Au Reservoir (14 page)

‘I don’t suppose, by any chance, Olga dear, that you might be able to prevail on Noël Coward to come and open this wretched fête?’ she asked idly.

‘Oh gosh, I’m sorry, Lucia,’ Olga replied uncomfortably. ‘As a matter of fact I
have
been trying, because I’d love to help, but his diary is very full at the moment as he’s on stage in the West End most nights.’

‘Of course,’ Lucia said graciously, ‘I quite understand. Well, I am very grateful to you for trying, anyway; it was very thoughtful of you.’

They all gazed mournfully at each other, and then at the ceiling, and then at the floor. Lucia sighed heavily.

‘I suppose it was too much to expect Olga to pull two rabbits out of the hat,’ she said, with a feeble attempt at humour.

‘Of course,’ Olga suggested rather wretchedly, ‘it would be quite correct to say that Noël has declined the invitation, because I have actually asked him, even if you haven’t.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Georgie averred, ‘but that still won’t stop Mapp from giving out –’

‘Yes, thank you, Georgie,’ Lucia cut in sharply. ‘The situation is quite clear, I think.’

She once again got out her writing paper and paused for thought.

‘Oh well,’ she concluded, ‘I shall simply express surprise that what was a very clear invitation to me personally has been rescinded, and convey my regrets that Mr Coward will be unavailable. Cadman can take it round in the Rolls.’

*   *   *

‘Any news?’ enquired Susan Wyse the next morning.

‘There certainly is,’ Elizabeth Mapp-Flint said with a steely glint in her eye. ‘Lucia has been exposed.’

‘No!’ Susan replied, with an accompaniment sotto voce from Mr Wyse.

‘Yes!’ Mapp responded. ‘You know that she’s been pretending to know Noël Coward? Well, thanks to the Padre’s good offices she was asked to invite him to open this year’s fête over at Tenterden – you know, the big one that everyone goes to for miles around.’

‘Oh, that would be fun,’ Susan said. ‘I do so like him.’

‘Not coming,’ Mapp announced, clutching her shopping basket in a very determined fashion indeed. ‘She can’t produce him! Sent some cock and bull story about how she’d asked him and he couldn’t make it.’

Major Benjy gave his wife a quick harrumph of support.

‘What a shame,’ Susan said. ‘Still, I suppose it’s only to be expected. After all, I’m sure he has a busy schedule and it’s a long way to come down from London just to open a fête.’

At this point Diva Plaistow joined the party, and was quickly apprised of the new development, Elizabeth maintaining, with even more heat this time, that Lucia’s claimed show business acquaintances were in fact entirely bogus.

At this Mr Wyse wrinkled his nose delicately.

‘Of course, it may all be entirely bona fide,’ he ventured mildly.

‘What do you mean, old man?’ Major Benjy replied, fixing him with a somewhat menacing stare. ‘Surely it’s just as the wife said. Mrs Pillson has overstretched herself and been caught out.’

‘Such a view might certainly be consistent with the facts,’ Mr Wyse persisted with a disarming smile, ‘but so might another. Might it not be the case that Mrs Pillson does indeed know Mr Coward, that she has asked him to come down from London but that he is unable to accommodate that date in his diary? Exactly as Mrs Pillson says, in fact?’

‘But you saw –’ Mapp began with vigour, but then broke off. Mr Wyse was staring at her vacantly. He raised his eyebrows and there was a definite hint of admonishment about the way in which he did so. Suddenly Mapp thought that it may not be politic to pursue the matter of the letter she had previously flourished at him.

Susan glanced first at her husband and then at Elizabeth. It seemed clear that she at least had been privy to Mr Wyse’s thoughts on the matter.

Mapp tried again.

‘Dear Mr Wyse, always trying to see the best in everyone,’ she said sweetly. ‘But I am afraid your good nature is getting the better of you. Lucia no more knows Noël Coward than I do.’

‘Certainly seems to point that way,’ Diva contributed sadly.

Major Benjy harrumphed afresh.

‘But there remains, as always,’ Mr Wyse added sagely, ‘a germ of doubt.’

There was something about this, as there so often was about Mr Wyse’s utterances, which induced the others to fall silent and nod thoughtfully for fear of their intelligence being called into question. Mr and Mrs Wyse took advantage of this pause to say ‘Au reservoir’ and continue about their shopping.

Elizabeth watched them go with the air of an Ottoman commander who was just about to launch a final, desperate wave of attacks on the tottering ramparts of a Byzantine city only for his men to look at their watches and announce that it was time for a tea break.

The following day found the same issues being discussed by different people in a different location: the Padre and Mrs Campbell in the latter’s living room in Tenterden, to which the Reverend Bartlett had been fetched by a Rolls-Royce every bit as splendid as the Wyses’, though perhaps not quite so magnificent as Lucia’s.

‘A most unfortunate turn of events, vicar,’ Mrs Campbell said disagreeably.

The Padre sighed, and wondered just how he had so severely disappointed the Almighty that He should have surrounded him with harpies in place of the kindly, domesticated housewives whom surely any self-respecting Anglican clergyman had a right to expect.

‘Well, the wee mannie is busy, nae doot,’ he ventured. ‘If you think about it, it’s perhaps a wee thing cheeky for us even to ask him in the first place.’

He raised his tea cup in a vain attempt to hide behind it.

‘If
we
had asked him, then perhaps it would,’ Mrs Campbell intoned, as if explaining something very simple to a backward child.

‘Come to think of it,’ thought the Padre, ‘she sounds awfully like Mistress Mapp-Flint.’

‘But
we
didn’t,’ his present tormentor went on with heavy emphasis. ‘The whole point of asking Mrs Pillson to issue the invitation was that she
does
know him.’

‘Aye, well,’ the Padre temporised, ‘I’m sure Mistress Pillson did her best, ye ken.’

‘All very well,’ Mrs Campbell retorted, ‘but now I’m left with nobody to open the thing.’

If she was expecting a reply, none was proffered, partly because the Padre thought her remark self-evidently rhetorical, and partly because he was wondering why she was referring to herself in the first person singular when she was surely but one member of a committee. Presumably heavy-handed attempts at social dominance were not confined to Tilling. He gave a little shudder and sank deeper into his armchair.

She rose and started pacing the carpet.

‘It really is too bad,’ she exclaimed. ‘Why, I can’t possibly have that grubby little man from the radio again.’

‘Why, was he no’ satisfactory?’ the Padre queried.

Mrs Campbell snorted.

‘You might say that,’ she replied. ‘You might indeed say that. All I was told was that he was “a star of stage, screen and radio” or something like that. Turned out he was a ventriloquist, if you please!’

‘And did he bring …?’ began the Padre, deeply intrigued.

‘His dummy? Oh, yes. Quite a conversation they had.’

‘Well, surely that was entertaining for the folks?’ he asked.

‘It would have been if you hadn’t been able to see his lips moving,’ she responded curtly.

‘Weel,’ the Padre said in a sudden flash of inner wisdom, ‘would nae that be the main advantage of being a ventriloquist on the radio?’

Mrs Campbell treated this contribution with the contempt it deserved. Ceasing punishing the carpet with her sensible shoes, she strode to the table, picked up a ginger biscuit and broke it savagely in two. The Padre winced.

‘Well, vicar,’ she remonstrated with him as she sat down, pressing her sensible knees firmly together, ‘what are we going to do?’

He noticed that now she was seeking to apportion tasks for action, she had lapsed into the first person plural.

The Padre was to prove pitifully barren of ideas.

‘I suppose there’s always yon Mistress Pillson after all,’ he suggested.

Mrs Campbell made a noise that sounded a lot like ‘Tcha!’

‘Well, she opens the Tilling fête most years, ye ken,’ he persisted, ‘so it’s no’ as though she lacks experience.’

She looked at him with what could have been sorrow, but felt awfully like contempt.

‘I’m sure it’s very kind of you to rally round, vicar, when our own man is indisposed, but this is Tenterden, not Tilling. Why, the
Kent Messenger
will be there. We cannot have a complete nobody officiating. It needs to be someone with, well, a certain
profile
, shall I say? A certain
status
.’

She sat back with a sigh, confident that this point had finally been understood. Unexpectedly, though, her interlocutor emerged gamely from his corner to fight another round.

‘But would you no’ say that Mrs Pillson satisfies those criteria?’ he asked doggedly.

‘Oh, vicar, I’ve never heard of her,’ Mrs Campbell wailed. ‘Who is she? She’s nobody. That Mrs Mapp-Flint told me so on the phone.’

‘Ah, weel,’ the Padre said, digesting this news, ‘you have to be a wee thing careful noo and again about what Mistress Mapp-Flint says, ye ken.’

He struggled to find a tactful way of expressing his views.

‘Why?’ Mrs Campbell prompted him.

He turned and set his cup down on the side-table to buy himself a few more precious seconds. Fortunately, as he did so inspiration struck.

‘Passing years, ye ken,’ he explained smoothly. ‘The poor lady sometimes gets into a bit of a birl. Why, she might even no’ have minded who she was blethering aboot.’

Mrs Campbell recoiled from this wave of dialect but gathered enough of what the Padre was talking about to look very puzzled.

‘But that’s what she said about you,’ she said.

‘What?’ the Padre asked, astonished.

‘Well, I assume it was her. One of my friends was meeting someone in Tilling the other day and she heard a large, loud woman with a very disagreeable expression talking about our fête. Naturally she was intrigued, so she dawdled past so she could listen and it turned out this woman was talking about you going to see Mrs Pillson, and forgetting what it was that you went there for, and ending up asking her to open the fête by mistake.’

‘And why would I do that?’ the Padre asked, still turning this nugget of new information over in his mind.

‘Well, according to my friend she as good as said you were in the grip of senile dementia,’ Mrs Campbell said briskly. ‘You’re not, are you?’ she demanded as an afterthought. ‘I do hope not. It might make things very awkward with the fête.’

Within the Padre’s troubled breast charity was struggling against less desirable emotions, and losing the battle.

‘I am happy to reassure you, madam,’ he said slowly, trying to keep his breathing even, ‘that I am not in the grip of senile dementia.’

‘Well, that’s some relief, I suppose,’ Mrs Campbell commented dubiously. ‘But in that case, how do you explain your silly notion of inviting this Pillson woman to open the fête?’

‘I do not know how much this might weigh in the balance with your committee,’ he said with studied calm, ‘but there is the fact that she is almost certainly the richest woman in England.’

S
ome days later found the Wyses being deposited by what Susan insisted on calling ‘the Royce’ at the other end of the High Street from which they lived so that they might walk slowly back home, making a few purchases along the way, as was their habit. As was also their habit, this outing was carefully timed to coincide with that hour around ten o’clock in the morning when the other worthy denizens of Tilling society could also reliably be expected to be out and about with their shopping baskets.

The real purpose of Tilling’s morning
passeggiata
had little to do with the acquisition of comestibles, which activity might safely be left to one’s servants, but the dissemination of ‘news’, hence the ritual utterances which accompanied it.

‘Any news?’ Susan enquired as they joined a group which had already formed around the substantial figure of Diva Plaistow, consisting of the Bartletts and Irene Coles.

‘Yes!’ Irene said triumphantly. ‘Those stick-in-the-muds over in Tenterden have asked Lucia to open their mouldy old fête after all. Isn’t it wonderful?’

‘No!’ Susan replied dutifully. ‘Why, what good news indeed.’

‘Good? It’s brilliant!’ Irene enthused. ‘And of course she’ll be wonderful, as always.’

‘And Mr Coward?’ Mr Wyse asked hesitantly.

‘Couldn’t come,’ telegraphed Diva. ‘Too bad. But wonderful Lucia
can do it instead.’

‘Weel, I dinna think she has actually accepted yet, mind,’ the Padre said cautiously.

‘But she will, surely?’ Susan asked anxiously. ‘After all, she’s already accepted once, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Irene replied, staring hard at the Padre, ‘but then her invitation was withdrawn, if you remember.’

The Padre squirmed wretchedly.

‘For reasons which remain unexplained,’ Irene added darkly. ‘Unless you were to enquire at Grebe, of course.’

‘All a wee misunderstanding, ye ken,’ he said awkwardly. ‘But the main thing is that she’s invited the noo, so hopefully everything is settled.’

‘It would serve you all right if she jolly well said “no” this time,’ Irene commented, ‘after the way she’s been treated.’

‘Well, I am sure Mrs Pillson will do the right thing by everybody,’ Mr Wyse commented tactfully, but then rather spoiled the effect by adding doubtfully, ‘whatever it may be.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll say yes,’ Irene enthused. ‘To refuse would be unkind and I can’t imagine Lucia ever doing anything unkind.’

‘I say,’ Diva suddenly enquired. ‘Has anyone told Elizabeth?’

‘I could’nae say,’ the Padre replied rather vacantly, as if surprised that everyone should be gazing at him at this point, and then before he really had a chance to think about what he was saying, ‘I suppose Mistress Campbell from Tenterden might have had a wee word.’

‘Why would she do that?’ Susan asked blankly. ‘Do they know each other or something?’