Susan certainly knew how to work the camera. She stared straight into the lens and winked out at the television audience. ‘Besides, if anything ever happened to me, I’d come back and whisper in your ear, “If yer lookin’ fer the bloke what done me in, his name is Greg Parker.”’
After a beat, the camera focused on Richard’s astonished face, then panned out, located another one of the demonstrators, steadied and zoomed in on the sign she was carrying: There shall not be found among you a consulter with familiar spirits for all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord. Deut. 18:10-12.
And the program cut to an ad.
‘Abomination? Doesn’t sound harmless to me,’ Alison remarked, fast-forwarding through the ad. When the program resumed, Susan and Richard were seated in an officers’ lounge in comfortable club chairs arranged in a conversational group in front of a long bar. Richard was pointing out the saucer-sized circles on the ceiling where celebrating cadets at various times had hoisted Prince Charles, his brother Andrew, and Charles’s son William up on their shoulders to autograph the ceiling.
When they got up to leave, I imagined the cameraman scuttling backwards as he preceded Susan and Richard into the Senior Gunroom. ‘Gunroom?’ Susan’s eyes darted from one wonder in the room to another. ‘Who knew?’
I could understand her confusion. The gunroom is actually an elegant dining room – mess hall, to be precise – with a vaulted ceiling decorated with beautifully painted and gilded bosses. Portraits of famous naval officers lined the richly paneled walls. None of the officers appeared troubled, however, or making any effort to contact the living, so the party moved on, pausing at the dress uniform of King George VI, dripping with medals, in a glass case. King George didn’t appear restless or eager to communicate either, so they set off again, walking briskly down the highly polished floors of a long narrow corridor, anchored on one end by the gunroom and on the other by the chapel.
Halfway along, the corridor opened into a vast entrance hall. On Susan’s right, huge double doors opened out, I knew, on to a marble staircase that led down to the parade ground overlooking the town and beyond it, the sea. On her left lay the heart of Aston Webb’s design for the college, the Quarterdeck, its entrance flanked by larger-than-life-sized portraits of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth, respectively. When Susan commented on the portraits, Richard said, ‘Young Philip was a cadet here in 1939 when King George VI and the Queen arrived on the royal yacht with their daughters, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Elizabeth was then thirteen. He escorted them round.’ The camera caught Richard smiling. ‘We have photographs of them playing croquet.’
The focus then shifted to Susan, hands clasped behind her back, studying Prince Philip’s portrait. Suddenly she raised a hand. Sniffed. ‘I smell smoke.’ She waved in the direction of the Quarterdeck. ‘What’s behind those doors?’
Rather than answer, Richard smiled enigmatically and held the door open for her. She hustled through, trailed by the cameraman and the soundman, his boom making a cameo appearance in one of the shots. As Susan moved to the center of the great hall, the camera took full advantage of the opportunity, zeroed in on her face, creased with concern, then arched up to take in the dark-timbered vaulted ceiling. It swept around the gallery, known as the poop deck, that surrounding the Quarterdeck on three sides, and would likely have examined the intricate wrought ironwork of the balustrades in more detail had not Susan pressed a hand to her throat, and said, ‘The smoke is really intense in here.’
The cameraman was on the case. He followed the medium to the far end of the room where a statue of His Majesty King George V stood wearing a heavy overcoat of marble. She stroked the marble, gazed thoughtfully into the old king’s face as if listening to what he had to say, then turned to Richard who waited silently, hands clasped in front of him. ‘This area was bombed, wasn’t it? A direct hit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that when this happened?’ she asked, touching the hem of the king’s coat where a triangular piece of marble appeared to be missing.
Richard nodded, then, as if remembering that there was a camera in the room, said, ‘Yes.’
‘I’m thinking the college was very lucky,’ Susan continued, her hand still resting lightly on King George’s overcoat. ‘I don’t feel death here.’
‘Fortunately, the bomb fell on a day when the cadets were not in residence. Otherwise…’ Richard shuddered. ‘It could have been a lot worse.’
Susan bowed slightly at the waist. ‘Thank God.’ After a respectful moment of silence, she led the little group back the way they had come.
‘They’re heading for the chapel,’ Alison whispered, freezing the action on a frame of Susan with her mouth forming an O. ‘Watch this.’
I would like to have seen what Susan ‘saw’ in the chapel, containing as it did many historical objects, including an altar cloth made from the same bolt of cloth as Queen Victoria’s wedding gown. But before she got anywhere near the chapel, however, Susan stopped dead in her tracks. She pressed a hand to her chest, breathed heavily. ‘Oh, my goodness!’
Nobody said anything. A jet plane roared overhead, stealing the silence, but for some reason, the post-production people hadn’t edited the noise out.
‘There’s a woman here,’ Susan said after the noise of the jet had faded away. ‘She’s wearing a uniform.’
Considering they were standing in a Navy school, that was a safe bet.
‘I’m getting an H. Helen?’ Susan squinted thoughtfully into the camera. ‘No, not Helen. It’s Ellen!’
The camera swung quickly from Susan back to Richard in order to catch his reaction. Viewers were not disappointed. Richard’s eyebrows shot upwards, then returned to a neutral position. He said nothing.
The camera swung back to Susan whose head was cocked at that angle I now recognized, when she seemed to be taking counsel from spirits in the great beyond. ‘Ellen says she’s dying of embarrassment. Does that mean anything to you?’
The camera swung back in time to catch the corners of Richard’s mouth twitching upwards in what might pass for a smile. Still, he said nothing.
‘It means something to me!’ I yelled at the television screen.
Alison glared at me. ‘Shhhh!’
‘The plaque is right behind her, Alison. She can’t help but notice it.’
‘They covered it up, silly. You’ll see in a minute.’
Sure enough, when the camera panned back, the bronze plaque that commemorated the event that cost Ellen Whittall her life had been covered with a dark cloth, taped to the wall with duct tape. Crafty Richard! He might agree to let a medium troop around the college with her entourage, but he had been careful to even up the odds. Susan had many talents, but I didn’t think X-ray vision was among them.‘She’s doing this.’ Susan traced a circle in the air. ‘She wants me to turn around.’
I have observed that in buildings designed exclusively to accommodate men, women’s restrooms are often tucked away in odd, out-of-the-way places, in closets, for example, or under staircases. When Susan did as the spirit instructed, she found herself facing the ladies’ restroom, squirreled away in a corner just off the elegant entrance hall. The camera caught her smiling in amusement, then her face grew serious. ‘You poor thing!’ she soothed. Susan glanced over her shoulder and out into our sitting room. ‘Ellen’s telling me she was in the loo when the bomb exploded. She’s saying she had higher aspirations when she joined the military than dying with her knickers around her knees.’
‘So!’ said Alison, pausing the program at the point where Richard’s bemused face filled the screen. ‘What do you think about that?’
‘I think it makes for interesting television,’ I answered, channeling Paul, ‘but the fact that a Wren was the only casualty of the bombing is common knowledge. I think it’s even mentioned in the BRNC brochure.’