ten years. So far, except for the signs, it looked more or less unchanged, and of course the outlook was just the same, the view of an expanse of hillside with those unmistakable terraces of small houses, some running along from left to right, some up and down, among patchy grassland with stretches and bits of cliff of bare rock, few trees and no bright colours anywhere. She had always thought it was incredibly typical, South Wales at one go, though not the kind of thing you put on a picture postcard, and looking at it now under thin rain she felt she had remembered it exactly as it was.
What they called the station concourse, the hall, was more or less unrecognizable: coffee-shop, travel bureau, passport-photograph booth and electronic-looking screen of arrivals and departures. Let into the wall below this she noticed a commemorative plaque, perhaps the one Alun had been so fed up at not being asked to unveil the previous year. After ac nose round she went into the coffee-shop, where everything that was not colouring-book red, blue or yellow was black. There was a very poor selection of things to eat and drink and only one girl serving, who seemed to be waiting for something or somebody that was not Rhiannon and who, like that interviewer, never looked at you. When she had given up hope of whatever it was she wordlessly produced and handed over a cup of tea.
The tables and chairs each stood on a single immovable stump to prevent them being picked up and thrown about. In Rhiannon's experience Welshmen had never gone in for that type of behaviour, but probably that had changed too. The tea turned out to be as nasty as that served in the old torn-down refreshment room, but in a different way; hot, though. As she sipped it she wondered what Alun had been seriously expecting, what a radio man was a let-down from. The mayor, the MP, the chairman of the Welsh Arts Council, a crowd of fans with autograph-books? Well? A TV team? He did a lot of TV and knew much more about it than she did, but...
Rhiannon had never settled in her own mind at any stage how important or well known Alun thought he was, or even really was except very roughly, but at times like this it crossed her mind that he might be making too much of that Part of himself. That might go with being his kind of writer. And that was a bit of a puzzle too, how he was always saying he wanted to be regarded as a writer first of all and then always going on television and being interviewed.
He came in sight now, striding towards the glass door, stopping all at once as somebody recognized him, shaking hands, grinning, nodding enthusiastically and writing something - not in an autograph-book but never mind. That was a bit of luck. But when he reached her he had his discontented expression on, with frown and nose- twitches.
'That chap was a prick,' he said, staring at her. 'A _prick__. Do you know what he asked me? Whether I found my books still sold reasonably well. Can you beat it? And when I said Yes as crappily as I could - what else could I do? Well, then he said he meant in England as well as in Wales. I mean Christ, you'd think they'd have told him.' He stared at her a moment longer before letting his shoulders collapse and laughing through his nose, and she joined in. 'Let's get out of this place. Sorry, finish your tea. Are you sure?'
They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said _TaxilTacsi__ for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before. It was starting to get dark and the lights were coming on, reflected in the wet pavements. Some of what she saw was no different or not much, but other things that she remembered well enough, from the old Mount joy Arms Hotel with the green-and-tan frieze of classical figures to that mock-rustic shop where you could get very good doughnuts, had vanished so thoroughly that it was impossible to say whereabouts they had stood. But the town was still the place where some of the special parts of her life had come and gone.
When thirty seconds had passed with still no taxi Alun started making tutting noises. 'I do think Malcolm might have met us,' he said. 'Lazy bugger.'
'I was there when you told him not to because the train might be late. Which it was, wasn't it?'
'Oh, were you and did I? Perhaps that's why he's not here. Let's say partly, anyway.'
After another minute, which was quite as long as any such minute with Alun about, a taxi arrived, in fact a London-model taxi, rare in this part of the world. Something about this displeased him. As they moved off he settled himself insistently on the jump-seat behind the driver and tried to talk to him through the open glass panel with a lot of shouting and calls for repetition. It was possible to guess that he had been expecting an ordinary saloon with a passenger-seat up front. Eventually he abandoned the struggle and came and sat beside Rhiannon.
'You can't have a proper conversation under those conditions,' he said.
'Of course you can't. What did you want one for?'
'Well, you know, I always like talking to drivers and people when I'm here. Very Welsh thing. It's a completely different relationship to what you get in England. Difficult to explain.'
'You needn't to me. I am Welsh too as it happens. Boyo.'
'Piss off,' he said, squeezing her hand.
2
Rhiannon and Gwen settled down in the kitchen after Alun and Malcolm had gone along to the Bible for a couple of beers before supper. The two women had been close friends at the university, members of a trio whose third party was Dorothy Morgan. Gwen had put a strong case for leaving Dorothy out of the evening's doings altogether, but Rhiannon had overruled her, mostly on the grounds that after all it was her inaugural, so to speak. Accordingly a false time of arrival had been circulated and the coast was 'reckoned to be clear for a good hour yet.
In Rhiannon's as well as Malcolm's eyes it was not an attractive kitchen, long and narrow with barely room for six people to sit down. At the moment you would have had trouble finding a vacant flat surface big enough to make a pot of tea on, the sink was full of pans not left to soak, just dumped there, and two or three of Malcolm's shirts hung from a cup-hook on the dresser. It took her back to Gwen's room in Brook Hall, the women's hostel - spick and span every Monday morning and in a frightening piggy mess by tea-time, all sandals, jam and lecture- notes, with plenty of sand underfoot in the summer term. There was always something that needed doing first, she used to say. Rather different now, you might have thought, but then it never worked like that.
With a small start Rhiannon noticed that the bottle of white wine on the table in front of her was not the same as the one they had started on quite a short time earlier. This had a green instead of a blue-and-white label and was also about half empty already. The excitement of getting here and of a sudden feeling, dim and out of nowhere but still real, that things had not stopped happening to her after all, that there were unknown possibilities lined up, had carried her away. Had she drunk two glasses? Three? Well, more than was sensible in the time. It would not do to start following in Dorothy's footsteps, if they were at all as Gwen had described a little while back and was now going on about again.
'Absolute hell. Sophie had to tell her there was no more wine and Charlie put on an act of trying to persuade her to have whisky. Of course if she had... '
If anyone was following in Dorothy's footsteps, thought Rhianno~ to herself, it might be Gwen. A bottle's-worth of wine had gone down that throat since the start of the session and there was no one around to say how much had before that. The mini-story about Dorothy and the whisky had been touched on already that evening.
