Au Reservoir (17 page)

‘Is that still going?’ Olga asked in puzzlement. ‘After all, the war’s been over for some time now.’

‘It was felt,’ Lucia explained majestically, ‘that it may continue to fulfil a useful purpose in peacetime, rather like the United Nations.’

‘Oh,’ said Olga, showing a proper mixture of respect for the committee’s potential for furthering the causes of world peace and universal goodwill, and abashment at the temerity of her implied suggestion that it might now usefully be disbanded.

‘And anyway,’ Lucia continued in rather more prosaic vein, ‘I have someone coming to lunch tomorrow who is going to tell me all about duplicate bridge.

‘I was rather hoping, Georgie,’ she added a little sharply, ‘that you might be there too. After all, it was your idea.’

‘I’m not sure it was actually,’ he muttered rebelliously as he tasted the Montrachet.

Olga kicked him under the table.

‘But of course I will be there,’ he concurred, feeling the huge finish swirl delightfully around his palate.

Lucia nodded magisterially, as though acknowledging a whispered communication from a palace aide that yet another war had broken out in the Balkans.

‘Only a shame,’ she said suddenly, ‘that I have been unable to see Mr Coward during my time in town.’

Irene glanced up from her plate and said ‘Poor angel’, at the same time darting a worried glance at Olga.

‘Yes, so wretched that he’s been so busy,’ Olga proffered. ‘I think the poor man is appearing in one play, rehearsing another, and writing yet another.’

‘Busy indeed,’ Lucia agreed rather distantly. ‘He must be. Why, I sent him a letter by hand yesterday, and followed it up with a telegram this morning. I tried to get tickets for his play tonight so I could visit him in his dressing room afterwards, but sadly it is sold out. Most vexing.’

Georgie and Olga looked at each other in consternation.

‘I did so want to meet him.’ Lucia bit her lip, hoping that she could correct her innocent slip before anyone noticed, ‘See him, I mean.’

‘He’s such a difficult man to see,’ Olga explained. ‘He rarely rises before midday, spends an hour or so in the bath, has lunch, spends all afternoon writing and then dashes into the theatre just in time for the ten minute bell.’

Lucia made one of her little noises which might have meant anything but which usually signalled disapproval.

‘Why,’ Olga continued, seeing that she needed to warm to her task, ‘I ran into the Queen at a Red Cross dinner a little while ago and even
she
hasn’t been able to get to see him.’

‘Are they friends?’ Georgie asked dubiously.

‘Oh, they’re great chums,’ she assured him. ‘They moved in the same circles before the abdication, when she was just the smiling duchess rather than the Queen. She loves the theatre, you know. And she says he’s invented a new cocktail for her, though nobody is quite sure what it is.’

‘Well,’ observed Lucia, relenting somewhat, ‘if even Her Majesty cannot get to see him that does put a rather different complexion on things. Although,’ she mused, ‘it is of course unfortunate that Her Majesty should have been unable to accept one of my invitations to attend civic functions in Tilling.’

‘You wrote to the Queen?’ Georgie asked, feeling rather faint.

‘Many times,’ Lucia said airily. ‘Before the war. Though she never replied.’

‘Oh dear,’ Olga commented rather helplessly. ‘I wonder why not.’

‘I think she was instructed not to,’ opined Lucia.

‘Who by?’ Georgie asked, and then kicked himself as he realised he should have said, ‘By whom?’

‘That nasty Mr Baldwin of course.’

‘Poor angel,’ Irene commented again. ‘I’ll bet he was being beastly because of your ideas about a special train for Tilling.’

Lucia pondered.

‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘Though it may also have had something to do with me being nominated as Warden of the Cinque Ports.’

This time Georgie got it right.

‘I never knew you’d been nominated for that,’ he said. ‘Why, it would be an enormous honour; it’s still one of the most important royal offices in the country. Nominated by whom?’

She looked at him in surprise.

‘By myself, of course, silly. Though I did mention that I was sure the idea would have the support of the town council, as well as my Lord Bishop.’

Since at least two-thirds of her audience had temporarily been deprived of the power of speech, she pressed on.

‘Such a fine idea, don’t you think, for the office actually to be held by someone local, someone on the spot? Much better surely than some old fuddy-duddy away in London who never comes near the south coast. That was the gist of my suggestion to Mr Baldwin, anyway.’

She looked at her watch and sighed.

‘I think I must slip away,’ she said. ‘It may take simply ages to get over to the City in the middle of the day. Georgie, dear, can I leave the bill to you?’

As Georgie rose, she air-kissed Olga and Irene and swept magnificently from the room, a vision of loveliness in a pre-war Old Imari concoction.

Georgie sat down again, and nodded his agreement to Irene’s rather hopeful suggestion of a brandy and benedictine. Somehow, he felt he needed it.

‘Well,’ he said finally, to break a silence which was threatening to become awkward, ‘that was …’

Having started without properly thinking through what he wanted to say, he found himself floundering.

‘Insightful?’ Olga suggested.

‘Yes, if you like.’

There was another silence, which was broken by Irene, revived by the tinkling sound of the approaching liqueur trolley.

‘Who is the Warden of the Cinque Ports, anyway?’ she demanded.

‘I rather think it’s the Queen,’ said Olga quietly.

N
oël Coward screwed his first cigarette of the day into an exquisite tortoiseshell cigarette holder (French, second empire) with an air of elaborate ennui, and tied around himself a very grand silk dressing gown (Macau, pre-war), which featured on the back a large gold dragon against a vivid blue background. He gazed into his large crested mirror (Venetian, eighteenth century), and sighed with the quietly desperate air of a man who is middle-aged but has yet to come fully to terms with the fact.

Confident that his valet would have heard him up and about and would therefore have preparations for breakfast well advanced, he opened the door and proceeded towards the drawing room. He walked at a steady, determined pace but with a gait which, were one in search of an apt though slightly esoteric epithet, might be described as somewhat epicene.

He entered the room and sat down at the table, drawing the smell of freshly made coffee eagerly into his lungs to mix with his Virginia and Turkish blend from Morland’s of Grosvenor Street. As he reflected on the perfect juxtaposition of fine coffee and fine tobacco, he became aware that he was not alone.

‘Hello, Noël,’ said Olga, looking up from a copy of
Variety
.

She was slumped backwards on his leather chesterfield (British, Edwardian), with her feet perched in most unladylike fashion on his hammered metal coffee table (Moroccan, age indeterminate), which had been sold to him by an awfully nice boy in the Casbah (Moroccan, age indeterminate) as part of a larger series of transactions which need form no part of this narrative.

He eyed her with cold disfavour.

‘I would have thought, my dear,’ he commented, eschewing any pretence of a greeting, ‘that an Englishman’s drawing room would be sacrosanct at breakfast time.’

‘It’s one o’clock in the afternoon,’ she pointed out, not unreasonably.

‘Which is when I have breakfast,’ he replied, ‘ergo, it is breakfast time. Please leave.’

‘Oh, don’t be such an old misery,’ Olga said. ‘Anyway, Denny let me in.’

‘Is this true, Denny?’ Coward asked as his valet came into the room bearing bacon and eggs.

‘Yes, sir,’ the handsome young man answered. ‘I hope I didn’t do wrong.’

‘You could hardly have done wronger,’ Coward rebuked him. ‘In fact, the last time anyone did me wrong to anything like such an egregious extent was when some fathead suggested that Herbert Marshall might have been a better choice for
In Which We Serve
.’

He buried his face in his hands as the pain came flooding back.

‘Now then, sir,’ Denny said gently, ‘I thought we were trying ever so hard to forget about that.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Coward replied faintly. ‘One must be strong after all.’

His looked up and sniffed the air appreciatively as his plate approached.

‘But that does not alter the fact that you have been a very naughty boy. After I have partaken of breakfast – alone – and then had a long soak in the bath, I shall decide upon a suitable punishment. Perhaps I may even send you back to live in Hendon Central.’

Olga gasped in horror.

‘Oh please, sir,’ cried poor Denny, who had gone quite pale, ‘not that. I don’t think I could bear it.’

‘Well, we shall see,’ Coward said majestically. ‘Perhaps Homer will nod on this occasion. There again, perhaps he will not.’

As he picked up his knife and fork he suddenly paused and gazed balefully at his valet.

‘Pray do explain, Denny,’ he enjoined with an air of quiet menace, ‘why you have brought
two
plates of bacon and eggs?’

‘One is for me, of course, silly,’ Olga cut in, sitting down on the other side of the table and falling upon her bacon and eggs with her customary appetite. ‘I say, Denny, bring some bread, there’s a poppet, I’m starving.

‘Now then, Noël,’ she went on, ‘stop being such a grump and eat your breakfast. I’m sorry I gatecrashed you like this, but you’re so busy at the moment it was the only way I could get to see you.’

Coward attempted to look pained at the same time as eating bacon and eggs. Being a consummate actor, he gave quite a convincing performance.

After a decent interval, while Olga rubbed pieces of bread around her plate in search of the last dregs of egg yolk, he placed his cutlery delicately in the centre of his plate and reached for another cigarette.

‘You may draw my bath as usual, Denny,’ he advised the hovering valet. ‘Verbena and magnolia today, I think. Those martinis last night were a tad severe.’

‘Oh you poor thing,’ Olga said feelingly, ‘I know what you mean. Either it’s us getting older, or it’s the gin. Martinis just don’t seem the same as before the war.’

‘I am not getting older,’ he said, lighting up, ‘though you are of course welcome to do so should you wish. Anyway, it’s not the gin, it’s the vermouth. Noilly Prat has become completely unobtainable, so they’re having to use any old junk they can get hold of. Even the Savoy hasn’t seen any since 1943, or so they say.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Olga replied. ‘Why?’

‘Who knows?’ Coward asked in rhetorical vein. ‘It’s just the French being French, I suppose.’

‘You’d think they’d be grateful,’ Olga said indignantly. ‘After all, we did save them from the Germans, didn’t we?’

‘Oh my dear,’ Coward said, ‘but perhaps they didn’t want to be saved? After all, if you
must
have somebody telling you what to do, then the Germans do it so frightfully well.’

‘Sometimes I think we just confused them,’ Olga mused. ‘After all, first you had all the people they thought were the goodies collaborating with the Germans and sentencing all the baddies to death, and then suddenly the baddies come back and beat the Germans, so
they
become the goodies and everyone has to pretend to have supported them all along. Now it’s the goodies who have become the baddies and it’s
their
turn to get sentenced to death.’

‘The idea of the French all sentencing each other to death is an enticing prospect, of course,’ Coward observed, ‘but even that is inadequate compensation for being deprived of Noilly Prat for one’s martinis.

‘The really aggravating thing,’ he went on, ‘is that it is apparently freely available in France, at a price anyway, but the British customs will not allow you to import it. It’s not as if it were the 1928 Petrus, which has simply disappeared because the wretched Bosche drank it all during the occupation.’

He stubbed out his cigarette.

‘And now, I must get on,’ he said decisively. ‘After my bath I have to be brilliant and compose an after dinner speech which I am giving for some dreadful politicians. Something to do with the Marshall Plan, I understand, or was it Berlin? Or perhaps both? Perhaps I shall give Louis Mountbatten a ring – after all, it was he who talked me into it.’

‘What’s so dreadful about these politicians?’ Olga asked.

He gazed at her as a Latin teacher might if she were a rather dull child who had just made a terrible mess of the ablative absolute.

‘They’re
all
dreadful. It’s just a fact of life. To make matters worse, they’re all inexpressibly boring – obviously they are or they wouldn’t become politicians in the first place – and I have to think of some devastating witticism about these inexpressibly boring little people, which I can deliver at the end of my speech and which will bring the house down thus proving that I am truly brilliant, which of course I am.’

He got up from the table with an air of finality.

‘Wait!’ Olga said suddenly.

‘I fear I cannot,’ he said loftily. ‘The tyranny of a blank page awaits.’

‘But what if I can give you what you want?’

‘What do you mean exactly, my dear?’ he asked, sounding puzzled.

‘Suppose I can give you your witticism, yes, and a whole case of Noilly Prat too?’

He gazed at her greedily.

‘Then I would undoubtedly grant you any favour that you may desire.’

‘Ah-ha!’ cried she in triumph.

‘No!’ he gasped, suddenly remembering. ‘Not that. Not that dreadful woman, not the fête, not mixing with the middle classes! No, Olga, I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I really can’t.’

His knees suddenly felt weak and he clutched the back of a chair for support.

Olga stared at him mercilessly.

‘You can and you will, Noël. You are going to give me a weekend of your time and I am going to prepare you a script, which you will follow exactly.’