by Muriel Zagha
‘Oh, it’s kind of you to worry about that, Karloff, but actually it’s only Velcro – so clever, no? – so that’s no problem.’
‘This is just great,’ Legend said, climbing into the van next to Jules and Belladonna. ’Cos I’ve always wanted to do something a little bit illegal.’
‘Actually, it is completely illegal, what we are going to do,’ Isabelle said reasonably, buckling her seat belt. ‘It is entrée par effraction, you know, heu ... I don’t know how to say it in English.’
‘Would that be breaking and also entering, darling?’ Chrissie asked breezily.
‘Isabelle? Right or left here?’ Karloff asked her from the driver’s seat.
‘I’m not sure,’ she replied in a deflated voice. Her feeling that she had become trapped in a mad dream was increasing by the minute.
‘Go right,’ Jules said decisively. ‘Then follow the signs for the West End.’
‘Don’t worry, Isabelle,’ Ivy said kindly. ‘We’re going to get them for you, simple as that.’
Isabelle smiled at her automatically and bit her lip. Astonishingly, what had started as a bit of a joke around their kitchen table last night was now actually happening. She should have put a stop to it much sooner, say when Chrissie had had the brainwave about the perfect outfit for a burglary, or when Legend had boasted that there was no lock she couldn’t pick. It still wasn’t too late to stop it all. As she opened her mouth to speak, though, Chrissie, who sat behind her, placed his hands on her shoulders.
‘Now darling, you have got to buck up. It might be illegal to break into the man’s house, but there is absolutely no other way of getting those manuscripts for you, is there?’
‘I mean, you said so yourself last night,’ Legend added. ‘That old geezer sounds dead suspicious. It’s obvious he’s got something to hide.’
With hindsight, Isabelle thought crossly, it might have been preferable to have kept her counsel last night after returning home from the Quince Society meeting. Had it been such a bright idea to tell Chrissie and The Coven about her discovery? Initially, her announcement had been greeted by a chorus of ‘What? Who’s resurfaced? Paul who?’
And indeed it had taken Isabelle herself a minute or two to work out whom Wendy was referring to when, while handing out large pieces of home-made parsnip cake, the sheeplike lady mentioned that she had caught sight of Paul Celadon outside the British Museum.
Isabelle’s ears had pricked up. Paul Celadon? Where had she heard that name before?
‘Paul was Meredith’s literary agent, you see, Isabelle,’ Fern had explained. ‘Years and years ago.’
Of course, Isabelle thought: Paul Celadon was the author of My Life as a Bookmark! He was the one who’d talked Meredith out of further literary experimentation. Isabelle had actually outlined a whole chapter about him before Christmas. But she had never considered that he might be a real person and not just a trope of Meredith’s creative landscape. And so much had happened since then that the name had become a distant memory.
‘Paul? Paul?’ Lucy had barked. ‘Ha! Must be a hundred years old. Anyway, thought the fellow had gone east.’
‘Don’t be so silly, Lucy,’ Maud had said, snorting. ‘People like Paul never die. They just crawl under a rock.’
At this point, the squirrellish Herbert Merryweather had said diffidently, ‘So, Miss Peppy-on, you’ve had no luck hunting down those manuscripts, then, eh? Not even,’ he had added in a wistful undertone, ‘Death of a Lady Ventriloquist?’
‘No, unfortunately. I have looked everywhere in Meredith’s house.’
‘Ha, yes!’ Lucy had barked. ‘Decent of young Quince, I think, to let you have a good shufti. Turned out to be quite a nice chap really, in the end.’
To her horror, Isabelle had felt the ominous prickle of tears. ‘Oh yes, he is very nice,’ she murmured. ‘He’s lovely.’ Desperately calling upon the ancestral Papillon tradition of self-control, she looked down at her plate and crumbled off a tiny piece of parsnip cake.
Lucy let her sharp blue eyes rest on her for a moment, then looked away and said briskly, ‘You two young people hit it off, Izbl?’
Isabelle swallowed and managed to say with reasonable self-possession that Tom had been very helpful with her work.
‘Well, p’r’aps you’ll meet up again soon? That would be frightfully jolly, eh?’
‘No. I don’t think that is going to happen,’ Isabelle said in a small voice.
‘And why not?’
‘Well, I could not find the manuscripts, so ... So that’s it. It’s finished.’
‘Ha? I see.’
Isabelle sighed. This cake of Wendy’s was really quite inedible, she decided. Perhaps she could make her excuses and go home now. She put her plate down with a trembling hand.
‘Of course I didn’t give him the slightest sign of recognition!’ Wendy went on, flushing a little. ‘After all, Paul never was very nice to our dear Meredith.’
‘Well, he did sell her books for her with some degree of success,’ Peter Holland said.
‘There’s more to life than money, my dear Peter!’ Wendy said tremulously.
‘You know, Izbl,’ Maud had said, between sips of her tea. ‘Paul is a sly old puss, and he might just know something about the location of Meredith’s manuscripts. I wouldn’t put it past him.’
‘Ha! Wouldn’t put anything past him! Well, Izbl? What do you say?’
‘I don’t know. I ...’
Isabelle had felt light-headed, her tears forgotten. The dazzling route leading to the manuscripts, including that of The Splodge, had just reopened before her eyes. She could see it all: whatever his faults may have been, Paul Celadon would by now have turned into a charming white-haired grand-père, touchingly fond of his favourite client’s relics – the precious manuscripts. Little did he imagine that an enthusiastic young scholar called Isabelle Papillon shared his affection! Everything was about to fall into place at long last. With great trepidation, Isabelle had watched Lucy locate the old agent’s telephone number on an ancient Rolodex and, her hands folded in her lap, had listened avidly to the conversation that followed.
It was immediately apparent that things were not going well: as soon as she had told Paul that a young French gel was interested in speaking to him about Meredith’s manuscripts, Lucy had to jerk her head away from the thundering sound of curses issuing from the receiver. A few barked rejoinders followed on her part, but to no avail. Paul Celadon hung up in the middle of the last one. Her crimson face now making a stark contrast with the white teapot motif of her bright green sweater, Lucy damned and blasted the fellow’s impertinence. Maud remarked crisply that it might have been preferable to put Isabelle on the line, since Paul and Lucy had never been the best of friends. Soon all the members of the Society were arguing about what Paul was really like and how best to handle him. During this commotion, Isabelle had discreetly copied down Celadon’s number and address, shut herself up in Lucy’s study and tried to ring him herself. But she’d barely had time to state her identity before Celadon, who spoke in a thin, reedy and exasperated voice, abruptly ended the conversation, leaving her like Lucy to listen to a toneless hum.
‘But what exactly did he say, darling?’ Chrissie had asked later that night, without looking up from the pages of Harper’s Bazaar.
‘He said he had retired a long time ago and that, anyway, he didn’t know anything about the manuscripts. And that he was going on a long trip and would be away from London for the next few months.’
‘Too much information,’ Ivy said, nodding. ‘That’s just, like, devious.’
Legend twisted off the top of her beer bottle with her teeth, then grunted in assent. They all stared at her for a moment.
‘Ledge. How shockingly uncouth, darling,’ Chrissie said severely.
‘Heh, heh, heh. Don’t care. Rock ’n’ roll.’
‘It’s very cool,’ Jules said in an undertone. ‘Like something out of a book.’
‘Yeah,’ Kar
loff said slowly, with shining eyes. ‘It’s like there’s these mouldy old tomes full of, like, incredible secrets. Hidden away in, like, this impregnable black tower or something. Guarded by, like, a dragon or something.’
‘Well, I really hope they are not mouldy,’ Isabelle said, a little anxiously.
‘Are they worth a lot, Isabelle?’ Belladonna asked languidly, painting another long fingernail dark purple. ‘Maybe he’s already flogged them on eBay or something.’
‘Oh no!’ Isabelle said, instinctively horrified, even though she had never heard of eBay. ‘I hope he hasn’t sold them!’
‘Not very likely,’ Chrissie interjected. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, darling, but Meredith Quince is, um, really rather niche, you know.’
‘There is a Society in her name,’ Isabelle said defensively.
‘Um, yes, but they’re all a bit crusty, aren’t they?’
Crusty or not, Isabelle had become rather attached to her Quince Society friends. Chrissie would probably be scandalised to hear it, but her recent immersion in the world of cutting-edge fashion had made her appreciate the idiosyncratic dress sense of those who existed entirely outside that world. Roberta and Selina had adopted their pudding-bowl hairstyle because they liked it, not because it was the latest thing seen on some hot Brazilian model. Maud wore her tinted glasses not in an effort to be cool but because she must realise how fantastically intimidating they made her look. And as for Lucy, Isabelle was quite certain that she hadn’t got the idea for her multicoloured jumpers and leg warmers from the pages of Vogue. Simply, she chose to express her forceful personality through her intrepid choice of knitwear. After two solid weeks of Savage and her crew, this sort of thing had become very restful.
After that, Isabelle reflected as Karloff’s van clattered through the West End in the direction of Clerkenwell, one might say that things had got rather out of hand. Chrissie had ordered a Chinese takeaway for everyone and because the food took rather a long time to come, Isabelle had rashly drunk two whole glasses of wine on an empty stomach, thus breaking one of her steadfast rules. This had dangerously eroded her self-control. Later on, as Chrissie, Ivy and Karloff started planning an ‘intervention’ to reclaim the manuscripts by all means necessary (while Legend and Jules marched tipsily up and down the kitchen, shouting ‘Power to the people!’ and punching the air), Isabelle, instead of saying something sensible and sobering, had merely laughed helplessly. As a result, here they all were, in the early hours of the morning, climbing out of the van into the dimly lit square where the self-styled ‘bookmark’ had his domicile.
Initially, much time was spent by The Coven in giggling and shushing each other loudly while Jules and Chrissie discussed how best to break into the agent’s house. Isabelle listened with a sense of unreality, telling herself firmly that they would never be able to get in and that the whole mad enterprise would soon collapse of its own accord. Next thing she knew, however, she was perched on top of the brick wall that separated the street from sunken private gardens. Beyond the gardens rose an intimidating row of tall houses. In one of these the elusive Celadon dwelled, withholding knowledge of the manuscripts’ whereabouts. It was tantalising – that man knew all about The Splodge! She looked down at Jules, Chrissie and Karloff beckoning from the flowerbeds. All she could discern in the dark were her friends’ pale faces looking up. While she sat there frozen, Ivy, Belladonna and Legend clambered past her over the wall.
‘Darling!’ Chrissie called out in an exasperated stage whisper. ‘Stop dawdling and get down here this minute.’ In a flash of inspiration he added: ‘Quince, darling, think Quince!’
Galvanised, Isabelle jumped into the darkness.
‘Damn! We didn’t think to bring a piece of that sticky stuff,’ Jules said crossly, as they all stood looking up at Celadon’s dark windows.
‘Sticky stuff, darling? Euw! Gross! Whatever for?’
‘To remove a pane of glass, dummy.’
‘Hmm, yeah,’ Ivy said pensively. ‘Except you’d need a ladder first. Cos he lives upstairs, don’t he?’
‘I wish we’d brought a torch, too,’ Belladonna said, after colliding for the twentieth time with an absent-minded Karloff.
‘Can we stop this faffing and go in? You’re all doing my head in.’
‘All right, Ledge, if you’re so clever. What do we do now?’
‘Throw gravel at his window.’
‘Put that down, you loon. Do you want to wake him up?’
‘Well, duh. That way we ask him direct. Hello, mate, give us the paperwork, ta, and home to bed.’
While this went on, Isabelle’s attention was drawn to a faint creaking sound issuing from the garden wall. A door was being opened from the street side. Before she had time to warn her friends, a beam of white light from an extra-powerful torch hit her in the face. She covered her eyes. That was it: the police! They were all going to jail. She could kiss her academic career goodbye.
‘You, there!’ said a thin, reedy, exasperated voice. Celadon! Isabelle opened her eyes in shock. ‘Stay where you are! Don’t you know that you’re trespassing on private property?’ As Meredith’s agent pointed his torch towards the other members of her gang, she was able to make out the nonagenarian’s wiry silhouette, framed by the extremely small door through which he had just walked.
‘Who are you people?’ Celadon demanded severely. ‘Are you thieves? Let me assure you that you will get no money from me! I shall call the police and have you all arr—’
‘Whoa, hold your horses! There’s no need for that kind of talk,’ Karloff said, putting his arm around Jules protectively.
‘Be not afeard, friend,’ Bella added in a beatific voice, holding out her hands. ‘We come in peace, to restore good karma.’
‘Good what? Are you all right, young lady?’
‘Look, mate, enough of the yapping. Just let us have the stuff sharpish, all right?’
‘Not now, Ledge darling,’ Chrissie whispered.
‘The stuff? The stuff?’ Paul Celadon stamped his foot in exasperation. ‘I’ll have you know that I am not a drug dealer. You’ll need to look elsewhere for your stuff, you disgusting hooligans!’
Isabelle could now see Paul Celadon’s birdlike countenance quite clearly: he looked furious and also appeared to be weighing his torch in his hand as a potential blunt instrument.
‘Monsieur Celadon,’ she said, taking a step towards him. ‘I am Isabelle Papillon. We spoke on the phone earlier about the manuscripts.’
‘What?’
‘This is all my fault. I am very sorry. We did not mean to be rude. We only came here to ...’
‘Nick the stuff ... Ow!’
‘Tell you more about my academic research,’ Isabelle continued, as Legend rubbed her arm furiously where it had made sudden contact with Isabelle’s elbow. ‘I assure you that I am a serious scholar. My supervisor Professeur Sureau will be happy to confirm this. I know that meeting like this doesn’t look very good, but my intentions are quite honourable. If only I could consult Meredith Quince’s manuscripts, I could show the academic world what a great author she was. Please will you help me?’
While Isabelle talked, Celadon cocked his head to one side and nodded along. That was encouraging. She looked at him expectantly.
‘My dear young lady, this is all very touching.’ Celadon then said, in a tone of infinite sarcasm. ‘Believe me, if it were up to me, your chances of getting your hands on Meredith’s manuscripts would be ... NIL!’ he screamed, his voice rising to a hysterical pitch. ‘And since it IS, in fact, UP TO ME, MAY I SUGGEST THAT YOU ALL SKEDADDLE! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT! NOW!’
Isabelle sighed. For a moment nobody said a word, then, suddenly, there was the sound of Jules clearing her throat. Much to Isabelle’s surprise, Jules reached forward and directed Celadon’s torch towards her own face.
‘Hello,’ she said simply.
Celadon seemed utterly transfixed. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but produced not a
sound.
‘Well, well, well,’ Jules said sternly, pushing her spectacles to the top of her nose. ‘And what’s happened to our manners? Hmm?’
‘Good evening, madam,’ Celadon produced eventually, while bowing slightly from the waist. He now spoke in quite a different tone, exceedingly meek and silken. Isabelle, Chrissie and the rest of The Coven stood stock-still, amazed at the transformation.
‘Yes, yes, good evening,’ Jules replied. ‘Well? I’m waiting.’
‘I am most terribly sorry for my outburst, dear madam. It was quite unforgivable.’
‘I should think so too. You have upset this lady very much,’ Jules went on, indicating Isabelle.
‘Yes,’ Celadon murmured, looking at his feet and shuffling a little.
‘You’ve let all of us down. You’ve let Meredith Quince down, too. But most of all, I think you’ll agree, you’ve let yourself down.’
‘Oh yes, I have. I am most dreadfully sorry.’
‘So. Do you have the manuscripts, yes or no?’
‘Yes, madam, I do. They’re upstairs in my study.’
‘And you are, of course, willing to let Miss Papillon have them?’
‘Yes, certainly. I should be delighted to help you in any way I can, madam,’ Celadon said, addressing Isabelle.
‘Thank you,’ Isabelle murmured automatically.
‘Right, then,’ Jules said. ‘We haven’t got all night. Go and fetch the manuscripts. Chop-chop.’
‘Yes, madam, of course. I shan’t be a moment. Shan’t be a moment.’
As Paul Celadon trotted off obediently in the direction of his apartment, everybody looked at Jules.
‘What the bloody hell just happened?’ Legend asked, speaking for all of them.
‘Well,’ Jules said tonelessly, ‘I said, didn’t I, that the customers at the House of Discipline were all very polite?’
Isabelle, feeling rather light-headed, thought that Jules was speaking in riddles.
Then Chrissie burst out laughing, clapping his hands in delight. ‘Oh my goodness, of course, your kinky shop! Darling, I always knew that you’d be excellent at retail, provided it was the right kind! Tell me, how many of your super-naughty trinkets have you sold him?’