Gay and glorious, one day every year, the market square of this little town is, and that’s the day in September when the fair comes, and music peals, and roundabouts whirl, and the through-traffic, if it wants to get by, has to give the town a miss and scrape along side lanes past sodden blackberry hedges. Though where through-traffic should be going, don’t ask me, for beyond the town, up the mountain, stands nothing but the water tower, on its one leg like a broody heron, and the castle of Owen Richards the poet; beyond again, and all round for that matter, lie only the mountains, heaving their mossy shoulders into the rain and the mist.
On Fair Day, then, the big roundabout takes up all the centre of the town square with its horses and swans and dragons, while round it thick as currants in a birthday cake crowd the sideshows and stalls and rifle-galleries, not to mention Jones the Rope Trick, the lovely fortune-telling Myfanwy, and, this year we are speaking of, Señor Pedro.
Señor Pedro was a wizened little man, nose like a parrot, eyes like chips of anthracite, hair a mere wisp at the back of his head, and a walnut shell face that was wrinkled and seamed all over as if, every night, he slept facedown on a doormat.
Indeed, he was talking about his face, standing on a big box in front of his little tent. The box was wreathed about with pink paper, and on the tent hung a banner: Agua de Vida, Water of Life.
“You see my face, señores, señoras?” he was shouting to the crowd. “Wrinkled, you think, my friends, but you are wrong. My face was scratched by thorns, yes, thorns—those very thorns that the South American pygmies use to tip their arrows. On the slopes of the Andes, your honours, grows a terrible thorn thicket, many miles across. In the middle of this thicket is a spring. Ah, your honours, such a beautiful spring! Nowhere in the world is there one like it—this is the spring of the water of youth. One sip removes twenty, thirty years from your age.”
“A fine story to tell us, that is!” shouted a derisive voice. “Why hasn’t anyone ever heard of this water before?”
Shrugged a patient shoulder, Señor Pedro did. “Am I not telling you, señoras, señores? This water is very hard to procure. The Indians are hostile, the place is distant, the thicket is impenetrable and perilous, muy periculoso.”
“If the water does that to you, why don’t the Indians drink it and stay young forever?”
“Quien sabe? Maybe they do. Who can tell what age a pygmy has reached? But what I am come to tell you, señoras, is that with me I have”—here he brought it from under his jacket and held it up with a flourish—“a bottle, the last bottle in Europe, of this renowned, miraculous, youth-giving liquid brought to you all the way from Brazil.” There was a murmur of wonder from the crowd, and they gazed at the stone bottle, which was crowned with gold foil and might hold a quart.
“Why don’t you drink it yourself?” shrilled Mrs Griffith the Dispensary. “Poison I believe it is!”
“Ah, there’s probable! Or why should he be offering it for sale when he’s as worn and wizened himself as an old seed potato?”
“Maybe he prefers the money, fair play?” suggested Rhys the Red Dragon.
“Why should I wish to grow younger?” said Señor Pedro scornfully. “One life with its troubles is enough for me. I have all I need. Back in the Andes my good wife is waiting for me, beautiful as an angel. But the dearest longing of her heart is a new grand piano, for though we stood the legs of her Otway in four pans of kerosene, the termites ate it away until nothing remained but the keys.”
“Did you ever hear of such a calamity?” mourned the sympathetic crowd.
“Her only wish is to play once more. And that is why, señoras, señores, at risk to my life I filled six bottles with the water of youth and came to Europe. Here you see the last of them. I am now going to auction it. Will any gracious lady or gentleman offer me five hundred pounds for it, this miraculous elixir, this water of youth?”
“Come on, now, Lily Griffith! Tickled to death your old man would be, to see you a lovely young twenty-one-year-old again!”
“As if I’d waste my money on such stuff,” sniffed Mrs Griffith. “Better things I have to do with it. Five hundred pounds indeed!”
The crowd hesitated, broke, laughed, and chaffered. Señor Pedro kept the auction bubbling like a lukewarm kettle.
There were other attractions in the square. Music thundered between the houses, there were goldfish to be won by a skilful fling of a dart, hot dogs to be eaten, vases and tea sets at the rifle gallery, candy floss for the children; and all the time the rain pelted down. But the great shafts of light pushing upwards from the sideshows turned the rain to a canopy of sparkle.
Owen Richards the poet came down from his castle to the fair with Ariel, his guest, a famous actress from the boards of London, and the love of his long life.
“I must have my fortune told,” said she, making a beeline for Myfanwy’s van with its sugar-pink stripes and the portrait of Myfanwy over the door which had so bewitched Ianto Evans two years before that he had gone into the van and never been seen again.
“You at least should have no worries about your fortune, Ariel,” said Owen, but she shuddered as she glanced into a little shell-encrusted looking-glass that he had won at the rifle gallery and caught a glimpse of her lovely, ageing face. He followed her into the sugar-striped van.
Myfanwy was playing waterfalls with a pack of cards which she could pour from one hand to another like water from a cup to a can.
“Tell my fortune,” commanded Ariel, and she put out her hand.
“Steady you must hold it, then,” Myfanwy bade her, and she built a card-house on Ariel’s palm, ten, jack, queen, king, and the ace for a roof; Ariel neither budged nor spoke.
“Second storey is it,” Myfanwy said at that, and she built another on top of the first. Ariel held her hand steady as a table—a fine, thin hand, and the wrist so transparent you could see the veins in it. “Fancy now,” Myfanwy said, and she laid a third storey on top of the second. “Very unusual that is.”
But still the tower stood without falling on Ariel’s palm, and Myfanwy pursed her lips and added the final storey, four black spades and the ace on top of it all.
“Now blow,” she said, and Ariel blew, scattering the cards like a shower of apple-blossom across the tent. Myfanwy picked them up. A look of amazement came over her face.
“O dammo,” says she, “crazy old fortune you’ve got here. Neither head nor tail can I make of it! Try again, you must.”
“No, I’ll not try again,” says Ariel, laughing. “I’m not wishful to tempt Providence too far. We’ll leave it at that.” And she crossed Myfanwy’s hand with a flourish of half-crowns.
“Can’t you say if she’ll marry?” asked Owen Richards the poet, anxious as a hen with one duckling.
“Far as I can make out she’ll have more husbands than Henry the Eighth,” Myfanwy says. “A heron must have flown over the van and bewitched the cards. Good luck to you, lady, and remember Myfanwy in your will.”
Ariel laughed. “Maybe I’ll never make a will,” she said. Out they went into the rain again.
Soon as they were gone, Ianto Evans, he that had left his good wife for Myfanwy’s sake two years before, crept out from under the bed.
“Ten o’clock,” he said. “Blodwen will have been out to Jones the Cod to buy her bit of fish and chips. Locked away snug, she’ll be, watching the telly; I’ll just nip along home and dig up the clematis by the back door. Planted that clematis myself, I did; no reason it shouldn’t come with us on our wanderings. Lovely little flowers it has, like red butterflies.”
“Careful now, Ianto, bach,” Myfanwy said. “Supposing she’s out at the fair? Meet her you might, and then the fur would fly.”
“Not Blodwen, not her. She never went to a fair since the day she was old enough to pop a penny into a moneybox.” And off he strode into the silvery wet night, and sniffing up the alley to his back door like a hound on a fish trail—only he was on the track of Blodwen and her Friday four-pennorth, to make sure was she safely locked up with the hake and chips. Smell of fish there was, sure enough, but it had been left by Thomas the Electric, four houses farther on. Just put the clematis in his pocket, Ianto had, when Blodwen came along with her supper and let out a screech at sight of him.
“Oh, there’s my skulking husband that ran off and left me for a cardsharping Jezebel! Wait till I get my hands on you, Ianto my man!”
Ran he did, like a hare, and she after him, down the alley, through the coconut shies, into the square, past the learned pig, between the tenpins, up the skiffle alley, and three times round the hot cat stand. Towards Myfanwy’s van he fled, meaning perhaps to hide behind her skirts, and then, gaining a bit of sense before it was too late, turned aside into Jones the Rope Trick’s enclosure.
“Save me, Jones man, save me!” he bawled.
The crowd cheered and laughed, for most of them had felt the weight of Blodwen’s tongue at one time or another, and they were on the side of the underdog. Quick as a wink Jones picked up his clarinet and tootled out “Men of Harlech.” The coiled rope stood up and begged like a hamadryad; no monkey ever climbed quicker than Ianto shinned up it hand over hand.
When Blodwen arrived, ten quick seconds later by Morgan the Turf’s stopwatch, he was out of sight into the black wet sky above.
“Gone he has, ma’am,” says Jones, very sober. “Angels are singing ‘Cwm Rhondda’ round him this minute, likely as not.”
Blodwen gave Jones one look, one, but enough to loosen every stopping in his teeth, and then she turned on her heel and started for home; she knew when she was beaten. But on her way, having lost her hake and chips in the chase, she stopped at the stand for a hamburger and tomato sauce.
Meanwhile Señor Pedro had sold his water of youth to Ariel the actress for two hundred and seventy pounds, nine shillings and ninepence. “Only to such a lovely lady as you would I part with my precious water for so mean a sum,” he mourned, handing over the gold-wrapped bottle.
“There’s crazy for you!” said Mrs Griffith. “Fancy spending all that good money on an old bottle with like as not nothing but tap water inside it.”
“Try a drop!” shouted the crowd.
“Throw it away!” begged Owen Richards the poet. “Marry me, Ariel! Forget about the moribund old theatre, is it? Stay here! Queen of the whole town you’d be.”
But Ariel looked about at the crowd, and in her voice that could sing or whisper its way up to the tiptop seat in the gallery, she called, “Who can lend me a corkscrew?”
Morgan the Turf had his whipped out a photo finish ahead of Rhys the Red Dragon, took the bottle, and opened it with a bow.
Set her lips to it, then, Ariel did, and a quick swallow with her. Then she stopped, half laughing, half scared, crying, “Dare I go on?”
“Throw it away, Ariel love,” Owen Richards begged. But the crowd shouted, “Drink up, ma’am!”
Now a law of physics there is, see, very unbreakable, which says, “All that goes up must come down.” And just at that moment what should come down but Ianto Evans like an old blockbuster plump into the middle of things. Knocked the bottle clean out of Ariel’s hand he did—lucky she’d put the cork back—and himself pretty near silly.
Soon on his feet again he was though, for when Blodwen, teeth halfway through her hamburger, loitering to enjoy a free spectacle for once in her cheeseparing life, laid eyes on him, she was after him again like an old pike after a springtime salmon, and off into the dark alleys he fled, clasping the bottle in his frantic hand. Once he tripped and fell and dropped it; Blodwen swooped on him, but it was the bottle she grabbed in her haste, not Ianto.
“Oh, but I’ll have you yet,” shouted the termagant, and while Morgan the Turf was going round laying two to one on Blodwen, the pair of them kept it up round the town, ding-dong, now here, now there.
No lie, now, for many a long year after, if a man wanted to describe something faster than mere speed he’d say, “Like Blodwen Evans the night she was after her husband, Ianto.”
Meanwhile, what of Ariel? you will be asking, and indeed to goodness there was wonder enough in the way the years were dropping off her like layers of gauze. No more than nineteen she looked now, as she stood scared and smiling, and a long ah! at her beauty trembled through the crowd. Only Owen Richards in grief turned his head away; he knew she was lost to him forever now.
“Oh! “she cried, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid of what is happening to me! Must it all begin again, the doubts and terrors of youth? Comfort me, Owen dear, tell me I haven’t changed. Owen, comfort me!”
But he in silence held up to her the little shell-bordered looking-glass. When she had looked once it seemed as if the weight of her beauty would crush her like a snowfall in May. Stepped away, she did, hanging her head, and the crowd parted in a hush as she walked to her car.
“Back to London, is it?” said Owen, standing with his hand on the bonnet.
“Back to London, indeed,” said she, sighing.
“Then good-bye, my love.”
Her tears splashed on the steering wheel like raindrops as she drove away to face her new legend of life and the harshness of being young. Owen, with a heart of lead, turned back, but with no spirit in him for the fair.
“Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of that bottle; unsettling it is,” Rhys the Red Dragon commented.
And Mrs Griffith said, “Indeed to goodness, yes!”
But Blodwen, now: breathless, with tomato sauce sticking in her gullet like china clay, she had stopped the chase of Ianto a moment to take a swig at the bottle, hoping maybe—knowing her Ianto—that it would be whisky. But no more than a couple of good gollops had she taken (“Ach y fi, it’s only water, then!”) when she laid eyes on Ianto stealing back to Myfanwy’s van behind the big roundabout.
Quick as a weasel after him, Blodwen. Over the roundabout she went, threading her way between horses and swans. “Give us a break, Alun, man!” shouts Ianto. “Start her up, then!” And Alun threw in his gears with a thrashing like an old whale in convulsions. Slow at first, then faster, spinning in a giddy gold spiral, switchbacking up and down, round went the swans and dragons, a whole glittering stableland of bucking broncos.
Well! stuck fast Blodwen was, and had to make the best of it, clinging tight to a swan’s neck. But the bottle, spun out of her hand by another natural wonder known as centrifugal force, flew off like a bullet over the heads of the crowd, and nobody’s eye followed it into the dark.
Gone, and a good riddance too, Owen Richards thought.
Back to his castle then, poor Mr Richards, to live out his final years with owls and ink, in an everlasting third act of spiderwebs. Or so he thought.
Sitting over a bottle of claret he was, late enough for tomorrow’s moon, when half the town came tapping at his door, timid but trustful, for to whom but a poet can you turn when life throws up such a problem as the roundabout had tossed them?
“See here, Mr Richards, bach, an orphan we have on our hands,” says Morgan the Turf, very solemn, and the crowd shoves forward a small girl, blackhaired, sapling-thin, fierce as a fury.
“You’re the wisest man in this town, Mr Richards, dear,” the neighbours said. “Fitting it is you should have charge of this child of misfortune. Too young she is to live in her own house alone, see; and her husband run off with the fortune-teller.”
“Husband?” said Owen Richards, and then he looked closer and recognised Blodwen Evans of forty years ago—Blodwen Pugh as she was then.
Tears of rage there were still on her cheeks, but forgetfulness had followed her plunge back into childhood. Her anger had left her, and she gazed at him with no more than wonder for an old poet and his cobwebbed castle.
“Live with me, is it, my dear?” said Owen.
And she in awe answered, “Yes, sir,” and bobbed a curtsy. Nodding approval, the town fathers withdrew to the Red Dragon.
Where, all this time, you will be asking, where is Señor Pedro, the author of these troubles?
Not a man to outstay his welcome, the little pedlar, and he was tramping out of town down the rainswept highroad with his two hundred and seventy pounds when a speeding pink van overtook him.
“Lift to Cardiff?” called a head from the window—Ianto’s.
“I thank you; yes.”
“Wet old night it is for walking,” Ianto said as the little man unslung his pack and shook the mud out of his turn-ups.
“Indeed, yes.”
“No more of those bottles, have you?” Ianto asked, handing over a mug of tea and a hospitable wedge of cake as Myfanwy drove them on their swift way.
Señor Pedro shook his head.
“Just as well then,” Ianto said. “More trouble in that bottle than in a whole keg of whisky, if you will be asking my opinion.”
“You do not think that to grow younger is a blessing?”
“Not for Myfanwy and me.” And Ianto looked fondly at the back of Myfanwy’s neck as she bent over the wheel. “All we wish is that we grow old together and die on the same day.”
“Ah,” Señor Pedro said with sympathy, and he thought of his own dear wife on the slopes of the Andes.
What became of the bottle? you will be wondering, and the answer to that is easy: it fell into the town reservoir, standing on its one leg farther up the mountainside.
Put up the water-rates like a shot, the council would have, had they guessed, but nobody did; though, as the years went by, and no one in the place grew a day older, people did begin to wonder why. But in a town the folk get used to one another’s faces, and nobody thought about it very deeply as they went about their business. Visitors might have wondered at it indeed; become a famous tourist centre, the place might have, but for the seeds in Pedro’s turn-ups.
Scattered some of those famous thorn seeds he had—whether by mistake or on purpose, who can say?—and almost overnight a dense thicket of brambles sprang up that soon had the town surrounded. Nobody noticed; too wrapped up in their own concerns they were, with council meetings and oratorios, weddings, and Gorsedds, all presided over by Owen the poet and his happy adopted daughter, Blodwen; Wales will hear of her, too, one day, indeed, if copies of her poems ever find their way past the thorn thicket.
So there you have them: Ariel still a lovely legend on the boards of London town; Ianto and his Myfanwy, old and wrinkled and gay as two crickets travelling the country in their fortune-telling van, with the flowers of the clematis—its roots safely bedded in a pickle-pot—fluttering like red butterflies over the roof; Señor Pedro long since back with his piano on the slopes of the Andes; the townspeople living their carefree unchanging lives till the Day of Judgment.
And what have any of them done to deserve it?
Not a thing.
No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.