The Big Over Easy

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.