'Or you could come up to me if you felt like it. Never been, have you? Not that there's much to see. There's this pad I share with one of the blokes at work. Miner's cottage it was, quite nice really, with a bit of garden at the back. And I'll tell you something about that garden. We've been there two years all but a few weeks and it hasn't had a fork in it the whole of that time. Don't you think that's interesting?'
Rhiannon was the first person Peter saw at the Golf Club when he went in by the side entrance from the car park and entered the large old-fashioned hall where non-members were entertained. She was standing in its opposite corner but seemed to have caught sight of him even before he saw her. At once she smiled with what looked like pure pleasure, pure affection, though how that could have been he had no idea, and hurried over towards him. He realized he had been afraid of not recognizing her after so many years, but when she came in range of his glasses (supposed to be for reading only but kept on most of the time out of inertia) he saw her face had not changed at all- well, a few lines, a fullness under the chin, nothing really, of course her hair was probably a bit touched up. The eyes were the same. Surely she was not going to kiss him but she was, she did.
'This is William,' he said almost without knowing it. 'My son.' He realized something else, that William had not said a word about her, or about Alun either, when he had had the chance. He must know, know something anyway.
'Hallo, William. Rosemary's round the place somewhere.'
The voice was the same too, but he had noticed that already, on the telephone. He said something back and she asked about Muriel. The three talked for some minutes, had drinks, were joined by Rosemary. Peter took in very little: he was too busy looking furtively at Rhiannon and listening to her talking rather than following what she said. Now and then he tried and failed to explain to himself what he hoped to achieve (or perhaps avoid) while present. No sooner was the question sharpened for him by William steering Rosemary away than Alun came up and hailed him with his normal supernormal display of warmth. He was looking disagreeably fit, and well turned out: hair snowier than ever, new pearl-grey suit in some unfamiliar, doubtless fashionable cloth, pink carnation in buttonhole. The effect was in part that of an upper-second-rate actor, one of the sort you wondered about a bit too, which had to be accidental. But it was fair to say that the comic side of this was almost endearing, Peter considered, nearer to it at least than anything he was likely to come up with himself.
'You have the good fortune,' said Alun with all his vivacity, 'or as some would no doubt call it, the misfortune to find me in a state of euphoria. One based moreover not on artificial stimulants but on sober fact. Two facts. Today I received a commission for seven half-hour television programmes, tittle to be agreed but something about Wales, what else, all right Peter, and more important, incomparably more important, I wrote a poem, well, got to the end of the first draft. It's been a long time. I don't know whether it's any good but the point is writing it, getting it written, finding you can still do it. Marvellous bloody feeling. Like finding you can still, er... '
He fell silent abruptly and with seeming finality, blinking at the floor. After a number of seconds he flung up his head in triumph. 'Sing in the choir, sing in the choir. You thought you'd, er... ' Another pause followed, but a much shorter one than before. 'Forgotten the harmony, forgotten how the part went, but you've still got it, it's still there. Very much the... Ah, here we are, there you are, you old devils, you.'
He turned with rekindled enthusiasm to Charlie and Sophie, to Garth, to Sian Smith and Dorothy Morgan, not abating it even for Dorothy; euphoria had been the word all right. When the cries and embraces of meeting were over Dorothy led Rhiannon away in the direction of a grim-faced female who looked like a retired bouncer in drag and shorty silver wig. Somebody's mother, Peter guessed; it had always to be remembered that there were still quite a lot of people about who had mothers.
Garth, quite natty in his usual tweeds, was eulogizing Alun's suit. 'Oh, lovely bit of garment you've got there, boy. Beautiful. Must have cost you a packet.' He reached out and turned a lapel over. 'Of course, I suppose having to look right for all your television 'appearances, this son of thing comes off tax, does it?'
'I shouldn't be surprised. My accountant sees to all that.
Anyway, what - '
'Do you know how long I've had this suit I'm wearing now?' Garth asked them all in a grim, challenging way. 'Thirty-seven years. You see, I've had a bit of sense, I've taken care of myself. Not like some, eh? Well, you're not as bad as these two, Alun, agreed, but you have let yourself go just a wee bit, come on, admit it now. Under here' - he tapped his chin - 'and here and - '
'I can't do anything about your terrible mind, Garth,' said Alun, grinning harder than before, 'I can't help your inability to notice anything that doesn't directly involve your pathetic self,' he continued, starting to shake with mirth, 'but when you start vaunting your supposed moral superiority, you bloody little cowshed mountebank,' and here he started laughing as he spoke, 'then at least I can tell you to shut your blathering trap before I slam your doubtless irreproachable dentures down your fucking throat.'
By now he and Garth had their arms round each other's shoulders, both of them bent in the middle and red in the face, roaring fit to bust, two old mates who had seen things so much in the same light for so long that they could be carried helplessly away together to a region of feeling no outsider could penetrate or understand. Charlie looked on with an unsettled smile, Peter without expression.
Alun was the first to come round. 'Well,' he said, breathing noisily and sniffing, 'that'll show the little bugger, what? Ah. Ah!' And he dashed off across the room to greet old Owen Thomas and his wife who had just come in the front entrance, near which there also stood a photographer.
'Oh dear, dear,' said Garth, 'there was a performance and no mistake. That boy's got a tongue to him, hasn't he? It's a treat to hear him use the language. God alive, I can't think when I last laughed like that.'
'How's Angharad?' asked Charlie.
'Oh, well enough, thank you, Charlie. Er, well enough.'
'I couldn't follow the bit about the cowshed,' said Peter when Garth had moved away.
'He's a vet, or was, at Capel Mererid. Sheep rather than cows, but you get the general gist. I thought everybody knew that. He doesn't give you a fair chance to forget it.'
'I knew. Well, after all, the mind's got to start going some time.'
'Not very nice, that just now, was it?' said Charlie. 'In fact not at all nice. It's odd, that was exactly what you've always wanted to say to him, you hoped somebody would one day and then when they do it's nothing like the treat you'd been banking on. Bloody... bloody little cowshed mountebank was it? M'm. There's trenchant, eh?'.
'You think Garth got it?'
'No. If he told Angharad about it she would, but he probably hasn't told her anything for twenty years. No,
