Chapter 15 The One and Only #2
“Uncle Gerry. ‘Mr. Gerald Lister. Owns a garage. Very successful. Flew Lancasters during the war.’ ” (She did a commendable impression of Ivy.) “The next stepdad after you. Oh, actually there was one in between, but he didn’t work out.
Uncle Gerry didn’t actually fly the bombers, you know, he was just on the ground, fixing them.
Saw his discharge papers. I know all sorts of things about Uncle Gerry that Ivy doesn’t.
I know he tops up his whisky bottle with tea so she doesn’t know how much he drinks.
” Veronica didn’t, he noticed, afford Ivy a maternal soubriquet.
He supposed it seemed sophisticated to her.
He imagined calling his own freesia-scented mother by her name. Bertha. So wrong.
Flynn frowned at her. “Why does he give you money?”
“No need for alarm. Nothing like what your dirty mind’s thinking. He pays me to be nice. ‘Harmony in the home,’ he calls it.”
“I could pay you to be nice?”
“No, not you,” she laughed. “You don’t have any money, for one thing.”
“And for another?”
“You’re my father.”
Flynn felt a little knot, somewhere where he imagined his anatomical heart to be.
Perhaps his metaphorical one, too. It made him feel uncomfortable—scared, even.
He worried that it might be the seed of paternal love germinating.
He really hoped not. It would wither on the vine if he was given care of it.
“You know I’m not actually your father?”
“Of course I do. He was blown to smithereens in the war before I was born. But you’re my legal father. Ivy says so.”
“Well, I’ll pay you back for anything you have to spend. Obviously.”
“Obviously. With interest? Compound?”
She knew about compound interest?
“Well, my dad did work in a bank. Must have got it from him.”
“A knowledge of compound interest? What if he’d been a train driver, would you have been able to drive a train? Or a surgeon, could you operate on someone?”
“Probably. Ivy says I’ve got his nose as well.”
Ivor Fowler knocked on the open door of the office.
“So, this is your hang-out, Flynn. We did wonder. It’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta down here.
” He had an artful forelock of hair that he had to keep brushing back from his forehead to stop it flopping in his eyes.
The gesture drew attention to his strong features.
Flynn heard a quiet hiss from Evans. On account of the hair, probably.
“We thought you might like to come and have a gander at the Parlours.”
“The Parlours are finished?”
“Well…I wouldn’t say finished, exactly.”
“What would you say, then?” Maud Ogilvie asked tartly.
Fowler was taken aback by her castigating tone.
“I don’t know. Almost finished, I suppose.
” She made a disdainful little noise, signifying the inadequacy of his answer.
Flynn suspected she was scolding Fowler for his hair on behalf of Evans.
Or perhaps on account of the jibe about the Black Hole of Calcutta. She was very protective of the office.
“Have you seen Badger yet today, Miss Ogilvie?” Flynn asked as Fowler began wandering around their small space, picking things up and examining them before putting them down again in the wrong place. Flynn could sense Maud Ogilvie’s patience thinning by the minute.
“I think he said something about going over to Homes and Gardens,” she said, her raptor eyes following Fowler’s progress around the room.
“I’m afraid I must love you and leave you.
I believe there are some problems that need sorting out with the quality of the crockery in the Regatta Restaurant.
” (E. Brain and Son, Fenton China, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs, Flynn thought.) “I have been asked to go and investigate. I shall be back within the hour.” Flynn suggested that she walk with them, but she whisked her hat and coat off the coat stand and said, “No, no, you go with Mr. Fowler.”
Flynn eventually managed to herd Fowler out of the building, and they made their way to the South Bank across the pedestrian bridge. By the time they were on the bridge there was no sign of Maud Ogilvie.
Fowler seemed convinced that the Bailey bridge was in danger of collapsing again. “Might do, I suppose,” Flynn said, indifferent to their fate. “Do you swim?”
“Only in the Med, usually. Or the Italian Lakes.” (What contempt Evans would have displayed at this answer.) “So,” Fowler said, when they had safely negotiated the peril of the Thames and were on site, “shall we have a tour? The first Parlour’s over here.
Hortense’s favourite, actually.” Where was Hortense?
“Brook Street, probably,” Fowler said. “Looking for curtain fabric.”
Desperate, last-minute noisy construction was being carried on all around. Unlike Battersea, where it had been announced that the opening of the Pleasure Gardens would be delayed, there was no talk of surrender here. They would be working through the night, fighting on the beaches.
Flynn’s heart sank when he caught sight of Mitzi, taking up a militant stance in one of the Kitchens. She was wearing a dress whose design seemed to have been inspired by a Savoy cabbage, and she could have easily passed for a pantomime dame. Widow Twanky, perhaps.
She had cornered Hetty, to whom she appeared to be delivering a spirited sermon on the necessity of there being a working kitchen in which she could bake the Festival Cake.
Flynn wondered if he should warn Hetty to keep her spice racks and Pyrex bowls locked away from the light-fingered Mitzi.
From the many to the few, wasn’t that what Archie had said?
Did Mitzi know anything about what Archie was up to in Half Moon Street?
She might not know about his shenanigans with Delphine Dubois, but she must be aware of the existence of those photographs—they had not been taken by a covert camera but had been deliberately staged for someone’s delectation.
Whose? Not Archie’s surely—why would Archie need lewd photographs of his wife when he had access to the real thing?
Flynn gave an involuntary shudder at the thought.
Perhaps they had been taken for commercial purposes (Mitzi was a graduate of Mrs. Ramsbottom’s academy, after all), intended for sale underneath the counter in Soho.
Hetty caught sight of him and mouthed “Help.” Flynn sighed, feeling obliged to rescue her. “You go on ahead,” he said to Ivor Fowler, “I’ll catch up with you.”
“Harry,” Mitzi said, by way of a greeting. “Harry, this girl is saying that I can’t bake the cake in one of your kitchens,” demoting the Kitchens to lower case.
“They’re not strictly speaking mine, Mitzi,” he said.
“Giles assured me that I would be able to.”
“Giles?”
“Dangerfield. Giles Dangerfield,” she said impatiently.
“Yes, sorry, of course. The problem is that nothing actually works in the Kitchens,” Flynn said, promoting them back to upper case. “None of the appliances are connected.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Flynn could see Hetty backing away in furtive retreat.
When she was a safe distance from Mitzi, she blew him a kiss (gratitude, he supposed) and then embarked on a dumbshow for his benefit—miming drinking from a glass and then tapping the watch on her wrist before displaying seven fingers.
A drink at seven o’clock tonight, he interpreted.
He was transfixed by her bravura attempt to communicate the Coach and Horses in Greek Street when Mitzi interrupted her charade, bellowing in his ear, “Harry! Are you listening?”
“Yes, sorry.” He made a gesture of helplessness to Hetty.
“So—we’ve agreed—you’ll get me a Calor gas cylinder or a portable generator, or indeed both. And water, of course.”
Perhaps he could divert the Thames for her.
Get the river nymphs to arrange something.
Hetty had disappeared now and he was stuck on his own with Mitzi.
She was saying something about a “water bowser,” but he was finding it hard to concentrate as the photographs of a naked Mitzi kept popping up in front of his eyes like a deviant zoetrope.
Hortense Fowler came sailing towards them through an assortment of workmen like a trireme ploughing through the Aegean. She was armoured in an immense stegosaurian necklace that seemed to have been made out of stone plates. Flynn was relieved to find that Mitzi was her intended prey, not him.
It seemed the Fowlers were having a “little soirée” on the eve of the Festival’s launch and wished to invite the Blinkhorns.
Like two old Titan gods they manoeuvred around each other, vying for supremacy.
Flynn worried that he might be crushed between them.
He made a rapid set of excuses to Mitzi, saying he had “urgent Parlour business,” gave a formal little bow to Hortense (where had that come from?) and made his escape while they were distracted by each other, leaving the Kitchens to fend for themselves.
“What do you think, then, Flynn?”
“About what?”
“The Parlour.”
“Oh, very nice, I’m sure.” The Parlour contained, amongst other things: a grand piano, an ivory cigarette box, a backgammon board, a Robert Adam sculpture and a marble fireplace.
Not to mention a large everlasting-flower decoration (“by the Rt. Hon. Elizabeth, Countess of Bandon, Padworth House near Reading, Berks”).
They had all been raided from the Stock List, but nonetheless when put together in the one overly gracious interior Flynn could see that if this one was anything to go by Parlours would be in trouble with the Rooms Committee.
“Hortense is an aesthete,” Ivor Fowler said. “She believes the common man should be elevated by living amongst beautiful things. It’s about discernment, not affordability.” Which was more or less the exact opposite of Festival thinking on the Parlours.