Candlenight

Chapter II

The corpse wore a shroud and a silly smile, and its hair was sticking out like wires. The five people standing around its coffin were gloomily dressed in black or dark brown — but they too were smiling.

Bethan was not smiling. It ought to have been comical, but it seemed all the more sinister and graphically real without the benefit of perspective. With the figures ludicrously out of proportion, big heads like grinning toffee apples on black sticks, it resembled some crude medieval engraving.

She turned over the exercise book to look at the name on the cover, and she was right. Sali Dafis, it said unevenly in capitals. She turned back to the drawing. Underneath it the childish script said in Welsh, Old Mrs. Jones, Ty Canol, died on Friday. We all went in to see her. She was in her coffin. It was on the table. Nain said she knew Mrs. Jones would die soon because she saw the cannwyll gorff in the churchyard and it went all the way to Mrs. Jones's door.

On the facing page, another drawing showed a white gravestone against a sky crosshatched with dark-blue crayon. In the sky were a half-moon and several stars and something that looked like a bigger star hanging over the grave. Underneath this one was written, Here is the cannwyll gorff over the grave of Mr. Tegwyn Jones. He is sending it to fetch his wife.

'God.' Bethan said and slapped the exercise book face down on the sofa.

She'd told the children to pretend they were working for the papur bro, the community newspaper in Pontmeurig, and to write about something that had happened in their own village which they thought people ought to know about. Of the results she'd seen so far, most had been predictably innocuous. Carys Huws had written about the haymaking, and how the famers were hoping to have it finished in time to go to the Royal Welsh agricultural show. Bobi Fon had described the chairman's chair his father, the carpenter, had made for Glanmeurig District Council.

But both Cefyn Lewis and Glyn Jones had described the Gorsedd Ddu meeting in the oakwoods at dead of night to judge the traitors and the cowards — writing as if it had really happened, although both were old enough to know the difference between history and legend.

And now Sali had written again of some sinister, imaginary aspect of death.

Slowly, to calm herself, Bethan poured out a mug of tea. Yesterday she'd overheard Glyn and Cefyn telling little Nerys Roberts about the toili, as if it were a regular feature of village life. Nerys was big-eyed and pale. Bethan, furious, had sent the two boys out into the yard, from where they'd grinned slyly at her through the window.

Buddug, she thought. Buddug is behind this.

She sipped the tea; it was horribly strong and bitter. Bethan grimaced. Corpse candles, phantom funerals. The knocking, the moaning, the bird of death. It was insidious.

The tea in the pot was as dense as peat. She went into the kitchen to make some more, pulling the rubber band from her black hair, shaking her head and letting the hair fall softly, comfortingly around her shoulders. She felt very alone.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, Bethan stood by the window, wondering whether to take up smoking again, and she thought, I hate weekends.

Outside the window it was Saturday night in Pontmeurig. Only eight miles — and yet a whole world — away from the village of Y Groes. Barely four thousand people lived in this town now, but it still had seventeen pubs. Considering how much of the population was either too young, too sick or too ostensibly clean-living to go out for a drink, that left…well, it made Bethan wonder how they'd all survived, the seventeen pubs.

She took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes, smudging the remains of her make-up and not caring; she would not be going anywhere tonight.

Just before ten o'clock, Guto Evans phoned.

'What are you doing then, Bethan, at this moment?'

'Nothing illegal,' Bethan said cautiously.

'That's a shame,' Guto said. He paused, hesitated. 'Look, the night, as they say, is young. Why don't we go out and paint the town? Any colour you like, except for grey, which nobody would notice.'

Bethan pictured him with the phone tucked into his shaggy beard, like a big terrier with a bone, his stocky frame wedged into a comer of his mother's front parlour amid hundreds of plates and china ornaments.

'I don't think so,' Bethan said solemnly into the phone, her glasses slipped and with one finger she pushed them back along her nose. 'I have my reputation to protect. You could lead me into bad ways.'

'One drink, then? A chat?'

'I'm sorry, Guto, I do appreciate it. It's just… well, I've such a lot of work to catch up on.'

And she drew him away from the subject by asking if he'd heard about the unfortunate incident at that afternoon's protest demo by some of their mutual friends in the sometimes-militant Welsh Language Society. The society targeted a particular estate agent in Aberystwyth who specialised in selling country' cottages in Welsh- speaking areas to affluent English people looking for holiday homes.

'It got seriously out of hand, of course.' Bethan said, some of the boys had collected For Sale signs out of people's gardens and heaped them up outside Hughes's door. And what should someone do but pour paraffin over the pile and set them alight. If the fire brigade had not arrived in time, who knows, the whole building might have gone up.'

'Would have been no great loss. Bloody Emyr Hughes. Him and his new Mercedes. And a helicopter now, did you hear?' Guto snorted. 'Traitorous fat bastard. Grown fat on English gold.'

Bethan smiled. Guto sharpening up his rhetoric, now, because it was rumoured Burnham-Lloyd was a very sick man and there might soon be a by-election. 'So Dewi and Alun Phillips were arrested,' she said. 'They will probably be charged tomorrow. Wilful damage, I hope. Not arson.'

'Of course, I would have been there myself,' Guto said. 'But I am keeping a low political profile until such time I am called.'

'Well, there's sensible.' said Bethan, in mock-surprise. She paused, 'Um, it was nice of you to ask me out.'

'Yes,' said Guto. 'I am a nice man, this is true.'

'But I must get back to my marking.'

'Should I call again some time?'

'Yes. When I'm not so busy.'

'And when will that be? No, no, it's all right. I might be nice but I'm not daft. Goodnight, Bethan. Nos da.'

'Guto, have you ever found…?'

'What?'

She had been going to ask about the cannwyll gorff. She stopped herself. What could she say? Guto, I'm scared. There is something badly wrong in the village and I don't think I can handle it.

'Hello… Bethan…?'

But if she said any more then Guto would say it was quite clear that in her state of mind Bethan should not be spending the night alone, and so…

'Are you still there, Bethan?'

'Yes… I… It doesn't matter,' she said. 'Nos da, Guto.'

'You take care of yourself,' he said.

It would have been nice to go out for a drink. And a chat, Just a chat. She wondered: did I say no because it would not be seemly for a widow of less than a year to be seen out with Guto Evans on a Saturday night in Pontmeurig?

No, she decided. If I'd thought that I would have gone.

Saturday night was probably the reason the seventeen pubs survived.

They had come into Pontmeurig now, from all the outlying villages and the hill farms, sometimes six or seven