From Aberystwyth with Love

Chapter 7

I went to the office to lock up and found Uncle Vanya sitting in the client’s chair. He had a bottle of vodka and two glasses on the table. The merry glitter in his eyes made it clear he had not waited for me to start. There was a copy of the evening paper on the desk folded to a story about three painters sighting Gethsemane Walters. It said they were students.

‘You are a hot-shot,’ he said.

‘I am not a hot-shot.’

‘Thirty-five years no one knew where she was, and you! Two days it took you. Even our best detectives in Hughesovka could not achieve a resolution so quickly.’

‘Yes they could, trust me. She escaped.’

‘Such charming modesty!’

‘We don’t even know if it really is Gethsemane.’

‘Who else could it be?’

‘I have no idea.’

He slapped the newspaper with the back of his hand. ‘According to this a passer-by found her hat and handed it in. Her name was written on the label inside her hat.’

‘That passer-by was me.’

‘How could she be wearing her hat if it was not her? The case is almost closed. We celebrate. We drink to the hot-shot.’

‘Even if it is her, we don’t know how she got there, or where she has been all these years. The case is not closed, not by me anyway. I haven’t earned my sock yet. Anyway, the cops are all over it now, so expect a visit from them.’

He slid his index finger across his lips to indicate that they were sealed as far as volunteering information to the authorities. ‘Tonight, my friend, we drink!’ he declared in a manner that would brook no denial, even on the remote chance that a denial was offered. ‘Please,’ he added. ‘No buts.’

‘OK, tonight we drink but in return you must help me.’

‘Of course I will help you.’

‘I want to go to the railway station buffet and speak to a man called Rwpert Valentino about this case.’

‘Who is Rwpert Valentino?’

‘He is a star in the TV soap North Road. According to the scandal sheets he hangs around the station buffet because he is in love with the girl there. He interests us because he was once in the same nativity play as Gethsemane.’

‘Is he so very difficult to talk to?’

‘Just pretend the case is still open.’

‘Say no more,’ said Vanya. ‘The case is still open and tonight we drink. Tonight we test the limits of that puny vessel, your Welsh heart.’

We remained in the office for a while, and drank in silence; a mute and intense seriousness as each considered his own thoughts. For many years I had been unaware of the void in my office. It was the calling card of my trade as a crime-fighter, a caped crusader. It went with the territory along with the dents in the tarnished armour, and the liquor and the Bakelite fan. Just like Sospan had his vanilla. There had been a girl, for a while, called Myfanwy, whom all the town loved but none more so than me. She was the singer at the Moulin Club and as much a part of our town as vanilla and donkey droppings and neon and heartache. She sang of them all. And then she lost her voice and the town hall clock lost its tick. In January of this year she went away to a sanatorium in Switzerland where the doctors say she would over time regain her voice. She sends postcards, but not often. And the townspeople ask about her in ways that I find painful. I smile and say in a falsely jovial voice that she is doing well and will be back soon, but she hasn’t said she will. We feel her absence almost as keenly as her presence.

I opened the drawer and took out the envelope that had contained the séance tape. I lifted it to my nose and sniffed. It was not a scent in the ordinary sense of the word, not the stuff you buy from Boots and dab behind the ears. And yet it was a scent of sorts, a fragrance from long ago that evoked an image I had seen once in my dreams: I look up from the bottom of a well, staring at blue sky framed by elm trees; the whistle of a steam engine shrieks; there is a shower of sparks and sweet smoke billows through the leaves; a woman in a cream two-piece outfit appears in the frame against the blue; she exclaims in mild dismay and says, ‘Oh sugar!’ She removes a spot of soot from her cream jacket sleeve. I do not know this woman but she has a young gentle face.

The level of the vodka began to approach the halfway mark. All true drinkers know that the second half of the bottle, like the second week of the summer holiday, passes much quicker than the first and this thought alone can induce a queasy form of angst. At times a summer night is a wide landscape to cross and a wise man provisions well before setting out. We walked to the off-licence on Terrace Road and I bought a supplemental bottle, this time of Captain Morgan rum.

We emerged from the off-licence with spirits buoyed by the knowledge that whatever befell us there was still alcohol. The actors in the drama of the coming night were putting the finishing touches to their grease paint, some were already to be seen emerging furtively from doorways, testing the night air with their whiskers like rats; in the orchestra pit the police cars were tuning up their sirens; already in some remote part of town there came that intimate and familiar ululation of the klaxon, denoting the first arrest or perhaps the first man carried on a stretcher into the back of an ambulance. By the end of the evening the medics would be throwing them into the back like an engineer shovelling coal into the firebox of a runaway train.

We walked along Terrace Road towards the railway station. Troops of girls, smeared with make-up, already drunk, lurched from side to side along the pavement, into the road, cars swerved and pipped their horns eliciting rude gestures from the girls. ‘We have such girls in my country too,’ said Uncle Vanya.

The streets cleared of the few remaining tourists, they were hurrying to their cars now, eager to return to the safety of the caravan and tonight’s Ludo ration. We walked towards the railway station, that iron lung that breathed in the people fed with the oxygen of hope, and exhaled them later, bitter, soul-weary, disbelieving; and all exemplifying Sospan’s assertion that belief in promised lands is defeated by the fact that we take our pain with us in our suitcase. Character is fate, as both Sospan and Heraclitus have said.

The coaches of the midnight train to Shrewsbury lay stretched out beside the platform in a maroon ribbon. Along the side were rectangles of electric light in that heartbreaking deep yellow that comes only from bulbs belonging to railway companies. Uncle Vanya beheld the train with glittering eyes. ‘Ah, my friend Louie! I can never look at a train without tears. Come, we must drink!’

We went into the buffet. On the counter a tea urn shone, the array of tubes and flasks and steam reservoirs evoked the innards of a ship’s engine room, or a lost property office in which had been deposited the instruments of a silver band. We took teas and sat at a shaky wooden table next to the window that looked out on to the platform. Sitting on an adjacent table was a group of actors from North Road. They were smoking and talking theatrical shop. Traces of foundation cream and paint still lay in the crevices of skin around their eyes. I never watched the programme but I could intuit easily enough that the young innocent-looking girl was a new recruit in the scullery and the rat-faced, grey-haired man was her master and predator. The other one, with the slicked-down hair and central parting, the big eyes and film-star looks from the 1930s studio portrait, was Rwpert Valentino. He spoke with a squeaky voice and threw his arms around in gestures that were flamboyant and self-consciously phoney. He smoked a cigarette held in a long holder and I knew for a fact there wasn’t a shop between here and Shrewsbury that sold such things.

Uncle Vanya poured the last of the vodka into the tea and we drank. ‘So much of my life has been spent in train compartments. Those of the Stolypin car were no bigger,’ he pointed to the train. ‘Ten people would share it if you were lucky; but it could be twenty or even thirty. On my way to Kolyma I spent two months in a train compartment like this, and that was by no means a record.’

‘Why did they send you to the camps?’

‘Which time? I was sent two times. The last time for murdering my wife. And the first time, who knows? The question is meaningless; it implies there was a “why?”. There was no such thing. They threw the dice, your turn came, you went. In the early years, when the secret police came, a man might naturally ask for a reason. What have I done? But soon we learned not to ask because the question was stupid. It rested on the old-fashioned bourgeois belief that one must do something wrong to be arrested. You see? Of course, there is always a reason written down on your file, and through the endless interrogations you will eventually agree to it, whatever it is, even if it makes no sense. I was twenty, I had been working for a year as a junior card-typist in the Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering. And then I was denounced for being a diversionary wrecker. I got ten years. Denouncing was a very useful method of getting rid of someone you didn’t like. Or who was perhaps a rival, not that I was a rival to anyone. Men were denounced by their adulterous wives in order to remove them from the scene. Neighbours were denounced so others could move into their apartment. One day someone did it to me and still to this day I do not know who, nor why. But it does not matter. I say this merely as a register of fact. I do not complain. No matter how bad one’s fate, there is always someone with a worse one. Throughout my time in the camps I was haunted by the fate of a woman whose story I heard. She had been suckling her baby one afternoon when she received a visit from the NKVD. They told her to get her coat and come down to the police station to answer a few questions. She asked what about the baby, and they told her to leave the child since she would only be gone ten minutes. She tried arguing but they were very insistent; they assured her the questions were a formality and would not even last ten minutes. They refused even to let her take the baby round to a neighbour. So she put the child in his cradle and went with the policemen. In the station she was charged as an enemy of the people and shipped off to Lubyanka for further questioning. From there she joined the long rail caravans to eastern Siberia. She left her baby that afternoon in an empty apartment in Hughesovka and never saw it again. Throughout my years of servitude I meditated upon this story, and wondered: is it the most tragic of all? As a cartographer of the human heart would she have been the greatest? But who is to say? In the monastery of Slovetsky they had a crooked cupboard inside which it was impossible for a man or woman to stand up or sit down, impossible to find any position of ease or comfort; whichever position you adopted you were forced by the crooked walls and low ceiling to adopt a pose that quickly became unbearable agony. They would lock a prisoner in this cupboard overnight. In the morning he would be completely insane. How can one measure the extent of his suffering during that night? An entire lifetime of agony condensed into the space of a single interminable night. Is it worse than the unending nightmare, spread out over many years, of the little girl of eight who was so demented by hunger that she ate a grain of rye from a cowpat? Stealing from the Collective, even its dung, is a terrible crime and grievously did she answer for it: ten years’ penal servitude. Is that night in the cupboard worse than those ten terror-filled years for the uncomprehending girl?’

At the table across from us the actors stood up and left, leaving Rwpert alone, smoking a doleful cigarette. We joined him and poured some rum into his cold tea. He looked at us warily and tried to lose the camp affection that had hallmarked his previous demeanour.

‘If you’re worried we might be two toughs looking for some fun at your expense,’ I said, ‘you could be right. My friend here has spent many years in a Siberian labour camp and he was denounced by an actor. He doesn’t like actors.’

Rwpert swallowed hard.

‘He especially doesn’t like ones called Rwpert.’

‘That was the name of the man who denounced me, I spit upon the bones of his mother,’ said Vanya.

Rwpert decided not to ask how we knew his name but he saw clearly that it was not a good sign.

‘When we arrived,’ said Uncle Vanya, ‘there was no camp. Just a railway line that ended in a buffer in the middle of the snow and tundra. “Where is the camp?” we cried. “This is it,” they laughed. “If you don’t want to die you had better build some shelter.” So we did. We walked ten miles to find water and five to find wood.’

‘All because of a man called Rwpert,’ I said.

‘I curse the bones of his mother and her mother too.’

‘All the time he was in that camp, during those odd hours when he was not mining the gold beneath the frozen wastes, he was thinking of how he would revenge himself upon all the people in the world called Rwpert.’

‘I spell my name with a “w”; it’s a very rare form of it.’

‘We know,’ I said. ‘The man who denounced him spelled it the same way. He was from Hughesovka which was founded by Welsh people and has the highest incidence of Rwperts who spell their name with a “w” of anywhere in the world.’

‘Oh shit,’ said Rwpert.

‘In Siberia, during the long bitter years incarcerated with the dregs of Soviet criminal society, he learned so many ways of killing a man, so many ways of inflicting torment, that sometimes it takes him all day to decide which to use.’

‘Please don’t kill me,’ Rwpert said softly. ‘I have a sickly child. We love her very much but the expense of looking after her is difficult to meet. With me gone, I’m not sure how my wife could manage. Please, beat me if you must, but do not kill me. And if you must beat me, please not on my face. I know it’s not much to look at these days, what with these accursed cigarettes, the cheap make-up and the late hours, but for all that it is my meal ticket; if you bruise my face I will not be able to work. I am sorry about the evil done to you by this other Rwpert, but please think of my child.’

I looked across to Uncle Vanya who was weeping. ‘You poor man, you poor brother in suffering, I bless the sacred bones of your dear mother,’ he said.

I took out the photograph of Gethsemane in the school nativity play and showed it to Rwpert. ‘If you tell me about this picture we will not hurt you.’

Rwpert looked at Uncle Vanya.

‘Don’t be fooled,’ I added hurriedly. ‘He is a very mercurial man. One minute up, the next down. Soon this perception that you are united by a common bond of suffering will pass, as swiftly as a cloud passes in front of the sun, and then he will want to kill you again.’

Rwpert took the photo and brought it up to his face and peered. The look of fear and hostility on his face slowly melted, replaced by surprise and wonder. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘That’s me, Joseph, father of baby Jesus. I look so . . .’ He stopped. He looked so . . . what was it? A look of concentration formed, the expression of a man struggling to call to mind a vital truth. He tried again. ‘You know, I was . . . I wanted . . .’ He stopped again. ‘I always thought that one day, I . . . I . . .’ He bunched his fingers into a fist and pressed it to his forehead. ‘Fuck,’ he said. He began to whimper. His heart had burst, ambushed by a tumult of anguish. What was he remembering? The little boy contemplating all the great things he would one day be? Or just a gate he played on as a kid? That can do it. I would have told him, if it had not been for the tears that now glistened on his cheeks and smudged the kohl-rimmed eyes, that sometimes we cannot find the words because they are not there. Words are such wonderful things that they deceive us, we fail to see how even the simplest things so often lie beyond their reach; we can describe spaceships and translucent sea creatures that live on the floor of the ocean trench, but we have no way to describe the subtly differing currents that sweep through the channels of our own hearts. Words are brass coal tongs with which we seek to caress butterflies. When the veils of memory are torn asunder, and the raw experience is released like scent in the mind, the coal tongs snap on empty air.

‘What do you want to know?’ he snivelled.

‘You remember this scene?’

‘Of course.’

‘This is you?’

‘Yes.’

‘The kid in the cardboard beak is Gethsemane Walters, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She disappeared.’

‘We know, but where did she go?’

‘I was only fifteen.’

‘So you’ve had a long time to think about it, what do you think happened?’

Rwpert considered and said, ‘I saw in the paper that she’s back. Someone saw her down by the lake.’

‘That’s right, and someone handed in her hat.’

‘Was it really her?’

‘I’ve no idea. What do you think?’

‘I think she’s dead, buried in the concrete of the dam.’

‘Who killed her? Goldilocks?’

‘So they say.’

‘What do you say?’

He pressed his wet face into his hands. ‘I don’t know, I don’t.’

I addressed Uncle Vanya. ‘Has your melancholy subsided?’

‘I’m recovering.’

‘Better hurry up, Rwpert. See how he flinches when I mention your name?’

‘Look,’ said Rwpert. ‘Why not ask her mum, Ffanci Llangollen? She’s back in town, I saw her the other day at the public shelter with a Tesco’s trolley. She heard about the town reappearing and came back. This is her.’ He pointed to the schoolteacher in the picture.

‘OK, Rwpert,’ I said trying to be tough. ‘Forget about Ffanci Llangollen, tell us about Goldilocks.’

‘I don’t know. I think they were trying to nail it on him because they didn’t like him, but it takes more than that, doesn’t it? Even a bad guy like him is entitled to the protection of the law. That’s only fair. That’s what the law is for, isn’t it? To protect us against spite and vindictiveness and lies and stuff. To shield us from the malice of those who would denounce us for selfish reasons of their own.’

He looked up at Uncle Vanya whose entire life had been a testament to the simple Christian truth uttered by Rwpert. They embraced as brothers.

Uncle Vanya and I stood up to leave and, on impulse, I took out a ten pound note and stuffed it into the balled fist of Rwpert. ‘Hope things work out with the kid,’ I said. As I walked away he called me back.

‘There was something,’ he said. ‘The same day that Gethsemane went missing they found Gomer Barnaby, the heir to the Barnaby & Merlin rock fortune, wandering around in a daze in the streets of Abercuawg. His hair was standing on end like he had seen something terrifying, and all his teeth were broken.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘No one knows. But he never recovered his wits. His father has nursed him ever since. Some people said he’d seen a troll, others said the Slaughterhouse Mob had done something to him. No one knows what. I don’t know if it helps.’

We walked out of the station and hovered for a while at the wrought-iron gates of Elm Tree Avenue. The night had darkened and the breeze brought scents of summer: woodsmoke, new-mown grass, creosote. But the street lights were flickering on and the orchestra of wailing police sirens was building. It was time to measure the capacity of a Russian heart against the eternal encephalograph machine of Aberystwyth Prom.