Madame Bovary's Haberdashery Read online

  Miss Marple was now a part of herself.

  Snap. The crack of broken glass underfoot. What had she wrecked this time? She stooped and picked up a small picture frame, then got out her pin-prick specs again. There were only herself and Miss Marple here now, and the old lady would not have approved of vanity, so she would leave them on.

  She read the framed calligraphy poem.

  No art with potters’ can compare

  We make our pots of what we potters are …

  Running her fingers over the ceramic frame, she recognised Odette’s work. And something was taped to the back. A Tarot card. The Tower. Odette would often isolate from the pack a card that she found significant in her readings. Display it, to remind her of the decisions that she must take.

  From memory, Cicely knew the tower was struck by lightning, crashing down, the inhabitants plunging headlong to earth. And there were two doves, one staying home to rebuild in the tower, the other flying out into the chaos.

  Cicely carefully hid the broken frame, more evidence of her clumsiness, behind one of the boxes, then, seeing herself move as deftly as Miss Marple might, she slipped the Tarot card into her suitably deep jacket pocket.

  Her first clue.

  She squinted around for more.

  She ran her hands over a group of unfired sculptures, Odette’s most recent craze. She hand-formed these hollow animal heads, then, before they were leather-hard, inserted illegally large, red Chinese fire crackers and set them off.

  Odette did not reveal to outsiders how she achieved these twisted clay creations. A reviewer had written about her ‘fluid, elegant forms’. The words ‘explosive talent’ had been used. Her reputation was on the rise.

  Cicely’s hands then moved to a finished, fired work, displayed alone on a lacquer stand near the animals. Her fingers confirmed it was a terracotta bust of Zac, moustache dominating the moon face. Rough. Unglazed.

  Except, that is, for the eyes.

  These were a startling cerulean blue. Odette had captured the azure shade of his eyes so exactly that they seemed to hover in space, staring hypnotically at Cicely.

  With difficulty, she tore her eyes away from Zac’s, pulling her hat down protectively, twirling the spiral flower petals with two fingers.

  Slipping deeper into her new role, Cicely peered at the out-of-date newspapers on the floor, inspected the fridge – cleaned out and turned off – and then the unmade futon in the bedroom. The two marshmallow pillows, placed one on the other, hinted that, recently at least, only one person had been sleeping here. Odette or Zac?

  Then her eyes made out the corkboard fixed to the bedroom wall. The black sheet silhouette of Odette, in that handstand position, legs spread. Cicely examined it, recognising the ruby-handled daggers embedded in a neat V along the figure’s inner thighs. One of the daggers had fallen to the floor.

  The blade lay on a small, dark stain on the beige carpet.

  Cicely peered at it through her little magnifying glass, then recoiled. She sank down onto the nearest packing case, trembling.

  A misjudged throw?

  She had come here to lay her nightmares to rest, not to confirm them. Odette and Zac had been in love, if weirdly, hadn’t they? They had moved into a love-nest, hadn’t they?

  Yet there was no evidence that the couple had ever set up home here. It resembled, rather, an abandoned campsite.

  Into Cicely’s mind drifted a word that had come up in Madame Bovary.

  Emma had planned a fugue with Rodolphe, which had led to her ruin. Cicely’s old Larousse had told her that in French, fugue meant a romantic voyage away from home. But her English dictionary had given her a harsher interpretation of such flights.

  fugue

  A flight from, or loss of awareness of, one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home, and often occurring as a reaction to loss or emotional stress.

  Was Odette in flight?

  And what had Zac meant by telling her on the phone that Odette would disappear ‘for good’?

  What would Miss Marple have done?

  Agatha Christie’s investigative procedures could perhaps point the way if she was dealing with an abduction or a murder.

  In either case, there was only one suspect, one ‘person of interest’.

  That was not enough to create a novel – Christie always had five suspects. But then that was perhaps one way in which real life might differ from fiction.

  Just sometimes, the truth might be glaringly obvious.

  Twirling the flowers on her Miss Marple hat again, Cicely wandered into the kitchen and noticed something odd.

  Odette’s ancient PC was plugged in and set up on the kitchen table. Odette, a Luddite like Cicely, had never been much into the online world, even ignoring the ‘artist’s statement’ website Zac had set up for her. So why would she have made the PC an unpacking priority?

  Cicely started up the lumbering old machine, feeling the sharp edge of the Tarot card in her pocket. As the computer whirred and groaned into action, Cicely extracted the card, attaching it to the corner of the computer screen, as if it might guide her to Odette, who, after all, believed in such powers. Then she pulled out her magnifying glass and peered at the screen.

  A prompt for a password was blocking her way.

  Now that was out of character for Odette – she would never be a password kind of girl. This had to be another one of Zac’s bright ideas. She blinked at the orange box, exasperated, then checked her watch.

  Night would soon be falling. She would have to leave soon, as she always feared being mugged on the tram after dark.

  Anyway, did she really want to stay alone in this eerily deserted block, with no fire and no cat to soothe her, where men with knives and spiders from horror films roamed?

  When she looked back, a screensaver was up – a poster that Odette had always loved at school. A cavewoman bent over her clay, forming a vessel around the shape of a woven basket. Container of food, water and then ashes.

  We make our pots of what we potters are …

  Used in ritual, in poetry, resonant of mystic arts, yet mundane and cheap enough to throw away. Clay shards from ancient rubbish tips gradually became prized archaeological digs.

  Cicely pictured Odette, just another cavewoman, in this cliff-face dwelling, high above the city, working with the memory of hands, like this stone-age woman baking her vessels in the flames …

  Pressing a random key, she brought up the password request again.

  What could be on the computer that was worth protecting with a password?

  She knew that she would have to return as soon as possible.

  As she put her brogues back on, Cicely did not notice something glittering on the floor by the golden casket.

  Something that would not have escaped Miss Marple’s keener eyes.

  It was the silver dagger that Zac had given Odette.

  And the chain had been roughly broken.

  Visionary

  Cicely’s visit to Golden Tower, forcing her to negotiate unknown surroundings, had pushed her to admit just how much her eyesight had deteriorated.

  The optometrist in the local shopping centre, however, was reluctant to commit to a diagnosis.

  ‘I’ll refer you …’

  Outside the eye-surgeon’s rooms, which were identified by a considerately enormous sign, blinking against the glare, she looked up at the building, whose reflective glass and metal surfaces sparkled as if they had been constructed yesterday. It brought to her mind a spaceship, recently and silently landed on a conveniently vacant block. Between Victorian terraces occupied by other specialists, it joined a conspiratorial ring around the hub of the mothership, the hospital where intricate and intrusive probings took place.

  To enter the grey and silver octagonal ship, which seemed to float above its discreet foundations, she grasped the illuminated guide-rail and stepped through the chrome and glass doors into the hushed waiting room. She heard the doors close behind he
r with a frightening clang.

  After a delay which seemed purely ritual, for she was the only one in the waiting room, she was ushered into the ophthalmologist’s dimly-lit consulting room, where the doctor rose and shook her hand as if welcoming a guest.

  Doctor Singh, smelling reassuringly clinical, inspiring confidence with his British accent, his precise movements. Even through her blurry veil, she could see that under his bushy black brows, his eyes were disproportionately large. Giant soft brown orbs that made her think of ‘eyes like saucers’ in that fairy tale. She couldn’t remember which one … In the dark, Cicely put her chin trustingly onto the machine that Dr Singh swung over her padded chair.

  It never failed to move him how people trusted their doctors. In particular, this movement of slightly extending and lifting the chin, as if for the slaughterer’s knife, made him almost shudder with the enormous responsibility that this trust imposed on his shoulders.

  The responsibility of the gifted was not light. His eyes, which as a child he had been told were beautiful, were protected by a forest of black lashes, and were slightly protuberant. Though sometimes a sign of glaucoma, this was not the case with Dr Singh, who had, even in his middle years, the gift of extraordinary vision.

  In fact, he was convinced, having submitted himself to all possible tests, that he had been graced with the most acute vision of the current Dwapara era. This, he believed, made him a clearer thinker than others, and convinced him that he was one of those exceptional personages who could grasp what ordinary inhabitants of his era could not. In any situation, he was able to see all the available data, and attempt to rectify others’ mistakes where he could. And he was concerned, naturally, that people with defective vision – which, it was clear to him, corresponded to a defective psychological vision – were running the planet.

  If one could get rid of the defects in the leaders’ vision, most particularly, the condition of myopia, it would mean, he was sure, an end to short-sighted decision making and may, in fact, lead to a small Golden Age within Dwapara, or even Peace in Our Time.

  He had not yet announced this insight of his to the world, as he was far-sighted enough to know that now was not the time. According to his meticulous Vedic research, this was only the Atomic/Dwapara Age, the slow upswing from the gross materialism of the Kali Age, which had its nadir in 500 AD. Humanity was currently climbing towards the enlightened Treta Age, which, unfortunately, was not due until 4099. This future age, he was sure, would enable full awareness of subatomic forces, and improved mental communication through mastery of the five nerve electricities, including his special interest, sonic rays.

  Although slightly peeved that he had missed out on being born into this Treta Age, which would appreciate and foster his talents, nevertheless he had at least been spared the gross ignorance of the Kali Age, when he probably would have been nailed to a cross. In this current intermediate Atomic/Dwapara age, he could help smooth the way for the coming halcyon days. He was a pioneer with his ocular experiments using ultrasound and other, even more sophisticated, sonic techniques.

  In the Vedic ascendancy, (and Dr Singh, like other Vedic partisans, could, through scientific analysis, prove a civilisation thousands of years before conventional prehistory; a culture which was the mother of all that was worthwhile from Greek philosophy and so-called Arabic numerals to the imminent identification of the Higgs bosun or ‘god’ particle, his ancestor Mr Bosun’s contribution belittled by that refusal of a capital letter) the ancient literature revealed a now forgotten mastery over sound.

  Most people knew that ultrasound could give impatient parents a snapshot of baby, but who really understood how sound waves could accomplish this? Surgery on cataracts no longer used laser beams, but was performed bloodlessly, using refined ultrasonic equipment to remove the cloudy lens and replace it with an artificial one.

  Understanding the enormous power of sound, Dr Singh readily admitted the possibility suggested to him by Alexander, the mathematician/engineer who he had met at Paddy’s, the local haunt of men like themselves. Gay, certainly, but fastidious in the company they kept. Brilliant, and not given to casual sex, or indeed, much sex at all.

  Their eye contact had begun as they had ordered the same rather unusual tipple, Irish Mist. They both preferred it with ice, they found, and from there, one thing had led to another. They both loved the song that the band was playing, especially the haunting refrain:

  ‘We are star-dust

  Million-year-old carbon …’

  It had become their song, and not just for sentimental reasons. The phrase was scientifically true, after all, and they found it coming into their heads at the oddest times, giving them both a strangely soothing, larger perspective on their small lives.

  After a few more Friday night Irish Mists together, Alexander, Gerald Singh’s new and exciting friend, had thrown caution to the wind and revealed his secret passion. He had recently returned from Egypt, where he had been permitted to thoroughly examine the building blocks, weighing up to several tons, of the pyramids. He had seen evidence of the past use of ultrasonic drills.

  ‘Which rotated at hundreds of times the speed of modern ultrasonic drills, and created the perfectly fitting edges of the blocks. You can even see the drill marks …’

  Gerald Singh had shivered as Alexander had gone on to suggest that a sonic technique may also have lifted the granite rocks, or even bounced them along like corks to construct the pyramids.

  ‘Think of the tales of magic lutes and musical instruments in Greek and South American tales, and in the tales of the powers of ancient Tibetan monks, Vedic …’

  Gerald Singh was becoming deeply stirred as he listened. He was a man whose sexual apparatus was operated by a deeply recessed and highly intellectual trigger, and Alexander’s voice had hit that hard to find nerve. Gerald knew that they would soon become lovers. At last he had met someone in whom he could confide his highly confidential research project.

  And at that moment, Alexander began to gently massage Gerald Singh’s delicate surgeon’s hands, sighing ruefully that they had not been born so much later, at the dawn of the Treta utopia.

  Unafraid of commitment, and not averse to another investment property anyway, they had soon bought a renovated church on top of a hill on the outskirts of the city. For they found they had exactly the same hobby as well. Star-gazing.

  That required a house far, as much as practicable, from the constant pollution of electric lights, and the church had a wonderful belfry from which the spire had been removed, so that it formed a round look-out open to the heavens. Perfect for installing their second joint purchase, a telescope.

  They soon discovered that they shared the same taste in interior design too, a style that they came to call Inter-Galactic. They decorated the bedroom in a way that suggested that they were in the galaxy of Sirius, and not on earth at all. A waterbed gave the illusion of peculiarly unpredictable gravity, and the entire ceiling was constructed as a giant, flat lava-lamp, through which, at enormous expense, even with the installation performed by Alexander’s engineering hands, oscillated cosmic globules of psychedelic comets and constellations of stars, centring on their favourite in terms of likely sonar-based life, Sirius.

  On clear, moonless nights, they would lounge on deckchairs in the open-air belfry and lift their gaze towards the skies. They felt that they were the centre of a sphere filled with the joy that lights the stars and gives power to the wind and storms.

  Others may have thought that they had rushed into things, but Gerald Singh and Alexander were sure they were made for each other.

  With Alexander’s encouragement and input, Dr Singh felt that he would soon be ready to publish his paradigm shifting research paper in a prestigious magazine. He had almost enough data now for a statistically viable sample.

  Cicely was to be his final experiment before publishing.

  So he now focussed all his attention on Cicely, who was meekly submitting to the usual eye-test
s, guessing wildly and inaccurately at letters on the chart. Finally, she achieved some assisted success when she peered through a black eye-shield pricked with holes which he passed her.

  ‘It corrects the aberration caused by cataracts. How on earth are you managing to get around? To work? Very simple operation … but unusual in one not yet forty.’

  He adjusted the height of the chin-rest for her so that she was more comfortable, then instructed her to look at his left ear, while he shone the first light into her eye. This light was standard. The second light, however, though harmless and painless, had been clandestinely imported from the same people in India who had made their lava-lamp ceiling to order – masters in any type of precision grinding.

  He leant over her, shining the second light into her eyes, jotting down a few calculations. His breath smelt like toothpaste. He was considered and calm, and he inspired confidence in her as a surgeon. He turned to his screen, to check the results that had been emailed through to him. He did not need to do this, but this little ritual would reassure his patient that her case was quite routine.

  Yes, she told him, she had always been very short-sighted, before the cataracts. He wrote this down, but it seemed to her that he was more interested in her work as a needlewoman. He even admired her Miss Marple hat, and asked permission to touch the spiral flowers.

  She inclined her head, and the tentative pressure of those long brown fingers probing at her hat was vaguely erotic. His tone was purely clinical, however, as he asked surprisingly knowledgeable questions about crochet techniques, in particular about three dimensional effects, such as her freestanding flowers. He listened carefully to her, and she was flattered to see him making notes. She found herself confiding in him that she had thought for a short time that she might be a writer, but the idea for a second novel just would not come. He listened to this too, nodded sympathetically, but made no notes.

  But in all, he was so attentive that she signed without a qualm the papers which would ensure that she would be operated on by Dr Singh himself, though it meant that she would max out her Visa card.