Complete Short Stories (36 page)

‘Maybe the Vicar…’

‘The Vicar was away last week-end.’

‘Maybe his locum, the sandy-haired
youth with pince-nez…’

‘Maybe. He certainly preached a very odd sermon the next day on Jezebel and the dogs…’

‘Maybe Dr MacGillicuddy himself…’

‘Maybe. He’s a bachelor. Anyhow, let’s forget the unpleasant subject.’

‘Bella… talking of that French thing. It occurs to me that possibly…’

‘And to me! You mean what Mrs Vicar was telling us about the sudden gratifying increase in Sunday School attendance?’

‘Exactly. Not girls, only boys. Four in all, including Harold Jelkes – and our little Robin Lostwithiel, of all children. She said that the dear laddies are so keen on Sunday School that they turn up half-an-hour early and play with her lonely little Evangeline.’

‘Never underestimate the power of a woman, even at six years old.’

‘This is worse than ever. If we’re right, Evangeline is sure to
be caught with the foul thing before long, and then it’ll be traced to us. She’ll open her baby-blue eyes wide and say: “Oh, I didn’t think there was any harm in it, Mummy! Mrs Nightingale sent it us with the
Picture Posts
and things.” We simply
must
get it back somehow, by fair means or foul. It’ll be somewhere hidden among her toys.’

‘Harry, how on earth do you expect me to burgle Evangeline’s
playroom?’

‘I don’t know. But it was you who got us into this mess. So you’d better get us out again pretty quick. Or else…’

Barbie Lostwithiel, extravagantly dressed and perfumed as usual, strolled in unannounced through the french-windows and kissed both the
Nightingales on either cheek, Continental fashion. Dr Nightingale rather liked this unconventional salute, especially as Bella didn’t
grudge it him.

‘Chums,’ Barbie said in a husky whisper, ‘I do want your advice so badly. You know how I am with Robin, ever since I got sole custody. No lies, no secrets, no half-truths, all absolutely above-board between us twain. I know you don’t approve altogether, but there it is! Well, a tiny little rift in the lute occurred last Sunday after lunch, when Robin cancelled our old-time ceremonial
game of draughts and wanted to hurry off early to the Rectory. Of course, I had thought it a bit odd when he said the week before that he wanted to try Sunday School; but I didn’t care to oppose him if that was his idea of fun. So this time I asked: “Bobbie, are you in love with Evangeline by any chance?” “No, Barbie, of course not,” he said with that engaging blush of his, “but she has some
very interesting photographs of ladies in a magazine from Paris. Ladies don’t wear any clothes in Paris, you see, and I feel sort of happy looking at them just as they really are underneath. But I’m not to tell anyone, not a soul – of course you don’t count, Barbie darling – in case Evangeline gets in a row with the Vicar. She stole it from the Hospital magazine collection.”’

The Nightingales
said nothing, but their fingers clenched and unclenched nervously.

Barbie Lostwithiel went on: ‘I’ve been wondering what to do about it all the week. I don’t in the least mind Bobbie’s admiring the undraped female figure, so long as it’s not misbehaving itself too shockingly – as I gather it isn’t in this case, apart from a bit of candid acrobatic posturing. But I
do
mind his getting involved
in a dirty little, sniggering, hole-and-corner Rectory peep-show – that
Turn of the Screw
Evangeline’s clever contribution to the Church’s standing problem of how to fill empty pews. Unfortunately, I can’t confide in Mrs Vicar. She hates my guts as it is, because I’m a
divorcée
– even if I’m billed as the innocent party. I mean: I couldn’t tell her what’s in the air without breaking Robin’s confidence
and spoiling his faith in my absolute discretion. Besides, I’d be getting him in bad with the Sunday School gang. Harry, can’t you, as the local physician, have a man-to-man talk with the Vicar? Say that a boy’s father has been complaining; which would let Robin out nicely.
Please!’

‘Barbie, dearly as I may be supposed to love you and yours, I can’t and won’t do anything of the kind! The Vicar
would toss me through his study window if I accused his innocent little daughter of keeping a… a
salon des voyeurs
, I suppose the official phrase would be. The Vicar played “lock” in the English Rugger pack only six years ago.’

So Bella Nightingale and Barbie Lostwithiel put their heads together. Their main problem was how to administer the doped chocolate without suspicion. Barbie solved that
one easily. She borrowed the Church key from the sexton, on the pretext of putting two vasefuls of Madonna lilies
from her garden on the Communion table; and, as she went out, paused briefly at the Rectory pew. There she hid the chocolate under Evangeline’s prayer book – wrapped in a small piece of grimy exercise paper marked: ‘Love from Harold Jelkes XXX.’

Bella, a certified dispenser before
she married, had calculated the dose nicely. Soon after Sunday lunch, Mrs Vicar rang up to say that Evangeline was down with a violent tummy-ache and would Dr Nightingale be good enough to come at once?

Dr Nightingale answered that surely a simple stomach-ache… ? He was just off with his wife for a picnic on the Downs. Still, since poor wee Evangeline…

‘Now’s your heaven-sent chance, Bella,’
he said, when Mrs Vicar had rung off.

‘Oh, very well, if I must, I must,’ said Bella. She had carefully not told him about the chocolate, because such a bad actor as he would be sure to give the game away. Besides, it was notoriously unethical for a doctor to charge fees for curing an ailment in the causing of which he had connived. Harry would certainly prefer not to know of her device.

They
collected the picnic things and drove to the Rectory. Bella went into the house, too, to express sympathy, but waited outside in the playroom, while Mrs Vicar was closeted with Dr Nightingale in Evangeline’s bedroom.

Bella unearthed the magazine, after a rapid search, from under the snakes-and-ladders board, which lay under an illustrated
Child’s Wonders of Nature
, which lay under a row of Teddy
Bears. She shoved it down the neck of her blouse, buttoned her coat, replaced the Teddy Bears, and sat down placidly to read
Sunday at Home.

Meanwhile, Dr Nightingale was puzzled. As Bella had foreseen, Evangeline did not own up to eating sweets in Church, especially love gifts from vulgar little boys.

‘Odd,’ he told Bella as they drove off. ‘I don’t think that stomach-ache is due to a bug.
The action is far more like colocynth or some other vegetable alkaloid of the sort; yet she seems to have eaten her usual breakfast and lunch, with nothing in between but a glass of milk. Anyhow, I put her on a starvation diet for a day or two, the little basket! Did you find the French thing?’

‘I did.’

‘Good girl! Burn it!’

Bella showed the magazine to Barbie, as she had promised. Barbie gave
a little yelp. ‘Oh, my poor darling Robin!’ she said, tragically throwing up her hands and eyes. ‘To think that his first introduction to the female form divine should have been a set of five-franc cats like these!’

‘Really, Barbie! Your language!’

‘It’s enough to upset his psychic balance for all time. I could
slap
your Mrs Jelkes for starting this lark.’

‘She’s already suffered quite a lot,
I’m glad to report,’ said Bella. ‘Her poor Harold passed a terrible night with so-called “hives” – tossing, turning, screaming, scratching, and keeping the whole household awake until the small hours. Not a wink of sleep, did Mrs Jelkes get. When Harry called in the morning, he found nothing wrong with the brat – except itching-powder in his pyjamas. Evangeline’s hit back for the stomachache,
I suppose. I wonder how she worked it? Thank Goodness, she doesn’t suspect
us
!’

Barbie was left to burn the French thing in her garden incinerator. When she got around to doing so, a week later, Robin strolled up unexpectedly and asked what the funny smell was.

Barbie got flustered, and told him her first lie. ‘I’m just burning a few bills, darling. So much easier than paying them, as you’ll
find when you grow up.’

‘I see… But, Barbie darling!’

‘Yes, my love?’

‘We met Evangeline in the wood. She says the Vicar found that Paris magazine and snatched it away from her. He was awfully cross, she says, and gave her a terrible beating with a knobbed stick – so bad that she had to be put to bed and Dr Nightingale was sent for, to cure her with bandages and iodine. And after that the Vicar
nearly starved her to death. And she told us that our fathers will give us all terrible whippings, too, and starve us nearly to death, if they hear we’ve looked at the undressed Paris ladies. (Lucky I haven’t a father now, isn’t it?) But she’s promised to watch for someone to send another copy. She doesn’t know whose pile the first one came from. She
thinks
it was the Nightingales’. But there’s
sure to be another, she says. And she’ll find a safer hiding place next time.’

I
N SPAIN
, a married woman keeps her maiden name, but tacks on her husband’s after a
de.
Thus, on marrying Wifredo Las Rocas, our Majorcan friend Rosa, born an Espinosa, became Rosa Espinosa de Las Rocas – a very happy combination. It means ‘Lady Thorny Rose from the Rocks’. Rosa was much luckier than her maternal cousin Dolores Fuertes, who thoughtlessly married a lawyer
named Tomás Barriga, and is now Dolores Fuertes de Barriga, or ‘Violent Pains of the Stomach’. My wife and I first met Rosa at a Palma store. We were complaining bitterly, in English, of an age-old Majorcan superstition that the sun shines brightly throughout the year, and that consequently no trouble about drying clothes can ever imaginably arise. Majorcans provide no airing-closets in even their
grandest houses, and scorn that old-fashioned English contrivance, the nursery towel-horse, which allows harassed mothers to keep abreast of their children’s washing during long rainy spells. We had by now visited every furniture shop in Palma, searching for one, but been greeted only by shrugs and smiles.

Then Rosa piped up at my elbow, in beautiful clear English, with hardly a trace of a Spanish
accent: ‘Excuse me! I could not help overhearing your conversation. My husband Wifredo Las Rocas will, I am sure, be delighted to make you a towel-horse. He knows all about towel-horses. My dear old English nurse, the late Nanny Parker, brought a towel-horse with her when she came to us from the British Embassy at Madrid; but I’m afraid my elder sister in Saragossa has it now. If you care to
come along with me…’

Wifredo and his partner, Aníbal Tulipán, worked in a large furniture factory on the outskirts of Palma. Though originally they owned fifty per cent each of the factory shares, the building got badly damaged by fire; so the Central Bank rebuilt and restocked it for them at the price of a controlling interest. Wifredo and Aníbal were, in fact, reduced to mere employees of the
Bank, subject to dismissal if they failed to show a profit – an uncomfortable position in times as difficult as those, for men so proud.

Aníbal looked after supplies and sales; Wifredo, after design, production
and personnel. They had been brothers-in-law, but the death of Wifredo’s sister from an overdose of sleeping-pills, taken in protest against Aníbal’s too serious liaison with a dentist’s
receptionist, snapped the family tie; and if ever two men were temperamentally more unsuited to become partners, these were they. Aníbal, who loved all things German, especially metaphysics, music and sauerkraut, closely resembled Goering in appearance, and had a truly Wagnerian ill-temper; often, when he felt cross, he would emulate Adolf Hitler by throwing himself on the floor and biting the
carpet. Until the war ended victoriously for the Allies, Wifredo – tall, fair, and rangy – was careful to conceal his strongly anglophile tendencies. These had been excited some years previously when he first fell in love with Rosa and came under the posthumous spell of the celebrated Nanny Parker. Nanny Parker, on entering the Espinosa household, had brought with her a bound series of the
Illustrated
London News,
dating from 1906 to 1925, and kept adding a fresh one every year. In 1936, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and Nanny Parker’s death – under a fast car driven by a party of non-intervening Italian airmen, remember? – closed the series. But a constant study of these volumes had made Wifredo an expert in all things English for the thirty years that they covered.

When Rosa introduced
us to Wifredo, and asked whether he could supply a nursery towel-horse, he agreed with enthusiasm, seeing in us a helpful source of information about all that had happened to the British race since the death of George V. The outcome was an almost breath-taking towel-horse, stout and capacious as a church, in solid mahogany, with fluted rails and brass knobs – and that at a period when mahogany
was practically unobtainable on the island. Wifredo charged us only a nominal sum for this masterpiece, assuring us that the pleasure was entirely his.

Then Aníbal heard about the towel-horse from the factory foreman, flew into one of his infernal rages, called Wifredo all sorts of gross names, and accused him of cheating the business, wasting valuable materials, delaying the execution of other
orders, and allying himself with certain ancient and inveterate enemies of Spain. He even threatened to bring the ridiculous towel-horse to the notice of the Central Bank. Wifredo replied passionately that Great Britain was Spain’s best customer and, after Spain, the noblest country in Europe. He also commented on Aníbal’s Teutonic lack of taste, humour and imagination, adding that he proposed
to start immediate production, though on a rather less expensive model than the prototype, of no less than one hundred ‘Nanniparkér’ nursery towel-horses. Then followed some very pointed remarks, such as: ‘The priest must have had a bad cold when he christened you “Aníbal”. He surely meant “Animal”. You are indeed a fat, brutish, sophistical, Germanic beast, save for whose degraded adventures in the
lowest haunts
of Santa Catalina, my poor sister would still be alive today!’