Ribblestrop (34 page)

“The house and the war.”

Lady Vyner stopped and sniffed. “We're doing a project,” continued Sam, “and some of the boys said that the prime minister used to stay here. Sanchez says he was a friend of your husband, but then Millie had a bet that it couldn't be true, because . . . well, you know the way people make up stories.”

The door opened wider. “Is it true?” said Sam. He found inspiration: “The headmaster said it was a lie.”

“He said
what
?”

“He said it was very unlikely. He said there's no proof Churchill was ever here. And he says that now all the tunnels have been closed, there's no way anyone—”

“
Stop right where you are
,” cried Lady Vyner. “Stop, before you say something you'll regret forever!” Her face was a rictus of fury, but she managed to bring her voice under control.

“What does that man know? Eh? What does he, or you, or anyone else in this
hellhole
that used to be my home
know
about my husband and Winston Churchill? I bet you don't know who Winston Churchill was, nobody teaches history anymore!”

“Well,” said Sam, “I know—”

“He won the war! He was the best prime minister this country ever had, that's who he was! And he was loyal! He wouldn't have . . .
betrayed
Cyril, not Winston. I tell you something, child—I danced with Winston Churchill. I
ate
with Winston Churchill—and that second-rate clown of a headmaster wouldn't be fit to light his cigars! Get inside, you're cluttering up my stairs! Churchill, I'll have you know, begged my daughter to marry his nephew's friend . . . Wipe your feet, boy—these rugs are worth a fortune!” The woman laughed like a power tool. “Oh, this is rich! Your headmaster pretends he knows about this house—Crippen! Get me a glass! I tell you, the Vyner family had the pick of them all. I could tell you stories. Caspar? Get me a glass, or find Crippen!”

“I don't know where he is,” said Caspar.

“Then get me a glass! Get some ice and some juice, grate a little nutmeg if you can find one, and see if there's any crisps, those cheesy ones. What's your name? Sam . . .”

Sam found there was a claw on his shoulder. He was being pushed down a corridor, into a fog of old smells. He had not realized that people could live in carnival ghost trains, and here he was, entering one with the controller. No wonder Caspar was strange. “I'd love to know about the house,” he said in a small voice. He was trying to take shallow breaths. The house stank.

Nobody cleaned this part of it, that was for sure. The elderly servant was snoring, slumped in a dark undertaker's suit that was messy with drool. The wallpaper—where you could see it behind the mass of pictures and mirrors—had a damp, yellow tinge.
Hallway and lounge were cluttered with the sort of furniture that was so dark and heavy it probably wouldn't burn. There were rusty-framed photographs, statues and statuettes, ridiculous pots and vases of dead or dry flowers. Part of the ceiling had collapsed under the weight of a chandelier, and Sam wondered what creatures lived up in the velvet dark above: bats, surely, and whole plaguefuls of rats. All down one wall was a rusty stain that meant either the rain was getting in or some captive in the attic had no toilet.

“Some of the boys,” he said, “say there are secret tunnels and that people still work down there doing secret things, but nobody . . .”

He couldn't concentrate on his mission, the apartment was so cluttered. There was a statue standing against the wall, holding a tray. It made him think of George, the model, but this one looked sad and had a cracked head. You could see gears and metal struts, and one of the hands was missing so the tray was lopsided.

“You need a bit of background, don't you?” said Lady Vyner. “Right: this house was the wartime base for military science—do you know what that is? Course you don't. It's part of the war office, and ran nearly two hundred scientists who were trying to come up with new ways of annihilating the Germans. Why was military science based here?”

“Well,” said Sam, “I would imagine—”

“I'm
telling
you, child, I'm not asking you! Listen if you want to learn something—and sit down. Military science needed
rural security
. This house had a whole labyrinth of tunnels and bunkers—all excavated in the eighteenth century for smuggling purposes—that is why it was declared the perfect base. Are you with me so far? That was Mr. Churchill's first visit, you see: to check for security. And he liked it, child. He liked it so much he had his own office built, just under my husband's lab: the Churchill Room it's known as. And it was he who had the underground train installed, so he could shoot back to Downing Street when he wanted to. So don't tell me he never came here!”

“Yes,” said Sam. “No.”

“Caspar!”

“I'm doing it, Gran!”

“Just a glass,” whispered the old woman. “It can't take even him this long
. Look in the kitchen! Forget the blasted
 . . . What's your name?”

“Sam.”

She fished an empty bottle from a bloated, drowned-looking sofa and lowered herself onto the cushions. Then she turned her attention to Sam's rum. “I don't drink in the daytime,” she said. “Not normally. But when I get a bit of good news, I allow myself a snifter.” She was panting with the effort of breaking the seals. “Ha! Rent increases, that's my bit of good news . . . this new woman, this deputy, she's keen to sign a new lease. Seems pretty sure Norcross-Whateverhisnameis has had his day. Stop looking at the toys, boy!”

“What?”

“You're looking at the robots, you're not listening to a word I'm saying.”

“Oh, I am! I was!”

“
Churchill's little army
, we called them. We had a dozen at one point, and that's another link you won't find in the history books.”

“I think there's one by our notice board,” said Sam.

“My husband knew more about automata than anyone in the world.”

“Auto . . . ? I don't know what that is.”

“Mechanics, child—that's what you're looking at. An automaton: a machine that contains its own power source. The prototypes were clockwork—the ones up here are pretty simple. But down in the basement, that's where the real work went on. They were loading in computer systems. Cameras, voice boxes. Jarman loved it! You see, the war office had
imagination
then, because it had a war to win. Winston and my husband used to sit for hours, drunk as lords, plotting and planning. This little fellow still does a few tricks . . .”

As she spoke, her old hands had reached to the neck of a model Sam hadn't even noticed. It was a curious, bent little thing, half hidden by the chair. Lady Vyner drew it close and Sam saw that the poor creature's lips had come off, so it wore an expression of horrified shock. A section of the forehead was missing as well, revealing a spaghetti of wires. It wore evening dress, and its arm was raised, like the other one, balancing a tea tray. On the tea tray stood a small china vase.

“064 Gerald,” said Lady Vyner. “Caspar used him for target practice, but he's a robust little chap—he'll outlive me. He could cross the ballroom with a martini and serve it unspilt. Then he'd come back with the ice. We had one could cook an omelette. That little girl there . . .” She pointed to another one that Sam hadn't seen. It was a child, and it was hunched over a piano in the corner. It wore a silk dress so worn that, once again, Sam could see the metal struts of her back and shoulders. “That's Lucy 027. She could play a Mozart piano concerto, note perfect. Can you imagine the engineering behind that, Sam? The memory?”

“No . . .”

She pressed a switch on Gerald's neck and the toy straightened up. “Can I help you, sir?” it said. “Can I help you, sir?” The voice was refined and respectful and the words came crackling from the lipless hole that was his mouth.

Lady Vyner winced; she took a slug of rum direct from the bottle. “My husband's voice,” she said, quietly.

The tape was clearly a loop; it paused, and came again. Then: “Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

Sam watched as it started to move. Its hips rotated. It glanced up at Sam and then at the ceiling, and it veered off to the left, as if it was searching for the door. It moved on hidden wheels and seemed to know the steps of its own dance. It twirled; it checked itself and stepped forward again, the voice repeating: “Can I help you, sir? Thank you, sir!”

Caspar appeared with a glass and pushed the little butler out of his way. “Can I show Sam my crossbow?” he said.

Lady Vyner looked at him with dislike. “Go and have your bath,” she said. “You can show him afterward.”

Sam was still riveted by the robot, which had stopped moving, its nose to the wall. “I wish Ruskin was here!” he whispered. “He loves this kind of thing! Did your husband make them?”

“He did the engineering, yes. Jarman did the heads and the eyes. They'd worked together since university, you see. Churchill's little army.”

“But if they were toys, how—”

“They were
prototypes
, Sam! Don't be so literal. We called them toys, but they were experiments in robot science, they weren't toys at all. They were going to be used in weapons manufacture, then mine clearance. It was the time of mad, wonderful ideas. An assassination squad, I remember. Stick one in a Hitler Youth uniform and send it into the bunker.”

“But if—”

“Hush.” Lady Vyner poured a good three fingers of rum into the glass and paused to take a huge sniff of it. “If you listen, I'll tell you. If you interrupt, you can clear out. Nuclear weapons was to be one application. You'd need robotics to handle plutonium, wouldn't you? That made sense. You'd need robotics to position a device and detonate it—we're talking wartime, still. They were dreaming, Sam—so many plans. And my husband dreamed until the war ended, and he made plans for a little while longer . . . and then what happened? How good is your history? Churchill was out and suddenly the government lost interest.”

“What happened?” said Sam. His eyes were wide.

“Jarman happened. Jarman saw the future.”

“Who was Mr. Jarman?” asked Sam.

“He's not in the past tense, child. You need to say, ‘Who
is
Mr. Jarman?' Ha!” Lady Vyner closed her eyes for a moment. “All dead and buried. Forgotten by one and all—except for me, and him. Crippen remembers. Sometimes.” She seemed to be searching for words. She hunched forward and looked into Sam's eyes. “I'll tell you if you want, boy, if you're old enough to understand.
My friend Mr. Jarman saw the future, sciencewise, and you know—looking back—I think he saw it before the war even started. He just didn't let on. He stayed close, learning everything he could from Cyril, because Cyril was the engineer. Jarman, you see, was the neurologist—that was his passion. He devised the minds and the eyes. Robotics was in its early days.” Lady Vyner drank again, thinking hard. She smiled. “What makes us human, Sam? Do you think about that? What's the difference between you and those little robots?”

“Well, I play soccer, and I—”

“The capacity for thought. You
think
, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“That's the magic—inside your brain. No robot is ever going to be human, and Jarman saw this when Cyril didn't. I can remember it, still: Cyril coming home, blood on his apron. The look on his face. I don't think he believed it himself.”

“I don't understand,” said Sam.

“His hands were bloody. He hadn't even washed. I said, ‘What are you doing down there? What's he made you do?' because I was in no doubt—Jarman was in control.” She drank again, nose in the glass, and slopped out more rum. “They'd been working on pigs. Jarman had ordered piglets, and he was wiring in their brains. He kept the creatures alive, wide awake—and he was cutting into the brain. And you know what? That night my husband howled in his sleep, he woke up weeping. It went on for a week, then on again for a whole, long month. I said, ‘You can't carry on like this.' It was killing him, Sam—Cyril wasn't a butcher! They had a monkey down there. Oh! I couldn't listen and he could hardly speak. It was a Friday night, I remember . . . and he came home shaking. And he said to me: ‘No more.' ”

“What had happened?”

“ ‘I'm closing the lab,' he said. I think he'd seen the future too.”

Sam was openmouthed. He'd drawn his knees up to his chin and had both arms tight round them. He managed to whisper the obvious question: “What did he see?”

“You want nightmares too, do you, Sam?”

Sam shook his head, but Lady Vyner's eyes were misted over with tears. “I told the police; they didn't care.” She looked hard at Sam. “Cyril had an assistant,” she said. She spoke slowly. “He was a boy, really, and he lived down there. They needed a porter to ferry things in and clean things up. Boys started work at thirteen or fourteen, and he'd worked for Cyril for some time—didn't have a family; he'd been grateful for a job with a bed. Cyril had found him, wandering the streets round Paddington station.”

Sam saw two tears slide down the woman's cheeks.

“Jarman took this boy and gave him a mild sedative—just enough to keep him under. All alone he was, that night—Jarman could go for days without sleep.” She paused. “He got the boy onto the table and he drilled a hole in the back of his head, just here. Injected something, some chemical they'd been using—I think the Nazis were working on it, too. And it was the breakthrough moment, for Mr. Jarman. He'd realized it, and this was his chance: you can't make robots
human
, Sam. But you can make humans into robots.” She sipped her drink and wiped her eyes hard. “Ha! The next morning he told Cyril what he'd done, and he made the boy—who was slow, but up on his feet . . . He made him carry some boxes. He could still do it, of course, very effectively. He expected my husband to be excited—to be awestruck with admiration. Pig brains, human brains . . . he was changing the world as he'd always planned, you see. He talked and talked, and the boy kept on carrying boxes from one side of the lab to the other, hard at work. He could make an army of them, he said. Men, women, children—all with their brains changed. He'd worked out how to destroy the inconvenient. So you'd have workers who would never stop working. Soldiers who would never stop fighting—keep going, whatever the odds. Children who would be only obedient—who'd do anything you programmed them to do.”