“She’s your fiancée,” said Mrs. Higgler. “I heard.”
Fat Charlie could feel his cheeks starting to burn. “She’s not my—we aren’t, actually. I had to say something to get her away from the man with the gun. It seemed the simplest thing.”
Mrs. Higgler looked at him. Behind her thick spectacles, her eyes began to twinkle. “I know that,” she said. “It was during your song. In front of an audience.” She shook her head, in the way that old people like to do when pondering the foolishness of the young. She opened her black purse, took out an envelope, passed it to Fat Charlie. “I promised Louella I keep it safe.”
Fat Charlie took out the feather from the envelope, half-crushed, from where he had been holding it tightly the night of the séance. “Okay,” he said. “Feather. Excellent. Now,” he said to Mrs. Higgler, “What exactly do I do with it?”
“You don’t know?”
Fat Charlie’s mother had told him, when he was young, to count to ten before he lost his temper. He counted, silently and unhurriedly, to ten, whereupon he lost his temper. “Of course I don’t know what to do with it, you stupid old woman! In the last two weeks I’ve been arrested, I’ve lost my fiancée and my job, I’ve watched my semi-imaginary brother get eaten by a wall of birds in Piccadilly Circus, I’ve flown back and forth across the Atlantic like some kind of lunatic transatlantic ping-pong ball, and today I got up in front of an audience and I, and I sang because my psycho ex-boss had a gun barrel against the stomach of the girl I’m having dinner with. All I’m trying to do is sort out the mess my life has turned into since you suggested I might want to talk to my brother. So, no. No, I don’t know what to do with this bloody feather. Burn it? Chop it up and eat it? Build a nest with it? Hold it out in front of me and jump out of the window?”
Mrs. Higgins looked sullen. “You have to ask Louella Dunwiddy.”
“I’m not sure that I can. She wasn’t looking very well the last time I saw her. And we don’t have much time.”
Daisy said, “Great. You got your feather back. Now, can we please talk about Grahame Coats?”
“It’s not only a feather. It’s the feather I swapped for my brother.”
“So swap it back, and let’s get on with things. We’ve got to do something.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” said Fat Charlie. Then he stopped, and thought about what he had said and what she had said. He looked at Daisy admiringly. “God, you’re smart,” he said.
“I try,” she said. “What did I say?”
They didn’t have four old ladies, but they had Mrs. Higgler, Benjamin, and Daisy. Dinner was almost finished, so Clarissa, the ma?tre d‘, seemed perfectly happy to come and join them. They didn’t have earths of four different colors, but there was white sand from the beach behind the hotel and black dirt from the flower bed in front of it, red mud at the side of the hotel, multicolored sand in test tubes in the gift shop. The candles they borrowed from the poolside bar were small and white, not tall and black. Mrs. Higgler assured them that she could find all the herbs they actually needed on the island, but Fat Charlie had Clarissa borrow a pouch of bouquet garni from the kitchen.
“I think it’s all a matter of confidence,” Fat Charlie explained. “The most important thing isn’t the details. It’s the magical atmosphere.”
The magical atmosphere in this case was not enhanced by Benjamin Higgler’s tendency to look around the table and burst into explosive giggles nor by Daisy’s continually pointing out that the whole procedure was extremely silly.
Mrs. Higgler sprinkled the bouquet garni into a bowl of leftover white wine.
Mrs. Higgler began to hum. She raised her hands in encouragement, and the others began to hum along with her, like drunken bees. Fat Charlie waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
“Fat Charlie,” said Mrs. Higgler. “You hum too.”
Fat Charlie swallowed. There’s nothing to be scared of, he told himself: he had sung in front of a roomful of people; he had proposed marriage in front of an audience to a woman he barely knew. Humming would be a doddle.
He found the note that Mrs. Higgler was humming, and he let it vibrate in his throat…
He held his feather. He concentrated and he hummed.
Benjamin stopped giggling. His eyes widened. There was an expression of alarm on his face, and Fat Charlie was going to stop humming to find out what was troubling him, but the hum was inside him now, and the candles were flickering…
“Look at him!” said Benjamin. “He’s—”
And Fat Charlie would have wondered what exactly he was, but it was too late to wonder.
Mists parted.