Now, it had struck her that Mrs Bartlett, the wife of the vicar of Tilling, had not been so staggered when she was informed at the choir practice of the identity and of the lurid past of the new parishioner as might have been expected: indeed, Mrs Bartlett had whispered, ‘Oh dear me, how exciting – I mean, how shocking,’ and Diva suspected that she did not mean ‘shocking’. So that afternoon she dropped in at the Vicarage with a pair of socks which she had knitted for the Christmas tree at the workhouse, though that event was still more than three months away. After a cursory allusion to her charitable errand, she introduced the true topic.
‘Poor woman!’ she said. ‘She was being wheeled about the High Street this morning and looked so lonely. However many males she has impersonated, that's all over for her. She'll never be Romeo again.’
‘No indeed, poor thing!’ said Mrs Bartlett; ‘and, dear me, how she must miss the excitement of it. I wonder if she'll write her memoirs: most people do if they've had a past. Of course, if they haven't, there's nothing to write about. Shouldn't I like to read Lady Deal's memoirs! But how much more exciting to hear her talk about it all, if we only could!’
‘I feel just the same,’ said Diva, ‘and, besides, the whole thing is mysterious. What if you and I went to call? Indeed, I think it's almost your duty to do so, as the clergyman's wife. Her settling in Tilling looks very like repentance, in which case you ought to set the example, Evie, of being friendly.’
‘But what would Elizabeth Mapp say?’ asked Mrs Bartlett. ‘She thought nobody ought to know her.’
‘Pooh,’ said Diva. ‘If you'll come and call, Evie, I'll come with you. And is it really quite certain that she is Lady Deal?’
‘Oh, I hope so,’ said Evie.
‘Yes, so do I, I'm sure, but all the authority we have for it at present is that Elizabeth said that Lady Deal had taken Suntrap. And who told Elizabeth that? There's too much Elizabeth in it. Let's go and call there, Evie: now, at once.’
‘Oh, but dare we?’ said the timorous Evie. ‘Elizabeth will see us. She's sketching at the corner there.’
‘No, that's her morning sketch,’ said Diva. ‘Besides, who cares if she does?’
The socks for the Christmas tree were now quite forgotten and, with this parcel still unopened, the two ladies set forth, with Mrs Bartlett giving fearful sidelong glances this way and that. But there were no signs of Elizabeth, and they arrived undetected at Suntrap, and inquired if Lady Deal was in.
‘No, ma'am,’ said Susie. ‘Her ladyship was only here for two nights settling Miss Mackintosh in, but she may be down again to-morrow. Miss Mackintosh is in.’
Susie led the way to the drawing-room, and there, apparently, was Miss Mackintosh.
‘How good of you to come and call on me,’ she said. ‘And will you excuse my getting up? I am so dreadfully lame. Tea, Susie, please!’
Of course it was a disappointment to know that the lady in the bath-chair was not the repentant male impersonator, but the chill of that was tempered by the knowledge that Elizabeth had been completely at sea, and how far from land, no one yet could conjecture. Their hostess seemed an extremely pleasant woman, and under the friendly stimulus of tea even brighter prospects disclosed themselves.
‘I love Tilling already,’ said Miss Mackintosh, ‘and. Lady Deal adores it. It's her house, not mine, you know – but I think I had better explain it all, and then I've got some questions to ask. You see, I'm Florence's old governess, and Susie is her old nurse, and Florence wanted to make us comfortable, and at the same time to have some little house to pop down to herself when she was utterly tired out with her work.’
Diva's head began to whirl. It sounded as if Florence was Lady Deal, but then, according to the Peerage, Lady Deal was Helena Herman. Perhaps she was Helena Florence Herman.
‘It may get clearer soon,’ she thought to herself, ‘and, anyhow, we're coming to Lady Deal's work.’
‘Her work must be very tiring indeed,’ said Evie.
‘Yes, she's very naughty about it, said Miss Mackintosh. ‘Girl-guides, mothers’ meetings, Primrose League, and now she's standing for Parliament. And it was so like her; she came down here last week, before I arrived, in order to pull furniture about and make the house comfortable for me when I got here. And she's coming back to-morrow to spend a week here I hope. Won't you both come in and see her? She longs to know Tilling. Do you play bridge by any chance? Florence adores bridge.’
‘Yes, we play a great deal in Tilling,’ said Diva. ‘We're devoted to it too.’
‘That's capital. Now, I'm going to insist that you should both dine with us to-morrow, and we'll have a rubber and a talk. I hope you both hate majority-calling as much as we do.’
‘Loathe it,’ said Diva.
‘Splendid. You'll come, then. And now I long to know something. Who was the mysterious lady who called here in the afternoon when Florence came down to move furniture, and returned an hour or two afterwards and asked for the card she had left with instructions that it should be given to Lady Deal? Florence is thrilled about her. Some short name, Tap or Rap. Susie couldn't remember it.’
Evie suddenly gave vent to a shrill cascade of squeaky laughter.
‘Oh dear me,’ she said. ‘That would be Miss Mapp. Miss Mapp is a great figure in Tilling. And she called! Fancy!’
‘But why did she come back and take her card away?’ asked Miss Mackintosh. ‘I told Florence that Miss Mapp had heard something dreadful about her. And how did she know that Lady Deal was coming here at all? The house was taken in my name.’
‘That's just what we all long to find out,’ said Diva eagerly. ‘She said that somebody in London told her.’
‘But who?’ asked Miss Mackintosh. ‘Florence only settled to come at lunch-time that day, and she told her butler to ring up Susie and say she would be arriving.’
Diva's eyes grew round and bright with inductive reasoning.
‘I believe we're on the right tack,’ she said. ‘Could she have received Lady Deal's butler's message, do you think? What's your number?’
‘Tilling 76,’ said Miss Mackintosh.
Evie gave three ecstatic little squeaks.
‘Oh, that's it, that's it!’ she said. ‘Elizabeth Mapp is Tilling 67. So careless of them, but all quite plain. And she did hear it from somebody in London. Quite true, and so dreadfully false and misleading, and so like her. Isn't it, Diva? Well, it does serve her right to be found out.’
Miss Mackintosh was evidently a true Tillingite.
‘How marvellous!’ she said. ‘Tell me much more about Miss Mapp. But let's go back. Why did she take that card away?’
Diva looked at Evie, and Evie looked at Diva.
‘You tell her,’ said Evie.
‘Well, it was like this,’ said Diva. ‘Let us suppose that she heard the butler say that Lady Deal was coming –’
‘And passed it on,’ interrupted Miss Mackintosh. ‘Because Susie got the message and said it was wonderfully clear for a trunk call. That explains it. Please go on.’
‘And so Elizabeth Mapp called,’ said Diva, ‘and left her card. I didn't know that until you told me just now. And now I come in. I met her that very afternoon, and she told me that Lady Deal, so she had heard in London, had taken this house. So we looked up Lady Deal in a very old Peerage of hers –’
Miss Mackintosh waved her arms wildly.
‘Oh, please stop, and let me guess,’ she cried. ‘I shall go crazy with joy if I'm right. It was an old Peerage, and so she found that Lady Deal was Helena Herman –’
‘Whom she had seen ten years ago at a music hall as a male impersonator,’ cried Diva.
‘And didn't want to know her,’ interrupted Miss Mackintosh.
‘Yes, that's it, but that is not all. I hope you won't mind, but it's too rich. She saw you this morning coming out of your house in your bath-chair, and was quite sure that you were that Lady Deal.’
The three ladies rocked with laughter. Sometimes one recovered, a
nd sometimes two, but they were re-infected by the third, and so they went on, solo and chorus, and duet and chorus, till exhaustion set in.
‘But there's still a mystery,’ said Diva at length, wiping her eyes. ‘Why did the Peerage say that Lady Deal was Helena Herman?’
‘Oh, that's the last Lady Deal,’ said Miss Mackintosh. ‘Helena Herman's Lord Deal died without children and Florence's Lord Deal, my Lady Deal, succeeded. Cousins.’
‘If that isn't a lesson for Elizabeth Mapp,’ said Diva. ‘Better go to the expense of a new Peerage than make such a muddle. But what a long call we've made. We must go.’
‘Florence shall hear every word of it to-morrow night,’ said Miss Mackintosh. ‘I promise not to tell her till then. We'll all tell her.’
‘Oh, that is kind of you,’ said Diva.
‘It's only fair. And what about Miss Mapp being told?’
‘She'll find it out by degrees,’ said the ruthless Diva. ‘It will hurt more in bits.’
‘Oh, but she mustn't be hurt,’ said Miss Mackintosh. ‘She's too precious, I adore her.’
‘So do we,’ said Diva. ‘But we like her to be found out occasionally. You will, too, when you know her.’
Lucia in London
1
Considering that Philip Lucas's aunt who died early in April was no less than eighty-three years old, and had spent the last seven of them bedridden in a private lunatic asylum, it had been generally and perhaps reasonably hoped among his friends and those of his wife that the bereavement would not be regarded by either of them as an intolerable tragedy. Mrs Quantock, in fact, who, like everybody else at Riseholme, had sent a neat little note of condolence to Mrs Lucas, had, without using the actual words ‘happy release’, certainly implied it or its close equivalent.
She was hoping that there would be a reply to it, for though she had said in her note that her dear Lucia mustn't dream of answering it, that was a mere figure of speech, and she had instructed her parlourmaid, who took it across to The Hurst immediately after lunch, to say that she didn't know if there was an answer, and would wait to see, for Mrs Lucas might perhaps give a little hint ever so vaguely about what the expectations were concerning which everybody was dying to get information…
While she waited for this, Daisy Quantock was busy, like everybody else in the village on this beautiful afternoon of spring, with her garden, hacking about with a small but destructive fork in her flower-beds. She was a gardener of the ruthless type, and went for any small green thing that incautiously showed a timid spike above the earth, suspecting it of being a weed. She had had a slight difference with the professional gardener who had hitherto worked for her on three afternoons during the week, and had told him that his services were no longer required. She meant to do her gardening herself this year, and was confident that a profusion of beautiful flowers and a plethora of delicious vegetables would be the result. At the end of her garden path was a barrow of rich manure, which she proposed, when she had finished the slaughter of the innocents, to dig into the depopulated beds. On the other side of her paling her neighbour, Georgie Pillson, was rolling his strip of lawn, on which, during the summer, he often played croquet on a small scale. Occasionally they shouted remarks to each other, but as they got more and more out of breath with their exertions the remarks got fewer. Mrs Quantock's last question had been ‘What do you do with slugs, Georgie?’ and Georgie had panted out, ‘Pretend you don't see them.’
Mrs Quantock had lately grown rather stout owing to a diet of sour milk, which with plenty of sugar was not unpalatable; but sour milk and pyramids of raw vegetables had quite stopped all the symptoms of consumption which the study of a small but lurid medical manual had induced. Today she had eaten a large but normal lunch in order to test the merits of her new cook, who certainly was a success, for her husband had gobbled up his food with great avidity instead of turning it over and over with his fork as if it was hay. In consequence, stoutness, surfeit, and so much stooping had made her feel rather giddy, and she was standing up to recover, wondering if this giddiness was a symptom of something dire, when de Vere, for such was the incredible name of her parlourmaid, came down the steps from the dining-room with a note in her hand. So Mrs Quantock hastily took off her gardening-gloves of stout leather, and opened it.
There was a sentence of formal thanks for her sympathy which Mrs Lucas immensely prized, and then followed these ridiculous words:
It has been a terrible blow to my poor Pepino and myself. We trusted that Auntie Amy might have been spared us for a few years yet.
Ever, dear Daisy, your sad
LUCIA.
And not a word about expectations!… Lucia's dear Daisy crumpled up the absurd note, and said ‘Rubbish’, so loud that Georgie Pillson in the next garden thought he was being addressed.
‘What's that?’ he said.
‘Georgie, come to the fence a minute,’ said Mrs Quantock. ‘I want to speak to you.’
Georgie, longing for a little gossip, let go of the handle of his roller, which, suddenly released, gave a loud squeak and rapped him smartly on the elbow.
‘Tarsome thing!’ said Georgie.
He went to the fence and, being tall, could look over it. There was Mrs Quantock angrily poking Lucia's note into the flower-bed she had been weeding.
‘What is it?’ said Georgie. ‘Shall I like it?’
His face red and moist with exertion, appearing just over the top of the fence, looked like the sun about to set below the flat grey horizon of the sea.
‘I don't know if you'll like it,’ said Daisy, ‘but it's your Lucia. I sent her a little note of condolence about the aunt, and she says it has been a terrible blow to Pepino and herself. They hoped that the old lady might have been spared them a few years yet.’
‘No!’ said Georgie, wiping the moisture off his forehead with the back of one of his beautiful pearl-grey gloves.
‘But she did,’ said the infuriated Daisy, ‘they were her very words. I could show you if I hadn't dug it in. Such a pack of nonsense! I hope that long before I've been bedridden for seven years, somebody will strangle me with a boot-lace, or anything handy. Why does Lucia pretend to be sorry? What does it all mean?’
Georgie had long been devoted henchman to Lucia (Mrs Lucas, wife of Philip Lucas, and so Lucia), and though he could criticize her in his mind, when he was alone in his bed or his bath, he always championed her in the face of the criticism of others. Whereas Daisy criticized everybody everywhere…
‘Perhaps it means what it says,’ he observed with the delicate sarcasm that never had any effect on his neighbour.
‘It can't possibly do that,’ said Mrs Quantock. ‘Neither Lucia nor Pepino have set eyes on his aunt for years, nor spoken of her. Last time Pepino went to see her she bit him. Sling for a week afterwards, don't you remember, and he was terrified of blood-poisoning. How can her death be a blow, and as for her being spared –’
Mrs Quantock suddenly broke off, remembering that de Vere was still standing there and drinking it all in.
‘That's all, de Vere,’ she said.
‘Thank you, ma'am,’ said de Vere, striding back towards the house. She had high-heeled shoes on, and each time she lifted her foot, the heel which had been embedded by her weight in the soft lawn came out with the sound of a cork being drawn. Then Daisy came closer to the fence, with the light of inductive reasoning, which was much cultivated at Riseholme, veiling the fury of her eye.
‘Georgie, I've got it,’ she said. ‘I've guessed what it means.’
Now though Georgie was devoted to his Lucia, he was just as devoted to inductive reasoning, and Daisy Quantock was, with the exception of himself, far the most powerful logician in the place.
‘What is it, then?’ he asked.
‘Stupid of me not to have thought of it at once,’ said Daisy. ‘Why, don't you see? Pepino is Auntie's heir, for she was unmarried, and he's the only nephew, and probably he has been left piles and piles. So naturally they say
it's a terrible blow. Wouldn't do to be exultant. They must say it's a terrible blow, to show they don't care about the money. The more they're left, the sadder it is. So natural. I blame myself for not having thought of it at once. Have you seen her since?’
‘Not for a quiet talk,’ said Georgie. ‘Pepino was there, and a man who, I think, was Pepino's lawyer. He was frightfully deferential.’
‘That proves it,’ said Daisy. ‘And nothing said of any kind?’
Georgie's face screwed itself up in the effort to remember.
‘Yes, there was something,’ he said, ‘but I was talking to Lucia, and the others were talking rather low. But I did hear the lawyer say something to Pepino about pearls. I do remember the word pearls. Perhaps it was the old lady's pearls.’
Mrs Quantock gave a short laugh.
‘It couldn't have been Pepino's,’ she said. ‘He has one in a tie-pin. It's called pear-shaped, but there's little shape about it. When do wills come out?’
‘Oh, ages,’ said Georgie. ‘Months. And there's a house in London, I know.’
‘Whereabouts?’ asked Daisy greedily.
Georgie's face assumed a look of intense concentration.
‘I couldn't tell you for certain,’ he said, ‘but I know Pepino went up to town not long ago to see about some repairs to his aunt's house, and I think it was the roof.’
‘It doesn't matter where the repairs were,’ said Daisy impatiently. ‘I want to know where the house was.’
‘You interrupt me,’ said Georgie. ‘I was telling you. I know he went to Harrods afterwards and walked there, because he and Lucia were dining with me and he said so. So the house must have been close to Harrods, quite close I mean, because it was raining, and if it had been any reasonable distance he would have had a taxi. So it might be Knightsbridge.’