‘Maybe someone is,’ said Joe lightly. ‘We probably count as foreigners ourselves, and I recall we had a hard time finding anyone who’d tell us how to get here. Even the signposts had been bust.’
‘Joe, you’re not getting a fit of the great detectives again, are you?’ she said warningly.
‘This Welsh air’s turning you into a comedian,’ he answered, grabbing her hand and pulling her towards him.
She wasn’t putting up much resistance when the door opened and Bronwen looked in.
‘Ooo, sorry,’ she said, smiling broadly and running her delicate pink tongue round her vibrantly red lips. ‘Thought I might finish that massage, Joe, but I see you’re in good hands. Da says he’ll pick you up round the back in twenty minutes. That be long enough for you?’
‘Yes, thanks. I’ll be there,’ said Joe.
The girl mouthed, ‘Bye’, and withdrew.
So did Beryl.
‘That, I assume, is the caretaker’s kid you mentioned,’ she said. ‘And what was this massage you didn’t mention?’
‘Massage? Thought she said message,’ said Joe unconvincingly.
‘Don’t think so, Joe,’ said Beryl. ‘And if you’ve only got twenty minutes, I think you should come with me to make your confession to Rev. Pot and Aunt Mirabelle. Though from the sound of it, twenty minutes ain’t going to be half long enough.’
Beryl was right. Mirabelle in particular wanted to nail Joe to the floor till she’d finished quizzing him, and in the end he had to do a runner in mid-sentence, and even then he was late getting into the courtyard.
An old red pick-up was being revved impatiently on the cobbles, shedding a shower of rust with each vibration. Joe climbed into the passenger seat, apologizing profusely and trying to keep as much distance as he could between himself and the snuffling Williams.
Then he was hit by something soft on his left side, and Bronwen’s voice said, ‘Shove up, won’t you?’
Rev. Pot could have made a sermon out of the competing claims of the yielding warmth of Bron’s haunch on the one side and the hard angularity of the handbrake on the other, but both sensations were rapidly relegated to the realm of the inconsequential by the furiousness of Dai’s driving. Alongside him, Jehu was a slouch.
The hedgerows were so overgrown that there scarcely seemed room for one vehicle, yet soon they were hitting fifty which felt like eighty in these narrow winding tunnels.
It took Joe three mouth-moistening attempts to say, ‘Know I was late, but I ain’t in this much of a hurry.’
‘Hurry?’ said Williams, surprised. ‘Who says we’re hurrying?’
‘Your speedo for one.’
The caretaker took one hand off the wheel and blew his nose into what looked like an oily rag.
‘Round here you don’t drive by the speedo, Joe,’ he said. ‘You drive by the clock. Two minutes later and I’d be driving round this bend at two miles an hour.’
They took it on two wheels, or so it seemed to Joe. To his right he caught a glimpse of an open gate and a stampede of full-uddered cows about to emerge.
‘Ifor James’s beasts,’ said Williams. ‘Brings them to the milking parlour same time, spot on, every evening. You can put your life on it.’
‘Think we just did,’ said Joe, thinking nostalgically of the quiet pleasure of doing the ton down the Luton bypass in Merv Golightly’s taxi.
He contemplated drawing attention to a potentially fatal flaw in Dai’s road-safety strategy, to wit, the intrusion of strangers, but a sign saying Llanffugiol flashed by and thinking they’d soon be stopping, he held his peace.
It wasn’t a very big place but it seemed to have everything necessary to a not-very-big place, like a little shop, a little chapel, a little church, a little village hall, a little war memorial, and, the Lord be praised, a sizeable pub.
Only it was called the Grey Mare not the Goat and Axle. Also it was receding fast, as was a field full of marquees which must be the site of the festival.
‘Not going to the village pub, then?’ said Joe hopelessly.
‘No. More at home in the Goat, you’ll be, Joe,’ said Williams. ‘Your kind of people, see.’
The renewal of terror as they plunged back into a green tunnel prevented Joe from riddling this assertion. After what seemed an age, they drew up in front of a long single-storeyed building in leprous whitewash standing alone at a five-lane crossroads, and Joe climbed out with the unsteadiness of a round-the-world sailor finally hitting home.
‘Don’t know about you, boy, but I’m ready for a drink,’ said Dai, heading for the open door beneath a weatherbeaten sign proclaiming this was the Goat and Axle, prop. John Dawe Esquire.
A chorus of greeting swelled at his entrance, cut off as by a conductor’s baton when Joe followed.
‘Boys, meet Joe Sixsmith,’ said Williams. ‘You’ll have heard about the woman who got trapped in Copa Cottage last night. Well, Joe’s the hero who pulled her out.’
‘Bloody hot fire,’ said someone. ‘It’s grilled the bugger black.’
No one was given the chance to laugh as the tall barrel-chested man behind the bar, presumably John Dawe Esquire, brought his hand down on the polished oak with a crack that set the ashtrays jumping and said in a basso profundo, ‘Anyone thinks that’s clever can find another pub to drink in. Mr Sixsmith, you’re most welcome. Let me draw you a pint. And take heed, Danny Edwards, this is going on your slate.’
Edwards, Joe presumed, was the young man who’d made the crack.
He remained seated, looking resentful, and there were others who didn’t move either, but sat there either indifferent or neutral. Some – two or maybe three, he only got a fleeting impression of retreating forms – felt the need to leave as he came in, their exit marked by a sudden gust of rock music as an inner door opened then closed behind them. Joe hoped their exit was coincidence rather than comment, but his unease was soon dissipated in the unmistakably genuine warmth of the half dozen or so who crowded round to shake his hand.
They were all men in the bar. Bronwen had vanished, presumably heading straight for the source of the music. Certainly there was little here to attract such a bright young denizen of the modern era. In fact, Joe doubted if this particular bar had changed much in the past hundred years. Its small windows created perpetual dusk, which was no great deprivation unless you wanted a good look at the uncarpeted floorboards, the low ceiling stained with enough nicotine to dye a thousand lungs, or the dusty photos of depressed-looking men in stiff collars which crowded the flaking walls. Was sadness endemic in these parts? Joe wondered. Like one of them cancer clusters some folk reckoned existed round nuclear power stations. Or maybe some apparition of something bad that had once happened appeared from time to time and sent you plunging into the depths. Sights and sadness. He recalled the two odd ailments scratched into the sickbay locker’s paint. Perhaps there was a connection, cause and effect, the sights bringing on the sadness.
But the jollity of the chief welcomers quickly seemed to communicate itself to the others, and he began to feel that maybe there were worse places to be than sitting here among Dai Williams’s cronies, modestly retailing details of the Copa Cottage rescue to a continuo of admiring applause.
Even Danny Edwards had come out of his sulk and was showing a lively interest. At one point he turned to a neighbour and said something in Welsh. Instantly