The Coward’s Tale

by Vanessa Gebbie

Nearly too old to work now, he is, but besides that, his eyes are not what they were. Hence the stick, see? Won’t tell anyone that, oh no. But all he sees now are bright lights and shadows. And before they fade, he will be walking across the town, in a straight line. For the granda he never knew.’

  Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins will stop and shake his head. He takes an old handkerchief out of his pocket and may be going to wipe his eyes, or blow his nose. But he looks up instead and catches Laddy Merridew watching him, Laddy Merridew who wasn’t here when the story began, but must have arrived in the middle – so he just polishes the face of his watch with no hands, and pushes it back in his pocket.

  And the cinemagoers will walk away, some putting one foot in front of the other, as they have seen the Undertaker do. But they meet the wall of the chapel, or the steps, or the curve of the road, and they stop, laughing, and go off home. But there is one man left, the Deputy Librarian Philip Factual Philips, who stood there at the back as he was passing, to hear a little about history. And now, as Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins turns away to go back to his bench, Factual Philips leans against the wall – and where his mouth is, a smile begins.

  The Deputy Librarian’s Tale and the Undertaker’s Tale iv

  Today, Mrs Cadwalladr the Chief Librarian has an afternoon off, gone up to Brecon to see the sister with the goitre. She went off after lunch, leaving instructions with Factual Philips about rearranging a rearrangement of books he did last week. And after she went, there was the sight of Factual running up the stairs to the Reference Room two at a time, the door closing and the sound of two men’s voices, low. Then another sight – Factual Philips talking to every person in the library, those choosing books, those standing reading, those tearing the adverts out of the daily papers in the Reading Room, ‘I am sorry, you’ll have to stop that now. The library is closing for the afternoon. Unforeseen circumstances.’

  There are those who will say he was smiling, but then that could always have been a mistake, and they were not there, after all, to hear the conversation upstairs. But it must have gone something like this, when Factual Philips, who for the very first time was not able to answer a question asked in his library – and him with every book in the place read and digested too – left his office in the basement and went up to the map section to find Tutt Bevan the Undertaker, back again, still turning the book of maps this way and that, muttering to himself, ‘Things were built, see. The straight paths have all gone.’ He shakes his head. And here Tutt Bevan shows Factual Philips one old map with a straight track from one side of the town to the other, hidden between the little patches that are houses, following alleys and side paths from one hill through the valley to the next. ‘I don’t know. All I need is this one little thing before I go myself, a journey like my grandfather Brightwell did, before he went? And what a going that was. Marvellous. Marvellous.’

  And there is something then. Maybe it is the echo of a boy making the sound of a train whistle between his fingers, or the memory of a boy shut in a father’s study, lost in the red books from the top shelf, and the mouth of Factual Philips finds itself smiling again, and saying, ‘I played a game once . . .’

  So now the double doors of the Public Library have been locked, and the staff sent home. It is only twelve noon, and if Mrs Bennie Parrish comes to change her books she will go home sucking her teeth and muttering about impropriety.

  Two men, one with a stick, his arm held by the other, have walked together straight up the hill up from the town to The Cat on the corner of Maerdy Street and waited for it to open for the lunchtime drinkers. Factual Philips has been talking to himself all the way up the hill, ‘Now, I just have to remember how it went . . .’ And a little later there they were inside The Cat, sitting together below a display case filled with a shining fish, its little brass plaque saying Caught by James Harris, fisherman shining in the lights of the bar.

  Now there they are, Tutt Bevan and Factual Philips cradling two half pints, whispering, their heads together like boys plotting adventures. Waiting for the bar to fill, for the smoke to rise, for the sound of beer-filled talk to ring through the room.

  The Deputy Librarian goes back to the bar. ‘Two more halves, thank you, Maggie.’

  ‘Not like you to be here in the day. Library burned down, is it?’

  Slowly, The Cat fills as the Librarian and the Undertaker have their second half pint. Factual Philips gets up and stretches, then makes for the smallest room at the back of the pub. Tutt Bevan waits a few moments, then does the same. And while the older man with a walking stick holds it against the door and keeps watch, the other climbs up and balances on the toilet seat like he did years ago, when he was a lad. Before he was caught by his father and given a thousand lines each time he was found playing. He reaches up and pushes at the window, sealed with dust and rust and the gifts of spiders.

  Then he’s knocking at the window with his fist, ‘Diawl. It will not open, it sticks.’

  And the Undertaker, one hand against the door, ‘Maybe it’s best we give up?’

  ‘Rubbish . . .’ for the librarian knows, Sherlock Holmes never gave up, did he?

  After a while the window opens, scattering rust and more than a few flakes of paint. And the air comes in, and with it the sounds of the town, the hum and the shouts and the barking of dogs while Factual looks down the years into the yard of The Cat Public House.

  As before, there are empty barrels. There is the alley running behind Maerdy Street, and the wall where he dropped down after his friends years back, ferns now growing where it joins the wall of The Cat.

  There is a hand-drawn trailer propped in the yard, some old boxes in a corner, slumping all damp from this morning’s rain. Scents rising, beckoning – damp afternoon air, damp coal dust, old beer and barrels. And over it all, smoke from the chimneys of Maerdy Street and Mary Street, whose gardens stretch away from him like a chain, their washing lines hanging slack, their walls sagging, the gates into the back alley hanging open, forgotten now behind the garden sheds.

  Factual Philips pulls himself up to lean on the windowsill and peers out at the narrow wall, the green duckweed growing on the old cinders, and nettles where the walls meet the earth. He looks back at the old man by the door. ‘Too far down, can’t see us doing this now.’

  Tutt tuts. ‘Impossible. I said it would be.’

  But Factual leans out further just to see, and below there is another window right above the alley half-hidden behind a fan of ivy and a rusty metal grille. So he climbs back down into the smallest room brushing himself free from cobwebs and dust, and he smiles. Beneath The Cat is a cellar, and not all underground.

  Factual Philips straightens his shoulders. ‘Righto, back to the bar, Watson. ’On’t give up quite yet, eh?’ And back they go to find their table taken and the fish in its case winking at them. And when Tutt Bevan asks who Watson might be, the only reply is a grin.

  ‘Another half, is it?’ says Maggie the publican’s wife, resting herself on the mahogany top. And so it is another half indeed, while they check the door just there, behind the bar, behind Maggie, smiling at them. ‘Surveying the place, are we?’

  So they wait. Then the telephone rings, and Maggie sighs and opens the door, reaches into the hallway for the phone and pulls it on its wire back into the bar, where she talks into it, ‘Helloo, Matty, it’s you then?’ her voice all soft, and one or two drinkers wink and smile and play with their money on the counter top. But through the door is the stairs. Factual and Tutt can see that. Up to the bedroom. And where there is a stairs going up, Factual Philips deduces, there may also be one going down.

  ‘I have to go, Matty,’ Maggie says to the telephone. ‘Can’t talk for long. Have to fetch some bottles.’

  And Factual Philips is brave now, made courageous by the fish he did not catch, and by the almost three half pints in his stomach. ‘Bottles, you said? Heavy. Bottles are no job for a lady now, Maggie. Where do we fetch them for you?’

  ‘There’s kin
d,’ she says and points with a red nail. ‘Down the stairs.’

  Tutt Bevan points his stick at the cellar steps, and she frowns, ‘Doesn’t take two of you, does it?’

  ‘Oh yes, when one has a bad back,’ says Factual, and they are gone.

  There is a single bulb on the stairs and no door at the bottom, a cellar room of barrels and pipes and pallets and boxes against the walls, crates of small bottles, and packets of crisps and scratchings. A broken chair from the bar, thrown at the wall during a fight, but all four legs seem solid enough. And there is the window, half-blocked from the outside by ivy, that metal grille.

  ‘Easy!’ Factual Philips drags the chair across and stands on it, but Tutt says, ‘Let me?’ So it is Simon Tutt Bevan who leaves his stick against a barrel. And Simon Tutt Bevan who has not climbed onto a chair for decades climbs onto one now with a steadying hand from the Librarian, and he peers at the window. Dark with dust and grime, the glass cracked across one corner, the frame unpainted for years, peeling and cracking onto the sill.

  There is a draught where the window doesn’t quite fit, the breeze from the afternoon coming through into the cellar, damp into damp. Tutt Bevan tamps round the window for the catch, feels the draught where the frame has buckled. The catch is stiff, but he puts his weight against it and with a push or nine it opens outwards, taking the ivy with it, then a tenth push sets the grille swinging back against the outside wall. ‘Rusted through. Easy, it is easy.’

  Factual Philips, the younger, climbs out first, ready to reach up and help Tutt Bevan, who half-climbs, half-falls down into the alley with his stick.

  And there it is, the alley between the Maerdy Street back yards and those belonging to Mary Street, running away from them straight as a ruler, at least until the bend in the distance where the street follows the valley. Behind them is The Cat. And behind that the hill they have climbed up from the town.

  ‘Here we are.’ Factual is grinning like a small boy. ‘See, behind us it’s all a straight line to the hill. And in front, we just go like we are on rails. A train. Don’t do corners too well, trains . . .’

  Tutt Bevan frowns, leans against The Cat and raises his stick. Peers along it towards the bulk of the hill, and the stick points down the alley and at the wall where it bends. ‘But there are walls, and houses, look, down there?’

  ‘Leave it to me, I’m the driver.’ And Factual, brushing the knees and elbows of his library suit, and wiping dust from the windowsill over his face, grins again and straightens his shoulders, facing down the alley.

  Then there they are, two grown men all ready to play at being a train, and no voices shouting from the window like years ago. Just a little pool of silence, the rustle of something small in the nettles at the base of the wall. And there is Tutt Bevan, one hand on the wall, one hand on his stick, not really certain.

  ‘Nothing to it. Follow me.’

  They walk the length of the alley in silence, one behind the other. Factual in front, Tutt Bevan and his stick following, and they try to keep straight but have to skirt an old wire trolley, a rusted tricycle with no front wheel and a symposium of old beer cans.

  Then, they get to the bend, so they stop. Tutt sees that the gap through which he saw the hill is there because some of the houses in Mary Street have been pulled down. There is a space, like a row of lost teeth. The house straight ahead is buttressed, waiting for the fall. There is a gate, hanging, what was a back garden once, now planted with weeds, and broken bricks, and a few old rose bushes still straggling up through the mess.

  Tutt puts a hand on the gatepost. ‘We can still go to the left, a bit by there? Straight through the building site. Then back on track in Mary Street?’

  But Factual shakes his head, pointing at the buttressed house where the back door gapes and a dark kitchen does not welcome. ‘Here. We can go through the house.’ And the train continues on its rails, two abreast now, one man holding the elbow of the other as the train pushes aside the old roses and picks its way over the bricks, down the garden, down three broken steps to an old privvy with weeds growing round a seatless pan, the door nowhere to be seen. A cat, running low then up and over a wall. The coalbunker, its sliding door raised, nothing there but black. And through the gape of a door they go, into the creak of damp floorboards, the smell of piss and dust. Tutt goes to lean against the wall and there is the clang of metal, a kitchen tap suspended in the air on its pipe, brick pillars waiting to hold a kitchen sink stolen a long time back. A mess of twigs where a bird has made a nest on a high shelf over the dark brick scar of an old range while the ghosts of brass plates and candlesticks dance in the gloom.

  Then the deeper gloom of the middle room, the men whispering about staying in a straight line, as much as they can. The roll of a bottle kicked across the floor and a thud as it falls into the gap where the boards are ripped up for firewood. The smell of their burning still in the air, faint, and dark metal hooks on the picture rail, holding nothing. A damp cardboard box behind the door, papers stuck with mildew. Receipts, orders, bills, picked up by Factual Philips, held to what light there is drifting in through the window, ‘Look at this. Bullseyes. Toffees. Penny chews. A sweet shop . . .’

  And Tutt Bevan nods, ‘Daley’s, this is. Remember? Used to run through here, stole bullseyes from the boxes under the stairs. It smelled wonderful . . .’ and he is sniffing at the dust and the darkness, lifting his face now, shutting his eyes, and smiling, ‘Bullseyes, oh yes. And sherbet. Those toffees wrapped in paper and twists of cherry pips.’

  He moves his hand in the air – walks towards the door to the narrow hallway and sniffs the air again. ‘It’s stronger here. Look, liquorish. Spanish. The stuff that made our tongues black as the devil. Do they still . . . through here?’ Tutt stumbles over a loose floorboard, and Factual catches his elbow. ‘Steady, mun.’

  The two of them stand among the bricks in the front shop, and Tutt remembers what has gone. There are no white paper bags on a string for a quarter of mintoes ready for Morgan Ddu from number twenty-one. Or two ounces of sherbet, or a couple of silver-wrapped toffees to suck for Mrs Pym with no teeth at number eight. There are the white-grey patches on the floorboards in the corner, below the hook in the ceiling where a budgie’s cage once hung. And the holes in the plaster where the shop blind has been pulled off the wall. A front doorway and no front door.

  It is in remembering that the shop is remade, the shelves filled with glass jars reflecting the single bulb in the shop, the one in the hallway. That the mahogany counter is replaced at the height of a small boy’s eye, the weighing pans shiny and gold, on the base of one some chewing gum stuck by mistake. That his fingers move despite themselves, clutching at the memory of warm pennies ready to trade for a quarter of Spanish Catherine wheels or penny chews, fruit salad squares in striped paper, pink prawns and blackjacks.

  ‘Aniseed balls, Phil. Acid drops. Do you remember?’

  Factual nods, ‘I do indeed. And pear drops . . .’

  On the other side of Mary Street is the allotment, and it is easy to walk across, the two men, sheepish now, waving to the gardeners, who scratch their heads and wonder at these two walking out from a derelict house and right through the rows of onions and potatoes and where are they going and why not use the pavements? The soil is black, the weeds bright and hopeful.

  Then the ground falls away and the allotments end at a wall, a drop to the road. Tutt stands at the top of the wall, and shakes his head. ‘What does a train do here?’

  Factual shakes his head as well. ‘Jumped, back then, if I remember right. Straight down, dodged across into the park . . . nearly got hit by a bus once . . .’

  And the best they can do now is pick their way along the allotment wall to the steps, and down to the road that way, and back to the point below the wall, no pavement here, where they wait for the traffic, and in a space, there is Tutt Bevan tutting as the Librarian holds his elbow. And in this way they go across and through the gates of the park, and there is the
tarmac drive sloping away gently, and the hill right there in front still, so a straight line is easy, past the old trees that drop silver leaves in autumn, not red and brown. Past the twin benches of the Watkins sisters, spinsters both, and on down the drive across the park. Not noticing the boy, Laddy Merridew, sitting on Gwynneth Watkins with a late lunch sandwich, skipping school because it is mathematics this afternoon and mathematics hasn’t come to terms with Laddy Merridew yet. He is sitting there, hunched over, writing something in a notebook, new, the price written on the cover in biro. He looks up when he sees Tutt Bevan and Factual Philips, closes the notebook and stuffs it in his pocket. He half-raises a hand to say hello, but it is as though the two men do not even see him there, so he stays put and watches as they walk together over the grass, straight towards the kiddies’ playground and its new sign, For no person over the age of ten.

  Through the little gate they go, past the metal legs of the swings that lift themselves out of the tarmac as if they would like to walk away – and over there the see-saw plank shows its wood through the paint, the handles rubbed brass and blue.

  Straight in front is the old iron rocking horse, with room for a football team of lads on its back, its nostrils flaring, its eye dark and fixed. Tutt shakes his head, ‘Still here? Strange old thing,’ and he climbs on and sits behind its head, thinking. Factual Philips climbs on a way behind him, and sits thinking too, and before either of them know how it happens, the horse is moving slowly back and forth. Squeak squeak it goes, squeak squeak, its head straining forward, nostrils red as blood, or warpaint.

  And then to the see-saw, the two men climbing astride, the long legs of the Undertaker folding and stretching beneath him, the shorter legs of the Librarian finding the tarmac with a thump of his shoe, remembering how easy it is to stop the thing, and send your partner off balance, bumping the old plank in the air, both men clutching at the blue and brass handles to stop falling, laughing suddenly like schoolboys, and Tutt’s stick falling to the ground as if it has forgotten what it is there for at all.