Make Room for the Jester (7 page)

The Super glared at him. ‘I’ll deal with these boys after you’ve gone. Now – clear off and think yourself lucky I haven’t mentioned that dinghy you took out…’

‘Superintendent,’ said Ashton, ‘do you realise I might have drowned if these boys hadn’t come out after me?’

The Super didn’t seem very impressed. ‘Very likely. Now – I’m telling you this, Mr Vaughan, don’t chance your luck. I’m letting you go. I’d act on that if I were you.’

Ashton examined the cigar in his hand with elaborate care, then shook his head. ‘No go, Super,’ he said. ‘You’re not charging me, so you’re not charging these boys…’

Superintendent Edwards’ face was normally red, but now the colour deepened. He was chewing a bit at the sergeant-major moustache too, and his great fists were clenched tight.

Gladstone turned to Ashton. ‘Please go home. We’ll be all right.’

But Ashton refused to move. He stood there with a half smile on his face, looking down all the time at the cigar in his hand. The Super turned his back on him and arranged us in front for the talking to which we knew was bound to come. He made a big thing of it too, but that night there was no cutting edge to his words. Behind him, a dripping wreck of a man, Ashton stood, head cocked a little to one side, listening. And the Super knew it.

‘Names, addresses, schools… you are all liable to a charge of larceny of one dinghy, you know that…. Next time you see a light in the harbour inform the authorities…. I don’t think you realise the seriousness…. You can’t take a man’s boat….’ The Super tried his best, but he was off form, and he didn’t take as long as usual, either. He had the reputation of being able to reduce the roughest boy to tears – just by talking to him – but that night he wasn’t at his best. ‘It’s a caution this time. I hope
I can leave your parents to deal with your
foolhardiness
….’ And he went on to his peroration before he ordered us all out of the Hut.

We went to the door, Ashton and Gladstone leading, Maxie and Dewi trailing after me because their fathers were waiting for them in the crowd.

‘Gangway, if you please,’ Ashton cried, waving his cigar, and he was laughing and joking and walking quite steadily. But by the time we reached Harbour View we were supporting him, and he was sick again. ‘Comes over me in waves,’ he said.

‘We’ll take him up,’ Gladstone said, but it was easier said than done on that narrow stairway. At the top he suddenly flung his arms out and nearly knocked us both down the stairs. ‘Jupiter!’ he cried, in a strange, choked voice. ‘Little Jupy. I see your face!’ Then he fell forward to the floor.

We dragged him into his room and propped him up on the bed. After a struggle we got the sodden overcoat off him, and then his boots. Gladstone slackened off his tie, and I wondered how he could do it. With all that sick down his front I knew I couldn’t have touched him.

‘Is he dead?’ I whispered.

Gladstone shook his head. ‘Be all right. I’ll have to clean him up a bit.’ He found the towel and dipped it into the big jug on the washstand, then he dabbed away at the creased face of the man on the bed. ‘He’ll feel better waking up clean, poor man,’ he said. He was as gentle and as careful as a woman bathing her child.

He turned away from the bed and went to the washstand to clean the towel. I looked down and saw that
Ashton Vaughan’s eyes were open. I saw his lips move and bent over him. ‘Your pal,’ he said, ‘is a proper little nursie boy, isn’t he?’ It was a sneer, the way he said it. My head came up as if he’d slapped me.

Gladstone came back with a glass of water which he put beside the bed. ‘Did he say something?’ he whispered.

‘Not a word,’ I said.

I was glad to get out, glad to be running home, my wet coat flapping noisily around me. Outside the door of Gladstone’s house we stopped and looked at each other.

‘An exciting night,’ Gladstone said with a grin.

‘Be trouble,’ I said.

He gripped my arm. ‘We did right, though, Lew. Only us on his side, remember, and he’s a broken man. Got a big scar inside him.’

‘Jupiter,’ I said automatically, but I was remembering the sneer in Ashton’s voice. ‘I’ll go or there’ll be trouble,’ I said, and although I was in the house a full three minutes before Owen and Meira came there was trouble all the same. The news had practically stopped the pictures.

There was trouble next day, too – all day.

‘Good people go to chapel,’ Meira said, and although it was the hottest day yet, I was sent to the ten o’clock service at the Mission, and back again at two for Sunday school. Chapel was a punishment where Meira was concerned: that was the only thing we agreed on that day.

At ten on the Mission benches, the hardest they ever made, we had a local preacher and a deacon warning us off things. That was the trouble with the Mission – it was always what we shouldn’t do. ‘Don’t’ they cried, and ‘Beware’, and everywhere you turned there were pitfalls and dangers. We were living on a tightrope suspended over burning fires – and everything, of course, had a moral.

‘Take this fountain pen, made in Britain,’ the local preacher was saying. He held up the pen for all to see. ‘Is this pen not like a righteous man? Think of it – so much ink
it takes in –
enough
ink. It is not a
greedy
pen.
Beware
of the evil of
greed
. The pen takes in enough – and
no more
. And then I write with it, and it lets the ink out again.
Enough
ink. But it doesn’t
blot
! It does not make a mess of a clean, white page. It does not let ink out in a great
blot
. So let us, friends, be like this pen. Let us take enough from life – enough and no more. And let us leave no
blots
.’

Rowland Williams, who was sitting next to me on the back bench, leaned closer and whispered, ‘Better to buy some
blotting
paper, Lew. Quick.’ Then he reached under the seat for his hat, got up, and walked out. The local preacher only managed fifteen minutes more after that.

At two I was back on the hard benches again, and so was Rowland Williams. He was in his fifties, Rowland, with a quiet voice that said quiet, sharp things. By trade he was a carpenter, working alone in an old workshop at the top end of Lower Hill. He didn’t do much work, though, because he had more books than anyone I knew, and he must have subscribed to all the periodicals they ever printed. His sister, with whom he lived, wouldn’t allow him to keep books in the house, so he had them up there with him at the workshop. They used to say that he had been found once sitting in an unfinished coffin reading Plato’s
Republic
…. He had been in the war, and as he said himself he had a glass eye to prove it. Every evening, except Sundays, he spent on Porthmawr station watching the trains go by, and although he brought up his reading all the time at Sunday school he never said a word about the trains.

That day he was talking about Elijah, the prophet, and H. G. Wells, also a prophet, and Bernard Shaw, another one. But I wasn’t in the discussion at all, and neither was
Dewi. Our eyes were on the door and the clock. At five to three the Rev A. H. Jones, BA, BD, always did his rounds and we both knew who he would be looking for.

He was ten minutes early that day, followed closely by Alderman Mrs Meirion-Pughe and Abraham Evans and Dr Gwynn. The Minister bounced in, roaring with laughter as usual; Mrs Meirion-Pughe walked as if on ice, her noble chin uplifted; Abraham Evans stopped to pat every little head he came to; Dr Gwynn walked like a Chicago gangster at the pictures, and with his dark jowls looked like one too. They swept past our class to the front and gathered around Mr Caradoc Probert who was in charge of the Sunday school. Start counting, I said to myself. I hadn’t reached ten before the Minister was there in the aisle, his black stomach touching my cheek.

He spoke over my head. ‘Afterwards, if you please. Dewi Price and Lew Morgan, stay behind.’ Mrs
Meirion-Pughe
was by his side, watching him say it. She was everywhere, that woman. Rowland Williams always said there was no point in going to heaven because they were bound to have her on the committee.

‘Now then,’ the Minister said, tapping Elin Parri on the shoulder, ‘let me hear a verse from this pretty girl.’

Elin wasn’t pretty, and had a bad stammer. She was nearly eighteen, but simple. She looked up, startled,
red-faced
. ‘G-god s-save the k-king!’ she said. The Rev A. H. Jones let rip with one of his falsetto laughs, and all the Sunday school laughed with him, except for Dewi and me and Elin, and Rowland Williams.

We were collected after the last Amen, and ushered through to the small vestry. Sitting there, almost in a
trance, guarded by Mrs Meirion-Pughe, was Gladstone. He didn’t even look up when we joined him on the seat.

‘Let us pray,’ said the Rev A. H. Jones after Maxie had stumbled in. We lowered our heads as he knelt, but I kept my eyes open and took a good look at Mrs Meirion-Pughe, who was also kneeling. Her face looked harder, more like a man’s than ever. She was wearing a wool dress, and she was sweating. It was Welsh wool, though – that’s what she told everybody. She only wore clothes made from Welsh wool. I had once heard Meira ask Owen, ‘Wonder how she’d go on, then, if she could only get French knickers?’

‘Amen,’ said the Minister.

Mrs Meirion-Pughe got to her feet and gave us a long, hard look. ‘I’ll leave them in your hands, A. H.,’ she said.

The Minister had one of his laughing spells, ‘Of course, my dear. Thank you. Thank you for everything.’

I wondered why they had to wring each other’s hands like that. Come six o’clock they would be meeting again for the evening service. They seemed to overdo everything, even a handshake.

The door closed behind her. The Minister placed himself directly in front of us. He was a very short man, but round and soft like a suet pudding. You had the feeling, without touching him, that he was soft all over. His neck, I always thought, once he removed that white, tight collar, would bulge slowly out, like rising bread, to the same width as the rest of him. Everybody said he wore wigs – that he had some short and some long ones, too, so that people would think he had just been for a haircut. Everybody said he was an elegant dresser, with his white cuffs and his white handkerchiefs. Everybody said that he
had a fine speaking voice, and that he would have made a wonderful actor.

‘How shall I begin?’ he said. ‘Should I say boys will be boys and leave it at that?’ He pointed to Dewi. ‘What would you say, my boy? What is your name, first of all?’

‘Dewi Price.’

The Minister nodded. ‘I was a boy once, you know. In fact I was rather a naughty boy. A very naughty boy.’ He ripped off one of his famous laughs. ‘What do you think of that?’

We didn’t say anything. I was studying the map of Paul’s journeys on the opposite wall.

‘Right,’ he went on. ‘Now – which is Gladstone…’ He squinted at us until his eyes rested on Gladstone. ‘Of course,’ he murmured. ‘Of course.’ Only last winter he had asked Gladstone to say a prayer in front of the Sunday school, and Gladstone had said, ‘Please God be patient, and make us as good as we think we are.’

‘Of course. Gladstone Williams. Now – Dewi Price?’

Dewi raised his hand.

‘And Lew Morgan?’ I said me, sir. ‘A mistake, surely? That should be Llew Morgan, shouldn’t it?’ No, sir. ‘Were you christened Lew?’ Sir. ‘Are you sure?’ Sir. ‘Well, well…. And Maxie Roberts? Your name isn’t
Maxie
, my boy, is it?’

‘Sir.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sir. My mam calls me Maxie.’

The Rev A. H. Jones shifted his false teeth. ‘I see. And you all live on Lower Hill Road?’

‘That’s right,’ Dewi said, ‘and if we lived up there on the Hill with the nobs you wouldn’t have to ask our names.’

The Minister for a moment looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach. But he recovered quickly. ‘Watch your tongue, my lad! Watch what you say. These names were given to me by Superintendent Edwards. Do you expect me to remember the name of every boy in my flock?’

He wasn’t a hard man, I saw. He even had a staring match with Dewi and lost it, too. And all this asking names business was just killing time because he didn’t know what to say to us.

He pointed to Gladstone. ‘What school do you attend, Gladstone?’

‘No school,’ Gladstone said. ‘Too old.’

The Minister looked disappointed. ‘Where does your father work, then?’

‘No father.’

He hesitated. Probably he had remembered who Gladstone’s mother was. Martha was very well known. ‘But you’re the leader,’ he went on. ‘You can’t deny that.’

‘The leader of what?’ Gladstone replied. ‘We’re not a gang…’

‘Superintendent Edwards – on the phone – he said you were the ringleader…’

‘We’re not a ring, either,’ Gladstone said flatly.

‘But’ – the Minister gathered himself – ‘you can’t sit there and deny that it was you who led these boys to risk their lives last night? To risk their lives in a foolish escapade in the course of which you all might have been drowned…’

‘There’s not much risk in the harbour,’ Dewi said.

‘In pitch darkness, boy. In a leaking boat…’

‘Wasn’t leaking,’ Maxie said, then added ‘Sir.’ The Rev
A. H. Jones wasn’t really getting a chance to go off on a spell of oratory, I thought.

He pointed a stubby finger at Gladstone. ‘How old are you, boy?’

‘Seventeen,’ Gladstone replied.

‘Seventeen – that’s what the Superintendent said. Old enough to know better. Old enough to know…’

‘The poor man was out there on the boat. We saw a light and went out to rescue him…’

‘The poor man, as you call him, was hopelessly drunk. He should have been left out there. People who make a God of Alcohol get their just rewards…’

‘Just a minute,’ Gladstone broke in, ‘are you saying we should have left him out there? Left him to drown?’

‘Not at all,’ the Minister replied. ‘Over-simplification. Very much over-simplification.’ Gladstone had let him in, given him something to talk about. ‘Let us try to see the problem straight, shall we? Now – I agree you acted with the best of intentions all of you. I agree your motives were sound – generous in fact… He was off now, on a tide of words, using his fine voice to best effect. ‘All this I grant, boys. But – consider the facts. This man you went out to rescue last night is a hopeless drunkard. A sot.’ Gladstone shifted his feet impatiently. ‘Ever since he left this town many years ago – before most of you were born – he has been the slave of drink. Did you know that? Every morning, year in, year out, he was woken up, this man, filled with a vile craving for drink. He must have a drink, he must have a drink… Ashton Vaughan is an
addict
. And what has he done? Has he fought it off like a man? Oh, no – he has gone out, every day, to some dingy bar and
soaked himself anew in the evil stuff.’ The Minister licked his lips. ‘Day after day. An addict. Did you know, any of you, that this man has been in and out of hospitals where they treat people who cast themselves on the seas of oblivion with drink?’ He came closer. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘do you think of that?’

None of us had anything to say. These were facts. There was no argument to make.

‘This man,’ the Minister went on, his voice rising, ‘in whose company – don’t deny it! – you have been seen so often, is a bad man.’

‘Not true,’ Gladstone cried.

‘A bad man,’ the Minister insisted. ‘I’m warning you now: the Vaughans are a law unto themselves.’ He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. ‘They have placed themselves beyond – beyond everything. One a drunkard, the other an atheist. Both of them baptised in Capel Mawr; both of them forsaken the ways and the House of God. A law unto themselves heeding neither man nor God… shudder inside myself when I think of them.’ He closed his eyes and lowered his head, and being so near to him we knew it was an act. A chapel’s length away it would have passed off, but this was point-blank range. ‘Shall I tell you something, boys? Look – I know how you feel. I understand. When I was a boy… It was time for a story – the story of his boyhood in the hills of Merioneth, on a tiny farm, his father an illiterate labourer, his mother saving every penny so that he could become a minister and go to Aberystwyth. He had never forgotten his background. He had been born poor, and was proud of it… his mother’s face, the little cottage…. It was a good story, except that
Polly had told me it wasn’t true. Polly had said that his father, for a start, had been a gardener to some rich family in the south, and his mother had been the parlourmaid. ‘Servants,’ Polly had declared scornfully. ‘Doesn’t want us to know his parents were in service. It was the people who had this house put him through college.’

The Minister was coming to an end. ‘A small, poor farm on a mountain. But we were rich in one thing – we knew the right road and we followed it. We lived clean lives. We put our trust in God – and God knows his servants.’

The silence followed, the actor’s pause to let the words strike home. Maxie ruined some of the effect by saying ‘Amen’, but the Rev A. H. Jones was a man who picked up anything and threw it back at you.

‘Well said, my boy,’ he whispered. ‘Well said. Amen indeed.’ He gave us a dazzling smile, mouth only. ‘I’ll tell you boys something, shall I? In confidence. There are many people in Capel Mawr whose one wish it is to see every public house in this town brought tumbling to the ground. Oh, yes – it’s true. Burn them down, they tell me. Houses of the Devil…. And they are right. Public houses
are
places of the Devil, but do you know what I think? I think we should leave them open. Every one! Yes – every single one.’ He came closer still. ‘Some people, you know, consider I hold
advanced
ideas. I suppose they are right. My ideas
are
unusual. Modern – shall we say? Leave them open, that’s my answer. Leave them open and be strong, and march past! We must be strong enough to walk past their open doors, head held high, all temptation cast aside. We must stand up and say – this is not for a Christian…. Oh, I know that’s daring –
modern
– but that’s what I believe. We
mustn’t be like Ashton Vaughan. We mustn’t give in to every weakness.’ He belched softly and looked at his watch. ‘Boys – I want you to do something for me. I’ll let you into another of my secrets: I don’t like telling boys off. Told you I was
unusual
, didn’t I? But – do this one thing for me. Steer clear of Ashton Vaughan. Don’t let him drag you down the slippery slopes. Stay away from him.’ He had the watch out again. He licked his lips: you could almost see him working out what there would be for tea. ‘I didn’t ask you in here to give you a lengthy telling off. Don’t think that….’ He was hurrying now. It was near teatime, and probably he knew he wasn’t making much of an impression, anyway. ‘I want you to think things over – talk things over very carefully.’ He gave us an uncertain smile. ‘All right?’