The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches Read online

  Metol, of course, was nothing more than a fancy name for plain old monomethyl-p-aminophenol sulfate.

  I had skimmed through the dark-stained pages of a photo reference manual and found that what needed to be done with the film was actually quite straightforward.

  First step was the developer.

  I groaned as I pulled the stopper from the bottle and decanted a sample into a beaker. Twenty years on the shelf had taken its toll. The metol had oxidized and become an acrid brown sludge, the color of last night’s coffee grounds.

  My groan turned slowly to a grin.

  “Do we have any coffee?” I asked, strolling into the kitchen with an air of pretended boredom.

  “Coffee?” Mrs. Mullet asked. “What you want with coffee? Coffee’s no good for girls. Gives you the colly-wobbles, like.”

  “I thought that if someone came to call, it would be nice to offer them a cup.”

  You’d think I’d asked for champagne.

  “And ’oo was you expectin’, miss?”

  “Dieter,” I lied.

  Dieter Schrantz was the German ex–prisoner of war from Culverhouse Farm who had recently become engaged to Feely.

  “Never mind,” I told Mrs. M. “If he comes, he’ll have to settle for tea. Do we have any biscuits?”

  “In the pantry,” she said. “That nice tin with Windsor Castle on the lid.”

  I gave her an idiotic grin and popped into the pantry. At the back of a high shelf, just as I had remembered, was a bottle of Maxwell House ground coffee. In spite of the rationing, it had been brought as a gift from the nearby American air base at Leathcote by Carl Pendracka, another of Feely’s admirers who, in spite of Father’s belief that Carl was of the bloodline of King Arthur, had been unhorsed in the recent matrimonial sweepstakes.

  Offering up a silent prayer of thanks for the general bagginess of old-fashioned clothing, I shoved the coffee under one side of my sweater, stuffed a large wire kitchen whisk under the other, clamped a couple of Empire biscuits between my teeth, and made my escape.

  “Thanks, Mrs. M,” I mumbled around the mouthful of biscuits, keeping my hunched back to her.

  Safely back upstairs in my laboratory, I emptied the coffee into a cone-shaped paper filter, placed it in a glass funnel, and, lighting a Bunsen burner, waited for the distilled water in the teakettle to come to the boil.

  Chemically speaking, I remembered, the developing of film was simply a matter of reducing its silver halide crystals through deoxidization to the basic element, silver. If metol would do the job, I reasoned, so would caffeine. And so, for that matter, would vanilla extract, although I knew that if I absconded with Mrs. Mullet’s vanilla extract, she’d have my guts for garters. The hoarded coffee was a much safer bet.

  When the water had boiled for two minutes, I measured out three cups and poured it over the coffee. It smelled almost good enough to drink.

  I stirred the brown liquid to break up the bubbles and foam, and when it had cooled sufficiently, stirred in seven teaspoons of sodium carbonate: good old, jolly old washing soda.

  The initially welcoming coffee aroma was now changing—the stench increasing by the second. To be perfectly honest, it now smelt as if a coffeehouse in the slums of Hell had been struck by lightning. I was happy to be able to leave the room, even if only for a few minutes.

  One more quick trip to the attics to retrieve the enamel bedpan I had spotted among the de Luce family relics, and I was nearly ready to proceed.

  That being done, I gathered up my equipment and locked myself into the darkroom.

  I switched on the safelight. There was a brief red flash—a tiny pop.

  Oh no! The blasted bulb had blown out.

  I opened the door and set out in search of a new one.

  There were times when we grumbled about the fact that Father had ordered Dogger to replace most of the bulbs at Buckshaw with ten-watt substitutes in order to save on electricity. The only one of us who didn’t seem to mind was Feely, who needed only a dim and feeble light to write in her diary and to examine her spotty hide in the looking glass.

  “Low wattage wins wars,” she said, even though the War had been over for six years. “And besides, it’s so much more romantic.”

  So I had no difficulty deciding which bulb to pinch.

  Before you could count to eighty-seven—I know that for a fact, because I counted in my head—I was back in the laboratory with the bulb from Feely’s bedside lamp as well as the bottle of “Where’s the Fire?” nail varnish with which she had recently taken to uglifying her fingers.

  To my mind, if Nature had wanted us to have bright red fingertips, She would have caused us to be born with our blood on the outside.

  I painted the bulb with the varnish, blew wolfish huffs and puffs of air onto it until it was dry, then gave it a second coat, making sure that the surface of the glass was completely covered with the ruby lacquer.

  With the critical job I was about to undertake, I couldn’t afford the slightest leakage of white light.

  Again I latched myself into the darkroom. I clicked on the switch and was rewarded with a dim red glow.

  Perfect!

  I gave the crank on the side of the camera a bit of a windup and pushed the button. There was a clattering whir as the film inside jerked into motion. After no more than about ten seconds, the end of the ribbon went through and flapped lazily on the spool.

  I undid the snap, opened the side of the camera, and removed the full reel.

  Now came the tricky part.

  I wound the film, one slow turn at a time, off the reel and onto the wire whisk, securing it at each end with a paper clip.

  I had already half filled the bedpan with my coffee “developer,” and into this I dipped the whisk, turning it ever so slowly … slowly … like a chicken on a spit.

  The thermometer in the coffee bath was spot on at 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

  The twelve minutes recommended by the photo manual went by like flowing sludge. As I waited with one eye on the clock, I remembered that in the early days of photography, film had been developed with gallic acid, C7H6O5, which was obtained in small percentage from oak apples, those tumors that grew on the twigs and branches of the gall, or dyer’s oak, wherever they had been punctured by the gallfly in laying its eggs.

  Oddly enough, those same galls, dissolved in water, had also once been used as an antidote to strychnine poisoning.

  How pleasant it was to reflect that without the female gallfly, we might never have had either photography or a convenient means of saving one’s rich uncle Neddy from the hands of a would-be killer.

  But would this film I had found in the camera have retained its latent images? Interesting, wasn’t it, that one word—“latent”—was used to describe the invisible, undeveloped forms and shapes on photographic film as well as yet-invisible fingerprints?

  Would the film show anything at all? Or rather just the wet, gray, disappointing fog that might well have resulted from too many baking summers and freezing winters in the attic?

  I watched fascinated as, at my very fingertips, hundreds of tiny negative images began to form, fading into existence as if from nowhere—as if by magic.

  Each frame of the film was too small to guess at its content. Only when the film was fully processed would its secrets—if any—be revealed.

  Twelve minutes had now passed, and still the images did not yet seem to be fully developed. The coffee developer was obviously slower-acting than metol. I would keep up my twirling of the whisk until the images seemed as dark as a normal negative.

  Another twelve minutes went by and I was beginning to flag.

  When it comes to chemistry, impatience is not a virtue. Half an hour is far too long to engage in any activity, even one that’s enjoyable.

  By the time the images seemed satisfactory, I was ready to scream.

  But I wasn’t finished yet. Far from it. This was merely the first step.

  Now came the first wash: five
minutes under running water.

  Waiting was agony. I could hardly resist the urge to load the partly processed film into the projector and hang the consequences.

  And then the bleach: I had already mixed a quarter teaspoon of potassium permanganate into a quart of water and added to it a second solution of sulfuric acid in a little less water.

  Another five minutes to wait as I slowly rotated the ribbon of film in the liquid.

  Another wash as I counted slowly to sixty to make a minute.

  Now the clearing solution: five teaspoons of potassium metabisulfite dissolved in a quart of water.

  It was now safe to switch on the room lights.

  The opaque silver halide—the part of the film that would eventually become black—was now a creamy yellow in color, like images daubed onto a ribbon of transparent glass with Mrs. Mullet’s abominable custard.

  By reflected light these images appeared to be negative, but when I held them up in front of the white light, they looked suddenly positive.

  I could already make out what seemed to be a distant view of Buckshaw: a yellow, aged Buckshaw like a dwelling from a dream.

  Now for the reversal.

  I held the whisk up at arm’s length until it was about eighteen inches from the white room light, then rotated it slowly as I counted to sixty, this time using a variation on a method I had learned while studying artificial respiration in Girl Guides before being sacked (unjustly) by that organization.

  “One cy-an-ide, two cy-an-ide, three cy-an-ide,” and so on.

  The minute flew by with surprising speed.

  At the end of that time, I removed the film from the whisk, turned it over, and similarly exposed the other side.

  Time for the coffee again: what the manual referred to as the second developer. The yellow objects in each frame would now become black.

  Six more minutes of dunking and dipping, turning the whisk to be certain that all parts of the film were equally immersed in the reeking liquid.

  The fourth wash—even though it took only sixty seconds—seemed an eternity. My hands and arms were becoming stiff from the constant rotation, and my hands smelled as if they had been—well, never mind.

  No need for a fixer: The bleach and clearing solutions would have already removed the reduced silver from the first developer, and whatever silver halide remained had been reduced to elemental silver by the second developer and was now forming the black parts of the image.

  Easy as Cottleston pie.

  I let the film rest for a few minutes in a tray of water to which I had added alum for hardening purposes, in order to make it scratch-resistant.

  After a time, I pulled up a length of the film and peered at it through a magnifying glass.

  My heart skipped a beat.

  The images were heartbreakingly plain: In frame after frame, Harriet and Father were seated on a picnic blanket in front of the Folly on the island in Buckshaw’s ornamental lake.

  I turned off the room light and let the film sink into the water, leaving the dim red safelight as the only illumination, not because it was necessary, but because it seemed somehow more respectful.

  As I have said, I traced their initials in the water:

  Harriet and Haviland de Luce. I was not able, at least for now, to look at their faces in anything other than light the color of blood.

  It was too much like spying on them.

  Finally, reverently, almost reluctantly, I removed the film from the water and wiped it clean with a bath sponge. I carried it out into the laboratory and hung it up to dry, draping it in great drooping festoons from the framed table of the elements on the west wall to the signed photograph of Winston Churchill on the east.

  In my bedroom, waiting for the film to dry, I dug out from the pile under my bed the disc I wanted: Rachmaninoff’s Eighteenth Variation on a Theme by Paganini, the best piece of music I could think of to accompany the recalling of a great love story.

  I wound up my gramophone and dropped the needle into the spinning shellac groove. As the melody began, I seated myself, knees drawn up under my chin, in one of the window seats overlooking the Visto, the long-overgrown lawn upon which Harriet had once tied down her de Havilland Gipsy Moth, Blithe Spirit.

  I fancied I could hear the clatter of her engine as Harriet lifted off among the swirling morning mists, rising up above the chimney pots of Buckshaw, up above the ornamental lake with its Georgian Folly, and vanishing into a future from which she would not return.

  It had been more than ten years since Harriet had disappeared, killed, we were told, in a climbing accident in Tibet: ten long, hard years, nearly half of which Father had spent in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He had made his way home at last, only to find himself wifeless, penniless, and in grave danger of losing Buckshaw.

  The estate had belonged to Harriet, who had inherited it from Uncle Tar, but because she had died without leaving a will, “the Forces of Darkness” (as Father had once referred to the gray men of His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue Department) had been hounding him as if, rather than a returning war hero, he were an escapee from Broadmoor.

  And now Buckshaw was crumbling. Ten years of neglect, sadness, and shortage of funds had taken its toll. The family silver had been sent up to London for auction, budgets had been trimmed and belts tightened. But it was no use, and at Easter, our home had finally been put up for sale.

  Father had, for ages, been warning us that we might have to leave Buckshaw at a moment’s notice.

  And then, just days ago, having received a mysterious telephone message, he had at last summoned the three of us—Feely, Daffy, and me—to the drawing room.

  He had looked slowly from one of us to the other before breaking the news.

  “Your mother,” he said at last, “has been found.”

  More than that: She was coming home.

  FOUR

  I REALIZED THAT, EVER since Father’s shocking announcement, I had been shutting myself off from reality: shoving the facts into some kit-bag corner of my mind and pulling tight the drawstring, in much the same way as you would try to trap a tiger in a sack.

  Although it is shameful to admit, I knew that I had been trying to hang on to the past, attempting to awaken every morning to my old world: a world in which Harriet was still comfortably missing, a world in which, at least, I knew where I stood.

  I was grasping at every chance to avoid change in the same way a drowning man tries to grab at his own rope of bubbles.

  Not that I didn’t want Harriet home: I did. Of course I did.

  But what would it do to my life?

  The finding of the film had been a godsend. Viewing it, I thought, might provide a new window into the past: a window that would help me see more clearly into the future.

  This was one of those troublesome thoughts with which I had recently begun to be plagued: new, raw, and still not entirely to be trusted. It was like thinking, sometimes, with someone else’s brain. It had something to do with being almost twelve, and I wasn’t sure I approved of it entirely.

  I darkened my bedroom by covering the windows with quilts, fastening them to the frames with drawing pins round the edges. Buckshaw’s shabby and threadbare draperies were not nearly enough to keep out the sunlight.

  In the laboratory, I had given the film a sharp flick with my fingernail. A hard, satisfying tick indicated that the same sunlight had dried it completely. I had wound it back onto its spool and brought it to my bedroom.

  I threaded the film into the projector, which I had set up on my washstand, and pointed the projector into the fireplace. The walls of my bedroom were covered with such vile Victorian wallpaper—red clots on bilious blue—that there was no blank surface upon which to project the developed ciné film.

  Fortunately, Mr. Mitchell, who was an expert in such things, had once told me, during a Film Night at the parish hall, that a white projection screen is not really required.

  “Everyone supposes it is,” he had told
me, “but only because they’ve never seen a black one.”

  He went on to explain that a projector will provide those shades which are missing from a screen: that in fact, while watching the latest Ealing comedy in the cinema, those parts of the screen which appeared to our eyes to be black were actually white.

  “Aye, white—but unilluminated,” he’d said.

  Well, that made sense, and it seemed logical to me that the vast flat brickwork at the back of the fireplace, blackened by eons of soot, would provide the perfect surface.

  And I was right!

  As I switched on the projector and twisted the lens to bring it into sharp focus, the image on the fireplace bricks was formed of luxurious, velvety blacks.

  Here was a view of Buckshaw, as seen from the Mulford Gates, moving now along the avenue of arched chestnuts towards the house. Next, a closer view: Harriet’s Rolls-Royce Phantom II, parked on the sweep of gravel near the front door.

  Then came a shot of Harriet seated in the cockpit of Blithe Spirit. I recognized several of the statues in the background as those which now, more than a decade later, lay strewn in ruins among the overgrown hedges of the Visto. Harriet grinned at the camera and, seizing the sides of the cockpit in both hands, boosted herself up and swung her feet out onto the aircraft’s lower wing.

  Harriet! My mother. Moving and breathing—as if she were still alive! And even more beautiful than I could have imagined. She seemed to glow from within, illuminating the world and all that was in it with the radiance of her smile.

  With her short, tousled bobbed hair, she reminded me of one of those celebrated female aviators in the old newsreels, but without the sense of doom that overhung so many of them.

  She waved, and the camera moved away to focus upon two little girls who waved madly back, holding their hands up as if to shield their eyes from the sun.

  Feely and Daffy—aged about seven and two respectively.

  As Harriet lowered herself carefully down from the wing, I saw for the first time her protruding belly. Although the bump was partially hidden by her flying gear, it was easy enough to see that she was pregnant.