"That wouldn't happen to
you. Giles." Berry said, meaning it. "You're not in that mould."
"What's that mean?"
Berry shrugged.
"Anyway I reckon we've
been thrown a lifeline, Claire and me. To pull us out of our complacency. Just
came out the blue. Something we'd just never thought of. We drove out there—couple
of weeks ago—first thing in the morning. Quite a grey morning, everything
really drab. But by the time we got there it was a gorgeous day, and it got
better and better. And we found the cottage almost straight away just as if we
were being guided. Up the street, over the bridge, past the church, along this
shady country lane and there it was. I felt—"
Giles hugged the lamp-post in a
burst of passion, then pulled away. "Bloody beer. This is not like me, not
like me at all. You'll go back in there and tell them what I said and all have
a fucking good laugh."
"Aw, Giles, come on . .
."
"Sorry, sorry ... an
injustice."
"Those guys didn't even
notice me leave, 'cept for Winstone. So what did you feel?"
"What?"
"When you saw the place.
What did you feel?"
"Look, here's a cab. I'll have
to grab it. OK? Excitement, Berry. Only more than that, much more. I didn't
want to come back. Course it was all locked up. we couldn't get in that day,
just peering through the windows like Hansel and bloody Gretel. It was
enchanting. I'd have stayed there all day and slept on the grass when it got
dark." Giles got into
the taxi. "Tell the buggers that, why don't you. I don't care."
Berry watched the cab's tail-lights
vanish into the traffic along what used to be Fleet Street.
Then he went back into the bar.
"Those stories," Berry said. "All shit, right? Kind of,
let's put the frighteners on ole Giles."
"Yes and no. old
boy." Winstone Thorpe said. "Yes and no."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning, probably, that
nobody poisoned Charlie Firth. Can you really see that man dining on unlicensed
premises?"
At close to midnight, old
Winstone and Berry Morelli were the only two left. Berry because he thought he
had nobody to go home to tonight and Winstone because—as he'd told them all earlier-—he
suspected that when he walked out of the bar this time he'd never come back. People
had been shaking his hand and promising to look in on him sometime. Berry
didn't think any of them ever would.
"And no?"
"No what?"
"You said yes and no."
"Ah." Winstone
finished off his last Glenfiddich. At this
hour
even he wouldn't get served again. "I suppose . . . Well, I was drinking
with our property chap the other day. Do you know how many English people have
bought homes in Wales over the past few years? Tens of thousands, apparently.
Mind boggles. Got them cheap, you see—well, cheap compared with the south-east.
Plenty of spare cash about down here these days. So it's holiday homes, retirement
homes, views of the mountains, views of the sea."
Winstone put his glass down,
sat back. "Backs to the wall, now, the Joneses and the Davieses. Getting driven
out, along with what's left of their language, by all these
foreigners searching for the old rural idyll bit."
Like Giles.
"Very pretty and all that,
apparently, this cottage of Claire's. They're so enchanted with the place,
they're talking about leaving London altogether and trying to make a living out
there ... or even commute, for God's sake."
Winstone shook his head sadly.
"Pretended I was asleep but really I was the only one listening to him. Oh
dear . . . Bad news, old boy. Going to get ugly. Seen it before. Nothing drives
people to loony extremes more than religion and national pride."
"We never learned much
about Wales at school, back home."
"A hard and bitter land,
old boy. Don't have our sensibilities, never been able to afford them. We go
there in our innocence, the English, and we're degraded and often destroyed.
I'm talking about North Wales and the West where they've always danced on the
edge of the abyss. Look, this is most unlike me. but is there some club we could
go on to?"
Berry smiled. "It isn't
the end, Winstone. They said you could freelance for them, right?"
"Not the same, old boy. Wife
gone, kids abroad. Paper's been my family" Winstone put a hand on Berry's
arm and the ancient eyes flickered. "Look, you put the arm on young Giles.
Persuade him to get the bloody place sold. Soon as he can. We're really not meant
to be there, you know, the English. Stop him. I mean it. You have to do this
for the boy. He won't survive.
Listen
to me. this is not the drink."
Berry met Winstone's urgent,
bloodshot gaze and saw some long-buried sorrow there. "C'mon," he
said. "I know somewhere." He thought Winstone was suddenly looking
too old and too sober. "Anyway, you try and talk Giles out of something,
he just gets more determined."
"He's a decent chap,
compared to most of us," Winstone said. "But naive. Innocent. Throw
everything away if somebody doesn't stop him. You see—as an American you may
not understand this, but the thing is, Giles made the big time too soon. What's
he now, thirty-three, thirty-four? My day, you were lucky if you'd made it to
the Nationals at all by that age. So now Giles is looking around and he's thinking,
where on earth do I go from here? What's there left to do? Sort of premature
mid-life crisis, everything comes younger these days. And of course he can see
all the editors getting alarmingly younger too. One day his copy's being
handled by some chap who only shaves twice a week. Or worse still," Winstone
got unsteadily to his feet and reached for his raincoat, "not shaving at
all, if you see what I mean."
"Women." Berry said.
Winstone scowled. "So he's
looking for a new adventure, But he thinks—fatal this—he thinks he's looking
for his soul."
"In Wales?"
"Insanity." Winstone
paused in the doorway, took a last look around the almost deserted bar. His
face was pale, his jowls like tallow dripping down a candle. "The boy was right.
I talk too much nonsense. So now nobody believes my stories anymore."
"Winstone, Giles was
smashed."
The old journalist smiled
wistfully and walked out into the street, where the night was warm but rain was
falling. "You know, old boy," he said after a moment, turning and looking
around him in apparent confusion. "I must say I feel rather odd."
"It's gonna pass, Winstone,
believe me, it's gonna pass, You just got to find a new . . . Hey—"
Winstone gripped the lamp-post which
Giles had hugged in his drunken excitement. "Do you know what, old
boy?" he said conversationally. "I'm think I'm having another
stroke."
Winstone Thorpe quietly slid
down to his knees on the wet pavement, as if offering a final prayer to the old
gods of what used to be Fleet Street.
"Shit," Berry
breathed. He stared down at Winstone in horror. The old man smiled.
Berry dashed back and stuck his
head round the pub door. "Somebody call an ambulance! Listen, I'm not
kidding. It's ole Winstone!"
He rushed back to the old man.
"Hey, come on, let's get you back inside, OK?"
But, as he bent down, Winstone
toppled—almost nonchalantly, it seemed—on to his face. As if his prayer had
been answered.
Chapter VIII
"Dead?" Giles said. "But that's wonderful."
Claire passed him his coffee.
"Oh, Giles, let's not get—"
"I know, I know, I'm sorry, it's
the beer. Bit pissed. But it is rather wonderful, isn't it? Not for the old
boy, of course, but we've all got to go sometime and, bloody hell, he couldn't
have chosen a better time for us, could he?"
"You can't say that yet,"
Claire said. 'They might not even let you do it."
She'd been waiting up for him
with the news, that mischievous little tilt to her small mouth; she knew something
he didn't. It was as near as Claire ever came to expressing excitement.
Giles had both hands around his
coffee cup, squeezing it.
"Let them try and stop me," he
said. "Just let the bastards try. Did it say on the news what his majority
was?"
"I don't think so. They
may have. It was still dawning on me, the significance of it, you know."
"Right then." Giles
sprang to his feet. "Let's find out."
"Will you get anybody?
It's nearly one o'clock."
"No problem." He was
already stabbing out the night desk number on the cordless phone. Standing, for
luck, under the framed blow-up of Claire's first photograph of the cottage, the
one taken from between the two sycamores at the entrance to the lane. They'd
taken down a Michael Renwick screenprint to make space for it on the crowded buttermilk
wall above the rebuilt fireplace.
"Peter, that you? Oh,
sorry, look is Peter there? It's Giles Freeman. Yes, I'll wait."
There were blow-ups of five of
Claire's photographs on the walls. None of the award-winning Belfast stuff,
nothing heavy. Just the atmosphere pics: the old woman collecting driftwood on
the shore, the shadowed stillness of a cathedral close at dusk, that kind of thing.
The picture of the cottage was the only one that hadn't appeared in a paper or
a magazine. Giles loved it. He was still amazed by Claire's ability to move at
once to the right angle, to link into a scene.
"Peter. Listen, sorry to
bother you. but I've just heard about Burnham-Lloyd, the MP for Glanmeurig. Was
there time for you to run it in the final?" Giles sniffed. "Well I think
you should have. Peter. I really do, even if it is only Wales." He and Claire
exchanged meaningful glances.
"Anyway, listen Peter, what was
his majority?"
Giles waited. Claire perched on
the edge of the sofa and cupped her small face in her slender hands, short,
fair hair tufting through the fingers. She wore a cream silk dressing gown and
wooden sandals. Giles, re-energized by the news, eyed her lustfully.
"Bloody hell." he
said. 'That's not bad. That's not at all bad. Thank you, Peter, thank you very
much indeed."
He cleared the line and made a
whooshing sound.
"Narrow?" Claire
asked.
Giles said, very slowly and
precisely, "Eight hundred and seventy-one." His freckles were aglow
again. He tossed the phone almost to the ceiling and caught it. "Eight
hundred
and seventy fucking one! It's marginal, Claire! Plaid's been slowly gaining on
him for years! Oh God, I really do feel something's working for us."
"I suppose," Claire
said thoughtfully, "I feel a bit scared now. It's all coming at once.
Propelling us into something. Out of our control." She was still feeling
upset, actually, by
her mother's reaction. She'd phoned her while Giles was out, to explain
about the inheritance, tonight being the first opportunity since her parents
had returned from their cruise.
Giles was hungrily pacing the
carpet "What I'll suggest is a bit of a recce. Zoom up there this weekend.
Take the air. Talk to people."
"I can't. I've got that
thing for the
Observer
in
Norwich." Claire was glad to put it off. She'd been frightened by her own
emotional response when they'd first gone to look at the cottage. The feeling
that somehow she was
meant
to live
there. Now she wanted to slow things down, give them time to think. Giles,
however, had to be firing on all cylinders or
none at all.
"Well, all right, next
weekend." he said impatiently. "You see, what we have to do is build
this up as a really significant mid-term by-election, knock up a couple of prelim
pieces, hype it up a bit. We can have the cottage as our base, save them hotel
bills and stuff. And while we're there ... I mean, with the run-up and everything,
we're talking well over three weeks for a by-election campaign. So we can do
all the groundwork, either for persuading them they really need a full-time
staffer in Wales or setting up some decent freelance outlets. I would have
sounded people out tonight, but they were all being so bloody snide and superior."