Shades of Grey

Meet the Chromogentsia

My father straightened his bow tie for the tenth time and pressed the doorbell outside Mrs. Ochre’s house. I hadn’t seen him so fastidious with his appearance for a long time, so presumed he was interested in her. I knew for a fact that he was lonely. He and I never talked about my mother, as it was too painful, but he, like me, carried a picture of her in his valise.

“Speak when spoken to at the Chromogentsia,” he said as we heard someone come to the door, “and don’t do anything that might jeopardize my chances with Velma.”

“Velma?”

“Mrs. Ochre.”

“Ah,” I said, not realizing this had gone as far as it had, “right.”

The door opened.

“So good of you to come!” exclaimed Mrs. Ochre, who was dressed in a particularly stunning red evening dress. It hugged her body tightly, and looked as though it had been adapted from a Standard Strapless #21. I saw Dad’s eyes look downward when he thought she wasn’t watching, but I think she noticed, and was flattered.

“We wouldn’t have missed it for anything, Mrs. Ochre,” said my father. “I brought you these.”

“Roses!” she exclaimed. “How too, too divine.” She turned to her daughter, who was hovering nearby.

“Lucy, my dear, would you find a vase and some water? Too wonderful to see you, Edward—is that the rice pudding? How marvelous. Would you put it in the kitchen? Lucy will show you.”

I walked into the kitchen with Lucy and watched as she selected a vase, then ran some water into it, making something of a mess.

“Did you hear that my mum and your dad took tea at the Fallen Man?”

“I’d not heard that, no.”

“They were even laughing together. Uproariously, some say—and they may even have held hands under the table. Look,” she added, “cards on the table and all that. My mother is interested in your father. And not just for the odd cup of tea and a stroll around the Outer Markers. She’s vulnerable at present, and I don’t want her hurt. If your father thinks he can take advantage of a grief-stricken widow, he’ll have me to contend with.”

Mrs. Ochre wasn’t exactly acting like a grief-stricken widow, what with laughing uproariously at the Fallen Man on a date with her dead husband’s replacement.

“Likewise,” I replied. “I don’t want anyone taking advantage of my father’s good nature and lonely disposition to effect a union that is not in his best interest.”

“Hmm,” she said, “I think that makes them both pretty much equal in the parental vulnerability stakes.

Perhaps we should just give them free rein and see where it goes. We can meet again to discuss whether to throw a spanner into the works or not.”

“I agree. Do you have any loganberry jam, by the way?”

“Ooh!” she murmured, “chasing knowledge, are you?”

“You’ve spoken to the Apocryphal man, too?”

She smiled. “I managed to reconstitute some loganberry from a dried-out jam pot I found at the back of the cupboard. It wasn’t very good, but enough for half a question.”

She opened the cooker and checked the chicken vol-au-vents.

“If you find some jam, I’ll come in for half the cost in exchange for a question.”

“Deal.”

There was a pause.

“I’m sorry to bring this up,” I said, “but your father—did he have much to do with the Grey, Jane?”

“Whyever do you ask?”

I had to think quick, but couldn’t, so said the first thing that came into my head. “It’s part of my, um, chair census.”

“Oh. Well, no. Not that I know of. But he would have seen everyone at some point—he would have been there when she was born. Unless—”

“What gorgeous flowers!” said Mrs. Ochre as she walked in. “Lucy, would you mind pouring the tea while I greet guests with Holden—I mean, Mr. Russett—at the door? Edward, be a dear and make yourself useful with the coats, and after that you might like to hand the sandwiches around.”

I picked up the cucumberesque sandwiches and walked into the large, wood-paneled drawing room.

Mrs. Ochre could have used real cucumbers, but they don’t hold the green dye so well. These were the more dye-absorbent sliced courgettes, and were a bright emerald mock-green. Although the room was half full, the only people I recognized were Mrs. Lapis Lazuli and the Apocryphal man, who had cleaned himself up and was even wearing a suit. Since I would not be able to acknowledge the Apocryphal man in company without heavy demerit, I merely walked past him so he could take some sandwiches off my tray. I nodded a greeting to Mrs. Lapis Lazuli, who inclined her head favorably in return.

The conversation was mostly about the possibility of High Saffron’s being open for toshing and how, with full colorization from a pipeline extension, East Carmine might once more host Jollity Fair.

The next guests to arrive were Aubrey and Lisa Lemon-Skye, parents of Jabez.

“You must be Edward,” said Aubrey as Lisa chatted with Mrs. Ochre and my father, who had fallen easily into the roles of hostess and host.

“You have a bicolored name,” I observed. “I’ve never heard of that before.”

“And not likely to again,” mused Aubrey. “Although Ruleful, its use is not encouraged. My wife is Turquoise’s cousin, so she managed to swing it for us. Besides, it’s not as though we were complementary colors.”

I gave an involuntary shudder. The notion of a Red-Green, Blue-Orange or Yellow-Purple conjoining was too scandalously degrading even to contemplate.

“Do you enjoy the bedtime story?” came a loud voice. I turned to find Mrs. Lapis Lazuli staring at me.

“Very much, ma’am.”

“Splendid. I can’t imagine who taps it out—most irresponsible.”

And she gave me a broad wink.

“I understand you’re thinking of staying with us for good?”

“Not really,” I replied. “In fact, not at all.”

“Glad to hear it. We are in need of fresh seed to stir up the politics before stagnation. Good gracious!”

she exclaimed as an equally wrinkly lady on the other side of the room caught her eye. “It’s Granny Crimson. How remarkably Rot-free she looks. I must take a closer look.”

And without another word, she moved off.

“One of the stalwarts of the Debating Society,” remarked Mr. Lemon-Skye as we watched the old woman move in a sprightly fashion across the floor. “Top hockeyballist in her time; represented the village sixteen times at the Jollity Fair athletics. Her areas of expertise are bar codes, book titles and maps—she has an original Parker Brothers map of the world.”

This was interesting, since the map represented the only view we had of the world before the Something That Happened. For some reason, its destruction had not been demanded under Annex XXIV.

“Does she adhere to the theory that it represents global Chromatic regions of the pre-Epiphanic world?”

“She does, although I’m doubtful myself. If we were regionally blue when Something Happened, there’d be more evidence of it now.”

“And the RISK acronym? What does she think that stands for?”

“Regional International Spectral Kolor . Yes, I know,” Mr. Lemon-Skye agreed when I looked doubtful, “it must be an archaic spelling. But get her to show you the map. It’s almost complete, you know—only the nations of Irkutsk and Kamchatka have been eaten by clodworms.”

“I’ll be sure to. Thank you.”

“My pleasure. What do you think of our crackletrap?”

“It’s . . . impressive.”

“It is, isn’t it? Some say it wasn’t worth the Greys lost in construction, but scaffolding is so very expensive these days. We’re lucky to have Prefect Gamboge, don’t you think? Splendid lady.”

I had forgotten that although Aubrey was spotted Green, he was the Lemon in Lemon-Skye. A Yellow through and through.

Another couple had entered the room. I recognized the woman because Tommo had pointed her out at the Fallen Man. They were Doug and Daisy Crimson’s parents. The father was a trifle somber-looking and had the unmistakable air of a senior monitor passed over for promotion. He also had an annoying habit of constantly looking about when being conversed with—as though there might be a more interesting conversation going on elsewhere.

“This is Edward Russett,” said Aubrey as they walked over. “I was just telling him how dangerous lightning was.”

There was a brief round of hand shaking and pleasantries in which I could sense they were studying me intensely on the off-chance that I stayed. Like their son, I was potentially a strong Red.

“Lightning? I’d be more concerned about swans. And the Riffraff.”

“Do you know anything about the Riffraff?” I asked, trying to make it sound like an intelligent question, and not the sarcastic remark I intended it to be.

“I’m not a big fact person,” said Mr. Crimson, who was honest, even if a twit. “Unproved speculation is more my thing. But Mrs. Gamboge knows a bit, don’t you, ma’am?”

I hadn’t noticed that the Yellow prefect had arrived, notebook in hand. It was usual for a prefect to be present to take minutes for the faculty’s record, as “great and important thoughts” sometimes emerged from the meetings. Thankfully, Courtland didn’t seem to be with her.

Sally Gamboge moved into the center of the room. She seemed marginally less unpleasant than usual, but that wasn’t saying much. Although she was not an ugly woman, her demeanor had soured her appearance into one that generated only mistrust. But she had my full attention, and my father’s. The rest had heard the story before, but stood in respectful silence regardless.

“I was visiting my sister in Yellopolis last year,” she said. “They’d had problems with Riffraff camping close enough to raid crops at dawn and dusk when no one was about, so they set a few snares around the Outer Markers. Astonishingly, they actually caught one.”

“What did it look like?”

“Scruffy beast. Unwashed, covered in lice, bad teeth, stained pinafore, torn dress and distinctly unshiny shoes—subhuman, if you ask me.”

“Could it have been Nightloss suffering from advanced nyctopsychosis?” asked my father, who, like most people, had seen or personally experienced the effects of a night panic: quivering, palpitations, irrational shouting, dissociation from reality and finally insanity.

“It didn’t have a postcode,” replied the Yellow prefect, tapping her left clavicle. “I checked when they stripped it off to hose it down.”

“Could it talk?” asked Lucy.

“A gutter mix of tongues,” replied Gamboge expertly, taking another sip of her yellow-tinged elderflower cordial. “Many of the nouns were s lang in origin, with the grammatical construction similar to our modern tongue, but with the sort of frightful mispronunciations one would expect from someone without access to proper schooling. I could understand part of what she was saying, but the language was so peppered with obscenities of the worst possible kind that it was barely worth trying to understand her at all.”

“A savage,” remarked Mr. Lemon-Skye with a shiver.

“Quite so,” replied Gamboge, “yet oddly enough, it did repeat a man’s name numerous times. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought it capable of a monogamous relationship.”

There was polite laughter at the somewhat fanciful notion, although I didn’t join in myself.

“But here’s the curious part,” continued Mrs. Gamboge. “The creature had lost part of its foot in the snare, and within a day infection set in. It grew listless, went pale and moaned in a most pathetic manner until it fell unconscious and died. It was all over in three days.”

“You mean,” said Lucy, “it didn’t catch traumatic Mildew?”

“Not a spore in sight. If any civilized person had suffered physical damage as bad as that, he’d have been carried off by Variant-T in a twinkling.”

The society went silent as they mused upon the possibility that the Riffraff had immunity from the Rot, excepting Granny Crimson, who told everyone she had just seen a bee fly past the window.

“I understand that some villages actually trade with the Riffraff,” announced Mrs. Ochre, being the perfect hostess and filling the hole in the conversation. “My sister Betsy lives in Hennarington on the Honeybun Peninsula, and they said the Riffraff leave sacks of sorted blue scrap at the Outer Markers, which they trade for semolina, Ovaltine and gravy granules.”

“If that’s true,” Aubrey replied, “one would have to come to the rather astonishing conclusion that the Riffraff may have a rudimentary understanding of color.”

Everyone nodded sagely in agreement.

“I have been studying Homo feralensis for many years,” remarked Mrs. Gamboge, “and I firmly adhere to the theory that they are Greys who have simply dropped the short distance into savagery. Without the stabilizing hand of Munsell’s Chromatic ideology, we would be like them—ignorant, filthy and bestial.”

“Is it true they eat their own babies?” asked Mrs. Crimson.

“It is absolutely true—and any other babies they can get hold of. Some say they produce babies only to eat.”

“How could feral Greys have a rudimentary sense of color?” I asked.

Mrs. Gamboge fixed me with an icy stare and announced in a doom-laden voice, “By eating the brains of those they slaughter, in order to inherit their Chromatic cognicity.”

“Eat their brains?” echoed Mrs. Ochre in a quavering voice, breaking the stunned silence that followed.

“Without a doubt,” murmured Mrs. Gamboge, “and with a spoon—the instrument of the truly barbarous.”

“Goodness!” Mrs. Lemon-Skye exclaimed. “Perhaps that’s why Harmony left spoons off the list of manufactured goods.”

“Truly, Munsell works in mysterious ways,” announced Mr. Crimson.

“The sooner we deal with the Riffraff problem once and for all,” continued Mrs. Gamboge, who was eager to drive her point home, “the sooner we can sleep safe in our beds at night.”

A chorus of agreement greeted this sentiment, followed by a long pause as everyone presumably thought about how lucky they were to be living within such a safe, ordered civilization. Except me, who was thinking about how I already slept safe in my bed.

“What utter balls!” came a loud and gravelly voice.

“Who dares to use such lang—” Mrs. Gamboge began, but she stopped when she saw it was the Apocryphal man, and changed the comment into a cough, while everyone stared at their drinks, or at the walls, or something.

Mrs. Ochre, attempting some misdirection, decided we should be seated. “Time for dinner,” she announced, clapping her hands together. “It’s boy-girl-boy-girl-boy-girl.”