"Oh . . ." old
Winstone Thorpe chuckled and his chins wobbled. "You mean Wales. Sorry old
boy, must've misheard."
Sure you did, you old bastard.
Berry thought affectionately. He looked at Winstone across the pub table. Then
he looked at Giles, who was clearly too drunk to realise he was being set up.
Several of the other journalists, who knew Winstone of old, glanced up from
their drinks and grinned.
"Wales, eh?" Winstone said.
"Oh dear."
There he goes. Berry thought.
"All right," Giles
Freeman said testily. "What's that supposed to mean?" Giles had drunk
maybe five pints of beer, and he wasn't used to it. His fair hair was in
disarray and his long face was hot and shiny, freckles aglow. He was too drunk
to realise how bored they all were with hearing about his incredible piece of
luck—well, Claire's actually, her inheritance. But an utterly amazing old
place, splendid countryside, absolutely terrific atmosphere. Just being there made
you realise how totally cardboard and artificial your urban environment was.
So Giles had fallen heavily for
some backwoods shack.
And now old Winstone Thorpe, who had
retired that day after more than half a lifetime on the
Daily Telegraph
, was blinking lazily beneath eyebrows like thatched
eaves and saying "Oh dear."
"Well, come on,
Winstone," Giles was leaning aggressively across the table now. Berry had
never seen him like this before; somebody had hit a nerve. "If you've got something
to say, just bloody say it."
"But. dear chap . .
." Winstone put down his empty whisky glass and looked around vaguely
until Ray Wheeler of the
Mirror
slipped him a replacement. "Ah, a fellow Christian. Thank you. No, you
see—am I stating the obvious here? You're an Englishman, old boy."
Somewhere a clock chimed. It was eleven
o'clock, and there was a momentary silence in the battered Edwardian bar of
what old Winstone Thorpe maintained was the last halfway decent pub in what
used to be Fleet Street.
Berry found himself nodding.
Aside, perhaps, from old Winstone himself, Giles Freeman was just about the most
English guy he'd ever met. even here in England.
"Now look, Winstone."
Giles took an angry gulp of his beer. "That is just incredibly simplistic.
I mean, have you ever even been to Wales? Come on now. tell the truth?"
Wrong question, Giles, thought
Berry. You just walked into it. He leaned back and waited for Winstone Thorpe's
story, knowing there had to be one.
"Well, since you ask . .
." The venerable reporter unbuttoned his weighty tweed jacket and lifted
his whisky glass onto his knee. "Matter of fact. I
was
in Wales once."
"No kidding." Berry
said and then shut up because there were guys here who still had him down as a
no-talent asshole on the run. Things had changed since his last time here, as a
student in the seventies. People had gotten tighter, more suspicious—even
journalists. They were coming across like Americans imagined the English to
be—stiff, superior. And they were suspicious of him because he wasn't like
Americans were supposed to be—didn't drink a lot, never ate burgers. They
weren't programmed for a vegetarian American hack who'd come up from the
Underground press and dumped on his distinguished dad. Berry looked around the three
tables pushed together and saw complacent smiles on prematurely-florid faces.
These were mainly Parliamentary reporters like Giles. In this job, after a
while, after long hours in the Westminster bars, journalists began to look like
MPs.
"Early sixties, must've
been." Winstone said. His face had long gone beyond merely florid to the
colour and texture of an overripe plum. "Sixty-two? Sixty-three? Anyway,
we were dragged out to Wales on a Sunday on the son of story that sounds as if
it's going to be better than it actually turns out. Somebody'd shot this old
fanner and his son, twelve-bore job, brains all over the wall. Lived miles from
anywhere, up this God-forsaken mountain. Turned out the housekeeper did it,
sordid domestic stuff, only worth a couple of pars. But that's beside the
point."
Berry glanced over at Giles who
was trying to look bored. Giles caught the glance and rolled his eyes towards
the ceiling. Berry got along OK with Giles, who was less clannish than the
others.
"Point is," Winstone
said. "Locals treated us as if we were lepers. Here we are, sitting in
this grim, freezing so-called guest house like the lost bloody patrol—Sunday, so
all the pubs are closed, can you imagine that—and all we can hear is the rain
and the natives jabbering away at each other in Welsh, which is just about the
world's most incomprehensible bloody language. We try to quiz the landlady: Are
you sure you didn't know them, Mrs. Davies, they only lived two hundred yards
away, surely you heard the shots, didn't you?" Everybody in Wales is
called Jones or Davies, terrible interbreeding. 'Will you take your tea now?' she
says. 'It's nearly time for the chapel.' Then she waddles out on us. And she'd
been to chapel twice that day already!
"And we're there for hours
and bloody hours, Freddie Payne of the
Express
,
Jack Beddall of the
Sketch
, and me,
knocking on the doors of these broken-down farmhouses, trying to drag a statement
out of Chief-lnspector-bloody-Davies-no-relation. Trying to cultivate the local
reporter who didn't even drink, even when it wasn't Sunday. Getting absolutely nowhere.
Dreadful times, old boy."
Giles Freeman sighed. "Look,
that's . . ."
A restraining hand went up.
Nobody deflected old Winstone Thorpe from his punchline.
"So, what I did in the
end. I went over to the local chapel and picked a name off a bloody gravestone.
Emrys Lloyd—never forget it. And I wandered back to the pub and button-holed
one of these local shepherd-types. 'Look here, I suspect this is a long-shot, old
boy, but I don't suppose you knew this great-uncle of mine. Emrys Lloyd, his
name. Told he used to live in this neck of the woods . . .'"
He paused while everybody laughed,
except Giles. 'Told 'em my name was Ivor Lloyd and I'd been born in Wales but
moved out at an early age, always regretted I'd never learned the good old language,
all this bullshit . . . Well, dammit, you couldn't stop the sods talking after
that. Gave me everything I wanted. No longer one of the enemy, you see. I could
be trusted. They even felt sorry for me because I was a bloody exile in
England, can you believe that?"
"No," said Giles
Freeman loudly, something catching fire behind his freckles. "It's utter
bollocks. You made it up. You've always made things up, you old bastard."
Winstone Thorpe looked hurt.
"Not a bit of it, old boy, that was precisely what happened. And the thing
is—"
"Utter balls." Giles
said contemptuously. He glared across the table at Winstone. "You're just
a boring old con-man."
And that, Berry perceived, was
the point at which the other guys decided that Giles, irrespective of the
amount of booze he'd put away, had overstepped the mark and should be dealt
with for pissing on a national monument.
Giles didn't notice the guys
exchanging glances. "You know why the Welsh are suspicious of the
English?" he demanded, slapping the table, making waves in all the
glasses.
"Actually." said
Shirley Gillies, one of the BBC's political reporters, "I once—"
"Just hang on a minute,
Shirley. Listen. I'll tell you why. Because we're so . . . bloody . . . smug.
We think we're the greatest bloody race on earth. We think we're great by tradition.
And the idea of people here in Britain, in our island who don't want to speak
English . . . we think that's a joke. Because ours is the language of
Shakespeare and Keats and Barbara bloody Cartland . . ."
"Actually." Shirley
Gillies repeated, as if Giles was some stray drunk who didn't really belong in
their comer. "I had rather a similar experience of being frozen out in
Wales. Only I wasn't as clever as you. Winstone. I rather left with egg on my
face."
And this mention of egg
reminded Charlie Firth, of the
Mail
,
of the time he and his wife had gone into this Welsh snack bar for a meal just
as it was about to close. The waitresses had muttered to each other—in Welsh,
of course—and eventually served Charlie and Mrs. Firth a couple of scrambled
eggs which had left them both with seriously upset stomachs. "Had to stop
off at about seven public lavs on the way hack." Charlie said. "Like,
you expect it in Spain, but . . ."
"Poisoned." said Max
Canavan, of the
Sun
. "They poisoned
you on account of you was English, yeh?"
Voices had risen, everybody
grinning, suddenly having fun thinking up horror stories about Wales. Or more
likely, Berry figured,
making them up
as a communal putdown for Giles. Other hacks in the bar, not part of Winstone's
farewell pissup, were gathering around, sensing that electric change in the
atmosphere, noses almost visibly twitching. The pack instinct was always strong
among British national journalists. Guys from papers which were bitter rivals
hung out together like a street gang.
"Oh dear me. look."
Old Winstone said. "I didn't want to start—"
"Always been like that,"
said Brian McAllister of the Press Association. "I remember once I was in
Colwyn flamin' Bay . . . Anybody ever been to Colwyn Bay?"
"Called in once, but it
was closed." Charlie Firth said.
"Bloody Welsh," one
of the newcomers said. "Frogs, Krauts, Eyeties—I can get along with all of
'em. but the bloody Welsh . . ."
"Right." Giles was on
his feet, swaying. freckles ablaze. "I've fucking had enough of
this." He was very angry and began to extricate himself from the table.
"Bigoted, racist
bastards . . ."
"No, mate, they're the
racists," Ray Wheeler of the
Mirror
said gleefully. "The Welsh. Ever since we beat the brown stuff out of 'em
back in, when was it, I dunno, Edward the First and all that."
"Piss off" Giles
snarled, and slammed his glass down so hard that it cracked in two places.
Giles being Giles, he paid for it on his way out.
Berry hesitated a moment, then
followed him.
Chapter VII
Giles had been pacing the pavement under a mild summer drizzle. As Berry
came up behind him he swung round murderously. Berry swiftly put a lamp-post
between them.
"Who the hell's
that?" Giles said.
Berry stepped out from behind
the post.
"Oh," Giles said.
"You."
"Yeah."
"If it was that fucking
Firth I was going to—"
"Sure."
Giles grinned, white teeth
flashing in the headlight of a Bentley whispering somebody home. "Bit
pissed. Those bastards." He pushed fingers through his heavy fair hair.
"Feel a bit of a prat now, actually. Shouldn't have let them wind me up.
Shouldn't have gone for old Winstone like that. Not like me. Am I very
pissed?"
Berry looked him up and down.
"Smashed outta your skull," he said.
Giles laughed. "You're
probably quite a decent guy, Berry, for an American. You didn't say anything
bad Wales."
"That's because I never
went there, Giles. It most likely is the armpit of Britain."
"Bastard."
"Sure."
The pub door opened and Giles
swung round again in case it was somebody he felt he ought to hit. Ted Wareham,
of the
Independent,
came out grasping
a bottle of Scotch and didn't notice them.
"So you're leaving us,
Giles," Berry said.
Giles said, rather wearily,
"I don't know. Don't know what to do. For a while I've been looking around
thinking it's time I moved on. Where do you go? It's a trap."
"Trap?"
"The money for one
thing," Giles said. "We moan sometimes, but, bloody hell, where else
can you collect on this scale in our job? Plus, it's an addictive sort of life.
Policing the Great and Good, or whatever it is we do. But the thought of
spending another thirty years around this bit of London, drinking with the same
blokes, getting older at shabbier and ending up, at best, as some lovable father
figure with a face full of broken veins and a knackered liver . . ."