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wing, I saw for the first time her protruding belly. Although the bump was partially hidden by her flying gear, it was easy enough to see that she was pregnant.
    That bump in her bloomers was me!
    How peculiar it was to be present in the scene, and yet not present, like the assistant in a conjuring show.
    What was I feeling? Embarrassment? Pride? Happiness?
    It was none of these things. It was the bittersweet fact that while Feely and Daffy were sharing that long-ago sunshine with Harriet, I was not.
    Now a close-up of Father approaching as if ambling out from the house. He glances up shyly and fiddles with something in his jacket pocket, then smiles at the camera. This scene was apparently filmed by Harriet.
    A quick change of scene, and as, in the background, Feely and Daffy dabble like ducks at the edge of the ornamental lake, Father and Harriet, filmed by someone else, picnic on a blanket in front of the Folly. This was the scene I had examined in the laboratory.
    She smiles at him, and he at her. He turns away to remove something from a wicker hamper, and in that instant,she becomes dead serious, turns to the camera, and mouths a couple of words, miming them in an exaggerated manner, as if giving instructions to someone through a windowpane.
    I was caught off guard. What had Harriet said?
    Normally, I’m a first-rate lip-reader. It is a skill I taught myself, first by sitting at the breakfast and dinner tables with my fingers stuffed into my ears, and later using the same technique at the cinema. I had sat at Bishop’s Lacey’s single bus stop with wads of cotton in both ears (“Dr. Darby says it’s a very bad infection, Mrs. Bellfield”), eavesdropping on early-morning shoppers as they headed for the market in Malden Fenwick.
    Unless I was greatly mistaken, the words on Harriet’s lips had been “pheasant sandwiches.”
    Pheasant sandwiches?
    I stopped the projector, pushed the reverse lever, and backed the film up, then viewed the scene again. The Folly and the blanket. Harriet and Father.
    She speaks the words again.
    “Pheasant sandwiches.”
    She articulates the words so clearly I can almost hear the sound of her voice.
    But to whom had she been speaking? Since she and Father were clearly in front of the camera, who had been behind it?
    What unseen third party had been present at that long-ago picnic?
    My options of finding out seemed limited. Feely and Daffy—at least Daffy, for certain—had been too young to remember.
    And I could hardly ask Father without admitting to finding and developing the forgotten film.
    I was on my own.
    As usual.
    “Feely,” I said, stopping her dead in the middle of the Andante cantabile from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8, the
Pathétique
.
    Any interruption when she was playing made Feely furious, which gave me the upper hand automatically as long as I remained perfectly calm, cool, and collected.
    “What?” she demanded, jumping to her feet and slamming down the lid on the keyboard, which made a lovely sound: a kind of harmonic mooing that went on echoing through the piano strings for a surprisingly long time, like the Aeolian harps whose strings, Daffy had told me, were played by the wind.
    “Nothing,” I said, forming my face into its slightly-hurt-but-bearing-up-in-spite-of-it look. “It’s just that I thought you might like a cup of tea.”
    “All right,” Feely demanded. “What are you up to?”
    She knew me as well as the magic mirror knew the wicked queen.
    “I’m not up to anything,” I replied. “I was merely making an effort to be nice.”
    I had her off balance. I could see it in her eyes.
    “Yes, all right, then,” she said suddenly, seizing the opportunity. “I think I
should
rather fancy a cup of tea.”
    Ha! She thought she’d won, and the game had barely even begun.

    “Her Majesty is demanding a cup of tea,” I told Mrs. Mullet. “If you’ll be so good as to make one, I’ll take it in to her myself.”
    “Of course,” said Mrs.