Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  I turned to Martin.

  ‘What was the best part for you?’

  He didn’t take long.

  ‘I really liked the Dyke, and the leg from Hay Bluff to Pandy was out of this world.’

  ‘Yes, I think that was the best bit for me too.’

  ‘Also the whole of Anglesey,’ I said, ‘especially the north. It felt really wild in places, like stepping back in time, and the wildlife up there was really good, better than anywhere I think.’

  I enthused about the seals, and the gannets with their scintillating orange-buff heads plunging into the whipped sea on a blue-breezy day, and the porpoises in Bull Bay surfacing in the water in front of me suddenly and shockingly, like eels in a bucket. He waxed lyrical about meeting no-one for days at a time. Walking around Wales can somehow herd everyone into the middle, like a dog rounding sheep: people retreat and look at you, full of interest, wondering if you’re going to bite them. Most are really kind. I’ll never forget the welcome I had at the Prince of Wales in Kenfig. In a pub above a lost village in the sand dunes, where I slept that night with Port Talbot steelworks all lit up like a huge spaceship about to land, I had been feted and fussed by the locals, as travellers should be in any self-respecting country; it’s a basic sign of culture, after all. News from afar. Strange tales. A chance to be magnanimous, generous. Personalities, and hopes and losses weighed up quickly. Everything in microcosm, speeded up; the journey from cradle to grave, humanity, deaths and entrances – all condensed into a play, a masque on a magnificent set, in which I, forever an understudy, had been the principal actor for just one performance. I had finally lodged my shaky fingerprint in the huge index of humanity; I had done something which was just slightly out of the ordinary. I had built a small and invisible monument to my passing.

  A fly buzzed and droned around us in the hide. We were quiet, happy. A bunch of military types were being taught to sail in cockleshell dinghies on the water in front of us. We could hear someone barking orders and screaming when anyone made a mistake. That was all over for me. I would never obey orders again.

  ‘Coming then?’ Waldo stirred slowly. I could see he fancied a pint and a nice nap.

  ‘Tell you what, I said, let’s go over the two bridges. It’ll be slightly more interesting.’ They agreed.

  Crossing the Britannia Bridge was no fun, since it’s a main arterial road now. The expressway through the region has changed it for ever, opening it up and making the hinterland much more accessible. It has made North Wales more of a playground than ever, a lawn for middle England to party on during sunny days. No-one can blame them for coming; our country is beautiful. And of course there are benefits. But it has sounded the death knell of old Wales. I have seen its passing. Somehow we have moved from medieval times to modern very quickly, in my lifetime. Never mind. I know where to find Wales still, in her secret bowers.

  We headed jauntily towards the suspension bridge with the Swellies – a dangerous channel for sailors – writhing below us. We could see Bangor Pier: the end, a little beyond, was nearly in sight. We paused in a lay-by, looking at the water between us and the mainland.

  Waldo fetched another letter from his pocket and handed it to me. This one was hand-written. It was from Robert Jones to Agnes Hunt. It had been written in ink; I could smell its pungent power on the page. Communication was different then too – the medium, after all, is the message. Ink is for courtesy, dignity and wit.

  Dear Agnes,

  Splendid news – we have made excellent progress with the frame which will treat Perthes children. I have devised soft leather thongs to immobilise the upper leg; they will cause discomfort at first, and we can expect some tears when the little ones are first strapped down, but they will get used to it. We shall see what results we get when we try the prototype.

  Your party was an excellent idea and Esmie had a wonderful time, well done. I’m glad that my ‘teddy’ was appreciated, no doubt the Vogel boy will like it, since he will need a comforter in the months to come – as you suggested, after presenting it to him I broke the news that he will be operated on after the proposed holiday, though I fear I can make only minor alterations; he will be bed-bound for quite a while. The teddy bear seemed to soften the blow.

  Finally, Goody’s plan seems an excellent one. By all means take your little protégés on holiday, I think London is within range providing you go by charabanc rather than rail. I think the Board of Education will allocate funds if I have a word with Miss Kenyon. I would suggest, however, that you keep sightseeing to a minimum, and spend as much time as possible in the parks – Kew Gardens might be an excellent choice. Since you are so good at arranging competitions, might I suggest that the holiday is couched as another ‘prize’ since we cannot afford to let the children believe that this is going to be a regular event. Incidentally, you and your merry band might like to call at my home, which as you know is just inside the border here in Wales, on your return, for a celebratory tea. I should consider it a great honour. The children can play in the garden, weather permitting, or we can go in the greenhouse if it rains.

  I will see you on Sunday, as usual.

  Fondest regards etc., Jones.

  I re-read the letter and handed it back to Waldo, who made a great show of folding it up again and putting it back in his pocket, as though he were a great illusionist who was mesmerising me with subtle magic.

  He arched his eyebrows and said: ‘Nearly there, aren’t we? I think we can work out what happened. We all understand now, don’t we?’

  I walked on.

  ‘I’m still rather foggy, actually, Waldo.’

  I noticed that Martin had made a start, so we ran after him. We couldn’t let him get away now. Waldo would sit on him, I knew, rather than let him beat me to the Blue Angel. I hoped the party wouldn’t be a flop. I wanted friends to be there to make a fuss of me and take photographs so that I could look at them years later. I would frame a big picture of me arriving and hang it above the bears on my mantelpiece.

  ‘Got it?’ asked Waldo.

  ‘No. A bit, but not all. I understand part of it. Vogel in the Vogel Papers won a large house with a pagoda and a fortune.’

  ‘It’s all simple, really,’ said Waldo, who was running out of patience.

  ‘Agnes Hunt arranged a holiday for the children in London, and she arranged a ‘competition’ which the children thought they’d won. Vogel was given the traditional gift for a child about to be operated on, a teddy bear, because he needed all the good news he could get – he was about to be tied down to a metal frame for a while. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that a child tied down to a frame for months on end is going to suffer. He’s going to have pain. He’s going to have indignity, with bedpans and bottles and bed-baths and nurses looking at his willie. He’s going to develop physical weaknesses – his muscles will waste through lack of use and his stomach will blow up like a famine baby. He’s going to have a lifelong phobia about being held down or restricted. It says so in his notes. He will suffer extreme claustrophobia and he will always want doors to be open. He will not want to sit in the middle row in the cinema, he will want to sit in the end seat so that he can walk out whenever he wants. He will feel sick and panicky if he feels he can’t get up and walk away from any situation. He’ll need more freedom than the average person.’

  ‘I understand that Waldo.’

  ‘I think you understand it very well,’ he replied. ‘It’s going to be a pretty traumatic experience, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sounds bloody awful, if you put it like that,’ I replied.

  ‘I’ll explain a bit more,’ said Waldo. ‘Vogel the child was made to believe that his ward had won a great prize, which was a trip to London. They saw great sights. They went to Kew Gardens, which has one of the most famous pagodas in Britain. On the way back they called at Robert Jones’s home and had tea in the garden. Do you see it now? The whole experience fused together in Vogel’s childish mind, and that is what we read about in t
he Vogel Papers. Got it now?’

  I had got it.

  We had to lunge forward again to catch Martin. Slimy little bugger was trying to slip away.

  My legs were beginning to feel like lead as we walked across the Menai suspension bridge.

  ‘Know why this was built so high above the water?’ asked Waldo.

  Martin knew.

  ‘Yep. To let sailing ships pass underneath.’

  ‘Right as usual,’ said Waldo sarcastically. ‘Do you know why Mr Vogel also won a croft on an island and a few fields overlooking the sea, Martin? Do you know the bloody answer to everything?’

  ‘No, don’t know the answer to that one,’ said Martin, who had detected a hint of mania in Waldo’s voice and was looking at the ground as hard as he could.

  ‘Because he thought he was one of the Bonesetters of Anglesey, that’s bloody well why,’ said Waldo, getting too close to him by far. ‘For some reason he thought he was one of those two boys washed ashore on a raft and rescued by Dannie Lukie – the boy who vanished from the records. Do you understand that? Do you get the sodding irony?’

  I had never seen Waldo like this.

  ‘Christ, I get it now,’ I said, jump-starting my ten-ton legs into action and leaping into the lead. ‘The quest round the island, I get it now – he was searching for his past, for his twin brother...’

  The Vogel Papers made sense, at last. But what was all that stuff about second hand clothes and Vogel’s legendary meanness? I asked Waldo.

  ‘Dunno,’ he answered in a tired voice. ‘Perhaps he was from a poor family who depended on hand-me-downs – that was normal then, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Or perhaps the Vogel Papers had something else in mind – remember, the two little boys had no clothes when they landed in Wales, and they had to be dressed in other children’s clothes – strange clothes – after they’d been saved,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Waldo. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.’

  We walked onwards in silence. We had made some sense of the Vogel Papers, and it felt good. We had no definite proof, it was true, but we had a likely scenario, and that was good enough for me.

  ‘We’re nearly there now Martin,’ I said with false jollity in my voice. ‘Got the dancing bear ready?’

  ‘I’ll find a stone to knock it in,’ said Waldo. He found a handy chunk of granite on the verge and kept it in his hand. Martin looked as though he got the message.

  I could see the Blue Angel, down by the docks, and its door was open. There were people outside with glasses in their hands. They had their tops off and they wallowed on the walls like albino seals on a stony promontory. I could see Paternoster Hill climbing away from them. There was an old camper van parked half way up. I wondered if the lights were still left on at night.

  ‘So, Waldo, tell me this,’ I said as we walked down towards the pub. Someone had seen us. It was Paddy. He waved, and fell backwards into the doorway. I could see his legs wiggling, pathetically and slowly, like a near-dead fly.

  ‘What was Vogel looking for then?’

  I looked at Waldo, who was looking at Martin.

  ‘OK Martin,’ he said, and he stepped in front of him. ‘That’ll do for now. No hard feelings or anything. Nothing personal. It’s quite simple. I know what this means to my friend. I couldn’t stand it if he was beaten. I know it’s wrong of me. But there you are, the English have won every race so far. I think we could do with a little victory. You can wait here for a few minutes while we go on ahead. There’s something I want to tell him before we get there. We’ll wait for you in the doorway, and you can walk in together. That’s only fair, isn’t it? Here’s the stone. You can do the business with the bear.’ Waldo looked at me. ‘Come on.’

  Faced with this mountain of a man, Martin sat down on the verge, sulkily.

  ‘The end is like this,’ he said to me, and he put his arm around me as we walked the final hundred yards.

  ‘Mr Vogel wasn’t searching for something important or valuable.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘He was looking for something that had been very important to him once.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Do you remember that teddy bear, the one which was given to him by Doctor Robert Jones?’

  ‘Yes, I remember it very well.’

  ‘It became more than a teddy bear to him. It became his best friend during that very long time he spent in bed. It was his mother. His father. His brother. His pillow. His pet. His confidante. His handkerchief when he cried. He held it. He smelled it. He kissed it goodnight. It comforted him. It stayed with him all those endless nights when he was alone in a bed many miles away from his parents. That bear gave him all the love that was missing from his life.’

  ‘Yes. I understand that.’

  ‘Then came the day to leave hospital. There’s a cryptic note in his records, which says that Vogel was extremely upset when he left, not because he was going home, but because of a decision by his father.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Waldo stopped me and pulled me round so that I was looking at him.

  I could hear people shouting and cheering. I could see arms waving through the blur of my tears.

  ‘The father,’ said Waldo, ‘went to get Vogel from hospital. And as they left he made the boy leave his teddy bear on the ward for the other children. He thought he was doing the right thing. He thought the other children would appreciate the teddy. But he was taking away from his son the only thing that was valuable to him.’

  ‘Yes?’

  I was blubbering, almost. Martin appeared like a tadpole in the pond that was my left eye. Someone with a camera appeared in the pond that was my right eye. And then a sudden gust of recognition swept through me. No, surely not. Could it be? It was! The person behind the camera, smiling her lovely wide smile, was Emmeline. I was overjoyed; I was so excited I trembled, my body quaked.

  ‘Vogel never forgave his father. Of course, there was nothing he could do about it. The teddy was taken from him and left on the ward. He went home. Years later, when he saw for the first time how certain wrongs, however small, can be as important to a child as great calamities, he decided to search for the bear. He created a fantasy about it. He wasn’t well.’

  Waldo gave me a squeeze and a great big brotherly smile. I turned, and walked towards my friends. There was a banner over the door, saying Congratulations, and another over the whole street saying Welcome Home.

  With his arm around me, Waldo guided me towards the door.

  ‘The bear – what happened to the bear?’ I asked.

  Waldo hugged me extra hard.

  ‘We’ll find the bear. I’m sure of that. We’ll find the bear.’

  Martin walked up to us, and we watched him hammer in the dancing bear. It gleamed against the black of the lintel. There was a hush.

  I turned round and smiled at everyone, waved.

  Then I walked in through the door of the Blue Angel.

  PART THREE

  And at the end of the seventh year they set out for the island of Gwales, where there was a fair royal palace, with a great hall, overlooking the sea at Pembrokeshire.

  They went into the hall, and two doors were open, but the third, facing Cornwall, was closed. Manawydan said: ‘That door, yonder, we must not open.’

  They spent the night there and they were joyful. They could remember nothing of the sorrows they had seen with their own eyes, or had suffered themselves, and they remembered nothing of all the sorrow in the world.

  And in that place they were eighty years, and they were unaware of having spent a time more joyous and delightful.

  Every day was just as perfect, and none of them looked any older...

  Then, one day, Heilyn son of Gwyn said: ‘Shame on me if I do not open that door to see if what is said about it is true.’

  He opened the door and looked on Cornwall and the Bristol Channel, and when he did so they all became conscious of every loss
they had sustained, and of every kinsman and friend they had missed, and of every ill that had befallen them...

  And from that moment they could not rest.

  Branwen, daughter of Llyr, The Mabinogi

  THE FIRST STEP

  AS SOON as one door closes another opens.

  That’s what the old people say, isn’t it?

  Just when you think you’ve reached a dead end, with nowhere else to go, something always seems to happen.

  That’s the way it was with me that afternoon. It was a dull day, grey, with occasional leaks from a sky bulging with water, an old man’s body bloated with oedema.

  Tied to my post, and untroubled by customers – who grow fewer by the day – my mind had wandered abroad, to visit an old friend of mine. He had strapped a knapsack to his back when we were still young, waved farewell, and tramped all the way to Istanbul, crossing Europe as Hitler came to power. His name is Patrick Leigh Fermor, and he lives in Greece now. You may have heard of him.

  It was then, in my mind’s eye, as Patrick Leigh Fermor and I opened Rabbi Loew’s door in Prague to see the rabbi’s famous man of clay, the golem, being brought to life with words fed into his mouth on slips of paper, that my own door opened suddenly and in lurched a wet and bedraggled thing, a dripping homunculus come to life.

  I’d given up all hope of finding Mr Vogel, in fact I’d pretty well forgotten about him. And to explain how and why he arrived in my shop, in a swaying, gasping moment of alarum and confusion, I must take you back to the very beginning of our tale.

  I need to mop up a bit, if you’ll pardon my little joke, since Mr Vogel left a sluggish spoor all along the floor as he struggled towards me, before falling into the seat alongside my desk. I’ll leave him there for a few minutes, rasping bronchitically, and looking around him dazedly, whilst I swab the decks.

  I introduced our story, the story of Mr Vogel, by telling you about the scribblings of an old bar-tender and dogsbody at the Blue Angel, a tavern in the old docklands.