Polly moved her bed into the basement. The earth conducted the vibrations more strongly there. She removed the carpet. She bought a stiffer mattress. Eventually, she drove stout iron rods into the earthen bank behind the house, and welded the bed frame directly to these to cut out the intermediary. She fitted springs to the bed feet to cut down on destructive interference from road traffic on the other side of the house. Finally, she put more rods into the bank and suspended the bed three foot from the ground, held only by the conductor arms, and she could lie in the embrace of the shuddering rails. She knew, not being stupid, that this was unusual behaviour, but she simply did not care. As time went by, she knew more and more about the network, the trains, the engines, and the men who rode them. By degrees and in her own mind, the Bold Receptionist became the bride of the iron road.
“Again,” she says, and indeed, twenty-five minutes thereafter, a passenger express thunders by, and Joe actually growls like an animal, something he has absolutely never done before in his life.
“Mmmm…” the Bold Receptionist murmurs into his neck, and stretches her shoulders, then looks up at him through tousled hair. It changes her face, or perhaps it just frames it correctly, because he experiences a curious lurch, a sudden, powerful déjà vu. I have seen you before. But where? She’s not an enemy or an antiques dealer or a policewoman, of that much he is sure. The memory is more comfortable, and much, much older… oh.
“Oh, bloody Hell,” he says. “Not Pollyanna. Polly, like Molly. Molly like Mary. Mary like Mary Angelica…”
“See?” Polly Cradle murmurs happily. “My plan was much better than yours. Imagine all the trouble I’d have had to go to if you’d known that before we went to bed.”
“Your brother is going to kill me.”
“He’s really not.”
“But—”
“He won’t. He’ll be very pleased. Or he will hear about it from me.” She kisses him earthily and falls asleep, just like that, on his shoulder.
Mercer Cradle is not exactly an orphan, but more a reject. That is to say, his parents subcontracted his upbringing and management to the London firm of Noblewhite’s, the same firm which handled Mathew Spork’s more egregious business and went to great lengths to keep him out of prison—an effort in which they were ultimately unsuccessful.
Mercer’s parents chose this unconventional approach to the business of education and nurture so that their personal involvement in the conception of a child should not become a matter of public knowledge, the liaison being both secret and dazzlingly inappropriate for a variety of reasons. Mercer was thus afforded all the care and fiscal security a boy could want, save for any information as to his biological antecedents. His filial affection he vested in the senior partners, and in a series of nurses, tutors, fee-earners and chauffeurs. On the day of his majority, Mr. Noblewhite—very tentatively and not without regret—took his charge to Claridge’s. After an excellent venison pie, and while the waiter laboured over crêpes Suzette, Jonah Noblewhite laid upon the table a slender white envelope which, he said, contained a cheque for a very considerable amount of money, and the true and accurate history of Mercer’s parentage and the very good and sound reasons for his progenitors’ reluctance to acknowledge him.
Mr. Noblewhite was a shy person. He had a pouchy face and a prominent nose, and he secretly believed that the secretarial pool thought him sweaty. His dignity was his professional blood, and he spared no pains in his dress, and researched exhaustively, so that he would never, ever be shown to be gauche or wrong about anything. And yet, he had consented on numerous occasions, when Mercer Cradle was very small, to play horsey through the file room. Later, he had broken a lifelong abstinence and taken Mercer to a football game, where a woman from Teesside had poured tomato ketchup into his lap and called him an ugly old toff. Jonah Noblewhite was ugly, and he was not young, but he was in no sense a toff. Toffs know one another. They keep the club secure. Noblewhite, any genuine toff would have told her, was an anglicisation of Edelweiss. It was a made-up name, plucked out of the air at Dover, and anyone who has to make up a new name when he travels is no toff. But rather than say any of this, or even object to this lady from Teesside that he had done her no wrong and was only here at this match to make the birthday weekend of an unwanted child that much less awful, he concealed the mess from Mercer and cheered (albeit without comprehension or enjoyment) and parroted with such precision the cries of the men around him and the tactical theories he had committed to memory regarding the game, that Mercer Cradle thought himself the companion of the most football-savvy man in London, and bathed in glory.
Mercer looked at Jonah Noblewhite, and thanked him very much. He picked up the envelope, and, taking care not to look at the text of the missive within, he removed the cheque. He considered the amount, which was prodigious, and the cold, blank pages of the exercise book in which one of his schools had demanded he make a family tree, and came to a decision. He returned the cheque to its place, waited until the crêpes Suzette ignited, and thrust the envelope firmly into the flames. When it was burning he withdrew it, and held it calmly until his plate was filled with steaming pancakes and his nose was filled with the heady scent of orange and brandy. Then he dropped the letter and its secrets into the empty copper pan, and asked the waiter to take it away.
Part of the reason for this froideur was that Mercer Cradle had not been alone when he was abandoned. When the son of Mathew Spork ran riot in the Night Market with Mercer, and roughhoused with giant guard dogs and skipped stones on the river Thames, the two were followed dutifully by a stringy, mouse-haired infant named Mary Angelica, whose birth certificate bore the same false flag as her brother’s.
The Bold Receptionist is Mercer’s beloved sister, rather different now from when last seen at the age of eleven, but—Joe Spork has no doubt—still the apple of her brother’s eye. And that eye is apt to look with a jaundiced glower upon this latest sequence of events. Joe just hopes that this outrage which he has inadvertently perpetrated upon the innocence of the Cradle family will not offset the Service, the ancient deed of valour which bound the firm of Jonah Noblewhite—and his adopted son—to the House of Spork unto the nth generation and for ever and ever, amen.
Mathew Spork was a-courtin’, and the world was bright. This was the dawn of all good things, when Mathew for all his bluster still stepped a little cautious around the law, and when he still felt the need to impress a girl instead of just overwhelming her, and here was Harriet Gaye, the finest singer in London, with deep brown eyes and strong forearms made to grab a fellow about the neck and draw his head to her lips.
Mathew took a table at Leonardo’s, because it was expensive and they knew him, would kowtow and make a fuss of him, would tell him he had the best table in the house because he was opposite this beauty, would actually give him the best table into the bargain. And Leonardo’s was the place, the in spot. If you knew London’s miserable food and iffy wine cellars, you knew that the one place where they really could cook halibut or slice a truffle, or would give you lamb which hadn’t been cooked unto its utter destruction, was Leonardo’s. It was swish and smooth and Continental, it whispered of Monte Carlo and Rome, of champagne and casinos and sharp suits. The kitchen at Leo’s (and there was no Leo, he was an opium dream of all the best cooking in the world, a fat hallucination whose white hat was occupied by seven unemployed Shakespearean actors between ’62 and ’79) used garlic and plenty of it, traded in spices that the rest of England hadn’t heard of and wouldn’t dream of using in a Christian dish if they had.