‘Put the public in the driving seat through a more expansive citizens’ assembly’
I TOLD him I had written to Bran and that she’d sent an even briefer note back, but one that just said, “No.”
I told him I hadn’t known about his dalliance. Or of anyone else. And she had married Mal after all. So QED, and all that. Gwilym seemed to think this made us some kind of blood brothers because his face lit up again. He said that then it must indeed be Mal who was Haf’s father but that, for reasons beyond him, neither Mal, nor apparently Haf, now thought so. “Unless …” he began to say, looking sly and even more conspiratorial.
I shook my head and halfturned in the bottom-scrunching bucket that called itself a chair to take in the room again. It was an oval office no less, with high ship-like portals for windows and, as well as the permanently closed books, an array of glass cabinets full of the kitsch and wonky maquettes and shields and framed certificates which academic dignitaries from all over the globe gave each other now, objects as pompous and self-proclaiming as those which former trade union leaders from the self-declared Socialist Republics had once carted over by the suitcase in order to show eternal fraternity and everlasting solidarity.
But on the single biggest wall space was an enormous painting in oil and chalk. It would be vivid anywhere. In this room it was positively life-giving. I breathed it in as relief.
“I didn’t know you collected art, Gwil,” I said.
It was his turn to swivel slightly to take in his exceptional picture.
“Not me. Not really. It’s part of the university collection. Hanging in here on loan, for safe keeping, I’m told. Valleys boy. Dead now. I’m told it’s good. Is it, do you think?”
It was better than good. It was amazing.
On an overall background of night-falling blue, chalky ribbons of roads, fitfully lit by the groping headlights of cars and the electric fuzz of stalked street lamps, cut their way down the picture, and the outline of a black river curled alongside like an indolent tape worm.
CONTINUES MONDAY