Eifion motioned me to sit and I eased myself gingerly into an armchair.
‘Aren’t the cats a threat to Tiresias?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘I’ve brought them up to respect the sanctity of all life. That’s a lesson I learned in the war.’ He took a tin of throat lozenges from his pocket and prised off the lid; but carefully, as if he was worried he might spill the contents. I peered forward and he held the tin out for me to see. It contained dead flies. He picked one out with a pair of tweezers and went over to feed a spider. ‘Come on, my beauties,’ he said. ‘Dinner time.’
‘What about the sanctity of the fly’s life?’
‘The flies aren’t real. I make them out of soya.’
I watched as he worked. It wasn’t easy to get the dead ‘fly’ to balance on the spider silk, but he was methodical and patient; soon he had fed his entire herd of spiders.
‘Caleb Penpegws,’ I said, feeling a great weariness manifest itself in all my limbs.
He sat down and said in the dreamy tone that sometimes accompanies reminiscence but more often play-acting. ‘Yes, I seem to remember a man of that name, but it’s all so long ago, you understand.’
I sighed; the weariness was now so great even sighing felt like weightlifting. ‘Yes, I understand. This is the bit where you have trouble remembering and I say, “Oh maybe a five-pound note will help you recall,” and miraculously it does for a while. But then, once we get halfway through your story, the lights go out again and I have to put some more money in the meter. And so it goes on until a few simple pieces of information – the sort which a normal person would be only to happy to volunteer – end up costing me twenty quid. Yes I think I know how this story goes. It has a depressingly familiar ring to it; perhaps it’s déjá vu, or perhaps it’s . . . What do they call it? Reincarnation? Or is it transmigration of souls? . . . As a classical scholar you will surely know . . . Yes, something like that. Maybe we met in a different lifetime; you were a priest officiating in a minor temple beside the Nile and I was a palace shamus working for King Otephep III or something. Or maybe it’s not that at all, maybe it’s just I’ve spent way too much of my shitty life playing this scene: sitting in a filthy pigsty room with lowlife nobodies, asking simple questions and getting in return wisecracks or a feigned amnesia that slowly lifts; or just gouts of infuriatingly imprecise Talmudic wisdom; when all I asked for was a simple sentence composed of easily understood English words. I don’t know, it feels like I’ve spent my whole life doing this and know the script off by heart.
‘But tonight it’s going to be different. I’m sick of that story; I’m re-writing the script. I’m tired of risking my life on behalf of the people of Aberystwyth; trying to help them; trying to bring justice to birth; trying and failing – but failing heroically – to somehow wrest the tiller from the hands of fate once in a while and make things better than they should be, or than the people of this town ever have the right to expect; and doing it all for so little money I’d be ashamed if people found out. Tonight is not going to be like that. Tonight I’m going to ask you a civil question and you are going to give me a straightforward answer; the sort you would give to your mother if she asked you what you wanted for your tea. And the reason you are going to do it is simple. You will do it because it’s the right thing to do; because it’s the decent thing to do; because two men who have no reason to hate each other should be able to sit in a room and have a nice conversation, one in which the one helps the other for no other recompense than the joy that comes from offering a hand of help to a wayfarer lost in the gloom of this world.
‘You’re going to do it because of all these things I have mentioned and because you are a good person underneath it all, a man who has suffered for sure, but still a man. I can see that from the very fact that you are here in front of me today. You are a man who fought and looked into the abyss in Patagonia, where many men forfeited their wits; and yet returned, it seems to me, with most of them intact. Thus you are a man, but being a man entails certain duties and responsibilities, chief of which is to bear your suffering well and sort it out alone; and never make it a burden to another man, who will assuredly have pain of his own in his soul which decency forbids him from showing you. You must, alas, shoulder your cross and not whinge. It is not easy, but being a man is not easy. For all these reasons you will help me here tonight and for one other reason, which I hoped I would not have to name, but I see alas! from the look in your eye that I do; namely this: you will help me, because if you don’t I’m going to make you eat that mouse.’ I finished and exuded a long, long sigh, almost completely enervated by the effort of what I had said.
There was silence for a long time after my speech ended. I smiled. He said nothing. I smiled again. He chewed a nail and looked at Tiresias; kissed the little rodent. He picked up a box of fire lighters and made a small fire in the grate. It gave me an idea what I might do if he refused to co-operate. It wasn’t a nice idea and made me hope Tiresias wasn’t blessed with the gift of prophecy. It never does you any good, anyway. Ask Oedipus. Finally, Eifion spoke.
‘Caleb Penpegws and I were wounded at the Mission House siege. We lay side by side on stretchers in the field hospital. One day some men turned up and took him away. I didn’t see him again until five years later, back in Barmouth. He told me they tortured him for a week about some coat they said he’d stolen. They wanted to know about this Hoffmann guy who everybody’s talking about. I said, “Hey, great to see you again, buddy,” and all that. I could see he wasn’t happy, so I suggested we go on the Fairbourne railway together. Thought it might cheer him up. We used to love riding that train. But he didn’t seem interested. He went all sort of misty and stuff, and said, “What’s the point?”’ Eifion looked baffled. ‘I guess it must change a man being tortured.’
‘Where can I find him?’
‘Not in this world, that’s for sure.’
‘Dead?’
‘For many years now.’
‘Is it true an angel appeared on the eve of the battle?’
He picked up the mouse and held him in one hand and stroked with the other. ‘Yes, it is true’
‘You really saw it?’
‘I really saw it.’ He put the mouse down and rested his chin in his cupped hands.
‘There was a little girl up in the mountains, a little goatherd. There was a spring up there, where she used to water the herd. The angel used to appear there to her and tell her stuff. She was famous and the peasants for miles around would go to see her and listen to her describe her angel. So me and some of the guys went along and spoke to the girl. We told her how scared we were and could she ask her angel to watch over us during the coming battle. Because, you see, we all knew the mission was madness. We knew none of us would come back alive. The little girl said she would ask her angel. And lo! on the eve of the battle she appeared among us, riding a shining white horse. It could have been a different angel, but what are the odds of there being two of them in Patagonia at the same time? Beautiful, she was, all shining white and pure and holy and all sorts of shit. Looking at her was like . . . I don’t know . . . It was like how you feel as a kid in church on Christmas Eve when you looked at the beautiful image of Christ in the stained-glass window. As a kid you’re not listening all that closely to what’s being said, but at that moment you look at Him in the window and you hear the words, “Once in Royal David’s City” or something and you just feel for that moment that there really is a greater Father who loves you and will make it all right in the end.