‘But it’s not like you think.’
‘It never is,’ said Calamity. ‘Robbing an old guy like that of his pension.’
‘I wasn’t robbing him, he knows it doesn’t really go to the spirits. We have to do it this way, you see. That Mr Williams is a kind man, a very decent man.’
Calamity and I exchanged frowns. We hadn’t been expecting this.
‘Oh, what’s the point?’ sighed Madame Sosostris. ‘You’ve already made up your mind, you don’t care about the truth, you just want to send me to the Pen.’
‘Of course we care about the truth,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Just tell us how it was. We saw you taking that man’s money, but maybe we didn’t see right.’
‘Take your time, ma’am, and tell us in your own words,’ said Calamity.
Madame Sosostris paused as if summoning up the strength to go on. ‘He started coming to my sittings when his wife got sick. She wasn’t what you might call an easy woman, Mrs Williams. No, not easy at all. She was one of those women who liked to organise everything, you see, she liked everything “just so” and woe betide you if it wasn’t. She used to send him here to make the arrangements for when she went to heaven, so it would be just how she wanted.’ Madame Sosostris paused and grimaced slightly as if the next bit was hard to say. ‘I’ve never . . . I’ve never been a very attractive woman, I know that. But Mr Williams didn’t seem to mind. He would stay for tea and, with time, when the weather turned nice and summer was upon us, we would sometimes drink pop – dandelion and burdock and on occasion, why! we might even treat ourselves to a glass of shandy. Mr Williams would take the bottles back for a refund and give the pennies to me, saying it was a little something for the spirits. That’s how it started. It became our little joke. Oh! We would chat so gaily. I suppose it sounds absurd to big city people like you, but I’d never had conversations like that before, not with . . . with someone who liked me. This isn’t easy for me to say but I’m afraid our friendship led us to stray from the path of righteousness. There were consequences. A child. A little girl called Maddy. This was fifteen years ago, Aberaeron was different then – there was no way we could even think of keeping her. Mrs Williams was still alive, you see, and despite having made very elaborate provisions for her accession to heaven she didn’t show any great impatience to finish the job. So we decided to give Maddy to my sister in Gwent who would bring her up as her own.’ Madame Sosostris clenched the tablecloth in her fists. ‘I’ve never been very good with words, so I won’t even try and say how that felt, giving her up, the fruit of the only episode of happiness I had ever known. Such a harmless thing, happiness, and yet we always seem to end up being punished for enjoying it. Mr Williams never saw her after that. I mean he never met her, although I do suspect he goes away sometimes and watches her through his binoculars. He goes on birdwatching trips, you see. But for fifteen years now he has given me anything he can spare for her. This is his way. A little money slipped across the table to be passed on to the spirits. That way the gossips round here will be none the wiser and he goes home happy that his daughter will have the occasional treat.’ A shiny tear fell on to the tablecloth. ‘May the Lord have mercy on us both. We were weak, led astray by laughter and summer days filled with gaiety and shandy, in a life that had always been as dour as the cover of a Bible. Was it such a sin? Life is so hard sometimes, so hard . . . so . . . cruel.’
I pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to Madame Sosostris. She accepted it without looking at me, and squeaked in acknowledgement like a mouse.
‘I think the loo-tenant here might be thinking of making a cup of tea,’ I said.
Calamity stood up. ‘Sure, boss.’
‘Tell the maid,’ said Madame Sosostris. She dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry for making a scene, I . . . I don’t know what I would do if you sent me to prison. I don’t know how I would cope.’
‘No one’s going to send you to prison,’ I said softly, eaten up with shame. ‘It’s all been a terrible mistake. We were given wrong information. We’re truly sorry, I would like to ask you to forget this meeting ever took place.’
She looked up, eyes glistening, and squeezed my hand. ‘Please don’t worry about it. Policemen are human too.’
Calamity came back with the maid, who carried a tray. As she stirred her tea, Madame Sosostris said, ‘I don’t think that tape you played was made by anyone at a séance. The demonic laughter sounds a bit artificial to me; and that squealing in the background sounds like seagulls; and the other sound, the clattering one with the bell, it reminds me of a tram. If you ask me the recording was made in Aberystwyth, somewhere on the Prom.’
As the bus circled the village green before heading back to Aberystwyth Calamity turned to me and said, ‘That story about Mr Williams, I guess it had to be true?’
I looked at her and said nothing.
Chapter 12
Once upon a time a man called Caxton transformed mankind’s destiny for ever by forging letters out of iron. Later the iron was replaced by molten lead. Thus were born those epistemological coal tongs we call printed words, and with them our ability to catalogue the contents of that mansion of infinite floors, the human heart. Our thoughts and dreams, our memories, the anguish of love, our inexpressible bafflement at the antinomies of space and time . . . all that had once been unnameable intimations were brought within the scope of the coal tongs. In those sturdy iron squiggles, all could be written down and communicated, not only to the living but to people who had not yet been born, to people who might not be born for many centuries to come. But, as we know, a cruel and pitiless contingency characterises our fate. We are chaff in the wind and the cup of life which, sooner or later, all must drink to the lees, is often more bitter than gall. And so to prevent this brute and inescapable fact from casting its shadow upon our summer holidays, it was ordained that the epistemological coal tongs in Aberystwyth would be fashioned from sugar. And men would call it Rock. In scarlet crystalline sweetness thereafter would all human thought be extruded. Or, as a very clever person once said, ‘Whereof the rock cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
At least that’s what it says in the free guidebook. Calamity read it with a frown creasing her forehead as we waited in the queue.
Barnaby & Merlin’s rock foundry occupies the southern wing of the Old College on Aberystwyth Prom. It is built from warm yellow blocks of stone in an eclectic architectural mixture of Teutonic castle, monastery, schoolhouse and St Pancras station. On the tower at the end is a mosaic of Archimedes, the man credited with having worked out in the second century how many grains of sand there are in the universe. For his reward he stands immortalised in little coloured stones, looking out upon a beach on which there isn’t a single grain of sand, only grit and smooth pebbles. They say the mosaic is not opaque, it just appears so from the outside, and in reality it is translucent and behind it sits old Barnaby counting his money. That’s what they say.
There was a queue of around ten or twelve holidaymakers. We followed them, up the steps and into a neo-Gothic foyer: stone spiral staircases, pale sandstone banisters, arched windows and circular skylights with stained glass. The floor was laid out of shiny red tiles. An old stone griffin stood sentinel and the building hummed, a sound that seemed to come from all sides and also from nowhere. The same sensation is experienced by people in the engine room of ships. At Barnaby & Merlin work continued round the clock throughout the year; in winter the rock was stockpiled like hay. The pink smoke never stopped belching from the modest chimney.
‘I’ve been looking into the troll bride angle,’ said Calamity. ‘It seems that a number of girls have gone missing from the area around Abercuawg over the past century. The old folk reckon they were sent to the trolls. Usually they got rid of unpopular girls, slatterns who gave the village a bad name. That’s what they say.’
‘I see.’
‘Traditionally it was the Witchfinder who organised it.’
‘That’s in
teresting.’
Mr Williams, the man who conducted the tour, seemed neither surprised nor disappointed at the small turnout; indeed he seemed to consider it reasonable. The decline of an entire way of life could be read in his resignation. The world had forgotten about rock, they had forgotten why they needed to eat it, and that was not difficult because there was no reason. People ate it because it was one of those things you did at the seaside, one of the things everyone else did. It answered no great need. If all the seaside rock in the world disappeared tomorrow, the seaside holiday which itself had all but disappeared would not be greatly diminished. The same would be true if the donkey rides disappeared because sitting on a donkey is not particularly essential; and the same would be true of eating hot dogs, and bingo, and countless other things. The experience of the seaside holiday would not be diminished if any of them disappeared but if they all did there would be no seaside holiday.
Each of the slim pink alabaster-smooth rods of confectionery was made in strict accordance with a secret recipe invented by founder Ephraim Barnaby and his partner Merlin who didn’t exist. Ephraim Barnaby had been a man with an acute understanding of Victorian business practice and knew that you couldn’t get anywhere in those days without an ampersand. It was universally acknowledged that B&M rock was superior to all other seaside rocks and this was the result of a secret formula that was passed down from father to son on his twenty-first birthday in a sealed envelope.
When the time came, the elder Barnaby would take his son for breakfast at the Belle Vue Hotel. There, amid the shining silver and the crisp white linen spread on an alcove table commanding a kingly view of the Promenade and Cardigan Bay, they would dine on dry toast and tea without milk and the young son would intuit from this that the meal embodied a moral about those twin cheats, triumph and disaster. After breakfast they would take the Cliff Railway to the summit of Constitution Hill and spend the morning discussing matters of business. The culmination of this ritual would be the handing over of the envelope that contained the secret formula. There would be a pause on top of that hilltop with its dramatic vista of Cardigan Bay and the boy would then open the envelope and read its contents, having first given his father a solemn undertaking, sealed with a handshake, to strive to make his life worthy of the legacy being entrusted to him, and also to take pains to bring into the world a son into whose care he could entrust the same legacy in a similar scene on top of Constitution Hill in years to come.
The boy would read the letter containing the secret formula and return from the mountain, like other prophets before him, with an expression composed in equal parts of astonishment and fear. The torch had been passed on this way for five generations without mishap until the current one when young Gomer Barnaby lost his wits the same day that Gethsemane Walters went missing. After this, the elder Barnaby became a recluse in the turret of the rock foundry and devoted his declining years to caring for his broken son and focussing his energies on the betterment of mankind by developing a better type of placebo. It came to be known as Ampersandium and people swear by it.
Mr Williams hurried through the first three halls because he knew from experience that no one cared. We rushed through a warehouse and unloading bay where the main ingredients, sugar, water and pink colour, were unloaded. We passed a kitchen in which people wearing hats and masks supervised steaming saucepans the size of small swimming pools. Inside the pans, constantly stirred by automatic spoons, was the hot mixture. At some point that was not disclosed the secret formula would be added from a glass phial by Ephraim Barnaby V personally; and some time after that would come the peppermint flavour and the pink colour. Lesser brands of seaside rock use a variety of artificial colours but B&M’s was a traditional firm and only used one. This was a mildly interesting discovery: the scintillating red of the letters, the pink of the outside and the white middle were all products of the same sugary dough. It was beaten and pulled and slowly aerated, a bit like bread, and the more it got aerated the lighter it became. Pulled and pulled and pulled until finally it was white. Along the way, a scarlet lump would be broken off for the letters, and further on down the line the pink casing would be set aside.
No one was interested in any of this. There is only one part of the tour that people care about, the typographer’s room; and only one question dominates all thought: how do they do it? How do they put in the letters? In keeping with the air of profound mystery that surrounds the letters passing through the rock we expected something equally impressive in the room where the rite was enacted: an enchanted grotto filled with bright shiny cogs and wheels and levers and all manner of fantastic machinery, but there was nothing: just a long table and tubes of the red, pink and white sugar-dough. But most importantly there were men. No machine can put the letters in seaside rock. There were three typographers, and a superintendent who I could tell was the ex-con from the Slaughterhouse Mob.
How do they do it? What is the great secret that baffles all those who have ever bitten into or just sucked a stick of seaside rock? Jam sandwiches are the secret. This is the visual analogy which will unlock the puzzle.
Imagine you have a jam sandwich, a square sandwich rather than one that has been cut into triangles for arranging on a plate. Look at it end-on and you will see a layer of red in between two layers of white. Now imagine that the white is not bread but white rock, and the filling is not jam but red rock. There you have it: this is your building block. All the lettering is created out of these sandwiches.
All the letters are in upper case and in Helvetica, or at least a sans serif face. This is because it already takes twelve years to teach a man to write A B E R Y S T W Y T H and that time would be even longer if he had to learn to do lower case as well with all its extra curves and flourishes. On its own, without need of any embellishment, a jam sandwich gives you the letter ‘I’. Put another one on top and you have a ‘T’. Add two more branches to the tree and presto! You’ve got an ‘E’. Already after six sandwiches you have the word ‘TIE’. Add two more sandwiches and you have ‘TILE’. In between individual letters you put spacers of white, which are sandwiches with no filling. Slightly more difficult are the ones where the cross-beams are diagonal: A, W, Y, and these require a certain degree of jiggery-pokery with your sandwiches, but nothing insurmountable to an enquiring mind. And that brings you to the tough ones, the ones for which the rock master spends twelve long years learning the craft: the ones with curves. But the principle is the same. Consider the letter ‘S’. To make this, first imagine wrapping the jam-filled sandwich around a tube of white, like a Swiss roll. Looked at from the end you will have a circle of red. Now bisect the circle with a knife to form two half circles. Move one up and you find you have an ‘S’, and it takes little skill to see how this arrangement can be adapted to make a ‘D’ and a ‘B’. All that remains is the Cellophane and a specially blurred, washed-out photo of Aberystwyth.
The tour petered out in the gift shop and we were free to wander round. Calamity went back to the office. I followed the chief typographer out into the yard and sat on a bench next to him as he had a smoke. I took out a brown paper bag that contained tongue lubricant without which in Aberystwyth the engine of detection grinds quickly to a halt.
I said, ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’
He didn’t answer.
‘I guess you don’t get to see much of the summer, working inside all day.’
Still no answer.
‘Apparently this building was originally built by the railway company as a hotel, but no one came. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
Apparently it didn’t.
‘Is it hard getting the letters in?’
Finally he spoke, without turning to look at me. ‘Ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’
‘I just like to talk.’
‘No, you like to make other people talk, I know. Spotted you the moment you walked in, knew straight away you were either cop or snooper. Spotted the brown paper package too. Cops don’t come bearing
gifts.’
I let the top of the rum appear through the paper. ‘You mean this?’
‘That’s what I saw. You intend drinking it all alone?’
‘Would it be a bad idea?’
‘Drinking alone is the thin edge of the wedge, I generally advise against it.’
‘Know anyone round here who could help shoulder the burden?’
‘I’m not busy at the moment.’
I unscrewed the cap, took a drink from the bottle and handed it to him. He tried not to look too eager but his hand was shaking.
As he drank, I said, ‘I like a nice conversation when I drink.’
The typographer swallowed a third of the bottle in a series of glug-glug sounds. He let out a long gasp of satisfaction and held the bottle away from him and examined it as if he had never seen such a wonder before. He said, ‘I can get downright chatty when there’s liquor around.’
‘They tell me you used to be a member of the Slaughterhouse Mob.’
‘Yes, I was a bodyguard.’
‘Did you know Goldilocks?’
‘You could say he and I were acquainted.’
‘Story goes he escaped from prison while awaiting execution.’
‘I heard that story too.’
‘How did he manage to escape?’
‘By magic.’
‘Oh.’
He took another swig. I waited. He took another swig. It was one of those silences.
‘By magic, you say?’
‘Yup.’
‘Just like that.’
‘Yup.’
‘A mystery.’
‘Sort of.’
‘Care to throw any light on it?’
‘What sort of light?’
‘You know, the stuff made of photons.’
He nodded. ‘Oh that.’
I sighed.
‘Dewi Stardust,’ he said. ‘Conjuror to the mob. It was the Christmas party and he went to give the prisoners a little show. He was going to make someone disappear and needed a volunteer. Since Goldilocks was on death row he was the obvious choice. We all thought it was really funny. Dewi Stardust had a big animal cage on the stage and Goldilocks went inside; they shut the door. He threw a drape over the cage and waved his wand and stuff. Then there was a bang and a flash and that was quickly followed by the bark of a dog. He whipped off the drape and it seemed Goldilocks had been turned into a dog. Well, they all cheered and clapped thinking it was a pretty good trick.
From Aberystwyth with Love Page 12
