by Tom Holt
‘I think we should ignore the whole thing,’ said Georgie who was re-reading the passage about the Wyses.
‘I agree with you, caro. We might possibly write a letter to the editor pointing out the strictly factual errors in the article, but beyond that it would be too humiliating to become involved directly in accusations of deception and fraud. If Elizabeth is so keen to announce to the world the depths to which she is prepared to sink, we at least should not assist her in her self-destructive mania.’
Lucia was getting excited again, and Georgie, thinking of her blood-pressure, interrupted her.
‘Oh look,’ he said, ‘our curtains have come out terribly well. There’s Brutus as clear as anything.’
‘I’m surprised Elizabeth didn’t claim them too. She has as much right to do so as she has to claim any connection with Mallards.’ Lucia was more furious than ever and Georgie started to edge nervously from the room. ‘When I think of the state this house was in when I rescued it from her! Why, if she was still the owner, there would have been nothing for her friend Mr. Arncott to see but a pile of fallen masonry.’
So quickly was Lucia speaking in her wrath that before he could attain the safety of the corridor, Georgie had to listen to a full and not particularly flattering character-study of Elizabeth, with speculation about her true ancestry and her likely ultimate fate. As he closed the door behind him, he wiped his brow with his handkerchief, for he was perspiring freely, and he noted with distress that the perspiration had made the deep auburn of his hair run a little.
‘If she carries on like that,’ he said to himself, ‘she’ll go off pop!’
The other eager readers of County Life had by this time reassembled in the High Street and their verdict on the article was hardly more favourable than Lucia’s. Their resentment, however, was focused on another scapegoat, for they too had read the small italics at the end of the piece. Besides that, there were other well-springs of animosity.
‘Gave me her word that Wasters would be in it,’ said Diva, ‘or as good as gave me her word. I wouldn’t have minded if she hadn’t gone and raised my hopes.’
‘Why, she virtually promised me that the Vicarage windows would be prominently featured,’ said Evie. ‘She thought that the sills alone—’
‘Currying favour,’ replied Diva. ‘Now I suppose she’ll blame poor Mr. Arncott and say that he ignored her recommendations. Won’t believe a word of it. Bet she suggested that hovel in Church Square. Why, it’s no bigger than my scullery.’
‘Why on earth she made all those promises when she knew she’d be found out, I really can’t imagine. But that’s so like Lucia. She must have everyone looking up to her and saying how clever she is.’
‘She can’t be all that clever,’ broke in Susan Wyse, ‘or she’d know my name by now. And what on earth possessed her to say that I was related to the Spanish aristocracy?’
‘Come now, Susan, my dear,’ said Mr. Wyse, although he knew in his heart that the devil whose advocate he was merited no defence, ‘we have no conclusive evidence that it was Mrs. Pillson who so misled those journalists.’
‘Yes we have!’ cried Diva. ‘It’s there at the bottom of the third page, in black and white. Thanks Mrs. Pillson for her invaluable assistance. Fancy that! And calling the Padre Mr. McBartlett. I call that downright disrespectful to a clergyman, but I suppose it’s her idea of a joke.’
‘There’s something that puzzles me,’ said Evie darkly. ‘Why did she say that Mallards belonged to Elizabeth and had been in her family since the Norman Conquest or whatever it was? And all that stuff about Hugo de Map and the Domesday Book? That’s not like Lucia.’
‘Easy,’ said Diva, who had puzzled long and hard over an explanation for this inconsistency. ‘She didn’t tell them that. Must’ve found it out for themselves. Looked up the history of the area, I shouldn’t wonder. Which only goes to show that what Elizabeth’s been saying all this time is perfectly true. Confirmed by Mr. Arncott no less. In black and white,’ she added, for she was fond of the phrase.
The word ‘white’ made Mr. Wyse wince. ‘It is some small consolation,’ he said, ‘that our dear friend Mrs. de Map-Flint’s noble lineage has been independently researched and confirmed. I thought that Mrs. Pillson had been unnecessarily sceptical on the subject.’
Thus the battle-lines were drawn, and it became necessary to believe in Elizabeth’s ancestry if one was against Lucia and her trickery. Irene, who had been to the Public Library to consult the copy of County Life available there (all the others having by now been sold), came running down the street grinning broadly. Thus it is that Fate seals our dooms, for her intervention at this point made Lucia’s condemnation irrevocable.
At the sight of the Wyses, she stopped and bowed gravely. Having greeted Mr. Wyse as Don Alhernon and Susan as Mrs. White, she proceeded to advance a theory accounting for what had happened, a theory that was precisely correct. However, since it was she who had suggested it, if was, of course, dismissed at once as a tissue of malicious lies, and Irene was received in silence and cold disdain.
‘Oh, please yourselves,’ she said equably. ‘But, if I were you, I’d get an architect to look over Starling Cottage. Judging by that photograph, I don’t think it’s terribly safe. Did you see how it was leaning over backwards? Olé.’
She departed as quickly as she had come and raced off towards Mallards to comfort Lucia. In fact, she did not have very far to go, for she met her outside Mr. Hopkins’s shop, where Lucia had paused to buy some turbot and to summon up her courage before facing the High Street.
‘Don’t worry, ’ said Irene. ‘It’s an awful score for Mapp, of course, but I’ll put her in her place all right, you just wait and see. I’ve scrapped my painting of the storm, by the way, and started a new one. You’ll like it. It’s the Battle of Hastings, only you’re William and Mapp is Harold—which is logical; since she’s not a Norman she’s got to be a Saxon, hasn’t she? And she’s got an arrow in her eye, and Major Benjy is standing beside her with a gonfalon tied to his golf-club and a bottle of whisky. Come across and have a look.’
‘Sweet of you, dear,’ said Lucia. ‘I must come and see it, but not just now. Shopping first.’
‘I should get the car out and go into Hastings for your shopping,’ said Irene. ‘They’re frightfully cross with you at the moment. They think you told all those fibs—it was Mapp, of course, but do you think they’d believe me? I think they got the impression that you promised to recommend their mouldy houses and then went back on your word. Utter rubbish, of course. You never promised anything.’
‘I most certainly did not! ’ snapped Lucia, and that was true enough.
‘Well, take care,’ said Irene, and she darted across into Taormina to start the work of changing the faces of the Saxon dead to resemble the Wyses, the Bartletts and Diva.
It had been one of the lowest troughs of Lucia’s career. To be snubbed en bloc by the whole of Tilling, to see them all cross the street at her approach to fawn on Elizabeth and compliment her on her excellent likeness in the photograph; to hear Evie Bartlett, the mouse-like, the insignificant, saying quite loudly, ‘Of course, Elizabeth dear, it’s appropriate really. And the rest of it was quite correct. In your family for generations’; it was a bitter blow, and Lucia seemed for a moment to be bowed by it. But she was Lucia yet, and Mayor of Tilling. It was horribly unjust to be blamed for Elizabeth’s forgeries. Of course, she had herself trodden dangerous ground by seeming to make promises that she could not and had not intended to keep. We learn by our mistakes, and Lucia had learnt from this disaster; now there was lost ground to be made up and mutiny to be suppressed. If she could engineer her own release from excommunication, she felt confident that she could deal with Elizabeth without too much difficulty, for Elizabeth had a delightful knack of making trouble for herself. But how was she to overcome this excommunication? Tilling had turned its back on her, and with those who will not hear, who can reason? Although she was sure that tea was s
till drunk and Bridge played in the town, she had received no invitations and her own had been declined with a cold formality that would have pleased Lord Chesterfield. She was under embargo; she did not exist.
Meanwhile Georgie, usually so resolute and unflinching (when properly handled), had refused to be her agens in rebus. He still existed in the eyes of Tilling, but his existence had from time to time been called into question by some of the more extreme agnostics, especially if he mentioned his wife or recounted her views on a subject. Then a sort of deafness afflicted his listeners, or else his voice became suddenly inaudible, for the conversation would continue as if he had not spoken. Indeed, if the house in which they were gathered had gone up in flames and he had said, ‘The house is on fire, as Lucia would have pointed out if she were here,’ he was sure that they would have stayed where they were and been burnt to death rather than acknowledge his words.
‘You’ve offended them,’ he said, on his return from a particularly enjoyable tea party at which Lucia’s name had not been mentioned once. ‘And so they’ve cut you out. I think they think they’ve proved that they can do without you perfectly well.’
Lucia received this message in stoical silence. She knew the difficulties that faced her; she also knew that if she had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. She rose from her place in front of the curtains, where she had been dividing the afternoon between Sallust’s Jugurtha and a report from the Municipal Refuse Disposal Committee, and went to the piano.
‘Dear Irene called while you were out,’ she said absently. ‘Such a delightful chat—Art, Philosophy, municipal affairs. I feel that much could be made of Irene if her eccentricities could be ironed out—for she has a Brain, no question about that. I wish you could have been here. So rare in the hurly-burly of social and political life to find time to pause, or reflect, with one or two good friends.’ She opened the lid of the piano and her fingers strayed idly over the keys. ‘That is why I do not resent this foolish, spiteful ostracism. I welcome it. So distracting, the ebb and flow of human interaction. How does that magnificent savage Wagner put it in his Siegfried? “Männertaten undämmern mir den Mut”—human actions cloud my mind.’
Georgie regarded her nervously, for Wagner was very much the heavy artillery of her intellectual armoury. That she should be using it now on him was rather alarming. So like a kitten which, when frightened, rolls on its back and purrs defensively (but with eyes open and ears back), he decided to be cautiously jocund.
‘I do believe that you’ve been practising some of our little duets while my back has been turned,’ he said tentatively. ‘I know you, cattiva Lucia, polishing up the treble so as to be oh so much better that your Georgino when we play together.’
‘Me innocent Lucia,’ she replied, ‘only play tiresome old scales all day long, like going up and down stairs.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Georgie. ‘You’d better play me something and then I’ll know if you’ve been practising or not.’
So Lucia played the slow movement of the Moonlight Sonata; and, after the requisite sigh, Lucia said that it proved that she hadn’t been practising and Georgie said that, on the contrary, it proved that she had.
‘So many unbearable errors,’ she said sadly, ignoring him. ‘My point, I think, is proved. I do need a break, Georgino, a holiday if you like, to sharpen up my blunt soul. Tilling has kept me from my studies, my music, my interests, with its incessant demands upon me. Now that it tells me that it needs me no more, I can resume my own life. I shall take this opportunity to retire from the world, and if the world ever wants me back it had better ask me very politely.’
That’s the spirit,’ said Georgie, stifling a yawn. ‘That’ll show them.’
This was not quite the reaction Lucia had been looking for, but since Georgie’s reactions were not of the least importance, she was not unduly disappointed. The coming days and weeks would try her patience severely, but she knew in her heart that Tilling could not give her up, any more than a nicotine addict could give up smoking.
* * *
Lucia would have been reassured on this point had she been outside Twistevant’s the next morning when Susan Wyse’s market-basket happened to collide with Evie Bartlett’s.
‘So sorry,’ said Evie. ‘Clumsy of me. I could have upset something. No motor today?’
‘A punctured tyre, I believe. But chauffeur assures me that it will soon be repaired.’
‘And where is Mr. Wyse today?’
‘A slight headache, nothing to be concerned about. But I insisted that he stay indoors. Any news?’
‘None at all,’ said Evie sadly. ‘Everything seems quite dead without—’ She paused, like a philosopher who has just stumbled across a new concept for which no name as yet exists.
‘Without Lucia, you mean?’ said Susan, almost in a whisper.
Thus, in the third week, the vague possibility of Lucia’s existence began to take more concrete form, rather as a photograph slowly begins to take shape in the developer’s tray; first a blurred outline, then a recognisable shape, then finally the complete picture. There was resentment enough even now, but curiosity is stronger than wrath; like Charity it suffereth long and is not afraid. Tilling had discovered that it could not give up the Lucia habit and was curious to know how Lucia had managed to do without Tilling for so long. It was true that Lucia had her books and her Council and the piano had been tinkling away in the garden-room at all hours of the day, but surely a meagre diet was not enough to sustain life. Was it?
On the way from Grebe, where tea and Bridge had been a rather subdued affair (for Lucia, like Banquo’s ghost, had somehow seemed to be present at the table, displacing the mirth), Diva asked Georgie as they walked together back to town how Lucia had been filling her time. She almost said ‘filling her time since she stopped being invited anywhere’, but she didn’t quite like to, even to Georgie, who understood.
‘Oh, she’s been as busy as anything,’ said Georgie truthfully. ‘There’s all her official work and her being a J.P., and the Council is considering where they should put the new rubbish dump, and she’s very concerned with that. And the rest of the time she reads or plays the piano—she’s playing much better than she has for a long time now—and when it’s fine she does her exercises. And sometimes we go for drives in the motor and sketch old castles and manor-houses, which makes a nice change from drawing the same old houses over and over again. And this morning she was talking of popping up to London for a week or so—The Magic Flute at Covent Garden and the new production of Othello—and then perhaps going on to Cannes for a month.’
It all sounded so pleasant and relaxing that Diva almost wished that she could be excommunicated too. It had not occurred to her that anyone could have so much fun outside Society, or be so busy. And London, and quite possibly Cannes after that—suppose Lucia decided that she preferred being an outcast and went away for ever and ever, leaving them all at the mercy of Elizabeth? That would be terrible.
‘So she’s not too miserable then?’
‘Well, she misses all her friends, of course,’ Georgie nerved himself to ask the important question, for he still did not know for certain (although he could guess) why the excommunication had come about in the first place. ‘And she always asks me what the news is.’
Diva was slightly comforted by this, although the fear of Lucia seceding, which would be no more than Tilling deserved, had begun to sink into her heart.
‘Everyone is still angry with her, of course,’ she declared. ‘Deeply offended. She should have known better.’
‘But what did she actually do?’ demanded Georgie, for he could delay no longer.
‘Why, saying that she was going to put all our houses in County Life and then recommending those others.’
‘She didn’t actually say that,’ said Georgie judicially.
‘P’raps not, but she implied it. Still, that wasn’t so bad.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ said Georgie mystif
ied.
‘Oh no, it was all those other things. All those fibs about the Padre and the Wyses—telling that writer that the Wyses were the Whites and—’
‘But that wasn’t Lucia,’ said Georgie. ‘We didn’t even speak to Mr. Arncott. We missed him.’
‘No! Then who told him all those stories?’
‘I don’t know,’ Georgie confessed. ‘Perhaps he just got it all down wrong in his notebook or couldn’t read his own writing. That’s happened to me before now. I’ve made a list of things I want from the draper’s and by the time I get there the list looks like something quite other, and I don’t remember what I really wanted until I get home.’
Georgie was silent for a moment, as if recalling some forgotten grief. Diva, however, had weighed up the likelihood of his suggestion and found it wanting.
‘But it says at the bottom,’ she wailed, ‘that Mrs. Pillson had given invaluable assistance or something. Surely that was—’
‘That was just for recommending the houses and saying when the streets were likely not to be too crowded. I don’t think she told them anything else, for she read me the letter she wrote to Mr. Cuthbertson, the editor.’
‘How fascinating,’ said Diva. ‘But she did recommend those houses in Church Square and not the Vicarage and Wasters.’
‘Yes, that’s true enough. But she never actually promised that she would recommend the Vicarage and Wasters. After all, you weren’t supposed to know about it, so how could she?’
‘Well, Elizabeth said that Mr. Arncott told her—’ She stopped dead in her tracks, her brain working furiously. Georgie, not noticing that she had stopped, walked on a few paces alone, then realised his mistake and went back.
‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve thought of something. I can tell.’
‘Well,’ said Diva, ‘it’s like this. If Lucia didn’t speak to Mr. Arncott and Elizabeth did ....’
By the time they reached the Landgate they were both utterly confused and if anyone had stopped them at that point and asked for a brief summary of their findings, they would have been hard put to it even to agree with each other. Nevertheless, the charge of practical joking was all but lifted from Lucia’s shoulders and was, so to speak, circling slowly before swooping down on Elizabeth. Try as they might they could not quite fit together the pieces of the immense jigsaw of evidence that they had compiled and deduced, but both were convinced that a logical explanation could not be far away.