I groaned as I pulled the stopper from the bottle and decanted a sample into a beaker. Twenty years on the shelf had taken its toll. The metol had oxidized and become an acrid brown sludge, the color of last night’s coffee grounds.
My groan turned slowly to a grin.
“Do we have any coffee?” I asked, strolling into the kitchen with an air of pretended boredom.
“Coffee?” Mrs. Mullet asked. “What you want with coffee? Coffee’s no good for girls. Gives you the colly-wobbles, like.”
“I thought that if someone came to call, it would be nice to offer them a cup.”
You’d think I’d asked for champagne.
“And ’oo was you expectin’, miss?”
“Dieter,” I lied.
Dieter Schrantz was the German ex–prisoner of war from Culverhouse Farm who had recently become engaged to Feely.
“Never mind,” I told Mrs. M. “If he comes, he’ll have to settle for tea. Do we have any biscuits?”
“In the pantry,” she said. “That nice tin with Windsor Castle on the lid.”
I gave her an idiotic grin and popped into the pantry. At the back of a high shelf, just as I had remembered, was a bottle of Maxwell House ground coffee. In spite of the rationing, it had been brought as a gift from the nearby American air base at Leathcote by Carl Pendracka, another of Feely’s admirers who, in spite of Father’s belief that Carl was of the bloodline of King Arthur, had been unhorsed in the recent matrimonial sweepstakes.
Offering up a silent prayer of thanks for the general bagginess of old-fashioned clothing, I shoved the coffee under one side of my sweater, stuffed a large wire kitchen whisk under the other, clamped a couple of Empire biscuits between my teeth, and made my escape.
“Thanks, Mrs. M,” I mumbled around the mouthful of biscuits, keeping my hunched back to her.
Safely back upstairs in my laboratory, I emptied the coffee into a cone-shaped paper filter, placed it in a glass funnel, and, lighting a Bunsen burner, waited for the distilled water in the teakettle to come to the boil.
Chemically speaking, I remembered, the developing of film was simply a matter of reducing its silver halide crystals through deoxidization to the basic element, silver. If metol would do the job, I reasoned, so would caffeine. And so, for that matter, would vanilla extract, although I knew that if I absconded with Mrs. Mullet’s vanilla extract, she’d have my guts for garters. The hoarded coffee was a much safer bet.