Lucia Victrix (83 page)

Diva gave a hoarse laugh.

‘Not much temptation,' she said, ‘from us old hags. But it is queer that he brought a woman of that sort to stay at Mallards on the very night Lucia was away. And then there's another thing. She told us all that
he
was going to stay at Poppy's last night –'

‘I can't undertake to explain all that Worship tells us,' said Elizabeth. ‘That is asking too much of me.'

‘– but he was here,' said Diva. ‘Yet I shouldn't wonder if you'd got hold of the wrong end of the stick somehow. Habit of yours, Elizabeth. After all, the woman may have been a friend of Lucia's –'

‘– and so Mr Georgie brought her when Lucia was away. I see,' said Elizabeth.

Her pensive gaze wandered to the window, and she stiffened like a pointing setter, for down the street from Mallards was coming Georgie with the common, handsome, screeching woman. Elizabeth said nothing to Diva, for something might be done in the way of original research, and she rose.

‘Very dark clouds,' she said, ‘but we must pray that they will break. I've done no shopping yet. I suppose Worship will be back sometime to-day with a basket of strawberry leaves, if Poppy can spare her. Otherwise, the municipal life of Tilling will be suspended. Not that it matters two straws whether she's here or not. Quite a cypher in the Council.'

‘Now that's not fair,' shouted Diva angrily after her. ‘You can't have it both ways. Why she ever made you Mayoress –' but Elizabeth had shut the door.

Diva went down to her kitchen with an involuntary glow of admiration for Georgie, which was a positive shock to her moral principles. He and his
petit point,
and his little cape, and his old-maidish ways – was it possible that these cloaked a passionate temperament? Who could this handsome, common female be? Where had he picked her up? Perhaps in the hotel
when he and Lucia had stayed in London, for Diva seemed to have heard that voluptuous assignations were sometimes made in the most respectable places. What a rogue! And how frightful for Lucia, if she got to know about it. ‘I'm sure I hope she won't,' thought Diva, ‘but it wouldn't be bad for her to be taken down a peg or two, though I should pity her at the same time. However, one mustn't rush to conclusions. But it's shocking that I've got a greater respect for Mr Georgie than I ever had before. Can't make it out.'

Diva got to work with her pastry-making, but some odd undercurrent of thought went trickling on. What a starvation diet for a man of ardent temperament, as Georgie now appeared, must his life in Tilling have been, where all the women were so very undecorative. If there had only been a woman with a bit of brilliance about her, whom he could admire and flirt with just a little, all this might have been averted. She left Janet to finish the shortbread, and went out to cull developments.

Elizabeth meantime had sighted her prey immediately, and from close at hand observed the guilty pair entering the photographer's. Were the shameless creatures, she wondered, going to be photographed together? That was the sort of bemused folly that sinning couples often committed, and bitterly rued it afterwards. She glided in after them, but Georgie was only giving the shopman a roll of negatives to be developed and printed and sent up to Mallards as soon as possible. He took off his hat to her very politely, but left the shop without introducing her to his companion which was only natural and showed good feeling. Certainly she was remarkably handsome. Beautifully dressed. A row of pearls so large that they could not be real. Hatless with waved hair. Rouge. Lipstick … She went in pursuit again. They passed the Padre and his wife, who turned completely round to look at them; they passed Susan in her Royce (she had given up tricycling in this hot weather) who held her head out of the window till foot-passengers blocked her view of them, and Diva, standing on her doorstep with her market-basket, was rooted to the spot as firmly as Elizabeth had been the night before. The woman was
a dream of beauty with her brilliant colouring and her high, arched eyebrows. Recovering her powers of locomotion, Diva went into the hairdressing and toilet saloon.

Elizabeth bought some parsnips at Twistevant's, deep in thought. Bitter moralist though she was, she could not withhold her admiration for the anonymous female. Diva had rudely alluded to the ladies of Tilling as old hags, and was there not a grain of truth in it? They did not make the best of themselves. What brilliance that skilfully applied rouge and lipstick gave a face! Without it the anonymous might have looked ten years older and far less attractive. ‘Hair, too,' thought Elizabeth, ‘that soft brown, so like a natural tint. But finger-nails, dripping with bright arterial blood: never!'

She went straight to the hairdressing and toilet establishment. Diva was just coming out of the shop carrying a small packet.

‘Little titivations, dear?' asked Elizabeth, reading her own thoughts unerringly.

‘Tooth-powder,' said Diva without hesitation, and scooted across the road to where Susan was still leaning out of the window of her Royce and beckoning to her.

‘I've seen her,' she said (there was no need to ask who ‘she' was). ‘And I recognized her at once from her picture in the
Tatler
. You'd never guess.'

‘No, I know I shouldn't,' said Diva impatiently. ‘Who?'

‘The great prima donna. Dear me, I've forgotten her name. But the one Lucia went to hear sing in London,' said Susan. ‘Bracelet, wasn't it?'

‘Bracely? Olga Bracely?' cried Diva. ‘Are you
quite
sure?'

‘Positive. Quite lovely, and such hair.'

That was enough, and Diva twinkled back across the road to intercept Elizabeth who was just coming out of the hairdressing and toilet shop with a pink packet in her hand, which she instantly concealed below the parsnips.

‘Such a screechy voice, didn't you say, Elizabeth?' she asked.

‘Yes, frightful. It went right through me like a railway whistle. Why?'

‘It's the prima donna, Olga Bracely. That's all,' said Diva. ‘Voice must have gone. Sad for her. Glad to have told you who she is.'

Very soon all Tilling knew who was the lovely
maquillée
woman with the pearls, who had stayed the night alone with Georgie at Mallards. Lucia had not been seen at all this morning, and it was taken for granted that she was still away on that snobbish expedition for which she had thrown over her Council meeting. Though Olga (so she said) was a dear friend, it would certainly be a surprise to her, when she returned to find her dear friend staying with her husband at her own house, when she had told Tilling that both Georgie and Olga were staying that night at Poppy's Castle. Or would Olga leave Tilling again before Lucia returned? Endless interpretations could be put on this absorbing incident, but Tilling was too dazzled with the prima donna herself, her pearls, her beauty, her reputation as the Queen of Song to sit in judgment on her.

What a dream of charm and loveliness she was with her delicately rouged cheeks and vermilion mouth, and that air of joyous and unrepentant paganism! For Evie her blood-red nails had a peculiar attraction, and she too went to the hairdressing and toilet establishment, and met Susan just coming out.

Lucia meantime had spent a municipal morning in the garden-room without showing herself even for a moment at the window. Her departmental boxes were grouped round her, but she gave them very little attention. She was completely satisfied with the explanation of the strange adventures which had led to the staggering discovery of Olga and Georgie alone in her house the night before, and was wondering whether Tilling need ever know how very brief her visit to Poppy had been. It certainly was not her business to tell her friends that a cup of tea had been the only hospitality she had received. Then her photographs (if they came out) would be ready by to-morrow, and if she gave a party in the evening she would leave her scrap-book open on the piano. She would not call attention to it, but there it would be, furnishing unshakable ocular evidence of her visit …

After lunch, accordingly, she rang up all her more intimate circle, and, without definitely stating that she had this moment returned to Tilling from Sheffield Castle, let it be understood that such was the case. It had been such a lovely morning: she had enjoyed her drive so much: she had found a mass of arrears waiting for her, and she asked them all to dine next night at eight. She apologized for such short notice, but her dear friend Olga Bracely, who was here on a short visit, would be leaving the day after – a gala night at the opera – and it would give her such pleasure to meet them all. But, as she and Olga went up to dress next evening, she told Olga that dinner would be at eightish: say ten minutes past eight. There was a subtle reason for this, for the photographs of Sheffield Castle had arrived and she had pasted them into her scrap-book. Tilling would thus have time to admire and envy before Olga appeared: Lucia felt that her friends would not take much interest in them if she was there.

Never had any party in Tilling worn so brilliant and unexpected an appearance as that which assembled in the garden-room the following night. Evie and the Padre arrived first: Evie's finger-nails looked as if she had pinched them all, except one, in the door, causing the blood to flow freely underneath each. She had forgotten about that one, and it looked frost-bitten. Elizabeth and Benjy came next: Elizabeth's cheeks were like the petals of wild roses, but she had not the nerve to incarnadine her mouth, which, by contrast, appeared to be afflicted with the cyanosis which precedes death. Diva, on the other hand, had been terrified at the aspect of blooming youth which rouge gave her, and she had wiped it off at the last moment, retaining the Cupid's bow of a vermilion mouth, and two thin arched eyebrows in charcoal. Susan, wearing the Order of the British Empire, had had her grey hair waved, and it resembled corrugated tin roofing: Mr Wyse and Georgie wore their velvet suits. It took them all a few minutes to get used to each other, for they were like butterflies which had previously only known each other in the caterpillar or chrysalis stage, and they smiled and simpered like new acquaintances in the most polite circles, instead of old and censorious friends.
Olga had not yet appeared, and so they had time to study Lucia's album of snap-shots which lay open on the piano, and she explained in a casual manner what the latest additions were.

‘A corner of the courtyard of Sheffield Castle,' she said. ‘Not come out very well. The Norman tower. The dining-hall. The Duchess's bedroom; wonderful Elizabethan bed. The picture-gallery. She is standing looking out of the window with her Pekingese. Such a sweet. It jumped up on the window-seat just before I snapped. The Duchess at the tea-table –'

‘What a big cake!' interrupted Diva professionally. ‘Sugared, too. So she does eat something besides dressed crab. Hope she didn't have much cake after her indigestion.'

‘But what a shabby court-yard,' said Evie. ‘I should have thought a Duke would have liked his Castle to look tidier. Why doesn't he tell his gardener to weed it?'

Elizabeth felt she would burst unless she put in a venomous word.

‘Dear Worship, when you write to thank Her Grace for your pleasant visit, you must say, just in fun, of course, that you expect the courtyard to be tidied up before you come next.'

Lucia was perfectly capable of dealing with such clumsy sarcasm.

‘What a good idea!' she said. ‘You always think of the right thing, Elizabeth. Certainly I will. Remind me, Georgie.'

So the photographs did their work. Tilling could not doubt that Lucia had been wrapped in the Norman embrace of Sheffield Castle, and determined silently and sternly never again to allude to the painful subject. That suited Lucia admirably, for there were questions that might be asked about her visit which would involve regrettable admissions if she was to reply quite truthfully. Just as her friends were turning surfeited and sad from the album a step was heard outside and Olga appeared in the doorway. A white gown, high at the neck, reeking of Molyneux and simplicity. A scarlet girdle, and pearls as before.

‘Dear Lucia,' she cried, ‘I see I'm late. Forgive me.'

‘My own! I always forgive you as soon as I see you, only
there is never anything to forgive,' said Lucia effusively. ‘Now I needn't say who you are, but this is Mrs Bartlett and our Padre, and here are Mr and Mrs Wyse, and this is Diva Plaistow, and here's my beloved Mayoress, Elizabeth Mapp-Flint and Major Mapp-Flint –'

Olga looked from Benjy to Elizabeth and back again.

‘But surely I recognize them,' she said. ‘That marvellous picture, which everybody raves about –'

‘Yes, little me,' said the beaming Elizabeth, ‘and my Benjy in the clouds. What an eye you've got, Miss Bracely!'

‘And this is my husband,' went on Lucia with airy humour, ‘who says he thinks he has met you before –'

‘I believe we did meet somewhere, but ages ago, and he won't remember me,' said Olga. ‘Oh, Georgie, I mustn't drink sherry, but as you've poured it out for me –'

‘Dinner,' said Grosvenor rather sternly.

In the hard overhead light of the dining-room, the ladies of Tilling, novices in
maquillage,
looked strangely spurious, but the consciouness in each of her rejuvenated appearance, combined with Olga's gay presence, made them feel exceptionally brilliant. All round the table conversation was bright and eager, and they all talked at her, striving to catch her attention. Benjy, sitting next her, began telling her one of his adventures with a tiger, but instantly Susan raised her voice and spoke of her tricycle. Her husband chipped in, and with an eye on Olga told Lucia that his sister the Contessa di Faraglione was a passionate student of the age of Lucrezia Borgia. Diva, longing to get Olga to come to ye old tea-house, spoke loudly about her new recipe for sardine tartlets, but Lucia overrode so commercial a subject by the introduction of the Mayoral Motif coupled with slums. Olga herself chattered and laughed, the only person present who was not anxious to make a favourable impression. She lit a cigarette long before dinner was over, and though Elizabeth had once called that ‘a disgusting foreign habit' she lit one, too. Olga ate a cherry beginning with the end of the stalk and at once Benjy was trying to do the same, ejaculating, as it dropped into his finger-bowl, ‘Not so easy, by Jove.' There was no bridge to-night, but by incessant
harping on antique dances, Lucia managed to get herself asked to tread a minuet with Georgie. Olga accompanied them, and as she rose from the piano, she became aware that they were all looking at her with the expectant air of dogs that hope to be taken out for a walk.