TEN
AT FIVE-THIRTY THE PEOPLE of Bishop’s Lacey began to arrive. First were the Misses Puddock, Lavinia and Aurelia, the proprietresses of the St. Nicholas Tea Room.
Incredibly, these two creaking relics had walked the mile through deep drifts of snow, and now their round faces glowed like little red furnaces.
“We didn’t want to be late, so we set out early,” Miss Lavinia said, looking round appreciatively at the decorated foyer. “Very, very swank, isn’t it, Aurelia?”
I knew that they were sizing up the situation, sniffing out the possibilities of being asked to perform. The Misses Puddock had managed to insinuate themselves into every public performance in Bishop’s Lacey since the year dot, and I knew that at this very moment, stuffed handily somewhere into the depths of Miss Lavinia’s handbag would be the sheet music for “Napoleon’s Last Charge,” “Bendemeer’s Stream,” and “Annie Laurie” at the very least.
“It’s not for an hour and a half yet,” I told them. “But you’re welcome to have a seat. May I take your coats?”
With Dogger out of action, I had decided to take over the duties of the doorman myself. I’d certainly had enough practice during the day! Father would be furious, of course, but I knew that he would thank me when he came to understand. Well, perhaps not thank me, but at least spare me one of his three-hour lectures.
But for now, Father was nowhere in sight. It was as if, having received payment for the use of Buckshaw, he had no further obligation. Or could it be, perhaps, that he was ashamed to show his face?
The film crew were putting the finishing touches to the improvised stage, adjusting the lights and moving tall basketwork trumpets of fresh flowers into position at each side of the make-believe courtyard, when the doorbell rang.
Bunching my sweater tightly round my shoulders, I opened the door to find myself nearly nose-to-nose with a complete stranger. He was wrapped in a khaki greatcoat with no insignia that I was quite sure must have been issued by some army or another.
He was short, with freckles, and was chewing gum the way a horse chews an apple.
“This Buckshaw?” he asked.
I admitted that it was.
“I’m Carl,” he announced. “You can tell your big sister I’m here.”
Carl? Big sister?
Of course! This was Carl from St. Louis, Missouri—Carl, the American, who had given Feely the chewing gum I had pilfered from her lingerie drawer—Carl who had told her she was the spitting image of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet—Carl who had taught her how to spell Mississippi.
There had been Americans, I recalled, who had shared the airfield with a Spitfire squadron at Leathcote, a few of whom, like Dieter, had chosen to remain in England at the end of the war, and Carl must be one of them.
He was holding a small package, almost completely hidden inside a thicket of green ribbon hung all over with red-and-white candy-cane decorations.
“Camel?” he asked, producing a packet of cigarettes at his fingertips and cleverly flipping it open at the same time with his thumb, like a conjuror’s trick.
“No, thank you,” I said. “Father doesn’t allow smoking in the house.”
“He doesn’t, eh? Well, then, I reckon I’ll hold my fire for a spell. Tell Ophelia Carl Pendracka is here and he’s ready to boogie-woogie!”
Good lord!
Carl sauntered past me into the foyer.
“Say,” he said. “Swell place you got here. Looks like they’re making a movie, am I right? Do you know what? I saw Clark Gable once in St. Louis. In Spiegel’s. Spiegel’s is where this came from …”
He gave the gift a shake.
“My mom picked ’em up for me. Stuck ’em in with the Camels. Clark Gable looked right at me that time in Spiegel’s. What do you say to that?”
“I’ll tell my sister you’re here,” I said.
“Feely,” I said, at the door of the drawing room, “Carl Pendracka is here, and he’s ready to boogie-woogie.”
Father looked up from the pages of his London Philatelist.
“Show him in,” he said.
The imp inside me grinned and hugged itself in anticipation.
I went only as far as the end of the corridor and beckoned Carl with a forefinger curled and uncurled.
He came obediently.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, touching the dark paneling appreciatively.
I held open the study door, doing my best to mimic Dogger in his valet role: a look on my face and a particular posture that indicated keen interest and at the same time keen disinterest.
“Carl Pendracka,” I announced, a trifle facetiously.
Feely looked up from her own to Carl’s reflection in the looking glass as Carl walked briskly to where Father sat, seized his hand, and gave it a jolly good wringing.
Although he didn’t show it, I could tell that Father was taken aback. Even Daffy glanced up from her book at the breach of manners.
“Carl’s family might be related to the King Arthur Pendragons,” Feely said in that brittle and snotty voice she uses for genealogical discussion.
To his credit, Father did not look terrifically impressed.
“Merry Christmas, Miss Ophelia de Luce,” Carl said, handing her his gift. I could tell that Feely was torn between centuries of good breeding and the urge to rip into the gift like a lion into a Christian.
“Go ahead, open it,” Carl urged. “It’s for you.”
Father subsided quickly into his stamp journal while Daffy, pretending to have reached a particularly gripping passage in Bleak House, was secretly peering out from beneath her furrowed brows.
Feely picked at the bows and ribbons as slowly and as fussily as a naturalist dissecting a butterfly under a microscope with tweezers.
“Tear it off!” I wanted to shout. “That’s what wrapping’s for!”
“I don’t want to spoil this beautiful paper,” she simpered.
By the buttons of the Holy Ghost! I could have strangled her with the ribbon!
Carl obviously felt the same way.
“Here,” he said, taking the package away from Feely and poking his thumbs through the folded paper at the ends. “All the way from St. Louis, Mo.—the Show Me State.”
A candy cane clattered to the hearth.
“Oh!” said Feely as the wrapping fell away. “Nylons! How lovely! Wherever did you find them?”
Even Daffy gasped. Nylons were as scarce as unicorn droppings: the Holy Grail of gift-giving.
Father shot up out of his chair as if on a spring. In a flash he was across the room, and the nylons, which he had ripped from Feely’s hands, were dangling from his wrists like adders.
“This is outrageous, young man. Positively indecent. How dare you?”
He brushed the stockings off his hands and arms and into the fireplace.
I watched as the nylons shriveled, writhing and blackening in the flames, transformed by heat into their constituent chemicals (adipoyl chloride, I knew, and hexamethylenediamine). I felt a little shiver of pleasure as the stockings gave up the ghost in one last, delicious flickering flame. Their dying breath, a wisp of the deadly poisonous gas hydrogen cyanide, floated up the chimney and then it was gone. In just a few seconds, Carl’s gift was no more than a sticky black glob bubbling on the Yule logs.
“I … I don’t understand,” Carl said.
He stood looking from Father to Feely to Daffy to me.
“You Limeys are crackers,” he said. “Just plain dizzo.”
“Dizzo,” Carl repeated to me in the foyer, shaking his head in disbelief. Feely had fled, shaken by sobs, to her bedroom and Father, in a thundercloud of outraged dignity, had taken refuge in his study.
“Have a chair,” I said and, as the doorbell rang again, I introduced Carl quickly to the Misses Puddock.
“Carl’s from St. Louis, in America,” I told them, and by the time I reached the door, they were already chatting away like lifelong cronies.