Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (29 page)

‘It’s that woman, Tadpole’s mum. Don’t think I don’t know. And I know who’s put her up to it and all. That Dinorwic-Jones.’

I stood there helpless, wanting to scoff but rendered helpless by the evidence on Mrs Llantrisant’s brow.

‘I know you think it’s all superstitious nonsense, but I’ve been around a while longer than you and I know about these things.’

‘Have you had anything to eat today?’

‘No, there’s no point. Food won’t help me if there’s a hex on me.’

‘What would happen if I found the photo and took the pin out? Would that help?’

‘But how would you find it?’

‘I know where to look.’

She made a sour expression, the look of someone who hates to concede ground, even when it’s to her advantage. ‘Well, it might.’

‘Then you’ll need food to re-build your strength.’

I slipped the video into the tape player and switched it on. ‘Take a look at this while I drive to the village and get some hot food.’

I apologised to Joe Winckelmann, who was still sitting in the car, for taking so long. He waved it away. He had waited all his life for this, he said. What was an extra half an hour? I drove to town and managed to find a fish and chip shop open and returned about forty minutes later.

Mrs Llantrisant was sitting up, holding the remote-control like a sceptre and replaying the scene with the bicycles over and over again. Tears glistened on her drab white cheeks.

‘Oh, Mr Knight! Do you know, I’ve never ridden a bicycle. My, oh my! And Sundance . . . He’s so handsome . . . Who’d have thought it? My grandfather so good-looking he could have been a movie star.’

We ate our fish and chips and watched the movie to the end. Mrs Llantrisant’s hand moved rhythmically from the chips on her knee to her mouth, accompanied now and again by the other hand dabbing away the tears. Yet at the end when her grandfather runs out into the market place, into a hail of bullets, and stands immortalised in a freeze frame that turns into sepia and then black, the tears washed down unabated. I let her cry. Like sleep, it’s about the only thing that works.

She turned to me. ‘There was a time I would have been ashamed – born out of wedlock like that. All my life I’ve looked down on such people; but it’s funny, Mr Knight, today I see it differently. You know, I think I’m proud of them.’

‘I would be, too.’

‘You can tell Sundance loved her, can’t you?’

‘Yes, I’d say he loved her. He just didn’t know how to say it.’

Mrs Llantrisant nodded. ‘That’s right. She was too hasty, the silly girl. I guess you can’t see it when you’re nineteen or whatever she was. When it comes to love and things, you can’t see the wood for the trees; you get it all wrong. And yet at my age it all looks so obvious. When she tells him she’s thinking of going back home she doesn’t mean it, does she? You can tell she’s just aching with every ounce of strength in her little young heart for
him to say, “No, you can’t! You mustn’t!” And what does he say? He says, “Oh, all right, that’s fine if that’s what you want to do.” But he doesn’t mean it, does he?’

‘No, I guess he doesn’t.’

‘Of course he doesn’t. He’s just another young fool who doesn’t understand what’s going on in his own heart. It’s the disease of youth, and by the time age brings the cure, it’s too late. He says, Go if you must, if that’s what you want to do; I won’t stand in your way. But what he means is, my life is nothing without you and if you go now I will die like a dog in a marketplace in an unknown town and strangers will spit on my corpse and throw rocks on my grave; and that will be my end; but I will never tell you these things because I love you. Even though I could never bring myself to use those words, you know I love you, and because of that I will never tell you what to do or where to go. If you want to go back to America I will let you, even though it will kill me. And the reason is this: all my life I have never been able to abide bars on a window or the feel of shackles on my flesh. The greatest gift I can give you is what I crave most, freedom. The stupid man. So typical. And so she doesn’t tell him she is carrying his child and she leaves. But instead of going back home like everyone says, she finds herself on a ship to Wales. Oh, Mr Knight, I’m quite overcome. What a beautiful film.’

There was a bottle of sherry on the side table and I fetched two teacups from the kitchenette and brought them over. I filled them to the brim and handed her one.

‘Happy Christmas, Mrs Llantrisant.’

‘And a Happy New Year. Don’t forget about the pin.’

‘I won’t.’

She drank the sherry in three greedy gulps and reached for the bottle. I passed my cup over.

‘Pity we don’t have any mince pies.’

‘There are some in the cupboard.’

I walked over to fetch them and she continued, ‘This reminds me of Christmas with Eichmann.’

She saw my expression of surprise and added hurriedly, ‘Of course, I didn’t know who he was then, did I? I’m not one of those Nazi sympathisers, if that’s what you think. I lost a good cousin in North Africa to Rommel. He sent me a picture of him and his mates frying eggs on a tank. How we laughed. They all died, though, those boys.’

‘Tell me about Eichmann.’

‘I knew him as Ricardo. Ever such a gent, he was. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? I never understood that thing with the Jews. We had one here once, the draper. Very respectable man.’

‘And you met him in the library?’

‘I was checking my family background. Of course, the names of Cassidy and Sundance didn’t mean anything to me. I suppose you could say he picked me up. We had a tryst. I can remember every detail of it. It was a cheap hotel on the Plaza de la Constitución, across from the railway station. It was a corner room on the top floor with a rickety old bed with broken springs and a picture of the Madonna hanging over the bed. All through the night as he made love to me there were flashes like artillery shells from the trams passing outside the window, and I could hear the shrieking whistles of the engines in the sidings. I remember thinking that night, this is one of those times, one of those rare occasions . . . I don’t know how to put it . . . you know even as you experience them, you sort of know how special they are.’

‘I think I know what you mean.’

‘Even when they are happening, you know they’ll never come again. Do you get that?

‘I’ve had one or two.’

‘Yes. We all get one or two if we’re lucky. Doesn’t seem much, does it?’

‘Why did you steal his coat?’

‘I didn’t steal it, Mr Knight. When those secret agents came
after me I told them the same thing, but they didn’t believe it. I borrowed his coat because it was raining, and the next day I took it round to his house to return it and that’s when I saw them bundling him into that car. I was so scared I didn’t know what to do so I sold the coat to Caleb Penpegws. I never looked in the pockets, I didn’t think. So I don’t know anything about this document they’re all asking about. And as for Hoffmann, I don’t know who he is, either. I sold it to that silly man and his stupid mouse.’

‘Caleb had a mouse? I thought it was Eifion, his buddy, who had the mouse?’

‘Oh no, Caleb was the one with the mouse. He’s still got one. You can see him every night at the Pier watching that laughing policeman machine. That’s what war does to you.’

I went out to fetch Joe Winckelmann and took him to meet the granddaughter of Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.

There was so much I had still to do, so much to undo, to set right, to fix; so many amends to make. Too much for any day, and today was the shortest day. I drove Joe back to his hotel and we arranged to meet later. I went round to Prospect Street. The light was still burning behind the curtain, and this time I rapped on the glass. The curtain was drawn back and Calamity stared out at me. It was one of those moments. The sort when you are not sure if there is any argument between you, even though you know things are not quite right. She closed the curtain and opened the front door. She invited me into her office.

‘Good to see you,’ she said.

‘And you. How’s it going?’

‘Oh, pretty good, you know. Slow, but pretty good. I think we’re making progress.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Yeah.’

I looked around the room. There was an incident board but nothing on it.

Calamity followed my gaze. ‘Actually,’ she said. ‘It’s crap. I’ve been a real dope. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘No, I can’t stop. I have things to do. Lots of things. I’ve just come to say . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I need you to come back.’

Something flashed in the depths of her young eyes. ‘Need me back?’

‘Please.’

‘Well . . .’

‘Something’s cropped up.’

‘Really?’

‘I can’t explain now, I have things to do. But something’s cropped up and I need you. I’ll catch you later, OK?’

‘Sure.’

‘I just wanted to let you know, that’s all.’

I WASN’T SURE WHAT I was going to say to Caleb, but something would occur to me. It generally did. Whatever it was, his first answers would be a pack of lies. People never told the truth these days, it was a point of principle. But that didn’t matter. I would find some way to bring truth to birth; I just didn’t know what. Something told me Tiresias might help me. Maybe I would have to hurt him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t even want to be here on the last Tuesday before Christmas, walking along a near-deserted Prom, in the drizzling rain, the grisly cold wet collar scraping my chin and channelling clammy drops of rain into the precious hoard of warmth beneath. I didn’t want to be here, but here I was, aware without looking, without the heart to look, that I was being watched by the old people in the front windows of the seaside hotels.

They were happy: in a room filled with warmth, stomachs full of too much lunch, and the faint tizzy feeling that comes from an afternoon of sherry. A real fire crackles in a real grate and Christmas decorations festoon a room that boasts a real Christmas tree in the corner. They’re happy because they are here; on the other side of the glass; they have the money to stay in a decent hotel where the people will go to the necessary effort to make it Christmassy. They know a lot of other people their age are sitting at home with nothing because they don’t have the heart any more to put up a Christmas tree; and its absence, even though they have decreed it with pointless Spartan austerity, rankles in their soul more than anything.

The old people, watching me through the windows of the
seafront hotel, they know it will never be like it was all those years ago. How could it? Christmas is defined by the poignancy of loss. But all the same they are happy in the knowledge that it is still pretty good and the next salver of sherry is just a raised eyebrow away. Oh yes, I didn’t want to be here, walking along an empty Prom in the season when only the broken-hearted walk like this, but here I was, trying not to look, head bowed, ploughing into the icy rain.

A man put a hand on my arm. It was Eeyore.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Have a pint with your father.’

We went to the Marine Hotel and sat in the bay window. The room glistened with gold foil, paper chains and crackers, balloons, Santas, silver stars. It was awful, cheap, tacky kitsch . . . it was glorious. I loved it. There was an angel above our heads and I asked Eeyore if he believed in the story from Patagonia.

‘Angel of Mons,’ he said. ‘That’s what it was, the Angel of Mons.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s one of the great legends of the First World War. Mons is a place in Belgium, I think, or France or wherever it was all those poor blighters lost their lives. The story goes that an angel appeared to the troops on the eve of the battle there; an angel on a white horse, holding a flaming sword aloft.’

‘You mean you think it was the same angel?’

‘Of course not, son. Your dad’s not that daft. But it is possible, I think, to use the one to explain the other. You see, it’s a funny thing. Although the original story is a timeless myth, no one has ever been able to produce a soldier who claims to have seen the angel with his own eyes. Plenty of them knew someone who had been there but there was never a proper eye witness. In fact, the story seems to have originated not on the front but with a spiritualist in London, who claimed to have heard it from an officer on leave. Many people suspect this officer was involved in black propaganda. They made stories up, you see. There was
one about a Canadian soldier crucified by German troops. And they planted a fake diary on a dead German soldier in which he described working in a factory that rendered the dead bodies of fallen soldiers for use as glycerine. You see what I’m saying? This Angel of Mons rumour appeared at a time when British fortunes were at a low ebb; morale on the home front was waning. There’d been a series of battlefield setbacks; poison gas and tanks had both been recently introduced. I reckon the story was concocted to boost morale.’

‘Trouble is, with the Patagonian angel there are people who claim to have seen her with their own eyes.’

‘That’s right, but just think of it. As a military man General Llanbadarn would have known the story of the Angel of Mons. Maybe he went one better. He wanted to send the men out on a dangerous mission; there were rumblings of mutiny. An angel might have been just what the doctor ordered. He knew, too, about the story in the local papers concerning the goatherd girl and her visions. Maybe it gave him the idea. Maybe he thought, why not treat the lads to a visit from a real angel?’