The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  And without a flicker of reaction he said, ‘No, not a thing.’

  I walked over to the car and fetched the Michelin guide to Welsh country houses from the glove compartment. I looked up Nanteos Mansion. The ghost appeared periodically in the Cranogwen Suite, accompanied by moans and the smell of burning. There was also the ghost-writing, comes stabuli – keeper of the stable. Since they hanged him you had to wonder why she bothered. Maybe she was just mean. I could never quite make up my mind about ghosts. Most of the time I didn’t believe in them but I found them harder not to believe in when alone late at night in rambling old houses with ivy on the wall where the wind banged doors shut in empty rooms. Maybe, maybe not. Of one thing I was certain: if you own a country house and want to run it as a hotel then a ghost is about as essential as a kitchen. As for the Grail, it was the genuine article. No doubt about it. Just like the fragments of the True Cross you used to be able to buy in the Middle Ages, and the clay God had used to fashion Adam from, and that little bag of bones from the donkey that Jesus rode on Palm Sunday. All 100 per cent genuine.

  There was no way I could take a case like this, but also no way I could turn down the money. I solved my dilemma by giving it to Calamity as her first solo case. She could use it to support her application for her detective’s badge. I dropped her off in the gravel forecourt of Nanteos and then drove to the nursing home to pick up Myfanwy and see which of her faces she would be wearing for our drive to Ynyslas. Usually it was the wooden one in which the features were carved and immobile, and in her eyes an uncomprehending stare. But on occasion whoever it was or used to be – or perhaps really just the shadow of whoever it was – would reappear in her eyes for a while, like a ghost in an upstairs window. On days like that Myfanwy could still smile and in the waters of her eyes something stirred from time to time, recognition or remembrance – like a fish flashing through a forest pool.

  The nurse who helped get her into the front seat finished adjusting the seat belt and then took out a little scent bottle and put a dab on Myfanwy’s wrists. It was the stuff they sold in the gift shop out at the Waifery, made from the bluebells in Danycoed Wood. She could have saved herself the effort. By that time I already knew: no ghost was going to appear at the upstairs window today.

  The absence of conversation hung heavily in the car as we drove and I turned on the radio. They were running a report of an escaped fugitive being sought by the police in the Aberystwyth area. He was a veteran of the old war in Patagonia and the public were warned not to approach him. That made me laugh. When was the last time anyone approached a Patagonian vet except to chase him off the land?

  We drove on to the wide flat sands of Ynyslas and pulled up alongside a party of day-trippers. They were sitting in an old black Morris Minor, the doors wide open and the interior exuding a smell of hot engine, pipe smoke and children’s vomit. It looked like they had just arrived and were still drinking the first cup of tea, the one that always tastes of the inside of a flask. Mum and Gran were sorting out the picnic. Dad was stretching his legs after the drive. Two kids were already squabbling. And Granddad sat in the front passenger seat wearing the beatific smile of one whose demands on life are so modest that a day driving for three hours in the company of his grandchildren to stare at the water for a while and drink tea was a source of joy. And one that would never lose its savour. The old man looked across as we arrived and raised his hand in greeting, just a simple movement of the hand, like the Queen, because he hailed from a world where not to have done so would have been impolite. And I returned the greeting because I didn’t want him to know that world had passed. And because he reminded me of my dad, Eeyore, sitting there amid the clamour as calm as a castle moat on a moonlit night. Another half an hour and he would probably loosen his tie.

  Myfanwy stared vacantly ahead across the estuary and beyond to the hills of Aberdovey. Away to the left were the dunes across which she had run once with such happiness and which now no longer possessed the power to enter the world into which she was slowly withdrawing. Somewhere from behind us, towards the entrance, came the tinkling xylophonic sound of an ice-cream van and I walked off to fetch two ices.

  When I returned with two cornets smothered with ripple the family of day-trippers was now struggling to raise that three-sided wind-breaker of stripy canvas that people from the Midlands find such comfort in. I reclined Myfanwy’s seat and mine and lay back to stare through the windshield at the grey cloud-filled sky. It was knobbled with the texture and colour of kneaded dough. Clouds too heavy and too low in the sky, inducing a heaviness like a hand pressing down on one’s forehead, the lugubrious weight muffling all sound. The wind came in a soft roar with too much heat as if emerging from the baker’s oven, and blew across the open door of the car as if over a giant mollusc. The warm hot air and the distant cries of children, combined with the diffuse brightness of the light, tugged down on my eyelids and even as I licked my ice cream I could feel the lids lowering as if the weight of the day were too heavy to sustain.

  When I awoke it must have been about three hours later. The sun was setting, still hidden by cloud but betrayed by the lengthening shadows. Granddad and family had packed up and left. My ice cream lay in my lap, melted and sticky. I had a thumping headache. A hint of bluebells hung on the air like a dying echo. And Myfanwy was gone.

  Chapter 2

  IT WAS WAY past their bedtime but Sister Cunégonde insisted on letting us have some waifs for the search. I stood and waited in a corridor. Feeble forty-watt light bulbs hung from the ceiling and were rendered insignificant by the moon outside. A row of doors led off with brass handles that rattled loosely in their sockets, like the hip joints of the mistresses who sat in the offices behind. Each door bore a name and a rank to indicate the degree of fear that should reside in the heart of whichever girl was sent to wait outside. At the end of the corridor, the assembly hall lay in darkness pierced by slabs of waxen moonlight. At the other end was another hall with a gallery where girls now ran to fetch gabardine macs and torches from bedside cabinets.

  The girls started to gather in the hall, dark shapes like crows on a telegraph line, whispering and bobbing in excitement until one of the sisters said the next one to talk would be sent back to bed. So then silence fell like a guillotine blade but lasted only a few brief seconds before irresistible whispering broke the surface again. Two girls were sent back to their dormitory. Then they formed into pairs and followed Sister Cunégonde out into the night with their torches, like a phalanx of cinema usherettes lifting the siege of a walled city.

  We passed through a door marked ‘Staff Only’ into a garden never normally visited by pupils, past shrubs that they could only appreciate through the window, and on through a door set in a high wall topped with vicious jags of broken glass. Beyond the wall, towards the edge of the estuary, lay the fifteenth-century ruins of the convent that the Sisters of Deiniol had once occupied. It threw shadows in the night like the broken teeth of a goblin. The chapel of rest was still in use and the candles inside threw a pale gleam that trembled like a reflection on the waters of a brook.

  From the car, Myfanwy could have turned right and walked in this direction and perhaps got lost in the salt marsh; or turned left towards the dunes. Or gone straight ahead into the waters of the Dovey estuary. After an hour of searching, one of the girls found a locket on the dunes engraved with the word ‘Myfanwy’.

  I returned to the caravan and brewed tea. Then I sat in the darkness and drank, waiting for dawn. All men, if they are honest, are scared of the dark. The arrival of light, even a glimmer under the edge of a door, lifts the spirit in a way that can’t be described, because it dates back to a time before language. Hope returns, night terrors evaporate. You smile at the childishness of it all, the demons who haunted your sleep. It was just a dream. But that morning I had a new companion. Dread. The light under the door was a passing car.

  I drove to town and parked by the harbour and walked down towards the elbow where the P
rom bent sharply and found Sospan already up and preparing his kiosk for the day. Word had already reached him about Myfanwy and when I asked which was best of all the many exotic flavours and combinations in his medicinal cabinet of ices he said in such a situation there was nothing better, no balm more soothing, than simple vanilla. And so, just like on any other day, I ordered a 99 with plenty of ripple.

  I offered him one but it was still too early; and, besides, he said, leaning forward out of the booth to be closer to me in my hour of need, he needed to keep a clear head to help get to the bottom of what had happened and erase this terrible stain on the honour of the ice man’s profession. His sharp mind had already intuited what the forensic scientists would later confirm: the search last night and the more thorough-going one planned for this morning were pointless. It was clear that the ripple in the ices yesterday had been tampered with and whoever did it, given that I was asleep for at least three hours, had all the time in the world to drive up alongside our car, transfer Myfanwy and drive off without arousing suspicion. The clue, said Sospan, was the gelati man.

  ‘You must try, Mr Knight, try and remember what he was like.’

  I shook my head. I couldn’t remember a thing. Whatever chemical had been added to the ripple to take Myfanwy away had also taken with it my memory.

  ‘Little details that are insignificant to you … you probably don’t think they are worth repeating but you never know …’

  ‘What’s there to say? He was just an ice man—’

  Sospan hissed indignantly. ‘I am surprised to hear you, of all people, utter a sentiment like that. Imagine if I had been mugged by the postman and you asked me to describe him and I said “Oh he was just a postman”, imagine the harsh words you would rightly reproach me with. That’s like saying it was just another Fabergé egg. On the surface, I grant you, gelati men may all look alike, but each van and vendor are distinctive. Each vendor has a thousand distinguishing characteristics that contribute to his own personal style. The van will reveal clues to the initiated eye as to who owns it, where he comes from and possibly his philosophy of life.’

  ‘I honestly can’t remember much, but you are welcome to come down to Ynyslas and have a look. The gelati van has gone but you might find something. A Stingray wrapper or something.’

  Sospan flinched and gulped as if a bluebottle had flown into his mouth and he had mistakenly swallowed it. A fugitive fear flickered in his eyes.

  ‘Oh … well … I couldn’t do that, Mr Knight, I … er … I’d love to, you know, but … but …’

  I turned away from his look of pain and stared at the Pier, pretending to find something unusually fascinating in it this morning, and affecting not to notice the grave sin I had just committed. I had just tried to seduce him to an act of heresy. I had asked him to leave his box. How could I have been so tactless? No one could remember having met Sospan outside his box. All our lives he had been but a disembodied upper torso, like Mr Punch, who flapped his arms about exaggeratedly in order to compensate for the guilty secret that maybe there was nothing else of him below the wooden stage that served as his counter. The kiosk represented the limits and essence of his world like the metal body of a Dalek. Tongue and grooved together from planks of wood and gloss-painted in blue and white, it was the carapace from which, if he ever emerged, it was like a hermit crab to scurry about when no one was looking.

  ‘You see,’ said Sospan, ‘every ice man has his own particular way of doing things, his own style. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is unique like a fingerprint or anything like that, but it can still help identify him. Take the ripple pattern for instance. Can you remember how he applied it?’

  I grimaced in frustration. ‘I don’t know! That’s like asking how someone puts salt on their chips.’

  A chill edge entered the tone of his voice. ‘That’s where you are wrong if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  I shrugged defiantly.

  ‘Some of the more common trademarks of an ice man’s style include the pattern of the ice-whorl, the handedness of the scoop action and the depth to which he buries the Flakes. Does he stick them up proud as a Priapus or does he sink them like the eye sockets of a snowman? Where does he get his cones from? Every one has the mark of where he bought it, like a gun. But it could have been filed off. Did he have insignia on his breast pocket? All these things you could have noticed and yet you tell me he was just another ice-cream vendor. And we haven’t even got to the ripple pattern.’ He pulled a thick reference work out from under the counter and opened it to the contents page.

  ‘Each pattern can be classified according to the broad characteristics and then subdivided into various phyla.’ He turned the book round and pushed it towards me and ran his finger along the contents page.

  ‘Was it spotted like measles, or blotched like Caesar’s toga? Splattered in the style known as “Chicago barbershop”? Or more like “MacDuff’s counterpane”? Did it perhaps resemble a starfish, or a fairy toadstool? A goblin’s hat, a vampire’s tooth or a school-girl’s nipple?’

  ‘Schoolgirl’s nipple,’ I said.

  Sospan smiled as if that were his favourite and then said, ‘I’ve just had a brilliant idea.’

  Today was the first official day of business in the new office and my feet hesitated for a second outside the old one but I forced them on up Canticle Street to take the unfamiliar left at the top into 22/1B Stryd-y-Popty. The street where the Poptys live, whatever they were. Judging by the windows, popty was Welsh for twitching net curtain. As with the old office, I entered through a door at the side and climbed up stairs coated in a carpet thinner than gossamer. There were two flats at the top – 1a and 1b. I hadn’t met the occupier of 1a but judging by the wine bottles in the bin outside it was probably a student. Or the Mayor.

  Inside, I found everything set up almost as it had been in the old place. My chair, the desk, the client’s chair, the picture of Noel Bartholomew on the wall. And there was one difference: along one blank windowless wall Calamity had pinned a vertical dividing line and on one side was her name and on the other was mine. There was a tea towel pinned to her side and an index card to mine. I peered to get a better look. The tea towel was a souvenir from Nanteos and bore the words comes stabuli in the authentic ghostly handwriting.

  ‘It’s the incident board,’ said Calamity. ‘It doesn’t mean we don’t work on each other’s cases or anything, it’s just to give us a handle on the bigger picture.’

  I walked over to read the card on my side. It said ‘Brainbocs’.

  ‘It’s the list of suspects for …’

  ‘Myfanwy.’

  ‘It’s the only name I could think of. You can take it down if you like.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. It’s the only name I can think of too.’

  She was sitting in the main chair, drinking tea and staring at something on the desk. She poured me a tea. I walked over and stood next to her, one hand resting on her shoulder. Laid out in front of her was a Cluedo set.

  ‘This is the stable boy,’ she explained pointing to one of the counters, ‘and this is Cranogwen. You have to pretend the board represents the first floor, so I’ve changed some of the room names.’

  I pointed to a daffodil in a milk bottle that looked out of place on the desk. ‘Is that the ivy he climbed up?’

  ‘It’s only symbolic.’

  ‘Where’s Professor Plum?’

  ‘I knew you’d say that.’

  ‘Are you sure this will help?’

  ‘Of course! All stately home murders conform to a similar paradigm. It’s archetypal, betokening a quintessentially human need to conform.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I read it in the instructions.’

  It didn’t require a lot of sleuthing to put the name of Dai Brainbocs down as a suspect. The man – or boy, it was hard to know – who had competed with me over the years and played ping-pong for her love. Brainbocs, the frail schoolboy genius with the withered leg, who
voluntarily stopped growing at the age of fourteen to channel his energy into his research. Once, more than a thousand years ago, Myfanwy sat in a caravan with me and described the scene when Brainbocs had removed his caliper to go down on one knee and propose. A lot of people in town said it was because of him that she got sick – because of his crazy attempt to win her heart with a love potion. Not something cooked up in a cauldron but in a test tube, based on rock solid scientific credentials and drawing on the latest neuro-physiological and neuropsychological research… Oxytocin and Phenylethylamine instead of the more traditional mandragora, henbane and eye of newt … She seemed all right at the time, but who could really say they understood these things?

  ‘Brainbocs is in Shrewsbury prison,’ said Calamity.

  ‘I know. I’ll talk to Meirion, the crime reporter on the Gazette.’

  ‘You got any other leads?’

  ‘I thought I’d take a look at the Journals of the Proceedings of the Myfanwy Society – see if any names spring out, people with an unhealthy interest – you know the sort of thing.’

  ‘Where you going to get them from?’

  ‘The library.’

  She smirked.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘You got a ticket?’

  ‘I thought I’d apply.’

  ‘You want me to come along?’

  ‘Not especially; what for?’

  ‘So I can pick your hat up for you when they throw you out.’

  The National Library of Wales has four million books on a variety of subjects but not much on DIY. For that you have to go to the town library. They say it’s the town with the highest ratio of books to people in the world. And the smallest ratio of townspeople who are allowed to read them. The problem was, in order to become a reader you needed to be vouched for by a respectable member of society and that tended to eliminate most people in Aberystwyth. They had a lot of books there, they just didn’t like to lend them out. In fact they refused to lend them out. That’s what always tripped you up. People who go there are known as readers. Ask for a lender’s ticket and instantly you are marked out as someone who runs his finger under the words.