Aberystwyth Mon Amour

Inside the foyer was another of the success stories of that far-off time. A passport photo booth created by the same boffins of the special operations executive at Llanelli Technical College. It was the world's only micro-dot photo booth and gave you your portrait the size of a currant. To see it, you had to buy a special viewer from the gift shop. Most of the micro-dot camera technology familiar from so many spy movies had been developed during the Patagonian War. An animal clinic had been established in Buenos Aires from which the military intelligence, condensed on to micro-dots, had been smuggled out as eye patches for hamsters with lazy eyes. As kids we had polka-dotted the wall of the art class with our drawings of it. Calamity ran to the photo booth and disappeared inside with a swish of orange curtain. I waited patiently for the flashes wondering idly what obscene gestures she was no doubt making to the camera.

Upstairs, in the main gallery, two super-enlarged black and white photographs filled the whole of one wall with a grainy ghostly sea of grey. One was a picture of the two Lancasters leaving Milford Haven aerodrome to cheering crowds. And the other showed five aviators standing in a relaxed circle outside some forgotten South American cantina, drinking tequila and clowning about. They were young and fresh-faced and laughing into the camera lens with a gaiety that suggested the picture must have been taken right at the start of the conflict. It was the Rio Caeriog bomber crew. Lovespoon, Dai the Custard Pie and, with a much younger horizontal crease in his face, Herod Jenkins the games teacher. A triumvirate of the current movers and shakers of Aberystwyth. Did Brainbocs discover something about them that might have taken the glint off those famous medals? Some awkward tidbit that would have wiped that horizontal crease off Herod's face? The smiles frozen in Ilford black and white gave nothing away.

Calamity walked over with the air of one who has made a discovery. I looked up and smiled and she handed me a sheaf of plastic laminated cards bearing the biographies of the airmen. Lovespoon: war hero, school teacher, prize-winning poet and Grand Wizard on the Druid council. Custard Pie: purveyor of fine soaps that make your face go black, and Red Indian arrows that appear to pierce the neck. Herod Jenkins: school games teacher; capped for Wales in his youth and subsequently, although the card did not record this distinction, famous for sending a consumptive schoolboy to his death during a blizzard. The last was Oswald Frobisher. A nobody. One of the handful of English intellectuals who were so dismayed at missing the Spanish Civil War they had signed up for the Patagonian adventure. The card said merely that he died of his wounds when his Lancaster ditched into the Rio Caeriog. There was no clue as to what the wounds were but any schoolkid could tell you: the bandits cut off his John Thomas and stuffed it in his mouth.

Calamity was still holding one card. I looked at her enquiringly and she passed it across. It contained even fewer details than hapless Frobisher's. None at all in fact, just bare white card, and a name. A name that I had last heard from the lips of Dai Brainbocs's Mam. The name of the woman her son had gone to see in the week before he died. Gwenno Guevara, it said simply, freedom fighter.

Chapter 12

BIANCA GINGERLY PULLED out the shards of broken glass from the picture of Noel Bartholomew and wrapped them up in newspaper.

'If I was lost in the jungle would you come looking for me?'

'No, it's too dangerous.'

'Not even to take my picture, like your great-great-uncle?'

I laughed. 'We don't know for sure that he did.'

She carried the parcel of jagged glass through to the kitchen, shouting over her shoulder as she went: 'Of course he did.'

I looked at the portrait. Did he? Did he really find her? Or was it all a hoax played on a gullible American tourist by a wily Chinese shopkeeper? It was Eeyore who gave me the portrait and the chest full of papers and artefacts, back in the days when I believed in common sense and thought the expedition must have ended in failure. But Eeyore had quietly disagreed with a patient conviction he only rarely displayed. It depended on what you considered failure, he said. And added that one day I would understand. But I never really have, even though I return again and again to that diary. Those cracked and yellow pages in which Noel records in a malarial scrawl, growing ever more indecipherable by the day, how she came to see him in his sickness. A passage which ends with the words taken from St Augustine: 'Faith is to believe what you do not yet see.'

Bianca walked back in to the office.

'I think he took her picture in Heaven.'

'He did what?'

'In Heaven. That's where he took her picture.'

I grinned and, seeing the expression, Bianca became suddenly cross.

'You think you know it all, don't you? I suppose you don't believe in ghosts either?'

'No. Do you?'

'Of course. I'm going to. be one.'

On our way out we met Mrs Llantrisant. She looked tired and pale, and swabbed robotically.

'Prynhawn da, Mr Knight!'

'Prynhawn da, Mrs Llantrisant! You look worn out.'

'I'm feeling my age, Mr Knight, that's what I am.'

'Why not take a few days off and put your feet up?'

'And who would fold the serviettes for the Ark if I did that?'

'Is that what you've been doing?'

She stopped and leaned like a drunkard on her mop. 'I'm glad to be able to play my part.'

'You believe in all this then, do you? This Ark business?'

'What's there not to believe?'

'I mean, you'd like to go, would you?'

She grabbed a loose strand of hair and tucked it up beneath the hem of her headscarf. Her hand was shaking.

'It's the kids I'm doing it for. It's too late for us, but the little ones - they deserve it.'

'With Lovespoon as king?'

'Social gerontocracy, Mr Knight, just like in ancient Greece.'

'What's wrong with Aberystwyth?'

She put the mop in the water.

'I'm surprised to hear you ask that, Mr Knight. What do you like about it all of a sudden?'

'It may have its faults but at least it's not currently under ten thousand feet of water.'

'Not ten thousand, less than twenty fathoms. Scarcely a puddle.'

Suddenly, Mrs Llantrisant lost her balance and fell into me. I grabbed her arm and held her upright.

'I'm all right, really I am,' she moaned. 'Just slipped on the wet step, that's all.'

'You're pushing yourself too hard, you are. We don't want another repeat of Easter do we?'

Bianca and I walked along the Prom, heading for Sospan's.

'Silly old bag.'

'There's no need for that.'

'Did you see the look she gave me?'

'She can't help it. She's old and set in her ways.'

'What happened at Easter?'

I ordered a round of ice creams. 'She had a funny turn. Said it was the apples in her pie but she took so bad she called a priest to administer the last rites. She's been all right since, though.'

Bianca leaned her head on my shoulder and said, 'Why didn't you call me?'

'What about?'

'What about!' she cried.

Of course. The last time we met had been the night I took her home.

'I'm sorry, I -'

'Don't apologise.'

I put my palm against the side of her face and ruffled her hair. Sospan handed us the ice creams with the discretion of a brothel madam. We ate them in silence for a while, and then Bianca spoke to the folds of my shirt.

'I've got something for you. I haven't got it yet, but I can get hold of it. That's if you want.'