Au Reservoir (6 page)

No matter how distracting the excellence of the food, however, Lucia’s lack of communication betokened deep inner reflection, as shortly became apparent.

‘I find I have been thinking oft of late,’ she revealed as she gestured for Grosvenor to pour the burgundy, ‘of Dame Catherine Winterglass.’

‘Oh yes?’ Georgie replied, while holding his glass up to the light. ‘I say, what a wonderful colour this wine has. Is it the last of the Gevrey Chambertin thirty-eight?’

‘Mm, yes, I think so,’ Lucia confirmed, darting him a quick reproving glance. While both the glance and the implied rebuke which it conveyed were clearly caught by Olga, they were nonetheless lost upon Georgie, who was by now inhaling deeply the bouquet of his wine before sipping it delicately, replacing the glass on the table and murmuring his approval.

He looked around for confirmation of his opinion but found only Lucia looking rather stern and Olga looking rather awkward. He wondered whether he had missed something, came to the conclusion that he probably had and adopted in consequence an expression of concerned enquiry.

If his wife was at all mollified by such overt contrition, she did not show it.

‘I was saying, Georgie,’ she repeated sharply, ‘that I had been thinking of Dame Catherine Winterglass.’

Georgie decided to be enthralled by this news.

‘Have you really?’ he marvelled. ‘Well, just fancy.’

‘The name seems familiar,’ Olga ventured. ‘I’m sure I must have heard you talk about her, Lucia, but I’m afraid I can’t remember in what context.’

Lucia sighed deeply and then began to explain in the sort of declamatory tones that made her improving lectures on Shakespearean drama so utterly compelling for at least the first two minutes.

‘Dame Catherine,’ she reminded her audience, ‘was the governess of a heartless male employer, a solicitor in fact, who threw her out of her employment to make way for a younger candidate.’

‘The swine!’ Georgie exclaimed, since such an endorsement of Lucia’s disapprobation seemed to be called for.

Lucia paused, looked down at her plate and summoned up a deep sigh, which seemed to communicate exactly the same depth of feeling as Georgie had just indicated, but naturally in more lady-like a fashion.

‘Happily,’ Lucia continued, ‘Dame Catherine was an extremely courageous and resourceful lady, and had by this time already managed to amass a small amount of personal capital – some five hundred pounds, I believe.’

‘Not so small, actually,’ Georgie murmured sotto voce.

Olga for her part tried hard to imagine exactly what sorts of courageous and resourceful behaviour on the part of a younger, and presumably prettier, Dame Catherine had induced a canny male solicitor to part with five hundred pounds.

‘This sum,’ Lucia swept on imperiously, ‘she proceeded to multiply many times over by judicious investment –’

‘Speculation, more like,’ Georgie corrected her, this time not so sotto voce.

Lucia quelled this incipient rebellion with a piercing glance.

‘By judicious investment,’ she repeated sternly, ‘to the point where she owned several houses, entertained royalty, and was able to be a generous patroness to a number of different charitable undertakings.’

‘Oh, now I remember,’ Olga said. ‘It was she who inspired you to begin your career as a stock market investor. You keep her photo on your desk.’

Lucia graciously inclined her head to acknowledge the accuracy of Olga’s recall.

‘Indeed I do,’ she concurred. ‘It is a privilege to have the example of such a remarkable woman always before me.’

She gazed rather mistily into the street outside the window to signify the depths of her sisterly emotions. Georgie took advantage of this lull in the proceedings to pour both himself and Olga another glass of burgundy from the decanter.

‘A remarkable woman indeed,’ Olga echoed.

‘That’s what the world needs, Georgie,’ she went on rather more hotly, turning to him, ‘more women who can carry the fight to men on their own terms.’

‘I’m not sure what my own terms are,’ Georgie mused, ‘but whatever they are, I surrender.’

They both laughed, while Lucia frowned.

‘This really is remarkable steak and kidney pudding,’ Georgie changed the subject hastily. ‘Why, it makes that wretched rationing almost worthwhile. Just think, before the war we would have been having leg of lamb or something like that this evening and just thinking of it as another everyday dish, while now it’s an occasional treat and we’ve learned to appreciate it.’

‘Absolutely!’ agreed Olga, who was known for the resolute qualities of her appetite. ‘You
are
lucky, Lucia, to have such a splendid cook.’

Lucia’s frown, though slight, was nonetheless still perceptible. It denoted, as it was intended to, that some important message had been communicated but either it had been in too subtle a form to be discerned, or (more likely) that those for whom it had been intended had been insufficiently intelligent to understand it.

‘Of course I remember going with you to Rule’s before the war when you were singing in
Lucrezia
…’ Georgie reminisced, but was cut short by Olga’s knife coming loudly into contact with her plate. Looking across at her, he caught the quick movement of her eyes towards Lucia and then away again.

He too now saw the frown and was perplexed. Lucia had invited approbation of Dame Catherine Winterglass, and approbation had duly been provided. She had implied criticism of Dame Catherine’s employer and he had dutifully joined in, condemning the man as an absolute bounder. Yet clearly something else had been intended by way of a response, and that response had not been forthcoming.

‘What in particular was it that your thoughts of Dame Catherine brought to mind, Lucia?’ asked Olga, whose mind was obviously moving on similar lines to Georgie’s.

The frown faded miraculously from Lucia’s face and was replaced by a look of such deep and appealing innocence that it was clear that the more insouciant what she was about to say might seem then the more heartfelt it would be, and the more spontaneous it might appear then the more lengthily it would in fact have been considered.

‘I was just thinking,’ she said insouciantly and spontaneously, ‘of all the similarities between Dame Catherine’s life and my own.’

Olga and Georgie stared at her blankly, as well they might. Not only had Lucia never been a governess but she was known to dislike children with a passion that was matched only by her detestation of Elizabeth Mapp-Fint, the gramophone and the Labour Party. Not only had she not worked in domestic service for twenty-five years, she had never done a day’s work in her life. Nor could Olga imagine her dealing with the importunate attentions of a middle-aged solicitor with the same courageous and resourceful behaviour that Dame Catherine had seemingly been able to employ.

‘Similarities?’ Georgie queried.

‘Isn’t it obvious, Georgie?’ Lucia replied tartly. Really, she thought, it was quite exasperating just how dense Georgie could be on occasion.

‘You mean the stock market dealings, of course?’ said Olga cannily.

Lucia looked upon her with an altogether more benevolent mien than she had just displayed towards her husband.

‘Partly that, naturally,’ she agreed. ‘Like her, I have increased my capital many times over.’

There could be no dispute about this last statement. She had inherited what was already a very large fortune from Pepino, who had in turn inherited a significant part of it from his aunt, having first taken the very wise precaution of obtaining what passed for her signature on a power of attorney during one of her increasingly rare lucid intervals in the private lunatic asylum to which he had considerately committed her. This inheritance Lucia had greatly increased by a programme of stock market investment beginning shortly after her arrival in Tilling.

Elizabeth Mapp, as she then was, had attempted to shadow some of Lucia’s investments, such as the legendary Siriami gold mine craze, which had been the sole item of discussion over the green baize of Tilling’s bridge tables for some weeks. Sadly for Mapp, Siriami had been a stock whose price had initially headed upwards with dizzying rapidity only then to reverse its direction with equal enthusiasm. While Lucia’s foray into these dangerous waters had been triumphantly successful, Mapp’s timing had been less adroit and her efforts less successful, except insofar as successfully turning a moderate fortune into a very small one. Naturally she had blamed Lucia for having kept her deliberately in the dark about her own dealings, and it was in such controversial circumstances that Mapp had been forced to leave Mallards, which had served as the citadel of her position of social prominence in the town. Casting imprecations in her wake, she had reluctantly decamped to Grebe clutching Lucia’s cheque for a hundred guineas, while Lucia had smiled sweetly and moved into Mallards.

It was while holidaying in Italy, however, that Lucia had experienced her true epiphany as an investor. A chance meeting with an American millionaire, Brabazon Lodge, had provided an entrée to a new world, which involved using her capital together with other like-minded individuals to take control of companies. Liquidating her portfolio for the purposes of participating in his scheme to take over a bank in New York had inadvertently saved her from the consequences of the Wall Street Crash and more besides, since her ‘sell’ orders had been accidentally repeated, thus bringing in a handsome windfall when she was able to buy back all the stocks needed to honour these contracts at much lower prices. Undeterred by the collapse of the very bank which Lodge had intended to buy, they instead put their money to work buying up the bonds of companies that owned office blocks in Manhattan. As the banks, desperate for cash, called in the companies’ loans, the bondholders exercised security over the office blocks, acquiring them in most cases for a fraction of their true value.

So it was that within a few years Lucia had become truly very wealthy indeed, perhaps even one of the wealthiest people in England. Yet this had to remain shrouded in the darkest secrecy, for not only did she not wish to attract the attention of the taxman but exchange controls should have prevented her from transferring money out of England to America in the first place. Here Brabazon Lodge had come to her rescue.

In the confusion surrounding the collapse of the London Stock Exchange alongside that in New York, Lucia had been able to obtain a banker’s draft for most of her capital from Mr Mammoncash, her stockbroker, shortly before his firm failed. With this she went to see a rather grubby little man in Hatton Garden who exchanged it for a packet of uncut diamonds, which she accepted somewhat dubiously as they resembled nothing so much as pebbles from the beach at Camber Sands. With this small but precious parcel concealed about her person she had journeyed to see his equally grubby younger brother in Amsterdam, who had exchanged the pebbles for another banker’s draft payable to bearer, with which she had journeyed to see a really rather nice man in Geneva, who was also Brabazon Lodge’s rather nice man in Geneva.

Even before she had stepped into the diamond dealer’s room in Hatton Garden, little trace remained of Lucia’s money. From the moment the man in Geneva took the Amsterdam draft with a little bow it vanished forever into the warm, comforting womb-like existence of Swiss banking. Suitably clad in new clothes, it went to New York, foreclosed on office blocks and, remaining resolutely in US dollars, spent the war comfortably housed in munitions stocks. Once a year Lucia and Georgie travelled to New York on the
Queen Mary
for a holiday, albeit a working holiday for Lucia as she spent most of her time closeted with Brabazon Lodge, lawyers, investment bankers and stockbrokers. On the homeward voyage, the system went into reverse, with a small parcel from a rather grubby man in the Diamond District concealed about Lucia’s person ready to be delivered back to the grubby man in Hatton Garden and magically transformed by him into Lucia’s anticipated expenditure for the coming year.

‘But also the charitable works,’ Lucia went on.

‘Why yes, you’re right, my dear,’ Georgie said, relieved that he had grasped the point at last. ‘You and Dame Catherine are really most amazingly alike.’

He smiled happily and looked hopefully at the steak and kidney pudding. There appeared to be a least one decent portion remaining.

Worryingly, his wife’s frown returned. She paused for him to amend his judgement and, when he did not, she did so for him.

‘In most respects, certainly, Georgie,’ she said, surprisingly sweetly. ‘All except what many people, silly people certainly but people nonetheless and many of them, might consider the most important.’

She gazed at him levelly, as though confident that her meaning was now clear and that he would grasp it instantly.

Georgie’s eyes darted around the room as though he might find inspiration through word association with some physical object, a technique Mr Wyse had been heard to advocate for use while grappling with a knotty crossword clue. If this was indeed his hope, whether conscious or otherwise, it was to prove in vain.

Suddenly inspiration came to Olga, and she spoke in the voice of one who has just discovered a religious mystery.

‘Dame Catherine was a dame and you’re not,’ she said in wonder. ‘Oh, Lucia, you dear thing, you want to be a dame.’

‘It’s not so much “want”,’ Lucia corrected her at once. ‘More a sense of what is fitting, what is proper. After all, I must have given at least as much to charity over the years as Dame Catherine did. It seems only fair that the dear King – oh, I know he’s a different one now, but I don’t see that matters – should treat us both fairly.’

‘Why, of course,’ Olga agreed enthusiastically, ‘who could possibly deserve it more than you, Lucia?’

She kicked Georgie under the table.

‘Oh yes, rather!’ he chorused. ‘Wouldn’t that be lovely?

‘And of course,’ he added unhelpfully, as his fingers strayed to the Order of Skanderbeg on his lapel (he had commissioned a miniature from Spink’s specially, copied faithfully from the original, which nestled nobly in his bibelot cabinet), ‘I’ve already got my medal.’