“Is it the harpist?” asked Jack. “I thought you’d lost her to the orchestra’s tuba.”
“Not lost, but temporarily
At that moment the back door opened and Ripvan blew in with a blast of cold air like some sort of furry tumbleweed. Following him was Pandora, who was well bundled up in a large down jacket. She had been at a talk given by a particle-physics professor from CERN, and the questions had gone on a lot longer than she had anticipated.
“Hi, Madeleine. Hi, Dad.”
“Is he still here?” she asked quietly as she peeled off layer upon layer of outer clothing.
“Who?” replied Jack.
“Who? Come off it, Dad.
“He’s about somewhere. Why?”
She looked at him demurely. “Oh, nothing. See you later.”
She ran off upstairs after throwing her down jacket into the cloakroom. As she rounded the newel post, she and Prometheus met face-to-face.
“Good evening,” he said with a disarming smile.
“Hello,” she said uneasily, “I’m — ”
“Pandora. Yes, I know.”
It seemed as though he had to force the name out.
“I once knew someone of that name,” he continued sadly, “a long, long time ago.”
Pandora stared at him, mumbled something incomprehensible that one might have expected to hear from Stevie and disappeared upstairs.
Jack and Madeleine had been watching. Madeleine giggled, but Jack was more serious.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“She’s not a child any longer. If she lived elsewhere, you wouldn’t treat her like an eight-year-old.”
“I do
“Sure you don’t.”
The phone rang, and Jack answered it. It was his mother.
“Jack?”
She had her angry voice on. Apology time. “Mother, I’m really sorry about the Stubbs — ”
“I know that,” she said, interrupting him. “That was yesterday’s crisis.”
“And today’s?”
“It’s the beans I threw out the window.”
“What about them?”
She had sounded distressed about the rapid growth of the beanstalk, and as Jack rang the doorbell twenty minutes later, he was expecting to find her in a state of acute anxiety. Strangely, she was precisely the opposite.
“Hello, darling!” she warbled unsteadily. “Come on in!”
She ushered him in, but by the time he had taken off his overcoat and hat, she had vanished.
“Mother?” he called, walking past the gently ticking grand-father clock to the living room, which was full of his mother’s ancient friends, most of whom he knew and all of whom had asked him surreptitiously to get them off speeding fines.
“New hip, Mrs. Dunwoody?” said Jack politely as he followed his mother towards the French windows, where he was waylaid by Mrs. Snodgrass. “Is that so?” replied Jack sympathetically. “You should eat more roughage.” He hadn’t got much further when Major Piggott-Smythe stopped him with the end of his pipe pressed on Jack’s lapel.
“Don’t think much of these alien-visitor johnnies,” he said, his red nose almost a hazard to shipping. “Who invited them here anyway?”
“We did,” replied Jack, “by transmitting all those seventies sitcoms. I think they wanted to find out why we never did a third series of
He found his mother standing on the lawn staring at the beanstalk. It was a cold, clear night, and the moon had come up, which somehow made the plant seem all the more remarkable. Just next to the potting shed, five separate dark green stalks had grown from the earth and fused into what appeared to be a large and complex plait that reached almost twelve feet into the air. Already leaves had started to unfurl on smaller stalks that radiated from the main trunk, and small pods had appeared with tiny vestigial beans inside.
“Isn’t it just the most beautiful thing ever?” asked his mother, her breath visible in the crisp air.
Jack took an eager step forward and then stopped himself. For a fleeting moment he’d felt a strange impulse to
She nodded.
“And the party?”
“You know, I was fearful at first about the beanstalk. I thought of the harm it could do to the foundations, the value it might take off the house, that kind of thing. But then all of a sudden I thought, What the hell! and woke up to how extraordinary it was. And do you know, I’m really quite fond of it. I’m having a botanist here tomorrow to have a look.” She glanced around at her friends. “Someone brought over some hooch. I’m afraid to say we’re all a little tipsy.”
Jack sighed. “Does this mean you want to keep it?”
“Why not? Is it doing any harm?”
Jack had to admit that it wasn’t — yet. They both gazed at it for a moment. It quivered every now and then as growing stresses were released; they could almost see it grow larger in front of their eyes. His mother shivered in the cold air, and Jack draped his jacket over her shoulders.
“Do you think it’s self-pollinating?” she asked.
“I haven’t the slightest idea. Are you
Mrs. Spratt patted her son’s hand reassuringly “Let’s leave it a couple of days. We can make a decision then.”
They went indoors, where his mum’s friends harangued him about the positioning of speed cameras until he was finally able to tear himself away.
When he got home, everything was peaceful. The young children were all asleep, Madeleine was in her darkroom, and Pandora was reading in the living room. Apart from the quiet sound of Prometheus playing a sad lament on his lute in the spare room, all was calm in the Spratt household. Jack went into his study, switched on his desk lamp and stared at his iQuang computer. It took him another hour to finish his report. The next morning at ten, he would present it to Briggs and officially close the case.
Or so he thought.
23. Mary’s Doubts
DOG WALKERS FACE BODY-FINDING BAN
Citizens who find a corpse while walking their dog may be fined if proposed legislation is made law, it was disclosed yesterday. The new measures, part of the Criminal Narrative Improvement Bill, have been drafted to avoid investigations looking cliched once they reach the docudrama stage. Other offenses covered by the act will be motorists declaiming in a huffy tone, “Why don’t you catch burglars/real criminals for a change?” when caught speeding, if there is a documentary crew in attendance. Civil libertarians, motorist groups and dog walkers are said to be “outraged.”
