The Complete Mapp & Lucia (142 page)

With a sigh she followed Withers out into the garden and up the eight steps into the garden-room. She had not seen the young couple since the long retirement of their honeymoon to the bungalow and to the garishness of Monte Carlo, and now even that mysterious phenomenon of Georgie with a grey, nearly white, beard faded out before the intense human interest of observing how they had adjusted themselves to matrimony… “
Chérie!”
cried Mrs. Elizabeth. “Too lovely to see you again! My Benjy-boy and I only got back two days ago, and since then it’s been ‘upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber,’ all day, in order to get things shipshape and comfy and
comme il faut
again. But now we’re settled in,
n’est ce pas?”

Lucia could not quite make up her mind whether these pretty Gallicisms were the automatic result of Elizabeth’s having spent a month in France, or whether they were ironically allusive to her own habit of using easy Italian phrases in her talk. But she scarcely gave a thought to that, for the psychological balance between the two was so much more absorbing. Certainly Elizabeth and her Benjy-boy seemed an enamoured couple. He called her Liz and Girlie and perched himself on the arm of her chair as they waited for the rest of the gamblers to gather, and she patted his hand and pulled his cuff straight. Had she surrendered to him, Lucia wondered, had matrimony wrought a miraculous change in this domineering woman? The change in the room itself seemed to support the astounding proposition. It was far the biggest and best room in Mallards, and in the days of Elizabeth’s virginity it had dripped with feminine knick-knacks, vases and china figures, and Tilling crockery pigs, screens set at angles, muslin blinds and riband-tied curtains behind which she sat in hiding to observe the life of the place. Here had been her writing-table close to the hot water pipes and here her cosy corner by the fire with her work-basket. But now instead of her water-colours on the walls were heads of deer and antelopes, the spoil of Benjy’s sporting expeditions in India, and a trophy consisting of spears and arrows and rhinoceros-hide whips and an apron made of shells, and on the floor were his moth-eaten tiger-skins. A stern business table stood in the window, a leather chair like a hipbath in her cosy corner, a gun stand with golf clubs against the wall, and the room reeked of masculinity and stale cigar smoke. In fact, all it had in common with its old aspect was the big false bookcase in the wall which masked the cupboard, in which once, for fear of lack of food during a coal strike, the prudent Elizabeth had stored immense quantities of corned beef and other nutritious provisions. All this change looked like surrender: Girlie Mapp had given up her best room to Benjy-boy Flint. Their little pats and tweaks at each other might have been put on merely as Company-manners suitable to a newly-married couple, but the room itself furnished more substantial evidence.

The party speedily assembled: the Wyses’ huge Rolls-Royce from their house fifty yards away hooted at the front door and Susan staggered in under the weight of her great sable coat, and the odour of preservatives from moth gradually overscored that of cigars. Algernon followed and made a bow and a polite speech to everybody. The Padre and Mrs. Bartlett arrived next: he had been to Ireland for his holiday, and had acquired a touch of brogue which he grafted on to his Highland accent, and the effect was interesting, as if men of two nationalities were talking together of whom the Irishman only got in a word or two edgeways. Diva Plaistow completed the assembly and tripped heavily over the head of a one-eyed tiger. The other eye flew out at the shock of the impact and she put it, with apologies, on the chimneypiece.

The disposition of the players was easily settled, for there were three married couples to be separated, and Diva and Lucia made the fourth at each of the tables. Concentration settled down on the room like the grip of some intense frost, broken, at the end of each hand, as if by a sudden thaw, by torrential postmortems. At Lucia’s table, she and Elizabeth were partners against Mr. Wyse and the Padre. “Begorra,” said he, “the bhoys play the lassies. Eh, mon, there’s a sair muckle job for the puir wee laddies agin the guid wives o’ Tilling, begob.”

Though Elizabeth seemed to have surrendered to her Benjy-boy, it was clear that she had no thoughts of doing so to the other wee laddies, who, though vulnerable after the first hand were again and again prevented from winning the rubber by preposterously expensive bids on Elizabeth’s part.

“Yes, dear Lucia,” she said, “three hundred down I’m afraid, but then it’s worth six hundred to prevent the adversary from going out. Let me see,
qui donne?”

“Key what?” asked the Padre.

“Who gives: I should say, who deals?”

“You do, dear Elizabeth,” said Lucia, “but I don’t know if it’s worth quite so many three hundreds. What do you think?”

Lucia picked up a hand gleaming with high honours, but psychic silences were often as valuable as psychic declarations. The laddies, flushed with untold hundreds above would be sure to declare something in order to net so prodigious a rubber, and she made no bid. Far more psychic to lure them on by modest overbidding and then crush them under a staggering double. But the timorous laddies held their tongues, the hands were thrown in and though Lucia tried to mingle hers with the rest of the pack, Elizabeth relentlessly picked it out and conducted a savage postmortem as if on the corpse of a regicide.

The rubber had to be left for the present, for it was long after tea-time. At tea a most intriguing incident took place, for it had been Major Benjy’s invariable custom at these gatherings to have a whisky and soda or two instead of the milder refreshment. But to-day, to the desperate interest of those who, like Lucia, were intent on observing the mutual adjustments of matrimony, a particularly large cup was provided for him which, when everybody else was served, was filled to the brim by Elizabeth and passed to him. Diva noticed that, too, and paused in her steady consumption of nougat chocolates.

“And so
triste
about poor Mr. Georgie,” said Elizabeth. “I asked him to come in this afternoon, and he telephoned that he was too unwell: hadn’t been out of his
maison
for more than a fortnight. What’s the matter with him? You’ll know, Lucia.”

Lucia and everybody else wondered which of them would have been left out if Georgie had come, or whether Elizabeth had asked him at all. Probably she had not.

“But indeed I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody knows. It’s all very puzzling.”

“And haven’t even you seen him? Fancy!” said Elizabeth. “He must be terribly ill.”

Lucia did not say that actually she had seen him, nor did she mention his beard. She intended to find out what that meant before she disclosed it.

“Oh, I don’t think that,” she said. “But men like to be left quite alone when they’re not the thing.”

Elizabeth kissed her finger-tips across the table to her husband. Really rather sickening.

“That’s not the way of my little Benjy-boy,” she said. “Why, he had a touch of chill out at Monte, and
pas un moment
did I get to myself till he was better. Wasn’t it so, mischief?”

Major Benjy wiped his great walrus-moustache which had been dipped in that cauldron of tea.

“Girlie is a wizard in the sick-room,” he said. “Bucks a man up more than fifty tonics. Ring Georgie up, Liz: say you’ll pop in after dinner and sit with him.”

Lucia waited for the upshot of this offer with some anxiety. Georgie would certainly be curious to see Elizabeth after her marriage and it would be too shattering if he accepted this proposal after having refused her own company. Luckily nothing so lamentable happened. Elizabeth returned from the telephone in a very short space of time, a little flushed, and, for the moment, forgetting to talk French.

“Not up to seeing people,” she said, “so Foljambe told me. A rude woman I’ve always thought: I wonder Mr. Georgie can put up with her. Diva, dear, more chocolates? I’m sure there are plenty more in the cupboard. More tea, anybody? Benjy, dear, another cup? Shall we get back to our rubbers then? All so exciting!”

The wee laddies presently began to get as incautious as the guid wives. It was maddening to be a game up and sixty, and not to be allowed to secure one of the fattest scores above ever known in Sussex. Already it reached nearly to the top of the scoring-sheet, but now owing to penalties from their own overbidding, a second sky-scraper was mounting rapidly beside the first. Then the guid wives got a game, and the deadly process began again.

“
Très amusant!”
exclaimed Elizabeth, sorting her hand with a fixed smile, because it was so amusing, and a trembling hand because it was so agonizing. “Now let me see;
que faire?”

“Hold your hand a wee bitty higher, Mistress Mapp-Flint,” said the Padre, “or sure I can’t help getting a keek o’t.”

“
Monsieur,
the more you keeked the less you’d like it,” said Elizabeth, scanning a hand of appalling rubbish. Quite legitimate to say that.

At this precise moment when Elizabeth was wondering whether it might not pay to be psychic for once, Major Benjy at the other table laid down his hand as dummy, and cast just one glance, quick as a lizard at the knotted face of his wife. “Excuse me,” he said and quietly stole from the room. Elizabeth, so thought Diva, had not noticed his exit, but she certainly noticed his return, though she had got frightfully entangled in her hand, for Lucia had been psychic, too, and God knew what would happen…

“Not kept you waiting, I hope,” said Benjy stealing back. “Just a telephone message. Ha, we seem to be getting on, partner. Well, I must say, beautifully played.”

Diva thought these congratulations had a faint odour about them as if he had been telephoning to a merchant who dealt in spirituous liquors…

It was not till half-past seven that the great tussle came to an end, resulting in a complete wash-out, and the whole party, marvelling at the lateness of the hour left in a great hurry so as not to keep dinner (or a tray) waiting. Mr. Wyse vainly begged Lucia and Diva to be taken home in the Royce: it was such a dark night, he observed, but saw that there was a full moon, and it would be so wet underfoot, but he became aware that the pavements were bone-dry. So after a phrase or two in French from Elizabeth, in Italian from Lucia, in Scotch and Irish from the Padre, so that the threshold of Mallards resembled the Tower of Babel, Diva and Lucia went briskly down towards the High Street, both eager for a communing about the balance of the matrimonial equation.

“What a change, Diva!” began Lucia. “It’s quite charming to see what matrimony has done for Elizabeth. Miraculous, isn’t it? At present there does not seem to be a trace left of her old cantankerousness. She seems positively to dote on him. Those little tweaks and dabs, and above all her giving up the garden-room to him: that shows there must be something real and heartfelt, don’t you think? Fond eyes following him—”

“Not so sure about the fond eyes,” said Diva. “Pretty sharp they looked when he came back from telephoning. Another kind of cup of tea was what he was after. That I’ll swear to. Reeked!”

“No!” said Lucia. “You don’t say so!”

“Yes, I do. Teetotal lunches at the bungalow indeed! Rubbish. Whisky bottles, I bet, buried all over the garden.”

“Dear Diva, that’s pure imagination,” said Lucia very nobly. “If you say such things you’ll get to believe them.”

“Ho! I believe them already,” said Diva. “There’ll be developments yet.”

“I hope they’ll be happy ones, anyhow,” said Lucia. “Of course, as the Padre would say, Major Benjy was apt to lift the elbow occasionally, but I shall continue to believe that’s all done with. Such an enormous cup of tea: I never saw such a cup, and I think it’s a perfect marriage. Perfect! I wonder—”

Diva chipped in.

“I know what you mean. They sleep in that big room overlooking the street. Withers told my cook. Dressing-room for Major Benjy next door; that slip of a room. I’ve seen him shaving at the window myself.”

Lucia walked quickly on after Diva turned into her house in the High Street. Diva was a little coarse sometimes, but in fairness Lucia had to allow that when she said “I wonder,” Diva had interpreted what she wondered with absolute accuracy. If she was right about the precise process of Major Benjy’s telephoning, it would look as if matrimony had not wrought so complete a change in him as in his bride, but perhaps Diva’s sense of smell had been deranged by her enormous consumption of chocolates.

Then like a faint unpleasant odour the thought of her approaching fiftieth birthday came back to her. Only this morning she had resolved to make a worthy use of the few years that lay in front of her and of the energy that boiled inside her, and to couple the two together and achieve something substantial. Yet, even while that resolve was glowing within her, she had frittered four hours away over tea and Bridge, with vast expenditure of nervous force and psychic divination, and there was nothing to shew for it except weariness of the brain, a few dubious conclusions as to the effect of matrimony on the middle-aged and a distaste for small cards… Relaxation, thought Lucia in this sharp attack of moralizing, should be in itself productive. Playing duets with Georgie was productive because their fingers in spite of occasional errors, evoked the divine harmonies of Mozartino and Beethoven: when she made sketches of the twilight marsh her eye drank in the loveliness of Nature, but these hours of Bridge, however strenuous, had not really enriched or refreshed her, and it was no use pretending that they had.

“I must put up in large capital letters over my bed ‘I am fifty’,” she thought as she let herself into her house, “and that will remind me every morning and evening that I’ve done nothing yet which will be remembered after I am gone. I’ve been busy (I will say that for myself) but beyond giving others a few hours of enchantment at the piano, and helping them to keep supple, I’ve done nothing for the world or indeed for Tilling. I must take myself in hand.”