Chapter 7 Clash of the Titans
Clash of the Titans
The large room seemed to be entirely full of people, all of whose faces had swivelled in our direction, although panic made them blurred to me.
‘Cariad, darling child,’ said a small, elderly man, with silvery hair and a beard. ‘If you become an archaeologist, you’ll be a huge loss to the stage!’
‘Hello, Uncle Noel!’ Cariad said, pulling me further into the room. ‘This is Ginny, and she’s not a Gorgon.’
She let go of my hand and made a beeline for a tray of canapés on the coffee table before a glowing and very realistic fake log fire.
‘I never thought she was,’ Nerys said. She was sitting at one end of a long, squishy blue velvet sofa and now patted the seat next to her invitingly.
‘Do come and sit down, Ginny. Most of our guests met briefly earlier, over tea and coffee in the refectory, but I thought we’d wait for you and do a proper round robin, with everyone introducing themselves.’
I sank down gratefully next to her and, now that my panic had subsided slightly, took in the room and the other people there – half a dozen or so men and women – including my mother, seated comfortably before the fire with her feet up on a pouffe and a glass of an amber liquid in her hand.
She gave me her somewhat crocodilian smile. She was clad in a slinky pleated jersey top and trousers in an odd pinkish-lilac shade that matched her short spiky hair. I was so glad she had given up the shrieking bubblegum shade it had been the last time I saw her.
The rest of the party were grouped sitting or standing around the fire, as if posing for a bizarre contemporary uptake on The Night Watch.
But they only occupied one end of the room, which must extend right to the back of the house, with a great, curtained bay, with cushioned seats around a table, at the far end.
Tall, well-filled bookshelves lined the walls and, as always in other people’s houses, I would much rather have looked at the books than the people, but Cariad’s voice recalled my attention.
‘Daddy isn’t here yet,’ she objected, through a mouthful of cheese straws, and I saw a large, lumpy middle-aged woman with a heavy face under tightly curled grey hair that resembled nothing so much as a metal pan scourer cast her a look of undisguised disapproval.
‘Oh, we won’t wait for Rhys. He won’t mind if we begin without him,’ Nerys said. ‘Timon, give Ginny a drink and then I’ll start our round robin off. We might as well get the family out of the way first.’
I accepted a glass of sherry from a tall, thin, bespectacled man with sandy hair. It wasn’t something I’d ever drunk before, but all the alternatives seemed to be spirits, which I don’t really like.
When I took a cautious sip, it reminded me of fruit cake somehow, and I quite liked it.
‘You all know who I am – Nerys Matthews,’ Nerys began. ‘This has been the family home of the Caradocs for generations and I am the direct descendant of the painter Cosmo Caradoc, who lived and worked here until his early death just after the First World War – late in 1919, to be exact.’
I cast a startled look at Evie. Caradoc’s death being around the crucial time she was researching was something that I, at least, hadn’t known. But she was regarding Nerys enigmatically over her glass.
‘I am also a painter,’ continued Nerys. ‘It seems to run in the family. My parents were not themselves artists of any kind; they were keenly interested in all the arts and began the Retreats. Now there are several over the year, although, of course, we have only recently been able to start them again.’
She looked at the wiry, sandy-haired man who had given me my drink and said: ‘Over to you, Timon.’
‘As you will have gathered, I’m Timon Matthews, Nerys’s husband.
I’m a ceramic artist and I also run the Triskelion Pottery in what was once the old stables and coach house.
Originally called Triskelion Art Porcelain, it was set up to produce porcelain figurines by Hugh Caradoc-Jones, who married Cosmo Caradoc’s daughter and added her name to his own.
We changed the name of the business to Triskelion Pottery, since that is what everyone called it, and branched out a little more in our range.
’ He beamed round at us all. ‘I can give any of you interested a tour of the pottery and there’s also an attached gallery and cafe. ’
‘I think you’d better get off your hobby horse, Timon, and pass the baton to Uncle Noel,’ Nerys suggested with a smile.
‘You introduce me, dear boy. I’m going to be talking enough later,’ said the silver-haired man to Timon.
I noticed that he bore such a strong resemblance to one of a pair of tall porcelain figurines on the mantelpiece behind him, a strange white-robed man wearing a wreath of twigs, that he must have sat for it.
And now I came to look at the other, a traditional Father Christmas, he looked remarkably like Tudor!
‘OK,’ Timon agreed. ‘This is Noel Piper, a relation of Nerys, and so Uncle Noel to us all! He owns the bookshop in the village, A Winter’s Tale, specializing in antiquarian and new books on Welsh mythology, history and legends, and also anything winter or Christmas related.
He is also an expert on local history and will be giving us an after-dinner talk tonight on the annual Seren Bach Winter Solstice ceremony, which takes place tomorrow night. ’
‘Succinctly put, dear boy,’ said Noel.
Just then, I felt the other end of the long sofa I was sitting on sink and I looked sideways.
Rhys Tarn must have slipped silently into the room and was now sitting right next to me with only the width of one cushion dividing us.
He was no longer blue-chinned and had the slightly startled air of someone who had just dipped his face in icy water to wake himself up.
His black hair was damp around the front and trying to curl.
He stared at me with a strangely arrested look and said, in an undertone: ‘Why, you’re Ginny Spain!’
‘I know I am,’ I said coldly.
I made to turn away and he said quickly, in the same undertone, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at once, but the bottom of those stairs is so badly lit.’
‘Why should you remember me? As I told you, we only met once, very briefly, years ago.’
I literally gave him the cold shoulder then, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him reach out a long arm and firmly remove the depleted bowl of cheese straws from Cariad’s reach.
‘That’s enough guzzling,’ he told her, and at the sound of that deep, mellow and entirely distinctive voice, all heads swivelled in his direction.
‘Ah, Rhys,’ said Timon. ‘This is my nephew, Rhys Tarn, everyone, the poet and novelist. He and his daughter, Cariad, live at Triskelion, but he’s just got back from a lecture tour of the US.’
‘Lucrative but shattering,’ Evie commented sympathetically, from a wealth of experience.
‘True,’ Rhys said, sounding amused. ‘Lecture tours, both at home and abroad, form a large part of my income.’
‘And mine,’ agreed Evie. ‘Just as well I enjoy them.’
The large, lumpy and formidable woman with the wire-wool hair, ignoring this interchange, had been frowning heavily.
‘I’m Kate Komodo and I hadn’t realized there would be children here!’ she stated, as if they were an alien subspecies. ‘I thought this was a serious retreat.’
‘Oh, sweet Kate, kind Kate – not,’ muttered Rhys under his breath, and then, as I turned startled eyes on him, quirked up one black eyebrow and the corner of his mouth, so that, despite my intention to keep him at a distance to try and prevent a barrage of traumatic memories from overtaking me, I had to stifle a giggle.
I thought it would take a brave Petruchio to tame this shrew!
‘I’m not children, there’s only one of me,’ said Cariad, unimpressed and looking at Kate Komodo with acute disfavour.
‘It’s clearly stated on the website, and in the literature I sent you when you booked, that this retreat, with a limited number of guests living en famille, is an opportunity to recharge your creative batteries and, if you want to, join in with all the seasonal celebrations and enjoy a family Christmas.
But of course,’ Nerys added, ‘other than mealtimes guests can occupy themselves however they wish. You can work in your rooms, or in the library next door, and artists are also welcome to use my studio.’
‘This is Cariad’s home and of course, at Christmas, she will be at the heart of the family celebrations,’ Timon said with finality.
‘And I’m allowed to stay up late for dinner in the school holidays,’ Cariad said, as if this was the clincher.
‘I have no objection. I’ve never found the presence of children in any way detrimental to my ability to work,’ announced Evie, which was quite true because she’d packed me off with Liv, or to boarding schools.
‘And I’m more than happy …’ stammered a young man who I hadn’t really noticed until then, since he seemed to be trying to hide in a dark corner.
‘It won’t matter to us, either,’ chorused two wispy, pale young women, leaning forward out of the shadows like twin wraiths.
They were small and very thin, with feathery, pixie-cut pale green hair that revealed the tips of their pointed ears.
In fact, I suspected they were going for the whole elfin vibe, because they were wearing floaty, tunic-short green dresses and had painted their finger- and toenails, revealed by unseasonable silver sandals, a greenish shade, too.
In my opinion, the nail varnish was a step too far, because combined with their pallor and almost transparent thinness, it made them look as if they’d been dead for a week. They did, however, look vaguely familiar.
‘Well, let’s move on from the family to the guests,’ said Nerys more briskly. ‘Perhaps we can start with you, Verity?’