The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [147]
“Mail for you!” announced Landen, dumping a large pile of post onto the kitchen table. Most of my mail these days was fan mail—and pretty strange it was, too. I opened an envelope at random.
“Anyone I should be jealous of?” he asked.
“I should keep the divorce lawyer on hold for a few more minutes—it’s another request for underwear.”
“I’ll send him a pair of mine,” grinned Landen.
“What’s in the parcel?”
“Late wedding present. It’s a—”
He looked at the strange knitted object curiously.
“It’s a . . . thing.”
“Good,” I replied, “I always wanted one of those. What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to teach Pickwick to stand on one leg.”
“Dodos don’t do tricks,” I told him.
“For a marshmallow I think I can make him do anything. Up, Pickwick, come on, one leg, up!”
Landen was a writer. We first met when he, my brother Anton and I fought in the Crimea. Landen came home minus a leg but alive—my brother was still out there, making his way through eternity from the comfort of a military cemetery near Sevastopol. I opened another letter and read aloud:
“Dear Miss Next, I am one of your biggest fans. I thought you should know that I believe David Copperfield, far from being the doe-eyed innocent, actually murdered his first wife, Dora Spenlow, in order to marry Agnes Wickfield. I suggest an exhumation of Miss Spenlow’s remains and a test for botulism and/or arsenic. While we are on the subject, have you ever stopped to wonder why Homer changed his mind about dogs somewhere between the Iliad and the Odyssey? Was he, perhaps, given a puppy between the two? Another thing: Do you find Joyce’s Ulysses as boring and as unintelligible as I do? And why don’t Hemingway’s works have any smells in them?”
“Seems everyone wants you to investigate their favorite book,” observed Landen, sliding his arms around my neck and looking over my shoulder so closely our cheeks touched and I shivered. He put his mouth close to my ear and whispered:
“While you’re about it can you try and get Tess acquitted and Max de Winter convicted?”
“Not you as well!”
I took the marshmallow from his hand and ate it, much to Pickwick’s shock and dismay. Landen took another marshmallow from the jar and tried again.
“Up, Pickwick, come on, up, up, one leg!”
Pickwick stared at Landen blankly, eyes fixed on the marshmallow and not at all interested in learning tricks.
“You’ll need a truckload of them, Land.”
I refolded the letter, finished my coffee, got up and put on my jacket.
“Have a good day,” said Landen, seeing me to the door. “Be nice to the other children. No scratching or biting.”
“I’ll behave myself. I promise.”
I wrapped my arms round his neck and kissed him.
“Mmm,” I whispered softly. “That was nice.”
“I’ve been practicing,” he told me, “on that pretty young thing at number 56. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not at all,” I replied, kissing him again, “so long as you want to keep your other leg.”
“O-kay. I think I’ll stick to you for practice from now on.”
“I’m depending on it. Oh, and Land?”
“Yuh?”
“Don’t forget it’s Mycroft’s retirement party this evening.”
“I won’t.”
We bade each other goodbye and I walked down the garden path, shouting a greeting to Mrs. Arturo, who had been watching us.
It was late autumn or early winter—I wasn’t sure which. It had been mild and windless; the leaves were still brown on the trees and on some days it was hardly cold at all. It had to really get chilly to put the top up on my Speedster, so I drove into the SpecOps divisional HQ with the wind in my hair and WESSEX-FM blaring on the wireless. The upcoming election was the talk of the airwaves; the controversial cheese duty had suddenly become an issue in the way things do just before an election. There was a snippet about Goliath declaring themselves to be “the world’s favorite conglomerate” for the tenth year running