Lucia read this interview aloud to Georgie. It seemed to suggest possibilities. She veiled these in her usual manner.
‘Rudolph da Vinci,’ she said musingly. ‘I have heard her name now I come to think of it. She seems to expect us all to be yokels and bumpkins. I fancy she will have to change her views a little. No doubt she will get some introduction to me, and I shall certainly ask her to tea. If she is as uppish and superior as she appears to be, that would be enough. We don’t want best-sellers to write up our cultured vivid life here. So cheap and vulgarizing; not in accordance with our traditions.’
There was nothing, Georgie knew, that would fill Lucia with deeper pride than that traditions should be violated and life vulgarized, and even while she uttered these high sentiments a vision rose in her mind of Rudolph da Vinci writing a best-seller, with the scene laid in Tilling, and with herself, quite undisguised, as head of its social and municipal activities.
‘Yet one must not prejudge her,’ she went on, as this vision grew brighter. ‘I must order a book of hers and read it, before I pass judgment on her work. And we may find her a very pleasant sort of woman. Perhaps I had better call on her, Georgie, for I should not like her to think that I slighted her, and then I will ask her to dine with us, très intime, just you and she and I. I should be sorry if her first impressions of Tilling were not worthy of us. Diva, for instance; it would be misleading if she saw Diva with those extraordinary eyebrows, bringing up teas from the kitchen, purple in the face, and thought her representative of our social life. Or if Elizabeth with her rouged cheeks asked her to dine at the Vicarage, and Benjy told his tiger-stories. Yes, I will call on her as soon as she arrives, and get hold of her. I will take her to our Art Exhibition, allow her to sign the Mayor’s book as a distinguished visitor, and make her free of my house without ceremony. We will show her our real, inner life. Perhaps she plays bridge: I will ascertain that when I call. I might almost meet her at the station, if I can find out when she arrives. Or it might be better if you met her at the station as representing me, and I would call on her at Grebe half an hour afterwards. That would be more regular.’
‘Elizabeth told me that she arrives by the three twenty-five to-day,’ said Georgie. ‘And she has hired a motor and is meeting her.’
It did not require so keen a nose as Lucia’s to scent rivalry, but she gave no hint of that.
‘Very proper,’ she said. ‘Elizabeth no doubt will drive her to Grebe, and show her tenant the house.’
Lucia bicycled to Grebe about tea-time, but found that Miss Leg had driven into the town, accompanied by the Mayoress, to have tea. She left her official card, as Mayor of Tilling, and went straight to the Vicarage. But Elizabeth was also out, and Lucia at once divined that she had taken Miss Leg to have tea at Diva’s. She longed to follow and open operations at once, but decided to let the Mayoral card do its work. On her way home she bought a copy of the 25th edition of the novelist’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, and dipped into it. It was very sumptuous. On the first page there was a Marchioness who had promised to open a village bazaar and was just setting off to do so, when a telephone-message arrived that a Royal Princess would like to visit her that afternoon. ‘Tell her Royal Highness,’ said that kind-hearted woman, ‘that I have á long-standing engagement, and cannot disappoint my people. I will hurry back as soon as the function is over …’ Lucia pictured herself coming back rather late to entertain Miss Leg at lunch – Georgie would be there to receive her – because it was her day for reading to the inmates of the workhouse. She would return with a copy of Kind Hearts and Coronets in her hand, explaining that the dear old bodies implored her to finish the chapter. The idea of Miss Leg writing a best-seller about Tilling became stupefyingly sweet.
Georgie came in, bringing the evening post.
‘A letter from Olga,’ he said, ‘and she’s written to me too, so it’s sure to be the same. She wants us to go to Riseholme to-morrow for two days, as she’s got music. A string quartette coming down.’
Lucia read her letter.
‘Yes, most kind of her,’ she said. ‘But how can I get away? Ah, she anticipates that, and says that if I’m too busy she will understand. And it would look so marked if I went away directly after Miss Leg had arrived.’
‘That’s for you to judge,’ he said. ‘If you think she matters, I expect you’re right, because Elizabeth’s getting a pretty firm hold. I’ve been introduced to her: Elizabeth brought her in to tea at Diva’s.’
‘I imagined that had happened,’ said Lucia. ‘What about her?’
‘A funny little round red thing, rather like Diva. Swanky. She’s brought a butler and a footman, she told us, and her new Daimler will get down late to-night. And she asked if any of the nobility had got country seats near Tilling –’
‘Did you tell her that I dined and slept – that Duchess Poppy asked me to dine and sleep at the Castle?’ interrupted Lucia.
‘No,’ said Georgie. ‘I thought of it, but then I judged it was wiser not to bring it up again. She ate a whole lot of buns, and she was very gracious to Diva (which Diva didn’t like much), and told her she would order her chef – her very words – to send her a recipe for cream-wafers. Elizabeth’s toadying her like anything. She said “Oh, how kind, Miss Leg. You are lucky, dear Diva.” And they were going on to see the church afterwards, and Leg’s dining with the Mapp-Flints to-morrow.’
Lucia reviewed this rather sinister intelligence.
‘I hate to disappoint dear Olga,’ she said, ‘but I think I had better stop here. What about you?’
‘Of course I shall go,’ said Georgie.
Georgie had to leave for Riseholme next morning without a maid, for in view of the entertainment that might be going on at Mallards, Lucia could not spare either Foljambe or Grosvenor. She spent a long time at the garden-room window that afternoon, and told her cook to have a good tea ready to be served at a moment’s notice, for Miss Leg would surely return her call to-day. Presently a large car came bouncing up the street: from its size Lucia thought at first that it was Susan’s, but there was a man in livery sitting next the chauffeur, and at once she guessed. The car stopped at Mallards, and from behind her curtain Lucia could see that Elizabeth and another woman were inside. A podgy little hand was thrust out of the window, holding a card, which the man-servant thrust into the letter-box. He rang the bell, but before it was answered he mounted again, and the car drove on. A hundred pages of stream-of-consciousness fiction could not have explained the situation more exhaustively to Lucia than her own flash of insight. Elizabeth had evidently told the novelist that it would be quite sufficient to leave a card on the Mayor and have done with her. What followed at the Vicarage that evening when Miss Leg dined with the Mapp-Flints bore out the accuracy of Lucia’s intuition.
‘A very plain simple dinner, dear Miss Leg,’ said Elizabeth as they sat down. ‘Just pot-luck, as I warned you, so I hope you’ve got a country appetite.’
‘I know I have, Liz,’ said Benjy heartily. ‘A round of golf makes me as hungry as I used to be after a day’s tiger-shooting in the jungle.’
‘Those are trophies of yours at Grebe, then,’ said Miss Leg. ‘I consider tiger-shooting a manly pursuit. That’s what I mean by sport, taking your life in your hand instead of sitting in an armchair and firing into flocks of hand-reared pheasants. That kind of “sportsman” doesn’t even load his own gun, I believe. Butchers and poulterers; that’s what I called them in one of my books.’
‘Withering! scathing!’ cried Elizabeth. ‘And how well deserved! Benjy gave such a wonderful lecture here the other day about his hair-breadth escapes. You could have heard a pin drop.’
‘Ah, that’s an old story now,’ said Benjy. ‘My shikarri days are over. And there’s not a man in Tilling who’s even seen a tiger except through the bars at the Zoo. Georgie Pillson, for instance –’
‘Whom I presented to you at tea yesterday, Miss Leg,’ put in Elizabeth. ‘Husband of our dear Mayor. Pointed beard.
Sketches quite prettily, and does exquisite needlework. My wicked Benjy once dubbed him Miss Milliner Michael-Angelo.’
‘And that was very withering too,’ said Miss Leg, eating lumps of expensive middle-cut salmon with a country appetite.
‘Well, well, not very kind, I’m afraid, but I like a man to be a man,’ said Benjy. ‘I’ll take a bit more fish, Liz. A nice fresh-run fish. And what are you going to give us next?’
‘Just a brace of grouse,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Ah, yes. A few old friends with Scotch moors haven’t quite forgotten me yet, Miss Leg. Dear old General!’
‘Your Miss Milliner has gone away, Benjy,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Staying with Miss Olga Bracely. Probably you know her, Miss Leg. The prima donna. Such a fascinating woman.’
‘Alone? Without his wife?’ asked Miss Leg. ‘I do not approve of that. A wife’s duty, Mayor or not, is to be always with her husband and vice versa. If she can’t leave her home, she ought to insist on his stopping with her.’
‘Dear Lucia is a little slack in these ways,’ said Elizabeth regretfully. ‘But she gives us to understand that they’re all old friends.’
‘The older the better,’ said Miss Leg epigrammatically, and they all laughed very much.
‘Tell me more about your Lucia,’ she ordered, when their mirth subsided.
‘I don’t fancy you would find very much in common with her,’ said Elizabeth thoughtfully. ‘Rather prone we think, to plot and intrigue in a way we regret. And a little superior at times.’
‘It seems to have gone to her head to be Mayor,’ put in Benjy. ‘She’d have made a sad mess of things without you to steady her, Liz.’
‘I do my best,’ sighed Elizabeth, ‘though it’s uphill work sometimes. I am her Mayoress and a Councillor, Miss Leg, and she does need assistance and support. Oh, her dear, funny little ways! She’s got a curious delusion that she can play the piano, and she gives us a treat sometimes, and one doesn’t know which way to look. And not long ago – how you’ll scream, Miss Leg, she told us all, several times over, that she was going to stay with the Duchess of Sheffield, and when she came back she showed us quantities of photographs of the Castle to prove she had been there –’
‘I went to a Charity Concert of the Duchess’s in her mansion in Grosvenor Square not long ago,’ said Miss Leg. ‘Five-guinea seats. Does she live near here?’
‘No, many miles away. There’s the cream of it. It turned out that Worship only went to tea. A three-hours’ drive each way to get a cup of tea! So odd. I almost suspect that she was never asked at all really; some mistake. And she always alludes to her as Poppy; whether she calls her that to her face is another question.’
‘Evidently a snob,’ said Miss Leg. ‘If there’s one thing I hate it’s snobbishness.’
‘Oh, you mustn’t call her a snob,’ cried Elizabeth. ‘I should be so vexed with myself if I had conveyed that impression.’
‘And is that a family house of her husband’s where I left my card to-day?’ asked Miss Leg.
Elizabeth sighed.
‘Oh, what a tragic question!’ she said. ‘No, they’re quite parvenus in Tilling; that beautiful house – such a garden – belonged to my family. I couldn’t afford to live there, and I had to sell it. Lucia gave me a pitiful price for it, but beggars can’t be choosers. A cruel moment!’
‘What a shame,’ said Miss Leg. ‘All the old homes of England are going to upstarts and interlopers. I hope you never set foot in it.’
‘It’s a struggle to do so,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but I feel that both as Mayoress and as a friend of Lucia, I must be neighbourly. Neither officially nor socially must I fail to stand by her.’
They made plans for next day. Elizabeth was very sarcastic and amusing about the morning shopping of her friends.
‘Such fun!’ she said. ‘Quite a feature of life here, you must not miss it. You’ll see Diva bolting in and out of shops like a rabbit, Benjy says, when a ferret’s after it, and Susan Wyse perhaps on a tricycle, and Lucia and quaint Irene Coles who painted the Picture of the Year, which is in our exhibition here; you must see that. Then we could pop in at the Town Hall, and I would show you our ancient charters and our wonderful Elizabethan plate. And would you honour us by signing your name in the Mayor’s book for distinguished visitors?’
‘Certainly, very glad,’ said Miss Leg, ‘though I don’t often give my autograph.’
‘Oh, that is kind. I would be ready for you at ten – not too early? and take you round. Must you really be going? Benjy, see if Miss Leg’s beautiful Daimler is here. Au reservoir!’
‘O what?’ asked Miss Leg.
‘Some of the dear folk here say “au reservoir” instead of “au revoir”,’ explained Elizabeth.
‘Why do they do that?’ asked Miss Leg.
Lucia, as she dined alone, had been thinking over the hostilities which she felt were imminent. She was quite determined to annex Miss Leg with a view to being the central figure in her next best-seller, but Elizabeth was determined to annex her too, and Lucia was aware that she and her Mayoress could not run in harness over this job; the feat was impossible. Her pride forbade her to get hold of Miss Leg through Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, somehow or other, must be detached. She sat long that night meditating in the garden-room, and when next morning the Mayoress rang her up as usual at breakfast-time, she went to the telephone ready for anything.
‘Good morning, dear Worship,’ said that cooing voice. ‘What a beautiful day.’
‘Lovely!’ said Lucia.
‘Nothing I can do for you, dear?’
‘Nothing, thanks,’ said Lucia, and waited.
‘I’m taking Miss Leg –’
‘Who?’ asked Lucia.
‘Susan Leg: Rudolph da Vinci: my tenant,’ explained Elizabeth.
‘Oh, yes. She left a card on me yesterday, Foljambe told me. So kind. I hope she will enjoy her visit.’
‘I’m taking her to the Town Hall this morning. So would you be a very sweet Worship and tell the Serjeant to get out the Corporation plate, which she would like to see. We shall be there by half-past ten, so if it is ready by a quarter past there’ll be no delay. And though she seldom gives her autograph, she’s promised to sign her name in Worship’s book.’
Lucia gave a happy sigh. She had not dared to hope for such a rash move.
‘My dear, how very awkward,’ she said. ‘You see, the Corporation plate is always on view to the public on Tuesdays at 3 p.m. – or it may be 2 p.m.; you had better make certain – and it is such a business to get it out. One cannot do that for any casual visitor. And the privilege of signing the Mayor’s book is reserved for really distinguished strangers, whose visit it is an honour to record. Olga, for instance.’
‘But, dear Worship,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’ve already promised to show her the plate.’
‘Nothing simpler. At 2 p.m. or 3 p.m., whichever it is, on Tuesday afternoon.’
‘And the Mayor’s book: I’ve asked her to sign it.’
Lucia laughed gaily.
‘Start a Mayoress’s book, dear,’ she said. ‘You can get anybody you like to sign that.’
Lucia remained a moment in thought after ringing off. Then she rang up the Town Hall.
‘Is that the Serjeant?’ she said. ‘The Mayor speaking. Serjeant, do not get out the Corporation plate or produce my visitors’ book without direct orders from me. At present I have given none. What a lovely morning.’
Lucia gave Mrs Simpson a holiday, as there was nothing for her to do, and went down to the High Street for her marketing. Her mind resembled a modern army attended by an air force and all appliances. It was ready to scout and skirmish, to lay an ambush, to defend or to attack an enemy with explosive from its aircraft or poison gas (which would be only a reprisal, for she was certain it had been used against her). Diva was watching at her window, evidently waiting for her, and threw it open.
‘Have you seen her?’ she asked.
There was only one ??
?her’ just now.
‘Only her hand,’ said Lucia. ‘She put it out of her motor – a podgy sort of hand – yesterday afternoon. She left a card on me, or rather her footman popped it into my letter-box, without asking if I was in. Elizabeth was with her. They drove on.’
‘Well, I do call that rude,’ said Diva, warmly. ‘High and lofty, that’s what she is. She told me her chef would send me a recipe for cream-wafers. I tried it. Muck. I gave one to Paddy, and he was sick. And she rang me up just now to go to tea with her this afternoon. Did she think I was going out to Grebe, just when I was busiest, to eat more muck? Not I. She dined at Elizabeth’s last night, and Janet heard from Elizabeth’s parlourmaid what they had. Tomato soup, middle-cut of salmon sent over from Hornbridge, a brace of grouse from Rice’s, Melba peaches, but only bottled with custard instead of cream, and tinned caviare. And Elizabeth called it pot-luck! I never had such luck there, pot or unpot. Elizabeth’s meaning to run her, that’s what it is. Let ’em run! I’ll come out with you and do my shopping. Just see how Paddy is, but I think he’s got rid of it. Cream-wafers, indeed! Wait a sec.’