“There’s a fly here,” said the Chief, without looking up from his work.
Not sure who was being addressed, Andrew glanced back at his mother, who just widened her eyes in helpless puzzlement. Even the man who had led them here was simply blank-faced.
“Andrew, lad,” the Chief went on impatiently, “look here. Do you see this fly, in the web? Waving his legs like a madman.”
Andrew stepped up beside the burly old man and pushed back a lock of his long blond hair to peer at the windowsill. A bluebottle fly was struggling in the spiderweb. “Yes, sir.”
“Can you kill it?”
Bewildered, assuming this was some token sort of test of ruthlessness, the boy swallowed against his nausea and then nodded and held out his hand for the letter opener.
“No,” said the Chief impatiently, “with your will alone. Can you kill the fly just by looking at it?”
Andrew really didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or start crying. He heard his mother shift and mutter behind him. “No, sir,” he said hoarsely.
The old Chief sighed, and turned to stare for several seconds straight into the boy’s eyes. “No,” he said at last, gent ly. Then he hugely startled Andrew by stabbing the letter opener into his own left thigh, which gave out a knock that let the boy know it was a wooden leg. Through ringing ears Andrew heard the Chief go on, “No, I see you could not—and good for you. Are you interested in radio, lad?” He rocked the letter opener out of his leg and tested the point with his thumb.
Chipping Campden had only got electricity the year before. “We don’t own one,” Andrew answered. He had fainted in church once, and the remembered rainbow glitter of unconsciousness was crowding in now from the edges of his vision—so he abruptly sat down cross-legged on the carpet and took several deep breaths. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be all right—”
Andrew’s mother was crouching beside him, her hand on his forehead. “The boy hasn’t eaten since midnight,” she said in an accusing or pleading voice.
“Good Lord,” came the Chief’s voice from over Andrew’s head. “Where did they drive from, Scotland? I thought you said they live in Oxfordshire.”
“That’s right, sir,” the black-haired man said, “in the Cotswolds. This is some Catholic fast, I believe.”
“Of course. Polarized, you see? Like Merlin in the old stories, christened. Nevertheless—Andrew.”
Andrew looked up into the old man’s stern face, and he felt clear-headed enough now to get back up onto his feet. “Yes, sir,” he said when he was standing again. His mother had stood up too, and he could feel that she was right behind him.
“Remember your dreams.” The Chief scowled. “Dreams, right? Things you see when you’re asleep, things you hear? Don’t write them down, but remember them. One day Theodora will ask you about them.”
“Yes, sir. I will, sir.” Andrew was simply postponing the effort of trying to imagine some no doubt frightening-looking woman named Theodora interrogating him about his dreams at some future date.
“Good lad. When is your birthday?”
“January the sixth, sir.”
“And why the hell shouldn’t it be, eh? Sorry. Good. Your mother has done very well in these seven years. Do as she tells you.” He waved his hand, suddenly looking very tired. “Go and get something to eat now, and then go home to your Cotswolds. And don’t— worry, about anything, understand? You’re on our rolls.”
“Yes, sir. Uh—thank you, sir.”
Andrew and his mother had been abruptly led out then, and the black-haired man had taken them down to a narrow dark lunchroom or employees’ bar on the seventh floor, and simply left them there, after telling them that their meal would be paid for by the Crown. Andrew managed to get down a ham sandwich and a glass of ginger beer, and he had guessed that he shouldn’t talk about the affairs of this place while he was still in it. Even on the drive home, though, his mother had parried his questions with evasions, and assurances that he’d be told everything one day, and that she didn’t know very much about it all herself; and when he had finally asked which of those men had been his godfather, she had hesitated.
“The man who led us in,” she’d said finally, “was the one who… well, the wooden-legged chap—you saw that it was an artificial limb, didn’t you, that he stabbed himself in?—he took the…” Then she had sighed, not taking her eyes off the already shadow-streaked road that led toward Oxford and eventually, beyond that, home. “Well, it’s the whole service, really, I suppose.”
On our rolls.
Shortly after the visit to London his mother had begun receiving checks from an obscure City bank called Drummond’s. They had not been accompanied by any invoices or memoranda, and she had let her father believe that the money was belated payment from Andrew’s delinquent father, but Andrew had known that it was from “the Crown”—and sometimes when he’d been alone on the windy hill below the Broadway Tower he had tried to imagine what sort of services it might prove to be payment for.
Remember your dreams.
In his dreams, especially right at the end of the year and during the first nights of 1930, he sometimes found himself standing alone in a desert by moonlight; and always the whole landscape had been spinning, silently, while he tried to measure the angle of the horizon with some kind of swiveling telescope on a tripod. Once in the dream he had looked up, and been awakened in a jolt of vertigo by the sight of the stars spinning too. For a few minutes after he woke from these dreams he couldn’t think in words, only in moods and images of desert vistas he had never seen; and though he knew—as if it were something exotic!—that he was a human being living in this house, sometimes he wasn’t sure whether he was the old grandfather, or the ex-nun mother, or the little boy who slept in the wooden box.
He always felt that he should go to Confession after having one of these dreams, though he never did; he was sure that if he could somehow manage to convey to the priest the true nature of these dreams, which he didn’t even know himself, the priest would excommunicate him and call for an exorcist.
And he had begun to get unsolicited subscriptions to magazines about amateur radio and wireless telegraphy. He tried to read them but wasn’t able to make much sense of all the talk of enameled wire, loose couplers, regenerative receivers, and Brandes phones; he would have canceled the subscriptions if he had not remembered the one-legged old man’s question— Are you interested in radio, lad?—and anyway the subscriptions had not followed him to his new address when he went away to school two years later.
In her new affluence Andrew’s mother had enrolled him in St. John’s, a Catholic boys’ boarding school in old Windsor, across the Thames and four miles downriver from Eton. The school was a massive old three-story brick building at the end of a birch-lined driveway, and he slept in one of a row of thirty curtained cubicles that crowded both sides of a long hallway on the third floor—no hardship to someone used to sleeping in an eighteenth-century box bed—and ate in the refectory hall downstairs with an army of boys ranging from his own age, nine, up to fourteen. To his own surprise, he had not suffered at all from homesickness. The teachers were all Jesuit priests, and every day started with a brief Mass in the chapel and ended with evening prayers; and in the busy hours between he found that he was good at French and geometry, subjects his mother had not been able to teach him, and that he could make friends.
Obedient to his mother, he had told his new companions about his youth in the Cotswolds but had not ever mentioned the circumstances of his birth, and never told them about his peculiar corporate “godfather.”