by Burke, John
Ellen pushed back her chair. “On second thoughts, let’s leave it at that. Charge it to Room 13, will you?” Afterwards she tried to laugh about it. She was, after all, travelling in order to find out just such things. But still she was upset. Perhaps she had been pushing it too hard this last couple of weeks. Perhaps she should cheat a little and take a few days off, find somewhere nice, relax before going on with the gruelling business of eating, drinking, and squabbling with waiters.
When this pilgrimage was over, would she ever be able to eat in a restaurant without mentally chalking up points and preparing some sly little test for the staff?
She didn’t sleep well. Although at this season of the year the central heating was certainly not on, the pipes belched strange booming noises at intervals. At three o’clock in the morning a spasmodic metal tapping began, to be replaced an hour later by a sly spasmodic squeak from the hotel sign beneath her window. Traffic woke up and began to come and go in unpredictable flurries.
At breakfast she carefully ignored the young man when he settled down to his bacon and eggs. When she asked for her bill she was kept waiting while a pallid woman with sleep-sullen eyes turned over sheets of paper, shook her head, and laboriously wrote out the figures.
Ellen was glad to be on the road again.
The Welsh mountains were grey whalebacks against the sky. The steely morning light grew harsh, striking up off the road and off the bonnet of her car. Then blue mellowed the dazzle. The shadowy hills took on new, blurred patterns – lumps of trees, huddles of rock, an occasional house pinned to a jagged slope, and moving blobs of cottonwool which must be sheep.
Plenty of time to spare. Ellen drove steadily. She had checked her map and notebook. Good restaurants, like good crops, were thin on the ground in Wales. Even adequate hotels had to be sought out. There could be the thrill of fresh, authentic discovery.
She coasted down a narrow river valley, green and dark, flickering, the road and water stabbed by sunlight through a lattice of branches.
She would turn off at the foot of the valley and eat at a place stressed in her book by a large question-mark. Then she could have a leisurely afternoon before heading for Cwmfraw, where she had a booking for the night.
The question-mark began to resonate the moment she arrived. There were two large coaches parked outside, and the noise from within was gay, not to say rowdy. Her first quick assessment was discouraging: canned music and tomato ketchup.
“For one, miss?” The head waiter combined the functions of doorman, stimulant, depressant, organiser, benevolent uncle and bouncer. “For one?” His brow furrowed.
“I can see it’s a bit difficult,” said Ellen.
She started mentally to count up to ten. On the stroke of ten, if he hadn’t proved helpful, she would experiment with a couple of tinkling pieces of silver.
Before she had reached five he said: “I’m sure we can fit you in, miss, if you don’t mind sharing a table.”
“Not at all.”
He led the way across the room. He was a brash, beefy man with a crudely masterful swagger in his bottom; and she gave him full marks.
One of the coach parties had spread itself over two long tables and two smaller side tables. There was a vacancy at one of the small tables. The head waiter smiled apologetically and hesitated. If Ellen shook her head slightly, he would conduct her smoothly onwards.
“It’s all right with us, love,” said a woman with a floral hat and florid cheeks.
Ellen hesitated. Then from the corner of her eye she was aware of a man getting to his feet at a nearby table.
“We met last night,” he was saying. “I’m Mark Nicholson. If you’d care to join me...”
Two waitresses carrying trays laden with soup bowls scurried from the kitchen. There were boisterous cheers from the main body of the coach party. Mark Nicholson wrinkled his nose in a wry, conspiratorial grimace at Ellen.
Ellen sat down defiantly at the table with the three plump ladies.
“I’d love to join you, if you’re sure it’s all right.”
“Just you dig in, love.”
Ellen dug in.
The vegetable soup was homemade. If the place catered for numbers like this every day, or even most days of the week, the sparse farms and vegetable gardens and allotments of Wales must be hard pressed to keep up with the demand.
She sat, ate, listened, chatted; and observed. Service well organised, brisk, jolly. Not so jolly for residents, perhaps. But then they must know when they chose such a hotel what they were in for. The coach park was large enough and obvious enough.
“They do give you good helpings, I’ll say that.”
Ellen would also say just that. She would include the name in her book with suitable recommendation and suitable warnings.
It was after this lunch that she decided to make the detour. Just to see the place Fiona had mentioned. Just to be able to say she’d been there. Fiona was intense and touchy and would probably give her some uncomfortable moments if she got back and said she hadn’t bothered to go anywhere near Bryncroeso.
The journey was longer than she had calculated. The map did not make clear the dizziness of some of the gradients. It gave little indication of the tight turns and twists in the roads, or of their narrowness. Stuck behind a lorry for several miles, Ellen lost more and more time.
And when at last, after all that, she reached Bryncroeso …
Well, here she was. The journey wasted, the Hall closed, and her evening’s destination a long, long way away. She would have to find a telephone and say how late she was going to be. Too late for a meal, almost certainly.
She ought not to feel so hungry after that massive lunch. But she did feel hungry.
Relief came sooner than she had dared to hope. A few hundred yards on from the Hall gates, the road wrenched itself into a hairpin bend and then levelled out under a steep rock face. The icy brightness of a stream flickered through the undergrowth in a widening, deepening gully. And there ahead, hunched back against the cliff, was a pub.
It was a grey granite building roofed with grey slate, its bleakness softened only by lintels and a squat porch in chipped, crumbling red sandstone. The inn sign, leaning perilously over the minor ravine on the far side of the road, proclaimed it the Pride of the Valley. About a dozen cars were parked on a narrow strip of asphalt to one side, some with noses against the rocky retaining wall at the back, some jutting a few inches out into the road.
Ellen swung into the last few feet of parking space at the extreme end. She had cut it so fine that she was unable to open her door. She wriggled across the adjoining seat and opened that door just as another car insinuated itself, legally clear of the road but discourteously imprisoning her.
Mark Nicholson – that was what he’d said his name was, wasn’t it? – edged out and slammed his door. Ellen let out her breath, pulled her tummy in, and succeeded in writhing along the narrow gap.
From the open window of the pub came a gusty clamour of voices.
“Aw, stuff it.”
“Eh now, wack. Come ed...”
Ellen stamped past Mark Nicholson and into the saloon bar. She was greeted by a slight slackening in the general babble and a few low, appreciative whistles. Then the voices surged up again into the swirling cigarette smoke, Birmingham whine playing its counterpoint against Liverpool catarrh.
Ellen hesitated.
On the far side of the room was a hatstand which had been converted into a tottering signpost, its arms pointing the way to HIS, HERS, and DINING ROOM.
She tried to steal herself.
At her elbow Mark Nicholson said: “What’ll you bet on the four-star menu? Fresh Welsh salmon lettered Cymru am byth right through...and chips?”
Resentfully she surrendered and allowed him to escort her through the turmoil.
Chapter Two
Fresh salmon it was. They were not offered chips with it. The strawberries and cream were authentic strawberries and cream.
> “From your own estates?” Mark flippantly asked the rosy-cheeked, bucktoothed little girl who served them.
“Grown on Mr Davies’s patch they are. And we get the cream down the road every day, like. Oh yes.”
“I believe you,” said Mark in an apology so sincere that Ellen decided he was not merely tolerable but might, at a pinch, be likeable.
The dining room was small. When they first came in it had been crowded, and from the hand-scrawled menu most of the visitors were choosing cod and chips, sausage and chips, or sausage and mash. A few had ordered steak and kidney pudding, and the aroma as it was carried past almost tempted Ellen to change her own order. But now the room was emptying, the noise in the bar next door was intensifying, she had made her phone call to Cwmffraw, and she was enjoying her strawberries and cream.
“What’s the verdict?” asked Mark. “Meal of the month?”
In answer to his casual but penetrating questions she had told him what her job was. Now, instead of answering this new query, she said:
“And what are you doing here?”
“Map making.”
She waited for enlightenment.
“We’re working on a great big new road atlas of Great Britain. Very plushy. Not just something pinched from the Ordnance Survey or one of the usual map printers, but a really new one, starting from scratch. Everything the motorist wants to know – in ten glorious colours. The places of note, the best views, peaks and panoramas, the lot. Quality of the roads – not just what their official classification is, but what they’re really like. And when the job’s finished, it still won’t be finished.”
“Very lucid.”
“There are four of us travelling round at the moment, covering different sections of the country. Once the map is printed and ready, two will still keep on the move. Every area will be checked and rechecked, and any alteration sent in for filing, so that when a reprint is called for it can be brought up to date. That’s why I want to know how long a new road is going to take, how long a postponed development plan will be postponed...”
“And how long a by-road’s going to be blocked because of subsidence,” she finished for him.
He nodded. “That’s a tricky one. I always compare my own notes with the local Town Hall, or the Borough Surveyor, the R.D.C...anyone who can give me confirmation one way or the other. But that road up to Bryncroeso Hall is unadopted. If the people at the Hall don’t want to do anything about it, nobody’s going to make them. I’ve got a good twenty or thirty problems like that in my notebook already.”
“You sound keen,” said Ellen.
His eyes glinted – not with the chill brightness of the stream outside, but with a warmth that made her want to smile in return. He wasn’t as young as she had first thought. He must be thirty, perhaps a year or two more. But his face came boyishly alive as he said:
“I like to be on the move. To see things. To know what the job is and to get on with it. I had too many years in town planning. County Hall stuff. Committees and reports and memoranda – and not one achievement to be proud of at the end of it. I’d forgotten what fresh air tastes like.”
“So you intend to be one of the two who keep on and on, travelling round the country and checking up after the main operation is finished?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead. I’ll get this part of it done properly first.” The landlord came in from the bar and stood by their table. His forehead and cheeks were damp with a beery sweat. He was a big man with a fat, blotchy nose, but his voice had a surprisingly gentle lilt.
“All right it was, what you had?” “Couldn’t have been better,” said Ellen. “Perfect,” said Mark. He glanced at his watch. “Any accommodation for the night?”
“Left it a bit late you have.” The landlord eyed them dubiously. “You’re together?”
“No,” said Ellen with what she recognised as rather overemphatic curtness. Mark raised a rueful eyebrow. “I mean,” she amended, “not in that way.”
“Well, now.” The landlord smeared one hand down his moist cheek. “Full up this time of year. But there’s someone left today – wanted to go down to Towyn, he did, and find somewhere there so he could ride up and down every day on that old railway. Lots of ’em like that. When there was lots of steam trains about you wouldn’t catch ’em going on one if they could help it, not likely, but now there’s none then they want to get on one even if it doesn’t go anywhere special, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Mark. “So you’ve got one room here?”
“And there’s Mrs Jones down the road – Mrs Lewis Jones that is, the Lewis Jones who won El Alamein. She helps out. Lets rooms if we get stuck.” He smiled paternally at Ellen. “There’s easily I can send our Ivor down to make sure she’s got one free, and tell her you’ll be along later? Right? Quieter for you down there than here with this lot.”
Mark had not been consulted as to his preference. He smiled agreement.
“Ivor’ll go, then, when he’s finished the washing-up. Come into the snug and have a drink with me.”
The tiny bar had two chairs, a wall bench, and a table which could just hold four glasses, Ellen calculated. With three of them in it, the room was crowded.
“A nice brandy?”
“Really, Mr...”
“Owen it is.”
“Mr Owen, I don’t think we ought to...”
“Nice brandy I got.” He spoke as though he had distilled it personally. “Megan, that’ll be three of my brandy. Proper size ones, girl.”
Ellen sat on the bench and put her head back against the hard woodwork. All at once she felt exhausted. The first sip of brandy, rich and soothing, made her even drowsier. Mark was saying something to Mr Owen, but his voice seemed to come from an incredible, furry distance. Mr Owen’s voice took over, rising and falling like an insidious lullaby.
“Up the Hall?” he was saying. “Oh, been up there? Closed, I hear. We never get much notion, down here, what they’re up to up there. He’s a bit of a sad one. Used to come in for a drink sometimes, but not now. Not since his wife upped and went. They never did really belong. Specially this one. Never quite right he was, not for here. Away a lot, like, and when he come back it didn’t seem to suit. Not this Mr Parr.”
The cadences were hypnotic. You didn’t need to listen to the words, only to the music.
“The older lad, now, the one got killed in Germany, he wouldn’t have fancied it being run as a guest-house.” The two men sipped their brandies. “No,” said Mr Owen reflectively, “doesn’t come in here at all anymore. Just as well. Bit of trouble with one of my girls, and now he won’t show his face. It wasn’t nice, not at her age.” He decided not to pursue this and said abruptly: “Gets his folk from books.”
“Books?”
“Mostly them colour things with lots of adverts telling you where to go because you’ve not got the sense to decide for yourself. Off to the mountain railway, take their snaps of the waterfall, and off in their cars again. Only time we get any of ’em in here is like when that woman come down late at night, all flustered. Mad she was. Didn’t say much, but knowing him I wouldn’t be surprised...” Again Mr Owen veered off on another tack. “Makes his money for the season, then off he goes to Abermadoc.”
“For a seaside holiday?”
Ellen had a blurred vision of a faceless man with his trousers rolled up to his knees, paddling, while Mark said something she didn’t quite catch about this being an odd time of year to close up and go off, and Mr Owen said, “Thinks more of his cottage there and that boat of his than he does of the Hall,” and went on to murmur that they’d always been odd, that was it, and anyway he supposed there’d been plenty coming in from the digging or whatever it was they’d been playing about at these last two months.
“Only, like my da used to say about those mines, you get something of everything but not much of anything.”
“Coal mines – in this part of Wales?” “Not coal,” said Mr Owen. “Gold.” A shout of
laughter resounded from the adjoining bar and something thumped against the wall behind Ellen’s head, jolting her into wakefulness.
“Gold?” she said, with the anxiety of the newly alert to show how attentive she had been.
“Oh, there’s a great streak of it under Merioneth,” said Mr Owen. “Thought they were going to make a fortune here, end of last century. Princess Marina’s wedding ring was made of Welsh gold,” he went on proudly. “Never heard that, now? And the Prince of Wales’s regalia – Welsh gold there is in all that.”
He looked into his empty glass.
Mark said: “A drink, Mr Owen?” “Well...just about time for one before our Ivor gets back.”
Ellen, who had hardly touched her brandy, waved Mark away when he turned towards her. What she really wanted was a breath of fresh air. She thought longingly of the room that was waiting for her at Mrs Jones’s. At least, she hoped it was waiting for her.
“Keep coming back, they do,” Mr Owen continued. “For all the good they’ll ever get out of it. Too much muck, not enough of the real thing. It’s there all right, but there’s no way of getting it out. You should ha’ seen the stuff they hauled up there in them days. Still standing, a lot of it was, when I was a boy. Mills and waterwheels, all over the place. Precious little left now.”
“Perhaps with more modern techniques...”
“Won’t do no good.” Mr Owen solemnly shook his head. “Too hard to get at, see. And when you got at it, what do you do then? An ounce of gold to a ton of rubbish – and it’s no fun getting it down the mountain, let me tell you. No, they got tired. The men got fed up and went off to South Wales, to the coalfields. Money there was there. Real money.”
“Real money,” Mark echoed, “rather than fairy gold?”
“Right you are. I tell you, nearly ruined my granda they did. He ran this pub then, like my da after him and now me. Full of people, it was – mine bosses and shareholders and con men, oh, there was no end to them. Left a fine lot of debts behind when they went. We don’t want no more of that lot back. Sooner have respectable folk, even if their money’s only paper!”
