A shitty irony hovered when the car refused to start at once, but then it did. He turned it round, something to get done on arrival in future, and slid off down the hill. Clear. Six minutes, eh? Like the old days. Sophie soon slipped from his mind, but as always at. this stage he felt utterly free, not triumphant, just never freer, never so free as now. Softly, shaping the notes, he broke into a pleasing light tenor: 'Was it young Denise who spread disease through all the men in the room?
Oh no, it wasn't young Denise, it was Mrs Rosenbloom... '
He took the road above Beaufoy which brought the sea into sight at a distance and, across the bay, the umber and dark-green stretch of Courcey, with vague industrial shapes half misted over in the background. For the moment the sun was out, strong enough to turn the water into something a bit more rewarding than grey-brown. Flat-fronted terraced houses reached by steep flights of steps gave place to semi-detached brick villas put - up between the wars, a cluster of 1950s two-storey pre-fabs and then, further along and from further back, the spaced-out stone-built residences of the coal-owners and ironmasters of prosperous times.
Hereabouts Alun eased up on the accelerator and caused his face to take on expressions of boredom, dissatisfaction, even disappointment, getting it ready for a going-over by his daughter Rosemary. There was a definite element of the creepy about the way that girl could get the wrong idea about her father's less significant activities and interests. Up to something was what he could reckon on being charged with having been, not a moment ago either, if at encounters like this he showed any more positive feeling than a fairly plucky resignation. The girl was even worse in this respect than her elder sister, now safely married, or rather safely out of the way most of the time on that account. He could not have explained why these challenges of theirs made him so uncomfortable.
In the drawing-room mother and daughter had staked out a little feminine enclave on the fireside rug and a low coffee-table beside it with coffee-cups, biscuit-tin, box of chocolates, box of tissues, handbags, manicure kit, wastepaper basket, local map and dozens of estate-agents' brochures and lists. If he could get through the first minute in one piece, Alun knew he was probably going to be all right. He crossed in safety the twenty feet of minefield from the doorway and embraced his daughter. As always it was a warm embrace.
'Good lunch?' asked Rhiannon when he had kissed her. 'Not really. Quite bearable. We'll go there some time.'
'You saw Charlie? Like some coffee?'
'No thanks. Yes, he was there. And Peter.'
'Oh, was he really?' said Rhiannon, with pleasure and interest in her voice. 'How was he looking?'
'Not very well I thought. He's put on a lot of weight. But he's, you know, recognizable.'
'Oh. Well, he never was much of a bean-pole, was he?'
Rosemary, a darker and more robust-looking version of Rhiannon, had stood waiting for this part to end. She had been told years previously that before meeting her father in the long-ago her mother had had some sort of attachment to a university lecturer called Peter Thomas. What more she might have heard or guessed was unknown and she showed no reaction now. Indicating one of the brochures, she said, 'There's a house in Kinver Hill with attractive Swedish-type sun-room and unusual walled garden Mum and I are looking at at five. You're just in time to run us along there.'
'So I am indeed. Tell me, how would you have managed if it hadn't been for me turning up?'
'Minicab, same as she's been managing all week while you've been driving yourself to the pub and wherever else has taken your fancy. Come on, how many houses have you actually seen?'
'Christ love, I don't know. Not many. As few as possible.
Three was it? Not my kind of thing. There's nothing you can say that'll drive me off the position that that kind of thing's a women's kind of thing.' Alun was busy hiding his relief at not after all being asked to account for himself, despite the unpleasant tilt in his daughter's last speech.
'You mean we've got to do it so we might as well like it. Well, here's one you're not getting out of, boy _bach__. Two, in fact. That's right, the place in Mary Tweed Lane'll be viewable at six, wasn't it, Mum?' Rosemary turned through the leaflets. 'Extensive hall with recessed fireplace and carved Victorian overmantel. Mum tells me you've got some scheme lined up for visiting places of scenic and historical interest in the surrounding vicinity.' She put on a quacking local accent for the last dozen words, efficiently enough though she had never lived in Wales. 'We'll go into the places another time, but of course part of the deal is while you're in Bargeman's Row exploring folkways and getting drunk you can't be in Pedwarsaint and Holland looking over houses. Well, for the next couple of days, Dad, resign yourself to a lot of looking over houses. You're not going to get away with leaving it all to Mum while I'm here. Right? Are you with me?'
Alun nodded without speaking. They always took it out of you for doing anything on your own, without them, however innocent, like glancing at a newspaper. Now he came to think of it, he had seen quite early the avoidance of house-viewing as an extra benefit of going in search of Wales. And by the way four to one was way off - four and a half it was, with Rhiannon, now furtively winking and peering at him, the half and Rosemary the four.
Well, roughly. Far from the least ill feeling the style of her harangue had shown affection of a sort, but the sort that mitigated the sense of her words not at all. She came and linked arms with him when at last they moved off, kissed him on the cheek and gave him a smile that exactly blended fondness and disapproval. It was the best he could reasonably have hoped for.
Three - Charlie
1
When Charlie Norris noticed that the smallest man in the submarine railway-carriage had a face made out of carpeting he decided h was time to be off. By throwing himself about and sucking in air fast and deep he got away and back to his bed in the dark. Intensely thirsty as usual he at once reached for one of the several glasses of water lined up on the low table beside him, but before he found it his hand was grabbed and worried by some creature with very long narrow jaws. It made croaking, creaking noises. He cried out, or thought he did, and pulled his body away like a swimmer surfacing, and then he was really back.
He could hear Sophie breathing quietly in the bed across the way and started to throw the covers of his own bed back before going on to scramble in beside her and nestle up to her. Then he worked out that he had done that twice in the last ten days or so and a third time now would be too much. She always woke up at his arrival however careful he was, whether he nestled up or not, and though she always said later that she dropped off again in a couple of minutes he doubted it. And after all, he had not found himself at the edge of one of those huge, brilliantly lit stretches of grassland with ruined pillars and water flowing uphill and changing its course as it went, nor had to deal with small things, small unrecognizable animals or machines behaving like animals. So for the moment he stayed there leaning on his elbow.
It was not really dark. He could even see part of Sophie's outline in the light of the hooded lamp next to him. Other gleams came from the passage doorway and its reflection in the tall mirror by the window. An early car
