From the sun-dappled lawns blackbirds collected their worms and flew up into the eucalyptus trees to nourish their young, oblivious to the crisis unfolding beneath. The manservant Lamb collected the tea things and moved indoors out of the hot sun. Calm, of a sort, descended.
In the garden room Pernilla Larsson was writing a letter. Or, more exactly, not writing a letter. This latest press attack on her husband was not only bad for business, it unsettled life at Ransome’s Retreat. And though as the inventor’s fourth wife, she had brought a new stability to his restless life, Larsson was an unpredictable man given to violent mood swings and she could never be sure where things would go with him. It made concentrating very difficult.
‘Lamb.’
‘Yes, madam?’
‘Have you given my husband his sedative?’
‘In the second cup, madam.’ Mistress and servant looked steadily at each other.
‘Ask Gus to come in.’
‘Very well, m’m.’
Just then an array of ancient clocks positioned across the ground floor of the ancient house raggedly signalled their agreement that it was four o’clock, and a confident-looking young man entered with a sheaf of papers in his hand.
‘What worries me,’ he said, ‘is not the Herald. It’s those idiots at the Doctors’ Medical Journal. They’re determined to get him.’
‘They’ve always hated him. Ever since he published A New Electronic Theory of Life.’
‘Quacks,’ uttered Gus Wetherby with a sneer. ‘Just because they’ve got medical qualifications they think they know everything. There are people on that journal who are out to get him, no matter what. Medics! Wouldn’t surprise me if they weren’t behind this latest press attack.’
Pernilla Larsson took off her glasses and looked at her son. ‘There are a lot of people,’ she said slowly, ‘who might be behind this latest attack. People have turned against Ben, they really have.’
‘Not altogether – we still have the daily visitors. The pilgrims to the shrine.’
‘I wish he hadn’t started that movement. It’s an embarrassment in the present circumstances – it was supposed to be about health and vitality, but they turned it into a religion! It’s one thing to say your invention can extend human life, quite another to allow people to believe there’s something mystical attached to it.’
‘They’re nuts. They think his book is the Bible.’
Wetherby picked up a biscuit off the tea tray. ‘That was all before the War,’ he went on. ‘People looking for something that couldn’t be found. Hoping to contact loved ones, trying to make sense of that lost generation after the First War. People who didn’t believe in spiritualism and Ouija boards and all that junk, but were looking for something …’
‘That couldn’t be found,’ said Pernilla, completing his sentence. The two often thought as one, it was uncanny.
‘So where are we?’ she said, collecting her thoughts. ‘Are the specifications right?’
‘I had them checked. We can go ahead.’
‘There’s just the matter of convincing Ben.’
The conspirators paused. ‘Look,’ said Gus, ‘even Ben knows the game’s up. Once upon a time people believed the Rejuvenator really did what it’s supposed to do but …’
‘You know he won’t accept criticism,’ warned Pernilla. ‘And he can’t accept the idea of change.’
‘That’s the problem, he’s a one-trick pony. All that publicity at the beginning – “Hope for the Aged – Electricity to Make Old Folk Young” – that kind of thing, it went to his head. And all he’d invented was a dolled-up and very expensive box of tricks, something that you plugged yourself into when you felt low which delivered a weak electric current and made you think you felt better.’
‘Don’t be disloyal!’ snapped Pernilla, though her response seemed automatic rather than anything else. ‘HE believed in it, THEY believed in it, therefore we must believe in it too.’ She paused for a moment, pulled in two directions. ‘Though I must confess the letters which are rolling in these days – people don’t want to believe any more. They want their money back.’
‘He shouldn’t have charged so much.’
Pernilla looked around the long, low room, its walls dotted with Impressionist paintings. ‘It bought all this,’ she reminded him quietly.
‘It can be done again,’ said Gus forcefully. ‘Now that we’ve found the formula for a Rejuvenator which really does work.’
Pernilla nodded. ‘All those old men,’ she sighed. ‘All wanting to be young again. All thinking, with the Rejuvenator I can have a younger model.’
Gus raised an eyebrow and smiled. Didn’t his mother become the fourth Mrs Larsson for precisely that reason?
‘Oh yes!’ she said, catching his meaning. Her cigarette holder described an elegant parabola as she laughed, her salt-and-pepper hair glowed, and her jewellery flashed in the sunlight. She looked expensive.
‘We still have to find a way to kill the kind of publicity we’re getting in the press,’ said Gus. ‘Have to announce the new model. Different name, fresh start.’
He warmed to his theme. ‘Got to stop those attack dogs at the Medical Journal. It would make sense for us to tell them, look, the Rejuvenator is a thing of the past, a creature of its time, whatever they want to hear – stopping short, of course, of saying that it never actually worked.’
Wetherby broke his biscuit in half but left its tumbling crumbs to disappear into the folds of the sofa while he thought. ‘We say it’s a new idea with a new inventor – me. Push Ben back into the shadows. For heaven’s sake, he’s eighty. Time to take a back seat!’
‘It’s been his whole life.’
‘Let him enjoy what’s left of it. Look,’ said Wetherby, standing up, ‘this is possibly the most idyllic place anywhere in the world – this house, these gardens, this climate. Back seat!’
‘He won’t agree.’
‘He’ll have to agree,’ said Gus Wetherby harshly, ‘or we’re all dead.’
The sun made its slow descent behind the Temple Regis skyline, gilding the rooftops, casting long black shadows across the greensward towards the broad open sands.
‘There are five hundred stars,’ sighed Athene Madrigale, the famous astrologer, looking upwards, ‘all competing with each other for my attention.’
Her companion did not take much notice of this. Athene often spoke like that.
‘I have been listening to the waves shuffling the stones. I have been watching the moon pulling the waves. Can you hear?’
There was a pause.
‘A shame about the dead girl,’ said Judy Dimont slowly. ‘Horrible, really.’
Athene nodded. They understood each other’s preoccupations.
Night was Athene’s daytime. It allowed her the space to clear her