"Shame."
"Not for me," said Giles.
"I hate bloody tourists. Pull in here. We'll walk the rest of the
way."
A track led between two outsize
sycamore trees. It was blocked after about twenty yards by a rusted metal farm gate.
"OK to park here?"
"Private road." said
Giles. "
Our
private road. Or it
will be."
They got out and stood looking
down on the village in the vivid light of early evening. To the left of them
stood the church tower, like a monolith. The church was built on a big hump,
around which cottages fitted—or grew, as Berry liked to fantasise—in a semi-circle.
The church tower had a short pyramid for a spire with timbers around the
belfry. It seemed very old, older than the village. Older than the goddamn sky.
Berry thought, for some reason.
"This is not typical, in Wales,
right? Like, big churches, stained glass and all?"
"Chapels." Giles
said. 'That's what you have mainly in Wales. Ugly Victorian chapels, presided
over by hellfire preachers rather than Anglican vicars. Non-conformism —Baptist
and Methodists. Puritanism. Fundamentalism — all that just stormed through
Wales around the turn of the century. Trampling on history. And it didn't go
away. Bit like your Bible Belt. I suppose."
"How come this place
escaped?"
"I don't know." Giles
said. "But I'm bloody glad it did. There's supposed to have
been
a Victorian chapel here, but it's
obviously gone. One of those little mysteries. Y Groes is
full of them."
A palpable silence lay over the
scene, like a spell. No dogs barked, no radios played. It was calm and mature
and the air was scented. The sycamores framed the view as if they'd been
arranged by some eighteenth-century landscape painter.
"Nice." said Berry.
"Hey. pal. I apologise. OK? You were right."
"Yes," said Giles.
"This is some place."
"Isn't it."
They stood in silence for
almost two whole minutes. Birds sang. Butterflies danced up and down invisible staircases
of warm air.
"You really gonna
commute?" he asked. "Can you
do
that?"
"The way I see it,"
said Giles. "I'm working this four-day week, OK? So, let's say I'm working
Monday to Thursday. I get up really early and drive down Monday morning. On Thursday
night I drive back. That means I only have to spend three nights in
London."
"Lot of travelling, ole
buddy."
"I don't care. I just want
to spend as much time in this bloody glorious place as I can wangle."
"Sounds good to me."
said Berry, wondering if it really did.
He thought, could I go for
this, all this rural idyll stuff, four nights out of the rat race? Well, maybe.
Maybe, with the right lady. Maybe for a few months. Maybe in the summer.
You
put the arm on young Giles. Persuade him to sell the bloody place, soon as he
can . . .
But what would Winstone Thorpe
have said if he'd seen this place?
"Tell you what,"
Giles was saying. "Why don't you come down for a weekend, or even a
holiday, when we're settled in? Bring whoever it is you're with these
days."
"Miranda ," said
Berry doubtfully.
"Oh yes, the one
who—"
"Thinks I look like Al Pacino.
When he was younger, of course."
Giles, face bright with pride,
opened the iron gate and carefully closed it when Berry was through. Then he
led the way along a track no more than eight feet wide, lined with
hawthorn and holly.
They came at last to the house.
And that was where, for Berry Morelli, the idyll died.
Chapter XV
The dead, lower branches of the close-packed conifers, pale brown by
day, were whitened by the headlights—the only kind of direct light they'd ever
known. Berry thought. He was aware of just how narrow a channel the road made between
the bristly ranks. Like driving down the middle of a toothbrush. He wondered
what it would be like in the frozen days of January.
Berry shivered.
"You thought of
that?" he asked, needing to talk.
"Thought of what?" said
Giles.
"How it'd be in winter. Like
when you have to get up at 6:30 on some freezing dark morning and drive to
London on icebound roads and wonder how you're ever gonna make it back if
there's snow. You ever think about that?"
"Nothing's without its
problems," Giles said. "If you start to dwell on things like that,
you never try anything new."
The forestry was thinning out
now. Berry braked as a rabbit scooted across the road. How about that,
something alive in this place. He shivered again. Pull yourself together,
asshole.
It wasn't so dark yet, not when
you got through the forestry. When they cleared the next ridge they'd get the benefit
of the light coming off the sea. A sign said Pontmeurig 5, Aberystwyth 16.
One-horse resort or not, he'd be glad to see Aberystwyth again. Least it had a
few bars and a pier with coloured lights and gaming machines. Familiar. tacky
things.
"Berry?" Giles said.
"Uh huh?" He turned
briefly to look at Giles, saw only a hunched-up shape in a space too small for
it and the glow at the end of a cigarette.
Giles said, "Are you trying to
put me off?"
"Put you off?"
They came into the valley of
the disused lead mine, stony towers black against the western sky. It looked
powerfully stark, quite impressive now it was too dark to see all the drab
detail. Wales's answer to Monument Valley.
Yeah, he thought, damn right
I'm trying to put you off. Berry snapped the headlights on again. This was
going to need careful handling.
It had seemed, in all the obvious
ways, a good house. Barely fifty yards off the road, but nicely private,
screened by laurels and holly and hawthorn, hunched into the hillside and protected
from the wind. It had a view of the church hill some 250 yards away. Below that
was the village; on winter evenings they'd be able to see the smoke spiralling
from the village chimneys, warming the grey sky.
Nice. Cosy.
So the cottage looked, too,
from the outside. Its walls were that warm, rusty grey that softened the
outlines of the whole village. Its windows, six of them on the front, were small
and quartered like in the picture books.
And clean. Somebody had been
and cleaned the goddamn windows.
Not only that, they'd taken
care of the garden too. It should have been overgrown, yet the small front lawn
had been mown, the flowerbeds tended, even the roses deadheaded.
This did not look like the
empty house of a man deceased.
Berry had said, "You're sure we
got the right place here?"
"No. I just thought we'd poke
around somebody else's garden first, to pass the time. Of course it's the right
bloody place!"
"Only somebody's taking
good care of it for you. Why would they do that?"
"It was the judge's house,
Berry. People respected the man." As if to make his own mark on the
garden. Giles bent down to a clump of pansies, and pinched off a couple of dead
flowers. "Perhaps the gardener and the cleaner wanted to maintain the
place as he'd have wanted. Maybe they got a little something in the will."
"I get it." said
Berry. "So the lawyer wouldn't give you a key but he gave one to the
cleaner so he or she could keep the place like the judge was still
around."
Giles clearly hadn't thought of
this. Visibly miffed, he turned and walked off round the side of the cottage.
Berry caught him up.
"Hey, don't worry about it,
fella. What d'you expect? You're English."
"Now look!" Giles snarled.
He spun round and shoved under Berry's nose an elegant English finger.
"Just stop trying to wind me up, all right? Me being English doesn't come
into it." And then he strode off across the back lawn that would be his
lawn, olive-green waxed jacket swinging open to reveal his olive-green
army-officer's pullover. An urban man who thought his life would be made
suddenly healthier by driving an extra five hundred miles a week.
Berry looked at the cottage,
soft-focus through the bushes. It was like most of the others in Y Groes,
seemed as if it had grown out of the soil, its timbers forming together, like a
developing bone structure.
Inevitably, the thought came to
him: Giles might need his house, but the house doesn't need him.
Giles strode back across the
lawn. He wore a wry half-smile. "Sorry, mate. I'm touchy, OK? It means a
lot to me. To be accepted. To be, you know, part of all this."
"I can buy that."
said Berry. "It's a good place to have." Maybe good wasn't quite the
word. It was its own place.
They peered through a few
windows, but even though the glass was clean and sparkling it was too dark
inside to see much. One downstairs room they couldn't see into at all.
"That's the study,"
Giles said. "Somebody must have drawn the curtains to protect the books
from too much light."
"Thoughtful of them."
said Berry.
And that should have been it.
He should have told Giles how nice the cottage looked and what a lucky man he
was and they'd have walked around a while then maybe gone down to the pub, had
one drink, then off back to the coast. They would have done just that if, while
strolling by the rear of the cottage, he, Berry dumb-ass Morelli, had not
spotted a dark line along the edge of a window. Now the late Winstone Thorpe
had himself a firm ally.
"Hey Giles—you want to get
in here?"
"What d'you mean?"
"See, if I go fetch a
screwdriver from the car, I can slip it into this crack, push up the lever and
maybe—well, just a thought, ole buddy . . ."
"Ha," said Giles.
"One in the eye for Mr. Goronwy Davies, I think. Well spotted.
Berry."
"Who's Mr. Goronwy
Davies?"
"The lawyer in Pontmeurig.
The chap who won't give us a key until probate's complete."
"Ah, right."
And from then on they'd been
like two school kids on an adventure. The goddamn Hardy Boys strike again.
"You did like it. though?"
"Oh. yeah. Sure. It looked
in pretty good condition. All things considered."
"That's not what I
meant."
"We still on the right
road. Giles? It looks different."
"Just getting dark. Bound
to look different. You seem a bit nervy tonight. Berry."
"Me? Naw, tired is all.
Been a long day."
"I'm not tired. I'm exhilarated.
It always seems to renew me, going back there. I feel it's my place. Becoming
more like my place all the time. And Claire's of course. I mean—"
"Sure." Berry said.
No, he thought. It's not your
place at all. It's somebody else's place. Always be somebody else's place.
Chapter XVI
He'd dropped to the floor and found himself standing next to a sink. An
old-fashioned sink of white porcelain sticking out of the wall. No cupboards
underneath, just a metal bucket. It was gloomy in here, but there was no smell
of damp. Two spiders raced each other along the rim of the sink. Spiders didn't
like damp either—where had he read that?
It had been quite a squeeze
getting through the window, which was only a quarter pane. It seemed unlikely
that Giles would be able to manage it.