Clouds among the Stars

by Clayton, Victoria

  ‘Well done, Portia – if I may call you that?’ There was a breezy kindness in his voice as he waved the stem of his pipe at her. Portia shrugged and quickly wiped the corner of one eye. ‘This fellow’s been on our books a long time. He’s done time for fraud, embezzlement and robbery. A couple of his chums are still inside for GBH. It’s likely he’s involved with drugs. The vice boys are very interested in him. Anyone else you recognise?’

  ‘Chico.’ She threw the photograph of a man with cheeks like cushions on to the floor. ‘And that’s the man who was lurking outside, ready to make us regret our birthdays.’ She held up a photograph of Dex.

  ‘The birthmark doesn’t look so bad, does it?’ Cordelia held her head on one side, considering.

  ‘I could get him straight away for loitering with intent. But I don’t want to warn off the big boys. Could you find the house again?’

  ‘I don’t think it was in Devon. It didn’t seem far enough away.’

  The inspector pom-pommed a little.

  ‘It was near Oxshott,’ I said. ‘That’s Surrey, according to Ophelia. Oh, here she is.’

  Ophelia came strolling into the drawing room, wearing her new fur-lined coat and a great deal of shimmering eye-shadow that made her eyes appear startlingly large. She looked extraordinarily lovely, even for her. Inspector Foy stood up politely. When she saw him she sighed. ‘I’ll be home late so don’t bolt the back door.’ She turned to go out again.

  ‘Just a minute, Miss Byng.’ The inspector spoke sharply. ‘There’s a man lurking who’s been making serious threats against your family. You’d better not go out.’

  ‘Why don’t you arrest him?’ Ophelia allowed her eyes to glide over the inspector’s face before training them on the fireplace in a bored way. ‘Isn’t that your job?’

  ‘I don’t plan to do that yet.’

  ‘Well, that’s your business.’ Ophelia lifted a brow. ‘Kindly mind it. I’m going out.’

  The inspector moved between her and the door. I admired the way he managed to look bigger suddenly, like an animal when challenged, though he had no fur to fluff up or hackles to raise. ‘Don’t be a fool.’ It was quietly said, but with an undertone of contempt. ‘I don’t want to have to fish your body out of the river in a few hours’ time. It doesn’t take long for a water-logged corpse to swell to four times its usual size. They’re a great deal of trouble to get to the morgue.’

  Ophelia stared at him as insolently as she could, which was plenty and then some, as Americans say. The inspector held her gaze with one equally forceful.

  ‘Life is rapidly becoming a dead bore.’ She took off her coat and let it drop to the floor. She walked slowly from the room and I heard her going upstairs.

  If the inspector felt victorious he had the grace not to show it. ‘If Chico’s clothes weren’t worth anything then there was something in the pockets, or perhaps the lining, that was. Can I have a word with your gardener?’

  ‘I’ll go and get him,’ said Portia.

  ‘I don’t think Loveday’s the easiest person to question,’ I said apologetically, aware as never before that our family must be quite infuriating to the methodical mind. ‘He’s rather – odd.’

  ‘We see all sorts in this job.’ The inspector was helping his pipe to draw by placing his matchbox on the bowl. I was becoming familiar with the habits and mannerisms of pipe-smokers. I was convinced now it was all a distraction so he could control the tempo of any conversation. ‘From genius to madman and everything in between.’ He got out his notebook and a Biro.

  ‘Have you seen the film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?’ asked Cordelia eagerly. ‘It’s about a man who’s both. This scientist invents a potion that makes him grow hideous and sinful and go out killing people. He’s good, you see, but his other self is as wicked as can be. It’s absolutely terrifying – particularly the bit when you see this horrible hairy hand come creeping round the door and she’s brushing her hair in front of the mirror and she sees it and tries to scream only she can’t get any sound out –’ Cordelia paused for breath – ‘but I expect being a policeman, nothing scares you.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it!’ Inspector Foy laughed. ‘The man who tells you nothing frightens him is whistling in the dark. Besides, fear is not necessarily bad. It may guard you from harm. And I suspect that fear of being caught, punished and disgraced keeps many more of us from committing crimes than does the voice of conscience –’

  The arrival of Loveday interrupted this philosophical discourse. He was a small man with a large pointed nose and small eyes, rather ratty-looking, in fact. He had been giving the maze one last trim before the onset of winter so his hair and his clothes were sprinkled with leaves. His eyes gleamed cunningly against his speckled green skin in a way that made me think of those sinister wild men in medieval literature, forces of Nature and all that sort of thing.

  ‘Thank you for coming to see me, Mr Loveday. I’m Chief Inspector Foy of –’

  ‘I know who ye are. I seen it all writ in the clouds, se’en nights ago.’ Though Loveday had been born and bred in East Hackney, he had a strange Loamshire accent that suggested a childhood on a heather-tufted moor or a sheep-bitten crag.

  ‘Oh.’ The inspector smiled, so far undeterred. ‘Well, Mr Loveday, I believe Miss Byng gave you some clothes to burn.’

  ‘Ah ha. Cloth made fro’ devil’s dust, spun into threads on Queen Mab’s wheel.’

  ‘Well – perhaps.’ The inspector blew noisily down the stem of his pipe. ‘Did you do so?’

  ‘No, milord.’

  The inspector forgot to puff and suck, and leaned forward on his chair. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Twas the flames that burned them. I am but a mortal man. I cannot combust.’

  ‘So they are destroyed?’ The inspector could not hide his disappointment.

  ‘Tha’s a deep question, milord. Who knows where things go that are consumed by fire? Mayhap they become smoke-imps that ride the backs o’ will-o’-the-wisps to mislead travellers in the dark. There’s only one can answer that.’

  The inspector frowned, and I sensed that Loveday’s particular brand of whimsy was beginning to pall. ‘Who?’

  ‘’Tis the man in the moon with a dog at his feet and sticks on his back.’

  ‘Right. Well, thank you, Mr Loveday, that’ll be all for the moment.’

  Loveday went back to his maze, leaving a trail of leaves across the carpet. The inspector put away his notebook, humming tunefully and spent some time examining the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. When he spoke again it was to ask me how I thought my father was bearing up in prison. The inspector was very kind and assured me that being on remand was nothing like as bad as serving a sentence. I hoped this meant he thought it unlikely that my father would have to do so. I was afraid to ask him outright.

  He waited with us until a police car delivered a uniformed bobby to stand in our front garden. PC Bird had round, grey, guileless eyes. A manifest sense of duty stiffened the large chin that braced the strap of his helmet. I noticed this at once for the events of the last few days had bread an increased sense of caution and mistrust in things generally, and in men in particular. I watched from the window as Loveday remonstrated angrily with him about treading on the emerging hellebores. This was sheer bloody-mindedness on Loveday’s part, for the journalists had long since crushed every living thing to stalks and mud resembling a small-scale Passchendaele.

  It was about then that things – already, I had thought, about as bad as they could possibly get – got suddenly worse. We were told by Inspector Foy that we should limit our excursions into the outside world. If we really had to go out, it should be during the hours of daylight and only to public places where there were plenty of people about. We had to inform the policeman on guard of our destination and appoint an hour for our return. Having to log in and out was curiously discouraging to enjoyment, and anyway, it was difficult to have a good time when we were jumpy and suspicious of every stranger. We all began to
behave as though we were characters in Wuthering Heights, digging up old scores, seeing slights where there were none, and generally doing a good deal of brooding, sulking and scowling.

  Absolutely the worst thing of all – apart from Pa being in prison, that is – was the disappearance of Mark Antony. He had become quite a favourite with the, by now, very bored reporters. So when, one rainy night, he did not return from his evening session at stool I went out to ask the last stragglers if they had seen him. They told me that the fellow with the birthmark had put in a brief reappearance an hour earlier with a ‘dish of scraps for the kitty’. It had struck them as odd at the time for he had not seemed the sort of person to be fond of animals and, anyway, it was apparent from the size of Mark Antony’s girth that he was already well catered for.

  I spoke urgently to the policeman on duty, not our nice PC Bird but the grumpiest of the three who took it in turns to prevent us being made sorry we had been born. He had noticed the man but assumed he was a crank. When I rang Inspector Foy he was sympathetic but regretted that resources would not permit him to send out a police car to search for Mark Antony.

  I had recently failed my driving test for the fourth time for being insufficiently in control of the vehicle but this did not prevent me from taking out Bron’s car illegally, with only Cordelia as passenger, and combing the streets of Blackheath. After an hour of hopeless searching we were both crying so much that I failed to see a bollard and we had to drive away hastily, leaving confirmatory evidence of the justice of the last examiner’s pithily worded strictures.

  After this, life looked as black as could be and I think it was this that prevented me from seeing what was happening to Maria-Alba. At first I thought her extreme volatility was due to distress at the disappearance of Mark Antony, of whom she was very fond. But when she started seeing the Virgin Mary on the basement stairs and having long hectoring conversations with her about the rights and wrongs of the Catholic Church, I became seriously worried. The others were no help at all in this latest crisis.

  To while away the hours of their incarceration Bron and Ophelia played Honeymoon Bridge in the drawing room for enormous if imaginary stakes. Portia spent all her time in her room, reading things like Swallows and Amazons and The Magic Pudding, chosen, she explained because she could be certain there would be no sex scenes, as she could not bear the idea of even the chastest kiss. Cordelia and I occupied the dining room where we were constructing a cat-sized four-poster bed for Mark Antony to sleep in when he came home. This was to distract Cordelia from her first plan, to keep a candle burning in every window of the house. I was certain this plan would result in him having no home to return to. Secretly I was convinced that he would not come back and whenever I thought of what might have happened to him I felt miserably sick, and scowled and brooded and sulked as much as anyone.

  I was just stitching some gold braid to the delicious blue velvet we had found for Mark Antony’s curtains when I heard screams of rage coming from the basement. I ran down to discover Maria-Alba beating the stair carpet with the soup ladle, so violently that the handle broke and the bowl flew off, hitting me painfully on the shin.

  ‘Diavolo! Diavolo!’ she howled, almost incoherent with angry weeping. When Cordelia appeared at the top of the stairs, her golden locks illuminated by the hall chandelier, Maria-Alba fell on her knees and implored il Spirito Santo to be merciful.

  Reluctantly I rang her doctor. He was out, and by the time he called back, a few hours later, Maria-Alba was her old self again, exhausted but perfectly rational. But the next afternoon, at about the same time, Maria-Alba was on her knees before the washing machine, weeping and begging it to forgive her for strangling Father Alwyn. I tried to reason with her but she was convinced I had come to arrest her. When PC Bird, who was on duty that afternoon and with whom we had become friendly, came to the back door to thank her for the tea and to return his mug, she shrieked with terror. To my surprise he turned pale and put his hands over his ears. Considering what ghastly things police officers are required to witness it struck me that PC Bird was going to have to toughen up. I went to call Maria-Alba’s doctor.

  I had to hang on for ages while the doctor’s receptionist rang round his various haunts. I returned to find PC Bird, glassy-eyed and gibbering, wandering about the kitchen declaring that he could see tiny faces of beautiful girls on the cupboard doors. I assured him they were just door knobs but when he began to clutch his head and moan that he was being blinded by brilliant stars exploding like fireworks, that were something ruddy marvellous but at the same time bloody awful, then I began to put two and two together.

  By the time Inspector Foy and Sergeant Tweeter arrived, one of the reporters had joined us in the kitchen, exclaiming that everything in the world had turned a bright, beautiful yellow and that he was floating in the scent of lemons. This encouraged PC Bird to assure us earnestly that he was a lemon.

  ‘All right. So it’s some kind of hallucinogenic substance.’ Inspector Foy began to pick up bottles at random and sniff the contents. ‘Obviously taken unintentionally.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Four thirty. Who had cups of tea?’

  ‘Everyone except Cordelia and two of the reporters who bring flasks. I had a mug of tea and I feel fine. Oh, I know – of course! It’s the sugar! Maria-Alba always has three spoons. Only two of the reporters take sugar. And poor Dicky, I mean PC Bird – sorry, but everyone calls him that – has four.’

  The inspector dipped his finger in the blue-and-white sugar jar and licked it. ‘Tastes all right to me but I’ll take it for analysis. I wonder, though …’ He got out his pipe while he was thinking but when he lit a match poor Dicky knuckled his eyes and whimpered that a big fiery dragon was coming to eat him up, so the inspector was forced to abandon it. ‘Look after that man,’ he instructed Sergeant Tweeter.

  Dicky began to sob brokenly into Sergeant Tweeter’s tunic, which embarrassed its owner horribly. Meanwhile Maria-Alba was cradling the pieces of the broken ladle in her arms and singing it a lullaby, while the reporter, under the impression that the kitchen table was a large chocolate cake, was trying to eat it with a spoon.

  The inspector sounded just a little rattled. ‘I can’t think with all this noise going on. Get that man into the car and wait for me. Calm him down. Sing him a nursery rhyme or something.’ Sergeant Tweeter’s ruby-coloured face darkened further and he dragged the poor sufferer away. ‘It’s something like LSD. That’s it. Sugar lumps!’ We opened every jar and box in the place until we found a large cache of lump sugar in an old biscuit tin.

  ‘We never usually have sugar in lumps,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Maria-Alba, shush a minute!’ I showed her the tin. ‘Where did you get them?’

  Her expression grew solemn and wondering. ‘Diamanti! Scintillanti! Siamo ricchi!’

  ‘No, not diamonds – unfortunately. Sugar. Zucchero.’

  ‘Sì, sì. Jack! Jack!’

  ‘Jack who? We don’t know anyone called Jack.’

  ‘No, no, no!’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘Jack!’

  Suddenly I got it. ‘I see! Not Jack but giacca! It means jacket. They must have been in Chico’s coat! We’ve been trying desperately to save money. She probably thought it would be wasteful to throw them away.’

  ‘If they’re all impregnated with LSD there must be a thousand pounds worth here,’ said the inspector. ‘Dex and his chums would be keen to recover them. Who else takes sugar in their tea?’

  ‘Not Ophelia – nor Portia – oh dear, Bron!’

  The inspector picked up the biscuit tin. ‘You go and see to your brother. I’ll check on the other reporter. Come along with me,’ he addressed the one who was trying to eat the table. ‘We’ll see you safely home.’

  The reporter looked at the inspector with astonishment. ‘Why, if it isn’t Rita Hayworth! Well, I never!’ he giggled. ‘I’ve always fancied you rotten.’

  I ran up to see how Bron was. He was lying on the sofa in the drawing room, screeching with laughter
.

  ‘I’ve never known him be so stupid.’ Ophelia was sitting at the table, building a house of cards. ‘I can’t get any sense out of him at all. I suppose he must be drunk but I do think he might have shared it round. He’s always so selfish. There!’ The construction collapsed with the last card. ‘I wish I knew what was funny. I’m bored to sobs.’

  ‘He’s on a trip. The sugar lumps in the tea had LSD in them.’

  ‘Really?’ Ophelia was interested for a moment. ‘How long will it last? Where did you get them from?’

  ‘Several hours, I should think. Maria-Alba found them in the pockets of Chico’s clothes.’

  ‘Who’s Chico?’

  ‘Oh dear, I’d forgotten. I promised Portia I wouldn’t tell anyone.’

  ‘All right, don’t bother, then. I’m not really interested in her sordid pick-ups.’ Ophelia looked gloomy. ‘I’d better have a sugar lump, then. I could do with a laugh.’

  ‘The inspector’s taken them away. Anyway, it wouldn’t do you any good. Honestly, I think it’s dangerous. People jump out of windows thinking they can fly, and often they have a really horrible time.’

  ‘I may as well go to bed then, until he’s sobered up.’

  ‘You aren’t supposed to leave people alone when they’re on trips.’

  ‘I shall have a migraine if I have to listen to that noise.’

  Dirk and I sat with Bron while he chortled and cackled and chuckled for hours without a break. I was glad for his sake that my brother seemed to have no inner demons, but whether this was good or bad for the rest of the world, I couldn’t make up my mind. Portia and Cordelia played draughts in Maria-Alba’s room while she slept deeply, having been given a sedative by her doctor. By evening we were all in a state of extreme lassitude. Bron finally stopped laughing and demanded supplies of wine, lemonade and throat lozenges, as he was painfully hoarse.