He looked back towards the lane
which led to the judge's house. It would have been perfect. Not too big, not
too small, nicely screened. But a lost cause. Christ, he'd never even heard of
the old chap having a grand-daughter. Recluse who never left the village, never
even went into Pontmeurig.
Maybe—he brightened momentarily—maybe
she'd want to sell. But then—his spirits sagging again—what would she do but
advertise it in the London papers?
It was, he thought, only a matter of time. They were bound to discover
this place, the English. Some young stockbroker-type would cruise out here in
his Porsche and spot a derelict bam, ripe for conversion, and make the farmer
an offer he'd be a fool to refuse. And another farmer would hear about it and
he'd sell
two
of his buildings. Then
some poor widow would be staggered at how much she could get for her cottage.
And, in no time at all, there'd be a little colony of English, enough to hold a
bridge party with After Eight mints.
Dai gave Y Groes a final rueful
glance before turning into the forestry.
And in time, he thought, the
little clutch of eggs will turn rotten in the nest.
Part Two
NOT MEANT TO BE THERE
Chapter V
ENGLAND
Lying back, red hair all over the pillow and the cane headboard, Miranda
applied the
Zippo to the end of her cigarette and said, "So how was it for
you,
Miranda?"
Berry Morelli said,
"Huh?" the sweat on his back was merely damp now, and chilly. It was an
hour before dawn, the bedroom half-lit from the street.
In a dreamy voice, Miranda
replied," Well, since you ask, Miranda, not too wonderful. I can say, with
some degree of confidence, that I have definitely had better. I suppose, as
rapes go, it was not
without
consideration
. . ."
"Rape?" Berry Morelli
sat up. "You said
rape
?"
"Well, if it was meant to
be love-making," Miranda said, "it was distressingly short on the
customary endearments. In fact, now that I think about it, it was entirely
silent, bar the odd sharp intake of breath."
"Hey, listen I . . ."
Berry leaned over her and helped himself to one of her cigarettes from the
bedside table.
". . .And then I began to
detect in the rapist a. . .sort of underlying absence of joy, would that
describe it? One's first experience of
pre-
coital
tristesse. Or perhaps it was simply lack of interest, which would be
considerably
less tolerable."
Miranda turned onto her side to face him, looking pale and fragile - which she
wasn't - in the hazy streetlight from the uncurtained window.
"OK," she said.
"What's eating you, Morelli?"
Berry hauled the black hair out
of his eyes. The hair was still wet. From the rain, not the sweat.
"Listen, I'm sorry."
"Oh, please. . . not the
apology. I expect I enjoyed it more than you anyway." She covered up a
breast and stared into space, smoking.
This Miranda. You could never
figure out if she was deeply wounded or what. Berry rolled out of bed and into his
bathrobe. "You want some tea? He was fully into tea now, no coffee these
days. Very British.
"No sugar," Miranda
said. "No, wait . . . make that two sugars. I suspect, God help me, that
the night is yet young."
"I'll fetch a tray.
Black?"
"Morelli, we haven't all
got the zeal of the converted."
"OK." While Berry's hands
moved things around in the tiny kitchen, his head was still walking the
streets. There'd been cabs around the hospital but he'd needed to walk. Death did
that to you, he thought. You had to keep moving, proving to yourself you still
could.
A bad night, in the end.
And he'd lost a friend.
He couldn't afford to lose a friend
in this country. It only left one, if you didn't include Miranda. Which he didn't,
yet.
"Biscuits, too, Morelli,"
she called imperiously from the bedroom. Miranda, whom he'd often find in his
bed but whom he hesitated to call his regular girlfriend. Who'd gone home with
him the first time because, she explained, she liked the sound of his name, the
way you liked the sound of Al Pacino and Robert de Niro. There were dukes in Miranda's
family and her aunt had once been a temporary lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne.
Berry liked the sound of Miranda's name too, the way you liked the sound of cucumber
sandwiches and Glyndebourne.
"Morelli!"
"What?"
"Biscuits."
"Yeah, I heard."
"The chocolate ginger
things from Sainsbury's. OK?"
"Right."
Earlier tonight Miranda's good mood
had blown like a light bulb after she'd produced tickets for Peter Gabriel and he'd
told her he wouldn't be able to make the gig on account of it was Old
Winstone's farewell binge. Old Winstone, his friend.
She hadn't believed him. "What's
he doing having it on a Sunday night?"
"All about Monday morning.
If he gets smashed, he doesn't wake up till way past the time he normally goes
to work. Thus avoiding the initial trauma of his first day of retirement."
"You think I'm awfully
stupid don't you, Morelli?" Miranda had said.
"Listen, I'm . . ."
"Sorry. Yes."
Berry put on the light as he carried the tea tray into the bedroom.
"I didn't figure on you being here when I got in."
"I suppose that explains it."
Miranda said. "You thought you were shagging someone else."
"You never came back before.
Not the same night. Not after a fight. How'd you get in anyway?"
"I'm frightfully
unpredictable," she said, sitting up, breasts wobbling at him and somehow
making the trayful of cups jiggle in his hands. "It's part of my
appeal." She giggled, a sound like Chinese bells, signifying things were
OK again, for the time being. "And I'm not going to tell you how I got in,
because I'm also terribly clever and rather mysterious."
Mysterious, she wasn't. In
spite of everything, he grinned, wishing he could say she was his girlfriend.
Why was he so goddamn insecure? He set the tea tray down on the bed and Miranda
reached across to pour. "Too strong as usual, Morelli. You're an awfully
selfish bastard."
He flinched a little. It was
what his old man had said, leading to Berry's decision to leave the States.
You're a goddamn selfish bastard. You don't
have to agree with a fucking thing I stand for, but when you screw things up
for me to further your own pissant career, that's indefensible, boy.
"Listen, I guess what
happened was I used you," he confessed to Miranda, "to reinforce my
hold on life. How's that sound?"
"Pretentious."
"It was kind of a heavy
night."
"You're not pissed, though, are
you?"
"No. I . . . Jesus, this guy—a
friend—he just died on me."
"To be quite honest I
thought somebody was dying on me" Miranda said. "Don't do it again.
Wake me up first. I might've missed it."
"Yeah. I'm . . "
Shit, he seemed to spend half his time apologising to people. Maybe he should
apologise for apologising too much. He felt he could still hear the ambulance
siren, the efficient clunk of the rear doors after they'd loaded the stretcher.
The finality of it. He'd known then that it was final.
"Oh for God's sake, Morelli
. . ." Miranda drowned her cigarette end in the dregs of her tea, a small
rebellion against her refined upbringing. "Tell mummy all about it. Who
died on you? You don't mean really died? As in, you know . . . turning up one's
toes?"
Berry drank his tea, not quite
knowing where to start. He detected mild amusement in Miranda's green eyes. How
could it be really serious if he'd strolled in afterwards and screwed her,
however perfunctory that had been?
"I ever tell you about
this guy I know, Giles Freeman?"
"The political reporter? I
met him. if you remember, that time at Verity's. Very dashing and sporty, but
terribly earnest. Quiet little wife, a bit hamsterish."
Berry admired the way Miranda
took in the essence of people she'd met only in passing. Ought to have been a much
better actress than she was—maybe she just found it hard to let her own outrageous
personality be submerged by lesser ones.
"You're saying Giles
Freeman is dead?"
"Huh? No, shit. Giles is fine.
That is . . ." He put the empty cup on the tea-tray and set it down on the
carpet. And then he asked her, because this really was the bottom line. "You
ever get to Wales?"
"Wales?" Miranda
patted around the duvet for her cigarettes. "What's Wales got to do with
it?"
"You ever go there?"
"Morelli." she said,
"do I look like the kind of person who has Welsh connections? Like someone
who reads the Bible all the time, plays rugby and eats seaweed?"
Berry thought about this.
"Maybe not." he conceded. He found her cigarettes in a fold of the
duvet, lit two and passed her one. "Folks do that in Wales? They eat
seaweed?"
"So it is said. They make
some kind of bread from it. I went there once, but it was depressing. It
rained."
Miranda. If she visited the Taj
Mahal during a monsoon it would forever be depressing.
"But this is Britain,
right?" Berry said. "This is Wales, England? Same island. What I mean
. . . Welsh folks live in England. English folks live in Wales."
"If they're desperate enough.
Or they've been offered some terribly lucrative job out there, and there can't
be many of those. Why do you ask?"
"OK." Berry said.
"Hypothetical, right? If you had friends aiming to move to Wales, what would
you say to them?"
Miranda's mouth twitched
impatiently. "I'd probably say au revoir rather than goodbye because most
of my friends wouldn't even survive in Dorking. Morelli, what is all this about?"
Berry sighed. "Listen, forget
the hypothetical shit. What it's about is there's this guy moving to Wales and I
find myself in the position of having to try and prevent that. I mean, Christ.
I never went there, I don't plan to go there, but I got to talk this guy out of
it. Guy who wants to make his home there more than anywhere else in the world,
however bizarre that sounds to you. That's it. That's the situation."
Under the duvet Miranda ran a
hand across his thigh and back again. "Nothing doing, then?" she
said, affecting a squeaky East End accent.
"Gimme a break."
"Morelli, I'm sure there's
an awfully interesting story behind all this but I don't somehow think I want
to go into it after all. It sounds frightfully complicated, and"—she reached
over to her teacup on the bedside cabinet and tipped her cigarette into it
half-smoked—"quite honestly, I find the whole subject of Wales the most
awful turn-off."
Miranda snuggled down, poking
her bottom into Berry's right thigh and within a minute was asleep, leaving him
to switch off the light and stare uncertainly into the blotchy dark, trying to
figure out how this situation came about.
Chapter VI
That evening, seeing Winstone Thorpe flick open his ancient hooded eyes,
Berry had thought of an old tomcat on a back-porch alerted by the flutter of
wings.
"Where's that then?"
Winstone had asked in that tired, diffident way he had."
"It's a smallish country sort
of welded onto the side of England, Winstone," Giles Freeman explained,
and he giggled drunkenly. "It's where the M4 peters out. They've got
mountains there. Play rugby. Sing a lot."