'Better all along the line.'
'When I look back,' said Gwen, resting her chin on a hand that also had a lighted cigarette in it and squinting towards a recent wine-stain on the tablecloth, 'and think of all that carry-on with the wretched stock-pot, never let it leave the stove, in with every scrap of the joint and you'd have thought a chicken carcass was worth ten times the chicken itself and... Do you know, Muriel, would you believe it, time was when I'd go along to the butcher and get bones for the dog, no dog, straight into the bloody pot with the beef-gristle. And for what? What possessed us?'
This time Muriel's response was affectionate as well as appreciative, or at least it sounded like it. In the usual run of things she and Gwen got on no better than all right even when she was not finding Gwen sly nor Gwen finding her loud or strange or both, but midnight could bring some display of amity. Part of this must have come from mere co-survival at the drinks table, as both had re1lected before now. But not all; not this time, at least.
Gwen waited for a moment, then said more or less at random, 'After all, it's not as if anybody in the world's going to notice, let alone appreciate even the most obvious... '
'Don't make me laugh.'
'I mean they don't even _know__.'
'Of course they don't _know__, love. You can only know if you want to know, and they don't want to know. They have other claims on their valuable attention, as I imagine you must have noticed before.'
'I can't bear the way they - '
'What, them bestir themselves to notice how life's lived in their own home, what makes the bloody world go round? Not them. Why should they? They've won.'
By this stage there was little doubt that those now under discussion were not the same as those who asked Gwen just which vegetables she had used. Nevertheless whatever the two women most wanted to talk about had pretty clearly not yet been broached. Give it time, as they used to say in South Wales when an unlooked-for silence descended on the company. Gwen was the one who let it come, that being what you did if you were the one with the luck when everybody present had given it time.
'Of course she still is very striking, I quite see that, I wouldn't call her beautiful, I never thought she was beautiful, but she is very striking.' She left the name out - not through any Cymric instinct of non-committal but because her thoughts were undeviatingly fixed on Rhiannon, as in fact they had been for some minutes past.
Perhaps Muriel's were too: she joined in promptly enough. 'Oh, agreed, with the benefit of a small fortune laid out on facials and massages and health farms and I don't know what all. Plus never having to do a hand's turn in the home.'
'Oh fair enough, but you don't get skin like that out of a tube. And that carriage, you're born with it or you're not. But as for-'
'Not so much as heave a plate on to the bloody rack.'
'It's when it comes to the what would you call it, the social side that I start, um, veering away from the consensus a bit. The conversational - '
'Airs and graces at her age.'
'I mean she's fine on the chit-chat level, nobody better for a good chinwag, oh, I'll give her that, it's just all rather run-of-the-mill. You know, humdrum. Of course, I'm not asking for a discussion of Wittgenstein over the coffee and gingernuts, nothing like that, but it's all very agreeable and chummy and then at the end you ask yourself what has she actually _said__. Nobody's demanding a coruscating shower of wit... '
This speech had given Muriel time to do some catching-up. 'Always found her a bit of a bore, quite frankly.'
'Well, I don't think I'd... '
'Look, wasn't she... didn't you... weren't you... '
'Wasn't I what, pet?'
'You know, at the... place along the road, the... _you__ know, the poly is it?'
'The university,' said Gwen a little stuffily.
'Yeah, that's right, well weren't you there together about a hundred years ago, you and her?'
'As a matter of fact we were, yes, way back as you say.' Gwen tried to remember what sort of place Muriel had been at. Surely if it had been another university or any other proper seat of learning then Muriel would have impressed it upon her many times over. So it must have been a teachers' training college or some other lowly institution where they had envy dinned into them. She realized she felt pretty vague on the whole topic. 'If the matter is of the smallest interest.'
'Sorry, I was just wondering what sort of showing she made as a student, you know, from the academic point of view.'
'_Oh__.' In the interval, not long but extended by a couple of soft interpolated belches from Muriel, it had returned to Gwen's mind that the place in question had been a school of art named after one of the industrial towns in the North of England and presumably responsible, to some degree anyway, for Muriel's taste in pictures as seen in her house. This made Gwen feel comfortable enough to go on, 'Well, actually now you come to mention it, er, it is quite interesting. She went to all her lectures, well that's sensible if you're not too sure of your own capacity to shine, as it were, and did all her essays, good girl, and would probably have ended up with a pass degree which was all she was going for, 'if she hadn't... '
'Right. What was she, what was she studying?'
'She was reading - ' said Gwen with some weight on the word, then carried on all offhand, '- biology main with botany subsidiary or the other way round, I can't remember. Some English in her first year I think.'
'Not a very distinguished career do I gather?'
'She was a conscientious student but she didn't seem to take any interest in her subjects the rest of the time. Did her work and that was that, then off out. No shortage of offers as you can imagine. She, er, she never
