The Eyre Affair

Landen’s photo and walked over to the bureau, thought for a moment and then placed it upside down in my knicker drawer. With the real thing around I had no need for an image. The TV droned on:

‘… despite intervention by the French and a Russian guarantee of safe habitation for English settlers, it looks as though the English government will not be resuming its place around the table at Budapest. With England still adamant about an offensive using the new so-called Stonk plasma rifle, peace will not be descending on the Black Sea peninsula…’

The anchorman shuffled some papers.

‘Home news now, and violence flared again in Chichester as a group of neo-surrealists gathered to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the legalisation of surrealism. On the spot for Toad News Network is Henry Grubb. Henry, how are things down there?’

A shaky live picture came on to the screen, and I stopped for a moment to watch. Behind Grubb was a car that had been overturned and set on fire, and several officers were in riot gear. Henry Grubb, who was in training for the job of Crimean correspondent and secretly hoped that the war wouldn’t end until he had had a chance to get out there, wore a navy blue flak jacket and spoke with the urgent, halting speech of a correspondent in a war zone.

‘Things are a bit hot down here, Brian. I’m a hundred yards from the riot zone and I can see several cars overturned and on fire. The police have been trying to keep the factions apart all day, but the sheer weight of numbers has been against them. This evening several hundred Raphaelites surrounded the N’est pas une pipe public house where a hundred neo-surrealists have barricaded themselves in. The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown. The neo- surrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to be winning until the police moved in. Wait, I can just see a man arrested by the police. I’ll try and get an interview.’

I shook my head sadly and put some shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe. There was violence when surrealism was banned and there was violence as the same ban was lifted. Grubb continued his broadcast as he intercepted a policeman marching away a youth dressed in sixteenth-century garb with a faithful reproduction of the Hand of God from the Sistine chapel tattooed on his face.

‘Excuse me, sir, how would you counter the criticism that you are an intolerant bunch with little respect for the value of change and experimentation in all aspects of art?’

The Renaissancite glanced at the camera with an angry scowl.

‘People say we’re just Renaissancites causing trouble, but I’ve seen Baroque kids, Raphaelites, Romantics and Mannerists here tonight. It’s a massive show of classical artistic unity against these frivolous bastards who cower beneath the safety of the word progress. It’s not just—‘

The police officer intervened and dragged him away. Grubb ducked a flying brick and then wound up his report.

‘This is Henry Grubb, reporting for Toad News Network, live from Chichester.’

I turned off the television with a remote that was chained to the bedside table. I sat on the bed and pulled out my hair tie, let my hair down and rubbed my scalp. I sniffed dubiously at my hair and decided against a shower. I had been harder than I intended with Landen. Even with our differences we still had more than enough in common to be good friends.

11. Polly flashes upon the inward eye

‘I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can’t be usual to go to your favourite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.’

Polly Next interviewed exclusively for The Owl on Sunday

As I was dealing with Landen in my own clumsy way, my uncle and aunt were hard at work in Mycroft’s workshop. As I was to learn later, things seemed to be going quite well. To begin with, at any rate.

Mycroft was feeding his bookworms in the workshop when Polly entered; she had just completed some mathematical calculations of almost incomprehensible complexity for him.

‘I have the answer you wanted, Crofty, my love,’ she said, sucking the end of a well-worn pencil.

‘And that is?’ asked Mycroft, busily pouring prepositions on to the bookworms, who devoured the abstract food greedily.

‘Nine.’

Mycroft mumbled something and jotted the figure down on a pad. He opened the large brass-reinforced book that I had not quite been introduced to the night before to reveal a cavity into which he placed a large-print copy of Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’. To this he added the bookworms, who busily got to work. They slithered over the text, their small bodies and unfathomable collective id unconsciously examining every sentence, word, vowel sound and syllable. They probed deeply into the historical, biographical and geographical allusions, then they explored the inner meanings hidden within the metre and rhythm and juggled ingeniously with subtext, content and inflection. After that they made up a few verses of their own and converted the result into binary.

Lakes! Daffodils! Solitude! Memory! whispered the worms excitedly as Mycroft carefully closed the book and locked it. He connected up the heavy mains feed to the back of the book and switched the power switch to ‘on’; he then started work on the myriad of knobs and dials that covered the front of the heavy volume. Despite the Prose Portal being essentially a biomechanism, there were still many delicate procedures that had to be set before the device would work; and since the portal was of an absurd complexity, Mycroft was forced to write up the precise sequence of start-up events and combinations in a small child’s exercise book of which—ever wary of foreign spies—he held the only copy. He studied the small book for several moments before twisting dials, setting switches and gently increasing the power, all the while muttering to himself and Polly:

‘Binametrics, spherics, numerics. I’m—‘

‘On?’

‘Off!’ replied Mycroft sadly. ‘No, wait… There!’

He smiled happily as the last of the warning lights extinguished. He took his wife’s hand and squeezed it affectionately.

‘Would you care to have the honour?’ he asked. ‘The first human being to step inside a Wordsworth poem?’

Polly looked at him uneasily.

‘Are you sure it’s safe?’

‘As safe as houses,’ he assured her. ‘I went into “The Wreck of the Hesperus” an hour ago.’

‘Really? What was it like?’

‘Wet—and I think I left my jacket behind.’

‘The one I gave you for Christmas?’

‘No; the other one. The blue one with large checks.’

‘That’s the one I did give you for Christmas,’ she scolded. ‘I wish you would be more careful. What was it you wanted me to do?’

‘Just stand here. If all goes well, as soon as I press this large green button the worms will open a door to the daffodils that William Wordsworth knew and loved.’

‘And if all doesn’t go well?’ asked Polly slightly nervously. Owens’ demise inside a giant meringue never failed to impinge on her thoughts whenever she guinea-pigged one of her husband’s machines, but apart from some slight singeing while testing a one-man butane-powered pantomime horse, none of Mycroft’s devices had ever harmed her at all.

‘Hmm,’ said Mycroft thoughtfully, ‘it is possible although highly unlikely that I could start a chain reaction that will fuse matter and annihilate the known universe.’