Cavalier Case (28 page)

The explanation for Miss Lewis' increasing number of intercontinental mess-ups had proved to be not so much overwork as the hideous—to Cy, at any rate—secret of her engagement to a district surveyor in the Northern Territories of Australia. Marriage was now imminent. Cy was both distraught and uncomprehending, like a child who is told his parent is doing something called "leaving."

"But how on earth will I reach her, my Miss Lewis?" he asked pathetically of more or less anyone who came into the office. No one was cruel enough to give him an answer.

Along the way, however, Miss Lewis had become quite the Cupid. At this particular dinner party, Jemima, for example, had found herself sitting next to the loquacious and high-spirited radical lawyer Ned Silver—sometimes described as having been born with a silver tongue in his mouth—although the place card actually read: "Sir Edward Silvers. " (That name, at the sight of which Jemima's heart had sunk, belonged to a heavily handsome television tycoon, whose skittish Iranian wife had just left him for a pop star.)

When Cy said to Jemima before dinner, "I've been longing to bring you two together," he did look at Ned Silver with a certain wild surmise—who on earth
was
he?—but since this was not the first time that Cy the celebrated host had been faced with this kind of probing question about one of his own guests, he knew just how to pass rapidly—and expertly—on without losing his equanimity. So Jemima Shore and Ned Silver were left talking to each other. And one way or another they had scarcely been apart, except during the hours of work, ever since. What was more, there was no danger—absolutely no danger—of Ned Silver wanting to do anything like "settle down"; the very phrase was impossible to imagine in his connection. None of this did Jemima see fit to tell Cass. It was, finally, none of his business.

The only other person to whom Jemima related her "ghost story"—Cherry—was equally dismissive, if in her own much kinder fashion.

"Oh, Jem, don't you see, you projected it?" she explained. "You were in a state of terrible nervous tension—not surprisingly, about to face that little monster up on the roof—you were so tense that you
projected
Decimus."

"I damn well didn't project the dog! Now if it had been a cat... Dogs like that terrify me. And that dog was absolutely enormous. Just like the one in my picture."

Cherry looked at her pityingly. "That's the whole point. The one in your picture—the picture that hung over your bed all those weeks—you projected that as well. We don't only imagine nice agreeable things . . .Our fears too play a part . . . You see, Jem, psychologically ..."

But Jemima always knew that she had seen the Decimus Ghost.