Make Room for the Jester (22 page)

I went out and walked the town in the wet, but it didn’t help much.

Gladstone went away on the first train in the morning. None of us saw him go. That night I went to the Palace with Dewi and Maxie to see Laurel and Hardy. We fell off the seats laughing. Even Maxie thought it was terrible that we could be like that. ‘Go and piss on it, shall we?’ he said, looking back at the cinema. But they decided to go window-smashing instead. I didn’t go with them. After that night we didn’t meet as often, didn’t have as much to do with one another.

Winter, black and damp and suffocating, fell on Porthmawr. As the months dragged on to Christmas there was less and less talk of Gladstone and the Vaughans, hardly a mention of the fire in Rowland’s workshop. The town was taking a look at its future, and in public meetings and private committee they debated (for the tenth time since 1918) whether or not to build a promenade with
boarding houses, whether or not to become a
proper
holiday resort like Rhyl, or Colwyn Bay, or Llandudno. The side issues were brought out and aired once again – the Welsh way of life, for instance, and the Sabbath, and the future of the language, and the unemployment question, and the drift into England… an ocean of talk into which the whole town plunged. Even Polly – we were friends again now – came out with some strong opinions when she wasn’t discussing Royalty and divorce, morganatic marriages and another Prince of Wales in trouble.

Meira, however, took no part in all this. She had become withdrawn and secretive, and each day more beautiful, a new lustre in her hair, a new sheen in her eyes. I noticed how she sat for hours in a daydream, noticed how she was filling out, too. Then, on a
sleet-lashed
December night, I was running for the doctor; and next morning there was blood on the bedclothes soaking in the old tub in the kitchen, and Meira was shrivelled and bitter upstairs, and Owen silent and resentful by the fire.

Before Christmas, the Rev A. H. Jones had gone to a new chapel in the south, and Eirlys Hampson had sold up and returned to Manchester. There was a lot of spiteful chatter, of course – especially about Eirlys, and particularly when
Mr
Meirion-Pughe, only three weeks after his wife had died of a swift and terrible cancer, was off to Manchester too. ‘But how do you know?’ I asked Polly. ‘Been
seen
there,’ she replied grimly, ‘more often than that.’

Then there was Martha and the children. In the first week of December, the week of Meira’s trouble, they left suddenly and without goodbyes, furniture van and all, for Birmingham and an uncle newly a widower. The news that
they had gone shattered me. There was no reason for Gladstone to return to Porthmawr now.

But I kept hoping. The day after they left, another letter arrived. It was headed ‘On the way Home’, and was posted in the Canary Islands. His other letters, all very long, had been high farce and in his worst manner – as if he was deliberately hiding from me – and this was no better. Consider the non-existence of canaries in the Canary Islands, he began. Was this another instance of the general fraud, the worldwide conspiracy that said something was, when it was not? Pages of that, pages about a master plan to move the Azores (‘why
do
they have such vulgar names?’), pages about Walt Whitman (‘newly discovered, a
marvellous
poet’), but not a word about how he felt. Except a postscript in pencil hurriedly scrawled, an arrow that found its target: ‘It is astonishing,’ he wrote, ‘how
alone
I feel.’

Not much hope, then. Yet, on many a Friday night, before and after Christmas, I went down to the station and waited in the white steam and the hissing gaslight for the 8.23. Rowland Williams was always there, his hands hidden in a kind of muff. We spoke occasionally, but only about trivialities. There was never anyone else. And nobody came.

Foreword by Philip Pullman

Born in Norwich in 1946, Philip Pullman is a
world-renowned
writer. He was educated in England, Zimbabwe and Australia before his family settled in North Wales where he attended Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech. His novels have won every major award for children’s fiction, and are now also established as adult bestsellers. The
His
Dark Materials
trilogy came third in the BBC’s 2003 Big Read competition to find the nation’s favourite book. In 2005 he was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s biggest prize for children’s literature. He lives in Oxford.

The Library of Wales is a Welsh Assembly Government project designed to ensure that all of the rich and extensive literature of Wales which has been written in English will now be made available to readers in and beyond Wales. Sustaining this wider literary heritage is understood by the Welsh Assembly Government to be a key component in creating and disseminating an ongoing sense of modern Welsh culture and history for the future Wales which is now emerging from contemporary society. Through these texts, until now unavailable, out-of-print or merely forgotten, the Library of Wales brings back into play the voices and actions of the human experience that has made us, in all our complexity, a Welsh people.

The Library of Wales includes prose as well as poetry, essays as well as fiction, anthologies as well as memoirs, drama as well as journalism. It complements the names and texts that are already in the public domain and seeks to include the best of Welsh writing in English, as well as to showcase what has been unjustly neglected. No boundaries limit the ambition of the Library of Wales to open up the borders that have denied some of our best writers a presence in a future Wales. The Library of Wales has been created with that Wales in mind: a young country not afraid to remember what it might yet become.

Dai Smith
Raymond Williams Chair in the Cultural History of Wales,
Swansea University

Thomas Evan Jones was born in 1922 and brought up in Pwllheli, north Wales. He attended University College Bangor, where his studies were halted by World War Two and five years in the British Army. He found himself in France on D Day, and was later promoted from private to corporal and given a signal detachment in India and Burma. After demobilisation he completed his degree and teaching qualifications. In 1952 he took the position of lecturer in Liberal Studies at Leyland Motors Technical College in Lancashire, where he remained until his retirement. He married and was the father to two daughters.

His first novel,
Make Room for the Jester
, was published in 1964 in both the UK and the USA to much critical acclaim. It was followed in 1966 by
The Ballad of Oliver Powell
(published under the title
The Man with the Talents
in the USA), and in 1968 by his third and last novel,
The Lost Boy
. He published all his books under the name of Stead Jones. He died in 1985.

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