The Big Over Easy

22. Titans and Beanstalks

As Jack stepped into the house, he noticed that even though it was nearly the children’s bedtime, things were unusually quiet.

“Hello…?”

Amazingly, the telly was off. The children usually watched it in shifts, and since it was the only one, fights were not uncommon.

Madeleine was in the kitchen. He kissed her and slumped in his big chair at the head of the table.

“The Dumpty case just folded.”

“Solved?”

“Through no skill on my behalf. His ex-wife killed him. She just topped herself over at the Yummy-Time factory. I’d avoid chocolate digestives for a while if I were you.”

Jack unclipped his tie and removed one of Stevie’s toys from the small of his back.

“What does that mean for the NCD?”

Jack shrugged. “Disbanded, I should imagine. I’ll be entitled to a full pension in four years. I’ll only be forty-eight. Perhaps it’s time to think about a new career.”

“What would you do?”

“Lots of things.”

“Name one.”

Jack thought about this for a while but couldn’t really come up with anything. Police work was his life. There was nothing he’d rather do. This was too depressing. He decided to change the subject.

“How are things with you?”

“Good. Prometheus said he’d never seen a photographer at work, so he came and helped me do a portrait of Lady Elena Bumpkin-Tumpkinson. He was telling us all about his life before his banishment to the Caucasus. The kids love him; why he can’t get British citizenship, I have no idea. The Home Office must be bonkers.”

“Not bonkers — just scared. It’s not a good idea to get on the wrong side of Zeus, what with all those thunderbolt things he likes to chuck around. Where is Prometheus at the moment?”

“Have a look for yourself.”

She pointed to the connecting door to the living room. Jack opened it a crack and looked in. Prometheus was standing in front of the TV, supplanting and outranking it for the evening. He was miming all the actions as he told the children a story, and Megan, Jerome and Stevie were sitting in an attentive semicircle in front of him. Ben sat on a chair close by and pretended to read a copy of Scientific American but was actually as enthralled as they were. No one moved or uttered a sound.

“ — when Zeus, Poseidon and Hades had deposed Cronus, their father, they drew lots out of Poseidon’s helmet, the helmet of darkness, you remember, that had been given to him by Cyclops. Anyway, they drew lots to decide who would gain the lordship of the sky, the sea and the dark underworld.”

“What about the earth?” asked Jerome.

“That, young man, they decreed they would leave common to all. Hades won the underworld, Poseidon the sea and Zeus the sky. Poseidon set about building his underwater palace in the sea off Euboea, constructing magnificent stables to keep his chariot horses in, horses that were brilliant white and had brazen hooves and golden manes. When they pulled Poseidon in his golden chariot, storms would cease and sea monsters appear and play about them like young dolphins….”

Jack shut the door silently.

“Did you speak to your mother?” asked Madeleine. “She’s called about eight times.”

“I’ll ring her later,” said Jack. “She’s probably mislaid one of her cats or — ”

Jack was interrupted by a loud groan of disappointment as Prometheus called a halt to his story. There was a pause, and then the kids trotted in to have a glass of warm milk before bed.

“Is Prometheus going to stay for good, Jack?” asked Jerome, the milk giving him a temporary white mustache.

“He can leave when he wants. He’s our lodger.”

“You mean a prostitute like Kitty Fisher?”

“No, not like that at all,” said Jack quickly.

After milk, Jack and Madeleine herded them upstairs. They put them all to bed and kissed them one by one. Megan had to be kissed twice, “just in case” and they switched out the lights.

They crept back downstairs, and Jack wandered through to the kitchen, where he found Ben, who was dressed up for a night on the town.

“Where are you off to?”

“Clubbing,” replied Ben as he carefully combed his hair in front of the mirror.

“Those poor seals. The leisure center really does cater for just about any minority sporting interests these days, doesn’t it?”

Ben gave Jack a withering look. “The comedy never ends,” he said sarcastically. “You can be such a dweeb, y’know, Dad.”

“Is it the harpist?” asked Jack. “I thought you’d lost her to the orchestra’s tuba.”

“Not lost, but temporarily mislaid,” said Ben after a moment’s reflection. A car horn sounded, and he ran out.

At that moment the back door opened and Ripvan blew in with a blast of cold air like some sort of furry tumbleweed. Following him was Pandora, who was well bundled up in a large down jacket. She had been at a talk given by a particle-physics professor from CERN, and the questions had gone on a lot longer than she had anticipated.

“Hi, Madeleine. Hi, Dad.”

“Is he still here?” she asked quietly as she peeled off layer upon layer of outer clothing.

“Who?” replied Jack.

“Who? Come off it, Dad. Prometheus, of course.”

“He’s about somewhere. Why?”

She looked at him demurely. “Oh, nothing. See you later.”

She ran off upstairs after throwing her down jacket into the cloakroom. As she rounded the newel post, she and Prometheus met face-to-face.

“Good evening,” he said with a disarming smile.

“Hello,” she said uneasily, “I’m — ”

“Pandora. Yes, I know.”

It seemed as though he had to force the name out.

“I once knew someone of that name,” he continued sadly, “a long, long time ago.”

Pandora stared at him, mumbled something incomprehensible that one might have expected to hear from Stevie and disappeared upstairs.

Jack and Madeleine had been watching. Madeleine giggled, but Jack was more serious.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“She’s not a child any longer. If she lived elsewhere, you wouldn’t treat her like an eight-year-old.”

“I do not treat her like an eight-year-old.”

“Sure you don’t.”

The phone rang, and Jack answered it. It was his mother.

“Jack?”

She had her angry voice on. Apology time. “Mother, I’m really sorry about the Stubbs — ”

“I know that,” she said, interrupting him. “That was yesterday’s crisis.”

“And today’s?”

“It’s the beans I threw out the window.”

“What about them?”

“They’ve started to grow!”

She had sounded distressed about the rapid growth of the beanstalk, and as Jack rang the doorbell twenty minutes later, he was expecting to find her in a state of acute anxiety. Strangely, she was precisely the opposite.

“Hello, darling!” she warbled unsteadily. “Come on in!”

She ushered him in, but by the time he had taken off his overcoat and hat, she had vanished.

“Mother?” he called, walking past the gently ticking grand-father clock to the living room, which was full of his mother’s ancient friends, most of whom he knew and all of whom had asked him surreptitiously to get them off speeding fines.

“New hip, Mrs. Dunwoody?” said Jack politely as he followed his mother towards the French windows, where he was waylaid by Mrs. Snodgrass. “Is that so?” replied Jack sympathetically. “You should eat more roughage.” He hadn’t got much further when Major Piggott-Smythe stopped him with the end of his pipe pressed on Jack’s lapel.

“Don’t think much of these alien-visitor johnnies,” he said, his red nose almost a hazard to shipping. “Who invited them here anyway?”

“We did,” replied Jack, “by transmitting all those seventies sitcoms. I think they wanted to find out why we never did a third series of Fawlty Towers. Excuse me.”

He found his mother standing on the lawn staring at the beanstalk. It was a cold, clear night, and the moon had come up, which somehow made the plant seem all the more remarkable. Just next to the potting shed, five separate dark green stalks had grown from the earth and fused into what appeared to be a large and complex plait that reached almost twelve feet into the air. Already leaves had started to unfurl on smaller stalks that radiated from the main trunk, and small pods had appeared with tiny vestigial beans inside.

“Isn’t it just the most beautiful thing ever?” asked his mother, her breath visible in the crisp air.

Jack took an eager step forward and then stopped himself. For a fleeting moment he’d felt a strange impulse to climb it. He shook himself free of the urge and said, “Stupendous! All this growth in one day?”

She nodded.

“And the party?”

“You know, I was fearful at first about the beanstalk. I thought of the harm it could do to the foundations, the value it might take off the house, that kind of thing. But then all of a sudden I thought, What the hell! and woke up to how extraordinary it was. And do you know, I’m really quite fond of it. I’m having a botanist here tomorrow to have a look.” She glanced around at her friends. “Someone brought over some hooch. I’m afraid to say we’re all a little tipsy.”

Jack sighed. “Does this mean you want to keep it?”

“Why not? Is it doing any harm?”

Jack had to admit that it wasn’t — yet. They both gazed at it for a moment. It quivered every now and then as growing stresses were released; they could almost see it grow larger in front of their eyes. His mother shivered in the cold air, and Jack draped his jacket over her shoulders.

“Do you think it’s self-pollinating?” she asked.

“I haven’t the slightest idea. Are you sure you want to keep it?”

Mrs. Spratt patted her son’s hand reassuringly “Let’s leave it a couple of days. We can make a decision then.”

They went indoors, where his mum’s friends harangued him about the positioning of speed cameras until he was finally able to tear himself away.

When he got home, everything was peaceful. The young children were all asleep, Madeleine was in her darkroom, and Pandora was reading in the living room. Apart from the quiet sound of Prometheus playing a sad lament on his lute in the spare room, all was calm in the Spratt household. Jack went into his study, switched on his desk lamp and stared at his iQuang computer. It took him another hour to finish his report. The next morning at ten, he would present it to Briggs and officially close the case.

Or so he thought.