I looked at the photo. I knew the face well enough.
“Jack Schitt.”
“And what do you know about him?”
“Not much. He’s head of Goliath’s Internal Security Service. He wanted to know what Hades had planned to do with the Chuzzlewit manuscript.”
“I’ll let you into a secret. You’re right that Schitt’s Goliath but he’s not Internal Security.”
“What, then?”
“Advanced Weapons Division. Eight billion annual budget and it all goes through him.”
“Eight billion?”
“And loose change. Rumor has it they even went over that budget to develop the plasma rifle. He’s intelligent, ambitious and quite inflexible. He came here two weeks ago. He wouldn’t be in Swindon at all unless there was something here that Goliath found of great interest; we think Crometty went to see the original manuscript of Chuzzlewit and if that is so—”
“—Schitt is here because I am,” I announced suddenly. “He thought it suspicious that I should want an SO-27 job in Swindon of all places—no offense meant.”
“None taken,” replied Analogy. “But Schitt being here makes me think that Hades is still about—or at the very least Goliath think so.”
“I know,” I replied. “Worrying, isn’t it?”
Analogy and Cable looked at one another. They had made the points they wanted to make: I was welcome here, they were keen to avenge Crometty’s death and they didn’t like Jack Schitt. They wished me a pleasant evening, donned their hats and coats and were gone.
The jazz number came to an end. I joined in the applause as Holroyd got shakily to his feet and waved at the crowd before leaving. The bar thinned out rapidly once the music had finished, leaving me almost alone. I looked to my right, where two Miltons were busy making eyes at one another, and then at the bar, where several suited business reps were drinking as much as they could on their overnight allowance. I walked over to the piano and sat down. I struck a few chords, testing my arm at first, then becoming more adventurous as I played the lower half of a duet I remembered. I looked at the barman to order another drink but he was busy drying a glass. As the intro for the top part of the duet came around for the third time, a man’s hand reached in and played the first note of the upper part exactly on time. I closed my eyes; I knew who it was instantly, but I wasn’t going to look up. I could smell his aftershave and noticed the scar on his left hand. The hair on the back of my neck bristled slightly and I felt a flush rise within me. I instinctively moved to the left and let him sit down. His fingers drifted across the keys with mine, the two of us playing together almost flawlessly. The barman looked on approvingly, and even the suited salesmen stopped talking and looked around to see who was playing. Still I did not look up. As my hands grew more accustomed to that long-unplayed tune I grew confident and played faster. My unwatched partner kept up the tempo to match me.
We played like this for perhaps ten minutes, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. I knew that if I did I would smile and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted him to know I was still pissed off. Then he could charm me. When the piece finally came to an end I continued to stare ahead. The man next to me didn’t move.
“Hello, Landen,” I said finally.
“Hello, Thursday.”
I played a couple of notes absently but still didn’t look up.
“It’s been a long time,” I said.
“A lot of water under the bridge,” he replied. “Ten years’ worth.”
His voice sounded the same. The warmth and sensitivity I had once known so well were still there. I looked up at him, caught his gaze and looked away quickly. I had felt my eyes moisten. I was embarrassed by my feelings and scratched my nose nervously. He had gone slightly gray but he wore his hair in much the same manner. There were slight wrinkles around his eyes, but they might just as easily have been from laughing as from age. He was thirty when I walked out; I had been twenty-six. I wondered whether I had aged as well as he had. Was I too old to still hold a grudge? After all, getting into a strop with Landen wasn’t going to bring Anton back. I felt an urge to ask him if it was too late to try again, but as I opened my mouth the world juddered to a halt. The D sharp I had just pressed kept on sounding and Landen stared at me, his eyes frozen in midblink. Dad’s timing could not have been worse.
“Hello, Sweetpea!” he said, walking up to me out of the shadows. “Am I disturbing anything?”
“Most definitely—yes.”
“I won’t be long, then. What do you make of this?”
He handed me a yellow curved thing about the size of a large carrot.
“What is it?” I asked, smelling it cautiously.
“It’s the fruit of a new plant designed completely from scratch seventy years from now. Look—”
He peeled the skin off and let me taste it.
“Good, eh? You can pick it well before ripe, transport it thousands of miles if necessary and it will keep fresh in its own hermetically sealed biodegradable packaging. Nutritious and tasty, too. It was sequenced by a brilliant engineer named Anna Bannon. We’re a bit lost as to what to call it. Any ideas?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something. What are you going to do with it?”
“I thought I’d introduce it somewhere in the tenth millennium before the present one and see how it goes—food for mankind, that sort of thing. Well, time waits for no man, as we say. I’ll let you get back to Landen.”
The world flickered and started up again. Landen opened his eyes and stared at me.
“Banana,” I said, suddenly realizing what it was that my father had shown me.
“Pardon?”
“Banana. They named it after the designer.”
“Thursday, you’re making no sense at all,” said Landen with a bemused grin.
“My dad was just here.”
“Ah. Is he still of all time?”
“Still the same. Listen, I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Me too,” replied Landen, then lapsed into silence. I wanted to touch his face but instead I said:
“I missed you.”
It was the wrong thing to say and I cursed myself; too much, too soon. Landen shuffled uneasily.
“You should take aim more carefully. I missed you a lot too. The first year was the worst.”
Landen paused for a moment. He played a few notes on the piano and then said:
“I have a life and I like it here. Sometimes I think that Thursday Next was just a character from one of my novels, someone I made up in the image of the woman I wanted to love. Now . . . well, I’m over it.”
It wasn’t really what I was hoping to hear, but after all that had happened I couldn’t blame him.
“But you came to find me.”
Landen smiled at me.
“You’re in my town, Thurs. When a friend comes in from out of town, you look them up. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”
“And you buy them flowers? Does Colonel Phelps get roses too?”
“No, he gets lilies. Old habits die hard.”
“I see. You’ve been doing well for yourself.”
“Thanks,” he replied. “You never answered my letters.”
“I never read your letters.”
“Are you married?”
“I can’t see that’s any of your business.”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
The conversation had taken a turn for the worse. It was time to bale out.
“Listen, I’m bushed, Landen. I have a very big day ahead of me.”
I got up. Landen limped after me. He had lost a leg in the Crimea but he was well used to it by now. He caught up with me at the bar.
“Dinner one night?”
I turned to face him.
“Sure.”
“Tuesday?”
“Why not?”
“Good,” said Landen, rubbing his hands. “We could get the old unit back together—”
This
wasn’t what I had in mind.
“Hang on. Tuesday’s not very good after all.”
“Why not? It was fine three seconds ago. Has your dad been around again?”
“No, I just have a lot of things that I have to do and Pickwick needs kenneling and I have to pick him up at the station as airships make him nervous. You remember the time we took him up to Mull and he vomited all over the steward?”
I checked myself. I was starting to blabber like an idiot.
“And don’t tell me,” added Landen, “you have to wash your hair?”
“Very funny.”
“What work are you doing in Swindon anyway?” asked Landen.
“I wash up at SmileyBurger.”
“Sure you do. SpecOps?”
I nodded my head.
“I joined Swindon’s Litera Tec unit.”
“Permanently?” he asked. “I mean, you’ve come back to Swindon for good?”
“I don’t know.”
I placed my hand on his. I wanted to hug him and burst into tears and tell him I loved him and would always love him like some huge emotional dumb girlie, but time wasn’t quite right, as my father would say. I decided to get on the question offensive instead so I asked:
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Never thought about it?”
“I thought about it a lot.”
We both lapsed into silence. There was so much to say that neither of us could think of any way to start. Landen opened a second front:
“Want to see Richard III?”
“Is it still running?”
“Of course.”
“I’m tempted but the fact remains I don’t know when I will be free. Things are . . . volatile at present.”
I could see he didn’t believe me. I couldn’t really tell him I was on the trail of a master criminal who could steal thoughts and project images at will; who was invisible on film and could murder and laugh as he did so. Landen sighed, dug out a calling card and placed it on the counter.
“Call me. Whenever you’re free. Promise?”
“Promise.”
He kissed me on the cheek, finished his drink, looked at me again and limped out of the bar. I was left looking at his calling card. I didn’t pick it up. I didn’t need to. The number was the one I remembered.
My room was exactly like all the other rooms in the hotel. The pictures were screwed to the walls and the drinks in the minibar had been opened, drunk, then resealed with water or cold tea by traveling reps too mean to pay for them. The room faced north; I could just see the airship field. A large forty-seater was moored on the mast, its silver flanks floodlit in the dark night. The small dirigible that had brought me in had continued onto Salisbury; I briefly thought about catching it again when it called on its return the day after tomorrow. I turned on the television just in time to catch Today in Parliament. The Crimean debate had been raging all day and wasn’t over yet. I emptied my pockets of loose change, took my automatic out of its shoulder holster and opened the bedside drawer. It was full. Apart from the Gideon’s Bible there were the teachings of Buddha and an English copy of the Koran. There was also a GSD volume of prayer and a Wesleyian pamphlet, two amulets from the Society for Christian Awareness, the thoughts of St. Zvlkx and the now mandatory Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I removed all the books, stuffed them in the cupboard and placed my automatic in the drawer instead. I unzipped my case and started to organize my room. I hadn’t rented out my apartment in London; I didn’t know if I was staying here or not. Oddly, the town had started to feel very comfortable and I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or not. I laid everything on my bed and then put it all carefully away. I placed a few books on the desk and the life-saving copy of Jane Eyre onto the bedside table. I picked up Landen’s photo and walked over to the bureau, thought for a moment and then placed it upside down in my knicker drawer. With the real thing around I had no need for an image. The TV droned on:
“. . . despite intervention by the French and a Russian guarantee of safe habitation for English settlers, it looks as though the English government will not be resuming its place around the table at Budapest. With England still adamant about an offensive using the new so-called Stonk plasma rifle, peace will not be descending on the Black Sea peninsula . . .”
The anchorman shuffled some papers.
“Home news now, and violence flared again in Chichester as a group of neosurrealists gathered to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the legalization of surrealism. On the spot for Toad News Network is Henry Grubb. Henry, how are things down there?”
A shaky live picture came onto the screen, and I stopped for a moment to watch. Behind Grubb was a car that had been overturned and set on fire, and several officers were in riot gear. Henry Grubb, who was in training for the job of Crimean correspondent and secretly hoped that the war wouldn’t end until he had had a chance to get out there, wore a navy blue flak jacket and spoke with the urgent, halting speech of a correspondent in a war zone.
“Things are a bit hot down here, Brian. I’m a hundred yards from the riot zone and I can see several cars overturned and on fire. The police have been trying to keep the factions apart all day, but the sheer weight of numbers has been against them. This evening several hundred Raphaelites surrounded the N’est pas une pipe public house where a hundred neosurrealists have barricaded themselves in. The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown. The neosurrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to be winning until the police moved in. Wait, I can just see a man arrested by the police. I’ll try and get an interview.”
I shook my head sadly and put some shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe. There was violence when surrealism was banned and there was violence as the same ban was lifted. Grubb continued his broadcast as he intercepted a policeman marching away a youth dressed in sixteenth-century garb with a faithful reproduction of the “Hand of God” from the Sistine chapel tattooed on his face.
“Excuse me, sir, how would you counter the criticism that you are an intolerant bunch with little respect for the value of change and experimentation in all aspects of art?”
The Renaissancite glanced at the camera with an angry scowl.
“People say we’re just Renaissancites causing trouble, but I’ve seen Baroque kids, Raphaelites, Romantics and Mannerists here tonight. It’s a massive show of classical artistic unity against these frivolous bastards who cower beneath the safety of the word ‘progress.’ It’s not just—”
The police officer intervened and dragged him away. Grubb ducked a flying brick and then wound up his report.
“This is Henry Grubb, reporting for Toad News Network, live from Chichester.”
I turned off the television with a remote that was chained to the bedside table. I sat on the bed and pulled out my hair tie, let my hair down and rubbed my scalp. I sniffed dubiously at my hair and decided against a shower. I had been harder than I intended with Landen. Even with our differences we still had more than enough in common to be good friends.
11.
Polly Flashes Upon the Inward Eye
I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can’t be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.
POLLY NEXT
—interviewed exclusively for The Owl on Sunday
AS I was dealing with Landen in my own clumsy way, my uncle and aunt were hard at work in Mycroft’s workshop. As I was to learn later, things seemed to be going quite well. To begin with, at any rate.
Mycroft was feeding his bookworms in the workshop when Polly entered; she had just completed some mathematical calculations of almost incomprehensible complexity for him.
“I have the answer you wanted, Crofty, my love,” she said, sucking the end of a well-worn pencil.
“And that is?” asked Mycroft, busily pouring prepositions ont
o the bookworms, who devoured the abstract food greedily.
“Nine.”
Mycroft mumbled something and jotted the figure down on a pad. He opened the large brass-reinforced book that I had not quite been introduced to the night before to reveal a cavity into which he placed a large-print copy of Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” To this he added the bookworms, who busily got to work. They slithered over the text, their small bodies and unfathomable collective id unconsciously examining every sentence, word, vowel sound and syllable. They probed deeply into the historical, biographical and geographical allusions, then they explored the inner meanings hidden within the meter and rhythm and juggled ingeniously with subtext, content and inflection. After that they made up a few verses of their own and converted the result into binary.
Lakes! Daffodils! Solitude! Memory! whispered the worms excitedly as Mycroft carefully closed the book and locked it. He connected up the heavy mains feed to the back of the book and switched the power switch to “on”; he then started work on the myriad of knobs and dials that covered the front of the heavy volume. Despite the Prose Portal being essentially a bio-mechanism, there were still many delicate procedures that had to be set before the device would work; and since the portal was of an absurd complexity, Mycroft was forced to write up the precise sequence of start-up events and combinations in a small child’s exercise book of which—ever wary of foreign spies—he held the only copy. He studied the small book for several moments before twisting dials, setting switches and gently increasing the power, all the while muttering to himself and Polly:
“Binametrics, spherics, numerics. I’m—”
“On?”
“Off!” replied Mycroft sadly. “No, wait . . . There!”
He smiled happily as the last of the warning lights extinguished. He took his wife’s hand and squeezed it affectionately.
“Would you care to have the honor?” he asked. “The first human being to step inside a Wordsworth poem?”
Polly looked at him uneasily.
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“As safe as houses,” he assured her. “I went into ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ an hour ago.”