Aberystwyth Mon Amour

all when he got back.'

'Knew what?'

'Everything. Knew it all then, after he saw her. Knew the lot. She told him, y'see. Told him everything. Why shouldn't she? She didn't care. Bitch. When he got back he was pale as a ghost. Wouldn't sleep or eat or anything. Just walked up and down all night. I told him he'd wear out the hinge on his calliper, but the boy wouldn't listen. Said: Ma if something happens to me in school tomorrow, remember: I want to be buried next to Dad.'

I let her grab the rum and watched in pity as she sucked it down making a noise like water emptying from a bath. She paused for a second.

'Who was this person he met?'

'Gwenno.'

'Gwenno who?'

'Just Gwenno.'

There was another pause; Ma Brainbocs was panting like an athlete now.

I patted her gently on the shoulder. 'Mrs Brainbocs, are you saying this Gwenno told him something? Something Lovespoon didn't like?'

She looked at me, the fire in her eyes declining like an oil lamp being turned down for the night. 'Yes.' For a moment, her forlorn gaze held mine and then her head slumped forward on to her chest. The faint light of understanding had gone out. 'All gone,' she intoned monotonously once more, 'all gone.'

As I started to leave, the rocking began again, rhythmically in accompaniment to the forlorn mantra of a mother's woe: 'All gone, my boy, all gone.'

Chapter 8

DID NOEL FIND her? After the typhoon the family of Hermione Wilberforce was dragged dead from the sea by local fishermen but Hermione was not among them. A search was conducted and nothing was found. And that should have been the end of the matter. If she wasn't dead the pirates infesting the coast off Borneo would soon make her wish she was. But then the strange stories started filtering out of the jungle. Absurd, impossible tales of a white woman seen residing there. No one who knew anything about these things believed them. Not the authorities in Singapore; nor the Rajah in Sarawak. But Bartholomew did - that daft Sir Galahad who soldiered on against all advice, even after all his guides and bearers abandoned him. The journal for which the bishop's wife traded the brass kettles peters out, after six weeks alone, in a fevered, malarial scrawl. 'I have seen her' he wrote in the final week, riddled with sickness and unable to move. I have seen her, and after that the last words, 'faith is to believe what you do not yet see'. Was it just a hallucination brought on by the madness of fever? Of course. There can be no other explanation. The chances that the woman was even there in the jungle in the first place were incalculably small. The possibility that he managed to locate her was zero. There was no real surprise about his fate, no mystery at all. Except for one thing: he took a camera with him.

*

I drove slowly round the large expanse of lawn that fronted the Museum and blinked as the sun flashed off the plexiglass nose of the Lancaster. Acquired in 1961 from the famous 617 'Dambusters' squadron, it had stood on Victory Square since the end of hostilities, its majesty never dimming despite the passage of time. Somewhere beneath the waters of the Rio Caeriog lay her sister plane. I pulled over and switched off the engine and watched a party of school children pair off and climb up the ladder, through the entrance under the dorsal turret and into the fuselage. All through school they told us how the people left Wales in the nineteenth century to settle in Patagonia, but no one ever told us why. A shilling from the end of the Pier to start a new life in a land of milk and honey. What they found wasn't even a land of bread and jam, but a barren, desolate, ice-covered wilderness. I was too young to remember the war of independence, but like everybody else I was familiar with the Pathй news footage of the queues snaking down the street outside the recruitment offices. The initial euphoria. And then the disillusionment. The body bags and policy U-turns; the sobering discovery that the boys weren't the men in white hats as everybody had supposed. Weren't liberators at all. Opinion at home turned against the ill-advised military adventure, people changed their minds. But the troops — entrenched in a war from which it was now impossible to extricate them — were not allowed such a luxury. And then came the famous Rio Caeriog campaign; a turning point and famous victory, in the same way that Dunkirk was a victory.

I found the Museum curator, Rhiannon Jones, in the Combinations and Corsetry section which ran the length of the top floor of a building that was more interesting than the exhibits it housed. The Devil's Bridge Tin & Lead Steam Railway Co. had built it during the middle of the last century, a magnificent neo-Gothic pile filled with cherubs and gargoyles, turrets, archways and crenellations. The lingerie that now shimmered in the prismatic light from the stained glass windows was said to be the largest collection of its kind in Europe and when I was young they employed a man specially to chase away the schoolboys who tried to sneak in. A job that had now gone the same way as workhouses and beadles. Although deserted, it was a pleasant enough place to take a stroll on a summer's day. I wandered through the shafts of late-afternoon sun that streamed in tenderly caressing the exhibits and making the dust dance. The tea-cosy section was at the far end under the Great South Window overlooking the Square. It was not a famous collection — a few shabby pieces in ancient cases that gave not the slightest hint at the infamous goings on of the harbour-side tea-cosy shops. It was easy to see where the Mayan piece had been stolen from. A newly replaced pane of glass and a tea cosy-shaped discolouration on the background paper in the' display cabinet. A new card lay next to it bearing the fib: 'On temporary loan to the Leipziger Staatsgalerie.'

Rhiannon Jones walked over and stood next to me, admiring the cosies.

'Prynhawn da, Mr Knight!'

I turned and smiled. 'Prynhawn da, Mrs Jones, lovely day!' She put on an epiphanic expression. 'Oh isn't it!' I needed to pump her for information but first I had to negotiate my way graciously through the introductory pleasantries. Too much haste here and she might stonewall me later.

'Oh yes, turned out beautiful, it has,' I said. 'Let's hope it stays like this for July.'

The sun slid behind a cloud on Mrs Jones's brow as some long-forgotten trauma from her childhood rose to the surface. 'Ooh you wouldn't say that if you'd seen it in '32! Lovely June that was, then first day of July it rained and didn't stop until August Bank Holiday.' She shuddered. 'I still haven't got over it!' 'Still,' I said consolingly, 'we can't complain about today.' 'Oh no,' she smiled, 'it's turned out nice all right. But then . . .'

She paused and slowly lifted her index finger to the bridge of her nose in a gesture that the women of Aberystwyth absorb at their grandmother's knee. It was a gesture designed to add a courtroom emphasis to a certain caveat that was coming. Coming unavoidably, and with the predestined certainty of a piano falling on to the head of a cartoon cat. I watched mesmerised. Oh yes, it was indeed a lovely day, she conceded, her rib cage filling up with air. 'But!' She wagged her finger in front of my face. 'But .. . but then it was nice yesterday, too, chwarae teg!'

Her eyes sparkled with the fire of victory. It was nice yesterday too. Of course it was. Or was it? To be honest I couldn't remember, but it didn't really matter. We were dealing here with that linguistic get-out-of-jail-free card 'chwarae teg'. It translated as 'fair-play' and if you put one in your sentence there was nothing, no solecism, platitude or canyon-bridging leap of logic you couldn't get away with.

Having verbally checkmated me, Mrs Jones returned her attention to the tea cosies, becoming a model of magnanimity towards her vanquished foe.

'Oh yes, beauties these are,' she said. 'This set was knitted by the Sisters of Deiniol at the Hospice in '61. It was part of the war effort to buy the Lancaster.' She gave a slight nod towards the window that looked out on to Victory Square.

'It was because we didn't have any air cover, you see.' 'Must have taken a lot of knitting to buy a bomber.' 'Oh yes, but those Sisters of Deiniol are nothing if not disciplined. Ever so strict they are. You know Mrs Beynon from the lighthouse? They wouldn't let her work in the gift shop when her monthly courses were on her!'

*

The cream in the cakes was mashed up from margarine and sugar. The tables and chairs came from a school assembly hall. And the high, church-like ceiling was filled with an echoey din, softened by the fug of steam and accumulated minto-flavoured breath that resides in places like this even in the depths of summer. It was the Museum cafe. Red plastic tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser on the table. Polished tea urn on the counter along from the display where canoe-shaped doughnuts bore scars of fake jam. In the corner there was a one-armed bandit for which you had to change money into old pennies at the till.

Mrs Jones wiped her little finger along the rim of her prune-like mouth. Traces of cream still clung stubbornly