The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (13 page)

She came rushing towards us, extending a soapy hand, withdrawing it before he could grasp it, and collapsing into a sort of comic curtsy that left her stuck on one knee.

Tristram hoisted her gallantly to her feet. “Is the kettle on, Mrs. M? I’ve come for a cup of that wizard tea of yours.”

“Just go right through to the drawing room,” she said, suddenly formal. “If you’ll be so good as to show Mr. Tristram in, Miss Flavia, I shall be in with the tea directly.”

“I’d prefer to stay here with you in the control tower,” he said. “Rather like old times.”

Mrs. Mullet was now blushing like billy-ho, rushing round the kitchen, darting into the pantry, and clasping her hands whenever she looked at him.

“I’ve come at a sad time,” he said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table and folding himself into it.

“That’s right. Sit yourself down. I shall fetch you a bit of my Arval bread. I made it special, like, for Miss ’Arriet—for ’er funeral, I mean, bless ’er soul.”

She mopped at her eyes with her apron.

Meanwhile, my mind was flying circles above the conversation.
“Squadron Leader,”
Mrs. Mullet had said. And hadn’t Tristram himself claimed to have been with one of the Biggin Hill fighter squadrons during the Battle of Britain?

How on earth, then, could he possibly have been at Buckshaw before the War dressed in the uniform of an American corporal?

Well, of course, there had been that laughable film
A Yank in the R.A.F.
, which we had been made to sit through as part of the parish hall cinema series, in which Tyrone Power and Betty Grable hopped across the pond to help save us from a fate worse than death.

But Tristram Tallis was no Yank. I was sure of it.

“I’ll leave you two to catch up,” I said, with what I hoped was a considerate smile. “I have a few things to do.”

Up the east staircase I flew, two steps at a time.

First things first. The very thought of Lena being left alone in my laboratory was enough to give me the crow-jinks. I should have shown her out politely before making my mad dash to the Visto, but there hadn’t been time to think.

I needn’t have worried, though. The laboratory door was closed, and the room itself was empty of everyone but
Esmeralda, who still sat dreamily perched on the test-tube rack, much as I had left her.

I checked the various traps I always leave set for unwary intruders: single hairs gummed across cupboards, ends of paper sheets jammed haphazardly in drawer openings (on the assumption that no snoop would ever be able to resist straightening them), and, behind each of the inner doors, a thimble filled to the brim with a solution of insoluble ferrocyanide of iron, or Prussian blue, which, once spilled, could not be washed away if seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year.

My bedroom, too, was untouched, and I grudgingly awarded Lena a couple of mental marks for honesty.

Now, at last, having set the stage, I was ready to undertake the next and most difficult act: the tackling of Feely.

I had not forgotten my plan to resurrect Harriet: Oh no!—far from it. I had been banishing the idea from the forefront of my mind simply to keep from shrieking out with delight.

The very thought of how ecstatic Father would be was enough to make me hug myself inwardly.

As I crossed the foyer, the strains of the Adagio cantabile from Beethoven’s
Pathétique
came drifting along the hall from the drawing room in the west wing. Each note hung for an instant in the air like a cold, crystalline drop of water melting from the end of an icicle. I had once referred to this sonata as “the old
Pathetic
” in Feely’s hearing, and had been rewarded with a near miss by a flung metronome.

This particular bit of Beethoven is, I think, the saddest piece of music ever written since the beginning of time,
and I knew that Feely was playing it because she was devastated. It was meant for Harriet’s ears alone—or for her soul—or for whatever might remain of her in this house.

Even listening to it from as far away as the foyer made my eyes damp.

“Feely,” I said at the drawing room door, “that’s beautiful.”

Feely ignored me and played on, her eyes fixed firmly on something in another universe.

“The sonata
Pathétique
, isn’t it?” I asked, taking great care to pronounce it as if I had been born on the Left Bank and baptized in Notre-Dame.

I could do such things when I wanted to.

Feely slammed down the lid and the piano let out an injured roar of strings, which went echoing on and on for an impressive amount of time.

“You just can’t resist, can you?” she shouted, waving her arms in the air as if she was still at the keyboard. “You do it every time!”

“What?” I asked. I don’t mind having my knuckles rapped when I’m guilty, but I hate it when I’ve done nothing.

“You know perfectly well,” Feely snarled. “And don’t give me that gaping simpleton look of yours. Close your mouth.”

I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about.

“You’re just being tetchy,” I told her. “We agreed that I could point out to you when you were being tetchy without having my head bitten off. Well, you’re being tetchy.”

“I am
not
being tetchy!” she shouted.

“If you’re not being tetchy,” I said, “then your brain is most likely being devoured by threadworms.”

Threadworms were one of my latest enthusiasms. I had recognized at once their criminal possibilities when Daffy had brought them up one morning at the breakfast table. Not brought them up in the sense of vomiting, of course, but mentioned that she had been reading about them in some novel or another where they were being bred by a mad scientist with nefarious intentions who reminded her of me.

I had seized at once on the possibilities: a colony of threadworms raised in a glass tank in the laboratory, where they were allowed to crawl through soil saturated with cyanide. Was cyanide poisonous to the threadworm? Would they themselves survive while spreading the deadly poison through the brain of their victim with those bristles—
setae
, Daffy said they were called—which they possess instead of feet?

Feely was gathering a head of steam to erupt when I stopped her dead in her tracks.

“Actually, I’ve come to apologize,” I told her.

“For what?”

“For being inconsiderate. I know how difficult all of this has been on you. I worry about you, Feely—I really do.”

“Oh, horsewater!” she said.

In certain circumstances, my sister Feely had a remarkable way with words.

“Well, I do worry,” I went on. “I know you’re not getting enough sleep. Look at yourself in the mirror.”

If there was one thing Feely did not need to be told, it
was to look at herself in the mirror. The looking glasses at Buckshaw—every last one of them—were flaking and peeling from Feely’s constant examination of her own image: her eyes, her hair, her tongue, her complexion.…

Every last crater of her old phizog was cataloged as carefully as it would be by an astronomer mapping the moon.

Yes! It had worked. I could already see Feely craning her neck surreptitiously to have a squint at herself in the chimneypiece mirror. She had fallen for my clever ruse.

“You’re pale,” I said. “You’ve been like that since—” I bit off the next words and gnawed a little at my lower lip. “You always give too much of yourself to others, Feely. You never think of yourself.”

I could see that I had her undivided attention.

“Miss Lavinia and Miss Aurelia, for instance,” I went on. “I could have shown them upstairs to pay their respects. You didn’t need to do that on top of everything else. You should be resting, damn it all!”

I surprised not only Feely, I surprised myself.

“Do you really think so?” she asked, drifting, as if absently, towards the chimneypiece and the hanging glass.

“Yes,” I said. “I
do
think so. I also think you ought to let me take the late vigil with Harriet and let you get some sleep. You won’t want to look haggard at the funeral, will you?”

This appeal to Feely’s vanity was not exactly fair play, but all’s fair in love and war and manipulating a stubborn sister.

Seeing that she was off guard, I decided to sit tight and see what happened. As I have mentioned before, it has
been my experience that a prolonged silence has the same effect as a W.C. plunger when it comes to unclogging a stuck conversation.

And it worked. As I knew it would.

After a time, Feely drifted over to a sideboard and took out a piece of sheet music.

“Look what I found tucked into Tchaikovsky,” she said, handing it over.

I knew that Feely never played Tchaikovsky if she could help it.

“Too many sequins,” she had once told Flossie Foster, and Flossie had nodded knowingly.

Feely handed me a rather dog-eared piece of sheet music.

I took the music from her and read the cover. “Bitter Sweet,
an operetta in three acts by Noël Coward.
”

Feely flipped the fragile pages. “Look here—near the end.”

Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay
, I read.

“Harriet loved it. I think it was her favorite song. She used to sing it to Daffy and me when we were children.”

“She never sang it to me,”
I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. I was just a baby when Harriet vanished in Tibet.

“It’s an old music-hall song,” Feely said, spreading the pages open on the piano’s music holder.

She placed her hands on the keys and began to play, quietly, so as not to be overheard by the mourners.

“Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay!” she sang. “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay.

“Do you know it?”

Actually I did, but I pretended I didn’t. I shook my head. We had been forced to sing the thing in Girl Guides back in the days before I was cashiered.

It was not the most intelligent song I had ever heard.

“I sometimes wonder,” Feely mused, “how well we really knew Harriet—if she was really the person we thought she was.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said sourly.

Feely repeated the first couple of bars on the piano—softly, almost wistfully in a minor key—then picked up the music and put it away.

“About the vigil—” I began.

But before I could say another word, Feely drifted back towards the looking glass.

“Agreed,” she said, leaning in for a closer look at her cantankerous hide.

And that, incredibly, was that.

From 11:36 in the evening until 4:24 in the morning—four hours and forty-eight minutes, to be precise—I was to have Harriet entirely to myself.

TWELVE

A
N ENDLESS QUEUE OF
bodies snaked in through the open door and across the foyer, shuffling unaware across the black line which, in an earlier century, the warring brothers Antony and William de Luce had painted from front door to butler’s pantry, dividing the house effectively into two distinct halves: a line which was never to be crossed.

Everyone wanted to catch my eye; everyone wanted to touch me, to clasp my hand or my arm and tell me how sorry they were that Harriet was dead.

There was a woman with a lantern jaw and her seven children, each with its own little lantern jaw. It was like looking at a display in the window of a chandler’s shop. I could not remember ever seeing any of them before.

On the far side of the foyer was a skinny gentleman who looked like a startled broomstick. He, too, was a stranger.

“Dear Flavia,” Bunny Spirling wheezed, taking my hand. He was one of Father’s oldest friends, and as such, required some kind of personal response.

I gave him a glum smile, but it was not easy.

Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, you’re numb, yet on the other, something inside is trying desperately to claw its way back to normal: to pull a funny face, to leap out like a jack-in-the-box, to say “Smile, damn you, smile!”

It is impossible for a young heart to remain gloomy for long, and I could already feel the muscles in my face growing tired from trying.

“The daffodils are so beautiful,” I heard myself telling Bunny, and I saw the tears spring to his eyes as he thought about how brave I was.