
rubicund fellow who set the floorboards to creaking mightily when he trod them and who
looked as if he keenly felt the lack of a pony between his legs. He wore his penny-red hair
cropped close to the scalp and there was something indefinitely colo-nial, a nasal echo of
cantonment or goldfields, in his speech. He nodded in turn to Parkins, to the refugee child,
and to Reggie Panicker, and then flung himself into his chair like a boy settling onto the
back of a school chum for a ride across the lawn. Immediately he struck up a conversation
with the elder Panicker on the subject of American roses, a subject about which, he freely
admitted, he knew nothing.
A profound reservoir of poise, or a pathological deficit of curiosity, Parkins supposed,
might explain the near-total lack of interest that Mr. Shane, who gave himself out to be a
traveler in milking equipment for the firm of Chedbourne & Jones, Yorkshire, appeared to
take in the nature of his in-terlocutor, Mr. Panicker, who was not only a Malayalee from
Kerala, black as a bootheel, but also a high-church Anglican vicar. Politesse or stupidity,
perhaps, might also prevent him from remarking on the sullen way in which Reggie
Panicker, the vicar's grown son, was gouging a deep hole in the tatted tablecloth with the
point of his fish knife, as well as on the presence at the table of a mute nine-year-old boy
whose face was like a blank back page from the book of human sorrows. But it was the
way in which Mr. Shane paid so little atten-tion to the boy's parrot that made it impossible
for Mr. Parkins to accept the new lodger at face value. No one could be immune to the
interest that inhered in the parrot, even if, as now, the bird was merely reciting bits and
scraps of poems of Goethe and Schiller known to every German schoolchild over the age of
seven. Mr. Parkins, who had, for reasons of his own, long kept the African gray under
careful observation, immediately saw in the new lodger a potential rival in his ongoing
quest to solve the deepest and most vex-ing mystery of the remarkable African bird.
Clearly, Someone Important had heard about the numbers, and had sent Mr. Shane to hear
them for himself.
"Well, here we are." Into the dining room swung Mrs. Panicker, carrying a Spode
tureen. She was a large, plain, flaxen-haired Oxfordshirewoman whose unimaginably wild
inspiration of thirty years past, to marry her father's coal-eyed, serious young assistant
minister from India, had borne fruit far mealier than the ripe rosy pawpaws that she had,
breathing in the scent of Mr. K. T. Panicker's hair oil on a warm summer evening in 1913,
permitted herself to antici-pate. But she kept an excellent table, one that merited the
custom of a far greater number of lodgers than the Panicker household currently enjoyed.
The living was a minor one, the black vicar locally unpopular, the parishioners stingy as
flints, and the Panicker family, in spite of Mrs. Panicker's thrift and stern providence,
uncomfortably poor. It was only Mrs. Panicker's lavishly tended kitchen garden and culinary
knack that could make possible a fine cold cucumber and chervil soup such as the one that
she now proposed, lifting the lid of the tureen, to Mr. Shane, for whose sudden pres-ence
in the house, with two months paid in advance, she was clearly grateful.
"Now, I'm warning you well beforehand, this time, Master Steinman," she said as she
ladled pale green cream, flecked with emerald, into the boy's bowl, "it's a cold soup and
meant to be." She looked at Mr. Shane, frowning, though her eyes held a faint glint
of amusement. "Sprayed the whole table with cream soup, last week, did the boy, Mr.
Shane," she went on. "Ruined Reggie's best cravat."