***
I was not frightened at the hotel in Llandudno until I was taken upstairs by the pockmarked clerk; and then I sat in the dusty room alone and listened. The only sound was my breathing, from having climbed the four flights of stairs. The room was small; there were no lights in the passageway; the wallpaper had rust stains that could have been spatters of blood. The ceiling was high, the room narrow: it was like sitting at the bottom of a well. I went downstairs.
The clerk was watching television in the lounge — he called it a lounge. He did not speak to me. He was watching "Hill Street Blues," a car chase, some shouting. I looked at the register and saw what I had missed before — that I was the only guest in this big dark forty-room hotel. I went outside and wondered how to escape. Of course I could have marched in and said, "I'm not happy here — I'm checking out," but the clerk might have made trouble and charged me. Anyway, I wanted to punish him for running such a scary place.
I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, "This is my bird-watching gear. I'll be right back—" The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in the nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.
I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played "If You Were the Only Girl in the World." I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.
Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses — naked people saying gloatingly, "We shouldn't be doing this!" In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.
It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass and iron canopies of the shopfronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer ("Excursions to the Isle of Man") moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments— Old Mother Riley at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing Tosca, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. "We're going to have a loovely boom competition," a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge — by touching them — which one's bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy — one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men's bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.
I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.
"It's a nice moon," Miss Maltby said.
"Aye," Miss Thorn said. "It is."
"But that's not what we saw earlier this evening."
"No. That was the sun."
Miss Maltby said, "You told me it was the moon."
"It was all that mist, you see," Miss Thorn said. "But I know now it was the sun."
The town was dominated by two silver-gray headlands of swollen limestone, Great and Little Orme. From Llandudno's pier head on a clear day it was possible to see the Lancashire coast, and from West Parade on the other side (where Lewis Carroll stayed with the Liddell family and wrote part of Alice), Bangor and the shore of Anglesey were greenishly apparent across Conway Bay.
***
There were two Indians in my railway compartment, trying to open a briefcase. It had a combination lock, and they had the combination, but still they could not open it. They quarreled a little, taking turns sighing at the stubborn lock, and then one said, "You would be so kind?" I took the briefcase into my lap and spanked it and it popped open. It contained some combs, a bottle of hair oil, a blue diary, a Bengali movie magazine, and a plastic pouch that was zippered shut. While one Indian removed a comb from the briefcase, the other Indian picked up a valise and left the train, muttering.
The remaining Indian combed his hair and said he had never seen the muttering one before in his life. They had met over the briefcase.
This Indian, Mr. Amin, said, "I am in catering business." He smiled and added, "That is to say, catering and restaurantooring."
He owned a curry shop in Bangor.
"I like Bangor and I am liking Vales," he said. "And the Vellish I am speaking as vell."
"Say something in Welsh," I suggested.
"I can say some few words for you," Mr. Amin said. "You are helping me with my briefcase and making me so happy. I am thinking, and that other man, too, perhaps ve are not unlocking my case! And — vhat you vanted?"
"Welsh," I said.
He straightened his head and in a clacking voice said, "Bore da. Good marning. Croeso. Velcome. Diolch yn fawr. Oh, thank you very much. Nos da. Good evening. Cymru am byth. Vales forever."
I said, "Are you going to stay in Bangor forever?"
"Who knows about forever?"
"Let's say five years."
He said, "Yes."
"How many Bangladeshis are there in Bangor?"
"Not more than eight."
"Do you have a mosque?"
"No," he said. "But sometimes ve use a certain floor in the Student Union building."
"Do you have a mullah?"
He said, "Ven five or six pray, vun can be mullah."
I asked, "How many children do you have?"
"Questions! Questions!" He seemed short of breath; his face was a tight fit; he probably took me for the tax man.
"Sorry, Mr. Amin. I have two children. Boys."
He relaxed and looked envious. "You are lucky. I have three girls, and then I try again, and then I just get a boy last year."
We entered a tunnel — silence — and then emerged, and Bangor lay before us, big and gray. Mr. Amin gathered his briefcase and paper bags and made ready to get off the train.
I said, "You could have settled anywhere in Britain, Mr. Amin. Why did you choose to settle in Bangor?"
He said, "Because it reminds me of my town in Bangladesh. Bangor is just very like Sylhet."