The Old Devils

by Kingsley Amis

  Now Sophie did look up. 'Oh, he doesn't, no, does he really?' , '_Yes__, always going on about where's Sophie these days.'

  'Oh no, really?'

  'Won't do him any harm either to get away for a bit.

  Now there's a bloke who says something if you like. If only the silly little thing would learn to leave it at that.'

  Seven - Alun

  1

  Soon after eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning Alun lifted the hatch at the rear of what he occasionally called the family car, or even our family car, though not in Rhiannon's hearing. The two were off to Birdarthur shortly. It had been agreed that Charlie and Sophie should follow them out the next day in time for lunch, with all four set to return late on the Friday. Alun's move to let the Cellan Davieses know of the impending trip had consisted in full of ringing their number once the previous noon, a foredoomed venture seeing that Gwen was expected at Sian Smith's for coffee, etc., and Malcolm strongly presumed to have left for the Bible, but it counted as not having been able to get hold of them. Peter had been told he really must come down, pick any time to suit himself, just turn up, and after a word or two about a bloody Welshman's invitation had conceded he might try. First categorically disowning any responsibility for anybody or anything, Tare Jones had consented to write down the number of the people called Gamer who lived two along from the telephone-free abode of Dai the Books.

  Alun had not so much lifted the hatch of his car as flung it boyishly upwards, which was something he would have done with no more and no less vivacity if he had thought he was being observed, and in that event whether by jobless school-leaver or high-ranking TV executive. First into the cargo-space went, in quick time, a carton of drinkables; twelve-year-old Scotch, classy spring water to put in it, gin, tonics, a rare bottle of Linie-Aquavit from Oslo, a much commoner bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream, ostensibly for Rhiannon, in fact no more than chiefly for her, one each of Asti Spumante and Golden Sweet Malaga absolutely solely for her, four large cold Special Brews in wet newspaper for him, and a spot of coffee liqueur and other muck he could not quite face simply throwing out of the house. Next he stowed a box of hand-picked groceries, featuring soused herring fillets, allegedly smoked oysters, German lump fish roe and other dainties thought to be proper to accompany the aquavit. He laid on top of this a flat paper bag containing a new pullover in yellow cashmere and two sports shirts still in their packaging.

  Trips, up to and including ones directed at funerals, had always heartened Alun, livened him up in prospect, and not just because you never knew what you might run into even in Blaenau Ffestiniog. It was admittedly getting a touch late with him for breaking new ground, however cruelly he might ravage the old. In addition, this coming trip was not a fit occasion for any of that, and besides there was nothing under Birdarthur in the for-his-eyes-only address book. A big part of the thrill could probably be put down to nothing more than anticipating a journey by car, by no means an everyday experience in the South Wales of the I930s and later, as he had been known to remind his London friends. But with all that said he got through the first part of the loading in fine breezy style, as also the second and duller part involving actual luggage and bedclothes and pillows assembled by Rhiannon after managing to get hold of Dai at the shop. The third part slowed him down.

  This part began with a typewriter, not the one from his study upstairs, the noble Japanese office-pattern needless-to-say electric job, but the lowly Italian portable, an acoustic model, as he would express it when he had the energy. Another carton followed it, not nearly such a nice one as the one full of drink, containing books and papers. The books included the _Concise Oxford__, a collapsing Roget's _Thesaurus, Y Geiriadur Mawr__ - The Big [Welsh – English / English-Welsh] Dictionary to him, a compilation notable for its _golygydd. ymgynghorol-__ the Rev Tydfil Meredith's _Courcey and Its Churches__, Sefton-Williams on Celtic mythology and the Brydan Complete Poems. Out of simulated personal need as well as feigned piety he took the lastmentioned volume with him everywhere he went within reason, pointless at best this trip perhaps with only Charlie and Sophie and possibly Peter to bowl over, but there it was. The papers in the carton consisted of typing paper and forty-six pages of a novel of whose existence only Rhiannon knew, together with a few notes.

  Doing some more work on this novel was an unstated reason for going to Birdarthur, already present somewhere in his mind before he blurted out the suggestion a couple of weeks before. He had knocked off the dreaded forty-six in six days in the spring, when a little bastard in BBC radio had tardily cancelled the definitive talk on the Welsh nonconformist conscience he had engaged to prepare and record, and he had not looked at them since. Now, under the Self-imposed pressure of a measured length of time in semi-confinement with no excuse for shirking, he was to apply himself to the hideous task of adding to them. As they stood, or with some minor surgery, they were supposed to be, he had striven to make them, his devout hope was that they were, the opening section of the only really serious piece of prose he had written since his schooldays. In more sanguine moods he softened this to his most serious, etc. But anyway a great deal, including the prospects for the whole undertaking, hung on whatever he would make of those forty-six in two or three hours' time.

  No wonder then that his demeanour was staid as he settled the creative container into place. And yet he felt an obscure excitement, nothing to do with any literary burgeoning except very remotely, just an internal squaring-up to a tiny bit of a leap in the dark. '1 was ever a fighter,' he muttered defiantly, continuing in a milder tone, 'or perhaps more accurately ever a medium-range light bomber designed for night operations and low-level reconnaissance. Thank you.' He reckoned he had it about as near right by now as he was ever going to get it.

  After that it was a cakewalk to shuttle the bloody puppy round to the char's daughter's, cancel the papers and fetch the ordinary suitcases and the rest of the gear out to the car. Last to go in were the heavy waterproofs and gumboots indispensable to the visitor to rural Wales at any season. The weather for the moment in fact was clear without being bright, though scattered showers were unadventurously forecast. Rhiannon turned up for the off at blokes' time as usual, wearing a dress with some sort of pattern; also shoes, or so Alun assumed. Likewise as usual on any journey she reached over and squeezed his hand when the wheels started turning.

  On Courcey the roads were practically empty, flushed of visitors by a lightning revolution in taste or nuclear accident. Even the streets of Birdarthur itself were unobstructed, with no obvious tourists to be seen. Brydan Books, dimly viewed by Dai as a pillar of greed and also as unethical competition, held no customers for the moment, nor was any Continental bus stuck on the acuteangled turn up to St Cattwg's church, in whose shadow the poet slept. There was some activity in the approaches to the Brydan Arms, though that had been just as true at mid morning when the place was still called the White Rose. With the end of its function as a port and the closure of the metal works and the silica quarry, Birdarthur had shown marks of unemployment, but none were visible now that the town had been designated or turned into an enterprise zone and the unemployment had gone away somewhere else.

  Alun took them round the corner by the Brydan Burger Bar and into the road - unmade for centuries, metalled now to suit visiting traffic - that ran above the foreshore and the larger and deeper part of the bay. The tide was full, near the turn, the sea flat calm and ginger-beer grey touched with green and yellow. The sight of the sun going down here had been a special favourite of Brydan's, people were always saying, and indeed he had been well placed physically to witness it from his cottage near the start of the row facing the water, though how often he had been up to taking it in, even when technically conscious, was another question. After extensive refitment to mend the devastations of his tenure, the building had been converted into a museum and gift shop, especially gift shop, and the one next door a little later into a coffee shop and refreshment bar 'that, excusably in the circumstances, sol
d no strong drink. From the secured outer door of this a lone elderly female in a parachute jacket, of necessity an American, was turning away in bafflement just as the Weavers passed.

  They passed along to the end of the line of cottages where there was a rough triangle of waste ground spread with refuse old and new. A cinder-path led on from here, signposted Brydan's Walk, though again local opinion doubted whether you would ever have got boyo to set foot on it, there being no pub or free-pound-note bloody counter at the other end. By prearrangement Alun sent Rhiannon on foot down the walk while he turned the car round and backed it after her for eighty yards or so, until the path was too narrow for him to go on. So he stopped there and more or less watched her unload all the stuff through the hatchway. Then he drove back to the triangle and parked arse-first up a muddy and precipitous lane and hurried to rejoin her.

  'There must be an easier way of doing this,' he said, catching her up actively with the case of booze clasped in his arms, 'but I can't seem to think of one.'

  'Oh, I can. You climbing over and out of the back and taking the whole lot out and carrying it to the cottage and putting it all away.'

  'Strange the way 'things come back to one. Before we left I could hardly have told you which direction Dai's place was, and now we're here I haven't even had to hesitate.'

  'Whereas I remembered this bit perfectly. Very strange.'

  'Put those down and I'll come back for them, go on. Oh, all right, suffer then. What's for lunch?'

  'Pork pie and baked beans.'

  'Did you bring the mustard?'

  'Yes, and Spanish onion and sweet pickle.'

  'Little genius.'

  They had reached Dai's place, not the prettiest or best-situated on this side of Birdarthur but by no means the dampest or the smelliest, a two-up-two-down affair with a sliver taken off one of the two up to form a narrow bathroom-lavatory, so narrow that only someone with thighs rather on the short side could have expected to use it in full comfort. Rhiannon went to and fro opening all the windows.

  'No trouble round here guessing who was brought up in a bloody town,' said Alun. 'Say the word and I'll knock a hole in the kitchen wall for you.'

  'You can take these out to the bin,' said Rhiannon, passing him a trayful of elderly foodstuffs. 'How long has anyone not been here?'

  'Hey, some of these are all right, aren't they? What about this pot of - '

  'You eat what you fancy.'

  When he had checked in with the Gomers and established that no dollar-laden commissions had materialized in the last couple of hours, Alun cleared a space for his typewriter at one end of a smallish table by the front-room window. Doing this entailed shifting a number of uncommonly horrible china dogs and other creatures. 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 i
nterest 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.

  Before he had got as far as pulling the contents out his demeanour changed to a frenzied casualness. Head on one. side, eyebrows raised and eyes almost shut, mouth turned down at the corners, he condescendingly turned back the flap, exposed the top half of the first sheet and allowed himself to let his glance wander over the typewritten lines there before he actually fell asleep as he sat. What he read woke him up with a start and set him doing what he had very, very nearly done a minute before: leap out of his chair and go glug-bloody-glug with the Scotch, not forgetting to top up his glass before returning whence he had come. There he slumped and stared out at the bay and tried to reason with himself.

  _Of course__ the first couple of sentences had reminded him of the opening passages of dozens of stories and novels by Welshmen, especially those written in the first half of the century. That was the whole point, to stress continuity, to set one's face against anything that could be called modernism and to show that the old subject, life in the local villages, in the peculiar South-Wales amalgam of town and country, had never gone away, in fact had a new ironical significance in these days of decline. Worth doing, agreed, but had he done it, any of it? Well, he might have. Like Socrates now, who when his time came (he remembered reading) had quite willingly and cheerfully drunk off the hemlock, he laid the typescript down on the table just like that and began at the beginning.