‘Five years I sat behind you and you never turned round once.’
‘As I say—’
‘I sent you a Valentine card and you thought it was from the girl from the estate. You asked her out and she said no.’
‘I remember that.’
‘She’s dead now, so they tell me. Brain haemorrhage.’ She picked up a litter bin and walked out.
Myfanwy sighed and shifted position. There was something deeply calming about that sigh. A sign that wherever it was she was wandering, whichever somnambulant world closed to us, it was nice there and bathed in warm sunshine. Perhaps she was walking through the marram grass at Ynyslas in summer. The day we had our first picnic. A hot blue sizzling day when you had to squint to look at the sea; a day of champagne and strawberries and whispered words; a day I keep locked away in a vault and seldom take out, for fear that exposure to the sun will fade it, and the joy it brings will seep away, like a perfume slowly loses its scent with time.
I walked to the window and looked out at the town. A woman wandered in and sat on the chair I had vacated. She was in a dressing gown, and wore her grey hair in pigtails like a Red Indian squaw. Her features were finely drawn and hinted at lost beauty. There were bandages on both her hands. She took Myfanwy’s hand and spoke.
‘I do envy you being able to sleep like this. I haven’t slept a wink for thirty years—’ She made a tiny startled movement, like a gazelle which picks up the scent of a predator on the breeze. ‘Who’s that?’ she whispered. ‘There’s someone here. Someone by the window . . . I can smell liquor.’ She sniffed the air. ‘Captain Morgan rum, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘I’m sorry, I was . . .’
‘A man! Oh, you must be Louie.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m blind, you see. Myfanwy always talks about you.’
‘That’s kind of you to say.’
‘How old do you think I am?’
‘Oh, I . . .’
‘Don’t say it, you’ll upset me. I’m only forty-six. That shocked you, didn’t it?’
‘No.’ She looked twice that.
‘I can tell from your voice that it did. I’ve had a hard life. I’m the oldest resident. Did you know that? That’s what fooled you, you see. I haven’t got my stick. That wretched nurse keeps hiding it.’
‘Is Myfanwy your friend?’
‘Yes. My name’s Evangeline . . . Miss not Mrs. I was never married. Who would want me? Oh, but there was a time, oh yes, a time when I was desired.’ She stood up. ‘Well, I must be going. I know better than to play gooseberry to two young sweethearts.’
‘You’re very welcome to stay.’
‘This place used to be a seminary, did you know that? “Seminarium” means nursery garden, from the Latin for seed, like semen. A place where they grow priests; you need to spread a lot of dung to do that. I knew a priest once, many years ago; he used me as a seed bed but they didn’t believe me. He was a beastly priest, or was it the other way round? Heigh-ho, there is a willy grows aslant a brook . . .’ She paused as if trying to recover a lost train of thought. ‘I was desired once, too. But that was long ago.’
She stepped slowly to the door and I said, ‘Does Myfanwy really talk about me?’
‘All the time.’
She reached the door and added, ‘Myfanwy says you drink too much rum. I think she was right.’
‘It’s my aftershave.’
‘Well, then, you drink too much aftershave.’
Before leaving, I dropped in on the doctor. He was sitting at his desk showing a series of cards to a small mongrel dog who sat on a chair. The cards showed pictures of various objects that might interest a dog.
‘The vet says he needs worming,’ the doctor explained without looking up. ‘Please take a seat.’
I pulled up another chair to the desk.
‘That’s their answer to everything: worm tablets. But what’s the point of removing the parasites if you don’t address the fundamental psychosomatic causes?’
He held out a card with a picture of a cat and the dog growled. The next card had a bone on it and the dog licked his nose.
‘You see!’ said the doctor as if this proved something.
‘Dogs have psychological problems, too?’
‘Of course. They have two eyes like us, a heart like us, two lungs like us, a brain like us. Why do people suppose they don’t also have the same neuroses?’
‘I’ve just been to see Myfanwy.’
‘Yes, she’s looking better.’
‘She seems to sleep a lot.’
The doctor paused and put on his concerned face. ‘She seems a bit – how should I say it – a bit reluctant to join the party. It’s as if she’s happier in dreamland or wherever it is she goes.’
‘I can understand that.’
‘We need to coax her back. We need to help her see that life is worth living and she will be happy again.’
‘How do we do that?’
The doctor put the cards down and made a steeple of his fingers as he warmed to his theme. ‘One thing you could do is bring in an item with sentimental value for Myfanwy, something that has associations of happier times. It doesn’t have to be anything dramatic – a photo or an ornament or something. Just leave it in her room. It could help.’
‘I’ve got some of her records, she gave them to me after our first date. I think she would like those.’
‘Excellent. That would do splendidly. We could play them to her; music has the most remarkable curative properties in this respect.’ He returned his attention to the dog. The next card showed two dogs copulating and the patient wagged his tail.
Downstairs in the hallway I ran into the nurse again.
‘Hello, Glenys,’ I said with forced cheeriness.
‘The name doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it? No one ever called me that. You all used to call me Tadpole.’ Her eyes watered at the memory and she stuck a pudgy fist into the socket and screwed it round. ‘Tadpole,’ she repeated and her mouth became distorted into the shape of a figure-of-eight lying on its side.
I still couldn’t remember her but the sight of her pain, still vivid after so many years, made me squirm. ‘Oh, now I remember. I’m so sorry, kids can be very cruel, it shocks me when I think about it.’
‘You never cared about me at all.’
‘Oh, that’s not true. I really liked you.’
She looked at me. ‘Really?’
‘Of course. We all did.’
The hand shot back up to the eye and she began to cry. ‘Now I know you’re lying. You never cared about me. Maybe if I’d been called Hoffmann, that would have been different.’
I blinked in surprise.
‘That got you, didn’t it? Yeah, that got you.’
‘Did you say “Hoffmann”?’
‘Might have done,’ she snivelled.
‘Do you know something about Hoffmann?’
‘Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘I saw the ad in the paper. I don’t want your lousy books, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘Tell me what you know.’
‘I used to nurse a man who had been a soldier in the war in Patagonia. They tortured him with an electric telephone generator. He used to cry out in the night, cry out the name “Hoffmann”. Bet you didn’t know that.’
‘No, I didn’t. Who was this soldier?’
Her face lit up in triumph. It was a small victory but I suppose people like Tadpole take what they can get. She minced off, seething with glee. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’
I ran after her. ‘Look, Nurse Glenys, I’m sorry the kids in school called you Tadpole—’
‘That’s it butter me up, now I’ve got something you want.’
‘You saw the ad in the paper. You know I’m looking into the murder of Father Christmas. It was a shocking crime.’