On the fourth day I passed a vagrant playing a violin on the pavement outside the entrance to the Pier. There was a hat at his feet but nothing in it. The familiar words passed through my head in accompaniment to his playing. ‘Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel. Then an old man came in sight, gathering winter few-oooh-el.’ I stopped. The man was Cadwaladr, the old veteran of the war in Patagonia. He stopped playing and said, ‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither.’ I showed him a bottle of rum in my Spar bag and he packed up the violin.
‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘I know just the place.’
We walked down towards the harbour.
‘I thought you were painting the railway bridge across the Dovey estuary.’
‘I was.’
‘You said it was a job for life.’
‘It was. Finish one end, and time to start again at the other end. Like Sisyphus, only better scenery.’
‘What happened? Get tired of it?’
‘Nope. They invented a new kind of paint. Lasts ten years.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘They gave me redundancy money – I bought a van. See.’
He took me to a van parked on the Prom across from the Yacht Club. It looked like a superannuated ambulance or a furniture van or something. It looked like a lot of the vans that got parked here: mobile homes for people whose dogs had string for a leash. The poor man’s Winnebago. He opened the back, pulled out a folding table and two matching chairs and set them up on the pavement. I put the bottle down and sat.
‘What was it before, a furniture van?’
‘Mobile library. Cost me two hundred quid.’ He brought out two cups and we sat on the Prom, drinking rum in the dim light of midday.
‘Mobile library.’
‘I like that. There’s an air about it, hard to define, an air of learning, of scholarship. And a hush like you get in a proper library.’
‘You got a bed in there?’
‘Got a bed and a cupboard and a primus. Got some water and some candles. Got some petrol. Got everything I need. Might even try a different country in the new year.’
‘Still got the hush, huh?’
‘I know it sounds strange.’
‘I don’t think it does.’
‘You going to the carol concert this year?’
‘Hadn’t thought about it.’
‘They say Myfanwy won’t be singing.’
‘Doesn’t look like she will. She’s lost her voice.’
Cadwaladr leaned back in his chair and stared at sea darker than an evergreen tree. ‘Won’t be the same.’
‘She knows that.’
‘Every year Myfanwy is the high point.’
‘She knows that. I think the pressure of expectation is part of the problem.’
‘Won’t be the same, even if Hoffmann does turn up.’
‘You think he will?’
‘Me? No. But everybody else does. Tickets are already sold out. Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I gave up hope of redemption many years ago, after I came back from Patagonia and found that no one would look me in the eye. The way I see it, we’ve done nothing to deserve our fate in the first place. We shouldn’t even be in this position. If God wants to redeem us, he can just go ahead and do it. No need to make us jump through hoops first.’
‘This Hoffmann stuff is pure craziness. It’s a word written by a dead man in blood. No one’s going to come and redeem us.’
‘Your dad’s supplying the donkey.’
‘He supplies the donkey for the nativity scene every year.’
‘They’re going to have a torchlight procession led by Clip.’
‘Is it true something terrible happened in the war—’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean at the Mission House siege. They say the priest went mad.’
Cadwalader rolled a cigarette. ‘That definitely didn’t happen. He was mad before he went.’
I touched the violin. ‘Did you learn to play this in the war?’
‘Learned as a kid. Do you know what the secret of a Stradivarius violin is?’
I was about to tell him but then I thought better of it. The world is full of smart alecs. ‘No, I’ve no idea.’
So he told me.
‘I always think of that story at Christmas. Those spruce trees growing slowly somewhere far away in the Alps. No noise at all, just silence and the sound of a tree growing slowly. Sounds mad, doesn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘That’s all there is. Just emptiness, bright grey light; the sound of snowflakes landing, the rustle of sifting snow. The tiny noise of a wolf’s paw in the fresh snow. Must have been beautiful. Maybe far off there is a post horn, if they had them then. Two travellers, perhaps, wandering lost in the blizzard, calling with their horns.’ He paused and looked sad. ‘The man who told me that story about the violins used to make rocking chairs.’
‘Yes, I met him. He once asked me if I’d ever ridden on an escalator.’
‘They found the poor chap dead in the snow above Talybont yesterday.’
‘The rocking-chair man is dead?’
‘Someone smashed his head in with a tyre iron. They found him in the trees behind his house. Never had an enemy in the world, that bloke. Just a mystery.’
‘He was a nice old man.’
‘Every Christmas I’ll think about him, too, from now on. The wolf, the post horn, and the rocking-chair man face down in the snow.’
They say the human heart is a mansion with many locked rooms and wings which are closed to the public. All the nice furniture is in the parlour at the front; the one that gets plenty of sun through those fine bright Georgian windows; the one that looks out onto a gravel forecourt and beyond to neatly clipped privet hedges and topiary.
This section is open to the public.
Towards the back there is a roped-off section, leading to stairs and a labyrinth of dim corridors. The sun doesn’t shine here; the doors are locked; the furniture is covered in sheets. Sometimes at night you can hear moans and cries echoing down the empty corridors, the cries of long-dead people. And you can see an ancient white-haired servant taking a tray of food and collecting an empty one. He has a key to the final set of locked doors at the corridor’s end. Someone lives there, someone they would rather you didn’t see. A man in a tracksuit. The school games teacher.
Reluctantly, I decided it was time to pay a visit to the circus. If I was lucky maybe I could get in and out during the strongman’s performance. I would not have to meet my former games teacher. But I needed to speak to his moll, Mrs Llantrisant. For years she had swabbed the steps of my old office in Canticle Street, and had given every indication of being a dim-witted, gossiping busy-body in her headscarf and curlers; we were later surprised to learn that she was a criminal mastermind at the top of the hierarchy of druid gangsters. As such, unless she had lost her power it was inconceivable that the Moth Brothers could have done a hit on Santa without her foreknowledge or consent. Unless it was an opportunistic slaying, but even then she would know about it. Although the chances that she would tell me what she knew were small.