‘I won’t give up the morning shopping. Besides, one learns all the news then. Why, it would be worse than not having the wireless! I should be lost without it.’
(Georgie Pillson, like all the Mapp and Lucia characters, gaga for gossip)
Only a few minutes ago some catastrophic development seemed likely, and Tilling’s appetite for social catastrophe was keen…
(The endless thirst for gossip)
Her eye had that gimlet-like aspect, which betokened a thirst for knowledge.
(What happened? Any news? What’s the latest?)
Endless interpretations could be put on this absorbing incident…
(Summary of Benson’s technique)
Lucia… went down to the High Street for her marketing. Her mind resembled a modern army attended by an air force and all appliances. It was ready to scout and skirmish, to lay an ambush, to defend or to attack an enemy with explosives from its aircraft or poison gas.
(The unrelenting battle for social supremacy which is the books’ subject)
‘There’s nothing that stings so much as contemptuous oblivion. I have often found that.’
(Lucia’s revenge)
‘Trouble for Lucia’ is a 1939 comic novel written by E.F. Benson. It is the sixth and final novel in the ever-popular Mapp and Lucia series. As you know by now, the novels are set in the town of Tilling, a thinly disguised version of Rye on the Sussex coast where Benson himself lived (and, like his fictional heroine Lucia, served as mayor).
The novels give minute descriptions of the petty rivalries and jealousies among a tiny cohort of characters, the comedy deriving from the discrepancy between the intense triviality of the tiny events described, and the po-faced earnestness of Benson’s treatment. It struck me this could be symbolised by the rich Wyses’ who own an enormous Rolls Royce complete with chauffeur but only ever use it to drive the 50 yards from their house to Lucia’s house, or the 100 yards down to the High Street to go shopping.
The lead characters are Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas, her long-time friend, lieutenant and piano duet partner, Georgie Pillson, and her bitter rival for supremacy of Tilling’s social scene, Elizabeth Mapp. At one point Georgie says of Lucia that:
That was her real métier, to render the trivialities of life intense for others.
in a phrase which could be Benson describing his own subject matter.
Cast
- Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas, now Pillson (since she married Georgie, in the preceding novel)
- Grosvenor – her maid
- Chapman – her chauffeur (I was puzzled whether this was a mistake; the chauffeur is called Cadman in all the other novels)
- Mrs Simpson – the lady she hires to be her secretary
- Georgie Pillson – her camp husband, ‘He and his petit point, and his little cape, and his old-maidish ways…’
- Foljambe – his peerless parlour-maid and valet
- Elizabeth Mapp-Flint – Lucia’s longstanding enemy
- Major Benjamin ‘Benjy’ Mapp-Flint – Elizabeth’s long-suffering husband, plays golf every day, given to sneaking off to have a few whiskeys whenever his wife’s back is turned
- Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow – along with gay Irene, the only single woman in the set; speaks in telegraphese: ‘Lovely to see you after all this long time. Tea going on. A few friends’ or ‘Two of your councillors here just now. Shillings. Didn’t charge them. Advertisement’; during the course of this novel she sets up a successful tea rooms
- Janet – her maid
- Paddy – her Irish terrier
- ‘quaint’ Irene Coles – the unshockable lesbian painter – I was staggered to learn in this novel for the first time that she is only 25 years old! (page 196) I thought she was middle-aged like all the others…
- Lucy, her 6-foot-tall maid
- Mr Algernon’s Wyse – rich, owner of a Rolls Royce
- Mrs Susan Wyse MBE – fat, her ‘immense bulk’, ‘Susan’s great watery smile spread across her face’
- Amelia, Contessa di Faraglione – Algernon’s sister, married an Italian count, makes occasional flying visits to Tilling where she’s always hugely amused by the tittle tattle
- The Reverend Kenneth Bartlett – vicar, addicted to speaking a weird combination of Highland Scots and Elizabethan English so as to be barely comprehensible
- Evie Bartlett – his mousey wife; ‘Evie emitted the mouse-like squeak which denoted intense private amusement’
- Olga Bracely – the internationally renowned opera singer, ‘a dream of beauty with her brilliant colouring and her high, arched eyebrows’, who appeared in the first and third novels but has been on a world tour; in those books Georgie was deeply in love with her
- Cortese – the Italian composer
- Dorothy – Cortese’s English wife
- Lady ‘Poppy’ Sheffield – owner of rundown Sheffield Castle, the cause of so much trouble in the final part of the novel, develops an amusing crush on Georgie
- Miss Susan Leg – real name of the world-famous novelist, Rudolph da Vinci
- Mr Rice – the poulterer
- Mr Twistevant – the grocer
- Mr McConnell – editor of the Hampshire Argus in which a lot of these shenanigans are reported
- Mr Fergus – the dentist
- Inspector Morrison – of the Tilling police
Plots and storylines
‘Trouble for Lucia’ takes up very soon after where its predecessor left off. To the reader’s amazement, in the preceding novel, ‘Lucia’s Progress’, the forceful widow Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas had married her long-time friend, lieutenant and piano duet partner, Georgie Pillson, thus becoming Mrs Pillson.
She had also made herself the most eminent person in the town of Tilling through a string of charitable donations, to the local church, the local hospital, the cricket and football clubs, until she was finally nominated first woman Mayor of Tilling. (For the biographically minded, Benson himself served as Mayor of Rye between 1934 and 1937 so a lot of the detail of council business and formal costume is presumably based on first-hand knowledge.)
This final novel opens at this point: it is October and Lucia’s nomination to Mayor is confirmed but she hasn’t yet taken up office, she’s due to do that in a month’s time. So she’s fussing about related problems. When she’s mayor should she continue to do her own shopping in the high street?
She shares with Georgie her plans: to make Tilling a centre of intellectual and artistic activity, to help the poor, to clear away the old slums, an end to overcrowding, pasteurisation of milk, strict censorship of films, benches in sunny corners, flower boxes in windows, affordable concerts of first-rate music. All very admirable.
Meanwhile, Georgie is offended that no place might be found for him at her inaugural dinner, which is usually restricted to the Corporation, the aldermen, other councillors and so on; until Lucia comes up with a seating suggestion for him. He has bought a red velvet jacket specially, to mark his new status. Lucia has engaged a shorthand and typewriting secretary, a Mrs Simpson, in readiness for her mayoral work.
Today’s gossip: Diva wants to convert her house into a café; Iris has been refused permission by the council to cover her house with a fresco depicting an immense naked woman standing on shell representing motherhood; Susan Wyse has sat on her own pet budgerigar and squashed it flat.
Everyone Lucia and Georgie meet in the High Street asks who she is going to choose to be her Mayoress, and all the usual suspects are soon vying for the post, appealing directly like Diva or getting their partners to send begging letters. This wave of appeals coincides with a dinner and bridge evening Lucia holds at which the different parties make their pitches.
Typically muted comedy as Georgie, immensely proud of the new red velvet jacket he’s ordered, is dismayed to find Mr Wyse turning up in a similar velvet jacket but of sapphire blue. As Diva puts it:
‘Aren’t the Tilling boys getting dressy?’
But Lucia has decided. She will have Elizabeth as her mayoress and invites her round to tell her so. Within an hour Elizabeth has told everyone. Her version is that Lucia begged her to take the post. Lucia doesn’t lower herself to tell the truth which is that Elizabeth had been loitering round her house all day, gagging for the job. And the reality is that Lucia, although she doesn’t put it like this, would, in Lyndon B. Johnson’s words, rather have Elizabeth inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.
Irene’s photo
Irene is outside her house enjoying the sun and making sketches for her fresco when Elizabeth hoves into view, fresh from Lucia telling her she’ll be her mayoress. Flush with enthusiasm she happily adopts a silly pose for Irene to sketch and take a photo of. But when she goes on to boast of how Lucia begged her to take the role, Irene (a passionate fan of Lucia) knows she’s lying and despises her. When Lucia comes by later on, and tells the true account of the interview, Irene’s suspicions are confirmed and she tells Lucia she will send the photo of Elizabeth in a silly pose to the newspaper, the Hampshire Argus, purporting to be a serious image of the new mayoress.
When the paper uses the disrespectful photo of Elizabeth in their story about the mayoress appointment, Liz and husband Major Flint are furious and Flint sets off for the newspaper offices with a riding-whip which he promises his wife he’ll horsewhip the editor with. But 1) while he waits he has a few nips of the newspaper’s hospitality scotch and 2) the editor turns out to be an imposingly massive man. Combine the two and the result is that a tipsy major not only ends up having a nice chat with Mr McConnell, but brings him home to Grebe (the cottage where Elizabeth and Benjy live) for dinner!
But the repercussions haven’t finished. Drunk Benjy Flint left his riding-whip at the newspaper offices so Elizabeth calls by to collect it. On the way home she stops at Diva’s place, where Diva is testing her tea offering on a few guests (Evie, the Padre and Georgie). Here she 1) puts a brave face on the Benjy-visiting-the-Chronicle story (claiming not to have seen the silly photo of herself, though all present know she has). But 2) she puts the riding-whip down for the duration and it is swiftly grabbed by Diva’s dog Paddy who (unseen by everyone) takes it outside and chews it to pieces. So that when Elizabeth rises to leave she can’t find it anywhere, searches high and low and leaves in high dudgeon. Only later does Diva spot the shiny silver cap of the riding-whip in her garden, attached to some chewed remains and realise her dog has destroyed it. So she guiltily buries the silver cap in her back garden and hopes the whole thing will blow over.
This is typical of how Benson takes the most trivial incidents and spools them into low-key, mildly amusing but very endearing comedy. It’s too low-key to be called farce (which is frantic and extreme), it’s more like charming amusement. And in this particular case, it’s not over yet because the issue of the riding-whip is destined to crop up later in the book…
Mayoring day
The great day arrives and Lucia is inducted as mayor of Tilling amid much pomp and ceremony. Later on she takes the first tea at Diva’s new tea rooms although, as she insists, purely in a personal capacity, as Mrs Pillson – mustn’t lower the dignity of her high office! After tea she and her friends repair to the back room to play bridge (which the characters are all addicted to) while actual paying customers arrive in the front.
Then the mayoral banquet in the evening. Not all the local dignitaries attend, but Lucia makes a fine speech and even gets to play her signature tune, the slow movement from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, on the piano, to respectful applause. That night she tells a tired Georgie she is determined that a new era in Tilling’s history is about to begin.
The new era
Lucia plunges into teaching herself about planning regulations and zoning policy and scads of other local government concerns. She becomes ‘excruciatingly didactic’, insisting on sharing every particle of her new knowledge with Georgie whose eyes glaze over. Elizabeth is a pest, phoning her bright and early every day: ‘Anything I can do for you, dear Worship?’ she asked. ‘Always at your service.’
She takes to referring to Lucia as ‘dear Worship’, to her face and to all their friends, to the latter’s intense irritation.
The new parsimony
Now that Lucia is mayor, she believes she needs to set an example of frugality and restraint. She orders her maid Grosvenor to prepare more humble meals at home (mutton hash and treacle tart). And decides to set an example to the general population by giving up gambling in the form of the little bets she and her friends have on their bridge games (threepence per hundred points).
In both these Puritan moves she is, of course, under the delusion that anybody in the general population either knows or cares what she does in her private life, but the bridge decision, in particular, upsets her friends. The harmless little stakes they place on their bridge games are what give them their zest and they resent Lucia’s high-handedness. As Diva puts it:
‘She may be Mayor but she isn’t Mussolini.’
The unintended consequences of Lucia ceasing to play bridge for money are 1) all the games when she invites guests round at a stroke become boring and flat, and so 2) the others start inviting Georgie alone to their games, without killjoy Lucia, because he resists Lucia’s new rule and continues to gamble. All of a sudden he finds himself invited everywhere without Lucia. In addition, 3) the group as a whole finds it most congenial to go to Diva’s for tea then cards afterwards. None of the bother of hosting and providing refreshments, and everyone pays their own way. Thus Diva’s cafe becomes a new social haunt, not only for the bridge set but with the town at large, and she’s soon coining it.
The council election
An election approaches for a vacancy on the town council. I don’t understand how, but apparently Elizabeth can stand for this as well as being mayoress. So Lucia persuades Georgie that he must stand against her (Elizabeth). The campaign is briskly described and then the announcement from the steps of the town hall in a howling gale: Elizabeth got 805 votes, Georgie is humiliated with just 421. It is universally seen as a humiliation for Lucia.
Budgie spirituality
I mentioned that right at the start there was gossip about whether large Susan Wyse accidentally sat on her pet budgerigar and squashed it to death. Answer: yes. I neglected to mention that, in a ghoulish development, she attached the wings and body to a hat as decoration (you have to remember how ornate many ladies’ hats were in the 1920s and ’30s). But this theme persists because Susan becomes convinced that she is in touch with the spirit of the dead bird and starts to have budgie séances.
The twist is that, on the afternoon before Lucia is invited to such a séance, Mr Wyse himself appears at her door, explains how his wife is becoming obsessed with the séances, has lost interest in all other activities, and spends hours mulling over the voluminous automatic writings which are generated at each session. Now since the sessions focus round a little shrine to the dead (and reassembled and stuffed) budgie placed on the séance table, Mr Wyse has gone to the subterfuge of stealing the bird when his wife was otherwise busy, wrapping it up, and has brought it to Lucia to hide. Which she agrees to do.
Cut to that evening when Lucia and Georgie arrive at the Wyse house, Starling Cottage. It is of course all ludicrous. Susan is a large lady and is wearing a white dress and a wreath in her hair so she looks like an immense Ophelia. The lights are low and the room is full of incense. In the event Lucia decides to play along, saying the can feel the little bird’s wings fluttering against her cheek and then, just before Susan goes to open the shrine, declares she feels an immense manifestation: ‘Blue Birdie has left us altogether!’ Which is just what Susan discovers when she opens the doors of the little ‘shrine’: the bird has gone. Lucia piles on the deceit, claiming that the bird has spent enough time in the temporal plane and has now decided to depart forever to the spiritual plane and what a good thing that is, leaving Susan puzzled and sad at the loss of her new hobby.
Bicycling
Talking of hobbies, Lucia and Georgie take up a new one, bicycling. They get trainers from the bicycle shop to jog along beside them holding the bicycles upright until they’ve gained enough confidence. Then they feel confident enough to go for trial runs along the flat wet sand of the beach, which has wide enough space for turning, until they’ve mastered that manoeuvre.
And so the grand day comes when they are ready to cycle in unison down to the High Street. Here they encounter the seven or eight people in their circle who are all dazzled by their skills and cycling quickly becomes the new fad of the town. The comic climax comes when Lucia and Georgie decide to be adventurous and cycle out from the town to the country, which first entails going down the steep Landgate Street. Lucia quickly hits such speed that she panics and, instead of pulling her brake rings her bell. When a policeman steps out in front to block the way she’s going far too fast to stop and so, in the manner of an Ealing Comedy, at the last minute he has to leap out of the way. She only narrowly makes the gap between a van and a pedestrian and runs along the flat for some way before finally trundling to a halt.
Next day the Inspector of Police calls to say that one of his officers spotted a female riding a bike at dangerous speed and the bicycle shop confirmed it had recently been sold to her address. Lucia confesses straightaway, insists on signing a summons issued to herself. At the next court sessions she tries a couple of cases with fellow magistrates, before announcing that she needs to take her place in the court, and coming before them as a plaintiff. She pleads guilty to dangerous cycling and is fined 20 shillings. Far from triggering the public shame which Elizabeth hoped for, this little scandal has the opposite effect, with the people of Tilling quietly proud to have such a spirited female mayor, and cycling becomes even more fashionable. Very sweetly:
It became fashionable to career up and down the High Street after dark, when traffic was diminished, and the whole length of it resounded with tinkling bells and twinkled with bicycle lamps.
It’s notable that fat rich Susan Wyse buys a grown-up tricycle, making her an amusing figure, trundling up and down the high street.
Olga Braceley
Back in the first novel in the series, ‘Queen Lucia’, we met the opera singer Olga Bracely who visited and then, for a season, moved into the novel’s setting, the village of Riseholme. She popped up again in ‘Lucia in London’, on both occasions ruffling Georgie’s gay heart and making him fall head-over-heels in love with her.
Now Georgie receives a letter saying she is back again, after an extensive world tour performing in the modern opera Lucrezia composed by the Italian composer Cortese, and she is writing to invite him and Lucia to Covent Garden Opera House for a gala performance.
The trouble is that Lucia has arranged a series of public lectures, starting and ending with ones given by herself, and one of these clashes with the gala night. For once, the worm turns. Georgie has gotten fed up with her municipal obsessions, and insists he will go to the gala night, with or without Lucia which gives Lucia pause.
Public lectures
Back to Lucia’s plan to raise the tone with a series of public lectures. It’s quietly amusing that none of the celebrities she improbably invited (John Gielgud, Sir Henry Wood) can attend and, in fact, not even many Tillingites buy tickets, so she ends up having to give out hundreds of ‘complimentary’ tickets.
Lucia gives the first lecture, on Shakespearian drama, using Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy to demonstrate the simplicity of Shakespeare, no sets, hardly any props, just extreme force of personality and situation. It’s effective, as well as comic moments (the torch she intends to place under her face once the house lights go out, fails to work first time).
The saga of the Major’s riding-whip
Major Flint’s lecture is all about shooting tigers in India, with some tigerskins dramatically hanging on the wall. But remember I mentioned the riding-whip earlier, now it recurs. Because Elizabeth and Benjy have had the leather goods man in town create a new one. This is due to a sequence of small farcical events, namely:
- Georgie offers to help Diva plant tulip bulbs for the spring and as he is digging a hole for the third or fourth one digs up the silver head of the famous riding-whip; realising what it is, he quietly pockets it and gets on with his gardening
- for the next few days he carries it round in his jacket pocket pondering how it got reduced from whip to silver caps
- one day he is rooting around in his pockets and accidentally spills it onto the table where neither he nor Lucia notices it (‘It fell noiselessly on the piece of damp sponge which Mrs Simpson always preferred to use for moistening postage-stamps, rather than the less genteel human tongue.’)
- later the same day Elizabeth comes for a visit to Mallards, spots the cap lying on Lucia’s the stamp sponge and quickly pockets it, taking it home and is just as puzzled as Georgie was as to a) how it got reduced to just the cap and b) what it’s doing in Lucia’s house when she thought she’d left it at Diva’s
But Elizabeth determines to puzzle her enemies and this is why she gets the leather goods man to knock up a complete replica of the original riding-whip and then has Major Flint very visibly brandish it during his lecture and even make it the centrepiece of one of his stories about biffing a fearsome tiger with it. To the great puzzlement of Lucia, Georgie and Diva.
Irene’s allegorical painting
Meanwhile, remember that when Elizabeth came swanning past Irene on the way from Lucia having told her she was going to choose her to be her mayoress, and that Irene made her pose in a boisterous pose (like a skater with one arm stretched in front of her and the other stretched out behind)? And how she sent the photo to the newspaper which published it and made Irene a laughing stock?
Well, Irene continued on to use this photo of Elizabeth as the model for a sort of parody of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, updated to mock the Victorians, with large Miss Map, dressed in Victorian costume, as Venus, with a parody of Major Flint, in full uniform, lounging in the clouds and blowing a great gale of wind which is propelling Elizabeth across the waves towards Tilling in the distance. Well Irene finishes this satirical masterpiece and sends it to the Royal Academy of Art annual competition, no less, which is not only chosen to be included in, but becomes the hit of the season! Irene’s painting is reproduced in a number of national newspapers, including The Times and the Daily Mirror!
Mapp and Benjy go up to London and see it 3 times in one day and come back glowing with fame. Lucia is bitterly jealous and wishes now that it was she who Irene had satirised, seeing as how it’s brought Elizabeth national fame!
More of the Major’s riding-whip
To partly get her own back, Lucia hatches a plan to do with the famous riding-whip. Like Diva and Georgie Lucia was mystified how the Major produced his riding-whip onstage when they knew it had been reduced to a silver cap and buried in Diva’s garden. So Lucia hatches a slightly bizarre plan. She goes to the leather goods shop and asks the man to make a perfect replica of the Major’s riding-whip, using the silver cap, which he hands over a day or two later. Lucia then wedges it in the climbers outside her window in order to weather it, where it will be assailed by wind and rain and birds and insects and generally weathered and aged.
When she thinks it’s looking worn and used, she extracts it, wraps it up and takes it with her to the next bridge session at Diva’s place. She gets there earlier than the others and, while Diva’s off serving customers, slips it behind the crockery cupboard in the bridge room. There follows a long game of bridge during which tempers (as usual) fray, not least because of Lucia’s barely concealed jealousy of Elizabeth’s great Painting Triumph.
But when the game is finally concluded and everyone is getting their things to leave, she says she can’t find her umbrella and gets Georgie to agree that maybe it fell behind the crockery cupboard and together they pull the wardrobe forward and… out falls the Major’s missing riding-whip!! This plunges Diva into even deeper confusion as well as embarrassing but also puzzling Elizabeth and the Major.
Georgie is as puzzled as anyone by this mysterious turn of events, as well he might be, but when, on the way home, he asks Lucia to let him into the secret meaning of her hiding the fake Benjy riding-whip in Diva’s house, she refuses to tell him and this makes Georgie genuinely cross.
‘You’re too tarsome,’ said Georgie crossly. ‘And it isn’t fair. Diva told you how she buried the silver cap, and I told you how I dug it up, and you tell us nothing. Very miserly!’
For the first time dawned on me that, what with his frustration at her endless yakking about municipal affairs, what with her mysterious behaviour in this and other incidents, what with the reappearance of his old flame Olga — is Benson setting us up for Georgie to leave Lucia?
Chapter 8. To London
Regarding Olga’s gala concert, Lucia gives in to Georgie and rearranges the schedule of public lectures. So Lucia and Georgie go up to London 1) to see Irene’s famous picture at the Academy, and then 2) on to Covent Garden Opera House to see Olga sing in Lucrezia.
(In an interesting aside, on page 155, the narrator tells us it was only three years ago that Georgie met and fell in love with Olga Bracely, as described in the first novel in the series, ‘Queen Lucia’. Since that novel was published in 1920 and this one was published a generation later, in 1939, the narrative asks us to accept the rather ludicrous notion that all the events which have occurred in the intervening 4 novels – 19 years apart – have taken place in just three years. I’m betting Benson never meant people to take this literally, it’s merely a gesture towards explaining why, despite the passage of so much time ‘in the real world’, his characters don’t appear to age.)
That night, in bed in his London hotel room, Georgie can’t get Olga out of his head and for the first time admits that he feels trapped in Tilling and by marriage to Lucia.
Next day he goes to meet Olga for lunch at the Ritz. She adores him and he is thrilled but then Lucia arrives and kills the spirit. The lunch is also attended by the same ‘your grace’ as the night before, who Olga casually introduces as ‘Poppy Sheffield’ and who affably chats. Olga tells them she is going down to Riseholme for a week and invites them to come and stay with her. When Lucia says she is far too busy infuriates Georgie so much that she is forced to concede that maybe she could spare a short weekend. But it isn’t the only thing that angers Georgie. When the Italian composer arrives at the end of dinner, Lucia, terrified of being humiliated all over again (by having it shown that she can speak hardly any Italian), insists that she and Georgie are busy and must leave. Georgie acquiesces but is furious at being forced to leave the lunch and the company of the woman he still carries a torch for.
Next evening Lucia meets up with the ladies for bridge and milks her London experiences. During the opera, a large grand lady (‘a large lady, clad in a magnificent tiara, but not much else’) and diminutive escort had been introduced into their box (the box reserved for guests of the main singer i.e. Olga) by the attendant who referred to her as ‘Your Grace’. This woman held completely aloof from Lucia, in fact the latter only finds out her name (Lady Sheffield) by asking the attendant after the show.
But the presence of Lady Sheffield in her box is reported in the next day’s edition of The Times so that by the time Lucia holds a bridge party the following evening (for ‘Mr. Wyse and Diva, (Susan being indisposed) the Mapp-Flints and the Padre and Evie’) they are dying to know more. This allows Lucia to skate dismissively quickly over seeing Irene’s famous painting at the Academy and tell outrageous lies about how she is on first-name terms with Lady Sheffield (‘poor Poppy Sheffield’), knows all about her little foibles (‘she simply lives off dressed crab and black coffee’), awing the Tilling ladies with her snobbish showing-off. But once again, Georgie is not impressed.
Back to Riseholme
Next morning Georgie and Lucia drive to Riseholme. In many ways it’s a shock to be back here. Lucia left it behind in the fourth novel, ‘Mapp and Lucia’, but it feels like an age ago. And for some reason, I’d forgotten how genuinely patronising and condescending she could be. It’s as if simply stepping out the car in Riseholme transforms her back to the painful snob she was in the early books.
Olga gave a garden-party in her honour in the afternoon, and Lucia was most gracious to all her old friends, in the manner of a Dowager Queen who has somehow come into a far vaster kingdom, but who has a tender remembrance of her former subjects, however humble, and she had a kind word for them all.
When everyone’s left, Lucia loftily dismisses the place as a vegetating backwater, but Georgie bristles and delivers a summary of the exciting developments in the place, providing a neat summary of most of the charming old characters we haven’t heard of for three books. (I always liked deaf old Mrs Antrobus who wielded an ear trumpet and had to be pushed everywhere in a bath-chair. I’d like to be pushed everywhere in a bath-chair. All this walking around under your own steam is much over-rated.)
Lucia infuriates Georgie and Olga with her endlessly boasting and humblebragging about how much work she has to do as mayor, but how rewarding it is to serve. But when Olga announces that the Italian composer Cortese will be coming tomorrow night, with his lovely wife, Lucia is struck with terror that, once again, she will be found out and humiliated. Benson puts it more bluntly than I’ve seen in any of the previous books, having Lucia admit to herself that she can’t speak Italian and knows next to nothing about music.
‘If only I could bring myself to say that I can neither speak nor understand Italian, and know nothing about music!’ thought Lucia. ‘But I can’t after all these years. It’s wretched to run away like this, but I couldn’t bear it.’
This has never been so explicitly stated before, nor has Lucia’s voice been so bluntly referred to as ‘her superior, drawling voice.’
Anyway, to escape the looming humiliation of meeting Cortese, Lucia tells Olga she must leave on Sunday evening to return to Tilling. But when Olga begs Georgie to stay, he simply says yes. Lucia wasn’t expecting him to say this, but Georgie is fed up of being bossed around by the impossible woman.
Chapter 9. The Lady Sheffield fiasco
There then follows something approaching real farce in its complexity.
For a start, ten minutes before she sets off for Tilling Cortese arrives and it turns out that his wife is English and has told him to speak only in English so he can learn it. In other words, Lucia would not have been humiliated and so she need not have fled so precipitately.
Not only that, but Cortese has arrived with the first act of his new opera, for Olga to try out. So Lucia is missing this incredible private world premiere opportunity.
And not only that but it turns out that Cortese’s English wife, Dorothy, is cousin to Lady Sheffield and, half an hour after Lucia’s left, Lady Sheffield phones up and invites cousin, Cortese, Olga and all to drive over to her place, Sheffield Castle, the next evening for dinner and stay the night. During the call there is a misunderstanding because the cousin tells Lady Sheffield that a guest of Olga’s is the mayor of Tilling, and the old lady mistakenly thinks this refers to Georgie, who she remembers meeting at Covent Garden, then for lunch at the Ritz, and took rather a fancy to, him and his stylish Van Dyck beard.
So next morning Georgie phones Lucia in Tilling and tells her the exciting news that they’ve all been invited to Lady Sheffield’s castle (‘A Norman tower. A moat. It was in Country Life not long ago’). Lucia is thrilled for him, and pleased when he goes out of h is way to explain that Lady Sheffield was pleased at the thought of seeing the Mayor of Tilling again (both of them misunderstanding Lady Sheffield’s misunderstanding that the Mayor is Georgie). But, as Lucia’s day wears on, and she has little if any work to do, she is bitten by the desire to join the party. What’s more, won’t it be a lovely surprise for everyone if she just turns up out of the blue and unannounced!
And so she asks her deputy to stand in for her, gives her secretary Mrs Simpson the rest of the day off (making sure to tell her why i.e. she’s going to stay at Lady Sheffield’s, with the result that the news spreads like wildfire around Tilling). After lunch she packs her things, brings the car round and is about to set off when there’s a phone call. It’s a servant from Sheffield Castle phoning ‘the mayor’ to tell her that her Grace has been taken ill and has cancelled the party. Lucia thinks quickly and wheedles the woman on the phone, telling her she still wants to come, not for dinner but just to check that Her Grace is alright. The servant goes away to convey this to her Ladyship, and returns with the reply that Her Grace would be delighted to see the Mayor, but the rest of the party has been cancelled. Neither of them realise the old lady is mistaking ‘the Mayor’ for Georgie.
She puts down the phone and finalises her packing. Just as she’s leaving the phone rings again but, scared that it will be Lady S ringing to cancel, she ignores it. What she doesn’t realise it that it’s Georgie phoning to say that, since the party has been cancelled, he and Olga are going to motor back to Tilling, for Olga to stay a few days.
So on the same afternoon that Lucia sets off for the long drive across England to Castle Sheffield on a doomed mission, Georgie and Olga are driving in exactly the opposite direction, from the heart of England to the South Coast. Both are to be surprised.
When Lucia finally arrives at Sheffield Castle she is, of course, surprised to find it dark and not lit up as for a party. A reluctant servant shows her into the courtyard and the first disappointment is that the whole place is overgrown, dirty and weed infested. The second one is that Lady Sheffield is dozing on a bench and when she awakes, asks who Lucia is. When Lucia answers ‘the mayor of Tilling’ Lady S says ‘No you’re not’ and Lucia realises her mistake. All along Lady Sheffield just wanted to spend some solo time with Georgie, who she’d taken a fancy to!
Lady Sheffield makes it crystal clear that she was looking forward to a quiet evening with a handsome male companion, not a middle-aged snobbish woman. She is most disappointed. This really is a test of Lucia’s mettle and she rises to the occasion. She persuades Lady Sheffield to show her round her home, snapping away on the camera she’s brought with her to record the heady social party which turns out not to exist.
But after barely an hour of this (in fact 45 minutes) Lady Sheffield is visibly tired and escorts Lucia to the door, shaking her hand, thanking her for coming and politely but firmly getting rid of her. What to do? It is still the middle of the evening. She toys with staying at the local inn but realises Foljambe, the maid who’s come with her, would give her away. Best to brazen it out and return to Tilling. So they have dinner at the inn and then set off on the long drive home, arriving at 10.30m back at Mallards. Reflecting on what a busy day she’s had, Benson has Lucia make an uncharacteristically up-to-date literary reference:
‘Quite like that huge horrid book by Mr. James Joyce, which all happens in one day,’ she reflected, as she stepped out of the car.
The Olga surprise
As she steps out of the car, Lucia is astonished to hear the sound of piano and of Olga singing in her house. She waits till she’s finished and then enters the garden room. Georgie is astonished but, strange to say, relieved. Having spent to long with Olga he was troubled by his old feelings for her. Lucia’s return will help him to return to superficial politeness. Olga, for her part, is tickled by Lucia’s absence and return: she finds Lucia a hilarious person. When Lucia in her pompous superior way goes on to congratulate her for her performance of the Prayer from Lucrezia, Olga restrains herself from saying she was actually singing some Berlioz.
It was only by strong and sustained effort that Olga restrained herself from howling with laughter.
So they chat gaily, have a few sandwiches and then, it being well past 11, they all go to bed.
The affair misapprehension
But the ramifications are far from complete. Because the next morning everyone in Tilling sees Georgie proudly squiring round town the gorgeous, lipsticked Olga. Heads turn and tongues wag. Soon everyone knows that he had her to stay at Mallards the second Lucia was away. Surprisingly, people aren’t moralistic but nod in sympathy. Diva goes so far as to say it must be hard for Georgie, living among so many ‘old hags’. To their surprise, the ladies of Tilling see Georgie in a new light, as a red-blooded Lothario.
Unaware of the impact all this has had, Lucia (who, as we saw, came home the previous evening i.e. there was never any hanky panky) phones round her friends, strongly gives the impression she has only just returned from Sheffield Castle, and invites everyone to dinner that evening.
The beauty fad
Olga is so ravishing and cosmopolitan that the old ladies (or ‘hags’ as Diva calls them) set about beautifying themselves with comic results, trying to hide from each other the little packets they set about buying in the chemist’s shop, and turning up at Lucia’s dinner looking grotesque (p.191). Here’s an extensive quote, to give the full comic effect.
Evie’s finger nails looked as if she had pinched them all, except one, in the door, causing the blood to flow freely underneath each. She had forgotten about that one, and it looked frost-bitten. Elizabeth and Benjy came next: Elizabeth’s cheeks were like the petals of wild roses, but she had not the nerve to incarnadine her mouth, which, by contrast, appeared to be afflicted with the cyanosis which precedes death. Diva, on the other hand, had been terrified at the aspect of blooming youth which rouge gave her, and she had wiped it off at the last moment, retaining the Cupid’s bow of a vermilion mouth, and two thin arched eyebrows in charcoal. Susan, wearing the Order of the British Empire, had had her grey hair waved, and it resembled corrugated tin roofing: Mr. Wyse and Georgie wore their velvet suits. It took them all a few minutes to get used to each other, for they were like butterflies which had previously only known each other in the caterpillar or chrysalis stage, and they smiled and simpered like new acquaintances in the most polite circles, instead of old and censorious friends.
Olga, when she appears, effortlessly outclasses them all. Over dinner they all babble to get her attention. There is no bridge, but Lucia insists Georgie does a little dance with her to Olga’s accompaniment and when she turns she sees all of them staring at her with their tongues hanging out like dogs that want to go for a walk, and so she gives in and sings for them.
Chapter 10. The Poppy and Olga crisis
The fad for wearing make-up endures. Lucia commissions Irene to paint her portrait. To my astonishment Irene tells her she is 25 years old! (page 196)
But when Irene says how much she admired Lucia for being so daring and so modern as to spend the night away (at Lady Sheffield’s) in order to give her husband and her lover (Georgie and Olga) a night of passion together, Lucia is genuinely horrified at how everyone must be interpreting those events. She realises she has to put the record straight. She has to confess to Irene that she did not spend the night at Sheffield Castle but, having driven all the way there, found Lady Sheffield unwell, had some tea and a little tour, and then drove home, arriving in time to find Olga serenading Georgie. And then everyone went off to their own bedrooms. Irene is disappointed:
‘Darling, what a disappointment!’ said Irene. ‘It would have been so colossal of you. And what a comedown for poor Georgie. Just an old maid again.’
Soon the disappointing news is spread all round town and Tillingites feel let down. ‘Everything had been so exciting and ducal and compromising, and there was really nothing left of it…’ As Mapp puts it:
‘Worship let it be widely known that she was staying the night with Poppy, and then she skulks back, doesn’t appear at all next morning to make us think that she was still away–‘
The annual Tilling art exhibition
The annual Tilling art exhibition comes round and all the characters donate works typical of them (Elizabeth and Georgie’s rival watercolours). Since you ask, they are:
- Elizabeth – ‘A misty morning on the Marsh’ she likes mist because the climatic conditions absolutely prohibited defined draughtsmanship
- Georgie – ‘A sunny morning on the Marsh’ with sheep and dykes and clumps of ragwort very clearly delineated
- Mr Wyse – one of his still-life studies of a silver tankard, a glass of wine and a spray of nasturtiums
- Diva – a still life of two buns and a tartlet on a plate
- Susan Wyse – a mystical picture of a budgerigar with a halo above its head and rays of orange light emanating from its wings
But the show is, of course, dominated by Irene’s famous allegory of Elizabeth and Benjy and her new portrait of Lucia. She has depicted Lucia in her home, with the piano, an art set, municipal boxes of papers and various other adjuncta of her character. Unfortunately it makes her look like the auctioneer at a jumble sale. Lucia tries to grandiosely donate it to the Council to hang in the town hall but Elizabeth is now a councillor (as well as mayoress) and she sways the other councillors (who can’t make head or tail of it) not to.
But Elizabeth doesn’t have it her own way because Irene, reviewing her allegory, decides it is too pale and insipid, especially given the Tilling ladies new penchant for wearing make-up. And so after the first hang, Irene adds some rouge and a line of lipstick to Elizabeth’s portrait, scandalising Miss Mapp. She goes round to beg Lucia use her influence on Irene to get her to remove the additions.
August rents and the arrival of Miss Leg
August comes round again, the season when all our characters rent out their homes and move into smaller properties to turn a little profit. Miss Mapp rents hers out to a Miss Susan Leg, who turns out to be none other than the world-famous novelist, Rudolph da Vinci. (Elizabeth and Benjy have temporarily moved into the house of the vicar who has gone with his wife on holiday to Scotland.)
Immediately Mapp and Lucia start fighting over who will own and influence Miss Legg and Elizabeth gets a good head start since Leg is renting her property, showing her round town, introducing everyone (with her own comments) and then hosting a dinner where she comprehensively rubbishes her rival.
However, the tide turns as Miss Leg turns out not to be so obliging. She fiercely dislikes the famous Botticelli portrait but, ironically, raves over the Lucia portrait. She offends half the people Mapp proudly introduces her to as being pushy and vulgar. When Elizabeth rings up Lucia to ask her to get access (in the town hall) to the Corporation plate and let Miss L sign the visitors’ book, Lucia apologises but says it’s impossible. Suddenly Elizabeth finds she’s hitched her wagon to a falling star.
And by the same token, it dawns on Miss Leg that she might have made a mistake. After a few days she draws the conclusion that maybe the Lucia that Elizabeth has spent so much time defaming is, in fact, the key to Tilling, and so she pays Lucia a solo visit. Lucia expected this and is set up with Georgie to receive her, playing the piano, art works on display, and so on, in order to create the best impression. Miss Leg perceives Lucia’s snobbery and artistic pretensions but can also see she is the Top Dog of Tilling and so likely to provide the best copy for a writer like herself.
Lucia lays on tea and buns and then plays a trump card, ringing up the town hall and instructing the Serjeant on duty to get the corporate plate and visitors’ book out for Miss Leg to sign, thus demonstrating her clout. Then she invites her to dinner with the gang, carefully excluding Elizabeth and Benjy, so that Miss Leg is shown who runs the Real Tilling. Miss L has a delightful evening, by the end of which she and Lucia are on first name terms (her name is Susan).
Chapter 11. More blows
1. Georgie and Olga leave This is a surprise. The narrative doesn’t follow them, but Georgie and Olga go for a week’s holiday at Le Touquet (on the north French coast). The tongues which wagged about their (erroneous) night of passion together, wag all over again.
2. The council reject Lucia’s portrait Second shock is that the council art committee chaired by Elizabeth decides not to buy the portrait of Lucia done by Irene and not to hang it in the town hall. This is a real blow to Lucia’s pride and prestige, and she goes home grinding with envy that the Mapp Botticelli painting is going on display at a big London gallery and then is likely to be bought by an American millionaire, while the portrait of her will simply come home to her house, with the same kind of status as Diva’s wretched watercolours.
3. Lady Sheffield publicly doesn’t know who Lucia is The third blow is that she sets off down the hill to put a brave face on the portrait debacle when who should she almost bump into getting into her posh car, but Lady Sheffield. But it’s bad, very bad, because 1) although Lucia goes to shake her hand, Lady Sheffield has no idea who she is and has to be elaborately reminded, and even then reveals out loud that she only met invited Lucia to her castle because she thought she was handsome Georgie. But worse, 2) Elizabeth is with her, Elizabeth witnesses first hand this excruciating encounter, and double worse, her Grace has just emerged from Diva’s tearooms where Elizabeth will have manipulated the situation to make it perfectly plain to all her Tilling friends that Lady S had no idea who Lucia was, and she was the opposite of a bosom friend.
Lucia is fearless as ever and invites her Grace up to her simple abode to view the photographs she took, but it turns out that her ladyship is also catching the ferry across the Channel, planning to go and stay with Georgie and Olga. Lucia squeezes in an invitation for her to come and stay on her way back. Maybe. Please. And her Ladyship climbs into her car and is gone, leaving Lucia standing distraught with smirking Elizabeth.
Lucia is committed and so has to go on, into the tea rooms, and face all the ladies who’ve just witnessed Lady Sheffield’s complete ignorance of her. She puts on her very best face, and braves their sarcasm, but she is mortally wounded.
Making her tea as brief as possible, Lucia returns home a stricken animal and this is new. Suddenly Lucia acquires something like actual depth. In all of these novels she and the other characters have been comic mannequins, puppets put through never-ending series of humiliations which they outface with heroic chutzpah but this novel is the first one which has anything like depth. For the first time you feel genuinely sorry for Lucia, something the reader never has before. And she feels sorry for herself.
Surely some malignant Power, specially dedicated to the service of her discomfiture, must have ordained the mishaps (and their accurate timing) of this staggering afternoon: the malignant Power was a master of stage-craft. Who could stand up against a relentless tragedian? Lucia could not, and two tears of self-pity rolled down her cheeks. She was much surprised to feel their tickling progress, for she had always thought herself incapable of such weakness, but there they were. The larger one fell on to her blotting-pad, and she dashed the smaller aside.
She pulls herself together, of course, but it’s a very rare moment of something like psychological realism. For a moment we glimpse the Samuel Beckett bleakness which is lurking beneath the endless backbiting and rivalry.
And then, finally, a break. She is playing the piano when the phone rings and guess who it is? Lady Sheffield! She missed her boat, will catch the one tomorrow, and remembers Lucia’s hurried invitation, and now wants to take her up on it: may she come and stay the night? To say Lucia is overwhelmed with relief is an understatement. She rings for Grosvenor and they hurriedly get the place ready, and Lady S does indeed arrive, have a little supper, spend the night, then get up early the next morning and leave.
Lucia can’t wait till marketing hour, when all the ladies mingle in the High street, but she is down there as soon as possible, and very calmly tells Elizabeth who came to stay last night. Elizabeth immediately pops into Diva’s tearoom, tells her but ridicules the whole thing as a desperate attempt to save face.
As it happens, Elizabeth and Benjy have invited Lucia to dine with them that evening. She goes but doesn’t understand why they keep changing the subject whenever she mentions Poppy Sheffield, but there you go, they’re odd people, and after dinner they play bridge as usual. It’s only on her walk home that the truth hits her: they don’t believe her. All her ‘friends’ think she made up the entire story of Poppy coming to stay. Indeed, seen one way, her coming late and leaving early and being seen by no-one is worse than if she’d never come at all.
Once again Lucia is plunged into real ‘misery’ and once again the reader is struck. These ‘troubles’ are the real thing, are really biting into her character.
Quite suddenly Lucia knew that she had no more force left in her. She could only just manage a merry laugh.
Chapter 12. Lucia’s low point
Very unlike her, Lucia is so demoralised that she can’t face going out the next morning. The day after is Sunday and she attends church and puts on a brave face but again, after the service, confronts Elizabeth’s scepticism and for once, and very unlike her, Lucia loses her temper and delivers a series of cutting ripostes to each of her ‘friends’.
At that precise moment there took possession of Lucia an emotion to which hitherto she had been a stranger, namely sheer red rage. In all the numerous crises of her career her brain had always been occupied with getting what she wanted and with calm triumph when she got it, or with devising plans to extricate herself from tight places and with scaring off those who had laid traps for her. Now all such insipidities were swept away; rage at the injustice done her thrilled every fibre of her being, and she found the sensation delicious.
Georgie returns
Next morning she drives to Seaport (presumably a fictional name) to meet Georgie off the boat back from Le Touquet. She is delighted to see him but so is the reader; in his absence she hasn’t been herself at all. All this plunging into misery and tears of vexation are very unlike her and threaten the rationale of the whole series, which is how comically unsinkable she is, the comedy lies in her ability to bounce back from every kind of humiliation and setback.
With Georgie’s return we enter the final end phases of the narrative. Lucia tells Georgie everything that has happened, in full unvarnished detail and Georgie refreshes her with his sympathy and support. In exchange Georgie tells us that Poppy Lady Sheffield was a pain at Le Touquet. She insisted on sitting right next to Georgie on the sofa and at meal times touching his hand and generally coming on to him. Olga thought it was hilarious, which wasn’t much help.
At which point he springs the news that Poppy said she’d like to stop over at Lucia’s for a couple of days on her way back. Lucia leaps out of her chair. Salvation! Yes! If Lady Sheffield stays for a few days, then all her friends will be poked in the eye. They’ll have to admit it’s true. And at that moment a telegram arrives confirming the request.
Georgie is horrified. If Poppy’s coming he’ll leave but Lucia begs him not to go and he reluctantly acquiesces.
Lucia’s revenge
And so Lucia has her revenge. Poppy Lady Sheffield does indeed come to stay with her the following evening and the next day Lucia makes quite sure to take her for a stroll through Tilling at marketing hour. Lucia and Georgie debate whether to invite her friends for tea or dinner. Georgie is all for ignoring them both nights but Lucia ponders and concludes that the best revenge would be to rise above all the slights and sarcasm she’d received and invite them as if nothing had happened.
‘There’s nothing that stings so much as contemptuous oblivion. I have often found that.’
She will adopt a policy of what Benson amusing calls ‘vindictive forgiveness’. Although she doesn’t lower herself to call them in person, She gets Foljambe to ring them all to apologise for the short notice and ask if they’d like to pop round for dinner that evening. The last little burst of comedy comes from the way all of them had other appointments, often with each other, and how they all worm out of them with weasel words, but then all arrive at Lucia’s realising how they’d lied to each other.
Poppy is late coming down and all the guests have arrived and are trying to control their excitement at meeting a real live Duchess. For a moment I thought Benson might pull one last comic trick and have her having expired in Lucia’s spare bedroom, but nothing that dramatic happens in Benson (well, not very often) and instead Lady Sheffield makes a modest but dramatic entrance and the evening is a great success. The last touch of comedy is that Poppy still fancies Georgie, insists on sitting next to him, touching his hand more than necessary and tries, after dinner, to go for a walk with him in the garden until Lucia hastens to Georgie’s rescue and fetches them both back indoors. But overall:
A most distinguished suavity prevailed, and though the party lacked the gaiety and lightness of the Olga-festival, its quality was far more monumental.
And so, after the genuine trials and tribulations of the last few chapters, the novel, and the series, ends on a quiet but firm note of Lucia triumphant.
Thoughts
This one feels different from the previous five M&L novels. Long though they all are, the preceding five stick to the same superficial equable tone throughout. Lots happens – the novels, after all, consist of long series of events, often fairly disconnected, one incident after another with rarely what you’d call an overarching ‘plot’ – but the tone rarely varies from one of amused and charming social satire.
But as I’ve indicated, all that changes in this one. In the last few chapters, Lucia is genuinely humiliated, experiences real ‘misery’ and, for the one and only time in all six novels, loses her temper. For the 30 or 40 pages in question, the novel hints at something like real psychological depth, more depth and ‘realism’ than we’ve previously seen before, as I’ve summarised, ending abruptly with Lucia’s unqualified triumph. But you’re left wondering how deliberate this was. Did Benson even know he was doing it, giving his character, right at the end of her history, more depth and genuine feeling than in the previous 1,000 pages? It feels not because the ending, when it comes, when Lucia is redeemed in those last few pages, feels incredibly abrupt. It just ends.
Credit
‘Trouble for Lucia’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1939. Page references are to the 1992 Black Swan paperback edition.
Related links
Mapp and Lucia reviews
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