I did. He didn’t come with me. I closed one eye and scanned the scene, and the effect was most strange, even to me. The red maple leaves seemed to lose their colour but grow brighter, and the green apples in the orchard were blurred into a dark mass on their trees. I turned it round. From the other way it was like clear glass.
I took it back to him. He was absently turning a hand viewer in his fingers.
‘Have you tried to talk her out of it?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t got all the facts together.’
‘You know I didn’t mean that.’
‘I’ve tried my sort of reasoning.’
‘It’s not right,’ he declared, his voice empty. ‘She shouldn’t think such thoughts.’
I placed the glass disc on the bench under his nose. ‘Try telling her that.’
He brought down the brass viewer suddenly, smashing the disc. ‘Oh hell!’
Then he would have marched out, but I hadn’t finished, and caught his arm. The eyes he turned on me were hot with fury. Then suddenly he relaxed.
‘One more point,’ I said patiently.
He actually smiled. There was not much warmth in it, but it was a smile. ‘You’re taking a lot of my time.’
‘I simply wondered — does this mean that Angie could have the same colour trouble?’
‘Oh no. Certainly not.’ He relaxed. ‘Here — have you got a bit of paper?’
I found him an old envelope, and he swept away the shards of glass. ‘The trouble’s transmitted down the female line, but the actual colour deficiency’s very rare in women. They simply pass it on to their male offspring. Most likely, Gledwyn’s mother had the latent genetic deficiency. Like this.’
He drew me a little diagram.
I’d come across the symbols before. ♂ for male, and ♀ for female.
‘The blank circles,’ he said, ‘are normal people, the ones with the dots have got the latent tendency, but usually not the actual deficiency, and the blanked out ones are the colour defectives. You can see that out of the children of the family, a family like this, one boy’s likely to be normal and the other have defective colour vision. Out of the girls, one could be normal, and one have the latent deficiency. A fifty/fifty chance for both. But now have a look at the next generation.’ He drew another diagram.
‘You see, any sons — that’s Paul in this case — would be normal, and the girls — Angie — wouldn’t have it, but it’d be latent. They’d be carrying the gene deficiency. Waiting, kind of.’
‘Which assumes, though, that Gledwyn’s wife was colour normal,’ I pointed out, having studied it for a minute.
‘She was very normal,’ he assured me. ‘Those paintings in the house, they were all hers. Each one was done after she got that blasted sclerosis. They used to drive her out into the mountains on fine days and set her up, and just leave her. She insisted on being left, you know. Very determined, very independent, Margie Griffiths. I admired her tremendously. It went on until she couldn’t hold the brush. No — she wasn’t colour blind.’
‘So Angie’s got the latent gene deficiency? What does that mean to her children?’
‘Then we go back to the first diagram. If the father of her children is normal, she’d have a fifty/fifty chance of having a son with defective colour vision, and a fifty/fifty chance of having a daughter with the latent tendency.’
‘Phil Rollason’s quite normal,’ I told him. ‘Her husband, that is. With colour, that is.’
He stuck his pen back into his pocket, and tossed me the hint of a smile.
‘That wasn’t quite what I said.’
Then he walked out into the sunshine, leaving me wondering and disturbed.
Chapter Seven
The weather looked like holding fine all afternoon, so I decided to try to locate Neville Green. Angie, perhaps in an attempt to demonstrate to me a lack of interest in Evan’s company, said she’d come with me. She wasn’t fooling anybody. He was one of those dark, handsome and morose types, and I couldn’t offer any of those but the morose bit. So clearly she wasn’t going to enjoy the trip, and to tell the truth, I was beginning to feel uneasy in her presence.
But all the same, we took the Rover and I drove down through Llanmawr, pausing only to call at the local council office, which turned out to be not much more than a typist and a phone console. As Neville Green didn’t work from there, but from the central County Council office, the telephonist phoned through to discover where he was that day. If it’d been his own office, then I’d have waited until he got home. I was simply hoping he would be within reach.
It happened that he was. The council was exploring the possibility of supplying Llanmawr and its outskirts with a different supply of water. A new reservoir and pumping station were involved, high in the mountains, and there’d be a considerable cost advantage. Only the brewery and the tweed mill might not be pleased.
The difficulty was in finding him. Drive out west, I’d been told, take the third left off the main road, and then, apparently, abandon all hope of a decent driving surface for a matter of nine miles. Which was understating what we encountered.
We were skirting a mass of mountain that never seemed to want to reach a peak, revealing around each shoulder a new valley and a further rise. The road surface was crushed slate, which gave the appearance of having slid down from above on one side or the other. They’d never have troubled to bring the stuff all up there, where only shepherds lurked, their sheep bleating plaintively from the far side of the valley. The grass was sparse, cut through with slate outcrops, and tiny streams trickled down, quite often cutting across the loose roadway. To the north, now, the air being quite clear, it was possible to see the far peak of Eglwyseg Mountain, or so Angie claimed.
She told me that very soon we would run out of road altogether. My instructions had been quite clear. ‘Keep going and you can’t miss him. The Land Rover will be parked at the side.’ It was quite true that I wouldn’t miss a Land Rover; I wouldn’t have been able to get past it. When I did spot it, there was no sign across the expanse of valley on our right of anybody running around waving a theodolite.
I drew up behind. When I walked round he was up in the cab sharing a flask of coffee with his helper, a young person who could have been either sex.
‘By God,’ he said, ‘it must’ve been urgent, if you’ll chase out here after me.’
He jumped down. What I’d already seen of him had indicated he was taller than me, but his face then had been lax and formless. Now it was firm, the face of a man who frowned a lot, the eyes of a dreamer whose dreams have not materialised.
‘Not urgent,’ I assured him. ‘It’s a fine day, lovely country. But I was wondering why you found it necessary to come all this way to dodge me.’
He twisted up one corner of his mouth and fell into step beside me. In wide open spaces I become restless and need to walk. We wanted privacy. The wind whipped away our words, and I found myself turning my head and raising my voice. He’d spoken in a mock plaintive tone. Perhaps meeting there amused him.
‘Not trying to dodge anything,’ he protested. ‘I gathered from your office that this trip was unscheduled.’
‘The headache wouldn’t go. I couldn’t even see the drawing board. Fresh air seemed indicated.’
It was too full an explanation. I suspected then — as I had not before — that he had been dodging me.
‘I hope it’s worked.’
‘Just fine now, thanks.’
We had walked a hundred yards along the crisp turf beside the track. Now he halted, legs apart, looking out over what he clearly considered his territory.
‘They’re bringing a pipeline right through the valley,’ he explained, ‘down between those two peaks there. See. Over to the left. You can just see the line of red poles...’
He must have had eagle’s eyes. Squinting, I just managed to see one red pole.
‘Then we go over the brook,’ he was saying with enthusiasm, ‘and farther on it’ll go over
the old railway line. To your right...that run of yellow poles going away through the valley. This year...next year...I’m doing a preliminary — a practicality study, they call it. Don’t they love their fine words! Feasibility! Next summer I’ll spend weeks out here. Do you envy me, Mr Kyle?’
‘Lynne told you my name?’
He nodded. He was cupping his palms round a cigarette, flicking his gold Dunhill. His anorak was an expensive model, his jeans tailored, and his boots were leather with a roll top, displaying the fur lining. The outfit set him off well, lord of all he surveyed.
‘You’re Harry Kyle,’ he said. ‘The one who’s staying with Angie.’ He worked a grain of tobacco onto his finger. ‘Yes, I heard. I hope you’re progressing.’
‘Lynne told you what I’m doing?’
‘Nosing around, she said.’ The smoke was dragged across his face by the breeze. ‘I’ve been trying out our new theodolite. It works with a laser beam. You wouldn’t believe! The little light actually shines a spot on the measuring rods, and you can work accurately right across the valley.’
‘Gledwyn would’ve liked to see that.’
‘He was going to come out with me to watch it working.’ He stamped out the cigarette, grinding it to total extinction.
‘Was he interested in your work?’
‘Was he just! Interested in everything, that man.’
‘Funny, I got a different impression. So far, it’s been the devoted and single-minded scientist.’
He lifted an eyebrow at me. ‘The mad professor type? Just between you and me, mate, he wasn’t all that dedicated, and not much of a bloody scientist, either.’
I walked away from him for a few yards, but he didn’t seem inclined to follow, so I walked back.
‘But you liked him, in spite of his faults?’
He shrugged. ‘You get to like people. You know. And he helped me a lot. Shoved me through school and helped me get my qualifications. But it wasn’t the same, you see. I hadn’t got the brains he thought ran in the family. Academic stuff, that’s what he was interested in, not the practical things I studied. It nearly finished him, I can tell you, when Angie flunked out of college.’
It wasn’t how I’d heard it. Hadn’t she had to come home because of her mother’s illness? Or was it her father’s driving accident?
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of that,’ I said.
‘Come to cousin Neville for the facts. That’s what I’d advise.’
‘Would you? Then tell me — while we’re on facts — when you started drinking so heavily — and why.’
‘Now...who’s taking liberties!’
‘As one who’s helped carry you home...’
‘Hell, why shouldn’t I have the odd jar? It gets you down.’
‘It?’
‘How long d’you think we’ve been engaged? Go on. Guess.’
‘Are you engaged? I didn’t see a ring on Lynne’s finger.’ I laughed, but it got carried away in the wind. ‘I thought you people didn’t trouble with engagements these days.’
‘You people! Hah! That’s going it a bit, and we’ve only just met. You people! I like that. Insults, now.’
‘Modern young people.’
‘Everybody’s modern,’ he declared. Had he argued this with teenage friends? ‘It’s the same now for all of us. I want to get married. Any harm in that?’
‘No harm at all. I apologise. But...engaged?’
‘There’s an understanding.’
‘Which, I gather, has been going on for some time?’
He was mollified, but so easily that I wondered how much of what he did and said was an act. Come to him for the truth, he’d said. For pretence, more likely.
‘Three years,’ he went on. ‘Lynne and me. That was where I met her, up at Uncle Gledwyn’s place. Did she tell you how he’s been using her as a dishcloth? He always acted the part well — the absent-minded scientist with no practical ideas in his head. Had to be carried around...and Lynne loved it. What chance have I had to get her even to think about getting hitched? So I tried to give her a hand with him. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? He wanted a chauffeur — well, Neville’s at hand. You know the sort of thing. I was pretty well at his beck and call, as much as Lynne.’
‘But he was so absent-minded that he didn’t notice your kindness?’
‘No kindness, mate,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong. It was all for me. We were going to be married, and I had to do something...Heh, you know, women are funny. D’you find that? The more I did...hell, the more time it left her to find things she could do for him. Well — I ask you! Wouldn’t you get a bit desperate and take in the odd pint here and there? Between ’em, they got me running round like a mad thing, getting nowhere.’
‘Such as the trip to see his son, Paul?’
All I had to do was keep him going by dropping in a remark here and there. He didn’t want me to think too highly of him. There was nothing disinterested about Neville Green, he’d have you believe.
‘Well, how the devil would Lynne have managed it? His speech to type for the Convention...’
‘Because, of course, he couldn’t drive himself?’
‘He could drive, but he hadn’t got any intention of doing it. Far too comfortable being chauffeured, Uncle Gledwyn was.’ And yet, from the tilt of his head and the half smile, I could tell this was intended as a fond remark.
‘Are you telling me he had been driving?’
‘Oh no. Not on your life. He’d got this psychological block of his. His eyesight was rotten with traffic lights. Did you know that — have they told you?’
‘The way I heard it, a pedestrian got killed.’
‘His own fault!’ he cried, waving his arms. ‘Witnesses all said the same. Uncle Gledwyn didn’t make any mistake. But he had to go into some sort of fugue — ain’t that a marvellous word? — went into this thing he’d got, that told him he couldn’t drive again. Like an invalid. No, no, I couldn’t touch a steering wheel again!’
‘You sound as though you hated him.’
He stopped waving and turned directly to face me, staring in surprise. ‘Oh Lor’, did I? No...no, nothing like that. It was the rest of ’em, pandering to him. They got up my wick. What he needed was to be shoved in a car and sent off on a long drive.’
‘But all the same, he was colour blind. He was tested.’
‘You really ought to get your facts right. Really you should. D’you know that one man in eight or ten is colour blind, some way or other? But d’you see one man in ten sitting at home because he daren’t drive? Nah! They all made too much of it. They let him make too much of it.’
‘But all the same, he didn’t drive.’
‘Crafty old bugger, no.’
‘So you and Lynne did it all for him?’
‘It got me a new Metro, didn’t it?’ He grinned tauntingly.
‘You’re telling me you didn’t do it to help out Lynne, and you didn’t do it to help out your Uncle Gledwyn. You just did it for yourself.’
‘He wanted my old Escort — the good old Green Dragon...heh, there’s a laugh for you. Me Green, and Lynne...’
‘I heard.’
‘Yes. Well, he wanted it to play around with — mess about with the windscreen or something, and that suited me, ’cause I’d only have got scrap price for it, anyway. And he offered to help me replace it, so who’m I to grumble! I reckon he felt easier, buggering up an old Escort’s screen rather than a new car’s.’
‘He seemed to think highly of you,’ I suggested.
‘Why shouldn’t he? I was the only relative still hanging around. A bit of plumbing at the house, Neville will do it. The lights’ve fused, send for Neville. You know how it is. He could’ve done it all himself, but he didn’t want to slip out of his own bit of typecasting.’
I didn’t know what to make of him. He said disparaging things about his uncle in a fond tone; he disparaged himself with a sardonic tongue.
‘It could well have paid off,’ I trie
d, venturing on a deliberate insult to see whether he could be shaken.
‘Did you hear about that?’ he asked with enthusiasm. A fresh cigarette was jiggling between his lips. ‘He told Lynne, on the way back from his Convention. He was going to change his will, and let me in for a bit.’
He lit the cigarette, and, catching my eyes on the lighter, tossed it in his palm. ‘A birthday present from Uncle Gledwyn.’
‘But he didn’t get round to his new will,’ I said.
‘Nah! That same night, he was dead.’
‘Disappointing, hearing about it when it was too late.’
‘Oh, don’t worry. I’d heard before. Hints, you know.’
‘From Lynne?’
‘Not Lynne!’ he said in fierce defence. ‘She called herself his private secretary, and that meant private. No...he’d hinted at it to me. You know the sort of thing. “Help me out with this, Neville, and you won’t find me ungrateful.” And: “I appreciate what you’re doing Neville, and you’ll find I shan’t forget.”’ It was as though he’d carried the words in his memory. ‘But he did forget, didn’t he! Bloody hell, there’s a laugh for you. There was me, working myself to the bone for him, running round in circles if that was what he wanted, and him knowing why I was crawling...and in the end he forgot to change his will.’ Then he threw back his head and did genuinely laugh.
‘You thought he’d already changed it?’
But he saw the trap in that. ‘If I’d thought that, I’d have eased off a bit, wouldn’t I? No — Lynne wasn’t that private a secretary. If he’d actually gone to a solicitor and changed it, I’d have known soon enough.’
‘So you drove him to Aberystwyth, to see his son, Paul, knowing that Paul was still going to inherit under Gledwyn’s will?’
‘Put it like that...yes. But I didn’t—’
‘Using the old Escort, and not your new Metro?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t drive all the way muttering to myself: “Paul’s going to get his money, Paul’s going to get his money.”’
‘Of course not. You’d have to pay attention to your driving.’
‘He wasn’t in a good mood. He left me to concentrate on the road.’
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