they began to shake, sweat and drop them, but Marguerite shushes me and points at my throat.
On TV a shrill children’s programme is in progress. A loudmouth, shrieking maniac of a host is tossing kids into something that looks like a vat of unformed jelly. Beneath my comprehension, I decide with relief. Alas, Heno, a news magazine which means ‘Tonight’, is not. Most of it goes over my head. It’s followed by Pobl y Cwm, which has ensnared Marguerite although she understands not a word. From seven to seven-thirty we both stare fixedly at the screen, trying to crack the code. A blonde woman and her husband (?) seem perturbed by a delivery of coal. There’s trouble brewing at the hair salon, and someone’s in a funk at the estate agent’s.
‘Are those two supposed to be engaged?’
I have no idea but I don’t want to admit it. ‘Uh huh. But these people are terrible mumblers, so I can’t be sure.’ I’m feeling very discouraged.
‘What’s with that couple and the coal? Is it some kind of conspiracy?’
‘Who knows? Maybe somebody’s buried in it. Wait! That guy just said, “Come over tomorrow around three.” I understood that!’
‘See, you’re getting it,’ she says brightly. I don’t know if I’d call one phrase in half an hour cause for celebration, but at least I go to bed with the rhythm of the language pounding in my ears, beating time to the night rain. Mae’n bwrw hen wraggedd a ffyn. My brain chugs it out in nine counts, over and over and over. It’s raining old women and sticks.
Chwilio to Search
An odd thing sometimes happens to me when I’m walking in Wales. Without warning a chip breaks off the corner of my mind’s eye and goes careening up and away, faster and faster – I can almost feel the rush in the depths of my stomach – until it stops in space and turns back to show me myself as a dot on a tiny bump protruding from an island on the north-western corner of the map of Europe. It seems such a funny place for me to be.
I lose my gravity like this on the way to Irene Williams’s house. The sun is shining as if Lampeter were the bloody Caribbean. As ever, I’m the only one in sunglasses (my ‘most American’ affectation, according to Welsh sources). Wales, this land of tumultuous, messy clouds that bank around the heavens like airborne glaciers, is lazing today under a faultless blue sky. It bothers me.
This morning I’ve been hard on the trail of far-flung Welsh-speakers, gleaning addresses and telephone numbers. One is Hiroshi Mizutani – who’s also known by his bardic name, Hywel Glyndŵr – a former visiting professor at Lampeter who teaches Welsh at the University of Nagoya in Japan. Another is a Dutch woman named Effie Wiltens, a pilot and fellow Welsh nut, described to me for the second time in a month as a ‘real character’ who’s learned to speak Welsh like a native, and whom I ‘must meet’. This time, I realize, my unbidden bird’s-eye view has a purpose. It’s set up the board on which we’ll soon start playing global connect-the-dots for real. From what I understand, Irene Williams is what Hollywood would call a ‘major player’ in the dot game.
Mrs Williams comes recommended as a walking address book of the world’s Welsh. Her house is just out of town, past the Cwmann Tavern on the Carmarthen Road (‘Cwmann’, by the way, isn’t a typo; it relies on the perfectly respectable Welsh vowel ‘w’ to give it the sound ‘Coo-man’). Mrs Williams is a lively sprite of a woman in her seventies, wearing striped trousers and a seed necklace. I whisper an apology for my laryngitis as we take seats in her torturously sunny solarium, and tell her I’m hunting foreign Welsh-speakers and expatriates.
‘So, dear, you’re American. Pardon me for asking, but I’ve never understood why your country won’t forgive Cuba for those old missiles.’
This is unexpected. I explain that I haven’t been able to understand it either, but forgo putting my sunglasses on. They suddenly seem way too American. Instead I winch my eyes into slits and begin to leak little tears.
Irene’s husband is Professor of Theology at Lampeter, and she acts as a kind of godmother to the curious lot of foreign students who show an interest in learning Welsh. Takeshi Koike, a student of Hiroshi Mizutani’s, is one of her favourites. She waves his Christmas card at me and I copy the address.
‘He was here for ten months and when he left he was fluent in Welsh. It helped that he played guitar at church. Every Saturday night he’d come over and we’d practise Welsh hymns. He even appeared in all-Welsh theatre productions. Are you all right, dear?’
I think I’ve groaned involuntarily, remembering Mark Nodine. Irene brings me a piece of spice cake and I thank her in Welsh, which is wilfully reckless, but the Takeshi story nettles me. There’s a pause. Will she simply say, croeso – you’re welcome – or launch into the old tongue in earnest? She takes a middle course which requires a few, simple exclamations on my part before she eases back into English. I don’t know how to take this. Is it too painful to hear me croak and struggle for words simultaneously? Am I incomprehensible? God, is she being nice to me?
Irene gives me a number of leads, including one in Poland, which cheers me, as so far nothing has come of my missive to Gdansk. Before I leave we determine that her daughter-in-law, Glesni, is best friends with Rosemary, with whom I’m to stay in Oslo.
‘She called Glesni a few days ago asking about you, and here you are!’
An itchy, small-world sensation tweaks me between the shoulder-blades. I have a feeling I could probably write this book if I stayed long enough on Irene Williams’s sun porch. Instead I thank her and walk away through a tunnel of hedgerows to the tiny village of Cellan to hire a car.
Ofni to Fear
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,
