Last Tango in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘Calamity’s my partner.’

  He turned to look, his face creased with suspicion. ‘It’ll cost extra, another person and all that.’

  ‘No it won’t,’ I snapped. ‘Just stop moaning.’

  He made a half-hearted attempt to rise and leave but it convinced no one. ‘I don’t have to do this, you know.’

  ‘Who does? Just get on with it.’

  The train picked up speed and glided soundlessly through the wide watery silence. Condensation dripped in icy streams down the inside of the window and, outside, the world seemed to be taking a lie-in. The sun glimmered through the lemon mist above the estuary like a nightwatchman’s lantern. Patches of water in the peat glistened and looked as if they had been cut out of the sodden turf with a giant pastry cutter. To the west beyond the dunes the sea was silent. At times like this the sight of the estuary in all its beauty made the heart gasp and long to turn back, a last final coquettish trick from that old whore Aberystwyth. Like a lover who catches you with a packed bag, tiptoeing down the stairs before sunrise, and calls to you from the landing, looking like she used to all those years ago when you first met at the Borth Carnival dance.

  The rickety, tar-stained wooden bridge appeared out of the mist. We were approaching Dovey Junction, the great fork in the road for British Rail caravans. One route led north, hugging the rocky, castle-studded coast, the other went over the mountains to Shrewsbury. Bert pressed his face against the cold glass, straining his eyes to make out features in the soft misty world. ‘Never thought I’d finally do it,’ he said. ‘Never, thought I’d leave like this, never in a million years …’

  ‘Get used to it, pal,’ I said, already tired of his moping. ‘It’s Aberystwyth not Monte Carlo.’

  At Dovey Junction we all stepped out on to the deserted platform and faced each other in a huddled group.

  ‘You got the money?’

  I nodded. ‘You got the name?’

  He grimaced. ‘No I don’t have the name. I told you. All I got is the box-top.’

  ‘That’s an expensive box of chocolates. Twenty quid.’

  ‘If you didn’t like the deal you shouldn’t have got on the train. You want to go and find her yourself, be my guest. There are only about ten thousand girls like her.’

  I took out the four crumpled-up fivers and straightened them out. He pulled out a piece of cardboard from his bag. We exchanged them. The cardboard had once been the top of a fudge box. And on the front, as always, a girl at a spinning-wheel in Welsh national dress. We all looked at it.

  ‘I don’t go for that type, myself, mind. But there are plenty that do. The old professor couldn’t get over her. Always staring at her and begging me to give him the box. “Isn’t she a beauty?” he would say. Soon as he left I knew where he was heading. I’ve seen it before.’

  In the distance we heard the feeble lowing of the train from Machynlleth. The clown’s Johnny shuffled his bag over to the edge of the adjacent platform, ready to jump aboard and swing north over the bridge to a better life. He turned to face us.

  ‘Well, so long then.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  One lone, broken man against the huge clear backdrop of mountains and sky.

  We caught the train back to Borth and took the bus outside the station, down the arrow-straight road that bisects the golf course, towards Ynyslas. On Calamity’s lap was a bag from Peacocks containing the sort of coat that used to be popular with medieval Jews and that had now come back into fashion with druid assassins. Meirion said he thought it had something to do with the military. And in West Wales there is only one military. The Welsh Foreign Legion, famous or notorious depending on the way you looked at it, for the campaign to liberate the former Welsh colony of Patagonia in 1961.

  It was all more than a quarter of a century ago now, but for the army of broken ghosts that haunted the fields and lanes of West Wales the memory burned as fiercely as ever. Five minutes in a recruiting office above Boots was all it took to seal their fate – farm boys who’d never been further than Builth Wells rubbing shoulders with a rag-bag of foreign intellectuals, artists and soldiers of fortune. Five minutes to think of a nom de guerre that hadn’t already been taken and sign your cross on the dotted line and head off to the Welsh Vietnam. Sorry there’s no képi blanc – that famous white pillbox hat worn by the heroes of Beau Geste – but here’s a free knapsack of woe to carry for the rest of your life.

  For two miles the scene was the same, a long line of rolling dunes, unending and unchanging, fringed with tufted marram grass like a lion’s mane. The eternal dunes that were really nothing of the sort. Under the coat of scrubby grass the sands were shifting and moving even as we spoke. Come back in a year and if you had a photographic memory you would be shocked at how much everything had changed. Compared to the geological slowness with which mountains altered their shape, the dunes of Ynyslas shifted at high speed: bubbling and boiling like the cloudscapes in time-lapse photography, or like the rippling sinews of a well-fed lion.

  When we reached the end we got off and walked past the man in the kiosk on to the wide flat sands of the estuary. A few cars were parked here and there was an ice-cream van with no one to serve. We spotted Cadwaladr outlined against the sky like a Red Indian on the ridge of the dunes; behind him the houses of Aberdovey across the estuary glinted like milk teeth left on a blue-green pillow.

  Calamity and I fetched some ice creams from the van and then walked to the top of the dune. Cadwaladr raised an arm in greeting and we sat down on the sandy top.

  ‘You live up here all the time?’ I asked.

  ‘Until it gets too cold. Then I spend the winter being chased out of barns by angry farmers.’

  ‘Where do you sleep?’ said Calamity.

  ‘Just a bivvy bag. That’s all I need.’

  ‘But where do you keep your things?’

  ‘I haven’t got any.’

  The ice-cream man had smothered the ices in a home-made raspberry sauce that scented the wind with a pungent tang. Cadwaladr sniffed. ‘There’s a smell that takes me back,’ he said. ‘Wild raspberries. It’s the smell of spring in Patagonia. They used to grow everywhere.’ His eyes misted over. ‘Beautiful sight. At a time like that, even when you’re a skinny seventeen-year-old, you don’t half wonder about the point of travelling round the world to die in such a beautiful place.’

  ‘And then you come home and there’s not even a bed for you to sleep in.’

  ‘They promised us a land fit for heroes but when we got back from Patagonia the only work they’d give us was building all these horrible holiday camps and caravan parks. All we got was a land fit for Noddy. But how can a man forget what he has seen when surrounded by such tawdry things?’

  He looked at me with an urgency that suggested I might have the answer.

  ‘How can he forget? A lifetime is not enough time, but … but … a lifetime is all we are given.’

  Calamity slowly drew the coat out of the bag, taking care not to let the paper disturb the moment with a rustle.

  ‘You know,’ said Cadwaladr, still lost in thought, ‘sometimes, when you stick a blade into a man, you can feel it grating on the bone like a spade hitting the pavement when you shovel snow.’ He clenched his fists tightly and added, ‘Now when I look out over this beautiful estuary in November and see snow-clouds forming over Barmouth, my heart fills with winter.’

  There was a pause and Calamity looked at me. I nodded and she slowly unfolded the coat on the dunes, saying, ‘Have you ever seen something like this before?’

  Cadwaladr glanced at it and his face darkened. He made a clicking sound deep in his throat as if this coat confirmed all the bad things he had ever thought or suspected about the world. ‘Yes, I’ve seen one like it.’

  ‘We’re looking for a man who is being followed by someone wearing a coat like this. We were told it’s something to do with the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. Do you know what that is?’

  He didn’t answer immediat
ely and we waited patiently. Then he said, ‘I don’t know too much about it.’ His words sighed out of him more wistfully than the sand sifting in the wind. There was always an air of soft, otherworldly melancholy about Cadwaladr but today he seemed even more remote.

  ‘The people who know a lot can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why not,’ I asked. ‘Are they scared?’

  ‘Possibly. Terror can do that, so I’ve heard. But who knows? They can’t speak about it. They can’t speak about anything really, just like babies before they learn to say Dad.’

  ‘So what was the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment?’

  The old soldier took out a scrap of newspaper and a polythene bag filled with salvaged cigarette ends. I wondered where he got them from – ash-trays in buses, the cinema floor … or maybe the maternity waiting-room where the fathers sit and wait for news.

  ‘Officially it doesn’t exist. And never did. Which is strange because I know some men who volunteered for it. It was some sort of military psychological experiment. In Patagonia we called that sort of thing “Psyops”. It was based at the old sanatorium out at Ysbyty Ystwyth.’

  ‘The old sanatorium was bought by the Philanthropist,’ said Calamity. ‘He’s the new owner.’

  ‘Is he anything to do with this experiment?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cadwaladr. ‘Maybe not. I don’t know. All I know for sure is the guys who came back were not the same as the ones who went.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘They were just different. Quiet, and brooding, and when you looked into their eyes you saw a sort of emptiness – as if all the life had been sucked out of them and all that remained was a husk of a man … That druid chap from the clothes shop was one of them, what was his name?’

  ‘Valentine?’

  Cadwaladr nodded. ‘Yeah, him. They say he went cuckoo after it. And there was Waldo, of course. Poor Waldo.’

  For a second or two he said nothing more, staring beyond our little group to the infinite ocean.

  ‘Who was Waldo?’ asked Calamity.

  Cadwaladr pressed his eyes closed with a deep weariness of the soul. ‘Waldo was the saddest man ever to serve in that war. His road to Calvary began on Christmas Day when we organised a game of football in no-man’s-land with the enemy. Ah! What a day that was! I remember it as if it was yesterday. When the shelling stopped and the silence rang in our ears so loud it almost hurt. Meeting our enemies face to face and clasping them in the embrace of true brotherhood. The smell of sherry and cinnamon and mince pies, mingling with the wild heather, the fresh sharp tang of distant snow. The sweet strains of ‘Stille Nacht’ drifting across to us … And then the football. What a glorious kick-about it was. Four all after ninety minutes, both sides evenly matched, you couldn’t separate them. And then, alas, in injury time one of their guys dived in the box – typical South American player. The ref awarded a penalty and they scored and that was it. They’d won. We didn’t say anything, of course, because it was Christmas but a lot of guys were not happy about it. And the incident became the cancer that ate away at Waldo’s soul. Waldo was the goalie, you see.’

  Cadwaladr shuddered and violently lofted his cornet, jerking back his head like a penguin catching a fish. He crunched off the pointy base with the venom of a wolf cracking a thigh-bone with its chops, and then sucked greedily on the vanilla marrow. ‘One day I will tell you the rest of it,’ he said, the ice cream bubbling in his mouth like lava from a fissure on the ocean floor. ‘But not today, my heart is too full.’

  Chapter 10

  ONCE UPON A time you just went mad and gave everyone a good laugh. They created a special position for you – the village idiot. You didn’t mind too much because you were mad and being a buffoon was probably no worse than tilling the squire’s fields for a living. Later when the world got more enlightened they got rid of the job and called you a fool or an idiot or an imbecile. And it was still OK to laugh. They weren’t squeamish about where they put you either, or what they called it. Asylums for criminal lunatics, asylums for incurable lunatics, hospitals for the insane, pauper asylums, workhouses for lunatics … If you were rich you might end up in a chancery asylum, but it was still a madhouse. Then someone had the bright idea of charging for the privilege of laughing at you. It was quite a popular pastime for a while, even more than the zoo. By the outbreak of the Great War and the new age of science they had managed to discern four grades of madness: idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded people and moral defectives. And nowadays, of course, there are hospitals for the mentally ill, and no one is mad any more. Although when you walk down the streets of Aberystwyth on Saturday night you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

  After we left Cadwaladr we picked up the car and drove out to Ysbyty Ystwyth to take a look at the old sanatorium. You might have called the Georgian country house with its ivy-covered redbrick exterior handsome if you didn’t know the history. But there wasn’t anyone for miles around who didn’t. It’s a taint by association that a house can never shake off.

  It hadn’t always specialised in the insane. After 1918 the house was taken over by a charity set up to treat victims of shellshock. And after that, when that particular malady lost its fashionable appeal, even though the victims didn’t lose their shock, it became a sanatorium treating TB patients who couldn’t afford to go to Switzerland. Later still, in the fifties and sixties it reverted to treatment of the mentally ill, and especially the fashonable new cure for depression – electro-convulsive therapy. People living nearby claim the lights in their sitting-rooms used to flicker during a busy day.

  The grim, forbidding prospect instantly squashed the mood in the car. It was only a building, of course, just bricks and mortar and ivy and joists of dry wood and crumbling plaster. And yet it seemed impregnated like a sponge with all the woe that had been spilled there. The windows were dark and filled with an emptiness like the eye sockets in a skull. The deserted grounds seemed still alive with broken men from the trenches being wheeled around in bath chairs by nurses in funny uniforms. Cadwaladr’s especial distaste for the place was understandable: many of the soldiers from the Patagonian conflict had been brought here and left to rot. The perimeter was enclosed by a stone wall, green with ivy and lichen and topped by newly installed rolls of razor-wire. Signs were placed at evenly spaced intervals along the wall warning us of various dire things. Private. Keep Out. Guard-dog patrols. And one sign said chillingly: ‘Trespassers will be shot. By Order The Philanthropist’.

  I dropped Calamity off in town and spent the rest of the afternoon flashing the top of the fudge box round places where the girl might be recognised. There was nothing remarkable about the picture. A young girl sitting at a spinning-wheel in an old cottage. Dressed in a shawl, coarse woollen skirt and of course the stovepipe hat. The girl was pretty, they always were. Might even have been beautiful but you couldn’t tell with all the make-up. For a man whose only contact with female company was theology students she might have been attractive, bewitching even.

  The same pattern of polite boredom was repeated everywhere I went. One swift uninterested glance at the picture and then a shrug. Sure they’d seen girls like this before, hundreds of them, but they couldn’t say if they’d seen this one. They were ten a penny. No, make that a hundred. Stick around in Aberystwyth and you’ll see a busload every week. Simple unlettered farm girls from up beyond Talybont, playing the one half-decent card life had dealt them – their looks. Nothing spectacular, but good enough. Girls who dreamed of making it big as a model, maybe featuring in the ads for the tourist board or on the cover of the Cliff Railway brochure, but all they ever got were the knitting patterns and the fudge boxes. But of course you can’t make a living out of modelling fudge boxes no matter how frugal you are, but a pretty girl in a stovepipe hat can always make a bit extra on the side in the druid speakeasies down by the harbour.

  The men from the cheese yards were bent over the counter of Sospan’s even further than usual, huddling together for th
e collective warmth. As if the inside was a brazier and they were watchmen sick of watching. I dropped by and mentioned the Philanthropist, but even Sospan, for once, had little to say on the subject. Everyone agreed that only a foreigner would have bought the haunted house. But they couldn’t agree on where he came from. Some said he was a Texan and others a Saudi prince. All agreed he had made his money in oil. Or white slave trafficking. ‘I heard he’s got an idiot wife locked away there,’ said one man. ‘Who hasn’t?’ answered another, and someone else added, ‘He can have mine if he wants!’

  *

  I passed round the picture of the girl and again it was the same response. Why get upset about a particular one when you can get any number down at the harbour and they all look the same anyway don’t they? Once they’ve got the hat on and the make-up and the wig. Then someone wishing to be helpful suggested I try Spin Doctors on Chalybeate Street, and wishing to be polite I said I would. ‘You mind she doesn’t put a spell on you!’ someone shouted after me as I left.

  The shop smelled of must and dry cardboard. It could have been an ironmonger’s or a bike shop but the frames in the window and hanging from the ceiling had one wheel and four legs. A bell tinkled in the back as I walked in, ducking under the foliage of hanging spinning-wheels. In the centre of the shop there was a space cleared among the bric-à-brac and a wheel stood on a podium. Even knowing nothing about them I could see this one was special. The frame was a modern carbon fibre composite, fitted with a derailleur gear-change made by Shimano of Japan. There was a racing-style aluminium footgrip on the treadle, and an alloy hub on the wheel. An enamel logo on the main frame tube said ‘The Sleeping Beauty’.

  ‘She’s a beauty that one, sir!’

  I looked down and saw the old lady, no bigger than Mrs Pepperpot, four feet nothing perhaps, clad in the traditional witches’ livery of black: ebony puritan shoes with shiny buckles; charcoal stockings and black skirt, blouse, bodice, shawl and fingerless mittens; obsidian beads and studs in her ears and a sable knitting needle through a bun of hair now silver but that no doubt had once been black. She stroked the Sleeping Beauty lovingly. ‘Handcrafted titanium distaff. None of your injection-moulded tat. Last for ever this one will.’