“And a most valuable one,” she said. “Her fame opened doors that are barred to mere mortals. She was made to play a role that was more deadly than any she had undertaken on stage or screen.”
“How do you know that?” I couldn’t keep from asking.
“I’m sorry, dear. I can’t tell you that.”
“Was Val Lampman one of you, as well? He might well have been, since he was Phyllis Wyvern’s brother.”
Something rose up in Aunt Felicity’s throat, and I thought for a moment that she was going to toss her tea cakes, but what came out was more like the braying of a donkey. Her shoulders shook and her bosoms trembled.
My dear old trout of an aunt was laughing!
“Her brother? Phyllis Wyvern’s brother? Wherever did you get that idea?”
“Her driving license. Lampman.”
“Oh, I see,” Aunt Felicity said, mopping at her eyes with the border of the afghan.
“Phyllis Wyvern’s brother?” she said again, as if repeating the punch line of a joke to another person in the room. “Far from it, dear girl—very far from it indeed. She’s his mother.”
My mouth fell open like a corpse who’s just had her jaw bandage removed.
“His mother? Phyllis Wyvern is Val Lampman’s mother?”
“Surprising, isn’t it. She gave birth to him when she was very young, no more than seventeen, I believe, and Val’s age, to all outer appearances, is rather … indeterminate.”
So that was it! Val Lampman was the “Waldemar” of Who’s Who, but he was Phyllis Wyvern’s son, and not her brother, as I had assumed. I had misinterpreted the entry in Who’s Who. I wanted to blush but I was too excited.
“She’d already had a daughter a year earlier,” Aunt Felicity went on. “Veronica, I believe the girl was called. Poor child. There was some great tragedy there that was never spoken of.
“Phyllida—or Phyllis, as she liked to call herself—had been married for a time to the late and not awfully-much-lamented Lorenzo, who, in spite of his blue blood and the great difference in their ages, was still active as a traveler in wines, or wigs, I’ve forgotten which.”
“Wigs, probably,” I said, “because she was wearing one.”
Aunt Felicity shot me a disgusted look, as if I’d blabbed a secret.
“It fell off,” I explained. “I was trying to keep the shroud the police had thrown over her from messing her hair.”
There fell one of those silences so thick you could have stood a spoon up in it.
“Poor Philly,” Aunt Felicity said, at last. “She suffered terribly at the hands of the Axis agents. Chemicals, I believe. Her hair was her crowning glory. They might as well have chopped out her heart.”
Chemicals? Torture?
Dogger had been tortured, too, in the Far East. It seemed bizarre, the way in which these old atrocities seemed to be coming home to roost in peaceful Bishop’s Lacey.
“Does Father know about these things? About Phyllida Lampman, I mean?”
“She had been directed by Malinovsky in a number of foreign films,” Aunt Felicity went on, staring at her own hands as if they were those of a stranger. “Most notably, of course, in Anna of the Steppes, a role which led, indirectly, to her assignment, and to her later downfall. Although she escaped with her life, she underwent a total breakdown, during which she developed an irrational horror of all Eastern Europeans.”
“Which is why she insisted on always working with the same British ciné crew,” I said.
“Precisely.”
We had seen the re-released version of Anna of the Steppes at the cinema in Hinley, where it was shown—with English subtitles—as Dressed for Dying.
Although it had seemed at first to be just another of those endless yawners about the Russian Revolution, I soon found myself swept into the story, my eyes as dazzled by the stark black-and-white images as if I had stared too long at the sun.
In fact, the unforgettable scene in which Phyllis Wyvern, as Anna, having put on her grandmother’s Russian dress and heavy boots, carefully combed her hair, and applied the scent and makeup brought to her from Paris by her lover, Marcel, lies down with her year-old baby in front of the army of snarling tractors, was still causing me occasional and inexplicable nightmares.
“Miss Wyvern must have been a very brave woman,” I said.
Aunt Felicity returned to the window and looked out as if World War Two were still raging somewhere in the fields to the east of Buckshaw.
“She was more than brave,” she said. “She was British.”
I let the silence linger until it was hanging by a thread. And then I said what I had come to say.
“You must have heard everything that happened. Being in the next room.”
Aunt Felicity looked suddenly drawn, and old, and helpless.
“I should have,” she said. “God knows I should have.”
“You mean you didn’t?”
“I’m an old woman, Flavia. I suffer from the vicissitudes of age. I had a tot of rum at bedtime, and slept with the pillow screwed into my good ear. That poor dear blasted soul ran ciné films all night. I knew why, of course, but even sympathy has its limits.”
Does it? I wondered, or was Aunt Felicity simply deflecting further discussion?
“So you heard nothing,” I said at last.
“I didn’t say I’d heard nothing. I said I hadn’t heard everything.”
I walked across the room and stood beside her at the window. It had grown dark outside, and the snow was still falling as heavily as if the world were coming to a bitter end.
“I got up to use the WC. She was arguing with someone. The noise of the film, you see …”
“Was it a man, or a woman?”
“One couldn’t be sure. Although they were keeping down the volume, it was evident that angry words were being exchanged. Even with an ear to the wall—oh, all right, don’t look so shocked, I’ll admit to clapping an ear to the wall—I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I gave it up and went back to bed, determined to have a word with her in the morning.”
“You hadn’t spoken to her before that?”
“No,” Aunt Felicity said. “There had been no opportunity. One had come across her unexpectedly in the corridor, but as I’ve told you, we were both of us too well trained in the art of seeming total strangers.”
My mind was leapfrogging back and forth over the things that Aunt Felicity had told me. If, for instance, what she said was true, Phyllis Wyvern could not possibly have been arguing with someone when Auntie F got up to use the baffins, because she was already dead. I had heard the toilet flush and I’d been in the death chamber moments later. Before that, someone had had enough time to strangle Phyllis Wyvern, dress her in different clothing (for whatever bizarre reason), and make their escape through one of three doors: the one to the corridor, the one that connected to Flo and Maeve’s bedroom, or—and here I shot a nervous glance over my shoulder—the one that opened into the very room in which I was now standing. Aunt Felicity’s bedroom—the very same Aunt Felicity who had just told me that she was capable of coming for me in the dark with a butcher knife. If what she said was true—if only half of what she hinted at were the ramblings of a woman who had grown suddenly old at the end of the war—she was capable of anything. Who knew what havoc old loyalties and older jealousies could play with two women who had once been friends?
Or was it enemies?
I needed time to think—time to get away—to collect my thoughts.
“Thank you, Aunt Felicity,” I said. “You must be very tired.”
I could always come back to her later to fill in the blanks.
“You’re such a thoughtful child,” she said.
I gave her a modest smile.
The cupboard under the stairs was little more than a right-angled triangle equipped with a dangling lightbulb. Here, stowed safely away from the eyes of the ciné crew and their cameras, were the magazines that had been cleared away from the library and the drawing room. Back numbers of Country Life pressed down like geological strata upon old issues of The Illustrated London News. Heaped high with issues of Behind the Screen and Cinema Weekly, back numbers of Cinema World were piled in crooked stacks that must have dated back to the days of silent film.