would not have said that if he had been on the spot just earlier, the awful chewing, etc. Rhiannon fixed the yellow rose in his button-hole and passed the bouquet to Rosemary, who had set Nelly down on the grass as now to be considered defused.
'Put them in that pretty Wedgwood jug - they'll look marvellous in there - and find somewhere in the cool for them.' Rhiannon was too shy herself to embark on a full-treatment head-on thank you. 'We'll decide on a proper place when I get back. That won't be before five at the earliest - I've got one or two things to see to in town first.' The last bit was said looking over her daughter's shoulder.
2
Immediately· upon getting into the car beside Malcolm, Rhiannon noticed a peaked cap in nearly the same pattern as his jacket folded up on the shelf in front of him. All she could do about that was hope he had already tried this and thought better of it, rather than that he was keeping it by him to spring on her later. Anyway she sighed comfortably, or tried to. There was a faint pleasant smell hanging about and the whole interior told of hours of tidying and cleaning. In a way she hardly understood, it was like something she remembered from years ago: she had complimented Malcolm on his clear neat handwriting and he had thanked her and said, well, he reckoned however boring or no-good what he wrote might be, at least whoever it was would be spared the extra chore of deciphering it. Like a lecturer's duty to be audible, he had said.
The first few minutes passed easily enough with chat about Rosemary, then Alun briefly, then Gwen no more briefly - Rhiannon's idea, that, to rub in that the subject was ordinary. The next few went even more easily with taking notice of the approaches to Courcey and after some delay the island itself. She had been along here quite recently with some of the crowd for a Sunday-lunchtime drink at the King Arthur just off the causeway, a brief or single drink as it had turned out, because the one huge bar had been full of fat young left-wing activists from a weekend school ordering things like blue curacao with passion-fruit juice. But they were soon past there now and on to where she had not been for at least ten years, probably a good deal more.
To Rhiannon the greenery looked greener and also thicker than it had, the hill-tops perhaps not as high, but it was hard to notice when the whole place was so tremendously more crowded. Approaching Chaucer Bay down the west road they ran into traffic like a Saturday morning in town: cars, buses from Cardiff and - she was nearly sure - Hamburg, bikes and of course caravans, of which some hundreds were stationed in lines like those of a military cantonment across the whole width of the furze-covered slope that faced the bay.
'Sorry about this,' said Malcolm as they came to another halt. Far from sorry, he looked cheered up by the thought of how much worse matters would have to get before he had to decide or do anything.
'We've got plenty of time.' With a qualm she realized how much.
'I'm glad I allowed for it. But it is remarkable, eleven-thirty midweek and still in school term.'
Rhiannon mentioned the marvellous weather and said to herself that that was good old Malcolm for you: it would simply never have occurred to him to start going on about where did all the money come from was what some of us would have liked to know, and so this was what a recession meant, and the black economy and minimum-wage agreements and the closed shop and who ever cared a curse for the pensioners. Everybody else she could think of for the moment except Rosemary would have been well into that by now. And Alun unless there had been other people around too.
They moved on a few more yards and round a bend. Malcolm was keeping fussily closed up to the car in front, but she had plenty of room to see the shingly, littered way on to the beach through a gap in the cliff and the half-naked people hurrying along it, all loaded with food and drink containers, tents, boats, sports kits, games, anything and everything for children - plenty of them about, school term or no school term. When they drove past a minute later Rhiannon got a squint at the sort of village of plastic stalls and booths that had sprung up to screw the visitors in every available line, cosmetic, decorative, educational, you name it, some of them not so plastic, but surely... A beach-boutique on the beach? In South Wales? Now?
Then the lights changed and they started squeezing their way up the hill on the far side between the groups of young men straggling down from the car-park with no shirts on, satisfied with that being all right and not bothering about looking horrible, being it too for not bothering. From the top Rhiannon had a view of the whole of the long, wide expanse of sand scattered over with moving or still figures as she had never seen it before. Some had wandered along as far as Rundle Bay, which they would have to move back from when the tide came up or face a steep climb up to the road, all right in the day, she remembered, but not much fun after dark with a pushy chap trying to give you a hand.
'Seems a long time ago, doesn't it?'
For Malcolm, this bit of advanced thought-reading was uncanny. She gave him a special look of appreciation before saying, 'Yes, thank God.'
'What? I meant, you know, going on the beach and bathing and what-not the way everyone used to.'
'That's what I meant. Yes, everyone did use to, didn't they? Coming for a swim?' She speeded up before he could think he was being asked to come for a swim now. 'Coming out to Courcey with us, and you just went along without thinking. Like, well, like a lot of things then. I never really liked swimming.'
'As I remember you were pretty good at it.'
'Not bad, and of course it was lovely in the water once you'd survived going in, but awful being out. Hoping you looked wonderful with wet hair and feeling it standing out in the wind and starting to go like straw.'
'Surely, didn't girls wear caps in those days? Bathing caps I mean.'
'Only if you didn't mind your face going the size of a nut. It's amazing thinking of it now, I can hardly believe it. Sort of half sitting with your legs out to the side and smiling and trying to feel if half your bottom was out of your bathing-costume. And it wasn't just me either - Gwen was the same, Sian, Dorothy, everyone. We used to - '
'But you all seemed so absolutely marvellously... '
'Poised? You should have seen us. All that awful tanning. I remember a serious discussion in Brook Hall about how red in the face you could afford to let yourself get at a time. And what you did about the hair on your legs and arms. Choices to be weighed up there. Snags to all of them.'
'But I mean you did enjoy it,' said Malcolm anxiously. 'Parts of it.'
'Oh yes. You noticed things like your hair and what horrible stuff sand is but you didn't really take it in. You were wondering how it was going and what would happen next and whether you could handle it. We weren't poised really, just trying not to give anything away. Of course, I don't suppose it was all plain sailing for the chaps,' she wound up thoughtfully.
'No.' He took a vigilant look at the now-empty road ahead. 'No, it certainly wasn't,' he added.
