Au Reservoir Page 8

  The Padre looked puzzled.

  ‘A specific mission, was it?’

  ‘The fête,’ Mapp snapped, the smile fading from her face. ‘In Tenterden. Now do you remember?’

  ‘Oh aye, the fête.’

  The Padre seemed to summon up the fact from the dimmest recesses of his subconscious mind, and managed to give a convincing portrayal of one who is grateful for having had his memory jogged in this way.

  ‘Tenterden?’ queried Diva, looking puzzled in her turn. Anything which pertained to the world outside the Old Town of Tilling rarely qualified as ‘news’.

  ‘A wee parish a few miles away in Kent,’ the Padre explained, grateful for this diversion. ‘St Mildred’s. A bonny kirk dating from the thirteenth century. Wagon-vault ceiling which is awful rare, ye ken.’

  ‘But –’ interjected Mapp, who seemed suddenly to be struggling for breath. She was conscious that Irene was fast approaching, even given her usual sauntering pace.

  ‘Though, of course, most of the building work dates from the fifteenth century, I believe,’ the Padre went on smoothly, affecting not to notice Mapp’s urgent attempts to break into the proceedings. ‘And such a lovely town! Why, I always say that the high street is as fine as anything in England.

  ‘Or mebbe even in Scotland,’ he added reluctantly. ‘Why, Mistress Coles! A bonny morning to ye.’

  ‘Morning, comrades!’ Irene shouted cheerfully. ‘Any news?’

  Elizabeth Mapp-Flint shuddered at this form of address, but said nothing. Since the Bolsheviks had been transformed by the Home Service into our gallant Russian allies, it seemed to have become almost fashionable to be a communist.

  ‘Nothing much, I’m afraid,’ Diva said in disappointment. ‘Although the Padre’s been talking to Lucia about Tenterden for some reason.’

  Irene fixed him with a quizzical eye.

  ‘Tell all, oh purveyor of opiate to the masses!’ she cried.

  Mapp shuddered anew.

  ‘There’s no’ really a great deal to tell,’ the Padre replied, temporising again.

  ‘Don’t understand,’ Diva turned her attention back to the Padre. ‘Elizabeth said something specific. So what was it?’

  There was a pause, during which Elizabeth wished she had yielded to her initial instinct of raising the matter later in private, rather than in the public environment of the street, exposed to the scrutiny of dear stupid Diva and that horrid Irene Coles.

  ‘Tenterden,’ signalled dear stupid Diva to the Padre helpfully. ‘Fête.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ the Padre answered, ‘that.’

  ‘Come on, Padre, spill the beans,’ Irene enjoined him.

  ‘Well, it might be reckoned by way of confidential,’ he said, casting a reproving glance at Mapp, ‘but I suppose there’s no harm you all knowing. Mrs Pillson has agreed to open the fête in Tenterden three weeks on Saturday.’

  ‘Mrs Pillson?’ Mapp echoed blankly.

  ‘Isn’t that just like her?’ Irene enthused. ‘What an angel! We all know how busy she is.’

  ‘Lucia has agreed to open the fête?’ Mapp repeated, this time gazing hotly at the Padre. ‘Herself? In person?’

  ‘Aye, isn’t that just the size of it,’ the Padre replied, seizing this opportunity to make a dignified escape. ‘Well, good day to you, ladies. I must awa’ to the kirk, ye ken.’

  He raised his hat and departed, the expression of relief on his face mercifully invisible to those who remained behind and watched his departing back.

  Of these, one was in a state of considerable agitation, struggling with great difficulty to control the almost irrepressible urge to shout, ‘But that wasn’t what you were supposed to ask her at all, you stupid man!’ after him.

  ‘Are you all right, Elizabeth?’ Diva enquired anxiously. ‘You’ve gone very red in the face.’

  Horrid Irene grabbed Mapp’s wrist and took her pulse, gazing over a pair of imaginary half-moon glasses in mock solemnity.

  ‘Bile, choler, venom,’ she diagnosed. ‘I prescribe large doses of charity and kindness. Ask Lucia – she has plenty to spare.’ So saying, she stuck her hands in her pockets and strolled off whistling the Internationale.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning found Olga’s bags being brought downstairs and put in the Rolls by Cadman ready for the short trip to the station, from whence Southern Railway’s 10.32 would whisk the singer to London in time to prepare for Siegfried, the second of her three performances as Brünnhilde.

  ‘Hello!’ said Georgie in surprise at seeing Olga in her coat and hat ready to depart. ‘I thought we were going later – about midday you said, didn’t you?’

  ‘Where’s Lucia?’ she hissed quickly in reply.

  ‘Oh, out at some committee meeting or other – the library, I think,’ he replied.

  ‘Good,’ she said grimly and pushed him sharply backwards into the drawing room, closing the door behind her.

  ‘We’re not going, Georgie,’ she explained. ‘I am. I think you should stay here with Lucia.’

  ‘But why?’ he cried, and then, with dawning horror in his eyes, ‘Oh, you don’t mean I’m to miss Siegfried? I was so looking forward to it, and dinner afterwards and everything. No, Olga, surely not that.’

  ‘Listen, you chump, Lucia’s in a hole with that septic Mapp and she’s going to need all the support she can get. I really don’t think this is a good time for you to be gallivanting off to London and leaving her on her own.’

  ‘In a hole?’ Georgie asked, puzzled. ‘But that’s all going to be alright, isn’t it? You’ve fixed it for Noël to come down at the weekend as a surprise.’

  Wordlessly she pulled a telegram from her handbag and passed it to him. He gasped with dismay as he read it.

  REGRET WEEKEND IMPOSSIBLE DUE TO SATURDAY MATINEE STOP UNDERSTUDY SICK AND USELESS ANYWAY STOP HEY HO STOP NOËL

  ‘That’s why I’m leaving early,’ Olga informed him mournfully. ‘I’m going to try to appeal to his better nature and get him to change his mind.’

  ‘Wretched man!’ Georgie exclaimed in a sudden spasm of irritation. ‘Why, I’m sure he could perfectly well come if he really wanted to. “Hey ho” indeed!’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Olga opined. ‘That’s what I’m off to find out.’

  ‘But he promised! It’s really jolly well not fair.’

  ‘Well,’ said Olga with a weak attempt at a smile, ‘I do remember him telling me once that you should never take seriously anything anybody says before two o’clock in the afternoon.’

  ‘Well, thank goodness we didn’t tell her,’ Georgie said. ‘She’d already have invited the whole of Tilling to meet him, and then think how Mapp would have crowed when she had to cancel everything.’

  ‘I know,’ Olga agreed. ‘It makes my blood run cold just to think of it.’ She glanced at her watch.

  ‘Hell’s teeth, I must go. Bye, m’dear.’

  She pecked him on the cheek and trotted quickly out to the car, beside which Cadman was looking pointedly at his own watch while distractedly polishing the radiator.

  ‘If I can get away …’ Georgie shouted hopefully after her.

  From the departing car Olga wagged an admonitory finger.

  Lucia was understandably surprised when Georgie appeared at lunch.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You’re here then?’

  ‘Well, um, yes,’ he mumbled.

  ‘But I thought you were going up to London with Olga?’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ Georgie replied awkwardly, ‘but then I decided to stay here with you instead.’

  ‘Why, caro mio? Isn’t it Siegfried tonight? That’s your favourite.’

  Georgie motioned to Foljambe, who was serving the fish sauce, and waited for her to leave the room.

  ‘It’s just that I thought I should stay here and support you,’ he began, searching for the right words. ‘You see, you’re in a real spot with Mapp over that wretched Noël Coward business. and I know you must be worried and upset about
it …’

  Lucia gazed at him in open astonishment.

  ‘… so I thought I should stay,’ he finished rather lamely.

  ‘Georgie,’ Lucia said in a very unusual tone of voice, ‘are you really proposing to give up Siegfried for me?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he answered. ‘I am.’

  She looked at him tenderly and for a moment it was almost as if she was going to reach across the table and take his hand, but the moment passed.

  ‘Out of the question,’ she said briskly, normal service being resumed.

  ‘But why?’ he asked blankly. ‘If I stay here we can talk about it and work out what to do, what to say.’

  ‘It’s extremely kind of you, Georgie,’ she replied, ‘and please don’t think I’m not touched because I am, but there’ll be plenty of time to have a council of war when you get back tomorrow. It’s only Mapp, after all. You and I have faced far worse crises than this, yes, and overcome them too.’

  ‘You say “only Mapp”,’ Georgie countered, ‘but she’s really got her teeth in this time and she’s not going to let go.’

  ‘I know, Georgie,’ Lucia agreed, ‘but I’m sure it’s not beyond our joint powers to deal with.’ She took a forkful of salmon and smiled mischievously.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she giggled, ‘our counter-offensive is already underway.’

  ‘Are you up to something?’ he enquired eagerly. ‘Do tell.’

  ‘I didn’t have a chance to tell you before because I didn’t want to mention anything in front of Olga,’ she said, ‘but she got poor Padre to ask me if Noël would open the fête at Tenterden in three weeks’ time.’

  ‘No!’ Georgie cried.

  ‘Yes!’ she responded enthusiastically.

  ‘But what on earth did you say?’ he asked desperately.

  ‘Fortunately,’ she explained, ‘Padre got rather flustered and asked me to open it instead, which request I of course duly accepted.’

  ‘But how the Dickens did that happen?’

  ‘Well,’ Lucia admitted coyly, ‘I did have something to do with it.’

  Georgie stared at her in admiration as she gave a tinkling laugh, holding her hand in front of her mouth and gazing at him coquettishly over the top of it.

  ‘Well, aren’t you wonderful?’ he exclaimed in awe. ‘So her little plan has been foiled.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Lucia agreed.

  ‘But hang on a minute,’ Georgie said suddenly. ‘Mapp won’t let it go at that, will she?’

  Lucia shrugged.

  ‘What can she do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Georgie mused, ‘but I really can’t see her just sitting back and accepting it. Why, she’ll be simply furious. Poor Padre! I wouldn’t like to be him when he has to tell Mapp that he forgot his lines.’

  ‘Poor Elizabeth!’ Lucia said with a sigh. ‘It must be dreadful to have such a nasty, scheming nature.’

  The Padre’s ordeal in fact took place shortly after the aforementioned conversation over the lunch table at Mallards. He had successfully avoided the encounter the day before, and had sought to do so again by declining Elizabeth Mapp-Flint’s invitation to tea at Grebe on the grounds that he needed to be at the Vicarage working on his sermon for Sunday. This was to prove a mistake. A planned excursion to some far-flung part of the country might have been a better expedient, since, he having rashly divulged his location, Mrs Mapp-Flint ran him to earth later that same afternoon, applying her considerable displeasure to a pattern of door-knocking which, according to Oscar Wilde, is normally employed only by creditors and relatives.

  While the Padre was still warbling ‘Mistress Mapp-Flint’ in a somewhat helpless, despairing manner, he found himself propelled backwards down the hallway, though whether by physical bulk or sheer force of personality he was unable later to remember, and came to rest on an upright chair while his redoubtable visitor subsided on to a sofa, which groaned audibly as she did so.

  ‘Now then, Padre,’ she began briskly, ‘what is all this nonsense about the fête?’

  Reverend Bartlett’s eyes roamed desperately around the room with the air of a man with the smell of smoke in his nostrils in urgent search of an emergency exit.

  ‘Nonsense?’ he echoed foolishly.

  ‘Nonsense I said, and nonsense I mean. You know perfectly well, Padre, that you were supposed to be asking Lucia to invite Noël Coward to open the fête, not to do it herself.’

  ‘Aye, well, there may have been a wee thing of a misunderstanding, ye ken,’ he ventured.

  ‘Misunderstanding fiddlesticks!’ she snapped. ‘What you mean is she managed to twist your words to make it seem as if you had said something you hadn’t.’

  ‘Well, no, I’m not sure that was the way of it,’ he protested, though come to think of it Mapp’s assessment, while brutally expressed, was not altogether inaccurate.

  ‘Well, what “was the way of it”, then?’ she replied, falling silent and gazing at him fixedly with her head tilted to one side.

  The Padre tried to find some coherent answer but failed, getting only as far as ‘Well’, repeated ruminatively every three seconds or so.

  ‘You see!’ Mapp said triumphantly. ‘Clearly the woman just bamboozled you some way or other. It’s so like her. Never gives a straight answer to a straight question. Duplicity, thy name is Lulu.’

  ‘Charity, Mistress Mapp-Flint,’ the Padre protested weakly.

  ‘Charity, humbug!’ cried Mapp, who had by now gone very red in the face. ‘The question is, Padre, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I? Do?’ the Padre quavered, as if these words uttered in combination filled him with dread. ‘Well, really, Mistress Mapp-Flint, I don’t see there is anything I can do. A mistake has been made, right enough, but an honest mistake, surely?’

  Mapp’s eyes bulged rather alarmingly at the word ‘honest’ and she drew breath to give vent again to her indignation. Seeking to forestall her, the Padre pressed on.

  ‘Has’nae she written it in her diary and everything? Would’nae it be an awful wicked thing to ask her to rearrange all her schedule? But it’s no use crying over spilt milk, ye ken. Let us summon up all our fortitude to bear what we must. It may prove inconvenient, but I’m sure it’s what He would expect.’

  As he mentioned ‘He’, the Padre gazed meaningfully at the crucifix on the wall.

  ‘Oh, how like a man,’ Mapp shouted in exasperation, so overcome by her emotions as clearly to have forgotten to whom she was speaking. ‘Weak as water. No wonder she can trample all over you. Why do none of you have any fight in you?’

  These deep emotions now bubbled to the surface as a positive wellspring, generously watering Elizabeth Mapp-Flint’s second best handkerchief as she clutched it to her face, rocking backwards and forwards in her chair and repeating, ‘It’s so unfair!’ at intervals between her sobs. So lengthy did this lachrymose interlude become that the Padre had time to rise awkwardly from his chair, fetch a glass of water from the kitchen, return, place it gingerly beside his distraught lady parishioner and nervously resume his seat. Slowly, the flood subsided.

  ‘Are you quite recovered now, dear lady?’ he enquired solicitously. ‘Aye, nae doot you’ll be after going home to your Major Mapp-Flint.’

  Of this pious hope he was, however, to be speedily disabused. Mapp raised a bleary yet steely eye from her wet, crumpled mess of a handkerchief and fixed him with the sort of piercing gaze which she generally reserved for her husband when caught in close proximity to strong liquor or attractive women, and especially when encountered in combination with each other.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, Padre,’ she informed him, ‘until we have decided how you are going to sort out this mess which you have created.’

  ‘But my sermon …’ he protested, gesturing weakly towards his study.

  Elizabeth Mapp-Flint treated this trifling objection with the contempt it deserved. ‘Fortunately,’ she said, speaking in an elaborately calm and measured fashion as if to
a naughty child or a befuddled elderly relative, ‘I was able to give this matter some thought while walking here from Grebe, so at least one of us has managed to arrive at a solution.’

  ‘If indeed there is one,’ he interjected dubiously.

  ‘Oh, there is,’ she replied emphatically. ‘Now listen to me very carefully, Padre. All you have to do is to phone the Chairman of the Tenterden fête committee and explain that there has been a mix-up and that you need her to write to Lucia, saying …’

  She broke off as she became aware of the Padre’s eyes revolving slowly and helplessly as he silently opened and closed his mouth.

  ‘On second thoughts, I will phone her,’ she said briskly. ‘Now then, Padre, who is it that we need to speak to?’

  ‘Her name is Mrs Campbell,’ the Padre gasped, feeling that cardiac arrest might prove both imminent and welcome, ‘but I would advise against such a course of action. Mistress Campbell can be, well … a little difficult at times.’

  Mapp snorted and reached for the vicarage telephone. After a necessary preamble with directory enquiries, she asked the operator to connect her.

  ‘Mrs Campbell,’ she crooned in her best friendly manner, ‘so sorry to disturb you. I’m with the Reverend Bartlett here in Tilling and am calling you on his behalf as he is so busy with parish affairs. My name is Mapp-Flint. I believe we met at the Coronation dinner in Hastings – such a sad business, I always thought, the abdication.’

  There was a pause while Mrs Campbell crackled politely at the other end of the line.

  ‘No, the lady with an MBE pinned to her dress was my dear friend Susan Wyse.’

  Further crackles.

  ‘No,’ Mapp said again, but this time with her smile becoming wider and more fixed, ‘the exquisitely dressed lady was my equally dear friend Mrs Pillson. Actually, it is her that we need to talk to you about, the Padre and I.’

  This obviously struck a chord.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, the lady who is such very close friends with Noël Coward.’