Make Room for the Jester (5 page)

For Martha Davies, Gladstone’s mother, living on Lower Hill was the end of the line. Once, when her first husband was alive, she had lived in a bigger house by the beach and taken in visitors. With her second husband she had gone in for businesses as well, a lot of businesses. But the boarding house had gone to pot, the businesses had all failed, and the second husband had caught the 7.10 one morning. So there was nowhere for Martha except Lower Hill. ‘Such a comedown,’ she would tell us sadly, but Meira said she’d asked for it. ‘I was made for better things,’ Martha would complain, but most people were agreed that she was too fond, by far, of a drop and more of gin…. Martha Davies had big breasts and a very big behind, and a top lip that was only lipstick. She dyed her hair all the time, and there was always a cigarette going, and she was forever cuddling you and kissing. With
Martha it had to be either a screech of laughter or a howl of anguish. ‘It’s a bit pathetic, really,’ Gladstone used to say. ‘Her emotions aren’t properly balanced, you see.’

Martha’s house was identical to ours, except that it was never as polished, never as tidy. That night when we walked in, it looked as if a hurricane had struck it. And the children were all up, too – standing in front of the fire in their nightshirts. They were the kind of children who look windblown on a summer’s calm; they could make the finest clothes look like oddments from a jumble sale without any effort at all.

Gladstone ran to them. ‘Naughty! Naughty! All of you,’ he cried. They rushed to him and had him on the floor in no time. ‘Why are you out of bed? Didn’t I tell you Mam wouldn’t be long?’

Martha went out every night, usually to the Harp where she waited on. ‘What have I got to stay in for?’ she used to say.

Gladstone struggled to his feet. ‘No playing about,’ he cried, trying to be stern. ‘What are you doing up, all of you?’

‘Walter wet the bed,’ Dora said.

‘Had to get out, quick,’ Mair added.

‘Nearly had to swim,’ Walter croaked.

‘We pulled the mattress off the bed,’ Dora explained, ‘but it got stuck on the stairs.’ She remembered her lisp and added, ‘thstuck on the thstairs.’

‘You were going to put it in front of the fire?’ Gladstone groaned. ‘Oh, what have I told you about that? What have I said?’ He did his enraged act, falling on his knees, banging his fists on the floor. The children howled with laughter. ‘Haven’t I told you never to go near the fire?’ he cried, and
their faces were suddenly stilled, except for Walter who kept on laughing and pulling up his shirt to show all. ‘Lew,’ Gladstone ordered, ‘bring the mattress down.’

I went up the stairs and dragged the mattress to the fire. Martha had one of the bedrooms in the house, the children the other. Gladstone always slept on the sofa in the living room. He never slept much, he used to say. Most of the night he spent reading.

‘It’ll be dry in no time,’ he announced, ‘but never again, mind.’ He took Walter on his knee. ‘Now, everybody sit down – not on the tiles or you’ll have cold bums. Right – now we’ll have a little concert until the mattress is dry. Everybody’s got to do something. All right?’

The children squatted down eagerly.

‘Now then – who’s first?’

There was the usual dead silence. I broke it by saying, ‘What does he want us to do?’

‘Later,’ Gladstone said. ‘Tell you later. Now – who’s first? Dora?’

‘First last time,’ Dora said sharply.

‘Walter then.’

Walter was always a volunteer. He got up and gave us a hymn – which one it was impossible to tell – in a voice like a crow.

‘Lovely,’ Gladstone said. ‘Sings like a beautiful bird. Now – Dora.’

Dora recited ‘Y Sipsiwn’ by Eifion Wyn. It went very well too, so she followed it with ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ – only the first three lines, though, because she got it mixed up with the ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’.

Then Mair tried ‘Calon Lân’, but had to give up
because her emotions got the better of her. So we had Walter again, whistling the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, on one note all the way through, but his rhythm was very good.

‘Your turn now Gladstone,’ the children cried. ‘Another poem like on the beach.’

He gave us an old one – a favourite – about Buck Jones riding off the screen at the Palace, and sending the dust flying down Porthmawr Market Street, and all the children cheering, and all the deacons scowling, and how he finished up picking a fight with the man on the war memorial in the Square, and how they had to get a posse out to get him back to the Palace in time for the second house.

As he finished it, Dewi and Maxie came in fresh and whooping from the pictures. They’d been thrown out, as usual.

‘Wasn’t much of a picture, anyway,’ Dewi said. He wanted to swear, I knew, but didn’t dare do so in front of the children, not with Gladstone there.

We persuaded Maxie to tell us about the picture. ‘In China it was,’ he began.

‘Arabia,’ Dewi said wearily.

‘About this man who loved this girl only she was a gypsy, or something.’

‘A narab,’ Dewi said.

‘Anyway, it was slow.’ Maxie scratched his square nose for a moment, thinking deeply. ‘All licking and stuff.’

‘A love story,’ Gladstone explained to the children.

‘Would have been better if they’d had the man tunnel through the sand like a mole,’ Maxie went on.

‘Oh, dear God,’ Dewi said.

‘Get down in the sand and tunnel through like a mole,
and come up the other side, and catch them when they weren’t looking…’

‘That never happened, you old fool,’ Dewi said.

‘I know,’ Maxie replied. ‘I was wishing it would, though. Wishing that all through the picture.’

Maxie always wanted the hero to become a human mole. There had been a serial in the Saturday matinee about that once, and he’d never forgotten.

‘Just tunnel through,’ he said. ‘Not choke or anything with the sand. Then come up in the dark and get his knife out and catch them…’

‘Lovely,’ Gladstone said to stop him. He felt the mattress carefully. ‘Now – it won’t be long. Who’s going to be next?’

‘You again,’ the children chorused, so Gladstone settled back with little Walter on his knee to tell us the story of
Wuthering Heights of Wales
by Emily Brontë. He had books everywhere, Gladstone – used to comb the jumble sales for them. Only rarely did he come to the pictures with the rest of us.

‘
Wuthering Heights of Wales
, by Emily Brontë,’ he began – and it all happened in the hills at the back of Porthmawr. Heathcliff was Lloyd the gypsy, Catherine was Rhian, Edgar Linton was Lord Caradog Snell (Snell was a favourite villain’s name for Gladstone), and Hindley Earnshaw was Trefor Baring (another villainous name). Gladstone altered the story too. Heathcliff was a great violinist that night – ‘potentially the world’s greatest, perhaps’ – and Rhian was an operatic soprano who could hit the highest note in the world. At the end he had Heathcliff playing a violin
obbligato
while Rhian sang ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove’ (Gladstone sang it for us, all the
way through) in a concert hall before five thousand people who rose, at the end, in a frenzy of applause. The concert hall was in Bond Street, London, not in heaven or anywhere final like that. In most of Gladstone’s versions the good ones never died.

When it was over they all wanted an encore. Mair wanted the story of Montagu Hughes and Capulet Williams, by William Shakespeare. I liked this one, too – especially towards the end when Romeo captured all of Juliet’s family and took them to the dungeons under Caernarfon Castle, and injected them one by one with a serum called common sense. Once that was done they all realised that, as Romeo explained, he couldn’t marry Juliet because she was under age, and even a bit young for her age too. The ending came with Romeo and the nurse eloping to the South of France, which seemed to me more satisfactory than the version we had just pawed through for the Senior.

Maxie said, ‘What about having the
Fall of the House of Cadwallon
?’ This was a comic one. If you made
everything
happen to people, like Edgar Allen Poe did, Gladstone used to say, then it was bound to be comic.

Gladstone shook his head firmly.

‘Can we have
Silas Morfa
by George Eliot?’ Dora pleaded, but again Gladstone was firm.

‘No more tonight,’ he said, and sent Dewi up with the mattress.

‘Not even
Llywelyn Macbeth Williams
?’

No. Not even that. The children had a small mutiny straight away, and we had to have a couple of dragging, missionary hymns to get them into the right mood for sleep.

Finally they were marched off, and after a while
Gladstone came downstairs, a smile on his face. ‘If I had a Woodbine,’ he said, ‘I’d give it to anybody.’ Dewi gave him a Woodbine. ‘What a struggle,’ he went on. ‘Listen to them laughing up there.’ He stood with his back to the blackleaded fireplace, the cigarette dangling from his lips. ‘Nice though. In about half an hour sleep will have collared them all, and they’ll be lying there like new puppies close together…’

‘Tell us, for heaven’s sake,’ I said.

‘Tell us what, then?’ Dewi asked.

‘He went to see the man on the boat,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes – Ashton Vaughan,’ Gladstone said lightly. ‘I paid him a call this evening.’

‘What did he say?’ I asked. ‘Tell us…’

Gladstone sat down. ‘I had a word with Martha after tea,’ he said, brushing his hair clear of his forehead. I asked her about Ashton Vaughan. She told me a lot…’

‘They fought with daggers,’ I said, getting it in quickly. ‘Him and his brother.’

Dewi whistled, high pitched. ‘Daggers? Never…’

‘It’s true,’ Gladstone said. ‘They had this fight, then Ashton vanished into thin air. Never been back till today.’

‘Where’d he go?’ Maxie asked.

‘Oh – everywhere. Australia. America. All over. He can speak six languages – fluently…’

‘Did he say so?’

Gladstone nodded. We all considered this.

‘Including Welsh?’ Maxie asked.

‘He’s been a sailor and a rancher…’

I envied Gladstone now, having heard this before any of us.

‘A gold prospector, too…’

‘Did he find the lost mine?’ Maxie asked.

We ignored the question.

‘Went away in 1920, and this is his first time back.’

‘Fought his own brother?’ Dewi said. ‘With daggers – seriously?’

‘By the harbour,’ I said.

‘And he’s going to live on the old
Moonbeam
, too?’

Gladstone’s face softened. ‘“Only the old
Moonbeam
for me”, he said. Never said a word about his brother in that big house…’

‘Marius Vaughan’s a big bastard,’ Dewi put in. ‘Our Tada worked for him once. Hard, our Tada said. Hard like iron.’

‘Won’t take his own brother back?’ I asked.

‘Ashton hasn’t asked him,’ Gladstone said. ‘He told me he wasn’t going to lick any man’s boots. Said he wasn’t a pauper.’ He thought about that for a moment, then he added, ‘Ashton Vaughan’s a sick man, though. You can tell by his eyes…’

‘Has he got malaria, then?’ Maxie asked.

We ignored that as well.

‘Years and years wandering away from his native land. “Funny what a grip the old place has on you,” he said to me. He had to come back, you see.’ The electric went out as Gladstone said this. There was no more money in the house for the meter so we stirred up the fire and made do with that. ‘He was sitting alone in the cabin there – looking at the stove. I put a fire in for him. He didn’t seem to have anything, except bottles…’

‘Glad to see you, then?’

‘Oh –
very
pleased. I took him half a loaf, but I don’t suppose he’ll eat it. Said he’d lost the taste for solid food. Then he said he’d been to a public school. Just like that. I didn’t ask him or anything…’

‘What’s a public school?’ Maxie asked. ‘Where they send you if you’re bad?’

‘A boarding school,’ Gladstone explained. ‘In England. Cost his father a fortune, he said, and gave him the manners of a gentleman and the brain of a Chinese
sea-cook
. That’s what he said.’

‘That’s a good one,’ Dewi commented. ‘Son of a bloody Chinese sea-cook.’

‘No need to swear,’ said Gladstone.

‘What else, then?’ I asked.

Gladstone brushed back his long hair. ‘He asked a lot of questions about people who used to live in the town. I didn’t know half of them. He said, “I don’t know why I’ve come back, kid” – he called me “kid” all the time. “I don’t know why I’ve come back – there’s nothing for me here…”’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him this was his native town, like. I didn’t know what to say. “Is that reason enough, kid?” he said. I said I thought it was. I was only talking, like.’ Gladstone jabbed away at the dying fire. ‘Martha told me I didn’t want to have anything to do with the Vaughans. Said she remembered Ashton Vaughan. He was rough, she said. Wicked. But – I’ll tell you this now –
I
don’t think he’s rough.’ He turned to me. ‘Lew – I thought he was a man with a bit of
style
to him, somehow. Know what I mean?’

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I nodded. The man aboard the
Moonbeam
was important now, and exciting.

‘What does he want us to do, though?’ I said.

Gladstone stared reflectively at the fire for a moment. ‘“This bloody little town, God damn it” – that’s what he said.’

‘Said that?’ Dewi too had forgotten we’d had our boat pinched by one of the Vaughans.

‘“If I’ll be needing friends anywhere,” he said, “I’ll need them here.” He wants us,’ Gladstone ended, ‘to be his friends.’

We crouched on the hearth and held our hands out to the fire, suddenly cold all of us with the news. Gladstone looked very pale and very serious.

‘He’s right, isn’t he? Bloody little town. He meant they’re all hypocrites here. That’s what he meant…’

‘All lick my ass and money,’ Dewi said fiercely.

‘What did he say about his brother?’ I asked.

‘Not a word.’

‘The fight, then?’

‘Nothing.’

‘With knives?’ Maxie said. ‘That right, Lew?’

‘Polly told me. She’d know…’

Gladstone broke in, ‘Martha said there was another brother. Had a funny name, she said. You know Martha – every name that’s not Gwen and Mair and Elin is real comic. Maybe that’s why she gave me Gladstone.’ He stirred the fire up. ‘You know what she said? She said that one on the Point – Marius Vaughan – shot this other brother dead!’