Lucia Victrix (76 page)

‘All too terrible,' she said. ‘I feel that poor Worship has utterly disgraced herself, and brought contempt on the dignified office she holds. Those centuries of honourable men who have been Mayors here must turn in their graves. I've been wondering whether I ought not, in mere self-respect, to resign from being Mayoress. It associates me with her.'

‘That's not such a bad notion,' said the Padre, and Evie gave several shrill squeaks.

‘On the other hand, I should hate to desert her in her trouble,' continued the Mayoress. ‘So true what you said in your sermon last Sunday, Padre, that it's our duty as Christians always to stand by our friends, whenever they are in trouble and need us.'

‘So because she needs you, which she doesn't an atom,' burst out Evie, ‘you come and tell us that she's disgraced herself, and made everybody turn in their graves. Most friendly, Elizabeth.'

‘And I'm of wee wifie's opinion, mem,' said the Padre, with the brilliant thought of Evie becoming Mayoress in his mind, ‘and if you feel you canna' preserve your self-respect unless you resign, why, it's your Christian duty to do so, and I warrant that won't incommode her, so don't let the standing by your friends deter you. And if you ask me what I think of Mistress Lucia's adventure, 'twas a fine spunky thing to have gone flying down the Landgate Street at thirty miles an hour. You and I daurna do it, and peradventure we'd be finer folk if we daur. And she stood and said she was guilty like a God-fearing upstanding body and she deserves a medal, she does. Come awa', wifie: we'll get to our bicycle-lesson.'

The Padre's view was reflected in the town generally, and his new figure of thirty miles an hour accepted. Though it was a very lawless and dangerous feat, Tilling felt proud of having so spirited a Mayor. Diva indulged in secret visions of record-breaking when she had learned to balance herself, and Susan developed such a turn of speed on her tricycle that Algernon called anxiously after her ‘Not so fast, Susan, I beg you. Supposing you met something.' The Padre scudded about his parish on the wheel, and, as the movement grew, Lucia offered to coach anybody in her garden. It became fashionable to career up and down the High Street after dark, when traffic was diminished, and the whole length of it resounded with tinkling bells and twinkled with bicycle-lamps. There were no collisions, for everyone was properly cautious, but on one chilly evening the flapping skirt of Susan's fur coat got so inextricably entangled in the chain of her tricycle that she had to shed it, and Figgis trundled coat and tricycle back to Porpoise Street in the manner of a wheelbarrow.

As the days grew longer and the weather warmer, picnic-parties were arranged to points of interest within easy distance, a castle, a church or a Martello tower, and they ate sandwiches and drank from their thermos-flasks in ruined dungeons or on tombstones or by the edge of a moat. The party, by reason of the various rates of progress which each found comfortable, could not start together, if they were to arrive fairly simultaneously, and Susan on her tricycle was always the first to leave Tilling, and Diva followed. There was some competition for the honour of being the last to leave: Lucia, with the
cachet
of furious riding to her credit, waited till she thought the Padre must have started, while he was sure that his normal pace was faster than hers. In consequence, they usually both arrived very late and very hot. They all wondered how they could ever have confined physical exercise within the radius of pedestrianism, and pitied Elizabeth for the pride that debarred her from joining in these pleasant excursions.

Lucia had failed to convince the Directors of the Southern Railway that the Royal Fish Train was a practicable scheme. ‘Should Their Majesties' so ran the final communication ‘express their Royal wish to be supplied with fish from Tilling, the Directors would see that the delivery was made with all expedition, but in their opinion the ordinary resources of the line will suffice to meet their requirements, of which at present no intimation has been received.'

‘A sad want of enterprise, Georgie,' said the Mayor as she read this discouraging reply. ‘A failure to think municipally and to see the distinction of bringing an Elizabethan custom up to date. I shall not put the scheme before my Council at all.' Lucia dropped this unenterprising ultimatum into the waste-paper basket. The afternoon post had just arrived and the two letters which it brought for her followed the ultimatum.

‘My syllabus for a series of lectures at the Literary Institute is not making a good start,' she said. ‘I asked Mr Desmond McCarthy to talk to us about the less known novelists of the time of William IV, but he has declined. Nor can Mr Noel Coward speak on the technique of the modern stage on any of the five nights I offered him. I am surprised that they should not have welcomed the opportunity to get more widely known.'

‘Tarsome of them,' said Georgie sympathetically, ‘such a chance for them.'

Lucia gave him a sharp glance, then mused for a while in silence over her scheme. Fresh ideas began to flood her mind so copiously that she could scarcely scribble them down fast enough to keep up with them.

‘I think I will lecture on the Shakespearian drama myself,' she said. ‘That should be the inaugural lecture, say April the
fifteenth. I don't seem to have any engagement that night, and you will take the chair for me … Georgie, we might act a short scene together, without dresses or scenery to illustrate the simplicity of the Elizabethan stage. Really, on reflection I think my first series of lectures had much better be given by local speakers. The Padre would address us one night on free will or the origin of evil. Irene on the technique of fresco-painting. Diva on catering for the masses. Then I ought to ask Elizabeth to lecture on something, though I'm sure I don't know on what subject she has any ideas of the slightest value. Ah! Instead, Major Benjy on tiger-shooting. Then a musical evening: the art of Beethoven, with examples. That would make six lectures; six would be enough. I think it would be expected of me to give the last as well as the first. Admission, a shilling, or five shillings for the series. Official, I think, under the patronage of the Mayor.'

‘No,' said Georgie, going back to one of the earlier topics. ‘I won't act any Shakespearian scene with you to illustrate Elizabethan simplicity. And if you ask me I don't believe people will pay a shilling to hear the Padre lecture on free will. They can hear that sort of thing every Sunday morning for nothing but the offertory.'

‘I will consider that,' said Lucia, not listening and beginning to draw up a schedule of the discourses. ‘And if you won't do a scene with me, I might do the sleep-walking from Macbeth by myself. But you must help me with the Beethoven evening. Extracts from the Fifth Symphony for four hands on the piano. That glorious work contains, as I have always maintained, the key to the Master's soul. We must practise hard, and get our extracts by heart.'

Georgie felt the sensation, that was now becoming odiously familiar, of being hunted and harried. Life for him was losing that quality of leisure, which gave one time to feel busy and ready to take so thrilled an interest in the minute happenings of the day. Lucia was poisoning that eager fount by this infusion of Mayoral duties and responsibilities, and tedious schemes for educational lectures and lighting of the streets. True, the old pellucid spring gushed out sometimes: who, for
instance, but she could have made Tilling bicycle-crazy, or have convinced Susan that Blue Birdie had gone to a higher sphere? That was her real
métier
, to render the trivialities of life intense for others. But how her schemes for the good of Tilling bored him!

Lucia finished sketching out her schedule, and began gabbling again.

‘Yes, Georgie, the dates seem to work out all right,' she said, ‘though Mrs Simpson must check them for me. April the fifteenth: my inaugural lecture on Shakespeare. April the twenty-second: the Padre on free will which I am convinced will attract all serious people, for it is a most interesting subject, and I don't think any final explanation of it has yet been given. April the twenty-ninth: Irene on the technique of fresco-painting. May the sixth: Diva on tea-shops. I expect I shall have to write it for her. May the thirteenth: Major Benjy on tigers. May the twentieth: Beethoven, me again … I should like to see these little centres of enlightenment established everywhere in England, and I count it a privilege to be able, in my position, to set an example. The BBC, I don't deny, is doing good work, but lectures delivered viva voce are so much more vivid. Personal magnetism. I shall always entertain the lecturer and a few friends to a plain supper-party here afterwards, and we can continue the discussion in the garden-room. I shall ask some distinguished expert on the subject to come down and stay the night after each lecture: the Bishop when the Padre lectures on free will; Mr Gielgud when I speak about Shakespearian technique; Sir Henry Wood when we have our Beethoven night; and perhaps the Manager of Messrs Lyons after Diva's discourse. I shall send my Town Council complimentary seats in the first row for the inaugural lecture. How does that strike you for a rough sketch? You know how I value your judgment, and it is most important to get the initial steps right.'

Georgie was standing by her table, suppressing a yawn as he glanced at the schedule, and feeling in his waistcoat pocket for his gun-metal match-box with the turquoise latch. As he scooped for it, there dropped out the silver top of Major
Benjy's riding-whip, which he always kept on his person. It fell noiselessly on the piece of damp sponge which Mrs Simpson always preferred to use for moistening postage-stamps, rather than the less genteel human tongue. Simultaneously the telephone-bell rang, and Lucia jumped up.

‘That incessant summons!' she said. ‘A perfect slavery. I think I must take my name off the exchange, and give my number to just a few friends … Yes, yes, I am the Mayor of Tilling. Irene, is it? … My dear how colossal! I don't suppose anybody in Tilling has ever had a picture in the Royal Academy before. Is that the amended version of your fresco, Venus with no clothes on coming to Tilling? I'm sure this one is far nicer. How I wish I had seen it before you sent it in, but when the Academy closes you must show it at our picture-exhibition here. Oh, I've put you down to give a lecture in my Mayoral course of Culture on the technique of painting in fresco. And you're going up to London for varnishing day? Do take care. So many pictures have been ruined by being varnished too much.'

She rang off.

‘Accepted, is it?' said Georgie in great excitement. ‘There'll be wigs on the green if it's exhibited here. I believe I told you about it, but you were wrestling with the Royal Fish Express. Elizabeth, unmistakable, in a shawl and bonnet and striped skirt and button-boots, standing on an oyster-shell, and being blown into Tilling by Benjy in a top-hat among the clouds.'

‘Dear me, that sounds rather dangerously topical,' said Lucia. ‘But it's time to dress. The Mapp-Flints are dining, aren't they? What a coincidence!'

They had a most harmonious dinner, with never a mention of bicycles. Benjy readily consented to read a paper on tiger-shooting on May 13.

‘Ah, what a joy,' said Lucia. ‘I will book it. And some properties perhaps, to give vividness. The riding-whip with which you hit the tiger in the face. Oh, how stupid of me. I had forgotten about its mysterious disappearance which was never cleared up. Pass me the sugar, Georgie.'

There was a momentary pause, and Lucia grew very red in the face as she buried her orange in sugar. But that was soon over, and presently the Mayor and Mayoress went out to the garden-room with interlaced waists and arms. Lucia had told Georgie not to stop too long in the dining-room and Benjy made the most of his time and drank a prodigious quantity of a sound but inexpensive port. Elizabeth had eaten a dried fig for dessert, and a minute but adamantine fig-seed had lodged itself at the base of one of her beautiful teeth. She knew she would not have a tranquil moment till she had evicted it, and she needed only a few seconds unobserved.

‘Dear Worship,' she said. ‘Give me a treat, and let your hands just stray over the piano. Haven't heard you play for ever so long.'

Lucia never needed pressing and opened the lid of the instrument.

‘I'm terribly rusty, I'm afraid,' she said, ‘for I get no time for practising nowadays. Beethoven, dear, or a morsel of precious Mozart; whichever you like.'

‘Oh, prettioth Mothart, pleath,' mumbled Elizabeth, who had effaced herself behind Lucia's business-table. A moment sufficed, and her eye, as she turned round towards the piano again and drank in precious Mozart, fell on Mrs Simpson's piece of damp sponge. Something small and bright, long-lost and familiar, gleamed there. Hesitation would have been mere weakness (besides, it belonged to her husband). She reached out a stealthy hand, and put it inside her bead-bag.

It was barely eleven when the party broke up, for Elizabeth was totally unable to concentrate on cards when her bag contained the lock, if not the key to the unsolved mystery, and she insisted that dear Worship looked very tired. But both she and Benjy were very tired before they had framed and been forced to reject all the hypotheses which could account for the reappearance in so fantastic a place of this fragment of the riding-whip. If the relic had come to light in one of Diva's jam-puffs, the quality of the mystery would have been less baffling, for at least it would have been found on the premises where it was lost, but how it had got to Lucia's table was as inexplicable as
the doctrine of free will. They went over the ground five or six times.

‘Lucia wasn't even present when it vanished,' said Elizabeth as the clock struck midnight. ‘Often, as you know, I think Worship is not quite as above-board as I should wish a colleague to be, but here I do not suspect her.'

Benjy poured himself out some whisky. Finding that Elizabeth was far too absorbed in speculation to notice anything that was going on round her, he hastily drank it, and poured out some more.

‘Pillson then,' he suggested.

‘No; I rang him up that night from Diva's, as he was going to his bath,' said she, ‘and he denied knowing anything about it. He's fairly truthful – far more truthful than Worship anyhow – as far as I've observed.'

‘Diva then,' said Benjy, quietly strengthening his drink.

‘But I searched and I searched, and she had not been out of my sight for five minutes. And where's the rest of it? One could understand the valuable silver cap disappearing – though I don't say for a moment that Diva would have stolen it – but it's just that part that has reappeared.'

‘All mos' mysterious,' said Benjy. ‘But wo'll you do next, Liz? There's the cruksh. Wo'll you do next?'

Benjy had not observed that the Mayoress was trembling slightly, like a motor-bicycle before it starts. Otherwise he would not have been so surprised when she sprang up with a loud crow of triumph.

‘I have it,' she cried. ‘Eureka! as Worship so often says when she's thought of nothing at all. Don't say a word to anybody, Benjy, about the silver cap, but have a fresh cane put into it, and use it as a property (isn't that the word?) at your tiger-talk, just as if it had never been lost. That'll be a bit of puzzle-work for guilty persons, whoever they may be. And it may lead to something in the way of discovery. The thief may turn pale or red or betray himself in some way … What a time of night!'

Puzzle-work began next morning.

‘I can't make out what's happened to it,' said Georgie, in a
state of fuss, as he came down very late to breakfast, ‘and Foljambe can't either.'

Lucia gave an annoyed glance at the clock. It was five minutes to ten; Georgie was getting lazier and lazier in the morning. She gave the special peal of silvery laughter in which mirth played a minor part.

‘Good afternoon,
caro
,' she said sarcastically. ‘Quite rested? Capital!'

Georgie did not like her tone.

‘No, I'm rather tired still,' he said. ‘I shall have a nap after breakfast.'

Lucia abandoned her banter, as he did not seem to appreciate it.

‘Well, I've finished,' she said. ‘Poor Worship has got to go and dictate to Mrs Simpson. And what was it you and Foljambe couldn't find?'

‘The silver top to Benjy's riding-whip. I was sure it was in my yesterday's waistcoat pocket, but it isn't, and Foljambe and I have been through all my suits. Nowhere.'

‘Georgie, how very queer,' she said. ‘When did you see it last?'

‘Sometime yesterday,' he said, opening a letter. A bill.

‘It'll turn up. Things do,' said Lucia.

He was still rather vexed with her.

‘They seem to be better at vanishing,' he said. ‘There was Blue Birdie –'

He opened the second of his letters, and the thought of riding-whip and Blue Birdie alike were totally expunged from his brain.

‘My dear,' he cried. ‘You'd never guess. Olga Bracely. She's back from her world-tour.'

Lucia pretended to recall distant memories. She actually had the most vivid recollection of Olga Bracely, and, not less, of Georgie's unbounded admiration of her in his bachelor days. She wished the world-tour had been longer.

‘Olga Bracely?' she said vaguely. ‘Ah, yes. Prima donna. Charming voice; some notes lovely. So she's got back. How nice!'

‘– and she's going to sing at Covent Garden next month,' continued Georgie, deep in her letter. ‘They're producing Cortese's opera,
Lucrezia
, on May the twentieth. Oh, she'll give us seats in her box. It's a gala performance. Isn't that too lovely? And she wants us to come and stay with her at Riseholme.'