It was a Haunting picture

We were staying in a cottage, inaccurately named ‘Coastal View’, in Porthgain, and we’d arranged to meet up with our friends for a meal at Harbour Lights, the restaurant across the square.  They were staying  in their caravan three miles up the road at Mathry.  I don’t remember the meal, but afterwards I know we went back to our place, had a few drinks and decided to go next door to the Sloop Inn. 

I know that I was drinking whisky of some sort, and so was Paul.  A few artists lived in Porthgain, still do, and Paul got into an argument with one of them, called Bryn.  Bryn was drinking brandy, and we worked out next day that the glasses might’ve got confused.  He did pretty good representational landscapes of the local scene, which Paul decided to challenge on the grounds that he was hypocritically exploiting the tourist trade whilst simultaneously decrying it and thereby squandering his talent, or some such stuff.  Paul is good at challenging when he’s in the mood, and Bryn was in the mood too. 

The pub ran a gallery in the back room in those days, and they dragged each other out there, getting a bit rough.  I was sitting at the bar holding hands with Caro, because she’d reached her weepy phase and I’d reached my amorous one, so I don’t know exactly what happened out there.  Reconstructions suggest that blows had nearly, possibly actually, been exchanged.  They wouldn’t have been very harmful by this stage, but what is sure is that a picture got knocked off the wall, and the frame got slightly damaged.  We popped in the next day and viewed it: an impressionistic depiction of a coastal scene – Druidstone, I think – in a rather abstract style.  Good, but certainly nothing to have a drunken conceptualistic fight over.  We all, Bryn included, laughed and forgot about it.

A few months later, V and I were in Narberth, visiting the old aunts, Margaret and Ray.  They still lived at home in those days, in the house in Spring Gardens that their father had built in the early years of the century.  The carers came in twice a day, did what caring had to be done, and left.  Ours was a duty visit, and the aunts were still just interesting enough for conversation, but there are limits, so we made our temporary excuses and wandered down the Drang and through to the High Street.  There used to be a nice gallery down next to the second-best butchers’, before it failed and got turned into yet another tat shop.  There in the window was the Picture.  We told Paul and Caro about this, and next time they were in the area they went to have a look, but it had moved on. 

On subsequent visits to Pembrokeshire, though, we all seemed to come across it every so often in various unexpected locations.  I don’t remember the details now, but it kept cropping up.  It was clearly stalking us.

That winter, we were invited to Paul and Caro's house for a meal.  When we arrived we were instructed to close our eyes, turn around, open them and look at the wall of the stairwell.

“Well, we had to, didn’t we?” said Caro.