Named of the Dragon, Page 2

"Oh, yes? And where's she off to this year? Rome? Vienna?"

  ' 'Pembrokeshire.''

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Some little place called Angle, in south Pembrokeshire."

  "Of course," he said. "That would have been my next guess."

  "Yes, well, you might laugh, but she's been asked to spend the holidays with James Swift, of all people. And she wants me to go with her."

  Graham turned his head at that. "I hope you told her yes."

  "I told her maybe." To his scandalized expression I explained: "It's my brother's first Christmas in Canada, Graham—my family's expecting me there."

  He felt sure they'd survive. Turning away, he adopted a carefully casual tone. "You do know who represents Swift, don't you?"

  "All the more reason not to go," I said.

  "And miss the chance to lure away his blue-eyed boy? You disappoint me." He glanced at me and smiled, taking pity on my situation. "I've been in this position myself,

  you know. I once had two invitations arrive by the same post—one to my oldest sister's anniversary supper, and another to this gala West End opening—both for the same night. In the end, I found that there was only one fair way to settle it." Fishing in his pocket, he produced a single penny and held it up for me to see.

  "What, you tossed a coin?"

  "It's the tried and trusted method," he defended his decision. "Saves a lot of mental aggravation. Here, you give it a go."

  I caught the coin in a reflex motion, shaking my head. "Don't be daft."

  "No, really. Heads, you do the boring family thing and go to Canada, and tails ... oh, hell," he said, as the ringing of his telephone cut in. "I'll have to take this, Lyn. Won't be a minute."

  As he swung round in his chair to take the call, his back to me, I frowned, considering. He might be right, I thought—a toss of the coin did seem the only fair way to decide where I ought to spend Christmas.

  And it only took four tries to make the penny come up tails.

  III

  And so to the land's

  Last limit I came—

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Guinevere"

  My mother didn't seem at all put out by my announcement. Sitting cross-legged on my sitting-room floor the next evening, she measured out ribbon with one hand and bent forward, only half-listening. "Of course I don't mind. Heavens, dear, you're twenty-eight now ..."

  "Twenty-nine."

  "Old enough to do your own thing, that's my point. Could you just put your finger right here, on this ribbon? That's it." She finished tying the elaborate bow, and sat back to judge the effect. To my mother, wrapping Christmas gifts was a job that demanded absolute perfection. She'd been a window-dresser once, and she still liked to make things beautiful. "That will have to do, I suppose." Setting the professional-looking parcel to one side she picked up a football shirt and shook out the creases. "Now then, who is this for?"

  "Patrick. He desperately wanted the new England strip." I glanced at her sideways. "You're sure you don't mind?"

  "Darling, I've already told you ..."

  "I know, but you're wearing that look."

  She raised her head and smiled. "You shouldn't be so sensitive to how I look, you know. I didn't live my life to please my mother."

  "Yes, well," I said drily, "I doubt that you could have pleased Granny. She'll have something to say about my not coming to Canada."

  "Your grandmother," my mother assured me, "will be far too busy putting Patrick's in-laws in their place to wony about you."

  I'd met Patrick's in-laws the previous summer. They were very political, full of opinions and ready to argue. They'd lock horns with Granny the minute they met. "Oh Lord, I hadn't thought of that."

  "So you see, it's just as well you won't be there," she said. "It isn't going to be a restful Christmas. I, for one, intend to buy a vat of sherry at the Duty Free and keep it to hand." Reaching for another roll of Sellotape, she glanced up, met my watching eyes, and sighed. "If I'm wearing any look at all, it's only because I'm a mother, and no mother likes leaving her child alone in the holidays."

  I could understand that. She'd never had to worry about it before, because I'd never missed a Christmas with my family. Even during those brief, disastrous years of my marriage to Martin—ancient history now—when the simple act of sitting down to Christmas lunch became a kind of torture and my mother took to serving the turkey already sliced, for fear my father might do murder with the carving knife—even then, I'd always kept the ritual, shuttling back and forth between our tiny flat in Shepherd's Bush and my parents' home in Maidstone.

  This would be the first year that I'd broken with tradition.

  "And I suppose," my mother went on, rather carefully,

  "I'm just a bit concerned about you being on your own, you know, at this time of the year."

  "I'm fine," I said. "And after all, it's been five years. I'm past the fragile stage." I'd been sitting too long. I rose rather stiffly, and stretched. "Shall I make us some tea?"

  It was a tactic that I often used when I didn't want to talk about something, and I knew she wasn't fooled, but being my mother she didn't let on. And she didn't follow me into the kitchen, either—she let me have my privacy. Alone, I filled the kettle, forcing back the pricking tears. I'd never liked to cry in front of anyone, not even my mother, but my emotions weren't so easy to control so close to Justin's birthday.

  That's how I preferred to think of it—his birthday. Not the day that he had died.

  It seemed like yesterday, sometimes, as if the five years hadn't happened. I remembered every moment of my labour, being glad that my mother was there, being glad that Martin wasn't—he'd been dead three months by that time, and although I had gone through the motions of grieving I'd secretly felt like an enormous weight had lifted from my shoulders. Martin hadn't wanted the baby in the first place. Careless, he'd called me at first, and then selfish, and finally he'd gone along grumpily, showing no joy at the prospect of being a father. His death had somehow made the baby more my own.

  I'd picked the baby's name myself, the day I'd learned I was carrying a boy. I'd spelled it out in brightly painted letters on the nursery door: Justin. I'd stocked the nursery shelves with clothes and books and cuddly toys, and planned the outings I would take him on, the places I would show him. I'd walked on air for weeks.

  He'd been a big baby, nine pounds and three ounces, so I'd expected that the labour would be difficult. But soon, I'd thought, the pain would be over. Soon I'd have Justin...

  One final push, the feeling of that tiny new life slipping from my body, and a rush of swelling happiness.

  And then had come confusion. Urgent voices, hurried hands, a sterile figure, gowned and masked, who'd whisked my baby out of the delivery room and down the echoing corridor. I'd heard the high-pitched crying, frantic, rising to a scream above the fast receding footsteps, and I'd struggled to rise, to go after my baby. "What is it?" I'd begged them. "What's wrong?"

  I remembered my mother's anguished eyes, and the doctor saying Justin wasn't breathing, and me shaking my head. "But he's crying ... I can hear him crying."

  No, they'd told me gently. That was someone else's baby, not my own.

  I'd refused to believe it. This isn't him, I'd thought, when they'd taken me to view the little body, to let me hold him. My baby's alive, he was crying, I heard him...

  The kettle rattled on the stove and whistled to the boil. Brushing my cheeks with an impatient hand, I brought myself back to the present and reached for the teapot.

  My mother's voice called from the sitting-room, "Need any help?"

  "No," I called back, "I can manage." I said it again, very quiet but firm and determined, for my ears alone: "I can manage."

  *-*-*-*-*

  Managing Bridget was another matter. My mother might not be having the most relaxing time in Vancouver, with Granny picking battles, but I had a hunch my holidays would not be much more restful. Bridget had a certain knack for finding trouble. The drive
to Wales alone was an adventure.

  I didn't realize I'd been holding my breath until it came out in a sigh of pure relief, as the driver ahead of us slid his rust-riddled Ford off the roundabout's first exit.

  "Bloody good job, you dozy old pillock!" Bridget called after him, uncaring that he couldn't hear. She put her foot to the floor and her sporty blue MGF sprang forward, accelerating with a force that pinned me to my seat. "Some people," she informed me, "should be taken off the road."

  I bit my tongue in time.

  Turning my head, I focused on the blur of passing hedges and went on playing the little silent travelling game I always played when driving with Bridget, counting the number of times we escaped certain death. I'd lost count in that near collision just outside of Bristol, but since then the score had risen once again to a respectable nineteen. Twenty, I amended, as we hurtled past the next car on a blind curve.

  Not that I really expected any harm to come to us. Bridget could have walked blindfold across a minefield and come safely out the other side—her life was somehow charmed. But it did make me breathe a little easier when we came round the curve to find the road was empty.

  "Not much traffic here," I remarked.

  "You want to see it in the summertime. Tourists everywhere." She pulled a face. "It took me ages to get down here last July."

  I looked round. "Last July?"

  "Mm. James had the house then, as well, for a fortnight."

  "I see. So the two of you are ..."

  Bridget glanced sideways, mischievous. "That would be telling."

  "I thought you liked telling."

  She laughed. "Bloody cheek. I've half a mind to become celibate, and leave you lot at Simon Holland with nothing to talk about. Is Graham still running a book on my love life?"

  I assured her that he was. "But I'm afraid he's put rather long odds on James Swift."

  "Poor old James." She sighed, fondly. "I met him at the London Book Fair this year, did I tell you? One of those cocktail party things, I don't remember it exactly. James took me to dinner afterwards, and... well, you know. He is a damned good-looking man, I must admit."

  "But?" I prompted, and she smiled.

  "Exactly. But."

  "He's very much your physical type," I said, knowing how much she admired the sleek and slightly predatory look, "so I'm assuming it's not that."

  "Oh no, he's prime," she said, using her trademark term of approval. "But you know me, I need a challenge. James is far too dull."

  I refused to believe it. "A man who writes novels like The Leaden Sky can't possibly be dull."

  "Cerebral, then. He thinks too much. I like a man to act."

  Turning in my seat, I looked at her, amused. "So why on earth did you agree to spend this Christmas with him?"

  "Because he asked me. And I do so hate to disappoint." Shifting gears, she overtook another car and nearly clipped a cyclist, who waved his fist and shouted as he wobbled in our wake. "Besides," said Bridget, taking no notice, "James isn't the only interesting man in Angle."

  I recognized her tone of voice, and knew that it spelt trouble. "Oh, Bridget."

  "What?" She looked round, innocent.

  "You're never thinking of making a play for some other poor sod while we're here, are you?"

  "Darling." Her smile was arch. "He's not a poor sod. He's a playwright."

  I rolled my eyes heavenward. "God, give me strength."

  "Oh, don't be so Victorian. It's not as though I'm married to James, or anything."

  "Well, true, but surely when you're staying with him—"

  "Don't worry," Bridget said. "I'll be discreet."

  "Define discreet."

  "No photographs." She winked. "Besides, James will be so busy talking to you that I doubt he'll even notice what I do."

  "Oh, I see." I smiled, catching on. "So that's why I'm here, is it? To create a diversion while you do the dirty work."

  "And maybe get yourself another client, in the process."

  "Well, you're living in cloud cuckoo-land if you think any man would find me so diverting that he'd fail to notice you."

  She clucked her tongue. "You underestimate yourself."

  "I'm only stating fact." Settling back in my seat, I took stock of our new surroundings. We'd reached the outskirts of a town—the hedges, flashing by, changed into houses, with a sign pointing off to a railway station on the left. "Where are we now?" I asked.

  "Pembroke."

  "Oh, really?" I strained forwards, longing for a view of the town's famous castle, but Bridget whipped us neatly round a roundabout and down a steepish hill between the pastel houses. Here the road flattened out again, chasing a serpentine course round a strip of green common, while the town itself ran on along the rocky promontory rising to our right. The old stone walls that once had ringed medieval Pembroke still stood stoutly at the common's edge, supporting the sloping jumble of tightly packed buildings and shops perched on top. But it wasn't till we came to the end of the common and turned at the road junction there that I caught my first sight of the castle.

  A dark, muddy grey, it soared straight and secure from the edge of the promontory, an immovable sentry set right at the top of the high street with traffic and pavements pressed close to its walls. Impressed, I twisted in my seat to keep the view of it, trying to imagine how it would have looked five centuries ago to peasants toiling in the fields below its walls.

  "Oh, for God's sake," said Bridget, and leaned on the horn. "Get a move on."

  She was talking to a pedestrian this time, an old man with blowing white hair who was taking his sweet time in crossing the road. He turned his head slowly, and looked at me, smiling.

  "Idiot," Bridget pronounced him. We picked up speed again, tucking round another narrow curve between old houses. I had one last glimpse of the castle from a different angle as we dipped along a river and entered a deep, quiet wood thick with fallen leaves from which the tall pale trunks of ash and poplar, birch and spindly hazel rose to close above our heads. Bridget said to me, encouragingly, "Nearly there. It's only twenty minutes' drive from here to Angle."

  I'd been hoping for a coastal road, so I could see the sea, but when we emerged from the wood the road stayed stubbornly inland, bordered by steep banks that tried to hide the bright green pastures on the other side. The banks themselves were rather curious, with their stone-and-grass fronts and the high blackthorn hedges on top. I'd never seen anything like them.

  "They're true Pembrokeshire banks," Bridget said, when I asked her. "I suppose they're made that way to give some shelter from the rain, or something. The weather can get fierce, down here."

  It wasn't fierce today. There was only the wind, waving soft down a ripple of dead flaxen grass at the edge of the green field beside me. It might have been spring. I'd read a few brochures on Wales these past few weeks, and endured countless lectures from my Welsh assistant Lewis, so I knew the weather here was somewhat softened by the Gulf Stream. I remembered enough of the maps, too, to know that we were heading west along the Angle peninsula. To the north of us, just out of sight, would be the sheltered waters of Milford Haven. Ahead of us and to the south lay miles of protected scenic coastline, part of the long stretch of high, ragged cliffs, windswept beaches and unspoiled coves that made up the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park—a rambler's paradise, the guidebooks had proclaimed, and one of the most beautiful coasts in all Britain—the only one deemed worthy to be designated a National Park.

  I'd expected to be dazzled by the scenery. Which was why, when I finally glimpsed the Milford Haven estuary a minute later, it surprised me to find the view spoiled by a sprawling oil refinery.

  Bridget agreed it was awful. "But people have to work somewhere. And at least they're all kept to this bit of the Haven. Once you get round the tip of the peninsula, you'd never even know that they were here. James hates them, though," she told me. "He's as bad as your brother, the way he goes on."

  I marked that down as a point in his
favour. ' 'Does he have family down here?"

  "Who, James? No, I don't think so. Why?"

  "I only wondered. His mother's Welsh, as I recall."

  Bridget smiled. "Been swotting up on James Swift, have you?"

  "Well..."

  "Then you know more than I do. I've never really asked him anything about—oh, bloody hell!" she burst out, braking to a sudden stop.

  My seat-belt snapped me smartly back to stare in some amazement at the cause of our near-accident. A waddling row of ducks, unhurried, filed across the road as Bridget left the engine idling.

  "They do this every bloody time I'm on this road," she complained. "I swear they recognize the car."

  She was probably right, I decided. The lead duck certainly seemed more intent on irritating Bridget than on anything else. He reached the other side, pecked once or twice without enthusiasm at the hedgerow, then, turning, led the whole troupe back again, towards the safety of their pond.

  He looked up rather smugly as he passed, and Bridget called him something rude.

  I laughed. "I thought you liked ducks."

  "Oh, I do," she told me, sweetly. "I love ducks. Lying on their backs in orange sauce." The last bird scuttled nervously aside as Bridget rammed the gearstick up again and the MGF sprang forwards. "I daren't run them over, though. My publicist would have a fit. 'Children's author kills defenceless duckling'," she mimicked the headlines. "It would never do."

  The road curved and narrowed again till the banks closed in upon us and the blackthorn scraped the car at either side, making it all but impossible to see round the bends or manoeuvre to avoid oncoming cars, but Bridget, ever confident, ploughed bravely on, refusing to reduce her speed. I closed my eyes, and didn't open them until she said, in cheerful tones, "There's Angle."

  We were turning now, at the top of a tall hill, preparing to start our descent to the village. Below us, the sea circled round the blunt point of the land, biting in at both ends of the straight line of paved road that cut through the narrowest part of the peninsula, running like a ribbon from one large rounded bay to the other. Along that ribbon I could see the speckled squares of cottages, and rising from their backs were narrow patchwork fields that climbed a hillside nearly as high as the one we were on before falling again to the icy-blue stretch of the Haven behind.