I pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to Madame Sosostris. She accepted it without looking at me, and squeaked in acknowledgement like a mouse.
‘I think the loo-tenant here might be thinking of making a cup of tea,’ I said.
Calamity stood up. ‘Sure, boss.’
‘Tell the maid,’ said Madame Sosostris. She dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry for making a scene, I . . . I don’t know what I would do if you sent me to prison. I don’t know how I would cope.’
‘No one’s going to send you to prison,’ I said softly, eaten up with shame. ‘It’s all been a terrible mistake. We were given wrong information. We’re truly sorry, I would like to ask you to forget this meeting ever took place.’
She looked up, eyes glistening, and squeezed my hand. ‘Please don’t worry about it. Policemen are human too.’
Calamity came back with the maid, who carried a tray. As she stirred her tea, Madame Sosostris said, ‘I don’t think that tape you played was made by anyone at a séance. The demonic laughter sounds a bit artificial to me; and that squealing in the background sounds like seagulls; and the other sound, the clattering one with the bell, it reminds me of a tram. If you ask me the recording was made in Aberystwyth, somewhere on the Prom.’
As the bus circled the village green before heading back to Aberystwyth Calamity turned to me and said, ‘That story about Mr Williams, I guess it had to be true?’
I looked at her and said nothing.
Chapter 12
Once upon a time a man called Caxton transformed mankind’s destiny for ever by forging letters out of iron. Later the iron was replaced by molten lead. Thus were born those epistemological coal tongs we call printed words, and with them our ability to catalogue the contents of that mansion of infinite floors, the human heart. Our thoughts and dreams, our memories, the anguish of love, our inexpressible bafflement at the antinomies of space and time . . . all that had once been unnameable intimations were brought within the scope of the coal tongs. In those sturdy iron squiggles, all could be written down and communicated, not only to the living but to people who had not yet been born, to people who might not be born for many centuries to come. But, as we know, a cruel and pitiless contingency characterises our fate. We are chaff in the wind and the cup of life which, sooner or later, all must drink to the lees, is often more bitter than gall. And so to prevent this brute and inescapable fact from casting its shadow upon our summer holidays, it was ordained that the epistemological coal tongs in Aberystwyth would be fashioned from sugar. And men would call it Rock. In scarlet crystalline sweetness thereafter would all human thought be extruded. Or, as a very clever person once said, ‘Whereof the rock cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
At least that’s what it says in the free guidebook. Calamity read it with a frown creasing her forehead as we waited in the queue.
Barnaby & Merlin’s rock foundry occupies the southern wing of the Old College on Aberystwyth Prom. It is built from warm yellow blocks of stone in an eclectic architectural mixture of Teutonic castle, monastery, schoolhouse and St Pancras station. On the tower at the end is a mosaic of Archimedes, the man credited with having worked out in the second century how many grains of sand there are in the universe. For his reward he stands immortalised in little coloured stones, looking out upon a beach on which there isn’t a single grain of sand, only grit and smooth pebbles. They say the mosaic is not opaque, it just appears so from the outside, and in reality it is translucent and behind it sits old Barnaby counting his money. That’s what they say.
There was a queue of around ten or twelve holidaymakers. We followed them, up the steps and into a neo-Gothic foyer: stone spiral staircases, pale sandstone banisters, arched windows and circular skylights with stained glass. The floor was laid out of shiny red tiles. An old stone griffin stood sentinel and the building hummed, a sound that seemed to come from all sides and also from nowhere. The same sensation is experienced by people in the engine room of ships. At Barnaby & Merlin work continued round the clock throughout the year; in winter the rock was stockpiled like hay. The pink smoke never stopped belching from the modest chimney.
‘I’ve been looking into the troll bride angle,’ said Calamity. ‘It seems that a number of girls have gone missing from the area around Abercuawg over the past century. The old folk reckon they were sent to the trolls. Usually they got rid of unpopular girls, slatterns who gave the village a bad name. That’s what they say.’
‘I see.’
‘Traditionally it was the Witchfinder who organised it.’
‘That’s interesting.’
Mr Williams, the man who conducted the tour, seemed neither surprised nor disappointed at the small turnout; indeed he seemed to consider it reasonable. The decline of an entire way of life could be read in his resignation. The world had forgotten about rock, they had forgotten why they needed to eat it, and that was not difficult because there was no reason. People ate it because it was one of those things you did at the seaside, one of the things everyone else did. It answered no great need. If all the seaside rock in the world disappeared tomorrow, the seaside holiday which itself had all but disappeared would not be greatly diminished. The same would be true if the donkey rides disappeared because sitting on a donkey is not particularly essential; and the same would be true of eating hot dogs, and bingo, and countless other things. The experience of the seaside holiday would not be diminished if any of them disappeared but if they all did there would be no seaside holiday.
Each of the slim pink alabaster-smooth rods of confectionery was made in strict accordance with a secret recipe invented by founder Ephraim Barnaby and his partner Merlin who didn’t exist. Ephraim Barnaby had been a man with an acute understanding of Victorian business practice and knew that you couldn’t get anywhere in those days without an ampersand. It was universally acknowledged that B&M rock was superior to all other seaside rocks and this was the result of a secret formula that was passed down from father to son on his twenty-first birthday in a sealed envelope.
When the time came, the elder Barnaby would take his son for breakfast at the Belle Vue Hotel. There, amid the shining silver and the crisp white linen spread on an alcove table commanding a kingly view of the Promenade and Cardigan Bay, they would dine on dry toast and tea without milk and the young son would intuit from this that the meal embodied a moral about those twin cheats, triumph and disaster. After breakfast they would take the Cliff Railway to the summit of Constitution Hill and spend the morning discussing matters of business. The culmination of this ritual would be the handing over of the envelope that contained the secret formula. There would be a pause on top of that hilltop with its dramatic vista of Cardigan Bay and the boy would then open the envelope and read its contents, having first given his father a solemn undertaking, sealed with a handshake, to strive to make his life worthy of the legacy being entrusted to him, and also to take pains to bring into the world a son into whose care he could entrust the same legacy in a similar scene on top of Constitution Hill in years to come.
The boy would read the letter containing the secret formula and return from the mountain, like other prophets before him, with an expression composed in equal parts of astonishment and fear. The torch had been passed on this way for five generations without mishap until the current one when young Gomer Barnaby lost his wits the same day that Gethsemane Walters went missing. After this, the elder Barnaby became a recluse in the turret of the rock foundry and devoted his declining years to caring for his broken son and focussing his energies on the betterment of mankind by developing a better type of placebo. It came to be known as Ampersandium and people swear by it.