Au Reservoir (31 page)

In that moment suspicion hardened into certainty in Lucia’s breast.

‘And in which department do you work, pray?’ Lucia enquired. Georgie was proud to note that as she handed him some tea the cup was rock steady in the saucer with not the slightest evidence of a rattle. ‘Accounts, perhaps?’

‘Why no, madam,’ Mr Chesworth replied with a proud smile. ‘I am an assistant curator.’

‘Really?’ Lucia exclaimed with every appearance of delight. ‘Why, isn’t that fascinating?’

She fixed Mapp with one of her most dazzling smiles.

‘Why, Elizabeth, dear,’ she marvelled, ‘how remiss of you not to mention that Mr Chesworth enjoyed such an exciting position.’

‘Thought it would be a nice surprise for you, dear,’ Elizabeth said, beaming with every appearance of sincerity. ‘I know how interested you are in antiquities. Naughty of me, I know.’

She gave a gulping noise which sounded awfully like a sea lion swallowing a herring, but which in fact did service for a laugh, and was usually recognised by her acquaintances as such.

By that innate instinct which allows refined company to sense impending social disaster without yet comprehending what, how or why, the background conversation faltered and died. All eyes turned to Lucia.

‘And what, Mr Chesworth, is your specialty, pray?’ Lucia continued, offering him a plate of biscuits. ‘Why, Egyptology, I’ll be bound. You remember, Georgie,’ she went on before any reply might reasonably be expected, ‘how much we enjoyed all those wonderful sarcophaguses the last time we went up to town. Or is it sarcophagi, I wonder? How dreadfully difficult these plurals can be.’

‘Sarcophagi, I expect,’ Georgie ventured, quick to assist Lucia in steering the conversation on to safer ground.

‘Dear Mr Wyse,’ Lucia said, ‘do put us out of our misery.’

Mr Wyse was generally acknowledged as the fount of all wisdom, or at least that part of earthly wisdom which was available in Tilling, for did he not complete
The Times
crossword every morning?

‘“Sarcophagi” would have my vote,’ he pronounced gravely. ‘The word is derived from the Greek, I believe, and translates literally as “flesh-eating”.’

There were involuntary exclamations of disgust from various quarters, particularly from Evie Bartlett, who was known to have a delicate stomach.

‘Goodness, how macabre,’ Lucia opined. ‘But then I always said that the Egyptians were positively obsessed with death. Isis and Osiris, you know –’

‘Not like the Romans, dear?’ Mapp interjected quickly.

‘The Romans?’ Lucia echoed.

Georgie gave a little gasp of vexation as the conversation was pulled expertly back into the jaws of the waiting lioness.

‘Yes, dear, didn’t you excavate a Roman temple or something in your garden all those years ago? Why, don’t I remember the newspapers writing about your finds?’

‘Oh really?’ asked Mr Chesworth with a puzzled expression. ‘I wasn’t aware of that.’

‘Well,’ observed Georgie somewhat desperately, ‘if you’re an Egyptologist that’s not really surprising, is it?’

‘Oh, but I’m not,’ the threat in their midst explained. ‘On the contrary, Roman Britain is my specialist area. That’s exactly why I’m surprised not to have heard anything about it.’

Elizabeth Mapp-Flint beamed beatifically.

‘
Quelle surprise
indeed,’ she commented. ‘Why, Lulu, I seem to remember you telling us that you had dug up positively yards and yards of Roman remains. Surely it was a temple of Apollo, wasn’t it? Just to think of all those years I spent living in Mallards and never suspected what was hidden beneath the garden.’

Lucia clapped her hands and smiled gaily.

‘
Cattiva
Elizabeth,’ she replied. ‘Naughty of you to arouse Mr Chesworth’s interest so! You know very well that my finds amounted to hardly anything – just a few shards of pottery, that’s all. A temple of Apollo, indeed – the very idea! Why, it hardly made the pages of the
Tilling Gazette
, far less the national press.

‘No, I’m afraid you’ve been letting your imagination run away with you,’ she went on playfully. ‘A temple of Apollo, forsooth! Why, that would have been a find of international significance and poor little Tilling would have journalists crawling around it from all over the world.’

As Mr Chesworth nodded his earnest agreement, she laughed merrily and turned to Diva to offer her another cup of tea, but Mapp was not to be so easily deflected.

‘Come now, Lucia, don’t be so modest,’ she protested, her beaming smile spreading more widely than ever and revealing a rather frightening array of teeth. ‘Why, surely you spoke of bones from animal sacrifices and glass, and pipes and all sorts of things?’

‘Perhaps your memory is playing tricks, Elizabeth?’ Lucia countered. ‘After all, it was all rather a long time ago now.’

‘Yes, it was just after you bought the house from Elizabeth, wasn’t it?’ Georgie asked, attempting to ride to the rescue once more. ‘Why, it was all the fault of those gas men who came round when we smelt gas. It was they who dug up the garden, trying to find the leak. Do you remember?’

‘But, dear worship,’ Elizabeth persisted, treating Georgie’s intervention with the contempt she felt it deserved, ‘we can easily settle the point. You keep everything in that box over there, don’t you? And yet you’ve always been very naughty and never allowed us to have a look at them. Why not open it up and let Mr Chesworth have a teeny peek, just to satisfy our curiosity?’

‘Personally, I’m not the slightest bit curious,’ Quaint Irene asserted. She could sense that her beloved Lucia was stepping into danger, and that Mapp was the cause. ‘Why don’t you drop it, Mapp? If Lucia doesn’t want to show us, that’s her business.’

There was a half-hearted murmur of support from the Wyses, promptly swept aside.

‘Oh, but you see,’ Mapp gushed, ‘I’m sure Lucia is just being modest and not wanting to show us because she thinks her finds don’t amount to very much, but in fact that’s not true, is it, Mr Chesworth? I understand that even bits of pottery – shards did you call them, dear? – can be awfully interesting and tell an expert a great deal.’

She gazed expectantly at the man from the British Museum, who felt forced to concur. He began to expound on the architectural merits of pottery analysis but, becoming increasingly aware that there was an edge to the atmosphere which he neither understood nor welcomed, faltered and stopped in mid-sentence.

Georgie felt a tide of panic rising within him, as matters seemed to be progressing inexorably towards humiliation for them both. How unutterably foolish it now seemed for Lucia to have kept those rotten bits and pieces of nothing all these years rather than discreetly disposing of them when nobody would have noticed their disappearance.

Mr Wyse, who in truth had never believed the story of Lucia’s Roman remains in the first place, was alarmed at the prospect of distress and embarrassment being caused, but was unable to think of anything meaningful which he might do to avert it. Filled with an awful sense of impending doom, he gazed dismally at Susan, who met his glance with equal distress. He read confirmation that she understood the situation all too well. He tried looking at Major Benjy in the vain hope that he might telepathically be able to transmit an urgent plea for him to restrain his wife, but in vain. The good Major, having finally divined the nature of his wife’s long-awaited flank attack, was sitting bolt upright with a faint smile on his face; clearly any tacit appeal would go unanswered.

For once, Lucia’s face, too, was showing signs of animation, Mr Wyse noted. With an inward pang of hopeless realisation, he identified it as alarm. Oh, this was awful! It was like watching a condemned man being led to the scaffold. Yet he could neither halt the execution not offer any solace.

‘Why, I can’t even remember if it is all there,’ she said distractedly.

‘Yes!’ Georgie agreed with a sudden glimmer of hope, ‘some of it may have got lost over the years.’

‘Surely not?’ Mapp cried brightly. ‘Don’t you remember, worship, that, when you and Mr Georgie came back from Italy that time, you were proposing to build a museum to yourself – I beg pardon, I mean to the office of Mayor, of course.’

‘I don’t remember anything of the sort,’ the loyal Irene objected.

Mapp’s fangs glinted briefly in her direction.

‘I am glad to say, quaint one, that we managed to confine the matter behind the closed doors of the town hall. Many members of the council felt, understandably, that the suggestion was not in the best of taste.’

‘And what does that have to do with the price of fish anyway?’ Irene asked doggedly.

Mapp shuddered dramatically.

‘Really, dear, such vulgar music hall expressions!’

‘Well?’ Irene persisted.

‘If you must know, Lucia suggested at the time adding her Roman finds to such other items of local importance as her bicycle, her shopping basket and various of her costumes for tableaux vivants. So, you see, we can be sure that she has always preserved them most carefully for the benefit of posterity.

‘Now then, dear,’ she continued, returning the full weight of her attack to Lucia, ‘surely you will allow this nice Mr Chesworth to examine your treasures? I’m sure he will handle them very carefully.’

With this she cocked her head on one side and gazed at Lucia expectantly.

Georgie felt a terrible sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was rather like when he had feared he had lost Foljambe for good when she married Cadman, but even worse. A sudden realisation hit him that his promised knighthood would surely evaporate in a puff of smoke given the scandal which was about to break around his head, coupled with the realisation that he cared about this very much, not for his own sake, but for Lucia’s.

With slow, deliberate movements Lucia got up, lifted up the box, carried it across the room and set it down in front of Mr Chesworth. Then, still without uttering a word, she returned to her seat.

‘Oh, how exciting!’ Mapp exclaimed girlishly as he lifted the lid. ‘Just like Christmas! I wonder what treats we will find inside?’

Georgie looked on with quiet resignation as Mr Chesworth very carefully lifted out first some tissue paper and then some pieces of pottery.

‘Ah-ha!’ Mapp said. ‘The shards! Pray, Mr Chesworth, what can you tell us about them?’

‘Not very much, I’m afraid,’ he admitted. ‘They seem to be of fairly recent origin.’

‘We knew that, of course,’ Lucia explained. ‘We only kept them so that we would have a complete record of the excavation …’

She tailed off as she realised that only a few moments earlier she had as good as denied that any proper excavation had taken place at all.

‘A very sensible measure,’ Mr Chesworth said approvingly.

‘Well, they look just like pieces of broken flower pot to my untrained eye,’ Elizabeth commented. Dear me – how disappointing!’

‘There is more,’ Mr Chesworth said as he lifted out first another layer of tissue paper and then a knife blade.

‘Well now,’ Elizabeth commented with heavy sarcasm (indeed, she never employed any other variety), ‘that looks a little small to be a Roman sword.’

‘Perhaps they had a special unit of midgets, what?’ Major Benjy conjectured. He seemed unhappy when nobody reacted to this shaft of wit in the manner which he felt it merited.

‘It is a knife, of course,’ Mr Chesworth noted in a tone of slight reproof. It was becoming clear to him that he was being used, and it was not a sensation which he enjoyed. He glanced at Lucia sitting, beautiful yet stoic, on the other side of the room and tried hard to think of something positive to say.

‘It is perhaps from the last century,’ he proffered. A derisive snort from Elizabeth Mapp was his only reward.

Further rustling preceded the emergence of an old clay pipe.

‘We thought it was perhaps … Jacobean,’ Lucia said in rather a small voice.

‘That is indeed possible,’ Mr Chesworth averred quickly as he laid it aside, though he knew better. ‘Tobacco has been smoked in England since late Tudor times, as you know.’

Elizabeth Mapp snorted again, clearly unconvinced. Impatiently, she leaned forwards and thrust her own hand in the box and felt around. Finding nothing but tissue paper, she turned and stared suspiciously at Lucia.

‘But where is the glass, dear one? You distinctly mentioned glass. I remember it well.’

‘The glass, it seems, has been mislaid,’ Georgie observed.

One could at least be thankful for small mercies, he thought. It was the discovery of the first part of the word ‘Apollinaris’ on a fragment of what turned out to be a mineral water bottle which had first convinced Lucia that they were dealing with the site of a temple to Apollo. However deep their humiliation might already be, so deep indeed that they would almost certainly have to quit Tilling the next day never to return, they were at least to be spared the indignity of the whole world being made aware that they had mistaken something which could be bought on any day of the week in Twistevant’s for a Roman relic. Come to think of it, he dimly remembered Lucia telling Grosvenor to clear various ‘finds’ off the table on which she had been scrubbing them with a toothbrush and throw them away.

‘So that’s it then,’ Mapp observed. ‘No Roman remains at all. Oh, how disappointing.’

She gazed triumphantly about her.

‘You’re a spiteful old woman!’ Irene shouted suddenly and ran abruptly from the room, trailing the beginnings of a sob behind her.

The company looked awkwardly at each other. Mapp had never been known to be gracious in defeat in the past. She clearly had no intention of being so in victory either.

Perhaps, thought Diva, who had watched the proceedings with growing horror, Mapp could be forgiven at least a little. For many, many years she had been worsted continually by Lucia in every conceivable social situation. The fact that she had been forced by unwise investment decisions (which naturally but unfairly she blamed on Lucia) to sell Mallards to her rival had never been forgiven. Nor had the fact that it was Lucia, not she, the long-standing resident of Tilling, to whom the town council had turned when seeking first a co-opted member and then their Mayor. Elizabeth had been forced by cruel fate to wait a very long time for her revenge, and now that total victory had at last been delivered into her hands she was clearly intending to savour every moment of it.