The Magus of Hay(67)

But his head had only filled up with the town. Starting with the Gothic clock tower, starlit, moonlicked, a fairytale touch like out of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Otherness.

He limped away from it, up a steep street to where the road divided, the junction watched over by the small statue in the apex of a building. He now knew this was Henry, first of the Tudor kings who’d passed this way after landing in West Wales, en route to his destiny.

More narrow streets, more hanging signs, and the next thing was the Buttermarket, like a Greek temple, with its locked iron gate. And then the sign which said Bear Street, bringing to mind an old photo he’d seen in one of the history books of a poor dancing bear brought into Hay as entertainment on market day.



The bear began a fractured dance, like in an old silent movie shot against stone walls, streetlights and the obsidian mirrors of darkened windows. Robin backed away, half closing his eyes, the town and its isolated lights breaking down into blown-up pixels of colour.

He stood his stick against a wall, opening out his hands, letting himself dissolve into the pattern. Trembling in that emotional place where, if things were good, your senses could sometimes soar. Nothing to do with Betty’s condition, this was a painter’s thing, beginning with an intense desire to discover, translate, interpret.

Feeling yourself into a place. He’d known it in the countryside, at dawn and twilight, but never in a town before. Couldn’t afford to paint it like Hockney did in Yorkshire, using several canvases fitted together, so he’d make do with a single sheet of white-primed hardboard on which images would be overlapping, details of Hay coalescing or superimposed one over the other. One glance, and you’d take in the whole town, subliminally. The town on a hillside, streets which had seemed parallel but in fact curled, one into another. He’d looked at them on a large-scale map and seen that the centre of the town actually formed a heart-shape, roadways like veins wound around it.

He followed a wall to the market square, directly under the jagged cliff-face of the castle, and it was here that the twinge had taken him, curling around his spine. Unable to move until it began to fade.

But it was in these moments of ebbing pain that his vision had begun to burn again, only so much more fiercely, like a blowtorch stripping everything before it, whole centuries crumbling away like worn stucco and he was close to crying aloud in this kind of atavistic ecstasy, as if the hours he’d spent in Gwenda’s bar had been a kind of initiation and now the town itself was admitting him.

Into its heart, the heart of Hay.

Was this possible?



* * *

Back under the clock tower, quivering inside, Robin sat on the edge of the terrace below the Granary. To his right Barclay’s Bank, to the left Golesworthy’s country outfitters. The bank was the only representation on this street of a national business. There were two or three other banks in Hay, but no chain stores that Robin had seen so far. A medieval town holding out against empty progress.

Betty said calmly in his ear, ‘Do you know how much you’ve had?’

‘Too much.’ Robin abandoned his original plan to say it was wine from a Welsh vineyard, how potent was that gonna be? ‘And I don’t see any cabs. And if I did, we’d have to get another cab in the morning to collect the truck. I fucked up.’

‘No kidding.’

‘In our position, do you turn your back on people who wanna make you feel welcome? Bottom line is I now know a whole bunch of booksellers.’

‘Better get a room somewhere, hadn’t you? Book into a hotel or a B and B.’

‘What?’ Robin changed ears with the phone. ‘No way.’

‘Yes.’

‘You know what all that costs in this town in high summer?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Listen—’

‘There’s a coat and some old sacks in the truck.’

‘You can’t sleep in the bloody truck!’

‘No, but I can take the stuff into Back Fold. Roll up some of the old curtains, make a pillow.’

Pause.

‘Not a good idea.’

‘It’s not cold, Betty. And this is my fault. And, like… why would it not be a good idea?’

‘Because I’m not there. And you have injuries. And you’re pissed.’



‘Just beyond passing a breath test is all. My senses are all functioning. In overdrive. I walk fine… fine as I ever walk. Not gonna be a prisoner of this. I can fit a key in a door. And the point is I have to do it. It’s right.’

‘You don’t have to do it at all. We’ve sold the bungalow.’

‘Huh?’

‘They came to look, they made an offer.’