Page 4 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“Oh, you know.” She smiled. “Happy-go-lucky as usual.”
Will was a watchmaker, operating out of a small shop on a quiet street between Marylebone and Mayfair. It was a profession that Magda had always thought entirely suited Will’s character. He was an introvert, and seemed to prefer time in a room by himself doing intricate work rather than dealing with unpredictable human beings. He was a slight man, with floppy blond hair and blue eyes behind wire-frame spectacles, and he had the pale skin of someone who spent most of their time under electric lights. Magda knew from experience that Will liked the finer things in life. He drank expensive ground coffee and ate food from London’s best independent delicatessens, and despite his reclusive nature, he always dressed in good-quality, tailor-made suits, his armour against an uncertain, irrational world. Will had been a member of the Society for longer than Magda, joining upon the death of his father, several years before Imelda had died.
“How is the life of the author?” Will asked, as Magda made her way back around the table.
“Fine, fine.” She shrugged. “Just finished edits on my next book. Should be out late next year.”
Will nodded slowly as if this was interesting information, but Magda seriously doubted that he had ever read any of her books. She wrote thrillers and adventure stories under the pseudonym Miranda Hepworth, and Will had once mentioned that he preferred to read nonfiction, particularly books about engineering and science. He had irritated her—entirely unintentionally—by confessing, “I don’t like made-up stories.”
“Do you know what the meeting is about?” Will asked.
Magda shook her head. “Frank gave nothing away.” She stripped off her coat to hang it over the back of her chair. “Clearly to neither of us. But it’s got to be about Henrietta, right?”
A frown creased Will’s brow. “Henry,” he murmured. It seemed to Magda that Will hadn’t even thought about Henry for quite some time.
Henrietta Wiseman—or Henry—was the fourth member of the Society, but she hadn’t attended a meeting for over three years. Nobody had heard from her or knew where she was, but Frank had refused to replace her despite her extended absence.
“He didn’t call a meeting when Henry stopped attending,” Will observed. “Why call one now? We’ve never had an extraordinary meeting, Magda.Never.Not even for Henry.”
Magda heard worry vibrating in Will’s voice and his anxiety threatened to infect her. “It has to be Henry,” she said, trying to convince herself.
She looked across the table to the empty chair where Henrietta had always sat, realising how much she missed the other woman’s presence. Henrietta was perhaps twenty years older than Magda, but she’d always had the vitality of a much younger person. She’d been effortlessly charismatic, cheeky and irreverent to the point of being a troublemaker but always with a disarming smile or a twinkle in her eye such that people would forgive all her sins. The meetings of the Society had never been as fun since Henrietta had stopped attending.
“I can’t think what else it could be,” Magda continued. “Maybe Frank’s heard from her?”
Will nodded, but he seemed distracted, the fingers of one hand tapping the knuckles of the other restlessly. Magda sighed, disappointed that Will couldn’t shed any light on why they had been called together. She ran her eyes around the basement to check all was in order. It was a large, rectangular space with bright, buzzing strip lights on the ceiling. Like the bookshop above, floor-to-ceiling shelves covered most of the walls, but there was more than just books here. The shelves were crowded with boxes and tins, piles of papers, and other odds and ends, an assortment of forgotten-about, broken, or misplaced everyday items.
Away from the shelves, there was a small table that sat off to the side, laden with a kettle and a coffeemaker and boxes of biscuits. A mini fridge sat on the floor beneath this table and hummed contentedly to itself. On the wall above the table there was a gallery of photographs, pictures of former and current members of the Society. Included amongst them was a large photograph of Magda with Imelda, taken onlya year before Imelda’s death. In the opposite corner, next to one wall of bookshelves, a couple of old armchairs sat on a rug, a low coffee table between them and one of Imelda’s landscape paintings hung on the wall above. All in all, the basement was a comfortable place, a featureless square box softened by knickknacks, furniture, and memories. But just like the reinforced door, there was a secret behind what was seen. The most important thing in the basement was hidden away out of sight. If a concealed button was pressed, one of the bookcases would swing open, revealing a recess. Magda had only seen inside that recess on a handful of occasions, and never for longer than on the day she had first joined the Society of Unknowable Objects ten years earlier.
But if this was an extraordinary meeting... perhaps...
What if it’s not about Henry? What if it’s something else? Something exciting?
Possibilities popped and fizzed in her mind like fireworks, but then she shook her head, curtailing childish daydreams. She walked over to the table at the side of the room to make drinks to distract herself.
“Here you go,” she said to Will a few minutes later, setting before him a mug of instant coffee that he hadn’t asked for. He peered into it as Magda placed two biscuits on the table next to the mug. “Get that down you.”
Will sipped the drink obediently and Magda watched him try to muster a smile of enjoyment as she picked up her own mug and returned to her seat. “Lovely,” he said, with an expression that suggested exactly the opposite.
The door to the stairs opened and Frank appeared. Magda’s heart kicked up to a faster rhythm: the meeting was about to start. She didn’t know whether to be excited or worried and the uncertainty reminded her of the awful nerves she used to feel before exams:Had she revised enough? Was she going to fail? Was she ready?
“Right,” Frank announced. He closed the door with a reassuringly solidthunkand walked over to his seat. “Shop’s all locked up, I’ve finished my chapter, and we’re all here.” He looked at both of them in turn, pushing his glasses up his big nose with one finger. “We can get down to business.”
Frank was an old man now, and visibly older each time Magda saw him. He had always delighted in telling long and winding stories, but increasingly these days Frank seemed to lose the thread of his tales, and on more than one occasion Magda had seen him stranded at a narrative dead end, wondering how he had got there. During the last few meetings of the Society there had been moments where Frank’s attention had seemed to drift off, as if he was falling asleep, or as if his mind was briefly elsewhere. Magda had noticed this without comment, always relieved whenever Frank snapped back into focus and was immediately the man he had always been again: warm, engaging, full of history and knowledge and secrets, the chair of the Society. The idea of Frank no longer being able to lead the Society, or no longer being around at all, was unbearable to Magda, the sort of dark thought she turned away from whenever it appeared. The sort of dark thought that was creeping in now as she sipped her tea and pondered the reason that Frank had called them together so unexpectedly.
“What is this all about, Frank?” Will asked, the question almost a plea. “We’re not supposed to meet for four weeks yet.”
“Is it Henrietta?” Magda asked, before Frank could answer.
“Three weeks,” Frank said to Will. “We’re due to meet in three weeks, not four.”
Will blinked at Frank. “Okay, we’re due to meet in three weeks. What could possibly have happened to require us to meet now? Nothing ever happens, Frank.”
Frank bobbed his head back and forth. “Sometimes things happen.”
“No,” Will insisted. “Nothinghappens. There’s never anything to talk about. We come here. We drink tea and we eat cheap biscuits.” Will lifted one of the biscuits Magda had given him to illustrate his point. “We agree everything is fine and then we go away again.”
Magda suppressed her annoyance at Will’s petulance, wishing he would let Frank talk.
