‘Is that what you are?’
‘Not precisely, but I have my role.’
‘And what is that?’
‘I provide spiritual sustenance.’
‘With ice cream?’
‘That is the vehicle.’
‘But it’s just frozen milk, isn’t it?’
A hint of annoyance darkened his countenance. ‘You think milk isn’t important? Milk is the staff of life.’
‘I thought that was bread.’
‘The spiritual staff.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s the first food you ever taste, the essence of the bond between mother and infant. The bond before the great betrayal.’
‘What was the great betrayal?’
‘It’s what your mother did to you, and you never forgave her.’
‘I never even met mine. What did she do?’
Sospan paused and blinked, as if it was difficult even now to talk about it.
‘What did she do?’
‘Weaned you, didn’t she. Took away her breast.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘You never really get over the shock of that. Did you know in some cultures the mother puts wormwood on her nipple to make it taste nasty? It’s in
‘So how do you differ from the milkman?’
Sospan winced and a look of resignation stole across his face, as if the realisation was dawning that he had chosen the wrong person to try and express the ineffable to.
‘Mr Knight, I’m surprised at you. I can only assume you are trying to provoke me. That’s like asking how the wine the priest gives with the sacrament differs from the stuff you get in the pub. In one sense it may not differ at all, in the purely technical sense of its provenance. But it is invested with symbolic freight of the most far-reaching consequences for those who believe. For them it represents the blood of Christ.’
‘What does your ice represent?’
‘Balm.’
‘Balm?’
‘A mother’s love.’
‘So you are like the big mother figure?’
‘I prefer to regard my role as that of a shaman.’
‘What about the flake?’
‘What about it?’
‘What does that symbolise?’
‘Nothing, you big twit. Not everything has to mean something. You should read your Freud. You know what he said? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. It’s the same with the flake.’
I took my ice cream and wandered down the Prom towards the harbour. At Castle Point I found Eyeore standing across from the Old College, looking flustered. Three donkeys, led by Ariadne, waited patiently.
‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ I said.
‘Barbarians in the citadel,’ he said. ‘That’s what we are.’
‘Are we? How so?’
He held out the book he was carrying. A guidebook to Wales published in the 1920s. ‘Read this and it breaks your heart, to see how things used to be, and what we are now. It’s like those pictures of a peasant farmer in Egypt, ploughing his field with oxen, irrigating his field with water from the Nile. A timeless ritual unchanged for centuries, like African farmers everywhere, except for one thing: He’s got the Great Pyramid of Cheops at the bottom of his field. He doesn’t know how it got there, nor what it is. No one knows. It’s been there for hundreds of years, left by a vanished race of superior beings. He’s a barbarian in the citadel. Just like us.’
He pushed the book toward me, opened to a page. ‘You see? The Royal Pier Pavilion; in those days it was seven hundred feet long and had its own orchestra. What is it now? Thirty feet, the rest blown away by a storm and never replaced. And then there’s the bandstand, home to “first-rate municipal bands” and “excellent London companies”. It was an age in which they were not ashamed to do things properly.’
Eeyore looked at me, brows furrowed in a pain almost palpable as he struggled to articulate the urgent truth hidden among the seeming pleasantries about bathing machines, 6d a time.
‘At what point did we change from being the people who built the wonder of the pleasure pier to the ones who couldn’t be bothered to repair it after a storm blew the end away?’
He paused as if expecting an answer and then continued, ‘And look at this: “To get the best view of Snowdon eighty miles north of Aberystwyth, stand on the Prom outside house number 7.”’
He looked at me in astonishment, silent, unable to find the words to convey what that discovery meant. What did it mean? That a guidebook should actually put someone’s address and tell you to go and stand on their doorstep to view distant Snowdon? Such a thing was inconceivable now. They’d call the police. A hundred years ago they would probably have invited you in for tea. And lent you a telescope.
‘Barbarians in the citadel,’ he said again.
‘Where’s the pyramid?’
He turned and pointed across the road at the Old College. ‘There.’
It was a lovely building, but architecturally it was the equivalent of a kid in a fancy-dress costumier’s who tries on everything at the same time. It had Rhineland castle and gothic turrets, battlements and mosaics, statues and garrets. It would have been absurd but for the warm yellow stone from which it was constructed. It soothed the incongruity and lent it a strange beauty. You could forgive a lot of architectural sins with stone like that.
‘It didn’t use to be a college, it was built as a hotel by the railway company.’
I understood his astonishment. It was impossible to envisage a modern railway company possessing the self-belief to build something like that. Nowadays they just unbuilded things. The old Great Western Region terminus on Alexandra Road got smaller every time you went; like a family of impoverished aristocrats who had closed down all the rooms and were living in the scullery. One day the train from Shrewsbury will arrive and find nothing there.
‘You got a week’s free bed and board if you bought a return ticket at Euston. Nowadays they can’t even cut the grass between the tracks. You know what it is, don’t you?’ said Eeyore. ‘It’s like that movie with Charlton Heston about the apes. You know the scene at the end when he rides that horse along the beach and sees the torch of the Statue of Liberty projecting out of the sand? Suddenly he realises he’s been on Planet Earth all along, after it has been taken over by apes. That’s Aberystwyth.’
He shoved the book into my hands. ‘You keep it, it just annoys me.’ He tugged Ariadne’s halter free from the railing. ‘Barbarians in the citadel,’ he muttered and led the troop away, on the never-ending traverse of the ruined Prom; the Ozymandias of Cardigan Bay.
I cast my gaze back down at the pages of the book and found the text that had most upset him; words of almost inexpressible poignancy. Aberystwyth, it said, was superior to many fashionable continental watering holes in being entirely free of such meteorological nuisances as the mistral, the sirocco or dust storms. In fact, said Sir James Clark, the court physician, it was better than Switzerland.
The words stabbed the heart. Free from the effects of the sirocco, that hot dry desert wind that blows in off the Sahara and ruins your picnic. It was impossible to imagine a guidebook writer expressing such sentiments today; and there was only one reason the man fifty years ago could write them: it would never have occurred to him that his audience might laugh. And they for their part would never have dreamed of responding to his kindly homilies with such impertinence. And that was it, the essence of our malaise: our forefathers were entirely free of that despicable modern vice, facetiousness. I stood transfixed for a while, infected with Eeyore’s melancholy. He had reached the Pier now, or what was left of it after the storm forty years ago: a dilapidated shed bathed in thin grey drizzle, and Matterhorned with seagull droppings; but still undisturbed by those hot, dry Saharan winds.
