Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘What was agony 22 for?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The word, or letters, or code, or whatever it was you wrote on my egg, of course. I took ages trying to decode it, and I wondered if I had the right solution.’

  ‘On your egg?’ Heatherley put down his soup-spoon and looked completely blank.

  ‘Yes, yes. Think. Of course it must have been you. This morning I had a boiled egg for breakfast, and written on the shell, in pencil, it had agony 22.’

  ‘Sophia, now, why would I write on your egg when I could so easily call you, come round and see you, or leave a note for you here?’ Why indeed? Sophia felt that she had been a fool.

  ‘Well, you said that we must be so careful, that our letters would be opened, and our telephone tapped ——’

  ‘If your telephone can be tapped, so could your egg be. No, Sophia, we need to be very, very careful, but there’s no sense in writing on eggs, no sense at all, when we can meet all we want to both at the Post and in this house.’

  ‘Anyway, what is our next move? I want to start work,’ said Sophia, to change the painful subject.

  ‘I was just coming to that.’ Heatherley paused and seemed to consider her. ‘How are your nerves?’ he said. ‘Pretty good? Fine. I have a very delicate job that I wish to entrust to you, delicate, and it may be dangerous. Are you game?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Heatherley, I think so.’

  ‘O.K. Well, presently, when you have quite finished your dinner, I want you to go back to the Post.’

  Sophia was not pleased. She had spent eight hours in the Post that day, and had left, as she always did, with a feeling of immense thankfulness and relief. The idea of going back there after dinner did not appeal to her at all.

  Heatherley went on, ‘You are to make a list of all the nurses there on night duty. Then I want a copy of every word that is written on the notice-board. When you have done that, go to the Regal Cinema and pin an envelope containing the copy to the second stall in the third row on the left-hand side of the centre gangway. You can give me the list of nurses tomorrow; that is less important. One last word of instruction – on no account take a taxi, that might be fatal. You will be safe enough if you walk it.’

  ‘Well, really,’ said Sophia, ‘that is far sillier than writing on eggs. Why can’t whoever is going to the third stall in the second row walk into the Post and see for himself what is written on the notice-board?’

  ‘Sophia.’ Heatherley gave a fish-like look which for a moment, and until she remembered it was only old Heth, quite struck a chill into her heart. ‘Are you, or are you not going to help me in clearing out a nest of dangerous spies? Let me tell you that Florence communicates with the rest of her gang by means of that notice-board. My friend cannot go to the Post himself, it would be as much as his life is worth to venture near it. If I were seen to be in communication with him, I too would have short shrift, but it is of vital importance that he should know what is on the board tonight. I can’t get away from this Brotherhood meeting without arousing Florence’s suspicions, but I thought I had seen a way of fixing things. I thought you would go for me.’

  ‘Oh, all right, Heth, I will. I only meant it sounded rather silly, but I see now that it has to be done. Have some apple flan.’

  11

  Now although Sophia supposed herself to be such a keen and enthusiastic spy, she had not really the temperament best suited to the work. It was not in her nature, for instance, to relish being sent out on a cold and foggy evening, after she had had her bath and changed her clothes, in order to do an apparently pointless job for somebody who could quite well do it for himself. Obviously if Heatherley could be closeted for ages in the coal-hole, if he could dine for more than an hour behind a locked door, he could easily escape from the house without Florence or anybody else noticing that he had gone, and do his own dreary work. So she determined that somehow or another she would wriggle out of going, but of course without annoying her Chief as she had not the least intention of being excluded from the delights of counter-espionage, and this might well happen should she be caught out disobeying orders. Sophia was very good at not doing things she disliked, and soon her plans were laid. She remembered that, exasperated by her long and unequal struggle with the overalls, she had herself, that very evening, written out a notice to the effect that those nurses who wanted to have their overalls sorted when they came back from the wash, should write their names clearly both on the overalls themselves and on their pigeonholes so that Sophia should know where to put them. When she had pinned this to the board, there had been no other notice there, and she had been particularly pleased, thinking that more attention would be paid to it on this account. Now a notice written out by Sophia would not, in the nature of things, contain Florence’s secret instructions to her corps of spies. Sophia therefore decided that she would explain to Heatherley that there had been nothing on the notice-board; impossible to make a copy of nothing, so she had done no more about it. That disposed of the notice-board. As for the list of nurses on night duty, she could find that out from Sister Wordsworth’s ledger in the morning. And in order to make perfectly certain of not seeing Heatherley before she arrived at the Post she decided to go immediately after breakfast to Phyllis Earle and have her hair done.

  As soon as she had reached these comfortable decisions, and with the prospect now of a delicious evening with Caroline of England in her warm bed, she became extremely nice, indeed almost flirtatious to Heatherley during the rest of their meal together. When it was over, and Heth had enjoyed brandy and a huge cigar (unlike Florence he did not despise his creature comforts at all), she went upstairs most cheerfully, put on her fur coat with its pretty, scarlet-lined hood, and then was shepherded by a quite unusually genial Heth, through a few Brothers who had finished eating, to the front door.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s rather foggy,’ he said, peering out with his pale eyes into a solid curtain of fog.

  ‘All the better. I am less likely to be followed,’ said Sophia.

  ‘And cold.’

  ‘Ssh. Think of our cause, dear Heatherley.’

  ‘You understand that on no account must you take a taxi,’ he reminded her. A more competent spy, she thought, would have seen the impossibility of walking more than two steps in her high-heeled velvet sandals. Anyhow, what did the man think she was, for heaven’s sake, a marathon walker?

  ‘No taxi, no indeed.’ She stepped gaily into the fog.

  ‘Sophia, you’re wonderful.’

  ‘No! No! Goodbye! Goodbye!’

  Heatherley shut the front door. Sophia waited a moment and then she went down the area steps, let herself in at the back door and took off her shoes. The servants were in the servants’ hall with the wireless blazing away, the back-stairs were pitch dark, and Sophia, using her torch, crept up them and hoped that she would not fall over Heatherley and his girl friend, quiet-timing. They could hardly have got there yet, she thought. On the first floor a door led from the back-stairs into the ballroom, a room which was used about twice a year for parties, and otherwise kept shut up, with dust sheets. She was rather surprised to notice, through the cracks of the door, that the lights were on. Wonderful how the quiet-timers seep into everything. She crept to the door and looked through the keyhole. What she saw turned her to stone.

  In a group near the door stood Florence, Heatherley, Winthrop, a microphone, and Sir Ivor King, the Lieder König.

  ‘I reckon,’ Heatherley was saying, ‘that she will be gone an hour at the very least, in this fog. Five minutes to the Post, ten minutes to copy out the notices, three-quarters of an hour to the Regal and back. And this is a very conservative estimate, I may add, for the fog is thick outside, and I have not allowed for her stopping to talk to anybody at the Post. So you see there is no danger, and we have ample time for everything. If the servants should happen to hear us, they will think we have switched on the radio and old Ivor is coming over the air better than
usual. But they will surely be listening to him themselves downstairs.’

  Florence was looking cross. ‘I still think it was perfectly stupid of you to tell her anything at all.’

  ‘Say, we’ve talked all this over before, haven’t we? She was wise to everything already, and it was a choice between making her think she was in on the racket, or taking her for a ride. If we had adopted the latter course, the police would have been rubbering round this house and the First Aid Post, and we should have been in a regular spot. Another thing, how would I have got her away this evening if she hadn’t been told the works, or some of them – as it is she’s just eating out of my hand, will do anything I order her to.’

  ‘Yes, there’s something in that,’ said Florence grudgingly.

  ‘I tell you,’ Heth continued, ‘I shall be glad when this business is over and we can do a bunk. I’m not so wild about the inspection of the drain tonight; it may mean they are on to something, or it may be just a routine affair. Either way, I don’t like it.’

  ‘In one minute it will be a quarter of,’ said Winthrop. He took up a position in front of the microphone, gazing at his wrist-watch. The others fell silent.

  ‘Germany calling, Germany calling,’ Winthrop said, with a very slight German accent and in an entirely different voice from his usual one. ‘Here is the Lieder König who is going to give you one of his inimitable programmes of Song Propaganda, so popular with lovers of song and also with lovers of propaganda the world over. The Lieder König.’

  Sir Ivor stepped smartly to the microphone. Sophia saw that, out of deference no doubt to the taste of his employers, he was wearing an Aryan wig of metallic brilliance; each curl was like a little golden spring. He raised his voice in song, ‘Kathleen Mavourneen the Grey Dawn is breaking,’ then he gave a short news bulletin, during the course of which he exactly described that evening’s Low cartoon, and also reminded his listeners that Sir Kingsley Wood was due to visit three aerodromes in Yorkshire the following day.

  Then Winthrop spoke. ‘The Lieder König thinks you would like to know certain facts which have come our way recently. In your great, free, British Empire, in the colony of Kenya, to be exact, there are two honest, thrifty, industrious German farmers, Herr Bad and Herr Wangel. These worthy men have been dragged away from their homes, for no better reason than that they were German-born, and put into the local prison. The prison is a wretched hut, the beds in it are unbearably hard, and the central heating hardly works at all. The prisoners are only allowed baths twice a week. But the worst scandal is the food which is offered to these Germans. Let me read out the bill of fare, considered by your Government as being sufficient for two grown men.

  ‘Breakfast. A liquid supposed to be coffee, some milk substitute, two lumps of beet sugar, pseudo-eggs and a loaf of brackish bread.

  ‘Luncheon. A so-called veal and ham pie, things which look like potatoes and beans, crab-apple pudding, cheese which is full of mites.

  ‘Tea. Tea (a nerve tonic indispensable to the decadent English, but which we Germans despise).

  ‘Dinner. A thin soup, fish, which is well known in these parts to cause leprosy. The leg of some sheep which had had to be killed, turnips and beetroot such as one feeds to cattle.

  ‘There was no tin of biscuits by their beds in case they woke up hungry in the night.

  ‘When you hear that things like this can happen in your great, vaunted, rich Empire perhaps you will demand that your statesmen, who can allow two honest and unoffending farmers to be so treated, should stop worrying over the scum of Polish cities in luxurious concentration camps, and should be a little bit more concerned about the beam in their own eye, for a change.

  ‘Ask Mr Churchill, where is the Ark Royal?

  ‘Here is the Lieder König again.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sir Ivor, ‘I hope you have all been as much shocked as I have by the brutal ill-treatment of Herr Bad and Herr Wangel. And now I am going to sing an old favourite, “Under the Deodar”.’

  He did so, and wound up his programme with ‘Fearful the Death of the Diver Must Be, walking alone, walking alone, walking alone in the Dehehehe-he-he-pths of the Sea,’ a song of which both he and his admirers were extremely fond, as, at the word ‘depths’, his voice plumbed hitherto uncharted ones, and any seals or hippos who might happen to be around would roar in an agony of appreciation. ‘Good night, dears,’ said the old König, ‘keep your hairs on. By the way, where is the Ark Royal?’

  ‘This ends,’ said Winthrop, resuming his place at the microphone, ‘our programme of Song-Propaganda in English, arranged and sung by the Lieder König.

  ‘Here are the Reichsender Bremen, stations Hamburg and D x B, operating on the thirty-one metre band. I have a special announcement for my English listeners. There will be a Pets’ Programme tomorrow from station D x B at 9.30 Greenwich mean time.’

  ‘Now we must scram,’ said Heatherley, ‘we can always wait in the Maternity Ward if the drain inspection is not finished.’

  They all, including the old gentleman, began to struggle into anti-gas clothing. Sophia waited no longer. She flew upstairs to her bedroom and locked herself in, dumbfounded by what she had seen.

  Her mind was in a whirl. If Heatherley, who pretended to be an American counter-spy, was really a German spy, perhaps the ‘King of Song’ was pretending to be a German spy, but was really an English counter-spy? Was he in the pay of the gang, or merely hoaxing them; was he perhaps longing, but unable, to get a message through to the outside world or was he only too anxious that his shameful secret should be kept? Was he neither spy nor counter-spy, but just a poor old gentleman who got a taste of the thumbscrew twice a day? She wondered, irrelevantly, whether he had seen in the newspapers the paeans of praise followed by the dirges of disillusionment which had so prominent a place in them. Suddenly she remembered that advertisement in The Times: ‘Poor old gentleman suffering from malignant disease would like to correspond with pretty young lady.’ Perhaps he did want to correspond with the pretty young lady, perhaps in fact, it was he who had written on her egg ‘Agony (column, box) 22’, and who had sent in the advertisement. But if he could do all this, surely he could equally well write to her, to Rudolph or even to poor Fred directly.

  Sophia felt that life had become very complicated all of a sudden. She wished she were more versed in the intricacies of spying, and she very much wished that she could remember more about what had happened in the limited number of spy stories which she had read at various times (generally, of course, on journeys, and how often does one remember anything read on journeys?) At what stage, for instance, does the beautiful heroine abandon her lone trail and call in the heavy hand, large boots and vacant faces of The Yard? She rather thought not until the whole plot had been brilliantly unmasked, except for a few unimportant details, by the glamorous amateur spy herself. This was a point of view which appealed to Sophia, who had to consider Rudolph and Olga as well as King and Country. She went to sleep, having decided on a policy of watchful waiting.

  The next day, when Sophia arrived at her First Aid Post, she found an atmosphere of subdued but horrified excitement. She immediately concluded that something untoward had happened at the Theatre; the nurses were always retailing awful atrocities they had witnessed there, and by Theatre they did not at all mean, as anybody else would have, the play; the ‘He’ of these entertainments was not Tom Walls, but the Surgeon, the ‘She’ not Hermione Baddeley but the Patient; in short, ‘the Theatre’ was not the Gaiety but St. Anne’s Hospital Operating Theatre. The dramas enacted there alternated, as at the Grand Guignol in Paris, between gruesome tragedy and roaring farce. Sophia supposed that a dead man must have come to life; the reverse which too often happened, could never have caused such a stir.

  Nurses were standing about in little groups, whispering, their eyes as round as marbles. Even Sister Wordsworth and Mr Stone, whom Sophia found in the office, were looking quite concerned.

  ‘Don’t tell Lady Sophia, she wou
ldn’t like it,’ said kind Sister Wordsworth, remembering about the knees.

  ‘What?’ said Sophia. ‘But of course you must tell me. I am so curious, I have the most curious nature in the world. If you don’t tell me, I shan’t get a wink of sleep, or give you one minute’s peace until you have. So please, dear Sister Wordsworth.’

  Of course they were dying to tell her really. It seemed that, during the drain inspection of the previous night, something too horrible had been found down there, brought up, carried through the Post (dripping, my dear, the smell), and taken to the Hospital mortuary. Sophia began to guess what this object might be, and sure enough, it was the body of a young woman, bound and gagged, and with its face completely gnawed away by rats. Greta.

  ‘But how on earth could it have got there?’ she asked, in a shaking voice.

  ‘Why, poor Sophia looks as white as a sheet. I told you we shouldn’t tell her. Sit down here, my dear, and have a cup of tea.’

  ‘They say it must have been washed down from much higher up. Nothing to do with this place at all.’

  ‘I should hope not indeed,’ said Sophia. ‘We should never get another outside patient for practices if they thought they were going to be popped down the main drain when we had finished with them.’

  ‘Outside patient – what an idea. Whatever made you think of that? Well, here’s your tea, drink it up, and you’ll feel better. We all think it was so clever of Miss Edwards, the way she saw something queer under our feet. I’m longing to have my fortune done again, now that there isn’t any more.’

  Sophia, however, was beginning to think that there was something very queer indeed, no less a thing than the headquarters of Florence’s gang and the hide-out of Sir Ivor King himself; otherwise, why did they hold their broadcast in her ballroom on the night of the drain-inspection? Why did they all work so assiduously at the Post? She had seen a plan of the hospital and knew that underneath the garage there were vast cellars and tunnels, as well as the main drain, no doubt admirably suited to Florence’s purpose. A more convenient place, in fact, it would be hard to imagine, a place where people wander in and out at all hours, often bandaged and on stretchers, or disguised in the sinister uniform of the decontamination squad. Could anything be more ideal? Then if, for any reason, the Post became temporarily unsuitable for their purpose, as it had done the previous evening during the drain inspection, they could repair, with their old ally (or victim) to Granby Gate, and under the guise of Brothers could hold their meetings and conduct their broadcasts there. Florence might not be a glamour girl, but she seemed to be a most efficient spy. Sophia hoped that this would all be a lesson to Luke, and that he would, in future, investigate the antecedents of his soul mates before introducing them into the home.