'Oh, Charlie,' Garth pleaded. 'Not Brydan. Not _Tales from the Undergrowth__. Known and loved all over the world as it is.'
'That in particular. Write about your own people by all means, don't be soft on them, turn them into figures of fun if you must, but don't patronize them, don't sell them short and above all don't lay them out on display like quaint objects in a souvenir shop.'
'I didn't realize you felt that strongly,' said Malcolm after a silence.
'I don't, I don't feel strongly at all. Not my field. But I do think if a chap decides to make a living out of being Welsh he'd better do it in a show on the telly. Which I think Alun realizes part of the time.'
'Oh dear.' Malcolm too seemed quite cast down. 'And you see that in the poetry, in Brydan's poetry too, do you?'
'Yes I do. What's that stuff about, er, the man in the mask and the man in the iron street. All he'd done was juggle two phrases about and had the Americans going on about childlike Welsh vision. Stark too it was, boyo. It's not serious enough, that kind of thing.'
Malcolm set about considering the justice of parts of this in his conscientious way. Soon Garth, who bad been looking anxiously from face to face, made a permission-to speak noise. Charlie nodded encouragingly at him.
'I was just going to say, what about, what about her? I have met her, of course I have, but I think only the once and long ago.'
'Well, what about her?' said Charlie. 'Just a very pleasant - '
'Rhiannon Rhys, as she was when I first met her,' said Malcolm fluently, raising himself in his seat like a panellist answering a question from the audience, 'was one of the most stunning-looking girls I've ever seen in my life. Tall, fair, graceful, beautiful complexion, grey eyes with just a hint of blue. An English rose, really. And a lovely nature - modest, unassuming. She made no attempt to be the centre of attraction, but she was, in any company. No, I haven't seen her for a long time either, and she may look a bit different now, but there are some things that don't change, not in thirty years. I'm glad she's coming back to Wales.'
Malcolm believed that he had on the whole said this in a conversational, down-to-earth way. Garth paid close attention. Charlie drained his glass for the second time, sucking fiercely to get the last couple of drops.
'Well, er,' said Garth, 'that sounds absolutely marvellous. Thank you, Malcolm. I'll look forward to renewing my acquaintance with, with Mrs Weaver.'
Before he had finished Charlie was urging Malcolm to have a real drink, assuring him that what he had before him was piss and getting up from the table. This was not as straightforward a procedure as might be thought, in view of the table itself and his chair and their respective legs, and his own bulk and state. On the way out of the room he gave a muffled cry of shock when the side of his heel bumped against the door-frame. By standing quite still for a moment and concentrating, however, he successfully avoided the hazard in the passage floor where for some years most of a tile had been missing. His shoulder grazed but did not dislodge a framed photograph on the wall showing a row of men in hats standing outside a thatched cottage in Ireland or some such place.
As he waited at the hatch for Doris to finish giving change for a couple of twenty-pound notes in the bar, Charlie thought about Malcolm's speech just now. Almost every phrase in it had been all right in itself, would have been, at least, if said in a different voice or eked out with a few oaths or perhaps seen written. It was the way the silly sod had looked and sounded so pleased with himself for having had no false shame about coming out with it that was what had called for a frantic personal exit headfirst through the closed window or, more prosaically, overturning the table in his lap. And that clear holy-man's gaze...
Doris ambled along and Charlie ordered a large pink gin, mentioning Garth's name, and three large Scotches and water. Down went one of the Scotches in its entirety while Doris was ringing up and right away the old feather duster twirled at the back of his throat and he was coughing his heart to bits, right there at maximum first go, roaring, bellowing like an imitation, in a crouch with his fists shoved into his guts, tears pawing down his face. A silence fell widely round him. When he tried to look he thought he saw somebody, several people, hobbledehoys, leaning over the bar· to peer. Doris gave him a glass of water and he sipped and breathed, then drank. With a great exhalation he straightened up and mopped his eyes, feeling now quite proud of himself, as if his well-known toughness and grit had got him through another testing external assault.
He had not yet touched the tray of drinks when the door banged at the end of the passage and a large lumpish figure creaked towards him through the gloom, recognizable after a moment as Peter Thomas, runner-up in the open tournament of the DSRC a couple of times in the 1940S but more of a golf man. Neither one nor the other these days, of course.
'Hallo, Peter. Early for you.'
'No, not really. Yes, I'll have a gin and slimline tonic.'
If Charlie Norris had ever been thought of as big and fat and red-faced, and some such description was hard to avoid, a revision of terminology might have been called for at the sight of his friend. Charlie's backside pushed the tail of his tweed jacket into two divergent halves, true, and his paunch forced the waistband of his trousers half-way down to his crotch, but Peter could have given him a couple of stone and still been the heftier, not so obviously from front or back where the cut of his suit tended to camouflage him, but to be seen in anything like profile as even thicker through than wide. And Charlie's cheeks and forehead were no more than ruddy compared with Peter's rich colouring. Their faces in general were different: Charlie's round and pug-nosed, with the look of a battered schoolboy, Peter's fine-featured, almost distinguished between the bulges and pouches. At the moment Charlie was smiling, Peter not.
'Well, how are you today?' asked Charlie. A duff question on second thoughts.
'How do you think? But as you see I can get out of the house. Who's in there?'
'Just Garth and Malcolm.'
Peter nodded and sighed, accepting it. His massive, bottom-heavy head turned sharply at a burst of laughter and jocular shouting from inside the bar. The voices sounded youthful. Frowning, he limped to the hatch and stuck his head round.
'According to Malcolm,' began Charlie, but stopped when the other turned back, speaking as he moved.
'I thought we were supposed to be in the middle of a depression. Have you looked in there? Three-quarters full, at this hour.' It was all coming out as if freshly minted. 'Most of them in their twenties or younger. Unemployed school-leavers, no doubt. Who'd be anything else these days if he had the chance, eh? What happens if we ever have a boom? They'll be falling down drunk from morning till night, presumably. Like the eighteenth century. You know, Hogarth.'
Charlie wanted to grin when Doris put the slimline on the tray next to the (large) gin. Talk about a drop in the ocean. Like an elephant going short of a banana, he thought. He also thought Peter looked distinctly fatter since he had last seen him, though admittedly this was doubtful after no more than a couple of days. Nor did he appear well. He had been breathing bard when he arrived and seemed to be sweating, though it was far from hot outdoors or in. High blood-pressure. Not good.
Still talking, he preceded Charlie down the passage. 'You should see the old bags coming out of the supermarkets with the goodies piled up on their trolleys like Christmas.' His hip thumped considerably into a table against the wall, agitating the leaves of the flowerless pot-plant that sprawled there. 'And I don't mean in the middle of town, I'm talking about wretched holes like Greenhill or Emanuel.' He opened the door of the lounge. 'And the point is you can't tell anybody. Nobody wants to know.'