Chapter 11 Snakes Alive #4
That evening, after a solitary whisky in the Coal Hole, the nearest pub to the office, Flynn made his way home—a route that took him past the Royal Opera House, where an audience was streaming in.
It was a gala production of Rigoletto, a poster informed Flynn, and everyone had dressed to the nines.
Even for opera-goers they seemed unusually fanciful—tiaras and fur capes abounded, diamonds glittered.
Top hats and even the occasional mothballed opera cloak had been pulled from the back of a cupboard.
It was quite a spectacle and had drawn its own audience from the hoi-polloi, amongst whom there was not a mink or tiara in sight.
Flynn heard someone say that “royalty” was attending.
Flynn found opera largely unpalatable—either overblown or turgid.
For him, a little Mozart went a long way.
His father had liked opera and had amassed a considerable collection of recordings, mostly from the epic and tragic end of the canon.
Flynn wondered if it had been an antidote to a life that was neither.
His mother, on the other hand, had no feeling whatsoever for music.
She might have had the Light Programme on the wireless playing in the background while she did the household chores, but he had never heard her humming along to Housewives’ Choice or Music While You Work.
Nor did he ever remember her singing nursery rhymes or silly infant songs in their childhood, and she had been positively hostile towards their father’s opera records.
Flynn had a vivid memory of her beating the life out of a rug she had hung on the washing line while, courtesy of his father’s gramophone, the Valkyries banshee-wailed their way across the Wagnerian skies above Acomb.
And there—stepping out of the crush—was Lydia.
Flynn didn’t know why he was surprised—this was her kind of territory, after all.
No tiara, but a dress that was all silvery-grey froth and lace—the Faerie Queen dressed by Dior.
She cast glamour wherever she trod, but was on the arm of a weedy, bespectacled type who looked as though he lived behind a desk in the Foreign Office.
And there was Dangerfield (this was his territory, too), with a haughty-looking, whippet-thin woman who was presumably his wife.
Jocasta Hunt. Dangerfield must have quietly hailed Lydia, because she turned round, a smile on her face, and walked towards him, her puny beau following obediently.
Dangerfield gave her a little bow—it was obvious they knew each other—then he took hold of her gloved arm, raised it to his lips and kissed her wrist, before shaking hands in a particularly manly fashion with the weedy beau and introducing his wife to him.
A lemony-faced Jocasta barely acknowledged Lydia.
Lydia looked up suddenly and stared at Flynn. He raised a hand in acknowledgement, but she didn’t reciprocate. Instead, she turned to her unlikely companion and tugged at his elbow, and the pair disappeared into the crowd.
“Spying on the toffs, boyo,” a voice behind him said. Flynn laughed. “Hardly spying, Hywel, just trying to make my way home through this mob.”
“Fancy a drink, Harry?”
The moleish Evans was so rarely sociable that it seemed churlish to refuse.
The other day, as he was returning to the office from one meaningless sortie or another, Flynn had been halted on the stairs by the sound of “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer” being sung stirringly by Evans, full-voiced and in a rather good bass baritone.
Flynn loitered outside the door to listen.
Denholm crept up behind, making him jump—the man had paws for feet.
“Oh, yes,” Denholm murmured, “a fellow artiste.” The song had drawn one of the commissionaires as well. When Flynn glanced at him, he saw that the man had tears in his eyes. Flynn looked away quickly. He sensed it had something to do with the war.
“Show me a Welshman and I’ll show you a man who can sing,” Denholm whispered.
Evans must have heard him, as the hymn stopped abruptly just as he was reaching the crescendo of “Feed me till I want no more!” The commissionaire left quietly, and when Flynn and Denholm entered the office they said nothing. Evans would have been mortified if they had commented on his singing.
The hymn had sounded resonant, triumphant even, the way Evans sang it, but Flynn knew, unlike either Denholm or the commissionaire, that this was the hymn that Evans had sung when trying to keep himself alive after his ship had been torpedoed and he spent a week keeping death at bay in the Arctic waters.
Flynn wondered if perhaps Evans was still trying to keep himself alive.
Was redemption possible? That was the question, wasn’t it? For any of them. One day, even the Boy would have to atone for sins not yet committed.
They left the opera crowd behind and settled at a table in the Lyceum Tavern.
Flynn considered whether he might unburden himself to Evans—the missing hours, the missing Delphine, the mystery of the scarf—but in the end decided against it.
(What could Evans do, after all?) Instead, they both took comfort in the two modest pints they drank, briefly finding clemency at the bottom of a glass of Worthington’s mild before shaking hands and going their own ways, Evans to the boredom of Bayswater and Flynn to his anchorite existence in Romilly Street and the nightcap that awaited him.