John mumbles something about changes to the script.
June blinks. “I wondered what had happened to the other dwarves.”
“Silence!” my maddened mother shouts. “They’ve been erased! I tired of their routines. The stairs, the stammering, the fairy-tale suburban house. There’s only so much business with the dishes one can take.”
The thrill of earthquake fades away. The glasses cease to chink.
“And what about Snow White?” I ask, from the doorway.
“The cordial.” June speaks slowly. “The Sleeping Death. It’s meant for me.”
Mother looks down, thin eyebrows arched, and swills the liquid, calmer now.
“Well, I can see why you’d think that. Fiancées have a heightened sense of destiny, and marriage is a sort of sleeping death, if you’ve a brain. Let’s see—Monday: rations, cupboards, cleaning. Tuesday: laundry. Wednesday: ironing, silver. Thursday: bed linen and the lounge. Friday: planning the meals for the weekend. Saturday: intimate relations with your spouse. That’s Snow White’s fantasy…”
“Bright people often pine for domesticity.”
“Perhaps. But Snow White never struggles with the idea. She never doubts. She knows her Prince will come. When Snow White sleeps, she trusts she’ll wake up at the touch of love’s first kiss. Alas, you feel doubt peeling at this vision like the silver flaking from a pier glass. She isn’t you. We’ve left behind the old story.”
With one swift motion, Mother hastens to June’s side, leans forward, and pulls back the damask drape. A baleful basalt mirror glares at us, its one eye deep and black. The glass is void, perpetual night.
“Where am I?” June cries out. “Oh, Alec—make her stop!”
No image forms in the crystal’s abysmal depths, and Mother sets her potion down the better to caress the mirror’s stand: wooden cascade of coils and whorls.
“This is a shaman’s glass, my child,” the Queen whispers. “This is the first, the one Mirror of Creation. It shows you what is missing from your picture of the world. And what is that, d’you think?”
“No, no…” June stares at me.
“It is the mind doing the picturing, my dear. The mirror shows you what you cannot ever grasp. And seeing it brings you impossible material knowledge of who you are—the workings of another’s ingenuity.”
June’s eyes are full of angry tears. I cannot reach for her.
“How did I get here?” she wonders. “How did I know the way—Alec?” She turns. “How did I know that you lived in this house?”
“A good question,” the Lilith of Cartoons declares. “You got here first. As if…”
“…as if I followed instructions. Was drawn.” June smooths her hands across her lap, touches her arms. “But I am not a slave. I’m not a line drawing, like you. Who ordered this? Who gave me… my choices?”
A silence like the heart of the forest descends. The hand-less clock omits to tell more time. And, looking at her feet, June sees—as can we all, now, with astonishment—her double, not in the mirror, but upside down exactly where she sits. Doing a headstand on the floor. The ghost of the snicket. It is as though she sat on the calm surface of a lake and summoned up her reflection to join her in a playing-card reality.
“Who knows but we may all be charged with orders in our sleep?” My mother’s voice alters. “Who served the Queen and found a way to honor life? Who mimicked slavery and knew freedom? None but the Forester. None but Snow White’s divided assassin. I bade you go about your daily work, to plant your larch and pine. I bade you kill the Fair One underneath an oak and set the fair heart in a box. But you were weak, deliberately so. You let your quarry go.”
“If I’m the Forester,” June says, “who is Snow White?”
The Queen’s hands age. She reaches for the flask of cordial. She pauses, with the foaming beaker halfway to her lips; John waddles to her side. Their comic lineaments begin to sag. Celluloid skin wrinkles, fills in.
The sleeping death, yes, for the apple and Snow White. But before that, the Great Queen brews an elixir of cunning and disguise from elder wood, the bony limbs of a trustworthy tree. It makes her ancient, wise, and just. She comes for Snow White in that guise. She comes for me.
Mother and brother share the draught. They drink.
They put on weight, flesh, comfortable solidity. Within seconds, the woman at the head of the French-polished table, telling June about the vanity mirror (“Italian, you see. Not valuable. But with this rather fetching stand—it was my aunt’s. I couldn’t bear to throw it out.”), is the epitome of taste. She pities June. She talks loudly to quell dislike. John occupies the bay, holding a cup and saucer to his lips. He bows his head and lifts his finger to his moustache, coughs. Says, once, beneath his breath, “Sorry.” June’s back is to the fireplace. She looks across at me. Her color rises with abandonment.
I feel myself outside the room.
I see a lady sitting all alone.
Here is a double strife: the sleeping death of duty—expectation, manners—and the waking inner life.
Dear Alec,
I suppose the point of Hamish & co. trailing you everywhere, and asking you about Nomads and secret societies, is the fear that you will be manipulated. Someone is worried you will “talk” to foreign intelligence—an agent got up as a muddled, married ex-fiancée, say—without realizing it. And I can only assume that is why, last week, I received a visit from a pair of gentlemen advising against further telephone communications with Mr. Pryor and asking me a lot of impertinent questions about our friendship. Our new phone, and the one call not to have come from my deaf father—intercepted!
Ours is a party line, of course, and the neighbors could have been listening—only I heard no clicks, so it must have been done professionally, and we said nothing of any value, as far as I am aware. But they caught it all and were very interested in the talk about reflections and the riddle. I’m trying to sound lighthearted, but naturally it has made me anxious. That’s why I am sending this via Max, for hand delivery.
You would have been grimly amused, re the unthinkable, by my conversation with the elder of the two intelligence officers, who began by saying, “We know that you appreciate the sensitive nature of your work for GC&CS,” to which naturally I replied that I didn’t know what he was talking about. We, or rather he, then got swiftly via G. Burgess to a lofty statement concerning individuals at risk of compromise by friends. And I said that if it was Mr. Pryor to whom the gentleman was referring, my understanding of the affair was that you had already been convicted of G.I.—which must surely lessen the risk of “compromise” if not remove it altogether—and that we were mathematical friends only with no record of joint employment, which the officer must know to be true.
If this is intelligence at the higher level these days, Alec, I am not impressed. I said nothing about your patriotic qualities because I did not want to seem to be mounting a defense.
The young man then said, “We have a job to do, Mrs. Wilson. Please answer these questions,” and I asked him who he was. He said that they both worked for MI6, and I inquired how, given the nature of his concerns and the Burgess affair, he could be so sure?
He wanted me to decrypt our conversation about the glass. He felt it might be a keyword for something and I said, no, it was a riddle as all things in dreams are riddles, and that he didn’t seem to understand what he was asking. Deciphering a message makes it intelligible; it doesn’t tell you what it means.
Well, I saw no reason not to tell him what a competent analyst of the forms and shapes would have gleaned from our call—that in this instance the oval scrying glass was clearly a concave mirror; that your brother John appeared as a dwarf because he stood beyond the center of curvature, in the back of the room, and that I had a self-image superimposed on me because I was at the center of curvature, and so on.