by Alan Bradley
Carla was a student of the Misses Lavinia and Aurelia Puddock, those musical spinster sisters whose musty talents made a misery of every public event in Bishop’s Lacey.
Although she lived in Hinley, several miles away, Carla came by bus to sing in our village at frequent intervals, on the principle that it was better to be a big frog in a small pond than a tadpole in a large one.
“With the deh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh-heh-ell-hick-cut air
Men call her the lass with the del-hick-cut air.”
Her voice hung shrill in the air like a shot partridge.
I have nothing against singing provided it’s done properly—I do it myself occasionally—but there are times when enough is too much, and this was one of them.
Perhaps in unconscious imitation of Carla’s pose, I wrung my hands.
“Men call her the lass with the-uh…”
In the brief and dramatic silence that followed her hovering high E—which is called a fermata, my sister Feely had told me, and can be held for as long as the performer wishes—my knuckles gave off a sickening crunch! All ten of them.
Simultaneously.
All of us in the parish hall, including Carla and me, whipped our necks round to locate the source of the ghastly disturbance.
Undine gave out a horrible, wet snicker, followed by a thumbs-up, and a grin of outright admiration.
To give her credit, Carla was game. She went on to the end:
“del…lick…hut air.”
And then she fled.
—
I found her sobbing in the churchyard.
I remembered that the poet Walter de la Mare had once written:
It’s a very odd thing—
As odd can be—
That whatever Miss T eats
Turns into Miss T.
If Mr. de la Mare was correct, Carla must be in the habit of feasting on fireflies. Her red face fairly glowed with the heat of her body, and her forehead was glossy with a greasy dampness.
“I hate you, Flavia de Luce!” she spat. “You’ve ruined everything. I hate you! I loathe you! I despise you!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was involuntary.”
Involuntary was perhaps too grand a word—too pretentious for the occasion—but it slipped out of me before I could stop my mouth.
It launched Carla into a cold, full-fledged fury.
“You de Luces are so…so…blooming superior,” she said, her voice dripping with the venom of a sack of vipers.
“Look, Carla,” I said, trying to calm her, “it’s a question of mechanics, not malice. When you put pressure on your metatarsals—”
“Oh, bugger your metatarsals!” Carla snarled, and I sucked in my breath noisily and widened my eyes, as if I were scandalized.
“Carla!”
The first step in gaining the upper hand is always to seize the moral high ground, and to be able to do this with no more than a single word is nothing short of genius.
I also let my jaw fall open in astonishment—which was gilding the lily, perhaps, but if a dab of gold paint here and there—as in the Sistine Chapel, for instance—hadn’t ruined Michelangelo’s reputation, why should it ruin mine?
The thought of gilding reminded me: Here was a golden opportunity.
“I know how you feel, though,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We’re two of a kind, you and I.”
We were no such thing, but the second step was: Create a kinship with your subject.
Carla looked up at me with something approaching hope. I came close to feeling sorry for her.
“We are?” she asked, and I knew she was mine.
“Of course we are!” I said with a laugh. “Everyone knows how dreadfully your family treats you.”
It was a shot in the dark, but I knew at once that it had struck blood, bone, and gristle.
“They do?” she said, something dawning on her face.
According to my sister Daffy, Tolstoy had written something about happy families being all alike and unhappy ones each unhappy in its own way. “Like us,” she had added with a horrible grimace. Well, Tolstoy was wrong. It’s the other way round—at least in my limited experience.
I knew nothing whatsoever about Carla, but it seemed a safe enough bet that she must have a family.
“You’re quite right,” she said suddenly. “They do treat me dreadfully. They think I’m going to be a failure.”
“Whatever makes them think such a thing?” I asked.
“Because they’re such failures themselves. Mother is a failed sculptor and Father a failed advertising man. I wonder what I shall fail at when I’m old enough?”
“How old are you? Right now, I mean. Today.”
“Sixteen,” she mumbled, casting her eyes down as if being sixteen were an indictable criminal offense.
“But let’s talk about happier things,” I said, putting the other hand on her other shoulder.
She looked up at me doubtfully.
“ ‘The Lass with the Delicate Air,’ ” I said. “You were actually singing about yourself, weren’t you?”
I paused to let the oblique compliment sink in. Carla was not the brightest star in the firmament.
“And you sing it so beautifully,” I said, shoring up the dam, just in case.
“Do you really, really think so?” Her great wet eyes swam up towards me.
It says somewhere—in the Book of Proverbs, I think—that lying lips are abomination to the Lord, but they that deal truly are his delight.
I considered my words carefully before I spoke them. “I don’t just think so—I know so,” I told her, giving her shoulder a tender squeeze.
I would probably burn in the fires of Hell for an eternity of eternities for such a flaming fib, but I didn’t care. Paradise would just have to get along without me.
“It always reminds me of that other wonderful song, ‘Who Knoweth Where Fate Will Fetch Her’—based on the poem by Shelley. I’m sure you know the one.”
I was equally sure she didn’t, since I had invented it on the spot.
Carla nodded knowingly.
I had her! A counter-fib cancels out any number of prior fibs by the party of the first part. Somewhere up above, Saint Peter would be blotting his big book and cussing at the two of us like billy-ho!
“…or,” I went on blithely, “ ‘King of the Sands.’ ”
I proceeded to quote:
“I shall make you a house of mud
With a one and a two and a three-a-ringo,
With mud-made walls and a mud-made floor
Just for you and me, by jingo!
“Oliver Inchbald,” I said. “Everybody knows that one. It’s from Hobbyhorse House. I’ve always thought that the poem is about loneliness, actually. The speaker is expressing the wish to return to the mother’s womb: to build a sanctuary and share it with a friend. Don’t you agree?”
The concept of returning to the mother’s womb had been explained to me at great length and in great detail by one of the more advanced girls at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, but I still wasn’t sure if she had been pulling my leg.
Carla nodded weakly. This was not going to be as easy as I thought.
“Perhaps you could set it to music,” I said. “With your great gift, you ought to—”
But before I could say another word, Carla’s voice, quavering at first, began to rise up in song. Even though she was inventing the eerily thrilling melody on the spot, the hair on the back of my neck began to arise like a snake charmer’s cobra.
“I shall make you a house of mud
With a one and a two and a three-a-ringo…”
And so forth.
At the words “Just for you and me,” Carla scrambled to her feet, flung her arms around me and gave me a bone-breaking hug.
I had overplayed my hand.
“You poor kid,” I said, and I almost meant it.
“Everyone has read Hobbyhorse House,” I added, waiting for
her snuffles to subside. “Or had it read to them, at least. I expect you did, too.”
This seemed to brighten her a bit. She wiped her eyes on her ruffled sleeves.
“My auntie Louisa actually knew Oliver Inchbald. Can you believe it? He had a mad purple pash for her—or so she said.”
“Oliver Inchbald? They must have been very young.”
Inchbald, I recalled from the dusty back issues of The Bookman and The Illustrated London News that formed a rising tide in all the cupboards and crannies of Buckshaw, had been happily married for donkey’s years to a honey-haired dough lady who spent her days knitting ditty bags for sailors and mittens for the homeless poor.
“It wasn’t all that long ago,” Carla said. “Not long before he died. Auntie Louisa worked for his publishers, and—”
“Lancelot Gath, Bedford Square, London!” I blurted out.
“That’s right,” Carla said. “How ever did you know that?”
I tapped my temple knowingly with my forefinger. “I keep my eyes open,” I said. Even though it didn’t quite make sense, I could see that she was impressed.
Already a plan was beginning to take shape in my mind. It would be risky, but that’s what life’s about, after all, isn’t it?
“Tell me about your auntie Louisa. She must have been awfully bright, to work for a publisher, and all that.”
“She was. She died a couple of years ago in an Aqua-Lung accident in the Mediterranean.”
“A what?”
“An Aqua-Lung. It’s a kind of underwater breathing apparatus. She was diving on a Roman shipwreck with Jacques Cousteau.”
“Holy cow!” I said, and I meant it. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s all right,” Carla said. “She always said she’d prefer to die on her way to the moon than under a runaway bus. And I suppose in a way, she did. Auntie Louisa was always something of an adventurer—or adventuress, as Mama always says.”
I knew from Daffy’s small talk that the word could be taken in more ways than one.
“I’ll show you a photograph of her some time, if you like. She’s smoking Albert Einstein’s pipe, and he’s wearing her slippers.”
“Sassafras!” I said.
“She was like that, you know. Madcap, Mama always says. She taught Winston Churchill to rhumba and beat the author of Jeeves at croquet.”
“P. G. Wodehouse,” I said. Daffy was always going on about the man and cackling to herself in the middle of the night when she ought to be sleeping.
“Yes, that’s it. Auntie Loo—everyone called her Loo, even her own mother—knew everyone who was anyone. She was unbelievably popular in certain circles.”
“I see,” I said. I would need to consult with Daffy, who had the uncanny, almost supernatural ability to read between the lines. Even though it would mean negotiating a truce with my sister, it would likely be well worth my while.
“Do you know what I envy about you?” I asked.
This is one of those trick questions to which no one on earth has ever answered “Yes.” If you need a “No” to keep things going—to keep the barn door open—this is the way to get one.
“No,” Carla said. “Tell me.”
“I’ll bet she used to read aloud to you, your auntie Loo. Oliver Inchbald, and so forth. Isn’t it wonderful to think that her ears heard him reading from his own works, and your ears heard her. What a treat for you that must have been, getting it secondhand, almost straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”
This was stretching things a bit, but it seemed to prime Carla’s pump.
“Oh, yes,” she gushed. “I begged her to tell me again and again about the punting and tea cakes in the Backs at Cambridge, and the Dixieland Jazz Band at the Hippodrome—and again, after hours at the Kublai Khan Club in Soho.”
“And Crispian Crumpet?” I suggested.
Carla closed her eyes, threw her head back, and chanted:
“Crispian Crumpet is christening his tricycle.
‘I name thee Icicle,’ says he…
‘Icicle, nicycle, pearl-without-price-icle
Icicle Thricicle, thou shalt be!’
“Silly, isn’t it?” Carla said, interrupting herself.
I didn’t say so, but it wasn’t silly in the least. In fact it was, in my opinion, probably the best poem Oliver Inchbald had ever written. As someone who had herself administered the rite of Holy Baptism to a bicycle, it touched a very deep chord.
“Some people have little need for human companionship,” I said, as if to no one, and Carla squeezed my hand. “Obviously, your auntie Loo was not one of them.”
“No,” Carla said. “Everyone adored her. They were always comparing her to a warm summer’s breeze. When she died, the postman had to bring the mail in a sack. It was very tragic.”
“But Oliver Inchbald was already dead by then?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. For some years. As a matter of fact, it was Auntie Loo who was called upon to identify his body.”
“Really?” I couldn’t hide my interest. “How do you know that?”
“Because she told me so. ‘It was I who was called upon to identify the body.’ Those were her very words. I remember them quite distinctly.”
My mind was running away with itself.
“Why would she be called upon to identify his body? Why not his family?”
“Well, Auntie Loo said it was because his wife had become deranged, and his son point-blank refused.”
“Good lord,” I said. “I wonder why? Was there something unusual about the way he died?”
“I suppose you could say so. He was pecked to death by seagulls while he was bird-nesting. On the island of Steep Holm. It’s in the Bristol Channel.”
“Nesting season?” I asked.
You didn’t need to be a radio panelist on Puzzle Corner or What Do You Know? to deduce that fascinating fact.
“I think so,” Carla said. “Auntie Loo said there wasn’t much left of him but a few ribbons, his wallet, and his pipe.”
“Crispian Crumpet—Crispian Inchbald, I mean—must have been devastated. What a way to lose your father!”
“I suppose,” Carla said. “Although by then he was no longer a boy. He was at Oxford, I think, and was already doing something in cinema films, lighting or sound or something. I don’t remember. He was very artistic—like his father.”
“Was?” I asked. “Isn’t he still alive? Crispian, I mean?”
“As far as I know. Auntie Loo used to send him a Christmas card every year, but he never wrote her back. ‘He’s a bit of a rum ’un,’ she used to say.”
Crispian Crumpet? A rum ’un? I could hardly believe it. Whatever could have become of the famous little boy who baptized his bicycle—the little boy who was digging a hole to China (or Bengal)—the dear little boy who wanted to build his father a house of mud, for just the two of them?
I realized with a pang that I had often wished to do just that myself.
I had a brief vision of kidnapping Father from the hospital in Hinley and whisking him off to some distant island in the tropics—just the two of us—where I would build him a hut of mud and grass: a new Buckshaw, free of all the cares and worries that had brought him so low. There would be an annex, of course, for his stamp collection, and another for my chemistry lab.
And there we would live upon turtle’s eggs and coconut milk, tuning in on a short-wave wireless set to the BBC whenever we felt like a bit of Bach or Philip Odell.
It would be heaven on earth, and we would hang in our hammocks, Father and I, as we talked quietly to each other and watched the setting sun.
“He got himself into some kind of trouble with the law,” Carla said. “Auntie Loo wasn’t sure what it was, but it had something to do with the racetrack.”
“A betting man, was he?” I asked.
Carla shrugged.
Undine chose that very moment to interrupt. She came charging out of the parish hall like a deranged bowling ball, arms flailin
g and veering alarmingly from side to side.
“Flavia! Gravia! Quavia, Slavia!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, as if the whole world had just gone deaf. She climbed up onto a teetering tombstone, where she stood wigwagging her arms for balance. “I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal!” she bellowed.
“Pipe down!” I said. “There’s a concert going on inside.”
“It’s finished,” Undine said. “The gingerbread was better than the music. I’m already hungry again. Let’s go home.”
“I must apologize for my cousin, Undine,” I said. “She can be quite uncouth.”
“Not at all,” Carla said. “I admire her frankness.”
“See?” Undine crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue.
“I’ve enjoyed our little talk,” Carla said. “Perhaps we can continue it another time.”
“I’d like that,” I told her. “Oh, by the way: I couldn’t help wondering if you still have all your Oliver Inchbald books? I’d like to borrow them one of these days,” I added, “…just for old times’ sake, and because of their association with the author. I promise I’d look after them.”
“Of course I have,” Carla replied, with just a trace of a glare. “I wouldn’t part with them for all the tea in China.”
“Oolong!” Undine shouted. As I seized her by the arm and dragged her away, she made a remarkably coarse sound with her mouth.
—
Outside, the temperature had plummeted and, as we made our way across the hardening fields in the growing darkness, a light snow began to fall. Here and there, distant electric lights came on in other people’s homes, mere pinpricks in the gloom. Mirages of happiness, I thought. If you walk towards them, they will never grow any closer. Eventually they will vanish into thin air, like the Lady of the Lake.
“What are you thinking about?” Undine demanded. “You make me nervous when you don’t say anything.”