in summer, lay on that coast. Along this one there ran for the most part a series of dark-coloured cliffs falling to narrow banks of pebbles or straight into the sea. In places they rose to a couple of hundred feet, their highest point being not far off the highest on Courcey. Hereabouts Malcolm stopped the car by agreement, and the occupants set about hauling themselves into the open, for a breath of air, they said, as well as a pee.
Charlie's first breath or sniff of air brought some redolence or other - salt, heather, pine-bark - that was gone before he could give it a name. He peed conscientiously into a grassy drain at the roadside. It was very quiet, or so he had just started to think when a small scarlet aeroplane· picked out with yellow came buzzing over his shoulder in the direction of the Swanset strip. He fought his way up a short damp tussocky slope to the inconsiderable summit, which was marked by a fake Celtic cross of some antiquity, flecked with lichen, and a more recent tablet in a purplish material.
Although he had known right away the spot to make for he had no recollection of having stood here before. He had certainly forgotten how the land dropped gently off on almost every side, giving a view of the mainland through a clump of Scotch firs and in the opposite direction an unsteady blur, if that, where Devon and Cornwall must be, but hiding most of the island itself. There was just one clear outlook down a small twisting valley on to the top of a straggle of bushes and low trees, a band of grey rock and a sunlit stretch of turf so dense and green it made him think of the cloth on a snooker table. He found the whole thing a most agreeable sight. At one time he had thought that there must have been more in such sights than he could merely see, perhaps not in them at all, behind them or beyond them but somehow connected with them, and plenty of poems had seemed to tell him the same story. But although he had stayed on the alert for quite a long while to catch a glimpse of what could not be seen, nothing answering remotely to any of his guesses or inklings had ever looked like turning up. Still, if he happened to stroll about in the country or to come across one of the poems he often found the experience appealing, even today. He started back down the slope.
'Come on, for Christ's sake,' called Alun rather irritably. 'We haven't got all night.'
'Indeed we haven't,' said Charlie, the last back to the car, though not possibly by much. As advertised, the breath of air had cleared his head. 'Look; I was in some _son__ of torpor or stupor when I let you bring us down this way. You won't find anything in Treville - it's all packed up round there.'
'The pubs'll still be going. '
'And with luck they'll be as nice as the one we've just come from.'
'Let's get going anyhow. No, they won't be trendy there, it's not that sort of place.'
'What are you talking about?' said Charlie as they moved off. 'Everywhere's trendy now unless it's actually starving.'
'I know what he's getting at,' said Peter. 'He means they're more authentic. More Welsh, God help us.'
'More suitable for his television series. Shit, I believe you're right.'
'Where do you want me to go?' asked Malcolm.
'About half a mile along there's our last chance to turn off over to the west side. That must be a better bet, surely. '
'What do you expect to find open there at this time of year?' Alun sounded pained and resentful, as if at ingratitude.
'I don't know, you're the researcher,' said Charlie. 'Hey, I tell you what we could do,' said Alun in an immediately livelier tone that would have revived Charlie's suspicions had they had time to abate: 'we could drop in on old Billy Moger just a bit further on. He'd know all that.'
'I haven't seen him for years. Vanished from sight when he moved out, pretty well. Are you sure he's still living there?'
'Well, he was last week when I rang.'
'Was he now?' Some female connected with Moger drifted up in Charlie's memory, not wife, or if wife then second wife, more likely long-standing lady-friend, but anyway also to do with Alun in the long-ago. 'That's good to hear.'
'I was going through my old address-book.'
'I understand.' Laura something, that was the name. 'Shall I take this right turn or not?' asked Malcolm. Charlie was fully expecting to be swept into the outskirts of Treville, but after no more than a few hundred yards the car pulled up in front of a bungalow built almost at the roadside. It would hardly have been anyone of Billy Moger's era who had required or accepted an original structure on the lines of a cottage in a whimsical book for children, but perhaps he or someone in between had ripped out the old-time twisty windows and goblin's front door and filled the apertures with steel and pine, and in the same spirit had put sensible housingestate chimneys there instead of whatever funny-hat arrangements had cheered up the roof before.
'Nasty place he's got here,' said Charlie when Alun had gone to ring the bell.
'Who is this Moger?' asked Peter.
'For years he had that sports shop in Cambridge Street next to the off-licence. Jolly handy, that. Nice little chap. Played a bit for Glamorgan before the war. You remember him.'
'After, too,' said Malcolm. 'Left-arm over the wicket. Used to bring them back from the off.'
'Right, we're summoned,' said Charlie. 'That didn't take long.'
His squint at the garden at the side of the bungalow showed him a. walled space landscaped like the small-mammal enclosure at some opulent zoo, including the dry bed of an artificial watercourse. But there were no animals in it and little in the way of vegetation either. On the threshold he was met by a strong but not obnoxious perfume, woody and spicy rather than sweet. He and the others got an outstandingly warm welcome from Laura, fully recognizable to him on sight, a small thin woman in a close-fitting black velvet suit, with piled blonde hair and a more than average allowance of jewellery round neck and wrists. Alun really performed the introductions.
Like a lot of people in Wales, though not only in Wales, Charlie had had a much more extensive education in horrible rooms and houses than in attractive or even so-so ones. So he was not much good on detail when, girded for the worst after what he had seen outside, he came across nothing of the interior loathsome to his practised eye, though others perhaps would have drawn the line at the well-stocked bar that filled one end of the living-room. He did notice flowers all over the place, numerous, varied, fresh, bloody marvellous in fact and, as another department
