CHAPTER

EIGHT

 

 

At Ealing Common – The wondrous rocketship –

Alfie is wretched – Wise words from Anand

Mr Clockwork’s Fabulous Emporium! –

“I will even help them fight the Zhell...”

 

 

TWICE AS TALL as St Paul’s Cathedral, the golden sub-orbital rocket towered over the supporting gantry, its needle-point nose piercing the blue sky. The viewing concourse, fifty yards from the base of the rocketship, was thronged with sightseers craning their necks to take in the wonder of the Empire’s latest, greatest invention.

Alfie and Anand crossed the concourse, took a crowded lift to the first gallery of the encircling gantry and squeezed out on to the elevated walkway. They made their way from the crowd and moved clockwise around the circular gallery, Anand wide-eyed at the rocket and Alfie impressed despite his current wretched mood.

The voice of the tour guide drifted their way. “Weighing some two hundred tons, and over fifteen years in development, the rocketship will make the journey from London to New York in a little over two hours.”

Alfie heard gasps from the crowd, but at the moment all he wanted was to be alone with his thoughts.

He clutched the gallery rail and gazed at the scintillating flank of the vessel, its sleek body and tripod of flaring fins. Seen this close, the skin of the ship was not one seamless golden expanse; the curved surface was marked with a thousand tiny insignia and hatches large and small, fuel inlets and ports connected to the gantry by hanks of what he supposed were electrical cables.

Despite all this being derived from Vantissarian technology, he told himself, what was nevertheless impressive was the work done by British scientists and technicians to come to some understanding of the alien technology. Beside him, Anand was agog.

Alfie’s own wonder at the ship, however, was short-lived, and soon he was swamped by the melancholia that had gripped him since the previous evening.

Until now he had thought little about his future; he had pledged himself to help Jani in any way he could, to remain faithful to her cause and ensure that she did not fall into the hands of the British, the Russians, and whoever else might be on her trail. He had prayed that Jani, seeing his faithfulness, and admiring what she might see as his sterling qualities of bravery and loyalty, might find it in her heart to reciprocate his affection in some way.

After their little tête-à-tête last night and this morning, however – and especially after his wrong-headed avowal of his love this morning, the mere thought of which made his face burn – he had little hope of this. Her heart was won by Sebastian (and Alfie felt a stab of mental pain at the very thought of his name), and he, Alfie, was resigned to accepting that he would remain no more than a mere friend.

And his future? On the run from the British, AWOL, without a passport or papers... and no doubt suspected of the murder of Colonel Smethers... what would become of him over the course of the next few weeks?

They made a circle of the ship and arrived back at the lift. “Shall we go back down, Mr Alfie?” Anand asked. “I saw a little café on the Broadway selling delicious-looking cakes.”

Alfie smiled. “Do you think of nothing but your stomach, boy?”

They descended in silence, left the rocket station and made their way across the common to the café. Five minutes later they were seated at a window table with a pot of Darjeeling tea, salmon paste sandwiches and a selection of éclairs, vanilla slices and Bakewell tarts.

Alfie bit into a sandwich without much appetite.

“You’re very quiet, Mr Alfie,” Anand observed, popping a second sandwich into his mouth.

“Oh!” Alfie sighed, and was surprised at how despairing he sounded. He shook his head. “I’ve been dwelling lately on what I did back in Nepal.”

Colonel Smethers had killed the alien, Jelch, and Alfie had no doubt that he would have done the same to Anand, had he not intervened. Acting on reflex, he had run the colonel through with his light-beam almost before realising what he’d done.

He had killed a man, a fellow British officer, and despite telling himself that it had been for the greater good, no amount of retroactive self-justification would expunge the terrible sense of guilt that weighed upon his soul.

He asked himself if he would rather he had never met Janisha Chatterjee, had never allowed himself to be drawn into the complex tangle of intrigue and danger, but admitted that his life was richer, and that he had come to know himself a little better, thanks to Jani.

If only he’d not fallen head-over-heels for the girl!

Anand was frowning. “But you saved my life, and helped Jani also.”

“And I wouldn’t have done anything any differently,” he assured the boy. “It’s just... What I did, killing a man, was a terrible thing. But it’s done now.” He shook his head again, gazing down at the neat bite he had taken from the small triangle of white bread.

Into the following silence, Anand said, “Mr Alfie, I think that one of your problems is an affair of the heart, no?”

Alfie looked up. “And what do you mean by that?”

“Meaning, you are sad that Jani-ji loves another and not yourself.”

Alfie stared at the lad, and his instinct was to deny the charge. He sighed. “You’re very right, young Anand.”

The boy looked up from the éclair he was about to slip into his mouth and smiled at Alfie. “I recognise your feelings because I too, until just a few days ago, felt sad also.”

“You did? And what eased that sadness?”

The boy shrugged, chomped on the éclair, then said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, “I looked at the situation with realistic eyes, Mr Alfie. I thought to myself: why would Jani-ji think romantic thoughts about a lowly houseboy when she is in love with a rich, handsome, aristocratic Englishman? Do you know that for years and years I harboured very very fond feelings for Jani-ji? All the while she was in England I was dreaming of the time she would return. And then she did, and we had many adventures, and a little piece of my heart did wonder at the possibility of...” He stopped, looking abashed, then went on, “But I must be realistic and know my place!”

Alfie smiled to himself and murmured, “And what is that, Anand?”

The boy straightened his spine. “I think of nothing but my duty, which is to serve Jani-ji, with no thought of reward. I will do what is right for her; I will save her from the British, from the Russians and from everyone else, and I will help her find Mahran. I will even help them fight the Zhell!”

Alfie gazed at the boy and felt a deep well of shame opening up within him. “That’s very commendable,” he said.

“And if you were wise, Mr Alfie, you too would forget the painful yearnings in your heart and dedicate yourself to assisting Jani and nothing else.”

Alfie pushed aside his plate. “Oh, I assure you that I will not be deflected from being there for Jani and doing all I can to aid her in her mission. But at the same time I cannot dispel the heartache.”

Anand smiled in sympathy and pushed the plate of cakes across the table. “Have an éclair and think of other things, Mr Alfie!”

Laughing, Alfie took an éclair and tried to obey the boy’s advice.

After lunch, as planned, they left Ealing and took the monotrain to Crystal Palace and strolled around the New Great Exhibition, opened just last year and containing the many wondrous technologies of the Empire.

If anything, the marvels in the vast house of glass were even more awe-inspiring than the sub-orbital rocketship. Alfie took in exhibit after exhibit, impressed by the sheer diversity of the inventions; for brief periods he even managed, somehow, to forget the likelihood that Jani was now in the arms of her lover.

Here, behind cordons of braided maroon rope, were devices that defied identification until he read the captions describing each one: a silver contraption that resembled a giant silver tarantula was the innards of a telephonic relay system; what looked like a spinning gyroscope within an aquarium was a machine that transmitted coded messages to the other side of the world in a fraction of a second. Alfie watched two uniformed nurses who were demonstrating – on an actor with a realistic-looking leg wound – a tubular device that applied salve to the wound, closed the gash with synthetic flesh ties, then bandaged the limb in a process lasting no more than two minutes. He looked around at the hundreds of milling sightseers and marvelled that he and Anand, alone amongst all these souls, knew the truth behind the provenance of these inventions. He considered what the alien creators of these wonders might have made of the appropriation.

Anand, like a child in a sweetshop, said that he would meet Alfie at a nearby café in one hour and scurried off into the crowd.

Alfie strolled from exhibit to exhibit, his sense of wonder soon overcome by the sheer plethora of inventions.

Inevitably, perhaps, his thoughts turned to Jani and his thwarted love, and an almost palpable heartache gripped his chest. He considered Anand’s wise words, and wished he could apply them to his own situation. But the fact was that he could not merely serve Jani – though he would do his best to do so; he craved her love and affection. The thought of her conjured her image in his head. He had watched her at breakfast, eating toast with grace and decorum, her long-fingered hands and full lips, and those huge, liquid brown eyes! – and the vision of her in his mind’s eye made him want to groan out loud. He was a lovesick fool and he wondered if there might be any cure.

“Mr Alfie! Mr Alfie!” Anand appeared at his side, tugging at his sleeve. “There you are. I have been searching for you all over! Come and see what I have found!”

Alfie allowed the boy to lead him by the hand through the surging crowd to the far end of the great palace. “There!” Anand announced, pointing to a display of what looked like clockwork automata.

“What?” Alfie said, wondering at the boy’s excitement – and then he saw the mechanical elephant.

“Mr Clockwork told me that there was another mechanical elephant in London,” Anand said. “But I didn’t know that he had an emporium here also! Look.”

Anand indicated a poster advertising Mr Clockwork’s Fabulous Mechanical Emporium – 55 Earl Street, Putney, London.

“Can we go there now!” the boy said.

Alfie consulted his watch. “It’s knocking on,” he said. “And we did say that we’d be back at Amelia’s by five. I’ll tell you what, why don’t we visit Mr Clockwork’s Emporium tomorrow, if Jani isn’t in need of our services?”

“Ah-cha,” Anand nodded. “But can we have another half an hour here, Mr Alfie?”

“Half an hour, and then we’ll catch the monotrain back to Mayfair,” Alfie said, and with a heavy heart followed the boy down the crowded aisle.