‘You want a caravan?’
Before I could answer, she appeared in the doorway.
‘Sorry I’m late; I couldn’t decide which hat to wear.’
‘You’re not late and you are not wearing a hat, but you can tell me about it in the car.’
She was wearing a cream cardigan over a simple cotton frock patterned with tiny lemon flowers. It was belted at the waist and reached demurely to just below that most underrated bone, the patella. She was wearing cream sandals and carried a cream handbag. Her hair was kept away from her face with a cream hairband. She was also holding a plastic Co-op bag which I knew contained our picnic. We drove in my Wolseley Hornet over Trefechan Bridge and turned right towards the station.
As traffic slowed on the approach to the roundabout I turned to her and said, ‘You look lovely.’
Instead of denying it or accusing me of saying it to all the girls, she smiled and said, ‘No one’s ever said that to me before.’
In the slightly awkward pause that followed, I patted my coat pocket and said, ‘I’ve got the tickets.’
‘You must tell me how much I owe you.’
‘Don’t be silly, it’s my treat.’
‘How many rides do you get?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘On the escalator.’
‘As many as you like.’
‘Really?’
‘The tickets are for the train.’
‘Oh!’
‘You get a special day return to Shrewsbury and it includes unlimited rides on the escalators.’
It is no coincidence that train windows are shaped like the celluloid frames of a movie. All rail journeys are adventure stories, which is why fate reserves her grandest statements for them. Without this tendril of steel linking us to Vladivostok and all stations between, Aberystwyth would be bereft: no Pier, no camera obscura, few hotels, and the tourist information office would almost certainly have been deprived of its proudest boast, namely that on 7 May 1904 Buffalo Bill came to town.
Miaow kept her nose pressed to the window for most of the journey and stared with a sense of wonder that made me regret I could never again take this journey for the first time. As we glided into Shrewsbury the track curved gently round the main signal box; once, no doubt, the red bricks and white-painted window frames would have gleamed like a mansion on a chocolate box, and an entire extended hierarchy of workers would have beavered away at the clockwork intricacies of directing trains. Today it stood in chest-high weeds like an abandoned house in an abandoned field; as with most businesses that have seen their best days, the first to go is always the guy who cuts the lawn. There is still a man up there, moving behind the filmy grey glass, drinking tea and reading the paper resting against rows of levers that don’t work. He doesn’t know the war is over.
The tracks converged onto a bridge across the river before the entrance to the station, and two buildings, one of pink Shropshire sandstone, the other of red Victorian brick, stood sentinel. Miaow pointed, but didn’t speak.
‘Guess what those buildings are,’ I said. ‘Home to two branches of the same family.’
Miaow gave me a look of inquiry.
‘Both been in business a long time, the same business in fact, although it goes by different names. The people from the one on the left quite often go and stay with the ones on the right, but it seldom happens the other way round.’
‘OK, I give up.’
‘That one is the castle, that one is the prison.’
‘That’s silly, the people in prison are thieves and murderers.’
‘So are the ones in the castle. How else do you get to own a castle?’
‘No!’
‘If you steal small things, you get a room on the right with a view of the river and the railway station. If you steal big things – like counties – you get a room on the left also with a view of the river and the railway station. The room is bigger, and the food is better. You have about as equal a chance of having your throat slit while you sleep.’
‘The people in the castle are lords and ladies with coats of arms and pointy Rapunzel hats. All through my childhood I dreamed of wearing one of those pointy hats.’
‘Trust me, the pointy hats are all stolen.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘Along with ermine stoles, gold-painted furniture, pheasants and oil paintings. Do you think they worked for it?’
‘Didn’t they?’
‘No, they were just smarter than the rest of us, or meaner. The way I see it, they are just descended from the better armed robbers. It’s like a great Welshman once said: “Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?” ’
She pulled a face. ‘So why didn’t anyone complain?’
‘The pointy-hats were smart. They invented the priesthood to preach to the multitude the great spiritual benefits of being penniless; they taught them not only to accept their misery but to love it, and to regard it as evidence of their spiritual superiority. In addition, for those who found themselves unconvinced by these fine sentiments, they had a rather persuasive complaints office in the basement of the castle.’
‘That’s what they teach us in the Denunciationists as well – to regard poverty as evidence of our spiritual superiority. Are we wrong?’
I smiled and pulled her closer. ‘No, of course not.’
Where do you take a girl for her first ride on an escalator? Marks and Spencers, Boots, Woolies? We did all three. We went up and down ten times in Boots, Miaow clutching the moving handrail with a grip slightly too tight, pausing too long each time before she stepped on. When the security guard asked us if everything was all right, we moved on to the other shops, and so threaded our way down town towards the river and the park along its banks. We chose a tree to sit under and began to unpack the picnic, but then Miaow changed her mind and we tried two more trees until we found one that satisfied.
‘I hope it’s OK, I’ve never made a picnic before. Back in Cwmnewidion Isaf such things are considered frivolous.’
‘It’s perfect.’
‘Don’t tease me.’
‘I’m not. You have every detail right. The thermos flask should always be tartan, the tea should be stewed and the plates bright yellow plastic. Sandwiches can be jam or on special occasions you can use that paste they sell in little glass jars, the one that smells like the harbour and has the texture of wet newspaper.’
‘I don’t know that one.’
‘They grind it up from the bits of the fish the glue factory rejects.’
For a while everything was still save the soft movements of our jaws, the quivering grass and the shadow of a cloud drifting across the lawn. The cloud revealed the sun and the heightened brightness caused an instant upsurge in my breast. A rowing team from the local boys’ school slid past.
‘Tell me about being a private eye.’
I leant back and spoke to the sky. ‘You get hit on the head a lot; it’s boring; there’s no money. Clients walk into my office clutching the pieces of their lives like the fragments of a broken vase. They expect me to fix it, but normally I can’t. This is usually their first introduction to the strange notion that the world is unfair. They think that by paying for a few hours of my time they will be able to buy some sort of redress; the amount they pay me is trivial, I can barely survive on it, but to the people who sit in my client’s chair it’s a fortune they resent parting with. Sometimes they want me to make everything all right, but most of the time they don’t even want that; they just want the world to take cognizance, they want to tell someone about the bad thing that has happened to them. They always think they are the first person since the Garden of Eden to have a bad thing happen to them.’