“Always remember,” he had taught me to recite:
“Brown wire to the live,
Blue to the neutral
Greenery-yallery to the propensity
So’s you don’t wake up in Eternity.”
When it came to wires and eternity, Gil was said to be something of an expert.
“ ’E was a Commando durin’ the war!” Mrs. Mullet had once whispered, while gutting a rabbit on the kitchen table. “They was taught ’ow to gavotte people with a bit o’ piano wire round their necks. Gzaaack!”
She’d grimaced horribly, her eyes rolled up, her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth by way of illustration.
“ ‘Quick as a wink,’ Alf says. Next minute the victim finds ’isself sittin’ on a cloud with an ’arp in ’is ’and, wonderin’ where in ’eaven’s name the world’s ever got to.”
“Mr. Crawford!” I called up to Gil. “What are you doing here?”
“Keeping the old hand in,” he shouted back above the din of the hammering.
I put one foot on the ladder at the scaffold’s side and began, hand over hand, to haul myself up.
At the top I stepped off onto the broad planks that formed a makeshift floor.
“Used to work this film lark when I was an apprentice lad.” He grinned, rather proudly. “Keep my dues up just in case. You never know, nowadays, do you?”
“How’s Mrs. Crawford?” I asked.
His wife, Martha, had recently invited me for tea while she ferreted out, from a box of cast-off valves, an obsolete rectifier for a radio-frequency fluorescing tube—for which she would take not a penny. It was a debt which I had so far been unable to repay.
“Topping,” he said. “Fair topping. She’s minding the shop so’s I can come out on this caper.”
He worked as he spoke, fastening a second long-snouted spotlight to a tubular cross member with a couple of clamps.
“Busiest time of year it is, too. Sold six wireless sets and three gramophones this week alone, so she did, a four-slice toaster, and an electric egg-cozy. Fancy!”
“You must have a lovely view of things from up here,” I observed.
“So I do,” he said, tightening the last bolt. “Funny you should say so. It’s the same thing that German fellow from Culverhouse told me as he left. ‘Far from the madding crowd,’ he called up to me. Talks over my head but he’s a good lad for all that.”
“Yes, his name is Dieter,” I told him. “He meant Thomas Hardy.”
Gil scratched his head.
“Hardy? Don’t know him. From around here, is he?”
“He’s an author.”
Like any bookworm’s sister, I knew the titles of a million books I hadn’t read.
“Ah!” he said, as if that settled it. “You’d better scramble down now. If the chief sees you up here, both our gooses will be cooked.”
“Geese,” I said. “Latshaw, you mean?”
“Yes, that’s right,” he said quietly. “Geese,” and turned his attention to a box of colored filters.
I had nearly reached the bottom of the ladder when I became aware of a face too close for comfort. I jumped to the floor and twisted round to find myself standing almost on Latshaw’s toes.
“Who told you you could go up there?” he asked, his ginger mustache bristling.
“No one,” I said. “I was having a word with Mr. Crawford.”
“Mr. Crawford is on time-and-a-half for a short call in the holiday season,” he said. “He has no time for idle chitchat—do you, Mr. Crawford?”
This last part he called out loudly enough for everyone to hear. I stepped back and glanced up at Gil, who was fussing with his spotlight, but he must have heard.
“I’m sorry,” I said, becoming aware of the sudden silence that had fallen upon the foyer.
“Take my advice, miss,” Latshaw said, “and keep to your quarters. We’ve no time for nuisances.”
In my mind, Latshaw was already writhing on the floor, his face engorged, his eyes bulging from their sockets, hanging on with both hands to his gut, begging for the antidote to cyanide poisoning.
“Help me! Just help me!” he was screaming. “I’ll do anything—anything!”
“Very well, then,” I was telling him, reluctantly handing over a beaker into which I had stirred carefully calibrated proportions of ferrous sulfate, caustic potash, and powdered oxide of magnesium, “but in future, you really must learn how properly to address your betters.”
Perhaps Latshaw was a mind reader, perhaps not, but he turned, strode off abruptly, and began giving right old hob to a carpenter who wasn’t driving a nail properly.
At that very instant a bloodcurdling shriek came echoing from somewhere in the upper regions of the house.
“No! No-o-o-o-o! Let me alone!”
I recognized it at once.
All eyes were turned upwards as I flew past the workers and up the stairs. At the landing, one of the actresses reached out to stop me but I shook her off and continued my flight to the top and along the first-floor corridors, my pounding feet the only sound in the eerie silence that had fallen suddenly upon the house.
Strangers fell back out of the way to let me pass, hands to mouths, their faces frozen with—what was it?—fear?
“No! No! Keep away! Don’t touch me. Please! Don’t let them touch me!”
The voice was coming from Harriet’s boudoir. I threw open the door.
Dogger was crouched in a corner, one of his quivering hands clasping the wrist of the other in front of his face.
“Please,” he whimpered.
“Leave him alone!” I shouted at his ghosts. “Get out of here and leave him alone!”
And then I slammed the door loudly.
I stood perfectly still and waited until I could bear it no more—about ten seconds, I think—and then I said, “It’s all right, Dogger, they’re gone. I’ve sent them away. It’s all right.”
Dogger trembled behind his hands, his face, the color of ashes, looking up at me unseeing. It had been months—half a year, perhaps—since he had suffered a full-blown episode of such terror, and I knew that this time it was going to take a while.
I walked slowly to the window and stood gazing out through a wreath of frost. To the left, in the steadily falling snow, the lorries of Ilium Films were almost hidden beneath the thick white blanket as if, at the end of the darkening day, they were tucked in for a winter’s sleep.
Behind me, Dogger let out a pitiful little whimper.
“It’s snowing again,” I said. “Fancy that.”
In the stillness I could almost hear the falling flakes.
“Isn’t it a wonder, with that number of snowflakes, that no one has ever thought to write a book called The Chemistry of Snow?”
There was silence behind me, but I did not turn round.
“Just think, Dogger, of all those atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, joining hands and dancing ring-around-a-rosy to form a six-sided snowflake. Sometimes they form around a particle of dust—it says so in the encyclopedia—and because of it the form is misshapen. Hunchbacked snowflakes. Fancy that!”
He stirred a little, and so I continued.
“Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.”
I could see Dogger reflected three times over in the triple looking glass on Harriet’s dressing table as he struggled slowly to his feet, and stood at last with his hands dangling limply at his side.
I turned away from the window and, taking one of his hands, led him, shambling, to Harriet’s canopied and ruffled bed.
“Sit down here,” I said. “Just for a minute.”
Surprisingly, Dogger obeyed, and dropped down heavily onto the edge of the bed. I had thought he would balk at the very idea of taking a seat in Father’s shrine to Harriet, but the fact that he did not was probably due to his confusion of mind.