Even though we’ve already announced the next generation?
Yeah, that announcement sets the scene for further announcements. Once you’re gone, I’ll tell them something that lets them call up any image they please. You miscarried and we had a breakup so bad I don’t ever want to talk about it again. Done.
Hang on—
That’s what I’m telling them, Harriet, no matter what you do.
She made a sort of hiccupping sound, and he sighed. That was when he asked Harriet if she thought she was someone who had a future, and that was when she’d gone with “yes” although she hadn’t a clue. Rémy gave her that look of curious sympathy and then he went back to work.
13
Perdita’s found it invigorating to hear about the people allied against her birth. She says she could get big-headed if she dwells on it, so she’ll just allow herself a moment of smugness for existing and then move on. It was strange too, to hear about Kercheval House as Harriet knew it—Perdita paid the Kerchevals a visit there, she invented that school trip to Canterbury just so she could go to Kercheval House, and it’s still the same Brutalist building site, never to be completed, its walls whirring as units of space yawn and are filled with room-sized cubes that are just passing through, just passing through . . .
When Perdita visited, there was no way for her to know that none of this was intended to have a menacing effect. She was yet to spend time with Ari Kercheval and gain some understanding of his idea of fun. All she did know was that no matter how many staircases she fled down or in which direction she hurried, the person she was trying to get away from was able to stride toward her as soon as she arrived on a new floor.
“Who was that person? Gabriel? Tamar?”
Perdita says she met a man and a woman at that weird white building, and that the names they told her to call them by weren’t their real names. They seemed really confident as they said the fake names too, confident that she would never be able to find out their real names unless they wanted her to. The man told her his name was Hansel and the woman said her name was . . . Gretel. The woman who said her name was Gretel was the person Perdita had gone to see and the reason she left so quickly.
“Perdita—honestly—you. Don’t you have any common sense? Going to a place like that without even knowing who you were really dealing with . . .”
Perdita says she thought they were being like that because of money—they asked her to wait a moment while they had a quick chat, and retired to the next room for a massive quarrel. Gretel was a little at a disadvantage; it seemed she wasn’t at all used to Hansel pushing back against her. And Hansel had plenty to say . . . he was in fact a fount of long-suppressed vexation. Gretel would flare up and get doused down to the faintest flicker—each point Gretel made got hit with three of Hansel’s ice-cold and crystal-clear rebuttals. The name Ari was repeatedly mentioned, in varying tones—as if speaking of someone omniscient, as if speaking of someone brainless, someone adored, scorned, feared, in need of protection, a habitual turncoat, a bully, a disappointment. Hansel and Gretel saw all that and more in this Ari, whose name they kept invoking—Perdita thought he must be the one with the most money. And he wasn’t there at the house. Perdita should be long gone before Ari returned (this was the law Gretel wanted laid down). Perdita should stay and meet him (this was Hansel’s insistence). This girl’s family; this girl’s no family of mine. Perdita heard all this as she waited in a drafty antechamber lined ceiling to floor with family photos. She picked him out immediately, the “Ari” they were talking about, and even though you can’t really tell from pictures, she thought he seemed like someone she could have a few laughs with.
Whose child is she?
. . . not a penny more from us . . .
Perdita half listened to all this as she ran a finger down each row of photos, keeping on the vertical so it felt like a physical analog of scrolling through Tumblr. Sport, parties, picnics, fashion, silliness, and solemnity, and when she looked at the photos in which six faces squeezed together in a frame she thought it did look a bit crowded, she could see why at least one of those pictured felt six should be the limit.
. . . my grandchild . . .
. . . your damn grandchild . . .
Perdita considered putting in her earphones. She was happy for Hansel and Gretel to just keep their Gothic drama to themselves. She might have been a bit more vigilant if she’d had some prior knowledge of the cast, but even if “Gretel” had said, Hi, I’m Tamar, and “Hansel” had flourished his rainbow-striped cane, straightened his red-spattered collar, and said, My name’s Ambrose, Perdita wouldn’t have turned a hair. Her mother had never mentioned either of them.
“Listen, you,” says Harriet. “Our social circles are a bit different, so the probability of your ever running into them and needing to know who they were was fairly slim, don’t you agree? How did you even come into contact with them?”
Harriet had brought this on herself
(“Charming,” says Harriet)
with all her wistful talk of Gretel and how it had been twenty years since they’d last seen each other. Perdita had been doing all she could toward reuniting them for Harriet’s thirty-fifth birthday—“It is morning now, happy birthday, Mother-of-Perdita,” the dolls say—and to that end she’d researched private investigators . . . not expensive ones, obviously, more in the “Tesco Value” range.
Harriet is laughing, but she is also angry at any investigator who’d take on a case for a Tesco Value fee whilst promising—well, Fortnum-type results. Perdita says she could only just about believe her luck when she came upon a guy who said that, depending on the difficulty of the case, he could find anybody in the world for a very low fee. Perdita was able to speak to people this guy had helped out, and they were on the level—plus the guy said that since it was a Druhástranian she was looking for, he’d do it for free.
This guy, Perdita explains, is the sort of gentleman detective you used to find all over England in the olden days—he doesn’t need money, so finding people is his hobby. He told Perdita his name, but it wasn’t his real name either. And he was so much more handsome than anybody really needs to be that Perdita giggled idiotically whenever he looked at her. Neither Perdita nor Harriet have photographs to compare, so the gentleman detective could be Rémy Kercheval or he could be Gabriel Kercheval or some other excessively handsome black man.
Wait—Perdita thinks for a moment. There were a few occasions on which the gentleman detective had seemed to completely ignore something she’d said, and if what she’d said definitely required a response she’d touch his arm, he’d look at her, she’d repeat herself. Then the gentleman detective would respond as if hearing her for the first time. This could just be how a person behaves when somebody else isn’t letting them get away with being rude, but Perdita’s decided the gentleman detective was lip-reading and that he is Rémy Kercheval.
When Perdita met Rémy—and, indeed, when Perdita met “Gretel” and when she met “Hansel”—the reaction of each fell along the same spectrum. Dread and fascination combined—they were like witnesses to a most unnatural wonder.
“Behold, the child that should not have been born sort of thing?”