‘I want to see!’ Peter ran to his father and held his arms out. Mr Bloom picked him up and for a moment Peter was lost in his smell and the feeling of flying. But his father’s face was not playful at all.
‘Charles,’ Peter’s mother said, with a hint of danger in her tone.
‘The boy needs to see this. Look, Peter. This is what Mr West and his friends have brought to us.’
A silvery, cigar-shaped craft drifted slowly above the jagged skyline in the distance, scissored by pale spotlight beams. Orange and golden flames bloomed beneath its bulk, and every fiery burst was followed by a delayed thunderclap that made the windows jingle. A small whimper escaped Peter’s lips.
‘Come on, now, Peter, be a brave boy, there is nothing to be afraid of. Just watch.’
A cloud of pale, fluttering things rose up around the airship, casting shadows on its gleaming hull. It was hard to see the details, but they had wings made from a translucent white substance that glowed faintly in the dark. They reminded Peter of the moths that had scared him one time when he hid in the cupboard beneath the stairs. But these were much larger, and man-shaped. Long, flexible tendrils trailed behind them.
‘Charles, you are being an ass,’ Peter’s mother said. ‘Give him to me. We are going to the basement right now.’
‘In a minute.’
As Peter watched, a moth-man swooped along the belly of the enemy vessel. One of his tendrils snaked out, hook-like, and traced a fiery wound on the silver surface. Fire poured out like blood and the nose of the airship dipped suddenly. The white moth-things swarmed around it. The pop and crackle of the distant fireworks reached a crescendo. Several of the flyers fell from the sky, their ghostly substance evaporating into nothingness as they plummeted towards the ground. Peter gasped, hot pressure in his bladder.
‘Those are ectoflyers, Peter,’ his father said. ‘The men with wings. That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Only they can’t fly unless they eat dead people. Their wings are made from the soul-stuff, which they push out through their mouths and eyes. Would you want wings like that, Peter?’
‘Charles, that is enough!’ Peter’s mother snatched Peter from his father’s arms.
‘I just wanted to make him understand how silly Mr West’s stories really are, Ann. Especially when they come true.’
Peter started crying. A warmth spread through his trousers and the shame made him cry louder. His mother carried him away, and the last thing he saw before she ran down the stairs to the basement was his father, standing at the window alone, lost in thought.
* * *
‘And what do you think about all this, Mr Bloom?’ the prime minister asked. His soul-spark had folded up like a flower closing, with only a glimmer of gold within.
‘I am not sure it is my place to say, sir,’ Peter said.
C’s monocle dropped from his eye and he gave Peter a long look.
‘Well, I am glad to hear at least one Spook has a modicum of modesty,’ Sir Stewart said.
‘Nonsense. Of course it is your place,’ West said. ‘I would not have asked you here if I did not want your opinion. There is more to the situation on the ground than the things you can capture in writing. I remember reading Colonel Bedford’s first transmissions, trying to make sense of it all—’
His soul-spark fluttered suddenly, like a candle flame in a current of air.
‘Where was I?’ the prime minister muttered.
‘You wanted to hear what Bloom thinks about the situation in Spain,’ C said.
‘Ah yes. So I did. What shall we do with this Dzhugashvili of yours, then? What would the Spaniards have us do?’
Peter hesitated. What does he want me to say? he wondered. But the magic lantern of the old man’s soul was now dim and shrunken, and offered no hints. C was looking at Peter impatiently. There was no time for anything but the truth.
‘The Spaniards want the war to end,’ he said. ‘In places like Barcelona, the class society is already reasserting itself. Many, like CARRASCOS, are having a crisis of religious faith. There is constant infighting between the parties, much of it fed by the NKVD. The economy is in tatters.
‘Yet the Spanish are a proud people, and they hate Franco and his Moorish butchers. They will force the Fascists to turn every city into a Guernica before they give up. A quick Franco victory is only possible if we throw our full weight behind him. That means ground troops in Spain—and a Soviet response in kind.’
And there it was again, the familiar sting of a contradiction. To serve the Presence, he had to convince C of his loyalty and thus argue against the Presence’s interests in Spain. At the same time, there was a truth to the argument he could not ignore, bright like Inez’s soul-spark in the burning city.
If you started with a contradiction, you could prove anything, just like his mother taught him, long ago.
* * *
They did not sit in the drawing room again for a long time. After the war, Mrs Bloom started working for the Labour Ministry and spent all her evenings in her study. Peter’s father won a seat for the Liberal Party and was consumed by politics. Every night, he arrived home late, dishevelled and worn, and stayed up even later writing speeches with manic energy.
One bleak winter afternoon when he was ten years old, Peter returned from school and found his mother sitting in the drawing room. The crystal set he thought was safely hidden amongst his toys under his bed lay in her lap. It was the size of a cigarette box, with a frayed cardboard casing, a Bakelite tuning dial and a tinny speaker that you had to hold up against your ear. Peter had bought it from Neville, an older boy at school.
‘Nanny Schmidt found this while cleaning,’ she said, tapping the set. ‘Tell me, Peter—what do the dead say when you talk to them?’
‘You … you can’t talk to them with the basic kit, you can only listen,’ Peter said. ‘There is a lot of static. Mostly you only get the recent dead. They don’t make much sense.’
‘I see.’
‘I just wanted to understand how it worked.’
‘And do you?’
‘Of course I do, Mother, it’s all in Powell’s Aetheric Mechanics for Boys. The Zöllner crystal has a tiny four-dimensional extent and the spirits can touch it and make it vibrate, and the amplifier translates it into sound, and—’
‘I believe you, Peter. But do you understand how the world works?’
She stood up and leaned on the mantelpiece. She looked tiny, suddenly, birdlike.
‘Of course you don’t, you are too young. Do you remember Doctor Cummings who treated you when you had measles? Well, soon there will be no doctors. If you get sick, you will just pass over.’
‘If you have a Ticket,’ Peter said.
‘That’s right. And soon, having a Ticket will be the only thing anyone cares about. Not studying, not working, not doing the right thing. Nothing real.’
‘But Tickets are real!’ Peter protested. ‘Mr Hinton showed that if you imagine a four-dimensional object, it really exists in the aether. The spirits can see it, or thought-travel to it. That’s how Tickets and ectophone beacons work.’
Mrs Bloom sighed. ‘Peter, you are a very clever boy, so I know you will understand what I am going to say. Your father and I want you to grow up in a world where it matters to be alive. We want you to learn to care about this world, about sunshine, about other people. And that is why I never want to see one of these things in this house again.’
She lifted the crystal set high and smashed it against the mantelpiece. The casing crumpled and glittering fragments of the Zöllner crystal rained on the carpet.
‘Mother!’
She kneeled and started gathering the shards into a coal shovel.
‘You don’t know how lucky you are that Nanny came to me first. Your father has a temper. He would have done something he would have regretted.’