I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

  “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.

  On the doorstep, as if for inspection, was Ned Cropper, gift in hand and brilliantine in hair. A few steps behind him stood Mary Stoker.

  Aside from her ruddy complexion and a bit of a squint, Mary might have been a Madonna in the National Gallery as she stood on the doorstep, radiant in the snow.

  No room at the inn, I thought uncharitably.

  “Ned! Mary!” I crowed, a little too cheerfully.

  Ned was the potboy at the Thirteen Drakes, Bishop’s Lacey’s sole hostelry, and Mary was the landlord’s daughter. I knew without being told that Ned had brought the gift for Feely: another box of those flyblown prewar Milady chocolates from the window of Miss Cool’s confectionery, its contents lightly frosted with a mold which could, of course, if you had a strong enough stomach, be scraped away before scoffing them.

  Ned’s love tributes were generally left on the kitchen doorstep in the dark of the moon to be brought in dangling distastefully between finger and thumb by Mrs. Mullet.

  “Them tomcats been round again,” she would mutter.

  “I like your hair,” I said to Mary. “Did you get it cut?”

  “Cut it myself, special for Christmas,” she whispered. “Do you like it, really?”

  “Nobody’s going to give Phyllis Wyvern a second look with you in the room,” I said, giving her arm a squeeze.

  “Oh, you!” she laughed, and slapped my hand a little harder than she knew.

  “Find a seat,” I told them. “You’re early, so you can take your pick.”

  I knew that Ned would choose front row center, and I was right. He’d want to be as close to Phyllis Wyvern as was humanly possible.

  A roaring motor in the forecourt announced that Dieter had arrived with the first load of audience. I threw open the door just as the Fergie jerked to a stop, its lamps making cornucopias of foggy yellow light in the falling snow. Behind the tractor, brimming over with passengers—a couple of village men perched precariously on the runners—was Harriet’s sleigh.

  A shadow passed in front of my heart.

  How sad it was to think that somewhere, Harriet should have died in snow like this. How could such tragedy occur amid such beauty?

  That was the way with ghosts, though: They appeared at the strangest of times in the most peculiar places.

  I hadn’t long to call my mother’s face to mind; people were already piling out of the sleigh and coming towards the door, laughing and talking excitedly.

  “Flavia! Haroo, mon vieux! Joyeux Noël!”

  That was Maximilian Brock, the pint-sized concert pianist (retired) who had traded his keyboard and bench for a whole new career as the village gossip mill. It was whispered (but not by me) that he wrote up and sold as fiction to the romance magazines the thinly disguised tales of door-latch scandal he had gleaned in Bishop’s Lacey.

  “Lust-sheets,” Daffy called them.

  “Have you seen Phyllis Wyvern yet?” Max demanded. “How does she look in life? Are her wrinkles as parched gullies, or was that sheer meanness on the part of Tittle-Tattle?”

  “Hello, Max,” I said. “Yes, I’ve seen her, and she’s never been more lovely.”

  “And those sisters of yours; still growing?”

  “You can ask them yourself,” I said, somewhat impatiently. Once Max got started, you might as well put down roots.

  But before he could frame another question, Max was nudged aside by the substantial tummy of Bunny Spirling, of Nautilus Old Hall, looking so much like Mr. Pickwick that it gave me the momentary creeps.

  His thumbs hooked tightly in his waistcoat pockets, Bunny patted his stomach and raised his pink nostrils into the air as if he were on the scent of food.

  “Flavia,” he said, not putting too much effort into it before scurrying away on curiously dainty feet.

  After the sleigh had emptied, Dieter made a tight circle with the tractor and sleigh in the snowy forecourt, and with the wave of a mitt, jounced off to the village for another load.

  With Dogger out of commission, I was kept busy welcoming newcomers and chatting up old acquaintances. It was evident that no one else in my family was going to put in an appearance. They had obviously decided that the evening’s performance was the business of the filmmakers, and that there was no need for them to lift a finger. I was on my own.

  Not long before starting time, the vicar arrived, huffing and puffing in the foyer, and stamping his feet.

  “It’s coming down as if all the angels and archangels are plucking chickens,” he said.

  Cynthia hung back, scowling at his blasphemy.

  “Constable Linnet te
lls me that all roads in and out of Bishop’s Lacey are hopelessly blocked,” he went on, “and are likely to remain so until the Hinley road men clear their own turf. It’s the price we pay for being outlanders, so to speak, but nevertheless, it’s dashed inconvenient.”

  Marion Trodd came squeezing herself through the hubbub.

  “Miss Wyvern is ready, Vicar,” she said. “If you’d be so kind—”

  “Of course, my dear. Tell her I shall preface her performance with a few remarks of my own re Roofing Fund, et cetera, and then it’s all hers—oh, and Mr. Duncan’s, of course. Dear me, we mustn’t forget Mr. Duncan.”

  As the vicar made his way to the front, Father, Feely, and Daffy, led by Aunt Felicity, filed slowly into the foyer and took their seats in the front row. Since Ned was occupying the chair that should have been mine, I stayed in the back.

  I twiddled my fingers at Nialla and she twiddled back, tapping her tummy and rolling her eyes comically.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, and anyone else I’ve managed to leave out—”

  There was a polite titter to reward the vicar for his sparkling wit.

  “We’ve all of us braved the roaring elements tonight to illustrate the wise old saw that Charity begins at home. If we now find ourselves warm and cozy in the ancestral home of the family de Luce, it is entirely due to the kind graces of Colonel Haviland de Luce” (“Hear! Hear!”) “that we are able to come together in such inclement weather to prop up the roof of St. Tancred’s, as it were.

  “Without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Miss Phyllis Wyvern and Mr. Desmond Duncan. Miss Wyvern, it is unnecessary to tell you, is a star of stage and screen, who has thrilled all of our hearts in such productions as Whitehall Nellie, The Secret Summer, Love and Blood, The Glass Heart …”

  He paused to pull a scrap of paper from his pocket, clean his spectacles with it, and then read what was written on it.

  “The Crossing Keeper’s Daughter, The Trench in the Drawing Room, The Queen of Love … ahem … Sadie Thompson” (a couple of nervous titters and a distinctly wolfish whistle), “and last, but not least, The Rector’s Wife.”

  This was greeted by general cheers but marred by a single catcall.

  Cynthia sat staring straight ahead, her lips pursed.

  “Mr. Duncan has been seen most recently in Articles of War. And so without further ado, we welcome to Bishop’s Lacey two great luminaries of the screen, Miss Phyllis Wyvern, ably assisted by Mr. Desmond Duncan, in their world-famous interpretation of a scene from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”

  There was no curtain to go up, but in its place, the lights were switched out, and for a few moments we sat in the dark.

  Then a spotlight pierced the blackness, picking out a little grove of potted lemon trees. A lettered placard on a wooden tripod told us that this was Capulet’s orchard.

  I twisted round far enough to see that the fierce white beam of light was coming from atop the scaffolding above the door, and that the figure hunched over one of the snouted spotlights was Gil Crawford.

  Romeo, in the form of Desmond Duncan, came strolling into the grove to a smattering of applause. He was dressed in tan tights, over which was a peculiar pair of red velvet shorts which looked rather like inflated swimming trunks. He wore a white shirt of the peasant variety, all fancy ruffles of lace at the neck and sleeves, and his sporty flat hat was decorated with a pheasant’s tail feather.

  He extended his open hands to the audience and took a series of elaborate little bows before speaking his first word.

  Come on! I thought. Get on with it!

  “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

  Another pause, and another sprinkling of applause in recognition of that famous voice.

  “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”

  A few sparse hand claps to show that they were familiar with the line.

  “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

  Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon …”

  Again he paused, gazing up, his eyes fixed on Juliet’s balcony, which remained, beyond the spotlight’s beam, in utter blackness.

  “Spot!” Phyllis Wyvern’s voice commanded loudly from somewhere above Romeo’s head.

  The moment was frozen. It seemed to stretch on and on.

  “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon …” Desmond Duncan began again, still not quite Romeo.

  You could have heard a pin drop in China.

  “Spotlight, dammit!” snapped the voice of the fair Juliet from the darkness, and there came from behind me the most frightful crash, as if some metal object had fallen from the scaffold onto the tiles of the foyer.

  “… the envious moon,” Desmond Duncan plowed on,

  “Who is already sick and pale with grief,

  That thou her maid art far more fair than she …”

  There was a sudden rustling of silks as Phyllis Wyvern came swishing down the steps from the landing, her feet appearing first at the perimeter of Romeo’s spotlight, and then her dress.

  Her costume was absolutely gorgeous, a fawn-colored creation, wide at the hem, tight as blazes at the waist, and shockingly low at the neck. The precious stones that lined the collar and sleeves glittered madly as she passed through the glare of Romeo’s spotlight, and a gasp went up from the audience at the unaccustomed splendor that had materialized so suddenly in their midst.

  Into her braided hair was woven a chaplet of flowers—real flowers, by the look of them—and I bit my lip in admiration. How young and beautiful, and how timeless she seemed!

  The real Juliet, if ever there was one, would have spit in envy.

  Down and down she came, and at last onto the foyer floor, her pointed slippers making a menacing sound on the tiles: like a pair of snakes tiptoeing on their rib ends.

  Ned Cropper shrank back a little as she swept past him towards the front door.

  She’s leaving! I thought. She’s walking out!

  I twisted round in my chair, fighting to remain seated, as Phyllis Wyvern, having reached the scaffolding, seized hold of the ladder, placed a delicately slippered foot on the first rung, and began to climb.

  Up and up she went, her Elizabethan dress, even in the darkness, shooting off sparks of light like a comet ascending the heavens.

  At the top, she stepped off onto the plank flooring and edged her way along to where Gil Crawford stood watching her approach, his mouth open.

  Clinging to the scaffold’s railing with one hand, Phyllis Wyvern hauled off and, with the other, slapped Gil hard across the face.

  The sharp crack of it echoed back and forth across the foyer, refusing to die.

  Gil’s hand flew to his cheek, and even in the near darkness, I saw the flash from the whites of his terrified eyes.

  She hitched up the hem of her dress and maneuvered back to the ladder, which she managed to climb down with surprising grace.

  Looking neither to the right nor the left, Phyllis Wyvern processed—there’s no other word for it; she looked as if she were walking in state up the center aisle of Westminster Abbey—she processed across the foyer to the foot of the west staircase, which she climbed, skirt still hitched in one hand, to the landing, where she turned and struck a pose at the railing of her make-believe bedroom balcony.

  After a heart-stopping pause, the second spotlight came on with an audible clack, catching her in its beam like some exotic moth.

  She clasped her hands to her breast, took a shuddering breath, and spoke her first line:

  “Ay me!” she said.

  “She speaks!” said Romeo.

  “O, speak again, bright angel!” he went on, rather hesitantly,

  “For thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head,

  As is a wingèd messenger of heaven

  Unto the white-upturnèd wondering eyes of mortals that fall back to gaze on him …”

  I couldn’t help thinking of
Gil Crawford’s eyes.

  “O Romeo, Romeo!” she cooed. “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”

  And so on. The rest of the performance was just a lot of that moon-June-balloon stuff—a load of old mulch, really—and I found myself wishing they had chosen a more exciting scene from the play, one of those involving toxicology, for instance, which are the only really decent parts of Romeo and Juliet.

  We had been made to listen to the play in its entirety on one of Father’s compulsory Thursday wireless nights, during which I had formed the opinion that while Shakespeare was good with words, he knew beans about poisons.

  The difference between poisons and narcotics seems to have escaped him, and he was in an utter muddle when it came to those vegetable and mineral irritants that act upon the brain and spinal cord.

  In spite of all the wordy hocus-pocus about gathering herbs by moonlight, Juliet’s symptoms indicated the use of nothing more mystifying than plain old hydrocyanic acid administered in drinking water.

  For ever and ever, Amen.

  By now, Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan were taking their bows. Joining hands like Hansel and Gretel, they took a couple of steps towards the audience, then backed away, and then advanced again, like waves lapping at the sands.

  Flushed with pleasure, or something, they were both perspiring freely, their makeup, at close range, suddenly ghastly in the overhead lights.

  Phyllis Wyvern was so close to Ned that his mouth gaped open like a flounder on a fishmonger’s stall, so that Mary had to nudge him in the ribs.

  I looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of a dark figure vanishing into the shadows at the head of the stairs, just above Juliet’s makeshift balcony.

  It was Dogger, and I realized with a start that he had been there all along.

  • ELEVEN •