Major Pettigrew's Last Stand: A Novel

by Helen Simonson

  “What he means is …” Alec paused as if he had just now lost an entirely diplomatic explanation.

  “Are we to take it that you disapprove of our efforts, Major?” asked Daisy in a low voice.

  “Of course he doesn’t,” said Alec. “Look, best leave us out of it, ladies. As long as the bar is open, we’ll be happy, won’t we, Pettigrew?” The Major felt a discreet tug on his arm; Alec was signaling the retreat. The Major pulled away and looked directly at Daisy.

  “What I meant to say, Mrs. Green, is that while last year’s theme was most creative—”

  “Yes, very creative, most entertaining,” interrupted Alec.

  “—not all the guests carried on in the decorous manner that I’m sure you had counted upon.”

  “That’s hardly the fault of the committee,” said Alma.

  “Quite, quite,” said the Major. “Yet it was most distressing to see ladies of your standing subjected to the rowdiness sometimes sparked by the perceived license of a costume party.”

  “You are absolutely right, Major,” said Daisy. “In fact, I think the Major brings up such a good point that we should reconsider our themes.”

  “Thank you,” said the Major.

  “I do believe that one of our themes, and only one, calls for the appropriate decorum and elegant behavior. I believe we can cross off ‘Flappers and Fops’ as well as ‘Brigadoon.’ ”

  “Oh, but surely ‘Brigadoon’ is beyond reproach,” said Alma. “And the country dancing would be so much fun—”

  “Men in kilts and running off into the heather?” said Daisy. “Really, Alma, I’m surprised at you.”

  “We can run off into the heather at home if you like,” said Alec, winking at his wife.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said. Tears seemed imminent as two red spots burned in her cheeks.

  “I think that leaves us with ‘An Evening at the Mughal Court’—a most elegant theme,” said Daisy.

  “I thought ‘Mughal Madness’ was the name?” said the bucket hat lady.

  “A working title only,” said Daisy. “ ‘Evening at the Court’ will send an appropriate message of decorum. We must thank the Major for his contribution to our efforts.” The ladies clapped and the Major, speechless with the futility of protest, was reduced to giving them a small bow.

  “The Major’s an Indian. He’s the one to advise you,” said Alec, clapping him on the back. It was an old joke, worn out with having been used on the Major since he was a small boy with large ears, being bullied on an unfamiliar playground.

  “Are you really?” asked Miss Bucket Hat.

  “I’m afraid that’s Alec being amusing,” he said, through tight lips. “My father served in India, and so I was born in Lahore.”

  “But you won’t find better English stock than the Pettigrews,” said Alec.

  “I wonder if you might have some souvenirs of that time, Major?” said Daisy. “Rugs or baskets—props we can borrow?”

  “Any lion skin rugs?” asked the bucket head.

  “No, sorry, can’t say I do,” said the Major.

  “I say we should talk to Mrs. Ali, the lady who runs the village shop in Edgecombe,” said Alma. “Perhaps she could cater some Indian specialties for us, or direct us to where we can buy or borrow some cheap props—like some of those statues with all the arms.”

  “That would be Shiva,” said the Major. “The Hindu deity.”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  “Like the Mughals, Mrs. Ali is, I believe, Muslim and might be offended at such a request,” he said, trying to bite back his irritation. It would not do to let the ladies infer any particular interest toward Mrs. Ali on his part.

  “Oh, well, it won’t do to offend the only vaguely Indian woman we know,” said Daisy. “I was hoping she could find us some suitably ethnic bartenders.”

  “How about snake charmers?” suggested Miss Bucket Hat.

  “I know Mrs. Ali slightly,” said Grace. There was a general shifting of heads in her direction and she began to knot her handkerchief in her fingers under the unwelcome scrutiny. “I’m very interested in local history and she was kind enough to show me all the old ledgers from her shop. She has records as far back as 1820.”

  “How exciting,” said Alma, rolling her eyes.

  “How about if I go to talk to Mrs. Ali, and I could perhaps trouble the Major to help me be sure I only make suitable requests?” said Grace.

  “Well … well, I’m sure I don’t know what’s suitable and what’s not,” said the Major. “Also, I don’t think we should bother Mrs. Ali.”

  “Nonsense,” said Daisy, beaming. “It’s an excellent idea. We’ll come up with a complete list of ideas. And Grace, you and the Major can put your heads together and work out how to approach Mrs. Ali.”

  “If you ladies are done with us,” said Alec, “we have people waiting for us in the bar.”

  “Now let’s talk about the floral arrangements,” said Daisy, dismissing them with a wave of the hand. “I’m thinking palms and perhaps bougainvillea?”

  “Good luck getting bougainvillea in November,” the lady with the bucket hat was saying as the Major and Alec slipped from the room.

  “Bet you five pounds they squash her like a bug,” said the Major.

  “Lord Dagenham’s niece,” said Alec. “Apparently she’s living up at the manor now and assuming all kinds of social duties. Daisy’s furious, so best look out. She’s taking it out on everyone.”

  “I’m not in the least intimidated by Daisy Green,” the Major lied.

  “Let’s get that drink,” said Alec. “I think a large G and T is in order.”

  The Grill bar was a high-ceilinged Edwardian room, with French doors looking over the terrace and eighteenth hole toward the sea. A series of mirrored doors at the east end hid an annex with a stage, which was opened on the occasion of large tournaments as well as the annual dance. The wall of the long walnut bar to the west end was hung with arched wood paneling on which racks of bottles were ranged below portraits of past club presidents. A portrait of the Queen (an early portrait, badly reprinted and framed in cheap gilt) hung directly above some particularly vile colored after-dinner liqueurs that no one ever drank. The Major always found this vaguely treasonable.

  The room contained a few clusters of scratched and dented club chairs in brown leather and a series of tables along the windows, which could be reserved only through Tom, the barman. This prevented any monopoly of the tables by ladies who might be organized enough to telephone ahead. Instead, members with early tee times popped in first to see Tom, who would put down his mop or emerge from the cellar to add their names in the book. It was the aspiration of many members to become one of the few, very august regulars whose names were penciled in by Tom himself. The Major was not one of these anymore. Since the creamed chicken incident, he preferred to persuade Alec to join him in a sandwich at the bar, or in one of the clusters of chairs. Not only did this protect them from a surfeit of clotted gravy and thin custards, but it freed them from the sullen charms of the waitresses who, culled from the pool of unmotivated young women being spat out by the local school, specialized in a mood of suppressed rage. Many seemed to suffer from some disease of holes in the face and it had taken the Major some time to work out that club rules required the young women to remove all jewelry and that the holes were piercings bereft of decoration.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. The usual?” asked Tom, a tumbler already poised under the optic of the green gin bottle.

  “Better make mine a double,” said Alec, making a great show of wiping his bare melon-shaped forehead with his pocket square. “My goodness, we barely escaped with our lives there.”

  “Make mine a half of lager instead, would you, Tom?” said the Major.

  They ordered two thick ham and cheese sandwiches. Alec also put in his order for a piece of jam roly-poly since it was only offered on Fridays and tended to sell out. He topped off the order with a small salad.

 
Alec had an unshakable belief that he was into fitness. He always ordered a salad at lunch, though he never ate anything but the decorative tomato. He insisted that he drank alcohol only when it was accompanied by food. Once or twice he had been caught short in an unfamiliar pub and the Major had seen him reduced to consuming a pickled egg or pork cracklings.

  They had barely settled onto a couple of bar stools when a foursome came in, laughing over some incident on the final green. Father Christopher and Hugh Whetstone he recognized, and he was surprised to see Lord Dagenham, who was very rarely at the club and whose atrocious playing made for some very awkward questions of etiquette. The fourth man was a stranger, and something in his broad shoulders and unfortunate pink golf shirt suggested to the Major that he might be another American. Two Americans in as many weeks was, he reflected, approaching a nasty epidemic.

  “Shaw, Major—how are you?” asked Dagenham, slapping Alec on the back and then clasping the Major firmly on the shoulder. “Sorry to hear about your loss, Major. Damn shame to lose a good man like your brother.”

  “Thank you, your lordship,” said the Major, standing up and inclining his head. “You are very kind to say so.” It was just like Lord Dagenham to pop up from nowhere and yet to be in possession of all the latest news of the village. The Major wondered if some assistant at the Hall sent him regular faxes to London. He was very touched by his lordship’s words and by the always respectful use of the Major’s rank. His lordship could so easily have called him Pettigrew, and yet he never did. In return, the Major never referred to him in the familiar, even behind his back.

  “Frank, allow me to present Major Ernest Pettigrew, formerly of the Royal Sussex, and Mr. Alec Shaw—used to help run the Bank of England in his spare time. Gentlemen, this is Mr. Frank Ferguson, who is visiting us from New Jersey.”

  “How do you do,” said the Major.

  “Frank is in real estate,” added Lord Dagenham. “One of the largest resort and retail developers on the East Coast.”

  “Oh, you’re making too much of it, Double D,” said Ferguson. “It’s just a little family business I inherited from my dad.”

  “You’re in the building trade?” asked the Major.

  “You got me pegged, Pettigrew,” said Ferguson, slapping him on the back. “No use pretending to be something grand in front of you Brits. You smell a man’s class like a bloodhound smells rabbit.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply anything …” the Major stumbled.

  “Yep—that’s the Fergusons, plain old brick-and-mortar builders.”

  “Mr. Ferguson can trace his lineage to the Ferguson clan of Argyll,” said Hugh Whetstone, who tried to ferret out the genealogy of everyone he met so he could use it against them later.

  “Not that they were very happy to hear it,” Ferguson said. “My ancestor faked his own death in the Crimea and ran off to Canada—gambling debts and a couple of husbands on the warpath, so I believe. Still, they were pretty happy with my offer on the castle at Loch Brae. I’m going to look into restoring the shoot up there.”

  “The Major is a shooting man, too. Quite a decent shot, if I may say so,” said Lord Dagenham. “He can drop a rabbit at a hundred yards.”

  “You country people are amazing,” said Ferguson. “I met a gamekeeper last week, shoots squirrels with a King James II ball musket. What do you shoot with, Major?”

  “Just an old gun that belonged to my father,” replied the Major, so upset to be lumped with some eccentric old villager that he would not give Ferguson the satisfaction of trying to impress him.

  “He’s being modest as usual,” Dagenham said. “The Major shoots with a very nice gun—a Purdey, isn’t it?”

  “A Churchill, actually,” said the Major, slightly annoyed that Dagenham had automatically mentioned the more famous name. “Lesser known, perhaps,” he added to Ferguson, “but they’ve made their share of exquisite guns.”

  “Nothing like the workmanship in an English best gun,” said Ferguson. “At least, that’s what they say when they insist on taking a year or two to make you a pair.”

  “Actually, I may be in the happy position of reuniting my pair.” The Major could not resist the opportunity to give this information directly to Lord Dagenham.

  “Well, of course,” said Lord Dagenham. “You inherit the other one from your brother, don’t you? Congratulations, old man.”

  “It’s not all quite settled yet,” said the Major. “My sister-in-law, you know …”

  “Oh, quite right to take a few days. Lots of feelings after a funeral,” said Father Christopher. He hinged his long angular frame forward over the bar. “Can we get a round, Tom? And do you have a table for Lord Dagenham?”

  “A matched pair of Churchills’,” said the American, smiling at the Major with slightly increased interest.

  “Yes, 1946 or thereabouts. Made for the Indian market,” said the Major, not allowing even a hint of pride to show through his modesty.

  “I’d love to see them in action sometime,” Ferguson said.

  “The Major often comes over and has a go with us,” said Dagenham. “Glass of cabernet please, Tom—and what’ll you have, Frank?”

  “Then I’m sure I’ll be seeing you at Double D’s shoot on the eleventh.” Ferguson stuck out his hand and the Major was forced into a ridiculous display of pumping, as if they had just made a pact to sell a horse. Dagenham stuck his own hands in his jacket pockets and looked awkward. The Major held his breath. He was aware of a certain personal humiliation, but he was equally anxious about his lordship. Lord Dagenham was now in the terrible position of having to find a gracious way to explain to his American guest that the shooting party in question was strictly for business colleagues, mostly down from London for the day. It was appalling to see a good man so trapped by the ignorance of the bad-mannered. The Major considered jumping in to explain the situation himself, but did not want to suggest that his lordship was unable to extricate himself from situations of tangled etiquette.

  “Of course you must come if you can, Pettigrew,” said Dagenham at last. “Not much of a challenge, though. We’ll only be taking the ducks off the hill pond.”

  Dagenham’s gamekeeper raised three varieties of duck on a small pond tucked into a copse that crowned a low hill above the village. He incubated abandoned eggs, fed the ducklings by hand, and visited every day, often with delighted schoolchildren from the Hall in tow, until the ducks learned to waddle after him as he called to them. Once a year, Dagenham held a shoot at the pond. The gamekeeper, and some young helpers hired for the day, scared the ducks off the pond with yelling and thrashing about with rakes and cricket bats. The birds circled the copse once, squawking in protest, and then flew back directly into the path of the guns, urged home by the gamekeeper’s welcoming whistle. The Major’s disappointment at never being invited to this more elaborate shoot, with its early morning meeting on the steps of the Hall and huge breakfast party to follow, was slightly mitigated by his contempt for so-called sportsmen who needed wildfowl driven right onto the gun barrel. Nancy had often joked that Dagenham should buy the ducks frozen and have the gamekeeper toss a handful of shot in with the giblets. He had never quite been comfortable laughing with her at this, but had agreed that it was certainly not the sporting match of man and prey to which he would be proud to lend his gun.

  “I’d be delighted to come,” said the Major.

  “Ah, I think Tom has our table ready,” said Dagenham, ignoring the expressions of hope on the face of the Vicar and Whetstone. “Shall we?”

  “See you on the eleventh, then,” said Ferguson, pumping the Major’s hand again. “I’ll be on you like a bear on honey, getting a good look at those guns of yours.”

  “Thank you for the warning,” said the Major.

  “I thought you said there was some difficulty about the gun?” Alec asked in a quiet voice as they chewed their sandwiches and refused to steal glances at Lord Dagenham’s party. Whetstone was laughing more loudly than the
American in order to make sure the entire room knew he was at the table. “What are you going to do if you can’t get it?” The Major now regretted mentioning Bertie’s will to Alec. It had slipped out somewhere on the back nine when he was overcome again by the injustice of the situation. It was never a good idea to confide in people. They always remembered, and when they came up to you in the street, years later, you could see the information was still firmly attached to your face and present in the way they said your name and the pressure of their hand clasping yours.

  “I’m sure there will be no problem when I explain the situation,” said the Major. “She’ll at least let me have it for the occasion.” Marjorie was always very impressed with titles, and she was not aware of Lord Dagenham being a reduced kind of gentry, with all but one wing of the Hall let to a small boarding school for children aged three to thirteen and most of the lands lying fallow, producing only EU subsidy payments. He was sure he could talk up his lordship to the heights of an earl and impress upon Marjorie the privilege accorded the entire family by the invitation. Once the gun was in his hands, he would be quite happy to draw out any discussion of ownership—perhaps indefinitely? He ate his sandwich more quickly. If he hurried, he might see Marjorie this afternoon and put the whole matter to rest.

  “Ah, Major, I was hoping to catch you.” It was Grace, standing awkwardly by the bar, her large handbag clutched in crossed hands like a flotation cushion. “I managed to get Mrs. Ali on the telephone about the dance.”

  “Very good,” said the Major in a voice as neutral as he could manage without being actively dismissive. “So you’re all set, then?” He hoped Dagenham’s table was not in earshot.

  “She seemed rather stiff at first,” said Grace. “She said she didn’t really do catering. I was quite disappointed, because I thought she and I were on quite good terms.”

  “Can we buy you a drink, Grace?” Alec said, waving half a sandwich at her from the Major’s other side. A speck of dark pickle landed dangerously close to the Major’s arm.