From Aberystwyth with Love (22 page)

Her face froze but it was difficult to see whether at the impropriety of the suggestion or because of the tender memory I had brutally dragged up.

‘I don’t know where you heard—’

‘He was the balloon-folder, wasn’t he? He couldn’t choose between you and then whoops-a-daisy! Ffanci Llangollen gets pregnant.’

Mrs Mochdre stared fixedly ahead, glaring.

‘Some people might think there was something a bit quick and convenient about it, almost as if the chap was being given a helping hand to make up his mind.’ I peered across at her, she kept her head fixed staring forward, wearing a face of stone. ‘Perhaps if she wasn’t the prettiest—’

‘My sister was always the pretty one—’

‘Well sometimes it’s not about that, is it? Not always. Maybe if he liked the pretty one but there was something about her elder sister that was . . . was . . . deeper, something he liked and satisfied him and touched him deep down in his soul, well, I can see how the elder one, even if she wasn’t the pretty one, in fact especially if she wasn’t . . . She knew she wouldn’t get many offers in her life, while all through her teens and early twenties she sees the boys rolling up at the door courting her sister and never one for her and all along she has to wear that face of bright airy joy and pretend she is just happy for her fortunate sister . . . that could get a bit wearing after a while. In a situation like that I could see how the elder one might feel aggrieved . . . might feel as if the chap was a worthless chap after—’

‘Don’t you ever say a word against Alfred Walters! Do you hear? Don’t you ever!’

I was stung into silence by the venom of her response. If I was a cop this would be the point where I smiled inwardly and thought, ‘Gotcha! I’ve found the button to press.’ But I didn’t feel like that. I wasn’t a cop, and I never wanted to be. I never wanted to feel triumphant at a moment like this. I said no more and we drove on in awkward silence. Mrs Mochdre had pressed her knuckle into her mouth and remained staring fixedly at the sky. As we drove up towards Commins Coch I shot a glance across. Her eyes were wet. She saw my look and said, ‘Some busybodies oughtn’t to poke their noses into things they don’t understand.’

There was a man and a dog sitting side by side on the beach, facing the waves. I went to join them. It was Uncle Vanya and Clip the stuffed sheepdog from the museum on Terrace Road. The sky was filled with shredded cloud; a strong breeze churned the sea to foam, the surface dancing with seams of gold in the bright late-afternoon light. The breeze was scented with vanilla and stewed tea, and seaweed and vodka. An empty bottle lay at Vanya’s feet and a half-full one stood erect between the paws of Clip. Vanya’s hair was wet.

‘My friend Clip has been explaining everything to me,’ said Vanya. ‘I understand it all now. I see what a terrible waste my life has been. Clip doesn’t say much but the things he says strike home.’

‘Isn’t he cold without his glass case?’

‘Sometimes, Louie, your comments perplex me.’

‘Why did you steal him from the museum?’

‘He wanted to come, I didn’t steal him.’

‘Why is your hair wet? Have you been for a swim?’

‘The man who owns the rock foundry, the one whose son is in a wheelchair, I helped him.’

‘Was he in trouble?’

‘He fetched an ice cream for his son and while he was away the boy dragged himself out of the chair and down the steps to the beach. He crawled on his belly into the sea.’

‘You saved him?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a great thing that you did.’

‘Mr Barnaby gave me something very precious as a reward: a phial of his panacea Ampersandium. Would you like some? I poured it into the vodka. It makes the taste of life less bitter on the tongue.’ Vanya passed the bottle across. I took a small drink to be sociable, but I could see this afternoon he was far advanced along a road that I had no wish to take myself, the one that always ends in tears. ‘We must drink, my friend, because it may be we will not meet again for a long time.’

‘Are you going away?’

‘Yes, I have an urgent journey to undertake.’

‘The case isn’t closed yet.’

‘It is for me. I will send you another sock as an indication of my complete satisfaction with the services you have rendered.’

‘I don’t need any more socks, the first one was enough. I would prefer you to stick around until I can finish the case. It’s still full of mysteries.’

‘But I am the client and I have learned enough to satisfy me.’

‘What have you learned?’

‘Under the searching and intelligent gaze of Clip, all mysteries have evaporated.’

I said, ‘You talk of leaving and we still have not found out what happened to Gethsemane.’

‘The answer to the mystery is to be found in the Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering in Hughesovka. It took dear Clip to make this apparent to me. As soon as I saw him I knew the truth: it was never intended that my life would end with the happy consummation I sought. Some men are born broken, never to be fixed. The moral of my tale is contained in the dark wisdom of the camps.’

‘What happened after you escaped with Ivan and Yuri? You never finished that story.’

‘I am finishing it now, on this beach with the help of Wise Clip who has been kind enough to corroborate for me the essential truth it contains.’ He put the bottle to his mouth and threw his head back as if gravity unaided was too slow a method of bringing the drink into his gullet. ‘At some point during our terrible journey,’ he said, ‘I sprained my ankle and could not walk. Ivan and Yuri took it in turns to carry me. This piece of bad luck put an intolerable strain upon our fellowship. My two friends began to quarrel and then one night there was a terrible fight and Ivan slew Yuri. I will never forget how the blood stained the moonlit snow. I said that we should bury him as best we could, but Ivan was indignant and said, “Why on earth would we want to do that?” I said, “Because it is the Christian thing to do.” He scoffed. “You don’t want to bury him?” I said. And he said, “Why waste good meat?” It took me a while to understand his meaning. “Surely,” I said in horror, “you do not mean to eat him?” “Of course I do,” he answered. “If we do not we will surely die.” “But he’s your friend,” I said. “There is no way I would ever eat Yuri.” Ivan laughed in a way that chilled the marrow, a laugh that would have shamed even Satan, and said, “You won’t eat Yuri? Now that, my friend, is ironic.” ’ Uncle Vanya stopped sadly and made a small wave of his hand, a gesture that somehow was meant to sum up the contingencies of fate. ‘This is the dark wisdom of the camps. There is only one way two men can escape and hope to survive. They must invite along a third man, preferably a chubby one, who does not yet know the dark wisdom of the camps.’ He emptied the vodka bottle and reached into a bag lying next to Clip and pulled out a third.

We both sat for a while, as the clouds gathered and took away the light, raising goosebumps on flesh and flooding the heart with anguish. He offered me a drink, but I turned it away. There are times when you have to face the terrors naked. Vanya spoke staring straight ahead, his words both for me and for all the ghosts who reside in the deep waters of the sea, slowly putting on incorruption:

I close the book;

But the past slides out of its leaves to haunt me

And it seems, wherever I look,

Phantoms of irreclaimable happiness taunt me.

We continued sitting there for a while; Vanya in a place somewhere that I couldn’t even begin to imagine, and me robbed of meaningful things to say. ‘I don’t pretend to understand any of this,’ I said. ‘But I respect the fact that for you it has a deep personal meaning . . . And I understand, too, that there are things in my life that would be mysterious to you but which are of vital significance for me. But . . .’ The words trailed away into the empty air.

Vanya broke off staring at the sea and turned to me. ‘You remember I told you about a story I heard in the camps, the story that haunted me all my life: about a poor woman who was arrested while she suckled her child, who was taken away that afternoon and never returned, never saw her child again. To tell you truly, Louie Eeyoreovitch, I did not hear that story in the camps. I carried it with me. That child abandoned was me. My whole life has been haunted by the tantalising prospect that I might one day find her again, but now I see this for the vain and futile self-deception that it is. Only in heaven will we be reunited. I am a failure, Louie Eeyoreovitch, everything I touch turns to dust. Even the fragile and short-lived bliss I had with my wife and child I managed to destroy. I am like my namesake in the play by Chekhov who failed in everything, even in his attempt to kill himself.’

We sat in silence, drinking slowly, each tending his own thoughts. The goosebumps became fiercer, the hairs all the way up my arm curling into the wind like ears of corn. Far off, the children could still be heard playing with laughter that at this distance sounded forlorn. Vanya began to speak, words not so much addressed to me as to the sea or all the people he had passed on the road over the years.

‘A wise man once said there are three ways to find a fool. He is a fool that seeks that which he cannot find; he is a fool that seeks that which being found will do him more harm than good; he is a fool that, having a variety of ways to bring him to his journey’s end, takes that which is worst. These have been my ways and the way of all the men I know. Dreams, illusions, faith, even love are flaming brands we pull from the fire and wave against the night, to keep the wolf at bay. Eventually we re-consign the charred stick to the flames. Sit on this beach in the late afternoon, dear Louie, when a strong breeze is blowing, and absorb the lesson. See how the wind whips the back of the sea; the sky is full of torn clouds that scud across the surface of the blue. The sun is fierce and laces the bubbling waters with veins of gold. You squint ahead into the crashing watery fire, ears filled with the roar. A transcendental feeling of loveliness floods your being, and then a cloud passes across the sky, the heart contracts like those deep-sea creatures that retract their tentacles at the approach of danger. Even in that moment you hear the pale far cry of the wolf. More clouds drift by, slowly they fill the sky with grey, and colour drains from the land, the gold that seamed the surface of the sea turns to stone; it gets chilly. The throbbing golden sea now looks cold, forbidding. You walk into the fierce waves, soon you are out of your depth, and the strong wind blows. You swim for the shore but you notice a strange thing: the shore recedes. You swim more strongly, and thrash against the mighty sea with all the power of a bobbing cork. This is all you are: a cork on a stormy sea. The waters no longer sparkle with shifting silver, they are dark and dim, and underneath the current grasps and pulls you towards the deep ocean with a force that mocks the puny efforts of your arms. The water is deep, and cold and alien, and bitterly salty: you have passed the boundary of the familiar, of ice creams and suntan lotion and sand in wasp-tormented sandwiches, of gritty towels. The figures on the beach grow small, the town retreats from view, and floats unreal like the view of town in the dim dish of the camera obscura. You gasp to catch your breath and instead of air you swallow a lungful of sea water; you choke and gasp, choke and gasp. Water is heavy, oh so heavy! It is like cement that fills the natural buoyancy chamber of your lungs. But it tastes good now, it works like morphine, the pain diminishes along with the subsiding world. The shore on which you left all your troubles recedes so gently, the way it does when you stand on the stern of a ship, of the ferry they sent for you alone. You watch the receding shore, perplexed by your sense of detachment. You recall vaguely it was fun there mostly and there were laughs, there was fellowship and dancing and there were tears. But both the laughter and the tears seem unaccountably unimportant. What was it that made them matter so much? It feels strange to leave this way, but no stranger than the way you arrived: immersed in salty water with a far-off drum-din pounding in your ears.

‘This was how your mother brought you to the shore, years before with the stars fading before the growing dawn. Soon there will be nothing left to see of the town, just a V-shaped wake trembling into nowhere. You scan the coast. There, on a headland maybe fifty miles away, is a field still shining fire-green, one field picked out by a single beam of sunlight. A delirium of envy convulses your heart as you perceive the bleak truth: that field belongs to your past. You drink a little more morphine, just a few more mouthfuls to take away all pain . . . This, my dear friend Louie, is the dark wisdom of the sea, which we all must drink one day.’

Chapter 16

A century or two later I was shaken awake by hands too gentle to be cops’. I opened my eyes. I was alone on a bench on the Prom. Vanya and Clip had gone. I looked up into the face of a monk. He had wispy white hair, shaved into a tonsure, and was wearing a cowl the same colour as the stormy sky.