The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [195]
“Darjeeling or Assam?” asked the waitress.
“Darjeeling,” I replied, “and two cream teas. Strawberry for me and quince for my friend.”
The island had gone. In its place was the tearoom in Winchester. The waitress scribbled a note, smiled and departed. The rooms were packed with amiable-looking middle-aged couples dressed in tweed. It was, not surprisingly, just as I remembered it.
“That was a neat trick!” I exclaimed.
“Naught to do with me!” replied Landen grinning. “This is all yours. Every last bit of it. The smells, the sounds— everything.”
I looked around in silent wonderment.
“I can remember all this?”
“Not quite, Thurs. Look at our fellow tea drinkers again.”
I turned in my chair and scanned the room. All the couples were more or less identical. Each was a middle-aged couple dressed in tweed and twittering in a home counties twang. They weren’t really eating or talking coherently; they were just moving and mumbling to give the impression of a packed tearoom.
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” said Landen excitedly. “Since you can’t actually remember anything about who was here, your mind has just filled in the room with an amalgam of who you might expect to see in a teashop in Winchester. Mnemonic wallpaper, so to speak. There is nothing in this room that won’t be familiar. The cutlery is your mother’s and the pictures on the walls are all odd mixes of the ones we had up in the house. The waitress is a compound of Lottie from your lunch with Bowden and the woman in the chip shop. Every blank space in your memory has been filled with something that you do remember—a sort of shuffling of facts to fill in the gaps.”
I looked back at our fellow tea-takers, who now seemed faceless.
I had a sudden—and worrying—thought.
“Landen, you haven’t been around my late teenage years, have you?”
“Of course not. That’s like opening private mail.”
I was glad of this. My wholly unlikely infatuation for a boy named Darren and my clumsy introduction to being a woman in the back of a stolen Morris 8 was not something I wanted Landen to witness in all its ignominious glory. For once I was kind of wishing I had a bad memory—or that Uncle Mycroft had perfected his memory erasure device.
Landen poured the tea and asked: “How are things in the real world?”
“I have to figure out a way into books,” I told him. “I’m going to take the Gravitube to Osaka tomorrow and see if I can track down anyone who knew Mrs. Nakajima. It’s a long shot, but who knows.”
“Take care won’t y—”
Landen stopped short as something over my shoulder caught his eye. I turned to see probably the last person I wanted to be there. I quickly stood up, knocked my chair over backwards with a clatter and aimed my automatic at the tall figure who had just entered the tearoom.
“No call for that!” grinned Acheron Hades. “The way to kill me here is to forget about me, and there is about as much chance of doing that as forgetting little hubbles here.”
I looked at Landen, who rolled his eyes heavenward.
“Sorry, Thurs. I meant to tell you about him. He’s quite alive here in your memories—but harmless, I assure you.”
Hades told the couple next to us to scram if they knew what was good for them and then sat down, tucking into their unfinished seed cake. He was exactly as I last saw him on the roof at Thornfield—his clothes were even smoking slightly. I could smell the dry heat of the blaze at Rochester’s old house, almost hear the crackle of the fire and the unearthly scream of Bertha as Hades threw her to her death. Hades smiled a supercilious grin. He was relatively safe in my memories, and he knew it— the worst I could do was to wake up.
I reholstered my gun.
“Hello, Hades,” I said, sitting back down again. “Tea?”
“Would you? Frightfully kind.”
I poured him a cup. He stirred in four sugars and observed Landen for a bit with an inquisitorial eye before asking: “So you’re Parke-Laine, eh?”
“What’s