David Mitchell - Slade House

back to Padders 10 home by 11 i hope xxxF

SEND. I don’t remember eating dinner so I suppose I must have missed it. I go downstairs to the bar to see if there’s anything to eat. It looks like a stage set, and rather a cash-strapped one at that. With the departure of the blind chap and his dog, the population of The Fox and Hounds has dwindled to four. Up on the plasma screen a red team are playing a blue team, but I don’t know who is who. Avril knows that MUN means Manchester United and ARS stands for Arsenal, but I’m hopeless. It’s a corner, and the landlady waits a few seconds to watch the outcome — no goal — before dragging herself over to my end of the bar. I ask if she sells snacks and she lets a long pause elapse to illustrate her contempt for metropolitan media dykes. “Cheese and onion crisps or ready salted; dry roasted peanuts, or honey-glazed cashews. That’s it.”

Wow, what an embarrassment of riches. ‘Two bags of cashews and a diet tonic water, with lemon. Please.”

“We only sell real tonic water. Not diet.”

“Looks like I’ll have a real tonic water, then. Thank you so much.”

The landlady plucks the nuts from a rack, takes the tonic water from a shelf below, flips off the cap, retrieves a glass, drops in a limp segment of lemon, and pecks at the till. “Three pounds forty-five.” I hand over the right money. She asks, “What paper d’you write for, then?”

“ Spyglass . It’s a magazine.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s bigger in the States than it is here.”

“Like Private Eye, is it? One o’ those sarcastic papers?”

“No, not really,” I say. “It’s less satirical.”

“So why do Americans give two hoots about six students who vanished in a small English city nine years ago?”

“I’m not sure if they do. My editor will decide that. But I’m curious.” I consider telling the landlady about Sally, but I don’t. “Being curious is my job.”

“It’s ancient history, all that stuff is.” She sighs, glances at the gents, and leans close enough for me to see the evidence of an exhausting life beneath her coating of make-up. “You’re not doing Fred any favours by egging him on. He blames himself for Alan’s vanishing, which really is mental. He spent six years at Dawkins Hospital, locked up with the Teletubbies — you do know that, yeah?”

“Mr. Pink’s been open about his medical history, yes.”

The landlady’s jaw chews phantom gum. “Meanwhile he fancies himself as this Inspector Morse who’ll solve the big mystery and maybe find Alan and the X-Files Six alive somewhere, which is double-mental. ‘X-Files Six’: as if it’s all some stupid TV show! But it’s not. It’s serious. It’s pain. It’s best left buried. Fred’s wife left him. A saint of a woman was Jackie, but when Fred buggered off to Algeria she just couldn’t take it any more and moved back to the Isle of Man. Now all Fred’s got is his theories about his Illuminati, the Holy Grail, Atlantis and whateverthebollocks it is this week. And you,” she folds her meaty arms as Fred Pink emerges from the gents in the corner, “ you, you’re feeding all that. Pouring fuel on the flames. Hey, Fred.” She straightens up and smiles at Fred Pink like nothing’s wrong. “Your new best friend here was telling me how low some media scum-suckers’ll stoop just to get a story. Throw ’em to the bloody piranhas, I say. Let like eat like. Fancy a brandy this time, eh?”

“Sorry about Maggs,” says Fred Pink, back in the upstairs room. “I shouldn’t’ve told her you’re a journalist. The locals’d rather forget the X-Files Six. Too Amityville Horror, too Bermuda Triangle. Bad for house prices.”

I munch a handful of honey-glazed cashews. God, they’re good. “ ‘Scum-sucker’ is one of the sweeter names I’ve had, believe me. So, Mr. Pink: we left Doctor Cantillon and the Grayer Twins in Bayswater after their years of travel in foreign parts.”

Fred Pink sloshes his brandy around the glass. “Yes, it’s now 1925. Norah and Jonah are twenty-six, and ‘Uncle Léon’ is fifty. For eleven years he’s been their fixer, guardian, PR man, accountant. Now he wants to be their biographer, or more — their John the Baptist. You see, he’d decided the time’d come to go public and persuade the world that spiritualism and science could be respectably married. Money and a comfortable life wasn’t enough. His new ambition was to establish a new discipline — psychosoterica — with none other than Doctor Léon Cantillon as its Darwin, its Freud, its Newton. Which put him at serious odds with Norah and Jonah. See, they’d drunk their fill of the big bad world. What they wanted was to hide away and see which dead ends down the Shaded Way might not be dead ends after all. So they told Cantillon no, there’d be no biography, no great unveiling, and no more public engagements. Obedient Uncle Léon told the twins, ‘I hear and obey.’ But Obedient Uncle Léon was lying through his teeth. He spent most of the next two years writing his exposé, The Great Unveiling. It wasn’t the usual re-hash of Europe’s Top Ten Witches and Wizards, like most books about the Occult were in those days. Leon Cantillon’s book had three sections. Part one was the first ever written history of the Shaded Way, from its fifth- century beginnings to the twentieth. Part two was a biography of the Grayer Twins from their Swaffham Manor days to their return to England. Part three was a manifesto for an International Psychoterica Society to be set up in London, with Doctor Guess Who as its lifetime president.”

My phone buzzes in my bag. Avril’s reply to my reply, I bet. It’s 8:45, it’ll wait. “Why did Cantillon go against the twins’ wishes?”

“Can’t be sure. I suspect he reckoned that once the cat was out of the bag, once Uncle Tom Cobley and all were clamouring for the Age of Psychosoterica to begin, the Grayers’d see how right he was, and sign up. If that was Cantillon’s thinking,” Fred Pink ruffles more dandruff out of his hair, “he was mistaken. Tragically mistaken. On March twenty-ninth, 1927, the printers delivered ten boxes of The Great Unveiling . On March thirtieth, he mailed about six dozen copies to various theosophists, philosophers, occultists and patrons, in England and overseas. My copy of the book, which I keep in a safety deposit box in a place I tell nobody, is one of those six dozen. In the early hours of the next morning — March thirty-first — a conveniently positioned bobby was walking down Queen’s Gardens. He saw Léon Cantillon lift his fifth-floor sash window and perch on the sill, naked as a baby, shout out these words: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’—John Milton, if you’re curious — and jump out. He might’ve survived, but he landed on a row of pointy railings. You can picture the scene. Quite the nine-day wonder, it was. The coroner recorded a verdict of death by insanity and the Westminster Gazette covered the funeral. Jonah read the eulogy, while Norah, ‘the very model of demure grief in an ankle-length dress of black crepe’—yes, I memorized it — sobbed for her guardian. Jonah told the reporter that he prayed that Doctor Cantillon’s ‘bizarre delusions’ would show how dangerous it is to meddle in the Black Arts. Dean Grimond would’ve been proud. Weeks passed, the tragedy of the ex-Foreign Legion doctor became old news, and, copy by copy, the large stock of unposed Great Unveiling s burned in the Grayers’ fireplace in Queen’s Gardens.”

I’m bothered by a phrase: “ ‘A conveniently positioned bobby’?”

Fred Pink sips his brandy. “Never cross a qualified suasioner.”