Make Room for the Jester (4 page)

But it was an important thing, the return of Ashton Vaughan. I knew that as soon as I told Owen and Meira. They made mouths as big as sparrow chicks, although Owen had to spoil it by saying he had heard something…. That was one of the troubles with Owen – you couldn’t tell him anything, especially if you were in the County School.

‘Trade should be up in the pubs,’ Meira commented in her best acid-drop manner. ‘Should be some fighting too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

We had the Vaughans all through tea. Owen said, ‘I wonder if that one on the Point knows?’ Marius Vaughan had his big house right at the tip of Graig Lwyd, with the ocean on his doorstep. ‘Bet the bastard hasn’t heard.’

Meira gave him a row for using dirty language in front of me, but all the boys in Porthmawr called Marius Vaughan a bastard. A word with a lot of meaning, I thought.

I took the news to Polly who lived next door, and by the time she had finished I knew that Ashton Vaughan’s return was one of the most interesting things that had happened all summer in Porthmawr.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you
do
interest me, Lew. How terribly interesting. I wonder if brother Marius knows?’

Polly always spoke English to me, and it was always high-class English for a few sentences at the beginning. Later on it became less so, more homely, more like the English everyone else spoke in Porthmawr. She had been my Auntie Polly when I was small, but now she insisted that I call her Polly, ‘Auntie is so old sounding,’ she’d say. ‘Call me Polly – not pretty Polly, of course.’ She said it without a laugh; she never went farther than a grin.

Polly had her father living with her – the Captain – and he was stone deaf and silent as a planet and eighty odd, so she was always glad of a bit of company and someone to talk to. I always liked going there, too, because Polly’s special interest was murder. In her black dresses with her hair high in a bun and her pale, oval face with the great hooked nose in the middle, she had the look which spelt the law and courtrooms and cross-examinations for me. Besides, her living room was full of the sea – pictures of ships riding seasick storms, pieces of quartz from Brazil, the skin of an Indian snake in a glass jar, trim ships snug in green bottles, a dried fish big as a football from Madagascar, Chinese plates on the wall, and surf breaking in the big shells on either side of the blackleaded fireplace. It was fine there on winter nights with the old man snoring in the rocking chair and Polly talking about the great murderers.

‘So Ashton Vaughan is back at last.’ Her black eyebrows,
thick as a man’s, swept up. ‘Are you quite certain, Lew?’

‘That’s who he said he was.’ I tried a description. ‘He’d been drinking,’ I said.

‘That’ll be him! My word, won’t this cause a stir in the old town…’

‘Why, then?’ I said. ‘Why should it?’

Polly went mysterious – the way she did when sex came up. ‘Events of the past,’ she whispered. ‘The wheel going full circle.’

I’d realised at tea, as Owen spoke, that I had heard a great deal about the Vaughan brothers. Polly, however, brought it all into sharper focus. In 1920, she said, Marius and Ashton Vaughan had fought it out, with knives, down there by the harbour. It had taken all the policemen in Porthmawr to part them; that scar on Marius Vaughan’s cheek was a relic of that night.

‘Then Ashton vanished from sight. Hardly a word of him until today…’

‘But why did they fight?’ I asked.

‘Brothers born to hate,’ Polly replied, and left me hanging on for more. It was a fatal mistake to
cross-examine
her. I had to wait until she was ready to tell me.

‘Their father,’ she continued, ‘went to sea with Tada there. As a matter of fact, Marius Vaughan always has a word to say to Tada.’

Polly said it as if it was an honour or something – just as Owen had admitted that the Vaughans were better than that crowd of shopkeepers up on Hillside: the Vaughans had fought it out brother against brother, but they were somebody and it was an honour when they spoke to you. It didn’t make sense.

‘Poor as a church mouse, their father’s family was, but my word he picked up some money from somewhere, that man did. Robbing poor sailors, I shouldn’t wonder. Serving bad food on those ships of his.’ She touched the Captain’s hand to see if he was still warm. ‘More money than I’d care to mention in coasters in those days. That’s what Tada used to say. And he used to wonder how William Vaughan made it, I can tell you. Born in those old houses used to be by the gasworks there – the ones they took down in 1930. Those old slums. Made all that money. Built that big house on the Point. Bought up all that property from the old Estate.’ She lowered her eyebrows so that I could no longer see her eyes. ‘Ways and means, dear. There must have been ways and means.’

She jumped up suddenly and put the ear trumpet to the Captain’s ear. ‘Do we want to wee-wee?’ she roared, so that the Chinese plates did a dance on the wall. The Captain shook his head, opened one small blue eye and gave me a wink, then closed it again.

‘
He
never made money,’ Polly said, ‘and he was a master mariner, Tada. Ways and means, dear.’

‘Stealing?’ I said.

Polly sniffed the air. ‘Who knows, dear? But he made it all right.’

I risked the question. ‘But why did they fight?’

Polly’s reply told me I had been too early with it. ‘They fought all the time,’ she said. ‘They even fought in Capel Mawr.’

‘Did they go to Capel Mawr?’ I said. We went to Capel Mawr, too – well, we went to the Mission by the harbour which belonged to Capel Mawr. We didn’t have clothes
good enough for the big building itself. The shopkeepers on Hillside set the standard.

‘They went when they were small.’ Polly gave one of her shudders. ‘Marius Vaughan doesn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t fear God. He doesn’t even fear the Devil, that man.’

‘An atheist?’

‘Well – he threw the Rev A. H. Jones out of his house. Threw him down the steps, they say – put him in bed for a week. That should make him an atheist…’

And that was something else I’d heard, of course. Hadn’t someone – Meira probably – said the Rev A. H. Jones had been too much of a Christian to bring a case against Marius Vaughan? And hadn’t Owen said the Rev A. H. Jones had been too scared of Marius to do so? Owen never went to Capel Mawr or anywhere else. Religion, he used to say, was the dope of the masses.

‘Why did he throw him out?’ I asked.

Polly curled her mouth in the way she did when she wanted to give something full force. ‘Because the minister went to ask him, as a man of God, to mend his evil ways.’

I thought about that for a moment. ‘Do you like the Rev A. H. Jones, Polly?’

‘A snob’s man in a snob’s chapel,’ she said sharply, and without thinking.

‘The kingdom of Heaven is reserved for exclusive draper’s models,’ I said.

Polly was still with shock. ‘Who told you to say things like that?’ she asked, very slowly.

Owen had said it, but I said it was one of the boys at school.

‘The County School!’ she said. ‘Talking like that!’ She
looked at me carefully, lowering her eyebrows again. ‘Lew – the Rev A. H. Jones is a man of God. Don’t you ever forget that.’

I’d made a mistake, I realised. I’d shocked her. There would be no hope of getting any more details about the Vaughans from her now. And in any case the Captain was awake and making noises which meant he wanted to go out to the back. I told Polly I had an errand to do, and went out quickly.

Porthmawr was the colour of lead, and wet. It sprawled up Hillside as if shrinking away from the sea, as if it was afraid that a heavy shower might wash it right into the ocean. Everyone was moving back, moving inland – especially the ones with money up there in their big houses on Hillside. The old town near the harbour had been left to the rats, whole streets pulled down. No one wanted the sea, not even the retired sea captains who were inland too, each with a flagpole in his garden. Only Marius Vaughan wanted the waters on his doorsteps.

By now my head was brimming with the Vaughans, although Marius had been there all the time in his big house on the Point. I hadn’t bothered much about him before, except to hate him with rest. But now he was nearer, somehow – like the close-ups at the pictures. I looked across the harbour following the line of the road which ran to his house – a road riddled with Private and Trespassers will be Prosecuted – along the foot of the great bulk of Graig Lwyd. I’d never taken my chance along that road. Dewi said he had – but we didn’t really believe him.

I’d seen Marius Vaughan, of course, many times.
Usually at the wheel of his car, very rarely on foot and in the town. I’d seen his house too. From the town there was just a part of it showing, a corner and a chimney, but one day up on Graig Lwyd I’d looked down on the slate roofs and seen a courtyard and a white wall between the house and the sea. There had been a car on the courtyard and a man had limped out of the house to it, and he’d looked up, and Dewi had nearly fallen off the rock where we were perched. ‘Old bastard Vaughan,’ he’d said, and to prove he hadn’t been near to losing his nerve he’d suggested we heave some stones down straight away. But Gladstone had stopped him. ‘The dogs will come,’ he’d warned. All the boys in Porthmawr had heard of Marius Vaughan’s dogs…. The limping man, so stiff and straight, his head of white hair shining in the sun, had carried on to the car and driven off towards the town.

I turned away from the Point and looked across the old fishermen’s hards to where the
Moonbeam
lay. The tide was in, but it wouldn’t touch the
Moonbeam
, wouldn’t cause the other Vaughan any trouble. Was he aboard now? There were no lights showing. Why had he come back after so many years, and why had he taken over the
Moonbeam
as a place to live? Couldn’t he have gone along that road to the Point? But they had fought like savages, that was it. Perhaps on this very spot where I stood, in a heavy shadow which the gaslight made, the knives had slashed the air…. I looked around suddenly, but there was only a couple of visitors, a man and a woman in macs, arm in arm, wishing they were back in Manchester.

The lights were coming on now, all over the town – the lights outside the Palace Cinema brightest of all. Once a
week at least, Gladstone and I took a walk along the harbour and through the town, taking in the side streets as well. Gladstone made it an adventure, somehow. Walking the town, he called it, and we would make things out of the names over shops, imagine what was going on behind the squares of lighted windows, wonder what would appear suddenly from the darkness around the next corner. In no time I would feel all my senses suddenly more acute, and our talk was rapid and high and excited. Walking the town after dark. I liked it best of all in winter when there was no one about and the wind was strong and the sea smelled everywhere, and the signs above the shops creaked and groaned, and the town cats went skidding and screeching ahead of you from doorstep to doorstep. We would stand and talk softly in the darkness, talking but half listening for a footfall, a sudden cough, the creak of a shoe, something said somewhere on the wind; and watching all the time for a shadow, the spurt of a match, a sudden light…. We were building it up, making it an adventure, moving towards the point where something was going to happen…. Gladstone said it was like the time when you were young, and you had in your hands the first page of
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson, and that was the best page, he said, because you didn’t want to turn over, because you knew that whatever was to come wouldn’t be, couldn’t possibly be, as good as that feeling of being on the edge of something, of not knowing. ‘I hope nothing happens,’ he used to say. ‘It might spoil everything.’ I watched the lights come on and remembered the sound of his voice, the way he’d looked…. There was a newness about everything that night, and everything had a meaning.

But I kept on turning back to the
Moonbeam
, and after a while I was walking quickly down the alleyways between the old storage sheds, then along the edge of the harbour towards the hards. I wondered, as I walked, if I’d have the courage to climb aboard and speak to him.

The light was going rapidly and I found it difficult to keep my feet clear of the old ropes and chains that were strung along the hards. It didn’t seem to be such a good idea now. What would I say to Ashton Vaughan, anyway? Did you have a fight with your brother, Mr Vaughan? With knives? Did you win? I stood there and asked myself questions and knew I wouldn’t dare take a step farther.

Then I heard the crunch of feet on the gravel. Someone running towards me, coming from the direction of the
Moonbeam
. I crouched quickly, screwing my eyes up against the darkness. The runner came into sight, and I knew straight away it was Gladstone. Nobody else ran with his shoulders raised high like that. I stood up and called to him. He halted almost in mid-stride.

‘Lew,’ he cried. ‘Lew the last prince! How did you know I’d gone to see him?’

‘Just out for a walk, that’s all…’

He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Funny place for a walk. Looks as if you had the same idea.’ He gripped my arm briefly. ‘Come on. Martha’s out as usual and I had to leave the children. Come on…’

I ran by his side. ‘See him, then?’

‘Oh, yes – he was glad I’d come.’ We reached the quay. Gladstone stopped to try the drawer of the new cigarette machine they’d put up on the corner of Harbour View Road. ‘Are you
the
Ashton Vaughan? I said. And he
said in person… of course, I knew all the time who he was.’ I tried a cigarette machine farther up, near Market Street, then doubled speed to catch up with Gladstone.

‘Was he – all right?’ I asked.

‘Who’s that? The Emperor of Abyssinia?’

‘Abyssinia to you too,’ I said. ‘Was he nice, then?’

‘Ask the League of Nations,’ Gladstone replied. He increased his pace, so that by the time we got to Lower Hill I was puffed and blown. ‘Wants us to help him,’ Gladstone said.

‘Doing what?’

We reached Gladstone’s door. ‘Blow up Capel Mawr,’ he said.