Candlenight

'How long were you there, before—?'

Her eyelids dropped. 'Under a year.'

'Listen, you don't have to—'

'There is very little to say. He complained increasingly of feeling tired. Put it down to the travelling and the stress. The stress, he— The survey team were being told to investigate Mid-Wales to find areas where the rocks were suitable for burying nuclear waste. Robin, of course, was fiercely anti-nuclear. He considered resigning. But then we would have been forced to leave the area — nothing else round here for a geologist. Then, worst of all, he found two prime nuclear-dumping sites in the Nearly Mountains, five miles from Y Groes. can you imagine that?'

'Awkward.'

'So be was tired and under terrible stress and he flew into a rage if I suggested he should see a doctor. And then—'

The kettle puffed and shrilled. Bethan got up. Berry followed her into the tiny kitchen.

'And then he did see a doctor,' she said dully. 'And of course it was too late.' She poured boiling water into a brown teapot. 'Far too late.'

Bethan pushed the fingers of both hands through her black hair. 'We had not quite two weeks,' she said.

'Jesus,' Berry said softly.

'My neighbour at the lime. Mrs. Bronwen Dafis, told me one day — being helpful, very nice, very understanding — that Robin would be dead before the weekend.'

'She was medically qualified, huh?'

'It emerged that she had followed a corpse candle from the church to our door.'

'Followed a what?'

'In rural Wales.' Bethan said. 'There are many signs and portents signifying death. The corpse candle is said to be a tiny light which floats a few feet above the ground. Identifying the house of a person who will soon die. Or perhaps someone will see his own corpse candle, trailing behind him along the lane.'

'People believe that?'

'That is the very least of what some people believe. There is something, also unique to Wales. I imagine, called the teuli or toili. The phantom funeral. A funeral procession may be seen carrying a coffin or pushing the coffin on a bier or a cart. Perhaps you are in some lonely place at night or twilight, and the cortege passes right through you.'

'Legends. Folklore. Country bullshit, right?'

'Of course.' Bethan poured two teas. 'Strong enough?'

'Fine. These stories… must scare the crap out of kids.'

'Except,' Bethan said, 'in Y Groes.'

'Why'd I have a feeling you were gonna say that?'

They carried the mugs back into the living room. Bethan put on the electric fire. They sat, one on each arm of the peacock sofa.

'All this furniture from the cottage?'

Bethan nodded and told him how, heartbroken, she'd at first put the furniture in store and taken a job, any job, in Swansea — in spite of the entreaties of her neighbours, several of whom had seriously urged her not to leave.

'Obviously, they wanted me to stay because I was a Welsh speaker and they needed younger blood. The young people leave this area in their hundreds, to find work. And because, well, that is what young people do, they leave their roots behind. So you have many villages which are full of old people. And immigrants.'

'Ah.'

'But not Y Groes. It is perhaps the only village in Wales where everyone is Welsh. And Welsh speaking.'

'Everyone? What about the Welsh people who bring their wives and husbands who happen not to be Welsh —?'

It hit him.

'Aw, hey, come on…'

Bethan shrugged.

Half asleep. Elinor thought at first, as anyone would, that it must be the wind.

And then she heard the unmistakable heat of wings.

The bed shifted as she sat up.

'What was that? What was it?'

George grunted.

'Did you hear it? George, did you hear it?'

A clear, cold night outside. A quarter moon in the top-left square of the deep-set window.

Elinor shivered in her cotton nightdress.

'I was asleep.' George complained. 'For God's sake. I was asleep'

'It's stopped,' Elinor said. 'It was a bird, I think.'

'Owl, probably.'

'Owls don't peck at windows.'

'I wouldn't know. I'm not an ornithologist' George wrenched at the blankets, turned over.

'Stopped now.' Elinor spoke faintly and sank back on the pillow.

'Go to sleep.' George mumbled. 'We'll be away from here tomorrow, God willing.'

Eyes wide open, she wondered how much influence God might exert in a place like this. She was no more a theologian than George was an ornithologist. But she was a woman and he was a depressingly unresponsive man. There were things that he would never begin to understand.

She lay on her back looking up at the beamed ceiling, only white bars visible, found by the sparse moonlight.

'George,' she said after a while, unmoving in the bed.

'What?'

And came out with it at last. 'I think she's pregnant.'

George turned over towards her. 'What on earth makes you say that?'

'Oh, you probably wouldn't understand, but I can feel it about her somehow — the way she moves, her colouring, her skin tone. Not much more than a month perhaps, but it's there.'

'Oh dear. That would be difficult, especially in a place like this. How would she support a child? She's a freelance. No maternity leave for a freelance.'

'I'm probably wrong,' Elinor said, sorry now that she'd blurted out what was on her mind. She'd always had cause to regret confiding her deeper feelings to bluff, shallow, well-meaning George.

'Hope you are,' George said. 'Although I'd quite like to be a grandad one day. Completes the picture.'

Within minutes he was snoring. Always make the best of things, that was George. Elinor turned on to her side and after a while began to drift unhappily towards the blurred frontier of sleep.

Was pulled back by that hideous noise again.

The measured, sharp laps on the windowpane, The convulsion of wings.

Rolling over in her lonely terror, she saw the shadow of the nightbird against the moon-tinted glass.

In a flat, cold silence, as if the sound of the world had been switched off, it brandished its dark wings at her, a spasm of black foreboding.

And vanished.

She turned to face the wall. And did not sleep again, nor look at the window, until morning came in a sickly pink mist.

Chapter XLVIII

Berry came down lo breakfast and heard voices from the sitting room next door.