Page 30 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“I quite liked the fairy-tale nonsense,” Magda said, her voice quiet.
“I did too,” Henrietta agreed, smiling at her. “But it’s not true. And we can’t hold on to childish things forever, I suppose. Not in this world. Eventually we have to put the childish things away.”
Magda didn’t answer that. She stared mutely at the countertop, cradling her mug of coffee against her stomach.
“Well,” Henry said. “I’d best be off. You need your bed. I’m sure everything will be better in the morning.”
Magda followed Henrietta back through the lounge to the front door.
“Will knows all about this as well, you know,” Henry said. “I told him after I had that last conversation with Frank.”
“You told him but not me?” Magda asked.
“Sad but true,” Henry admitted. She scratched her cheek with one finger. “I don’t have a good reason for that, except you were always very close to Frank. I didn’t really want to spoil your relationship, not after Imelda’s death. And if Will didn’t support me, there wasn’t much point speaking to you anyway. You were always going to side with Frank.”
Magda resented this conclusion, hating that Henry had thought her so incapable of independent thought, hating that she might have been right. “Will has known all this time, but he kept coming to the meetings.”
Henry shrugged. “You know what he’s like. Probably found it all too awkward to talk about. Probably easier just to play along than disrupt. Now, come here.” Henry reached forward and pulled Magda into a hug, and that embrace felt good, soothing Magda’s unsettled mind,the vanilla and cinnamon scent of Henry’s perfume filling her nose. “So good to see you again, Mags. I’ll be around in London for a while, I think, if you want to talk more. Just drop me a message, my number hasn’t changed.”
Magda grunted. “Left my phone in Hong Kong, didn’t I?”
“Oh right, yes!”
“In all the panic with the, you know...”
“Man with the gun,” Henrietta finished.
“Right.”
“Well, drop me an email, then. I’ll always get back to you, Magda dear.”
Henrietta turned to go, but Magda caught her by the arm and halted her. “Frank will call a meeting of the Society tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll have to. We have an artefact. If he calls, will you come?”
Henrietta considered the question for a moment, a smile playing around her lips, eyes dancing around the hallway. “Maybe,” she said. Then she winked once and Magda watched in astonishment as Henry walked straight through the front door without opening it, just like a ghost.
The Man Who Stopped the World
During her three years studying law in London, Magda Sparks would meet Frank Simpson at least once a week. In those days she knew Frank as a friend of her mother, a slightly geeky older man who ran a cool-if-slightly-crusty bookshop in Marylebone; a man who liked soft drinks and who always seemed to have a twinkle in his eyes, as if he had all the secrets of life understood and sorted and was quite happy just to let the days and months pass him by. These meetings would inevitably involve a discussion about Magda’s mother, the goings-on at Frank’s bookshop, and an update on Magda’s writing, which she pursued around (or often at the expense of) her studies. Magda was committed to completing her law degree, almost to prove a point to herself and to the world that she could, that she wouldn’t just live on her family’s wealth, but she had always been even more committed to becoming a full-time writer. Frank would jokingly offer to employ her in Bell Street Books to keep her going until she sorted herself out.
“You can work here and write at the same time!” he would joke. “Come keep an old man company. I can help you with ideas for your books.”
Evening meetings would take place in Frank’s apartment above theshop, but sometimes they would meet at lunchtime, particularly during the warmer months of the year, and those meetings would always take place in Regent’s Park, a short walk from Bell Street Books. It was a place Frank had taken Magda as a young girl one weekend when Imelda had gone off for a trip to Wales and Magda had been left in Frank’s care. They had visited London Zoo and then had walked the Broad Walk, through the avenue of trees, eating ice cream Frank had bought from an espresso bar halfway along the walk. In her haste to eat it, Magda had dropped the ice cream all over her T-shirt. The memory was strangely magical to Magda (even if the loss of the ice cream had been traumatic at the time), and when she had first arranged to meet Frank in the early days of her first year at university, on a warm, golden day in late autumn, Regent’s Park had seemed to her the best place to meet.
“Meet me where I spilled my ice cream!” she had said to Frank, by email, when they had been discussing arrangements. She had half expected Frank to ask her what she meant, but he never did, and he had been there waiting for her, at the espresso bar, with two ice creams in hand when she had arrived.
“I got you a replacement for the one you lost,” he had said, grinning.
On the day she had met Frank for the first time after her mother’s funeral, it was again in Regent’s Park, walking together along empty paths with dark grey clouds brooding above them. On that day Frank hadn’t come with any ice cream, but he had told her a tale about the Society and magic, and how it had all started.
“The Society was formed in the aftermath of war,” he had said to her, “as the embers of fire and hate cooled and transformed into an icy wind sweeping across Europe.”
Magda had listened silently to the tale of the origin of the Society. Frank had told her about the first magical item, an object his grandfather had inherited from his own father, an item that had been a family secret for generations: the Impossible Box, a small wooden box that could hold endless items of any size, and which would befuddle you with impossibility if you ever looked inside. Frank’s grandfather had called such items “unknowable objects.”He and his friends, scarred by war and worried about what might be done with other unknowable objects if they fellinto the wrong hands, had formed the Society of Unknowable Objects to collect and protect such items.
A decade after hearing that story for the first time, on the day after her return from Hong Kong and the morning after Henrietta Wiseman had surprised her at home, Magda asked to meet Frank again.
“Let’s meet somewhere public this afternoon,” she wrote in her email. “Let’s meet where you twice bought me ice cream.”
When Magda arrived at the espresso bar on the east side of the park, just off Chester Road, she was somehow both exhausted and energised. She had slept fitfully after Henry had departed the previous evening, and her body still felt weighed down by fatigue, even as her mind was throwing questions around like a child with multiple rubber balls.
