Chapter Six
An Unexpected Tea with the Shadow of Past Events On It

One early autumn morning, in fact it was the first day of autumn, when Hapless was in the garden removing weeds from among the anemones, who should come along the lane uninvited but Dumbledalf himself. He stood by the gate observing Hapless at work until the latter looked up enquiringly.
“Good morning”, he said, in a rather clipped manner, and resumed his gardening.
“What do you mean?”, replied Dumbledalf.
“Eh?” stuttered Hapless.
“Eh!”, mused Dumbledalf, “Do you mean ‘Eh’ as if you are clearing your throat, or ‘Eh’ that you are about to say ‘elephant’ or ‘Eh’ because that is the only word that comes to mind?” asked Dumbledalf, with nauseating pedantry.
“All of them at once init”, replied Hapless quickly, and muttered to himself, or so he thought, “and eh for eff off you old nutter”.
“Nutter?” repeated Dumbledalf in a way designed to make Hapless feel uncomfortable, small and exposed at the same time. “Nutter? As in someone who shells nuts I presume?”, and he looked sternly at Hapless from beneath long and bushy eyebrows. Then his face suddenly brightened. “Ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrr”, he said, “Don’t worry, I’m pulling your leg young Hapless”.
Hapless looked up again, wondering how he could know this eccentric-seeming chap.
“Oh!... good”, he remarked, in a slightly worried tone.

“It’s me, Dumbledalf, I’ve been a friend of your uncle’s for years, don’t you remember?”.
“Dumbledalf?”, said Hapless, ‘a less than common name’, he mused, then continued, “Nope. Wait, Dum…. Ahah! Dumbledalf! Blimey!, Old Merlin Dumbledalf, from England? You were a wizard at darts init! Of course I remember you. Gosh, you haven’t changed a bit. My eyes must be going. How did I fail to recognise you immediately?” He turned towards the front door. “Uncle Jams!”, he called, “It’s Merlin Dumbledalf, from London.
‘Nice recovery’, thought Dumbledalf, ‘considering that since we last met I have gone grey, grown a beard, and have taken to wearing a hat’.
“I’m not from London”, Dumbledalf informed him.
“Uncle Jams will be 65 tomorrow!”, Hapless informed him back.
“Yes, I know”, replied Dumbledalf, “and you will be 18.”, he added.
“It’s quite a while since I’ve lived in Camberwell”, said Dumbledalf. “Nice carrots!”, he added, nodding towards the vegetable patch.
“Do you grow?”, asked Hapless. Dumbledalf shook his head.
“But I prefer vegetables to flowers.”, he remarked. “Little tarts!”.
After a few niceties in the same vein, it was not long before the three of them were having tea in the greenhouse, or the conservatory as Dumbledalf called it. They had consumed several muffins and had now run out of biscuits.
“I have some seed cake in the pantry”, said Jams, “and I made some Kitchen cakes earlier”, and he stood up to fetch them.
“Kitchen cakes?”, asked Dumbledalf, “What are they?”.
“Cakes”, said Jams.
“Who calls them ‘kitchen cakes’?, continued Dumbledalf.
“I do”, replied Jams plainly. “I invented them in the kitchen, and they look like cakes”.

He went off to find them. Dumbledalf looked at the room about him. There were several chairs and a large settee, a table in the corner, and some books on shelves. Jams was still clanking around in the kitchen, so Dumbledalf stood up, ostensibly to look at a painting in the corner, but in reality to let out a secret fart without Hapless noticing. The picture was a reproduction of The Lady of Shallot by Waterhouse. On a shelf next to it he noticed an old leather bound edition of King Solomon’s Mines, a Compendium of stories by Denis Wheatley, and a copy of the Worst Witch. Then, over by the fireplace, Dumbledalf spotted the thing he sought. The torus was resting on the mantelpiece, just as it had been in the image that had become lodged in his brain for years. Jams came back in with a tray, and they had a pleasant summer afternoon’s tea.

“Well, it’s nice to see you again after all these years, Merlin, I must say”, opened Jams, opening the jam. “What brings you back here, boy?”.
“Oh, this ‘n’ that”, replied Dumbledalf. “I thought I’d drop in for your birthdays, I wanted to see that you were both OK, and I want that doughnut of yours”.
“What? Why?”, asked Jams.

Dumbledalf thought about this for a moment or two. The event that brought the identity of this obscure and frankly archaic object to mind was the recent re-emergence of J.R.R.Rowling into the grubby little world of university management. Long forgotten and unobtrusive in his esoteric subject area, unexpectedly he had been appointed to oversee the undergraduate core training programme, a low grade and tedious addition to his teaching role, but it nevertheless represented a foot on the management ladder and, within weeks, he had climbed another rung in taking on management of the spring seminar series. Already his name was being mentioned in meetings in connection with future tasks. He was a “valuable addition to the management team”, and that ‘little episode’ was a long time ago, and ‘surely forgotten now’, though clearly it was not. Even more worrying, a gaggle of students seemed to regularly accompany him around the campus. Dumbledalf scratched his groin and thought hard, ‘Could he have constructed another torus?, Where could he have obtained either osmium or taegidium, especially taegidium?’. The notion seemed unlikely, but from that time on, he had maintained a watch on all of Rowling’s activities, and had sought to ascertain the means by which a torus could have been constructed. Dumbledalf was brought back to the present by the sound of Hapless’s voice.

“Merlin?”, he said. “Why do you want my uncle’s doughnut? Have you come all this way for it?”. Dumbledalf stood up and looked at it.
“Yes”, he replied, “but, to be honest”, “I don’t want it. I want to destroy it”.
“Destroy it?”, said Jams and Hapless together.
“Whatever for boy?”, asked Jams. Dumbledalf looked at them both sternly, as if weighing up whether to tell them the truth. “Because it’s dangerous and it might end up causing you some serious problems.”, replied Dumbledalf. He sighed. “We’ll talk of it later, shall we?”. His expression changed , “I have something for each of you.”, he announced, and produced two cards, written in elegant copperplate.

“To Jeremiah Potts, and to Hapless Potts”, he said, handing them to Jams and Hapless with ceremony. To Jams he gave a good quality compass and three Ordnance Survey maps of west and central Wales, and to Hapless a map of England and Wales, along with a bottle of twelve-year old malt to each of them. Jams Potts looked at Dumbledalf as if somehow the old fellow had guessed his mind.

“I have something to say lads”, he said. “I’m fed up with this town life and am off to the hills init. Off on the road. I want to see mountains again!”, he added, excitedly. All Dumbledalf’s concerns were quite distant to what Jams perceived as the changes in the life of Jeremiah Potts, who had become increasingly dissatisfied with his life. The next evening, after Hapless’s eighteenth birthday party (and his own sixty-fifth), there came a knock on the door, and there stood his companion, known to all as ‘Tigger’, who had packed two rucksacks, made sandwiches and a flask, bought cake and crisps, and worked out a suitable route. She looked at Jams.

“Are you ready?”
“Yup”, he said. He gave Hapless a hug and an envelope, shook hands with Dumbledalf, and went off into the deepening gloom. With that, he upped sticks and moved to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, where legend had it that the infamous ‘Rat-woman’ knitted jumpers and made furniture. He left all of his possessions, including the doughnut, to the lad. Dumbledalf thought this somewhat curious.

The following morning, after a leisurely second breakfast, which they felt was needed following Jams’ departure, Dumbledalf spoke to Hapless, who was trying to come to terms with what had happened.
“Hapless my lad”, he said, “There’s a ruthless and scurrilous Maltbyist who will stop at nothing to get hold of this mechanical doughnut of yours.”, he mentioned lightly.
“You’re kidding!”, replied Hapless. “Why would anyone even want it, let alone steal it?”.
“Well, to cut a long story short.”, replied Dumbledalf, “He made it and he wants it back! His henchmen are probably already on their way here now. He looked at his blank face. “They could be nasty”, he added. He opened the front door and they stood in the garden. “Well”, he sighed, “I’m off home”.
“But….!”
“Better bring it to Grimauladris quick”, said Dumbledalf cheerfully, and left, whistling a merry tune.
“But…. !” repeated Hapless, to nobody. He thought about his new situation. “Now what?”, he muttered. “Where or what is Grimauladris?”. He went back into the empty house and switched on the computer.