A Sudden Wild Magic

Her fat hand, with a peapod in it, gestured to the nearest cane chair. Mark walked over to it and settled himself, creaking, with his hat over his knees. Instantly he was in a ring of cats. They appeared silently from clumps of grass, from under bushes and from behind flowerpots, and sat gravely surveying him, a circle of round green and yellow eyes. Her ritual. He sighed.

“What can I get you?” she asked. “Have you had any breakfast?” “Not really,” he said. “There was no buffet car on—”

“They always forget it,” she said, “on trains out this way. Jemima, you and Tibs.”

Two of the cats disdainfully got up and walked toward the house.

“I’ve a lot to explain,” Mark said.

“So I see from the size of that briefcase,” she said. “Eat first. Get some coffee inside you at least.”

There was, without any apparent disturbance, a wooden tray now lying beside him on the grass. On it was a rack of toast flanked by a glass dish of butter and a jar of marmalade. A bone-handled knife was laid carefully across a glass plate on top of a paper napkin with a pattern of puppy dogs on it. Beside that was a glass of orange juice, and milk in a jug that matched the plate. A mug with the words THE BOSS on it and a blue steaming coffeepot materialized as Mark looked. He felt considerable irritation.

“He’ll need a strainer,” Gladys said. As the strainer duly appeared, propped in a little glass bowl, she added, “They can’t remember if you take sugar or not.”

“I do, I’m afraid,” Mark said, and tried to suppress his irritation. He had tried, any number of times, to persuade her that magic was not just something you used as a home help, and that she had skills too important to be squandered in this way. Most of the time Gladys pretended not to hear. When she did listen, she laughed and said she had plenty more where that came from, and besides, it never did anyone any harm to keep in practice. She looked at him challengingly now, knowing just what he was thinking, and he did his best to seem impassive. A glass bowl full of sugar cubes came to stand by the milk jug.

“Eat,” she said. “You need the energy.”

Mark laid aside his hat and wedged the tray across his knees in its place. Breakfast, however it arrived, was thoroughly welcome. As he buttered his toast, he saw the two cats return and, quietly and disdainfully, station themselves among the others. Gladys continued shelling peas until he was on his second cup of coffee. Then she looked up again, a sharp, full look.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Would it surprise you,” asked Mark, “if I said Chernobyl was no accident?”

“I feel bad about that,” Gladys said. “You know I do — we all do. Damned if I can see how none of us noticed that radioactive stuff until it was too late to do more than push it off to where there were fewest people to harm.” She paused, with her hands on her fat thighs. “You’re not saying that just to make me feel better, are you? Who’d do a thing like that?”

“The same people who distracted you with the bombing of Libya,” he said. “Who’d cause World War Two, or the Cold War, AIDS, drugs, or— come to that — the greenhouse effect? Who isn’t interested in our having a space program?”

“People,” said Gladys. “This is people. You don’t have to tell me the world’s a crazy place. If it isn’t stupidity, it’s greed with most people.”

“Yes, but which people?” he asked her. “Suppose I were to tell you the same people were responsible for all these things I just mentioned and a great deal more I haven’t?”

She was silent. For a second or so he feared she was rejecting every word, and he sighed. She was too old. Her face was blank. Her mind was set. He should have quelled his fear and gone to Amanda instead. Then he saw that Gladys’s expressionless face was turned toward something in the grass. Her lips moved. “Jimbo,” she said faintly, “I’d have to ask three questions, wouldn’t I?”

She was talking to that animal of hers. Some people claimed it was a monkey. Others declared it to be a small dog. Mark himself had never been sure which it was. All he knew was that it was brown and skinny. When it appeared, it scratched rather a lot — as it was doing now. He suspected this was a device to stop people looking at it too closely.

“I’d have to ask,” said Gladys, “Who? and Why? and What proof has he? Wouldn’t I, Jimbo? And why is he coming here with a tale like this when the Berlin Wall’s down at last, and just as Russia and so forth start being more friendly?”

So her mind was working, after her own fashion. “That’s all part of my proof,” Mark explained quietly. “Ask yourself — or Jimbo — who might want all technologically advanced nations at peace with one another at the moment when the world’s climate is changing.”

“Sounds like a well-wisher,” she said.