The Complete Mapp & Lucia (173 page)

Georgie dismissed the notion that Mapp had made some violent assault upon the infant occupiers of the perambulators as inadequate.

“Darling, what has happened?” he asked.

She gazed out of the window without speaking.

“I have just received a note from the Mayor,” she said at length in a shaken voice. “While we were so light-heartedly looking at almond trees, a private meeting of the Town Council was being held.”

“I see,” said Georgie, “and they didn’t send you notice. Outrageous. Anyhow, I think I should threaten to resign. After all you’ve done for them, too!”

She shook her head.

“No: you mustn’t blame them,” she said. “They were right, for a piece of business was before them at which it was impossible I should be present.”

“Oh, something not quite nice?” suggested Georgie. “But I think they should have told you.”

Again she shook her head.

“Georgie, they decided to sound me as to whether I would accept the office of Mayor next year. If I refuse, they would have to try somebody else. It’s all private at present, but I had to speak to you about it, for naturally it will affect you very greatly.”

“Do you mean that I shall be something?” asked Georgie eagerly.

“Not officially, of course, but how many duties must devolve on the Mayor’s husband!”

“A sort of Mayoress,” said Georgie with the eagerness clean skimmed off his voice.

“A thousand times more than that,” cried Lucia. “You will have to be my right hand, Georgie. Without you I couldn’t dream of undertaking it. I should entirely depend on you, on your judgment and your wisdom. There will be hundreds of questions on which a man’s instinct will be needed by me. We shall be terribly hard-worked. We shall have to entertain, we shall have to take the lead, you and I, in everything, in municipal life as well as social life, which we do already. If you cannot promise to be always by me for my guidance and support, I can only give one answer. An unqualified negative.”

Lucia’s eloquence, with all the practice she had had at Town Councils, was most effective. Georgie no longer saw himself as a Mayoress, but as the Power behind the Throne; he thought of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, and bright images bubbled in his brain. Lucia, with a few sideways gimlet-glances saw the effect, and, wise enough to say no more, continued gazing out of the window. Georgie gazed too: they both gazed.

When Lucia thought that her silence had done as much as it could, she sighed, and spoke again.

“I understand. I will refuse then,” she said.

That, in common parlance, did the trick.

“No, don’t fuss me,” he said. “Me must fink.”

“
Si, caro: pensa seriosamente,”
said she. “But I must make up my mind now: it wouldn’t be fair on my colleagues not to. There are plenty of others, Georgie, if I refuse. I should think Mr. Twistevant would make an admirable Mayor. Very business-like. Naturally, I do not approve of his views about slums and, of course I should have to resign my place on the Town Council and some other bodies. But what does that matter?”

“Darling, if you put it like that,” said Georgie, “I must say that I think it your duty to accept. You would be condoning slums almost, if you didn’t.”

The subdued radiance in Lucia’s face burst forth like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

“If you think it’s my duty, I must accept,” she said. “You would despise me otherwise. I’ll write at once.”

She paused at the door.

“I wonder what Elizabeth—” she began, then thought better of it, and tripped lightly downstairs.

Tilling had unanimously accepted Lucia’s invitation for dinner and Bridge on Saturday, and Georgie, going upstairs to dress heard himself called from Lucia’s bedroom.

He entered.

Her bed was paved with hats: it was a
parterre
of hats, of which the boxes stood on the floor, a rampart of boxes. The hats were of the most varied styles. There was one like an old-fashioned beaver hat with a feather in it. There was a Victorian bonnet with strings. There was a three-cornered hat, like that which Napoleon wore in the retreat from Moscow. There was a head-dress like that worn by nuns, and a beret made of cloth of gold. There was a hat like a full-bottomed wig with ribands in it, and a Stuart-looking head-dress like those worn by the ladies of the Court in the time of Charles I. Lucia sitting in front of her glass, with her head on one side was trying the effect of a green turban.

“I want your opinion, dear,” she said. “For official occasions as when the Mayor and Corporation go in state to church, or give a civic welcome to distinguished visitors, the Mayor, if a woman, has an official hat, part of her robes. But there are many semi-official occasions, Georgie, when one would not be wearing robes, but would still like to wear something distinctive. When I preside at Town Councils, for instance, or at all those committees of which I shall be chairman. On all those occasions I should wear the same hat: an undress uniform, you might call it. I don’t think the green turban would do, but I am rather inclined to that beret in cloth of gold.”

Georgie tried on one or two himself.

“I like the beret,” he said. “You could trim it with your beautiful seed pearls.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Lucia cordially. “Or what about the thing like a wig. Rather majestic: the Mayor of Tilling, you know, used to have the power of life and death. Let me try it on again.”

“No, I like the beret better than that,” said Georgie critically. “Besides the Mayor doesn’t have the power of life and death now. Oh, but what about this Stuart-looking one? Rather Vandyckish, don’t you think?”

He brought it to her, and came opposite the mirror himself, so that his face was framed there beside hers. His beard had been trimmed that day to a beautiful point.

“Georgino! Your beard: my hat,” cried Lucia. “What a harmony! Not a question about it!”

“Yes, I think it does suit us,” said Georgie, blushing a little.

THE END

    

    

    

    

First Published 1939

    

        

    

    

    
CHAPTER I

    
CHAPTER II

    
CHAPTER III

    
CHAPTER IV

    
CHAPTER V

    
CHAPTER VI

    
CHAPTER VII

    
CHAPTER VIII

    
CHAPTER IX

    
CHAPTER X

    
CHAPTER XI

    
CHAPTER XII

        

Lucia Pillson, the Mayor-Elect of Tilling and her husband Georgie were talking together one October afternoon in the garden-room at Mallards. The debate demanded the exercise of their keenest faculties. Viz: Should Lucia, when next month she entered on the supreme Municipal Office, continue to go down to the High Street every morning after breakfast with her market-basket, and make her personal purchases at the shops of the baker, the grocer, the butcher and wherever else the needs of the day’s catering directed? There were pros and cons to be considered, and Lucia had been putting the case for both sides with the tedious lucidity of opposing counsel addressing the Court. It might be confidently expected that, when she had finished exploring the entire territory, she would be fully competent to express the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge. In anticipation of the numerous speeches she would soon be called upon to make as Mayor, she was cultivating, whenever she remembered to do so, a finished oratorical style, and a pedantic Oxford voice.

“I must be very careful, Georgie,” she said. “Thoroughly democratic as you know I am in the truest sense of the word, I shall be entrusted, on the ninth of November next, with the duty of upholding the dignity and tradition of my high office. I’m not sure that I ought to go popping in and out of shops, as I have hitherto done, carrying my market-basket and bustling about just like anybody else. Let me put a somewhat similar case to you. Supposing you saw a newly-appointed Lord Chancellor trotting round the streets of Westminster in shorts, for the sake of exercise. What would you feel about it? What would your reactions be?”

“I hope you’re not thinking of putting on shorts, are you?” asked Georgie, hoping to introduce a lighter tone.

“Certainly not,” said Lucia. “A parallel case only. And then there’s this. It would be intolerable to my democratic principles that, if I went into the grocer’s to make some small purchase, other customers already there should stand aside in order that I might be served first. That would never do. Never!”

Georgie surveyed with an absent air the pretty piece of needlework on which he was engaged. He was embroidering the Borough arms of Tilling in coloured silks on the back of the white kid gloves which Lucia would wear at the inaugural ceremony, and he was not quite sure that he had placed the device exactly in the middle.

“How tar’some,” he said. “Well, it will have to do. I daresay it will stretch right. About the Lord Chancellor in shorts. I don’t think I should mind. It would depend a little on what sort of knees he had. As for other customers standing aside because you were the Mayor, I don’t think you need be afraid of that for a moment. Most unlikely.”

Lucia became violently interested in her gloves.

“My dear, they look too smart for anything,” she said. “Beautiful work, Georgie. Lovely. They remind me of the jewelled gloves you see in primitive Italian pictures on the hands of kneeling Popes and adoring Bishops.”

“Do you think the arms are quite in the middle?” he asked.

“It looks perfect. Shall I try it on?”

Lucia displayed the back of her gloved hand, leaning her forehead elegantly against the finger-tips.

“Yes, that seems all right,” said Georgie. “Give it me back. It’s not quite finished. About the other thing. It would be rather marked if you suddenly stopped doing your marketing yourself, as you’ve done it every day for the last two years or so. Except Sundays. Some people might say that you were swanky because you were Mayor. Elizabeth would.”

“Possibly. But I should be puzzled, dear, to name off-hand anything that mattered less to me than what Elizabeth Mapp-Flint said, poor woman. Give me your opinion, not hers.”

“You might drop the marketing by degrees, if you felt it was undignified,” said Georgie yawning. “Shop every day this week, and only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday next week—”

“No, dear,” interrupted Lucia. “That would be hedging, and I never hedge. One thing or the other.”

“A hedge may save you from falling into a ditch,” said Georgie brilliantly.

“
Georgino,
how epigrammatic! What does it mean exactly? What ditch?”

“Any ditch,” said Georgie. “Just making a mistake and not being judicious. Tilling is a mass of pitfalls.”

“I don’t mind about pitfalls so long as my conscience assures me that I am guided by right principles. I must set an example in my private as well as my public life. If I decide to go on with my daily marketing I shall certainly make a point of buying very cheap, simple provisions. Cabbages and turnips, for instance, not asparagus.”

“We’ve got plenty of that in the garden when it comes in,” said Georgie.

“—plaice, not soles. Apples,” went on Lucia, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Plain living in private—everybody will hear me buying cheap vegetables—Splendour, those lovely gloves, in public. And high thinking in both.”

“That would sound well in your inaugural speech,” said Georgie.

“I hope it will. What I want to do in our dear Tilling is to elevate the tone, to make it a real centre of intellectual and artistic activity. That must go on simultaneously with social reforms and the well-being of the poorer classes. All the slums must be cleared away. There must be an end to overcrowding. Pasteurisation of milk, Georgie; a strict censorship of the films; benches in sunny corners. Of course, it will cost money. I should like to see the rates go up by leaps and bounds.”

“That won’t make you very popular,” said Georgie.

“I should welcome any unpopularity that such reforms might earn for me. The decorative side of life, too. Flower boxes in the windows of the humblest dwellings. Cheap concerts of first-rate music. The revival of ancient customs, like beating the bounds. I must find out just what that is.”

“The town-council went in procession round the boundaries of the parish,” said Georgie, “and the Mayor was bumped on the boundary stones. Hadn’t we better stick to the question of whether you go marketing or not?”

Lucia did not like the idea of being bumped on boundary stones…

“Quite right, dear. I lose myself in my dreams. We were talking about the example we must set in plain living. I wish it to be known that I do my catering with economy. To be heard ordering neck of mutton at the butcher’s.”

“I won’t eat neck of mutton in order to be an example to anybody,” said Georgie. “And, personally, whatever you settle to do, I won’t give up the morning shopping. Besides, one learns all the news then. Why, it would be worse than not having the wireless! I should be lost without it. So would you.”

Lucia tried to picture herself bereft of that eager daily interchange of gossip, when her Tilling circle of friends bustled up and down the High Street carrying their market-baskets and bumping into each other in the narrow doorways of shops. Rain or fine, with umbrellas and goloshes or with sunshades and the thinnest blouses, it was the bracing hour that whetted the appetite for the complications of life. The idea of missing it was unthinkable, and without the slightest difficulty she ascribed exalted motives and a high sense of duty to its continuance.