Au Reservoir Page 14

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the handsome young man answered. ‘I hope I didn’t do wrong.’

  ‘You could hardly have done wronger,’ Coward rebuked him. ‘In fact, the last time anyone did me wrong to anything like such an egregious extent was when some fathead suggested that Herbert Marshall might have been a better choice for In Which We Serve.’

  He buried his face in his hands as the pain came flooding back.

  ‘Now then, sir,’ Denny said gently, ‘I thought we were trying ever so hard to forget about that.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Coward replied faintly. ‘One must be strong after all.’

  His looked up and sniffed the air appreciatively as his plate approached.

  ‘But that does not alter the fact that you have been a very naughty boy. After I have partaken of breakfast – alone – and then had a long soak in the bath, I shall decide upon a suitable punishment. Perhaps I may even send you back to live in Hendon Central.’

  Olga gasped in horror.

  ‘Oh please, sir,’ cried poor Denny, who had gone quite pale, ‘not that. I don’t think I could bear it.’

  ‘Well, we shall see,’ Coward said majestically. ‘Perhaps Homer will nod on this occasion. There again, perhaps he will not.’

  As he picked up his knife and fork he suddenly paused and gazed balefully at his valet.

  ‘Pray do explain, Denny,’ he enjoined with an air of quiet menace, ‘why you have brought two plates of bacon and eggs?’

  ‘One is for me, of course, silly,’ Olga cut in, sitting down on the other side of the table and falling upon her bacon and eggs with her customary appetite. ‘I say, Denny, bring some bread, there’s a poppet, I’m starving.

  ‘Now then, Noël,’ she went on, ‘stop being such a grump and eat your breakfast. I’m sorry I gatecrashed you like this, but you’re so busy at the moment it was the only way I could get to see you.’

  Coward attempted to look pained at the same time as eating bacon and eggs. Being a consummate actor, he gave quite a convincing performance.

  After a decent interval, while Olga rubbed pieces of bread around her plate in search of the last dregs of egg yolk, he placed his cutlery delicately in the centre of his plate and reached for another cigarette.

  ‘You may draw my bath as usual, Denny,’ he advised the hovering valet. ‘Verbena and magnolia today, I think. Those martinis last night were a tad severe.’

  ‘Oh you poor thing,’ Olga said feelingly, ‘I know what you mean. Either it’s us getting older, or it’s the gin. Martinis just don’t seem the same as before the war.’

  ‘I am not getting older,’ he said, lighting up, ‘though you are of course welcome to do so should you wish. Anyway, it’s not the gin, it’s the vermouth. Noilly Prat has become completely unobtainable, so they’re having to use any old junk they can get hold of. Even the Savoy hasn’t seen any since 1943, or so they say.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Olga replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Coward asked in rhetorical vein. ‘It’s just the French being French, I suppose.’

  ‘You’d think they’d be grateful,’ Olga said indignantly. ‘After all, we did save them from the Germans, didn’t we?’

  ‘Oh my dear,’ Coward said, ‘but perhaps they didn’t want to be saved? After all, if you must have somebody telling you what to do, then the Germans do it so frightfully well.’

  ‘Sometimes I think we just confused them,’ Olga mused. ‘After all, first you had all the people they thought were the goodies collaborating with the Germans and sentencing all the baddies to death, and then suddenly the baddies come back and beat the Germans, so they become the goodies and everyone has to pretend to have supported them all along. Now it’s the goodies who have become the baddies and it’s their turn to get sentenced to death.’

  ‘The idea of the French all sentencing each other to death is an enticing prospect, of course,’ Coward observed, ‘but even that is inadequate compensation for being deprived of Noilly Prat for one’s martinis.

  ‘The really aggravating thing,’ he went on, ‘is that it is apparently freely available in France, at a price anyway, but the British customs will not allow you to import it. It’s not as if it were the 1928 Petrus, which has simply disappeared because the wretched Bosche drank it all during the occupation.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘And now, I must get on,’ he said decisively. ‘After my bath I have to be brilliant and compose an after dinner speech which I am giving for some dreadful politicians. Something to do with the Marshall Plan, I understand, or was it Berlin? Or perhaps both? Perhaps I shall give Louis Mountbatten a ring – after all, it was he who talked me into it.’

  ‘What’s so dreadful about these politicians?’ Olga asked.

  He gazed at her as a Latin teacher might if she were a rather dull child who had just made a terrible mess of the ablative absolute.

  ‘They’re all dreadful. It’s just a fact of life. To make matters worse, they’re all inexpressibly boring – obviously they are or they wouldn’t become politicians in the first place – and I have to think of some devastating witticism about these inexpressibly boring little people, which I can deliver at the end of my speech and which will bring the house down thus proving that I am truly brilliant, which of course I am.’

  He got up from the table with an air of finality.

  ‘Wait!’ Olga said suddenly.

  ‘I fear I cannot,’ he said loftily. ‘The tyranny of a blank page awaits.’

  ‘But what if I can give you what you want?’

  ‘What do you mean exactly, my dear?’ he asked, sounding puzzled.

  ‘Suppose I can give you your witticism, yes, and a whole case of Noilly Prat too?’

  He gazed at her greedily.

  ‘Then I would undoubtedly grant you any favour that you may desire.’

  ‘Ah-ha!’ cried she in triumph.

  ‘No!’ he gasped, suddenly remembering. ‘Not that. Not that dreadful woman, not the fête, not mixing with the middle classes! No, Olga, I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I really can’t.’

  His knees suddenly felt weak and he clutched the back of a chair for support.

  Olga stared at him mercilessly.

  ‘You can and you will, Noël. You are going to give me a weekend of your time and I am going to prepare you a script, which you will follow exactly.’

  He gaped soundlessly, and a distracted hand went scurrying around the tabletop in search of his cigarettes.

  ‘And once you have done this wonderful thing, Noël – and it is a wonderful thing you will be doing, I promise you – then you have my personal word that the car which drives you back to London will have nestling snugly in the boot as a personal “thank you” six bottles of the 1928 Petrus.’

  So saying she snatched up her hat and bag and departed the scene of her victory. As she did so, the strains of Noël weakly saying ‘Cruel, so very cruel,’ wafted after her.

  Georgie was by this time deeply ensconced in the intricacies of duplicate bridge with Lucia and a gentleman with the rather imposing name of Maurice Harrison-Grey, whom she had invited for lunch.

  It all seemed very complicated the way he described it. There were Mitchell movements and Howell movements and Georgie really couldn’t understand which was preferable, and why. There were skip moves and hesitations, and pivots and arrow switches, and very soon his head was spinning as if in sympathy. Lucia, however, was listening intently and giving every appearance of comprehension.

  If the way the boards and pairs moved around the room from table to table was complex enough, it seemed to pale into insignificance compared to the scoring. Rather than the good old rubber bridge scoring method of tricks scored being entered below the line, and overtricks and penalties above the line, a totally different method was employed. He asked about this rather weakly and was told quickly by Lucia, ‘Don’t be silly, Georgie, there is no line of course,’ after which he decided to sulk quietly on his side o
f the table and enjoy his veal Holstein, the veal having somehow magically slipped through the rationing system without recourse to meat vouchers.

  It seemed that some elaborate triple process was involved, since points were converted into match points and these could in turn be converted into victory points, but only if one was playing in teams rather than pairs. What on earth did that mean?

  ‘Can’t a pair be a team?’ he enquired incautiously. ‘A team of two, anyway?’

  Lucia cast him a withering glance.

  ‘Really, caro mio, do pay attention. A team is two pairs playing together against two other pairs and you score on the difference between the scores achieved on the two tables. I think it might do very well for some of our little local encounters here in dear old Tilling.’

  ‘It all does seem rather complicated at first,’ Harrison-Grey broke in sympathetically. ‘The best thing to do is get one or two members of your local club to attend a director’s course for a day or two. Then you’ll always have someone around who can tell everyone what to do.’

  Lucia promptly whipped out her little notebook and pencil and started writing things down in her small and incredibly neat handwriting. Georgie sighed and sipped his Gewürztraminer. Perhaps it was the result of telepathy from having been her companion for so long, but he knew instinctively that what she was jotting down would be:

  1. Form bridge club

  2. Elect self President

  3. Go on director’s course

  The ‘4. Tell people what to do’ could safely be inferred, he thought.

  ‘Well, you seem to understand it all very well,’ Georgie marvelled. ‘Really, I don’t know how you do it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Harrison-Grey said modestly. ‘You just sort of pick it up as you go along.’

  ‘You seem to forget, Georgie,’ Lucia chided him as she replaced her pencil and notebook in her handbag, ‘that Mr Harrison-Grey is the European bridge champion.’

  ‘That may be because you neglected to tell me,’ he said waspishly.

  Lucia gave one of her tinkling laughs.

  ‘Dear me, I am justly scolded!’ she acknowledged. ‘Of course, caro, I had only just come in from my committee meeting, hadn’t I, when Mr Harrison-Grey arrived? A committee in the morning, a working lunch – if I may refer to it so without fear of offence? – and a meeting at the town hall this afternoon. Goodness, how you all work me so.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were going to the town hall today,’ Georgie observed, puzzled. ‘After all you’re not on the council any longer.’

  ‘Really, Georgie, one does not abdicate one’s civil responsibilities just because one leaves public office. Duty is not a mantle that can be lightly cast aside, that can be slipped off and on at will. Either one is a public servant or one is not. Elected office is as much a state of mind as anything else.’

  She gazed grimly into the distance, wearing her Queen Elizabeth face, while her two lunch companions looked at each other in confusion, and then at the tablecloth. With obvious difficulty she drew herself out of her reverie of lofty good intentions and returned to the mundane, everyday world.

  ‘If you must know, though I was hoping to keep it a secret a little longer, I believe it would be a great coup for Tilling to host a duplicate bridge tournament, and the council chamber would make a magnificent setting for it, don’t you think?’

  Georgie mentally kicked himself for not having thought to add ‘5. Hold bridge tournament’.

  ‘Oh, really?’ he said, trying to sound surprised.

  ‘Capital idea, if I may say so, Mrs Pillson,’ Harrison-Grey commented, nodding approvingly.

  ‘But do you think you’d get enough people?’ Georgie asked anxiously. ‘After all, there are only about a dozen bridge players in the whole town.’

  ‘We will invite applications from further afield, silly,’ Lucia said grandly. ‘I will place advertisements in the newspapers.’

  ‘You mean Brighton? Golly.’

  Lucia frowned. As so often, her partner had failed to grasp the magnificent scope of her vision.

  ‘London, I think,’ she said decisively.

  She rang the bell for the plates to be cleared away.

  ‘Now, then,’ she said rather dreamily, ‘if only I could think of something which would make it so overwhelmingly attractive and exciting that people would flock to it from all over the country …’

  Georgie felt that she was gazing at him, albeit dreamily, and that he was expected to proffer some suggestion. He floundered, thinking desperately of other competitions which Lucia had sponsored.

  ‘A cup, perhaps?’ he asked desperately.

  Lucia nodded sagely.

  ‘A sound suggestion, Georgie,’ she agreed. ‘I shall see about one immediately. But there is something else that is creeping around at the back of my mind … oh dear, it’s no use.’

  Georgie stared across the table rather helplessly. If only she had arrived home a little earlier, he thought, and had time to brief him in advance. She inclined her head slightly towards their lunch guest and suddenly everything fell into place.

  ‘Oh,’ he said rather weakly, ‘why not invite some of the leading players in the country to come and compete? Why not Mr Harrison-Grey here, for example?’

  There was a noticeable softening in the atmosphere, signifying that he had indeed struck the right target.

  ‘Why, Georgie,’ she said brightly, ‘what a wonderful idea.’

  Georgie smiled contentedly as he helped himself and Harrison-Grey to the last of the wine.

  ‘And let us strike while the iron is hot,’ she continued briskly. ‘Let us issue our first invitation here and now. Mr Harrison-Grey, I do hope that you will honour us by attending?’

  Harrison-Grey shifted uneasily.

  ‘My partner and I do attend tournaments, of course,’ he began, but then halted awkwardly.

  Lucia frowned, but then her face cleared as realisation dawned.

  ‘But as professionals, of course,’ she said. ‘I do understand.’

  ‘Quite,’ Harrison-Grey said. ‘My usual terms –’

  Lucia held up an imperious hand.

  ‘Pray do not let me embarrass you by being so vulgar as to discuss money at the lunch table. I will pay you and your partner double your usual attendance fee, and I will subscribe a cash prize in addition to the cup of one hundred pounds. Would that be acceptable?’

  ‘More than acceptable, dear lady,’ Harrison-Grey purred contentedly, savouring the last spicy remnants of his Gewürztraminer.

  ‘And I think,’ Lucia went on, ‘that we should make it a teams event, don’t you, Georgie? Teams of four. That way we can get all our friends here in Tilling used to the idea.’

  ‘Yes, if you think so,’ he said.

  Looking at Lucia across the table, however, he could not help but feel a palpable sense of unfinished business. She had the look of a woman who knows that she has scored many notable victories, but is conscious that she is still on the brink of her crowning triumph. Troublingly, she seemed to be expecting him to provide her with an opening once again. Frantically he cast around, but found nothing.

  ‘Teams of four it shall be, then,’ she said, with a meaningfully intent focus on Georgie.

  Had there been just the faintest of inflections on the word ‘four’, he wondered? Then he had it.

  ‘But Lucia,’ he asked innocently, ‘if we need a team of four to enter this tournament, who on earth shall we ask to play with us?’

  Harrison-Grey gave a little bow from the seated position, which, had Mr Wyse been present, he would surely have applauded.

  ‘Should the suggestion prove acceptable,’ he said, ‘I would be delighted to offer the services of my partner and myself.’

  ‘Why, what a wonderful idea,’ Lucia exclaimed. ‘I would never have entertained that possibility for a moment. Let me accept with alacrity.’

  Grosvenor entered the room with coffee and cream on a silver salver. Behind her ca
me Foljambe with the cups and saucers.

  ‘If you please, sir,’ announced the latter as she bobbed, ‘Miss Bracely telephoned during lunch, and wonders if you can call her back when convenient?’

  Chapter 13

  ‘Any news?’ asked Diva hopefully.

  ‘Indeed there is,’ Elizabeth Mapp-Flint informed her grimly. ‘Mr Georgie, if you please, is going to open the fête at Tenterden. Not Lucia, mind. Georgie.’

  ‘No!’ Diva gasped dutifully, and then, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘In the newspaper for all to see,’ Major Benjy cut in.

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ Diva said doubtfully.

  ‘That’s because you were looking at the Tilling Gazette, I assume, or one of the other Sussex papers,’ Mapp explained. ‘Don’t forget, Tenterden is in Kent. One of Benjy’s friends left the Kent Messenger lying around at the golf club, and he saw it there. Some nonsense about being proud to welcome a distinguished patron of the arts. Pah!’

  ‘But why should Georgie be opening a fête?’ Diva asked in a puzzled tone of voice as the Bartletts approached. ‘Doesn’t make sense. Not his sort of thing at all. Sure I heard him say once that he hated public speaking. Now, Lucia would be a different matter entirely. She opens things all the time.’

  ‘She’d open an envelope if she thought there might be a press cutting in it for her,’ Mapp said savagely. ‘Steady, Liz-girl,’ Major Benjy enjoined her, raising his hat to Evie Bartlett.

  ‘Any news?’ warbled the Padre.

  ‘News from Tenterden, Padre, yes,’ Mapp replied, eyeing him suspiciously. ‘Why, I’m surprised you should be asking us. After all, you are very much in the swim at Tenterden these days, are you not?’

  She popped her head on eye side and stared at him in raptorial fashion. Fortunately the Reverend Bartlett had been subjected to such treatment before, and remained steady under fire.

  ‘Indeed?’ he asked innocently. ‘News about the fête, would it be?’

  ‘Mr Georgie to open it. Not Lucia. Very strange,’ telegraphed Diva.

  Evie squeaked, though whether in surprise, confirmation or refutation it was difficult to tell.