The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Dogger took the drink in both hands, stared at it for a long moment as if he didn't know what to do with it, and then raised it unsteadily to his mouth. He drank deeply until the milk was gone. He handed me the empty glass.

For a moment, he looked vaguely beatific, like an angel by Raphael, but that impression quickly passed.

"You have a white mustache," I told him. I bent down to the cucumbers and, tearing off a large, dark green leaf from the vine, used it to wipe his upper lip.

The light was coming back into his empty eyes.

"Milk and cucumbers." he said. "Cucumbers and milk."

"Poison!" I shouted, jumping up and down and flapping my arms like a chicken, to show him that everything was under control. "Deadly poison!" And we both laughed a little.

He blinked.

"My!" he said, looking round the garden as if he were a princess coming awake from the deepest dream, "isn't it turning out to be a lovely day!"

FATHER DID NOT APPEAR AT LUNCH. To reassure myself, I put an ear to his study door and listened for a few minutes to the flipping of philatelic pages and an occasional clearing of the paternal throat. Nerves, I decided.

At the table, Daphne sat with her nose in Walpole (Horace), her cucumber sandwich beside her, soggy and forgotten on a plate. Ophelia, sighing endlessly, crossing, uncrossing, and recrossing her legs, stared blankly off into space, and I could only assume she was trifling in her mind with Ned Cropper, the jack-of-all-trades at the Thirteen Drakes. She was too absorbed in her haughty reverie to notice when I leaned in for a closer look at her lips as she reached absently for a cube of cane sugar, popped it into her mouth, and began sucking.

"Ah," I remarked, to no one in particular, "the pimples will be blooming in the morning."

She made a lunge for me, but my legs were faster than her flippers.

Back upstairs in my laboratory, I wrote:

Friday, 2nd of June 1950, 1:07 P.M. No visible reaction as yet. "Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius."

-(Disraeli)

TEN O'CLOCK HAD COME and gone, and still I couldn't sleep. Mostly, when the light's out I'm a lump of lead, but tonight was different. I lay on my back, hands clasped behind my head, reviewing the day.

First there had been Father. Well, no, that's not quite true. First there had been the dead bird on the doorstep—and then there had been Father. What I thought I had seen on his face was fear, but still there was some little corner of my brain that didn't seem to believe it.

To me—to all of us—Father was fearless. He had seen things during the War: horrid things that must never be put into words. He had somehow survived the years of Harriet's vanishing and presumed death. And through it all he had been stalwart, staunch, dogged, and unshakeable. Unbelievably British. Unbearably stiff upper lip. But now…

And then there was Dogger: Arthur Wellesley Dogger, to give him his “full patronymic” (as he called it on his better days). Dogger had come to us first as Father's valet, but then, as “the full vicissitudes of that position” (his words, not mine) bore down upon his shoulders, he found it “more copacetic” to become butler, then chauffeur, then Buckshaw's general handyman, then chauffeur again for a while. In recent months, he had rocked gently down, like a falling autumn leaf, before coming to rest in his present post of gardener, and Father had donated our Hillman estate wagon to St. Tancred's as a raffle prize.

Poor Dogger! That's what I thought, even though Daphne told me I should never say that about anyone: “It's not only condescending, it fails to take into account the future,” she said.

Still, who could forget the sight of Dogger in the garden? A great simple hulk of a helpless man just standing there, hair and tools in disarray, wheelbarrow overturned, and a look on his face as if… as if…

A rustle of sound caught my ear. I turned my head and listened.

Nothing.

It is a simple fact of Nature that I happen to possess acute hearing: the kind of hearing, Father once told me, that allows its owner to hear spiderwebs clanging like horseshoes against the walls. Harriet had possessed it too, and sometimes I like to imagine I am, in a way, a rather odd remnant of her: a pair of disembodied ears drifting round the haunted halls of Buckshaw, hearing things that are sometimes better left unheard.

But, listen! There it was again! A voice reflected; hard and hollow, like a whisper in an empty biscuit tin.

I slipped out of bed and went on tiptoes to the window. Taking care not to jiggle the curtains, I peeked out into the kitchen garden just as the moon obligingly came out from behind a cloud to illuminate the scene, much as it would in a first-rate production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But there was nothing more to see than its silvery light dancing among the cucumbers and the roses.