There's a trick they do with one pea and three cups which is very hard to follow, and something like it, for greater stakes than a handful of loose change, is about to take place.
The text will be slowed down to allow the sleight of hand to be followed.
Mrs. Deirdre Young is giving birth in Delivery Room Three. She is having a golden.. haired male baby we will call Baby A.
The wife of the American Cultural Attaché, Mrs. Harriet bowling, is giving birth in Delivery Room Four. She is having a golden.. haired male baby we will call Baby B.
Sister Mary Loquacious has been a devout Satanist since birth. She went to Sabbat School as a child and won black stars for handwriting and liver. When she was told to join the Chattering Order she went obediently, having a natural talent in that direction and, in any case, knowing that she would be among friends. She would be quite bright, if she was ever put in a position to find out, but long ago found that being a scatterbrain, as she'd put it, gave you an easier journey through life. Currently she is being handed a golden.. haired male baby we will call the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness.
Watch carefully. Round and round they go ... .
“Is that him?” said Sister Mary, staring at the baby. “Only I'd expected funny eyes. Red, or green. Or teensy.. weensy little hoofikins. Or a widdle tail.” She turned him around as she spoke. No horns either. The Devil's child looked ominously normal.
“Yes, that's him,” said Crowley.
“Fancy me holding the Antichrist,” said Sister Mary. “And bathing the Antichrist. And counting his little toesy.. wosies ...”
She was now addressing the child directly, lost in some world of her own. Crowley waved a hand in front of her wimple. “Hallo? Hallo? Sister Mary?”
“Sorry, sir. He is a little sweetheart, though. Does he look like his daddy? I bet he does. Does he look like his daddywaddykins ...”
“No,” said Crowley firmly. “And now I should get up to the delivery rooms, if I were you.”
“Will he remember me when he grows up, do you think?” said Sister Mary wistfully, sidling slowly down the corridor.
“Pray that he doesn't,” said Crowley, and fled.
Sister Mary headed through the nighttime hospital with the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness safely in her arms. She found a bassinet and laid him down in it.
He gurgled. She gave him a tickle.
A matronly head appeared around a door. It said, “Sister Mary, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be on duty in Room Four?”
“Just glide along, there's a good nun. Have you seen the husband anywhere? He's not in the waiting room.”
“I've only seen Master Crowley, and he told me.. ”
“I'm sure he did,” said Sister Grace Voluble firmly. “I suppose I'd better go and look for the wretched man. Come in and keep an eye on her, will you? She's a bit woozy but the baby's fine.” Sister Grace paused. “Why are you winking? Is there something wrong with your eye?”
“You know!” Sister Mary hissed archly. “The babies. The exchange.. ”
“Of course, of course. In good time. But we can't have the father wandering around, can we?” said Sister Grace. “No telling what he might see. So just wait here and mind the baby, there's a dear.”
She sailed off down the polished corridor. Sister Mary, wheeling her bassinet, entered the delivery room.
Mrs. Young was more than woozy. She was fast asleep, with the look of determined self.. satisfaction of someone who knows that other people are going to have to do the running around for once. Baby A was asleep beside her, weighed and nametagged. Sister Mary, who had been brought up to be helpful, removed the nametag, copied it out, and Attachéd the duplicate to the baby in her care.
The babies looked similar, both being small, blotchy, and looking sort of, though not really, like Winston Churchill.
Now, thought Sister Mary, I could do with a nice cup of tea.
Most of the members of the convent were old.. fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie.. dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights. And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else. Besides, Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea. She hoped someone would come soon; she'd done the important bit, now she wanted her tea.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
There was a knock at the door. She opened it.
“Has it happened yet?” asked Mr. Young. “I'm the father. The husband. Whatever. Both.”
Sister Mary had expected the American Cultural Attaché to look like Blake Carrington or J. R. Ewing. Mr. Young didn't look like any American she'd ever seen on television, except possibly for the avuncular sheriff in the better class of murder mystery. [With a little old lady as the sleuth, and no car chases unless they're done very slowly.] He was something of a disappointment. She didn't think much of his cardigan, either.
She swallowed her disappointment. “Oooh, yes,” she said. “Congratulations. Your lady wife's asleep, poor pet.”
Mr. Young looked over her shoulder. “Twins?” he said. He reached for his pipe. He stopped reaching for his pipe. He reached for it again. “Twins? No one said anything about twins.”
“Oh, not” said Sister Mary hurriedly. “This one's yours. The other one's ... er ... someone else's. Just looking after him till Sister Grace gets back. No,” she reiterated, pointing to the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness, “this one's definitely yours. From the top of his head to the tips of his hoofywoofies.. which he hasn't got,” she added hastily.
“Ah, yes,” he said doubtfully. “He looks like my side of the family. All, er, present and correct, is he?”
“Oh, yes,” said Sister Mary. “He's a very normal child,” she added. “Very, very normal.”
There was a pause. They stared at the sleeping baby.
“You don't have much of an accent,” said Sister Mary. “Have you been over here long?”
“About ten years,” said Mr. Young, mildly puzzled. “The job moved, you see, and I had to move with it.”
“It must be a very exciting job, I've always thought,” said Sister Mary. Mr. Young looked gratified. Not everyone appreciated the more stimulating aspects of cost accountancy.
“I expect it was very different where you were before,” Sister Mary went on.
“I suppose so,” said Mr. Young, who'd never really thought about it. Luton, as far as he could remember, was pretty much like Tadfield. The same sort of hedges between your house and the railway station. The same sort of people.
“Taller buildings, for one thing,” said Sister Mary, desperately.
Mr. Young stared at her. The only one he could think of was the Alliance and Leicester offices.
“And I expect you go to a lot of garden parties,” said the nun.
Ah. He was on firmer ground here. Deirdre was very keen on that sort of thing.
“Lots,” he said, with feeling. “Deirdre makes jam for them, you know. And I normally have to help with the White Elephant.”
This was an aspect of Buckingham Palace society that had never occurred to Sister Mary, although the pachyderm fitted right in.
“I expect they're the tribute,” she said. “I read where these foreign potentates give her all sorts of things.”
“I'm a big fan of the Royal Family, you know.”
“Oh, so am I,” said Mr. Young, leaping gratefully onto this new ice floe in the bewildering stream of consciousness. Yes, you knew where you were with the Royals. The proper ones, of course, who pulled their weight in the hand.. waving and bridge.. opening department. Not the ones who went to discos all night long and were sick all over the paparazzi. [It is possibly worth mentioning at this point that Mr. Young thought that paparazzi was a kind of Italian linoleum.]
“That's nice,” said Sister Mary. “I thought you people weren't too keen on them, what with revoluting and throwing all those tea.. sets into the river.”
She chattered on, encouraged by the Order's instruction that members should always say what was on their minds. Mr. Young was out of his depth, and too tired now to worry about it very much. The religious life probably made people a little odd. He wished Mrs. Young would wake up. Then one of the words in Sister Mary's wittering struck a hopeful chord in his mind.
“Would there be any possibility of me possibly being able to have a cup of tea, perhaps?” he ventured.
“Oh my,” said Sister Mary, her hand flying to her mouth, “whatever am I thinking of?”
Mr. Young made no comment.
“I'll see to it right away,” she said. “Are you sure you don't want coffee, though? There's one of those vendible machines on the next floor.”
“Tea, please,” said Mr. Young.
“My word, you really have gone native, haven't you,” said Sister Mary gaily, as she bustled out.
Mr. Young, left alone with one sleeping wife and two sleeping babies, sagged onto a chair. Yes, it must be all that getting up early and kneeling and so on. Good people, of course, but not entirely compost mentis. He'd seen a Ken Russell film once. There had been nuns in it. There didn't seem to be any of that sort of thing going on, but no smoke without fire and so on ...
It was then that Baby A awoke, and settled down to a really good wail.
Mr. Young hadn't had to quiet a screaming baby for years. He'd never been much good at it to start with. He'd always respected Sir Winston Churchill, and patting small versions of him on the bottom had always seemed ungracious.
“Welcome to the world,” he said wearily. “You get used to it after a while.”
The baby shut its mouth and glared at him as if he were a recalcitrant general.
Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she'd also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it. They were the sort you only ever get at the bottom of certain teatime assortments. Mr. Young's was the same pink as a surgical appliance, and had a snowman picked out on it in white icing.
“I don't expect you normally have these,” she said. “They're what you call cookies. We call them biscults.”
Mr. Young had just opened his mouth to explain that, yes, so did he, and so did people even in Luton, when another nun rushed in, breathless.
She looked at Sister Mary, realized that Mr. Young had never seen the inside of a pentagram, and confined herself to pointing at Baby A and winking.
Sister Mary nodded and winked back.
The nun wheeled the baby out.
As methods of human communication go, a wink is quite versatile. You can say a lot with a wink. For example, the new nun's wink said:
Where the Hell have you been? Baby B has been born, we're ready to make the switch, and here's you in the wrong room with the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit. Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness, drinking tea. Do you realize I've nearly been shot?
And, as far as she was concerned, Sister Mary's answering wink meant:
Here's the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness, and I can't talk now because there's this outsider here.
Whereas Sister Mary, on the other hand, had thought that the orderly's wink was more on the lines of:
Well done, Sister Mary.. switched over the babies all by herself. Now indicate to me the superfluous child and I shall remove it and let you get on with your tea with his Royal Excellency the American Culture.
And therefore her own wink had meant:
There you go, dearie; that's Baby B, now take him away and leave me to chat to his Excellency. I've always wanted to ask him why they have those tall buildings with all the mirrors on them,
The subtleties of all this were quite lost on Mr. Young, who was extremely embarrassed at all this clandestine affection and was thinking: That Mr. Russell, he knew what he was talking about, and no mistake.
Sister Mary's error might have been noticed by the other nun had not she herself been severely rattled by the Secret Service men in Mrs. Dowling's room, who kept looking at her with growing unease. This was because they had been trained to react in a certain way to people in long flowing robes and long flowing headdresses, and were currently suffering from a conflict of signals. Humans suffering from a conflict of signals aren't the best people to be holding guns, especially when they've just witnessed a natural childbirth, which definitely looked an un.. American way of bringing new citizens into the world. Also, they'd heard that there were missals in the building.
“Have you picked a name for him yet?” said Sister Mary archly.
“Hmm?” said Mr. Young. “Oh. No, not really. If it was a girl it would have been Lucinda after my mother. Or Germaine. That was Deirdre's choice.”
“Wormwood's a nice name,” said the nun, remembering her classics. “Or Damien. Damien's very popular.”
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