Lucia Victrix (49 page)

‘We are all here to help each other, Georgie,' she continued, ‘and I consider it a Providential privilege to be able to give Elizabeth a hand out of this trouble. There is other trouble in front of her, when she realizes how she has been deceiving others, and, as I say, perhaps herself, and it will make it easier for her if she has no longer this money worry and the prospect of living in some miserable little house. Irene burst into tears when I told her what I was going to do. So emotional.'

Georgie did not cry, for this Providential privilege of helping others, even at so great an expense, would give Lucia just what she wanted most. That consideration dried up, at its source, any real tendency to tears.

‘Well, I think she ought to be very grateful to you,' he said.

‘No, Georgie, I don't expect that; Elizabeth may not appreciate the benevolence of my intentions, and I shall be the last to point it out. Now let us walk up to the town. The nature of Dr Dobbie's visit to Mallards will probably be known by now and I have finished with my Office till the arrival of the evening post … Do you think she'll take my offer?'

Marketing was over before they got up to the High Street, but Diva made a violent tattoo on her window, and threw it open.

‘All a wash-out about Dr Dobbie,' she called out. ‘The cook scalded her hand, that's all. Saw her just now. Lint and oiled silk.'

‘Oh, poor thing!' said Lucia. ‘What did I tell you, Georgie?'

Lucia posted her philanthropic proposal to Elizabeth that very day. In consequence there was a most agitated breakfast duet at Mallards next morning.

‘So like her,' cried Elizabeth, when she had read the letter to Benjy with scornful interpolations. ‘So very like her. But I know her well enough now to see her meannesses. She has always wanted my house and is taking a low advantage of my misfortunes to try to get it. But she shan't have it. Never! I would sooner burn it down with my own hands.'

Elizabeth crumpled up the letter and threw it into the grate. She crashed her way into a piece of toast and resumed.

‘She's an encroacher,' she said, ‘and quite unscrupulous. I am more than ever convinced that she put the idea of those libellous dinner-bells into Irene's head.'

Benjy was morose this morning.

‘Don't see the connection at all,' he said.

Elizabeth couldn't bother to explain anything so obvious and went on.

‘I forgave her that for the sake of peace and quietness, and because I'm a Christian, but this is too much. Grebe indeed! Grab would be the best name for any house she lives in. A wretched villa liable to be swept away by floods, and you and me carried out to sea again on a kitchen-table. My answer is no, pass the butter.'

‘I should't be too much in a hurry,' said Benjy. ‘It's two thousand pounds as well. Even if you got a year's let for Mallards, you'd have to spend a pretty penny in doing it up. Any tenant would insist on that.'

‘The house is in perfect repair in every respect,' said Elizabeth.

‘That might not be a tenant's view. And you might not get a tenant at all.'

‘And the wicked insincerity of her letter,' continued Elizabeth. ‘Saying she's sorry I have to turn out of it. Sorry! It's what she's been lying in wait for. I have a good mind not to answer her at all.'

‘And I don't see the point of that,' said Benjy. ‘If you are determined not to take her offer, why not tell her so at once?'

‘You're not very bright this morning, love,' said Elizabeth, who had begun to think.

This spirited denunciation of Lucia's schemings was in fact only a conventional prelude to reflection. Elizabeth went to see her cook; in revenge for Benjy's want of indignation, she ordered him a filthy dinner, and finding that he had left the dining-room, fished Lucia's unscrupulous letter out of the grate, slightly scorched, but happily legible, and read it through again. Then, though she had given him the garden-room for his private sitting-room, she entered, quite forgetting to knock and ask if she might come in, and established herself in her usual seat in the window, where she could observe the movements of society, in order to tune herself back to normal pitch. A lot was happening: Susan's great car got helplessly stuck, as it came out of Porpoise Street, for a furniture van was trying to enter the same street, and couldn't back because there was another car behind it. The longed-for moment therefore had probably arrived, when Susan would have to go marketing on foot. Georgie went by in his Vandyck cape and a new suit (or perhaps dyed), but what was quaint Irene doing? She appeared to be sitting in the air in front of her house on a level with the first-storey windows. Field-glasses had to be brought to bear on this: they revealed that she was suspended in a hammock slung from her bedroom window and (clad in pyjamas) was
painting the sill in squares of black and crimson. Susan got out of her car and waddled towards the High Street. Georgie stopped and talked to Irene who dropped a paint-brush loaded with crimson on that blue beret of his. All quite satisfactory.

Benjy went to his golf: he had not actually required much driving this morning, and Elizabeth was alone. She had lately started crocheting a little white woollen cap, and tried it on. It curved downwards too sharply, as if designed for a much smaller head than hers, and she pulled a few rows out, and began it again in a flatter arc. A fresh train of musing was set up, and she thought, with strong distaste, of the day when Tilling would begin to wonder whether anything was going to happen, and, subsequently, to know that it wasn't. After all, she had never made any directly misleading statement: she had chosen (it was a free country) to talk about dolls and twilight sleep, and to let out her old green skirt, and Tilling had drawn its own conclusions. ‘That dreadful gossipy habit,' she said to herself, ‘if there isn't any news they invent it. And I know that they'll blame me for their disappointment. (Again she looked out of the window: Susan's motor had extricated itself, and was on its way to the High Street, and that was a disappointment too.) I must try to think of something to divert their minds when that time comes.'

Her stream of consciousness, eddying round in this depressing backwater, suddenly found an outlet into the main current, and she again read Lucia's toasted letter. It was a very attractive offer; her mouth watered at the thought of two thousand pounds, and though she had expressed to Benjy in unmistakable terms her resolve to reject any proposal so impertinent and unscrupulous, or, perhaps, in a fervour of disdain, not to answer it at all, there was nothing to prevent her accepting it at once, if she chose. A woman in her condition was always apt to change her mind suddenly and violently. (No: that would not do, since she was not a woman in her condition.) And surely here was a very good opportunity of diverting Tilling's attention. Lucia's settling into Mallards and her own move to Grebe would be of the intensest interest to Tilling's corporate mind, and that would be the time to abandon the role of
coming motherhood. She would just give it up, just go shopping again with her usual briskness, just take in the green skirt and wear the enlarged woollen cap herself. She need make no explanations for she had said nothing that required them: Tilling, as usual, had done all the talking.

She turned her mind to the terms of Lucia's proposal. The blaze of fury so rightly kindled by the thought of Lucia possessing Mallards was spent, and the thought of that fat capital sum made a warm glow for her among the ashes. As Benjy had said, no tenant for six months or a year would take a house so sorely in need of renovation, and if Lucia was right in supposing that that wretched hole in the ground somewhere in West Africa would not be paying dividends for two years, a tenant for one year, even if she was lucky enough to find one, would only see her half through this impoverished period. No sensible woman could reject so open a way out of her difficulties.

The mode of accepting this heaven-sent offer required thought. Best, perhaps, just formally to acknowledge the unscrupulous letter, and ask for a few days in which to make up her mind. A little hanging back, a hint conveyed obliquely, say through Diva, that two thousand pounds did not justly represent the difference in values between her lovely Queen Anne house and the villa precariously placed so near the river, a heart-broken wail at the thought of leaving the ancestral home might lead to an increased payment in cash, and that would be pleasant. So, having written her acknowledgment Elizabeth picked up her market-basket and set off for the High Street.

Quaint Irene had finished her window-sill, and was surveying the effect of this brilliant decoration from the other side of the street. In view of the disclosure which must come soon, Elizabeth suddenly made up her mind to forgive her for the dinner-bell outrage for fear she might do something quainter yet: a cradle, for instance, with a doll inside it, left on the doorstep would be very unnerving, and was just the sort of thing Irene might think of. So she said:

‘Good morning, love: what a pretty window-sill. So bright.'

Regardless of Elizabeth's marriage Irene still always addressed her as ‘Mapp'.

‘Not bad, is it, Mapp,' she said. ‘What about my painting the whole of your garden-room in the same style? A hundred pounds down, and I'll begin to-day.'

‘That
would
be very cheap,' said Mapp enthusiastically. ‘But alas, I fear my days there are numbered.'

‘Oh, of course; Lucia's offer. The most angelic thing I ever heard. I knew you'd jump at it.'

‘No, dear, not quite inclined to jump,' said Mapp rather injudiciously.

‘Oh, I didn't mean literally,' said Irene. ‘That would be very rash of you. But isn't it like her, so noble and generous? I cried when she told me.'

‘I shall cry when I have to leave my sweet Mallards,' observed Elizabeth. ‘If I accept her offer, that is.'

‘Then you'll be a crashing old crocodile, Mapp,' said Irene. ‘You'll really think yourself damned lucky to get out of that old ruin of yours on such terms. Do you like my pyjamas? I'll give you a suit like them when the happy day –'

‘Must be getting on,' interrupted Elizabeth. ‘Such a lot to do.'

Feeling slightly battered, but with the glow of two thousand pounds comforting her within, Elizabeth turned into the High Street. Diva, it seemed, had finished her shopping, and was seated on this warm morning at her open window reading the paper. Elizabeth approached quite close unobserved, and with an irresistible spasm of playfulness said ‘Bo!'

Diva gave a violent start.

‘Oh, it's you, is it?' she said.

‘No, dear, somebody quite different,' said Elizabeth skittishly. ‘And I'm in such a state of perplexity this morning. I don't know what to do.'

‘Benjy eloped with Lucia?' asked Diva. Two could play at being playful.

Elizabeth winced.

‘Diva, dear, jokes on certain subjects only hurt me,' she said. ‘
Tiens! Je vous pardonne
.'

‘What's perplexing you then?' asked Diva. ‘Come in and talk if you want to,
tiens
. Can't go bellowing bad French into the street.'

Elizabeth came in, refused a low and comfortable chair and took a high one.

‘Such an agonizing decision to make,' she said, ‘and its coming just now is almost more than I can bear. I got
un petit lettre
from Lucia this morning offering to give me the freehold of Grebe and two thousand pounds in exchange for the freehold of Mallards.'

‘I knew she was going to make you some offer,' said Diva. ‘Marvellous for you. Where does the perplexity come in? Besides, you were going to let it for a year if you possibly could.'

‘Yes, but the thought of never coming back to it.
Mon vieux
, so devoted to his garden-room, where we were engaged. Turning out for ever. And think of the difference between my lovely Queen Anne house and that villa by the side of the road that leads nowhere. The danger of floods. The distance.'

‘But Lucia's thought of that,' said Diva, ‘and puts the difference down at two thousand pounds. I should have thought one thousand was ample.'

‘There are things like atmosphere that can't be represented in terms of money,' said Elizabeth with feeling. ‘All the old associations.
Tante Caroline
.'

‘Not having known your
Tante Caroline
I can't say what her atmosphere's worth,' said Diva.

‘A saint upon earth,' said Elizabeth warmly. ‘And Mallards used to be a second home to me long before it was mine.' (Which was a lie.) ‘Silly of me, perhaps, but the thought of parting with it is agony. Lucia is terribly anxious to get it,
on m'a dit
.'

‘She must be if she's offered you such a price for it,' said Diva.

‘Diva, dear, we've always been such friends,' said Elizabeth, ‘and it's seldom,
n'est ce pas
, that I've asked you for any favour. But I do now. Do you think you could let her know, quite casually, that I don't believe I shall have the heart to leave Mallards? Just that: hardly an allusion to the two thousand pounds.'

Diva considered this.

‘Well, I'll ask a favour, too, Elizabeth,' she said, ‘and it is that you should determine to drop that silly habit of putting easy French phrases into your conversation. So confusing. Besides everyone sees you're only copying Lucia. So ridiculous. All put on. If you will, I'll do what you ask. Going to tea with her this afternoon.'

‘Thank you, sweet. A bargain then, and I'll try to break myself: I'm sure I don't want to confuse anybody. Now I must get to my shopping. Kind Susan is taking me for a drive this afternoon, and then a quiet evening with my Benjy-boy.'

‘
Très agréable
,' said Diva ruthlessly. ‘Can't you hear how silly it sounds? Been on my mind a long time to tell you that.'

Lucia was in her Office when Diva arrived for tea, and so could not possibly be disturbed. As she was actually having a sound nap, her guests, Georgie and Diva, had to wait until she happened to awake, and then, observing the time, she came out in a great hurry with a pen behind her ear. Diva executed her commission with much tact and casualness, but Lucia seemed to bore into the middle of her head with that penetrating eye. Having pierced her, she then looked dreamily out of the window.