We stood up and I said, ‘Maybe we’ll try a chemist.’
The girl showed us out to the car. I slid into the driver’s seat and she bent forward and whispered with a nervous backward glance at the cottage in case Peredur was in the window, ‘I’m sorry about Peredur. He’s frightened, you see. They say the man was killed by gangsters and it is better not to get involved.’
‘Is it true what the papers say, about you and . . . the dead man?’
‘You mean Absalom? Most of it is lies, of course.’
‘You knew him?’
‘You mustn’t tell Perry.’
‘Oh we won’t.’
‘You see . . . I went to Aberystwyth. To see Bark of the Covenant. Perry would go mad if he found out. He thinks Clip is a graven image. He hates idolatry.’
‘Of course we won’t breathe a word.’
‘I met him in the queue for the movie. He was a Jew, you see, and I was wearing my stovepipe hat because they told me I would get a concession on the ticket if I did. And Absalom saw my hat and thought I must be a Jew and started talking to me. He asked me what tribe I was from.’ She giggled.
We forced polite smiles.
The girl looked over her shoulder again and leaned further into the car window. ‘I had dinner with him afterwards. But you mustn’t tell Peredur.’
‘We won’t.’
‘We talked, you know, about things. Mostly about hats and stuff and the best way to re-black the brim. He had some good tips.’
‘Did he say anything unusual?’
‘Well, the funny thing is, he did say something rather odd. He said, “After seeing this movie tonight my life is fulfilled.” And I said, “Yes, it was a jolly good film, wasn’t it?” And he said, “No, I don’t mean that. I mean tonight at the cinema I saw a man, a man whom I have sought all my life. My quest is ended.”’ She smiled. ‘He was ever so posh!’
I pressed a card into her hand.
‘If you think of anything that might help us, feel free to drop in to our office.’
She stuck the card up the sleeve of her blouse along with her handkerchief.
‘It’s in Aberystwyth,’ added Calamity.
The mention of the town lit a small fire in her eyes. ‘Ooh!’
‘And merry Chr . . . er . . . Christ Mass.’
‘No, you mustn’t say that – it’s like saying merry funeral or something.’
‘Happy New Year, then.’
‘No, you mustn’t say that, either; God doesn’t like it because it implies there was something wrong with the old one.’
‘What about “Oh, the baby’s knuckle or the baby’s knee, Where will the baby’s dimple be?”’ said Calamity. ‘Can we say that?’
‘I’ve never heard that one.’
‘It’s traditional.’
‘Well, then, I think it would be suitable.’
I dropped Calamity at her bus stop and drove back to the office. The sky was overcast and, though it was still only midafternoon, the cloud had snuffed the last dregs of light from the day. Occasional flakes of snow fell. There was a small crowd gathered in the street outside the office. But, for once, they hadn’t come to complain. They were watching a crane winch a fat man into a garret across the road.
The woman from the all-night sweetshop said, ‘You’ve just missed the reinforced bed. You’d think he’d find somewhere on the ground floor, wouldn’t you?’
‘Who is he?’
A man leaning against a lamppost spoke from under the brim of a fedora hat pulled down low. ‘Nobody knows.’ He had a slight American accent and was impeccably dressed: two-tone black and white brogues, sharply creased, generously cut trousers. A silk handkerchief peeped out of the breast pocket of a coat of midnight blue. The discretion of the handkerchief was good: just enough to see it. Most people get that bit wrong. The man walked off.
I stared up, along with the other good burghers of Aberystwyth. Flakes of snow, invisible in the gathering dusk, smarted coldly for the briefest of moments on my eyeballs. The man was a round shadow slung beneath the crane, with short arms and legs sticking out and giving the outline of an inflated rubber glove. He turned slowly, swivelling on the end of the chain as, down below, workmen in hard hats shouted instructions to the crane operator. As he turned he came to face us for the briefest of seconds and then the momentum swept him on to more orbits. Round and round. And then, a kid turned up dressed in a red tunic and red pillbox hat like a bellboy from one of the fancier hotels. He was holding an insulated food box, and said, ‘Who ordered the pies?’ There was no answer but fifteen bystanders turned to look at him and then with synchronised movements pointed at the fat man hanging from the crane. The kid walked over and handed the pies to the foreman. I stared up at the man for whom the pies were intended, and as he swivelled and turned again to face us my gaze was caught and locked for a second by two sharp bright points of light that were his eyes, set deep in the dark, shadowy pumpkin of his face.
Chapter 4
THE PROM gleamed in watery golden sunlight like a newly washed doorstep. A thin dusting of crystalline snow speckled the pavement, glittered in the sun, and turned at the edges to water. Breath was fog and cheeks smarted.
Sospan stirred a steaming pan of mulled-wine-flavoured ripple. The vapour of cinnamon, cloves and rum made my eyes water and mingled with the sharp, sweet scent from the Christmas tree in the corner of his kiosk; on the roof the fibreglass cone had been squirted with snow from a can, smelling of pine. He lifted the wooden spoon and tested the mixture with the air of a chef, nodded approval and turned down the gas.
‘I love Christmas,’ he said. ‘Although it won’t be the same this year. Not with . . . without . . . you know.’ He looked away, avoiding eye contact, with a sheepish air. For once his unerring instinct had led him astray and he had brought up a subject which might be a breach of decorum. He had meant to say, ‘without Myfanwy singing at the Pier carol concert’.
Myfanwy was my girlfriend, a former nightclub singer from the Moulin. It was a cherished tradition in Aberystwyth that she sang every year at the carol concert, but this year it did not look like it would be honoured. In the summer she had been kidnapped by gangsters and I rescued her. When I found her she was very sick, but she could have been a lot worse – she could have been dead. For a while after, she had hovered on the edge of consciousness, in a way that suggested rejoining Aberystwyth life was a plunge into a deep pool for which you needed to summon up the courage. The light inside her flickered on and off like a faulty fluorescent light. And then one day she woke up and smiled and started eating and everything seemed fine except for one thing. She couldn’t sing. It was as if the town hall clock had lost its tick.
‘I was talking to the chap at the home,’ said Sospan, ‘and he says there’s nothing physically wrong – nothing wrong with her voice. It’s a mental thing. Blocked, she is.’
I nodded politely but said nothing and wished he would choose another subject. Mercifully he moved to the ice dispenser and started to polish it. Calamity stamped her feet to keep out the fresh cold. A man appeared from the direction of the Pier, ambling slowly, and leading a train of mules like a gold prospector arriving at the foot of the mountain. It was Eeyore, my father. I watched his gait for signs of the slowing that must inevitably come for a man now over seventy but he seemed unchanged, no more soporific than the donkeys who were sixty-five years his junior. There were only five this morning: Antigone, Erlkönig, Firkin, Sugarpie and Gretchen. A slimmed-down troupe to reflect the fact that no one ever bought a ride between late October and March. It was partly a bid to conserve feed and not unnecessarily wear out hoof metal, but also a statement by my father that maintenance of the ritual had a value beyond the money that accrued from the rides. A value which he might have found difficult to put into words but which he felt in his bones just as he would have felt something amiss, a sense of letting the side down, if he had let bad weather serve as an excuse for staying at home. Or perhaps it was a more deeply personal fear: the recognition that the day he first stayed at home would be the beginning of a pattern in which those days would gradually outnumber the days he worked. Until one day the time came when he didn’t go out at all, and we stood at his bedside and discussed in whispers what we would do with the donkeys once he was gone.