To the Ends of the Earth (25 page)

I passed a store with textbooks in the window. Dead flies lay on their sides on the book covers; they had not been swatted, but had simply starved; they seemed asleep. There were shelves in this bookstore, but not many books. There was no salesperson. A husky voice came from behind a beaded curtain.

“In here.”

I went in. A man was whispering into a telephone. He paid no attention to me. There were plenty of books in
here. On the covers were pictures of naked people. The room smelled of cheap paper and ink. The magazines were in cellophane wrappers. They showed breasts and rubber underwear, and there were children on some of them—the titles suggested that the naked tots were violated inside. No guidebooks here, but as this pornography shop was Welsh, the door had a bell that went
bing-bong!
in a cheery way as I left.

Welsh politeness was softhearted and smiling. Even Llanelli’s Skinheads were well behaved, and the youths with swastikas on their leather jackets and bleached hair and earrings or green hair and T-shirts saying
ANARCHY!
—even they seemed sweet-natured. And how amazing that the millions of Welsh, who shared about a dozen surnames, were the opposite of anonymous. They were conspicuous individuals and at a personal level tried hard to please. “You’re a gentleman!” one man would cry to another, greeting him on the street.

At Jenkins the Bakers (“Every bite—pure delight”) I saw a strawberry tart with clotted cream on top. Were they fresh strawberries?

“Oh, yes, fresh this morning,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

I asked for one.

“But they’re thirty pence, darling,” Mrs. Jenkins said, warning me and not moving. She expected me to tell her to forget it. She was on my side in the most humane way, and gave a commiserating smile, as if to say, It’s a shocking amount of money for a strawberry tart!

When I bought two, she seemed surprised. It must have been my knapsack and my vagabond demeanor. I went around the corner and stuffed them into my mouth.

“Good morning—I mean, good evening!” Mr. Maddocks the stationmaster said at Llanelli Station. “I knew I’d get it right in the end. It’s patience you want!”

The rest of the people on the platform were speaking Welsh, but on seeing the train draw in—perhaps it was the excitement—they lapsed into English.

T
HE ELEGANT HOUSES OF
T
ENBY STANDING TALL ON THE
cliff reminded me of beautifully bound books on a high shelf—their bay windows had the curvature of book spines. The town was elevated on a promontory, so the sea on three sides gave its light a penetrating purity that reached the market square and fortified the air with the tang of ocean-washed rocks. It was odd that a place so pretty should also be so restful, and yet that was the case. But Tenby was more than pretty. It was so picturesque, it looked like a watercolor of itself.

It had not been preserved by the fastidious tyrants who so often took over British villages—the new class who moved in and gutted the houses, and then, after restoring the thatched roofs and mullioned windows, hid a chromium kitchen in the inglenook, which ran on microchips. Such people could make a place so picturesque that it was uninhabitable. Tenby had been maintained, and it had mellowed; it was still sturdy, and I was glad I had found it. But it was the sort of place that denied a sense of triumph to the person who secretly felt he had discovered it—because its gracefulness was well known; it had been painted and praised; it was old even in Tudor times; and it had produced Augustus John (who wrote about Tenby in his autobiography,
Chiaroscuro)
, as well as the inventor of the equal sign (=) in mathematics, Robert Recorde. But, then, there were no secret places in Britain that I had seen; there were only forgotten places, and places that were being buried or changed by our harsh century.

Tenby had been spared, and it was the more pleasing for being rather quiet and empty. I walked around dreamily.
For the first time since I had set out on this trip I felt that a watering place was fulfilling its purpose—calming me, soothing me, making me want to snore over a book on a veranda with a sea view.

M
Y STRANGE ENCOUNTER TOOK PLACE AT THE
H
OTEL
Harlech, a dismal semiruin not far from the silted-up river in Cardigan. It had been closed for years, and it smelled that way—of mice and unwashed clothes. The smell of rags is like the smell of dead men anyway, but this was compounded with the smells of dirt and wood smoke and the slow river. I knew as soon as I checked in that it was a mistake. I was shown to my room by a sulking girl of fifteen, who had a fat pouty face and a potbelly.

“It seems a little quiet,” I said.

Gwen said, “You’re the only guest.”

“In the whole hotel?”

“In the whole hotel.”

My bed smelled, too, as though it had been slept in—just slept in recently, someone having crawled out a little while ago, leaving it warm and disgusting.

The owner of the Harlech was a winking woman with a husky laugh, named Reeny. She kept a purse in the cleavage between her breasts; she smoked while she was eating; she talked about her boyfriend—“My boyfriend’s been all around the world on ships.” Reeny’s boyfriend was a pale unshaven man of fifty who limped through the hotel, his shirttails out, groaning because he could never find his hairbrush. His name was Lloyd, and he was balding. Lloyd seldom spoke to me, but Reeny was irrepressible, always urging me to come down to the bar for a drink.

The bar was a darkened room with torn curtains and a simple table in the center. There were usually two tattooed youths and two old men at the table, drinking beer with Lloyd. Reeny acted as barmaid, using a tin tray. And it was she who changed the records: the music was loud and terrible, but the men had no conversation, and they looked haggard and even rather ill.

The unexpected thing was that Reeny was very cheerful and hospitable. The hotel was dirty and her food unspeakable and the dining room smelled of urine, but Reeny was kind, and she loved to talk, and she spoke of improving the hotel, and she knew that Lloyd was a complaining old fake. Relax, enjoy yourself, have another helping, Reeny said. She had the right spirit, but the hotel was a mess. “This is Paul—he’s from America,” Reeny said, and winked at me. She was proud of me. That thought made me very gloomy.

One night she introduced me to Ellie. She was red-eyed and very fat and had a gravelly voice; she was somewhat toothless and freckled; she came from Swansea. “Aye,” she said. “Swansea’s a bloody bog.” Ellie was drunk—and she was deaf in the way drunks often are. Reeny was talking about America, but Ellie was still mumbling about Swansea.

“At least we’re not tight,” Ellie said. “Aye, we’re careful, but the Cardies are tight.”

“That’s us,” Reeny said. “Cardies, from Cardigan. Aye, we’re tighter than the Scots.”

Ellie screwed up her face to show how tight the Cardies were, and then she demanded to know why I was not drunk—and she appealed to the silent, haggard men, who stared back at her with dull damp eyes. Ellie was wearing a baggy gray sweater. She finished her pint of beer and then wiped her hands on her sweater.

“What do you think of the Cardies?” she said.

“Delightful,” I said. But I thought,
Savages
.

At midnight they were still drinking.

“I’m going upstairs,” I said.

“None of the rooms have locks,” Reeny said. “That’s why there are no keys. See?”

Ellie said, “Aarrgh, it’s a quiet place, Reen!”

“Too bloody quiet, I say,” Reeny said. “We have to drive to Saundersfoot for a little nightlife.”

Saundersfoot was thirty-three miles away.

“What is it, Lloyd?” Reeny said.

Lloyd had been grinning.

He said, “He looks worried,” meaning me.

“I’m not worried,” I said.

This always sounds to me a worried man’s protest. I stood there, trying to smile. The four local men at the table merely stared back with their haggard faces.

“There’s no locks in this place,” Lloyd said, with pleasure.

Then Reeny screeched, “We won’t rob you or rape you!”

She said it so loudly that it was a few seconds before I could take it in. She was vivacious but ugly.

I recovered and said, “What a shame. I was looking forward to one or the other.”

Reeny howled at this.

In the sour bed, I could hear rock music coming from the bar, and sometimes shouts. But I was so tired, I dropped off to sleep, and I dreamed of Cape Cod. I was with my cousin and saying to her, “Why do people go home so early? This is the only good place in the world. I suppose they’re worried about traffic. I’d never leave—”

Then something tore. It was a ripping sound in the room. I sat up and saw a tousled head. I thought it was a man. It was a man’s rough face, a squashed nose, a crooked mouth. I recognized the freckles and the red eyes. It was Ellie.

I said, “What are you doing?”

She was crouching so near to the bed that I could not see her body. The ripping sound came again—a zipper on my knapsack. Ellie was slightly turned away from me. She did not move. When I saw that it was Ellie and not a man, I relaxed—and I knew that my wallet and money were in my leather jacket, hanging on a hook across the room.

She said, “Where am I?”

“You’re in my room.”

She said, turning to me, “What are you doing here?”

“This is my room!”

Her questions had been drowsy in a theatrical way. She
was still crouching near my knapsack. She was breathing hard.

I said, “Leave that thing alone.”

“Aarrgh,” she groaned, and plumped her knees against the floor.

I wanted her to go away.

I said, “I’m trying to sleep.” Why was I being so polite?

She groaned again, a more convincing groan than the last one, and she said, “Where have I left me clothes?”

And she stood up. She was a big woman with big jolting breasts and freckles on them. She was, I saw, completely naked.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and stepped closer.

I said, “It’s five in the morning, for God’s sake.”

The sun had just struck the curtains.

“Aarrgh, I’m sick,” she said. “Move over.”

I said, “You don’t have any clothes on.”

“You can close your eyes,” she said.

I said, “What were you doing to my knapsack?”

“Looking for me clothes,” she said.

I said in a pleading way, “Give me a break, will you?”

“Don’t look at me nakedness,” she said.

“I’m going to close my eyes,” I said, “and when I open them I don’t want to see you in this room.”

Her naked flesh went flap-flap like a rubber raincoat as she tramped across the hard floor. I heard her go—she pulled the door shut—and then I checked to see that my money was safe and my knapsack unviolated. The zippers were open, but nothing was gone. I remembered what Reeny had screamed at me:
We won’t rob you or rape you!

At breakfast, Reeny said, “I’ve not been up at this hour for ten year! Look, it’s almost half-eight!”

Reeny had a miserable cough and her eyes were sooty with mascara. Her Welsh accent was stronger this morning, too.

I told her about Ellie.

She said, “Aye, is that so? I’ll pull her leg about that! Aye, that is funny.”

An old woman came to the door. She was unsteady, she
peered in. Reeny asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted a pint of beer.

“It’s half-eight in the morning!” Reeny said.

“A half a pint, then,” the old woman said.

“And it’s Sunday!” Reeny said. She turned to me and said, “We’re dry on a Sunday around here. That’s why it’s so quiet. But you can get a drink at St. Dogmaels.”

The woman looked pathetic. She said that in the coming referendum she would certainly vote for a change in the licensing law. She was not angry, but had that aged, beaten look that passes for patience.

“Oh, heavens!” Reeny said. “What shall I do, Paul? You tell me.”

I said to the old woman, “Have a cup of tea.”

“The police have been after me,” Reeny said. “They’re always looking in.” Reeny walked to the cupboard. “I could lose my license.” She took out a bottle of beer and poured it. “These coppers have no bloody mercy.” The glass was full. “Forty-five pence,” she said.

The woman drank that and then bought two more bottles. She paid and left, without another word. She had taken no pleasure in the drink and there was no satisfaction in having wheedled the beer out of Reeny on a dry day in Cardigan—in fact, she had not wheedled, but had merely stood there gaping in a paralyzed way.

I said, “It’s a hell of a breakfast—a beer.”

“She’s an alcoholic,” Reeny said. “She’s thirty-seven. Doesn’t look it, does she? Take me, I’m thirty-three and no one believes it. My boyfriend says I’ve got the figure of a girl of twenty. You’re not going, are you?”

E
IGHT MORE MILES ON THIS SUNNY DAY AND WE DREW INTO
Criccieth, where I hopped out of the train. I owned a guidebook that said, “
Criccieth:
For several years this small town was the home of James (now Jan) Morris, probably the finest living travel writer.” The “James (now Jan)” needed no explanation, since the story of how she changed from a man to a woman in a clinic in Casablanca was told in her book
Conundrum
, 1974. She still lived near Criccieth, outside the village of Llanystumdwy, in what was formerly the stables of the manor house, looking northward to the mountains of Eryri and southward to Cardigan Bay.

I seldom looked people up in foreign countries—I could never believe they really wanted to see me; I had an uncomfortable sense that I was interrupting something intimate—but I did look up Jan Morris. She had written a great deal about Wales, and I was here, and I knew her vaguely. Her house was built like an Inca fort, of large black rocks and heavy beams. She had written, “It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon the other in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. Its architecture is of the variety known these days as ‘vernacular,’ meaning that no professional architect has ever had a hand in it.”