Candlenight by Phil Rickman Read Free Book Online Page B

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 thishour
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