Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Oh, then, haven’t you heard, dear?” said Miss Mapp. “It is all too terrible! On Christmas Day, too!”

  “Suicide?” asked Diva. “Oh, how shocking!”

  “No, dear. It was like this…”

  Miss Mapp got back to her house long before she usually left it. Her cook came up with the proposed bill of fare for the day.

  “That will do for lunch,” said Miss Mapp. “But not soup in the evening. A little fish from what was left over yesterday, and some toasted cheese. That will be plenty. Just a tray.”

  Miss Mapp went to the garden-room and sat at her window.

  “All so sudden,” she said to herself.

  She sighed.

  “I daresay there may have been much that was good in Captain Puffin,” she thought, “that we knew nothing about.”

  She wore a wintry smile.

  “Major Benjy will feel very lonely,” she said.

  EPILOGUE

  Miss Mapp went to the garden-room and sat at her window…

  It was a warm, bright day of February, and a butterfly was enjoying itself in the pale sunshine on the other window, and perhaps (so Miss Mapp sympathetically interpreted its feelings) was rather annoyed that it could not fly away through the pane. It was not a white butterfly, but a tortoise-shell, very pretty, and in order to let it enjoy itself more, she opened the window and it fluttered out into the garden. Before it had flown many yards, a starling ate most of it up, so the starling enjoyed itself too.

  Miss Mapp fully shared in the pleasure first of the tortoise-shell and then of the starling, for she was enjoying herself very much too, though her left wrist was terribly stiff. But Major Benjy was so cruel: he insisted on her learning that turn of the wrist which was so important in golf.

  “Upon my word, you’ve got it now, Miss Elizabeth,” he had said to her yesterday, and then made her do it all over again fifty times more. (“Such a bully!”) Sometimes she struck the ground, sometimes she struck the ball, sometimes she struck the air. But he had been very much pleased with her. And she was very much pleased with him. She forgot about the butterfly and remembered the starling.

  It was idle to deny that the last six weeks had been a terrific strain, and the strain on her left wrist was nothing to them. The worst tension of all, perhaps, was when Diva had bounced in with the news that the Contessa was coming back. That was so like Diva: the only foundation for the report proved to be that Figgis had said to her Janet that Mr. Wyse was coming back, and either Janet had misunderstood Figgis, or Diva (far more probably) had misunderstood Janet, and Miss Mapp only hoped that Diva had not done so on purpose, though it looked like it. Stupid as poor Diva undoubtedly was, it was hard for Charity itself to believe that she had thought that Janet really said that. But when this report proved to be totally unfounded, Miss Mapp rose to the occasion, and said that Diva had spoken out of stupidity and not out of malice towards her…

  Then in due course Mr. Wyse had come back and the two Poppits had come back, and only three days ago one Poppit had become a Wyse, and they had all three gone for a motor-tour on the Continent in the Royce. Very likely they would go as far south as Capri, and Susan would stay with her new grand Italian connections. What she would be like when she got back Miss Mapp forbore to conjecture, since it was no use anticipating trouble; but Susan had been so grandiose about the Wyses, multiplying their incomes and their acreage by fifteen or twenty, so Miss Mapp conjectured, and talking so much about county families, that the liveliest imagination failed to picture what she would make of the Faragliones. She already alluded to the Count as “My brother-in-law Cecco Faraglione,” but had luckily heard Diva say “Faradiddleony” in a loud aside, which had made her a little more reticent. Susan had taken the insignia of the Member of the British Empire with her, as she at once conceived the idea of being presented to the Queen of Italy by Amelia, and going to a court ball, and Isabel had taken her manuscript book of Malaprops and Spoonerisms. If she put down all the Italian malaprops that Mrs. Wyse would commit, it was likely that she would bring back two volumes instead of one.

  Though all these grandeurs were so rightly irritating, the departure of the “young couple” and Isabel had left Tilling, already shocked and shattered by the death of Captain Puffin, rather flat and purposeless. Miss Mapp alone refused to be flat, and had never been so full of purpose. She felt that it would be unpardonably selfish of her if she regarded for a moment her own loss, when there was one in Tilling who suffered so much more keenly, and she set herself with admirable singleness of purpose to restore Major Benjy’s zest in life, and fill the gap. She wanted no assistance from others in this: Diva, for instance, with her jerky ways would be only too apt to jar on him, and her black dress might remind him of his loss if Miss Mapp had asked her to go shares in the task of making the Major’s evenings less lonely. Also the weather, during the whole of January, was particularly inclement, and it would have been too much to expect of Diva to come all the way up the hill in the wet, while it was but a step from the Major’s door to her own. So there was little or nothing in the way of winter-bridge as far as Miss Mapp and the Major were concerned. Piquet with a single sympathetic companion who did not mind being rubiconned at threepence a hundred was as much as he was up to at present.

  With the end of the month a balmy foretaste of spring (such as had encouraged the tortoiseshell butterfly to hope) set in, and the Major used to drop in after breakfast and stroll round the garden with her, smoking his pipe. Miss Mapp’s sweet snowdrops had begun to appear, and green spikes of crocuses pricked the black earth, and the sparrows were having such fun in the creepers. Then one day the Major, who was going out to catch the 11.20 tram, had a “golf-stick,” as Miss Mapp so foolishly called it, with him, and a golf-ball, and after making a dreadful hole in her lawn, she had hit the ball so hard that it rebounded from the brick-wall, which was quite a long way off, and came back to her very feet, as if asking to be hit again by the golf-stick — no, golf-club. She learned to keep her wonderfully observant eye on the ball and bought one of her own. The Major lent her a mashie — and before anyone would have thought it possible, she had learned to propel her ball right over the bed where the snowdrops grew, without beheading any of them in its passage. It was the turn of the wrist that did that, and Withers cleaned the dear little mashie afterwards, and put it safely in the corner of the garden-room.

  To-day was to be epoch-making. They were to go out to the real links by the 11.20 tram (consecrated by so many memories), and he was to call for her at eleven. He had qui-hied for porridge fully an hour ago.

  After letting out the tortoise-shell butterfly from the window looking into the garden, she moved across to the post of observation on the street, and arranged snowdrops in a little glass vase. There were a few over when that was full, and she saw that a reel of cotton was close at hand, in case she had an idea of what to do with the remainder. Eleven o’clock chimed from the church, and on the stroke she saw him coming up the few yards of street that separated his door from hers. So punctual! So manly!

  Diva was careering about the High Street as they walked along it, and Miss Mapp kissed her hand to her.

  “Off to play golf, darling,” she said. “Is that not grand? Au reservoir.”

  Diva had not missed seeing the snowdrops in the Major’s button-hole, and stood stupefied for a moment at this news. Then she caught sight of Evie, and shot across the street to communicate her suspicions. Quaint Irene joined then and the Padre.

  “Snowdrops, i’fegs!” said he…

  LUCIA IN LONDON (1927)

  The second novel to feature Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas transfers the irrepressible social climber from rural England to the capital city, where she moves after receiving an inheritance. Soon the cream of London high society are divided into two factions: her followers (dubbed ‘Luciaphils’) and her bitter enemies.

  Brompton Square, South London, where much of the action of the novel takes place and where Benson lived for a time
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  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  Geraldine McEwan as Lucia in the Channel 4 TV series, ‘Mapp and Lucia’

  CHAPTER I.

  Considering that Philip Lucas’s aunt who died early in April was no less than eighty-three years old, and had spent the last seven of them bedridden in a private lunatic asylum, it had been generally and perhaps reasonably hoped among his friends and those of his wife that the bereavement would not be regarded by either of them as an intolerable tragedy. Mrs. Quantock, in fact, who, like everybody else at Riseholme, had sent a neat little note of condolence to Mrs. Lucas, had, without using the actual words “happy release,” certainly implied it or its close equivalent.

  She was hoping that there would be a reply to it, for though she had said in her note that her dear Lucia mustn’t dream of answering it, that was a mere figure of speech, and she had instructed her parlour-maid who took it across to ‘The Hurst’ immediately after lunch to say that she didn’t know if there was an answer, and would wait to see, for Mrs. Lucas might perhaps give a little hint ever so vaguely about what the expectations were concerning which everybody was dying to get information. . . .

  While she waited for this, Daisy Quantock was busy, like everybody else in the village on this beautiful afternoon of spring, with her garden, hacking about with a small but destructive fork in her flower-beds. She was a gardener of the ruthless type, and went for any small green thing that incautiously showed a timid spike above the earth, suspecting it of being a weed. She had had a slight difference with the professional gardener who had hitherto worked for her on three afternoons during the week, and had told him that his services were no longer required. She meant to do her gardening herself this year, and was confident that a profusion of beautiful flowers and a plethora of delicious vegetables would be the result. At the end of her garden path was a barrow of rich manure, which she proposed, when she had finished the slaughter of the innocents, to dig into the depopulated beds. On the other side of her paling her neighbour Georgie Pillson was rolling his strip of lawn, on which during the summer he often played croquet on a small scale. Occasionally they shouted remarks to each other, but as they got more and more out of breath with their exertions the remarks got fewer. Mrs. Quantock’s last question had been “What do you do with slugs, Georgie?” and Georgie had panted out, “Pretend you don’t see them.”

  Mrs. Quantock had lately grown rather stout owing to a diet of sour milk, which with plenty of sugar was not palatable; but sour milk and pyramids of raw vegetables had quite stopped all the symptoms of consumption which the study of a small but lurid medical manual had induced. To-day she had eaten a large but normal lunch in order to test the merits of her new cook, who certainly was a success, for her husband had gobbled up his food with great avidity instead of turning it over and over with his fork as if it was hay. In consequence, stoutness, surfeit, and so much stooping had made her feel rather giddy, and she was standing up to recover, wondering if this giddiness was a symptom of something dire, when de Vere, for such was the incredible name of her parlour-maid, came down the steps from the dining-room with a note in her hand. So Mrs. Quantock hastily took off her gardening gloves of stout leather, and opened it.

  There was a sentence of formal thanks for her sympathy which Mrs. Lucas immensely prized, and then followed these ridiculous words:

  It has been a terrible blow to my poor Pepino and myself. We trusted that Auntie Amy might have been spared us for a few years yet.

  Ever, dear Daisy, your sad

  Lucia.

  And not a word about expectations! . . . Lucia’s dear Daisy crumpled up the absurd note, and said “Rubbish,” so loud that Georgie Pillson in the next garden thought he was being addressed.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Georgie, come to the fence a minute,” said Mrs. Quantock. “I want to speak to you.”

  Georgie, longing for a little gossip, let go of the handle of his roller, which, suddenly released, gave a loud squeak and rapped him smartly on the elbow.

  “Tarsome thing!” said Georgie.

  He went to the fence and, being tall, could look over it. There was Mrs. Quantock angrily poking Lucia’s note into the flower-bed she had been weeding.

  “What is it?” said Georgie. “Shall I like it?”

  His face red and moist with exertion, appearing just over the top of the fence, looked like the sun about to set below the flat grey horizon of the sea.

  “I don’t know if you’ll like it,” said Daisy, “but it’s your Lucia. I sent her a little note of condolence about the aunt, and she says it has been a terrible blow to Pepino and herself. They hoped that the old lady might have been spared them a few years yet.”

  “No!” said Georgie, wiping the moisture off his forehead with the back of one of his beautiful pearl-grey gloves.

  “But she did,” said the infuriated Daisy, “they were her very words. I could show you if I hadn’t dug it in. Such a pack of nonsense! I hope that long before I’ve been bedridden for seven years, somebody will strangle me with a bootlace, or anything handy. Why does Lucia pretend to be sorry? What does it all mean?”

  Georgie had long been devoted henchman to Lucia (Mrs. Lucas, wife of Philip Lucas, and so Lucia), and though he could criticise her in his mind, when he was alone in his bed or his bath, he always championed her in the face of the criticism of others. Whereas Daisy criticised everybody everywhere. . . .

  “Perhaps it means what it says,” he observed with the delicate sarcasm that never had any effect on his neighbour.

  “It can’t possibly do that,” said Mrs. Quantock. “Neither Lucia nor Pepino have set eyes on his aunt for years, nor spoken of her. Last time Pepino went to see her she bit him. Sling for a week afterwards, don’t you remember, and he was terrified of blood-poisoning. How can her death be a blow, and as for her being spared—”

  Mrs. Quantock suddenly broke off, remembering that de Vere was still standing there and drinking it all in.

  “That’s all, de Vere,” she said.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said de Vere, striding back towards the house. She had high-heeled shoes on, and each time she lifted her foot, the heel which had been embedded by her weight in the soft lawn came out with the sound of a cork being drawn. Then Daisy came closer to the fence, with the light of inductive reasoning, which was much cultivated at Riseholme, veiling the fury of her eye.

  “Georgie, I’ve got it,” she said. “I’ve guessed what it means.”

  Now though Georgie was devoted to his Lucia, he was just as devoted to inductive reasoning, and Daisy Quantock was, with the exception of himself, far the most powerful logician in the place.

  “What is it, then?” he asked.

  “Stupid of me not to have thought of it at once,” said Daisy. “Why, don’t you see? Pepino is Auntie’s heir, for she was unmarried, and he’s the only nephew, and probably he has been left piles and piles. So naturally they say it’s a terrible blow. Wouldn’t do to be exultant. They must say it’s a terrible blow, to show they don’t care about the money. The more they’re left, the sadder it is. So natural. I blame myself for not having thought of it at once. Have you seen her since?”

  “Not for a quiet talk,” said Georgie. “Pepino was there, and a man who, I think, was Pepino’s lawyer. He was frightfully deferential.”

  “That proves it,” said Daisy. “And nothing said of any kind?”

  Georgie’s face screwed itself up in the effort to remember.

  “Yes, there was something,” he said, “but I was talking to Lucia, and the others were talking rather low. But I did hear the lawyer say something to Pepino about pearls. I do remember the word pearls. Perhaps it was th
e old lady’s pearls.”

  Mrs. Quantock gave a short laugh.

  “It couldn’t have been Pepino’s,” she said. “He has one in a tie-pin. It’s called pear-shaped, but there’s little shape about it. When do wills come out?”

  “Oh, ages,” said Georgie. “Months. And there’s a house in London, I know.”

  “Whereabouts?” asked Daisy greedily.

  Georgie’s face assumed a look of intense concentration.

  “I couldn’t tell you for certain,” he said, “but I know Pepino went up to town not long ago to see about some repairs to his aunt’s house, and I think it was the roof.”

  “It doesn’t matter where the repairs were,” said Daisy impatiently. “I want to know where the house was.”

  “You interrupt me,” said Georgie. “I was telling you. I know he went to Harrod’s afterwards and walked there, because he and Lucia were dining with me and he said so. So the house must have been close to Harrod’s, quite close I mean, because it was raining, and if it had been any reasonable distance he would have had a taxi. So it might be Knightsbridge.”

  Mrs. Quantock put on her gardening-gloves again.

  “How frightfully secretive people are,” she said. “Fancy his never having told you where his aunt’s house was.”

  “But they never spoke of her,” said Georgie. “She’s been in that nursing-home so many years.”

  “You may call it a nursing-home,” observed Mrs. Quantock, “or, if you choose, you may call it a post office. But it was an asylum. And they’re just as secretive about the property.”

  “But you never talk about the property till after the funeral,” said Georgie. “I believe it’s to-morrow.”

  Mrs. Quantock gave a prodigious sniff.