Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘Child,’ said Lady Beech, ‘have you got Rawlings with you? No? Then perhaps Lord Edward will escort me to a bus.’

  Fred and Sophia decided to make a night of it. They went to several very gay restaurants and then to a night club. Here, many hours after they left the Carlton, Fred talked about his Ideals. It seemed that, at night, as he watched his Blossom careering about among the stars, Ideals had come to Fred, and he had resolved, should he ever again achieve Cabinet rank, that he would be guided by them.

  ‘I used to go on, you know, from day to day, doing things just as they came without any purpose in my life. But now it will be different.’

  Sophia had heard this kind of talk before; it sounded horribly as though the Brotherhood was claiming another victim. Apparently however, this time it was Federal Union, and Fred expounded its theories to her at great length.

  ‘So what d’you think of it?’ he said when he had finished.

  ‘Well, darling, I didn’t quite take it in. I feel rather deliciously muzzy to tell you the truth, you know the feeling, like that heavenly anaesthetic they give you nowadays.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fred was disappointed.

  ‘Tell me again, darling, and I’ll listen more carefully.’

  He told her.

  ‘Well, if it means the whole world is going to be ruled by the English, I’m all for it.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not like that at all; I must have explained it badly.’

  He began again, taking enormous trouble.

  Presently someone Sophia knew came up to their table. Sophia was feeling extremely vague. She introduced Fred as Sir Frederick Union. After this he took her home.

  9

  The Lieder König had just finished one of his Pets’ Programmes. These were a terrible thorn in the side of the authorities, who considered that all the other pieces in his repertoire were exceedingly harmless, although the news which was thrown in at the end always included some item proving that the German Secret Service arrangements for transmitting facts to Berlin had ours beat by about twelve hours, and this certainly did tease the M.I. rather. But the Pets’ Programmes were a definite menace. Playing upon the well-known English love of animals the wily Hun provided this enormous treat for the pets of the United Kingdom.

  ‘Bring your Bow-wow, your Puss-puss, your Dickie-bird, your Moo-cow, your Gee-gee, your Mousie and your three little fishes to the radio. Or, take the radio out to the stables if your pets cannot be brought indoors. For those raising hens on the battery system these concerts should prove profitable indeed – few hens can resist laying an egg after hearing the Lieder König. The real object of these programmes is not, however, a mercenary one, the object is to bring joy to the hearts of dumb creatures, too many of whom spend a joyless life without song. There is no need for your pets to belong to this category any more: bring them all to the radio and see what pleasure you will give them. The Lieder König himself, who can sing so high that bats can hear him, and so low that buffaloes can, is here expressly to minister to your dumb ones, and bring them strength through joy.’

  The old gentleman then came to the radio and gave first a little talk about the muddle of animal A.R.P. in London. Few dogs and no cats, he said, carried gas masks, and gas-proof cages for birds and mice were the exception rather than the rule. The animal first-aid posts were scandalously few and ill equipped. The evacuation scheme had not been a success, and many mothers of dogs had fetched their little ones home rather than unselfishly bear the parting for their sakes. ‘I dedicate this concert to the animal evacuees in strange homes,’ he said, ‘may they think of England and stay away from London until this stupid war is over. Here in Germany you hardly ever see a pet; all the dogs are at the West Wall, and the rest are nobly playing their part, somewhere.’ He then delivered a series of shrieks and groans which certainly did have an uncanny effect upon any animals who happened to listen in. Dogs and cats joined in the choruses, horses danced upon their hind legs, and dickie birds went nearly mad with joy. Mice crept out of their holes to listen, while in the country the radio on these occasions proved such a magnet to frogs and snails and slugs that many people thankfully used it as a trap for small garden pests. The authorities at the Zoo had gramophone records made to cheer up their charges during the black-out, and Ming, the panda, would soon eat no food until one of them was played to her.

  The results of all this can readily be imagined. On the day after one of these concerts Members of Parliament would be inundated by a perfect flood of letters from sentimental constituents demanding instant cessation of hostilities against our fellow animal-lovers, the Germans. In fact, the Pets’ Programme did more for the enemy cause over here than all the broadcasts by Lord Haw-haw, all the ravings of the Slavery Party’s organ, The New Bondsman, and all the mutterings of Bloomsbury’s yellow front put together.

  ‘If the pets all over the world,’ concluded the Lieder König, ‘were to rise up as one pet and demand peace, peace we should have.’

  ‘Here are the Reichsender Bremen, stations Hamburg and D x B operating on the 31 metre band. The Lieder König wishes to thank all pets for listening. The next Pets’ Concert will be on Tuesday next at 9.45.’

  Sophia and Fred, who had dined with her, had been listening, for the benefit of those returned evacuees, Milly and Abbie. Sophia had sent for Milly, against her better judgement, because she did not get along without her very well, and also for protection from the parachutists. She was a French bulldog, as clever as she was beautiful, and Abbie was her daughter. Abbie’s blood was mixed, Milly having thrown herself away upon a marmalade Don Juan, one spring morning in Westminster Abbey, but she was very sweet and the apple of Fred’s eye. When the Pets’ Programme was over, they took their leave, Sophia going a little way up the Square with them in order to give Milly a run after her emotional experience. When they got back, Milly galloped upstairs and burrowed her way under Sophia’s quilt until she came to where the hot-water bottle was, when she flopped at once into a snoring sleep.

  Sophia followed more slowly. She had a pain which had not been improved by her excursion into the cold. When she reached her bathroom she looked for the Cachets Fèvre, but presently remembered that she had given the box to Florence, and went up the next flight of stairs to Florence’s bedroom. She knocked on the door without much expecting any reply: when there was none, she went in.

  She had not seen the room since Florence had occupied it, and was quite shocked to see how much it had been subdued. Pretty and frilly as it was, like any room done up by Sophia, Florence had done something intangible to it by her mere presence, and it was looking frightful. The dressing-table, exquisite with muslin, lace, roses, and blue bows, like a ball dress in a dream, and which was designed to carry an array of gold-backed brushes, bottles, pots of cream and flagons of scent, was bare except for one small black brush and a comb which must have originally been meant for a horse’s mane. The Aubusson carpet had its pattern of lutes and arrows, with more roses and blue bows, completely obscured by two cheap-looking suitcases. A pair of stays and a gas-mask case had been thrown across the alluring bed cover, puckered with pink velvet and blue chiffon. Sophia, who herself wore a ribbon suspender-belt, looked in horrified fascination at the stays. ‘No wonder Florence is such a queer shape,’ she thought, picking them up, ‘she will never be a glamour girl in stays like that, and how does she get into them?’ She held them against her own body but could not make out which bit went where; they were like medieval armour. As she put them back on the bed she saw that the gas-mask carrier contained a Leica camera instead of a gas-mask, and she thought it was simply horrible of Florence never to have taken a photograph of Milly with it. The pigeon, in its cage, was dumped on a beautiful satinwood table, signed by Sheraton; considering how much Florence was supposed to love it, she might have provided it with a larger cage. The poor thing was shuffling up and down miserably. Sophia stroked its feathers with one finger through the wire netting, and remembered a beautiful Chippendale bird-
cage for sale in the Brompton Road. She might give it to Florence for Christmas, but Florence seemed so very indifferent to pretty objects. Perhaps, she thought, the bird wants to go out. She opened the cage, took it in her hands, stroked it for a while, and put it out of the window, just too late, evidently, for it made a mess on her skirt.

  When she had shut the window and wiped her skirt, Sophia felt an impulse to tidy up: it was really too annoying of Elsie, the housemaid, to leave the room in such a mess. She put away the stays and gas-mask case, and then took hold of a hatbox, intending to take it upstairs to the boxroom, but although, as she did so, the top opened, revealing that it was quite empty inside, it was so heavy that she could hardly lift it, so she gave up the idea. Really, her pain was quite bad and she must find the cachets. She opened a few drawers, but they were all full of papers. Then she remembered that there were some shelves in the built-in cupboard so she opened that.

  In the part of the cupboard which was meant for dresses stood Heatherley Egg.

  Sophia’s scream sounded like a train going through a tunnel. Then she became very angry indeed.

  ‘Stupid,’ she said, ‘to frighten me like that. Anyway, what’s the point of waiting in Florence’s cupboard – she’s on duty, doesn’t come off till six.’

  Heatherley slid out into the room and gripped her arm. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we have got to get this straight.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s bother,’ said Sophia, who had lost interest now that she had recovered from her fright. ‘God knows I’m not a prude, and Florence’s private life has nothing to do with me. Live in her cupboard if you like to; I don’t care.’

  ‘See here, Sophia, you can’t get away with that. Now, sit down; we have to talk this over.’

  ‘You haven’t seen some Cachets Fèvre anywhere, have you? I lent her a box and, of course, she didn’t bring them back; people never do, do they? It doesn’t matter to speak of, I must go to bed. Well, good night, Heatherley. What about breakfast? Do you like it in your own cupboard, or downstairs?’

  She went towards the door.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ said Heatherley, in quite a menacing sort of voice, very different from his usual transatlantic whine. ‘You can’t fool me that way, Sophia. Very clever, and I should have been quite taken in, but I happened to watch you through the keyhole. Those bags have false bottoms, haven’t they, the gas-mask contains a camera, doesn’t it, and there are code signals sewn into the stuffing of those stays. Eh?’

  ‘Are there, how simply fascinating! Is that why they are so bumpy? Do go on!’

  ‘Quite an actress, aren’t you, and I might easily have believed you if you hadn’t sent off the pigeon with a phoney message.’

  ‘The dear thing asked to go out.’

  ‘Yes, knowing how stupid you are, Sophia, I might have believed that everything had passed over your head, but you can’t laugh off that pigeon. So come clean now; you’ve known the whole works since Greta disappeared, haven’t you?’

  ‘What works? Darling Heth, do tell me; it does sound such heaven.’

  ‘As you know so much already, I guess I better had, too, tell you everything. Florence, of course, as you are no doubt aware, is a secret agent, working under a pseudonym, and with a false American passport. Her real name is Edda Eiweiss and she is the head of the German espionage in this country.’

  ‘You don’t say so! Good for Florence,’ said Sophia. ‘I never thought she would have had the brains.’

  ‘Gee, Florence is probably the cleverest, most astute and most daring secret agent alive today.’

  ‘Do go on. What are you? Florence’s bottle-washer?’

  ‘Why no, not at all. I am engaged in counter-espionage on behalf of the Allied Governments, but Florence, of course, believes that I am one of her gang. Now, what I want to know is, are you employed by anybody, or are you on your own?’

  ‘But neither,’ said Sophia, opening her eyes very wide.

  ‘Sophia, I want an answer to my question, please. I have laid my cards on the table; let’s have a look at yours.’

  ‘Oh, on my own, of course,’ said Sophia. As Heatherley seemed to be crediting her with these Machiavellian tactics it would be a pity to undeceive him.

  ‘I thought so. Now, Sophia, I need your help. A woman’s wits are just what I lack, so listen carefully to me. I have found out a great deal, but not all, about the German system of espionage. By November 10th, I shall have all the facts that will enable the Government to round up the entire corps of spies at present operating in this country. On that day we can catch the gang, Florence and her associates, but not before. Will you come in on this with me, Sophia?’ He clutched her shoulders and stared with his light blue eyes into her face. ‘Before you answer, let me tell you that it is difficult and dangerous work. You risk death, and worse, if you undertake it, but the reward, to a patriotic soul, is great.’

  ‘Rather, of course I will.’ Sophia was delighted. She, and not Olga, was now up to the neck in a real-life spy story.

  ‘Understand, you must take all your orders from me. One false step might render useless my work of months.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And not act on your own initiative at all?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Sophia, you are a brave woman and a great little patriot. Shake.’ They shook.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Go right ahead.’

  ‘Well, what happened to Greta in the end?’

  ‘What did she say to you?’ asked Heatherley, with a searching look.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What did she say when you saw her in the Post on that stretcher?’

  ‘Well, but she couldn’t speak. She had a sort of bandage on her tongue, you see.’

  ‘Sophia,’ Heatherley’s voice again took on that horrid rasping tone, ‘you promised to be perfectly frank with me. Come clean now, what was she doing with her eyes?’

  ‘Oh, her eyes. Yes, she must have had a great grit in one of them, I should imagine. She was blinking like mad; I had quite forgotten.’

  ‘She was winking out a message to you in Morse Code. What was that message, Sophia? No double crossing——

  ‘My dear Heatherley, however should I know?’

  ‘You don’t know Morse Code?’

  Sophia saw that she might just as well have admitted to an Ambassador of the old school that she knew no French. She decided that as she did long to be a counterspy with Heatherley and that as she could quite quickly learn the Morse Code (she knew that stupid looking Girl Guides managed to do so) there would be no harm in practising a slight deception.

  ‘Semaphore perfect,’ she said airily. ‘But I must confess my Morse needs brushing up. And anyhow, if you remember, I was running to the telephone when I passed you in that dark passage and had no time at all to see what Greta was winking about. She was such a bore, anyway, I never could stick her. So what happened to her after that?’

  Heathley pursed his lips. ‘I’m afraid, my dear Sophia, that it was not very pleasant,’ he said. ‘You must remember that my job is counter-espionage, that I have to suppress my own personal feelings rigidly, and that very very often I am obliged to do things which are obnoxious to me.’

  ‘Like in Somerset Maugham’s books?’

  ‘Just like – I am glad you appreciate my point. Well, it seems that Florence wasn’t feeling any too sure about Greta, who was, of course, one of her corps, and was particularly anxious that Greta should not come up before the Alien’s tribunal as she would probably have made mistakes and given them all away, Florence and the rest of them. Also her papers were not foolproof. So, at Florence’s bidding, of course, Winthrop and I carried her on the stretcher, just as you saw her, gagged and bound, and put her into the main drain which flows, as you may not know, under the First Aid Post.’

  Sophia screamed again. Heatherley went on, ‘Yes, my dear Sophia, counter-espionage is a dangerous, disagreeable profession. I should l
ike you to remember this and be most careful, always, how you act. It is absolutely necessary for you to trust me and do exactly what I say on every occasion. We are in this together now, remember, you and I.’

  Sophia did not so much care about being in anything with Heatherley, and hoped that all this would not lead to being in bed with him; she seemed to remember that such things were part of the ordinary day’s work of beautiful female spies. On the other hand, she felt that she would, if necessary, endure even worse than death in order to be mixed up in this thrilling real life spy drama. The horrible end of poor Greta served to show that here was the genuine article. Fancy. The main drain. Sophia shuddered. No wonder Miss Edwards saw something queer going on under her feet.

  ‘Now, Sophia, I hope you realise,’ Heatherley said, ‘that whatever happens you are not to tell a living soul about all this. You and I are watched day and night by unseen eyes. These are evil things that we are fighting – yes, evil, and very clever. The telephone, to this house and to the Post, is tapped by Florence’s men; our letters are read and our movements followed. We may have got away with this conversation simply by daring to hold it here, in the heart of the enemy country; on the other hand, we may not. As you leave this room, masked men may seize upon us and carry us, on stretchers, to the fate which befel you know who. Of course, if you were to go to anybody in authority with this tale, the gang would know it, and would disperse like a mist before the sun – at the best my work of months would be destroyed, at the worst you and I would suffer the supreme penalty. I may tell you that the War Office and Scotland Yard are watching over us in their own way, and I have secret means of communicating with them. By the 10th November, as I told you before, I shall have all the evidence I need, and then the whole lot can be rounded up. Meanwhile, you and I, Sophia, must be a team. Now you should go back to your room; this conversation has already lasted too long. I shan’t be able to speak to you like this again until all is over, so REMEMBER.’