Make Room for the Jester

by Stead Jones

  That was Monday night. Straight after school every day that week I went to see him, but he hadn’t moved – just lay there as if some terrible drug was working on him. On Wednesday, Martha said that a specialist was going to be sent for. ‘Who’s going to pay for that?’ she asked. ‘It’s not right, is it? He’s always been queer.’

  Her attitude towards Gladstone changed as the days went by. She had stopped crying, and every time she spoke of him it was grudgingly, as if she resented his long sleep. ‘Just can’t keep up,’ she complained to me, and the dust everywhere, the ashes in the grate, the newspaper spread on the table, and the cigarette stumps proved how right she was. ‘Not been to work for a week,’ she said. ‘What’s going to happen to my babies, then?’ But she managed to get out to the Harp every night just the same.

  ‘You don’t want to be going round there so often,’ Meira said. ‘Might catch something…’

  ‘Sleep isn’t contagious,’ I said.

  ‘Contagious! Well – listen to the County School.’

  ‘My opinion,’ said Owen, ‘is that he isn’t right – never was.’

  ‘Tell me what right is,’ I said.

  ‘Well – like us.’ Owen laughed. ‘By damn, that’s not saying much, is it? Give me time and I’ll work it out for you.’ He made a move on the draughtsboard. ‘Don’t worry, Lew – it’ll clear itself.’

  Owen and Meira refused to fight with me, which was annoying in a way because by Thursday I was all set for an argument, and dreamed hopefully of catching one of the jokers of Porthmawr with Gladstone’s name on his lips.

  Polly said, ‘There was a case in Liverpool some years ago – exactly the same – only it was a girl…’

  ‘How could it be the same if it was a girl?’ I asked smartly, and Polly became dry and withering, and talked in her best legal manner of people who changed, of certain parties who altered.

  Then Rowland Williams caught me up on the street. ‘You passed me,’ he said. ‘Never even looked…’

  I said sorry, and that I had a lot on my mind. There was a week’s growth of black beard on his chin, and his eyes were bloodshot, but there was no smell of drink on him.

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘The mind’s the trouble.’ He looked down at his boots and added, ‘Thought you might not want to be seen talking to a comic character like me.’

  I said that was soft for a start, then I told him about Gladstone.

  ‘I know,’ he broke in. ‘I know.’ And he was wringing his hands, almost breaking up in front of me, I thought. ‘It’s what happens,’ he said. ‘You show yourself and…’ He had to lean against a wall for a moment. ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Been through worse and I’m all right.’ He gripped my arm tight. ‘Listen – know what the Nationalist Party’s done, don’t you? Burnt an aerodrome in Pwllheli to the ground! Know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Saw it in the paper, Mr Williams.’

  ‘But it isn’t enough,’ he went on, tightening his grip on my arm. ‘I’m with them, Lew – but they mustn’t stop there. They’re too late by a hundred years and more, but I’m with them…. It’s a great fire we want that’ll scorch away all the institutions of mediocrity – a great flame burning bright in the shabby dark, celebrating a dignity we have lost…. Oh, Lew bach, this bloody business between birth and death! We need a conflagration that will leave in its ashes a new birth, a fresh start…’

  This was Rowland Williams, once so sharp, so lucid – and I wasn’t following him at all. ‘Didn’t know you were a Nationalist, Mr Williams,’ I said.

  He came straight to attention. ‘Not talking about Nationalism,’ he snapped. ‘Burning is what I’m talking about. Can’t you understand? I’m talking about humanity, about being alive, about the cancer that’s eating away at head and heart…’ He turned on his heel and shuffled off up Lower Hill, muttering angrily. Had he been six feet tall and clean and handsome perhaps my mouth wouldn’t have shaped itself for a smile, perhaps I wouldn’t have said ‘Bloody hell!’ again and again as a substitute for laughing aloud.

  On Friday night I waited until I saw Martha go out before I went over to Gladstone. I was tired of her always expecting me to perform the miracle. Three times that day I had been in a fight because someone had asked after the ‘sleeping beauty’: I was in no mood to talk to anyone.

  Nothing had changed at Gladstone’s, except that the kitchen was dirtier still. The children were asleep, the silence in the house still holding traces of their cries. I removed a dirty blouse which Martha had thrown down on the rocking chair and sat down. Gladstone didn’t seem to have moved at all. His face was the same, still mask-like, but paler if anything. The rash had cleared, but that was the only change. I sat there a long time, frustration gnawing at me, trying without success to will him awake.

  Then, suddenly, the children awoke upstairs, shouting and protesting in a brief, sleepy quarrel. Automatically I looked up, and must have stayed liked that until the noise had died down. When I returned to my former position Gladstone’s eyes were open and his face was turned towards me, and he was smiling.

  I jumped up, as if stung, and went on wobbly legs to him. ‘Well, good God,’ I said. ‘Good God.’

  ‘What on earth were you looking at up there?’ he asked, and raised himself up on the pillow.

  ‘Lie down,’ I said. ‘Lie down – you’re weak. I’ll fetch the doctor.’

  His familiar laugh echoed in the kitchen. ‘A glass of water will do,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit parched. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Don’t talk,’ I called over my shoulder as I went to the tap in the yard. ‘Don’t strain yourself.’

  ‘I’ve had a good sleep,’ he said. ‘What day is today?’

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Drink this. Don’t talk.’

  ‘But I’m ready for talk now,’ he said, and he sat up on the sofa and drank all the water. ‘What day?’

  ‘Friday.’

  He whistled softly. ‘Monday to Friday! Still the same week, is it?’

  ‘Seems much longer,’ I said. ‘Get the doctor, shall I?’

  ‘Don’t need any quack at all,’ he replied. ‘Refreshed and ready, that’s me.’ He cast his eyes over the kitchen. ‘Things have got on top of me, haven’t they?’ he said in Martha’s voice. ‘Children all right, Lew?’

  ‘All right except that they’ve been upset. Lie down, now. Get your bearings first.’

  ‘Bearings?’ he said with a laugh. ‘Good God, Lew – that’s why I went to sleep!’ He flung back the blankets, swung his legs over the side of the sofa, and stood up: I moved nearer to him, certain he would fall, but there was no need. He stretched his arms upwards and sideways. ‘A bit of exercise, Lew. To restore circulation.’ He sat down again on the sofa and looked at his long, bony legs. ‘Know what? I’ll have to get a pair of pyjamas, Lew. Not right sleeping in your underclothes, is it? I’ll have to get a pair – black, with a golden dragon on the pocket.’ He winked at me. ‘Two things I want to do,’ he said in his actor’s voice, ‘two things ere my life is ended. The first is to play the piano in a nightclub, the second is to have a pair of black pyjamas with a golden dragon on the pocket. What say you?’

  ‘Make a cup of tea, shall I?’

  ‘Can’t play the piano, though,’ he went on. ‘Put the kettle on – and go and wake the children.’

  ‘Wake the children!’ He was out of his mind, surely? ‘They’ll bring the house down.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I think I’d like that. Very much. Go on, then. Kettle on first then up you go.’

  I stood, open-mouthed, in front of him. I couldn’t believe that he was serious, but he pointed upwards and said it was all right, and I found myself blundering up the stairs. It was dark on the landing, but although I was as noisy as an army there was no sound from the children’s room. I opened the door, and the thought struck me: what if, by the time I had them awake and down the stairs, he had settled down on the sofa again and gone to sleep? The ver
y idea threw me in a panic. I knocked the candle off its saucer and had to grope after it on hands and knees. Then, when it was finally alight, I was much too quick, much too rough. Walter first, then Mair, then Dora, were scratching and rubbing and crying like warm kittens newly disturbed. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘got a surprise for you in the kitchen.’ I went down ahead of them, anxious now for Gladstone, but he was awake, trousers and shirt on as well. The children stumbled down the stairs behind me, complaining and crying, but when they saw Gladstone and realised he was awake, they were on to him in a rush. It was worth seeing. I felt as if I’d done something fine.

  Ten minutes it took for the excitement to die down. Walter was really overcome and wet himself twice.

  ‘Bladder trouble,’ Dora told him, ‘that’s what you’ve got.’

  They crowded around him, and went off into ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, very serious and tune-pure, followed by ‘Dacw Mam yn Dwad’, flat out but a bit ragged. And all the time Gladstone was touching and examining them, as if he expected to find a snail behind an ear. ‘Look at their hair,’ he tutted. ‘Just look at that tidemark…’

  Walter broke off in the middle of a note. ‘Sleep well, did you?’ he asked.

  ‘Except when the linnets were singing,’ Gladstone replied. He was awake, a part of us once again. I kept on saying that to myself as item followed item in the concert. Back from the dead – my emotions were on free rein – old Gladstone back from the dead, the same as ever. But was he? Throughout Mars versus Wales by H. G. Wells I watched him carefully, and he was the same, surely? There seemed to be no change in voice or face as he recited ‘The Mermaid of Porthmawr’ and the terrible fate that befell her in the May Day procession 1933…. Yet, when he wasn’t saying or doing anything, just looking at the children, there was a difference – all the lines of an old sadness were there.

  At ten, Martha came in, three sheets to the wind and smelling like a brewery. At the sight of Gladstone she immediately fell to her knees and crawled the rest of the way to him. ‘Oh my God, my God,’ she cried in a strangled voice. ‘He’s back – never thought to see him no more in this life. Thought I was going to be left to struggle on alone with my babies….’ She knelt at his feet, her chin on his knee, and went on like that, tears coursing down her cheeks. Gladstone and the children stroked her hair and said there, there, and giggled and winked at one another, too. It wasn’t long before she was asleep, and in sleep looked strangely young and rather pretty. I helped Gladstone lift her up on the sofa. Dora removed her shoes, and they all settled her down for the night, as they would have done a baby.

  There followed the pantomime of getting the children back to bed – everyone whispering and walking tiptoe and eyes shining, mouths smiling, because Mam was snoring and Gladstone was back in the land of the living.

  When they were finally gone, Gladstone and I made tea and toasted bread, and talked. But all the talking was about what had happened, and I did most of it. There was nothing about why he had gone off like that. He seemed to regard it as a normal thing to do, almost as if he had deliberately set himself the task of sleeping from Monday to Friday.

  He came with me to the door. ‘Let’s walk the town,’ I suggested in fun. He shook his head and breathed in deeply. ‘Ever noticed the air of Lower Hill, Lew? One part salt, to one part mountain damp, to one part old lavatories.’ We laughed together and looked out at the darkened houses. Then, piercing sharp, came the curlew’s cry from the harbour somewhere. Gladstone shivered beside me. ‘Smelly and beautiful,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what it is all the time.’

  For a while I stayed with him, then said I’d see him in the morning. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘come over in the morning.’ Before I reached our door I looked back: he was still there, his giant’s shadow sprawled across the street.

  XX

  In the morning he was gone.

  ‘Stolen my babies,’ Martha wept. ‘Taken my little ones away…’

  The Super straddled a chair. ‘Tell me again, Mrs Davies,’ he ordered, ‘from the beginning.’ He glared at me from under bushy eyebrows. ‘Stand there, you – and get your ideas sorted out.’

  ‘He must’ve gone loony,’ Martha cried. Her face was blotched and swollen with weeping. ‘All that sleeping. He was always queer.’ She came for me suddenly and caught me by the shoulders. ‘You know all about it, Lew Morgan. Don’t tell lies – you do.’

  ‘Never told me anything,’ I said. I was struggling to free myself: she was yelling in my face and her breath smelled worse than the harbour at low tide. ‘I’m as shocked as you are.’

  ‘Oh, no you’re not. Nobody’s as shocked as me.’

  ‘We’ll come to Master Morgan in a minute,’ said the Super heavily. ‘Just you calm yourself, Mrs Davies. Calm down now. Tell me what happened last night, when you got home.’

  ‘He was awake,’ she cried. ‘The more I think of it, the more I can see he was pretending all the time.’ She rounded on the Super as if he was responsible for it all. ‘That boy never was sick, I bet you. I bet he woke up every night when I was out. Bet you anything he’d be prowling around here once I’d got to bed.’ Her whole body shuddered at the thought. ‘Noises I used to hear…’

  ‘Let’s get back to last night,’ said the Super. ‘He was awake…’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’ Martha yelled at me. ‘Weren’t you here? Wasn’t he awake?’

  ‘Half past eight or so,’ I said, ‘he woke up then.’ It was still early and I was straight from bed, still bewildered. And Gladstone, she said, had run away with the children – without giving me any hint. ‘He woke up and we had the children down…’

  ‘That’s a lie for a start,’ Martha cried. ‘They never were down, my babies. They were in bed – tucked up nice and snug in their little bed…’

  ‘They were here when you came in,’ I said. ‘Then you went to sleep on the sofa…’ I had to stop there because Martha went into a sobbing fit. The Super beckoned me over, pulled me closer to his chair.

  ‘Lew Morgan – you’re on oath…’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Going to tell me everything, aren’t you?’

  ‘Nothing to tell, sir. Don’t know anything.’

  The Super drew breath in, very sharp. ‘Look at that poor woman there. You going to let that poor woman suffer?’

  ‘No, sir, but I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Woke up this morning that poor woman did. Been to sleep on the sofa there. Woke up to an empty house. Your friend Gladstone woke up and gone. Her little children gone too. Think of that. Go on – think of it. Think how she feels.’

  ‘Awful,’ sobbed Martha. ‘I feel awful.’

  ‘And all she can remember is that he was awake last night – and you were here…’

  ‘I was here,’ I agreed, ‘but he never told me anything. Never a word.’

  ‘His best friend,’ said the Super. ‘Never told him anything – his best friend?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And you want me to believe that?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Never told me he was going, sir.’

  The Super got to his feet very slowly. Everything about him said menacing. ‘Lew Morgan,’ he began…

  ‘What’s all the fuss, then?’ I said hurriedly. ‘He’s probably only gone for a walk. Taken them for a walk.’

  ‘Clever,’ said the Super, allowing himself a brief laugh. ‘Gone for a walk, is that it? Gone for a walk and took with him all the children’s clothes.’

  Oh, my God, I thought. ‘To the laundry?’ I managed to whisper.

  ‘All their personal effects – in a suitcase…’

  ‘The only one we’ve got,’ Martha sobbed.

  ‘And,’ the Super concluded, drawing himself to his full height, ‘there’s money gone as well.’ He glowered down at me. ‘Gone for a walk, you say? Tell you what – let’s you and me go for a walk. To the police station.’

  ‘No breakfast,’ I protested weakly.

  ‘You’ll remember better
on an empty stomach,’ said the Super.

  I was there all morning. Shortly after ten, Dewi and Maxie joined me. The questions went on. ‘There’s a general alarm out,’ said the Super. ‘Kidnapping, that’s what they call it in the States…’

  Maxie rose to that one. ‘Fry them on the electric chair,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up,’ said the Super.

  ‘Seen them on the pictures…’

  ‘If you don’t shut up,’ said the Super, ‘I’ll be doing some frying myself.’

  ‘He was only making a comment,’ Dewi joined in.

  ‘And you shut up as well.’ Super Edwards by now was breathing heavily. ‘Lew Morgan, I’m going to ask you once more…’

  ‘Maybe he decided to go underground,’ Maxie put in.

  ‘What d’you mean,’ the Super said, ‘underground?’

  ‘Well – there was this human mole, see. He went under the ground all the time. Burrowed down. Like a mole, see. That’s why they called him the human mole…. He’d come up when he was ready. Catch everybody bending…’

  The Super let Maxie go through it all, even sent a couple of constables to have a look at the old quarry workings.

  ‘You know something, don’t you?’ he said in the nearest he could get to a whisper. ‘You’re in this, all of you – accessories before the fact….’ He was all things that morning: now pleading, now threatening, now reasonable. But we had nothing to tell. Perhaps he had begun to realise this when, at one, he sent us home for dinner. ‘Report back at two sharp,’ he roared. ‘I’m going to get to the bottom of this.’

  The interrogation continued over dinner, Meira all sentimental and sorry for Martha, but worried for me as well; Owen in one of his amused and cynical moods, yet anxious to know if I was hiding something. ‘Where would you go, then – if you was running away with three little children?’ That was the biggest question of all, I thought – until Meira asked ‘Why did he take the children, then?’