David Mitchell - Slade House

“Well, events took place at Swaffham Manor what suggested Norah and Jonah Grayer combined these two skills. To call a spade a spade: telepathy.” Fred Pink gives me a probing look. “Do we have a problem with telepathy, Miss Timms?”

My nutter-detector glows amber. “I am rather a fan of proof, Mr. Pink.”

“So am I. So am I. Albertina Chetwynd-Pitt — Her Ladyship — published a memoir in 1925 called Rivers Old and Lost . It’s all about what I’m telling you now: the twins, their upbringing, and everything. In it, she says how one January evening in 1910, her, her daughters and Norah Grayer were playing cribbage in the drawing room at Swaffham. All of a sudden, Norah cried out, dropped her cards, and said that Arthur, the eldest Chetwynd-Pitt boy, had fallen off his horse at Poole’s Brook — over a mile away from the manor — and couldn’t move. He needed a stretcher and the doctor, right away. Lady Albertina was shocked that Norah’d tell such a baseless fib. But Norah begged her to send help, ’cause, and I quote, ‘Jonah is with him and Jonah is telling me.’ By now the Chetwynd-Pitt daughters were properly spooked too, so against her better judgment, Lady Albertina sent a servant running off — who found the scene as Norah’d described it, in every detail.”

I reach for my tomato juice but it still looks like roadkill and I change my mind. “It all makes a good anecdote, but how is it ‘proof’?”

Fred Pink takes out his Benson and Hedges, remembers the smoking ban and puts the cigarettes back, tetchily. “The day after, the twins were interviewed by Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt with their friend Dean Grimond of Ely Cathedral. Dean Grimond was a no-nonsense hardboiled Scot who’d been an army chaplain in the Crimea and had none of the airy-fairy about him. He ordered the twins to tell him how Norah’d known about Arthur coming off his horse at Poole’s Brook. So the twins confessed they’d been able to ‘telegram’ thoughts for years, but kept it a secret ’cause they’d noticed it scared people and drew attention to them. Like you, Miss Timms, Lord Chetwynd-Pitt wanted proof, so he devised this experiment. He gave Norah a pencil and paper, led Jonah to the billiards room in Swaffham Manor, and read out a random line from The Jungle Book . His Lordship asked Jonah to ‘telegram’ the line to Norah, back in the library. Jonah shut his eyes for a few seconds, then said the job was done. Then they both went back to the library to find that Norah had written down the very same line from Kipling.” Fred Pink looks at me like the matter is now beyond dispute.

I say, “Remarkable,” but think, If all this actually took place.

“Next, Dean Grimond got Norah to ‘telegram’ a verse from St. John’s Gospel.” Fred Pink shuts his eyes: “ ‘He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.’ That one. Back in the billiards room Jonah wrote it down, word-perfect. Lastly, Lady Albertina wanted a go. She had Jonah ‘telegram’ a verse from a nursery rhyme in German. Norah wrote it word-perfect, though with a few spelling mistakes, ’cause neither of the twins knew a word of German, see.” Fred Pink slurps his bitter and dabs his cracked lips with the frayed sleeve of his jacket. “Dean Grimond told the twins that some of God’s gifts are better left unexamined, and that they shouldn’t refer to their ‘telegrams’ in public, ‘lest excitable persons be tempted down wrong paths.’ Norah and Jonah promised to obey. Dean Grimond gave them both a humbug and went back to his cathedral. Job done. Nice work if you can get it.”

A TV roar of disappointment wafts up the stairs. Checking my Sony’s still working, I ask, “How do you know Lady Albertina is a trustworthy source?”

Fred Pink rubs his scalp and dandruff falls. “Same way you judge your sources, I imagine, Miss Timms. By developing a nose for a lie, an ear for a fib, and an eye for a tell. Right? Lady Chetwynd-Pitt’s book is detailed where a fraud would gloss over stuff, and rough where a liar would polish it better. Anyway, where’s her motive for lying? Not money — she was loaded. Not attention — she only had a hundred copies of her book printed, and by the time it was published, she was a virtual recluse, like.”

I swivel my gold ring from Avril around my finger. “In journalism, we try to cross-corroborate an informant’s more contentious claims.”

“ ‘Cross-corroborate.’ Good word. I’ll store that away. It’s time you met Doctor Léon Cantillon.” Fred Pink unfastens his satchel, takes out a dog-eared folder and produces a laser-scanned copy of an old hand-tinted photograph of a man of about forty. He’s wearing a French Foreign Legion uniform, a raffish smile, a couple of medals and, around his neck, a stethoscope. The caption underneath reads: Le docteur L. Cantillon, Légion étrangère, Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, Croix de guerre . “Léon Cantillon. Colorful figure, you might say. Born in 1874 in Dublin in an old French Huguenot family; grew up speaking French; studied Medicine at Trinity College, but he had a hot-headed streak and had to leave Ireland after shooting the son of a Member of Parliament in a duel, no less. Bang. Straight between the eyes, dead before he hit the deck. Cantillon joined the French Foreign Legion a few months later — we’re up to 1895 now — and served as a medic in the Mandingo War on the Ivory Coast, and later in the South-Oranese Campaign. Dirty little wars in the carve-up of Africa, these — even the French’ve forgotten ’em nowadays. Cantillon had a knack for languages, too. When he wasn’t doctoring and soldiering he was learning Arabic, and claims he spoke it fluently by 1905, when he got himself a plum job at the Legion’s hospital in Algiers. It was in Algiers that his interest in the occult took root, by his own account. He mingled with Prussian theosophists, Armenian spiritualists, Ibadi Muslim shamans, Hassidic Kabbalists, and one mystic in particular who lived south of Algiers in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. He’s known as the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif, and by and by he’d be playing a major role in the Grayers’ lives.”

This is all sounding a bit Da Vinci Code for me. “What’s your source for all of this, Mr. Pink? Lady Albertina’s book?”

“No. Léon Cantillon wrote his memoir too, see. The Great Unveiling. My own copy’s one of just ten known survivors, and it’s this what cross-corroborates Lady Albertina’s story, so to speak.” He turns away to cough a smoker’s cough into the crook of his elbow. It lasts a good while. “So. Doctor Cantillon met Lord Chetwynd-Pitt in early summer of 1915 at the house of mutual friends in London. After a few schooners of port, His Lordship began telling the soldier — doctor about Lady Albertina’s ‘chronic hysteria.’ The poor woman was in a terrible state by this point. In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt sons’d been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the Somme. All three. Imagine that: on Monday, you’ve got three sons, by Friday you’ve got none. Lady Albertina had just, y’know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally. Her husband hoped that Léon Cantillon, as a sympathetic spiritualist and a man of medicine, might be the man to help where everyone else’d failed, like. To bring her back from the brink.”

Fred Pink’s framed by the window. Dusk’s falling. “So the Chetwynd-Pitts had been dabbling in spiritualism since the ‘telegram incident,’ had they?”

“They had, Miss Timms, they had. The craze for séances was in full swing by this point, and the likes of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle no less was saying it was founded in science. To be sure, there was no shortage of shysters all too happy to milk the craze, but thanks to Norah and Jonah, the Chetwynd-Pitts knew that some psychic phenomena, at least, was genuine. As a matter of fact, Lord Chetwynd-Pitt’d brought several mediums up to Ely to channel the spirits of their boys, but none of them’d proved themselves to be the real McCoy, and with each dashed hope Lady Albertina’s sanity took a fresh battering.”