The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth Read Free Page A

some waifs for the search. I stood and waited in a corridor. Feeble forty-watt light bulbs hung from the ceiling and were rendered insignificant by the moon outside. A row of doors led off with brass handles that rattled loosely in their sockets, like the hip joints of the mistresses who sat in the offices behind. Each door bore a name and a rank to indicate the degree of fear that should reside in the heart of whichever girl was sent to wait outside. At the end of the corridor, the assembly hall lay in darkness pierced by slabs of waxen moonlight. At the other end was another hall with a gallery where girls now ran to fetch gabardine macs and torches from bedside cabinets.
    The girls started to gather in the hall, dark shapes like crows on a telegraph line, whispering and bobbing in excitement until one of the sisters said the next one to talk would be sent back to bed. So then silence fell like a guillotine blade but lasted only a few brief seconds before irresistible whispering broke the surface again. Two girls were sent back to their dormitory. Then they formed into pairs and followed Sister Cunégonde out into the night with their torches, like a phalanx of cinema usherettes lifting the siege of a walled city.
    We passed through a door marked ‘Staff Only’ into a garden never normally visited by pupils, past shrubs that they could only appreciate through the window, and on through a door set in a high wall topped with vicious jags of broken glass. Beyond the wall, towards the edge of the estuary, lay the fifteenth-century ruins of the convent that the Sisters of Deiniol had onceoccupied. It threw shadows in the night like the broken teeth of a goblin. The chapel of rest was still in use and the candles inside threw a pale gleam that trembled like a reflection on the waters of a brook.
    From the car, Myfanwy could have turned right and walked in this direction and perhaps got lost in the salt marsh; or turned left towards the dunes. Or gone straight ahead into the waters of the Dovey estuary. After an hour of searching, one of the girls found a locket on the dunes engraved with the word ‘Myfanwy’.
    I returned to the caravan and brewed tea. Then I sat in the darkness and drank, waiting for dawn. All men, if they are honest, are scared of the dark. The arrival of light, even a glimmer under the edge of a door, lifts the spirit in a way that can’t be described, because it dates back to a time before language. Hope returns, night terrors evaporate. You smile at the childishness of it all, the demons who haunted your sleep. It was just a dream. But that morning I had a new companion. Dread. The light under the door was a passing car.
    I drove to town and parked by the harbour and walked down towards the elbow where the Prom bent sharply and found Sospan already up and preparing his kiosk for the day. Word had already reached him about Myfanwy and when I asked which was best of all the many exotic flavours and combinations in his medicinal cabinet of ices he said in such a situation there was nothing better, no balm more soothing, than simple vanilla. And so, just like on any other day, I ordered a 99 with plenty of ripple.
    I offered him one but it was still too early; and, besides, he said, leaning forward out of the booth to be closer to me in my hour of need, he needed to keep a clear head to help get to the bottom of what had happened and erase this terrible stain on the honour of the ice man’s profession. His sharp mind had already intuited what the forensic scientists would later confirm: the search last night and the more thorough-going one planned for thismorning were pointless. It was clear that the ripple in the ices yesterday had been tampered with and whoever did it, given that I was asleep for at least three hours, had all the time in the world to drive up alongside our car, transfer Myfanwy and drive off without arousing suspicion. The clue, said Sospan, was the
gelati
man.
    ‘You must try, Mr Knight,