He was reading a letter and looked up at the noise of our approach. He folded the letter and put it back in the envelope but instead of putting it away he laid it carefully down on the counter. He had the air of someone who wanted to talk about its contents, but would prefer to be asked rather than bring the subject up himself.
I nodded towards the letter. ‘Good news?’
‘Very good actually, Mr Knight, since you ask. Usual is it?’
Without waiting for the answer he turned to the ice cream dispenser, held a cornet under the Mr Whippy nozzle and laid a gentle hand on the tiller.
‘Is it a girlfriend?’
‘You know very well my vocation forbids such pleasures. Since you enquire, I can tell you my letter is from a publishing firm in London who have expressed interest in my treatise on the role of ice cream as analgesic of the soul.’
‘You’ve written a book?’
‘My life’s work; not finished, of course.’
‘What’s it called?’ asked Calamity.
‘The Primal Ice Cream.’
‘What’s it about?’ I asked.
‘It is difficult to sum up in a few words, but it concerns the nature of vanilla as the spiritual keyhole to paradise.’
There was a slight pause in which we strove to formulate the obvious reply, but there wasn’t one.
‘Got any good flavours coming up?’ said Calamity.
Sospan brightened. ‘Autumn season starts in September, it’s going to be a humdinger. I think you’ll be impressed. Lot of cutting-edge stuff, flavours that haven’t been seen before in ice cream.’
‘I expect it’s still all under wraps for now,’ I said.
Sospan considered. ‘Well, seeing it’s you, Mr Knight, and Calamity, I might just give you a little peek.’ He pulled a notebook from the breast pocket of his white ice man’s coat and flipped it open. ‘You’ll like these.’ He put on a pair of reading glasses and read from his notes. ‘Rose water.’
‘Mmm,’ said Calamity, ‘that sounds good.’
‘Although I’m not sure whether to call it that or something more evocative such as Scheherazade.’
‘I think Rose water is better, if you call it that other name no one round here will know what it is,’ said Calamity.
‘Does it matter? They can always taste it, can’t they?’
‘But they’ll say, hey, tastes a bit like roses.’
Sospan looked a trifle flustered. One of the continuing struggles of his life was the disconnect that seemed to exist between his role, as he saw it, and the way the townspeople viewed it. To Sospan, to classify his vocation as dispensing ice cream was like saying the priest who administered the sacrament handed out biscuits.
‘Tell us another one,’ I said.
‘Ginkgo Biloba.’
This time he read the puzzled expressions on our faces and continued quickly, ‘That’s a sacred tree, much prized in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. It was the only tree in Hiroshima to survive the atom bomb.’
‘I’m not sure about that one,’ said Calamity.
Sospan consulted his notes again. ‘Then we’ve got Sea Cucumber, Ambergris, Spanish Fly, and Potato.’
Calamity looked glum. ‘Potato sounds a bit boring.’
Sospan acquired that look of infinite patience that the artist who paddles in the wilder experimental shores learns to assume. ‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘try this: it’s the centrepiece of the autumn collection. I have high hopes for it; it intertwines a variety of approachable themes that even the day-trippers can enjoy while at the same time it contains within it notes of complexity that will satisfy the educated palette.’ He pulled out a tub from the fridge that was marked only with a code as if the exact identity must remain a secret for a while. He scooped out two small testing samples and laid them on mini wafers like canapés. We popped the morsels into our mouths and savoured. It was very fishy and sharp, even seaweedy.
‘I haven’t decided on a name yet,’ he explained, ‘but I was thinking of Mermaid’s Boudoir.’
‘It’s very fishy,’ said Calamity. ‘What’s in it?’
‘Fish milt,’ said Sospan with evident pride at his ingenuity.
I choked.
‘Fish what?’ said Calamity.
‘Milt.’
‘What’s that?’
The ice-cream man turned pink. ‘Well . . . not sure if I should . . . you know . . .’
‘It’s OK, Sospan, she’s seventeen now, she’s grown-up.’
‘I saw a corpse last year,’ added Calamity as further illustration of her maturity.
Sospan rubbed his neck with the palm of one hand. ‘It’s, you know, well . . .’
I tried to help him out. ‘When daddy fish and mummy fish want to start a little shoal . . .’
‘Yes?’ said Calamity.
‘Daddy fish sprays something on to mummy fish’s eggs,’ said Sospan.
‘Oh that,’ said Calamity, as if it was a substance one encountered every day.
‘They eat a lot of it in Russia. You needn’t pull a face, it’s quite a delicacy.’
‘Your new flavours are certainly . . . brave,’ I said.
‘Brave?’
‘Avant-garde.’
‘I know what you are trying to say, the people round here will hate them. Of course they will, do you think I don’t know that? Do you think a man could remain sane making ice cream for the people of Aberystwyth all his life? What do they care about art? All they want is chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. Not just in their cornet but in everything. Louie, I’m not doing this for them, it’s for me. For my self-respect, to assuage the yearning . . .’
‘But if no one eats it, won’t it upset you?’
‘The only people who I need to care about are the reviewers for The Iceman Cometh. I don’t need to make a lot, just a few scoops, that’s all.’
‘Any others on your list.’
‘Just one, Tempura.’
‘Mmm!’ We both chorused bogus enthusiasm to soothe his wounded pride.
‘How do they collect the fish milt?’ asked Calamity.
Sospan blushed.
Fortunately, before he could reveal this particular trade secret we were distracted by the sharp cry of a gull swooping low over the kiosk. It was followed by a short intense bray of joy, and the smell of donkey wafted across signalling the arrival of my father, Eeyore, leading the donkeys on the morning’s first traverse. In contrast to the rest of the townspeople that hot August morning he was wearing a suit, with bits of straw stuck to it. He greeted us with a sprightly cheer that belied his age and slung the halters loosely on to the emergency-exit door bar at the back of the kiosk. Sospan put down a washing-up bowl of water for the donkeys and they lapped happily. There were seven that morning: Escobar, Spinnaker, Uncle Ho, Squirrel, Invincitatus, Anwen and Piper. There were no riders. Eeyore had long ago relinquished all pretence that the job of the donkey man had anything to do with giving rides to children. Partly because he did not like the modern variety of children very much, and partly because the job had a deeper significance. Or so he thought. Years ago, Eeyore had been a cop. When he retired, a community grateful for all the crooks he had removed from their midst presented him not with a gold watch but a different sort of time-keeper: a pendulum made of donkeys. And every day he led the caravan of mute and obliging beasts along the perimeter of the town with a rhythm that was as reassuring and predictable as the bright star that traces across the screen of an oscilloscope on a heart monitor.