The woman who won it was on the row in front, further along, and Grandma glowered at her innocent back.
“Ridiculous!” she snapped. “I’ve only five numbers on my whole card yet. Isn’t he going to do something about it?”
“Sometimes they do win quick,” said Mrs Fosdyke, whispering in the hope that Grandma would lower her voice too.
“I thought you said there was no cheating allowed?” Grandma said loudly and distinctly.
“There isn’t!” hissed poor Mrs Fosdyke. People were beginning to look at them. “Sshh – he’s starting again – you might win the whole game yet.”
Grandma did not win the whole game, though it was not for want of trying. She adopted the tactic, whenever she did not hear a number properly, of marking off one of her numbers at random anyway. She probably thought this was fair. There was no vice in Grandma. It was simply that she couldn’t stand losing.
The second game was about to get under way when Grandma rose in her seat. Jack shrivelled inside his skin.
“Young man!” she called. “Young man!”
The caller, a balding man wearing a cream jacket and red-spotted bow tie, glanced about looking puzzled. Grandma picked up her umbrella and waved it.
“Here!” she called. “Here, young man!”
He placed her, and said into his microphone:
“What’s up, then, Madam?”
“Would you mind not talking into that loudspeaker thing,” called Grandma. “I can hear you much better without it.”
A murmuring broke out in the hall, and it was getting increasingly difficult for anyone to hear anything.
“Ssshh!” hissed the caller into his microphone, and his clients immediately stopped their chatter.
“I simply want to say,” Grandma told him, in her clear, ringing tones, “that I am not likely to win this game the way it is being played at present.”
A deathly hush settled on the hall. Nothing like this had ever happened before, nothing remotely like it. Sometimes the odd drunk would get up and start shouting and have to be hustled out, but Grandma obviously did not fall into this category.
“To begin with,” she said, “I would rather you did not use that loudspeaker. If you just call the numbers loudly and distinctly in your normal voice, as I am speaking now, it will be quite sufficient.”
The bald man’s mouth was slightly ajar now.
“The next thing is,” she resumed, “that I would like you, please, to refrain from adding these peculiar ‘clickety clacks’ and ‘doctor’s orders’ to the numbers you call. We were not taught our numbers like this when I was at school. Also, I am only a learner, and I am not familiar with them. I am perfectly familiar with the numbers up to a hundred, however, and if you would kindly call them in an undecorated form, I think I shall do very well.”
She paused. The caller looked as if he thought he was having a nightmare, aghast and astounded at the same time, and when his mouth started to move, at first no sound came out. At last he managed, very faintly:
“Is that all?”
“I think so,” said Grandma. “Oh – there is one more small point. I am, as I have told you, a beginner. Until I have had a little more practice I would appreciate it if you could call the numbers more slowly. I think you are going too fast. Possibly others here feel the same?”
She looked enquiringly about her and met with total non-confirmation. The regulars gaped back at her with blank, stunned faces.
“Perhaps those who do feel the same, would like to raise their right hands?” she suggested. No one moved. Jack noticed that two large men in uniforms had appeared at either end of the row where they were sitting. They would, he realised with horror, bundle Grandma out at a nod from the caller.
Over my dead body, he thought, and tried not to imagine the details.
On the rostrum there were signs that the caller was beginning to collect himself.
“I must apologise for this interruption, ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the microphone.
“Oh, and do accept my own apologies too,” chipped in Grandma. “I think I have said all that I wanted to say. Thank you.”
She sat down. She looked almost as if she expected a round of applause. She was the only person in the whole hall who looked pleased with herself. The regulars were beginning to murmur again.
“If we are all ready, then,” said the caller, “we’ll start the next game. Eyes down for the lucky winner of another sensational prize. And the first number – wait for it – all the fives, fifty-five.”
Jack numbly crossed this off his own card and waited for the inevitable. The caller, he realised, was going to carry on as if the interruption had never occurred. He was going to pretend Grandma had never spoken. And Jack knew that when Grandma was anywhere, people knew she was. She was not ignorable. To a point he could sympathise with the man. He was probably not, he reflected, very bright. He certainly had not been able to think of a single word to say in reply to Grandma. But then, if he spent every day of his life calling out numbers, perhaps he was not very good with words any more. Perhaps he had lost his conversation.
What Grandma did next was the worst thing she could possibly have done. Her big mistake was not realising that every single person in that hall took this game at least as seriously as she herself. They were all obviously better losers (they could not be worse) but they were all playing to win. Tension builds up very high in a Bingo Hall after even the first few numbers have been called. If only Grandma had sat and sulked till the game was over, and then stood up and said her piece, the worst that could have happened was that she would have been asked to leave. She might even have got her money back at the door.
As it was, she came very near getting lynched. She, Mrs Fosdyke and Jack could all have got lynched. She stood up, right in the middle of a call of “Lucky for some – thirteen!” and shouted “Stop!” at the top of her considerable voice.
“Sit down!” and “Shut up!” – these, and other less politely phrased requests and exclamations came from all parts of the hall. Several of the players themselves stood up and waved their arms while making their protests and thus set other people off doing the same thing and within thirty seconds flat everyone in there had, with the exception of the halt and the lame, got on his or her feet yelling. The caller was yelling too, into his microphone, but yelling must have affected its vibrations because you couldn’t hear the words at all, only a kind of booming. It was probably as well.
From then on, everything happened more or less as Mr Bagthorpe had predicted it would. A riot broke out. The interesting thing was, and Jack could not help noticing this at the time, that although people started hurling abuse and even hitting one another, nobody did this to Grandma herself. Standing there with her umbrella aloft in the manner of the Statue of Liberty, she seemed in some curious way to be above it all, even though it was she who had set the whole thing off.
Somebody obviously panicked and rang the police, and they arrived quickly, about ten of them, and gradually quietened people down. The bald-headed caller was still booming into his microphone and making gestures with his hands as if tearing at the hair he had once had. When everyone else had sat down quietly under the watchful eyes of the police he sounded suddenly very silly, booming like that, and stopped abruptly.
In the ensuing silence the people on Grandma’s row stood up quite politely and let the trio pass to the gangway, and they were escorted out of the hall by two policemen. In the foyer one of them, a sergeant, took out a notebook.
“Now then,” he said, “what’s it all about?”
“It wasn’t Grandma’s fault,” said Jack instantly.
“Oh, I don’t know, officer, I really don’t know!” Mrs Fosdyke, incredibly, was close to tears. “I shouldn’t never have brought her.”
“I think perhaps we’d better go along to the station,” said the sergeant.
He gave certain orders to the constable, who went back into the hall. Grandma, Mrs Fosdyke and
Jack walked in silence to the swing doors. Several police cars were standing out there, one with its blue light flashing.
Grandma had gone very quiet and dignified. Mrs Fosdyke kept sniffing all the way to the station. Jack was torn between enjoyment of being in the novel situation of riding as an apprehended criminal in a police car, and a sinking feeling that he had let Uncle Parker and everybody else down.
At the station Grandma kept up her silent dignity for a while, but after a cup of tea seemed to thaw and consented to give her version of what had transpired. She stood up.
“I solemnly swear that all I shall say will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” she began. “Shouldn’t I have a Bible to hold while I say that?”
“Oh, there’s no call for that at all, Madam,” the sergeant told her. “Not at this stage.”
“I think I have seen enough television films about policemen and criminals,” Grandma told him, “to know something of procedure. I suppose I should not be surprised that the Bible is no longer required. It is yet another sign of the times.”
In the end she gave a very good account, Jack thought. And when she told what she had said to the Bingo man, and the requests she had made, they all sounded very reasonable, and nothing like riot-raising speeches. Jack could tell from the policemen’s faces that they were thinking this too.
“First time you’d played, then, was it, Mrs Bagthorpe?” asked one of them. “I can see how it must have been confusing.”
“Precisely,” she nodded. “I simply thought that some consideration should be shown to a beginner. And I thought that young man very rude indeed when he just carried on as if I had never spoken.”
All in all, the interview went very well. At the end of the day, it was clear that the only word Grandma had spoken which could be even loosely interpreted as riot-raising and provocative, was the single word “Stop!”, and even Jack could see that this would not stand up very well in Court.
In the end Grandma was told that no charges would be preferred though she was advised to avoid Bingo Halls in future. It appeared that two witnesses had also been interviewed, and their version of what happened had corresponded almost exactly with her own, except that they had added that Grandma was, in their view, mad.
The whole thing was just beginning to be rather enjoyable when the police asked whom they might telephone to take the trio home. Grandma gave their number, and Jack shut his eyes and prayed that Mr Bagthorpe would not answer the phone. He did. Jack could hear, even from where he was sitting, the snapped-out “Well?”, which was the way his father always let people know he was being interrupted doing something important on one of his scripts. (In this particular instance, as it happened, he had been on the verge of a Slogan that was going to win him a new car and a thousand pounds to spend on petrol.)
From what the police said after the telephone call Jack gathered that Mr Bagthorpe had come much nearer being prosecuted than Grandma ever had. He created a good deal of sympathy for Grandma, and she was further plied with cups of tea. The police thought they could see why she was driven out to play Bingo at nights.
With the Bagthorpes, when things were bad they inevitably tended to go to worse. The long day was not yet over. When Mr Bagthorpe arrived he was in a very bad temper. He immediately set in on the police for what he called the “malicious persecution of an innocent and elderly lady” – which might have been interpreted as a gallant gesture, but was not.
Neither the police (who had been very kind indeed) nor Grandma (who did not like being described as “elderly”) thanked him for it. He would, as it turned out, have been wiser to play the scene in a much lower key.
It did not escape the attention of a very junior constable that Mr Bagthorpe’s road fund licence was a month out of date. For this he was duly booked. Grandma could have put in a word for him, because she had gone down very well with the police, but she evidently did not choose to.
During the silence that prevailed in the car on the way home, the only words spoken were spoken by Grandma herself, and had been carefully chosen for their ambiguity.
“Truth,” she observed in the darkness and silence, “will speak out of stone walls.”
No one replied.
Chapter Four
It might reasonably have been supposed that the day following the Bingo débâcle would have been a quiet one, even something of an anticlimax. That had been the kind of day that is difficult to match. Some families never have a day like it in their lives.
Mrs Fosdyke was in two minds whether to take the day off. She felt this would be justifiable in view of the hammering her nervous system had taken the previous night. On the other hand, Mr Bagthorpe was doing a script about her and trying to get inside her mind. When it came on television, she did not want her mind to appear in a bad light. Some people might call it weak to take days off for nervous reasons. In the end she decided to go, but not until midmorning. She was later to regret coming in at all.
Things were not too bad to begin with. All the Bagthorpes were much entertained by the account of what had happened at Bingo. Grandma herself was not the least cast down. She enjoyed winning games, but she also enjoyed a good free-for-all, and in this respect had had more than her money’s worth. The only person present at breakfast who was not in high spirits was Mr Bagthorpe, who was still sore about his humiliating encounter with the police. He maintained that if there was a fine, Grandma should pay it. He further went on to say that if anybody’s licence got endorsed it should be hers, and that it was his luck that she should not possess one.
“I carry the can for everybody,” he declared. “I’m the Archetypal Can-carrier of all time.”
“It is illegal to go about with an out-of-date licence,” Grandma told him piously. “And at your age, you should know that, Henry.”
“I hadn’t even noticed,” he replied. “If it had been five years out of date I should not have noticed. Or five hundred years. I have my mind on higher things.”
“You might try explaining that to the police,” said Grandma. “But it does not sound like a convincing argument to me, and I doubt whether it will to them. They, after all, are not even your mother.”
After breakfast the Bagthorpes retired to their rooms for a short period and then, one by one, made trips into the village, to the Post Office. They needed things like stamps and Postal Orders in connection with the Competition Entering. They bought some magazines too, after having had a quick leaf through to make sure they had any Competitions worth entering. Some of these were the same ones as Mrs Fosdyke had fetched for Mr Bagthorpe the day before.
It was around midmorning that things began to hot up. First of all Uncle Parker came round to find out how Grandma had got on at Bingo. Grandma was just finishing her account when Mr Bagthorpe entered the kitchen, having smelled coffee.
“Oh, bad luck, Henry,” Uncle Parker greeted him. “Would you believe it! Well, that’s one thing I’ve never had, I’m happy to say – an endorsement.”
This made Mr Bagthorpe genuinely feel like murdering Uncle Parker. He clenched and unclenched his hands and it was nearly a full minute before he trusted himself to speak.
“If there were any justice,” he said “– and there isn’t – you would not have anything so trivial as an endorsement. You would long ago have been banned from driving for life, and possibly even imprisoned.”
Here Grandma was inclined to agree.
“That is perfectly true,” she said. “At least you, Henry, never ran over a beautiful and innocent cat.”
“Quite,” said Mr Bagthorpe, letting this inaccurate description of Thomas go. “Nor was I, I’m happy to say, responsible for encouraging a sheltered old lady to run loose in a Bingo Hall.”
He had gone too far.
“Just one moment,” said Grandma frigidly. “Is it to myself you are alluding as a ‘sheltered old lady’? If so, I take the utmost exception to the expression. I am not sheltered – nobody who has lived i
n this house all the years I have could ever be sheltered. And I am not old.”
“Of course not.” Uncle Parker saw his chance of winning her back on his side. “Age cannot wither you nor the years condemn, nor custom stale your infinite variety.”
This complicatedly worded compliment set off a heated argument about mixed sources. Mr Bagthorpe maintained that half of it was from a poem about the war dead, by Binyon, and the other half from Anthony and Cleopatra. Uncle Parker, realising he was right, sidestepped by saying that he had been perfectly aware of this. It was an impromptu remark, he said, and without wishing to boast, it was a sign of creative genius to Reconcile the Seemingly Disparate.
This inflamed Mr Bagthorpe still further, and a real three-cornered fight was just getting under way when Mrs Fosdyke, whom everyone had been ignoring, suddenly let out a wild shriek. The row stopped dead. A lot of shrieking went on in the Bagthorpe house, but to date none of it had come from Mrs Fosdyke.
They all turned. She was standing in the doorway of the pantry looking pale and distraught. In each hand she held out a tin without a label.
“There’s thousands of them!” she shrieked. “And tops off packets and holes in the sides of things!”
Only Mr Bagthorpe among those present had the faintest idea what she was talking about. He wished himself at the ends of the earth, the salt mines.
Mrs Fosdyke let the tins fall and watched them dully as they rolled away over the tiles. She turned back, picked up two more tins and let them go the same way. Jack thought it obvious that she had gone mad, like Ophelia, but instead of strewing flowers was rolling tins. They all stood there and watched till the tins finally came to rest. There was a silence. The next words clearly had to be spoken by Mrs Fosdyke, and they waited patiently. She started off by shaking her head. She shook her head for quite a long time and then at last spoke, but not really to them, more to herself.
“Plums and haricots, beans and tomatoes,” she intoned. She repeated it, as if it were a line of poetry.
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