A Red Herring Without Mustard

“Some of that was true—he was specially good at the invisible dodge.”

As Porcelain spoke, there appeared in my mind a thought as sudden and as uninvited as a shooting star in the night sky: Would I trade my father for hers?

I brushed it away.

“Tell me about your mother,” I said, perhaps a little too eagerly.

“There’s little enough to tell. She was on her own. She couldn’t go home, if you can call it that, because Fenella and Johnny—mostly Fenella—wouldn’t have her. She’d me to care for, and she hadn’t a friend in the world.”

“How awful,” I said. “How did she manage?”

“By doing the only thing she knew. She had the gift of the cards, so she told fortunes. Sometimes, when things got bad, she would send me to Fenella and Johnny for a while. They cared for me well enough, but when I was with them they never asked about Lunita.”

“And you never told them.”

“No. But when the war came, things were different. We’d been living in a frightful old bed-sitter in Moorgate, where Lunita told fortunes behind a bedsheet strung up across the room. I was only four at the time, so I don’t remember much about it in those days, apart from a spider that lived in a hole in the bathroom wall.

“We’d been there for, oh, I think about four years, so I must have been eight when one day a sign went up in the window of the empty house next door, and the landlady told Lunita that the place was being turned into a servicemen’s club.

“Suddenly she was making more money than she knew what to do with. I think she felt guilty about all the Canadians, the Americans, the New Zealanders, and the Australians—even the Poles—that came flocking in their uniforms to our rooms to have their cards turned. She didn’t want anyone to think she was profiting by the war.

“I’ll never forget the day I found her weeping in the W.C. ‘Those poor boys!’ I remember her sobbing. ‘They all ask the same question: Will I go home alive?’ ”

“And what did she tell them?”

“ ‘You will go home in greater glory than ever you came.’ She told them all the same, every one of them: half-a-crown a time.”

“That’s very sad,” I said.

“Sad? No, not sad. Those were the best days of our lives. We just didn’t realize it at the time.

“There was one particular officer that was always hanging round the club: tall bloke with a little blond mustache. I used to see him in the street, coming and going. Never had much to say, but he always seemed to be keeping an eye out for something. One day, just for a lark, Lunita invited him in and told his fortune. Wouldn’t take a penny for it because it happened to be a Sunday.

“Within a day or two she was working for MI-something. They wouldn’t tell her what, but it seemed that whatever she’d seen in his cards, she’d hit the nail on the head.

“Some boffin in Whitehall was trying to work out what Hitler’s next move was going to be, and he’d heard through the grapevine about the Gypsy who spread the cards in Moorgate.

“They invited Lunita straightaway to lunch at the Savoy. At first, it might have been no more than a game. Maybe they wanted word to get about that they were desperate enough to pin their hopes on a Gypsy.

“But again, the things she told them were so close to the top-secret truth that they couldn’t believe their ears. They’d never heard anything like it.

“At first, they thought she was a spy, and they had a scientist from Bletchley Park come up to London to interrogate her. He was hardly through the door before she told him he was lucky to be alive: that an illness had saved his life.

“And it was true. He’d just been attached to the Americans as a liaison officer when a sudden attack of appendicitis had kept him from taking part in a rehearsal for D-day—Exercise Tiger, it was called. The thing had been badly botched—hundreds killed. It was all hushed up, of course. Nobody knew about it at the time.

“Needless to say, the bloke was flabbergasted. She passed the test with flying colors, and within days—within hours—they had us set up in our own posh flat in Bloomsbury.”

“She must have remarkable powers,” I said.

Porcelain’s body went slack. “Had,” she said flatly. “She died a month later. A V1 rocket in the street outside the Air Ministry. Six years ago. In June.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. At last we had something in common, Porcelain and I, even if it was no more than a mother who had died too young and left us to grow up on our own.

How I longed to tell her about Harriet—but somehow I could not. The grief in the room belonged to Porcelain, and I realized, almost at once, that it would be selfish to rob her of it in any way.

I set about cleaning up the shattered glass from the test tube she had dropped.

“Here,” she said. “I should be doing that.”

“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’m used to it.”

It was one of those made-up excuses that I generally despise, but how could I tell her the truth: that I was unwilling to share with anyone the picking up of the pieces.

Was this a fleeting glimpse of being a woman? I wondered.