“Yes, you know: like in the song.”
And she began to sing in a curiously sweet and innocent voice:
“We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do,
“We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money, too!
“Old England and Saint George!” she shrieked suddenly. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve!
“That’s the way the song ends,” she explained. “It’s all I can remember.”
I’ll admit it: I was out of my depth. I needed to get this conversation back under control.
“Kim’s Game,” I reminded her.
“Kim’s Game!” she cried, clapping her hands together with delight. “Twelve assorted objects are placed on a tray and covered with a silk scarf. We’ll have Dogger do it! Then he whisks away the scarf and we have sixty seconds to study the items. The scarf is replaced and we each write down the names of as many as we can. Whoever remembers the most wins. That will be me.”
There was no need for her to explain it to me. We had been made to play the wretched game to distraction on rainy evenings in Girl Guides—that is, until the night I had managed to smuggle a toad and a quite decent-sized adder under the silk.
As I have said before, elsewhere, that organization is not noted for its sense of humor, and I had found myself on that occasion being made to sit in the corner once again wearing Miss Delaney’s handmade but highly irregular “Crown of Thorns,” which may have been amusing to some but not to me.
“Exactly,” I said to Undine. “But just to keep things interesting, let’s play the game a different way this time.”
Undine clapped her hands happily again.
“Let’s pretend that the railway platform is the tray and that all the people on it are the objects we have to remember.”
“That’s not fair!” Undine protested. “I don’t know any of the people—except you and your family … and Mr. Churchill, of course. Ibu pointed you out.”
“You had quite a good view of us, then?”
My Daimler mind was firing on all twelve cylinders.
“Top hole!” she said. “Like a box at the pantomime.”
Something twisted inside me. It didn’t seem right that the arrival of my mother’s body at Buckshaw had been viewed by anyone, let alone this little twerp, as some kind of cheap music-hall entertainment.
“All right, then,” I said, holding myself in check. “I’ll begin. There was Aunt Felicity. She counts for one.”
“And the men in uniforms who lifted your mother from the train. That’s six—I’m winning!”
This was insane, I thought, but the game needed to go on.
“Father, Feely, Daffy, and me,” I said. “And Dogger, of course. Six all.”
“Not fair! I already counted the lot of you. Eleven to me!”
“Mrs. Mullet,” I said, “and her husband, Alf.”
“The vicar!” Undine shouted. “I knew him by his collar! Twelve ho!”
I counted on my fingers: “The woman with Aunt Felicity … the officer who saluted Father …
“The engine driver on the footplate,” I added with sudden inspiration, “the conductor, and the two guards on the van. That’s nine, plus Sheila and Flossie Foster and Clarence Mundy, the taxicab driver.”
Although I thought I had spotted Sheila and Flossie at the edge of the platform, I had picked Clarence’s name out of thin air. Undine would never know the difference.
“Tied at twelve,” I told her. “I’m finished. Last chance.”
Undine gnawed at her knuckles, her brow furrowed. “That man in the long coat!” she said, her face lighting up.
My heart stopped.
“What man in the long coat?” I managed, my voice trembling a little. “You’re making him up.”
“The one who was talking to Ibu!” she shouted. “I win!”
Her face was a little, round glowing orb, red with excited accomplishment.
I even smiled a little myself.
I watched as Undine’s happy smile slowly froze—and then solidified. She was staring over my shoulder—like the stranger at the station—as if she had spotted a specter.
The hair at the back of my neck was already bristling with strange electricity as I turned slowly round.
Lena was standing in the doorway and I swear her eyes were glowing like red coals in the darkness of the hall. How long she had been there, and how much she had overheard, I couldn’t begin to guess.
“Go to your room, Undine,” she said in a voice that was like a cold wind blowing through frozen grass.
Without a word, Undine brushed past me and vanished.
“You mustn’t encourage her,” Lena said when the little girl was gone. She spoke in that same odd voice, as if she were a ventriloquist’s dummy being operated by a cobra. “She’s far too excitable. Living too much in one’s imagination may be detrimental to one’s health.”
She smiled at me and lit a cigarette. When it was drawing to her satisfaction, she blew a trumpet of smoke from a protruding lower lip towards the ceiling.
“Do you understand?”
“Detrimental to one’s health,” I repeated.
“Exxxs-zactly!” Lena said, and let out another cannonade of smoke.
I made a swift calculation of the risk involved and then blurted out: “Who was he? The man in the long coat, I mean?”
Lena touched her cigarette to her lips in a picturesque fashion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The man on the railway platform. The one Undine saw you talking to.”
Lena walked over to one of the laboratory’s casement windows, placed her palms on the sill, and stood looking down upon the Visto for what seemed like an eternity.
Was she remembering happier days? Those days when Harriet took off and landed in Blithe Spirit on that grassy expanse?
“How well did you know my mother?” I asked. She had not even answered my first question and here I was already pelting her with another. I was almost, but not quite, aghast at my own boldness.
“Not as well as I should have liked,” she said. “We de Luces, as you know, are a peculiar lot.”
I smiled at her as if I knew what she was talking about.
“ ‘Cousin Excelsior,’ we used to call her in Cornwall. Harriet flew further, farther, and faster than any human being has a right to do. I suppose in some quarters that was resented.”
“In yours?”
I couldn’t believe my mouth!
“No, not in mine.” Lena turned away from the window. “I cared for her a great deal.”
Cared for her a great deal? Those were the precise words Undine had used to express her mother’s feelings towards Harriet.
“In fact,” Lena went on, “we were quite chummy, your mother and I—at least when we ran into each other outside of a family setting.”
I sat there in utter stillness hoping the vacuum created by my silence would attract more words about my mother. I had learned by close observation of Inspector Hewitt’s questioning techniques that silence is a question mark that cannot be ignored.
“I’m going to confide in you,” Lena said at last.
Hallelujah! My trap had worked!
“But you must promise me that what I say goes no further than this room.”
“I promise,” I said, meaning it at the time.
“Undine is a most unusual child,” she said.
I nodded sagely.
“Hers has not been an easy life. She lost her father in tragic circumstances when she was no more than a baby—much like yourself.”
For a moment I took this to be an insult, but then I saw what she meant—that both Undine and I had lost a parent while still in the cradle.
I nodded again, this time sadly.
“Undine is rather a highly strung child, I’m afraid. She requires a very particular kind of handling.”
Lena stopped and stared at me as if she were allowing
time for some crucial meaning to penetrate my brain.
Although I knew instantly what she was getting at, I decided to receive her barely coded message by letting my face melt into a slack, village idiot expression. I stopped short, though, of letting my tongue loll out of the corner of my mouth.
One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.
She ignored me and looked slowly round the room as if she had never noticed it before—as if she were awakening gradually from a dream.
“This was your uncle Tarquin’s laboratory, was it not?”
I nodded, barely capable.
There was another restless silence, and she went again to the casement window—the same window, I realized with a small ripple of gooseflesh, at which the military stranger had appeared in the ciné film.
What remarkable things windows are when you stop to think about it: silica, potash, soda, and lime combining in thin sheets to form a solid you can see through.
Even now, I realized—at this very instant—Lena was looking out at the world through the same crystal lattice as the stranger had so many years ago, the same crystal lattice through which the ciné camera had looked in at the stranger.
A window, I realized, can exist almost unchanged itself while looking out upon the ever-changing ages. A miracle of chemistry right here under our very noses!
Window glass, technically, is a liquid. A slow-flowing liquid, but a liquid nonetheless. Drawn by gravity, it can take hundreds—or even thousands!—of years to flow the same quarter inch that water can travel in a thousandth of a second.
My friend Adam Sowerby, the flora-archaeologist, had not long ago remarked that a simple flower seed was our one true time machine. I made a mental note to set him straight: Next time I saw him, I would insist he add plain ordinary window glass to his somewhat hasty theory.
“I’ve decided to enlist your assistance, Flavia,” Lena said with sudden determination, turning away from the window and breaking in upon my thoughts.
Her face was half in shadow and half in light, like one of those black-and-white Venetian carnival masks you sometimes see in the illustrated papers.
I made plummy lips and gave her the barest nod of submission.
“Undine, you see,” she began, choosing each word as carefully as if she were choosing diamonds, “Undine, you see—Good Lord!”
Something shot past the window outside, blocking the sunlight and, for an instant, plunging the room into semi-darkness.
“Good Lord,” Lena said again, her hand to her breast, “what in the name of—”
I was already at the window, pushing past her to get my nose against the glass.
“It’s Blithe Spirit!” I shouted. “Harriet’s plane! It’s come home!”
And indeed it had. As I watched, the de Havilland Gipsy Moth touched down as lightly as a feather in the scrubby grass of the Visto and came to a jaunty stop among the foxgloves and the odd bits of shattered statuary that projected here and there from the weeds.
With its engine revving, it turned and teetered, its control surfaces waggling and flapping saucily as if to say “There! Wasn’t that something?”
Needless to say, I was out of the room like a brick from a ballista, down the east staircase, out the front door—where the long queue of waiting mourners watched in silent astonishment as I flew past them—galloping across the overgrown ruins of the tennis courts and onto the weedy wasteland of the Visto.
I was alongside Blithe Spirit even before her propeller clattered to a halt, and a tall man—an excessively tall man—began to unfold himself from the cockpit.
There was more of him than it seemed possible for such a frail craft to have contained, but he kept coming and coming until at the end of one of his impossibly long legs a foot appeared, a foot which lifted itself neatly out over the cowling and planted itself on the root of one of the wings.
He shoved up the goggles covering his eyes, then un-snapped his flying helmet and lifted it to reveal the most golden head of hair that had ever existed on the planet since Apollo flew about in his personal cloud during the Trojan War.
Suddenly, and for just an instant, my heart seemed to have filled with air, and just as suddenly, it deflated and the feeling passed.
I raked my toe in the dust. What was happening to me?
“Miss de Luce, I expect?” he asked, extending a hand. “I’m Tristram Tallis.”
His voice was clipped and yet mellow: frank, man-to-man.
I didn’t dare touch him. Even the simple act of shaking hands with a god could turn one into a thornbush, and I knew that for a fact.
“Yes,” I managed. “Flavia. How did you know?”
“Your mother,” he said gently. “You are her very image.”
Suddenly, and without an instant’s warning, hot globs of water had sprung from my eyes and were streaming down my cheeks. I had, for days, intentionally been trying to keep my brain so busy with details, so full of this and that, that there was no farthest nook or cranny left to think about the fact that my mother was dead.
And now, in a single unguarded instant, a word from a stranger had reduced me to a sodden pulp.
Fortunately, Mr. Tallis was enough of a gentleman to pretend he hadn’t noticed. “I say, pity about Oxford, isn’t it?”
“Oxford?” He had caught me completely off guard.
“The University Boat Race. Easter weekend. At Henley. Oxford sank. Hadn’t you heard?”
Of course I’d heard, and so had everyone else in England—in the whole world, for that matter. By now it had likely been shown in cinema newsreels from London to Bombay.
But that had been several days ago. Only an Englishman of a certain type could still have the incident running foremost in his brain.
Or was he joking?
I peered carefully at his face, but he gave away nothing.
I couldn’t stop the smile from creeping up my cheeks.
“I had heard, as a matter of fact,” I said. “Bugger Cambridge.”
I’ll admit I was taking a chance. I had no idea, rather than the slightest hint in his accent, to which of our great universities he might belong. But since he had said “pity about Oxford,” I was going to take a chance that he was not being sarcastic.
His ready smile told me that I had judged correctly.
“RAW-ther!” he said, laying it on a bit thick.
The crisis had passed. We had managed a delicate moment quite nicely, the two of us, in the most civilized way of all: deflection.
Father would be proud of me—I know I was.
I laid an affectionate hand on Blithe Spirit’s taut fabric, which gave off in the warm sunlight a slight but comforting reek of nitrocellulose lacquer. How perfect, in a way, I thought, that an aircraft’s skin should be painted with explosive guncotton in its liquid form.
I sniffed my fingers surreptitiously, and in that instant added to my store of memories a smell that would from now and forever, until the end of time, never fail to remind me of Harriet.
I glanced up—guiltily, for some odd reason—at the laboratory windows to see if Lena was watching, but the old glass, like the clouded eyes of some village ancient, showed no more than the reflected sky.
ELEVEN
“BEAUTY, ISN’T SHE?”
Tristram Tallis brushed away an imaginary particle of dust from one of Blithe Spirit’s wings. “I bought her from your mother just before the War. We’ve had some grand times together, the old girl and I.”
And he suddenly went the color of pickled beetroot. “Blithe Spirit and I, I mean. Not your mother.”
I looked at him blankly.
“I must make a clean breast of it, though: I renamed her years ago. She’s now a he: Typhon.”
It seemed a sacrilege but I didn’t say so.
“I trust you’ve spent many pleasant hours flying her—him.”
“Not so many as I’d like. Typhon—”
He saw the pain
ed look on my face.
“All right, then, Blithe Spirit, if you like, has been hangared for years.”
“So you haven’t done much flying.”
“I shouldn’t say that,” he said quietly. “No, I shouldn’t say that at all. I’ve had my innings.”
“You were in the RAF!” I said as the light came on in my brain.
“Biggin Hill.” He nodded modestly. “Mostly Spitfires.”
Crikes! Here I was condescending to one of the young men Mr. Churchill had called “The Few”: one of those youthful warriors who had climbed high into the sky above England’s green and pleasant land to take on the German Luftwaffe.
I had seen their photos in the back issues of Picture Post that littered the library of Buckshaw like drifts of fallen autumn leaves: those boyish pilots who, in their life vests and sheepskin flying boots, draped themselves in canvas deck chairs in the grass, awaiting the grated voice from the Tannoy system to call them to action.
I couldn’t wait to introduce Tristram Tallis to Dieter! And to Feely!
“When I heard about your mother,” he said, “I knew I needed to bring Blithe Spirit back to Buckshaw. I—I mean—dash it all! I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”
But I understood him perfectly.
“My mother would have been grateful,” I told him. “And she’d have wanted me to thank you.”
“Look, this is deuced awkward,” he said. “I don’t know what your family will think of me barging in at a time like this—” He waved his hand vaguely towards where the long queue of villagers shuffled slowly and mournfully towards the house. “Dash it all! I mean, landing on your lawn as if Buckshaw were the bally old airfield at Croydon. I mean—”
“Think nothing of it, Mr. Tallis,” I told him, desperately trying to cover up the fact that I was floundering badly. When it came to the social graces, I was in far over my head.
How would Feely handle this? I wondered. I tried to put myself for a moment into my sister’s shoes.
“Perhaps you’d care to come in and freshen up,” I said, touching his wrist lightly and flashing him my most charming smile. “I expect flying gives you the most awful craving for a cup of tea.”
It was exactly the right thing to say. A broad schoolboy grin split his face, and a moment later he was leading the way, with alarmingly long strides, towards the kitchen door.