by E. F. Benson
“Si, caro: pensa seriosamente,” said she. “But I must make up my mind now: it wouldn’t be fair on my colleagues not to. There are plenty of others, Georgie, if I refuse. I should think Mr. Twistevant would make an admirable Mayor. Very business-like. Naturally, I do not approve of his views about slums and, of course I should have to resign my place on the Town Council and some other bodies. But what does that matter?”
“Darling, if you put it like that,” said Georgie, “I must say that I think it your duty to accept. You would be condoning slums almost, if you didn’t.”
The subdued radiance in Lucia’s face burst forth like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
“If you think it’s my duty, I must accept,” she said. “You would despise me otherwise. I’ll write at once.”
She paused at the door.
“I wonder what Elizabeth—” she began, then thought better of it, and tripped lightly downstairs.
Tilling had unanimously accepted Lucia’s invitation for dinner and Bridge on Saturday, and Georgie, going upstairs to dress heard himself called from Lucia’s bedroom.
He entered.
Her bed was paved with hats: it was a parterre of hats, of which the boxes stood on the floor, a rampart of boxes. The hats were of the most varied styles. There was one like an old-fashioned beaver hat with a feather in it. There was a Victorian bonnet with strings. There was a three-cornered hat, like that which Napoleon wore in the retreat from Moscow. There was a head-dress like that worn by nuns, and a beret made of cloth of gold. There was a hat like a full-bottomed wig with ribands in it, and a Stuart-looking head-dress like those worn by the ladies of the Court in the time of Charles I. Lucia sitting in front of her glass, with her head on one side was trying the effect of a green turban.
“I want your opinion, dear,” she said. “For official occasions as when the Mayor and Corporation go in state to church, or give a civic welcome to distinguished visitors, the Mayor, if a woman, has an official hat, part of her robes. But there are many semi-official occasions, Georgie, when one would not be wearing robes, but would still like to wear something distinctive. When I preside at Town Councils, for instance, or at all those committees of which I shall be chairman. On all those occasions I should wear the same hat: an undress uniform, you might call it. I don’t think the green turban would do, but I am rather inclined to that beret in cloth of gold.”
Georgie tried on one or two himself.
“I like the beret,” he said. “You could trim it with your beautiful seed pearls.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Lucia cordially. “Or what about the thing like a wig. Rather majestic: the Mayor of Tilling, you know, used to have the power of life and death. Let me try it on again.”
“No, I like the beret better than that,” said Georgie critically. “Besides the Mayor doesn’t have the power of life and death now. Oh, but what about this Stuart-looking one? Rather Vandyckish, don’t you think?”
He brought it to her, and came opposite the mirror himself, so that his face was framed there beside hers. His beard had been trimmed that day to a beautiful point.
“Georgino! Your beard: my hat,” cried Lucia. “What a harmony! Not a question about it!”
“Yes, I think it does suit us,” said Georgie, blushing a little.
THE END
Trouble for Lucia
First Published 1939
Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER I
Lucia Pillson, the Mayor-Elect of Tilling and her husband Georgie were talking together one October afternoon in the garden-room at Mallards. The debate demanded the exercise of their keenest faculties. Viz: Should Lucia, when next month she entered on the supreme Municipal Office, continue to go down to the High Street every morning after breakfast with her market-basket, and make her personal purchases at the shops of the baker, the grocer, the butcher and wherever else the needs of the day’s catering directed? There were pros and cons to be considered, and Lucia had been putting the case for both sides with the tedious lucidity of opposing counsel addressing the Court. It might be confidently expected that, when she had finished exploring the entire territory, she would be fully competent to express the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge. In anticipation of the numerous speeches she would soon be called upon to make as Mayor, she was cultivating, whenever she remembered to do so, a finished oratorical style, and a pedantic Oxford voice.
“I must be very careful, Georgie,” she said. “Thoroughly democratic as you know I am in the truest sense of the word, I shall be entrusted, on the ninth of November next, with the duty of upholding the dignity and tradition of my high office. I’m not sure that I ought to go popping in and out of shops, as I have hitherto done, carrying my market-basket and bustling about just like anybody else. Let me put a somewhat similar case to you. Supposing you saw a newly-appointed Lord Chancellor trotting round the streets of Westminster in shorts, for the sake of exercise. What would you feel about it? What would your reactions be?”
“I hope you’re not thinking of putting on shorts, are you?” asked Georgie, hoping to introduce a lighter tone.
“Certainly not,” said Lucia. “A parallel case only. And then there’s this. It would be intolerable to my democratic principles that, if I went into the grocer’s to make some small purchase, other customers already there should stand aside in order that I might be served first. That would never do. Never!”
Georgie surveyed with an absent air the pretty piece of needlework on which he was engaged. He was embroidering the Borough arms of Tilling in coloured silks on the back of the white kid gloves which Lucia would wear at the inaugural ceremony, and he was not quite sure that he had placed the device exactly in the middle.
“How tar’some,” he said. “Well, it will have to do. I daresay it will stretch right. About the Lord Chancellor in shorts. I don’t think I should mind. It would depend a little on what sort of knees he had. As for other customers standing aside because you were the Mayor, I don’t think you need be afraid of that for a moment. Most unlikely.”
Lucia became violently interested in her gloves.
“My dear, they look too smart for anything,” she said. “Beautiful work, Georgie. Lovely. They remind me of the jewelled gloves you see in primitive Italian pictures on the hands of kneeling Popes and adoring Bishops.”
“Do you think the arms are quite in the middle?” he asked.
“It looks perfect. Shall I try it on?”
Lucia displayed the back of her gloved hand, leaning her forehead elegantly against the finger-tips.
“Yes, that seems all right,” said Georgie. “Give it me back. It’s not quite finished. About the other thing. It would be rather marked if you suddenly stopped doing your marketing yourself, as you’ve done it every day for the last two years or so. Except Sundays. Some people might say that you were swanky because you were Mayor. Elizabeth would.”
“Possibly. But I should be puzzled, dear, to name off-hand anything that mattered less to me than what Elizabeth Mapp-Flint said, poor woman. Give me your opinion, not hers.”
“You might drop the marketing by degrees, if you felt it was undignified,” said Georgie yawning. “Shop every day this week, and only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday next week—”
“No, dear,” interrupted Lucia. “That would be hedging, and I never hedge. One thing or the other.”
“A hedge may save you from falling into a ditch,” said Georgie brilliantly.
“Georgino, how epigrammatic! What does it mean exactly? What ditch?”
“Any ditch,” said Georgie. “Just making a mistake and not being judicious. Tilling is a mass of pitfalls.”
“I don’t mind about pitfalls so long as my conscience assures me that I am guided by right principles. I must set an example in my private as well as my public life. If I decide to go on with my daily marketing I shall certainly make a point of buying very cheap, simple provisions. Cabbages and turnips, for instance, not asparagus.”
“We’ve got plenty of that in the garden when it comes in,” said Georgie.
“—plaice, not soles. Apples,” went on Lucia, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Plain living in private—everybody will hear me buying cheap vegetables—Splendour, those lovely gloves, in public. And high thinking in both.”
“That would sound well in your inaugural speech,” said Georgie.
“I hope it will. What I want to do in our dear Tilling is to elevate the tone, to make it a real centre of intellectual and artistic activity. That must go on simultaneously with social reforms and the well-being of the poorer classes. All the slums must be cleared away. There must be an end to overcrowding. Pasteurisation of milk, Georgie; a strict censorship of the films; benches in sunny corners. Of course, it will cost money. I should like to see the rates go up by leaps and bounds.”
“That won’t make you very popular,” said Georgie.
“I should welcome any unpopularity that such reforms might earn for me. The decorative side of life, too. Flower boxes in the windows of the humblest dwellings. Cheap concerts of first-rate music. The revival of ancient customs, like beating the bounds. I must find out just what that is.”
“The town-council went in procession round the boundaries of the parish,” said Georgie, “and the Mayor was bumped on the boundary stones. Hadn’t we better stick to the question of whether you go marketing or not?”
Lucia did not like the idea of being bumped on boundary stones…
“Quite right, dear. I lose myself in my dreams. We were talking about the example we must set in plain living. I wish it to be known that I do my catering with economy. To be heard ordering neck of mutton at the butcher’s.”
“I won’t eat neck of mutton in order to be an example to anybody,” said Georgie. “And, personally, whatever you settle to do, I won’t give up the morning shopping. Besides, one learns all the news then. Why, it would be worse than not having the wireless! I should be lost without it. So would you.”
Lucia tried to picture herself bereft of that eager daily interchange of gossip, when her Tilling circle of friends bustled up and down the High Street carrying their market-baskets and bumping into each other in the narrow doorways of shops. Rain or fine, with umbrellas and goloshes or with sunshades and the thinnest blouses, it was the bracing hour that whetted the appetite for the complications of life. The idea of missing it was unthinkable, and without the slightest difficulty she ascribed exalted motives and a high sense of duty to its continuance.
“You are right, dear,” she said. “Thank you for your guidance! More than ever now in my new position, it will be incumbent on me to know what Tilling is thinking and feeling. My finger must be on its pulse. That book I was reading the other day, which impressed me so enormously—what on earth was it? A biography.”
“Catherine the Great?” asked Georgie. Lucia had dipped into it lately, but the suggestion was intended to be humorous.
“Yes: I shall forget my own name next. She always had her finger on the pulse of her people: that I maintain was the real source of her greatness. She used to disguise herself, you remember, as a peasant woman—moujik, isn’t it?—and let herself out of the back-door of the Winter Palace, and sat in the bars and cafés or wherever they drink vodka and tea—samovars—and hear what the common people were saying, astonishing her Ministers with her knowledge.”
Georgie felt fearfully bored with her and this preposterous rubbish. Lucia did not care two straws what “the common people” were saying. She, in this hour of shopping in the High Street, wanted to know what fresh mischief Elizabeth Mapp-Flint was hatching, and what Major Benjy Mapp-Flint was at, and whether Diva Plaistow’s Irish terrier had got mange, and if Irene Coles had obtained the sanction of the Town Surveying Department to paint a fresco on the front of her house of a nude Venus rising from the sea, and if Susan Wyse had really sat down on her budgerigar, squashing it quite flat. Instead of which she gassed about the duty of the Mayor Elect of Tilling to have her finger on the pulse of the place, like Catherine the Great. Such nonsense was best met with a touch of sarcasm.
“That will be a new experience, dear,” he said. “Fancy your disguising yourself as a gypsy-woman and stealing out through the back-door, and sitting in the bars of public-houses. I do call that thorough.”
“Ah, you take me too literally, Georgie,” she said. “Only a loose analogy. In some respects I should be sorry to behave like that marvellous woman. But what a splendid notion to listen to all that the moujiks said when their tongues were unloosed with vodka. In vino veritas.”
“Not always,” said Georgie. “For instance, Major Benjy was sitting boozing in the club this afternoon. The wind was too high for him to go out and play golf, so he spent his time in port… Putting out in a gale, you see, or stopping in port. Quite a lot of port.”
Georgie waited for his wife to applaud this pretty play upon words, but she was thinking about herself and Catherine the Great.
“Well, wine wasn’t making him truthful, but just the opposite,” he went on. “Telling the most awful whoppers about the tigers he’d shot and his huge success with women when he was younger.”
“Poor Elizabeth,” said Lucia in an unsympathetic voice.
“He grew quite dreadful,” said Georgie, “talking about his bachelor days of freedom. And he had the insolence to dig me in the ribs and whisper ‘We know all about that, old boy, don’t we? Ha ha. What?’”
“Georgie, how impertinent,” cried Lucia. “Why, it’s comparing Elizabeth with me!”
“And me with him,” suggested Georgie.
“Altogether most unpleasant. Any more news?”
“Yes; I saw Diva for a moment. Paddy’s not got mange. Only a little eczema. And she’s quite determined to start her tea-shop. She asked me if I thought you would perform the opening ceremony and drink the first cup of tea. I said I thought you certainly would. Such éclat for her if you went in your robes! I don’t suppose there would be a muffin left in the place.”
Lucia’s brow clouded, but it made her happy to be on Mayoral subjects again.
“Georgie, I wish you hadn’t encouraged her to hope that I would,” she said. “I should be delighted to give Diva such a magnificent send-off as that, but I must be very careful. Supposing next day somebody opens a new boot-shop I shall have made a precedent and shall have to wear the first pair of shoes. Or a hat-shop. If I open one, I must open all, for I will not show any sort of favouritism. I will gladly, ever so gladly, go and drink the first cup of tea at Diva’s, as Mrs. Pillson, but not officially. I must be officially incognita.”
“She’ll be disappointed,” said Georgie.
“Poor Diva, I fear so. As for robes, quite impossible. The Mayor never appears in robes except when attended by the whole Corporation. I can hardly request my Aldermen and Councillors to have tea with Diva in state. Of course it’s most enterprising of her, but I can’t believe her little tea-room will resemble the goldmine she anticipates.”
“I don’t think she’s doing it just to make money,” said Georgie, “though, of course she wouldn’t mind that.”
“What then? Think of the expense of cups and saucers and tables and tea-spoons. The trouble, too. She told me she meant to serve the teas herself.”
“It’s just that she’ll enjoy so much,” said Georgie, “popping in and out and talking to her customers. She’s got a raving passion for talking to anybody, and she finds it such silent work living alone. She’ll have constant conversation if her tea-room catches on.”
“Well, you may be right,” said Lucia. “Oh, and there’s another thing. My Mayoral banquet. I lay awake half last night—perhaps not
quite so much—thinking about it, and I don’t see how you can come to it.”
“That’s sickening,” said Georgie. “Why not?”
“It’s very difficult. If I ask you, it will certainly set a precedent—”
“You think too much about precedents,” interrupted Georgie. “Nobody will care.”
“But listen. The banquet is entirely official. I shall ask the Mayors of neighbouring boroughs, the Bishop, the Lord Lieutenant, the Vicar, who is my Chaplain, my Aldermen and Councillors, and Justices of the Peace. You, dear, have no official position. We are, so to speak, like Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort.”
“You said that before,” said Georgie, “and I looked it up. When she opened Parliament he drove with her to Westminster and sat beside her on a throne. A throne—”
“I wonder if that is so. Some of those lives of the Queen are very inaccurate. At that rate, the wife of the Lord Chancellor ought to sit on a corner of the Woolsack. Besides, where are you to be placed? You can’t sit next me. The Lord Lieutenant must be on my right and the Bishop on my left—”
“If they come,” observed Georgie.
“Naturally they won’t sit there if they don’t. After them come the Mayors, Aldermen and Councillors. You would have to sit below them all, and that would be intolerable to me.”
“I shouldn’t mind where I sat,” said Georgie.
“I should love you to be there, Georgie,” she said. “But in what capacity? It’s all official, I repeat. Think of tradition.”
“But there isn’t any tradition. No woman has ever been Mayor of Tilling before: you’ve often told me that. However, don’t let us argue about it. I expect Tilling will think it very odd if I’m not there. I shall go up to London that day, and then you can tell them I’ve been called away.”
“That would never do,” cried Lucia. “Tilling would think it much odder if you weren’t here on my great day.”