The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [475]
I returned to the kitchen where Mum was still hard at work cooking my bacon and eggs. To her and Friday, I had been gone less than twenty seconds.
“What was that noise when you were at the door, Thursday?”
“Probably a car backfiring.”
“Funny,” she said, “I could have sworn it was a high-velocity bullet striking wood. Two eggs or one?”
“Two, please.”
I picked up the newspaper, which was running a five-page exposé revealing that “Danish pastries” were actually brought to Denmark by displaced Viennese bakers in the sixteenth century. “In what other ways,” thundered the article, “have the dishonest Danes made fools of us?” I shook my head sadly and turned to another page.
Mum said she could look after Friday until tea, something I got her to promise before she had fully realized the implications of nappy changing and seen just how bad his manners were at breakfast. He yelled, “Ut enim ad veniam!” which might have meant “Look how far I can throw my porridge!” as a spoonful of oatmeal flew across the kitchen, much to the delight of DH-82, who had learned pretty quickly that hanging around messy toddlers at mealtimes was an extremely productive pastime.
Hamlet came down to breakfast, followed, after a prudent gap, by Emma. They bade each other good morning in such an obvious way that only their serious demeanor kept me from laughing out loud.
“Did you sleep well, Lady Hamilton?” asked Hamlet.
“I did, thank you. My room faces east for the morning light, you know.”
“Ah!” replied Hamlet. “Mine doesn’t. I believe it was once the box room. It has pretty pink wallpaper and a bedside light shaped like Tweety Pie. Not that I noticed much, of course, being fast asleep—on my own.”
“Of course.”
“Let me show you something,” said Mum after breakfast.
I followed her down to Mycroft’s workshop. Alan had kept Mum’s dodos trapped in the potting shed all night and even now threatened to peck anyone who so much as looked at him “in a funny way.”
“Pickwick!” I said sternly. “Are you going to let your son bully those dodos?”
Pickwick looked the other way and pretended to have an itchy foot. To be honest, she couldn’t control Alan any more than I could. Only half an hour previously, he had chased the postman out of the garden accompanied by an angry plink-plink-plink noise, something even the postman had to admit “was a first.”
Mum opened the side door to the large workshop, and we entered. This was where my uncle Mycroft did all his inventing. It was here that he had demonstrated, amongst many other things, translating carbon paper, a sarcasm early-warning device, Nextian Geometry and, most important to me, the Prose Portal—the method by which I first entered fiction. Mother was always nervous in Mycroft’s lab. Many years ago he’d developed some four-dimensional paper, the idea being that you could print on the same sheet of paper again and again, isolating the different overprintings in marginally different time zones that could be read by the use of temporal spectacles. By going to the nanosecond level, a million sheets of text or pictures could be stored on one sheet of paper in a single second. Brilliant—but the paper looked identical to a standard sheet of 8½-by-11—and it had been a long contentious family argument that my mother had used the irreplaceable prototype to line the compost bucket. It was no wonder she was careful near his inventions.
“What did you want to show me?”
She smiled and led me to the end of the workshop, and there, next to my stuff that she had rescued from my apartment, was the unmistakable shape of my Porsche 356 Speedster hidden beneath a dust sheet.
“I’ve run the engine every month and kept it MOTed for you. I even took it for a spin a couple of times.”
She pulled the sheet off with a flourish. The car still looked slightly shabby after our various encounters, but just the way I liked it. I gently touched the bullet holes that had been made by Hades all those years ago, and the bent front wing where I had slid it into the river Severn. I opened the garage doors.
“Thanks, Mum. Sure you’re all