I phoned Waldo, and told him where I was.
‘What the bloody hell are you doing there?’
I explained as briefly as I could. I think he understood.
‘Come and join me for the last day,’ I begged him. ‘Get Paddy to drive your wagon back to the Blue Angel – surely he can stay sober for that long. I’d really like you to be with me. You’ve been with me all along, and you and Williams and Marek have made this possible. Have you learnt any more about the photo?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
‘No – it’s my turn to keep you guessing. I’ll tell you tomorrow.’
‘Aw, come on Waldo...’
‘It’s no use. I want to be with you anyway, to see your face when I tell you. I know the ending before you do. Or do I? It’s a nice feeling, my little friend, and I want to see you dance. Bye.’
And he was gone.
I looked at the celandines clustered in a yellow sheen around me in the grass and felt sorry for crushing some of them; they and the wood anemones are among my favourite flowers, for they herald the full glory of spring. The celandine seems brighter and fresher than its cousin the buttercup, which was once hung in bags around the necks of lunatics to cure them. But it would take more than a few buttercups to cure me of my own brand of madness.
The alfresco bed was a good idea. I slept like a baby that final night.
THE END OF A MISSION
I AWOKE with the dawn and lay there like a weasel, sniffing the air. A sea breeze ruffled me and a gust of mortality went right through me, coldly, and I felt, looking across the grey sea, that I had only a short time left; my ancestors were nearing me with their bronze vacuum cleaners, ready to suck me into their big bag of dusty history. As I lay there I heard someone dislodge pebbles on the shore. Once, I had lain waiting for death, for nights on end, and I had felt the force of death close to me, circling me slowly, waiting. I was not afraid of him; both of us waited for the other to make the first approach. Death, when I met him, was quite different to the death I had expected. He had appeared to me as a young man, very good-looking, sleek, well groomed, detached yet close, humorous, experienced, warm in a controlled way; death had behaved like one of those Italian-looking men you see in glossy magazines, sitting in a street café, smoking alone at a table, waiting for someone to charm. The smoke curls from their cigarette, slowly and beautifully, as they consider the finer points of art and philosophy; they are the ones who get the pretty girls because they never try.
I saw a figure appearing on my left, scrabbling along the shoreline scree, and it most certainly wasn’t death. It was Waldo, I recognised his girth and his Neanderthal lurch from afar. He had someone with him. I waved and hallooed. They saw me and changed direction, rattling the stones and sending a covey of ducks winging away from the capillary creeks. And who was that man with him?
Sweet Jesus! It was Martin!
‘Hello Waldo,’ I said, staggering to my feet.
‘Hello Martin,’ I said, and my trousers fell down. I had undone them in my sleeping bag because the dancing bear in my pocket was cutting into my leg.
I looked ridiculous.
‘Hello there,’ replied Martin, studying my alabaster limbs. ‘Don’t know how you got round Wales with them,’ he said, nodding at my legs. His own were brown and hairy and manly.
‘You were lost in thought there,’ said Waldo. ‘Anything interesting?’
‘I was thinking about death, actually.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Martin, still looking at my legs as I hiked up my trousers.
‘Martin’s going to join us for the last day,’ said Waldo with a subversive wink.
‘Oh,’ I said abashed – I suspected that Waldo had used his cunning and wiles to scupper Martin’s run for the finishing line. ‘Why’s that Martin? You’d have been there by now, nearly. Could have been the first to walk round Wales.’
I petered off rather lamely, because I felt like crying. I had so desperately wanted to be the first. There was no denying it.
‘Actually,’ said Waldo, sitting on a large boulder and rolling himself a cigarette, ‘Martin was fascinated by your story and he wants to be one of your guests at the Blue Angel.’
‘Why, you’re welcome Martin,’ I said. Secretly, I wondered how Waldo had pulled off this little coup.
‘Sort of walk in together, you mean,’ I quavered.
‘That’s fine with me,’ said Martin. ‘I’d love to be one of the twelve at your last supper. Waldo said it would be fine with you. He said I would make up the numbers, because you’re one short.’
‘That’s right,’ said Waldo, cutting in quickly. ‘It’s like this, isn’t it,’ he said, winking madly at me, ‘we’ve got eleven at the moment, and twelve would make it a nice round number. Now let me see.’ He stuffed his roll-up in his mouth and held his hands in front of him, to increase the dramatic effect, sticking his fingers in the air, one by one, as he spoke.
‘We’ve got three healers – that’s old Hotty with his gammy eye, Doctor Robert Jones with his big moustache, and Agnes Hunt with her crutch – seems to me the healers need more attention than the rest,’ he quipped.
‘Then we’ve got three walkers – let’s see now – there’s yourself,’ he said, pointing to me, ‘there’s Dic Aberdaron and there’s the minstrel, Roland.
Then there are three cripples – Edwin, Luther and Jack. That’s because Julius is dead (he looked up at me quickly and made a sign for me to shut up), Vogel and Esmie we can’t find, and Nosy Parker and his sister Angelica, well, unfortunately they’re unable to attend. Indisposed, as it were...
‘Now then, we need three helpers,’ he said, accentuating the word, though he seemed to be scrabbling about a bit here – ‘there’s me, if I’m allowed (big wink at me), Paddy can stand in for Anwen Marek our American ambassador, that’s if he can stand of course, and you Martin, I’d like you to stand in for our Tasmanian friend Dr Williams, who can’t make it because he’s too far away. That makes twelve. The Last Supper! Couldn’t be better. Sorted!’
Waldo’s voice crackled under the strain of his connivance, but it seemed as good a plan as any, so I joined in the conspiracy by pulling the dancing bear from my pocket and handing it to Martin, saying: ‘There, you can nail that into the doorframe of the Blue Angel when we arrive, to mark the end of our journey. Whadya think?’
‘That’s great,’ said Martin, who seemed genuinely grateful to be involved in all this nonsense.
‘Well that’s agreed then,’ said I, labouring the point as usual.
Waldo went into headmaster mode and got me going, stuffing my sleeping bag into my rucksack and tidying up whilst I splashed some water on my face in a nearby burn.
‘Time to go!’
We skirted the wide Foryd Bay in the early morning light, and I felt weightless, as though a pressure valve had been released steamily into the Foryd mists; we chatted and strolled pleasantly (sometimes one of us fell back a little to enjoy a private reverie, as walkers do). I thought of the great early actress Sarah Siddons walking through Wales with Ward’s Strolling Players, on just such a morning as this, her ears ringing with last night’s applause. A jenny wren darted across my path, chiding me angrily: and then my mind went to the Stephens Island wren, which had lived in peace for many millennia on a small green island off the coast of New Zealand. Without an enemy in the world, it had lost the ability to fly, which proved fatal: when a lighthouse was built on the island along came a lighthouse keeper, who took with him – for company – his cat Tibbles. The last Stephens Island wren disappeared down this (vastly experienced) feline gullet in 1894. Nature, red in tooth and claw...
As the rising sun warmed my body and flooded my soul, I caught up with the others to share my tale.
Waldo laughed and pointed at Fort Belan near the bay’s mouth, built by the super-rich Sir George Assheton-Smith so that he could play soldiers. His family had plundered the slate of the Vaynol Estate, all 33,000 ac
res of it, and had lived opulently in a mansion on the banks of the Menai Straits, waited on by fourteen unmarried servants. I remembered that the very same Sir George had been in contact with a character mentioned in the Vogel Papers – the super-strong Margaret daughter of Evans, builder of boats and wrestler of men, who had thrown Sir George from her boat into a lake when he had pretended to make advances to her, supercilious young parvenu. That was the way to deal with them. I was about to say something along the lines of ‘we’ve been milked long enough by those bloody leeches’ when I remembered that Martin was English, so I buttoned my lip and made fair conversation with him about the flora and fauna around us; he turned out to be a bit of an expert (he would, wouldn’t he?) and I mumbled ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as if I knew what he was talking about when he identified each flower and trotted out its Latin name like some bloody memory man let loose on me for the day. We spotted a little church in the field alongside us and we detoured to browse in its ancient curtilage. ‘These little churches in the middle of nowhere are the gems of Wales, aren’t they,’ said Martin, and I could see Waldo miming the words and mincing about behind him. I looked down at a gravestone and studied it as though it were my own, hot about the cheeks with embarrassment at Waldo’s antics.
I sat on the gravestone and picked my teeth with a long grass-stem.
‘That’s sweet vernal grass,’ said Martin. ‘It’s responsible for the smell of new mown hay. Used for bonnet-making once...’
Waldo stood behind him, on a grave, holding a pretend boulder above his head.
‘Waldo,’ I almost shouted, jumping from the gravestone and stumbling painfully against a slate tomb, ‘Waldo, did you get anywhere yesterday? Any news about the picture?’
Waldo did a mock stage entrance and produced a folded slip of paper from his pocket with an absurdly dramatic flourish. It was a letter.
‘Come on, you can read it whilst we’re walking,’ said Waldo, who offered to take Martin’s rucksack for a while (I think he was mocking me) and declared archly:
‘Of course, common cottongrass used to be made into candle-wicks and is excellent as a stuffing for pillows and mattresses.’ Waldo emphasised the word stuffing and looked back at me with an idiotic look.
I opened the letter, which had become torn along the folds. It was typewritten, and some of the letters were half red and half black because the ribbon was worn. It was from Agnes Hunt to Robert Jones:
Dear Robert,
I shall expect you on Sunday, as usual, to operate. We have a busy schedule, so please leave the dogs at home, since the Factotum is tired of cleaning after them!
I wonder if you might provide your services for a few moments on the children’s ward after completing your duties. One of the new girls, Esmie Falkirk, celebrates her birthday on the 29th of February, and since we do not have a leap year on our hands, I have devised a stratagem to give the child a treat on a date close to her birthday. I have arranged a celebration for the first of March, which is this Sunday, in the form of a fancy dress party for the children, as a special treat for Esmie. I have organised a number of competitions, and since Esmie is very bright, and clever with her hands, I am sure she will carry off most of the prizes. I would be most grateful if you could drop in at some point to present the children with their prizes and to help us sing Happy Birthday to the girl, who admires you greatly and holds your book on Thomas Pennant as a prized possession. Perhaps you will be able to spare a small prize to add to our haul – the little boy whom they all call Vogel is due to have his first op soon and I would like you to give him a little present, as per usual. Goody has a scheme which sounds very grandiose and I think it would benefit from your advice, since the travelling involved would be very hard on some of the younger ones.
Yours etc, Agnes Hunt.
‘I told you so,’ I called to Waldo as I struggled to catch up with them. I was breathless, and waved the letter at him. ‘Told you.’
‘OK clever clogs, you were right – it wasn’t Christmas in the photo. I suppose we might have guessed something from the vase of daffodils on the table in the background,’ he added dryly. And the presents at the end of Esmie’s bed were all the prizes she’d won. It was all very plain now. And the teddy bear, Rupert, mentioned in the Bo Peep letters: was he the present which young Vogel received from Dr Jones that day so long ago? I was beginning to think so. Was receiving the teddy bear – such a small present, really – so momentous an event in the boy’s life that it became the equivalent of a great treasure, equal to the fortune won by Mr Vogel in the Vogel Papers? My brain prodded this new information as I followed Waldo and Martin towards the open sea. Waldo was rambling in more ways than one: as we turned eastwards he was telling Martin about the vagaries of the Welsh language. The ever-brilliant Martin responded with a story about the Lokele people of the eastern Congo, who rely on tone to give different meanings to the same word or phrase. For instance, he said, liala meant rubbish dump, whilst liAla meant fiancée. Likewise, aSOolaMBA boili meant I’m watching the riverbank, whilst aSOoLAMBA boIli meant I’m boiling my mother-in-law.
‘Fascinating, absoLUTEly FAScinating,’ said Waldo with wafer-thin sarcasm. He turned to me and waved me on, urging me to catch up.
Caernarfon Castle, that magnificent badge of our subjection, loomed into view as we came alongside Abermenai Point.
Martin was ready with some more information; the bastard knew more about Wales than I did. Knew it like the back of his hand.
‘This used to be a ferry point,’ he confided in us. ‘Many years ago the ferry sank twice in a short period of time and on both occasions everyone was drowned except for one man – amazingly, it was the same man who survived both accidents. Kinda lucky, don’t you think?’
I felt left out, so I elbowed in with my ha’p’orth.
‘Ferrymen were cruel sods,’ I said, still out of breath – both of them were quicker than me, even though I’d walked a thousand miles. It really pissed me off. ‘Yes, some bloke, English I think, was told by the ferry blokes that he could walk over from the island, but of course he couldn’t, so they just waited for him to drown and then rowed out to strip his corpse. Think there was a court case.’
‘Scottish.’ Martin looked at me pityingly. ‘He was Scottish.’
Here Waldo pretended to be a bagpipe-player and did a silly walk over the little swing bridge that crosses the river Seiont. We were in Caernarfon.
‘Quick,’ whispered Waldo whilst Martin was in the toilets, ‘let’s get him out of here before he starts. Can’t stand the castle anyway, so let’s grab some grub and get him onto the other side. He’s doing my head in.’
‘What the hell was all that baloney about the last supper and twelve of us at the Blue Angel?’ I asked.
‘Had to bait the hook, or he’d be there by now. You deserve it. It means a lot to you. To the victor his spoils. It was only a little white lie anyway. You are having a party, after all. Paddy’s already there blowing up the balloons. Well, maybe not. He’s promised not to get legless before we arrive. Cheer up! It’s a great day for us! Why the long face?’
‘To tell you the truth Waldo, I’m not looking forward to it. You know what I’m like. There’s a black hole waiting for me the minute I step out of that place and go back to normality. I just can’t imagine how I’m going to come down slowly. It’s scary.’
‘Well think of something else then – do something else that’s daft and meaningless,’ said Waldo. ‘Fly round Wales, or sail round it, or follow all the river to their sources – endless possibilities. Huge! You’ve only just started!’
Fair play to Waldo, he’s a good mate.
‘And there’s more, we’re coming to the end of this little play of ours, aren’t we?’
He waved his arms around, pretending to be a ringmaster: ‘Take your seats please, ladies and gentlemen, for the greatest show on earth (trumpet impression)...’
Martin came out of the toilet and looked at him.
‘OK Martin?
’
‘OK’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘Positive?’
‘Absolutely bloody positive,’ said Martin. His face reddened.
‘I thought we’d get some rolls and eat out of town,’ said Waldo. ‘Caernarfon’s great and all that, but I’m just not in the mood for history. Stuffed with it. Could do with a good party.’
Martin was tensing up, I could tell. He was looking at us in a different way, and sat slightly apart, legs dangling over the wall as we rested on the quay. We watched the boats on the river, and a small crowd gathered as the bridge swung open for a party of fishermen. I could smell the gutted fish, and a few gulls harried the deck as the men eased into a berth.
‘Hey Martin,’ I said, ‘you can go ahead of me if you like. I don’t mind. It doesn’t mean anything to me.’ Liar.
‘No, it’s OK, we’ll go in together,’ he nearly whispered, ‘anyway, I’m going to carry on right round, hope to do Britain. Want to join me?’
‘Might do just that,’ I lied again.
‘You might get some more muscle in those chicken legs of yours if we do,’ he added.
We bought rolls and moved on, but then we made a curious error, because I missed the cycle track on my map and we headed out of town on the main road, which was a big, big mistake because it’s narrow and there’s no pavement, a real death trap, and we had to walk Indian file on a hostile stretch of road with drivers glaring at us. We were mighty glad to turn off on the B road to Port Dinorwic, and walk along the Straits again. By now it was steaming hot and we were beginning to tire – road walking is twice as hard because the surface has no give, and stress levels rise because you’re always on the lookout for loony drivers. We were all hot and bothered by the time we reached a little bird hide on the little-known National Trust reserve on the Vaynol Estate. We stopped to eat, and to rest. Walking around Wales hadn’t been a bowl of cherries throughout – trudging through industrialised Newport and Cardiff had been boring at times, and unsightly caravan parks had dampened my spirit along the west coast.