Candlenight

of them in a single Land-Rover. Farmers, farmers' sons, farmers' grandsons. Even a few women, these days. Some of the men would get quietly and expertly drunk. A handful would make a macho celebration out of it, and there would perhaps be a fight, a smashed window, a beer glass flung in the street, splintering against the kerb or somebody's head.

A yellow haze of smoke and steam, beer fumes and chip fat settled on the street below the lighted window of the apartment over Hampton's bookshop. In the window, Bethan was a still silhouette.

She drew the thin curtains, turned back to the sadly over-crowded sitting room, drank tea and glared at the dark green cover of the book lying on the sofa. Sali Dafis. Aged seven.

A bright child. Confident too — winner of the recitation prize for her age-group at this year's Urdd Eisteddfod, where three other children from the school had also won prizes. Which was incredible for a little village school with twenty-four pupils. One of the judges had commented this was clearly a school where children were encouraged to be imaginative. He could say that again. Bethan thought. She remembered Buddug, huge and beaming, in audience. Buddug, quite rightly, taking all the credit because Bethan had been away looking after a sick husband,

Then mourning for a dead husband.

She was back now. She didn't have to return, she'd terminated her lease on the cottage. She could have gone anywhere, stayed in the city, where there was no silence and no sense of a gathering darkness.

Parting the curtains, Bethan looked down into the street, watched four youths standing outside the Drovers' Arms nursing beer glasses, admiring a motor bike. She thought, I should have gone. Maybe it was my last chance. I've been too long with death.

Irritated and restless now, she snatched the green exercise book from the sofa. Sali Dafis was the daughter of the man who ran the garage. Her mother had died when Sali was a baby; the child had been raised by her grandmother, Mrs. Bronwen Dafis. a withered crone who dispensed heart remedies and told fortunes.

And who, Bethan thought, frowning, was also a friend of Buddug's.

She got out her red pen, intending not to mark Sali's exercise but to write, 'See me after school' at the bottom it, because the child needed help. She had a vague memory of Sali's mother, a little blonde-haired secretary from Essex whom Dilwyn had met on holiday.

As she started to write 'gwel . at the bottom of the second drawing, Bethan's red ballpoint pen ran out. Without thinking, she bustled into the bedroom to pinch a pen from the inside pocket of Robin's jacket in the wardrobe. Stood there with the wardrobe door half-open, a hand inside feeling from coat to coat. Her coats. Realising then that Robin's jacket had never been in this bedroom, had gone long ago to the Oxfam shop, probably with the pens still in the pocket.

I'm not going to cry, she told herself. I'm going to laugh. But she couldn't make her lips go through the motions.

She heard a scornful, trailing cheer from the street outside, as she went back into the living room, edging around cumbersome furniture she didn't need any more..

A male voice hooted and a girl screamed in excitement as Bethan sat down at the table to continue her note to Sali in pencil.

'Geraint, don't…!' the girl squealed in the street and Bethan knew that whatever it was Geraint was doing the girl really didn't mind. It was about romance.

Bethan looked up from the table. By the wan light of the Victorian brass standard lamp, their first Christmas present from Robin's mother in Durham, she saw a little attic flat over somebody else's failed bookshop in a town which had been falling apart for five centuries.

Single person's accommodation, Bethan thought.

She broke down then, a hot rush of despair, over the horror-comic drawings of Sali Dafis, aged seven.

For three nights before Robin died, the village women said, the cannwyll gorff had been seen. First in the churchyard, then over the river.

Finally, hanging solemnly in the still air outside their cottage.

When Bethan raised her head from the table she saw that the pages of the exercise book were crumpled and tear-stained, I spilled tea on your book, she would tell Sali on Monday, I shall have to give you a new one. I'm sorry. All your nice drawings.

Feeling suddenly light-headed, she almost rang Guto back to say yes, she would go out with him and they would get very, very drunk.

She didn't, though. It was not the time.

Chapter III

Above him the whitewashed ceiling gleamed faintly between beams as thick as railway sleepers. The heavy bed of Victorian mahogany was creaking below like the timbers a sailing ship.

Sinking.

Head rolling back on the pillow, he closed his eyes.

… And his mind was alive with images, burgling his brain like fragments of a dream getting through from other side of sleep, as if they couldn't wait. Black tower in a purple sky, perpendicular tower, wooden bell-stage, in tiers…

Always ends in tiers, he thought ludicrously. Opening his eyes again, he tried to calm his thoughts, remembering pushing at the door of the inn to escape from the cloying dark. Then the yellow light, beer haze, oak beams, the ceaseless banter — the overwhelming relief of it, of being back amongst these tiresome people with their impenetrable language. Still not closing time when he'd returned. How had he made it back so quickly?

Pounding pain in his chest now. He reached to the bedside cabinet for a Trinitrin. Slipped it under his tongue.

How had he got back? He remembered the stink of decay all around him in the churchyard. Remembered trying to find the steps in the mist. Then nothing until the door and the yellow light. Inside, they had seemed almost pleased to see him.

'All right then, Professor?'

'Well hell, man, you look cold…'

'Course he's cold, Morgan. Bloody church — sorry, Reverend — always cold, that church. No heating, see. Get him a drink, for God's sake, Aled.'

'Oh, I'm so sorry. Doctor Ingley. Should have replaced these batteries weeks ago, but you know how it is. Look, my fault, have a drink. What is it to be now, nice drop of brandy? Best Welsh brandy, mind…'

'Thank you, no. I think I'll go directly to bed.'

'Big mistake, Professor. First time this year Aled's offered anybody a free tot of his precious bloody brandy. Never see it again.'

'Leave him be, Morgan. Poor man's knackered.'

'Oh aye, leave him be, now, is it Aled? Any excuse, you bugger.'

'I'm sorry, I… good night.'

'Night, Professor.'

'Nos da i chi!'

Still the pain.

Another Trinitrin. Worked in seconds, they always worked in seconds. He lay there in the bed, not moving, the pill under his tongue. It was a small room; just beyond the bed was a lumbering Victorian wardrobe, to its right the uncurtained window hanging open for air, bringing in the sounds of glasses jingling as they were collected in the bar below, laughter, oaths, a nos da or two.

He was uncomfortable and tried to roll over. But when he moved the pain ripped through his chest like the roots of a tree being torn out of the ground, Christ.

Breathe. Come on, breathe steadily.

His eyes closed by themselves.

Creaking of the bed. Wooden bed. Wooden bellstage, moulded doorway eighteenth-century, heptagonal font, perpendicular tower… black on purple… falling…