“Is that an improvement on the Thames Valley Fruit-Growers Ball, where you were merely photographing ‘low-grade celebrity wannabes’?”

“Of course, dear—it’s called upward mobility. By the summer I could be doing portraits of chinless twerps at the Henley Regatta.”

“Well, you’d better dress up a bit, then.”

“All in good time, husband dearest. Can you take Megan to Scouts?

“Sure. When is it again?”

“Seven,” said Megan, and excused herself from the table.

“What did you do at school, Jerome?” asked Jack when Madeleine had gone upstairs to change into something a little smarter. It didn’t do well to turn up at a charity bash dressed scruffy, even if you were only the photographer.

“Nothing much.”

“Then it’s a bit pointless sending you, isn’t it? Why don’t we just cancel school, and you can stay at home and—I don’t know—just eat chocolate and watch TV all day?”

Jerome perked up at this gold-edged scenario. “Really?”

“No, not really.”

His shoulders slumped. “But school’s sooooooo boring.”

“Agreed. But it’s almost perfect training for a career at Smileyburgers.”

“But I’m not going to work at Smileyburgers.”

“You will if you do nothing much at school.”

“Da-woo!!” yelled Stevie, jumping up and down. In the absence of anything more productive to do, he grasped large handfuls of scrambled egg and squeezed until it oozed between his fingers like yellow toothpaste.

“Yag,” said Jerome, “and you tell me off for picking my nose!”

“It’s not the picking,” explained Jack, who secretly liked a good dig himself and didn’t want to be a hypocrite, “it’s the eating. ”

Talk abruptly halted as Ben walked into the kitchen looking very self-conscious in his college orchestra uniform. He was sixteen, gangly and awash in a toxic sea of hormones. He had joined the orchestra less through the love of music than the love of Penelope Liddell, who played the harp.

“It’s those slender fingers plucking on the strings,” he had explained while confessing the object of his adoration to Jack a few days before, “and that concentration ! Hell’s teeth! If she looked at me like that, I think I’d explode.”

“Well, mind you don’t,” Jack had replied. “It could be very messy.”

Ben was actually a very competent tuba, but since the tuba player is about as far away as you can get from the harp and the tuba doesn’t exactly ooze macho sexuality—except, perhaps, to another tuba—he had joined the percussion section to bring him closer to the object of his affections. He dragged two heavy cases out from the cupboard under the stairs and put on a parka.

“Do you need a hand with those?” asked Jack.

“Thanks, Dad. My ride will be here soon.”

A car horn sounded outside.

Jack tried to pick up one of the cases, but it was so heavy it felt as though it had taken root.

“What the hell have you got in here?”

“We’re doing Il Trovatore, ” Ben explained. “Mr. Moore said we should experiment—so I’m using real anvils and real hammers.”

Between the two of them, they managed to drag the cases across the floor and heave them over the doorstep and down the path to the trunk of the waiting car, which sank alarmingly.

Half an hour later, Madeleine came back down dressed in a strapless red ball gown kept up by nothing but faith. All eyes were on her as she did a twirl for them in the kitchen.

“How do I look?”

“Whoa!” said Pandora who had just walked in. “Maddy’s in girl clothes!”

“Beautiful,” said Megan wistfully, clasping her hands together and holding them at her chin, dreaming of a time when she could dress up in ball gowns, go to parties and be kissed by a handsome prince—although she would accept a knight, if there were problems regarding availability.

“It’s very bright,” was Jerome’s only comment.

“Da-woo,” said Stevie.

“I thought you were the one doing the photographing,” said Jack. “I mean, how do you actually get in your own photographs? Press the shutter and then run around really fast?”

“It is the Spongg Footcare Charity Benefit, darling. While I’ve still the tattered remnants of youth and good looks, I might as well use them to drum up some work. Debs’ parents pay good money for portraits.”

“Well,” said Jack, “just don’t allow yourself to be chatted up by Lord Spongg—you know what a reputation he has.”

“I have every intention of being chatted up by Lord Spongg,” she responded with a smile. “I need all the work he can give me.” She curled a hand around Jack’s chin and neck, brought her lips to his ear and whispered, “These dresses are notoriously tight, and the zips are always faulty. You may have to tear it from my body.”

She kissed him, smiled and withdrew.

“I’ll wait up.”

“Oh, no need for that is there?” she returned playfully.

“Yes.”

She laughed and was suddenly a burst of energy.

“Megan, get your shoes on—NOW! If you can’t find a woggle, use an elastic band. The rest of you behave yourselves with Jack. I’ll be back after your bedtime.”

She kissed them all, grabbed her camera bag, which spoiled the illusion of sophisticated socializing, and was out of the door in a flash.

“Da-woo,” murmured Stevie, clearly impressed.

It was after ten, the younger children were all tucked in, and Jack and Pandora were sitting in the living room. The telly was on, although they weren’t paying it much attention, and Pandora was doing some revising, as several textbooks on theoretical particle physics were strewn around the sofa. Pandora was almost twenty and still at the sort of age where she didn’t really care what her father thought of her life choices and wanted him to know it—which naturally meant she cared a great deal what he thought but wasn’t going to let on. And Jack, for his part, couldn’t help giving her advice that he thought valuable and pertinent but was actually useless—mostly because it had been a long time since he was her age, and he hadn’t been able to figure it out either. But there were small triumphs. For a start, Pandora didn’t have any piercings or tattoos. This was partly due to Jack’s relaxed attitude, something that took the wind out of her semirigged rebellious sails. Sometimes she thought Jack was using reverse psychology on her, which meant that she should double-bluff his double bluff, and she might have done so except that the idea of a tattoo or a piercing made her feel queasy.

Jack stared blankly at his crossword. It was the 344th consecutive puzzle he had failed to complete. A new personal best.

“Hey,” said Pandora, “tough break on the three-pigs case. I’m a committed holier-than-thou-meat-is-murder-bore-the-pants-off-all-and-sundry vegetarian, and even I thought they should have been served up boiled with new potatoes, peas and parsley sauce.”

“Well,” replied Jack, taking a swig of beer, “we thought we might have got Gerald—that’s Little Pig A—to squeal on his elder brothers for a lesser sentence, but he wouldn’t play ball. How’s school?”

“I’m nearly twenty, Dad. I don’t go to school anymore. It’s called uni-ver-sity, and it’s good. Can you help me with my quantum-particle homework?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Here’s the question: ‘Solve the Schrödinger equation explicitly in the case of a particle of mass m in a constant Newtonian gravitational field: V=mgz. ’”

Jack thought for a moment.

“Definitely B.”

“Eh?”

“Box B, unless the previous answer was box B, in which case it’ll be box C. This is multiple choice, yes?”

Pandora laughed. “No, Dad. Particle physics is a little more involved than that.”

“Box A?”

She slapped him playfully on the arm. “Dad! You are so no help at all!”

The local news came on. There was a piece about Chymes and the Peabody case, of course, and more about the Jellyman’s visit on Saturday to dedicate the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center. There was also a bit about the Spongg Footcare Charity Benefit, live from the Déjà Vu Ballrooms. They both craned their necks to catch a glimpse of Madeleine in her red dress and saw her lurking in the back of a shot where Lord Randolph Spongg, the CEO of Spongg Footcare PLC, was doing a piece for the live broadcast.

“…as well as representatives from Winsum and Loosum’s and QuangTech, we’ve seen a galaxy of Reading celebrities tonight,” said the handsome peer cheerfully, “in order to help us raise funds to replace the outdated and woefully inadequate St. Cerebellum’s mental hospital. We are very grateful indeed to Mr. Grundy, Mr. Attery Squash, the Blue Baboon, Mr. Pobble, Lola Vavoom and of course the Dong, who so generously agreed to entertain us with his luminous nose.”

“Ah, yes, Miss Vavoom,” said The Toad reporter as he crossed to the retired star of screen and stage, “so good to see you out in Reading society again. How do you react to the epithet ‘formerly gorgeous’?”

“Like this, ” she said, downing the reporter with a straight right to the jaw. There was a cry, a flash going off, and they cut the live broadcast back to a bemused anchorman who hid a smile, told a heartwarming story about the efforts of the fire service to rescue a kitten stuck in a pipe, then introduced Reading’s favorite weather-girl, Bunty McTwinkle.

“Reading will once again experience a cloudy day with little sign of sunshine,” said Bunty without much emotion, “a bit like living inside Tupperware.”

Pandora keyed the remote, and the TV went silent.

“I was hoping I might make the local news this time,” said Jack despondently, “even if it was to be trashed.”

Ben finally drifted in at eleven and made a little too much noise. A light switched on in Mr. and Mrs. Sittkomm’s bedroom, which was always a bad sign. Jack beckoned him in as quickly as he could.

“Have you been drinking?”

“To excess. I had two shandies.”

“Almost an alcoholic. How did it go with the harpist? Did she like your anvils?”

“Oh, her, ” he sniffed, taking off his parka and chucking it in the cloakroom. “She’s going out with Brian Eves, who plays the tuba. She says it’s the sexiest instrument in the brass section.”

“Oh, Ben,” said Jack, “I’m so sorry!”

“Shit happens,” he replied, making his way toward the staircase, his room and the welcome oblivion of low-alcohol-induced lovelorn unconsciousness. “Yes indeed, shit happens.”