The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth Read Free

smile and in the waters of her eyes something stirred from time to time, recognition or remembrance – like a fish flashing through a forest pool.
    The nurse who helped get her into the front seat finished adjusting the seat belt and then took out a little scent bottle and put a dab on Myfanwy’s wrists. It was the stuff they sold in the gift shop out at the Waifery, made from the bluebells in Danycoed Wood. She could have saved herself the effort. By that time I already knew: no ghost was going to appear at the upstairs window today.
    The absence of conversation hung heavily in the car as we drove and I turned on the radio. They were running a report ofan escaped fugitive being sought by the police in the Aberystwyth area. He was a veteran of the old war in Patagonia and the public were warned not to approach him. That made me laugh. When was the last time anyone approached a Patagonian vet except to chase him off the land?
    We drove on to the wide flat sands of Ynyslas and pulled up alongside a party of day-trippers. They were sitting in an old black Morris Minor, the doors wide open and the interior exuding a smell of hot engine, pipe smoke and children’s vomit. It looked like they had just arrived and were still drinking the first cup of tea, the one that always tastes of the inside of a flask. Mum and Gran were sorting out the picnic. Dad was stretching his legs after the drive. Two kids were already squabbling. And Granddad sat in the front passenger seat wearing the beatific smile of one whose demands on life are so modest that a day driving for three hours in the company of his grandchildren to stare at the water for a while and drink tea was a source of joy. And one that would never lose its savour. The old man looked across as we arrived and raised his hand in greeting, just a simple movement of the hand, like the Queen, because he hailed from a world where not to have done so would have been impolite. And I returned the greeting because I didn’t want him to know that world had passed. And because he reminded me of my dad, Eeyore, sitting there amid the clamour as calm as a castle moat on a moonlit night. Another half an hour and he would probably loosen his tie.
    Myfanwy stared vacantly ahead across the estuary and beyond to the hills of Aberdovey. Away to the left were the dunes across which she had run once with such happiness and which now no longer possessed the power to enter the world into which she was slowly withdrawing. Somewhere from behind us, towards the entrance, came the tinkling xylophonic sound of an ice-cream van and I walked off to fetch two ices.
    When I returned with two cornets smothered with ripple the family of day-trippers was now struggling to raise that three-sidedwind-breaker of stripy canvas that people from the Midlands find such comfort in. I reclined Myfanwy’s seat and mine and lay back to stare through the windshield at the grey cloud-filled sky. It was knobbled with the texture and colour of kneaded dough. Clouds too heavy and too low in the sky, inducing a heaviness like a hand pressing down on one’s forehead, the lugubrious weight muffling all sound. The wind came in a soft roar with too much heat as if emerging from the baker’s oven, and blew across the open door of the car as if over a giant mollusc. The warm hot air and the distant cries of children, combined with the diffuse brightness of the light, tugged down on my eyelids and even as I licked my ice cream I could feel the lids lowering as if the weight of the day were too heavy to sustain.
    When I awoke it must have been about three hours later. The sun was setting, still hidden by cloud but betrayed by the lengthening shadows. Granddad and family had packed up and left. My ice cream lay in my lap, melted and sticky. I had a thumping headache. A hint of bluebells hung on the air like a dying echo. And Myfanwy was gone.

Chapter 2
     
    IT WAS WAY past their bedtime but Sister Cunégonde insisted on letting us have