The Complete Mapp & Lucia (113 page)

He tripped along up to the cottage, and Lucia’s heart was wrung for him, for all that gaiety would soon suffer a total eclipse, and she was to be the darkener of his day. Had she better tell him instantly, she wondered, or hear his news first, and outline the recent Manoeuvres of Mapp. These exciting topics might prove tonic, something to fall back on afterwards. Whereas, if she stabbed him straight away, they would be of no service as restoratives. Also there was stewed lobster for lunch, and Georgie who adored it would probably not care a bit about it if the blow fell first.

Georgie began to speak almost before he opened the door.

‘All quite happy at the cottage,’ he said, ‘and Foljambe ever so pleased with Tilling. Everything in spick-and-span order and my paint-box cleaned up and the hole in the carpet mended quite beautifully. She must have been busy while I was away.’

(‘Dear, oh dear, she has,’ thought Lucia.) ‘And everything settled at Riseholme,’ continued poor Georgie. ‘Colonel Cresswell wants my house for three months, so I said yes, and now we’re both homeless for October, unless we keep on our houses here. I had to put on my Drake clothes again yesterday, for the
Birmingham Gazette
wanted to photograph me. My dear, what a huge success it all was, but I’m glad to get away, for everything will be as flat as ditchwater now, all except Daisy. She began to buck up at once the moment you left, and I positively heard her say how quickly you picked up the part of the Queen after watching her once or twice.’

‘No! Poor thing!’ said Lucia with deep compassion.

‘Now tell me all about Tilling,’ said Georgie, feeling he must play fair.

‘Things are beginning to move, Georgie,’ said she, forgetting for the time the impending tragedy. ‘Night-marches, Georgie, manoeuvres. Elizabeth, of course. I’m sure I was right, she wants to run me, and if she can’t (if!) she’ll try to fight me. I can see glimpses of hatred and malice in her.’

‘And you’ll fight her?’ asked Georgie eagerly.

‘Nothing of the kind, my dear,’ said Lucia. ‘What do you take me for? Every now and then, when necessary, I shall just give her two or three hard slaps. I gave her one this morning: I did indeed. Not a very hard one, but it stung.’

‘No! Do tell me,’ said Georgie.

Lucia gave a short but perfectly accurate description of the gardener-crisis.

‘So I stopped that,’ she said, ‘and there are several other things I shall stop. I won’t have her, for instance, walking into my house without ringing. So I’ve told Grosvenor to put up the chain. And she calls me Lulu which makes me sick. Nobody’s ever called me Lulu and they shan’t begin now. I must see if calling her Liblib will do the trick. And then she asked me to dinner to-night, when she must have known perfectly well that Major Benjy and Diva are dining with me. You’re dining too, by the way.’

‘I’m not sure if I’d better,’ said Georgie. ‘I think Foljambe might expect me to dine at home the first night I get back. I know she wants to go through the linen and plate with me.’

‘No, Georgie, quite unnecessary,’ said she. ‘I want you to help me to give the others a jolly comfortable evening. We’ll play bridge and let Major Benjy lay down the law. We’ll have a genial evening, make them enjoy it. And tomorrow I shall ask the Wyses and talk about Countesses. And the day after I shall ask the Padre and his wife and talk Scotch. I want you to come every night. It’s new in Tilling I find, to give little dinners. Tea is the usual entertainment. And I shan’t ask Liblib at all till next week.’

‘But my dear, isn’t that war?’ asked Georgie. (It did look rather like it.) ‘Not the least. It’s benevolent neutrality. We shall see if she learns sense. If she does, I shall be very nice to her again and ask her to several pleasant little parties. I am giving her every chance. Also Georgie…’ Lucia’s eyes assumed that gimlet-like expression which betokened an earnest purpose, ‘I want to understand her and be fair to her. At present I can’t understand her. The idea of her giving orders to a gardener to whom I give wages! But that’s all done with. I can hear the click of the mowing-machine on the lawn now. Just two or three things I won’t stand. I won’t be patronized by Liblib, and I won’t be called Lulu, and I won’t have her popping in and out of my house like a cuckoo clock.’

Lunch drew to an end. There was Georgie looking so prosperous and plump, with his chestnut-coloured hair no longer in the least need of a touch of dye, and his beautiful clothes. Already Major Benjy, who had quickly seen that if he wanted to be friends with Lucia he must be friends with Georgie too, had pronounced him to be the best-dressed man in Tilling, and Lucia, who invariably passed on dewdrops of this kind, had caused Georgie the deepest gratification by repeating this. And now she was about to plunge a dagger in his heart. She put her elbows on the table, so as to be ready to lay a hand of sympathy on his.

‘Georgie, I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

‘I’m sure I shall like it,’ said he. ‘Go on.’

‘No, you won’t like it at all,’ she said.

It flashed through his mind that Lucia had changed her mind about marrying him, but it could not be that, for she would never have said he wouldn’t like it at all. Then he had a flash of intuition.

‘Something about Foljambe,’ he said in a quavering voice.

‘Yes. She and Cadman are going to marry.’

Georgie turned on her a face from which all other expression except hopeless despair had vanished, and her hand of sympathy descended on his, firmly pressing it.

‘When?’ he said, after moistening his dry lips.

‘Not for the present. Not till we get back to Riseholme.’

Georgie pushed away his untasted coffee.

‘It’s the most dreadful thing that’s ever happened to me,’ he said. ‘It’s quite spoiled all my pleasure. I didn’t think Foljambe was so selfish. She’s been with me fifteen years, and now she goes and breaks up my home like this.’

‘My dear, that’s rather an excessive statement,’ said Lucia. ‘You can get another parlourmaid. There are others.’

‘If you come to that, Cadman could get another wife,’ said Georgie, ‘and there isn’t another parlourmaid like Foljambe. I have suspected something now and then, but I never thought it would come to this. What a fool I was to leave her here when I went back to Riseholme for the fête! Or if only we had driven back there with Cadman instead of going by train. It was madness. Here they were with nothing to do but make plans behind our backs. No one will ever look after my clothes as she does. And the silver. You’ll miss Cadman, too.’

‘Oh, but I don’t think he means to leave me,’ said Lucia in some alarm. ‘What makes you think that? He said nothing about it.’

‘Then perhaps Foljambe doesn’t mean to leave me,’ said Georgie, seeing a possible dawn on the wreck of his home.

‘That’s rather different,’ said Lucia. ‘She’ll have to look after his house, you see, by day, and then at night he’d—he’d like her to be there.’

‘Horrible to think of,’ said Georgie bitterly. ‘I wonder what she can see in him. I’ve got a good mind to go and live in an hotel. And I had left her five hundred pounds in my will.’

‘Georgie, that was very generous of you. Very,’ put in Lucia, though Georgie would not feel the loss of that large sum after he was dead.

‘But now I shall certainly add a codicil to say “if still in my service”,’ said Georgie rather less generously. ‘I didn’t think it of her.’

Lucia was silent a moment. Georgie was taking it very much to heart indeed, and she racked her ingenious brain.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said at length. ‘I don’t know if it can be worked, but we might see. Would you feel less miserable about it if Foljambe would consent to come over to your house say at nine in the morning and be there till after dinner? If you were dining out as you so often are, she could go home earlier. You see Cadman’s at the Hurst all day, for he does odd jobs as well, and his cottage at Riseholme is quite close to your house. You would have to give them a charwoman to do the housework.’

‘Oh, that is a good idea,’ said Georgie, cheering up a little. ‘Of course I’ll give her a charwoman or anything else she wants if she’ll only look after me as before. She can sleep wherever she likes. Of course there may be periods when she’ll have to be away, but I shan’t mind that as long as I know she’s coming back. Besides, she’s rather old for that, isn’t she?’

It was no use counting the babies before they were born, and Lucia glided along past this slightly indelicate subject with Victorian eyes.

‘It’s worth while seeing if she’ll stay with you on these terms,’ she said.

‘Rather. I shall suggest it at once,’ said Georgie. ‘I think I shall congratulate her very warmly, and say how pleased I am, and then ask her. Or would it be better to be very cold and preoccupied and not talk to her at all? She’d hate that, and then when I ask her after some days whether she’ll stop on with me, she might promise anything to see me less unhappy again.’

Lucia did not quite approve of this Machiavellian policy.

‘On the other hand, it might make her marry Cadman instantly, in order to have done with you,’ she suggested. ‘You’d better be careful.’

‘I’ll think it over,’ said Georgie. ‘Perhaps it would be safer to be very nice to her about it and appeal to her better nature, if she’s got one. But I know I shall never manage to call her Cadman. She must keep her maiden name, like an actress.’

Lucia duly put in force her disciplinary measures for the reduction of Elizabeth. Major Benjy, Diva and Georgie dined with her that night, and there was a plate of nougat chocolates for Diva, whose inordinate passion for them was known all over Tilling, and a fiery curry for the Major to remind him of India, and a dish of purple figs bought at the greengrocer’s but plucked from the tree outside the garden-room. She could not resist giving Elizabeth ever so gentle a little slap over this, and said that it was rather a roundabout process to go down to the High Street to buy the figs which Coplen plucked from the tree in the garden, and took down with other garden-produce to the shop: she must ask dear Elizabeth to allow her to buy them, so to speak, at the pit-mouth. But she was genuinely astonished at the effect this little joke had on Diva. Hastily she swallowed a nougat chocolate entire and turned bright red.

‘But doesn’t Elizabeth give you garden-produce?’ she asked in an incredulous voice.

‘Oh no,’ said Lucia, ‘Just flowers for the house. Nothing else.’

‘Well, I never!’ said Diva. ‘I fully understood, at least I thought I did—’

Lucia got up. She must be magnanimous and encourage no public exposure, whatever it might be, of Elizabeth’s conduct, but for the pickling of the rod of discipline she would like to hear about it quietly.

‘Let’s go into the garden-room and have a chat,’ she said. ‘Look after Major Benjy, Georgie, and don’t sit too long in bachelordom, for I must have a little game of bridge with him. I’m terribly frightened of him, but he and Mrs Plaistow must be kind to beginners like you and me.’

The indignant Diva poured out her tale of Elizabeth’s iniquities in a turgid flood.

‘So like Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘I asked her if she gave you garden-produce, and she said she wasn’t going to dig up her potatoes and carry them away. Well, of course I thought that meant she did give it you. So like her. Bismarck, wasn’t it, who told the truth in order to deceive? And so of course I gave her my garden-produce and she’s selling one and eating the other. I wish I’d known I ought to have distrusted her.’

Lucia smiled that indulgent Sunday-evening smile which meant she was thinking hard on week-day subjects.

‘I like Elizabeth so much,’ she said, ‘and what do a few figs matter?’

‘No, but she always scores,’ said Diva, ‘and sometimes it’s hard to bear. She got my house with garden-produce thrown in for eight guineas a week and she lets her own without garden-produce for twelve.’

‘No dear, I pay fifteen,’ said Lucia.

Diva stared at her open-mouthed.

‘But it was down in Woolgar’s books at twelve,’ she said. ‘I saw it myself. She is a one: isn’t she?’

Lucia maintained her attitude of high nobility, but this information added a little more pickling.

‘Dear Elizabeth!’ she said. ‘So glad that she was sharp enough to get a few more guineas, I expect she’s very clever, isn’t she? And here come the gentlemen. Now for a jolly little game of bridge.’

Georgie was astonished at Lucia. She was accustomed to lay down the law with considerable firmness, and instruct partners and opponents alike, but to-night a most unusual humility possessed her. She was full of diffidence about her own skill and of praise for her partner’s: she sought advice, even once asking Georgie what she ought to have played, though that was clearly a mistake, for next moment she rated him. But for the other two she had nothing but admiring envy at their declarations and their management of the hand, and when Diva revoked she took all the blame on herself for not having asked her whether her hand was bare of the suit. Rubber after rubber they played in an amity hitherto unknown in the higher gambling circles of Tilling; and when, long after the incredible hour of twelve had struck, it was found on the adjustment of accounts that Lucia was the universal loser, she said she had never bought experience so cheaply and pleasantly.

Major Benjy wiped the foam of his third (surreptitious and hastily consumed) whisky and soda from his walrus-moustache.

‘Most agreeable evening of bridge I’ve ever spent in Tilling,’ he said. ‘Bless me, when I think of the scoldings I’ve had in this room for some little slip, and the friction there’s been… Mrs Plaistow knows what I mean.’

‘I should think I did,’ said Diva, beginning to simmer again at the thought of garden-produce. ‘Poor Elizabeth! Lessons in self-control are what she wants and after that a few lessons on the elements of the game wouldn’t be amiss. Then it would be time to think about telling other people how to play.’