that showed one of those glistening plasma globes. I’ve stared at them in the shop window. Tender filaments of lightning dance and fork like animated trees, retracting and exploding softly against the Perspex like the spume crashing against the sea wall, or the violet tentacles of jellyfish shimmering in the sea. This vital dance, these concatenations, is what we are; it crushes the heart to think of how precarious it is, how frail. The dance only has to pause for a second and everything goes dark. Concatenations smeared on the sole of a shoe.
‘Call Mooncalf,’ I said. ‘Tell him we need two tickets to Hughesovka.’
Two days later I stood across his counter. He handed me a smart travel folder printed with a montage of old travel posters and suitcase stamps: The Grand Hotel, Luxor. The Eastern & Oriental, Penang. Raffles.
‘The route is straightforward: Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul, with a small detour to deliver this letter to my esteemed client Mr Vlad Tepes in Romania.’ He handed me an envelope marked simply Mr V. Tepes, Sighisoara. ‘You will take the local train from Brasov to Sighisoara where Mr Tepes, or someone representing him, will meet you at the station. You will stay for dinner and overnight as a guest and in the morning you will catch the train to Bucharest and continue with your journey to Hughesovka. At your destination you will be met by a member of the Welsh Underground who will make all necessary arrangements.’
‘They have a Welsh Underground?’ I asked.
‘It’s just a formal expression, nothing to worry about.’
‘Something in your voice tells me there will be plenty to worry about by the time we reach our journey’s end.’
‘You jump the gun, Mr Knight. Did I say there was nothing to worry about? In respect of your errand to Mr Tepes, there is nothing to worry about, but with regard to the journey on the whole there is plenty. Hughesovka is not a typical tourist destination. In fact, in the fifty years that Mooncalf Travel has been operating we have only ever sent one party of tourists there, the Talybont and Environs Ladies bowls team.’
‘And how did they enjoy themselves?’
‘I have no idea. They never came back and all efforts to inquire about their fate via the British Consulate in Kiev were rebuffed on grounds of State security. But I am sure you will not go wrong so long as you remember to observe the two cardinal rules of travellers to Hughesovka, to wit: never utter a syllable in disparagement of its revered founder John Hughes, whose tomb and mausoleum you must as a matter of unavoidable courtesy pay homage to at your earliest convenience; and, secondly, on your way to Hughesovka, beware of honey-traps.’ Mooncalf finished his sermon and looked at me enquiringly, as if there might be any part of it that was not clear.
‘Why would I need to beware of honey-traps?’
‘Because every traveller to the Ukraine does. It’s not a personal thing, it’s like telling someone not to drink the water or to take precautions with regard to mosquitoes.’
‘But what reason would they have to entrap me?’
‘They don’t need a reason, they do it as a matter of routine in order to compromise you at a future date should it prove necessary.’ He took out a small pamphlet and put it on to the desk. It was a cheaply printed A5 booklet bearing an image on the cover of a lady in silhouette unpeeling a stocking in a hotel bedroom together with a skull and crossbones warning symbol such as you get on bottles of poison in cartoons.
‘Everything you need to know is in here, familiarise yourself. The only other point to cover is the matter of your incognitos. I presume you would be happy to go as a spinning-wheel salesman?’
That night Calamity and I caught the midnight train to Shrewsbury.
Chapter 18
A light summer breeze blew across the rooftops of Montmartre, around the eaves and garrets from where candlelit artists mailed off ears to ungrateful lovers. It blew through the iron trelliswork and removed someone’s hat and sent it rolling along the platform to stop at my feet. It was a stovepipe hat. I bent down to pick it up and straightened up to look into the face of a pretty young girl of about seventeen with blonde ringlets and high Slavic cheekbones. She was wearing Welsh national dress. She smiled, took the hat with a ‘
With a few minutes to spare she arrived and we walked in the direction of the train. Lights began to flicker on and the braids of intertwisting track out beyond the platform’s end turned gold in the setting sun. The carriage was a deep lustrous midnight blue, imprinted in gilt with the world’s most romantic stencil: Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. At the carriage end, next to the door, there was a smaller removable enamel sign that said: Orient Express: Paris–Munich–Vienna–Budapest–Bucharest–Istanbul (with connections to the twice-weekly steam packet to Hughesovka). The last sentence was written in tiny print like the bottom line of an optician’s chart.
We climbed aboard and found the guard sitting in a little office next to the shower and WC. It was no more than a cubby hole with a small desk, a lamp giving off a yellow glow and suffused with a smell of Pernod. He examined our travel documents and his face lit up with pleasure or surprise, or some emotion that suggested few people ever ventured as far as this fabled Shangri-la. A faraway look glimmered in his Pernod-stained eyes as he said, ‘Hughesovka. Ah yes! There was a time . . . a time long ago . . . when I too might have . . . ah! But whatever became of those years? Kept in the same place as the snow from last winter, no?’ He handed the tickets back with a melancholic smile. ‘Light-fingered life steals the dreams from our pockets while we are busy watching the parade, is it not so?’
‘That’s exactly how it is.’
‘Compartment 4a, and 4b for Mademoiselle Calamity.
The door to my compartment was ajar, a man stood with his back to the door, peering into a mirror inset in the aged wood veneer of the compartment. He seemed to be taking his own pulse but once my eyes became accustomed to the light given off by the dim bulbs in blue-velvet, tasselled lampshades I saw that he was in fact adjusting his cufflink. Opened on a small shelf beneath the mirror was a gentleman’s travelling kit containing brushes, combs and manicure devices. From this he took out a set square and checked the precision with which his cuff was aligned to the central axis of his shirt. I coughed politely and he turned round and said, ‘If you are looking for Edgbaston he’s gone. Killed himself. Good riddance, too, he was a liar. He deserves no pity from the likes of us.’
‘I don’t know Mr Edgbaston.’
‘You’re looking at him now, or rather at the husk that once contained the impostor known as Edgbaston.’ He reached out a hand to shake. ‘Stanley. Stanley Edgbaston. I would give you one of my cards but I burned them all.’
‘Louie Knight.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I sell spinning wheels.’
‘I was in extruded aluminium. Hard to believe, isn’t it?’
‘What are you in now?’
‘Now? Now I inhabit a different world, one where a man scorns to have his soul bend to the crude arbitrage of such labels. The man who for thirty years submitted to that yoke is gone.’
‘Was he your brother?’
‘He was a Judas. He wore these clothes, he wore this face. For many years he drove a Vauxhall Cavalier with the same registration number as mine up the M69 every morning and ate my breakfast at the Heston Services. He slept with my wife every night and he dandled my little ones. But he is gone now and with him the falsehood he called a life. His wife and children beg for crusts, and his little one asks each morning, “Mummy, when is daddy coming back?” ’ He finished with the cuff, and grabbed the knot of his tie and rammed it into his Adam’s apple. ‘Spinning wheels you say? What sort?’
‘Oh you know, the usual: Sleeping Beauties, Cinderellas, full Saxons mostly and a few semi-automatics, nothing fancy.’
He nodded. ‘You’ll have to tell me about it.’
‘Most of my work is secret: for the government.’
