by Dai Smith
“S’right,” said Lionel.
“Pints again?” This time from Tommy.
I was tempted. Another and I’d have settled in for the afternoon. That would be no trouble for them, but I had more calls to make before I could slip into forgetfulness with them. I left them swilling away the grime and dust they had absorbed all morning, and across a lifetime every morning since they had left secondary modern entrapment at fifteen with bruised knuckles and a dislike of authority and its preachiness which had sustained them into the righteous anger of their mid-sixties.
I waited at the lights to cross the two lanes of busying traffic and looked up at the platforms and retaining wall of what had once been one of Europe’s busiest rail interchanges. A funnel to the world for coal out and people in which filled and emptied day and night for half a century. It had shrunk inside itself like a terminally ill patient in a baggy suit. What was tacked on to the original façade had the unwelcome effect of loose-fitting false teeth sitting on shrivelled gums. There was nowhere to buy a ticket, and I rode free for the ten minutes or so it took for the diesel to grind its way up an incline beyond the town to the halt.
* * * * *
After the frayed edginess of the town, spread out beneath the mountain escarpment, there was a surreal feel to the Development Park. At least from a distance there was. Up close you could still see the railway cutting, now concreted over and the tunnel now bricked up, through which an exodus of coal had once rattled to the sea. Most of the site was a car park. I crossed it, as instructed, until at almost its far end I came to a red-brick wall which sectioned off a lawned area that you entered through open iron gates. The gates were fancy. Their railings were painted silver and had gold spears to top off the effect. You were welcomed in by a slate plaque that was six feet long and four feet high. It was mounted on a granite plinth and stood ten feet up from the lawn. The grass was so green it sparkled. The grass did not quiver even for a synthetic nano second. The deeply cut grey lettering on the plaque said: ADEILAD ALFRED WALLACE BUILDING. Another twenty yards down a yellow-brick path took me to the frontage of a very new, low slung two storey building. The oval windows which studded its riveted white cladding were framed in steel and glowed blue. It took me less than a nano second to admire it. I went through a series of automatic doors that swished open and closed, into a reception area where I had to state my business at a desk which could have issued airline tickets. I was sent to another series of glass doors, all electronically locked, where I was acknowledged over the intercom and buzzed through to the inner sanctum. I’d been told to ask for The Directorate, and here it was. The last time that one had been up in lights was in the 1790s, just before Napoleon doused them, dissolved the collective and crowned himself, literally I recalled, Emperor. The only thing Gwilym had in common with Bonaparte was an ineffable self-regard and the short-arsed cockiness that often accompanied it.
A door to an outer office opened and Gwilym’s PA stood framed in it. I seemed to remember the little guy asked Josephine not to wash until after he’d come home. Maybe Gwil had a different olfactory arousal. This Josephine had definitely washed. And sprayed. And perked and painted. She was to natural fragrance what chemical is to organic. She was to natural blonde what chicory is to espresso. Her jersey silk dress had had its pink and red geometric pattern imprinted big on a size that was a tad too small and too short, and just right. Her voice, when it came, was more doll than baby and excitingly formal, as in “The Director is expecting you, Mr Maddox. Do go right in. Coffee?” And she half-turned on her teeteringly high pink suede stilettos and gave me a smile as sweet as a sucked sherbet lemon as she adjusted her made-for-the-job horn-rimmed glasses. Perhaps she was really efficient, too.
I said, “Yes” and “Please”, and did as I was told. Gwilym was sat, head bowed over neatly stacked papers, behind a veneer-inlaid desk that could have done duty as a stage prop for Il Duce. It was cleared of any clutter. As pristine as the paperwork looked virginal. Only a mounted and gold-plated rollerball pen broke the gleaming expanse of its surface. Il Duce looked up as if he was due for a surprise instead of an announced visitor. He cracked a smile that went all the way from who’d’ve believed it to whaddya know, well well. He opened up his arms to receive me even before he rose slowly from the desk and advanced around it towards where I stood with Josephine hovering just behind me. She might have seen the move before, because I sensed her sliding out of the room – discretion and valour and all that. I stood my ground as Gwilym thrust his arms up as high as he could reach to pat my shoulders. He was staring lovingly up into my face, a technique Josephine’s high heels might have helped him perfect, and saying quietly, but with feeling, “Bill. Bill. Bill. Well. Well. That’s just great. Bill.”
What could I say back? I thought about a speech, but just said “Gwil. Gwilym. Eh, Gwil!” and wrapped my arms around the back of a dark grey, pure wool suit. We clutched each other a while longer, until he gradually let go with what seemed like the reluctance of velcro to detach itself. He gestured to a corner of the room where two blue cloth tub chairs squatted either side of a lower splay-legged table. We sat. Josephine returned with a silvery tray on which she’d positioned a white bone china coffee pot with matching cups, except for the gold trim around the lip, a milk jug and a little bowl of white and brown sugar lumps. The spoons rattled as she put it down. Gwilym smiled at her. He called Josephine Morwenna, and thanked her. We poured our own coffee and, as before, discreetly and with valour she turned and retreated. I guessed that from the back she would look even better. So I looked. And she did. I turned my wayward head as Gwilym began to speak. It sounded rehearsed. That would be about right for Gwilym who had always been as instantaneous as freeze-dried coffee without the boiling water.
“Fantastic to see you again. All these years. Older,” he snickered, “but aren’t we all? And looking good, kiddo. Looking good. Are you home for long? Any special reason? Great to see you, whatever.”
Kiddo, I thought? Maybe the outmoded slang went with the inquisitional probe. A sort of Welcome Home that was as sincere as a Commercial Christmas. Was there any other kind anymore, kiddo? He slurped a little coffee and sat back, waiting. I studied the dots on his shot-silk tie and the cufflinks in his off-white cotton shirt with its shiny pearly grey buttons, and I contemplated his journey from railway signalman’s son to the Duce of the Directorate. I didn’t feel I was intruding on any secret thought process. He probably contemplated the same route with some satisfaction at least twice a day. He was just a year older than me, and we’d been at university, almost overlapping, in the late 1970s. I’d dropped out. He hadn’t. A doctorate had arrived for Gwil via a “comparative sociological study” of the coalfields of Durham, Appalachia and South Wales. He’d met Bran in her undergraduate years after I’d already left to become the next Robert Frank. Another dream. I was surfing on the first waves of published glamour when Gwil had gloatingly introduced me to her. Maybe he thought the fact they were size compatible was sufficient security. Mistake. She dropped him, and we began. I didn’t detect resentment at the time. We’d told ourselves it was a freewheeling world and included ourselves in the spin. There seemed less envy of the relationship and more envy of the career, mine, one that was soon worlds apart from graduate fellowships and junior lectureships and monthly pittances. Yet he’d clung onto the educational ladder and occasional letters told me of two marriages, twice divorced, and no kids behind him, and finally a view from almost the top of his particular pole to compensate for all the effort. It worked for him, this viewpoint, gloating being good downwards, envy being pointless upwards. Besides, any other emotion would have taken him too long and too far away from thinking about himself, and his own needs for power and privilege. It was the relative not the absolute nature of these commodities that mattered to him, so I directed the past freight we both carried back to his favourite topic, one so precious he rarely shared it openly with others. Himself. I didn’t answer about me, I signalled the comfort
ing topic of Him, and looked around at the framed certificates, at the dusty tomes gathering sightless motes behind glass, and the painting that filled an entire wall with its incongruous rebuke of his inward vision.
“You’ve done well. I can see. Congratulations.”
There was a disconcerting but characteristic giggle in return. He stroked a small razor trimmed beard, one that gave neat, circumscribed length to his small-featured, cutely handsome face. Gwilym had unnaturally round deep brown eyes, almost glassy, beneath his plucked and arched eyebrows. The eyes glistened now in a self-deprecating way that, if you knew him as I did, was anything but. Christ, I thought for a moment he was going to flutter his feathery lashes at me. And then, in a trained instant, almost uncannily quickly, the look tightened and hit-switched to a more attentive, focussed mode. It was as if the whole thing was there, just in that look. The passage from junior lecturer to dean via the journeyman authorship of a couple of convoluted and densely footnoted academic articles, with a bland textbook survey thrown in along the way, to the heights, and salary, of administrative grandeur. And now this, Director of an independent unit for research and development, for business growth and social regeneration. It was the link that was missing which interested me more than the outward show of success and the inner conviction of merit. Gwilym still believed, in his innermost sanctuary, that the latter was a deserved compound of IQ and effort. He never got satire. Not if it was directed against his own deserved needs. Just deserts was a different thing altogether. Not that he would appreciate the distinction.
“It’s a terrific opportunity, Bill. Even in these challenging times. Especialy in these times. We’re bringing you know, together here, the private and the public. Pulling in the best ideas, and the most go-ahead people. Graduates on short-term contracts. Start-up pods. Peppercorn rents. All the latest kit. Spin offs for commercial ventures. Creative industries. Links into business and government. Able to form partnerships across the piste. Not tied down. Fleet of foot. University connections that do not hamstring us with the caution of academic regulation. Innovative to the core. Mal’s idea originally, of course, and he worked his socks off to secure the funding. A dream come true. So when they asked me, the Board, you know, to leave the University, where, did you know? I was the Pro Vice Chancellor, well, I didn’t, despite everything, hesitate. What a chance, eh, to put into practice all I’d studied and researched. What else could I do?”
I tried looking impressed. At his bravery. At the opportunity. At the personal sacrifice. And I must have succeeded.
“I can see you’re wondering a bit if I’ve gone mad. Solid career, and all that, thrown away on a, let’s be honest, gamble. Now, Bill, I won’t lie to you, salary is on a par for a guaranteed five year contract, so I won’t exactly starve, and, as you can see, there are the perks and trappings of power, which are enjoyable, and at my, our, advanced age, why not? Eh, Bill. But the bottom line is, the real thing is, this is a once in a lifetime chance to give a lead. To be, and Christ we need it here don’t we, a leader. That’s the reward, and that’s the responsibility I’ve taken on.”
A smile to dazzle a whole plank of Board members followed the soliloquy, topped off with that cherry of self-sacrificial selflessness.
“So very, satisfyingly, rewarding.”
“Rewards, like charity, begin at home,” I said as blandly as I could manage. It puzzled him momentarily. I couldn’t be that vulgar, could I? Try me, I thought. This time the smile came sans teeth.
“It’s well paid, as I said. You’d expect it to be. For the responsibility. I don’t deny that. Though senior colleagues elsewhere in Academe proper …”
The voice trailed off in a wistful sigh for appointment in faraway universities whose “catchment areas” were not so compromised as those more locally situated, and whose “culture” was more aspirational than needy. The same look came to both our faces. Unbidden and, for him, unwanted. Who’d employ him in such Groves of Academe? He was forgetting his guest and the feel-good factor he liked to create in all possible circumstances. He hurried on:
“Anyway, anyway. What about you, Bill? Really really great to see you, by the way. Great. Exhibitions. Retrospectives. Books. Newspaper articles – I’ve read them all. And wasn’t there a documentary film you made, quite recently? Got shown on BBC4 over here? About Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles who’d made good, as they say? Great title: Wetbacks to Greenbacks?”
I nodded. He changed tack. Opportunities for both of us had just flitted across his radar screen. A better future.
“I just thought,” he said thoughtfully. And he probably had. “I just thought … would you consider some, temporary of course, to suit you, part-time, appointment here? A research fellowship perhaps? And we could help, you know, with any, er, archiving, or whatever. A permanent home, perhaps? A depository of your lifetime’s achievement under your own name? I don’t know about you, but that’d excite me. We could get external funding for that, I’m sure. The William Maddox Photographic Centre. Nice ring to it.And, hey, talking of names, what d’you think of ours ?”
I smiled. He smiled. I waited. He settled into accustomed pedagogic mode.
“No? Don’t blame you. I’ve had to inform quite a few. Well, he was Welsh of course. And nowadays, things have changed quite a lot in that department, Billy boy, we have to stress that connection. Born in 1823 was old Alfred Wallace. Just as everything in our part of the world was beginning to take off big time. He was from Monmouthshire. Gwent as they say now. Clothes on a poodle but still a dog underneath. Our dog though. And he died in 1913, just as our madcap growth, our boom and bust, iron and coal, and people swarming in, was about to end. Perfect timing. And here’s the thing. He was the boy who first came up with the notion of the natural selection of the species, the key concept to understand the evolution of everything. Not Charles Darwin, Bill, but his correspondent and co-worker, our own Alfred Wallace. No one really denies this anymore. Wallace was the originator and the catalyst to Darwin’s work. Fantastic, eh? And the thing is, it gets even better. For us to use his name, I mean. Because, you see, Charlie’s emphasis was all on competition, between individual units in the same species, so to speak, for there to be any survival of the fittest. But old Alfred, our pal, more in keeping with us, showed that wider environmental pressures were what actually forced adaptation, change, to survive as a whole, in any given local world or environment. So any survival of the fittest, and that was Herbert Spencer’s spin on Darwin’s biological theories when applied to economy and society, has to place individual life within the frame of culture and society. Which is, after all, what we need to hear in this benighted part of the globe, isn’t it? Moving on together. Sorry about the lecture, you know me, but I thought you’d like the idea.”
I dutifully nodded. Gwilym took that as a good sign. He waved his hand in the air. Modest and self-deprecating.
“I’m getting ahead of myself. As usual. You know me. Always the doer! And I still haven’t found out why you’re home. Bran? Have you seen her?”
I nodded again. I should have been sitting on the back-shelf of a car.
“Yes, I have. That’s partly why I’m here.”
“Partly?”
“Yes. And for Haf. Why don’t you tell me about Haf, Gwil?”
He poured himself another coffee. I waited. He put his cup down, a little too heavily. The coffee spilled from the saucer onto his inlaid and varnished coffee table. He ignored the puddle. He was considering my request. Its innocence. Or not. He began slowly.
“You remember I wrote to you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. Wasn’t my place. But, you know, everything had gone – went – so lopsided, for a while, after you left, after you and Bran split. All so uncertain.”
He paused and looked up. He switched effortlessly from the academic to the demotic. Just to show he could. Just to show we were still blood brothers. He was wasting his time with that one, and had done years since. I didn’t bother to alert him to it. Not yet. He lean
ed, like a buddy, towards me. Go ahead, kiddo, I thought. And he did, effortlessly.
“Look. I started. We started. That autumn. To see each other again. Just after you’d gone. Casually, of course. Not like you two had been, of course. Then, it ended. Again. Only, as you know now, she was pregnant. Quite soon. The girl, Haf, was born. End of June or July ’86, I forget. Bran married Mal after that. Maybe. No, certainly, they’d seen each other around the time I split … she stopped … with me, I mean – around the same time, so I just assumed it was Mal. I didn’t, you know, enquire. Well, not for years anyway. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent a card. I confess I was out to hurt. Her not you. I’d met her at a party. She wasn’t with Mal, and he’d spoken, bitterly, to me, about his bitch of a wife. And, he said, her, from the off he said, lies. I was between marriages myself, and pissed. I tried it on, to be honest. She made it plain, brutally plain, I wasn’t a runner, let alone a rider anymore. I certainly wasn’t on her radar screen by then and, for Bran, it was all TV reporting and small-screen stardom those days – not PR and networking yet – so, a bit narked, I asked out loud, pissed, who the fucking father was then, and if not me now, then maybe me then, and how she’d be the one to know it. And she just stood. Icy and looking at me, and said “No chance”, that I was a tosser then and a shit now and she always knew how to protect herself from any unwanted, ‘dribble’.”
He swallowed. I think he expected me to feel a twinge of sympathy. I felt a pain elsewhere. Gwilym hadn’t noticed. He wanted it all to come out now. He’d stared in the mirror so long that monologue was the sound of sweet reason to him.
“So, naturally, Bill I thought of you. You hadn’t come back when your old man died that Christmastime. No one blamed you, I mean. You were away. But, I thought, years later, and, yeah, I was angry, that maybe you needed to know. In case you didn’t, I mean. So I just sent the card to the newspaper’s address. You never replied, so I let it drop. I assumed you’d ask Bran. You know, I mean, if it was yours, or not.”