35
The coastal route from Hestyn meanders past mudflats and inlets. In the distance, far out to sea, loom the Giant’s Teeth, a treacherous group of rocks where several vessels have come to grief in the past, among them two passenger ships, wrecked with terrible loss of life in 1798 and 1856. It’s said that the victims’ cries can still be heard at night.
Said by Lambert Stokes, anyway, and he probably made it up. Wilf leans back on the headrest to watch the sun fire up a sodden strip of cloud. He almost missed this train as well, and had to jog the last quarter-mile to the station, with Gwennie’s Full English swilling to every step. What a relief to be on board. He feels like an escaped convict. Free of Hestyn and its weirdoes, back on track, making plans, watching a wet day open out over a leaden sea. Another crook in the coast slips past, water pestering the cliff directly beneath the railway. The train rights itself and turns to take a steadier, inland course. Wilf picks up his pen again.
One brief diversion takes the train along the estuary bank to the elegant 19th-century span of Royal Bridge; then it’s back to the shoreline for the last 15 miles to our next destination: Beaumont Beach.
*
‘Jesus’ says Wilf. ‘If we call this place a Gem of the Coast we’ll be sued’.
‘That’s what you said about the last one’ says Paul. ‘And then it turned out to be full of surprises’.
‘Yes, and I never got to the bottom of them,’ Wilf admits. ‘There’s a lot more to Hestyn than meets the eye. If it wasn’t for this schedule …’
‘Yes, yes, I know, but everyone has deadlines, Wilf, and budgets, no matter how pressing the issue. For now, just give me what you can and get this bloody job done’.
‘Compared with this dump, Hestyn is seething with interest’.
‘Good, good, fine. Get a move on. And keep me posted, will you? I don’t want you disappearing on me, too.’
There’s an awkward silence. Wilf hears the echo of his own breath in the phone.
‘Wilf’, says Paul, ‘are you all right?’
‘Yes. I’m all right’.
‘She’ll turn up’ says Paul.
‘Yes, I know’.
They seldom mention Aggie’s name nowadays. They just add these footnotes to their conversations, marking the passage of time, keeping her alive.
Wilf continues along the seafront towards the pier. The front runs alongside the main coastal road, where traffic is light but constant. On one side of him a railing marks the boundary of the pavement, and a scraggy slope, more grit than sand, leads down to the pebble beach. As far as the eye can see the tideline is sketched out with cigarette packets, polystyrene boxes, condoms, plastic bags and beer cans. The other side of the road is lined with a sweep of high concrete pocked with windows. A slab of balcony is clamped to each one, smeared with dirt and weather, and swagged here and there with damp washing. An old man leans on his window on the third floor, chewing and watching Wilf’s progress like a cow at a gate.
Access to the pier is through a turnstile. There’s a ticket booth and a notice listing prices and concessions, but no sign that anyone’s paid or taken an entrance fee for many a month. A length of chain sags uselessly between the turnstile and the booth, and Wilf steps over it. A middle-aged couple stand at the far end of the pier. They turn and saunter towards him, and the wooden boards thunk and shudder in response. The far end isn’t very far at all: only about a hundred metres. The rest has been lopped off and replaced so many times during a century and more of gales and fires that the local council has conceded defeat and put a rail across its remaining stump. From here Wilf looks out at a tedium of ocean. He wonders why the Victorians were so keen to walk out into such a bland view. To his right, some half a mile away, the seafront bulges out in a vast, semicircular mess of buildings. This is the Lido and Casino, heralded in the 1930s as the British answer to Monte Carlo. Wilf looks down at the motion of sea between the slats. As a child he hated piers. He was an only child, a late child, and while his friends’ parents were arranging frantic sports and activities, Wilf was taken on genteel strolls through country parks and winter gardens and along promenades. He always resisted the piers, always begged to be allowed to visit the amusement arcades instead, where the appeal was as much protection from the waves as the trill and gush of machines.
‘The floor rocks’ he would whine. ‘I don’t feel safe.’
And his dad would say,
‘It’s lasted this long. It’s not going to fall apart under your weight’.
But they do fall apart, don’t they? thinks Wilf. Piers do fall, as this one has proved, time and time again. He reminds himself that he’s an adult now, too old to be spooked by a pier. But anyway there’s nothing much to see. He walks quickly back to the turnstile and heads for the Lido.
Not even a wilting chain hinders access to this part of town. Wilf passes between the fluted columns of the entrance, each topped with a startled-looking griffon. Forming an arch over his head, between the columns, are the last surviving letters: BEAU ON LID. They’re studded with metal rings which once held bulbs to light the evening sky with the promise of fun and flirtation. Beyond the entrance the pavement opens into a wide yard. A fog of colour marks the painted clowns, stars and sunbursts that decorated the floor, now trodden almost to oblivion. Low-rise rows of shuttered stalls line the outer edges. All are shut, but they look as if they’re still in business, at least in the high season. Big Joe’s Hoopla. The Pink and Powdery Candy Floss Stall. Funky-Funky Jewellery and Gifts. Maybe it’s not such a ghost town, when the sun comes out. Ahead is the vast curve of the Colosseum Casino. When this was lit up and busy it must have been an impressive sight. Wilf stands to admire its bulk. Long windows break the monotony of stone; most are covered with perforated metal blinds, but two or three are paneless and open to the elements. Wilf approaches one of them, checks for splinters of glass, then hoists himself over the sill and into the building. It’s a huge, circular space, cleared of all its contents, entirely bare except for the usual hem of litter. Pools of water glisten in the semi-darkness. The wheeze of the sea is blocked out altogether; the only sound is a ponderous drip-drip-drip, and the buzzing in Wilf’s own ear. Wilf paces out half the circumference, then pauses to look through another window onto the Lido itself: a stepped concrete crescent surrounding an empty swimming pool. Wilf reckons he can see a figure lying on one of the steps; he screws his eyes up and decides it’s a discarded coat. The pool basin is irreparably shattered into large slabs, which, judging by the crevices in between, are shifting apart like tectonic plates. Wilf lets the weight of his backpack pull him against the edge of the window cavity. He tries to think about guesthouses and hotels. No urgency there. Plenty of them on the stretch between railway and seafront, all equally disgusting. He tries to think of Aggie’s face, and fails. He remembers Martha Crick’s squint and Lambert Stokes’s walking stick and mad-professor hair, and he remembers the voices of Hissing Marsh. A sweet, sad warmth makes him put his hand to his cheek. He expects to see blood: there must be scratchings of glass left, after all. He’s surprised to find it’s a tear.
Back in town, Wilf has beans on toast in the Wild West Diner. A man and a woman are sitting three tables away, sharing the same high-backed bench, close but not touching. They’re not young: 40s, maybe. The woman is older than the man. Affair, thinks Wilf. He slaps a conclusive blob of HP sauce onto his beans and mixes it in. The woman sits upright, knees together at an angle: riding the bench sidesaddle. The man is relaxed, arms stretched along the back of the bench, so that if she sits back he’ll almost have an arm around her shoulders. (Old trick. Back of the Odeon, two decades ago. Penelope Carroll, just turned 16, black bra visible under her white school blouse.) Like Penelope Carroll, this woman doesn’t sit back. She’s talking quite animatedly, laughing now, but the man is impassive, watching but apparently taking no part. She taps his leg to emphasise a point. He still doesn’t react. Then Wilf realises she’s not talking to the man at all. She’s on the phone. There it is: a white wire dangling from the earpiece half-hidden under her dyed hair. How odd, thinks Wilf. Touching her companion as part of a conversation with someone else. How rude. The woman finishes her phone call and tilts to whisper to the man, who finally embraces her. Wilf washes down his lunch with cold tea. They start kissing, making slow fish mouths, pressing in and drawing back, in and back, in perfect coordination. Wilf consults his list of nearby sights. There’s an iron-age hillfort three miles (5km) away, marked walking trails, no entry fee. Somewhere in Beaumont Beach itself is the former home of someone called Basil Clemence. The name means nothing to Wilf but it seems he wrote a novel in the 1920s called Sleight of Hand, and set some of the action in this house. Rooms reconstructed with period furntiure and personal memorabilia. The man’s hand is slithering down the woman’s leg. Wilf gets up to pay the bill.
He books into the Horizon Hotel, on the seafront. It must have been quite a grand place in its day, and still gamely flies a row of flags above its portico: Britain, England, Wales, Scotland, Europe. They snap together in the breeze. A grubby red carpet spills over the front step and onto the pavement. The receptionist is young. She raises a smooth face to him and smiles without disturbing the flesh.
‘One night only, sir? Certainly. If you could pop your ID card into the slot, thank you! and just put your index finger over the scanner … Could I interest you in our honeymoon suite? We’re offering a half-price deal on our deluxe rooms…’
I bet you are, thinks Wilf, watching the red light wink at his finger. I bet you’d pay me to stay, if I held out. He shrugs.
‘Why not’.
‘Excellent choice. And if you could just pop your bag open for security purposes…’
She trawls through his underwear and T-shirts with a show of delicacy and Wilf glances round the lobby. Dark wood, leather chairs, low tables necklaced with circular stains. Men’s laughter drifts from elsewhere.
‘Can I reserve a table for dinner, please?’
‘Certainly, sir. I’m sure we’ll fit you in’.
The honeymoon suite is actually one room, divided into two levels, plus a small bathroom. There’s a window seat, a small dressing table, a couch with heart-shaped cushions and a rip in one seat. The telly hovers on a metal arm. Set on the upper level, on a kind of stage, is a four-poster bed, closed off with curtains. Wilf hestitates before pulling them back. The material is heavy and leaves a faint residue on his hand. A round face with a rictus grin looks back at him from the tasselled pillow. Wilf staggers back and nearly turns his ankle on the edge of the platform. It’s a rag doll, in a frill frock, with an outsized head and frozen eyes. Wilf shuts the curtain again and the brocaded pelmet shivers above his head. He inspects the ensuite bathroom and is relieved to find it modern and well equipped. Shiny tiles, hairdryer, minuscule tubes of shampoo and gels, polythene-sealed plastic cup. The Horizon must have splashed out on a bit of a revamp. He returns to the main room, passing his backpack, forlorn in the centre of the floor, and going to sit in the bow window. He watches a boy walking his dog along the front, then leans forward to see the pier and Lido on the right. He’ll struggle to get any text out of Beaumont Beach. It’s not really worth the price of the room. He takes off his trainers and raises his feet onto the seat. He rests his forehead on the window as it receives the first stammering of rain. Best wait a while, then, and investigate Sleight-of-Hand House when the weather’s cleared.
A thud in the room above wakes him up. It’s raining hard now, and vertically, hardly marking the window at all. Wilf peels his right temple from the glass, leaving a greasy patch. He looks at his watch. Damn. Another hour wasted. He’ll have to revise his schedule yet again. Aggie would give him hell.
The rain lasts all afternoon and Wilf decides to do Beaumont Beach tomorrow morning, before catching the train. He can give the iron-age hillfort a miss. There’ll be plenty of tourist info bumf to copy. Instead he orders a pot of tea and spends two hours keying in his Hestyn notes, at a desk in a corner of the musty second-floor landing. The lift gives an occasional bronchial cough through the wall, and there are gusts of corporate breeziness from below as the receptionist answers the phone or greets a colleague, but otherwise it’s quiet. At six o’ clock he goes back to watch the news in his room. Another burst of conflict overseas. A politician announcing a clampdown on benefits cheats, with earnest indignation. A feature on obesity. A piece on some student who’d gone missing and turned up in a drugs den. ‘He doesn’t really understand what’s going on’ says his tearful mother, ‘but we’re just so grateful to have him back home’. A royal launching a charity for homeless addicts. Wilf takes a bath, puts the same clothes back on, and goes down to dinner.
A youth too small for his uniform consults a table plan before seating Wilf in the cavernous and mainly empty dining room. Most tables are laid with white cloths and condiments, ready for breakfast. About half a dozen are primed with cutlery and glasses. One large man is tucking into a meal at the opposite end of the room. The waiter guides Wilf’s seat under him and hands him a tall menu board pasted with an A5 typed menu. Wilf orders cod in parsley sauce with new potatoes and a selection of veg. The meal is set before him with a conjurer’s flourish. The sauce is congealed, the potatoes are hard and the veg is an overcooked sludge in a kidney-shaped metal dish. Despite wolfing the lot, Wilf thinks wistfully of the food being served to Martha Crick right now. Aggie would tell him he’s spoilt, but then even Aggie is no more than a mediocre cook compared with Gwennie Price.
He spends the rest of the evening watching football on the telly. At about 10 o’ clock he’s hungry again. He phones room service, and after an infinity of ringing manages to hook a bewildered member of staff and persuade him to rustle up a sandwich. It arrives bordered with damp crisps and a splat of coleslaw. Wilf eats it all, then polishes off the complimentary bourbons and custard creams on the tea-and-coffee-making-facility tray. His brief stay at Hestyn seems to have doubled his stomach.
36
The rain has moved on from Hestyn, travelling up the coast after Wilf, and leaving a clear, cool, moonlit night. Lambert was grateful for his hooded raincoat, nevertheless, as the rhododendron bushes flung water at his back along the lane. Now he stands at the window of the tower’s first room, absorbing the colourless light. Every detail is precisely drawn. The lettering on the sill. Blades of grass. Every vein on every leaf in the silver woodland. All etched out, fine and sharp.
Lambert waits.
While he waits, he plans. The moonlight has cleared his mind, as well, and he plots his next steps, anticipates obstacles and finds solutions with satisfying ease. Then the clouds move. The tower, the woods and Lambert’s plans are blotted out. Deep within him, deep within the earth, a disturbance: not a sound, not a feeling, but a change, in time, in space, in the marrow of his bones.
Here it is.
Lambert shuts his eyes and his fists. After so many years of this, in so many settings, he’s still afraid—a profound, atavistic fear that makes him want to scream and run.
His eyes open.
The clouds have passed. The room, the carved words, the leaves on the trees have reappeared, icy and still. He’s not alone. Lambert’s breath quickens. An insect-touch at the base of his skull. A cobweb-soft movement, reflected in the glass.
They’re here.
37
‘Any chance I could leave my luggage here for a few hours?’
The receptionist angles her head sympathetically.
‘Sorry, sir, I’m afraid it’s not hotel policy’.
‘But you’ve checked it already—I’m quite happy for you to check it again—’
‘Sorry sir’, she says, with breathy compassion, ‘it’s not hotel policy’, and Wilf gives up. No point arguing with an android. She hands him his ID card with a glacier-bright smile.
‘Have a good journey, sir’.
Wilf lugs the pack onto his back and turns to see Martha Crick in the middle of the lobby. Martha Crick, with her long feet set at twenty-to-four, clutching her cartoon handbag, complete with butterfly clip. She grins her gappy grin and indicates the foyer.
‘Isn’t this super? A real Agatha Christie set!’
Of course, thinks Wilf. That’s how to write it. The dingy Horizon Hotel is immediately transformed into a temple of retro chic—a paragraph at least. Martha Crick really does have a knack for cheering places up.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here’ he says, and she squeezes her shoulders to her ears with pleasure.
‘I know! Isn’t it funny! I knew it was you, as soon as I came in! I said to myself, how funny!’
‘Don’t tell me’ says Wilf ‘you’re spending part of your holiday at Beaumont Beach’.
She stoops towards him conspiratorially.
‘Well, keep it under your hat, but I’m not really on holiday at all’.
‘Thought as much’ says Wilf. ‘You’re sussing places out, aren’t you?’
‘On a sort of reccie, yes. But, you see, it puts people’s backs up if they think I’m, you know—’
‘Snooping?’
‘Which, of course, I’m not. I’m just looking for potential. Opportunity. Areas ripe for improvement. All that.’
‘You’re a developer’ announces Wilf. Martha’s squint become more pronounced and earnest.
‘I develop potential, yes. I make the best of places’.
Wilf has a vision of an expanse of land, scraped bare and flat, and at its centre a slow herd of demolition vehicles, reversing and advancing around the rubble of Hestyn House, and the last stubby ruin of its tower. How would she make the best of that place? With a Tesco? Or a theme park? He remembers Lambert crushing his hand as they parted, and it occurs to him that Martha might not even know about the house yet. Maybe they’re relying on his guide to help them steal a march on the JCBs. He waves at his surroundings and says,
‘Plenty of scope to improve this dump’, giving the words a valedictory heartiness and sidling towards the main doors.
‘Off to explore?’ asks Martha.
‘Got to see some writer’s house—’
‘Oh, Basil Clemence? He lived here, didn’t he? Sleight of Hand—have you read it?’
Wilf is still backing towards the street, and Martha has turned a half-circle to keep him in view, without apparently altering her stance at all. Wilf remembers a musical box his sister used to have, with a dancer in a tutu poised on one leg and spinning on the spot to The Blue Danube. He says,
‘No, I can’t say I have—’ and is already pushing the door open, letting in the salty air. Martha Crick says,
‘Oh, you must, it’s marvellous! Actually—would you mind very much if I came too?’
38
‘Drink it down, Mr Stokes. While it’s hot’.
‘One of these days, Gwennie,’ says Lambert, ‘you’ll call me by my first name’. He attempts a smile. His cheeks are flushed: two narrow lines of vivid red, sucking all the blood from the rest of his face.
‘You know me’ says Gwennie. ‘Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I hold to the old conventions. My mother always said, the only first names you use should be your husband’s, your children’s and your dog’s’.
‘Gwennie,’ says Lambert, ‘you are a remarkable—’
He abandons the sentence, surrendering again to the echoes in his head. His hands, draped over his knees, are trembling.
‘Drink your tea, Mr Stokes’ murmurs Gwennie. ‘It’s sweet and hot. Just what you need’.
She stands over him, repeating her mantra, more as a comfort than as an instruction. She’s seen him like this before.
After a while Lambert recovers sufficiently to drink his tea.
‘Shan’t trouble you much longer’ he says, as the colour begins to spread more evenly across his face. ‘Soon be on my way’.
‘No trouble at all’ says Gwennie. She starts moving around the breakfast room, tucking the chairs more closely under their tables. ‘Now that my guests have gone I’ve got all the time in the world’. She pauses in her task and lets a glance skim the edge of his shoulder. ‘Were you there all night, Mr Stokes?’
‘Pretty well…’ Lambert screws up his eyes and takes another gulp of tea.
‘A deal of activity up there, Gwennie’ he says. ‘Many troubled souls’.
Gwennie smacks another chair into place and says,
‘Could you manage a round of toast now, do you think?’
Lambert gives a look of wan gratitiude, and she sets off for the kitchen. As she’s leaving the room she says,
‘What about our young friend, then, Mr Stokes? Is that all sorted out?’
Lambert nods absently.
‘Yes, yes, no need to worry about Wilfred. That’s all in hand.’
An afterthought brings him to his feet and he calls after her down the hallway:
‘Would there be a spot of offal in the offing, Mrs P?’
39
Martha Crick claps her hands.
She actually claps her hands. Wilf didn’t think people did that, not really; only on the telly and in twee romantic novels. But there she is, looking at the peeling blue shutters and ring-pull bell of Sleight-of-Hand House, clapping her hands and squealing.
‘It’s exactly the way he describes it!’
It’s a small terraced house on a steep hill. There’s a sign on the front door saying ‘Please Ring for Attention’ and giving a range of ticket prices. As they’re pulling the bellcord three more visitors line up behind them. Evidently Basil Clemence had more fans than Wilf realised. A man holding a newspaper opens the door and takes their fee at a desk in the hall, rattling off his spiel: self-guided tour, start upstairs, first door on your left and follow the signs, takes about an hour, ID card and bag check please, audioguide £2 extra. Wilf opts for the audioguide, reasoning that it’ll save making conversation with Martha.
They climb the narrow stairs. Every step croaks underfoot. Wilf presses ‘start’ on his handset and a deep voice booms into his ear:
‘WELCOME! to the former home of BASIL CLEMENCE!’
There’s an interlude of tea-dance music; Wilf hears Martha singing along to her own handset, behind him. They shuffle from room to room. Basil’s camelbacked bed. Basil’s wash-stand and jug.
‘Notice the faded flowers painted on the porcelain jug and described so evocatively in Chapter Seventeen…’
A small bathroom with a large, lion-pawed tub and a brass shower attachment.
‘The very latest model available at the time’.
A third room, hardly big enough for the pink cot inside.
‘In this nursery baby Nellie suffered through her fever…’
Beside Wilf, Martha gives a tremulous ‘Aaaah…’
‘Although in Basil’s day this was used as a storeroom’.
‘Oh!’ says Martha, disappointed.
As they turn back down the stairs the threesome who followed them in take their place at the nursery door. From their handsets comes the murmur of narration. After a few seconds they chorus back: ‘Aaaah … Oh!’.
Wilf and Martha proceed as directed, to the parlour, where various Clemence relatives bridle at the intrusion from their framed photographs. Basil’s chair has an anti-macassar, and coal is heaped in the authentic but cold fireplace.
‘Now retrace your steps to the hall and go to the next room on your right. When you have reached the doorway, press 8’.
Wilf rolls his eyes. ‘Hardly necessary, are they, these directions?’
But Martha has already pressed 8 and is busy noticing the original electric light switches. This room is the library. Smaller than Gwennie Price’s breakfast room, but lined from floor to ceiling with glass-fronted bookcases. The books are looking fairly rough—cracked leather, crumpled spines, peeling corners. The only neat shelf holds a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica; all the rest are jammed and propped and bursting with books, just as Clemence left them. Wilf tries to make out some of the titles. Catullus. Brontë. Rousseau. Horace Walpole. The Gallic Wars. Indexing was obviously not Basil’s forte. Wilf can only see the volumes nearest the door; the centre of the room is roped off. Martha pulls at his sleeve: she’s already on to button 9, and is being directed into the kitchen. Wilf sidles awkwardly past the three other visitors, who’ve caught up and are crowding into the library.
‘Cosy, innit!’ says one, an old woman who comes up to his waist.
‘Isn’t it!’ says Wilf. Martha has broken free and is heading for the kitchen, exclaiming at the iron stove. Wilf pauses at the door to press his handset button.
‘OK! We’ve reached the kitchen. Please take care as you step down from the hallway—’
‘Excuse me’ interrupts a reedy voice at Wilf’s elbow. ‘You dropped this’.
The old woman hands him an envelope.
‘No, I—’ starts Wilf, and then recognises her. It’s Millie, the Sunbeam regular. And now that he thinks of it, her friends look familiar, too. He’s about to greet her, but her yellowing eyes nail him with a stern, warning glare. Her ragged lips are clamped shut. The envelope juts at his hand.
‘I think it’s yours’ says Millie. ‘You’d better keep it safe.’ Obediently, Wilf takes the envelope and puts it in his jacket’s inside pocket. A wide smile concertinas Millie’s cheeks.
‘Interesting, innit?’ she says, nodding towards Martha, who now has her head inside the stove, examining the period detail.
Wilf takes a pace forward and trips on the step down from the hallway. By the time he’s regained his balance the Sunbeam regulars are depositing their handsets at the desk on their way out.
Martha opens the back door to survey the vegetable garden and greenhouse. She wrinkles her nose at a fresh smattering of rain.
‘Pity’ she says. ‘I like gardens. But I haven’t got the right shoes for mud’.
She arches her eyebrows at Wilf’s handset, which is burbling into mid-air.
‘Oh, did you get bored?’
‘I heard enough’ says Wilf.
‘Well, I really enjoyed it. I like a guided tour. Thanks for letting me tag along. Where are you off to next?’
‘Fairend’ answers Wilf. ‘Funny thing—’ he begins, and is about to tell her about the strange encounter in the hall. But he changes his mind.
‘Funny thing…?’
‘Just … this place. This kind of, of shrine’.
Martha nods with great solemnity.
‘I do know what you mean. A bit creepy. But I still enjoyed it’.
Wilf blunders on:
‘Tell me, just between ourselves, are you here to, er, cheer up the Lido? Because if it’s gone by the time the guide’s at the printers, I’ll look an idiot.’
Martha giggles.
‘You’re trying to get me into trouble, you naughty man!’ She taps her nose. ‘Highly confidential, all that. I’m on holiday, remember?’
So the Lido’s in for it, then, thinks Wilf. Municipal car park? A new block of flats? Doesn’t really matter. Noone’s going to come to Beaumont Beach to watch the Lido rot away.
Wilf shakes hands with Martha outside Sleight-of-Hand house and walks to the railway station. Once past the baggage check he retreats through the empty waiting room to a foul-smelling loo. He’s got 12 minutes before the Fairend train. He locks himself and his backpack into a cubicle and retrieves the envelope from his jacket. Inside it is a train ticket. Perfectly genuine to all appearances, and registered in his name. It’s all there, in boxy official print: his full name, a series of asterisks and the last four digits of his ID number, date of travel (today), date of reservation (three months ago), one seat, single journey on the 11.37 from Beaumont Beach to Hestyn. He turns the ticket around and around, examining the small print, the barcode, the quality of card. Obviously a forgery, but it’s bloody good. Is this what Millie and her chums get up to over their Sunbeam fry-ups? Outside, the tannoy makes its disjointed announcement. The 11.23 to Fairend is now approaching platform one. Wilf’s heart is crashing against his ribs. Why does Millie want him to go back to Hestyn? And if he plays along, he’s likely to be hauled off the train before he gets there. He’s already had his real ticket checked. Some inspector is bound to notice if he’s suddenly offering another one, and travelling in the wrong direction. Wilf’s not like Aggie—courting trouble. He prefers to do everything above board if he can.
There’s a narrow frosted window half open above the cistern. He listens. The cubicle shakes to the engine’s elephantine arrival. Still time to catch the Fairend train, if he rushes out. Through the noise Aggie whispers: don’t be a coward, Wilf. Take the risk. I’m no hero he reminds her. I just roam and report. He waits. As the engine subsides he hears light, running footsteps. Doors opening and shutting. The squeal of rails under pressure, a passing cackle of voices, the cut-and-paste phrases of the tannoy. He listens to the churning engine, the swell of acceleration. In the silence of the train’s wake he unbolts the cubicle door. Platform one is deserted. The display screen is already flipping away the 11.23. Not a guard or a passenger in sight. Whoever was running to catch the Fairend connection is well on her way, and Wilf has a good 14 minutes to cross to platform two for the coastal express back to Hestyn.
40
Lambert Stokes is waiting at the Hestyn platform. Wilf struggles out of the train door and steps heavily into a puddle. He can feel dirty water seeping into his sock. He tries not to think about it. He’s having enough trouble controlling his bladder as it is. Lambert has made no move towards him; he just stands there, propped on his stick. Wilf watches the stub-end of the train recede in the distance. Maybe he could just stay where he is until the next Fairend service, however long it takes, and get out. Tear up Millie’s forged ticket and go back to the schedule, to following rules, to safety. He’ll be OK, he assures himself, as long as he stays put. Even if Lambert is some kind of maniac, with the Sunbeam regulars in his thrall, enticing people to his seaside domain to kill them and eat them—well, even so, he won’t touch Wilf out here, in the open, on a railway platform, will he? Birds resume their din over the train’s departure and Wilf feels very alone. Of course, Lambert Stokes can do anything he likes. There’s noone around to see.
‘Wilfred’ says Lambert. ‘I’m delighted to see you again so soon. Shall we go?’
He swings an arm towards the exit. Wilf decides not to ask Lambert whether he’s a mad cannibal. He considers a choice of other questions, and opts for:
‘Am I being arrested?’ His consonants flow into each other.
Lambert looks bemused.
‘I’m not an officer of the law’ he says. ‘Why—are you a criminal?’
‘No. No, I haven’t done anything, but—’ Wilf revs his throat to steady his voice and continues: ‘I’ve heard that doesn’t make any difference these days’.
‘Ah—I’m afraid you’re absolutely right, there, dear boy. Brute power is its own justification’.
Lambert’s arm ushers him again and Wilf takes two small steps forward. Then Lambert adds,
‘Were I seeking a reason to effect your arrest, of course, I would cite the forged ticket you carry on your person’.
All the heat in Wilf’s body drains through his trainers and into the floor. Lambert goes on:
‘However. As I said. I am no officer of the law, and I have neither the right nor the desire to apprehend you. As, I presume, you already know. You have, after all, come back’.
‘What’s happening?’ asks Wilf. The question is all but lost in birdsong. Lambert’s stick points in the general direction of the town.
‘There’s nothing to fear, Wilfred. I merely want to introduce you to some of my friends’.
They walk through Hestyn to Hissing Marsh. Lambert apologises for taking the circuitous route.
‘A car would be so much quicker, but we in Hestyn are not great motorists, as you may well have noticed’.
Yes, Wilf had noticed. It’s one of the features he noted in his text as evidence of Hestyn’s slower pace of life: the absence of cars. Nothing parked along Gwennie’s street, or squeezed into the spaces around the market square, or backed up from the harbour and the station. Hardly any vehicles at all, in fact, apart from the odd truck, the occasional van, one or two motor bikes. He says,
‘I suppose they’re too easily traced’. But Lambert doesn’t respond.
Lambert has climbed down to the walkway and turns to support Wilf’s elbow as he sways and limps down the steps, battling against the counterweight of his luggage.
‘I’m so sorry you’ve been obliged to bring all your worldly goods’ says Lambert. ‘All rather last minute, you know.’
‘What is? What’s all rather last minute?’
Wilf reaches the walkway and limps after Lambert. His backpack brushes against the reeds, setting off a frenzied fugue of whispers. By the time he’s onto the beach Lambert is well ahead and marching clear of the incoming tide. Wilf catches the first fingerings of sea between the boulders and drenches his feet again. He squelches after Lambert, labouring up to the slipway, pawing at the sand and sliding a little way back with every step. Lambert waits for him on the seafront.
‘What’s?—last minute?’ gasps Wilf, as his backpack struggles up the slope. ‘What’s—going on?’
He reaches the pavement and stoops with his hands on his thighs to regain his breath. Lambert speaks with an air of mild curiosity.
‘Something else you might have noticed here. Or rather, something you might not have noticed. Have a think, old boy. Take a guess.‘
Wilf shakes his head.
‘No? Can’t think?’ Lambert waves his stick at the two streets of Hestyn Beach. ‘Look! No cameras! Doesn’t that strike you? Maybe not. Your generation has ceased to see them, I daresay. Part of the landscape. Like trees. Or weeds. Growing out of every gutter and crack in the wall’.
Wilf makes an effort to straighten and casts an eye, as directed, over the rooflines and lampposts. He nods, still gulping for breath.
‘Blast from the past,’ he manages.
‘Indeed. Hestyn is the place, as you might say, that time forgot. Has been, at any rate. No doubt all that will change’.
Wilf desperately wants to stand still, to concentrate on events and clear his head. But Lambert has set off again.
‘Lambert’, he calls, ‘is this about my guidebook? Are you worried I’m going to spoil your town, is that it?’ He lumbers up the street behind him. ‘I thought you were all for it!’
They approach the Sunbeam Café and Wilf, drawing level with Lambert, lowers his voice. ‘I thought you were all for it’ he repeats. ‘The guide. I always thought it was a stupid idea. I mean, nobody’s going to bloody read it’.
‘No’ says Lambert. ‘I know’.
‘You know?’ Wilf lets his backpack slither to the pavement, and sits on it. ‘Lambert, will you please tell me now what this is all about?’
Lambert smiles an affectionate, avuncular smile. The kind of smile, Wilf muses, that a deranged conservationist might smile just before battering a travel writer to a pulp with his walking stick. Lambert says,
‘I did rather enjoy the idea of bringing the hordes to Hestyn House. But I fear it was always a fantasy. You are right in saying that noone will read the guide. The guide will not be published’.
‘Because you’re going to have to kill me?’
Lambert chuckles and places an elegant hand on Wilf’s sweaty head.
‘Good grief, my dear chap, what a very morbid imagination you possess. No, I’m not a violent man, and if I were, I would harbour no ill-will against you. The guide was never intended for publication in the first place. Now. Fancy a spot of lunch?’
41
The Sunbeam is empty except for Vince, who’s leaning on the counter, reading a paper.
‘Afternoon, gents! Going through?’
‘Going through, Vince’ says Lambert.
Vince reaches under the counter, and Wilf hears a buzz and a click from somewhere at the back of the café. Lambert leads him past the counter and tables and through a door on the right, marked ‘Toilets’. They enter a tiny passage. Wilf’s backpack scrapes against the walls. They pass the first door, with its little stick-man symbol, and catch a waft of urinals and bleach. They turn in to the women’s loo and squeeze past the handbasin. Wilf accidentally kicks a covered bin. There are two narrow cubicle doors, one standing ajar to show an ordinary toilet bowl. The other is padlocked shut and displays a handwritten sign: Out of Order. Lambert is unscrewing the top of his walking stick. He produces a key and opens the padlock. Behind this door is another, solid and external, and next to it is a ?speakerphone. Lambert presses the button and speaks into it as he’s shoving a metal bar to open the external door.
‘All right Vince, we’re through. You can lock up now’.
Wilf is faintly disappointed to find that they’re not in a cavernous HQ or on another planet, but in the café’s back yard, where the bins are kept. They cross the yard and Lambert releases another padlock, on a tall wooden gate leading into a wide, unsurfaced alley. Lambert shuts the gate behind them and slaps it twice, and Wilf hears whistling on the other side as Vince comes to lock all the doors behind them. The alley runs parallel to the street, presumably meeting the seafront at one end. They turn in the other direction, passing a row of garages and then a wild, thorny hedge on one side, the back fences and yards of the high street shops on the other. Presently the alley veers slightly to the right and delivers them to a sturdy fire door in a blackened, blank wall. Wilf recognises it as the back of the boarded-up nightclub.
‘Lambert,’ he says, ‘was all that subterfuge really necessary? I mean, couldn’t we have come up here off the main road?’
‘There may be no cameras in Hestyn’ says Lambert, ‘but there are many eyes and ears. One can’t be too careful’.
As they approach, the door gives a thunk and swings open. Standing inside is a man Wilf recognises, wearing a flat cap and carrying a rolled-up umbrella.
‘Rain’s held off so far, then’ he remarks to Lambert, as they enter. Wilf remembers where he saw him before—in the marketplace, on his first day in Hestyn, with the companion who so spontaneously directed him to Gwennie Price’s house.
They’re in a dark corridor, containing nothing apart from three rusty bikes. Wilf is trying to breathe steadily, trying to summon every strategy he’s ever learned about self-defence. It doesn’t amount to much. If he had a key he could wield it ready to shove into an eye, but his keys are in his backpack, out of reach. The marketplace man points his remote and watches the door glide shut again. Then he takes them to a door at the far end of the corridor.
‘After you, Jack’ says Lambert. Jack opens the door.
Wilf is stunned by noise and light. The noise is familiar: it reminds him of Tuesday evenings. All through his childhood, every Tuesday at 7 o-clock, Wilf would be packed off to his room to play or do his homework and four of his parents’ friends would come round and play poker. Ted and Rosemary, Ken and Fay, and Wilf’s parents, Martin and Sal. They’d all been students together and they all went on meeting every Tuesday, when they were first married, before Wilf was born, while he was growing up, after he left home, and on through the years as the group dwindled. One by one they disappeared. Ted had emphysema. Rosemary took too many pills. Wilf’s mother had a heart attack. Fay forgot to look when she crossed a busy road. Eventually it was just Martin and Ken, and Tuesday evenings were a sadder and more muted affair. And then Ken fell ill, and then there was only Wilf’s father left. He’d been a widower six years by then, managed all that time, without Wilf’s mother. But he only survived the end of the Tuesday evenings by a month. Wilf had been an incidental, transient part of his parents’ lives, compared with the Tuesday gatherings. And now, in a derelict nightclub, in an obscure seaside town, he’s caught in a blast of memory, transported to those Tuesdays in their prime, when he would squat enviously on the stairs and listen to the free, reckless laughter of people who’d shared their youth and were embarking on hilarious, liberating old age.
One of the regulars looks up from her screen and shrieks:
‘Here they are!’
‘Look at them, what a handsome pair!’ shouts another.
‘Lucky for us’ murmurs Lambert in Wilf’s ear ‘that these walls are soundproofed’.
Wilf begins to make sense of the scene. There are long tables, each with two rows of computers. There are cups of tea ewverywhere, and newspapers, and handbags, and cables gushing over table edges and across floors. Regulars are reading their screens, or keying in, or wandering around, or chatting, and they’re all keeping up this racket, cackling, calling, coughing, gossiping.
‘It’s a bloody farmyard in ‘ere’ comments a bearded old man, handing Wilf a mug of tea. The computers are a strange and mongrel selection of ancient, glowering models, grubby second-hands, and one or two quaint recycled laptops.
Wilf tries his tea. It’s bitter and strong. He says to Lambert,
‘What’s happening here?’
‘Free speech, old boy’ says Lambert.
A frail old lady sitting nearby extends her brittle hand and gives the belt of Wilf’s trousers a tweak.
‘You come over here, darling’ she says. ‘You can sit on my lap, if you like’.
Lambert leads him away.
‘Do excuse her, Wilfred. She’s incorrigible. Leave your worldly goods and come with me.’
Reluctantly, Wilf deposits his backpack on the floor and follows Lambert between the tables, stepping over handbags and around propped-up walking sticks and brollies. Wilf has a fleeting glimpse of some of the screens as they pass. He sees ‘Family Tree’, and a patchwork of old photographs; ‘Which Insurance’; ‘Most Common Symptoms’. A woman with marmalade hair is machine-gunning words into an e-mail. He sees ‘should be birched’ as they struggle past. At the next place a man wearing a homberg and a woolly scarf blots out his screen, buit not before Wilf has caught sight of a collage of naked women.
‘Lambert’, he asks, ‘are these the Bloggers?’
‘I believe that name has been coined in the Press’ says Lambert, ‘but I’m not sure our friends would regard themselves as an homogenous entity of any kind’.
He’s heading for the far end of the room, where a row of old schooldesks is backed against the wall and a man much younger than the others is busy at his work. Wilf steals another look back at the man in the homberg.
‘It doesn’t look much like political subversion to me’ he comments.
‘Lambert smiles. ‘My dear, you really mustn’t be so eager to swallow the party line. This is free speech. Not necessarily interesting speech.’
He taps the younger man on the shoulder and immediately the man swivels round and offers Wilf his hand. He’s Japanese, Wilf guesses, and would be quite handsome if his hair didn’t stick up in mad tufts, and his face didn’t have that tinge of green from hours at the computer.
‘This is Billy’ says Lambert. ‘Billy is our techno-wizz’.
‘Good old Billy!’ calls someone from further down the room, and a vague cheer goes up.
‘It’s thanks to Billy’ says Lambert ‘that we’ve been free of prying mechanical eyes for so long’.
Billy grins modestly and turns back to his screen, where he seems to be sorting through several different e-mail boxes. Wilf spots ‘Sir Roger Hartby-Mace’ in one list, and ‘Restricted Circulation’ in another.
‘Are you hacking?’ he asks, but it’s Lambert who answers.
‘We prefer to call it “intercepting”. Billy keeps an eye on certain correspondence, certain lists, and … revises them, you might say.’
‘Lists?’
‘Yes—lists of conurbations, for instance, which are, as yet, unmonitored. Such as our own’.
‘No CCTV’.
‘As you say. “Blank pockets”, they’re called, and the powers-that-be don’t like ‘em. But Billy here has it all under control’.
As he talks, Billy smiles and nods, all the while fixing his eyes on the screen and moving the cursor up and down, here and there, opening and shutting files and documents with dizzy speed. Try as he might, Wilf can’t keep pace; sentences disappear before he can lock onto their sense.
‘Billy’ says Lambert ‘is another co-opted member of the Hestyn House Conservation Society. Does a stirling job, deflecting the attentions of possible interested parties. Developers and the like.’
Wilf’s head is throbbing. It may be the tea, or the pressure of all those waves of light, all those words and images glowing from their violet squares. He makes an effort to clear and stack his thoughts.
‘Not that stirling. No offence, Billy. But it didn’t stop me snooping round. Or Martha Crick’.
Billy turns questioningly to Lambert, says, ‘Not briefed?’ and simultaneously his screen shuts down. Wilf gets the impression that the hum and gabble of the room drops a few decibels. Lambert winks reassurance at Billy.
‘I’m about to clarify’ he says. ‘Been rather tardy about it, I know. My fault, entirely’.
Billy’s screen revives and he returns to his task. The clamour resumes its former level. Lambert says,
‘Wilfred, let’s withdraw to the office,’ and leads the tortuous way back through the room to the door, acknowledging cries of ‘tatty-bye!’ and ‘come again soon!’ with an imperious flick of the hand.
42
The office is a tiny room on the opposite side of the corridor. There’s just enough room for the two men to sit, knees touching. In the sudden silence, Wilf’s ear fizzes busily. As he eases himself into his seat he feels, with a sick lurch, the absence at his back.
‘My rucksack!’ he says, but Lambert lays a hand on his leg to stop him jumping up again.
‘Don’t worry, my boy, it’s perfectly safe. They’ll carry out a cursory check, that’s all. Usual thing.’
‘A check for what?’ Wilf is more surprised than Lambert at the anger roughening his voice. ‘There’s nothing more dangerous than socks and underpants in there’.
‘Don’t be upset, my dear. We know you haven’t packed anything suspect. But I’m afraid others may not be above adding to your load.’
‘Adding to my—?’
Wilf sinks into the baggy canvas seat.
‘Yes—others who might exercise a little—shall we say—sleight of hand…’
Lambert’s mouth bows in appreciation of his own joke.
‘Sleight of hand! You mean that house where Millie slipped me the ticket.’
‘Indeed. Another mistress of dexterity, our Millie. She used to be a dressmaker, you know, until her nimble fingers were caught in the till’.
‘But it’s not Millie you’re on about, is it? You’re talking about Martha Crick’.
‘Well done, that man. Top marks’.
Wilf massages the bridge of his nose.
‘Drugs?’ he asks, eventually.
‘Bugs’ says Lambert, then barks a laugh of delight. ‘That is to say, a recording, or possibly tracking device. Maybe even a combination of both! Who knows what wondrous gadgets they might produce nowadays? I leave all that to Billy and our more technically minded gentlefolk in there’.
Lambert plaits his hands over his chest. He watches Wilf rubbing his forehead and his voice dips sympathetically.
‘My poor young chap. It must seem very confusing. One has to take such care, you see. But the time has finally come for—as Billy would put it—the briefing. Perhaps you’d like another tea, or …’ —reaching under a shelf to his right and bringing out a bottle of whisky. Wilf doesn’t like whisky but he accepts it anyway, and they drink from small metal caps as Lambert begins his tale.
43
‘We’ve had a complaint’.
The head teacher balanced a white envelope between her hands. Lambert could see her name on it, in angry block capitals. No address. It must have been delivered personally, along with the force of the writer’s indignation.
The head turned the envelope and started to pull out the letter, but didn’t unfold it.
‘Apparently’ she said ‘there are some who feel your history lessons overstep the mark’.
She presented Lambert with an expression of professional concern, angling her head, her eyebrows, deepening the frown-lines above her nose.
Lambert said, ‘Some?’
Her look hardened instantly.
‘One letter from one parent, yes. But, you know, one voice can represent the view of a silent majority’.
‘Indeed it may. Or it may not’.
Now she unfolded the letter, consulted it and tapped a phrase as she quoted it:
‘History lessons should be about history. Not an excuse to peddle cynicism and liberal propaganda’.
She lowered the page and directed her colourless stare at Lambert. ‘And I have to say’ she added ‘I agree’.
‘Who is the correspondent, might I ask?’
Lambert extended his long hand but the head made no move in return.
‘Not relevant. I must tell you that this is a point of view reflecting my own. To put it bluntly, you’ve been straying too far from the syllabus’.
‘And the complainant is…? You may rest assured I shall bear no grudge against parent or offspring’.
The head glanced irritably at the page.
‘Dr Andrews’.
‘Ah…’ Lambert leaned back and his plastic chair groaned. Dr Andrews was a square, overbearing, pompous man, a school governor and local magistrate and chair of the regional RadWatch committee, which alerted the authorities to unorthodox teaching in schools and colleges. His son was a chip off the old block, billowing over a desk two sizes too small, challenging Lambert with his piggy eyes, scanning the classroom for victims among the plain, the clever, the reticent.
‘Whoever it is making the point,’ said the head, ‘it’s a point well made. You’re supposed to be teaching these kids about the past’.
‘And I do’.
‘Not the present day. History and Current Affairs are two entirely separate modules. You are a specialist in the former. We employ others to teach the latter. I understand—’ she put the letter aside and leaned forward, lowering her voice—’you have been telling your charges the world has not changed’. One hand emerged from her nested arms and rapped an accompaniment to each word:’ The. World. Has. Not. Changed.’ The hand vanished again. ‘I’m told that was the very phrase you used’.
Lambert heaved a fathomless sigh. He turned to look through the office window towards the sports field, where pupils were eking out the lunch hour in twos and threes, strolling, tussling, hunched over some teenage secret. Beyond the field were the terraced houses that bordered the school grounds. Beyond them, the buzz of the ring road. Wearily, Lambert embarked on his reply.
‘I was merely trying to impress upon them the recurring themes of human society. Fear of the enemy. Power. Aggression. Desparation. These are all—’
‘Themes! This is precisely my point. Precisely Dr Andrews’ point. Young minds need a clear, safe and structured narrative. Dates. Kings. Willy, Willy, Harry, Stee. Battle of Bosworth. Industrial Revolution. I see no ships. Sun never sets’.
‘Yes, yes—’ Lambert’s wide palms fanned out—’and all this is covered. In depth and detail—’
‘But it’s the kind of depth and detail that’s the issue. What clothes people wore, the food they ate, the weaponry, the, the hairstyles—all well and good. Adds to colour and interest. Themes—that’s the difficulty. Avoid themes. Avoid convoluted connections. Above all, demarcate your subject. Leave the present day to Media Studies. That’s my advice to you. One more thing—’ She was already turning back to her terminal—’I’m removing your school internet access and shutting down the history website’.
The classroom door shut behind the last pupil and the hubbub of release receded down the corridor. Lambert waited for silence to follow. An adult’s voice boomed over the din, failing to restore order. The clamour emptied into the yard below. Car and bus engines simmered and snarled. In the classroom, a coin dropped in the exodus rolled between desks and chairs and slowed into a lazy metallic spin. Lambert’s computer beeped and purred, comforting itself. Filling the screen was a page of the history class site: ‘Join the Dots’. Multicoloured lines of text, some of them misspelt, built into a rainbow of columns.
GENOCIDE/DEMOCIDE—LINKS.
Darfur
Rwanda
Armenia
Holocaust
Kulaks
Aborigines
Roman Christians
TERRORISM—LINKS
Al Qaida
ETA
IRA
Ku Klux Klan
French Revolution
Guy Fawkes
Zealots
Experimentally, Lambert pressed a key, and a new window hit the screen: ACCESS DENIED.
The head had got to work quickly.
Lambert tried to turn his mind to next week’s lessons, and how to redesign them. A picture parade: that was what was required. People with quirky names and silly costumes. Battles always went down well. Men hacked, women raped, children slaughtered, all neatly tucked into another century, with no wider meaning and no lessons to learn.
Lambert got up and wandered to the window to watch the last of the children swarm away. He spotted Dr Andrews, bellowing at his son from his people-mover. Maybe, thought Lambert, maybe things won’t look so bad come Monday morning.
By Sunday evening Lambert had a lesson plan ready in his head. He poured himself a drink and switched on his computer. As the machine yawned and stirred itself, he sifted through his handwritten notes, ideas for handouts, subheadings and—no, not themes: facts. One by one the screen’s icons settled into their places. Lambert glanced up to check its progress. He blinked. An improbably large folder had appeared, labelled ‘Class Register’.
‘Class register?’ muttered Lambert to himself, and took another sip of his drink. ‘What’s that doing there?’
His hand acted before his brain, double-clicking in an instant. Even as the icon expanded in response, Lambert knew he shouldn’t have opened it. A white page filled the screen, and one by one a row of thumbnail pictures began to unfold. Then another row. Then another. His screen was filled with ranks of tiny photographs. Lambert’s hand hovered over the mouse, but he didn’t need to enlarge any of these images, to see what they were. He peered at the screen in horror, unable to breathe. A paleness of flesh, a tangle of limbs, the skinny, childlike torsos. His heart pummelled his lungs back into action, and Lambert leapt away from the computer, knocking over his drink and his chair. He looked around him, at his little sitting room, as if its domesticity might hold an answer. A noise outside made him flinch. Just someone passing by. Lambert put his hand to his mouth and felt its tremor. He should tell someone, report this, ring the headmistress. But … he glanced again at the screen and shut his eyes. But no. If he told anyone, he was finished. If he simply tried to get rid of the monstrous thing, so much the worse. Lambert’s breathing steadied, calmed by his lack of options. He stooped to clear up the spilt drink, and tried to remember where his suitcase was.
44
On Monday morning Lambert placed the key to his flat on the hall table, picked up his suitcase and slammed the front door behind him. In a security room somewhere in a nearby city, a succession of grey screens showed his progress up the leafy road, along the high street, past the early tranquility of the school gates and towards the bus station. Finally his blurred back disappeared onto an express coach, where his image was taken over by the bus-driver’s camera, and carried out of local range.
‘No ties, you see’ says Lambert. He sniffs at his whisky before taking a final sip. ‘No other half?’ asks Wilf, gently.
‘Not since the Oxford riots’ says Lambert. For a moment his bony face takes on a new expression. Sickened. Sad.
‘You were caught up in all that?’
‘ have never been a demonstrator as such’ says Lambert, ruefully. ‘I don’t take to crowds. But my partner insisted that one of us, at least, should make a stand. We had been married many years, you see. To us, statutory annulment was not merely a cosmetic change. It was a relegation.
Wilf nodded sympathetically. ‘I never held with the repeal, myself’.
Lambert inclines his head, acknowledging the support.
‘Well, my partner was there when it all turned unpleasant. A sweet, gentle man. Incapable of violence. And yet he was struck, arrested, held for many days. I thought he had gone the way of so many … “alien abductions”. But he did return. Briefly’.
Wilf takes a slow mouthful of whisky and waits for Lambert to carry on. He’s not comfortable, listening to Lambert tell his story, but he knows it’s a sign of trust, and he pays careful attention to every word. Lambert has lapsed into thought, but presently gives a small shudder, and resumes:
‘Ah, well. In retrospect, we should have let things be. But you see he had a very keen sense of justice. He was deeply upset by the whole experience. He lodged a complaint. And then it started. Little stories in the local press, hints and implications …’
‘Making him out to be a troublemaker?’
‘That sort of thing. His employer received a visit from the police, asking about his track record. All very troubling. And eventually he left. To protect me, as much as anything. He said goodbye and simply … disappeared’.
‘Off the radar’ says Wilf, nodding.
‘Indeed. And I haven’t seen him since.’ There’s a short silence, then Lambert rallies himself again. ‘So! In consequence, when I found myself in a spot of bother of my own, I had noone to leave behind. No spouse, no Fido or Tiddles, no siblings. Parents passed away many moons ago. No reason not to leave’.
‘But after all that stuff on your computer, it must have looked—suspicious. Just clearing off, like that’.
Lambert moves his shoulders to indicate resignation and agreement.
‘A sorry state of affairs, my friend’ he says, ‘when a man’s desire to wander at will is hindered and condemned’.
Wilf thinks of his lopsided house, of the useless front gate shutting, of Aggie slipping into the night.
‘You just walked away’, he says. ‘You went wandering’.
‘Yes. And a wanderer I must stay.’
‘How did you do it? I mean—what was it like?’
‘Remarkably straightforward’ says Lambert. ‘In fact, it quite cheered me in regard to my other half. My hope is that he found it an equally liberating experience’.
There was a coach for Bristol parked in the bay, due to leave in seven minutes. Lambert emptied his account at the station cashpoint and bought his ticket from the driver. There were only two other passengers, already on board, but still the driver was irritated, tutting with every part of the process—ID cardswipe, finger-scan, iris-beam—and fumbling tetchily at his keypad to produce the printout.
Lambert took a seat near the back. The coach shouldered its way out of the station and through the suburbs and turned into a tailback on the dual carriageway. As the dusty shrubbery of the central reservation edged by, Lambert examined his printed ticket. Maybe he should contact the school, to buy time. What would he say? Mental breakdown? Head cold? Funeral of a long-lost relative? He fished out his mobile and began to key in a message to the head. Apologies. Obliged to attend…The traffic queue was beginning to unravel. The coach picked up speed and bridges pulsed overhead. Under one of them Lambert saw two youths, their heads covered in hoods or maybe masks, rifling through the detritus heaped against the scrawled concrete. He looked at his mobile: essential, surely, for communication. He reached into his pocket and fingered his ID card: essential for travel, cash, accommodation. And yet… Lambert heard his own classroom exhortations floating over bored heads. ‘Challenge your certainties! Question everything! You have hungry, inquiring, astounding minds! Do not let them languish in the mire of prejudice and habit!’
Lambert thought: I have a mouth for communication. I have feet for travel. Food grows on trees and in the earth. If needs be, the ditch can be my bed. His heartbeat was accelerating. Was it really possible to cut the leash?
He revised the message on his mobile.
Apologies. Obliged to resign.
For a while he let the words sit there, heavy with consequence. Then his thumb jabbed ‘SEND’ and it was done.
The weather broke. The road fizzed with spray. The driver sat forward to concentrate through the whip and splash of his windscreen wipers. Lambert took off his jacket and slung it across one shoulder like a cape, concealing his hands as best he could, while they slipped his ID and his mobile down the cleavage between back and seat cushions.
He spreads conjurer arms, knocking them against the walls of the office.
‘Voilà! I disembarked at Bristol with only myself and my sanity’.
Wilf slides his metal cup onto a wooden shelf and narrows his eyes.
‘But here you are’ he says, ‘advertising your services as the local boffin, conducting guided tours—hardly incognito, is it?’
Lamberts arms slacken and he gives Wilf a pitying smile.
‘My dear old chap, Lambert Stokes is a fine old name. But it is not my own. D’you see?’
Wilf’s expression triggers a little wheeze of amusement in Lambert’s throat. ‘Terribly sorry, old boy’, he adds.
‘But—’ Wilf is trying to read this man’s real name. But ‘Lambert Stokes’ is as fixed a part of him as his skin. ‘What is your name, then?’
Lambert wags a stern finger, then answers in an entirely different, lighter tone.
‘Sometimes I can barely recall. Lambert Stokes, you know,’—he shifts his legs, trying to find a more comfortable position—’Lambert Stokes was a rural parson. Died in 1791—a troubled time. Paranoia, fear, blood flowing across the Channel. A period that coined the name ‘terrorist’. What the Reverend Stokes thought about such matters, one doesn’t know. He rests—as far as one can tell—in peace, and his earthly remains decompose on a rather wonderful and remote clifftop cemetery about five miles south of here. Even his name is being blown away, little by little. These sea winds simply rub out the sandstone, you know. Rather romantic, in its way. I have taken it upon myself to prolong the memory of the Reverend Lambert Stokes for just a few more years’.
They sit in silence for a while. Wilf breathes in the dry, febrile scents of earth and roots and tastes the acidity of alcohol in his mouth. He mulls over Lambert’s story, and finally says,
‘I can’t get my head round it. Not knowing your name. It’s like not seeing you properly. Like you’re wearing a disguise’.
‘Strange, isn’t it?’ agrees Lambert. ‘The power of a name. You know, there’s a village in Rwanda, on a riverside. During the killings, bodies floated past, bloodied and bloated, every day. And every day the women of that village went to the water’s edge and turned the bodies to face them. A form of tribute, you see? A way of proclaiming identity. Individuality. Giving a name—it has the same resonance, one might say. A life is more than the mechanics of pulse and lung. See the face. Hear the name’.
As he speaks the timbre of his voice is changing. The theatrical consonants and elastic vowels soften into something more delicate, more natural. Wilf wonders whether he detects a hint of a northern accent.
‘I can’t tell you my name’ says Lambert Stokes, in what seems to be his real voice. ‘I’m sorry. My name changes from time to time, from place to place’.
Wilf knows he is being offered a glimpse behind the mask. And then Lambert speaks again and the old affectations and tics are back:
‘So, old boy, there we have part the first of your briefing. And now perhaps we’ll take a breath of fresh air, before embarking on part the second.’
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