“And all because of a double helping of lardy cake!” Phyllis Wyvern said, clapping her hands together in delight. “Well, here’s to the second hundred years.”
She picked up her fork and lifted a morsel to her mouth, pausing halfway to give Mrs. Mullet a smile that must have cost someone a thousand guineas.
She chewed reflectively.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said, putting the fork down on her plate. “Oh, my goodness!”
Even her magnificent acting ability couldn’t suppress the little gag reflex I saw at her throat.
“I knew you’d like it,” Mrs. Mullet crowed.
“But I must be brutal and rein myself in,” Phyllis Wyvern said, pushing the plate roughly away and getting to her feet. “I tend to make a swine of myself when there’s cake to be had, and with lardy cake, it’s no more than a day from lips to hips. I’m sure you’ll understand.”
Mrs. Mullet lifted the plate away and placed it a little too carefully behind the sink.
I knew without a doubt that she would take the slice of cake home, wrap it in gift paper, and put it in her china cabinet between the china-dog salt and peppers marked “A Present From Blackpool” and the slender glass bird that bobbed up and down as it sipped water from a tube.
When her friend Mrs. Waller came to visit, Mrs. Mullet would reverently unwrap the moldy relic. “You’ll never guess ’oo ate the missin’ bit of this,” she would say in a hushed voice. “Phyllis Wyvern! Look—you can still see ’er teeth marks. Just a peek, mind—quick, so’s it doesn’t go stale.”
The doorbell rang and Dogger put down his tea.
“That will be Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said, with a wry grin. “She’ll claim to have missed her connection from Paddington. She always does.”
“I’ll fix ’er a nice cup of tea,” Mrs. Mullet said. “The train always makes your stomach go all skew-gee—at least it does mine.
“Gives me the dire-rear,” she whispered in my ear.
In a moment, Dogger was back, followed by a round little woman with iron-rimmed spectacles, her hair tied back in a large tight ball like the tail of the horse, Ajax, that had once been owned by one of my ancestors, Florizel de Luce. Both of them, Florizel and Ajax, immortalized in oils, now hung side by side in the portrait gallery.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Miss Wyvern,” the little woman said. “The taxicab took a wrong turning and I missed my connection at Paddington.”
Phyllis Wyvern looked round triumphantly at each of us, but she said nothing.
I felt rather sorry for the little creature, who, now that I thought about it, looked like a flustered cannonball.
“I’m Bun Keats, by the way,” the woman said, giving a jerk of the head to each of us in the room. “Miss Wyvern’s personal assistant.”
“Bun’s my dresser—but she has even greater aspirations,” Phyllis Wyvern said in a haughty, theatrical voice, and I could not tell if she was teasing.
“Hurry along now, Bun,” she added. “Spit-spot! My wardrobe wants unpacking. And if my pink dress is wrinkled again, I’ll cheerfully strangle you.”
She said this pleasantly enough but Bun Keats did not smile.
“Are you related to the poet, Miss Keats?” I blurted, anxious to lighten the moment.
Daffy had once read me “Ode to a Nightingale,” and I’d never forgotten the part about drinking hemlock.
“Distantly,” she said, and then she was gone.
“Poor Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said. “The more she tries—the more she tries.”
“I’ll give her a hand,” Dogger said, moving towards the door.
“No!”
For an instant—but only for an instant—Phyllis Wyvern’s face was a Greek mask: her eyes wide and her mouth twisted. And then, almost at once, her features subsided into a carefree smile, as if the moment hadn’t happened.
“No,” she repeated quietly. “Don’t do that. Bun must have her little lesson.”
I tried to catch Dogger’s eye, but he had moved away and begun rearranging tins in the butler’s pantry.
Mrs. Mullet turned busily to polishing the covers on the Aga cooker.
As I trudged upstairs, the house seemed somehow colder than before. From the tall, uncurtained windows of my laboratory, I looked down upon the vans of Ilium Films, which were clustered, like elephants at a watering hole, round the red brick walls of the kitchen garden.
The crew members were going about their work in a well-rehearsed ballet, lifting, shifting, unloading rope-handled shipping boxes: always a pair of hands in the right place at the right time. It was easy to see that they had done this many times before.
I warmed my hands over the welcoming flame of a Bunsen burner, then brought a beaker of milk to a bubbling boil and stirred in a good dollop of Ovaltine. At this time of year, no refrigerator was required to keep milk chilled: I simply kept the bottle on a shelf, alphabetically, between the manganese and the morphine, the latter bottle neatly labeled in Uncle Tarquin’s spidery handwriting.
Uncle Tar had been given the gate under mysterious circumstances just before taking a double first at Oxford. His father, by way of compensation, had built the remarkable chemistry laboratory at Buckshaw in which Uncle Tar had spent, by choice, the remainder of his days, conducting what was said to be top-secret research. Among his papers I had discovered several letters that suggested he had been both friend and advisor to the young Winston Churchill.
As I sipped at the Ovaltine, I shifted my gaze to the painting that hung above the mantelpiece: a beautiful young woman with two girls and a baby. The girls were my sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. I was the baby. The woman, of course, was my mother, Harriet.
Harriet had secretly commissioned the work as a gift for Father just before setting out on what was to become her final journey. The painting had lain for ten years, almost forgotten, in an artist’s studio in Malden Fenwick, until I had discovered it there and brought it home.
I’d made happy plans to hang the portrait in the drawing room: to stage a surprise unveiling for Father and my sisters. But my scheme was thwarted. Father had caught me smuggling the bulky painting into the house, taken it away from me, and removed it to his study.
Next morning I had found it hanging in my laboratory.
Why? I wondered. Did Father find it too painful to look upon his blighted family?
There was no doubt that he had loved—and still loved—Harriet, but it sometimes seemed that my sisters and I were no more to him than ever-present reminders of what he had lost. To Father we were, Daffy had once said, a three-headed Hydra, each one of our faces a misty mirror of his past.
Daffy’s a romantic, but I knew what she meant: We were fleeting images of Harriet.
Perhaps that was why Father spent his days and nights among his postage stamps: surrounded by thousands of companionable, comforting, unquestioning countenances, not one of which, like those of his daughters, mocked him from morning till night.
I had thought about these things until my brains were turning blue, but I still didn’t know why my sisters hated me so much.
Was Buckshaw some grim training academy into which I had been dumped by Fate to learn the laws of survival? Or was my life a game, whose rules I was supposed to guess?
Was I required to deduce the secret ways in which they loved me?
I could think of no other reason for my sisters’ cruelty.
What had I ever done to them?