Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 13

Several years ago Glynne Williams rented a car to me for six weeks. A fortnight into the rental he appeared at my door with an exact clone, another red Fiat Uno. ‘Gave you the one without any insurance,’ he’d said cheerfully, as we switched keys.

His latest offering is a slovenly white Ford, which gets its first outing en route to the Indian restaurant where we’re to meet our troubled friends. As we park Marguerite looks at me solemnly.

‘Let’s make a vow not to go back to their house after dinner, okay? I’m tired, you’re sick …’

‘Don’t worry, it’s a done deal. We will not, under any circumstances, go back to their house after dinner.’

On the way back to their house after dinner I pray that the Ford has insurance. It’s raining and the roads, wavy and narrow in the best of conditions, are slick as sucked licorice. There’s something unsettling about driving in Wales at night; the countryside is so dark that headlights strike me as an imprudent challenge, an invitation to things that shouldn’t be seen – things that belong in the dark – to creep forward into the light. Of course this doesn’t happen, but I get moods when I fear it will.

Our friends’ domestic nightmare is definitely something that belongs in this category. Nonetheless, we’ve caved in to what was ostensibly a polite request to meet their dog, Peanut, but what we recognized as an urgent plea not to be abandoned. In the middle of dessert – or rather my champagne ice cream, which everyone else watched me eat from a miniature Moët et Chandon bottle – they realized she’d forgotten her pills. We left quickly after that.

When we reach their home in an indeterminately rural area that the postal address calls ‘near Lampeter’, we pet Peanut, down a quick coffee and desert them an hour later, leaving gifts from New England in our wake: two small, plastic bears filled with honey.

Scant talismans, it occurs to me now as I plough the homeward curves unnecessarily fast, too fast for Marguerite, who complains, against the demons of depression and this ageless Welsh night, too dark even for shadows.