Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

Chapter 16

BESIDES THE CHAPLAIN there were four mourners at Miss Evangeline’s funeral: the director of the nursing home, one of the patients, a woman from the social services, and, standing some distance away, Lorelei, the one-eyed street-walker who used to visit Miss Evangeline. A small lane runs through Llanbadarn cemetery, and in the late afternoon gloom the streetlamp was already lit. She stood like a sentinel under the lamp, surrounded by swirling white moths of snow; her mouth a scarlet fissure across the powdery moonscape of her face. It was as if she was reluctant to get too close, as if a life being made to feel unwelcome at any sort of respectable gathering had led to ingrained habits that were hard to dissolve, even for the funeral of an old friend. We stood together and listened to the drone of the chaplain’s words. Watched them lower the coffin into the ground. Listened to the thud of dirt on hollow wood. When there was nothing more to watch we walked down Elm Tree Avenue together and on down Queen’s Road to the Prom.

We went to the Cliff Railway station café and ordered two teas just as they were closing. Teas served with sullen ill-will because the appearance of two customers at this hour would make the woman late closing. Lorelei took out a metal flask and poured shots of whisky into the tea. The woman closing up with unnecessary bangs and accusatory crashes threw a look of disapproval. This was an unlicensed café, I could lose my licence. The last train of the evening clanked down to rest on the buffers. No one got off, no one got on. On a night like tonight there was no point trying to escape. Better to drink. To wassail.

‘Not much of a turn-out,’ said Lorelei.

From the radio in the kitchen came the haunting anthem of all troubled Christmases: Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright. The simple ditty that made the soldiers in the Great War lay down their arms and play football. Then pick them up and start shooting each other again. There is no better cameo in all the annals of human history for demonstrating the futile insanity of war.

‘Mind you, I’ll be lucky to get four turn up when I go.’

I squeezed her hand in an attempt to reassure. ‘Does it really matter, once you’ve gone, who turns up to the funeral?’ I said.

Lorelei considered. ‘We were quite close in school. Then we lost touch.’

‘How long have – had you been visiting her at the nursing home?’

‘About ten years. I left town for a while, then when I came back I heard about her from someone, so I started going to see her.’

‘She kept talking about a child.’

‘Yes. I never knew about it at the time.’

‘I promised her I’d try and find it.’

She nodded.

‘Was I wrong, do you think?’

‘It’s not for me to say.’

‘A dying woman’s wish. I could hardly say no.’

‘No, I suppose not. That Erw Watcyns . . . Someone should do something.’

I asked her if she had heard of a soldier called Caleb Penpegws, because all boys who fought in that war, as in all wars, must have passed on their way to the front through the arms of someone like Lorelei.

‘There were so many boys,’ she said. ‘I never remembered the names. But there’s a man at the Pier, Eifion. He might know.’

I paid for the teas and just before we stood up to leave Lorelei said, ‘Will you kill Erw Watcyns?’

I looked at her in surprise, unsure whether she was asking me to do it or asking if I planned to. She saw the look on my face and nodded and said, ‘It’s all right. I know. I’m sorry I said that.’

We walked out into the falling snow; the Prom was hushed and filled with a soft luminescence. Light was a thing you had to be very wary of. In summer it flashed in strange, haunting fashion off the hot chrome bumpers of distant cars turning at Castle Point. All cars have chrome, so why should a flash like that stop you and make you long for things you cannot name? We stood at the brim of the Wishing Well, maintained by the Round Table, and heavily padlocked against wish-thieves.

‘Make a wish,’ I said.

‘I could do with some shoes that don’t pinch.’ She looked down at her feet, clad in old grey vinyl trainers, the ones put out by one of the high-street chains in a forlorn attempt to imitate a famous brand.

‘That Salvation Army shop has plenty on display.’

‘Army Surplice? They always charge me double.’

‘You never find charity where they advertise it.’

‘Oxfam are nice enough.’

I threw in a 50p piece and made a wish about Myfanwy and Christmas and snow.

Son of God, love’s pure light, and then the line I liked best: Sleep in Heavenly peace. But only children know the secret of how to do that. It’s a different country when you grow up.

An old man approached the Wishing Well and stopped when he noticed us. I could understand; being caught making a wish is undignified, like reading pornography. It was Elijah and he was crying. Instinct or tact made Lorelei step away into the shadows.

Elijah said, ‘I am sorry about your little girl, what I did: pulling the gun.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘I am astounded at what has become of me.’

‘You just got carried away.’

‘That is what astounds me most. All my life I have made it a point of principle not to get carried away. Giving in to passion is for fools.’

‘And for human beings.’

‘This, you see, is the poison of Hoffmann. May the ever-merciful Lord blight and curse that fiend.’

‘They say he is coming. They say the name means Hopeman.’

Elijah scoffed. ‘They! Who are they? The peasants of Aberystwyth? What do they know, the poor ignorant fools? They see a word painted in blood and they think their troubles are over.’

‘You don’t think he’ll come?’

‘You ask that of me, a man who has spent a lifetime searching for this chimera? You think this ignis fatuus will just turn up and sing “Away in a Manger”?’ He scoffed again.

‘If that’s the case, why don’t you give up your quest? Can it really be so important now, after all these years? Surely most of the people involved must be dead?’

‘Two brothers I have lost to this cause. Two lovely brothers, two of the noblest men ever to walk the earth . . . First there was delightful Ham the poet; and then delicate Absalom, the prophet and scholar. I never knew a human heart so little visited by the vice of pride as Absalom’s. He was willing to wear the ludicrous red robes of a Christian icon and work in a department store in order to fill his belly with bread – honourable bread – rather than shame his family by begging. Both those boys were superior to me in so many ways. Sometimes I wish God had taken me in their stead. You ask me to give up my quest, after such a price has been paid? After my family has lost so much? I should pack my bag and go home to the grave of my dear beloved Mama and tell her I could not save her sons; I could not find them because I lacked the strength to carry on when so near my goal? You ask me to do that? You ask me to dishonour myself.’

‘But if he’s not coming . . .’

‘Did I say that? You asked if I thought he would turn up and announce himself to the people of Aberystwyth and I said no. But all the same I feel that he is here. And so must my brother Absalom have felt it, too. Otherwise, why would he have come?’

‘But Absalom came in search of Ham.’

‘Yes, and Ham was seeking Hoffmann. By finding one you find the other. Such are the perplexities that confront me. And yet you could so easily lift my burden by telling me what your girl found in the alley.’

‘Why don’t you lift my burden and tell me what was in the coat pocket, the one stolen from Eichmann?’

‘You offer to trade?’

‘That’s fair, isn’t it?’

‘The item in the pocket was the list of names of people who attended Eichmann’s weekly card game.’

‘Just a list of names?’

‘Ah, but think who would be on that list. Think who would want to see it. Every Nazi fugitive in Patagonia would be on it. What wouldn’t the Israeli secret service give for that information? What wouldn’t Odessa give to see that they did not get it?’

‘So why did the Americans want it?’

‘Because the Israelis wanted it. And the Russians wanted it because the Americans wanted it.’

‘Who is killing all these people?’

‘The Pieman.’

‘Who does he work for?’

‘Hoffmann.’

‘And who does he work for?’

‘Welsh Intelligence.’

‘Do they also want the list of names?’

‘Oh yes, they want it more badly than any of them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the people on that list were witnesses to the commission of an evil crime.’

‘What sort of crime?’

‘One so grave it caused a priest, so they say, to lose his wits.’

‘Yes, but what was it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Hey! We’re supposed to be trading . . .’

‘Truly, I don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s your turn now, anyway.’

‘The item we found was just a picture of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’

Elijah’s face flashed with anger and disappointment. ‘Even now he mocks me. After I treat fairly with him, he cheats me, the Gonif.

‘It’s true.’

‘Oh yes, it’s true! A picture of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? You like to swindle me, heh? You . . . you . . . moyshe Pupik! You . . . you chiam Yankel . . . with your Shikseh from the Shandhoiz!’

‘But it was! Truly!’

‘Of course it was a picture of Butch Cassidy. But what else?’ He threw his hands up in weary despair and walked off, shouting, ‘I throw salt in your eyes! And pepper in your nose, you Kucker!’

Lorelei and I walked the length of the Prom. She was taking me to see an old soldier called Eifion, one of those sad, benighted fools who are addicted to the Laughing Policeman machine. It was too early to find him and we headed for the Castle for a drink. At the shelter overlooking the crazy golf course a man stood on an orange-box preaching to a small crowd. It was the army chaplain, the one who left his wits behind in Patagonia. His voice drifted over and we stopped to listen.

‘. . . and yet, like many here tonight, they had no stomach for the truth. They expected me to pull a rabbit out of a hat and say, “It’s not really happening; you’re not really ensnared in a tragedy from which the only escape is the grave; you’re not really about to die in a cause that no one here can remember any more the point of.” I tried to show them, to make them see how little a thing to be feared is death. I said, “Why do you fear to die?” And they did not know. The fools did not know why. I told them. We fear death because in looking upon it we contemplate our non-existence and see how utterly the world will be unchanged by our absence from it; and, even more terrifyingly, how little difference it would have made to the world if we had never existed at all. A few minutes is all it would have taken at the dawn of our life for us never to become even a spark in the eternal night. Imagine it! He who was to be your father comes home and pauses to scrape some dog poo off his shoe. And lo! the universe is different. He does not mount that woman who would have been your mother; that night they watch TV instead. Their first child, the one that is no longer you, is conceived the following night. So easily could you not have existed. And therein lies our salvation, because if that is the case, if our existence is really such a trivial accident, what pain could it possibly cause us to end it? This I said to them and they repudiated me for it.’

The chaplain paused to catch his breath; his brow was glistening with sweat.

‘It is a curious thing that a man mortally wounded on the battlefield, when he knows his end is near, will cry for his mother. I used to walk among them and say, “Oh yes, now you cry for your mummy, you big baby, you big ninny, you hopeless cissy! Have you never considered how little she would have noticed if you had not been born? And yet here in your final moments, with the last of your strength, you cry to her!”’ He paused again and said softly, more to himself than to the assembled crowd, ‘What a fucking nightmare. Let us pray.’

* * *

The bar was gloomy, illuminated only by flashes of colour from two fruit machines against the wall. I used to like playing them in the days when you just pulled a handle and no other input was needed. But I didn’t understand them any more. Nowadays you needed a pilot’s licence to operate them though it was difficult to see why: for all the extra sophistication the outcome never changed. How could it, since it was fixed by law? Perhaps it was all just a metaphor, an easily understood parable for the citizens of the town, which illuminated the cruel but strangely popular Calvinist doctrine of predestination. For reasons we can only guess at, it is said that God decides before we are born which of us are to be saved and which consigned to eternal damnation; and not just before we were born, but before anyone was born. Before He started work on the universe, before He had even laid the first brick, it had been ordained who would be lost and who would be saved; and which of us would serve our time in Aberystwyth. Nothing we do on this earth makes a blind bit of difference. God pulls the arm, the wheels spin, we are damned or saved. All you can do is hope He gives better odds than the publican.

A figure detached itself from the dark and walked over to our table. A man’s shadow spread across Lorelei’s white, powdery face. We looked up. It was Erw Watcyns.

‘This is a nice surprise,’ he said with the air of one who doesn’t like surprises. ‘Two of Aberystwyth’s noblest professions sharing a drink. The whore and the shamus.’

‘Now you’re here, we’ve got the set,’ I said.

He laughed. His eyes were glittering from the effects of drink. ‘Enjoy your jokes, Shamus, I’m not interested in you tonight.’ And then to Lorelei, ‘It’s you I want tonight, hotpants.’

She raised her eyes in an understanding that took me a second longer to grasp.

‘She’s done nothing . . .’ I began, but the sneer on his face told me that this was not about what she had done; but about what he would make her do.

‘Not yet she hasn’t; but she will. Get your coat.’

She stood up with the weary air of a prizefighter who had hoped the referee would count her out. ‘Please, Louie, pay no mind. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.’

I sat and drank my pint along with the handful of people who were in the bar that night; people for whom drinking was less a pleasure than a ritual which imposed structure on the terrifying abyss of time stretching between now and the grave. I thought about the people in my client’s chair. What did they expect? Why did they come? Because nothing ever turned out they way they hoped. Really? What were you hoping for? I don’t know, it’s so long ago now. I was seventeen. Full of bubbling expectancy, latency for things I couldn’t name. I just assumed something would turn up. Guess what? Nothing did.

The people in my client’s chair.

Have you thought about a Promised Land? That often helps. Patagonia is one, but there are plenty more to choose from. Just follow the Yellow Brick Road. Can’t miss it. It snakes over hill and dale, curves and wriggles over the landscape and round church spires, and is lost somewhere in the gentle mauve haze of evening. The Promised Land. The address is easy to remember: yonder.

I looked at my watch and slid off my chair. I walked out into the cold night air and stood in the porch of the pub, a three-sided alcove with three doors as if ingress to the sanctuary was of vital importance and no time could be lost admitting the patrons. Across the road, beyond the railings, the sea roared with the usual muted thunder, like a storm beyond the hills. There was a scrape of shoe sole on gritty pavement, the sort of sole that my ears, with that otherworldly intensification of the senses which sometimes happens in nights like this, detected as belonging to sensible shoes; ones worn by nuns and district nurses and the terminally insane. A face popped out of the darkness into the light of the the porch, like the ghost train at the fair; a bright moon of a face, tear-stained and with eyes shining in fear like those of a colt disturbed in a byre by a thunderstorm. Crowning the face, across the forehead, was a dishevelled bandage. It was Tadpole, looking like Frankenstein’s monster. I jumped back, startled, half-expecting a bolt of lightning to hit the spire above the pub and fill Tadpole’s veins with current. She looked deep into my face, breathing heavily, features wild. Neither of us spoke and then just as suddenly she darted away across the road. A car driver hit the horn and swerved, tyres squealed, but she reached the other side and banged into a lamppost, ricocheted off and gathered a momentum which took her to the railings. She rebounded off them like a wrestler off the ropes and fell to the ground in a misshapen sprawl. Her sobs resounded across the tarmac, adding a sad harmonic to the thunder from the beach. I walked across and knelt down beside her, put my hand on her back. She throbbed like a frightened animal. It was the easiest thing in the world to despise someone like Tadpole. But was she responsible for being despicable? She just played the hand she was dealt, like the rest of us. Could Myfanwy take credit for being beautiful and beloved? If she burned her face badly in a car crash, would she still infect people with the joy that accounted for her popularity? Tadpole was one of the most unpleasant girls I knew, but also the unhappiest, and these things are not disconnected.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she snivelled, ‘about Miss Evangeline. But it wasn’t me, it was Erw Watcyns. I know what you think, I know you hate me . . .’ She sobbed into her hands.

I made no attempt to deny that I blamed her or hated her. Maybe she was telling the truth, but I knew that if she was guilty she would still be here lying about it, saying: ‘it wasn’t me’.

‘I was going to tell you, at the caravan. When I came round for my pants, I was going to tell you.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘About Hoffmann. I know who he is. You’ll be amazed when you find out. I was going to tell you and then, and then . . .’ She collapsed again into convulsions of sobs. I waited. ‘All I wanted was for you to like me. All that stuff, it wasn’t true. I said it to impress you. I haven’t really had lots of dates. I . . . I’ve never had a boyfriend. Only once, some lad took me on his motorbike and . . . did it in the hedge. He left me there. Now all his mates point at me when they see me. No one liked me in school, no one’s ever liked me.’

‘I like you,’ I said.

‘No, you don’t. You’re just saying it so I’ll tell you who Hoffmann is.’

‘I’m not. I don’t give a damn. Honest.’

‘I had some whisky.’

There’s nothing wrong with that. I drink, too, when I’m unhappy.’

‘They say you shouldn’t.’

‘Sure.’

‘I don’t usually drink. It made me feel sick.’

And then she was. I tried to reposition her so she could throw up over the ledge of the pavement, onto the beach, but it wasn’t easy. She didn’t have the will to try, so the stuff flowed down over her shoulder. I took out a handkerchief and wiped her mouth. I brushed a wet straw of hair aside; her tear-stained cheeks glistened in the streetlamp.

‘Better?’

She nodded. ‘Louie?’

‘Yes?’

‘Kiss me.’

I tried not to react.

‘Just for Christmas. A Christmas kiss. I’ve never had one. Please.’

I bent forward into the fumes of her ammoniac breath and gave her a peck on the corner of her mouth.

She smiled. ‘Thank you.’

I helped her to her feet, rearranged her coat, like a mother getting a kid ready for school.

‘Louie, let’s go away.’

The sinews of my body stiffened.

‘Take me away, now, tonight. We could go to Shrewsbury, or London. I’ve got fifty pounds in the bank. You can have it . . .’ The words trailed off. ‘Louie.’

‘It’s not possible.’

‘Why?’

‘It just isn’t.’

‘You said you liked me.’

‘I do.’

‘It’s because of her, isn’t it? Myfanwy?’

I thought for a second. I was about to deny it, but that felt like a betrayal. ‘It’s because of her and lots of things. I said I liked you, that doesn’t mean—’

She jerked herself away from me and said, ‘I was going to tell you about Hoffmann, but I’m never ever ever ever going to tell you now, you bastard. Never.’

She waddled drunkenly off along the sugar-white railings of the Prom, that railway line where they shunt human woe all through the night.

When Lorelei returned she looked stricken; maybe that was normal after a trick. She gave me a slight nod and we left. Outside the Old College she said, ‘Hang on a sec,’ and pulled an eye dropper from her bag. She tilted her head back and let some drops fall onto her glass eye. ‘Artificial tears. My tear ducts don’t work – it’s called Sjögren’s syndrome.’ She strode off, newly wetted eyes glistening like a rain-slicked street after a storm. I followed thinking, In Aberystwyth it’s not just the harlot’s smile that is bought.