enough to come up after the show and give both our hands a good cranking.
'After such a bath of gore at the death, my levitation at the resurrection was almost a letdown, if I may use the phrase, although it brought round after round of ringing applause from an audience of kind hearts who were relieved to see the hapless volunteer restored to life. At the end, we were made to come back for seven curtain calls, although I knew perfectly well that at least six of them were for my partner.
'Bony soaked up the adulation like a parched sponge. An hour after the show he was still shaking hands and being patted on the back by a tidal wave of admiring mothers and fathers who seemed to want only to touch him, although when I threw my arm across his shoulders, he gave me rather an odd look: a look which suggested, for a fleeting instant, that he had never seen me before.
'In the days that followed, I saw that a transformation had come over him. Bony had become the confident conjurer, and I was now no more than his simple assistant. He began speaking to me in a new way, and adopted a rather offhand manner, as if his earlier timidity had never existed.
'I suppose I could say he dropped me—or that was how it seemed. I often saw him with an older boy, Bob Stanley, who was someone I had never much fancied. Stanley had one of those angular, square-jawed faces that photographs well but seems hard in real life. As he had done with me, Bony seemed to take on some of Stanley's traits, in much the same way a bit of blotting paper absorbs the handwriting from a letter. I know that it was at about this time that Bony began smoking and, I suspect, tippling a bit as well.
'One day, I realized with a bit of a shock that I no longer liked him. Something had changed inside Bony or, perhaps, had crawled out. There were times when I caught him staring at me in the classroom when his eyes would seem to be at first the eyes of an aged Mandarin, and then, as they regarded me, would become cold and reptilian. I began to feel as if, in some unknowable way, something had been stolen from me.
'But there was worse to come.'
Father fell silent and I waited for him to go on with his story, but instead he sat gazing out sightlessly into the falling rain. It seemed best to keep quiet and leave him to his thoughts, whatever those might be.
But I knew that, as with Horace Bonepenny, something had changed between us.
Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out.
I wished I could hug him, but I couldn't. For some time now I had been aware that there was something in the de Luce character which discouraged any outward show of affection towards one another; any spoken statement of love. It was something in our blood.
And so we sat, Father and I, primly, like two old women at a parish tea. It was not a perfect way to live one's life, but it would have to do.
sixteen
A FLASH OF LIGHTNING BLEACHED EVERY TRACE OF color from the room, and with it came a deafening crack of thunder. We both of us flinched.
'The storm is directly overhead,' Father said.
Nodding to reassure him that we were in it together, I looked about at my surroundings. The brightly lighted little cubicle—its naked bulb overhead, its steel door, and its cot—the rain pouring down outside, was oddly like the control room of the submarine in
Father went on as if there had been no interruption.
'We became rather strangers, Bony and I,' he said. 'Al though we continued as members of Mr. Twining's Magic Circle, each of us pursued his own particular interests. I developed a passion for the great stage tricks: sawing a lady in half, vanishing a cage of singing canaries, that sort of thing. Of course, most of these effects were beyond my schoolboy budget, but as time went on, it seemed enough simply to read about them and learn how each one was executed.
'Bony, however, progressed to tricks which required an ever-greater degree of manual dexterity: simple effects which could be done under the spectator's nose with a minimal amount of gadgetry. He could make a nickel-plated alarm clock disappear from one hand and appear in the other before your very eyes. He never would show me how it was done.
'It was about that time that Mr. Twining had the idea of organizing a Philatelic Society, another of his great enthusiasms. He felt that in learning to collect, catalogue, and mount postage stamps from round the world, we would learn a great deal about history, geography, and neatness, to say nothing of the fact that regular discussions would promote confidence among the more shy members of the club. And since he was himself a devoted collector, he saw no reason why every one of his boys should be any less enthusiastic.
'His own collection was the eighth wonder of the world, or so it seemed to me. He specialized in British stamps, with particular attention to color variations in the printing inks. He had the uncanny ability of being able to deduce the day—sometimes the very hour—a given specimen was printed. By comparing the ever-changing microscopic cracks and variations produced by wear and stress upon the engraved printing plates, he was able to deduce an astonishing amount of detail.
'The leaves of his albums were masterpieces. The colors! And the way in which they ranged across the page, each one a dab from the palette of a Turner.
'They began, of course, with the black issues of 1840. But soon the black warms to brown, the brown to red, the red to orange, the orange to bright carmine; on to indigo, and Venetian red—a bright blossoming of color, as if to paint the bursting into bloom of the Empire itself. There's glory for you!'
I had never seen Father so alive. He was suddenly a schoolboy again, his face transformed, and shining like a polished apple.
But those words about glory: Hadn't I heard them before? Weren't they the ones spoken to Alice by Humpty Dumpty?
I sat quietly, trying to work out the connections his mind must be making.
'For all that,' he went on, 'Mr. Twining was not in possession of the most valuable philatelic collection at
