Aberystwyth Mon Amour

A gleam of comprehension appeared in the waters of her eyes and the mauve iris of her mouth slowly opened like a sea anemone's vagina.

'Dai?'

I nodded.

'He's gone.'

'Yes.'

'They took him.'

I knelt down and looked into her eyes.

'Who took him, Mrs Brainbocs?'

'That teacher.'

'Lovespoon?'

'Yes!'

'Do you know why?'

She looked at me now, her eyes slightly narrowing and whispered, 'Because of what he wrote.'

'About Cantref-y-Gwaelod?'

There was no answer and for a while there was silence in the room except for the sound of her hoarse rasping breath. I looked around. There was not much: a spinning wheel; a festering mattress in the corner; empty sherry bottles. I walked over to the stove to make her a cup of tea. There was no food in the house; instead I picked up a baked beans tin from the floor and washed it out under the tap, then I filled it with rum from my hip flask.

'This will do you good,' I said, holding it under her nose.

Two cold trembling hands gripped mine and drew the tin upwards. As the fiery spirit flowed inside her, she began to speak again with renewed strength.

'It was the Druids.'

'They took your boy?'

'Killed him.'

'Are you sure?'

She nodded and looked up at me, with a new determination.

'Of course I'm sure.'

'What was the essay about, Mrs Brainbocs? Can you remember?'

Her eyes dropped and focused on the hip flask in my coat pocket. I refilled the tin and handed it to her. She snatched at it and drank too greedily. A cough erupted from her throat and the pale warm liquor mixed with her saliva and dribbled down her bearded chin. I patted her on the back as if she were a baby.

'Please try and remember!'

'I don't know,' she said when the coughing subsided, 'I told the police everything I know.'

'Did he make a copy of it?'

This time she looked directly me with the fire of certainty burning in her eyes. 'Of course he did. Boy always did that. Always made a copy. 'Case anything happened.'

'Do you know where he put the copy?'

'Yes.'

My heart leaped. 'Yes!? Where?'

She grabbed my forearm and pressed weakly as if confiding her last secret. 'He hid it in a well-known beauty spot.'

'Well-known beauty spot?'

'Yes.'

'Which one?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know. He didn't say.' She reached out again for the baked beans tin. I refilled it but this time held it out of her reach.

'Which one?'

She shook her head back and forth like a frisky horse.

'I don't know. I don't know . . . !'

I poured some of the rum on to the floor and she gasped in horror.

'No ... no ... please don't!'

'Which beauty spot, Mrs Brainbocs?'

Fear crept into her eyes. 'Please give me a drink. Please!'

I turned the rum flask upside down. The liquid started to gush out. She jerked herself forward and the words tumbled out as she said anything that might stop me wasting the precious rum.

'I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. He couldn't. Boy was so excited he could hardly talk. Wouldn't hardly eat. Then he went away for a whole week. That's when he met her, y'see. That's how he knew for sure. Wouldn't eat at all when he got back.'

'Knew what?'

'Everything. Knew it all then, after he saw her. Knew the lot. She told him, y'see. Told him everything. Why shouldn't she? She didn't care. Bitch. When he got back he was pale as a ghost. Wouldn't sleep or eat or anything. Just walked up and down all night. I told him he'd wear out the hinge on his calliper, but the boy wouldn't listen. Said: Ma if something happens to me in school tomorrow, remember: I want to be buried next to Dad.'

I let her grab the rum and watched in pity as she sucked it down making a noise like water emptying from a bath. She paused for a second.

'Who was this person he met?'

'Gwenno.'

'Gwenno who?'

'Just Gwenno.'

There was another pause; Ma Brainbocs was panting like an athlete now.

I patted her gently on the shoulder. 'Mrs Brainbocs, are you saying this Gwenno told him something? Something Lovespoon didn't like?'

She looked at me, the fire in her eyes declining like an oil lamp being turned down for the night. 'Yes.' For a moment, her forlorn gaze held mine and then her head slumped forward on to her chest. The faint light of understanding had gone out. 'All gone,' she intoned monotonously once more, 'all gone.'

As I started to leave, the rocking began again, rhythmically in accompaniment to the forlorn mantra of a mother's woe: 'All gone, my boy, all gone.'

Chapter 8

DID NOEL FIND her? After the typhoon the family of Hermione Wilberforce was dragged dead from the sea by local fishermen but Hermione was not among them. A search was conducted and nothing was found. And that should have been the end of the matter. If she wasn't dead the pirates infesting the coast off Borneo would soon make her wish she was. But then the strange stories started filtering out of the jungle. Absurd, impossible tales of a white woman seen residing there. No one who knew anything about these things believed them. Not the authorities in Singapore; nor the Rajah in Sarawak. But Bartholomew did - that daft Sir Galahad who soldiered on against all advice, even after all his guides and bearers abandoned him. The journal for which the bishop's wife traded the brass kettles peters out, after six weeks alone, in a fevered, malarial scrawl. 'I have seen her' he wrote in the final week, riddled with sickness and unable to move. I have seen her, and after that the last words, 'faith is to believe what you do not yet see'. Was it just a hallucination brought on by the madness of fever? Of course. There can be no other explanation. The chances that the woman was even there in the jungle in the first place were incalculably small. The possibility that he managed to locate her was zero. There was no real surprise about his fate, no mystery at all. Except for one thing: he took a camera with him.

*

I drove slowly round the large expanse of lawn that fronted the Museum and blinked as the sun flashed off the plexiglass nose of the Lancaster. Acquired in 1961 from the famous 617 'Dambusters' squadron, it had stood on Victory Square since the end of hostilities, its majesty never dimming despite the passage of time. Somewhere beneath the waters of the Rio Caeriog lay her sister plane. I pulled over and switched off the engine and watched a party of school children pair off and climb up the ladder, through the entrance under the dorsal turret and into the fuselage. All through school they told us how the people left Wales in the nineteenth century to settle in Patagonia, but no one ever told us why. A shilling from the end of the Pier to start a new life in a land of milk and honey. What they found wasn't even a land of bread and jam, but a barren, desolate, ice-covered wilderness. I was too young to remember the war of independence, but like everybody else I was familiar with the Pathй news footage of the queues snaking down the street outside the recruitment offices. The initial euphoria. And then the disillusionment. The body bags and policy U-turns; the sobering discovery that the boys weren't the men in white hats as everybody had supposed. Weren't liberators at all. Opinion at home turned against the ill-advised military adventure, people changed their minds. But the troops — entrenched in a war from which it was now impossible to extricate them — were not allowed such a luxury. And then came the famous Rio Caeriog campaign; a turning point and famous victory, in the same way that Dunkirk was a victory.

I found the Museum curator, Rhiannon Jones, in the Combinations and Corsetry section which ran the length of the top floor of a building that was more interesting than the exhibits it housed. The Devil's Bridge Tin & Lead Steam Railway Co. had built it during the middle of the last century, a magnificent neo-Gothic pile filled with cherubs and gargoyles, turrets, archways and crenellations. The lingerie that now shimmered in the prismatic light from the stained glass windows was said to be the largest collection of its kind in Europe and when I was young they employed a man specially to chase away the schoolboys who tried to sneak in. A job that had now gone the same way as workhouses and beadles. Although deserted, it was a pleasant enough place to take a stroll on a summer's day. I wandered through the shafts of late-afternoon sun that streamed in tenderly caressing the exhibits and making the dust dance. The tea-cosy section was at the far end under the Great South Window overlooking the Square. It was not a famous collection — a few shabby pieces in ancient cases that gave not the slightest hint at the infamous goings on of the harbour-side tea-cosy shops. It was easy to see where the Mayan piece had been stolen from. A newly replaced pane of glass and a tea cosy-shaped discolouration on the background paper in the" display cabinet. A new card lay next to it bearing the fib: 'On temporary loan to the Leipziger Staatsgalerie.'