MORNING SERIAL
I WALKED away from the yard and back out onto the road. I bent into the rain, as naggingly penetrating as ever, and walked up the road. It was a hundred yards or so, but I broke no records getting to the hotel.
In the rain, on that road, the hotel looked more incongruous than the first time. Maybe it was me that just wasn’t congruent anymore. Out of step. Out of time. Out of place, and yet inside from outside.
It was beginning to sound like the soapy wisdom of a moody song. I told it to stop. I had them order me a cab and waited in the dry.
SIR Ceri Evans was running late. There had been no further messages.
It was probably the common assumption of what had become an uncommon life.
That he could be late with no apology. I was at ease with that. I was even more at ease with the large G&T that was nursing me. The brasserie was at the back of a grooved wooden deck two flights up from the pavement of the washed and scrubbed waterfront.
The marble-topped table had been booked and I had been sat at it on a spindly bentwood chair for over half an hour. The view was of a flat viscous lagoon that struggled to reflect back the light of its ambient Venusberg café-bars and restaurants.
That, too, was OK by me. I needed a matt finish to soothe the Technicolor of the day. It was more soothing anyway than the signature buildings near to which the taxi had dropped me for my short promenade to the brasserie.
The buildings were new to me. There seemed around the parliamentary one to be a skirt of slate that lapped up the steps and into the building as if to bring to a darker ground the plate glass which promised transparent government. Its pine roof had a funnel of wood which looked like a wheatsheaf ready for harvesting. It felt more sauna than smoke-filled room. I wondered if this county council Cymru had really stripped itself down so soon to such an indecent basic openness.