Chapter 8 The Lion and the Unicorn #3
“Tell you what—” She took a knife from the display and held it up for his perusal.
“Fixed-blade utility knife,” she said, and deftly sliced through the card in front of the Poems, removing his name from it.
“There you go. Perhaps in return—seeing as you’re that Harry Flynn—you could find some Roman coins and a rabbit.
I’m helping out with ‘The People of Britain—Evidence of the Past.’ It’s a tableau sort of thing—a rabbit burrow with some coins in it. ‘What Gets Left Behind.’ ”
“What gets left behind?” Flynn was struck by how poignant that sounded. He shook it off. Poignancy, like nostalgia, was no help in life.
“It’s stuck away in a corner,” Olive said. “No one will ever notice it. Bit of a waste of time really. Any ideas?”
“Well, there’s Baldwin’s in the Strand for the coins and Rowland Ward in Piccadilly for the rabbit.”
“Wilco. Thanks.”
“I have to go, Olive. I’m supposed to be picking up a dove.”
“They’ve just arrived. They’re outside. Oh, and Flynn,” she said as he turned to go, “give me a shout if you want to take me for a drink sometime.”
—
The doves were indeed outside, still nestled in heavy, straw-lined crates that were being decanted from the back of a flat-bed lorry.
The Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion was destined to be the birds’ home for the summer.
There wasn’t a feather in sight, as they were made of plaster and were going to be suspended from the ceiling of the Pavilion on wires.
Two hundred and eight of them in all. (“Why two hundred and eight?” Evans asked, his suspicions of numeracy aroused again.) A huge decorative wicker birdcage had already been hoisted up to the ceiling, a rope dangling from its open door, reaching all the way to the ground.
The Pavilion was enormous, and Flynn couldn’t imagine the daredevil feats necessary to get anything up there, let alone a flight of flightless doves.
They were doves of peace, Denholm had explained, and were symbolic of liberty, freed from the (wicker) cage of tyranny by the Unicorn, who, when it finally arrived, would hold in its mouth the rope that opened the cage’s door.
The Boy, more practical, had wondered what would happen if a dove fell on someone’s head.
Flynn dutifully counted the doves as they were removed from their crates and placed on trestle tables, ready to take wing. Two hundred and six in the end, as one was dropped by a clumsy workman and one was being temporarily purloined by Flynn.
He lugged the dove back across the river. It was both bigger and heavier than it looked. Perhaps the Boy had been right to be worried about it falling on someone.
“Oh, now I get the idea,” Denholm said when the dove was laid on his desk.
The prototype didn’t do it justice—it was a quarter of the size.
“Thank you, Mr. Flynn. You can return it to the South Bank now. Oh, and Mr. Flynn? Don’t forget dinner with the Blinkhorns tomorrow night, and do try and smarten yourself up a bit, there’s a good chap. ”
If Mitzi wore a ballgown just to cook during the day, then, Flynn reasoned, black tie might be the dress code for dining with her this evening. Before the war he had been a careful, smart dresser, but that had been a different, more debonair Flynn. He was too frayed and jaded now for Jermyn Street.
After another hectic day in the office on Friday, he returned to Romilly Street to look for a clean shirt and sponge down his suit as best he could.
He had only the one, rather old now (his demob suit, in fact), which he had “express” dry-cleaned at Yang’s Chinese laundry in Gerrard Street every other Saturday.
Even the politely disinterested Mrs. Yang had suggested to Flynn that he might think about extending his wardrobe.
He reknotted his tie and wondered if he should have a drink before facing the Blinkhorns. (Yes was the definite response to that question.)
Presuming that it would be bad manners to turn up on the Blinkhorn doorstep empty-handed, Flynn made a detour to Covent Garden, where on the corner of Floral Street a wizened old woman was selling peonies left over at the end of the day from the flower market.
We’re in Belgravia! Archie had told him, and the salubrious nature of the address had led Flynn to assume something rather grand, but it seemed the Blinkhorns had managed to find a down-at-heel street in the area, occupying a cellar-like basement in what had once been a large house but was now parcelled up into oddly shaped flats.
On the grimy subterranean sills of the basement windows, dried-up pots of last summer’s shrivelled geraniums lingered on.
The windows themselves were barred with fancy metal grilles, rust spotting through the white paint.
The windows gave no sign of having been cleaned since the war.
Flynn hadn’t been sure what to expect, but it hadn’t been this air of shabbiness.
The brass door knocker was in the shape of a mermaid, landlocked and oddly out of place in Belgravia, where lions’ heads ruled the doors of the grand white stucco terraces.
Flynn lifted the mermaid’s tarnished tail and rapped three times with it.