The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘She was seventeen, about the same age as Seren is now. I was twenty-two, twenty-three.’

  ‘Quite a beauty.’

  ‘Yes, she was. Never seen anyone brush her hair so much.’

  ‘This chap looks familiar.’

  Meredith flinched. ‘Yes, he’s a well-known man in these parts. More’s the pity.’

  It was Frankie Mephisto, dressed like a backing singer in Bill Haley’s band. Hair slicked down, face shiny. And handsome. He had a girl on his arm: the carnival queen runner-up.

  ‘He’s changed a lot,’ I said.

  ‘This was before he became the big gangster. In those days he was just into small stuff.’

  ‘Did you know Frankie Mephisto was Cunégonde’s brother?’

  ‘Yes, I knew. She won’t thank you for putting it about though.’

  ‘Who’s the girl with Frankie?’

  ‘I don’t know. Frankie always had a pretty girl on his arm. He knew how to charm them in those days. I don’t know who she is.’

  I peered at her. There was something familiar about her. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  ‘You kept it all these years,’ I said, handing it back.

  He said nothing. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Were you in love with Cunégonde?’

  Again he said nothing. He didn’t need to. Why else do you keep a photo of someone for thirty years? He walked to the back door and opened it in a manner that said he’d talked enough for today. He held out his hand to shake. ‘I hope they find Myfanwy.’

  The college scarf hanging on the hat stand had alternating stripes of grey, henna and beige. We had a visitor from the college in Lampeter.

  ‘This is Iestyn,’ said Calamity. ‘He’s from the theology college.’

  ‘Always nice to meet a student,’ I said.

  ‘The honour is mine, sir,’ he replied.

  ‘Is this your first visit to Aberystwyth?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Just a lucky guess.’

  There was a candle on the desk and the inside of a toilet roll.

  ‘Iestyn has been helping me with the case,’ explained Calamity. ‘We’ve almost cracked it.’

  I sat down. ‘We had a client once from your college. Faculty of undertaking.’

  ‘Yes, some of the guys in the third year got the cadaver. “Come to Sunny Aberystwyth” knife lodged up to the hilt between the sixth and seventh intercostal. Nice job.’

  ‘Yeah, well, not all our clients end up on a slab.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to offend, sir.’

  ‘No offence taken. Tell me about the case.’

  Calamity pulled a large book out from under the desk and thrust it down with emphasis.

  ‘Item one: Mrs Llantrisant’s book on meterology, Red Sky at Night.’

  ‘It’s an inquiry into the anthropomorphic fallacy in forensic meteorology,’ added Iestyn helpfully.

  ‘I know, she wrote it when I was paying her to swab my step.’

  ‘According to this, 1849 was the driest summer for thirty years. The spinning wheels would have been tinder dry. Neglect to oil one, spin a bit too fast and, presto, you have a stray spark.’

  ‘Where is this leading to?’

  Calamity placed her hands on her hips and paced up and down the room. ‘The stable boy said he saw burning and climbed up the ivy to save Cranogwen. The peelers say he stole the gems and then set the room on fire. But we already know he couldn’t have done that because the gems showed signs of fire damage. So they must have been removed after the fire and planted. But by who? Good question, I’ll come to it in a minute. And there’s a funny thing about the fire: only the bed burnt. The rest of the room was largely untouched. Except the spinning wheel in the corner.’

  ‘OK, the spinning wheel catches fire because it’s tinder dry, a spark jumps from the wheel and sets fire to the bed …’

  ‘It couldn’t have worked like that,’ said Iestyn. ‘If the bed catches fire so does the rest of the room. There’s only one way the bed can burn and not the room, only one thing produces such a localised effect.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Spontaneous human combustion,’ said Calamity.

  ‘It’s my specialist subject,’ added Iestyn. ‘Look!’ He moved over to the table and picked up the candle. ‘See this? It’s a candle made from human tallow.’

  He took out a lighter and lit the wick. ‘The wick’s made from a gauze taken from the mid-section of a lady’s combinations circa late 1840s. And that’s the key, you see. The wicking effect. A light summer corset wrapped round a lump of fat makes a pretty good candle.’ The candle had fizzled out, but not without filling the room with the odour of singed flesh. ‘Now normally, as you see, nothing happens. The fire won’t catch. You need something to get it going. A catalyst. And what do you think that could be?’ He looked at me. I shrugged and Iestyn picked up the toilet roll tube. ‘Tra-la-la!’ he shouted in a lame attempt to invest the proceedings with an air of drama. ‘Her stovepipe hat!’

  I shot Calamity a glance. She was striving for an air of nonchalance as if this was all purely routine.

  ‘Stand back, now,’ said Iestyn. ‘And look what happens.’ He lit the candle and then brought the tube of cardboard down over the flame. Instead of standing back we both leaned in closer. And then we jumped back as a blinding flash shot up the tube and burned with a fierce white flame like magnesium in a school chemistry lab. ‘See!’ Iestyn shouted above the roar of the flames. ‘It acts like a flue! Pretty impressive, huh? It’s the same process as a Bessemer converter used for smelting iron – but then I expect you already know that.’ He drew the flue away and the flame subsided. There followed half a second’s stunned silence and then Calamity said, ‘Open and shut case.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘The fire started accidentally, spontaneous human combustion. The stable boy saw the flames and climbed up to save the girl. He didn’t touch her gems, someone else planted them after the fire to incriminate him. So why does the ghost finger the kid by writing comes stabuli? She must have known he didn’t do it.’

  ‘Easy,’ said Calamity. ‘There was no ghost. The writing was done by a member of the household to point the finger at the kid. That’s why the writing stopped appearing after a while and then started again this century. If you compare the handwriting of the ghost on the tea towel which is taken from the appearance in 1923 it’s clearly a different hand from the original sketches done in 1860.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘I spoke to a graphologist.’

  ‘Where did you find one of those in Aberystwyth?’

  ‘Llunos knows one.’

  ‘First I knew.’

  ‘He said they are clearly different hands. I reckon the new owners are doing it. A decent ghost can add another twenty-five quid a night to the cost of a room.’

  ‘OK, the ghost is a phoney, I buy that. That means the stable boy was set up. By who?’

  ‘Still working on that,’ said Calamity ‘But it has to be someone who understands Latin so my guess is the physician Dr Weevil.’

  Later that morning I saw Gabriel Bassett walking into the Pier and I followed. He moved with the blinkered swiftness of someone who knows exactly where he is going, who has come to still a craving rather than for mere pleasure. He moved through the machines and took a seat at the bingo game towards the rear. I sat next to him and put a couple of coins into the electro-illuminated screens.

  ‘Didn’t expect to find you here, Mr Knight,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not one of my regular haunts.’

  The caller invited us to focus our attention on the game by the time-honoured manner of casting down our eyes and looking in. She reeled off the numbers and Gabriel talked to me and slid the doors across on the screen without even looking at what he was doing.

  ‘Not long now,’ he said. ‘Just over a week.’

  ‘We’ll be fine, we’re almost there.’

 
He nudged me slightly in the ribs as if making a lewd remark. ‘Care to give me a little foretaste?’

  ‘Calamity will have to take you through the detail, but we’re pretty certain the ghost is a phoney—’

  He jumped in surprise. ‘A phoney? My word you surprise me!’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘But how can that be? The medium I spoke to contacted her not two weeks ago.’

  ‘How much did you pay the medium?’

  ‘Only two hundred pound. You’re not suggesting she was a charlatan are you?’

  ‘I never met one yet who wasn’t.’

  ‘She seemed very honest.’

  ‘Believe me, that’s not always a reliable indicator.’

  ‘She even gave me some ectoplasm. Look.’ He took out an old tobacco tin – St Bruno Ready Rubbed Flake – and opened it. The heady sweet sharp perfume of tobacco rose up but otherwise the tin was empty.

  ‘It’s a nice tin, Mr Bassett, but it’s not worth two hundred pound.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  A woman shouted ‘House’ and everyone looked round with hate in their eyes. The numbers were checked, the call confirmed, the next game began.

  ‘Lucky bitch!’ said Gabriel. ‘I was almost there and all.’

  I put a shilling in to light up his screen and he started mechanically moving the little plastic doors.

  ‘How can you be sure the ghost isn’t real?’ he said.

  ‘We had the handwriting analysed. It’s not consistent. We think originally someone had it in for the stable boy and tried to point the finger at him.’

  ‘You don’t know how happy this news makes me.’

  ‘Care to tell me why it makes you so happy?’

  ‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly do that. It’s a long story anyway and you’d probably fall asleep.’

  I apologised for falling asleep midway through his story about the suitcase.

  ‘It was rather strange, I must say.’

  ‘I was suffering from the after-effects of being hit on the head with a shovel. Concussion.’

  ‘You know what it reminded me of? The way you dropped off like that? It was like those people in the audience at Mr Evans’s hypnotism show. That’s what it was like, like you’d been hypnotised. Anyway,’ he added, kicking the case under the bingo console, ‘I don’t blame you for falling asleep. The story of my case isn’t very interesting.’

  ‘It’s not boring at all, I was fascinated. What did you find when you opened the case?’

  ‘I found a pair of Breton fisherman’s trousers and a pile of old letters tied with a ribbon.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘There was also a photo of a little girl. The darlingest little girl ever: standing in the Jardin du Luxembourg in winter as snow fell, wearing a pillar-box-red coat. The letters were in French and I had to get them translated. They told the story of a love affair between this girl’s mother – Evegnie – and a Breton fisherman. Evegnie had lived a sheltered life, brought up by her aunt who was a strict and puritanical woman and saw to it that her niece remained untutored in matters of the heart. I’m sure you can guess the course the affair took: the man swore that he loved her and when he had robbed her of that treasure that it is a young maiden’s shame to lose, he abandoned her. He left her with child by him and as a consequence her aunt called her a tramp and cast her out. She went to work as a seamstress in Paris where the child was born. I suspect you will have guessed by now that this fisherman was none other than myself in the pre-Gabriel-Bassett days. Yes, I was that fisherman. Which is surprising because nowadays I only have to look at a boat and I get seasick. Naturally, I was appalled at what I had discovered. To think that I could have been responsible for such cruelty! Her letters were written in a simple, disarmingly frank and childish style, and leavened with many beguiling touches. And as I read I found myself growing increasingly fond of this girl: of her candour, and open-hearted wonder, the sensitivity of her soul revealed in a thousand light touches, the charming childishness of her handwriting and even the cheapness of the perfume with which she daubed the paper – it all conspired to win my heart. What a paradox, you may think, that the story of her suffering, that I myself had inflicted, should now melt my heart. And then I thought of the little girl in the red coat. My daughter? What an astonishing thing! To think that I had such a lovely daughter here on this earth.

  ‘And so I wrote to Evegnie telling her all that had befallen me. At first, of course, she refused to acknowledge my letters. But I persisted, writing again and again and repeating over and over the simple truth that I was a changed man. Until eventually she started to write back. In time I managed to win her trust and convince her of my sincerity. I dared to inquire if there was another man in her life. She told me that there was not, that there never could be, that she was capable of giving her heart away but once in this world. And then I took the boldest step of all and asked whether I might be permitted to visit her and my daughter. I waited for her reply with my heart in my mouth. What might she say? Would she spurn me like I deserved or would the light of Christian charity that shone so clearly through her letters look kindly on my request? Suddenly the humble postman had acquired the power to transfigure me with joy, or crush me utterly with despair.’

  Bassett stopped and sighed and said, addressing the bingo console, ‘I guess some of us were never meant to achieve happiness in this world.’

  ‘But what did she say?’ I asked. ‘Did she refuse to see you?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No. I sat by the front door for days waiting for her reply. And then finally when I thought my heart could take it no more, when I thought that it was surely too late and that I was destined not to receive the reply I craved, I saw the postman turn into our street. He was wearing the uniform of the special delivery corps and he was carrying something. It was a box of some sort. I watched him walk up and stop outside my house. He checked the number against a slip of paper that he carried, then walked up to the door and rang the bell. I opened the door before his finger had even reached the bell. I looked at his face and then cast my eyes down to the box standing next to his shoe. It was a suitcase, a tatty cardboard suitcase very similar to mine. And then I saw that I had been deceived. It was not the special delivery postman, it was someone whose uniform was similar. It was the man from the left luggage office. He told me there had been a mix-up and they had given me the wrong case. He had come to exchange them. He gave me this one, the one I carry around now, the one I have never dared open. And he took away the case containing the record of my love for Evegnie and the beautiful daughter I thought for a while was mine.

  ‘But what did Evegnie say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never contacted her again. How could I? She was a stranger.’

  ‘But the love was real.’

  He looked at me, pain etched into the crevices of his face. ‘Yes, the love was real. But it wasn’t mine. It belonged to someone else and I just picked it up and wore it for a while the way you wear someone else’s hat by mistake.’

  I gave Bassett another shilling for the bingo and walked down to Sospan’s and ordered an ice cream.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts, Mr Knight,’ said Sospan.

  I shook my head. ‘I was just wondering. Do you ever think you might have chosen the wrong career?’

  A look of deep earnest furrowed the ice man’s brow. ‘To tell you truly, Mr Knight, it’s difficult to answer that question in the terms in which it is asked. Being an ice man is not a career as such, more of a calling.’

  ‘You didn’t choose it then?’

  ‘Not really. I was called to it.’

  ‘Did you get to choose to do it in Aberystwyth or was that part of the calling?’

  ‘That is the question that should never be asked.’

  ‘All I’m asking is what made you come to Aberystwyth.’

  ‘Let’s just say I came for the water.’

  ‘The seawater?’

  ‘No! Not the seaw
ater. Whoever heard of going somewhere for that. I mean, you know, the water. Like in that film with what’s-his-name, the bloke whose photo they’ve got on the wall in the Cabin.’

  ‘Humphrey Bogart.’

  ‘Exactly. The guy asked him what brought him to Casablanca and Humphrey Bogart said he came for the water. And the guy said but there is no water in Casablanca and he said, “I was misinformed.”’

  ‘He was misinformed?’

  Sospan gave me a bright insistent nod and said, ‘There you go.’

  But I was baffled and asked him to explain. He frowned with annoyance. ‘I shouldn’t have to spell it out, it’s perfectly clear. Saying he came for the water was his way of saying “mind your own business” wasn’t it? He didn’t want to tell him, you see, because his past housed a ghost, a source of pain that he preferred not to think about.’

  ‘And there’s a ghost in your past like that?’

  He raised his index finger and pointed to a fine jagged scar that meandered down his cheek just in front of the ear. ‘Never ask how I got this in the days before I came to Aberystwyth. I’ll say no more.’

  Chapter 12

  I THREW MY HAT across the room and missed the hat stand.

  Calamity looked up from a sheaf of papers on the desk. ‘Nice walk?’

  ‘It was OK. I was thinking about various things and one thing that I got to thinking about was the incident board. Covered with clues and facts and statements, and I was wondering about where you are getting it from—’

  ‘From my sources.’

  ‘That’s right: from your sources. Or maybe that should be your source.’

  ‘More than one.’

  ‘I got to thinking about something else too. Have you noticed how I keep falling asleep? It’s not really like me.’

  Calamity looked at me slyly. ‘It’s probably the strain about Myfanwy, preying on your mind. It’s surprising how tired a thing like that can make you.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s probably it. But I’ve noticed that every time I wake up, you have a new clue on the wall.’

  She looked at me, eyes narrowing and then said with exaggerated casualness, ‘No I don’t.’