The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  Sophie couldn’t understand why the government should pay for the girls’ hairdressing. What had these pretty paragons to do with the torture chambers she’d seen just moments earlier? Had all the girls she saw passed through the course of treatment, and what had it done to them?

  “These ones will be ready to take up first-rate positions by the end of the summer,” Miss Mackay added, “and we stagger the groups so as to produce a new crop every three months. If we go to war, of course, we’ll need to speed that up.”

  Crop was such an agricultural word, as if the girls were lambs being fattened for the slaughter! Even as Sophie thought this, a girl at the back of the class began to flail around in her chair. An alarm rang, and two attendants appeared in an instant. They rushed to the girl’s side and held her down as the seizure racked her body. Sophie flinched.

  Miss Mackay pushed a button and the window went cloudy.

  “Don’t mind that,” she said. “A few girls experience side effects, sometimes from the surgery itself but more often from the drugs administered afterward. That girl will be treated at once, and it is most unlikely the seizure will recur.”

  She looked at her watch.

  “I’ll show you into the garden now, Sophie,” she said, leading Sophie back into the corridor, “and you can amuse yourself there like a good girl. I’ll make sure Miss Hunter knows where to find you.”

  She unlocked a door and shooed Sophie out of the building.

  Sophie felt rather shattered. What if she had to enroll at IRYLNS and become one of those pretty, polished girls? Would it be possible to do that and still be Sophie? Perhaps this was what had happened to Sheena. Why, Sheena hadn’t even recognized her the other day!

  After a little while Sophie dug her book out of her satchel and took a seat on one of the benches beneath the tree at the bottom of the garden. Unfortunately the book was Mansfield Park. She’d already read it at least four times, and it was altogether too somber in tone to console her now. But having a book in one’s hands was good protective coloration. Sophie gazed at the back of the institute. Through the windows on the right, she could see the girls in the common room, their placid expressions and general air of contentment now taking on a far more frightening aspect.

  Blinds covered the windows to her left, but as she watched, a second door to the garden opened, the door from the side of the house Sophie hadn’t set foot in. Two nurses came out, each pushing a wicker Bath chair with a small bundled occupant. They trundled their charges over to a sunny spot by the fence, parked the chairs and left them, then began an intense chat on the paved terrace at the top of the garden.

  Looking at the two figures in the chairs, Sophie wondered for a moment whether the other half of IRYLNS housed some kind of program for the elderly. The people in the chairs were small and motionless. But the smoothness of their skin suggested they were quite young. What was wrong with them?

  Trying not to attract the nurses’ attention, Sophie crept closer until she could see that both patients were girls not much older than herself. One had a surgical scar reaching down along her left temple from beneath a turban of bandages; the other was covered with scabs and bruises, including a black eye that made her look as though she’d gone ten rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world.

  “All right over there?” one of the nurses called out, not looking up from the discussion of the second nurse’s sister’s prolapsed uterus and the general iniquity of husbands.

  One of the girls mewed, a thin keening sound like a baby seagull. The other simply stared into space.

  Sophie had never seen anything so dreadful in her entire life, not even the tortoiseshell kitten squashed flat in the road outside the house in Heriot Row. These weren’t kittens, they were girls, real live girls like the ones at school, somehow stripped of their humanity and reduced to damaged husks.

  Was this what Sheena would come to in the end?

  Was this what would happen to Sophie?

  Sophie’s great-aunt found her pale and shivering. She gave Sophie a sharp look but said nothing until they reached the street.

  “Do you know the age of the youngest person ever prosecuted for breach of the Official Secrets Act?” she said.

  “No,” said Sophie, her teeth chattering despite the day’s warmth.

  “Twelve,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, hailing a taxi and directing the driver to Heriot Row. The hand clutching her purse looked like the talons of a bird of prey.

  Sophie jumped out of the cab and let herself into the house before her great-aunt even finished paying the driver. She raced upstairs and threw herself into bed. Only when she’d pulled the duvet up around her neck and curled into a ball did she begin to feel safe.

  EIGHTEEN

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON Peggy knocked on Sophie’s bedroom door and came in without waiting to be invited.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling you from downstairs?” she asked, picking up a jumper from the floor and folding it before replacing it in the chest of drawers.

  Unable to fall asleep and unwilling to get up and tackle her homework, Sophie had tried to banish all thoughts of IRYLNS by reading her favorite novel, not Mansfield Park but Pride and Prejudice. Her copy had been read so many times it had almost fallen to pieces, but the story never lost its power to transport Sophie out of her real life.

  She apologized to Peggy for making her come upstairs.

  “It’s not me who’s missed an important telephone call,” Peggy said, straightening the oilcloth on top of the chest and looking with disgust at the dust that came off on her fingers. “Sophie, why don’t you tell me when Annie does such a poor job of cleaning in here?”

  Sophie’s senses finally came back to her. “Do you mean to say there was a telephone call for me?” she said.

  “Yes, and I wrote down the message like the young gentleman asked. Disappointed, he was, not to speak with you yourself.”

  “Oh, Peggy, you should have come and fetched me while you still had him on the line!”

  “Some people put their face in a book and go dead to the world,” Peggy said, sniffing and tossing her head. “I did give you a shout, Sophie, and you didn’t answer. It was a boy called Michael, well-spoken but foreign, I’d say. Your great-aunt would have a fit if she knew you were getting telephone calls from young men; and it’s not just any young man, is it? Isn’t it the one the police had in the other day?”

  “Peggy, I must telephone him at once!”

  “Oh, he left a number,” Peggy said, relenting at the sight of Sophie’s unhappy face. “Better make the call while your great-aunt’s out, Sophie; she won’t like you talking to that boy again.”

  Sophie raced downstairs to the message tablet by the instrument in the hallway. It was characteristic of Great-aunt Tabitha to have rejected hot and cold running water as unnecessary luxury while thoroughly embracing the technology for transmitting and receiving the human voice over distance, the brainchild of Aleksandr Tolstoy Bell, son of an eminent Scottish educator of the deaf and his glamorous Russian wife. The tablet usually held reminders about the times and locations of various spiritualist meetings. Now the top sheet bore a telephone number in Peggy’s careful hand.

  Sophie picked up the receiver. When the operator came on, she asked her to put through a local call.

  It went through almost at once, and Sophie heard Mikael on the line.

  “Sophie!” he said, his voice high and thready. Perhaps it was just the distortion of the instrument, but Sophie thought he sounded really upset. “Are you coming for tea on Thursday?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Sophie. “Mikael, is something wrong?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Look, what do you know about how your great-aunt met up with this Mrs. Tansy?”

  “Not much,” said Sophie. Did it really matter? “She tends to hear about pretty much any medium above the level of a fairground fortune-teller. They all seem to come to our house sooner or later.”

  “That Commander Brown
had me back in yesterday afternoon,” Mikael said.

  Sophie groaned. “Your aunt must be livid,” she said, wishing she and Mikael were in the same room talking. The way the telephone didn’t show one the other person’s face made it hard to tell what he was thinking.

  “No, it’s all right,” said Mikael, sounding a little more like himself. “He’s satisfied I couldn’t have had anything to do with the murder, and he told me a few interesting things. Apparently someone paid the medium off to approach your great-aunt; they found a note in her records, no information about who it was. And wait till you hear this: the Monday morning after the séance, your great-aunt called a friend at the ministry of public safety and asked him to have Mrs. Tansy put under surveillance.”

  “But didn’t Commander Brown say the other night that his people had been following her for some time?”

  “Yes, but they lost her shortly before the night you met her—that was why they didn’t know she’d been to your great-aunt’s house. I think that when your great-aunt sicced the people from the ministry on her afterward, Mrs. Tansy must have got the wind up and gone to ground at the hotel.”

  “What else did the commander tell you?” Sophie asked.

  “Mostly he asked me more questions. They took me back to the Balmoral—”

  Sophie heard the shake in his voice.

  “—and had me look at everything again, to see whether the murderer might have left something behind him.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Not really. There were some strange tracks on the carpet that weren’t there when I first arrived, but they may well have been left by the room service cart or the police photographer’s tripod; I’m not sure. But I did learn a few other things. Sophie, it’s quite clear from the questions they asked that they believe there’s some link between the dead woman and the Brothers of the Northern Liberties.”

  They both fell silent, listening to the hiss of the line.

  “Sophie, are you there?” said Mikael.

  “I’m here. What kind of link?”

  “I’ve got no idea, and I don’t think they have much of one either. I phoned just to pass this on and to ask you to be careful. Really careful, Sophie. If you’d seen the blood…these people have no qualms about taking lives. It’s different for me. But you’re a girl. I want you to stay well out of it.”

  “A girl?” Sophie said stupidly. Of course she was a girl, but what difference did it make? Mikael’s words made Sophie feel irritable and aggressive, like wearing a scratchy wool vest a size too small for you.

  “Look, Sophie, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you on Thursday, all right?”

  Replacing the receiver in the cradle, Sophie felt so weary that she actually sank to the floor and started to cry. When Peggy found her there, she dragged Sophie into the kitchen and made her a cup of tea, but Sophie could not be consoled. She decided to try and get through some of her mountain of homework, but after arriving at three different answers to the same sum, she finally packed everything back into the satchel and retreated upstairs to the solace of Jane Austen.

  The most surprising thing of all happened on Sunday evening as Sophie lay on her bed reading the chapters Miss Chatterjee had set for Tuesday.

  A knock came at the door.

  “Come in,” Sophie called out, though she knew Peggy always came in a moment later regardless of whether Sophie had invited her or not.

  But it wasn’t Peggy. It was Great-aunt Tabitha, who hadn’t set foot in Sophie’s room for years, not since Sophie had had whooping cough when she was eleven and received an awkward visit from her great-aunt bearing a toy from her own youth, a stuffed woolly sheep that may or may not have been responsible for the later infestation of moths in Sophie’s wardrobe.

  Equally surprising was the fact that rather than offering a tart remark about girls who chose to ruin their posture (and, it was implied, their morals) by lounging around reading in bed, Sophie’s great-aunt paused for a minute at the door, then crossed the room, sat down beside Sophie, and awkwardly patted her shoulder.

  When Sophie flinched away from her—she couldn’t help it; her flesh recoiled at the thought of the gags and the electrodes—Great-aunt Tabitha took off her spectacles and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and the tips of her fingers.

  “Think of how much energy we waste,” she said, sighing heavily, “when we experience unwanted emotions.”

  This was unexpected enough to cause Sophie to roll over to look at her.

  “If only we could altogether suppress the irrational,” Great-aunt Tabitha continued, “and manage our feelings with the efficiency of a dynamo! Our own personal feelings are good for nothing; the perfection of human nature is to feel much for others and little for ourselves.”

  Sophie was dismayed to find she didn’t disagree. It would be a good thing if nobody ever felt anything beyond the mild ups and downs of anticipation and enjoyment and occasional disappointment. And yet there must be something terribly wrong with this philosophy of self-control and self-sacrifice, mustn’t there, if it culminated in those drooling wrecks in the garden?

  “Sophie,” Great-aunt Tabitha went on, “I want you to know that I’ve been wrestling with my conscience over this business of IRYLNS. Of course the institute contributes an enormous amount to the good of the country, but I’ve had doubts….”

  “What kind of doubts?” Sophie asked, prompting Great-aunt Tabitha to withdraw her hand and begin pacing across the room.

  “Doubts about the associated costs,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “Don’t misinterpret what I’m about to say, Sophie. I will never withdraw my support from the program. It does too much good, and I continue to subscribe to the enlightened social psychology. But the thought of what happens to those girls as they become sophisticated machines for the suppression of feeling…well, if I could go back to the way I felt before,” she added, “it would certainly be a blessing.”

  “What changed?” Sophie asked, afraid but also really curious to hear what Great-aunt Tabitha would say.

  “You,” said Sophie’s great-aunt, spitting out the word. She stopped in the middle of the rug, fists clenched by her sides. “Various philosophers have wrestled with the problem of how to restrain the excessive attachment that we are disposed to feel for our own children above those of other people…. I never understood the vehemence with which they treated the topic until one day I looked at you (you were doing your homework at the other end of the dining table) and surprised myself by realizing I didn’t want you to go to IRYLNS.”

  Sophie didn’t know what to say.

  “Believe me,” her great-aunt added, “I struggled for some time to dismiss these feelings as a momentary aberration. It simply couldn’t be, I told myself, that I thought an exception should be made for my great-niece because I loved her.”

  Oh, how typical, how maddening of Great-aunt Tabitha only to say she loved Sophie in the shadow of a future in which Sophie’s present self might cease to exist! Sophie sat up and swung her feet to the floor. It was a terrible disadvantage to be lying in bed talking to a person who was standing up.

  “It soon became clear,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, her voice even drier than usual, “that my feelings were not about to go away. I did not want you to go to the institute, and that meant I did not wholeheartedly endorse what happened there. I began to suspect that a truly ethical person would withdraw from the institute; indeed, she might well resolve to make it her job to bring the program to a halt. If one wouldn’t choose to have one’s own loved ones undergo the procedure, fairness would seem to dictate that one should prevent its being exercised on one’s fellow citizens.”

  “So will you try to make it stop?” Sophie asked, though she felt more despairing than hopeful.

  “I am a pragmatist and a patriot, Sophie,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “I place the good of my country above that of any private citizen, including myself.”

  “What are you saying, then, Great-aunt Tabitha
?” Sophie said, unable to stop her shoulders from slumping. “Are you telling me I’ll have to go to IRYLNS after all?”

  “Don’t look at me like that!” And Great-aunt Tabitha actually turned away from Sophie and resumed her unhappy pacing, avoiding Sophie’s eyes. “With any luck, it won’t come to it. I will do everything I can, within reason, to keep you out of the program. What you don’t seem to realize, though, is the extent to which my hands are tied.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Sophie. “It sounds as though you think what happens at IRYLNS is quite wrong. Those poor mangled girls in the garden! I suppose I can see the point of the argument for the national good. One of Nan’s brothers lost his leg in the army, and everybody who goes into the service has to take the chance that something will go terribly awry. But it wasn’t just the girls outside—can it be right to turn the others into a sort of machine? Isn’t it almost as bad as killing, to reshape someone so completely? How can their parents let it happen? If everyone really knew what goes on there, wouldn’t they put a stop to it?”

  Great-aunt Tabitha was silent so long that Sophie thought she wouldn’t answer. Then she sighed and turned back to Sophie.

  “Of course a few parents get upset. There’ve been lawsuits, threats to expose the damage…but in the last analysis, everyone understands the program’s value greatly exceeds its costs. And of course it’s only a handful of girls who have really poor outcomes. Those excepted, the girls of IRYLNS are really invaluable, not just because of their secretarial skills but for other reasons, reasons you’re too young to understand. The same way parents give up their sons to the army, knowing that those young men risk grave injury or even death, they accept the need to allow their daughters to serve.”