The Triple Goddess (56 page)

There was another reason for adopting the habit: research done on Stace’s behalf had indicated that it was inadvisable to do anything in a syncopated manner: whether it were speaking, walking, or chewing food, one should do it on the downbeat so as to avoid going against the flow of nature, and interfering with the (carefully monitored) self-regulation of his metabolism.

That morning when Arbella woke up, without her customary hangover, she made a life-changing decision. It was not that she loved her father any the less; but she was no longer prepared to follow, as had been her compliant wont in the past, the script of “His Lordship’s
Ante Meridiem
Colloquy with his Daughter, Arbella”, defer to his inflexible schedule, and listen to the interminable explication of his nostrums.

Full well she knew how difficult this would be for him to understand, and impossible to adjust to.

But at the risk of offending her father greatly, Arbella was resolved to be, in her own way, as assertive as he was. So instead of answering his inquiry as to her condition this morning, she placed what was to be her last Turkish-and-Virginia cigarette between her lips, lit it with her gold Dunhill lighter, exhaled the smoke in a long luxurious stream at the ceiling, and regarded the day with interest as it gathered strength and momentum outside.

The pause that was supposed to be filled by her response to her father’s rhetorical question came and went, and Garforth the butler cleared his throat. Stace was unable to perform a similar action, a) because it irritated his perfectly strung vocal cords; and b) because he was holding his breath as the emergency fans of the air filtration system in the house self-activated to neutralize the carbon monoxide and dioxide,
nitrogen dioxide, polonium, plutonium, arsenic, prussic acid,
cyanide,
cadmium, methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide,
DDT, formaldehyde, benzene,
toluene,
butane, lead, and chloroform—et cetera—released from his daughter’s cigarette.

Detecting wasted seconds, Stace’s auditory nerves sent an urgent message to his brain, which put his system on Green, or Precautionary, alert. He repeated the question, which was an unprecedented thing for him to do, louder and in a strangulated tone.

‘How
are
you, his
dear
?, he
won
ders. A
litt
le be
neath

‘
The
weath
er
,
per
haps
; one
does
so
fer
vently
hope
not.

‘
Water
in your
ears
from the
shower
, per
haps
?
O
ver.’

Still Arbella said nothing and drank her coffee, and the code went to Blue, or Guarded, level.

‘
O
ver, he
said
, said
da
-da, said
da-
da, said
da
-da!’

Beads of sweat broke out on his lordship’s forehead as he had no choice but to gasp the tar- and nicotine-polluted air, reducing the effectiveness of his skin-rejuvenation cream by forty per cent, and causing panic amongst the cilia in his lungs.

In a moment of mental aberration the baffled baron shot his cuff to consult his watch; but of course there was no watch: he often gave them as presents but had no need of one himself, for timepieces were as sundials compared to the regulatory dependability of his constitution. His system went to Yellow, Elevated, status.

‘
Hrr
m
hrr
m
hrr
m
.
Ar
bell
a, Ar
bell
a...’

Stace rapped out a sequence of SOSs on the table, thereby incurring a mild inflammation to the knuckles that was bound to confuse his anti-arthritis drug.

‘
Pop
to
Pop
pet
—
re
spond!
Come
in
now,
please!

‘It’s im
per
ative you
ans
wer the
ques
tion; ac
know
ledge at
once!
’

When Arbella did not reply, her father’s eyes flashed like lights on a rogue computer, his feet stamped dully on the rug, his pulse went haywire, and he agitated his arms like an epileptic penguin.

The alert was raised to Orange, or High, alert, which permitted both the
in extremis
discontinuation of pedal metre, and the resumption of referring to oneself in the First Person Singular; which was something that Charles Stace had not done since...he had no idea when, because the memory had been erased under deep hypnosis, and hazarding a guess was too hazardous.

‘Dash it, girl,’ said Stace, appalled and frightened as scansion of speech went by the board, and he egotized himself: ‘you’re making...ME...ill. M-M-My...Blood Pressure has gone up by...’—he consulted the diamond-set digital monitor that served as his tie-pin—‘…oh my god, my Heart can’t take this sort of strain.

‘Your father begs…
I
beg you, Arbella: please say something…say anything, within reason. Hell, say something unreasonable, ludicrous even, if you want to. Take pity on your old man in ten words or less…splurge on twenty...blather, if you like!’

Garforth, whose outline had for once remained extant from the panelling, left the room. He needed to caucus with the staff and decide whether they should call his lordship’s deputy senior primary general physician; or even, depending on the consensus, the top man himself. He paged the chauffeur, Sprocket, on his beeper to summon him.

Dreamily through the window Arbella saw Sprocket look at his own, very real, chronometer as he got out of his lordship’s car. It had been issued as part of his uniform, and its accuracy was guaranteed by a radio signal, not directly from the Atomic Clock, but from Stace’s Atomic Clock monitoring station. The chauffeur’s contract required that he wear it at all times.

Inside the house there was the sound of pounding feet on the stairs from below and above as Mrs Skillet the cook, Miss Feather the housemaid, Garforth, and Sprocket converged in the hall and discussed what to do in urgent whispers.

At last Arbella came out of her trance. ‘Daddy,’ she drawled, ‘we need to talk; or rather I need to talk. It’s important, and there’s no time except the present, as you always say, so I hope you won’t mind being late for the office this morning. I’m sure all your executives can manage without you for a bit.’

Stace went Red, signalling the upgrade of the warning code to Severe, and hyperventilated at the thought of not being at his desk at the appointed time. Routine maintenance was being performed on the single-person helicopter—an updated version of 007’s autogyro “Little Nelly” in the film of Ian Fleming’s
You Only Live Twice—
that the baron kept on the roof terrace; and the latest-model turbocharged jet-pack was still on order, so there was no possibility of suiting and goggling up, having it strapped to his back and making up for the delay.

‘The fact is, Daddy, I’ve decided to make a new life for myself…starting with the delicious breakfast I just finished. I know you want me to be happy, so I hope what I have to say won’t come as too much of a blow. You see, effective today I’ve given up my job, and I’m moving out to share a flat in Hammersmith with my friend Jeanette Witherspoon. I’ll be gone by the time you get home tonight.’

Arbella poured herself more coffee, dribbled in full-fat milk from the creamer, stirred in a heaped teaspoonful of sugar, and took several sips before continuing to address her by-now incoherent father.

‘You see, Daddy, lying awake last night—I’ve not been sleeping very well for a long time now—I started making a mental list of all the stuff I’d like to do in my life, and realized that I’m going to have to get a move on or I’ll be thirty before I know it.

‘There’s another thing I want to mention. You may not be aware, in fact I know you’re not, which is why I’ve taken the thing in hand myself and sought independent professional advice—by which I mean not from any of your people—but it is my considered opinion that the strain of running a big corporation has taken a very serious toll on your health. You’re a completely different person from the one you were when Mummy was alive, and you have developed some really weird habits, many of…most of…all of which, frankly, are really annoying.

‘I’ve not mentioned this before because I didn’t want to offend you, but obviously what with me decamping the premises the time has come.’

Come and gone, Stace registered, as the System Restore pill that he had choked down failed to find a point of sanity to revert to; his nerves went into hyperspace; and the coronary timpanist in his chest, cranking the tuning taps to tighten the skin on the kettledrum and raise the tone an octave, began an energetic unaccompanied solo.

‘Daddy, I’ve spoken to a couple of new-wave psychiatrists, Dr Looney and Mr Binns; who, although they aren’t on your consultant staff list, or even the reserve one, owing to some mix-up over their medical licences, have signed the necessary papers for you to be committed to their asylum.

‘It’s a very pleasant place, I’m told, as asylums go, and they’ll make you as comfortable as possible given the severity of your condition, in a nice padded room with a view of Bodmin Moor.

‘But you mustn’t expect any quick results, Daddy—it’s a five-year programme. Treatment involves the application of twenty-four-seven restraints, a lot of old-fashioned electrode therapy, and likely some, how did they describe it?, some “neurological restructuring and selective cell elimination”.

‘Although Dr Looney and Mr Binns don’t like to call it trepanning and lobotomy, they are great believers in tried and tested methods, and they recognized your condition—apparently they come across it all the time, albeit in a much, much, milder form—as soon as I played them a tape of a conversation we had last week, d’you remember?, never mind if you don’t, when you were telling me about the medicinal value of pickled salamander for the treatment of shingles.

‘Anyway, Daddy, the most important thing from now on is for you to concentrate on getting better. You mustn’t worry about me, or your companies, or anything at all. It’s not as if the businesses can’t do without you, and you certainly don’t need the money. My brothers have been aching to take control of everything for yonks, as you know, and I’m sure they won’t let you down.

‘There, I’ve said it. I apologize for not fitting what I had to say into ten words, or twenty, and I hope I didn’t blather too much, but it’s for your own good.’

‘
Wahoop! Wahoop!
’, emitted Stace, clutching his windpipe to quell the rattling and gurgling within. He collapsed with a thump on a chair, and his vermilion hue changed to shades of green, blue, and yellow, as he strangled himself, that were in no way related to those denoting the lowest to intermediate levels of personal crisis.

Arbella smiled at him. ‘As I say, Daddy, I’m sorry to dump all this on you in such a hurry over breakfast, but it’s the only opportunity I get to talk to you. And now I’ve a ton of packing to do, because Jeanette and I are catching the Eurostar tomorrow. After a week in Paris we’ll be touring Italy for a month, and then it’s on to...oh, so many places. I promise to send postcards from every one of them, and to come and see you the moment we’re back.’

She got up, kissed her chameleonic father and went upstairs, on the way passing Garforth as he returned to the room with Mrs Skillet, Miss Feather, and Sprocket. The staff had decided that the aetiology of his lordship’s condition was grave enough to warrant scrambling a dozen of his most eminent physicians.

When Garforth speed-dialled and teleconferenced them all from the console in the pantry, and explained the situation, he received assurances that it was possible that they might shortly be able to be on their way; after they had dealt with some problems of their own, and delays, including an alarm clock that had failed to go off, a toaster that had caught fire, a child who would not come out of the bathroom, the lateness of a school bus, a leak in the roof, an overseas call from an aged relative, the misplacement of a favourite necktie, some lost glasses, a garage door that would not open, leaves on the railway line, a recalcitrant carburettor, and another urgent house-call to make...by which time perhaps the rush-hour traffic might have died down a little.

The servants were joined by Sanders the valet, who wandered up from his hermetically sealed dry-cleaning and fumigation station in the basement. The sound of heavy activity above had pierced the fog of chemicals in his head, and he wanted to find out what was going on.

Together they heaved his lordship back onto the seat from which he had fallen, propped him up as best they could so that his head leaned on the back instead of lolling, and pushed his tongue back in his mouth with a spoon.

Now that Lord Stace’s breathing seemed to have calmed right down, and there was nothing else that could be done, Garforth went to the drawing-room to get the brandy decanter from the sideboard for himself, Sprocket, and Sanders; Mrs Skillet returned to the kitchen to make herself a nice pot of tea; Miss Feather prepared a cooling compress to revive her for her domestic duties; Sprocket put the car back in the garage and brought in his
Daily Mail
, in which he had only half completed the crossword, and the Wordpuzzler awaited his attention; and Sanders fetched the football pools coupon that he filled out at the kitchen table once a week on behalf of the domestic household.