Their surfaces were· blurred, with a buggered-about look as though someone, perhaps under Muriel Thomas's influence, had caused a flame-thrower to play upon them at some stage of manufacture. Their colours were off too. He bundled them away in a cupboard, thinking it was a bit hard to have come all the way out to south-west Courcey and walk into a bunch of boldly innovative china dogs at the end of it.
To put off the evil hour he ran his eye over Dai the Books's books and soon saw there would be nothing worth even short-listing for removal. The works of Brydan, on the other hand, were present in all sorts of editions, rendering his own copy of the poems an even more superfluous piece of luggage than before. Like everybody else in middle South Wales over the age of thirty, not to speak of many further off, Dai had his Brydan connections. On the wall there was a framed blow-up of the famous almost pitch-dark photograph of the two of them he kept in his shop. He used to say he had had Brydan in there to lend him a hand once or twice in the school holidays - liked to think he had done a bit to help the lad out. In fact Brydan's main association had come rather later, when he used to drop in on his way to the station to steal a few pieces of new stock for subsequent resale, or rather sale, in that second-hand joint off Fleet Street. Alun shook his head at the memory. A great writer, he sometimes thought to himself and had often said in non-Welsh company, but in too many ways a sadly shabby human being.
Almost in the act of turning away from the shelves he caught sight of a strip of jacket he recognized, that enwrapping _The Blooms of Brydan__, a selection by Alun Weaver. Some alchemy, compounded of a nervy literary agent, a gullible publisher, a matter of coincidence with the date of Brydan's death and a historic review in _Time__ magazine, had turned the produce of three weeks' work into a quite decent and lasting annuity: 5,000 last year in hardback in the USA alone and _Brydan's Wales__ still very much alive. Whenever reminded of this Alun was tempted to think of himself as quite good at making money in his line, better than at pushing himself forward, not enough of a power man for that, too much of a sensual Celt. And in recent weeks he had been wondering rather about how he was doing, how he was making out as the organ-voice of Wales in Wales. Perhaps after all he had been more audible in England, where competing strains were fewer and less clamorous. He had never quite got over the paucity of his welcome home at Cambridge Street station. So be it: here squarely in front of him was a chance to do something about that all round.
He was sitting at the table looking out of the window at the seashore when Rhiannon came in wearing - well, he was nearly sure she had changed her clothes.
'Sorry, are you - '
'No, just wool-gathering. Can't think how that's got itself a bad name, can you? Pricey stuff, wool. Getting it for free, too.'
'I thought I'd just take a look round the town. I haven't set eyes on it for donkey's years.'
'Fine, see you later, love.'
'What did you make of Ingrid?'
'Ingrid?'
'Ingrid Jenkins or whatever she's called. You know, Norma's daughter.'
'Who's - of course, the char, the char's daughter. To be sure. Well.'
'M'm, what did you make of her?'
'I don't know, I don't know that I made anything of her.
Seemed perfectly pleasant, I only saw her for a moment. Why, what should I have made of her?'
'Oh, nothing. Did she seem the sort to look after Nelly properly, did you think?'
'Christ, Nelly's the puppy, right? Yes, fine. Well, I mean the whole place looked respectable enough. Clean. Things like that I mean... '
'Oh, good.' Rhiannon's manner changed. 'I couldn't have brought her here, could I?'
Alun thought he saw now where this conversation was designed to lead. 'No, no,' he said, frowning at the idea. 'No, out of the question.'
'You can't leave them on their own for a minute when they're that age. I'd have had to be taking her out the whole time or else stay indoors with her here. Or make you.'
'Cheers. No, of course. You couldn't have brought her along and have any kind of proper break yourself. Out of the question.'
'M'm. Are you going to look at that stuff of-yours?'
'Just glance at it, you know.' He always kept her roughly abreast of what he was up to in the writing part of his life. About broadcasting, with the sudden excursions here and there it might require, he was sometimes less informative.
'Good luck, dear. Be about an hour.'
She was gone. Yes, what she had wanted was moral support for farming out the pooch. Normal and understandable. He made to pick up the horrendous buff envelope in front of him, then paused with a groan. There had been something crappy about what had gone before that. What the bugger had it been? Something to do with Ingrid. He had barely glanced at the girl - well, female, pushing forty he had supposed,. smallish, pale; nothing else. So obviously there could be no question of...
He gave a muffled cry, then, remembering he was alone in the house, unmuffled it. His glance dropped to the floor at his side, to the carton of books there, to the scuffed green cover of the paperback _Thesaurus__. Absurdity, he subvoca1ized: stuff and nonsense, fiddle-de-dee, bosh, bunk, rats. _Fjwlbri__. Tell it to the Marines. _Credat Judaeus Apella__. If Rhiannon had been stirring the pond to catch him betraying an interest in this Ingrid, if she really thought 'he might have in mind getting off with the charwoman's daughter, then she was barmy. Unless that kind of suspicion, suspicion of stuff at that level, though unfounded in this case, was not unreasonable in general, was no longer unreasonable, in· which case he was the barmy one. Was that the way it was going to take him - not willingness or ability but judgement, nous?
Several unalluring trains of thought presented themselves at this juncture. He found himself in pursuit of the one about anybody of any sense knowing when he was well off with Rhiannon. But he had not got any sense, or enough sense, or... But he had got this far a thousand times without ever having got any further. He hoped his unpreparedness for the Ingrid question had let his innocence show through, because if not there was nothing he could say about it; it was much too late for any of that, ever. Almost eagerly he picked up the envelope.
