Make Room for the Jester (9 page)

August came and brought good weather, except for Bank Holiday Monday when it poured. The visitors were
everywhere
. Normally you heard a lot of English spoken in Porthmawr, but that first week in August seemed to be all English. We even gave up Welsh ourselves just to be in fashion.

Most of the time we were on the beach criticising the visitors as they wore themselves out chasing after beach balls and jumping about in the sea and eating ice cream and drinking lemonade. They were from the big factories and had money to burn. They were English, from a different world, sharp and cocky with high, strident voices, of a higher class than us altogether. So we sat around and felt sorry for them because they weren’t Welsh, because they were so pale, because their talk was so comic. Porthmawr in August made you realise what it was like being a native.

 We had Ashton with us all the time. ‘My gang,’ he called us whenever he was able to get any words out. Most of the time he was a brimming barrel of drink and his speech was all over the place. But, sometimes, when he hit a sober patch, he tried to tell us stories about his adventures. They were so obviously untrue that even the children gave up listening. In any case, halfway through, his words would get all tangled up, and what the rest of the story was about was anybody’s guess. I felt sorry for him in a way: he was all broken down, just skin and bone, as if corroded by some dreadful acid.

Gladstone watched over his every move, even going to the trouble of finishing some of his stories when his speech gave out, explaining afterwards that Ashton had told them to him in private. He carried and fetched for him more than any of us. He got the children to sing and recite for him. He made sure Ashton got home safely every night. With all the visitors about, and the town so busy, no one said a word to us, no one warned us off. The Rev A. H. Jones was away on holiday, anyway, and Super Edwards was too occupied arresting all the drunks from Birmingham. We didn’t mention Ashton’s visit to his brother’s yacht, and neither did Ashton himself. In fact he never said a word about his brother, one way or the other.

But, although Gladstone tried his best to make me like him, I kept on thinking about him lying there, stinking on that bed, saying ‘Nursie boy’. It wasn’t just that, though: it was sometimes a look, a gesture, the way his mouth twisted when he spoke to Gladstone. We had an English word that we had made Welsh to cover what I felt. The word was
sbeitlyd
, but it meant much more than spiteful:
 it meant cynical and mean and cruel, and somehow fraud. We were the only ones who bothered about Ashton Vaughan, but I felt that if he had a better offer from someone else we would very soon be given the push…. That’s how I felt about him, but what bothered me more was whether I was the only one of us who sensed this. I watched Gladstone’s face very carefully but could find no hint of it there. Often I caught him looking across the bay towards the Point, but he never said what he was thinking. As for Dewi and Maxie, I reckoned they took everything as it came: Ashton was one of our company because Gladstone ordered it so.

That was the week we went to Gwynfor Roberts’ house for tea. The way I felt about Ashton was the way I felt about Gwynfor Roberts, and Gwynfor Roberts’ mother, and Gwynfor Roberts’ father too. If Gwynfor, who was harmless as milk and sat with me in Form VA, had had any more family I’d have felt the same way about them as well. Gwynfor was all right, I suppose, but he wasn’t any one thing: not dull, not clever, not vulgar, not polite, not daring, not timid, not even dirty-minded. I was always forgetting what he looked like, but most days he came and sat next to me, and every time he met me I was asked up their big house on the Hill. I didn’t understand why, had never really tried to understand, but sometimes I went up to his house for tea, especially if his mother had issued the invitation. It wasn’t an invitation when Mrs Roberts asked, though: it was an order.

‘You’ll come to tea,’ she’d say, and then she’d touch me pityingly on the shoulder, and I felt suddenly undernourished
and about to go down with malnutrition or something. The Roberts had a big grocer’s shop, and eating was their hobby. It was always a good tea, I’ll say that for them.

Towards the end of that Bank Holiday week I was standing with Gladstone near the slot machine on the Square. I’d been trying to get some cigarettes out of it with a washer but without any luck. Then, out of the crowd, came Gwynfor Roberts, and sharp as a flash he put a coin in the machine, a real coin – Gwynfor always had money on him – and slipped a packet of Player’s into his pocket. Then he saw us. He didn’t blush exactly, but he looked as if he was going to blush. He handed round some chocolate straight away – he always carried a few bars with him – and said something about giving us a fag only his mother was on the way.

‘Lew,’ he said, ‘will you come up this afternoon?’

‘Well,’ I said.

‘Got a new Meccano,’ he said.

I hated the sight of his Meccano, and his Hornby train too – but because he wasn’t anything I said that’s nice.

I heard his mother before I saw her. Practically everybody on the Square must have heard her. ‘Gwynfor – is that your friend, then? Bring him to tea!’ Mrs Roberts had her hand on my shoulder, checking if I’d fattened up a bit. ‘Bring him along! Now! And his friend!’

Gladstone nearly fell over. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘are you serious?’

Mrs Roberts hitched up her enormous bosom, fixed her glasses on her podgy little nose and gave a great roar of laughter. ‘Of course I am, cariad,’ she cried. ‘Come and have a good tea!’

She swung around and marched off into the crowd, charging them aside like Boadicea with the Romans.

‘Better come,’ Gwynfor said. ‘It’ll be all right for Gladstone.’

The three of us followed in Mrs Roberts’ wake, Gladstone wide-eyed with shock. ‘Haven’t been out to tea since the Sunday school trip in 1933,’ he whispered to me.

At the end of the street was the car. We piled in the back and Mrs Roberts drove off at her usual speed, which was the speed of Royalty. Gladstone, always quick to sense an occasion, sat bolt upright by the window, chin held high, and graciously waved to the crowds.

Meira had once done a bit of cleaning for Mrs Roberts and had always come home saying the house was a palace. All I knew was that it wasn’t a house where you could wear tar on your shirt, and have a hole in the seat of your trousers. Not without feeling like a cat dragged in out of the storm, anyway.

‘God,’ Gladstone said, as we sat on the big couch in the big front room, ‘it’s very nice, but I feel like a
flea-circus
attendant.’

He didn’t show it, though. He had Gwynfor showing him his things, and he was saying very nice, charming, how interesting, fascinating. ‘I must get one of those,’ he remarked, looking at an expensive building outfit.

By the door there was a grand piano – a German make which I’d heard was the best. When the boys bragged at school it was often about the make of their pianos.

‘I suppose you can play it?’ Gladstone said.

‘Not much,’ Gwynfor replied.

‘Of course he does,’ Mrs Roberts said as she stormed
in. She spoke Welsh to us all that afternoon, and English to Gwynfor. That was one of those things that made me have this feeling about her.

‘Gwynfor – play for the boys,’ she ordered.

‘Oh – Mam!’

‘Now then,’ Gladstone said, finger raised, ‘we mustn’t make him play if he doesn’t want to. Very bad, you know. Could so very easily turn him away from his music.’

Mrs Roberts’ glasses slid down her nose as her eyebrows went up. She was so surprised she had to sit down – opposite us, her legs wide apart so that you could see the skin above her stockings. She looked like a chair we had at home.

‘What did you say your name was?’ she asked Gladstone.

‘Gladstone Williams,’ he replied, ‘after the famous Greek politician.’

‘Oh,’ Mrs Roberts said.

‘Not a politician I really care for,’ Gladstone went on. ‘Did you know he used to chew each mouthful of food eighty-six times?’

‘Really?’ Mrs Roberts breathed.

‘And what I said just then about the piano is right, you know. I mean – you’ll excuse me saying this to a lady, to a mother, like yourself – but you should never force a child into making an exhibition of himself. You might be spoiling a genius…’

‘Well,’ Mrs Roberts said, ‘Gwynfor plays hymns very nice…’

‘Exactly,’ Gladstone replied, crossing his legs and showing her for the first time that he wasn’t wearing socks. ‘We all must start somewhere – but the great danger is that
we might drown a talent with too much insistence. But of course this is old-fashioned stuff to you, Mrs Roberts, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll have thought like this.’

‘Well – yes,’ Mrs Roberts said, but vaguely.

‘You need practice, of course,’ he went on. ‘Practise for as long as possible, but at the early stages like this it is so easy, so very easy to make a genius hate his instrument.’

‘You must be right, I’m sure,’ Mrs Roberts said, her glasses still at the end of her nose. ‘Do you play, then?’

I kept my eyes on the
Boy’s
Own Annual
but I wasn’t doing any reading.

‘Well,’ Gladstone said, ‘I don’t actually
play
. Let’s say I merely amuse myself occasionally.’ He swept the long hair clear of his forehead. ‘A few notes sometimes, here and there.’ He got up and walked over to the piano and ran his hand gently along the top as if he expected to find dust there. ‘Beautiful,’ he said softly, ‘a lovely instrument…’

‘Walnut,’ Mrs Roberts explained quickly. ‘Polished.’

Gladstone looked down at the keyboard – I was all attention now – then sat on the stool and stared at the music that was propped up on the stand. ‘Handel’s
Largo
,’ he announced.

‘Oh – beautiful,’ Mrs Roberts said, clapping her hands. ‘A lovely piece, that. Can you play it, then?’

Gladstone flexed his long fingers. ‘I
have
played it, of course, Mrs Roberts. A popular piece…’

‘Makes
me
think of Heaven,’ Mrs Roberts said. Her voice sounded very spitty.

Gladstone began to hum the opening bars. Mrs Roberts joined in, conducting as well. ‘Dah, dah, dah, daah, da, da, da-hah,’ they sang. ‘Lovely,’ Mrs Roberts
said. ‘Oh – lovely.’ I was wondering why she hadn’t noticed that Gladstone’s shirt was threadbare around the collar, and that his trousers looked as if he’d slept the week in them. She had always been very observant where my clothes were concerned. Once, she had even given me an old pair of trousers to take home, and I had thrown them into the harbour…. Perhaps she would pay more attention once Gladstone was forced to play.

He stopped singing. ‘The
Largo
,’ he said. ‘You’ll know it used to be the Chinese national anthem, I suppose?’

Something went in the pit of my stomach.

‘Really?’ Mrs Roberts breathed. She was sitting forward on her chair, eyes intently fixed on him. And now his hands were up, poised over the keyboard. Oh, God, I thought, perhaps he’s carried away, perhaps he thinks he really can…. His eyes were closed. A strand of hair had fallen across his forehead.

‘Handel’s
Largo
,’ he whispered, and his eyes snapped open, and he brought his hands down gently on the keys without striking a note. ‘To be or not to be?’

‘Oh – yes,’ Mrs Roberts said.

‘That – is the question,’ Gladstone went on.

‘Shakespeare, Mam,’ Gwynfor explained. He was still crouched on the carpet, trying to straighten out a bent Meccano girder.

‘I know,’ Mrs Roberts said sharply. ‘Been to school.’ Her eyes pleaded with Gladstone. ‘Go on, then – please.’

Gladstone sighed. He was looking at the ornaments on the top of the piano. Mrs Roberts believed in hiding nothing. There were a dozen and more of them – toy dogs, milkmaids, egg-timers with Present from Llandudno on
them, and a pot monkey sitting on a spring, and a bird with a yellow beak that couldn’t possibly have been a blackbird, and Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall…. ‘I had an uncle named Erasmus,’ Gladstone began softly, ‘who was a major pianist. Mind you – he only had two fingers on his left hand. Used to make up the chords with his right. Got into trouble at the Royal Academy of Music about that. He was a genius, of course – had to oil his hands every night and wear silk gloves in bed in case the damp got at them. He used to play concertos…’

‘Really?’ Mrs Roberts was bolt upright, sensing a story. ‘And symphonies?’

Gladstone gave me a frozen-faced look. ‘Only concertos – or, to be more exact, concerti. He played the Birmingham Concerti of John Sebastian…’

‘Bach?’ Mrs Roberts cried joyfully.

‘Exactly,’ Gladstone replied. ‘A Welshman, thank God…’

You’re taking a chance, I thought. Any minute now and it’ll be the way out for us.

‘Then there was the “Unfurnished” by Franz Sherbert, of course. Who
hasn’t
played that? And “Hiding”,’ he went on, speeding up so as to get away with it, ‘the “Machynlleth March”, naturally. And Olga’s “Circumcision”, and the “List Post” by Lost. You’ve no idea – it was a musical education just to be near him. He practically
lived
at the Albert Hall….’

‘On the wireless, too?’ Mrs Roberts begged.

‘Never,’ Gladstone replied firmly. ‘All that electric, you know – the currents might affect his
diminuendo
. He was always afraid of that. And he was right, of course. Doctors know they play havoc with the
diminuendo
…’

‘Really?’ Mrs Roberts breathed, and the maid came in and said tea was ready.

Gladstone hit one note on the piano, said ‘Beautiful’, and came away quickly. He held the door open for us, as if he was the host, and we went through to the kitchen where the table sagged with food.

During tea Gladstone kept it up. He was sitting next to me so I gave him a kick now and then, but he took no notice.

‘I have always considered Henry Wadsworth Shortman a mediocre poet,’ he remarked as he stuffed a couple of ham sandwiches into his pockets for the children. ‘Mind you – the “Lay of the last Ministerial” wasn’t bad…’