the shrieking whistles of the engines in the sidings. I remember thinking that night, this is one of those times, one of those rare occasions . . . I don’t know how to put it . . . you know even as you experience them, you sort of know how special they are.’
‘I think I know what you mean.’
‘Even when they are happening, you know they’ll never come again. Do you get that?
‘I’ve had one or two.’
‘Yes. We all get one or two if we’re lucky. Doesn’t seem much, does it?’
‘Why did you steal his coat?’
‘I didn’t steal it, Mr Knight. When those secret agents came after me I told them the same thing, but they didn’t believe it. I borrowed his coat because it was raining, and the next day I took it round to his house to return it and that’s when I saw them bundling him into that car. I was so scared I didn’t know what to do so I sold the coat to Caleb Penpegws. I never looked in the pockets, I didn’t think. So I don’t know anything about this document they’re all asking about. And as for Hoffmann, I don’t know who he is, either. I sold it to that silly man and his stupid mouse.’
‘Caleb had a mouse? I thought it was Eifion, his buddy, who had the mouse?’
‘Oh no, Caleb was the one with the mouse. He’s still got one. You can see him every night at the Pier watching that laughing policeman machine. That’s what war does to you.’
I went out to fetch Joe Winckelmann and took him to meet the granddaughter of Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.
There was so much I had still to do, so much to undo, to set right, to fix; so many amends to make. Too much for any day, and today was the shortest day. I drove Joe back to his hotel and we arranged to meet later. I went round to Prospect Street. The light was still burning behind the curtain, and this time I rapped on the glass. The curtain was drawn back and Calamity stared out at me. It was one of those moments. The sort when you are not sure if there is any argument between you, even though you know things are not quite right. She closed the curtain and opened the front door. She invited me into her office.
‘Good to see you,’ she said.
‘And you. How’s it going?’
‘Oh, pretty good, you know. Slow, but pretty good. I think we’re making progress.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Yeah.’
I looked around the room. There was an incident board but nothing on it.
Calamity followed my gaze. ‘Actually,’ she said. ‘It’s crap. I’ve been a real dope. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No, I can’t stop. I have things to do. Lots of things. I’ve just come to say . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I need you to come back.’
Something flashed in the depths of her young eyes. ‘Need me back?’
‘Please.’
‘Well . . .’
‘Something’s cropped up.’
‘Really?’
‘I can’t explain now, I have things to do. But something’s cropped up and I need you. I’ll catch you later, OK?’
‘Sure.’
‘I just wanted to let you know, that’s all.’
Chapter 21
I WASN’T SURE WHAT I was going to say to Caleb, but something would occur to me. It generally did. Whatever it was, his first answers would be a pack of lies. People never told the truth these days, it was a point of principle. But that didn’t matter. I would find some way to bring truth to birth; I just didn’t know what. Something told me Tiresias might help me. Maybe I would have to hurt him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t even want to be here on the last Tuesday before Christmas, walking along a near-deserted Prom, in the drizzling rain, the grisly cold wet collar scraping my chin and channelling clammy drops of rain into the precious hoard of warmth beneath. I didn’t want to be here, but here I was, aware without looking, without the heart to look, that I was being watched by the old people in the front windows of the seaside hotels.
They were happy: in a room filled with warmth, stomachs full of too much lunch, and the faint tizzy feeling that comes from an afternoon of sherry. A real fire crackles in a real grate and Christmas decorations festoon a room that boasts a real Christmas tree in the corner. They’re happy because they are here; on the other side of the glass; they have the money to stay in a decent hotel where the people will go to the necessary effort to make it Christmassy. They know a lot of other people their age are sitting at home with nothing because they don’t have the heart any more to put up a Christmas tree; and its absence, even though they have decreed it with pointless Spartan austerity, rankles in their soul more than anything.
The old people, watching me through the windows of the seafront hotel, they know it will never be like it was all those years ago. How could it? Christmas is defined by the poignancy of loss. But all the same they are happy in the knowledge that it is still pretty good and the next salver of sherry is just a raised eyebrow away. Oh yes, I didn’t want to be here, walking along an empty Prom in the season when only the broken-hearted walk like this, but here I was, trying not to look, head bowed, ploughing into the icy rain.
A man put a hand on my arm. It was Eeyore.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Have a pint with your father.’
We went to the Marine Hotel and sat in the bay window. The room glistened with gold foil, paper chains and crackers, balloons, Santas, silver stars. It was awful, cheap, tacky kitsch . . . it was glorious. I loved it. There was an angel above our heads and I asked Eeyore if he believed in the story from Patagonia.
‘Angel of Mons,’ he said. ‘That’s what it was, the Angel of Mons.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s one of the great legends of the First World War. Mons is a place in Belgium, I think, or France or wherever it was all those poor blighters lost their lives. The story goes that an angel appeared to the troops on the eve of the battle there; an angel on a white horse, holding a flaming sword aloft.’
‘You mean you think it was the same angel?’
‘Of course not, son. Your dad’s not that daft. But it is possible, I think, to use the one to explain the other. You see, it’s a funny thing. Although the original story is a timeless myth, no one has ever been able to produce a soldier who claims to have seen the angel with his own eyes. Plenty of them knew someone who had been there but there was never a proper eye witness. In fact, the story seems to have originated not on the front but with a spiritualist in London, who claimed to have heard it from an officer on leave. Many people suspect this officer was involved in black propaganda. They made stories up, you see. There was one about a Canadian soldier crucified by German troops. And they planted a fake diary on a dead German soldier in which he described working in a factory that rendered the dead bodies of fallen soldiers for use as glycerine. You see what I’m saying? This Angel of Mons rumour appeared at a time when British fortunes were at a low ebb; morale on the home front was waning. There’d been a series of battlefield setbacks; poison gas and tanks had both been recently introduced. I reckon the story was concocted to boost morale.’
‘Trouble is, with the Patagonian angel there are people who claim to have seen her with their own eyes.’
‘That’s right, but just think of it. As a military man General Llanbadarn would have known the story of the Angel of Mons. Maybe he went one better. He wanted to send the men out on a dangerous mission; there were rumblings of mutiny. An angel might have been just what the doctor ordered. He knew, too, about the story in the local papers concerning the goatherd girl and her visions. Maybe it gave him the idea. Maybe he thought, why not
