The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

escaped the eighteenth century, while her companion, enveloped in a cyanide blue tent dress, was wearing brass earrings the size of soup plates.

The house itself was what is often called romantically “a pile.” Once the ancestral home of the de Lacey family, from whom Bishop's Lacey took its name (and who were said to be very distantly related to the de Luces), the place had come down in the world in stages: from being the country house of an inventive and successful Huguenot linen merchant to what it was today, a private hospital to which Daffy would instantly have assigned the name Bleak House. I almost wished she were here.

Two dusty motorcars huddling together in the fore-court testified to the shortage of both staff and visitors. Dumping Gladys beside an ancient monkey puzzle tree, I picked my way up the mossy, pitted steps to the front door.

A hand-inked sign said Ring Plse., and I gave the enameled handle a pull. Somewhere inside the place a hollow clanking, like a cowbell Angelus, announced my arrival to persons unknown.

When nothing happened I rang again. Across the lawn, the two old ladies had begun to feign a tea party, with elaborate mincing curtsies, crooked fingers, and invisible cups and saucers.

I pressed an ear to the massive door, but other than an undertone, which must have been the sound of the building's breathing, I could hear nothing. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The first thing that struck me was the smell of the place: a mixture of cabbage, rubber cushions, dishwater, and death. Underlying that, like a groundsheet, was the sharp tang of the disinfectant used to swab the floors— dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride, by the smell of it—a faint whiff of bitter almonds which was uncommonly like that of hydrogen cyanide, the gas that was used to exterminate killers in American gas chambers.

The entrance hall was painted a madhouse apple green: green walls, green woodwork, and green ceilings. The floors were covered with cheap brown linoleum so pitted with gladiatorial gouges that it might have been salvaged from the Roman Colosseum. Whenever I stepped on one of its pustulent brown blisters, the stuff let off a nasty hiss and I made a mental note to find out if color can cause nausea.

Against the far wall, in a chromium wheelchair, an ancient man sat gazing straight up into the air, mouth agape, as if expecting an imminent miracle to take place somewhere near the ceiling.

Off to one side a desk, bare except for a silver bell and a smudged card marked Ring Plse., hinted at some official, yet unseen, presence.

I gave the striker four brisk strokes. At each ting of the bell, the old man blinked violently, but did not take his eyes from the air above his head.

Suddenly, as if she had slipped through a secret panel in the woodwork, a wisp of a woman materialized. She wore a white uniform and a blue cap, under which she was busily poking limp strands of damp straw-colored hair with one of her forefingers.

She looked as if she had been up to no good, and knew perfectly well that I knew.

'Yes?' she said, in a thin but busy, standard-issue hospital voice.

'I've come to see Dr. Kissing,' I said. 'I'm his great-granddaughter.'

'Dr. Isaac Kissing?” she asked.

'Yes,' I said, 'Dr. Isaac Kissing. Do you keep more than one?'

Without a word the White Phantom turned on her heel and I followed, through an archway into a narrow solarium which ran the entire length of the building. Half way along the gallery she stopped, pointed a thin finger like the third ghost in Scrooge, and was gone.

At the far end of the tall-windowed room, in the single ray of sunshine that penetrated the overhanging gloom of the place, an old man sat in a wicker bath chair, a halo of blue smoke rising slowly above his head. In disarray on a small table beside him, a heap of newspapers threatened to slide off onto the floor.

He was wrapped in a mouse-colored dressing gown—like Sherlock Holmes's, except that it was spotted like a leopard with burn holes. Beneath this was visible a rusty black suit and a tall winged celluloid collar of ancient vintage. His long, curling yellow-gray hair was topped with a pillbox smoking cap of plum-colored velvet, and a lighted cigarette dangled from his lips, its gray ashes drooping like a mummified garden slug.

'Hello, Flavia,' he said. 'I've been expecting you.'

AN HOUR HAD PASSED: an hour during which I had come to realize truly, for the first time, what we had lost in the war.

We had not got off to a particularly good start, Dr. Kissing and I.

'I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls,' he announced.

I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut.

'A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?”

I recognized it as one of those questions which doesn't require an answer. I raised the corners of my lips into what I hoped was a Mona Lisa smile—or at least one that signaled the required civility.

'So you're Jacko's daughter,' he said. 'You're not a bit like him, you know.'

'I'm told I take after my mother, Harriet,' I said.

'Ah, yes. Harriet. What a great tragedy that was. How terrible for all of you.'

He reached out and touched a magnifying glass that perched precipitously atop the glacier of newspapers at his side. With the same movement he pried open a tin of Players that lay on the table and selected a fresh cigarette.

'I do my best to keep up with the world as seen through the eyes of these inky scribblers. My own eyes, I must confess, having been fixed on the passing parade for ninety-five years, are much wearied by what they have