by Dai Smith
He became an assiduous attender. Assiduity would become his hallmark. It was funny, so I said ha-ha to myself, how you had to wait to the end, of a life, as of a book, to see how it all turned out. And that it could have been different. Maybe. Choices. Pathways, and all that. Only I didn’t go in for “all that” anymore. For some people in some places at some times it was fixed. Our time had been made for Ceri and he always seemed to know it better, quicker, than any of the rest of us. Maldwyn had just seen ways to make money, but he’d do that any place any time. Bran was a chancer who needed to escape what her good looks had made easy and mundane for her as she looked in the mirrors which were other people’s eyes, and for her the exit routes to success were never dependent on the satnav of exile. Gwilym flew high inside cages erected by others, and never understood the difference between fluttering his flashy wings and flying to any purpose. Tommy was collateral damage in a society that had devalued the power that thousands of Tommys together had once shown. Me, I had mistaken my despair for insight and my contempt for courage, and I’d used my small gifts only to direct my retreat. Haf was what was left, hurt and hopeful. If I owed anything to anyone in the ruins of this time and place it was, I thought, to her. It would depend on the price I could exact for damages. It would depend on how bad the damage had been. I was counting on Ceri to tell me.
* * * * *
The voice entered the room first. Greeting the waiter with a “Phillipe!” and a bear hug, and a smile that let his eyes wander over the faint blush from “Nadine, lovely,” more quietly said, as a petite blonde bobbed into view and took his coat from his back. A thicker back than I’d remembered but still proportionate to his height, just six feet, and his wide shoulders. His eyes made a quick inventory of the room, three or four couples who clocked him even as he ticked them off on his highly tuned radar screen, and me. He grinned, opening up an abyss of a welcome on his handsome crag of a face. His hair was still shaggy and lustrous on top and greying in all the right distinguished places elsewhere. He was in no hurry to cross the room. This was a piece of theatre for Ceri. He patted the lapels of his well-cut bespoke dark-blue single-breasted suit, fiddled with a black-polka-dot-on-light-grey tie as if he was Oliver Hardy, and let the voice take over again. Out it rumbled from some warm, deep, irresistible cavern. “Well, well, well. Little Billy Maddox. How are you, butt? How are you? Bloody well come ’ere.”
He was with me before I could even rise from the table. He had made it a lifetime’s practice to invite warmth but to make sure he gave it out first. I was grabbed and pulled in towards him, held almost as if I was a child. Size, as they say, had nothing to do with it. This was all about technique. In anybody else the body cinch, the handshaking wonderment, the brown eyes lit up with an irrepressible delight at being, just the two of us, any old us, together, would have been a giveaway. Politician. Kisses baby. Congratulates Mother. Envies Father. And all that. But Ceri had somehow made natural to himself what in others were lame gestures. What you felt was what you got. Or so it appeared. What you saw was what you truly saw, and what was not to like? Everyone liked Sir Ceri Evans.
He finally let me go, still cracking a smile, and sat down with a thump. As always, he went straight to it, by whatever back road he felt safe on.
“Surprised about the knighthood, were you? Can’t imagine what your old man would have said. Well. I can, actually! But hey, Lady Olwen loves it, and she bloody well deserves it, doesn’t she? More than me, anyway!”
He laughed so all-embracingly that the other diners looked over, happy for him, and so now for themselves. He waved a little self-deprecatingly, as if to say “Enjoy” – me, this hour, your being here, with me. He had lots of ingratiating habits. He deployed the next one. A shy hesitancy, signalled by the repetition of inconsequential words, as if he was readying himself, gearing up for the task, this Ceri, for whom there had never been any hesitation in reaching out and taking what he wanted, the biggest-beaked fledgling in the nest yet with the modesty to tip his head away as he simultaneously swallowed the worm whole. All for him.
“It’s, it’s … er … a case of recognition,” he began. “Recognition, see. Not, uh, not, for me. For what I tried to, we, in the old days, your old man even, represented. See. Oh shit. Fuck the title. That’s not important. Though, mind, the Lords was mentioned, too. Aye. But. See. I have to keep active. Working. Mostly in Europe now. For Wales. So there it is, see.”
And he spread his hands on the table and looked imploringly at me. I told him it was OK by me. That I couldn’t speak for the old man. But he was dead, after all. Ceri said, “Yes,” and looked mournful, as if it was yesterday, not years ago, and he wasn’t exactly asking the old man’s opinion or permission even in those days. We airbrushed the history we’d filed away. We decided to order. Proper decisions. Ceri was no fine diner. So far as food, his “grub” as he called it out of some further gesture of solidarity with people who had actually eaten it as fuel for work, he liked it large, quick and showy. The blonde waitress drifted to the table like a fish drawn to a hook. He must have tipped well before.
“Shall we have the usual, Billy? My usual, I mean, of course. Sorry, butt. Oysters. Chablis. Fillet steak. Chips, natch. No bloody veg, and a bottle or two of Costières de Nîmes. OK? Rare or medium rare? “À pointe” as I’ve learned to say, eh, Nadine?”
Nadine hovered, and glowed a little. I’d like to think she was indulging the customer as an old fool. Unfortunately, I could see she was enjoying the exchange. He hadn’t missed a beat. Still had the rhythm at his fingertips. The steaks would be rare but not too blue. Wrong colour. Even for an Independent, he said. We agreed, and laughed. That led us to more political banter and reminiscence over the Boys’ Own meal we were scoffing. Two bottles of the deep southern red took us into a shared cheese plate. I broached nothing, waiting for him to make a move. He finally came to it over coffee and cognac.
“Anyway, this has been great, Billy. Just great. I’ll pay, mind! God! Makes me feel young again, seeing you. D’you fancy that, do you? I think, I think, she’s up for it! I know I would be!
“But, anyway, what, what’re you bothered about, bothering with, this, er, this regeneration scheme? Bran tells me her daughter, daft kid, is causing, making, waves, trouble ’bout it. Can’t see why. It’ll do a lot of good, see, for a lot of people up there. Dependent on me, it is, getting all the pieces together, in place. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
He leaned back. He swirled his spoon in the sugary grit of his double espresso. He made a face of genuine puzzlement. I reached down and opened the folder in which I’d put all the papers Haf had sent me. I scattered them on the table. He scarcely glanced at them beyond a peremptory flick of a few pages.
“Oh that,” he said. “Gwilym told me about those. So what, Billy? You don’t think we’re stupid, do you? Do you? S’all on the level. Derelict land. Deprived communities. Our people, Billy. All for their aspirations. A portal to the outside world. Valleys on the map again, eh? European money. Welsh welcome. Know-how imported. Knowledge grown and exported.”
I rifled through the emails in front of him which confirmed the payments from Bran, or rather from Bran’s piddling little PR outfit, into his bank. Thousands that totted up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. I showed him the newspaper cuttings and the committee transcripts that detailed his enthusiasm as he lobbied with all the considerable skill he’d acquired for ear-marked grants. Millions of euros. I read out the letters from the commission in Brussels and the civil service in Cardiff nominating Tir Werin to take a central role in the proposed scheme and to act as recipient of the disbursed money. Then there were more confidential notes about Tir Werin, the plans and drawings of what were, acres and acres of, iron and coal wasted tips and hillocks and plateaux, and what exactly could be cleaned up, and how, and at what cost it could be built upon. Homes as well as the primary project. Retail units as well as research centres. High-end leisure as well as conference facilities. And most of the g
rant moneys conducted discreetly by Gwilym as secretary into the accounts of the owners of the land. And that was Valleyscorp, the company trust in Haf’s name, with Maldwyn nowhere in sight. Valleyscorp was Mal’s sleeper. It was a frog which Tir Werin, as princess, would kiss to wake it up into a terrible new kind of beauty.
There was more, of course, but that seemed to me, as it had since I’d first seen it, more than enough for questions to be asked. I asked him to justify how the public good he was espousing worked out as such personal good fortune.
Quite reasonable, I thought. But Ceri, as ever, was not disturbed. He told me that none of it would stand up, that all of it could be explained away, and that, besides, the payments to him were fees, registered for consultancy and advice. It would have been impossible to move those mountains of cash without a general political will and inside a common framework of policy far beyond any feeble effort he could individually offer. Also, I should grow up. Also, I should wake up. Also, I had no idea any more, if I ever had, of how the lives of ordinary people – I loved that ordinary – were settled now, or fucked up, by the dealings of what he airily called envoys to power, committees of notables, and entrepreneurs directed, by such as him whenever and wherever he could, to do social good. Not just to ensure their own gain. Though, of course, and be reasonable, don’t be stupid, there was, inevitably, and why not, that too. A little bit of greed, he’d learned, was good. The wheels had to turn. Needed oiling.
He seemed to like the industrial metaphor. His own conversational wheels ran more smoothly from that point, with no grinding of the gears as the Ceri who had only ever used conflict if it served his ultimate, personal purpose came back into view. He’d never gone away of course. It was always, beginning and end, about Ceri. That was his abiding purpose. And it wasn’t really the incentive of greed that drove his wheels on. It was what he wanted to see in the light of other people’s regard of him, and hear in the warm gurgle of his own voice. He leaned across and held my arm down onto the table amongst the relics of our meal.
“Look, I know you’re hurt. But you’re making it too personal, butt. See, things have changed. You can see that, can’t you?”
His thick, strong fingers pressed gently on my forearm. Reassuring. Just like Sir Ceri.
“What I’m saying is, is that, that, there’s nothing else, see. To do, mind. What are our natural advantages? What’s left? More to the point boy, how can we help? And it is about that, see, Billy, helping, I mean. Because they can’t help themselves, see, any more. Perhaps they never could, eh!”
He swallowed. He pressed. He gave me his friendliest shrug that went from smile to body language to actual words.
“Hey, I know your old man would’ve laughed at all this, eh? You and me having a debate like this, after a bloody bourgeois spread as he’d’ve put it, eh. But, look, he was great, he was great. Then, see. You have to see that, Billy. It was all then. Only now you can’t be romantic like he was. And, you know, he turned from that at the end, too. Too cynical then, he was. You said it yourself at the time. Remember?”
He paused. He took his fingers from my forearm.
“Got to stop beating yourself up, Billy. Difference between me and your old man is that I went and did it, didn’t I? And it had to be different. Not saying he didn’t teach me a lot, but he couldn’t teach me that, could he? And you can only lead what’s willing to be led, see. Best thing now is to help. And this, er, scheme, project, is only that. Another way. Look back and you’ll see there were always, various, different, ways like this. Find a way to make things happen, is all. Get real, like they say, eh, Billy, go with the flow? You come from a long line of helpers, butt. You could help now.”
When I saw he was finished, silent and smiling, I smiled back and gathered up the papers and returned them to their folder. I told him I agreed with him. That that was, indeed, the way it was now. That he had always known, for a purpose perhaps, how to dance between the cogwheels and neither stop the machinery nor get mangled by the machine. I told him, too, what I still expected him to do, and where the papers would otherwise go. He waved this away like splatting a bothersome fly from a waiting sweetmeat, and snarled, disdainful of my stubborn behaviour, that it’d be a news story for a day, a flash in the pan for a week, a dead duck in a fortnight. I said,
“Sure. And you, Ceri? But you Ceri? Land speculation? Second phase, of course, after the regeneration project is built. But then an infrastructure ready for construction and sale. Well, dirty but OK, I guess. A largely public enterprise expanding, a little too close to some benefactors perhaps, but ultimately benefitting others. Houses and shops and retail outlets and a new road grid. Profits for the prophets. A bit messy. But OK. And then again. A senior public figure. Of some influence. In places of crucial decision-making. Still an idealist. A rebel, even. But one with hundreds of thousands in the bank, directly from a source attached to the whole scheme. You’ll be crucified.”
I added a “butt” to show there were no hard feelings. Then I told him what I wanted him to do. He looked more amused than bemused. More dismissive than compliant. I reached inside my jacket and took out the envelope marked with his name. I gave it to him. I walked away, leaving Sir Ceri Evans to pick up the bill.
THURSDAY
I woke late the next morning, around ten, to the flash and blink of the red light of the bedside table’s telephone. I had a message from reception. A Branwen Williams had called at eight thirty-five. She’d meet me in the lobby at eleven fifteen. I blinked back, my eyes as red as the pulsing light. Ceri’s booze doing its trick. The one I always fall for. I cleaned up and put on a black T-shirt over black chinos and stuffed my bare feet into a pair of black tasselled loafers. I grimaced into the mirror. Colour co-ordination. Not exactly my game, unless minimalism is to your taste.
I was downstairs at eleven and sat in the far corner of a wannabee atrium. I hid behind a newspaper I wasn’t reading. One I couldn’t have read even if I’d wanted to try. My eyes wouldn’t allow for the close attention needed. If there had been a potted fern I’d have hidden myself in its fronds. I could have watered it by crying occasionally. Twenty minutes later, she was late, and at eleven thirty later still. I could feel the blurred newsprint starting to come back into focus. I scrunched my eyes to prevent that. I waited some more. I was good at that. I had long experience, and currently a deeply felt lack of mobility.
I clocked her entrance, in both senses, at eleven forty five. She smiled at the East European behind the desk and gave him my name. She turned at his reply, in the direction where I’d told Pavel I’d be when requested. The one doing the asking was, for Bran, definitely dressed down. She had on flat dove-grey suede shoes with an understated silver buckle. The look was not quite, and yet not not, casual. Perfectly judged, unlike my own sombre ensemble, from the light grey cotton, flecked and knife-edged creased, trousers to the open-necked pink shirt worn beneath the darker steel-grey of a wraparound cardigan with a loose belt. It left her elegant wrists on display. And on the left one she wore – nice touch this I thought – a silver and turquoise Navajo bangle, late 1940s I’d been told, which I’d once bought for her in Arizona before all the skies of our lives had clouded over. There was no discernible make-up this morning, and her full hair looked tousled. I’d tousled her a few times myself. She was a fine tousler, all right.
And a mind-reader, too. Now she smiled at me. I could see we were going to get along fine. She sat down opposite me in the matching armchair. Its charcoal fabric framed the pretty and complementary picture she made as if it had been designed for it. Somewhere, maybe, it had. She crossed her legs at the ankles. I kept mine straight. She said, “You’re all in black,” as if colour coordination was her constant and actual game. Maybe it was.
“Thank you for seeing me. Again. You know …”, she said.
I did, and told her that was fine and that we had unfinished business anyway, didn’t we? She raised one carefully under-plucked eyebrow, and said nothing. So, I told her I�
�d seen Ceri the night before and had made him a proposition that might affect all other current propositions, if she knew what I meant. She did. She told me he’d told her. Ah, I thought, with a twinge of discomfort at my all-round slowness, that explains the tousled look and the uncharacteristic lateness then.
I had said nothing about the small suitcase she had been carrying and which sat, shabbily out of place, by the side of her chair. It was clearly not like any overnight bag she might use even if, which I doubted, she’d use one. It wasn’t even colour coordinated. Either with her, the atrium or the present day. It was too defiantly retrogressive for the faux retro of the lobby and too rectangular and brown to play off the black-and-white steel-framed pics of Manhattan and Paris and Milan with which this transient space moored its uncertain identity. The last time I’d seen the suitcase was on top of my old man’s post-war utility furniture wardrobe. I tuned back in to Bran’s insistent murmuring.
