I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (21 page)

Desmond Duncan was now regarding her fixedly, not openly staring, but not far from it. He opened his mouth as if to say something, and then at the last second, his mouth had decided to say something else.

“Not bad at all, young lady,” were the words that came out. “In fact, bloody remarkable.”

Daffy slipped heavily down into the seat of the chair and flung her legs over the arm. She turned to an imaginary bookmark in
Bleak House
and resumed reading.

“Thank you all,” Inspector Hewitt said, jotting the timing into his notebook. “That will do for now.”

It was just as well. Something was weighing heavily on my mind.

EIGHTEEN

I
KNOCKED
LIGHTLY
AT Aunt Felicity’s door and, without waiting for an answer, let myself in.

The window was propped open the regulation inch, and Aunt Felicity was lying on her back, tucked to the chin with an afghan, with little more than the cup hook of her nose exposed to the room’s cold air.

I leaned over slowly to examine her. As I did so, one of her ancient turtle eyes came open, and then the other.

“God sakes, girl!” she said, dragging herself up by the elbows into a half-sitting position. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Aunt Felicity,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you something.”

“Was my mouth open?” she mumbled, swimming rapidly back to the surface of reality. “Was I talking in my sleep?”

“No. You were sleeping the sleep of the dead.”

I didn’t realize what I was saying until it was too late.

“Phyllis Wyvern!” she said, and I nodded.

“Well, what is it, girl?” she asked sourly, changing the subject. “You’ve caught me slumbering. An old woman’s rhythmic oxygen needs to be renewed at precise twelve-hour intervals, physical culture enthusiasts be damned. It’s a simple matter of hydrostatics.”

It wasn’t, but I didn’t correct her.

“Aunt Felicity,” I asked, taking the plunge, “do you remember that day last summer beside the ornamental lake? When you told me I must do my duty, even if it led to murder?”

We had been talking of Harriet, and the ways in which I was like her.

Aunt Felicity’s face softened and her hand touched mine.

“I’m glad you’ve not forgotten,” she said softly. “I knew you wouldn’t.”

“I have a confession to make,” I told her.

“Go ahead,” she said. “I enjoy a good blurting out of secrets as much as the next person.”

“I let myself into Phyllis Wyvern’s room,” I said, “to have a look around.”

“Yes?”

“I found a driving license in her purse. In 1929 she was Phyllida Lampman. Phyllida, not Phyllis.”

Aunt Felicity swung her legs heavily off the bed and walked stiffly to the window. For a long time she stood staring, like Father, out into the snow.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” I blurted.

“Whatever makes you think that?” Aunt Felicity asked, without turning round.

“Well, when you arrived, the electrician, Ted, greeted you like an old friend. Val Lampman uses the same crew on every film he makes. And the same cast—even Phyllis Wyvern. Daffy says she’ll allow no one else to direct her, ever since something-or-other happened. Everyone knows everybody else. When I asked you about Ted, you said he’d seen you somewhere during the war—during a blackout. When I pointed out that you couldn’t have seen his face, you said I ought to be painted with six coats of shellac.”

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.”

“You hadn’t spoken to her before that?”

“No,” Aunt Felicity said. “There had been no opportunity. One had come across her unexpectedly in the corridor, but as I’ve told you, we were both of us too well trained in the art of seeming total strangers.”

My mind was leapfrogging back and forth over the things that Aunt Felicity had told me. If, for instance, what she said was true, Phyllis Wyvern could not possibly have been arguing with someone when Auntie F got up to use the baffins, because she was already dead. I had heard the toilet flush and I’d been in the death chamber moments later. Before that, someone had had enough time to strangle Phyllis Wyvern, dress her in different clothing (for whatever bizarre reason), and make their escape through one of three doors: the one to the corridor, the one that connected to Flo and Maeve’s bedroom, or—and here I shot a nervous glance over my shoulder—the one that opened into the very room in which I was now standing. Aunt Felicity’s bedroom—the very same Aunt Felicity who had just told me that she was capable of coming for me in the dark with a butcher knife. If what she said was true—if only half of what she hinted at were the ramblings of a woman who had grown suddenly old at the end of the war—she was capable of anything. Who knew what havoc old loyalties and older jealousies could play with two women who had once been friends?

Or was it enemies?

I needed time to think—time to get away—to collect my thoughts.

“Thank you, Aunt Felicity,” I said. “You must be very tired.”

I could always come back to her later to fill in the blanks.

“You’re such a thoughtful child,” she said.

I gave her a modest smile.

The cupboard under the stairs was little more than a right-angled triangle equipped with a dangling lightbulb. Here, stowed safely away from the eyes of the ciné crew and their cameras, were the magazines that had been cleared away from the library and the drawing room. Back numbers of
Country Life
pressed down like geological strata upon old issues of
The Illustrated London News
. Heaped high with issues of
Behind the Screen
and
Cinema Weekly
, back numbers of
Cinema World
were piled in crooked stacks that must have dated back to the days of silent film.

I stepped inside, closed the door behind me, and, taking down the first handful of ciné magazines, began my search.

I flipped through page after page of
Ciné Tit-Bits
and
Silver Cinema
, smiling, at first, at the antics of the so-called “movie stars,” most of whom I had never heard of.

Parties, galas, premieres, benefit performances: smiling faces, toothy grins, top hats and sequined dresses, arms around shoulders in exotic motorcars—what vast amounts of time these people had spent having themselves photographed!

It wasn’t difficult to find Phyllis Wyvern. She was everywhere, spanning the years without apparently aging a day. Here she was, for instance, sitting, legs crossed, in a canvas chair with her name painted on the back, studying a script, with a cardigan thrown over her shoulders and a look of intense concentration on her face. Here she was, dancing with a young airman in a dark nightclub that seemed to be located in a church crypt. And here she was again, on the set of
Anna of the Steppes
, standing with another actress, their faces turned skyward, in front of one of the behemoth tractors as their makeup is retouched by a man in a mustache and a beret.