I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows

My mouth fell open like a corpse who’s just had her jaw bandage removed.

 

“His mother? Phyllis Wyvern is Val Lampman’s mother?”

 

“Surprising, isn’t it. She gave birth to him when she was very young, no more than seventeen, I believe, and Val’s age, to all outer appearances, is rather … indeterminate.”

 

So that was it! Val Lampman was the “Waldemar” of Who’s Who, but he was Phyllis Wyvern’s son, and not her brother, as I had assumed. I had misinterpreted the entry in Who’s Who. I wanted to blush but I was too excited.

 

“She’d already had a daughter a year earlier,” Aunt Felicity went on. “Veronica, I believe the girl was called. Poor child. There was some great tragedy there that was never spoken of.

 

“Phyllida—or Phyllis, as she liked to call herself—had been married for a time to the late and not awfully-much-lamented Lorenzo, who, in spite of his blue blood and the great difference in their ages, was still active as a traveler in wines, or wigs, I’ve forgotten which.”

 

“Wigs, probably,” I said, “because she was wearing one.”

 

Aunt Felicity shot me a disgusted look, as if I’d blabbed a secret.

 

“It fell off,” I explained. “I was trying to keep the shroud the police had thrown over her from messing her hair.”

 

There fell one of those silences so thick you could have stood a spoon up in it.

 

“Poor Philly,” Aunt Felicity said, at last. “She suffered terribly at the hands of the Axis agents. Chemicals, I believe. Her hair was her crowning glory. They might as well have chopped out her heart.”

 

Chemicals? Torture?

 

Dogger had been tortured, too, in the Far East. It seemed bizarre, the way in which these old atrocities seemed to be coming home to roost in peaceful Bishop’s Lacey.

 

“Does Father know about these things? About Phyllida Lampman, I mean?”

 

“She had been directed by Malinovsky in a number of foreign films,” Aunt Felicity went on, staring at her own hands as if they were those of a stranger. “Most notably, of course, in Anna of the Steppes, a role which led, indirectly, to her assignment, and to her later downfall. Although she escaped with her life, she underwent a total breakdown, during which she developed an irrational horror of all Eastern Europeans.”

 

“Which is why she insisted on always working with the same British ciné crew,” I said.

 

“Precisely.”

 

We had seen the re-released version of Anna of the Steppes at the cinema in Hinley, where it was shown—with English subtitles—as Dressed for Dying.

 

Although it had seemed at first to be just another of those endless yawners about the Russian Revolution, I soon found myself swept into the story, my eyes as dazzled by the stark black-and-white images as if I had stared too long at the sun.

 

In fact, the unforgettable scene in which Phyllis Wyvern, as Anna, having put on her grandmother’s Russian dress and heavy boots, carefully combed her hair, and applied the scent and makeup brought to her from Paris by her lover, Marcel, lies down with her year-old baby in front of the army of snarling tractors, was still causing me occasional and inexplicable nightmares.

 

“Miss Wyvern must have been a very brave woman,” I said.

 

Aunt Felicity returned to the window and looked out as if World War Two were still raging somewhere in the fields to the east of Buckshaw.

 

“She was more than brave,” she said. “She was British.”

 

I let the silence linger until it was hanging by a thread. And then I said what I had come to say.

 

“You must have heard everything that happened. Being in the next room.”

 

Aunt Felicity looked suddenly drawn, and old, and helpless.

 

“I should have,” she said. “God knows I should have.”

 

“You mean you didn’t?”

 

“I’m an old woman, Flavia. I suffer from the vicissitudes of age. I had a tot of rum at bedtime, and slept with the pillow screwed into my good ear. That poor dear blasted soul ran ciné films all night. I knew why, of course, but even sympathy has its limits.”

 

Does it? I wondered, or was Aunt Felicity simply deflecting further discussion?

 

“So you heard nothing,” I said at last.

 

“I didn’t say I’d heard nothing. I said I hadn’t heard everything.”

 

I walked across the room and stood beside her at the window. It had grown dark outside, and the snow was still falling as heavily as if the world were coming to a bitter end.

 

“I got up to use the WC. She was arguing with someone. The noise of the film, you see …”

 

“Was it a man, or a woman?”

 

“One couldn’t be sure. Although they were keeping down the volume, it was evident that angry words were being exchanged. Even with an ear to the wall—oh, all right, don’t look so shocked, I’ll admit to clapping an ear to the wall—I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I gave it up and went back to bed, determined to have a word with her in the morning.”

 

“You hadn’t spoken to her before that?”

 

“No,” Aunt Felicity said. “There had been no opportunity. One had come across her unexpectedly in the corridor, but as I’ve told you, we were both of us too well trained in the art of seeming total strangers.”

 

My mind was leapfrogging back and forth over the things that Aunt Felicity had told me. If, for instance, what she said was true, Phyllis Wyvern could not possibly have been arguing with someone when Auntie F got up to use the baffins, because she was already dead. I had heard the toilet flush and I’d been in the death chamber moments later. Before that, someone had had enough time to strangle Phyllis Wyvern, dress her in different clothing (for whatever bizarre reason), and make their escape through one of three doors: the one to the corridor, the one that connected to Flo and Maeve’s bedroom, or—and here I shot a nervous glance over my shoulder—the one that opened into the very room in which I was now standing. Aunt Felicity’s bedroom—the very same Aunt Felicity who had just told me that she was capable of coming for me in the dark with a butcher knife. If what she said was true—if only half of what she hinted at were the ramblings of a woman who had grown suddenly old at the end of the war—she was capable of anything. Who knew what havoc old loyalties and older jealousies could play with two women who had once been friends?

 

Or was it enemies?

 

I needed time to think—time to get away—to collect my thoughts.

 

“Thank you, Aunt Felicity,” I said. “You must be very tired.”

 

I could always come back to her later to fill in the blanks.

 

“You’re such a thoughtful child,” she said.

 

I gave her a modest smile.

 

The cupboard under the stairs was little more than a right-angled triangle equipped with a dangling lightbulb. Here, stowed safely away from the eyes of the ciné crew and their cameras, were the magazines that had been cleared away from the library and the drawing room. Back numbers of Country Life pressed down like geological strata upon old issues of The Illustrated London News. Heaped high with issues of Behind the Screen and Cinema Weekly, back numbers of Cinema World were piled in crooked stacks that must have dated back to the days of silent film.

 

I stepped inside, closed the door behind me, and, taking down the first handful of ciné magazines, began my search.

 

I flipped through page after page of Ciné Tit-Bits and Silver Cinema, smiling, at first, at the antics of the so-called “movie stars,” most of whom I had never heard of.

 

Parties, galas, premieres, benefit performances: smiling faces, toothy grins, top hats and sequined dresses, arms around shoulders in exotic motorcars—what vast amounts of time these people had spent having themselves photographed!

 

It wasn’t difficult to find Phyllis Wyvern. She was everywhere, spanning the years without apparently aging a day. Here she was, for instance, sitting, legs crossed, in a canvas chair with her name painted on the back, studying a script, with a cardigan thrown over her shoulders and a look of intense concentration on her face. Here she was, dancing with a young airman in a dark nightclub that seemed to be located in a church crypt. And here she was again, on the set of Anna of the Steppes, standing with another actress, their faces turned skyward, in front of one of the behemoth tractors as their makeup is retouched by a man in a mustache and a beret.

 

Could it be?

 

For a moment I thought that the woman beside Phyllis Wyvern was Marion Trodd. A much younger Marion Trodd, to be sure, but still …

 

In spite of my excitement I was having difficulty in keeping my eyes focused on the page. The air in the cupboard was becoming stuffy; the bare bulb giving off a surprising amount of heat. That and the fact that I was bone tired was making my head swim.

 

How long had I been huddled in this cupboard? An hour? Perhaps two? It seemed like days.

 

I rubbed my eyes with my fists, forcing myself to pay attention to the tiny type in which the caption was printed.

 

Perhaps there was something after all in Father’s insistence on having all of us outfitted with spectacles. I wore mine only when trying for sympathy, or when I needed to protect my eyes during a hazardous chemical experiment. I thought momentarily of running upstairs to get them, but decided against it.

 

I shook my head and read the caption again:

 

Phyllis Wyvern and Norma Durance freshen up between takes. Eyes front for the birdie, girls!

 

What a disappointment. I must have been mistaken. I had thought for a moment that I was on to something, but the name Norma Durance meant nothing to me.

 

Unless …

 

Hadn’t I seen that face a few issues back? Because the woman wasn’t photographed with Phyllis Wyvern I had paid her no attention.

 

I went back a couple of issues.

 

Yes! Here it was in Silver Cinema. The actress is in a barnyard, throwing a handful of grain from her gathered-up skirt to a mob of frenzied chickens.

 

“Pretty Norma Durance ably undertakes the part of Dorita in The Little Red Hen. We hear she’s not working for chicken feed!”

 

I held the magazine up to the light for a closer look. As I carefully studied the woman’s features, the top edge of the cover pressed for a moment against the lightbulb. In an instant the tinder-dry paper had browned, then blackened—and before I could blink, burst into flame.

 

It’s wonderful how the mind works in such situations. I remember distinctly that my first thought was “Here’s Flavia, her hands full of fire in a cupboard jam-packed with combustibles.”

 

It was the kind of thing of which front-page stories in the Times are made.

 

Smoldering ashes are all that remain of historic country house. Buckshaw in ruins.

 

And there would be a grisly photo, of course.

 

I threw down the burning magazine and stamped on it again and again with my feet.

 

But because of the waterproofing solution that Dogger applied so conscientiously to our footwear—a witches’ brew containing both linseed and castor oils, as well as copal varnish—my shoes burst immediately into flames.

 

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