Lucia Triumphant

by Tom Holt

  ‘There’s something else, too,’ he ground on, unaware that his guile was in vain. ‘Now that you’ve been appointed Mayoress a second time—the least she could do after getting Miss Coles to stand against you, and who voted for her I can’t imagine—you’ll be wanting to keep up with civic affairs just as much as ever before, if not more so. Next year to think of, after all. I tell you what, though. I think I know why you didn’t get elected this time.’

  ‘Oh, do tell me,’ said Elizabeth acidly.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious really. There’s Miss Coles parading up and down all day, while you’re stuck out here where nobody can see you. No wonder they voted for her and not for you. Out of sight, out of mind, don’t you know.’

  ‘On the contrary, Benjy. I would have thought that the more the voters saw of Miss Coles, the less they would have liked her, given the tasteless eccentricity of her costume.’

  Even as she spoke, it occurred to her that her husband might for once be right. In politics visibility was all, as Lloyd George would undoubtedly have confirmed. At the same time, an explanation for his concern for her political career began to suggest itself. She could read him like a book, although what sort of book he most closely resembled she did not like to imagine.

  ‘It is possible,’ she conceded, after a sip of tea, ‘but there we are. We cannot carry our dear little house on our backs like snails, to be busy in town during the day and cosy in the country in the evenings. So we must make the best of things.’

  ‘But we could make up for that, you know,’ he replied. ‘I’ve often thought it a crying shame that we—I mean you—don’t get an official car as Mayoress.’

  Elizabeth smiled. So he was thinking those foolish thoughts of which she had not deigned to suspect him.

  ‘What sweet nonsense you do talk at times, dear,’ she purred. ‘Now you wouldn’t want us to be like those dreadful Wyses with their Royce when they drive the fifty yards to Mallards instead of walking. And Lucia herself, with that enormous chariot that she never uses. Too ostentatious for words. Besides it would strike at the very heart of my economic strategy for Tilling, which is, as you should know by now, the ruthless elimination of unnecessary expenditure. It would be a fine thing for me to preach frugality from the back seat of an official Daimler.’ Fine indeed; she could just picture it.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean that we should get a Rolls or a Daimler like the others,’ he said. ‘Something much smaller. More economical. More dignified. Less ostentatious. Why have four wheels when three will do just as well?’

  Elizabeth broadened her smile and her perfect teeth (no random work of nature but the product of human craftsmanship) shone like the desert sun on a man dying of thirst.

  ‘Alas, I doubt whether we could persuade Lucia and her Council—as she will insist on calling it, and I'm glad I’m no longer a member of it—to buy us even the most modest of cars, one with no wheels at all, let alone three. And since we obviously cannot afford to buy one ourselves, there the matter must rest. Now if Lucia were still living here at Grebe, I expect she would have a private railway built at the rate-payers’ expense, and have her own liveried coaches, all in the interest of creating employment, you understand. What a sweet hypocrite our dear friend is. So amusing!’

  Benjy snorted, no doubt at the thought of Lucia’s hypocrisy, and turned to contemplation of his tea, which was cold. But Elizabeth, instead of persecuting him further as she would normally have done, sat awhile in silence. Why shouldn’t they afford a motor, so long as it was small and not liable to involve them in ruinous maintenance? Of course, she, not her husband, would drive it, thus eliminating the risk of further collisions. Driving was easily learnt, so she understood, and she was a quick learner. As for the expense—well, Benjy must never know, but she had recently sold some unprofitable shares and reinvested the money wisely. Eighty pounds might be raised without undue strain, and that would surely be enough to secure a nice little car.

  She consulted her watch; it was nearly time to dress for dinner at Mallards, to celebrate Lucia’s second term of office. Lucia had, as usual, offered to send the motor over to collect them; as usual she had declined the kind but unnecessary offer. As she rose from the table, rain began to rattle against the window-panes.

  Irene Coles, artist, Fabian, free-thinker and Town Councillor (an impressive curriculum vitae for one who had not yet reached her thirtieth year) sat in her oilskins in the shadow of the Landgate and surveyed the dark clouds over the estuary. The driving rain had extinguished her short clay pipe, so that only a little black silt remained in the bowl, but she was unconscious of that as of all else but the grandeur of the scene that Nature had laid on for her benefit. Shortly she would have to abandon the spot, for she was bidden to attend Lucia’s dinner party and Lucia’s wish was her command. But she hoped to absorb a little more of the atmosphere if she could (she had absorbed a great deal already, and it was starting to trickle down the back of her neck) for her next work. This was to continue her series of masterly allegorical sketches, in all of which Lucia had appeared as the representative of freedom and civilisation. This latest was to be a version of the Second Coming (Lucia’s Second Coming into the Mayoralty), with her darling riding into town on the wings of the storm while the voters of Tilling pulled down and smashed to pieces an enormous statue of Elizabeth Mapp-Flint. Her work on this masterpiece had been frustrated by a period of relatively clement weather, so that she had not been sure where, so to speak, her next thunderstorm was coming from. So she was determined to make the most of this one.

  The Mapp-Flints, wet and bedraggled as two animals entering Noah’s Ark, scuttled wearily under the ancient arch and shook the water from the small, crooked umbrella which alone stood between the elements and their evening clothes. Had they been less wet and weary, they might have noticed Irene just outside the arch, and so been more reserved in their speech. As it was, they shouted to make themselves audible over the pelting of the storm and so were overheard by an audience they would not themselves have chosen.

  ‘See what I mean, Liz old girl?’ roared the Major through his chattering teeth, and Irene’s acute ears recognised his voice at once. ‘Now, if we’d had a little car, with a nice waterproof hood—’

  ‘Oh Benjy, how frail you old soldiers are!’ cried Elizabeth, loud and shrill above the fury of Nature. It took more than a thunderstorm to silence her.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said how frail you old soldiers are!’ shrieked Elizabeth playfully. ‘A little spot of rain terrifies you so much and yet you faced all those ferocious Pathans and tigers in your Army days. I wonder that the enemy did not attack during the monsoons, for you would never have come out to fight and risk getting wet.’

  Had Elizabeth known that she was saying all this before one who would take it all down, albeit not in writing, and use it in evidence against her, she would have silenced the batteries of her brilliant wit. Instead, she fulminated on.

  ‘Why, anybody would think that you were made of sugar and liable to dissolve in water. Sugar and spice and all things nice, Benjy, that’s what you are made of.’

  ‘You’re as wet as I am,’ replied he, ‘so I don’t know why you’re being so deuced funny about it.’

  ‘Don’t be a cry-baby, nuisance, we’ll soon dry out in front of Lucia’s nice warm fire, always supposing that Her Worship allows us near it, of course.’

  Benjy muttered something about a sure path to pneumonia and they were silent for a while before a dainty little Morgan three-wheeler sped through the arch, spraying them both with water as its tyres cleaved the deep puddles. Elizabeth was briefly vituperative about motorists in general, but from her tone of voice, Benjy (and the fascinated Irene) were able to deduce that her hatred was not untainted with envy.

  ‘Now be fair, Liz,’ said Major Benjy. ‘Wouldn’t it be pleasant, and sensible too, to have a trim little craft like that for getting about in when it’s wet? And there’s our health to think about too. I hope I w
on’t sound selfish when I remind you that my constitution was broken on the wheel of the Indian climate.’

  Did climates have wheels and, if so, how many? But Elizabeth’s resolve that her finances should not be broken on the wheel of the Birmingham Small Arms Company was waning fast. The rain showed no sign of letting up ....

  ‘Be that as it may,’ she said with an effort, ‘finding the money would be a problem. You know that those wretched mining shares have gone down yet again.’ So they had; how lucky she no longer had any. ‘Faced with that sort of risk to our capital it would be sheer recklessness ....’

  Irene, hidden from their sight by darkness and foul weather, grinned broadly. As Tilling’s foremost mimic, she would rarely get such an opportunity for gathering the sinews of satire. Unfortunately, she grinned too broadly and sneezed, thereby betraying her position. Elizabeth at once realised that her words had been overheard and offered up a short prayer that it should not prove to have been Irene who had overheard them.

  ‘Hello, Mapp. Qui-hi, Benjy. When shall we three meet again, I wonder? What a lot of weather we’re having, except that you seem to have taken most of it and secreted it about your person. Mind you give it back later; that’s public weather, and I’m a Government official now.’

  Elizabeth snarled, but could think of nothing to say. Irene often had that effect on her, like a fly that buzzes and buzzes and cannot be caught.

  ‘The owl and the pussy cat will need a beautiful pea-green boat if they’re to get back to Grebe this evening. Or a beautiful pea-green motor-car might do at a pinch, I suppose. What a shame you’re too poor to buy one after your speculations on the Stock Market. When we socialists are in power, of course ....’

  Elizabeth suddenly seemed to recover her powers of speech, and she drove the fly from her presence with a radiant smile.

  ‘So you overheard our little plot, did you, dear one—I shall never get used to calling my little friend “Councillor Coles”. Well, you shall be the first to know, in that case. Benjy-boy and I are to have a dear little motor-car to drive about in ....’

  ‘But I thought you said....’ interrupted her husband. She ignored him.

  ‘... and there’ll always be the dickey-seat for you to ride in if you wish. My dear Benjy has seen such a dear little car, and since I cannot refuse him anything —’

  ‘Except whisky, or so he says,’ snapped Irene. ‘Well, that will be a sight to see, unless you get rammed by Malleson Street again. So careless, those street-corners, always bumping into people and flattening their motor-cars. Well, good luck to you both. I’ll tell you what, though. I could be your chauffeur and drive Major Benjy round the public-houses while you’re out of the way. That would be fun.’

  ‘Oh look,’ said Elizabeth brightly, gazing fixedly at the howling storm. ‘It seems to be clearing up. Come along, Benjy, we’re late enough as it is. See you at Lucia’s.’

  ‘Save me a place by the fire,’ Irene called after them as they splashed their way through the puddles. ‘Rain suits you, Mapp. Makes you look like a Rhinemaiden.’

  Lucia’s party proved to be a great success, but not for Lucia. Instead, Elizabeth held the stage, while Benjy, revived by warmth and sherry after his shock under the Landgate, prompted her with technical details concerning her forthcoming purchase.

  Elizabeth had, in her characteristic fashion, become a whole-hearted motorist now, and her only fear seemed to be that someone else might buy the motor-car before she managed to get to the garage first thing next morning. She was not deterred by the fact that she was getting one less wheel for her money than she would have liked, while Benjy’s enthusiasm was not entirely destroyed when he learnt that Elizabeth meant to be the driver, for he was sure that she would soon despair of it and leave him in charge of the driving. To be sure, eighty pounds was a small price to pay for the glances of envious admiration in whose radiance they bathed that evening.

  The Wyses, Tilling’s foremost motorists, had been made to feel that their enormous Rolls-Royce was both antiquated and grotesquely over-sized, whereas Lucia, whose motor rarely left the garage and was retained only to provide employment for Cadman, her chauffeur and husband to Georgie’s irreplaceable parlourmaid Foljambe, was made to look more foolish still. Of the pedestrians, Evie Bartlett, wife of the Vicar (or Padre, as Tilling was pleased to call him), had wasted no time in reminding her husband of the many occasions on which he had declared how useful a small, unostentatious car would be for getting around the parish. He had replied in the curious composite-Scottish dialect that he spoke in preference to the language of his native Birmingham, that it was sair muckle work to get about a district so full of hills on a bicycle.

  Diva Plaistow, whose late husband had once briefly owned a second-hand Darracq, and who therefore felt a great nostalgia for the lost joys of motoring, said that it sounded lovely, and spent much of the evening trying to work out how she might raise eighty pounds to buy a car. But she was no business-woman, and, although she had the idea of making pin-cushions and selling them on a commission basis in the draper’s shop, she feared that it would take her some time to raise such a sum in that fashion.

  Lucia was thus on the horns of a dilemma, for the gage had been clearly thrown at her feet and the challenge fairly issued. Elizabeth meant to become great in the land by her motoring, and although Lucia could have no possible objection to poor Elizabeth’s making herself conspicuous if she felt it necessary to do so, she did not wish to see Tilling swept by some foolish craze when she might soon have need of their energies for some worthy project of her own. Yet she could not simply pour scorn on motorism in general, for she did not wish to offend the Wyses, nor indeed to dispose of her own motor. For if Cadman left, Foljambe would leave too, and Georgie had declared, over and over again, that life without Foljambe would be intolerable; no one else would ever be able to run his bath to the temperature he liked, or care for his things as they should be cared for—it was impossible. So Foljambe and Cadman, and the car, must stay. She was therefore faced with a choice between pouring scorn on Elizabeth’s car and that alone (which would be highly invidious and might provoke unwelcome and distracting reprisals) or else substituting some craze of her own, cheaper and more attractive to the temperament of her fellow-citizens, and also in some way related to that lofty project which she had yet to decide upon ...

  It was a thorny problem, and yet there was something that Georgie had said that might resolve all. Therefore, once her guests had departed into the night (Elizabeth and Benjy as prospective motorists being driven home by the Wyses in the Royce), she set to thinking, with the aid of strong coffee and a bag of peppermints.

  Whether it was the coffee or the peppermints or a night’s rest that provided the inspiration, she awoke the next morning with the whole idea, like Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, fully fledged in her mind. Fortunately no intrusive visitor from Porlock interrupted her (since Porlock was over two hundred miles away, the danger was slight in any case) and she was able to write out the bare skeleton of her plan before any of it could evaporate.

  Tilling, its history and heritage, was to be her January stunt, and the instrument of her destiny would be a Tilling Tapestry (or rather embroidery) depicting the whole history of the town from mythological times down to the present day. It would be a work to rival the handicraft of the good wives of Bayeux—greater, indeed, than theirs by as much as the scope of her subject, which was broader and more comprehensive. Roman Tilling, Saxon Tilling, Norman Tilling (that sounded like somebody’s name, but never mind), the French incursion in the Middle Ages and the prosperity of the Wool Trade, Elizabethan enterprise and Hanoverian elegance, culminating in modern science and achievement. As a counterpoint to this lofty abstract she would interpose the human specific, uniting this mighty tale with some great continuum; and for that purpose, what could be better than the great tradition of the Mayors of Tilling, their portraits running like a commentary below and above the main action?

  In this n
oble project she could profitably find employment for her husband. She was far too perceptive not to have noticed that at times her civic role had tended to overawe him somewhat, to make him feel excluded and unimportant. She had felt uneasy about this before now, but had steeled her heart (for duty must come first, and there is a dignity hedges round a mayor that a mayor’s husband must learn to live with). Now she would have an opportunity to involve him closely in her official work, almost (but not quite) let him be her partner in it. For Georgie was a very fine embroiderer, proficient at both gros and petit point, and successful products of his prolific needle decorated many of the chairs and cushions of the house. Other, less successful efforts decorated the interior of a large chest of drawers in the box-room. Georgie, then, would be her chief assistant and master craftsman, while the rest of their circle would act as his apprentices, filling in, doing backgrounds. The finished embroidery would, of course, hang in the Town Hall, unless it became necessary to build special premises to house it. As it so happened, she had made a couple of rough sketches for a Tilling Festspielhaus to accommodate the ill-fated Tilling Festival. With a few alterations, the same concept could be used for the tapestry, and the Town Hall would thus be spared the disruptions to its activities that must of necessity be caused by the enormous crowds which would regularly flock to see so great a work of folk-art.

  ‘And all that,’ she mused as she rang for breakfast, ‘came from Georgie’s hassocks and Elizabeth’s motor-tricycle. Fancy!’

  Georgie had, unusually for him, come down to breakfast as well. Generally he preferred to breakfast in his dressing-room, being aware of the damage that sleep and the early morning were capable of doing to his youthful appearance. But Lucia had been pensive last evening, and so he had decided that it would be advisable to be up and about early to take whatever steps might be necessary in the event of Lucia having one of her ideas. Should she decide to trump Elizabeth’s planned motor-car by taking up aviation, for example, he wanted to be in time to dissuade her from ordering an aeroplane.