‘God, you look so healthy Patchouli.’
‘And I’ve cleaned up the house for you …’
They turned to see the other passenger extricating himself from the taxi. But he was not what Patchouli had imagined.
He was holding some kind of bundle, which slowed his exit from the taxi considerably. Patchouli saw his hair was the fake colour of the setting sun. The tall thin man unfolded himself and stood before her, as if seeking her approval. He sheltered an oval ukulele as if it were a baby
He was wearing what the fashion pages would call a Bohemian Outfit. A red and yellow embroidered vest, soft white pirate shirt heavily gathered at the wrist and shoulder, tight harlequin pants and high leather boots.
They eyed each other, Emma hoping for the best (sister and new lover was sometimes awkward). No nerves for him, however, and before Patchouli could object he had imprisoned her limp hand between his fists so tightly that the sharp edge of his heavy gold ring cut into her.
‘Hi … Chip,’ said Patchouli, trying to release her hand.
She felt a sharp kick at her ankle.
‘Not Chip,’ Emma hissed. ‘This is Rodolphe’.
‘Hi … Rodolphe,’ Patchouli faltered.
With another effort she broke free from his grip, and they immediately turned away from each other. Towards Emma.
So that she did not know there was any discord between them.
A samovar in the sky
Whenever she lit the incense in her reclaimed study, Cicely had a timidly growing sense that Odette was trying to contact her.
That Zac was preventing her.
Compulsively, she bombarded Odette with new emails, but they still bounced back. So, in desperation, her mind returned to that failed attempt to explore Miss Marple’s interrupted advice.
Listen to the silence.
She should face that fear, that ambiguity, again, if it was the only way to find Odette.
Others threw dice.
Odette threw the Tarot.
Even Calvino had been fascinated by its ability to reveal character and destiny. So seeking advice from her reticent dream visitor was just as logical. For why had Miss Marple appeared to her in the first place, if not to help her? Drawn from the spirit world by her old attachment to solving a mystery that no one else could. And even rational men like Plato and Aristotle believed in the shadow world. Who was she to doubt such illustrious company?
She would attempt to recreate the circumstances that had been conducive to Miss Marple’s earlier visits.
So, in bed that night, in the spirit of scientific experiment, Cicely placed the newly crocheted framed photo of Agatha Christie next to Milan, and telling herself that she was getting very fond of them, she took her pills. Then she picked up her crazy crochet and started nervously inserting the hook into the same lilac wool that she had been using the last time Miss Marple had descended to the earthly train carriage. The same colour as the lady detective’s finely knitted suit.
Again she felt the vulnerability that she had felt before, when she had closed her eyes, trying to discover what the silence might tell her.
But Odette needed her.
So, round and round she went with her rows of treble, popcorn and picot, her hook diving in and out of the lilac wool. Then she started whispering Miss Marple’s name. Over and over.
An incantation?
A spell?
But most of all, an invitation.
Her eyelids became heavy, the crochet fell from her hands. Once more she heard the humming sound, like a bumblebee, a hypnotic sound that made her drowsily recall hot summer days, the intoxicating scent of a lilac tree. Then the nostalgic taste of lemon drops filled her mouth, flute and harp returned, and she felt a wave of heat as a long, vibrating bell sounded through her, stronger and deeper until …
It became that familiar chug-a-chug.
Cicely was sitting at an elegant table set with white linen, in the velvet upholstered dining car of the train. Miss Marple, more solid than ever, sat opposite her. She refreshed her own cup of dark brew, and poured for Cicely from the huge Russian samovar.
‘Strong tea essence, diluted with hot water. Flavour it with honey, sugar, even lemon drops,’ she said, indicating the bowls on the table. Cicely added a lemon drop. Foreign yet familiar taste …
‘Even dear Agatha, to whom I owe my life after all, did not realise that I owe all my inspiration to that silence. After all, that is its function.’
Miss Marple produced her knitting from her voluminous bag and Cicely wished she had brought her own chaotic crochet with her. Perhaps Miss Marple could have explained its function to her.
‘She needed me. I was the real star. But she insisted that I remain in the background in the books. Jealous. That’s why no one knew about my exotic adventures, my scandalous secret.’
She raised her eyebrows, drew herself up, preparing herself for a barrage of curious questions. Cicely had more than an inkling of why Agatha Christie might have lost patience with her self-important friend, but she would have to humour her.
‘Tell me about it …’
Miss Marple looked delighted, and plunged in.
‘You remember she wrote about my nephew, who paid for my holidays abroad in the sun from time to time?’
‘Yes, Raymond West. Your poet nephew, who wrote poems without capital letters.’
‘Well, actually he was my son.’
She paused, but this revelation had clearly fallen flat.
‘My dear gel, I wasn’t married.’
Cicely nodded understandingly.
‘These things are not so shocking in your day. But back then …’
‘Who was his father?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said, looking slyly at Cicely to gauge her reaction this time. Nothing. These modern girls were really too much.
‘You see, I had many grandes amours. I knew about the world. I followed up my intuitions, gleaned from the silence, but I got out there in the world. I put on my jodhpurs – can you imagine me, doddery old Miss Marple, in jodhpurs? Agatha wouldn’t write about that, didn’t want to admit that I was just as capable as she was. She never wore jodhpurs, even at the Mesopotamian digs, always keen to wear a dress and show off those thick ankles of hers. Have you seen those photos?
‘If you look in the background, among all the Arab workers covered in the dust of the actual excavation work, you will see me. I ate with the men, went into the tombs where women were forbidden. They thought I was an effete foreign man with no beard.
‘So it was easy for me, back in the English villages, to climb over fences and spy through doorways, in my disguise of jodhpurs and other men’s clothes.
Sometimes I even dressed like old Hercule Poirot – those days when people noticed how particularly black his hair was? How very waxed his moustache? Me!
‘But I am rambling on. So few temptations to descend from … up there,’ she muttered, with a vague wave of her gloved hand. ‘But I still get excited about my glory days …’
‘Where is she?’ Cicely interrupted sharply, unable to restrain herself any longer.
Miss Marple looked offended.
‘Over there,’ she said, glancing over the aisle to the other side of the carriage, where a sole table was set for one. But when Cicely looked, the carriage was still empty.
‘Can’t you hear her calling you?’
‘Where?’
Miss Marple frowned, and the lamp at the table blinked off at the same time, leaving only the dim overhead globe.
‘Must I spell it out for you? You have at last managed to do as I instructed and listen to the silence, but your mind is too full of static …’
‘I can’t do it …’
Miss Marple’s frown deepened.
‘Then how on earth do you think we are here talking otherwise?’ she snapped.
Again, Cicely found herself sympathising with Agatha, rather than with her pompous creation.
‘Please help me. She’s
in danger, I feel it. I need your method.’
Unable to hide a satisfied smile, Miss Marple relented.
‘Very well. You must listen to the silence again. But go further. Until you hear the silence between your own breaths. Only then, out of all your suspects, will you choose correctly. That is the Marple Method. But …’
For the first time in her flow of words, Miss Marple hesitated, and they took a sip of the sweet tea in unison.
‘But there is another kind of murder, as well as murder of the body that your modern TV shows explore with such grisly detail.’
‘Another kind of murder?’
‘As if the mystery of life can be revealed just by dissecting a body,’ she sniffed.
Miss Marple peered more closely at Cicely, as if assessing her, finding her worthy of what she was about to say.
‘The murder of the heart, my dear,’ she sighed, leaning forward and lightly touching Cicely’s arm.
‘Time is running out for your friend.’
The train started to chug more slowly. Miss Marple dabbed at her lips, stood up, easing on her lilac gloves.
‘By the way, my dear, have you ever wondered why you have constipation?’ she asked matter-of-factly. ‘I found senna leaf tea very good. You do know that it is those painkilling drugs you take that cause it? It poisons the system, constipation. Next you will be choking on your own reflux because your bowels and stomach are too full. Time to swear off my dear! This is my stop. St Mary Mead. Put on your jodhpurs, my dear gel! And don’t look out the window …’
Cicely hurriedly stood up to get a glimpse of this famous village, but, catching sight of the rushing view outside the train window, she fell back in her seat, overcome with a sickening dizziness.
Not trees or houses rushing past the train, but whirling stars and planets.
Cicely woke with a burning in her throat.
Reflux?
She swallowed carefully, then ran her hand over her throat, over her belly. The thought of a solution to this bloating she had been trying to ignore gave her a sudden surge of energy. She would have to throw out the tablets, put up with sleeping less cosily, but it would be worth it to be rid of the threat of choking.
She looked at her bedside clock. It was three in the morning. Whatever the murder of the heart might be, she knew that she would have to hurry if she was to find Odette in time.
There was a yellow moon shining into the window and she found herself drawn to it. Unable to sleep, she dressed in a trance and was soon sitting outside once more on the low brick fence, gazing up at the huge moon that seemed suspended over Miss Ball’s place.
In only two weeks, as soon as the papers were settled, she would be leaving the flat and moving into the tiny residence on top of the shop. She had asked the agent why Miss Ball had left.
‘You mean Emma?’
‘Really? Is that her first name?’
He faced accusations of dishonesty every day in his profession, but this had caught him off guard. Why should this straightforward information about a first name so astonish his new tenant?
‘She’s gone …’
‘On a trip?’
‘To …’
‘Europe?’
He bristled.
‘If you already know so much, why ask?’
She looked over at the moonlit shop, then up at the moon which seemed too close, wondering about her future. She searched the skies for distant stars, invisible planets and constellations. She could name The Southern Cross, but that was all. She had always found the constellations very hard to identify. The star patterns didn’t really resemble bulls, scorpions and the rest, no matter what Odette said.
She must have a star chart somewhere. She wanted to become familiar with names that she had known previously only from science fiction.
Sirius. Andromeda.
The black skies no longer frightened her.
Dr Singh’s blind spot
He did not shine even a cursory light into her eyes, but seemed more interested in jotting down her words in his tiny script.
‘Noticed any life changes?’
She told him everything, as if he were a psychologist.
How, having narrowly escaped taking up citizenship in that parallel universe where invalids dwelt, she had found that all her minor fears, like her fear of spiders, were fading. Only well warranted ones remained.
She gave him – encouraged to talk too much, she was to think afterwards – an account of trying to track down Odette. Even the visions in the night of Miss Marple.
But it was when she went on to speak of her new fondness for star-gazing that the usually reserved Dr Singh amazed her by giving her hand the tiniest squeeze.
After she had left, Dr Singh did a little two-step of triumph.
This was the last successful data outcome he needed to make his sample of patients statistically viable.
He would have loved to tell Cicely, as she walked away believing that he had performed a simple, physical correction on her eyes, that she was now far-sighted. Psychologically. She would now be able to see clearly, find anything, anyone, she wanted in life, all as a result of Dr Singh’s highly particular, and slightly illegal, specially imported lenses, manipulated with a skill which few possessed.
For he knew how to listen to the silence between heartbeats as his hands moved delicately over a patient. How to move only after he had heard the beat of his heart, so that the pulse in his finger tips would not cause a disastrous shudder.
His ideal world would be full of happy citizens, like himself – precise, helpful, clean and organised. But above all – far-sighted. This was his contribution to a more tolerable world, at least until 2123 AD, and the ushering in of the kinder, sonic age.
He entered the details of her changes into his innovative research paper on the effects of short-sightedness and farsightedness on the brain.
In the conclusions that he would soon publish, he would reveal how easy it was to cure such patients as Cicely of their fearfulness – in her case of spiders, of the dark, of life itself, it seemed to him – with his revolutionary operation.
Dr Singh was so confident of success that he was already starting his next project. His digital images of the human eye and our solar system were revealing a fascinating signature of correspondences – the microcosm of the round eyeball with its rings of pupil and iris, the parallel form of the sun and the planets. His hypothesis was that other galaxies would have inhabitants whose eyes were formed according to their own galaxies. They would see, in other words, the shape of themselves out there in space. He would need an assistant skilled in the unlikely medium of three-dimensional crochet to assist in this mathematical experiment. Yes, along with Alexander, he would need an experienced needlewoman who could crochet a three-dimensional model of hyperbolic space. That hat covered in spiral flowers was a sign. The universe had sent her.
He would invite Cicely out for a night of star-gazing in their hill-top turret. He would have to be careful, however, about Alexander.
For Dr Singh had recently suffered an unexpected lesson in humility. He, of the perfect vision, had to admit that even he had evidenced a small blindspot. He had believed that Alexander was his perfect mate in every way.
But he had discovered – too late, for he was already hopelessly in love with him – that, in fact, Alexander was given to certain disturbing sexual fantasies.
Including a persistent one about a ménage à trois.
With a woman.
But Dr Singh would have to risk the introduction anyway. He needed Cicely’s skills if this next project was to succeed.
And surely, he reassured himself, she hardly looked the type of woman to be involved in any sort of untoward sexual behaviour.
Killer hand
The low morning sun shimmered against the walls of Golden Tower.
Hunched over the screen, Cicely was now desperate to find any clue she may have overlooked. She re-examined the emails about stalking. The axe-murde
rer. The secret. The whackos.
But Zac still loomed.
The previous night, Miss Marple had appeared so close that she had even smelt her lilac scent. But where once Cicely had hoped to solve the mystery by using the Christie method of selecting five suspects, Miss Marple had warned her that it was all a fraud. So Cicely had strained her ears to hear Miss Marple again, before coming here this morning, to no avail.
Volition, it seemed, was not enough.
And now, to avoid drowning in a hundred sketchily drawn calling cards of love – for too many suspects were worse than none – she would have to construct a Christie shortlist. Miss Marple had said that this was not the path to follow, but, after all, she clearly resented her creator. Had motive.
She sighed, sipping cold tea to revive her flagging spirits. Perhaps she was just going crazy. Imaginary friends and all … re-reading Sebastian’s emails in an erotic daydream, she could see why Odette might call him her King of Cups, the romantic fulfiller of desire.
That was it.
She sat up straight, and in a flurry scrolled through the emails to see how many men Odette had named after Tarot cards. Knowing how important the Tarot was to Odette these, surely, would have been her favourites. The most likely …
As she trawled, she wondered again what the difference was between stalking and protecting. Stalkers usually had no life of their own. She had … her books. Her knitting and crochet. Her dream visitors at night …
But she had a new theory, and kept sifting, reading every word systematically. Making careful lists in her little blue notebook.
Just as Calvino’s pilgrims had chosen cards that recounted their pasts, could Odette’s chosen cards reveal her present?
It had worked.
That is, if there were no joker in this particular game.
In her little blue notebook she had assembled the fabled killer hand of cards. It was certainly all trumps.
Sebastian, of course, the King of Cups, drinking his decent red while writing his murder story. This was the highest rank, and the preferred suit, no doubt, but there were four others.
Madame Bovary's Haberdashery Page 15
