Lucia Victrix

by E. F. Benson

  She turned her mind to the terms of Lucia’s proposal. The blaze of fury so rightly kindled by the thought of Lucia possessing Mallards was spent, and the thought of that fat capital sum made a warm glow for her among the ashes. As Benjy had said, no tenant for six months or a year would take a house so sorely in need of renovation, and if Lucia was right in supposing that that wretched hole in the ground somewhere in West Africa would not be paying dividends for two years, a tenant for one year, even if she was lucky enough to find one, would only see her half through this impoverished period. No sensible woman could reject so open a way out of her difficulties.

  The mode of accepting this heaven-sent offer required thought. Best, perhaps, just formally to acknowledge the unscrupulous letter, and ask for a few days in which to make up her mind. A little hanging back, a hint conveyed obliquely, say through Diva, that two thousand pounds did not justly represent the difference in values between her lovely Queen Anne house and the villa precariously placed so near the river, a heart-broken wail at the thought of leaving the ancestral home might lead to an increased payment in cash, and that would be pleasant. So, having written her acknowledgment Elizabeth picked up her market-basket and set off for the High Street.

  Quaint Irene had finished her window-sill, and was surveying the effect of this brilliant decoration from the other side of the street. In view of the disclosure which must come soon, Elizabeth suddenly made up her mind to forgive her for the dinner-bell outrage for fear she might do something quainter yet: a cradle, for instance, with a doll inside it, left on the doorstep would be very unnerving, and was just the sort of thing Irene might think of. So she said:

  ‘Good morning, love: what a pretty window-sill. So bright.’

  Regardless of Elizabeth’s marriage Irene still always addressed her as ‘Mapp’.

  ‘Not bad, is it, Mapp,’ she said. ‘What about my painting the whole of your garden-room in the same style? A hundred pounds down, and I’ll begin to-day.’

  ‘That would be very cheap,’ said Mapp enthusiastically. ‘But alas, I fear my days there are numbered.’

  ‘Oh, of course; Lucia’s offer. The most angelic thing I ever heard. I knew you’d jump at it.’

  ‘No, dear, not quite inclined to jump,’ said Mapp rather injudiciously.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean literally,’ said Irene. ‘That would be very rash of you. But isn’t it like her, so noble and generous? I cried when she told me.’

  ‘I shall cry when I have to leave my sweet Mallards,’ observed Elizabeth. ‘If I accept her offer, that is.’

  ‘Then you’ll be a crashing old crocodile, Mapp,’ said Irene. ‘You’ll really think yourself damned lucky to get out of that old ruin of yours on such terms. Do you like my pyjamas? I’ll give you a suit like them when the happy day –’

  ‘Must be getting on,’ interrupted Elizabeth. ‘Such a lot to do.’

  Feeling slightly battered, but with the glow of two thousand pounds comforting her within, Elizabeth turned into the High Street. Diva, it seemed, had finished her shopping, and was seated on this warm morning at her open window reading the paper. Elizabeth approached quite close unobserved, and with an irresistible spasm of playfulness said ‘Bo!’

  Diva gave a violent start.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ she said.

  ‘No, dear, somebody quite different,’ said Elizabeth skittishly. ‘And I’m in such a state of perplexity this morning. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Benjy eloped with Lucia?’ asked Diva. Two could play at being playful.

  Elizabeth winced.

  ‘Diva, dear, jokes on certain subjects only hurt me,’ she said. ‘Tiens! Je vous pardonne.’

  ‘What’s perplexing you then?’ asked Diva. ‘Come in and talk if you want to, tiens. Can’t go bellowing bad French into the street.’

  Elizabeth came in, refused a low and comfortable chair and took a high one.

  ‘Such an agonizing decision to make,’ she said, ‘and its coming just now is almost more than I can bear. I got un petit lettre from Lucia this morning offering to give me the freehold of Grebe and two thousand pounds in exchange for the freehold of Mallards.’

  ‘I knew she was going to make you some offer,’ said Diva. ‘Marvellous for you. Where does the perplexity come in? Besides, you were going to let it for a year if you possibly could.’

  ‘Yes, but the thought of never coming back to it. Mon vieux, so devoted to his garden-room, where we were engaged. Turning out for ever. And think of the difference between my lovely Queen Anne house and that villa by the side of the road that leads nowhere. The danger of floods. The distance.’

  ‘But Lucia’s thought of that,’ said Diva, ‘and puts the difference down at two thousand pounds. I should have thought one thousand was ample.’

  ‘There are things like atmosphere that can’t be represented in terms of money,’ said Elizabeth with feeling. ‘All the old associations. Tante Caroline.’

  ‘Not having known your Tante Caroline I can’t say what her atmosphere’s worth,’ said Diva.

  ‘A saint upon earth,’ said Elizabeth warmly. ‘And Mallards used to be a second home to me long before it was mine.’ (Which was a lie.) ‘Silly of me, perhaps, but the thought of parting with it is agony. Lucia is terribly anxious to get it, on m’a dit.’

  ‘She must be if she’s offered you such a price for it,’ said Diva.

  ‘Diva, dear, we’ve always been such friends,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and it’s seldom, n’est ce pas, that I’ve asked you for any favour. But I do now. Do you think you could let her know, quite casually, that I don’t believe I shall have the heart to leave Mallards? Just that: hardly an allusion to the two thousand pounds.’

  Diva considered this.

  ‘Well, I’ll ask a favour, too, Elizabeth,’ she said, ‘and it is that you should determine to drop that silly habit of putting easy French phrases into your conversation. So confusing. Besides everyone sees you’re only copying Lucia. So ridiculous. All put on. If you will, I’ll do what you ask. Going to tea with her this afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you, sweet. A bargain then, and I’ll try to break myself: I’m sure I don’t want to confuse anybody. Now I must get to my shopping. Kind Susan is taking me for a drive this afternoon, and then a quiet evening with my Benjy-boy.’

  ‘Très agréable,’ said Diva ruthlessly. ‘Can’t you hear how silly it sounds? Been on my mind a long time to tell you that.’

  Lucia was in her Office when Diva arrived for tea, and so could not possibly be disturbed. As she was actually having a sound nap, her guests, Georgie and Diva, had to wait until she happened to awake, and then, observing the time, she came out in a great hurry with a pen behind her ear. Diva executed her commission with much tact and casualness, but Lucia seemed to bore into the middle of her head with that penetrating eye. Having pierced her, she then looked dreamily out of the window.

  ‘Dear me, what is that slang word one hears so much in the City?’ she said. ‘Ah, yes. Bluff. Should you happen to see dear Elizabeth, Diva, would you tell her that I just mentioned to you that my offer does not remain open indefinitely? I shall expect to hear from her in the course of to-morrow. If I hear nothing by then I shall withdraw it.’

  ‘That’s the stuff to give her,’ said Georgie appreciatively. ‘You’ll hear fast enough when she knows that.’

  But the hours of next day went by, and no communication came from Mallards. The morning post brought a letter from Mammoncash, which required a swift decision, but Lucia felt a sad lack of concentration, and was unable to make up her mind, while this other business remained undetermined. When the afternoon faded into dusk and still there was no answer, she became very anxious, and when, on the top of that, the afternoon post brought nothing her anxiety turned into sheer distraction. She rang up the house-agents’ to ask whether Mrs Mapp-Flint had received any application for the lease of Mallards for six months or a year, but Messrs Woolgar & Pipstow, with much regret, refused to disclose
the affairs of their client. She rang up Georgie to see if he knew anything, and received the ominous reply that as he was returning home just now, he saw a man, whom he did not recognize, being admitted into Mallards: Lucia in this tension felt convinced that it was somebody come to look over the house. She rang up Diva who had duly and casually delivered the message to Elizabeth at the marketing-hour. It was an awful afternoon, and Lucia felt that all the money she had made was dross if she could not get this coveted freehold. Finally after tea (at which she could not eat a morsel) she wrote to Elizabeth turning the pounds into guineas, and gave the note to Cadman to deliver by hand and wait for an answer.

  Meantime, ever since lunch, Elizabeth had been sitting at the window of the garden-room, getting on with the conversion of the white crocheted cap into adult size, and casting frequent glances down the street for the arrival of a note from Grebe, to say that Lucia (terrified at the thought that she would not have the heart to quit Mallards) was willing to pay an extra five hundred pounds or so as a stimulant to that failing organ. But no letter came and Elizabeth in turn began to be terrified that the offer would be withdrawn. No sooner had Benjy swallowed a small (not the large) cup of tea on his return from his golf, than she sent him off to Grebe, with a note accepting Lucia’s first offer, and bade him bring back the answer.

  It was dark by now, and Cadman passing through the Landgate into the town met Major Benjy walking very fast in the direction of Grebe. The notes they both carried must therefore have been delivered practically simultaneously, and Elizabeth, in writing, had consented to accept two thousand pounds, and Lucia, in writing, to call them guineas.

  6

  This frightful discrepancy in the premium was adjusted by Lucia offering – more than equitably so she thought, and more than meanly thought the other contracting party – to split the difference, and the double move was instantly begun. In order to get into Mallards more speedily, Lucia left Grebe vacant in the space of two days, not forgetting the india-rubber felting in the passage outside the Office, for assuredly there would be another Temple of Silence at Mallards, and stored her furniture until her new house was fit to receive it. Grebe being thus empty, the vans from Mallards poured tiger-skins and Polynesian aprons into it, and into Mallards there poured a regiment of plumbers and painters and cleaners and decorators. Drains were tested, pointings between bricks renewed, floors scraped and ceilings whitewashed, and for the next fortnight other householders in Tilling had the greatest difficulty in getting any repairs done, for there was scarcely a workman who was not engaged on Mallards.

  Throughout these hectic weeks Lucia stayed with Georgie at the Cottage, and not even he had ever suspected the sheer horse-power of body and mind which she was capable of developing when really extended. She had breakfasted before the first of her workmen appeared in the morning, and was ready to direct and guide them and to cancel all the orders she had given the day before, till everyone was feverishly occupied, and then she went back to the Cottage to read the letters that had come for her by the first post and skim the morning papers for world-movements. Then Mammoncash got his orders, if he had recommended any change in her investments, and Lucia went back to choose wallpapers, or go down into the big cellars that spread over the entire basement of the house. They had not been used for years, for a cupboard in the pantry had been adequate to hold such alcoholic refreshment as Aunt Caroline and her niece had wished to have on the premises, and bins had disintegrated and laths fallen, and rubbish had been hurled there, until the floor was covered with a foot or more of compacted debris. All this, Lucia decreed, must be excavated, and the floor-level laid bare, for both her distaste for living above a rubbish heap, and her passion for restoring Mallards to its original state demanded the clearance. Two navvies with pick-axe and shovel carried up baskets of rubbish through the kitchen where a distracted ironmonger was installing a new boiler. There were rats in this cellar, and Diva very kindly lent Paddy to deal with them, and Paddy very kindly bit a navvy in mistake for a rat. At last the floor-level was reached, and Lucia examining it carefully with an electric torch, discovered that there were lines of brickwork lying at an angle to the rest of the floor. The moment she saw them she was convinced that there was a Roman look about them, and secretly suspected that a Roman villa must once have stood here. There was no time to go into that just now: it must be followed up later, but she sent to the London Library for a few standard books on Roman remains in the South of England, and read an article during lunch-time in Georgie’s En-cyclopaedia about hypocausts.

  After such sedentary mornings Lucia dug in the kitchen-garden for an hour or two clad in Irene’s overalls. Her gardener vainly protested that the spring was not the orthodox season to manure the soil, but it was obvious to Lucia that it required immediate enrichment and it got it. There was a big potato-patch which had evidently been plundered quite lately, for only a few sad stalks remained, and the inference that Elizabeth, before quitting, had dug up all the potatoes and taken them to Grebe was irresistible. The greenhouse, too, was strangely denuded of plants: they must have gone to Grebe as well. But the aspect was admirable for peach-trees, and Lucia ordered half-a-dozen to be trained on the wall. Her gardening-book recommended that a few bumble-bees should always be domiciled in a peach-house for the fertilization of the blossoms, and after a long pursuit her gardener cleverly caught one in his cap. It was transferred with angry buzzings to the peach-house and immediately flew out through a broken pane in the roof.

  A reviving cup of tea started Lucia off again, and she helped to burn the discoloured paint off the banisters of the stairs which were undoubtedly of oak, and she stayed on at this fascinating job till the sun had set and all the workmen had gone. While dressing for dinner she observed that the ground-floor rooms of Mallards that looked on to the street were brilliantly illuminated, as for a party, and realizing that she had left all the electric lights burning, she put a cloak over her evening gown and went across to switch them off. A ponderous parcel of books had arrived from the London Library and she promised herself a historical treat in bed that night. She finished dressing and hurried down to dinner, for Georgie hated to be kept waiting for his meals. Lucia had had little conversation all day, and now, as if the dam of a reservoir had burst, the pent waters of vocal intercourse carried all before them.

  ‘Georgino, such an interesting day,’ she said, ‘but I marvel at the vandalism of the late owner. Drab paint on those beautiful oak banisters, and I feel convinced that I have found the remains of a Roman villa. I conjecture that it runs out towards the kitchen-garden. Possibly it may be a temple. My dear, what delicious fish! Did you know that in the time of Elizabeth – not this one – the Court was entirely supplied with fish from Tilling? A convoy of mules took it to London three times a week … In a few days more, I hope and trust, Mallards will be ready for my furniture, and then you must be at my beck and call all day. Your taste is exquisite: I shall want your sanction for all my dispositions. Shall the garden-room be my Office, do you think? But, as you know, I cannot exist without a music-room, and perhaps I had better use that little cupboard of a room off the hall as my Office. My ledgers and a telephone is all I want there, but double windows must be put in as it looks on to the street. Then I shall have my books in the garden-room: the Greek dramatists are what I shall chiefly work at this year. My dear, how delicious it would be to give some tableaux in the garden from the Greek tragedians! The return of Agamemnon with Cassandra after the Trojan wars. You must certainly be Agamemnon. Could I not double the parts of Cassandra and Clytemnestra? Or a scene from Aristophanes. I began the Thesmophoriazusae a few weeks ago. About the revolt of the Athenian women, from their sequestered and blighted existence. They barricaded themselves into the Acropolis, exactly as the Pankhursts and the suffragettes pad-locked themselves to the railings of the House of Commons and the pulpit in Westminster Abbey. I have always maintained that Aristophanes is the most modern of writers, Bernard Shaw, in fact, but with far more wi
t, more Attic salt. If I might choose a day in all the history of the world to live through, it would be a day in the golden age of Athens. A talk to Socrates in the morning; lunch with Pericles and Aspasia: a matinée at the theatre for a new play by Aristophanes: supper at Plato’s Symposium. How it fires the blood!’

  Georgie was eating a caramel chocolate and reply was impossible, since the teeth in his upper jaw were firmly glued to those of the lower and care was necessary. He could only nod and make massaging movements with his mouth, and Lucia, like Cassandra, only far more optimistic, was filled with the spirit of prophecy.

  ‘I mean to make Mallards the centre of a new artistic and intellectual life in Tilling,’ she said, ‘much as the Hurst was, if I may say so without boasting, at our dear little placid Riseholme. My Attic day, I know, cannot be realized, but if there are, as I strongly suspect, the remains of a Roman temple or villa stretching out into the kitchen-garden, we shall have a whiff of classical ages again. I shall lay bare the place, even if it means scrapping the asparagus-bed. Very likely I shall find a tesselated pavement or two. Then we are so near London, every now and then I shall have a string quartet down, or get somebody to lecture on an archaeological subject, if I am right about my Roman villa. I am getting rather rich, Georgie, I don’t mind telling you, and I shall spend most of my gains on the welfare and enlightenment of Tilling. I do not regard the money I spent in buying Mallards a selfish outlay. It was equipment: I must have some central house with a room like the garden-room where I can hold my gatherings and symposia and so forth, and a garden for rest and refreshment and meditation. Non e bella vista?’