To the Ends of the Earth

She said, turning to me, “What are you doing here?”

“This is my room!”

Her questions had been drowsy in a theatrical way. She was still crouching near my knapsack. She was breathing hard.

I said, “Leave that thing alone.”

“Aarrgh,” she groaned, and plumped her knees against the floor.

I wanted her to go away.

I said, “I’m trying to sleep.” Why was I being so polite?

She groaned again, a more convincing groan than the last one, and she said, “Where have I left me clothes?”

And she stood up. She was a big woman with big jolting breasts and freckles on them. She was, I saw, completely naked.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and stepped closer.

I said, “It’s five in the morning, for God’s sake.”

The sun had just struck the curtains.

“Aarrgh, I’m sick,” she said. “Move over.”

I said, “You don’t have any clothes on.”

“You can close your eyes,” she said.

I said, “What were you doing to my knapsack?”

“Looking for me clothes,” she said.

I said in a pleading way, “Give me a break, will you?”

“Don’t look at me nakedness,” she said.

“I’m going to close my eyes,” I said, “and when I open them I don’t want to see you in this room.”

Her naked flesh went flap-flap like a rubber raincoat as she tramped across the hard floor. I heard her go—she pulled the door shut—and then I checked to see that my money was safe and my knapsack unviolated. The zippers were open, but nothing was gone. I remembered what Reeny had screamed at me: We won’t rob you or rape you!

At breakfast, Reeny said, “I’ve not been up at this hour for ten year! Look, it’s almost half-eight!”

Reeny had a miserable cough and her eyes were sooty with mascara. Her Welsh accent was stronger this morning, too.

I told her about Ellie.

She said, “Aye, is that so? I’ll pull her leg about that! Aye, that is funny.”

An old woman came to the door. She was unsteady, she peered in. Reeny asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted a pint of beer.

“It’s half-eight in the morning!” Reeny said.

“A half a pint, then,” the old woman said.

“And it’s Sunday!” Reeny said. She turned to me and said, “We’re dry on a Sunday around here. That’s why it’s so quiet. But you can get a drink at St. Dogmaels.”

The woman looked pathetic. She said that in the coming referendum she would certainly vote for a change in the licensing law. She was not angry, but had that aged, beaten look that passes for patience.

“Oh, heavens!” Reeny said. “What shall I do, Paul? You tell me.”

I said to the old woman, “Have a cup of tea.”

“The police have been after me,” Reeny said. “They’re always looking in.” Reeny walked to the cupboard. “I could lose my license.” She took out a bottle of beer and poured it. “These coppers have no bloody mercy.” The glass was full. “Forty-five pence,” she said.

The woman drank that and then bought two more bottles. She paid and left, without another word. She had taken no pleasure in the drink and there was no satisfaction in having wheedled the beer out of Reeny on a dry day in Cardigan—in fact, she had not wheedled, but had merely stood there gaping in a paralyzed way.

I said, “It’s a hell of a breakfast—a beer.”

“She’s an alcoholic,” Reeny said. “She’s thirty-seven. Doesn’t look it, does she? Take me, I’m thirty-three and no one believes it. My boyfriend says I’ve got the figure of a girl of twenty. You’re not going, are you?”

Jan Morris

EIGHT MORE MILES ON THIS SUNNY DAY AND WE DREW INTO Criccieth, where I hopped out of the train. I owned a guidebook that said, “Criccieth: For several years this small town was the home of James (now Jan) Morris, probably the finest living travel writer.” The “James (now Jan)” needed no explanation, since the story of how she changed from a man to a woman in a clinic in Casablanca was told in her book Conundrum, 1974. She still lived near Criccieth, outside the village of Llanystumdwy, in what was formerly the stables of the manor house, looking northward to the mountains of Eryri and southward to Cardigan Bay.

I seldom looked people up in foreign countries—I could never believe they really wanted to see me; I had an uncomfortable sense that I was interrupting something intimate—but I did look up Jan Morris. She had written a great deal about Wales, and I was here, and I knew her vaguely. Her house was built like an Inca fort, of large black rocks and heavy beams. She had written, “It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon the other in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. Its architecture is of the variety known these days as ‘vernacular,’ meaning that no professional architect has ever had a hand in it.”