Au Reservoir Read online

  ‘Oh, now I remember,’ Olga said. ‘It was she who inspired you to begin your career as a stock market investor. You keep her photo on your desk.’

  Lucia graciously inclined her head to acknowledge the accuracy of Olga’s recall.

  ‘Indeed I do,’ she concurred. ‘It is a privilege to have the example of such a remarkable woman always before me.’

  She gazed rather mistily into the street outside the window to signify the depths of her sisterly emotions. Georgie took advantage of this lull in the proceedings to pour both himself and Olga another glass of burgundy from the decanter.

  ‘A remarkable woman indeed,’ Olga echoed.

  ‘That’s what the world needs, Georgie,’ she went on rather more hotly, turning to him, ‘more women who can carry the fight to men on their own terms.’

  ‘I’m not sure what my own terms are,’ Georgie mused, ‘but whatever they are, I surrender.’

  They both laughed, while Lucia frowned.

  ‘This really is remarkable steak and kidney pudding,’ Georgie changed the subject hastily. ‘Why, it makes that wretched rationing almost worthwhile. Just think, before the war we would have been having leg of lamb or something like that this evening and just thinking of it as another everyday dish, while now it’s an occasional treat and we’ve learned to appreciate it.’

  ‘Absolutely!’ agreed Olga, who was known for the resolute qualities of her appetite. ‘You are lucky, Lucia, to have such a splendid cook.’

  Lucia’s frown, though slight, was nonetheless still perceptible. It denoted, as it was intended to, that some important message had been communicated but either it had been in too subtle a form to be discerned, or (more likely) that those for whom it had been intended had been insufficiently intelligent to understand it.

  ‘Of course I remember going with you to Rule’s before the war when you were singing in Lucrezia …’ Georgie reminisced, but was cut short by Olga’s knife coming loudly into contact with her plate. Looking across at her, he caught the quick movement of her eyes towards Lucia and then away again.

  He too now saw the frown and was perplexed. Lucia had invited approbation of Dame Catherine Winterglass, and approbation had duly been provided. She had implied criticism of Dame Catherine’s employer and he had dutifully joined in, condemning the man as an absolute bounder. Yet clearly something else had been intended by way of a response, and that response had not been forthcoming.

  ‘What in particular was it that your thoughts of Dame Catherine brought to mind, Lucia?’ asked Olga, whose mind was obviously moving on similar lines to Georgie’s.

  The frown faded miraculously from Lucia’s face and was replaced by a look of such deep and appealing innocence that it was clear that the more insouciant what she was about to say might seem then the more heartfelt it would be, and the more spontaneous it might appear then the more lengthily it would in fact have been considered.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ she said insouciantly and spontaneously, ‘of all the similarities between Dame Catherine’s life and my own.’

  Olga and Georgie stared at her blankly, as well they might. Not only had Lucia never been a governess but she was known to dislike children with a passion that was matched only by her detestation of Elizabeth Mapp-Fint, the gramophone and the Labour Party. Not only had she not worked in domestic service for twenty-five years, she had never done a day’s work in her life. Nor could Olga imagine her dealing with the importunate attentions of a middle-aged solicitor with the same courageous and resourceful behaviour that Dame Catherine had seemingly been able to employ.

  ‘Similarities?’ Georgie queried.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious, Georgie?’ Lucia replied tartly. Really, she thought, it was quite exasperating just how dense Georgie could be on occasion.

  ‘You mean the stock market dealings, of course?’ said Olga cannily.

  Lucia looked upon her with an altogether more benevolent mien than she had just displayed towards her husband.

  ‘Partly that, naturally,’ she agreed. ‘Like her, I have increased my capital many times over.’

  There could be no dispute about this last statement. She had inherited what was already a very large fortune from Pepino, who had in turn inherited a significant part of it from his aunt, having first taken the very wise precaution of obtaining what passed for her signature on a power of attorney during one of her increasingly rare lucid intervals in the private lunatic asylum to which he had considerately committed her. This inheritance Lucia had greatly increased by a programme of stock market investment beginning shortly after her arrival in Tilling.

  Elizabeth Mapp, as she then was, had attempted to shadow some of Lucia’s investments, such as the legendary Siriami gold mine craze, which had been the sole item of discussion over the green baize of Tilling’s bridge tables for some weeks. Sadly for Mapp, Siriami had been a stock whose price had initially headed upwards with dizzying rapidity only then to reverse its direction with equal enthusiasm. While Lucia’s foray into these dangerous waters had been triumphantly successful, Mapp’s timing had been less adroit and her efforts less successful, except insofar as successfully turning a moderate fortune into a very small one. Naturally she had blamed Lucia for having kept her deliberately in the dark about her own dealings, and it was in such controversial circumstances that Mapp had been forced to leave Mallards, which had served as the citadel of her position of social prominence in the town. Casting imprecations in her wake, she had reluctantly decamped to Grebe clutching Lucia’s cheque for a hundred guineas, while Lucia had smiled sweetly and moved into Mallards.

  It was while holidaying in Italy, however, that Lucia had experienced her true epiphany as an investor. A chance meeting with an American millionaire, Brabazon Lodge, had provided an entrée to a new world, which involved using her capital together with other like-minded individuals to take control of companies. Liquidating her portfolio for the purposes of participating in his scheme to take over a bank in New York had inadvertently saved her from the consequences of the Wall Street Crash and more besides, since her ‘sell’ orders had been accidentally repeated, thus bringing in a handsome windfall when she was able to buy back all the stocks needed to honour these contracts at much lower prices. Undeterred by the collapse of the very bank which Lodge had intended to buy, they instead put their money to work buying up the bonds of companies that owned office blocks in Manhattan. As the banks, desperate for cash, called in the companies’ loans, the bondholders exercised security over the office blocks, acquiring them in most cases for a fraction of their true value.

  So it was that within a few years Lucia had become truly very wealthy indeed, perhaps even one of the wealthiest people in England. Yet this had to remain shrouded in the darkest secrecy, for not only did she not wish to attract the attention of the taxman but exchange controls should have prevented her from transferring money out of England to America in the first place. Here Brabazon Lodge had come to her rescue.

  In the confusion surrounding the collapse of the London Stock Exchange alongside that in New York, Lucia had been able to obtain a banker’s draft for most of her capital from Mr Mammoncash, her stockbroker, shortly before his firm failed. With this she went to see a rather grubby little man in Hatton Garden who exchanged it for a packet of uncut diamonds, which she accepted somewhat dubiously as they resembled nothing so much as pebbles from the beach at Camber Sands. With this small but precious parcel concealed about her person she had journeyed to see his equally grubby younger brother in Amsterdam, who had exchanged the pebbles for another banker’s draft payable to bearer, with which she had journeyed to see a really rather nice man in Geneva, who was also Brabazon Lodge’s rather nice man in Geneva.

  Even before she had stepped into the diamond dealer’s room in Hatton Garden, little trace remained of Lucia’s money. From the moment the man in Geneva took the Amsterdam draft with a little bow it vanished forever into the warm, comforting womb-like existence of Swiss banking. Suitably clad in
new clothes, it went to New York, foreclosed on office blocks and, remaining resolutely in US dollars, spent the war comfortably housed in munitions stocks. Once a year Lucia and Georgie travelled to New York on the Queen Mary for a holiday, albeit a working holiday for Lucia as she spent most of her time closeted with Brabazon Lodge, lawyers, investment bankers and stockbrokers. On the homeward voyage, the system went into reverse, with a small parcel from a rather grubby man in the Diamond District concealed about Lucia’s person ready to be delivered back to the grubby man in Hatton Garden and magically transformed by him into Lucia’s anticipated expenditure for the coming year.

  ‘But also the charitable works,’ Lucia went on.

  ‘Why yes, you’re right, my dear,’ Georgie said, relieved that he had grasped the point at last. ‘You and Dame Catherine are really most amazingly alike.’

  He smiled happily and looked hopefully at the steak and kidney pudding. There appeared to be a least one decent portion remaining.

  Worryingly, his wife’s frown returned. She paused for him to amend his judgement and, when he did not, she did so for him.

  ‘In most respects, certainly, Georgie,’ she said, surprisingly sweetly. ‘All except what many people, silly people certainly but people nonetheless and many of them, might consider the most important.’

  She gazed at him levelly, as though confident that her meaning was now clear and that he would grasp it instantly.

  Georgie’s eyes darted around the room as though he might find inspiration through word association with some physical object, a technique Mr Wyse had been heard to advocate for use while grappling with a knotty crossword clue. If this was indeed his hope, whether conscious or otherwise, it was to prove in vain.

  Suddenly inspiration came to Olga, and she spoke in the voice of one who has just discovered a religious mystery.

  ‘Dame Catherine was a dame and you’re not,’ she said in wonder. ‘Oh, Lucia, you dear thing, you want to be a dame.’

  ‘It’s not so much “want”,’ Lucia corrected her at once. ‘More a sense of what is fitting, what is proper. After all, I must have given at least as much to charity over the years as Dame Catherine did. It seems only fair that the dear King – oh, I know he’s a different one now, but I don’t see that matters – should treat us both fairly.’

  ‘Why, of course,’ Olga agreed enthusiastically, ‘who could possibly deserve it more than you, Lucia?’

  She kicked Georgie under the table.

  ‘Oh yes, rather!’ he chorused. ‘Wouldn’t that be lovely?

  ‘And of course,’ he added unhelpfully, as his fingers strayed to the Order of Skanderbeg on his lapel (he had commissioned a miniature from Spink’s specially, copied faithfully from the original, which nestled nobly in his bibelot cabinet), ‘I’ve already got my medal.’

  Lucia looked pained. The circumstances of Georgie’s medal winning1 had not been entirely to her liking and had prompted her to issue sharp words to Georgie, which he had uncharacteristically chosen to ignore. Though the temporary rift had long since healed, she was still inclined, when Georgie’s natural modesty prevented him from revealing the details of his exploits, to say loudly, ‘All too positively Ruritanian, my dears,’ and promptly change the subject.

  ‘And there’s Susan Wyse too,’ he added even more unhelpfully. ‘Why, she’s had hers for years and years. I can remember it being on the hall table the first time we ever went to dinner with them.’

  ‘Indeed,’ came Lucia’s glacial comment on the proceedings.

  Again it was Olga who, with her natural sense of the rightness of things, came to the rescue with exactly the question Lucia wanted to hear.

  ‘And what can we do to help?’ she asked, gazing fondly at her hostess.

  Lucia smiled and it was as though at the same time she had adjusted the central heating, because the temperature in the room seemed instantly to rise by several degrees. However, she could not resist a sharp glance at Georgie, conveying a clear rebuke for the fact that his lack of natural solicitude had led to an offer of assistance being advanced by a house guest rather than by her husband. He chose mutinously not to notice, and reached for the last helping of steak and kidney pudding.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure,’ Lucia replied with a vague wave of her hand. ‘I hadn’t really given the matter much thought.’

  This was palpably untrue. Olga dealt with this by looking at Lucia with an even more earnest smile than before. Georgie chose to essay a sigh as he addressed his next mouthful of steak and kidney pudding, which proved to be a mistake as he got a fine spray of gravy across his shirt front and perilously close to his Order of Skanderbeg. His natural instinct was to say ‘How tarsome’ but this too proved a mistake as he attempted to do so while swallowing and succeeded only in provoking a violent coughing fit.

  While he recovered amid sips of water, streaming eyes and concerned enquiries from Olga, Lucia managed to maintain her innocent demeanour with perfect composure.

  ‘How does one go about such things, I wonder?’ she enquired of nobody in particular as Georgie’s barking convulsions subsided. ‘How does it all work?’

  ‘I believe there are two possible methods,’ Olga enlightened her. ‘On the one hand you could get some of the organisations you have benefited to write to the Prime Minister suggesting that your contribution be recognised by some suitable award.’

  ‘A Labour Prime Minister,’ Lucia interjected at once. ‘Oh dear!’

  ‘The other approach,’ Olga went on, ‘would be to ask one or two people who are well placed to ask one or two people who are even more highly placed to make some discreet enquiries. Take soundings, as it were.’

  ‘But who, I wonder?’ Lucia mused.

  ‘Depends where you have the best connections, really,’ Olga replied. ‘Do you know anyone in politics?’

  Lucia wrinkled her nose as though experiencing an unpleasant smell.

  ‘The church?’

  Lucia shook her head. The Bishop had been strangely unappreciative of her endowment of a new organ upon the local church and had resisted all her subsequent invitations, as well as her repeated suggestion that her generosity be marked by a commemorative plaque in the transept.

  ‘The palace?’

  Lucia shook her head afresh and looked rather glum. ‘Toby Limpsfield?’ she proffered, perking up.

  Now it was Olga’s turn to shake her head.

  ‘Too louche,’ she said determinedly. ‘At least for this boring old lot. If his brother had stuck around instead of running off with that Simpson woman then maybe. He was rather fun in his own way, though he could be a frightful cad. He treated poor old Thelma Morgan very badly.’

  Lucia nodded sagely, as though to convey that she had known both Edward VIII and Lady Furness intimately, and concurred with Olga’s view of the situation.

  ‘Babs Shyton?’

  ‘Too fast.’

  ‘Adele Brixton?’

  ‘Too dead, Lucia.’

  ‘Is Adele dead?’ asked Lucia in some confusion. ‘Surely not?’

  ‘Yes, don’t you remember? She died when that bomb hit the Café de Paris in 1941.’

  Lucia looked shocked for a moment and then shook her head sadly.

  ‘Isn’t there anybody else?’ Olga asked, a little desperately.

  ‘I say,’ Georgie interjected, ‘what about Noël Coward?’

  Lucia gave him a very old-fashioned look indeed.

  ‘Really, Georgie,’ she said waspishly. ‘If you are not going to take this discussion seriously then perhaps Olga and I should continue it in your absence.’

  ‘Oh I say, look here,’ Olga cut in quickly. ‘If you’d be agreeable to the idea, Lucia, I’d be very happy to try to take a few soundings myself.’

  ‘Why, thank you, Olga,’ Lucia responded graciously. ‘Goodness, what an inspiration you are to us all. I would never have thought of that for myself.’

  1 See Lucia on Holiday

  Chapter 5

 
Olga loved staying in Tilling for much the same reason that she had enjoyed living in Riseholme. The ritual cry of ‘Any news?’ during the morning round of shopping did not refer to the news of the day as reported in the national newspapers, and had anyone been so crass as to reply by commenting on the end of fuel rationing or Mr Attlee’s cabinet reshuffle they would have been met with a stare of blank amazement. ‘News’ meant real news, the comings and goings of a select group of Tilling residents, which group included as honorary members the Mapp-Flints – since strictly speaking they no longer lived in Tilling itself.

  It was almost as though the Landgate marked not just a physical barrier between Tilling and the rest of the world but a spiritual one as well. Outside one might be forced to take account of changes in the rate of income tax, the times of trains to London or Brighton, and other such matters of significance, but step within it and the perspective became resolutely local. Tilling was a perfect self-contained microcosm and Olga loved the gossip and petty squabbles of the little groups that ebbed and flowed spontaneously in its cobbled streets just as she had adored the gossip and petty squabbles of the corresponding little groups that had met, merged and dispersed on the Green at Riseholme.

  She was in something of a unique position as far as this microcosm was concerned, for she was both of it and not of it. While she was in Tilling she was graciously and easily assimilated into the process itself and found herself naturally adopting the aforementioned local greeting and the attendant acknowledgement of ‘No!’ when any such news was in fact imparted. Yet because she was not a permanent resident but only an occasional house guest, she was also an observer of it and, she was sometimes uncomfortably aware, often part of the news itself. Though even here the local perspective asserted itself. When Olga Bracely’s name came up in conversation it was not to refer to her latest triumph at the Met or La Scala but simply to comment on the fact that she was expected at Mallards on Friday afternoon.

  So it was that she waited eagerly to venture forth the next morning yet unexpectedly found Lucia sitting studiously at her desk, a pair of pince-nez already in place.