Chapter 18 Hors de Combat
Hors de Combat
It was hardly a surprise that when he did manage to crawl back on to his sofa, Flynn found that the gates to the Land of Nod were now firmly shut against him.
No golden slumbers—the entire Stock List would not have helped.
The night was deathly quiet; even from Romilly Street he could hear the hours being doled out grudgingly by Big Ben.
To make matters worse, every time he drifted off he was poked awake by the broken springs of the sofa, until finally he was woken for good by a fully dressed, alarmingly wide-awake Veronica pinching his ear.
“You were screaming in your sleep,” she said.
“Thought I’d better wake you.” She thrust a cup and saucer in his face.
“Here. Made you a cuppa. Good of me or what?”
“Are you after something, Veronica?”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say. I made you tea out of the goodness of my heart.”
The tea tasted like iron filings, as if Veronica had dumped the remains of his entire week’s ration into the pot. Why was she up so early? “Why are you up so early?”
“It’s not early. You forgot to set your alarm.”
He made another attempt at the tea. It really was foul.
“Good cuppa?” Veronica asked.
“Yes, very good,” he lied. “Thank you.”
She preened at the praise and fetched the little aluminium teapot and poured more tea into his cup.
Could he really trust her to be left on her own all day a second time, especially now that “the game was afoot”?
She was possessed of a kind of low cunning and had no sense of danger.
She might return to the Lamb and Flag by herself, or be unable to resist the temptation to take the gun out of the drawer, despite her promise not to.
The gun. The problematic gun. He had disposed of the scarf and that had come back to haunt him, perhaps the gun would do the same if he got rid of it.
Perhaps he should keep it. A useful kind of thing to have, Archie had said. Was it?
“Drink your tea up,” Veronica said, and monitored him until he had drained the cup.
“Delicious,” he said.
“Actually…”
“You do want something.”
“Can we have a day just…being. Daughter and Dad, kind of thing. Please?”
Flynn was so surprised (moved, if he was honest) that he acquiesced immediately. He could see it wasn’t fair to keep Veronica cooped up so much—but perhaps more importantly it would distract her (and him too, if it came to that) from his current fretful predicament.
“All right. How about a spot of sightseeing?”
It transpired that Fortress Wealdstone was Veronica’s entire universe and she didn’t know the capital at all, even though it was almost within touching distance of where she lived.
“Been to Selfridges,” she said. “Ivy works there. And Whiteleys.” She was counting off on her fingers.
“Swan and Edgar’s. Harrods. Liberty’s. Peter Robinson—”
“So every department store in London, but not the Houses of Parliament?”
“What’s that when it’s at home?” she mumbled, hindered by a caramel she had foraged from somewhere.
“It’s the seat of government.”
“Sounds boring.”
He had to admit it did. “How about Big Ben? Westminster Abbey?” he asked, fathoming the depths.
It took a woefully long time to hit rock bottom.
She stared at him like a hypnotized cat.
She was wilfully ignorant. The mute staring continued.
She was a mouth-breather, he noticed. The cat went briefly cross-eyed, which seemed to be a comment on his tiresome catechism.
She rolled the caramel from one cheek to the other.
“How about St. Paul’s?”
“A church?” She mimed an extravagant yawn, exposing the sickly remains of the sweet.
“Buckingham Palace?”
“I know that, silly. It’s where the King lives.
” (Although not for long, apparently. He would be “dead before next Easter,” according to Lydia, a fact conveyed to him when they had been in her bed.
They would have a new queen—young and beautiful to boot.
“Now that will be a tonic for the nation,” Lydia said.
“Your Festival will pall in comparison to a Coronation. A new era. A new Jerusalem.”)
“I’m not stupid, you know,” Veronica said.
“Didn’t say you were. How about the Tower of London?”
“Yep, heard of that too.” (Increasingly pleased with her sum of knowledge.) “That’s where they chopped people’s heads off.”
“So, shall we, then? Go and see the sights?”
Veronica removed the tiny nub of remaining caramel and examined it before putting it back in her mouth. “Go on, then,” she conceded.
—
Big Ben was briefly admired. Buckingham Palace was tolerated, as were the Houses of Parliament, although Veronica was baffled as to why they couldn’t go inside either building.
(“So we just look at them? What’s the point of that?
”) The National Gallery was offered and refused.
(“Just pictures?”) Ditto the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History Museum and its neighbour the Science Museum.
“Science” and “Museum” in the same sentence was a double dose of horror where Veronica was concerned.
Flynn’s rather feeble attempts at enlightenment—politics, history, the streets of London—fell on deaf ears.
“Is there anything you don’t know?” she said, growing rebellious.
“Well, I don’t know where Delphine Dubois is.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” she agreed.
—
The sights were swapped for food, for Veronica anyway. She seemed to have a bottomless appetite. Flynn wondered if she had worms. All this eating was funded by an endless stream of IOUs as Flynn still hadn’t had a chance to go to the bank to replenish his funds.
There was lunch in a Lyons; an extravagant sundae in an Italian ice-cream parlour near Piccadilly; a cup of tea and finally a currant bun in a café that faced on to the entrance to the British Museum—the closest Veronica was prepared to get to its great edifice, despite the promise of the embalmed dead.
“Mummies?” she said, suspicious of the word.
“Not like Ivy,” he said. “Although…”
“Could murder an Eccles cake,” she said.
“You must have hollow legs.”
Veronica inspected her limbs as if she was checking their solidity.
She had no idea of human anatomy, of the skin and bone and fragile flesh that constituted a body.
Or of how vulnerable it could be—how it could be wiped out in the swipe of a bamboo stick, the prick of a bayonet, by any and every filthy disease.
He gave himself a little shake and put the war back in his own museum.
“Well, they’re not full yet,” she said. “An Eccles cake’ll probably do it.”
This must be how the hoodwinked foster parent of a cuckoo chick felt, Flynn thought, eaten out of house and home.
He bought the Eccles cake and also a sausage roll for Mrs. Betty, who was tied patiently to a lamppost outside, staring vacantly at the edifice of the British Museum across the road.
Next time they embarked on this kind of lengthy expedition he should leave her behind—with Leonora perhaps, who professed to be a dog lover.
If she returned, of course. But then, why wouldn’t she?
“Bored now,” Veronica bleated.
“How about St. James’s Park?” Flynn cajoled, thinking of somewhere he might be able to rest for a while. “You might see the pelicans. Pelicans are big birds,” he elucidated before she could ask.
He carried Mrs. Betty to the park and was relieved to deposit her on the grass.
Even more relieved to deposit himself on it.
The sun was warm, and a drowsy Flynn, deprived of rest for countless nights now, was grateful to lie down and plunge into the deep pit of sleep.
He was hauled out of it only a short time later by Mrs. Betty licking his face, her dog breath hot and meaty.
There was no sign of Veronica anywhere and Flynn surprised himself with how fearful her absence made him suddenly feel.
The fear felt visceral, as if his guts had shrunk and twisted.
It was only the scarf that was being held to ransom at the moment—what if Veronica was next?
Leaping to his feet in a panic, he started shouting Veronica’s name.
He was about to set off in search of her when she stepped unexpectedly out of the middle of a large herbaceous border, pushing aside a tall stand of delphiniums and saying, “Keep your hair on. What are you yelling about? I just went to have a wee in the bushes. I didn’t know where the Ladies’ was. ”
“Well, next time you’re planning on disappearing, maybe you could tell me,” he said crossly.
She was a force majeure who had entered his life uninvited and would perhaps wreck it.
He had been terrified by her absence and now he was terrified by her presence.
The germinating seed was pushing painfully towards the light.
(He was in danger of poetry.) He still refused to think of it as love.
Love flayed the skin off you. Then it flensed the flesh.
Within no time at all, it was down to the bone.
An untroubled Veronica said, “Let’s find a café. They might have iced buns. Are you coming?”
—
“What’s happening here, then?” Veronica said. They had slowly wended their way home, all three of them wilted by the long day.
“I don’t know.” What was happening here?
Flynn wondered. They had been halted in their tracks by the sight of two uniformed constables at the far end of Rose Street, outside the Lamb and Flag.
They seemed extraordinarily interested in something on the pavement.
One of the constables was stroking his chin as if he was trying to work out a conundrum.
Occasionally they glanced up at one of the windows as if assessing its height.
The barman, Tommy Gammage, had said he “lived above the shop.” There were two floors above the pub; on the third floor a window gaped, its curtains billowing out in the evening breeze.
“Gammage lives up there, doesn’t he?” Veronica said.