Make Room for the Jester (20 page)

‘Don’t talk,’ I called over my shoulder as I went to the tap in the yard. ‘Don’t strain yourself.’

‘I’ve had a good sleep,’ he said. ‘What day is today?’

‘Here,’ I said. ‘Drink this. Don’t talk.’

‘But I’m ready for talk now,’ he said, and he sat up on the sofa and drank all the water. ‘What day?’

‘Friday.’

He whistled softly. ‘Monday to Friday! Still the same week, is it?’

‘Seems much longer,’ I said. ‘Get the doctor, shall I?’

‘Don’t need any quack at all,’ he replied. ‘Refreshed and ready, that’s me.’ He cast his eyes over the kitchen. ‘Things have got on top of me, haven’t they?’ he said in Martha’s voice. ‘Children all right, Lew?’

‘All right except that they’ve been upset. Lie down, now. Get your bearings first.’

‘Bearings?’ he said with a laugh. ‘Good God, Lew – that’s why I went to sleep!’ He flung back the blankets, swung his legs over the side of the sofa, and stood up: I moved nearer to him, certain he would fall, but there was no need. He stretched his arms upwards and sideways. ‘A bit of exercise, Lew. To restore circulation.’ He sat down again on the sofa and looked at his long, bony legs. ‘Know what? I’ll have to get a pair of pyjamas, Lew. Not right sleeping in your underclothes, is it? I’ll have to get a pair – black, with a golden dragon on the pocket.’ He winked at me. ‘Two things I want to do,’ he said in his actor’s voice, ‘two things ere my life is ended. The first is to play the piano in a nightclub, the second is to have a pair of black pyjamas with a golden dragon on the pocket. What say you?’

‘Make a cup of tea, shall I?’

‘Can’t play the piano, though,’ he went on. ‘Put the kettle on – and go and wake the children.’

‘Wake the children!’ He was out of his mind, surely? ‘They’ll bring the house down.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I think I’d like that. Very much. Go on, then. Kettle on first then up you go.’

I stood, open-mouthed, in front of him. I couldn’t believe that he was serious, but he pointed upwards and
said it was all right, and I found myself blundering up the stairs. It was dark on the landing, but although I was as noisy as an army there was no sound from the children’s room. I opened the door, and the thought struck me: what if, by the time I had them awake and down the stairs, he had settled down on the sofa again and gone to sleep? The very idea threw me in a panic. I knocked the candle off its saucer and had to grope after it on hands and knees. Then, when it was finally alight, I was much too quick, much too rough. Walter first, then Mair, then Dora, were scratching and rubbing and crying like warm kittens newly disturbed. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘got a surprise for you in the kitchen.’ I went down ahead of them, anxious now for Gladstone, but he was awake, trousers and shirt on as well. The children stumbled down the stairs behind me, complaining and crying, but when they saw Gladstone and realised he was awake, they were on to him in a rush. It was worth seeing. I felt as if I’d done something fine.

Ten minutes it took for the excitement to die down. Walter was really overcome and wet himself twice.

‘Bladder trouble,’ Dora told him, ‘that’s what you’ve got.’

They crowded around him, and went off into ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, very serious and tune-pure, followed by ‘Dacw Mam yn Dwad’, flat out but a bit ragged. And all the time Gladstone was touching and examining them, as if he expected to find a snail behind an ear. ‘Look at their hair,’ he tutted. ‘Just look at that tidemark…’

Walter broke off in the middle of a note. ‘Sleep well, did you?’ he asked.

‘Except when the linnets were singing,’ Gladstone replied.
He was awake, a part of us once again. I kept on saying that to myself as item followed item in the concert. Back from the dead – my emotions were on free rein – old Gladstone back from the dead, the same as ever. But was he? Throughout Mars versus Wales by H. G. Wells I watched him carefully, and he
was
the same, surely? There seemed to be no change in voice or face as he recited ‘The Mermaid of Porthmawr’ and the terrible fate that befell her in the May Day procession 1933…. Yet, when he wasn’t saying or doing anything, just looking at the children, there was a difference – all the lines of an old sadness were there.

At ten, Martha came in, three sheets to the wind and smelling like a brewery. At the sight of Gladstone she immediately fell to her knees and crawled the rest of the way to him. ‘Oh my God, my God,’ she cried in a strangled voice. ‘He’s back – never thought to see him no more in this life. Thought I was going to be left to struggle on alone with my babies….’ She knelt at his feet, her chin on his knee, and went on like that, tears coursing down her cheeks. Gladstone and the children stroked her hair and said there, there, and giggled and winked at one another, too. It wasn’t long before she was asleep, and in sleep looked strangely young and rather pretty. I helped Gladstone lift her up on the sofa. Dora removed her shoes, and they all settled her down for the night, as they would have done a baby.

There followed the pantomime of getting the children back to bed – everyone whispering and walking tiptoe and eyes shining, mouths smiling, because Mam was snoring and Gladstone was back in the land of the living.

When they were finally gone, Gladstone and I made tea
and toasted bread, and talked. But all the talking was about what had happened, and I did most of it. There was nothing about why he had gone off like that. He seemed to regard it as a normal thing to do, almost as if he had deliberately set himself the task of sleeping from Monday to Friday.

He came with me to the door. ‘Let’s walk the town,’ I suggested in fun. He shook his head and breathed in deeply. ‘Ever noticed the air of Lower Hill, Lew? One part salt, to one part mountain damp, to one part old lavatories.’ We laughed together and looked out at the darkened houses. Then, piercing sharp, came the curlew’s cry from the harbour somewhere. Gladstone shivered beside me. ‘Smelly and beautiful,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what it is all the time.’

For a while I stayed with him, then said I’d see him in the morning. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘come over in the morning.’ Before I reached our door I looked back: he was still there, his giant’s shadow sprawled across the street.

In the morning he was gone.

‘Stolen my babies,’ Martha wept. ‘Taken my little ones away…’

The Super straddled a chair. ‘Tell me again, Mrs Davies,’ he ordered, ‘from the beginning.’ He glared at me from under bushy eyebrows. ‘Stand there, you – and get your ideas sorted out.’

‘He must’ve gone loony,’ Martha cried. Her face was blotched and swollen with weeping. ‘All that sleeping. He was always queer.’ She came for me suddenly and caught me by the shoulders. ‘You know all about it, Lew Morgan. Don’t tell lies – you do.’

‘Never told me anything,’ I said. I was struggling to free myself: she was yelling in my face and her breath smelled worse than the harbour at low tide. ‘I’m as shocked as you are.’

‘Oh, no you’re not. Nobody’s as shocked as me.’

‘We’ll come to Master Morgan in a minute,’ said the Super heavily. ‘Just you calm yourself, Mrs Davies. Calm down now. Tell me what happened last night, when you got home.’

‘He was awake,’ she cried. ‘The more I think of it, the more I can see he was pretending all the time.’ She rounded on the Super as if he was responsible for it all. ‘That boy never was sick, I bet you. I bet he woke up
every night
when I was out. Bet you anything he’d be prowling around here once I’d got to bed.’ Her whole body shuddered at the thought. ‘
Noises
I used to hear…’

‘Let’s get back to last night,’ said the Super. ‘He was awake…’

‘Wasn’t he?’ Martha yelled at me. ‘Weren’t you here? Wasn’t he awake?’

‘Half past eight or so,’ I said, ‘he woke up then.’ It was still early and I was straight from bed, still bewildered. And Gladstone, she said, had run away with the children – without giving me any hint. ‘He woke up and we had the children down…’

‘That’s a lie for a start,’ Martha cried. ‘They never were down, my babies. They were in bed – tucked up nice and snug in their little bed…’

‘They were here when you came in,’ I said. ‘Then you went to sleep on the sofa…’ I had to stop there because Martha went into a sobbing fit. The Super beckoned me over, pulled me closer to his chair.

‘Lew Morgan – you’re on oath…’

‘Sir.’

‘Going to tell me everything, aren’t you?’

‘Nothing to tell, sir. Don’t know anything.’

The Super drew breath in, very sharp. ‘Look at that poor woman there. You going to let that poor woman suffer?’

‘No, sir, but I don’t know anything.’

‘Woke up this morning that poor woman did. Been to sleep on the sofa there. Woke up to an empty house. Your friend Gladstone woke up and gone. Her little children gone too. Think of that. Go on – think of it. Think how she feels.’

‘Awful,’ sobbed Martha. ‘I feel awful.’

‘And all she can remember is that he was awake last night – and you were here…’

‘I was here,’ I agreed, ‘but he never told me anything. Never a word.’

‘His best friend,’ said the Super. ‘Never told him anything – his
best
friend?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And you want
me
to believe
that
?’

‘Yes, sir. Never told me he was going, sir.’

The Super got to his feet very slowly. Everything about him said menacing. ‘Lew Morgan,’ he began…

‘What’s all the fuss, then?’ I said hurriedly. ‘He’s probably only gone for a walk. Taken them for a walk.’

‘Clever,’ said the Super, allowing himself a brief laugh. ‘Gone for a walk, is that it? Gone for a walk and took with him all the children’s clothes.’

Oh, my God, I thought. ‘To the laundry?’ I managed to whisper.

‘All their personal effects – in a suitcase…’

‘The only one we’ve got,’ Martha sobbed.

‘And,’ the Super concluded, drawing himself to his full
height, ‘there’s money gone as well.’ He glowered down at me. ‘Gone for a walk, you say? Tell you what – let’s you and me go for a walk. To the police station.’

‘No breakfast,’ I protested weakly.

‘You’ll remember better on an empty stomach,’ said the Super.

I was there all morning. Shortly after ten, Dewi and Maxie joined me. The questions went on. ‘There’s a general alarm out,’ said the Super. ‘Kidnapping, that’s what they call it in the States…’

Maxie rose to that one. ‘Fry them on the electric chair,’ he said.

‘Shut up,’ said the Super.

‘Seen them on the pictures…’

‘If you don’t shut up,’ said the Super, ‘I’ll be doing some frying myself.’

‘He was only making a comment,’ Dewi joined in.

‘And you shut up as well.’ Super Edwards by now was breathing heavily. ‘Lew Morgan, I’m going to ask you once more…’

‘Maybe he decided to go underground,’ Maxie put in.

‘What d’you mean,’ the Super said, ‘underground?’

‘Well – there was this human mole, see. He went under the ground all the time. Burrowed down. Like a mole, see. That’s why they called him the human mole…. He’d come up when he was ready. Catch everybody bending…’

The Super let Maxie go through it all, even sent a couple of constables to have a look at the old quarry workings.

‘You know something, don’t you?’ he said in the nearest he could get to a whisper. ‘You’re in this, all of
you –
accessories before the fact
….’ He was all things that morning: now pleading, now threatening, now reasonable. But we had nothing to tell. Perhaps he had begun to realise this when, at one, he sent us home for dinner. ‘Report back at two sharp,’ he roared. ‘I’m going to get to the bottom of this.’

The interrogation continued over dinner, Meira all sentimental and sorry for Martha, but worried for me as well; Owen in one of his amused and cynical moods, yet anxious to know if I was hiding something. ‘Where would
you
go, then – if you was running away with three little children?’ That was the biggest question of all, I thought – until Meira asked ‘Why did he take the children, then?’

I kept quiet and put on an innocent face. By the middle of the afternoon, once the Super had chased us out, I was beginning to enjoy my new status. I was in the know, hiding something…. Bet he knows, they would be saying in the town, he’s a dark one, bet he’s been in on this from the start…. As I walked the town among the squat, raw farming people who had come in for the shops and the pictures, I turned up the collar of my coat and hunched my shoulders, and affected a small smile that was, I thought, both knowing and mysterious…. But once darkness had fallen my anxiety for Gladstone came to the fore: miles away, cold, maybe hungry, he’d be, the children fretting and whining. Dewi was in the same mood. ‘Should never have taken them children,’ he said. Maxie came up with a succession of daft ideas. ‘Perhaps he’s still in Porthmawr,’ was the only one we acted on. We went down to the
Moonbeam
, but there was no one – nothing to see, either, except the mud around her deeply
printed by size ten policeman’s boots. That night I slept fitfully, in and out of a black dream.

Meira in the morning was strict and very serious. I was sent off to chapel ‘to think about things properly’, and there they must have spotted me because every second word was truthfulness, and the sermon was about the evil of deceit…. At two, in spite of all protests, I was ordered to the Sunday school. ‘Mr Williams won’t be there for a start,’ I said, ‘and you can’t have a class without the teacher.’ But he was – clean suited, clean shaven and clear of eye. Quietly, gently, he took us through a few verses from the Acts of the Apostles, but he soon gave that up and began to talk about Wales. ‘A conquered people, an ancient, conquered people,’ he said. ‘We are frustrated by the facts of history, bogged down by the very thing that gives us brilliance and colour – our emotions….’ Oh, it was the same old Rowland, and I was glad to find him so again. Dewi and Maxie helped me out in giving him all the details about Gladstone. He was very interested but showed no excitement. ‘It doesn’t matter
where
he’s gone,’ he said at the end. ‘To go is to protest.’

He looked all set for a long speech, but at that moment we were collared by Abraham Evans and Dr Gwynn. They took us to the small vestry where Mrs Meirion-Pughe and the Rev A. H. Jones were waiting. They lined us up against the wall, as if for a firing squad, and they closed the door. Dr Gwynn leaned back against it, for all the world one of Edward G. Robinson’s henchmen at the pictures. The Minister looked very nervous and very uncomfortable.

‘Well, Mr Jones?’ Mrs Meirion-Pughe said.

The Minister shuffled a bit, then stepped forward and looked at each of us in turn. ‘Does any one of you know anything about the disappearance of Gladstone Williams and these little children? Dewi Price?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Ah – Max – ah –
you
.’ He pointed at Maxie.

‘So help me God, no.’

‘Lew Morgan?’

‘No,’ I said.

The Minister crunched his false teeth. ‘Honestly, now?’

We all nodded.

‘Right,’ he said, and stepped aside, letting us go.

Mrs Meirion-Pughe charged forward. ‘Just a minute, Mr Jones,’ she snapped. ‘What about the Bible?’

The Minister kept his back to her and closed his eyes. ‘There will be no swearing on the Bible,’ he said slowly but firmly. ‘There will be no swearing on anything. I believe these boys. Open the door. Let them go.’

We went out in a silence that could only be measured in kilowatts.

That night – in reality, the early hours of Monday morning – Rowland Williams’ workshop on Lower Hill, Porthmawr, Wales, became an enormous bonfire, a great flame, as he had said, burning in the shabby dark. Rowland set it off himself; timber exposed to long, damp years does not burn with such intense brightness without a can or two of petrol…. And, in any case, Rowland was inside the workshop, at the centre of the great glow and the blazing heat. He came running out, so the morning stories had it,
like a human torch, bursting out of the fire in an explosion of sparks. They exaggerated. Rowland came out of the fire slowly, almost reluctantly. He was wearing his long greatcoat, singed it is true, but not on fire; and he came with sleepwalker’s arms straight for me where I stood at the front of the crowd. His hands were blackened stumps and stinking. I cowered back, but he wasn’t making for me or anyone else. The crowd parted for him. Only the hiss and crackle of the burning workshop could be heard. Rowland went floundering through to the darkness of Lower Hill, and we left the fire and followed him, all of us, until he fell. He looked very small lying there on the worn sett-stones. I kept back and wept for him.