I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (11 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said, becoming aware of the sudden silence that had fallen upon the foyer.

“Take my advice, miss,” Latshaw said, “and keep to your quarters. We’ve no time for nuisances.”

In my mind, Latshaw was already writhing on the floor, his face engorged, his eyes bulging from their sockets, hanging on with both hands to his gut, begging for the antidote to cyanide poisoning.

“Help me! Just help me!” he was screaming. “I’ll do anything—anything!”

“Very well, then,” I was telling him, reluctantly handing over a beaker into which I had stirred carefully calibrated proportions of ferrous sulfate, caustic potash, and powdered oxide of magnesium, “but in future, you really must learn how properly to address your betters.”

Perhaps Latshaw was a mind reader, perhaps not, but he turned, strode off abruptly, and began giving right old hob to a carpenter who wasn’t driving a nail properly.

At that very instant a bloodcurdling shriek came echoing from somewhere in the upper regions of the house.

“No! No-o-o-o-o! Let me alone!”

I recognized it at once.

All eyes were turned upwards as I flew past the workers and up the stairs. At the landing, one of the actresses reached out to stop me but I shook her off and continued my flight to the top and along the first-floor corridors, my pounding feet the only sound in the eerie silence that had fallen suddenly upon the house.

Strangers fell back out of the way to let me pass, hands to mouths, their faces frozen with—what was it?—fear?

“No! No! Keep away! Don’t touch me. Please! Don’t let them touch me!”

The voice was coming from Harriet’s boudoir. I threw open the door.

Dogger was crouched in a corner, one of his quivering hands clasping the wrist of the other in front of his face.

“Please,” he whimpered.

“Leave him
alone
!” I shouted at his ghosts. “Get out of here and leave him
alone
!”

And then I slammed the door loudly.

I stood perfectly still and waited until I could bear it no more—about ten seconds, I think—and then I said, “It’s all right, Dogger, they’re gone. I’ve sent them away. It’s all right.”

Dogger trembled behind his hands, his face, the color of ashes, looking up at me unseeing. It had been months—half a year, perhaps—since he had suffered a full-blown episode of such terror, and I knew that this time it was going to take a while.

I walked slowly to the window and stood gazing out through a wreath of frost. To the left, in the steadily falling snow, the lorries of Ilium Films were almost hidden beneath the thick white blanket as if, at the end of the darkening day, they were tucked in for a winter’s sleep.

Behind me, Dogger let out a pitiful little whimper.

“It’s snowing again,” I said. “Fancy that.”

In the stillness I could almost hear the falling flakes.

“Isn’t it a wonder, with that number of snowflakes, that no one has ever thought to write a book called
The Chemistry of Snow
?”

There was silence behind me, but I did not turn round.

“Just think, Dogger, of all those atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, joining hands and dancing ring-around-a-rosy to form a six-sided snowflake. Sometimes they form around a particle of dust—it says so in the encyclopedia—and because of it the form is misshapen. Hunchbacked snowflakes. Fancy that!”

He stirred a little, and so I continued.

“Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.”

I could see Dogger reflected three times over in the triple looking glass on Harriet’s dressing table as he struggled slowly to his feet, and stood at last with his hands dangling limply at his side.

I turned away from the window and, taking one of his hands, led him, shambling, to Harriet’s canopied and ruffled bed.

“Sit down here,” I said. “Just for a minute.”

Surprisingly, Dogger obeyed, and dropped down heavily onto the edge of the bed. I had thought he would balk at the very idea of taking a seat in Father’s shrine to Harriet, but the fact that he did not was probably due to his confusion of mind.

“Put your feet up,” I told him, “while I gather my thoughts.”

I piled a mound of snowy pillows at his back.

With glacially slow speed, Dogger eased himself back until at last he was reclining in what looked, at least, like a comfortable position.

“
Stiff Water
, we could call it,” I said. “The book, I mean. Yes, that would probably have more appeal.
Stiff Water
—I quite like that. I expect some people would buy it thinking it was a detective novel, but that’s all right. We wouldn’t care, would we?”

But Dogger was already asleep, his chest rising and falling in gentle swells, and if the tiny crease at the corner of his mouth was not the seed of a smile, it was, perhaps, a lessening of his distress.

I covered him to the chin with an afghan, and returned to the window and there, for what might have been an eternity, I stood staring out into the gathering gloom, into the cold, blowing universes of hydrogen and oxygen.

TEN

AT
FIVE-THIRTY
THE
PEOPLE
of Bishop’s Lacey began to arrive. First were the Misses Puddock, Lavinia and Aurelia, the proprietresses of the St. Nicholas Tea Room.

Incredibly, these two creaking relics had walked the mile through deep drifts of snow, and now their round faces glowed like little red furnaces.

“We didn’t want to be late, so we set out early,” Miss Lavinia said, looking round appreciatively at the decorated foyer. “Very, very swank, isn’t it, Aurelia?”

I knew that they were sizing up the situation, sniffing out the possibilities of being asked to perform. The Misses Puddock had managed to insinuate themselves into every public performance in Bishop’s Lacey since the year dot, and I knew that at this very moment, stuffed handily somewhere into the depths of Miss Lavinia’s handbag would be the sheet music for “Napoleon’s Last Charge,” “Bendemeer’s Stream,” and “Annie Laurie” at the very least.

“It’s not for an hour and a half yet,” I told them. “But you’re welcome to have a seat. May I take your coats?”

With Dogger out of action, I had decided to take over the duties of the doorman myself. I’d certainly had enough practice during the day! Father would be furious, of course, but I knew that he would thank me when he came to understand. Well, perhaps not thank me, but at least spare me one of his three-hour lectures.

But for now, Father was nowhere in sight. It was as if, having received payment for the use of Buckshaw, he had no further obligation. Or could it be, perhaps, that he was ashamed to show his face?

The film crew were putting the finishing touches to the improvised stage, adjusting the lights and moving tall basketwork trumpets of fresh flowers into position at each side of the make-believe courtyard, when the doorbell rang.

Bunching my sweater tightly round my shoulders, I opened the door to find myself nearly nose-to-nose with a complete stranger. He was wrapped in a khaki greatcoat with no insignia that I was quite sure must have been issued by some army or another.

He was short, with freckles, and was chewing gum the way a horse chews an apple.

“This Buckshaw?” he asked.

I admitted that it was.

“I’m Carl,” he announced. “You can tell your big sister I’m here.”

Carl? Big sister?

Of course! This was Carl from St. Louis, Missouri—Carl, the American, who had given Feely the chewing gum I had pilfered from her lingerie drawer—Carl who had told her she was the spitting image of Elizabeth Taylor in
National Velvet
—Carl who had taught her how to spell Mississippi.

There had been Americans, I recalled, who had shared the airfield with a Spitfire squadron at Leathcote, a few of whom, like Dieter, had chosen to remain in England at the end of the war, and Carl must be one of them.

He was holding a small package, almost completely hidden inside a thicket of green ribbon hung all over with red-and-white candy-cane decorations.

“Camel?” he asked, producing a packet of cigarettes at his fingertips and cleverly flipping it open at the same time with his thumb, like a conjuror’s trick.

“No, thank you,” I said. “Father doesn’t allow smoking in the house.”

“He doesn’t, eh? Well, then, I reckon I’ll hold my fire for a spell. Tell Ophelia Carl Pendracka is here and he’s ready to boogie-woogie!”

Good lord!

Carl sauntered past me into the foyer.

“Say,” he said. “Swell place you got here. Looks like they’re making a movie, am I right? Do you know what? I saw Clark Gable once in St. Louis. In Spiegel’s. Spiegel’s is where
this
came from …”

He gave the gift a shake.

“My mom picked ’em up for me. Stuck ’em in with the Camels. Clark Gable looked right at me that time in Spiegel’s. What do you say to that?”

“I’ll tell my sister you’re here,” I said.

“Feely,” I said, at the door of the drawing room, “Carl Pendracka is here, and he’s ready to boogie-woogie.”

Father looked up from the pages of his
London Philatelist
.

“Show him in,” he said.

The imp inside me grinned and hugged itself in anticipation.

I went only as far as the end of the corridor and beckoned Carl with a forefinger curled and uncurled.

He came obediently.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, touching the dark paneling appreciatively.

I held open the study door, doing my best to mimic Dogger in his valet role: a look on my face and a particular posture that indicated keen interest and at the same time keen disinterest.

“Carl Pendracka,” I announced, a trifle facetiously.

Feely looked up from her own to Carl’s reflection in the looking glass as Carl walked briskly to where Father sat, seized his hand, and gave it a jolly good wringing.

Although he didn’t show it, I could tell that Father was taken aback. Even Daffy glanced up from her book at the breach of manners.

“Carl’s family might be related to the King Arthur Pendragons,” Feely said in that brittle and snotty voice she uses for genealogical discussion.

To his credit, Father did not look terrifically impressed.

“Merry Christmas, Miss Ophelia de Luce,” Carl said, handing her his gift. I could tell that Feely was torn between centuries of good breeding and the urge to rip into the gift like a lion into a Christian.

“Go ahead, open it,” Carl urged. “It’s for you.”

Father subsided quickly into his stamp journal while Daffy, pretending to have reached a particularly gripping passage in
Bleak House
, was secretly peering out from beneath her furrowed brows.

Feely picked at the bows and ribbons as slowly and as fussily as a naturalist dissecting a butterfly under a microscope with tweezers.

“Tear it off!” I wanted to shout. “That’s what wrapping’s for!”

“I don’t want to spoil this beautiful paper,” she simpered.

By the buttons of the Holy Ghost! I could have strangled her with the ribbon!

Carl obviously felt the same way.

“Here,” he said, taking the package away from Feely and poking his thumbs through the folded paper at the ends. “All the way from St. Louis, Mo.—the Show Me State.”

A candy cane clattered to the hearth.

“Oh!” said Feely as the wrapping fell away. “Nylons! How lovely! Wherever did you find them?”

Even Daffy gasped. Nylons were as scarce as unicorn droppings: the Holy Grail of gift-giving.

Father shot up out of his chair as if on a spring. In a flash he was across the room, and the nylons, which he had ripped from Feely’s hands, were dangling from his wrists like adders.

“This is outrageous, young man. Positively indecent. How dare you?”

He brushed the stockings off his hands and arms and into the fireplace.

I watched as the nylons shriveled, writhing and blackening in the flames, transformed by heat into their constituent chemicals (adipoyl chloride, I knew, and hexamethylenediamine). I felt a little shiver of pleasure as the stockings gave up the ghost in one last, delicious flickering flame. Their dying breath, a wisp of the deadly poisonous gas hydrogen cyanide, floated up the chimney and then it was gone. In just a few seconds, Carl’s gift was no more than a sticky black glob bubbling on the Yule logs.

“I … I don’t understand,” Carl said.

He stood looking from Father to Feely to Daffy to me.

“You Limeys are crackers,” he said. “Just plain dizzo.”

“Dizzo,” Carl repeated to me in the foyer, shaking his head in disbelief. Feely had fled, shaken by sobs, to her bedroom and Father, in a thundercloud of outraged dignity, had taken refuge in his study.

“Have a chair,” I said and, as the doorbell rang again, I introduced Carl quickly to the Misses Puddock.

“Carl’s from St. Louis, in America,” I told them, and by the time I reached the door, they were already chatting away like lifelong cronies.

On the doorstep, as if for inspection, was Ned Cropper, gift in hand and brilliantine in hair. A few steps behind him stood Mary Stoker.

Aside from her ruddy complexion and a bit of a squint, Mary might have been a Madonna in the National Gallery as she stood on the doorstep, radiant in the snow.

No room at the inn
, I thought uncharitably.

“Ned! Mary!” I crowed, a little too cheerfully.

Ned was the potboy at the Thirteen Drakes, Bishop’s Lacey’s sole hostelry, and Mary was the landlord’s daughter. I knew without being told that Ned had brought the gift for Feely: another box of those flyblown prewar Milady chocolates from the window of Miss Cool’s confectionery, its contents lightly frosted with a mold which could, of course, if you had a strong enough stomach, be scraped away before scoffing them.

Ned’s love tributes were generally left on the kitchen doorstep in the dark of the moon to be brought in dangling distastefully between finger and thumb by Mrs. Mullet.