THE KING IN WAITING By Dan Griliopoulos A young lady stepped lightly down from a hansom cab in the new suburbs of Barnet, in far North London. She was slight, with bobbed brown hair, oval glasses, a round hat, and a two-piece tweed suit that made her look much older than her years. The only dissonant element was at her waist and at her wrists, where clusters of gewgaws, gimcracks and fetishes dangled and clashed as she moved.
The cab had deposited her in the middle of a building site and she looked around for a moment. She was standing at the end of a row of ugly new houses, where they faded into construction equipment. Up the road was a suburban scene, with topiary-heavy gardens and red-tiled roofs topped by small birds lazing in the summer sun. Here, rubble and cranes dominated, with a long Nissen hut acting as a site office. As she took it in, a suntanned man in overalls and a builder’s helmet jumped up from his desk in the hut and hurried over.
He smiled ingenuously. “Can I ‘elp you, Miss?” he said. “Do you need directions somewhere? This building work is rather dangerous.” He gestured widely around at the deserted dig site and made to escort her away.
“My name is Emily Confort, of the Met Office.” she said, pulling her elbow out of his grasp. “George is expecting me. He said to say ‘Chrome Yellow’.”
The man’s chummy demeanour changed to respectfully dour. “Oh! Oh.” He frowned and then turned back towards the site office. “You’d better come down.”
There was a moist warmth and sharp actinic smell inside the corrugated steel hut. A pair of huge ventilation shafts loomed over both the foreman’s cheap desk and a steep spiral staircase going down. He handed her a tin helmet. “You’d best wear this, miss.” Emily shook her head at the proffered helmet, and peered down into the banister-less depths. “Well then. Watch your head and your step. Come this way.”
. . .
