The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Mr. Giddings was escorted reluctantly back to his seat, his face still burning red. Yet in spite of it, he was man enough to come up after the show and give both our hands a good cranking.

"After such a bath of gore at the death, my levitation at the resurrection was almost a letdown, if I may use the phrase, although it brought round after round of ringing applause from an audience of kind hearts who were relieved to see the hapless volunteer restored to life. At the end, we were made to come back for seven curtain calls, although I knew perfectly well that at least six of them were for my partner.

"Bony soaked up the adulation like a parched sponge. An hour after the show he was still shaking hands and being patted on the back by a tidal wave of admiring mothers and fathers who seemed to want only to touch him, although when I threw my arm across his shoulders, he gave me rather an odd look: a look which suggested, for a fleeting instant, that he had never seen me before.

"In the days that followed, I saw that a transformation had come over him. Bony had become the confident conjurer, and I was now no more than his simple assistant. He began speaking to me in a new way, and adopted a rather offhand manner, as if his earlier timidity had never existed.

"I suppose I could say he dropped me—or that was how it seemed. I often saw him with an older boy, Bob Stanley, who was someone I had never much fancied. Stanley had one of those angular, square-jawed faces that photographs well but seems hard in real life. As he had done with me, Bony seemed to take on some of Stanley's traits, in much the same way a bit of blotting paper absorbs the handwriting from a letter. I know that it was at about this time that Bony began smoking and, I suspect, tippling a bit as well.

"One day, I realized with a bit of a shock that I no longer liked him. Something had changed inside Bony or, perhaps, had crawled out. There were times when I caught him staring at me in the classroom when his eyes would seem to be at first the eyes of an aged Mandarin, and then, as they regarded me, would become cold and reptilian. I began to feel as if, in some unknowable way, something had been stolen from me.

"But there was worse to come."

Father fell silent and I waited for him to go on with his story, but instead he sat gazing out sightlessly into the falling rain. It seemed best to keep quiet and leave him to his thoughts, whatever those might be.

But I knew that, as with Horace Bonepenny, something had changed between us.

Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out.

I wished I could hug him, but I couldn't. For some time now I had been aware that there was something in the de Luce character which discouraged any outward show of affection towards one another; any spoken statement of love. It was something in our blood.

And so we sat, Father and I, primly, like two old women at a parish tea. It was not a perfect way to live one's life, but it would have to do.

16

A FLASH OF LIGHTNING BLEACHED EVERY TRACE OF color from the room, and with it came a deafening crack of thunder. We both of us flinched.

"The storm is directly overhead," Father said.

Nodding to reassure him that we were in it together, I looked about at my surroundings. The brightly lighted little cubicle—its naked bulb overhead, its steel door, and its cot—the rain pouring down outside, was oddly like the control room of the submarine in We Dive at Dawn. I imagined the rolling thunder of the storm to be the sound of depth charges exploding immediately above our heads, and suddenly I was not quite so fearful for Father. We two, at least, were allies. I would pretend that as long as we kept still and I remained silent, nothing on earth could harm us.

Father went on as if there had been no interruption.

"We became rather strangers, Bony and I," he said. "Al though we continued as members of Mr. Twining's Magic Circle, each of us pursued his own particular interests. I developed a passion for the great stage tricks: sawing a lady in half, vanishing a cage of singing canaries, that sort of thing. Of course, most of these effects were beyond my schoolboy budget, but as time went on, it seemed enough simply to read about them and learn how each one was executed.

"Bony, however, progressed to tricks which required an ever-greater degree of manual dexterity: simple effects which could be done under the spectator's nose with a minimal amount of gadgetry. He could make a nickel-plated alarm clock disappear from one hand and appear in the other before your very eyes. He never would show me how it was done.