“Flavia—”
Drat!
Feely had broken off her conversation, and was bearing down upon me. It was too late to pretend I hadn’t heard her.
She seized my elbow and gave it a furtive shake. “Don’t go sneaking off,” she said in an undertone, using her other hand to wave a cheery good-bye to Cynthia. “Father will be here in a few minutes, and he has asked in particular that you wait.”
“Father here? Whatever for?”
“Oh, come off it, Flavia—you know as well as I do. It’s cinema night, and Father was quite right—he said you’d try to dodge it.”
She was correct on both counts. Although I had since put it out of my mind, Father had announced suddenly several weeks earlier that we didn’t get out enough as a family—a situation that he intended to rectify by subscribing to the vicar’s proposed cinema series in the parish hall.
And sure enough—here was Father now with Daffy, at the church door, shaking hands with the vicar. It was too late to escape.
“Ah, Flavia,” the vicar said, “thank you for adding your voice to our little choir of angels, as it were. I was just telling your father how pleased I was to see Ophelia on the organ bench. She plays so well, don’t you think? It’s a treat to see her conducting the choir with such verve. ‘And a little child shall lead them,’ as the prophet Isaiah tells us … not, of course, that Ophelia’s a little child, dear me, no!—far from it. But come away, the Bijou Cinema awaits!”
As we strolled through the churchyard towards the parish hall, I noticed Colin flitting from gravestone to gravestone, engaged apparently in some elaborate game of his own invention.
“I worry about that boy,” I heard the vicar confiding to Father. “He has no parents, and now, with Brookie Harewood no longer around, as it were, to look out for him—but I’m chattering—ah, here we are … shall we go in?”
Inside, the parish hall was already uncomfortably warm. In preparation for the pictures, the blackout curtains had been drawn against the evening light, and the place was already filling with that humid fug that is generated by too many overheated bodies in a confined space.
I could distinguish quite clearly the many odors of Bishop’s Lacey, among them the various scents and shaving lotions; of talcum powder (the vicar); of bergamot scent (the Misses Puddock), of rubbing alcohol (our neighbor Maximilian Brock); of boiled cabbage (Mrs. Delaney), of Guinness stout (Mr. Danby), and of Dutch pipe tobacco (George Carew, the village carpenter).
Since Miss Mountjoy, with her pervading odor of cod-liver oil, was nowhere in sight, I circulated slowly round the hall, sniffing unobtrusively for the slightest whiff of fish.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Spirling. It’s nice to see you. (Sniff) How’s Mrs. Spirling getting on with her crocheting? Gosh, it’s such a lot of work, isn’t it? I don’t know where she finds the time.”
In the center of the room, Mr. Mitchell, the proprietor of the photographer’s shop in the high street, was grappling with writhing snakes of black cine film, trying to feed them into the maw of a projector.
I couldn’t help but reflect that the last time I’d been in the parish hall, it had been on the occasion of Rupert Porson’s final puppet performance—on this same stage—of Jack and the Beanstalk. Poor Rupert, I thought, and a delicious little shudder shook my shoulders.
But this was no time for pleasantries—I had to keep my nose to the grindstone, so to speak.
I rejoined Father, Daffy, and Feely just as the front row of houselights was being switched off.
I will not bother quoting the vicar’s preliminary remarks about “the growing importance of film in the education of our young people,” and so forth. He did not mention either Brookie’s death or the attack upon Fenella, although this was perhaps neither the proper time or place to do so.
We were then plunged into a brief darkness, and a few moments later the first film flashed onto the screen—a black-and-white animated cartoon in which a chorus of horribly grinning cats in bowler hats bobbed up and down in unison, yowling “Ain’t We Got Fun?” to the music of a tinny jazz band.
Mercifully, it did not last long.
In the brief pause, during which the lights came up and the film was changed, I noticed that Mrs. Bull had arrived with Timofey and her toddler. If she saw me among the audience, she did not let on.
The next film, Saskatchewan: Breadbasket of the World, was a documentary that showed great harvesting machines creeping across the flat face of the Canadian prairies, then rivers of grain being poured into railway hopper cars, and the open hatches of waiting cargo ships.
At the end of it I craned my neck for a glimpse of Colin Prout—yes, there he was at the very back of the hall, returning my gaze steadily. I gave him a little wave, but he made no response.
The third film, The Maintenance of Aero Engines: Part III, must have been something left over from the war—a film that was being shown simply because it happened to be in the same box as the others. In the light reflected from the screen, I caught Father and Feely exchanging puzzled glances before settling down to look as if they were finding it terrifically instructive.
The final feature on the program was a documentary called The Versatile Lemon, which, aside from the narrator’s mentioning that lemons had once been used as an antidote to a multitude of poisons, was a crashing bore.
I watched it with my eyes shut.
The new moon was no more than a sliver of silver in the sky as we made our way homeward across the fields. Father, Daffy, and Feely had got slightly ahead, and I trudged along behind them, immersed in my own thoughts.
“Don’t dawdle, Flavia,” Feely said, in a patient, half-amused voice that drove me crazy. She was putting it on for Father.
“Squid!” I said, warping the word into a sneeze.