Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [9]
‘Yes, I agree,’ said Smith, his eyes on some inner vision. ‘It mustn’t be accepted.’
‘So here we are,’ Chiltern said drily, ‘questioning God’s master plan in a parlour full of people waiting to attend a seance. Radical thinking turns up in the oddest places.’
‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it? Ideas that threaten the centre are always pushed to the edge. The truth is forced to keep company with the silly and the rightfully scorned.’
‘Exactly!’ Chiltern sat forward a little. ‘We expect truth to show up at the front door with its Sunday suit on and its shoes shined. But truth is indifferent to our notions of intellectual propriety. It will out!’
‘Yes,’ Smith agreed softly. ‘Like murder.’
* * *
‘Ah, the East,’ the woman in the mauve turban with the black feather stuck in top of it like the tuft on the head of a quail. ‘So mysterious.’
Anji smiled. She had found this to be the best response to anything said to her, as it was taken as more evidence of how mysterious and Eastern she was. Also, frankly, she was afraid that if she opened her mouth she would find herself crying, ‘This is all nothing but genteel racist garbage!’, which would be true but would upset the Doctor’s plans.
Which, speaking of mysterious, were as obscure as ever. He’d come back from that magic show or whatever it had been in Newcastle very tight-lipped and obviously unhappy about something, but other than muttering about doing without partners, thank you, especially silent and lazy ones, had divulged nothing about the trip.
She glanced at Fitz, looking almost comically uncomfortable in his stiff collar and three-piece suit. Those absurd Victorian clothes. She had told the Doctor she would prefer to stay in the TARDIS throughout their visit to the nineteenth century rather than wrap herself in all those layers of cloth and he had cheerfully replied that a sari would actually be a better choice since they would be spending a good deal of time in Theosophist circles, in which India was considered the fountainhead of spiritual wisdom. Anji felt absurd in a sari – as if she were playing dressing-up with the old photographs of her paternal grandmother for a model – but at least it was loose and comfortable.
The Doctor, for once, actually fitted the period sartorially. His cravat and bottle-green velvet frock coat were a shade dandyish, but not outre, and he looked perfectly in place standing amidst the dark, overcarved furnishings, softly lit by gaslight. He was absorbed in conversation with a gaunt, fair-haired man of around forty, with an expressive mouth and faded, near-colourless eyes, who had been introduced to Anji as Dr Chiltern. She wasn’t sure what his speciality was. She thought she’d overheard him say something to the Doctor about ‘the phenomenology of personality’ which didn’t encourage her to eavesdrop further.
‘I wonder sometimes,’ said the earnest young man with puffy reddish hair who, Anji had discovered, was under the illusion that he could write poetry, ‘whether the Anglo-Saxon races are too pragmatic for genuine enlightenment.’
Anji smiled enigmatically.
Their hostess hurried over. She was a plump, energetic woman whose briskness put her at odds with her guests, who tended towards the sensitive and lethargic. Aside from Chiltern, the turbaned woman and the self-described poet, these included a blonde girl of eighteen or so, plump and bored-looking, and her aunt, a straight-backed woman with an uncompromising glint in her eye, who said, ‘How much longer, Mary?’
‘Oh soon, soon. You can’t rush the spirits, you know More biscuits anyone?’
‘You are very kind, Mrs Hemming,’ said puffy-hair, taking a biscuit from the proffered plate.
‘Nonsense. One mustn’t face a journey into the unknown without sufficient sustenance. Mr Kreiner, another biscuit?’
Fitz seized the biscuit gratefully.
‘Miss Kapoor?’
Anji shook her head, smiling.
‘I hope you don’t find our food too vulgar,’ said the turbaned woman. Anji thought she had said her name was Mrs Ainsley, but she wasn’t sure she’d quite heard her. She smiled again in order