by Jo Walton
15
After that, things settled into a kind of pattern and went on like that for a few days. I rehearsed all day, then in the evening Devlin met me at the theater, drove me home, cooked me dinner, and I cleaned up after him and after that we went to bed. I kept on moving between the three worlds—Devlin’s world where I was going to blow up tyrants and I loved him but had to be careful not to say so, Antony’s world where I was going to act in a play, and Hamlet’s world where I was going to catch the conscience of a king and die in a duel with Laertes. You could say I was acting with Devlin, but I was also acting with Antony, and certainly when, as I was more and more, I was entirely caught up in Hamlet.
When Malcolm had said I was rooted in shallow soil, like all my sisters, what he’d meant was that he didn’t think I was sane all the way through. Hamlet certainly wasn’t sane all the time, and the more I thought about what he said, and the more I moved between the three worlds, the more right it seemed. Hamlet’s upbringing lacked sisters, and mine had all too many of them, but neither of them had made us like other people.
We were working a lot on the Ophelia scene, which is the part of the play where the balance is most changed by the gender swapping. Antony had Pat standing above me, leaning over me, as he threw our sexual past in my face and I gave my responses desperately, and then starting to circle me, holding the gifts out of my reach. We kept the nunnery line in the end, because we decided it worked if Hamlet said it as if she thought Ophelia was going to have as much luck finding a partner in a nunnery as with her. I kept dreaming about this, but in my dreams, Ophelia was not Pat, but Devlin, who changed into Loy as people do in dreams, and began giving Ophelia’s mad speech, “They say the owl is a baker’s daughter,” and becoming an owl and flying around the theater. All my dreams were terribly strange. Perhaps a trick cyclist would be able to explain it, or perhaps it was because I wasn’t sleeping very much.
The next thing that really happened was on the Thursday night, when Loy and Siddy came to see us.
Devlin must have known they were coming because he’d bought enough lamb. He cooked very precisely, buying all the ingredients he needed and using them all up. If he wanted a handful of parsley, he’d buy a handful in Covent Garden, he didn’t keep any in the cupboard. If he was cooking with wine, which he was that day, he’d use what he needed and we’d drink the rest of the bottle. Everything was always ready at the same time, and it was usually delicious. That night he made lamb stroganoff with a mushroom risotto, and as I was laying the table the door opened.
I hadn’t seen Loy since the morning he’d caught me naked in the kitchen. He’d obviously listened to what Devlin said about sleeping elsewhere. But he’d kept his key, so he just walked in without knocking or anything. I didn’t like that at all. Siddy was behind him. She looked defiant somehow, the way she looked when she used Mamma’s diamonds to carve hammer-and-sickles into every window pane of Carnforth. (Actually, that wasn’t entirely her fault. I mean Pip did start it by using her engagement diamond to draw a swastika on the drawing room window. And Pip was four years older, and should have known better.)
Devlin glanced up as they came in. Loy nodded to him. “No trouble,” he said. “They don’t know they’re born, compared to the other side of the water.”
Siddy blew out smoke and did her eye-sliding thing at me. “How are you doing?”
“I’m very well, no thanks to you,” I said, and laid extra plates and knives and forks on the kitchen table.
I was angry with Siddy. I felt she’d betrayed me into all this. I didn’t blame Devlin, or even Loy; they had acted as they had to act once I was involved. I blamed Siddy for saying it was fate and dragging me in.
Devlin dished up the dinner, and I poured out the white wine that was left in the bottle. It didn’t go far between four.
“This is good,” Loy said when he tasted the meat.
“It’s a sweet little oven. I’ll be halfway sorry to leave this place,” Devlin said.
“Why do you have to leave?” I asked.
“It’ll be burned, after the job,” he said, then saw my face. “Oh, not literally burned, love, burned out. Traceable. They’re sure to find out you were living here. But then I’ll be burned too.” He shrugged.
“You’re burned, Dev?” Loy asked, concerned.
“Mollie Gaston knows me, and half the theater’s seen me picking Vi up after rehearsal. My face and papers wouldn’t stand up to too much investigation. I’ll have to go home and lie low for a while. No harm done. It’s about time I stopped taking so many chances.”
Loy frowned and chewed.
“You actually think there’s going to be something past the job?” I said.
Devlin gave me one of his lovely smiles. “Well, there might be. It all depends how we do it, and how innocent you look.”
“If they’re sure to find this flat and find out about you, then they’ll know I’m not innocent.”
“There’s always the ‘don’t they know who Pappa is’ defense,” Siddy put in. She wasn’t eating, just pushing her food around with her fork. “You are a peer’s daughter after all.”
“Do they hang peer’s daughters, or strike off their heads with an axe like Anne Boleyn?” Loy asked, raising an eyebrow and leaning his elbow on the table.
“How about Irish baronets?” I riposted. I’d asked Mrs. Tring who he was, and she’d told me he was a baronet who had done something brave in the war. “They can line up the three of us on the block, while poor Devlin hangs in lonely solitude.”
“It all depends how we do it,” Devlin said again. “If we make it look as if it was done by the dangerous Jewish communists Normanby’s been ranting about, they may not even bother to examine the people in the theater. But if we have to do it in a way that points to you, then they’re going to find this flat and find out about me, though I’ll be gone. You could be gone too, or you could stand there and look guilty, or you could stand there and look innocent.”
“You could also play ‘my boyfriend set me up,’ ” Siddy said.
“When he said to put this bomb in Hitler’s box, I had no idea it was going to explode!” Loy said in a squeaky falsetto.
“The trouble with that one is that it won’t play very well late on. You need to start coming outraged innocence from the first moment, or it doesn’t work at all,” Devlin said. “Not understanding what you did is not a fallback position from knowing nothing.”
I ate a mouthful of my dinner. It was delicious, tender and flavorful, subtle and sophisticated. I’d have swapped it in a heartbeat for one of Mrs. Tring’s corned beef hashes.
“So how are we going to do it?” Siddy asked. She pushed her plate away almost untouched and lit a cigarette.
“What’s the layout like?” Loy asked, turning to me.
After asking me to find out, the first day, Devlin hadn’t said a word to me about it. “There are two doors, well, three, but the third one’s double-locked and only used for bringing large pieces of scenery in. There’s a doorman on the stage door all the time the theater’s open, and another on the front-of-house when that door’s open, which it usually isn’t, except for performances. All the public come in through the one front-of-house door, which opens onto a lobby with a ticket office, and doors from that into the stalls, stairs straight up to the circle, and smaller stairs going all the way up to the upper circle and the ha’pennies.”
“The ha’pennies?” said Loy, raising an eyebrow.
“The very top circle, the cheapest seats,” Devlin put in. “The seats cost more than a ha’penny now, of course. They also call it that because you’re so high up.”
“To get to the boxes you go up to the upper circle and around. There are four boxes, two on each side. The Royal Box, which is pretty much bound to be where they sit, is on the left of the theater, stage right. It’s bigger and more gilded than the other boxes. There’s nothing underneath it that I can see, other than the side stalls. I think we’d have to put something ri
ght inside the box.”
“That’s not good,” Siddy said. “They’re sure to check it pretty thoroughly.”
“What’s the outside of the box like?” Loy asked. “The front of it?”
“It curves, it’s white, and it has a gilded shield on it,” I said.
“Could you fasten something onto it?”
“I suppose so, I mean maybe someone could, but it would be extremely conspicuous.” I couldn’t picture it at all.
Loy looked at Devlin expectantly. “The trouble is getting the charge right,” Devlin said. “If it’s inside the box, that’s easy. If it’s fastened to the outside, then if we make it big enough to be sure to kill them, then there’s going to be a lot of collateral.”
“It’ll show if it’s on the outside,” I repeated.
“Not if it’s under a flag,” Devlin said. “He never goes far without his flags.”
I thought of the hundreds of swastika flags you always saw in pictures from Germany. “How can you be sure they’ll put a flag there, even so?”
“They’re going to put two, a Union Jack and a swastika, together. It couldn’t be better if we’d planned it,” Loy said.
“Privileged information, Vile, they’re not about to tell you how they know,” Siddy said. “But the truth is there’s a chap in the Foreign Office in Moscow’s pay who’s helping us.”
“Shut up. I know too much already,” I said. I was actually relieved to discover that there was more to the conspiracy than the people I’d already met.
“How easy would it be for you to get up to the front of the box, during a rehearsal?” Loy asked.
“Impossible,” I said. “It’s twelve feet up in the air. The only way would be a ladder. It would be fairly easy for me to go into the box. Antony has us sit in the stalls while we’re waiting to be rehearsed, watching the others. I could quite easily go out of the back of the stalls and up to the circle and through into the box, and I suppose I could lean out and get to the front of it that way, though someone on stage would probably see me.”
“Wouldn’t they see you going up to the box?” Siddy asked. She still looked a little suspicious of me, though the men both seemed quite trusting. They were professionals, but then they didn’t know me as well.
“They might, but if they did I suppose it wouldn’t seem like an impossibly eccentric thing to be doing. I mean we’re supposed to sit quietly and watch, but getting up and wandering about quietly would come under the category of stretching our legs.”
“What they let you do now and what they let you do next week before the performance might well be different things,” Loy said.
“Would they let me in, do you think?” Devlin asked. “They know I’m your boyfriend, and I’m burned anyway. Would they let me come in and sit and watch, and maybe go up to the box?”
“I could ask Antony,” I said, dubiously. “You’d have to be as quiet as a mouse when he’s directing. And he might ask Jackie or someone to take charge of you.”
“Let’s try that tomorrow,” Devlin said. “I’d like to have a look at the place for myself.”
“Wait a moment, how soon can we get it in?” Loy asked. “How far ahead of the time? Because if we could get it in tomorrow, or before they even think we know they’re going to be there, it would be something their security has already noted.”
“Unless their security finds it,” Devlin said.
“It should be either a long time before or immediately before,” Siddy said. She got up and walked around the kitchen, peering into empty cupboards.
“It depends exactly what we use,” Devlin said. He leaned back looking comfortable, in complete contrast to Siddy’s twitchiness and Loy’s alertness. “Most times the simplest thing is to use an alarm-clock timer, and that means you can’t set it more than twelve hours before. But we could have it in place well before that, if Vi can get up to the box on the day and wind the clock.”
I flinched. They all looked at me. “If I were caught winding it, it would be the chop without any tyrant slaying,” I said.
“Would you be nervous, then?” Devlin asked.
“She’d be bound to be,” Siddy said, for once seeming sympathetic. Her pacing had brought her behind my chair; she put a hand on my shoulder.
“Vi’s been very calm so far,” Devlin said.
“Vi’s been half-believing she could get out of it at the last minute, so far,” Siddy said.
I twisted and looked up at her, annoyed that she had guessed. “I’m not!”
“I know how you are when you’re pretending, and how you are when you’re committed. You’re pretending.” All those years of games, of alliances and betrayals, sister against sister, against parents and servants, all of us in that crucible atmosphere where adult supervision was brief and arbitrary, where we were supposed to be educating ourselves we had at least learned each other.
“Not pretending,” I protested, not sure myself as I spoke if I were faking sincerity or meaning it now. “But it all seems so—unreal. Dramatic.” There had been moments it had felt only too real. In the car, freewheeling, and when Devlin came out of the bedroom with the gun. I hadn’t seen that again, but I knew it must be there all the time, hidden somewhere in his easy reach.
“It’s real enough,” Loy said. He turned to Devlin. “I thought you said—”
“Vi will do what she needs to do when she needs to do it,” Devlin said, evenly.
Nobody said anything for a moment. I ate some more of my rapidly cooling dinner. Loy swallowed down the last of his wine. “Enough of this gnat’s piss,” he said, and brought a fifth of whiskey out of his pocket. He poured for himself and Devlin, in the wineglasses. Siddy sat down and pushed her glass forward. Loy hesitated, and poured for her too. I thought how she had said on the phone that the thought of her being drunk was a good joke. Loy looked at me, his head cocked.
“No,” I said.
Siddy cupped the wineglass in both hands and sniffed, then tasted the whiskey with her tongue, catlike. “It’s your beastly Irish stuff,” she said, putting it down on the table.
“There’s others will drink it if you won’t,” Loy said, pouring it into his own glass. Siddy laughed, a little shrilly.
“If it isn’t a clock, if getting into the box on the day to wind it might be difficult, it will have to be a detonator,” Devlin said, as if he were going straight on with what he’d been saying before. He’d finished his dinner and put his knife and fork neatly together bisecting the empty plate. It was my job to wash the dishes, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Siddy and Loy, especially Siddy.
“I think they’d notice a long fuse sizzling away like in a pirate film,” Loy said.
Devlin laughed. “I was thinking of a radio detonator. That would be better than a clock in some ways. For one thing, it’s silent ahead of time, and even the quietest clock ticks and draws attention to itself. Also, it means the timing is more exactly controlled. With a timer there are always possibilities, an early interval, someone leaving to go to the toilet. With a detonator we can pick our moment.”
“You say we,” Loy said. “Who?”
He wanted it to be him, I could see it in the set of his body. Devlin took a slow pull of his whiskey and smiled at Loy. “Vi,” he said.
“Oh no!” I said.
“You’ll be on stage, you’ll be able to see everything in the box, and you’ll have a nice straight line of sight,” Devlin said, as if that settled it.
“But if she doesn’t do it the whole thing will be wasted!” Loy said.
“She’ll do it,” Devlin said.
“I might have a straight line of sight, but I’ll also be trying to act,” I said. “I can’t be acting Hamlet and thinking about lines of sight and whether they’re all in their box! And I can’t be carrying around a great big detonator or whatever it is! Anyway, you don’t know how dark the house looks from the stage. It’s just a dazzle of darkness against the lights. They could all be in the bathroom and I wouldn’t k
now.”
“Do it when you stab Polonius through the arras,” Devlin said. “It’ll be a little box. It can go in your pocket.”
“I won’t have pockets!”
“I’ll make it as small as I can and you’ll easily be able to hide it.”
“Let me do it,” Loy said. “You and Vi get the bomb into the theater, and I’ll sit in the audience and blow the detonator.”
“You can be backup, the way we discussed before,” Devlin said.
Loy frowned, but nodded. He sipped his whiskey.
“What about afterwards?” I asked. “I can’t see me saying my boyfriend told me to squeeze this trigger and I didn’t think it would do any harm. How would I get rid of it?”
“We could put it inside something nobody would look inside, something you could get rid of afterwards,” Devlin said.
“Yorick’s skull,” Siddy said, and gave a horrified giggle.
16
Carmichael spent the days between Tuesday and Thursday trying to get hold of the Greens, Nash, and Bannon, and talking to those of Gilmore’s friends he could find. His picture of the actress didn’t much change, and his idea of her motivation in building a bomb didn’t clarify much either. He discovered that the bomb-making pamphlet was one produced during the war for use by the civilian population after the projected German invasion. Jacobson and the Hampstead police interviewed the Greens’ Jewish connections, without finding any sign of the Greens themselves. Mrs. Channing was pulled in and questioned, but stuck to her story that she wasn’t going to allow Jews in her respectable establishment. She broke down when confronted with the evidence of her husband’s Jewishness, and cursed Jacobson as a traitor, but either did not know or would not reveal the location of the Greens. There wasn’t anything to charge her with, so they had to let her go.
On Thursday, after a flurry of messages and miscommunications, he managed to speak to Bannon’s secretary directly. She established that Bannon was always at rehearsal, but that he would see Carmichael at rehearsal on Friday morning.
