From Aberystwyth with Love

Chapter 14

It was a long walk to the bus stop and Calamity had gone by the time I got to the office. Eeyore had left a book open on my desk. It was Llewellyn’s History of the Welsh Stylite, with a passage referring to the spiritual malaise called acedia underlined. It said, ‘And when this has taken possession of some unhappy soul, it produces dislike of the place, disgust with the cell, and disdain and contempt of the brethren who dwell with him or at a little distance . . .’ This must be the sickness that afflicts the private detective in the lurid electric-blue desert night, the neon wilderness of Aberystwyth.

I took the envelope that had held the séance tape out of the drawer and smelled it. I explored the feeling of disquiet that had taken up abode in my heart.

Had the reappearance of Abercuawg made everyone aware of the void in their lives and the stratagems they employed to conceal it? Faith, ice cream, arresting people . . . Each chooses his own road. One man makes Ampersandium, the world’s greatest placebo. Others set sail for promised lands such as Patagonia, Hughesovka . . . Ffanci Llangollen, they say, has wheeled a shopping trolley around the coast of Britain in search of the daughter she lost. Vanya, too, had filled his life with a quest, and yet I got the impression that he did not seriously expect it ever to be resolved. The important thing was the quest.

I left the office and walked down Terrace Road. The cries of children from the beach became discernible as the light slowly changed hue; there was always a subtle change in the children’s voices at this time of the afternoon, as if in a recess of their hearts they were registering the subliminal decline of the sun, the soft, barely perceptible transition from a hot summer day to the edge of evening. The ability to perceive it is innate, the way the knowledge of the river of birth is hardwired into the soul of a salmon.

All seaside towns are in a state of permanent autumn. This is evident in the ruins of the former great civilisation that once built Aberystwyth: a scar in the hillside beneath Pen Dinas too smoothly curved to be the work of nature, it turns out to be the cicatrice of a lost railway line. If you consult an old map you discover with a shock that it was built long ago to Milford Haven; you can’t even get a bus there now. Other archaeological relics left by this vanished race of super-beings include the bandstand which now has a padlocked concertina door like an old garage. Once it had its own silver band, in a town that boasted two orchestras, one at the Pier and one at the winter gardens on top of Constitution Hill. Now no one even knows what a winter garden is. I don’t. Is it really a garden or does it mean just a park of some sort? According to the old guidebooks, the ones that tell you to eat kidneys for breakfast and give advice about buying your fishing licence, there used to be a winter garden on Constitution Hill. But you will look in vain for any trace of it now.

Nowhere is the emptiness more acutely symbolised than in the institution of the pleasure pier where no pleasure is to be had. Originally piers were functional constructions, built to tie boats up to, boats that once plied the main with big smokestacks and restaurants and children in sailor suits or miniature frock coats; but the boats have gone and the projections into the sea remain like those towers they built to enable passengers to alight from Zeppelins in the early years of the twentieth century. The forlorn holidaymakers still walk to the end and back, partaking in a ritual whose meaning escapes them, unaware that there had once been a purpose to this two-hundred-yard walk out to sea. In the absence of anything else to do they buy ice cream or spend money in the amusement arcade and after a while this becomes the point.

The spiritual befuddlement that dogs the man of Aberystwyth at every turn is thus an unavoidable part of his fate because it is written into the very stones of the town in which he dwells. Other talismanic cities of the world such as Timbuktu, Troy and Gilgamesh grew out of the imperatives of trade and commerce or war but, like Babylon, and the towns of the American gold rush, Aberystwyth grew as a town of pleasure. A town in which human felicity was perverted into the singing, carousing, giddy tarantella, the vertiginous stovepipe hat debauch.

When I reached Sospan’s stall there was a sign saying, ‘No specials until further notice’. Uncle Vanya was there, looking worried. Sospan wore the face of a man whose hour has come.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

‘Something’s happened,’ said Vanya.

‘Something?’

‘Oh, Mr Knight,’ cried Sospan. ‘Something terrible, something awful, the worst, the absolute worst thing that can befall an ice-cream man has befallen me. I may have to leave town under an assumed identity.’

‘Oh dear. And no specials today either?’

‘No specials. It may be that there will never again be specials.’

‘Not even a Fish Milt Sundae?’

‘Yes, mock me in my hour of need,’ said Sospan. ‘The Fish Milt Sundae was the cause of my downfall. As you know, it was not exactly popular; possibly the most despised flavour I have ever served. But there was one customer who liked it. A very devout and religious woman of advancing years, not normally given to levity, who came every afternoon for three weeks to eat my special Fish Milt Sundae.’ The ice man paused and exhaled in despair. ‘Today I have received news that she is pregnant.’

I said, ‘You can’t get pregnant like that . . . can you?’

‘Mr Knight, I will be frank with you. I assumed that you couldn’t. But, as you know, biology is not my strong suit.’

‘There must be another explanation,’ I said.

‘She is not the sort who would be mistaken about such a thing. She used to work for the St John Ambulance Brigade.’

‘Maybe she got pregnant by the conventional route.’

‘Impossible.’

‘Who is it?’

‘That I cannot tell you.’ He put a plain vanilla cornet on the stands in front of me. ‘On the house. I might as well use up the stock before I leave town.’

‘Are things really that bad?’

‘What can I do?’ he replied. ‘What would you do?’

‘If it was me,’ I said, ‘before I made such a drastic move I would first demand a paternity test. And then, if it was established that I was the father—’

‘I’ve spoken to her doctor, there is no doubt about it.’

‘I’m not doubting her condition,’ I said. ‘Just the cause. Sospan, sometimes in situations like this even respectable ladies do not always tell the truth. It is not unknown, for example, for a lady of good reputation to fall victim to the sugary lies of some passing Don Juan and later when her belly gets big she seeks out a decent and unworldly man such as you, in the hope of deceiving him into believing it is his.’

‘You mean,’ said Sospan, ‘like Mary and Joseph?’

‘That is an extreme example of the phenomenon. Far more humdrum examples are to be found in the Cambrian News every week. Although the Fish Milt Sundae routine is new. You definitely ought to check if it is yours.’

Sospan stared out at the sea, surrounded by the shattered fragments of his world. ‘And if I do that and it turns out to be mine?’

‘Then you should do the honourable thing,’ I said.

Vanya and I took our ice creams to the seaside railings and watched the slow drift of people packing up on the beach. At some point, once the heat loses its edge, a chill breeze can arise that throws a soft shadow over our joy.

‘Things are far worse than I expected,’ said Vanya gloomily. ‘I saw Calamity in Great Darkgate Street, she has told me everything.’

‘What has she told you?’

‘About the troll brides.’

‘I wouldn’t pay any attention to that, it’s not serious.’

‘Do you think my worries can be so easily dismissed?’

‘You can worry about anything you like but I wouldn’t waste time on troll brides.’

‘This is a bitter blow. Of all the fates that I imagined might have befallen the child whose spirit possessed my daughter this is one I did not consider.’

‘I’m sure the ones you did consider are far more likely.’

‘My grief is not so easily assuaged. To become the bride of a troll is a fearsome fate, especially for a child. The Portuguese have a word for this heaviness in my heart, saudade. In Hughesovka we call it hiraeth, a Welsh word, I believe, which denotes a form of spiritual homesickness.’ He pushed himself up and away from the railings. ‘Come, we must drink. There is no other remedy.’

The sky in the west had turned the colour of geraniums and Aberystwyth began to unfold like a rosebud in time-lapse photography; a sick rose whose innards have been eaten by a worm. The air turned sultry and the breeze of the summer night wafted over the Prom heavily laden and moist. A rich assortment of smells were intricately intertwined in the sensual tapestry: vanilla, dead mollusc, seaweed, aftershave, suntan lotion, spilled ice cream, soiled nappy, stale sweat, the electric ozone smell of the machines in the amusement arcades, take-away curry, fried onions, chips, hot dogs, testosterone, salty breeze, fish milt and, of course, prowl car, handcuff grease and the unmistakable sour fumes of police sarcasm.

Vanya produced a bottle of vodka from a bag, took my arm in his and we ambled along the Prom. The shift changed, the decent folk began to scurry away to their chalets and caravans, and the dance began; the giddy jig. The hustlers and the hoods and fixers, the druids in their sharp Swansea suits, the girls in the stovepipe hats and dreams of making it sparking in their eyes, the drunken brawling sailors, the morose fishermen and melancholic tradesmen, the lonely and the damned, the haunted and the hunted and the exiles all converged on the electric-blue Prom to sweat away the night.

Vanya breathed in deeply and exhaled with appreciation. ‘Bignoniaceous,’ he said. ‘The word is bignoniaceous.’

I gave him a puzzled look.

‘Yes, my dear friend Louie, bignoniaceous. There is a word for everything and for this experience too, there is a word.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘It describes a type of plant with trumpet-shaped flowers adapted for pollination by bats. Did you know that? I have great respect for this mammal. Few animals are quite so unfairly slandered as the harmless and affable bat. Their sonar is so good they can use it to catch fish; their sense of smell is far superior to that of the bee. All that the rose needs to do to attract the noble bee is give off its hot vapour to the summer breeze, and yet what is the scent but that of the rose? The rose smells of its own essence, which is a feat we all manage, and counts as no great achievement. But the bignoniaceous plant, faced with the challenge of attracting the attention of the far more discerning, though unloved, bat has to try harder. Bignoniaceous plants smell of cabbage and mice. Did you know this?’

I confessed that I did not.

‘I have come to the conclusion this is the same trick repeated every spring by the old courtesan Aberystwyth. She cakes on the all-concealing foundation, and stands at the back of the chorus line, where the shadows are deeper, hoping that her faded charms will last another season, while the leg-kicking strumpets at the front twirl petticoats that flash and blaze like fireworks in the hot footlights. Is it not so, dear Louie?’

‘I’ve never heard Aberystwyth described like that before but it captures her perfectly.’

He examined my face to see if I were in earnest and finding that I was said, ‘The vodka is good.’

A thought flashed across my mind like a swallow through a barn. I realised a simple truth: I loved Vanya, although I was not sure why.

We reached the end of the Prom beneath Constitution Hill and we each placed a single foot upon the railing in accordance with a ritual whose origins are lost in the mists of time.

Vanya spread his arms and exclaimed, ‘Yet the bat is generally disdained by poets, even though bat-pollination is responsible for one of the greatest gifts from animals to mankind, namely tequila. As an analgesic for the soul it is far more effective than the breathless rose-scented summer night. In fact, it is precisely this quality of the summer night that tequila can cure. But the crowning glory of the bat-pollinator’s art is the durian fruit from Southeast Asia. It is something of an acquired taste. A Victorian traveller once described the experience of eating it as that of eating strawberries and cream in a public convenience. This is because the odour has a faint whiff of carrion about it. To which is added notes of civet, sewage, skunk spray, turpentine, caramel, onions, custard and gym sock.’

We turned and walked back, towards the bandstand. It is not likely that anyone would have eaten strawberries and cream in the convenience in the public shelter on the Prom, but as we passed it by an old woman emerged eating jam tarts. She pushed a shopping trolley across the zebra crossing. It was Ffanci Llangollen. In her trolley was a dirty woollen coat, black-and-yellow-hooped football socks, mitts and a fake sheepskin hat screwed up into plastic shopping bags from which all the lettering had worn away.

‘I love the old Prom,’ she said. The words weren’t really addressed to us, nor anyone, but said simply to the night. She had long ago learned not to expect a response.

I said, ‘We all do.’

Uncle Vanya offered her the bottle of vodka and she looked grateful and surprised. She took a drink and patted her chest as she registered the invigorating effect of the medicine. ‘Your smell reminds me of my time in the Stolypin car,’ said Uncle Vanya. ‘I do not mean that unkindly,’ he added quickly. ‘That was the greatest event in my life. We seek happiness with an insatiable hunger, like plants seek the sun, and yet it is the dark times in which we gain our real insight into the mysteries of life.’

Ffanci, whose entire life had been spent exemplifying this philosophy, did not deem it worthy of comment and took another drink. Vanya took Ffanci’s trolley and wheeled it over to the shelter. I left them and walked over to the Spar on Terrace Road to buy more bottles. I sensed it was going to be another of those nights. An old man in a charity shop suit stood by the door and asked me for the price of a cuppa. I gave him a fiver and told him not to waste it on tea or any other type of soft drink. He thanked me for the advice, and waited discreetly for me to leave before going in to buy something to slake his thirst.

When I returned they were absorbed in Uncle Vanya’s life story.

‘In the camps men would play cards and because they had nothing to wager they would stake your life. And you would not even know it until the moment came for the gambler to pay his debt. You could be in the same room and remain unaware that they were playing for the privilege of murdering you. This was the way of the two men Yuri and Ivan. They befriended me and showed me great kindness and I was too naïve to understand that no good could come from their solicitude. Instead, I was touched. No one had ever shown me kindness before. Perhaps the kindness of the wolf is better than nothing to a lonely man. The other inmates perceived this and watched in silence, striving to keep the mocking look from their faces as Yuri and Ivan gave me extra rations. They told me they were going without food themselves in order to help a fellow Christian soul and I was deeply touched. Of course they were not going without at all, some other poor wretch was. Since the food in the camps was never more than barely enough to keep a man alive, then it follows that the extra food they fed me must have led to the death of another man, and his death still weighs heavily on my conscience. But I loved these two men deeply because they fed me, which is the greatest act of love you can show to a man in the camps. They also used their power to get me an easy job as a clerk in the office, and that too meant the difference between life and death. If it was not for those two criminals I would surely have perished that first winter. I loved them, for how could I have known what they had in store for me? How could I have known that on the day of my arrival in the camp Ivan won me in a card game?

‘As winter approached its end they informed me they had an escape plan and I was invited to go along. Even then I was too ignorant to understand their scheme, to understand what evil, what horror these men had planned in their wicked hearts. We climbed over the wire in May at the first hint of spring. Escape was virtually impossible and successful escape, almost unknown. It is so far – thousands of square miles of empty tundra where even the wolves struggle to survive. There is no food and finding fuel is difficult. The local people if they catch you will turn you in. In the past it was not so; in the time of the Czars, there was a tradition that they would leave milk and bread out on the doorstep overnight to help escaping prisoners, because Siberia has always been the land of exile. But under Stalin those who aided or gave you succour would end up in a camp themselves; even for failing to report having seen you was enough to get them a ten-year stretch. The task was truly hopeless. But some there were who preferred to die trying rather than serve their twenty-five years of hell. Many were the times during that journey when it seemed that Death had finally come for me and each time some miracle intervention by my two companions stepped in to snatch me from the edge of the precipice. Each time they saved me, my love for them grew deeper. We crossed a frozen river and the ice cracked beneath us and I fell in; those two men, those two evil merciless murderers, both risked their lives to save mine. Then later we were attacked by wolves and this time I was surely done for, but my two friends fought them off with fire. Another time we were attacked by a bear and they drove the bear off with rocks. Thus in the company of these two scoundrels I crossed the vast frozen wastes of that land and also traversed the inner continent of the human heart. There I discovered the darkest wisdom ever to be found in such a vessel, far down in the deepest, dimmest cistern of the heart where only lunatics visit. I began that spring the journey that would bring me here to the Promenade in Aberystwyth, I discovered the terrible wisdom and became the most celebrated, most famous cartographer of the human heart, second only to the woman whose fate haunted me the whole time, the mother forced to abandon her suckling child and entrain for Siberia.’ His voice acquired a croak and we could tell without looking that his face was creased with pain. ‘Perhaps I shall not finish this story tonight.’

Ffanci put her arm round him and reassured him. We left the shelter and walked slowly along the Prom, taking turns to drink from the bottle. At the Pier Vanya suggested we go dancing. I expected the doorman at the Pier to create difficulties with regard to Ffanci but it appeared that Uncle Vanya had already befriended this man during his short stay in town. ‘He is a great bear of a man,’ explained Uncle Vanya, ‘and so am I. We have an understanding.’ We walked down the carpeted corridor with windows overlooking the blackness of the sea, towards the dark smoky cavern at the end. Disco balls twirled and threw flashes of light on to the corners and niches where couples hid. A man in a penguin suit holding a small flashlight showed us to a table near the back. The tables were set in a circle around an empty dance floor; it was not yet midnight, still early. Some druid wise guys were seated near the front with young girls eager to make an impression sharing their table. Here and there, dotted around, there were members of the cast of North Road, the grim ritual of determined drinking saying more eloquently than words that being a soap star was not much of a career to aspire to. Here and there too were waiters and chefs from the hotels’ grills, dressed up as far as their meagre wages would permit; and there were a few isolated souls, men drinking alone in a way that suggested they could no longer remember a time when that had not been the case.

I took Uncle Vanya aside and suggested it might be kinder not to bring up the reason for his being in Aberystwyth, about the quest. He agreed and went to the floor to dance alone, completely oblivious to the impression he made. Ffanci ordered a brandy and Coke and said, ‘There used to be proper dancing when I was young. Waltzing and things.’

‘I hear you used to be quite a famous singer.’

‘Oh yes, back in the forties. Skegness, Scarborough, Weston-super-Mare, I did them all, all the lovely old piers, the lovely old songs . . .’ She began to sing in a frail soft descant:

It’s a lovely day tomorrow

Tomorrow is a lovely day

Come and feast your tear-dimmed eyes

On tomorrow’s clear blue skies . . .

The words faded out.

I said, ‘After that you became the schoolteacher?’

‘It was just a little school I ran for a while . . . all the children, I loved them all. But after Gethsemane was . . . after she went away, they stopped coming to my school. I had to close. Then I went on my travels. When it rains I wonder if she is getting wet. When I’m cold I wonder if she is cold too. When I buy new shoes I wonder what sort of shoes she wears. Sometimes I get a new dress from the charity shop and I wonder what sort of pretty dresses she likes to wear.’ She turned to look at me. ‘I’ve spoken to Llunos. The girl they found by the lake wasn’t Gethsemane, it was an actress. Some students paid her as part of a rag stunt.’

‘That was a wicked thing to do,’ I said.

Ffanci made a half smile that seemed to dismiss the significance of the event when set against the broader canvas of her life. ‘I suppose they thought it was funny . . . How could they have known what I . . . They wouldn’t know. They are so young.’

A waiter brought two more drinks and Ffanci moved her hand holding her drink in time to the music with the simple side-to-side movement of a puppet.

‘Is it true you and your sister were courted by the same man?’

‘It wasn’t . . . Alfred wasn’t like that, I don’t care if he was just a balloon-folder, he had dignity. All the girls were sweet on him. Including my sister, but he never requited it, that was just her jealous imaginings. He used to drive the tram for a while, when balloon-folding times were lean. I know what they say, that I . . . you know . . . when I fell pregnant, those gossips said I did it on purpose to trap him. It’s not true. I would never have dreamed of doing such a terrible thing, it just happened the normal way these things do. He loved me, you see. That’s what my sister could never forgive. I don’t blame her for that, we’re all human and jealousy is as human an emotion as love in a way, isn’t it? You can’t stop yourself sometimes, I know that. But you have to make the best of it, don’t you? We all do. Why she had to go and marry that Witchfinder, I really don’t know. It’s not like she didn’t have suitors. And she had made it quite plain she couldn’t abide the chap. Then she goes and does that. It’s almost as if she did it to spite me, to punish me the only way she could, by punishing herself.’

A body came between Ffanci and the glittering ceiling lights and a shadow passed over her face. I looked up. It was Arianwen. I stood up, she stepped forward and kissed me on the cheek. She whispered something into my ear but I couldn’t hear what she said in the noise. I bent down over Ffanci Llangollen and pointed to Vanya. ‘That man there is my client,’ I said. ‘You can ask him about Gethsemane. I wasn’t going to tell you; I wanted to protect you, but I realise I don’t have the right.’

Arianwen and I left by the exit at the back and emerged on to the iron walkway that led out to sea and ended in an iron precipice where the end of the Pier had long ago been blown away. Flashing coloured bulbs lit up her face and cast it again into darkness.

‘You are so amazing,’ she said. ‘You returned the tape and the stamps.’

‘Think nothing of it.’

‘Wasn’t it dangerous? Meici Jones must be in with some bad people.’

‘It wasn’t dangerous.’

‘He’s been following me. Or at least I think it’s him. Someone is anyway.’

There was silence for a while except for the sigh of the surf on the rocks twenty feet below us. We stood separated and joined by an unresolved tension.

‘Why don’t you like me?’ she said.

‘What makes you think I don’t?’

‘You’re not interested, I can tell. They tell me you used to go out with Myfanwy.’

I said nothing but flinched softly in the dark.

‘She’s in Switzerland, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you miss her a lot?’

‘I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.’

‘That’s lovely. I wish you’d say that about me.’

‘It’s Bogart, In a Lonely Place.’

‘It’s still lovely. They say she isn’t coming back.’

This time she felt me flinch.

I said, ‘I don’t care what people say. They don’t know anything.’

‘Yes, people always say horrible things, they pretend they want the best for you but really they want bad things to happen to you so they won’t feel so upset about their own lives.’

We returned to the disco but Vanya and Ffanci had left. We walked out too. ‘Will you walk me to the cab rank?’ she asked and then suddenly her face flashed with scorn. ‘Well of all the . . . You see! I told you he was following me.’ I followed the direction of her gaze and saw Meici Jones standing next to the hamburger van.

‘Go and make him leave me alone, Louie. Please, he gives me the creeps.’

I strode across to Meici Jones. His face was a sea of desolation.

‘You’re a dirty double-crosser!’ he cried. ‘I ought to smash your face.’

‘Don’t bother, it’s not worth the effort.’

‘I saw her first.’

‘We were only talking. Other people are allowed to hold conversations.’

‘You must think I’m stupid.’

‘I do actually.’

Over the past hour my spirits had sunk lower and lower and I no longer had the energy for pretence. I turned to go and said, ‘Just leave her alone, OK? She wants me to tell you, she’s not interested in you. She never was and she never will be. So forget it and scram.’ I was ashamed of how good it felt. It was like pulling the legs off a spider.

‘You’re a dirty double-crosser!’ he cried again.

I looked round. ‘What are you so upset about? Why don’t you play the Glad Game? I’m sad that Arianwen is talking to Louie but I’m glad for her because he’s better looking than me and I’m a creep.’

‘Just you wait! I’ll get you!’

‘What are you going to do? Smother me in the night like you did to Esau?’

For a second he wore the expression of a fawn startled by a noise in the undergrowth. And then a different expression, one of astonished revelation, crept across his face. It was a vile sight. I realised with a sick feeling in my stomach that he had never known, had never suspected the reason why his mother hated him. He gasped twice, choked once, spluttered once, and then clutched at his heart with hands contorted to talons. He spun round and fell to the floor and lay there convulsing in pain. People crowded round him and I told the bouncer to call an ambulance. Arianwen stood next to me resting her head on my shoulder as we waited for the medics to arrive. It wasn’t long. We watched them load Meici into the back of the ambulance. He had an oxygen mask strapped on and his two eyes bulged on either side with hatred or heartbreak; two eyes that were trained the entire time on Arianwen. Then they closed the doors.

The next afternoon an anonymous package was delivered to the office. It was addressed to ‘Louee the dirty double-crosser’ and contained the broken shards of an Airfix model and the charred remains of a correspondence course, The Old Black Magic.