Alan Bradley - I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

Aunt Felicity drew in a long breath—the sort of breath the queen must draw in before stepping out with the king onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace to face the newsreel cameras and the multitudes.

“Flavia” she said, “you must make me a promise.”

“Anything,” I said, surprised to find that I didn’t have to put on a solemn face. It was already there.

“What I am about to tell you must not be repeated. Not ever. Not even to me.”

“I promise,” I said, crossing my heart.

She gripped my upper arm, hard enough to make me wince. I don’t think she realized she was doing it.

“You must understand that there were those of us who, during the war, were asked to take on tasks of very great importance …”

“Yes?” I asked eagerly.

“I cannot tell you, without breaching the Official Secrets Act, what those tasks entailed and you mustn’t ask me. In later years, one finds oneself running into old colleagues with monotonous regularity, whom one is bound, by law, not to recognize.”

“But Ted called out to you.”

“A shocking blunder on his part. I shall tear a strip off him when we’re alone.”

“And Phyllis Wyvern?”

Aunt Felicity sighed.

“Philly,” she said quietly, “was one of us.”

“One of—you?”

“You must never mention that,” she said, squeezing my arm even harder, “until the day you die. If you do, I shall have to come for you in the night with a carving knife.”

“But, Aunt Felicity, I promised !”

“Yes, so you did,” she admitted, releasing her grip.

“Phyllis Wyvern was one of you,” I prompted.

“And a most valuable one,” she said. “Her fame opened doors that are barred to mere mortals. She was made to play a role that was more deadly than any she had undertaken on stage or screen.”

“How do you know that?” I couldn’t keep from asking.

“I’m sorry, dear. I can’t tell you that.”

“Was Val Lampman one of you, as well? He might well have been, since he was Phyllis Wyvern’s brother.”

Something rose up in Aunt Felicity’s throat, and I thought for a moment that she was going to toss her tea cakes, but what came out was more like the braying of a donkey. Her shoulders shook and her bosoms trembled.

My dear old trout of an aunt was laughing!

“Her brother? Phyllis Wyvern’s brother? Wherever did you get that idea?”

“Her driving license. Lampman.”

“Oh, I see,” Aunt Felicity said, mopping at her eyes with the border of the afghan.

“Phyllis Wyvern’s brother?” she said again, as if repeating the punch line of a joke to another person in the room. “Far from it, dear girl—very far from it indeed. She’s his mother.”

My mouth fell open like a corpse who’s just had her jaw bandage removed.

“His mother ? Phyllis Wyvern is Val Lampman’s mother?”

“Surprising, isn’t it. She gave birth to him when she was very young, no more than seventeen, I believe, and Val’s age, to all outer appearances, is rather … indeterminate.”

So that was it! Val Lampman was the “Waldemar” of Who’s Who , but he was Phyllis Wyvern’s son, and not her brother, as I had assumed. I had misinterpreted the entry in Who’s Who . I wanted to blush but I was too excited.

“She’d already had a daughter a year earlier,” Aunt Felicity went on. “Veronica, I believe the girl was called. Poor child. There was some great tragedy there that was never spoken of.

“Phyllida—or Phyllis, as she liked to call herself—had been married for a time to the late and not awfully-much-lamented Lorenzo, who, in spite of his blue blood and the great difference in their ages, was still active as a traveler in wines, or wigs, I’ve forgotten which.”

“Wigs, probably,” I said, “because she was wearing one.”

Aunt Felicity shot me a disgusted look, as if I’d blabbed a secret.

“It fell off,” I explained. “I was trying to keep the shroud the police had thrown over her from messing her hair.”

There fell one of those silences so thick you could have stood a spoon up in it.

“Poor Philly,” Aunt Felicity said, at last. “She suffered terribly at the hands of the Axis agents. Chemicals, I believe. Her hair was her crowning glory. They might as well have chopped out her heart.”

Chemicals? Torture?

Dogger had been tortured, too, in the Far East. It seemed bizarre, the way in which these old atrocities seemed to be coming home to roost in peaceful Bishop’s Lacey.

“Does Father know about these things? About Phyllida Lampman, I mean?”

“She had been directed by Malinovsky in a number of foreign films,” Aunt Felicity went on, staring at her own hands as if they were those of a stranger. “Most notably, of course, in Anna of the Steppes , a role which led, indirectly, to her assignment, and to her later downfall. Although she escaped with her life, she underwent a total breakdown, during which she developed an irrational horror of all Eastern Europeans.”

“Which is why she insisted on always working with the same British ciné crew,” I said.

“Precisely.”

We had seen the re-released version of Anna of the Steppes at the cinema in Hinley, where it was shown—with English subtitles—as Dressed for Dying .

Although it had seemed at first to be just another of those endless yawners about the Russian Revolution, I soon found myself swept into the story, my eyes as dazzled by the stark black-and-white images as if I had stared too long at the sun.

In fact, the unforgettable scene in which Phyllis Wyvern, as Anna, having put on her grandmother’s Russian dress and heavy boots, carefully combed her hair, and applied the scent and makeup brought to her from Paris by her lover, Marcel, lies down with her year-old baby in front of the army of snarling tractors, was still causing me occasional and inexplicable nightmares.

“Miss Wyvern must have been a very brave woman,” I said.

Aunt Felicity returned to the window and looked out as if World War Two were still raging somewhere in the fields to the east of Buckshaw.

“She was more than brave,” she said. “She was British.”

I let the silence linger until it was hanging by a thread. And then I said what I had come to say.

“You must have heard everything that happened. Being in the next room.”

Aunt Felicity looked suddenly drawn, and old, and helpless.

“I should have,” she said. “God knows I should have.”

“You mean you didn’t?”

“I’m an old woman, Flavia. I suffer from the vicissitudes of age. I had a tot of rum at bedtime, and slept with the pillow screwed into my good ear. That poor dear blasted soul ran ciné films all night. I knew why, of course, but even sympathy has its limits.”

Does it? I wondered, or was Aunt Felicity simply deflecting further discussion?

“So you heard nothing,” I said at last.

“I didn’t say I’d heard nothing. I said I hadn’t heard everything.”

I walked across the room and stood beside her at the window. It had grown dark outside, and the snow was still falling as heavily as if the world were coming to a bitter end.

“I got up to use the WC. She was arguing with someone. The noise of the film, you see …”

“Was it a man, or a woman?”

“One couldn’t be sure. Although they were keeping down the volume, it was evident that angry words were being exchanged. Even with an ear to the wall—oh, all right, don’t look so shocked, I’ll admit to clapping an ear to the wall—I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I gave it up and went back to bed, determined to have a word with her in the morning.”