Guest Post: a Fictional Tarot Reading

I usually have a guest post when viewing figures for the blog round some significant number. Obviously 107,000 is significant and signifies that 105,000 and 100,000 passed without me noticing. The guest post this time is by Nancy Spain who was a trouser-wearing character if ever there was one, and comes from her novel Cinderella Goes to the Morgue (Thriller Book Club, London, pp. 189-91). Spain's characters Miriam Birdseye and Nathasha duVivien have got mixed up in a pantomime and in a murder investigation involving clothing coupons under wartime rationing. I like this as an illustration of the way describing the cards brings out their meaning. Spain had obviously come across a Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

There was no music in 148a Leazes Gardens. Marilyn let herself in and groped,ccursing, for the electric light switch. The dark hall sprang into relief about her as she went ahead, past various dank waterproofs and hats that made strange shapes in the shadows. She came to the kitchen door and stood outlined against it. Here everything was sweetness and light.
The parrot cage was shrouded in green baize. Tony Gresham and Mrs Furbinger sat on either side of the kitchen table, which this evening wore its red frieze cloth. They were laying out the Major and Minor Arcana with a set of very old German tarot cards. Cups, swords, pentacles and wands were littered in terrifying profusion about the table. As Marylyn and Sergeant Robinson stood at the top of the steps and looked down on their bent heads, one neat and grey and grasped in curls, the other fair and vulnerable, Mrs Furbinger picked up the nine of swords with a little cry of horror. It showed a woman in bed weeping. Nine drawn swords dominated the darkness behind her.
"There," she said, "Tony. Not that I think it has anything to do with your legacy from Mister Banjo. But I knew I done wrong sewing up them clothing coupons for your poor dear mother in that old costoom. I shan't have a moment's peace till I tell the Sergeant all about it."
There was a very faint smell of kippers. It was easy to guess what Tony had had for supper.
"But look, Mrs Furbinger," he was saying earnestly. "Here is the hierophant in the great Arcana."
"That signifies the Pope," said Mrs Furbinger. "That denotes that all will be accomplished as be wished for the querent for the greatest good."
"What is this frightfully upsetting gentleman standing in this box with all that armour?"
The old-fashioned stove twinkled with black-lead. The curtains were drawn closely, excluding the rest of the world.
"That is the chariot of victories with urim and thumim like, on both shoulders and all the earth under him. But look at this three of swords..."
She gave a long sigh, compounded of bronchitis and apprehension. The kettle on the hob also puffed and wheezed and blew out its little plume of steam.
"I think all the swords are terrifying," said Tony and covered his eyes with his hand. I don't know which frightens me most. That one with the man face down, I think, transfixed with swords on the seashore..."
The cards made sinister shapes on the warm red cloth in the friendly room. They represented a future that was fearful and menacing. It was dangerous, like madness. In this kitchen everything was safe.
"You'll get over it in time," said Mrs Furbinger comfortably. "I was just like you over the tarot cards at the start. Particularly the three of pentacles with them beggars in the snow and that stained glass window. Fair gave me the creeps, I can tell you. But I'm altogether over it now..."
And she dealt them out in three packs face downwards, muttering, "To your house, to your heart, what's bound to be."

The tarot reading is never concluded.