be a third.”

      The way Jack felt at that moment about Mrs Fosdyke he rather hoped her prunes would set fire to her house – in a minor way, anyhow.

      He met his mother on the landing. Her Yoga did not seem to have worked very well this morning, or else the calmness had worn off already.

      “I must get over there and see if Celia’s all right. Have you heard? Oh, it’s dreadful, terrible!”

      “It’s Daisy again, I expect,” Jack said. “It didn’t sound all that bad from what Mrs F said.”

      “But Celia – you know how highly strung she is.”

      “At least no one can say it’s Zero’s fault this time,” Jack said. “Come on, Zero, good boy.”

      He went into his room. He sat in front of the mirror and began to practise but soon found it was no good. You couldn’t do it in a mirror. The whole point was that you had to look past somebody, just by their ear, and if you did that to your reflection you couldn’t check up on yourself. It didn’t matter how quickly you flicked your eyes sideways, you couldn’t catch yourself looking past your own ear. You always ended up looking yourself in the eye. Jack gave up.

      He took out his notebook and studied it. There wasn’t much in it so far. It didn’t look like a Plan of Campaign at all. He remembered Uncle Parker’s instruction to guard it with his life. He hid it between his comics, where he knew it would be safe. Everybody else in the house despised him for reading them, and said so. They would not, they said, be caught dead looking at them.

      By now there was quite a lot of noise downstairs, so Jack decided to go down and have another try at creating a Mysterious Impression. Twice this morning and twice this afternoon, Uncle Parker had said, and he hadn’t done it once yet.

      “Stay, Zero.”

      The longer Zero lay low the better, Jack thought. He found the whole family in the kitchen with Mrs Fosdyke darting among them distributing orange juice and toast. Everyone was talking loudly about fires. Mr Bagthorpe was moodily weighing up the chances of both himself and Uncle Parker getting their insurance money when it turned out Daisy had started both fires. It would look like conspiracy to defraud, he said.

      “We got our fire in first, though. We get priority. I’ll bang the claim in first thing this morning.”

      Jack sat down. Nobody took any notice of him, including Mrs Fosdyke, who evidently thought he had breakfasted sufficiently already. Everyone but him got orange juice and toast. He began to feel depressed. He began to wonder whether the whole Campaign was not a mistake, and whether to call it off before it even started. Out of a fog he heard his mother’s voice:

      “… all right, Jack, dear?”

      “What? What’s that?”

      “I said, are you feeling all right. You look a bit pale and funny.”

      “Oh – yes, oh, I do feel queer!”

      His heart began to race. He had done a Mysterious Impression without even trying! He concentrated hard on looking faraway rather than delighted, and must have done it quite well because Mrs Bagthorpe said something about delayed shock.

      “I just – just feel sort of faraway,” Jack said. He moved his gaze over his mother’s left ear and encountered William’s stony eyes. Hastily he moved his gaze again over William’s ear, and then met Rosie’s interested stare.

      “You do look queer,” she said.

      Then Mrs Fosdyke put her oar in.

      “And no wonder,” she said deflatingly. “A fry-up like that first thing. I should’ve felt queer, a plateful like that. I did tell him, Mrs Bagthorpe – a grapefruit’s what you want. I told him, and get your vitamings.”

      Jack could have killed her.

      “Oh, well, perhaps that’s it.” Mrs Bagthorpe sounded relieved. “There’s enough to worry about – nobody else feels as if they’ve got delayed shock, do they?”

      “I do,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “So what are you going to do about it?”

      He was ignored. He did not mean it. He was just making dialogue, as he did in his TV scripts, and as nobody else in the family was paid for doing this, they did not see why they should play his game. The remark at least drew attention off Jack, who, despite Mrs Fosdyke’s untimely intervention, began to feel that he had established some sort of interest in his condition.

      When Mrs Bagthorpe said, “You three help Mrs Fosdyke clear and wash up – Jack, you sit where you are and have a nice hot cup of coffee,” he decided to mark up his performance as the first authentic Mysterious Impression of the day.

      The second was equally difficult to achieve. Jack had always known that his family was an unusually active one, even overactive, but he had never before realised how difficult it was to pin one of its members down and look him or her in the eye. It is very difficult to look someone in the eye when they are reading Voltaire or trying to contact a radio ham in Puerto Rico or painting a portrait. (Rosie had already begun on a second attempt at a Birthday Portrait of Grandma. Grandma had said she had better, because the way she felt, she didn’t think she would see another birthday.)

      Mr and Mrs Bagthorpe were going to inspect the damage to The Knoll, and Mrs Fosdyke, as Jack now knew, was a congenital non-receiver of Impressions, Mysterious or otherwise.

      He opted in the end for trying Rosie and Grandma because both of them seemed basically bored by the idea of the sitting, and would be more likely to spare a glance for himself.

      Grandma had opted for having her Portrait painted with the burnt-out shell of the dining-room as a background. Mrs Bagthorpe had protested that this was morbid and unnatural, but Grandma was adamant.

      “It was a Sign,” she said. “You can’t just toss it aside as if it were a mere bubble in the wind. I think I was meant to have my Portrait painted in there. If I were not, it wouldn’t have burned down.”

      The logic of this was at the same time hard to follow and irrefutable, and Mrs Bagthorpe had let it go. There was certainly no time to argue with Grandma today. She and her husband had driven off to The Knoll, the latter fulminating.

      “It’s all go,” he said. “Yesterday a fire, today a fire, and on Monday a funeral.”

      “A funeral!” shrieked Grandma. “Whose?”

      “Daisy’s,” he replied, “if I’ve anything to do with it.”

      The sitting began. Jack sat very quietly to begin with. Grandma, against advice, was sitting on the one remaining dining-chair. It had only just survived, and was very charred up and shaky, so Grandma was sitting gingerly. She definitely looked as if she were sitting on a chair she expected to collapse at any moment. In some ways Jack could see this was a good thing because it gave her a more than usually wide-awake expression.

      When Rosie had been sketching for a while he peered over to look. He saw that Rosie was getting plenty of the burnt-out background in. She had liked this idea as well as Grandma, and said it would give the portrait atmosphere and make it stand out. As yet Grandma’s face had no features and it still looked like the one that had gone up in flames. It was hard to think of anything to say about the portrait in its present state but Jack thought he had better try in case his silence was misconstrued as disapproval. He did not, however, attempt anything like a critical appraisal.