The Eyre Affair, Page 9

  9.

  The Next Family

  . . . I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton—go figure. My mother was called Wednesday but was born on a Sunday—I don’t know why—and my father had no name at all—his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn’t exist at all. It didn’t matter. He was always Dad to me . . .

  THURSDAY NEXT

  —A Life in SpecOps

  I TOOK my new car for a drive in the countryside with the top down; the rushing air was a cool respite from the summer heat. The familiar landscape had not changed much; it was still as beautiful as I remembered. Swindon, on the other hand, had changed a great deal. The town had spread outward and up. Light industry went outward, financial glassy towers in the center went up. The residential area had expanded accordingly; the countryside was just that much farther from the center of town.

  It was evening when I pulled up in front of a plain semidetached house in a street that contained forty or fifty just like it. I flipped up the hood and locked the car. This was where I had grown up; my bedroom was the window above the front door. The house had aged. The painted window frames had faded and the pebbledash facing seemed to be coming away from the wall in several areas. I pushed open the front gate with some difficulty as there was a good deal of resistance behind it, and then closed it again with a similar amount of heaving and sweating— a task made more difficult by the assortment of dodos who had gathered eagerly around to see who it was and then plocked excitedly when they realized it was someone vaguely familiar.

  “Hello, Mordacai!” I said to the oldest, who dipped and bobbed in greeting. They all wanted to be made a fuss of after that, so I stayed awhile and tickled them under their chins as they searched my pockets inquisitively for any sign of marshmallows, something that dodos find particularly irresistible.

  My mother opened the door to see what the fuss was about and ran up the path to meet me. The dodos wisely scattered, as my mother can be dangerous at anything more than a fast walk. She gave me a long hug. I returned it gratefully.

  “Thursday!—” she said, her eyes glistening. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”

  “It was a surprise, Mum. I’ve got a posting in town.”

  She had visited me in hospital several times and bored me in a delightfully distracting manner with all the minutiae of Margot Vishler’s hysterectomy and the Women’s Federation gossip.

  “How’s the arm?”

  “It can be a bit stiff sometimes and when I sleep on it, it goes completely numb. Garden’s looking nice. Can I come in?”

  My mother apologized and ushered me through the door, taking my jacket and hanging it up in the cloakroom. She looked awkwardly at the automatic in my shoulder holster so I stuffed it in my case. The house, I soon noticed, was exactly the same: the same mess, the same furniture, the same smell. I paused to look around, to take it all in and bathe in the security of fond memories. The last time I had been truly happy was in Swindon, and this house had been the hub of my life for twenty years. A creeping doubt entered my mind about the wisdom of leaving the town in the first place.

  We walked through to the lounge, still poorly decorated in browns and greens and looking like a museum of velour. The photo of my passing-out parade at the police training college was on the mantelpiece, along with another of Anton and myself in military fatigues smiling under the harsh sun of the Crimean summer. Sitting on the sofa were an aged couple who were busy watching TV.

  “Polly!—Mycroft!—Look who it is!”

  My aunt reacted favorably by rising to meet me, but Mycroft was more interested in watching Name That Fruit! on the television. He laughed a silly snorting laugh at a poor joke and waved a greeting in my direction without looking up.

  “Hello, Thursday, darling,” said my aunt. “Careful, I’m all made up.”

  We pointed cheeks at each other and made mmuuah noises. My aunt smelled strongly of lavender and had so much makeup on that even good Queen Bess would have been shocked.

  “You well, Aunty?”

  “Couldn’t be better.” She kicked her husband painfully on the ankle. “Mycroft, it’s your niece.”

  “Hello, pet,” he said without looking up, rubbing his foot. Polly lowered her voice.

  “It’s such a worry. All he does is watch TV and tinker in his workshop. Sometimes I think there’s no one at home at all.”

  She glared hard at the back of his head before returning her attention to me.

  “Staying for long?”

  “She’s been posted here,” put in my mother.

  “Have you lost weight?”

  “I work out.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No,” I replied. They would ask me about Landen next.

  “Have you called Landen?”

  “No, I haven’t. And I don’t want you to either.”

  “Such a nice lad. The Toad did a fantastic review of his last book: Once Were Scoundrels. Have you read it?”

  I ignored her.

  “Any news from Father?—” I asked.

  “He didn’t like the mauve paint in the bedroom,” said my mother. “I can’t think why you suggested it!”

  Aunt Polly beckoned me closer and hissed unsubtly and very loudly in my ear:

  “You’ll have to excuse your mother; she thinks your dad is mixed up with another woman!”

  Mother excused herself on a lame pretext and hurriedly left the room.

  I frowned.

  “What kind of woman?”

  “Someone he met at work—Lady Emma someone-or-other.”

  I remembered the last conversation with Dad; the stuff about Nelson and the French revisionists.

  “Emma Hamilton?”

  My mother popped her head around the door from the kitchen.

  “You know her?” she asked in an aggrieved tone.

  “Not personally. I think she died in the mid-nineteenth century.”

  My mother narrowed her eyes.

  “That old ruse.”

  She steeled herself and managed a bright smile.

  “Will you stay for supper?”

  I agreed, and she went to find a chicken that she could boil all the taste out of, her anger at Dad for the moment forgotten. Mycroft, the gameshow ended, shuffled into the kitchen wearing a gray zip-up cardigan and holding a copy of New Splicer magazine.

  “What’s for dinner?” he asked, getting in the way. Aunt Polly looked at him as you might a spoiled child.

  “Mycroft, instead of wandering around wasting your time, why don’t you waste Thursday’s and show her what you’ve been up to in your workshop?”

  Mycroft looked at us both with a vacant expression. He shrugged and beckoned me toward the back door, changing his slippers for a pair of gumboots and his cardigan for a truly dreadful plaid jacket.

  “C’mon then, m’girl,” he muttered, shooing the dodos from around the back door where they had been mustering in hope of a snack, and strode toward his workshop.

  “You might repair that garden gate, Uncle—it’s worse than ever!”

  “Not at all,” he replied with a wink. “Every time someone goes in or out they generate enough power to run the telly for an hour. I haven’t seen you about recently. Have you been away?”

  “Well, yes; ten years.”

  He looked over his spectacles at me with some surprise.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Is Owens still with you?”

  Owens was Mycroft’s assistant. He was an old boy who had been with Rutherford when he split the atom; Mycroft and he had been at school together.

  “A bit tragic, Thursday. We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesize methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired. Polly helps me now.”

  We had arrived at his work
shop. A log with an ax stuck in it was all that was keeping the door shut. Mycroft fumbled for the switch and the striplights flickered on, filling the workshop with a harsh fluorescent glow. The laboratory looked similar to the last time I had seen it in terms of untidiness and the general bric-à-brac, but the contraptions were different. I had learned from my mother’s many letters that Mycroft had invented a method for sending pizzas by fax and a 2B pencil with a built-in spell-checker, but what he was currently working on, I had no idea.

  “Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle?”

  “The what?”

  “The memory erasure device. You were testing it when I last saw you.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about, dear girl. What do you make of this?”

  A large white Rolls-Royce was sitting in the center of the room. I walked over to the vehicle as Mycroft tapped a fluorescent tube to stop it flickering.

  “New car, Uncle?”

  “No, no,” said Mycroft hurriedly. “I don’t drive. A friend of mine who hires these out was lamenting about the cost of keeping two, one black for funerals and the other white for weddings—so I came up with this.”

  He reached in and turned a large knob on the dashboard. There was a low hum and the car turned slowly off-white, gray, dark gray and then finally to black.

  “That’s very impressive, Uncle.”

  “Do you think so? It uses liquid crystal technology. But I took the idea one step farther. Watch.”

  He turned the dial several more notches to the right and the car changed to blue, then mauve, and finally green with yellow dots.

  “One-color cars a thing of the past! But that’s not all. If I switch on the car’s Pigmentizer like so, the car should . . . yes, yes, look at that!”

  I watched with growing astonishment as the car started to fade in front of my eyes; the liquid crystal coating was emulating the background grays and browns of Mycroft’s workshop. Within a few seconds the car had blended itself perfectly into the background. I thought of the fun you could have with traffic wardens.

  “I call it the ChameleoCar; quite fun, don’t you think?”

  “Very.”

  I put out my hand and touched the warm surface of the camouflaged Rolls-Royce. I was going to ask Mycroft if I could have the cloaking device fitted to my Speedster but I was too late; enthused by my interest he had trotted off to a large rolltop bureau and was beckoning me over excitedly.

  “Translating carbon paper,” he announced breathlessly, pointing to several piles of brightly colored metallic film. “I call it Rosettionery. Allow me to demonstrate. We’ll start with a plain piece of paper, then put in a Spanish carbon, a second slip of paper—must get them the right way up!—then a Polish carbon, more paper, German and another sheet and finally French and the last sheet . . . there.”

  He shuffled the bundle and laid it on the desk as I pulled up a chair.

  “Write something on the first sheet. Anything you want.”

  “Anything?”

  Mycroft nodded so I wrote: Have you seen my dodo?

  “Now what?”

  Mycroft looked triumphant.

  “Have a look, dear girl.”

  I lifted off the top carbon and there, written in my own handwriting, were the words: ¿Ha visto mi dodo?

  “But that’s amazing!”

  “Thank you,” replied my Uncle. “Have a look at the next!”

  I did. Beneath the Polish carbon was written: Gdzie jest moje dodo?

  “I’m working on hieroglyphics and demotic,” Mycroft explained as I peeled off the German translation to read: Haben Sie mein Dodo gesehen? “The Mayan Codex version was trickier but I can’t manage Esperanto at all. Can’t think why.”

  “This will have dozens of applications!” I exclaimed as I pulled off the last sheet to read, slightly disappointingly: Mon aardvark n’a pas de nez.

  “Wait a moment, Uncle. My aardvark has no nose?”

  Mycroft looked over my shoulder and grunted.

  “You probably weren’t pressing hard enough. You’re police, aren’t you?”

  “SpecOps, really.”

  “Then this might interest you,” he announced, leading me off past more wondrous gadgets, the use of which I could only guess at. “I’m demonstrating this particular machine to the police technical advancement committee on Wednesday.”

  He stopped next to a device that had a huge horn on it like an old gramophone. He cleared his throat.

  “I call it my Olfactograph. It’s very simple. Since any bloodhound worth its salt will tell you that each person’s smell is unique like a thumbprint, then it follows that a machine that can recognize a felon’s individual smell must be of use where other forms of identification fail. A thief may wear gloves and a mask, but he can’t hide his scent.”

  He pointed at the horn.

  “The odors are sucked up here and split into their individual parts using an Olfactroscope of my own invention. The component parts are then analyzed to give a ‘pongprint’ of the criminal. It can separate out ten different people’s odors in a single room and isolate the newest or the oldest. It can detect burned toast up to six months after the event and differentiate between thirty different brands of cigar.”

  “Could be handy,” I said, slightly doubtfully. “What’s this over here?”

  I was pointing to what looked like a trilby hat made from brass and covered in wires and lights.

  “Oh yes,” said my uncle, “this I think you will like.”

  He placed the brass hat on my head and flicked a large switch. There was a humming noise.

  “Is something meant to happen?” I asked.

  “Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Try to empty your mind of any thoughts.”

  I closed my eyes and waited patiently.

  “Is it working?” asked Mycroft.

  “No,” I replied, then added: “Wait!” as a stickleback swam past. “I can see a fish. Here, in front of my eyes. Wait, there’s another!”

  And so there was. Pretty soon I was staring at a whole host of brightly colored fish all swimming in front of my closed eyes. They were on about a five-second loop; every now and then they jumped back to the starting place and repeated their action.

  “Remarkable!”

  “Stay relaxed or it will go,” said Mycroft in a soothing voice. “Try this one.”

  There was a blur of movement and the scene shifted to an inky-black starfield; it seemed as though I were traveling through space.

  “Or how about this?” asked Mycroft, changing the scene to a parade of flying toasters. I opened my eyes and the image evaporated. Mycroft was looking at me earnestly.

  “Any good?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “I call it a Retinal Screen-Saver. Very useful for boring jobs; instead of gazing absently out of the window you can transform your surroundings to any number of soothing images. As soon as the phone goes or your boss walks in you blink and bingo!— you’re back in the real world again.”

  I handed back the hat.

  “Should sell well at SmileyBurger. When do you hope to market it?”

  “It’s not really ready yet; there are a few problems I haven’t quite fixed.”

  “Such as what?” I asked, slightly suspiciously.

  “Close your eyes and you’ll see.”

  I did as he asked and a fish swam by. I blinked again and could see a toaster. Clearly, this needed some work.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “They will have gone in a few hours.”

  “I preferred the Olfactroscope.”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet!” said Mycroft, skipping nimbly up to a large work desk covered by tools and bits of machinery. “This device is probably my most amazing discovery ever. It is the culmination of thirty years’ work and incorporates biotechnology at the very cutting edge of science. When you find out what this is, I promise you, you’ll flip!”

  He pulled a tea towel off a goldfish bowl with
a flourish and showed me what appeared to be a large quantity of fruitfly larvae.

  “Maggots?”

  Mycroft smiled.

  “Not maggots, Thursday, bookworms!”

  He said the word with such a bold and proud flourish that I thought I must have missed something.

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s very good, Thursday. These worms might look like a tempting snack for Mr. Trout, but each one of these little fellows has enough new genetic sequencing to make the code embedded in your pet dodo look like a note to the milkman!”

  “Hold on a sec, Uncle,” I said. “Didn’t you have your Splicense revoked after that incident with the prawns?”

  “A small misunderstanding,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Those fools at SpecOps-13 have no idea of the value of my work.”

  “Which is?—” I asked, ever curious.

  “Ever smaller methods of storing information. I collected all the finest dictionaries, thesauri and lexicons, as well as grammatical, morphological and etymological studies of the English language, and encoded them all within the DNA of the worm’s small body. I call them HyperBookworms. I think you’ll agree that it’s a remarkable achievement.”

  “I agree. But how would you access this information?”

  Mycroft’s face fell.

  “As I said, a remarkable achievement with one small drawback. However, events ran ahead of themselves; some of my worms escaped and bred with others that had been encoded with a complete set of encyclopedic, historical and biographical reference manuals; the result was a new strain I named HyperBookwormDoublePlusGood. These chaps are the real stars of the show.”

  He pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer, tore off a corner and wrote the word “remarkable” on the small scrap.

  “This is just to give you a taste of what these creatures can do.”

  So saying, he dropped the piece of paper into the goldfish bowl. The worms wasted no time and quickly surrounded the small scrap. But instead of eating it they merely conglomerated around it, squirmed excitedly and explored the interloper with apparent great interest.