“Of course we are,” I told her. “It’s where I do my experiments.”
“Like magic?” she asked, glancing around at the glassware.
“Yes,” I said. “Like magic. Now then, you take these …”
She jumped at the pop of the Bunsen burner as I put a match to it.
“Hold them over the flame,” I said, handing her a couple of bangers and a pair of nickel-plated test tube clamps. “Not too close—it’s exceedingly hot.”
I broke six eggs into a borosilicate evaporating dish and stirred them with a glass rod over a second burner. Almost immediately the laboratory was filled with mouthwatering aromas.
“Now for toast,” I said. “You can do two slices at a time,” I said. “Use the tongs again. Do both sides, then turn them inside out.”
By necessity, I had become quite an accomplished laboratory chef. Once, just recently, when Father had banished me to my room, I had even made myself a spotted dick by steaming suet from the larder in a wide-neck Erlenmeyer flask. And because water boils at only 212 degrees Fahrenheit, while nylon doesn’t melt until it is heated to 417 degrees, I had verified my theory that one of Feely’s precious stockings would make a perfect pudding bag.
If there’s anything more delicious than a sausage roasted over an open Bunsen burner, I can’t imagine what it might be—unless it’s the feeling of freedom that comes of eating it with the bare fingers and letting the fat fall where it may. Porcelain and I tore into our food like cannibals after a missionary famine, and before long there was nothing left but crumbs.
As two cups of water came to the boil in a glass beaker, I took down from the shelf where it was kept, alphabetically, between the arsenic and the cyanide, an apothecary jar marked Camellia sinensis.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only tea.”
Now there fell between us one of those silences that occur when two people are getting to know each other: not yet warm and friendly, but neither cold nor wary.
“I wonder how your gram is doing?” I said at last. “Fenella, I should say.”
“Well enough, I expect. She’s a hard old bird.”
“Tough, you mean.” Her answer had surprised me.
“I mean hard.”
She deliberately let go of the glass test tube she’d been toying with and watched it shatter on the floor.
“But she’ll not be broken,” she said.
I begged to differ but I kept my mouth shut. Porcelain had not seen her grandmother, as I had, sprawled in a pool of her own blood.
“Life can kill you, but only if you let it. She used to tell me that.”
“You must have loved her awfully,” I said, realizing even as I spoke that I made it sound as if Fenella were already dead.
“Yes, sometimes very much,” Porcelain said reflectively, “—and sometimes not at all.”
She must have seen my startled reaction.
“Love’s not some big river that flows on and on forever, and if you believe it is, you’re a bloody fool. It can be dammed up until nothing’s left but a trickle …”
“Or stopped completely,” I added.
She did not reply.
I let my gaze wander out the window and across the Visto and I thought about the kinds of love I knew, which were not very many. After a while I thought about Brookie Harewood. Who had hated him enough to kill him, I wondered, and hang him from Poseidon’s trident? Or had Brookie’s death come about through fear rather than hate?
Well, whatever the case, Brookie would be laid out on a wheeled trolley in Hinley by now, and someone—his next of kin—would have been asked to identify the body.
As an attendant in a white coat lifted the corner of a sheet to reveal Brookie’s dead face, a woman would step forward. She would gasp, clap a handkerchief to her mouth, and quickly turn her head away.
I knew how it was done: I’d seen it in the cinema.
And unless I missed my bet, the woman would be his mother: the artist who lived in Malden Fenwick.
But perhaps I was wrong: Perhaps they would spare a mother the grief. Perhaps the woman who was stepping forward was just a friend. But no—Brookie didn’t seem the type to have ladies as friends. Not many women would fancy spending their nights sneaking about the countryside in rubber boots and handling dead fish.
I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard Porcelain begin speaking.
“—but never in summer,” she was saying. “In summer she’d chuck all that and take to the roads with Johnny Faa, and not a penny between them. Like a couple of kids, they were. Johnny was a tinker when he was younger, but he’d given it up for some reason he would never explain. Still, he made friends easily enough, and his way with a fiddle meant that he spoke every language under the sun. They lived on whatever Fenella could get by telling the fortunes of fools.”
“I was one of those fools,” I told her.
“Yes,” Porcelain said. She was not going to spare my feelings.
“Did you travel with them?” I asked.
“Once or twice when I was younger. Lunita didn’t much like me being with them.”
“Lunita?”
“My mother. She was their only child. Gypsies like large families, you know, but she was all they had. Their hearts were broken in half when she ran off with a Gajo—an Englishman from Tunbridge Wells.”
“Your father?”
Porcelain nodded sadly. “She used to tell me my father was a prince—that he rode on the back of a pure white horse that was faster than the wind. His jacket was of spun gold and his sleeves of finest silk. He could talk to the birds in their own language and make himself invisible whenever the fancy took him.
“Some of that was true—he was specially good at the invisible dodge.”
As Porcelain spoke, there appeared in my mind a thought as sudden and as uninvited as a shooting star in the night sky: Would I trade my father for hers?
I brushed it away.
“Tell me about your mother,” I said, perhaps a little too eagerly.
“There’s little enough to tell. She was on her own. She couldn’t go home, if you can call it that, because Fenella and Johnny—mostly Fenella—wouldn’t have her. She’d me to care for, and she hadn’t a friend in the world.”
“How awful,” I said. “How did she manage?”
“By doing the only thing she knew. She had the gift of the cards, so she told fortunes. Sometimes, when things got bad, she would send me to Fenella and Johnny for a while. They cared for me well enough, but when I was with them they never asked about Lunita.”
“And you never told them.”
“No. But when the war came, things were different. We’d been living in a frightful old bed-sitter in Moorgate, where Lunita told fortunes behind a bedsheet strung up across the room. I was only four at the time, so I don’t remember much about it in those days, apart from a spider that lived in a hole in the bathroom wall.
“We’d been there for, oh, I think about four years, so I must have been eight when one day a sign went up in the window of the empty house next door, and the landlady told Lunita that the place was being turned into a servicemen’s club.
“Suddenly she was making more money than she knew what to do with. I think she felt guilty about all the Canadians, the Americans, the New Zealanders, and the Australians—even the Poles—that came flocking in their uniforms to our rooms to have their cards turned. She didn’t want anyone to think she was profiting by the war.
“I’ll never forget the day I found her weeping in the W.C. ‘Those poor boys!’ I remember her sobbing. ‘They all ask the same question: Will I go home alive?’ ”
“And what did she tell them?”
“ ‘You will go home in greater glory than ever you came.’ She told them all the same, every one of them: half-a-crown a time.”
“That’s very sad,” I said.