'We stopped for petrol and the surly bloke wouldn't change a fiver, remember?'
'Oh yes of course.' With the heat off, Rhiannon would have agreed that she remembered General Tate's landing at Fishguard.
'And we'd hardly gone ten yards after when that terrific cloudburst started and I had to stop because the windscreen-wiper wasn't working properly.'
'That's right.'
'Ah, now I think I can almost fix the date. The Australians were playing at Cardiff and in their - '
He stopped walking and stared ahead of him. She knew something awful had happened. Her eyes skidded away to a horizontal stone gone almost black and read helplessly of Thomas Godfrey Pritchard who departed this life 17th June 1867 and was sorely missed. When she looked at Malcolm again he was still staring, but at her now.
'Doug Johnson was away in France the whole of that summer,' he said, 'doing his teaching prac. He certainly wasn't around to lend his car to me or anyone else. So that must have been a different day altogether.'
'M'm.' She forced herself to go on looking at him.
'We must have taken the bus down. You couldn't have remembered it like that, the way you said you did.'
'No.'
'You don't remember any of it, do you? Not having lunch or walking up to St Mary's or what I said or anything.'
It was not to be got out of or away from. Coming on top of the little tensions of the day the unashamed intensity of his disappointment was too much for her. She hid her face, turned aside and started to cry.
He forgot his own feelings at once. 'What is it? What's the matter?'
'I'm so stupid, I'm so hopeless, no good to anybody, I just think of myself all the time, don't notice other people. It's not much to ask, remembering a lovely day out, but I can't even do that.' She had his arm round her now and was resting her forehead against his shoulder, though she still kept her hands over her eyes. 'Anybody who was any use would remember but I can't, but I wish I could, I wish I could.'
'Don't say such ridiculous things. You don't expect me to take them seriously, do you? It's sweet of you to worry about it just slipping your mind like that, but I didn't remember it very well myself, did I, confusing those two times? Anyway you remember coming down here? To Pwll Glin?'
'M'm.'
'And perhaps me bringing you? You know, sort of vaguely?'
'M'm.' Perhaps she did. 'Even this bit? Just... '
Suddenly it went impossible to say yes, even to this bit. 'Not... ' She shook her head wretchedly. 'It's gone. Sorry.'
'I can't have you apologizing to me, my dear Rhiannon.
Honestly, now.' He gazed 'Over the top of her head in the general direction of the land. 'Well, put it this way, the fact you minded so much about not remembering, that's worth as much to me as if you had remembered, very nearly.'
That set things back a bit, but in the end it was only the clearing-up shower. She got to work with her tissues and comb and he wandered about making suitable points like the church being _probably__ twelfth century and having effigies of a member of the de Courcy family and his lady in the south wall of the chancel and a battlement round the top of the tower, exactly what she wanted to hear just then, no sarcasm. When he saw she was ready he gave the bay a final going-over.
'It was all houses there once, before the sea came up,' he said. 'A whole village.'
Rhiannon thought she had heard that the sea had once been over the marshes and then gone back, but that must have been another time. 'I suppose they can tell.'
'At low tide twice a year when the water's calm you're supposed to be able to see down to what were streets. Houses even. I think another church.'
'Do you still do your poetry?'
'You remember that.' He smiled with pleasure. 'Indeed I do, yes. And I mean to go on. I'm lucky enough to have a few things to get off my chest still.'
Before he could get on to what they were she found herself saying, with a sense of instant inspiration that amazed her, 'There used to be a lovely rose-garden with brick walls - and, you know, pergolas along the paths belonging to some grand house somewhere. You could look round it ID the afternoon. I don't know whether you still can.'
'Let's see, would that be Mansel Hall? Over by Swanset?' No prizes for not rushing in this time. 'I'm not absolutely... '
'No, I know where you mean - er, now, Bryn House, that's it. Bryn House, of course. Local stone with brick facing. Not far from here. Anyway, you'd like to go there, would you?'
'M'm. Didn't we go there once before, one summer, not a very nice day?' The not very nice day had stuck in her mind all right, not actually raining but chilly and dark.
'I think so,' he said, as he more or less had to. 'Yes, I'm sure we did. Come on, let's go and have a look. Might bring all sorts of stuff back, you never know.'
'It may have just gone, the garden, like a lot of things.'
'Let's go there anyway.'
