Summerland

6 HOW TO TAME AN ELEPHANT, 5TH NOVEMBER 1938

On Saturday, Rachel White was on her way to meet the dead spymaster when she realised she was being followed.

It was little more than instinct at first, a glimpse of a familiar gait, face or hat. The crowd in Charing Cross was thick, drawn out by the sunny autumn afternoon. She stopped at a booth that sold old records, pretended to study the cover of a Schubert music sheet, and watched the passers-by.

Newsboys carried advert placards on their backs: THE TRUTH HURTS—THIS AWFUL TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU SCREAM. Workmen pasted down steaming, pungent asphalt. Sleek electric cars and tottering old buses huddled shoulder to shoulder in a traffic jam and blared their horns. A young man in a sweater gave her an appreciative look. Ectofactory workers wearing dishevelled coats and pasty complexions shuffled past. A cabbie union man offered her a leaflet on the evils of spirit cabs and unemployment.

Nothing. No familiar faces, hats or gaits. Her street tradecraft—a spy’s art of clandestine encounters and surveillance evasion—was rusty but she still knew how to execute a surveillance-detection route: a logical path through the city that was designed to force any observers to reveal themselves. In the past three hours, she had criss-crossed the city on the Tube, taken several cabs and wandered through Harrods. Foyles bookstore was going to serve as her final choke point.

Of course, it was possible for a team of agents to shadow a suspect without being spotted. More than four were practically undetectable. In addition, she had no way of sensing aetheric surveillance, although spirit Watchers were nearly useless in the daytime.

Was she being overcautious? As far as anyone in the Winter Court knew, she was now happily working as a clerk in the Finance Section, doing exactly what Roger had advised. She shuffled dull paperwork any office girl could have handled, except for the high clearance required, approved bank wires to fund overseas operations and reconciled accounts with deliberately obscure line items. She lunched with the junior staff in the canteen, away from her former colleagues. On the rare occasions when she interacted with Liddell, Vee-Vee or other senior personnel, she gracefully accepted empty promises of support and hinted that she might want to retire early, as soon as her pension and Ticket were secure.

Rachel might almost have believed it herself if not for the contents of the Manila folder she had taken from Wormwood Scrubs, and the response to the anonymous ectomail she had sent to the folder’s subject two days earlier.

She crossed the road, navigated the puddles of last night’s rain and entered Foyles. She made sure to spend time in the bird section, looking for a book on feeding finches. That would come in handy for the cover story she was working on.

Over breakfast, she had told Joe she was going shopping. He had suffered another bad night. A cold spot had appeared in the bedroom and Rachel had slept in the guest room. When she woke, she had found Joe lying down on the couch in the drawing room with curtains closed, Gertrude fussing over him.

‘Maybe you can bring me a new head, dear,’ he said. ‘I heard they are on sale at Harrods.’

She felt guilty at the easy lie. ‘I like this one just fine,’ she said and kissed his forehead.

Now, as she breathed in the smell of new books and made her way through the labyrinth of shelves, she wondered if actually getting birds would be a bad idea.

Then she recognised the young blond man in the camel-hair coat, leafing through a book barely thirty feet away.

Memory matched his features to other impressions from her route, like light glinting off facets of a jewel. A sandy brown coat glimpsed in Harrods. The face of a man bent over a newspaper on the Oxford Court Line. Thin blond hair, combed back from a high forehead, and improbably chiselled features.

Rachel made sure to walk across his field of vision and then proceeded farther into the bookstore’s depths. When he turned a corner into the history section, she was waiting.

The man froze when he saw her standing there, only a few steps away.

Of course the Service was watching. She had been an idiot to think otherwise. Someone—probably Harker or Roger—had already passed her information to C in the Summer Court, and they were keeping an eye on her just in case she planned to do something foolish. The feeling was both reassuring and embarrassing at the same time, like when her mother had caught her as a child after she ran away with her wet nurse’s daughter in Bombay to make chapattis in the local bakery.

The man pretended to ignore her, studied the shelves and touched the spine of a book with a gloved hand. He was remarkably handsome, too much so for the field, where the real heroes were faceless, average-looking men.

Rachel herself, on the other hand, belonged exactly where she was. Behind a desk. On the shelf. She just refused to admit it. That was why she had saved Kulagin from the duel. She had wanted something more than the empty nursery and the haunted man in her bedroom.

No matter. There was no arguing with tradecraft: no rendezvous under surveillance. Harker was probably laughing behind her back, but she was not going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging that she had been caught. She headed back to the bird section and bought a book on the care and breeding of Gouldian finches. There was a hollow feeling in her stomach when she walked back towards the Tube station.

‘Excuse me, Mrs White?’ said a voice with an impeccable public-school accent.

The young man in the camel-hair coat stood in front of her.

Rachel sighed. ‘Tell Harker to send you back to Brickendomby Hall for more training,’ she said.

‘You misunderstand me, madam. I am not a Watcher.’

‘Enlighten me, then.’

‘My name is Henry. I am merely a messenger. Would you be so kind as to step inside for a moment?’ He gestured at the entrance to a wax museum that advertised THE HORRORS OF THE TRENCHES—OVER 100 FIGURES.

She stared at him.

‘It will only take a minute,’ the man said reassuringly. ‘Allow me, please.’ He offered her his arm. ‘This is supposed to be a splendid show. Our mutual friend you worked with in Wolverhampton thinks so, too.’

Rachel raised her eyebrows, accepted the man’s arm and allowed herself to be led inside.

* * *

The wax museum was crowded, hot and smelled of burning dust. The exhibits were in small, low rooms filled with sandbags to make them look like trenches. In the dim light, stiff wax figures in their broad-rimmed helmets and uniforms enacted scenes from the war.

A medic offered a wounded soldier with a bloody bandage around his head a Ticket and a vial of cyanide. A group of Tommies huddled behind barbed wire while an old rattling newsreel played on the wall—hulking forms of ectotanks over charging soldiers, striding forward and growing bigger with every death, picking up field guns with ectoplasm tentacles. A group of doctors and technicians, white coats stained by dust and grime, doing final checks on a spirit-armoured soldier before his transformation. The metal plates and heavy coiled wire evoked a medieval knight. Rachel stared at that tableau for a long time. Was this what Joe’s nightmares were like?

‘Here, Mrs White,’ Henry said. He ducked under a piece of tape blocking a corridor, indicating an unfinished part of the exhibit. She followed him into a pitch-black dead end. He fumbled with a light switch. A bulb flickered into a half-hearted glow and revealed a group of naked wax dolls standing at attention.

Henry removed his hat. Underneath, he was wearing a Crookes aetheric resonator, or a spirit crown as it was colloquially known. It was an expensive model, too: the filigreed silver net practically vanished into his hair, and it was only now that she noticed the skin-coloured power cord that ran into the pocket of his coat. That explained the good looks: Henry was a high-class medium who rented his body to affluent spirits. He smiled a little sadly and reached into his pocket. There was a small click and his features contorted unnaturally, his eyes flickering from side to side and then rolling back in his head. No wonder mediums usually wore masks.

‘Mrs White,’ he said in a new voice. It was gentle and mellifluous, lower than Henry’s own, and made her think of a kindly old uncle. Children across Britain loved that voice, the voice of Max Chevalier, the famous naturalist and author whose radio shows were a part of many a family’s Sunday ritual even after his passage to Summerland. What most people did not know was that Chevalier had been the head of his own Section in the Winter Court and the most successful agent runner in the Service.

Until he was assigned to vet Peter Bloom.

‘You passed the test, Mrs White,’ Chevalier said. ‘I hope you will forgive my little ruse. It is always good to observe wild animals from afar for a while before approaching.’

Rachel stared into the medium’s white, empty eyes. Henry’s handsome features were contorted into something resembling a mischievous grin, but exaggerated, like a Mr Punch figure in a street booth.

‘Do you mind if I smoke a pipe while we talk? It’s a pleasure I rarely experience—thought-forms simply are not the same—so I asked Henry to bring it especially.’

Rachel nodded and waited while the medium took a curved pipe from an inside pocket and filled it. His movements were jerky and a lot of the tobacco spilled to the floor. Then he lit it, filling the corridor with pungent smoke.

‘Ah, that is better. Now, I have made some inquiries about you, Mrs White. I understand you had something of a career setback recently. A pity. A real pity.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke that obscured his unnatural face.

‘I do not want your pity, Mr Chevalier. I want answers.’

‘Please call me Max. And I can assure you that it is not pity making me spend my meagre savings on Henry’s services to meet with you like this. It’s curiosity. Tell me, do you actually plan to breed finches?’

‘I might. As you say, I have suffered a career setback and have more spare time on my hands.’

‘Intelligent creatures, more so than they get credit for. But very fragile, Mrs White. A sudden cold, shock or unhappiness can kill them. Prone to tumours, as well. You need to keep them warm. Feed them fennel seeds.’

‘With all due respect, I did not seek you out to discuss birds.’

‘Oh? A good intelligence officer needs to be a naturalist. I myself am currently raising a cuckoo—with the help of my lovely Susi, of course, my living pair of hands—and it is most instructive.’

‘Tell me about Peter Bloom.’

‘Ah. Now there is a rare and interesting bird.’

‘You had your own Section, practically your own miniature Service. Then you vetted Peter Bloom. Suddenly there were rumours about you being a deranged witch-hunter. You passed away very suddenly. There was talk of suicide. The Summer Court did not want you. What happened?’

Max Chevalier’s spirit puffed on the pipe. Tendrils of smoke swirled around the medium’s face like ectoplasm.

‘You have already answered your question, Mrs White. You see, I raised a fox once. It was a sweet creature as a cub, like a cross between a cat and a dog. As it grew older, it became troublesome: very good at sneaking into henhouses while still allowing itself to be cuddled. One day, it tore up my favourite pair of slippers. I took it to the backyard and shot it in the head. It looked surprised when I pulled the trigger.’

Rachel frowned. ‘So you grew too bold and Bloom was merely an excuse to put you down?’

‘Yes. In this case by planting documents on one of my agents to make it look like we had framed an innocent man, a public outcry, et cetera et cetera.’

‘What did you find about Bloom that was so dangerous?’

‘Sir Stewart asked me to vet Bloom, and I did some digging, not realising it was a trap. It turned out that Bloom’s father, Charles, was an MP for an anti-Dimensionist Labour group before he died without a Ticket. His mother, Ann Veronica née Reeve, had radical leanings in her youth and took up the struggle. And then Peter engaged in some adolescent indiscretions at Cambridge. Burned his own Ticket, if you can believe that. But that could be disregarded—rebellion is a prerogative of the young, after all. Still, I advised against hiring him. I was overruled.’

‘By whom?’

‘I believe the final decision was made during dinner at White’s, with Sir Stewart in attendance and a certain author of some renown—a Mr Herbert Blanco West.’

Rachel stared at him. ‘The prime minister?’

Max nodded. ‘I made a very bad error, then. Fortunes can turn quickly in the Service, as you know.’

‘But why was the PM involved?’

‘If you had the patience to dig up old gossip pages like I did, Mrs White, you would have discovered that Mr West engaged in an affair with a young Miss Reeve—whose subsequent marriage to Charles Bloom was very sudden indeed.’

Rachel drew a sharp breath. ‘You mean to say that—’

‘Peter Bloom is untouchable, Mrs White. Whatever your grievance with him may be, your superiors will do anything to keep him safe in order to secure favours from the highest level. The windmill you are tilting at is very high and ancient and English: privilege.’

Rachel looked at the cartoon horrors of the Great War around them and felt sick. She thought about what it felt like to share a cigarette in the trenches and then see a comrade blown apart into red mist, see green fields transformed into landscapes of death and nightmare. She remembered her first night as a volunteer nurse, the first burn victim of a Zeppelin bombing, his peeling flesh and pustules and charred skin.

And then the memory of lying sprawled on the bathroom floor, touching the spongy, seedlike thing that came out of her.

There are wounds in the world, she thought.

‘No,’ Rachel said quietly.

Max said nothing. For a moment, there was just the noise of the crowd a corridor’s length away and the eyes of the dead man looking at her, unblinking.

‘No one is untouchable. Not if we can find evidence.’

‘You are far too idealistic, Mrs White.’

‘You thought you were untouchable, once.’

‘Ah, but I was just a peasant reaching above my station. Bloom belongs in all the right clubs.’

‘There has to be a way to find proof. Locate his handler.’

‘That would present considerable difficulties. For one thing, you are still alive, Mrs White.’

‘But you are not.’

‘Mrs White, I am content with my afterlife. I have my loyal listeners, my books. The next one is going to be called How to Tame an Elephant. Fascinating creatures. Did you know that they may have souls? Edison has been testing a kind of spirit armour for pachyderms. And I have my cuckoo Goo and other creatures in Sloane Square. Why should I help you?’

It was difficult to read someone wearing another person’s body, but there was something familiar in the way Max cocked his head.

‘Revenge would be enough for most people: your enemies used Bloom to destroy you, why not use him to destroy them? Only I do not think you care about that. You are a naturalist. You like to understand creatures like Bloom. He had everything, so why did he turn, like a well-treated dog that bites its master? I think, deep down, you want to know.’

The medium’s thin lips curled in a devilish parody of a kindly uncle’s grin.

‘Ah, Mrs White, you do not disappoint.’

* * *

At five in the afternoon, two hours later, Rachel returned home to St John’s Wood, carrying a covered birdcage.

Gertrude took the cage and rolled her eyes when it chirped, but said nothing. Joe came down the stairs to meet her. He was still unshaven and dishevelled, but his eyes were brighter.

‘What do you have there, dear?’

‘Finches.’ Rachel felt playful and strangely free. Her mind tingled with ideas. She and Max had scheduled a planning session on Tuesday in a flat that he maintained on Sloane Square. In the meantime, she was going to investigate opening a credit line for their illicit operation. A part of her—the part that had been Head Girl at Princess Helena College—recoiled from the very idea of misuse of government funds. Another part found it inexplicably thrilling.

‘I thought my old bird could use some company,’ she said.

‘You know very well that I could never even keep a house plant alive.’

‘You always liked a challenge. Don’t worry, I can help. Now that I have more time on my hands.’

Joe took her hand. That was the closest she had come to acknowledging that she had trouble at work.

‘Gertrude, would you do the honours, please?’ Rachel asked.

Gertrude drew the heavy cloth aside. There was a storm of feathers inside. Two frantic, brightly coloured birds bounced from one perch to another.

‘Scheisse,’ she swore. ‘Begging your pardon, madam.’

Eventually the birds settled down. One was bright yellow-green with a red head, the other blue and grey with a hood of pale silver. Their beadlike eyes were alert. The yellow-green one cocked its head to one side and stared at them.

‘Aren’t they really difficult to keep?’ Joe asked.

‘I met an old colleague who keeps birds. Max Chevalier.’

The bird she knew to be the male started bouncing up and down at a furious pace and sang a continuous, trilling, complex song. The other bird—a female—raised her head slightly, listening.

‘What on Earth is it doing?’ Joe asked.

The male was like a wound-up toy. It continued the joyous bouncing until Rachel was sure its tiny brain would be addled. She giggled a little, then laughed. Once she started it was hard to stop, and then Joe joined her.

Finally, they both had to wipe tears from her eyes.

‘Very well,’ Joe said. ‘I suppose I can look after these silly creatures for a while. And here I was thinking that I could go to the club later tonight.’

Rachel looked at him. ‘I think I would like it if you stayed at home, dear,’ she said quietly.

Joe blinked.

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t look so surprised. It is not like you have to jump up and down to impress me anymore.’

‘Indeed, but it is just that since—’

Rachel was dimly aware of Gertrude making a discreet retreat in the background.

‘I know,’ she said, then took Joe’s hand and led him upstairs to the bedroom.

* * *

They had not made love for six months. It was long enough to make it clumsy at first. Joe alternated between being too rough and too gentle, first squeezing and biting and grunting, then barely daring to touch her, caressing her thighs and belly with spidery fingers, a sensation she hated.

Eventually, they found an old rhythm, half-sitting, him inside her. He had the sweaty smell of a day spent in bed and his mouth tasted of tobacco. She did not care, breathed it in, lapped at his lips teasingly, tore at his greying chest fuzz with her fingers. Joe groaned. He was skinnier than she remembered. Old burn scars were prominent on his chest and wiry arms. His hands were cold.

She was close to her climax when it happened.

Joe’s eyes became white pools. Tendrils of ectoplasm poured out of his mouth and onto her skin, milky and cold. He made mumbling, chattering sounds, his voice shifting registers as if many people were trying to speak through him at once. Then the coldness was inside her, swelling.

Rachel screamed. She beat at Joe’s frigid, sweaty chest. Then she bit his shoulder as hard as she could, tasting blood.

He jolted and toppled. She rolled to the side and out of the bed.

‘Joe! Joe, come back!’

The ectoplasm floated around him for a moment like a white halo and then evaporated. She stood up, breathing heavily. Then Joe’s eyes were his own again. He stared at her and then at his hands in horror.

‘I am so sorry, Rachel. Are you all right? I am so sorry.’

She nodded. It was cold in the room and the sweat chilled on her skin. Gingerly, she climbed back into the bed and drew most of the blanket to her. Joe sat up but kept himself away from her.

‘I shouldn’t have,’ he said. ‘After … after I was decommissioned, they said most of the … ability would be gone. I’m so sorry, Rachel. It has been getting worse. I didn’t want to worry you. Especially after—’ He paused.

‘After the baby,’ Rachel said.

Joe nodded. The old guilt rose up in Rachel, colder than ectoplasm.

‘Maybe I should sleep in the guest bedroom,’ Joe said.

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Lie down with me.’ She pulled him next to her and pressed her face against his neck. His skin was still like ice, but she forced herself to bear it, holding him tight. After a while, his breathing grew steady and he slept.

Rachel lay awake and pulled away from the chill of him, into a warm place, her India, imagined the humid heat, the smell of spices, and when the image was firm in her mind, she started making plans.