‘Prokofiev,’ said Johnny, a fraction of a second before she did, ‘yes.’
Ivan looked up from the map and said, ‘Now, when we’ve crossed the Severn Bridge, we keep straight on till the motorway turns into the A48.’
‘Just tell me when to go right or left,’ said Johnny, and twiddled the volume right down so that the talk and then the music that followed could be barely made out amid the roar of the road and the thunder and whine of the overtaking traffic.
‘Ah, there it is . . .’ – over a crest in the road, the two towers, the low arc of the roadway, at an angle and foreshortened, the two white arcs descending to kiss it, a haze of rain on the river and the Welsh shore. ‘Isn’t it beautiful.’ He felt Ivan took some pride in it: he looked up from the map, but said nothing. As they approached, it was as if a sketch resolved into a monument, sublime in its abstract absence of scale; then they came closer still and it rose and settled into place and detail. A minute later there was the swerve of freedom, half a dozen lanes, before the dark traps of the tollbooths. ‘Have you got 30p?’
Ivan groped in a pocket. ‘I’m not sure I have.’
‘Look in the glovebox, Auntie Kitty usually has some change in there.’ He slowed, joined a queue, wound his window right down. There was something to Johnny’s eye quite new as they came in under the canopy, a flash of light against shadow as if a photo had been taken, when the woman in her cabin looked down into the car and saw them together, Ivan beyond him, peering across as he offered the coins with an up-stretched arm. They were a couple, travelling. And then, doubted still for the second or two before it happened, the barrier flicked upwards and rocked where it stopped in the air, in a passing salute.
When they were on the bridge there was no stopping, and the two rows of fences screened off the view of the river, the high-loaded ship that was sliding beneath. The rhythmical pulse of the air through the open window smelt of the sea. After the great bridge was the smaller unheralded bridge, over the Wye – and ten seconds later they were back on land. ‘Welcome to Wales,’ said Ivan.
‘Thank you,’ said Johnny, and laid his left hand on Ivan’s knee.
Ivan shifted. ‘Do you want one of your auntie’s sweets?’
‘Yes, please.’ Ivan eased off the lid of the tin, in which chipped and sugared tablets, orange, yellow and lime-green, had fused long ago in a crystallized lump. ‘Can I have orange?’
‘You’ll have what you’re given,’ said Ivan, prising off a fragment, and when Johnny kept his hands on the wheel, pushing the sharp sticky lump into his mouth, which Johnny pretended to resist, and licked Ivan’s finger as well as the sweet. ‘You’ve got sugar on your chin,’ said Ivan; but this Johnny had to wipe off himself.
Twenty miles later the motorway ended, and they were on their own, and within half an hour on hilly roads almost deserted. Now the bluster of the wind in the car had a local softness and smell, freshened to a nice chill when they went fast, then slowing into warmth at a crossroads or a steep bend. They passed through villages and small towns with their chapels and shut houses and not much to look at. Sometimes a farm in the middle distance, in its shelter of old oaks, caught Johnny’s eye. ‘I can’t wait to see West Tarr,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Ivan, ‘I hope you like it.’
Johnny said, ‘As a Peter Orban fan . . .’ and smiled at him, picturing the house from a small grey photograph, a thin glass-fronted box on a bushy slope; if nothing happened between them he would have to make the most of the building. He was nervously optimistic – the weekend was Ivan’s idea, he was purposeful but mysterious. And at least in a Welsh valley, miles from anywhere, he probably wasn’t going to slip off with someone else, as it now seemed clear he had done from the Solly.
Ivan was the host, with a necessary belief in the treat he was offering, and with something new in his tone, once the name of the nearest town appeared on the signposts: a furtive evasion of responsibility. ‘Of course I don’t know what it’s like now, Jonathan. As I told you, no one’s been there for two years, at least.’
‘But someone keeps an eye on it.’
‘Sort of. It’s very hidden away.’
‘Mm, I like the sound of that,’ Johnny warming the talk when he could.
Ivan said, ‘Of course you like modern things.’
‘Don’t you?’ said Johnny.
They couldn’t see the sea but there was a sense of it in the sky above the long bare hill, a freshness, a deflected lustre. The lane turned back from it, dropped slowly then steeply into the sheltered valley, there were a dozen grey cottages, a chapel, tiny, tin-roofed, and then the messy gateway to a farm, ruts strewn with hay. The broad fields above had just been mown. ‘It’s after the farm,’ said Ivan, ‘if I remember correctly.’ They passed an overgrown gate. ‘I think that’s it.’
Johnny backed up, pulled in and let him get out – watched him walk down the short incline in front of the car, small, neat, urban against the unpeopled landscape. It was a light five-barred field gate, aluminium, tall nettles round the posts. Along the verge, and on the far side of the low broken wall, cow parsley held up its tilting crowns. Ivan was fiddling with the padlock. He was a puzzle, a stranger, grey flannels, Viyella shirt, no tie at least today, but a jacket on the back seat with everything checked in the pockets before they left: wallet, address book, fountain pen. At the petrol station near Chippenham, the pub where they’d had lunch, he had seemed embarrassed by Johnny’s threadbare jeans, and the way people looked at his hair. Now he turned, and beamed, lifted and thrust the gate wide, and Johnny smiled back and let his foot off the brake.
The way down to the house had a high bank on the left, and a view through a hedge across the valley on the right. Clearly it was used, once in a while, by farm machinery, a tractor and trailer – the tyre-gouged ruts held long shallow puddles. Johnny was anxious about his aunt’s Renault; anxious too that it should do the job. He smirked guiltily as they dropped and jolted, brambles tearing vainly at the doors, wild flowers thrusting their heads through the open window and then rearing back. The Calor gas canister thumped in the boot. Round a bend the track swung to the right into a field, ignoring the second gate, straight in front of them; beyond which Johnny saw no more than a pale horizontal, a gleam of glass among leaves, and felt, as he had all his life, the pull of any unknown building, and the odd but essential twist of fear in his need to look at it.
The door was at the side, the narrow end of the box. Johnny stood with the bags, shifting between concern about the blocked gutter and strip of white trim hanging off and a guest’s pretence of being happy with everything. Ivan had a further key, a tatty label attached to the key ring, ‘West Tarr’, in rusted ink, a glimpse, as he pushed it into the lock, of the habits of the Goyles, who had come here thirty-five years ago. ‘Are there any paintings by Stanley here?’ said Johnny.