a very little, but the woman wished to tell me something, and I thought she was asking for encouragement.
“Is she… That is to say, is Mrs Adler dependable?”
An interesting word. “Dependable?”
She looked to be regretting the question, but she persisted. “I mean to say, Mr Adler seems a nice enough sort, for an artist, that is. Polite and so very good with the little girl, but the wife… well, she's a bit queer.”
“Hmm,” I said, desperate for a hint as to Yolanda's particular type of oddness. “She does strike one that way, it's true. Perhaps it's just that she's foreign.”
“True. But you'd say that, deep down, she's a good wife and mother?”
Ah. “She loves the child a great deal,” I said, with somewhat more assurance.
“Oh yes, no doubt about that. It's just, well, they've had three different nannies in the few months they've been here, and the agency-it's the agency I use, when I need anyone-they told me that word is getting out that it's not an easy post. Nice people, don't you know, but… foreign. They don't understand the proper way things are done. In any case, this means that Damian-Mr Adler-seems to care for the child on his own rather more than one might expect.”
“Yolanda does go away from time to time,” I offered.
“Exactly!” the non-Bohemian wife and mother said.
“Well,” I said. “You know artists. They live differently from other people. I believe Damian rather enjoys being a… daddy.”
She took no note of my hesitation, which was less at the idea of Damian's pleasure in fatherhood than it was a matter of the unfamiliar vocabulary:
I did my best to assure her that Damian enjoyed nothing better than to spend his every daylight hour with the child while his wife flitted around doing God knew what, then I thanked her again and left her to supervise the dollies' tea-party.
As I walked down the steps, I reflected that a woman who did not think to offer her name to a visitor might not be the best judge of a woman whose interests lay outside of the home.
I found no help from the three remaining houses, and considered: Branch out through the adjoining streets, or head for the Brompton Road meeting hall?
I decided that a further canvass of the more distant houses held little hope of striking gold, so I re-traced Jim's steps, out of Chelsea along the Fulham Road and along the crooked tail of Brompton. There I found a doorway next to a stationers. The shop was open, the door was not, although a hand-lettered sign tacked to its centre read:
Children of Lights meeting, 7:00 p.m. Saturdays
I let my gaze stray to the reflection in the stationers' glass. The young woman there did not resemble a potential child of light-lights, I corrected myself, although I had to wonder if the plural was an error. If I had anywhere near the right impression of Yolanda Adler, my dowdy skirt and sensible shoes would not serve to ingratiate myself into her circle. In any event, there was no doubt that I should have to do something about my appearance before entering the venue that would come after.
Some years before, I'd kept a flat in the city, but the married couple I'd hired to keep it up had since retired, and the bother of maintaining it outweighed its occasional usefulness. Now, on the rare occasions I was in Town without Holmes, I would either stay with his brother or in my women's club, the whimsically-named Vicissitude. Or, in a pinch, one of Holmes' bolt-holes.
It was the latter that held the wherewithal to transform me from drab chrysalis to full-blown butterfly; as it happened, there was one very close to hand.
I continued along the commercial streets until I came to the department store in which Holmes had built a concealed room. I let myself in by a hidden key and invisible latch. Of his various hidey-holes across the city, this was one of the more oppressive, as dim and airless as the wardrobe it resembled. But it was packed to the brim with costumes, and in minutes, I had an armful of likely garments to hold up before the looking-glass.
Or perhaps
I traced a line of kohl around my eyes and added a peacock-feather bandeau to my hair, then on second thought changed the half-dozen glass bangles on my right wrist for a silver chain to which were attached various tiny and esoteric shapes. As a piece of jewellery it was both ugly and uncomfortable, but on previous occasions I had found it to offer great opportunity for conversation. I studied the result in the glass, then checked the time on my lamentably mundane wrist-watch.
Twenty minutes to seven. I could by-pass the Children of Light, or Lights, as may be, ignoring the wife's interests to plunge directly on the trail of Damian himself. On the other hand, this church of hers would appear to hold very limited hours, as the other place I was headed did not.
No, I decided: I would stop briefly at the meeting hall, then go on. I could only pray that, in neither place would I meet anyone who knew me.
Of course, I could always claim I was dressed for a costume ball.
18
the man found himself possessed of gifts both profound
and primitive, insights human and divine:
what men call clairvoyance.
Testimony, II:2
THE NARROW DOORWAY BESIDE THE STATIONERS' was now attracting people. Three young women in very ordinary dress went in, causing me to question my costume, but then a man in a dramatic black velvet cape that must have been roasting stepped out of a cab and swept inside, the woman left behind to pay the driver wearing garments only fractionally less outrageous than my own, so I kept coming.
The doorway led to a narrow, unadorned stairway, with the sound of a crowd coming from above. I climbed, and found a room twice the size of the stationers' downstairs, half the chairs filled by fifty or sixty or so professional Seekers, poetic undergraduates, bored young women, and earnest spinsters. I was by no means the most colourful.
One of the Earnest Spinsters with bad skin and dyed-black hair greeted me with a proprietary air coupled with an enthusiasm that made me uneasy. She grasped my hand in both of hers, holding it while she told me her name (Millicent Dunworthy), asserted her long history as a Child of Lights (plural, I noted), and delivered her assurance that I, too, would find myself Enlightened by the Evening and sure to have any Questions from my Heart's True Heart answered (all capital letters clear in her pronouncement). I withdrew my hand with some difficulty, accepted the brochures she thrust at me, and backed away while she was still talking.
Fortunately, some others came in then and kept her from following me to a seat in the back between a woman with a nose like a tin-opener and a young man with sloping shoulders and damp-looking hands.
The only suggestion that the evening might include a religious element was that the chairs were arranged with an aisle down the middle, to permit a sort of procession. The room itself was made up of three nondescript wallpapered walls and a fourth of new-looking wooden storage cupboards. It was this wall towards which the seating had been arranged, which seemed an odd choice, particularly as the centre doors were held together by a large, utilitarian padlock. Heavy curtains sagged alongside the three windows overlooking the street, although they were drawn back and the windows open in a vain attempt to disperse the room's heat: If the evening's
