fists.
‘I’m sorry!’ Eirion almost sobbed. ‘I genuinely didn’t realize she’d be quite so…’
‘Opportunistic?’
Eirion was too honest to reply.
It was a big old farmhouse. The first floor had been divided into two sections. There was a separate staircase to Dafydd and Gwennan’s suite; the other staircase led to three small bedrooms: Sioned, Lowri… and Jane in the middle. Most nights the kids fell asleep with their respective boom-boxes still pumping Welsh-language rock through the plasterboard walls either side of Jane’s bed.
Come to think of it, Gwennan and Dafydd were unlikely to be at all put out by the thought of the young master giving one to the English au pair.
Not that he had, yet. The daily and nightly presence of the evil little stepsisters seemed to be intimidating him more than whoever had been his school’s version of Charles Manson.
Stepfamilies: a nightmare.
She’d made the kids’ supper. She’d made them tidy their rooms. She’d made them go to bed at ten p.m. She’d made them go back to bed at ten-fifteen. And in the course of this endlessly crappy evening, she’d been grilled by Mum over the phone and made to feel like shit. At eleven-thirty, probably looking like some totally knackered housewife, she’d followed Eirion up to his attic bedroom and collapsed, fully clothed, onto his bed and poured it all out.
‘Let’s go over it again,’ Eirion said. ‘This Layla and this…’
‘Kirsty.’ Jane moved closer to him, which wasn’t difficult on a single bed.
‘… Find that by staging little seances, or whatever you want to call them, they can wield enormous power over certain kids.’
‘It’s addictive, I reckon. You keep going back, even though you’re terrified. I mean, I’m not terrified – OK, maybe a little scared – but I’m, like, somebody who’s attracted to all this stuff anyway. As you know.’
‘Yeah,’ Eirion said grimly.
‘But this is a buttoned-up kid from some fiercely Christian household, who’s been taught that spiritualism is, like, firmly in the devil’s domain, and her immortal soul is at risk – and she still keeps going back because something about it has… grabbed her.’ Jane gripped what she thought was going to be Eirion’s arm but turned out to be his thigh. ‘Sorry.’