The Everlasting Story of Nory

46. Some Chandeliers

On the stairs they passed by a painting of dead birds, which was called a still life because the birds are not moving or flying, but are just there, still as glass, which makes them easier to paint. ‘Still deads’ would be a more realistic name for them than ‘still lifes.’

‘Ulg, I think I just lost my appetite,’ said Kira.

‘Wouldn’t they go a little rotten while they were being painted?’ asked Nory. She was remembering something Mr. Blithrenner told them in History about the Aztecs, which was that once the priests were done with a sacrifice, they let the person’s brains rot in his chopped-off head. That was somewhat like what they did to Oliver Cromwell for chopping off the king’s head. They dug him up a few years after he was dead, then cut his head off of his by now totally disgusting body, and put it on a spike on a building so that any child passing by would point at it and say, ‘Mom, what is that strange black lump with teeth?’ Once again, nothing to be proud of.

The people who figured out Ickworth House had a better idea of what you would want to pass by on the stairway every day and instead of a big painting of dead birds they put up a woman holding a fan. The real-life fan that was painted in the picture was attached to the wall above the fireplace in one of the rooms upstairs, so you could compare the painted fan and the real fan and see how good a job the painter had done. He had done a fine job. Some fans used to be made from chicken skin, though, so they would qualify as being still lifes, too.

The Yellow Drawing Room of Wimpole House was quite reasonable, and it had a dome that was shaped like the Jasperium of the Cathedral, but with a chandelier hanging down from it that was slightly on the scrawny side. Ickworth had a humongous chandelier over the dining room table. A man there had explained that it used to be at a different house but it had suddenly plundered from the ceiling one day for some reason and they’d had to prune it down, like a huge bush that was run into by a tractor. They carefully saved all the good pieces, and threaded it with new string, and now you couldn’t possibly tell that it wasn’t the way it was meant to be when you looked at it, since it was an extravaganza of sparkles as it was. Kira found out from the children’s guidebook that it wasn’t actually a chandelier but a ‘gasolier,’ running on gas power.

‘Is it a diesel?’ Littleguy asked.

Nory suddenly remembered the bathrooms at the restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco where she had gone to lunch one day with her parents. Each stall of the bathroom had a chandelier above it. She told Kira about it.

‘Wow, your own personal chandelier,’ said Kira. ‘That’s pretty incredible.’

Nory was quite content to have impressed her with a known fact about America.