by Tom Holt
Dazed and shattered by his transcendent emotions, Georgie came away from the piano-stool, his ears ringing with the approbation of the soldiers. Although no husband could be as devotedly loyal as he, he knew that but for Olga the concert would have been a hopeless failure, and that Olga had turned it into a triumph for which Lucia would take the credit. As it was, the audience held no grudges, and officers of every rank were thanking Lucia for a highly entertaining evening, some perjuring their immortal souls by saying how much they had enjoyed her piano-playing. Admittedly they were also congratulating him, so that his blush became ever more crimson, and they were worshipping Olga, who was autographing a sea of programmes.
She broke away from the throng and joined him. With her were Teddy Broome and Lord Tony, and at the back of them, although Georgie did not see her, Lucia.
‘Georgie, you were marvellous,’ said Olga, and he could find no words with which to reply. ‘I never knew you could play like that. It makes all the difference in the world to have a good accompaniment. I wish you could come and play for me on my tour. My usual accompanist isn’t a patch on you. He never puts any feeling into the music—I imagine he thinks it’s below his dignity to play popular songs.’
‘You see,’ said Lord Tony to Teddy Broome, ‘not only can he create Stroganoff out of sawdust and brown paper, but he has the common touch, he can communicate. You’ll have to sign him up now. He’s better than all your stuffy professors.
Teddy Broome nodded gravely, like a Prime Minister.
‘Indeed, Mr. Pillson, I haven’t yet had an opportunity to say how much I admired your skill and resourcefulness as a cook. I was deeply impressed.’
‘Georgie,’ cried Olga, ‘don’t tell me you can cook as well. You are a dark horse.’
‘Cook!’ exclaimed Lord Tony. ‘He can do more than cook. Why, he created a perfect lemon sorbet tonight out of one little lemon the size of a golf-ball. So Teddy’s going to sign him up to take part in a series of broadcasts he’s getting up on hints to housewives on “Making the Most of Your Ration-Book”.’
Georgie may have attempted to mumble a refusal, but it was not a very serious attempt. He was full of his own glory, and when Olga screamed ‘Oh Georgie, you must!’ at him, he said, ‘Yes, please,’ and turned from scarlet to mauve.
‘That’s settled, then,’ said Teddy Broome. ‘I’ll write to you in a couple of days with details. You’ll have to come up to London for a week or so.’
‘That’s all right, you can stay at my house,’ said Olga. ‘Brompton Square, Georgie, quite like old times. I won’t be there because I’m on tour still, but Foljambe can look after you and I don’t think you’ll be needing a cook.’
Poor Georgie! In his hour of triumph he thought only of himself, broadcasting on the wireless, staying at Olga’s house, doing his bit—more than his bit—towards the war-effort. He was useful at last after a half-century of being moderately ornamental, and the idea overwhelmed him. After all, as Lord Tony had said at dinner, designing a new vegetable pie for the Home Front was just as good as designing a new tank for the battlefront. And as for Lucia, well, she must make do without him for a while. For as long as he could remember he had supported her in her triumphs—now she must support him in his. It did not occur to him, of course, that with Grosvenor and the cook gone and Foljambe in London looking after him, Lucia would have to fend for herself, unless she could get a charwoman from the town. Oddly enough, this horrible thought did not occur to Lucia herself until the next morning. Her mind, up till then, had been far too busy with thoughts of betrayal and desertion.
Of course she had brought it on herself: She had overreached herself with the officers’ concert, and Nemesis had been quick to strike her down. Of course, she should have been the one to man the abandoned tiller of the kitchen, then she would be going to London to broadcast on the B.B.C. while Georgie stayed behind and polished his bibelots (would he take them with him to London? No, he would be afraid of dropping them). It was simply the penalty of laziness. She had made a mistake—two mistakes—and she must rectify the situation as best she could. She must be realistic; Georgie could not be stopped from going to London, and so she must be all for it. As for herself, she would be in the same situation, she felt, as the wives of the fighting men at the front, for her husband would be away serving his country in the kitchen and the broadcasting studio, if not in the field of battle. Obviously while he was away she could not dream of entertaining, or taking any part in the life of Tilling. Therefore she must have influenza (which with judicious management could be made to appear like pining for the departed) and do what she could to keep the house in order. Flight to the refuge of a hotel (even the Ambermere Arms in Riseholme) was not for her. That would be cowardice, and she was no coward. Besides, she could probably get a charwoman from the town through the agency, who might perhaps be persuaded with gold to do whatever was necessary to corned beef to make it edible, and as a last resort the tin-opener and the moderate stock of nutritious if simple provisions laid down in the cellar in case of emergencies (if this was not an emergency, what was?). Besides, she would have leisure enough to learn to cook herself, for if Georgie could do it so could she, and no doubt Mr. George Pillson, the radio expert, would be delighted to give her a few elementary lessons. The radio expert .... She had hardly considered the glow of reflected glory that must inevitably surround her as she waited, influenza-ridden, in Mallards for his return.
‘And to think,’ she reflected cheerfully, ‘that he’s been frittering away his time with gros point and watercolours when he’s really the Toscanini of the kitchen range! And if I learn to cook and can get a char to do the cleaning there’s no reason why I shouldn’t give tea parties, with Bridge to follow, and perhaps if Georgie’s broadcasts are in the afternoon we can all gather round the radio and listen. That would be fun.’
Georgie, whose conscience·was beginning to trouble him, eagerly agreed to introduce her to the freemasonry of the kitchen.
‘My dear, it couldn’t be simpler. So long as you follow the recipe you can’t go wrong. You just put all the things together and heat them up. You’ll be doing lobster à la Riseholme by the time I come back.’
So, armed with food and Cooking for Gentlefolks, they descended, like Dante and Vergil, into the kitchen, and Georgie, like the Roman poet, pointed out all the instruments of torture and described their dark purposes. That, he said, was a frying-pan; you put lard in it and it sizzled. That was a casserole; that was a baking-dish. These were the knives that you carved meat and vegetables with. This was a kettle, the source of boiling water without which tea could not be made.
‘Oh Georgie,’ she said, ‘I shall never get used to all these different pans. What’s this?’
‘It’s an omelette pan. You make omelettes in it, if you can get the eggs. And that’s a whisk for beating eggs and making batter and things. The flour’s kept in here, and this is for peeling potatoes. No, I’m not quite sure how you use it. Foljambe usually does that for me.’
Lucia proved a willing pupil, and after a day of concerted effort she produced her first cup of drinkable tea and her first slices of bread and butter that resembled food rather than masonry. The letter arrived from Teddy Broome with a week’s notice for Georgie; and another from Prince Andrei—his mother the Princess and his younger brother the Count would be passing through Tilling in two days time. Could she possibly spare them a few hours to make them welcome in the land of freedom? His mother had been particularly impressed, wrote the Prince, by his account of the miraculous Stroganoff that Georgie had cooked on the night of the wonderful concert, and had openly expressed her doubts that an Englishman could make a better Stroganoff than a Pole .... Would it be possible for Mr. Pillson to vindicate his judgment and taste in the eyes of his beloved mother? He added that she spoke very little English, and the Count not much more, but since both Mr. and Mrs. Pillson seemed perfectly at home in the Polish tongue this would of course present no difficulty. Lucia wrote at
once to say that they would be only too honoured. She was determined to have at least one other gaudy lunch, very little English or no, although it might be as well not to invite anyone else to the lunch party. En famille. The thought of the last two Chopin duets having been learnt in vain had angered her more than almost anything.
In the greater world of Tilling, marketing and news-gathering continued ignorant of the turmoil of Mallards. Diva had quite got over the disappointment of not being the hindquarters of Hitler in the tableau; she had been in the back-room most of the time, only emerging when her curiosity had overcome her discretion during Olga’s singing, and therefore remained in ignorance of the less than entire success of the rest of the programme. Irene did nothing to correct her impression of overall triumph, merely stressing the excellent reception accorded to Hitler and the orange, so that for all that Diva knew the tableau had merely receded gracefully in favour of Olga’s offer to sing, after which even her performance as the dragon’s tail must have been an anti-climax.
‘“Run, rabbit, run.” Not quite my cup of tea, but certainly the stuff to give the troops,’ she admitted to the Padre, whose lips were as sealed as Irene’s, albeit from different motives. ‘Jolly good for morale, all that singing. I know they enjoyed your ballads. Tell me, was Irene really such a big hit, or does she go round calling you Harry Lauder out of sheer jealousy?’
Fortunately something distracted Diva’s attention before he was called upon to give a truthful answer to her question, and Tilling was left with the impression that Lucia had been entirely responsible for giving the officers such a splendid farewell. Elizabeth, maddened by the news of Georgie’s imminent fame, speculated endlessly that it had been otherwise, but there were too many witnesses and Irene (being loyal), Diva (being ignorant) and the Padre (being compromised) did nothing to confirm her suspicions. Meanwhile, all Tilling buzzed with excited anticipation, asking if a date had been set for Mr. Georgie’s broadcasts, what he would say, would he betray the secret of lobster à la Riseholme that only Lucia and Elizabeth knew, and which Elizabeth had gone to sea on a kitchen-table to obtain .... The sheer practicality of it astounded them, and aroused their jealous admiration. Diva, who had been compelled to close her tea-shop at the outbreak of war because she could not make head or tail of the endless official forms with which a concerned Government bombarded her, felt a certain reflected pride, for she could make pastry and pour tea. Nonetheless, Tilling shared Prince Andrei’s view that Georgie was Renaissance Man, equally at home with a palette or a skillet.
Elizabeth, for all her fury, was content to sit quietly and wait for the furore to die down. Her hour of glory was rapidly approaching, for now that Lucia’s officers had evaporated she would be the sole purveyor of military personnel to Tilling. Major Benjy represented the native product, so to speak, and her cousin Herbert the imported commodity. He would be arriving soon, and there must be widespread tea and Bridge to welcome him. Besides, Major Benjy’s troop of warriors was no longer followed about by hordes of ribald children, and she had written to the Red Cross, putting her name forward for a vacancy as its principal officer in Tilling. The post was largely honorary and, since there were no casualties yet, a sinecure anyway. She was eminently qualified for the job, for had she not taken a first-aid course in those first panic-stricken days of war and spent a number of seemingly wasted evenings bandaging the head of the draper’s wife in the pretty fiction that she had burns?
As for dear Lulu, she reckoned that with Georgie and Foljambe away and Grosvenor busy with her bombs at the factory, she would be reduced to eating grass and drinking rainwater unless the entire Mallards household had suddenly all become notable chefs. The thought of Lucia eating pilchards out of the tin with a fork, cold, gave Elizabeth a great deal of innocent amusement as she sat in the isolated splendour of Grebe and looked out over the unending marshes. Once, before that woman came out of Worcestershire like the Assyrian, before she had been ensnared by dear Lucia in reckless speculation and had lost so much money that she had been forced to sell her Mallards and retire to this desert spot like an Anatolian saint, she had had a garden-room to look out of from behind a curtain. She turned, choked with emotion, and listlessly counted her collection of Tilling china pigs, usually an infallible narcotic in time of stress. One of them was missing, however, and her vexation increased, for she found its poor decimated corpse under the desk. She opened a drawer to hide the ruins from her sight and found a half-empty whisky flask. A chain of consequence involving Major Benjy, the flask, an erratic whisky-induced movement, a smash of china and frantic efforts to hide the debris, sprang complete into her mind. She ground her teeth and sat down at the desk to write the invitations for the tea and Bridge party that would introduce her cousin Herbert. She paused and wondered whether it might not be advisable to have him to lunch on his own the first time, just in case he turned out to be less than the paragon of virtue that she imagined him to be, but she dismissed the notion at once. She was impatient to regain her rightful crown, which she had surrendered, along with her house, to that interloper.
Having completed the last invitation, she set off down the long road that entered the town via the picturesque old stone archway. She intended to deliver the invitations by hand (for it was sinful, in such difficult times, to waste money on stamps, and the post was so erratic) and perhaps drop a few tantalising hints as she went. Her first call was on Diva, who was sitting in her favourite position at the front window of Wasters, from which she could over look the High Street while getting on with whatever piece of needlework she was engaged in at the time. Just now she was trimming an old hat with the now familiar chintz roses.
‘Diva dear,’ called Elizabeth from the street, ‘may I just pop in for a moment? An invitation to meet my cousin.’
Although eager to receive the invitation, Diva was rather put out by the unexpected visitation. Chintz roses were no longer a surprise to anyone, but on a hat they might take on a new lease of life, and she hoped that Elizabeth would not be sarcastic about them. Just to make sure, she hid the hat behind a cushion. Unfortunately Elizabeth saw it at once and drew it forth.
‘Not another new hat already, dearest? No, it’s the old straw one and, of course, chintz roses! Your trademark. Now then, any news?’
‘Not really,’ replied Diva with a certain amount of reserve. Elizabeth’s condescending tone demanded a slight coolness, but too much could precipitate a quarrel, which would mean that she would have to decline the invitation to meet Elizabeth’s cousin. ‘Except that Lucia has got a Polish Princess and Count going to lunch with her tomorrow, but she can’t invite anyone else because they don’t speak English. I suppose that means that Lucia and Georgie can speak Polish, and they haven’t just been putting it on because they can’t speak Italian anymore. Fancy! And she’s learning to cook from Mr. Georgie. Lucia, I mean, not the Princess.’
‘No!’ exclaimed Elizabeth in mock awe. ‘Is there any limit to our dear Lucia’s talents? A linguist and a chef as well. I suppose they really are Polish, and not just any old people?’
‘Lucia showed me the letter,’ replied Diva. ‘She said it was to let me see how quaintly Prince Andrei wrote English, but I think it was documentary evidence to prove they were both real princesses and counts.’
‘Such a relief to know that dear Lulu won’t be entirely on her own now that the officers have gone, and Mr. Georgie about to go away as well. She will have the comfort of knowing that the aristocracy of half of Europe may drop by at any time and share a tin of sardines with her. Otherwise she should be quite on her own in that great big house. I remember how lonely I used to be there before my Benjy-boy and I were married.’
Nonsense, thought Diva, you were too busy spying on everyone from the garden-room to be lonely for a moment.
‘Don’t suppose she’ll have time to be lonely,’ replied Diva. ‘You know how busy she always is even though she’s not Mayor any more. She’s still chairman of the governors of the hospital, and now
she’ll be cooking as well—she’ll be busier than ever.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Elizabeth sweetly, ‘so brave to be embarking on something new at her time of life. Of course, we’re never too old to learn.’ (Elizabeth was believed by the charitably minded to be a year or two younger than Lucia and since, in fact, she was, their charity was rather superfluous.) ‘Nevertheless, it must be a dreadful worry to her, with Mallards to look after and no servants. I hope it doesn’t go to rack and ruin while Foljambe is away. A disagreeable woman I have always found, but no doubt very capable at her job. I should hate to think that I had parted with dear Aunt Caroline’s house only to see it crumble away before my very eyes.’
‘Really, Elizabeth,’ said Diva crossly (Elizabeth was being intolerable today) ‘compared to what it was like when you had it, it’s a different house altogether. Painted. Re-wired. Doors close properly.’
That was an unfortunate thing to say, for who could forget a certain cupboard door that had failed to close properly during a certain coal-strike? Diva thought of her invitation and tried to be more pleasant.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m looking forward to meeting your cousin. Great respect for the Air Force. Bravemen. Admirable.’