'Ah, the old righteous sound!' cried Alun, hurrying over to the Playbox. 'Surely I know this one, don't I? Wasn't there a Louis version with, with Johnny Dodds? On the back of, was it 'Skip the Gutter'?'
'It was 'Ory's Creole Trombone' actually.'
'_Thats__ right - on the old Parlophone 78, correct?'
'Correct,' said Malcolm, beginning to smile.
Alun set about vivaciously looking through the pile of records. Percy Morgan glanced briefly and without hope at the rubric of every third or fourth one he came to. Malcolm went off for more glasses. Charlie turned to Peter and nodded to him in a pleased way, as though the two had not met for some weeks.
'Cheer up,' said Charlie. 'Cheer up and enjoy the music.'
'I'm afraid the effort of cheering up sufficiently to enjoy this music would be beyond me.'
'What's wrong with this music more than any other?'
'Not much, I suppose. When I look back, you know, music's like chess or foreign coins or what, folk tales. Something that only interested me when practically everything else interested me as well.' , 'I wouldn't have gone to the Bible in the first place if the Glendower hadn't been shut.'
'While they fit the new stove. You said.'
'Where are these bloody drinks?' Charlie gave a searching look round. 'And where's bloody Garth? I thought he was meant to be here.'
'He was and is. As you came in he was going up the stairs, in all probability on his way to the lavatory.'
'Hey, there's one very good thing about Garth,' said Charlie, including in this announcement Percy, who had finally given up on the records, and repeating it for Malcolm's benefit as he approached with the promised drinks. 'Mark me closely. Whenever you see, er... What?' He frowned and looked from face to face. 'Oh, whenever you see _Garth__ you get the most wonderful feeling of security. You can relax. You know, m'm? - you _know__ you're not going to suddenly run into Angharad. No chance of it. You can relax. Eh? And a very much more minor benefit of seeing _Angharad__... is knowing you're not going to suddenly run into _Garth__. Well.'
Peter had looked away sharply at this, but the other two at least showed they understood the reference, namely to the frequent observation or supposed fact that the Pumphreys never both appeared at once. It gave rise to regular good-natured speculation about the homicidal-maniac uncle or two-headed son who needed attention of some sort at all times. Anyway Charlie was on well-trodden ground.
'You know I was thinking about that pair the other day,' he went on. 'Now: if they were in a detective story there'd only be one of them. See what I mean? Only be one of them really. One of them would have knocked off the other 'years ago and now whichever one it was would be going round posing as the other. As well, I mean. Just some of the time. They're about the same height, aren't they?'
'Why only some of the time?' asked Malcolm, glancing at Percy, who shook his snowy head very slowly from side to side.
'What? Well, Christ, because the rest of the time he'd. be going round being himself, wouldn't he? Or herself if it was Angharad, of course.'
'I don't seem to have given Alun a drink,' said Malcolm, and moved off.
Alun had that moment slid a record out of its sleeve and was peering at the label in a vigilant way but, without his glasses, surely in vain. 'Ah, _diolch yn fawr__, dear boy. I can't make out, I can't make out whether this is a remake or the original-'
'Could I just have a quick word?'
'Sir, a whole history.' He sighed briefly. 'I mean take as long as you like.'
'Thanks, Alun. I wanted to ask you... Well, something Gwen said gave me a really nasty shock.'
2
'Well, I treat the whole thing as a joke,' Muriel was saying. 'Which I can just about manage to do most of the time if I keep my teeth well and truly gritted. Take it easy, lass, I tell myself when the adrenalin starts to flow - you've seen it all before and you've come through without a scratch. Well anyway you've come through. Say it slowly and calmly: you're in Wales, land of song, land of smiles, and land of deceit. Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief all right, and by Christ boyo Taffy has been keeping up the old traditions indeed in a bloody big way oh yes now look you.' The last couple of dozen words were delivered in an accent that sounded as much like a West Mrican one as anything else, Ghanaian, possibly, or Ibo. 'I thought counting the spoons was just an expression till I came to live down here. Nothing more than a colourful catch-phrase.'
Dimly recognizing this as the end of a section, and even more dimly aware of having heard something rather like it before, Dorothy Morgan looked up. She had lost the initiative a minute or two earlier. Astonishingly, she had found herself out of immediate things to say about New Zealand, the adopted home of one of the Morgan sons, a whole country gloriously unknown to anyone she was ever likely to run into round here and in many other parts, serving her as a magic wand or spell for reducing great assemblies to silence. Now, she missed her chance of coming in with alternative unanswerable stuff on what Percy had said to the County Clerk, or what she remembered of a magazine article about DNA she had recently happened to read. It was not of course that she was actually listening to what Muriel was saying, just that the continuous sound of another voice distracted her, put her off even the unexacting task of knocking one of her starters into shape.
What Dorothy had looked up from was the stylish Scandinavian table, made of different sorts of wood, in Sophie's apparatus-packed kitchen. It, the table, was strewn with the debris accumulated in twelve hours of drinking wine, smoking cigarettes and not eating all manner of biscuits, sandwiches, portions of cheese, little plastic zeppelins of pate. Muriel and Dorothy were the only two still present and active: Sian Smith was thought to be asleep somewhere upstairs and Sophie herself, never a keen partaker, had gone off to her sitting-room TV quite a while before, though at the moment she was in the hall on the telephone trying for the second 'or third time to get hold of the much-needed Percy.
'I think I may have told you about a long-service warrior I ran into in Monmouth,' said Muriel now, sounding in no doubt whatever on the point. 'Twenty years up-country in the thick of it, doing something to do with reservoirs and pipes among the Welsh hill-tribes. Normally, of course, at home that's to say, Yorkshire people don't think a lot to Derbyshire folk, but it's different when you're abroad. Anyway he and I got on all right, and he was very knowledgeable about, you know, what makes Johnny Welshman tick. Quite fascinating. One day, he didn't explain how but I imagine it involved showing tolerance for local rituals and such, one day he found himself among
