Maskerade - Terry Pratchett [80]
“But you’re wearing evening dress!”
“Yes then I got to be a waiter afterward because we’re short-handed and there’s no one else to be a waiter when they have drinks and sausages on poles before the opera.”
No one could have moved that fast. True, Walter and the Ghost hadn’t both been in the room at the same time, but she’d heard his voice. No one could have had time to duck around behind the piles of flats and turn up at the opposite side of the room in seconds, unless they were some sort of wizard. Some of the girls did say the Ghost could almost seem to be in two places at once. Perhaps there were other secret places like the old staircase. Perhaps he—
She stopped herself. Walter Plinge wasn’t the Ghost, then. There was no sense in trying to find some excitable explanation to prove wrong right.
She’d told Christine. Well, Christine was giving her just a slightly bemused look as Walter helped her up. And she’d told André, but he hadn’t seemed to believe her so probably that was all right.
Which meant that the Ghost was…
…someone else.
She’d been so certain.
“You’ll enjoy it, mother. You really will.”
“’Tain’t for the likes of us, Henry. I don’t see why Mr. Morecombe couldn’t give you tickets to see Nellie Stamp at the music hall. Now that’s what I call music. Proper tunes you can understand.”
“Songs like ‘She Sits Among the Cabbages and Leeks’ are not very cultural, mother.”
Two figures wandered through the crowds heading for the Opera House. This was their conversation.
“’S a good laugh, though. And you don’t have to hire suits. Seems daft to me, havin’ to wear a special suit just to listen to music.”
“It enhances the experience,” said young Henry, who had read this somewhere.
“I mean, how does the music know?” said his mother. “Now, Nellie Stamp—”
“Come along, mother.”
It was going to be one of those evenings, he knew it.
Henry Lawsy did his best. And, given the starting point, it wasn’t a bad best. He was a clerk in the firm of Morecombe, Slant & Honeyplace, a somewhat old-fashioned legal partnership. One reason for its less-than-modern approach was the fact that Messrs. Morecombe and Honeyplace were vampires and Mr. Slant was a zombie. The three partners were, therefore, technically dead, although this did not prevent them putting in a proper day’s work—normally during the night, in the case of Mr. Morecombe and Mr. Honeyplace.
From Henry’s point of view the hours were good and the job was not onerous, but he chafed somewhat about his promotion prospects because clearly dead men’s shoes were being fully occupied by dead men. He’d decided that the only way to succeed was to better himself by Improving His Mind, which he tried to do at every opportunity. It is probably a full description of Henry Lawsy’s mind that if you had given him a book called How to Improve Your Mind in Five Minutes, he would have read it with a stopwatch. His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people.
Mr. Morecombe had given him two opera tickets as a reward for sorting out a particularly problematical tort. He’d invited his mother because she represented 100 percent of all the women he knew.
People tended to shake Henry’s hand cautiously, in case it came off.
He’d bought a book about the opera and read it carefully, because he’d heard that it was absolutely unheard-of to go to an opera without knowing what it was about, and the chance of finding out while you were actually watching it was remote. The book’s reassuring weight was in his pocket right now. All he needed to complete the evening was a less embarrassing parent.
“Can we get some peanuts before we go in?” said his mother.
“Mother, they don’t sell peanuts at the opera.”
“No peanuts? What’re you supposed to do if you don’t like the songs?”
Greebo’s suspicious eyes were two glows in the gloom.
“Poke him with a broom handle,” suggested Granny.
“No,” said Nanny. “With someone like