Au Reservoir (20 page)

When the garage owner returned, wiping his hands on a rag, the Major tried again.

‘This is awkward, Williams,’ said he, wondering how he was going to explain the failure of his mission to the little woman. ‘Fact is, I was counting on you, don’t you know.’

‘Tell you what, Major,’ Williams replied. ‘There’s old Hughes who has a coach business over in Hastings. Why don’t you try him?’

The Major’s countenance brightened.

‘That’s the ticket,’ he said. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Don’t have his telephone number, I suppose?’

‘Afraid not, Major,’ Williams replied.

In fact he had it tucked behind the till but he knew that the next step would be the Major asking to use his phone, and both he and his wife held very strong views about strangers running up charges on their telephone. The Major, however, accepted this news with the manly demeanour to be expected of one who had patrolled the dangerous passes of the North West Frontier, and prepared for the long walk back to Grebe.

‘Well, goodbye, Major Finn,’ said Williams. ‘Sorry not to have been able to help.’

‘My name is Flint,’ the Major said stiffly. ‘Mapp-Flint now, actually.’

‘Well, there’s a coincidence,’ Williams said. ‘Mine is Gillings.’

M
ajor Mapp-Flint arrived home in poor humour, having had a long walk in each direction to no good purpose. Having rung for a restorative pot of tea, he bellowed at directory enquiries for a while until they found the number for Hughes’s Motorworks in Hastings. This process took longer than it should have done as the operator proved unfamiliar with the Major’s standard greeting of ‘Quai-Hai!’, took it to be a Chinese restaurant and asked him to spell it. The Major’s subsequent explanations grew so increasingly irritated that the operator soon pretended there was a fault on the line, and rang off.

He was fortunate that the next time he called, a different operator answered, and by avoiding Hindustani entirely he managed to make himself tolerably well understood. Having dialled the number he was given, he asked for old Mr Hughes.

Unfortunately it turned out that old Mr Hughes was now young Mr Hughes, who seemed to have little idea of the proper respect due to a former officer of the King’s former Indian Army. While happy to accommodate the Major’s request, he stoutly refused to accept the booking without receipt of a ten shilling deposit.

Fuming, the Major sat down and penned a brief note confirming the arrangements (2 p.m. on Saturday at the gun platform), took a lengthy slurp of tea which was really still too hot to drink, jammed his cap back on his head and set off once more.

Arriving in Tilling about half an hour later, he queued at the post office for a stamp for his letter and a ten shilling postal order. Having placed the latter in the envelope, he sealed it, licked the stamp and stuck it on, and deposited it in the letter box. Having done so, he looked around himself with the air of a man who is pleased with a job well done. His gaze chancing upon the King’s Arms, he entered the lounge bar and ordered a large whisky and soda. Since this seemed to disappear with some rapidity, he ordered another.

Some time later he stood up, wiped his moustache and proceeded to Twemlow’s. Approaching the counter, he took from his pocket the postcard with the announcement written upon it and the requisite threepenny bit for one week’s display. The young lady behind the counter glanced at it, as she had been instructed to do by Mr Twemlow, to check that it contained nothing unseemly. There had been an embarrassing incident a year or so earlier when a lady had succeeded in slipping a card offering French lessons past his defences. Fortunately the lady in question had turned out to be a retired governess from Frinton-on-Sea, and a stream of gentleman callers had left her cottage linguistically enhanced, but otherwise uninspired.

A frown creased the youthful face of the shop girl.

‘Surely there must be some mistake, sir?’ she enquired.

‘I don’t think so,’ the Major replied, taking back the card to scan it. ‘No, it’s all in order.’

‘But haven’t you seen the card that’s in the window already, sir?’

‘Card? What card?’

She raised the flap of the counter and walked the length of the shop towards the window. Opening the partition at the rear, she carefully removed a card.

‘Not those damn French lessons again, eh what?’

‘No, sir, nothing like that,’ she replied patiently, handing him the card.

He gazed at it, first in irritation, for he was anxious to be home, then in bewilderment, and finally in consternation. Then he looked at his own card. Then he tried holding them side by side. In the end he gave the other card back to the girl with a glazed expression. As he left the shop, she was refastening the card to the noticeboard.

Tenterden Fête – an invitation

A coach will be provided for the convenience of all who wish to witness George Pillson, Esq. open the fête in Tenterden on Saturday next. Departing the gun platform at 1.45 p.m. All welcome. A note to Mrs George Pillson at Mallards would be appreciated but is not essential.

The Major wandered back towards Grebe in a daze. What did it mean? Suddenly he realised that it must be Lucia who had booked the coach of that grubby little man at the garage. He realised too that he had just sent a man in Hastings a postal order for ten shillings for a purpose now overtaken by events. He paused and then, gloomily, turned and began to walk back towards Tilling.

At 5.30 prompt the postman arrived to empty the letter box. As he opened the door with his key and began to remove the contents of the box, he became aware of a looming presence close behind him.

‘Ah,’ said the looming presence. ‘Glad I’ve caught you.’

As the Major had spent the last two and a half hours in the public library, being stared at suspiciously by a thin, ugly librarian, he was not in the best of moods.

‘Was there something I can do for you, sir?’ asked the postman warily.

‘Yes,’ came the curt reply. ‘Fact is, sent a letter earlier. Didn’t mean to. All a mistake. Grateful if I could have it back.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir,’ the postman responded. ‘More than my job’s worth.’

‘What damn fool nonsense is that?’ demanded the Major. ‘It’s my letter, dammit, what?’

‘Not any more, sir,’ the postman contended stoutly. ‘As soon as it goes into this box it belongs to the King. Nobody has the right to interfere with His Majesty’s mail. Once it’s in the post it has to be delivered. That’s the law.’

As if the word ‘law’ was imbued with some magic quality, a constable appeared behind the protagonists while the Major was launching into a vigorous and somewhat noisy rejoinder.

‘Now then, Major Mapp-Flint, what seems to be the problem?’ he enquired, having waited for the latter to pause for breath.

‘Damn fool won’t give me my letter back,’ the Major explained. ‘Posted in error, don’t you know.’

‘I’m afraid he’s acting quite properly, sir,’ the constable replied evenly. ‘Interfering with His Majesty’s mail is a criminal offence, you know.’

The Major looked mutinous.

‘As is impersonating a police officer, for example,’ the policeman continued, with a meaningful glance.

‘Ah,’ said the Major sheepishly. He had a dim recollection that one night before the war, having been injudiciously over-appreciative of Lucia’s port, he had been discovered stopping cars in the High Street and demanding to see their occupants’ driving licences on the grounds that he was a plain clothes police officer on point duty.

‘Why don’t you be off home now, Major?’ the constable suggested after a pause. ‘Much the best thing. ’Spect your wife will be waiting for you.’

The thought of his wife waiting for him at home failed to lift the Major’s spirits but, acknowledging defeat, he turned and began the long walk back to Grebe for the last time that day. As he went he muttered something which might have been, ‘God bless His Majesty,’ but probably was not.

An intense and difficult family conference ensued that evening when Major Mapp-Flint finally arrived home, footsore and with a headache. To rub salt into the wound, his wife’s mien and general attitude appeared to imply that the whole sorry mess was somehow his fault. In the circumstances the only sane response to this insane allegation seemed to be to retreat in dignified silence behind his copy of the
Daily Telegraph
and await an apology. This approach turned out on mature reflection to be unwise, for two reasons. First, no apology was in fact forthcoming, and he should have anticipated this eventuality as his wife had never been known to apologise for anything in her life. Second, he had already read the same newspaper over breakfast, and had not much liked its contents then either.

He was thus now faced with the dilemma of how to move from his self-imposed retreat in the depths of his armchair without it looking like at best a tactical withdrawal, and at worst an acceptance of defeat. His mind ran through a number of options, including lighting a cigarette and setting his paper on fire at the same time, but this seemed less than ideal as the nearest pack of cigarettes was on the sideboard on the other side of the room.

Suddenly, his wife spoke.

‘But what are we to do, Benjy?’ she wailed, throwing down her knitting in vexation.

While a resumption of conversation was welcome in general terms, he decided to proceed cautiously. It remained to be discovered whether this parley signalled a return to normal relations or a further assault on his already injured male sensibilities.

He considered the situation thoughtfully. While she seemed intent on ignoring entirely her blatant attempt to shift the blame for this disaster on to his manly shoulders, her request for assistance at least suggested a shift towards an acknowledgement of the natural superiority of the male of the species. In the circumstances, it was probably the best outcome for which he might reasonably have wished. With a sigh, he laid aside the
Daily Telegraph
, with its sad story of a scoutmaster in Godalming only half reread, and squared those manly shoulders.

‘Been thinking about that,’ he replied judiciously. ‘Bit of a poser, what?’

‘So what’s the answer?’ she enquired, staring at him intently.

The Major’s initial intention was to say, ‘Blowed if I know, old girl,’ and enquire what was for dinner, but he wisely refrained. He had an instinct that should he do so his wife might deploy a wide array of counter-attacking weaponry, ranging from accusations of gross insensitivity to foaming at the mouth and driving her knitting needles into his thigh. There was also of course the possibility that she might caustically enquire why it was, given that he been turning the matter over in his mind, that his prodigious intelligence had entirely failed to arrive at a helpful conclusion. Since his instinct on this occasion was to some extent sound, the recently strained marital relationship of the Mapp-Flints was happily not to be further tested that evening.

‘Why not just press ahead anyway?’ he ventured. ‘After all, we can’t get our deposit back, and we’ve got no other way of getting to Tenterden ourselves. Not unless you are planning to accept Lucia’s offer, and I can’t see you being inclined to do that.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Benjy,’ she said brusquely. ‘If we do that then everyone will simply say that we are copying Lucia.’

The Major noted silently that whenever his wife’s plans went awry they underwent a subtle but significant transformation from being ‘her’ plans to ‘their’ plans. Sensibly he laid this insight aside and soldiered on regardless.

‘But you thought of it first,’ he said reasonably.

‘Yes, but she got her note in Twemlow’s first,’ Elizabeth replied. ‘No, that won’t do, Benjy, it simply won’t.’

There seemed to be little reply to this, and so he proffered none.

‘Oh, why is life so unfair?’ she burst out suddenly.

The Major felt a strong desire to pick up his newspaper again, though sadly such a course of action was unthinkable, even for a husband who had been as sorely tried as he had that day. There was no acceptable answer that could be given to this question, as he knew well, for his wife posed it several times a week. Now, as then, he decided to treat it as rhetorical.

‘Ah,’ he said with what he hoped would be interpreted as deep sympathy.

‘I mean to say,’ she went on, though whether this elaboration was intended for him, or by way of a soliloquy to vent her own frustrations was unclear, ‘I think of something designed solely as a charitable gesture to give pleasure to my fellow man, and Lulu gets hold of it and twists everything somehow, and makes it hers. It’s wicked, Benjy, pure wickedness.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘is how she found out. It’s all very well us saying that she stole our idea –’

‘Which she did, of course,’ his wife interjected, glaring at him ominously.

‘Which she did, of course,’ he added hurriedly, ‘but that doesn’t answer the question: how did she know?’

‘Perhaps Withers told Grosvenor,’ she suggested, after a pause for thought. ‘They are friends, I believe.’

‘But how?’ the Major persisted. ‘Yesterday wasn’t her afternoon off, was it? So how could she have told her, even if she wanted to?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said irritably. ‘Perhaps it was Grosvenor’s afternoon off and she popped in to visit for a while. We wouldn’t have seen her, would we? She would have used the tradesmen’s entrance.’

‘Maybe,’ the Major conceded reluctantly, ‘but I still say it’s a rum do.’

‘Are you seriously suggesting,’ Elizabeth began, in that dangerously calm tone which she always employed when seeking to demonstrate very clearly to her husband that he was a congenital idiot, ‘that Lulu and I should have hit upon exactly the same idea –
exactly
the same, mind you – at exactly the same time, quite independently of each other?’

‘It does seem a bit of a coincidence,’ he admitted.

There was a pause while she digested matters further.

‘Benjy,’ she asked suddenly, ‘remind me what it was that you told me once about coincidence.’