From Aberystwyth with Love (25 page)

‘Why would I need to beware of honey-traps?’

‘Because every traveller to the Ukraine does. It’s not a personal thing, it’s like telling someone not to drink the water or to take precautions with regard to mosquitoes.’

‘But what reason would they have to entrap me?’

‘They don’t need a reason, they do it as a matter of routine in order to compromise you at a future date should it prove necessary.’ He took out a small pamphlet and put it on to the desk. It was a cheaply printed A5 booklet bearing an image on the cover of a lady in silhouette unpeeling a stocking in a hotel bedroom together with a skull and crossbones warning symbol such as you get on bottles of poison in cartoons.

‘Everything you need to know is in here, familiarise yourself. The only other point to cover is the matter of your incognitos. I presume you would be happy to go as a spinning-wheel salesman?’

That night Calamity and I caught the midnight train to Shrewsbury.

Chapter 18

A light summer breeze blew across the rooftops of Montmartre, around the eaves and garrets from where candlelit artists mailed off ears to ungrateful lovers. It blew through the iron trelliswork and removed someone’s hat and sent it rolling along the platform to stop at my feet. It was a stovepipe hat. I bent down to pick it up and straightened up to look into the face of a pretty young girl of about seventeen with blonde ringlets and high Slavic cheekbones. She was wearing Welsh national dress. She smiled, took the hat with a ‘
Merci, monsieur
’, curtsied and ran back to her suitcase that was being held by the porter. I checked my watch, and waited for Calamity to return with her postcards. I thought it was a little too early in the journey to send them but Calamity had never been further than Shrewsbury before and my words were useless.

With a few minutes to spare she arrived and we walked in the direction of the train. Lights began to flicker on and the braids of intertwisting track out beyond the platform’s end turned gold in the setting sun. The carriage was a deep lustrous midnight blue, imprinted in gilt with the world’s most romantic stencil: Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. At the carriage end, next to the door, there was a smaller removable enamel sign that said: Orient Express: Paris–Munich–Vienna–Budapest–Bucharest–Istanbul (with connections to the twice-weekly steam packet to Hughesovka). The last sentence was written in tiny print like the bottom line of an optician’s chart.

We climbed aboard and found the guard sitting in a little office next to the shower and WC. It was no more than a cubby hole with a small desk, a lamp giving off a yellow glow and suffused with a smell of Pernod. He examined our travel documents and his face lit up with pleasure or surprise, or some emotion that suggested few people ever ventured as far as this fabled Shangri-la. A faraway look glimmered in his Pernod-stained eyes as he said, ‘Hughesovka. Ah yes! There was a time . . . a time long ago . . . when I too might have . . . ah! But whatever became of those years? Kept in the same place as the snow from last winter, no?’ He handed the tickets back with a melancholic smile. ‘Light-fingered life steals the dreams from our pockets while we are busy watching the parade, is it not so?’

‘That’s exactly how it is.’

‘Compartment 4a, and 4b for Mademoiselle Calamity.
Bon voyage!
’ And then he added, ‘Monsieur Mooncalf is a great man.’

The door to my compartment was ajar, a man stood with his back to the door, peering into a mirror inset in the aged wood veneer of the compartment. He seemed to be taking his own pulse but once my eyes became accustomed to the light given off by the dim bulbs in blue-velvet, tasselled lampshades I saw that he was in fact adjusting his cufflink. Opened on a small shelf beneath the mirror was a gentleman’s travelling kit containing brushes, combs and manicure devices. From this he took out a set square and checked the precision with which his cuff was aligned to the central axis of his shirt. I coughed politely and he turned round and said, ‘If you are looking for Edgbaston he’s gone. Killed himself. Good riddance, too, he was a liar. He deserves no pity from the likes of us.’

‘I don’t know Mr Edgbaston.’

‘You’re looking at him now, or rather at the husk that once contained the impostor known as Edgbaston.’ He reached out a hand to shake. ‘Stanley. Stanley Edgbaston. I would give you one of my cards but I burned them all.’

‘Louie Knight.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I sell spinning wheels.’

‘I was in extruded aluminium. Hard to believe, isn’t it?’

‘What are you in now?’

‘Now? Now I inhabit a different world, one where a man scorns to have his soul bend to the crude arbitrage of such labels. The man who for thirty years submitted to that yoke is gone.’

‘Was he your brother?’

‘He was a Judas. He wore these clothes, he wore this face. For many years he drove a Vauxhall Cavalier with the same registration number as mine up the M69 every morning and ate my breakfast at the Heston Services. He slept with my wife every night and he dandled my little ones. But he is gone now and with him the falsehood he called a life. His wife and children beg for crusts, and his little one asks each morning, “Mummy, when is daddy coming back?” ’ He finished with the cuff, and grabbed the knot of his tie and rammed it into his Adam’s apple. ‘Spinning wheels you say? What sort?’

‘Oh you know, the usual: Sleeping Beauties, Cinderellas, full Saxons mostly and a few semi-automatics, nothing fancy.’

He nodded. ‘You’ll have to tell me about it.’

‘Most of my work is secret: for the government.’

He mouthed a silent ‘ah’ in acknowledgement as if this was just as he’d suspected.

We dined with Edgbaston and the girl in Welsh national dress who was sharing the compartment with Calamity. Her name was Natasha and she was returning to Hughesovka from her finishing school in Caerphilly. When I arrived, Edgbaston was talking about the day he killed himself.

‘For twenty years we had been telling our customers that plastic was no good, that aluminium was the only suitable material for replacing a wooden door. We preached it every day, from morning to night, like Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was a mission. They used to come back at us and say, “Ah yes, but aluminium sweats doesn’t it? You get condensation, don’t you, which you don’t get with plastic?” And they were right, of course, but then we confounded them by thermally breaking our aluminium. You probably don’t know what that is but it means joining two sections with a seal of resin so that the heat can’t transfer. It was a masterstroke. Suddenly you get the strength and resilience and good looks of aluminium combined with the thermal properties of plastic. The bloke who thought of that should have got the Nobel Prize. That was in 1981. There was no stopping us then, or so we thought. And then one day we were all called in to a special sales meeting and the marketing director gave us the news that we would be selling plastic alongside aluminium from now on. He even had the gall to suggest that it would be a boon to us, an extra string to our bow. Not a nod to the fact that we had spent all our lives insisting it was no good. Our universe fell apart. We weren’t spivs, you see, we were honest guys. People think salesmen are all full of shit, but it’s not true. Most of them find it easy to do their job because they believe what they are saying. Selling doors might not be heroic like being a fireman or something, but we can’t all be firemen and there is a quiet satisfaction that comes from knowing that you’ve been persuading people to buy your product because it is genuinely in their best interests. You’ve been telling them the truth. And then you find that you’ve been talking a load of crap all your life like some cheap sit-com parody of a travelling salesman . . .’ He stopped and lowered his head as if once again reliving the pain. Natasha looked moved and squeezed his forearm as if to say that no matter how black things got he must not give up. When he spoke again it was in a distant voice, as if addressing someone from his burned up past.

‘When we raised this point in the meeting, the point about our shattered credibility, they said, “Oh, now we’ve addressed that. We’ve been working on this plastic system for three years in close partnership with the Swedish manufacturers and we’ve ironed out all the problems.” But you only had to take one look at the suite to know the truth: it was just a cheap off-the-shelf system hastily branded with our name and brought in from the continent to stem the haemorrhage of sales figures to plastic. And because it was a cheap off-the-peg system it had all the problems we had been descrying for years, in spades. Plus a few more we had never thought of.’

‘And so you burned your business cards,’ said Natasha sadly.

‘What else was there to do?’

‘But what about your little children?’

He looked up and now there were tears in his eyes. ‘Leaving them was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. But what sort of father would I have been to them if I had continued living that lie?’

Silence engulfed us for a while. On the other side of the window a group of ghostly
doppelgängers
dined, served by transparent waiters. A tiny moon raced alongside, gently bobbing up and down like a stone skimming the surface of a lake; trees and copses swooped past like diving birds.

I said to Natasha, ‘You must have loved Caerphilly, the pleasure pier is wonderful.’

‘Yes,’ said Natasha, ‘although I didn’t spend too much time there, the sea makes my tummy queasy.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Edgbaston, ‘Caerphilly is thirty miles from the sea.’

Natasha gasped. ‘Oh!’

‘And there’s definitely no pier there, I know that because I’ve been.’

‘There’s a nice castle,’ I said. ‘It looks a little like a pier from a distance.’

She thought for a second and then exhaled as if defeated. ‘I’m such an idiot. I told them I could never hope to fool a guy like you.’

‘Told who?’

‘Them.’

‘Who?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

Edgbaston and Calamity and I exchanged automatic glances, empty of meaning.

‘Please don’t ask me about it . . . Oh, this is all so . . . all so . . . so horrible!’ She flung her napkin down and threw her face into her hands and emitted the sounds of muffled weeping.

‘Steady on, miss,’ said Edgbaston.

‘No! Don’t! Please . . . please don’t say anything.’ She stood up and rushed away in the direction of the sleeping carriage. The waiter observed through half-closed eyes and gave out a studied yawn, expressing the deepest imaginable ennui.

‘Women!’ said Edgbaston. ‘Can’t live with them, can’t bury them beneath the patio . . . oops! What have I said!’ He gave me a bone-chilling wink.

During the night, to the soothing background sound of clanking wheels and creaking wood, France turned into Germany. Periodically the hypnotic rocking of the train would subside, imperceptibly, until it had gone completely and a tingling silence remained. At such times I would crawl to the end of my bed and peer out through the gap between the edge of the blind and the window frame at an unknown station, bathed in yellow electric light. No one would be around except perhaps a station master somewhere cradling a cup of coffee, listening to the radio, his presence sensed rather than seen. Moths swarmed round the lights, and far away other lights flickered green and red. By dawn we had reached Munich. I ate breakfast alone, neither Stanley, Calamity nor Natasha turned out. I took out the photo of the invisible imaginary friend holding the levitated dog. What did it mean? Assuming the imaginary presence of Gethsemane Walters did not really have corporeal form, it meant somebody must have rigged this shot up. But to what purpose? And was it really possible that the spirit of Gethsemane could have travelled to Hughesovka?

The next day dragged by, we skirted alpine foothills and entered Austria. Vienna arrived and four Austrian policemen boarded the train and took Edgbaston away. They saluted me and called me ‘sir’ but didn’t say why they were taking him away and I knew cops well enough not to waste time asking. Stanley avoided my gaze.

The sky filled with cloud, the light dimmed, the waiter was replaced by a plumper, less supercilious one with a moustache. Dumplings appeared on the menu and Budapest station slid past the window. It was nice being alone in the compartment. I examined the letter Sospan had given me to deliver to Mr Tepes. It seemed improbably light considering its contents were somehow of such moment that they were paying for our travel expenses to Hughesovka. I obtained a flask of boiling water from the dining car and back in the compartment I steamed open the letter. It was empty. I was a courier for an empty envelope.