by Stead Jones
‘Our Tada said we were no good,’ Maxie said.
‘He tried his best,’ Gladstone went on, ‘but he was out of his depth.’
‘Are we steering clear, then?’ I said.
Gladstone shook his head.
‘My Tada will kill me,’ Maxie said. ‘Got the belt last night.’
‘So did I,’ Dewi said. ‘My ass is red raw.’
‘I took him some food this morning,’ Gladstone said, then stopped suddenly as a big black car went slowly by. There was a woman in the front and she turned right round and pointed towards us and said something to the driver. The car drew into the kerb a little way down Station Road and the woman’s blonde head appeared through the window. She was smiling and waving at us. We were so startled we even had a look to see if there was anyone behind us. ‘Wants us,’ Gladstone said, and ran forward to the car.
Dewi held Maxie and me back. ‘That’s Marius Vaughan’s car,’ he said softly.
Gladstone had his head in at the window now, talking. Then he stepped back and the car moved off up Station Road. He watched it go all the way to the corner before he came back to us.
‘Marius Vaughan,’ he said a little breathlessly. ‘Said he hoped we hadn’t got into trouble because of last night.’ He laughed nervously. ‘He – he was very nice.’ He laughed again. ‘Said thanks very much!’
There were two red marks high on Gladstone’s cheeks. His eyes were shining.
IX
Polly spent nearly all of Sunday with the News of the World. She read it through a Woolworth’s magnifying glass, aloud to herself, very slowly, the paper flat on the table under the lamp. In this way she had become an expert on the great murderers. She knew them as well as she knew her neighbours – Thompson and Bywaters, Rouse, Norman Thorne, Buck Ruxton, Dr Crippen – and she spoke of them as if she had been with them before the killing, during the trial, in the condemned cell. ‘Such a high forehead he had,’ she used to say. ‘You’d never have dreamt there was murder in his heart.’ The poison and the pistol, the hacksaw going in the cellar at dead of night, the fire stoked up, the sodden packages surfacing in the canal – these were images she brought out before the spitting fire while the Captain slept and dreamt of the sea. But Polly was an expert on local dying, too – especially on the white bodies which sometimes came ashore on Porthmawr beach after a great storm. The wheeling seagulls near the water’s edge, seaweed and long hair, cold fingers on wet sand – pictures conjured out of the air for me…. All I had to do, I reckoned, was wait for the right time and work her round to the Vaughans.
‘The Vaughans?’ She folded the News of the World as if it was precious and returned the magnifying glass to the mantelpiece. ‘You and your Vaughans. Never hear anything else out of you. There’ll be trouble yet…’
‘I don’t know anything about them,’ I said. ‘That Marius Vaughan – I’d never seen him properly till last night.’
‘Oh? Come down, did he? Well, well – you want to have a look at Station Road some night. He’s always around there, they say. Has his lady friend living there. A very fancy lady friend, too…’
‘Yellow hair?’ I said.
‘Blonde,’ Polly replied, making it sound like a disease. ‘Eirlys Hampson she’s called now. Has a shop. Spoilt herself that girl has. Marius Vaughan won’t marry her. And after what he did to his wife, I shouldn’t think anyone in her right mind would want to take him on…’
‘Did his wife die, then?’
‘Divorce, dear.’ It was worse than murder, the way Polly said it. ‘She was a very refined person. English. Much too refined for the Vaughans. She divorced him – let’s see, in 1928, was it?’ Polly was very good on dates. ‘1928, that’s right. Oh, she was very tall and slim. Had her hair bobbed. Used to smoke in the street – that raised a few eyebrows, I can tell you. And she used to go with him to the Red Dragon and stand with him at the bar.’ Polly held her hand up as if there was a glass in it, her little finger raised. ‘This fancy one he has now does that, too – but she’s a local…’
She considered this intently for a moment. I was trying to think of something to spur her on but I couldn’t decide on anything. It was very difficult getting Polly settled down to a story.
‘Ashton and Marius Vaughan?’ she went on, and my spirits rose. ‘Oh, yes, I could tell you a lot about them. Marius is the eldest, then Ashton, then Jupiter. Did you ever hear such names for Welsh boys? Trying to be different, that’s all. They used to come to Capel Mawr in a carriage – tie the horse to the chapel rail. Aping the gentry. They liked to think they were gentry, but they weren’t. You can always tell gentry – they own land, for one thing. Not just houses, but land. The Vaughans were never in that class. Property’s not the same as land…’
‘Jupiter died,’ I prompted her gently.
Polly nodded sadly. ‘Too beautiful to live…’
‘I saw his picture,’ I said.
Polly’s eyebrows went up. ‘Oh? Ashton had it? Well – fancy.’ She glanced across at the Captain and touched his hand. The old man opened one eye. Polly, reassured, smiled. ‘They were away at school most of the time, but they were here for holidays, lording it over everybody. Oh, but they were rough – not Jupiter – the other two. No, not rough – vicious…’
‘What did they do?’ I asked.
She shrugged, bringing her shoulders up high. ‘Oh – they had everything. Guns, dogs, bikes – they ran wild, really now. And they talked like the English – you know, all ladida.’ Nothing vicious in that, I thought. ‘Both of them Welsh, mind, but it was English with them all the time.’ Polly always spoke English too, I thought. ‘And there was that bike they had…’
‘Motorbike?’ I asked hopefully.
‘A cycle, Lew. Used to fly along Market Street there, knocking people down. Oh – they were rough…’
Nothing to bite on there, I thought. ‘Jupiter was different, though, you said?’
‘Oh – different altogether. Quiet and smiling all the time, not bragging like the others. He had this look about him – as if he had the stars in his shoes. He was smaller, see. Not old enough to go to the war with them. A lot round here said the army would make men out of them, but they were worse afterwards. That one on the Point – lost his leg in Flanders fields, but he comes home just the same as ever. And Ashton – making the boys round here salute him…. Oh, I remember a fight there was…’ I moved to the edge of my seat. ‘Big Huw – you wouldn’t know him – been dead a good ten years. He was nearly seven feet tall, but when they buried him everyone said his coffin was no bigger than a child’s…’
I nearly came off the chair. ‘Did they kill him?’
‘TB,’ Polly said curtly.
I knew about TB. There were more cases than that in Porthmawr.
‘This Big Huw had been in the war, too,’ Polly went on. ‘Had shellshock. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?’
I nodded. There were men in Porthmawr who had shellshock, men who couldn’t stand still, men in wheelchairs.
‘That’s what made him terrible in drink, this Big Huw. Well – this night – down there at the old Fishers – they give him a lot of drink and pushes him into fighting the Vaughans. 1918, that was. The one on the Point there had just come home without his leg, and Ashton was on leave too…’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Well – the Vaughans come in, and by now Big Huw is like a raging tiger, crazy with drink. He goes up to Ashton Vaughan and he hits him clean through the door of the Fishers. Right out into the street…’
‘Dear God,’ I said.
‘Then he starts on Marius Vaughan.’
‘Only one leg.’
‘That’s right,’ Polly snapped, ‘one leg. But they say he had a bottle in his hand, and he threw it at Big Huw, and it catches him on the side of the head…’
‘Knocked him out?’
‘Oh, no. Never,’ Polly went on. ‘It wasn’t a human head, Big Huw’s. Someone said there was a metal plate in it.
All the bottle did was shock him, made him fall to his knees.’ Polly got up and went through the mime for me. ‘It was deathly quiet, the way I heard, then Marius Vaughan goes right up to Huw and hits him one fearful blow across the neck – here – and Huw fell with a crash in the spit and sawdust. Marius Vaughan looks around the room. “Any more of you local trash?” he asks. Not a man moved. Then he goes up to the barman and asks for a pint of beer. The men haven’t moved, standing there like statues. He takes the pint to the door, kicks it open and goes out to his brother lying there on the pavement. Then he pours the beer over his brother’s face. Some of the men said he even kicked him, even called him dirty names, never even helped him when he staggers to his feet. His own brother, Lew.’ Polly was back in her chair but looking beyond me now, seeing it all for herself. ‘Hard as granite, that Marius. His brother was just a no-good, but Marius was hard – is hard still. He didn’t have to have a drink to make him do the things he did. You can excuse a drunken man sometimes.’ Polly looked at me intently. ‘Lew – they’re not like us. That Eirlys Hampson has a husband, they say. If I were her I’d get back to him quick. She’ll never make a man of him.’ The intent look again. ‘You won’t understand this, Lew, but Marius Vaughan’s an appetite for women.’
I wanted to smile, but Polly’s face was dark and forbidding.
‘Immoral,’ she said harshly. ‘In everything….’
I sat there and blinked and said nothing. I was hoping that Polly might go into detail. After all, we knew all about it. Didn’t we sneak up on the couples locked together on the beach? Weren’t there enough French letters to be seen among the rubbish left by each tide? But Polly was very careful with me. No details. ‘Living in sin,’ was the nearest she ever came to it.
We sat in silence and watched the fire. Polly had switched off the electric, which, she said, ran away with the money.
‘The Vaughans,’ she sighed, and the coal in the grate sighed with her. ‘They had to be different. Their names tell you that. Marius and Ashton and Jupiter…’
‘Jupiter died,’ I prompted her.
‘A beautiful boy. Makes you wonder if he was from the same bed, that one.’ Polly had a look of high tragedy on her face now – her Lady Macbeth look – and I knew then that she was in the mood to tell me more. That was the look she had when she got going on the great murderers.
‘November, 1920. Just after Guy Fawkes. They’d set off for Traeth Hir, shooting.’ Traeth Hir was up the coast, beyond Graig Lwyd, five miles off – all marshland. You could be cut off by the tide there, easy as wink. ‘They always had guns, the Vaughans. Always dogs with them, too. Always shooting, as if there hadn’t been enough in the war. But they were trying to act the gentry, see…. The people up at the Hall in those days never accepted them, though.’ She gave a superior smile. ‘Anyway, they went that morning, the three of them. A grey, misty morning, clouds down, cold. Can you see them, Lew? The three of them in knickerbockers and big boots and hats on their heads, guns under their arms? A couple of dogs following on. Hard to their dogs even, they say. They disappear into the mists that lie heavy over Traeth Hir, and from a distance you can hear the explosions of their guns.’ Five miles away! I thought. ‘Then – about eleven o’clock, with the turn of the tide comes the rain. People say there’s never been such rain as fell in that hour – not in the whole history of Porthmawr, and God knows that’s saying plenty. It was like a second flood, and out of it, Lew, over Graig Lwyd there, come the Vaughans – two of them only, Lew, and one of them carrying the dead boy in his arms. They walked slow because of Marius’ leg, see – walked right through the town – did you know that? Right past the police station, right past everything, wet like some creatures of the sea. And this boy was there, lifeless, in Marius Vaughan’s arms, and there was blood everywhere. Edwards Llywn House – he was Chairman of the council then – saw them and ran out of his shop. He nearly fainted at the dreadful sight. Marius Vaughan, he said at the inquest, was bathed in his brother’s blood. “Man, what happened?” Edwards asked them. “My brother is dead,” Marius tells him. “An accident. I shot him. Get out of the way, old fool.” They marched on, the dogs howling at their heels. “The doctor,” Edwards cried. “Let the doctors see him.” Marius Vaughan keeps on walking. “Can the doctors resurrect the dead?” he asks over his shoulder. “Mr Evans Capel Mawr, then?” cries Edwards. Mr Evans was minister at the time. Marius Vaughan turns around. There’s a crowd on the street now. “To hell with Evans Capel Mawr,” he says. “The age of miracles is past!” Oh – it was shocking, shocking! Then the police come, but the Vaughans wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t even listen. “Come to the house, if you must,” Marius tells them, and they walk on in all that terrible rain, down past the harbour and along to the Point, Marius leading, Ashton behind him, and those dogs…. Someone said Ashton smelled of drink, but perhaps they were only saying that to make it sound worse. People in Porthmawr like doing that, you know.” Polly, hands tightly clasped in her lap, shook her head slowly from side to side. “What a day that was. A terrible crime had been done. We all felt that. They say the town never slept for a week. They say that seeing it caused Edwards Llywn House to have the stroke that killed him two hours after that inquest. The whole town was for going after Marius Vaughan, I heard – but of course that was just public house talk. Nothing was done. They buried Jupiter, and that was that.”’
‘Then he fought with Ashton?’ I said eagerly. ‘Killed his own brother, then they had this fight?’
‘It was an accident,’ Polly said sharply. ‘Everybody knew that. It was his attitude people didn’t like.’ She shivered. ‘Someone walking over my grave,’ she added.
‘They fought with knives, though,’ I insisted, feeling her drifting away from me.
‘A terrible family,’ she said. ‘Brother fighting brother…’
The performance was over, I knew, and Polly was spent with the telling of it.
‘Tell me why they fought, then,’ I said, but not very hopefully.
‘Always fighting…’
‘But why?’ I’d never had a brother. It didn’t make sense. ‘What happened, then?’
Polly didn’t answer. She had the absorbed, indrawn look which spelt the end. She had given a performance; now she had to go over it critically, like an actor when the play is over. I was a nuisance now. The audience had no right to be asking for more. But I stayed on with her for a while, just in case she might come to. Gladstone would have to hear this story before the night was out.
So I sat by the spitting fire and saw in it again that terrible, drowned, November day, and the two of them coming through the town, Marius carrying the dead boy, blood everywhere, Ashton following with the guns, and the dogs behind them, cowering and yelping like beasts out of a nightmare. It was very still there in Polly’s room, and I felt as if someone was walking over my grave, too.
X
August came and brought good weather, except for Bank Holiday Monday when it poured. The visitors were everywhere. Normally you heard a lot of English spoken in Porthmawr, but that first week in August seemed to be all English. We even gave up Welsh ourselves just to be in fashion.
Most of the time we were on the beach criticising the visitors as they wore themselves out chasing after beach balls and jumping about in the sea and eating ice cream and drinking lemonade. They were from the big factories and had money to burn. They were English, from a different world, sharp and cocky with high, strident voices, of a higher class than us altogether. So we sat around and felt sorry for them because they weren’t Welsh, because they were so pale, because their talk was so comic. Porthmawr in August made you realise what it was like being a native.
We had Ashton with us all the time. ‘My gang,’ he called us whenever he was able to get any words out. Most of the time he was a brimming barrel of drink and his speech was all over the place. But, sometimes, when he hit a sober patch, he tried to tell us stories about his adventures. They were so obviously untrue that even the childre
n gave up listening. In any case, halfway through, his words would get all tangled up, and what the rest of the story was about was anybody’s guess. I felt sorry for him in a way: he was all broken down, just skin and bone, as if corroded by some dreadful acid.
Gladstone watched over his every move, even going to the trouble of finishing some of his stories when his speech gave out, explaining afterwards that Ashton had told them to him in private. He carried and fetched for him more than any of us. He got the children to sing and recite for him. He made sure Ashton got home safely every night. With all the visitors about, and the town so busy, no one said a word to us, no one warned us off. The Rev A. H. Jones was away on holiday, anyway, and Super Edwards was too occupied arresting all the drunks from Birmingham. We didn’t mention Ashton’s visit to his brother’s yacht, and neither did Ashton himself. In fact he never said a word about his brother, one way or the other.
But, although Gladstone tried his best to make me like him, I kept on thinking about him lying there, stinking on that bed, saying ‘Nursie boy’. It wasn’t just that, though: it was sometimes a look, a gesture, the way his mouth twisted when he spoke to Gladstone. We had an English word that we had made Welsh to cover what I felt. The word was sbeitlyd, but it meant much more than spiteful: it meant cynical and mean and cruel, and somehow fraud. We were the only ones who bothered about Ashton Vaughan, but I felt that if he had a better offer from someone else we would very soon be given the push…. That’s how I felt about him, but what bothered me more was whether I was the only one of us who sensed this. I watched Gladstone’s face very carefully but could find no hint of it there. Often I caught him looking across the bay towards the Point, but he never said what he was thinking. As for Dewi and Maxie, I reckoned they took everything as it came: Ashton was one of our company because Gladstone ordered it so.
That was the week we went to Gwynfor Roberts’ house for tea. The way I felt about Ashton was the way I felt about Gwynfor Roberts, and Gwynfor Roberts’ mother, and Gwynfor Roberts’ father too. If Gwynfor, who was harmless as milk and sat with me in Form VA, had had any more family I’d have felt the same way about them as well. Gwynfor was all right, I suppose, but he wasn’t any one thing: not dull, not clever, not vulgar, not polite, not daring, not timid, not even dirty-minded. I was always forgetting what he looked like, but most days he came and sat next to me, and every time he met me I was asked up their big house on the Hill. I didn’t understand why, had never really tried to understand, but sometimes I went up to his house for tea, especially if his mother had issued the invitation. It wasn’t an invitation when Mrs Roberts asked, though: it was an order.
