Lucia Victrix (37 page)

Immediately after the marriage the ‘young couple' had left
Tilling, for Elizabeth had accepted the offer of a very good let for Mallards for the summer and autumn months, and they had taken a primitive and remote bungalow close to the golf-links two miles away, where they could play golf and taste romance in solitude. Mr and Mrs Wyse had been there to lunch occasionally and though Mr Wyse (such a gentleman) always said it had been a most enjoyable day, Susan was rather more communicative and let out that the food was muck and that no alcoholic beverage had appeared at table. On wet days the Major had occasionally come into Tilling by bus, on some such hollow pretext of having his hair cut, or posting a letter, and spent most of the afternoon at the Club where there was a remarkably good brand of port. Then Elizabeth's tenants had been so delighted with Mallards that they had extended their lease till the end of November, after which the Mapp-Flints, gorged with the gold of their rent-roll, had gone to the Riviera for the month of December, and had undoubtedly been seen by Mr Wyse's sister, the Contessa Faraglione, at the Casino at Monte Carlo. Thus their recent return to Tilling was a very exciting event, for nothing was really known as to which of them had established supremacy. Teetotalism at the bungalow seemed ‘one up' to Elizabeth, for Benjy, as all Tilling knew, had a strong weakness in the opposite direction: on the other hand Mrs Wyse had hinted that the bride exhibited an almost degrading affection for him. Then which of them was the leading spirit in those visits to the Casino? Or were they both gamblers at heart? Altogether it was a most intriguing situation: the ladies of Tilling were particularly interested in the more intimate and domestic side of it, and expressed themselves with great delicacy.

Lucia came up the steep rise into the High Street and soon found some nice food for constructive observation. There was Foljambe just going into the chemist's, and Lucia, remembering that she really wanted a tooth-brush, followed her in, to hear what she ordered, for that might throw some light on the nature of Georgie's mysterious indisposition. But a packet of lint was vague as a clue, though it disposed of Grosvenor's dark suggestion that his illness was mental: lint surely never
cured lunacy. A little further on there was quaint Irene Coles in trousers and a scarlet pullover, with her easel set up on the pavement, so that foot-passengers had to step on to the roadway, making a highly impressionistic sketch of the street. Irene had an almost embarrassing
schwärm
for Lucia, and she flung her arms round her and upset her easel; but she had no news of Georgie, and her conjecture that Foljambe had murdered him and was burying him below the brick pillar in his back-garden had nothing to support it.

‘But it might be so, beloved,' she said. ‘Such things do happen, and why not in Tilling? Think of Crippen and Belle Elmore. Let's suppose Foljambe gets through with the burial to-day and replaces the pillar, then she'll go up there to-morrow morning just as usual and tell the police that Georgie has disappeared. Really I don't see what else it can be.'

Diva Plaistow scudded across the street to them. She always spoke in the style of a telegram, and walked so fast that she might be mistaken for a telegram herself. ‘All too mysterious,' she said, taking for granted what they were talking about. ‘Not seen since yesterday fortnight. Certainly something infectious. Going to the Mapp-Flints, Lucia? Meet again then,' and she whizzed away.

These monstrous suggestions did not arouse the least anxiety in Lucia, but they vastly inflamed her curiosity. If Georgie's ailment had been serious, she knew he would have told so old a friend as herself: it must simply be that he did not want to be seen. But it was time to go to the bridge-party, and she retraced her steps a few yards (though with no definite scheme in her mind) and turned up from the High Street towards the church: this route, only a few yards longer, would lead her past Mallards Cottage, where Georgie lived. It was dusk now, and just as she came opposite that gabled abode, a light sprang up in his sitting-room which looked on to the street. There was no resisting so potent a temptation, and crossing the narrow cobbled way she peered stealthily in. Foljambe was drawing the curtains of the other window, and there was Georgie sitting by the fire, fully dressed, with his head turned a little away, doing his
petit point.
At that very moment he shifted in
his chair, and Lucia saw to her indescribable amazement that he had a short grey beard: in fact it might be called white. Just one glimpse she had, and then she must swiftly crouch down, as Foljambe crossed the room and rattled the curtains across the window into which she was looking. Completely puzzled but thrilled to the marrow, Lucia slid quietly away. Was he then in retirement only in order to grow a beard, feigning illness until it had attained comely if not venerable proportions? Common sense revolted at the notion, but common sense could not suggest any other theory.

Lucia rang the bell at Mallards, and was admitted into its familiar white-panelled hall which wanted painting so badly. On her first visit to Tilling, which led to her permanent residence here, she had taken this house for several months from Elizabeth Mapp and had adored it. Grebe, her own house, was very agreeable, but it had none of the dignity and charm of Mallards with its high-walled garden, its little square parlours, and, above all, with its entrancing garden-room, built a few yards away from the house itself, and commanding from its bow-window that unique view of the street leading down to the High Street, and, in the other direction, past Mallards Cottage to the church. The owner of Mallards ought not to let it for month after month and pig it in a bungalow for the sake of the rent. Mallards ought to be the centre of social life in Tilling. Really Elizabeth was not worthy of it: year after year she let it for the sake of the rent it brought her, and even when she was there she entertained very meagrely. Lucia felt very strongly that she was not the right person to live there, and she was equally strongly convinced as to who the right person was.

With a sigh she followed Withers out into the garden and up the eight steps into the garden-room. She had not seen the young couple since the long retirement of their honeymoon to the bungalow and to the garishness of Monte Carlo, and now even that mysterious phenomenon of Georgie with a grey, nearly white, beard faded out before the intense human interest of observing how they had adjusted themselves to matrimony …

‘
Chérie
!' cried Mrs Elizabeth. ‘Too lovely to see you again!
My Benjy-boy and I only got back two days ago, and since then it's been “upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber”, all day, in order to get things shipshape and comfy and
comme il faut
again. But now we're settled in,
n'est ce pas
?'

Lucia could not quite make up her mind whether these pretty Gallicisms were the automatic result of Elizabeth's having spent a month in France, or whether they were ironically allusive to her own habit of using easy Italian phrases in her talk. But she scarcely gave a thought to that, for the psychological balance between the two was so much more absorbing. Certainly Elizabeth and her Benjy-boy seemed an enamoured couple. He called her Liz and Girlie and perched himself on the arm of her chair as they waited for the rest of the gamblers to gather, and she patted his hand and pulled his cuff straight. Had she surrendered to him, Lucia wondered, had matrimony wrought a miraculous change in this domineering woman? The change in the room itself seemed to support the astounding proposition. It was far the biggest and best room in Mallards, and in the days of Elizabeth's virginity it had dripped with feminine knick-knacks, vases and china figures, and Tilling crockery pigs, screens set at angles, muslin blinds and riband-tied curtains behind which she sat in hiding to observe the life of the place. Here had been her writing-table close to the hot-water pipes and here her cosy corner by the fire with her work-basket. But now instead of her water-colours on the walls were heads of deer and antelopes, the spoil of Benjy's sporting expeditions in India, and a trophy consisting of spears and arrows and rhinoceros-hide whips and an apron made of shells, and on the floor were his moth-eaten tiger-skins. A stern business-table stood in the window, a leather chair like a hip-bath in her cosy corner, a gun stand with golf-clubs against the wall, and the room reeked of masculinity and stale cigar smoke. In fact, all it had in common with its old aspect was the big false book-case in the wall which masked the cupboard, in which once, for fear of lack of food during a coal strike, the prudent Elizabeth had stored immense quantities of corned beef and other nutritious provisions. All this change looked like surrender: Girlie Mapp had given up her
best room to Benjy-boy Flint. Their little pats and tweaks at each other might have been put on merely as Company-manners suitable to a newly married couple, but the room itself furnished more substantial evidence.

The party speedily assembled: the Wyses' huge Rolls-Royce from their house fifty yards away hooted at the front door and Susan staggered in under the weight of her great sable coat, and the odour of preservatives from moth gradually overscored that of cigars. Algernon followed and made a bow and a polite speech to everybody. The Padre and Mrs Bartlett arrived next: he had been to Ireland for his holiday, and had acquired a touch of brogue which he grafted on to his Highland accent, and the effect was interesting, as if men of two nationalities were talking together of whom the Irishman only got in a word or two edgeways. Diva Plaistow completed the assembly and tripped heavily over the head of a one-eyed tiger. The other eye flew out at the shock of the impact and she put it, with apologies, on the chimneypiece.

The disposition of the players was easily settled, for there were three married couples to be separated, and Diva and Lucia made the fourth at each of the tables. Concentration settled down on the room like the grip of some intense frost, broken, at the end of each hand, as if by a sudden thaw, by torrential post mortems. At Lucia's table, she and Elizabeth were partners against Mr Wyse and the Padre. ‘Begorra,' said he, ‘the bhoys play the lassies. Eh, mon, there's a sair muckle job for the puir wee laddies agin the guid wives o' Tilling, begob.'

Though Elizabeth seemed to have surrendered to her Benjy-boy, it was clear that she had no thoughts of doing so to the other wee laddies, who, though vulnerable after the first hand, were again and again prevented from winning the rubber by preposterously expensive bids on Elizabeth's part.

‘Yes, dear Lucia,' she said, ‘three hundred down I'm afraid, but then it's worth six hundred to prevent the adversary from going out. Let me see,
qui donne
?'

‘Key what?' asked the Padre.

‘Who gives: I should say, who deals?'

‘You do, dear Elizabeth,' said Lucia, ‘but I don't know if it's worth quite so many three hundreds. What do you think?'

Lucia picked up a hand gleaming with high honours, but psychic silences were often as valuable as psychic declarations. The laddies, flushed with untold hundreds above, would be sure to declare something in order to net so prodigious a rubber, and she made no bid. Far more psychic to lure them on by modest overbidding and then crush them under a staggering double. But the timorous laddies held their tongues, the hands were thrown in and though Lucia tried to mingle hers with the rest of the pack, Elizabeth relentlessly picked it out and conducted a savage post mortem as if on the corpse of a regicide.

The rubber had to be left for the present, for it was long after tea-time. At tea a most intriguing incident took place, for it had been Major Benjy's invariable custom at these gatherings to have a whisky and soda or two instead of the milder refreshment. But to-day, to the desperate interest of those who, like Lucia, were intent on observing the mutual adjustments of matrimony, a particularly large cup was provided for him which, when everybody else was served, was filled to the brim by Elizabeth and passed to him. Diva noticed that, too, and paused in her steady consumption of nougat chocolates.

‘And so
triste
about poor Mr Georgie,' said Elizabeth. ‘I asked him to come in this afternoon, and he telephoned that he was too unwell: hadn't been out of his
maison
for more than a fortnight. What's the matter with him? You'll know, Lucia.'

Lucia and everybody else wondered which of them would have been left out if Georgie had come, or whether Elizabeth had asked him at all. Probably she had not.

‘But indeed I don't know,' she said. ‘Nobody knows. It's all very puzzling.'

‘And haven't even you seen him? Fancy!' said Elizabeth. ‘He must be terribly ill.'

Lucia did not say that actually she had seen him, nor did she mention his beard. She intended to find out what that meant before she disclosed it.

‘Oh, I don't think that,' she said. ‘But men like to be left quite alone when they're not the thing.'

Elizabeth kissed her finger-tips across the table to her husband. Really rather sickening.

‘That's not the way of my little Benjy-boy,' she said. ‘Why, he had a touch of chill out at Monte, and
pas un moment
did I get to myself till he was better. Wasn't it so, mischief?'

Major Benjy wiped his great walrus-moustache which had been dipped in that cauldron of tea.

‘Girlie is a wizard in the sick-room,' he said. ‘Bucks a man up more than fifty tonics. Ring Georgie up, Liz: say you'll pop in after dinner and sit with him.'

Lucia waited for the upshot of this offer with some anxiety. Georgie would certainly be curious to see Elizabeth after her marriage and it would be too shattering if he accepted this proposal after having refused her own company. Luckily nothing so lamentable happened. Elizabeth returned from the telephone in a very short space of time, a little flushed, and, for the moment, forgetting to talk French.

‘Not up to seeing people,' she said, ‘so Foljambe told me. A rude woman I've always thought: I wonder Mr Georgie can put up with her. Diva, dear, more chocolates? I'm sure there are plenty more in the cupboard. More tea, anybody? Benjy, dear, another cup? Shall we get back to our rubbers then? All so exciting!'