‘Mrs Lucas, as I need not remind my readers, is the acknowledged leader of the most exclusive social circles in Tilling, a first-rate pianist, and an accomplished scholar in languages, dead and alive.’
(from an embarrassingly gushy article about our heroine in the Hastings Chronicle)

‘That’s the best of Tilling,’ cried Georgie enthusiastically, throwing prudence to the sea-winds, and leaning out of the window. ‘There’s always something exciting going on. If it isn’t one thing it’s another, and very often both!’
(The Tilling worldview)

‘But you are all adorable,’ she cried. ‘There is no place like Tilling, and I shall come and live here for ever when my Cecco dies and I am dowager.’
(The Contessa Faraglione on a flying visit to Tilling, delighted to hear a digest of all the latest gossip)

Diva felt she would burst unless she at once poured her interpretation of these phenomena into some feminine ear…
(Tilling’s undying need to gossip)

‘Can’t we give them all something new to jabber about?’
(Tilling’s eternal need for novelty, for the next new thing)

‘Lucia’s Progress’ is the fifth book in the Mapp and Lucia series of novels by E.F. Benson.

Tilling

It starts exactly where book 4 concluded, with Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas having moved from her previous ‘kingdom’ (the provincial village of Riseholme) to the town of Tilling on the South Coast (closely based on Rye on the Sussex coast where Benson himself lived). A little surprisingly, Lucia moved into a cottage a quarter of a mile out of town, named Grebe, while her loyal lieutenant, her companion in gossip and companion in playing Mozart duets on the pianoforte, ‘Georgie’ Pillson, moved into a cottage in the centre of Tilling named Mallards Cottage.

Cast

We are swiftly introduced to all the characters we’d met in the previous novels, namely:

• Emmeline Lucia Lucas – self-styled Queen of Tilling, owner of ‘the silvery laugh which betokened the most exasperating and child-like amusement’, possessor of ‘black bird-like eyes’
  • Grosvenor, her dour parlourmaid
• George ‘Georgie’ Pillson aka Georgino
  • Foljambe – Georgie’s peerless parlourmaid, who has married Mapp’s chauffeur, Cadman
• Elizabeth Mapp who is now married to Major Flint, becoming the Mapp-Flints who call each other Benjy-boy and Girly – since returning from honeymoon in France she has taken to dropping little French phrases into her conversation
• Major Flint, now Flint-Mapp – owners of a great walrus-moustache
  • Withers, her maid
• Irene Coles, the lesbian painter, always described as ‘quaint’
  • Lucy, Irene’s six-foot maid
• The Reverend Kenneth Bartlett, the vicar – speaks a humorous combination of Irish and Scottish accents
• his wife Evie, speaks very fast
• Mr Algernon Wyse – rich, owner of a huge Rolls Royce; there’s a running joke about this, that they use it to go everywhere, even when it’s only a question of driving the hundred yards from their house to Mallards; but that it’s always getting stuck in the narrow, bendy, cobbled streets of Rye and spends more time backing up and doing ten-point turns than it does travelling in a straight line 🙂
• Mrs Susan Wyse previously Poppit, fat, with her ‘her plump round face’
  • Figgis – their butler
  • Isabel Poppit – Susan’s grown-up daughter by her first marriage, now ‘a Yahoo’, living permanently in an unplumbed shack among the sand-dunes
• Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow – ‘always spoke in the style of a telegram’
  • Paddy, her dog
• Mr. Wyse’s sister, the Contessa Emilia Fariglione, nicknamed Faradiddlione
• Mammoncash – Lucia’s rather crudely named stockbroker (sounds like a character from one of Ben Jonson’s citizen comedies)
• Mr Worthington, the butcher
• Mr Twistevant, the greengrocer
• Woolgar & Pipstow’s – the estate agents
• Spencer & Son – the plumbers

Mysteries

Characteristically, the narrative starts with Lucia walking onto Tilling for a game of bridge at Miss Mapp’s which is described at some length, along with the contemporary debates about which form of bridge to play, auction bridge, contract bridge, or versions the characters have thought up.

But the really characteristic thing is the mysteries. Because what the Mapp and Lucia novels are about is the way the slightest wrinkle in town gossip (well, among this small community of ten or so main characters) triggers reams of speculation and second-guessing.

Mysterious behaviour, odd goings-on, trigger the obsessive generation of theories, speculation, discussion, gossip, the gathering and weighing of evidence, cudgeling of brains, ‘a flood of conjectures’, ‘intrigue beyond measure’, ‘plots and counterplots’, and so on. And the comedy is in the comic disproportion between the utterly triviality of these small-town incidents and the vast amount of mental effort the characters put into analysing every aspect.

Who wears the trousers?

For example, Miss Mapp and Major Flint haven’t been married long so all their guests spend all their time noting the tiniest detail of their behaviour and pondering ‘who wears the trousers?’ Is it Elizabeth calling her husband Benji-boy and making him go to church on Sunday, or is it the Major, nipping off half-way through the game for an illicit nip of whiskey?

Where is Georgie?

As if that wasn’t enough, there is an even bigger mystery which is, Where is Georgie? He hasn’t been seen for weeks, so all the other characters puzzle over the mystery and propound a variety of theories, from the banal (he needs a new toupee, he’s had dental work which needs to settle) to the preposterous (he’s left the country, his parlour-maid has murdered hum and buried his body in the garden).

But the more they talked, the less they could construct any theory to fit the facts…
(Diva and Elizabeth chewing over Georgie’s absence)

In the event the mystery is solved fairly easily: turns out Georgie has had a bad attack of shingles on his face and neck and so has grown a beard to cover it. From this simple basis develop a series of schemes and plans. Once Lucia has penetrated Georgie’s defences and ascertained the facts, she invites him to come and stay with her at Grebe, out of the public eye, although this requires a special operation, with their respective servants forming a kind of protective shield between the door to h is house and Lucia’s car, so Georgie can scuttle out unseen. But he is glimpsed in the car and this triggers a flood of speculation.

Once Georgie is ensconced at Lucia’s, she becomes convinced that he will look more handsome with the beard as a permanent fixture, but trimmed to a point like a 17th century grandee in a portrait by Van Dyck. At which point there is still one more challenge which is that Georgie (famously) wears an improbably auburn toupee whilst this beard of his has come out snowy white. It’s another reason he’s been hiding, because it shows his age. So Lucia suggests he has it dyed the same colour as his hair, although this has to be handled with tact because Georgie fondly imagines no-one has noticed that he wears a dyed toupee.

Lucia’s 50th birthday

But there’s more. It’s coming up to Lucia’s 50th birthday and she is afflicted with a mid-life crisis. What, really, has she achieved in her life, apart from play hundreds of piano duets with Georgie, teach the local ladies the principles of callisthenics, make hundreds of sketches of the view of the marsh behind her house, and give occasional lectures about Elizabethan literature or the Age of Pericles? Precious little.

‘It isn’t the years that give the measure of one’s age, but energy and capacity for enterprise. Achievement. Adventure.’

So the opening chapter finds her mulling over what a middle-aged woman should do with her life? The examples that spring to mind are an interesting bit of social history:

Women seemed to be much to the fore: there was one flying backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, but Lucia felt it was a little late for her to take up flying: probably it required an immense amount of practice before you could, with any degree of confidence, start for New York alone, two or three thousand feet up in the air.

Then eight others were making a tour of pavilions and assembly rooms in towns on the South Coast, and entrancing everybody by their graceful exhibitions (in tights, or were their legs bare?) of physical drill; but on thinking it over, Lucia could not imagine herself heading a team of Tilling ladies, Diva and Elizabeth and Susan Wyse, with any reasonable hope of entrancing anybody.

The pages of reviews of books seemed to deal entirely with novels by women, all of which were works of high genius. Lucia had long felt that she could write a marvellous novel, but perhaps there were enough geniuses already.

Then there was a woman who, though it was winter, was in training to swim the Channel, but Lucia hated sea-bathing and could not swim. Certainly women were making a stir in the world, but none of their achievements seemed suited to the ambitions of a middle-aged widow.

Lucia the investor

Then comes the moment of revelation which triggers a key storyline through the novel. She is inspired by the story of a canny lady investor on the Stock Exchange.

Lucia turned the page. Dame Catherine Winterglass was dead at the age of fifty-five, and there was a long obituary notice of this remarkable spinster. For many years she had been governess to the children of a solicitor who lived at Balham, but at the age of forty-five she had been dismissed to make way for somebody younger. She had a capital of £500, and had embarked on operations on the Stock Exchange, making a vast fortune. At the time of her death she had a house in Grosvenor Square where she entertained Royalty, an estate at Mocomb Regis in Norfolk for partridge shooting, a deer forest in Scotland, and a sumptuous yacht for cruising in the Mediterranean; and from London, Norfolk, Ross-shire and the Riviera she was always in touch with the centres of finance. An admirable woman, too: hospitals, girl-guides, dogs’ homes, indigent parsons, preventions of cruelty and propagations of the Gospel were the recipients of her noble bounty. No deserving case (and many undeserving) ever appealed to her in vain and her benefactions were innumerable. Right up to the end of her life, in spite of her colossal expenditure, it was believed that she grew richer and richer.

Lucia realises how much she could help Tilling if only she was richer; she would become a patron and sponsor of all sorts of events but to do this she needs money which is why the story of Dame Catherine Winterglass is so inspiring. So Lucia turns to the City pages of the newspaper and takes the City Editor’s advice to invest in shares in a gold mine named Siriami.

As so often, Lucia’s actions start a fashion, for the others (Elizabeth, Diva, Major Flint) in various ways discover that she is investing and sending regular telegrams to her broker in London, and, after the inevitable wave of mystery and guesswork, they start doing the same and everyone starts reading the Financial Post.

A wave of stock market speculation passes through Tilling (well, the three or four characters which the narrative describes as Tilling). As soon as everyone else has bought shares in Siriami, Lucia lets it be known that she has sold all her holdings and moved into railways, buying ‘Southern Prefs’, triggering agonising from the other characters about whether to follow suit or stay firm with the goldmine. And then daily bursts of euphoria, or despair, depending on whether their holdings have gone up or down.

Like George’s beard, the stock market theme becomes a recurring theme for the rest of the narrative.

The municipal elections

Elizabeth Mapp is concerned that her husband, Major Flint, is not doing enough with his life. Every morning he catches the tram out to the golf course where, more likely than not, he is soundly beaten by the vicar. So Mapp conspires for him to enter, except that… One afternoon as she is explaining to him all the issues facing the town and what their policies ought to be, the Major makes the simple observation that she is so much better at expressing their positions that she ought to run!

Anyway, the Major told Lucia about his plans at her 50th birthday party and this set Lucia thinking… There she was worrying what a 50-year-old lady should do with her life, and here was the perfect solution: she should run for the council too!

Battle lines are swiftly drawn for the two women hold diametrically opposing policies. Mapp has the lower middle-class dislike of the working class, the petty bourgeois resentment of every penny of tax she pays. He watchword is Economy.

‘Benjy-boy and I both feel very strongly–I believe he mentioned it to you last night–that something must be done to check the monstrous extravagance that’s going on. Tout le monde is crippled by it: we shall all be bankrupt if it continues. We feel it our duty to fight it.’

While Lucia takes the liberal position of the better off and comfortably affluent i.e. I ought to pay more tax to help the poor and unemployed.

‘Rates and taxes are high, it’s true, but they ought to be ever so much higher for the sake of the unemployed. They must be given work, Georgie: I know myself how demoralizing it is not to have work to do. Before I embarked on my financial career, I was sinking into lethargy. It is the same with our poorer brethren. That new road, for instance. It employs a fair number of men, who would otherwise be idle and on the dole, but that’s not nearly enough. Work helps everybody to maintain his–or her–self-respect: without work we should all go to the dogs. I should like to see that road doubled in width and–well in width, and however useless it might appear to be, the moral salvation of hundreds would have been secured by it. Again, those slums by the railway: it’s true that new houses are being built to take the place of hovels which are a disgrace to any Christian town. But I demand a bigger programme. Those slums ought to be swept away, at once. All of them. The expense? Who cares? We fortunate ones will bear it between us. Here are we living in the lap of luxury, and just round the corner, so to speak, or, at any rate, at the bottom of the hill are those pig-sties, where human beings are compelled to live. No bathroom, I believe; think of it, Georgie! I feel as if I ought to give free baths to anybody who cares to come and have one, only I suppose Grosvenor would instantly leave. The municipal building plans for the year ought to be far more comprehensive. That shall be my ticket: spend, spend, spend!

‘Cost what it may we must have no more slums and no more unemployment in our beloved Tilling. A Christian duty.’

Striking that the same basic division/binary/opposition applies to modern politics in 2025, namely one party wants to tax more in order to spend and invest and rebuild and improve people’s lives, while the other party wants to cut back on spending, let the unemployed or rebuilding look after themselves. The bienpensant comfortably off, liberal middle class versus the squeezed and resentful lower middle class.

The Tillingites take sides so that:

the feuds of the Montagus and Capulets were but a faint historical foreshadowing of this municipal contest.

Lucia and Elizabeth are both surprised when Irene organises a march through the town, wearing a helmet like Britannia and followed by four ragged girls carrying a huge canvas banner painted with a portrait of Lucia, and the legend in gold letters ‘Vote for Mrs. Lucas, the Friend of the Poor’ with, following behind them, four ragged boys carrying another banner painted with a hideous rendering of Elizabeth and the strapline: ‘Down with Mrs. Mapp-Flint, the Foe of the Poor’. Very entertaining for the good people of Tilling, though outrageous to Elizabeth.

Like all the little incidents and excitements which form the overall ‘plot’, this one doesn’t take long to resolve itself. Only a few days later the election is held, there are seven candidates for two places on the local council, and Lucia and Elizabeth come joint last.

For several weeks or so the bitterness lingers on and members of both camps cut each other in the street, the friendly bridge games at Mr and Mrs Wyse’s are abandoned, social life (well, among the ten or so people we’re concerned with) grinds to a halt. And then, just as suddenly, it’s alright again. Lucia bumps into Elizabeth in the doorway to the fishmonger’s and speaks quite politely and Elizabeth doesn’t want to appear ungracious, and so civilities of a sort are restored, and the group bridge evenings resume with more vigour than ever.

Is Georgie gay?

Irene is a lesbian so she totally gets that Georgie is gay, even if he doesn’t know it himself:

‘Georgie, I adore your beard. Do you put it inside your bedclothes or outside? Let me come and see some night when you’ve gone to bed. Don’t be alarmed, dear lamb, your sex protects you from any frowardness on my part. I was on my way to see Lucia. There’s news. Give me a nice dry kiss and I’ll tell you.’
‘I couldn’t think of it,’ said Georgie. ‘What would everybody say?’
‘Dear old grandpa,’ said Irene. ‘They’d say you were a bold and brazen old man. That would be a horrid lie. You’re a darling old lady, and I love you.’

His hobby is petit point, a kind of delicate embroidery. He is very vain about his toupee and, in this novel, takes great pains to shape and dye his beard. To accompany the beard he takes to wearing a dashing blue cape and comes to think of himself as:

the professional jeune premier in social circles at Tilling, smart and beautifully dressed and going to more tea-parties than anybody else.

Not overtly gay, then. But very camp. At the climax of the narrative Georgie marries Lucia. But there’s no sense whatsoever that they sleep together, it’s more a question of sympathetic temperaments. Many a gay man has been married.

Elizabeth is forced to leave Mallards

Elizabeth wasn’t joking when she said raising taxes was all very well for the likes of Lucia, who seemed to be lucky with her investments and blessed with money. Lucia’s reading of the Stock Market is shrewd and she seems to be continually winning. Whereas Elizabeth sold quite a lot of her government stock to buy shares in the Siriami mine and so is horrified to learn that it’s only just being developed and likely won’t pay any dividends for two years or more.

On learning this, she confesses to Benji-boy that they probably need to move. We knew from previous books that Elizabeth routinely augmented her scanty income by letting out her house, Mallards, for 3 or more months of the year. Now, she tells Benji, they’ll probably have to let it for 6 months, maybe for a whole year. It’s a secret but of course, when the hawk-eyed inhabitants of the town see her popping into the town estate agents, Woolgar & Pipstow’s, tongues begin to wag in the usual way.

And once it becomes common knowledge, Lucia makes her move. She’s always wanted to live in Mallards, right in the centre of town (it’s always seemed improbable to me that she would ever have accepted exile to a cottage so far outside the centre of things). So now she writes Elizabeth a letter, high-mindedly claiming to write in a spirit of philanthropy and charity, to offer Elizabeth £2,000 for the freehold of Mallards and throwing in the freehold of the Grebe in exchange. This offer, of course, makes Elizabeth furious but she is forced to accept.

In fact there’s some comic business whereby both ladies hold out till the last minute until they’re both simultaneously overcome with anxiety that the deal might collapse, and so Lucia sends a note by hand saying she’ll increase her offer to 1,000 guineas (a guinea being a pound and a shilling, or £1.05) while Elizabeth sends a note by her servant saying she will accept a mere £1,000. The note carriers pass each other by and the recipients open them at the same time leading to even more confusion and bad feeling.

Is Elizabeth pregnant?

Coinciding with her reluctant decision to move, are the fast-spreading rumours that Elizabeth might be pregnant. One by one the suspicious Tillingites detect signs and indications and, as usual, cogitate them to death. Her green dress seems to have been let out several inches! She exudes a positive glow of maternal happiness! Major Benjy swanks around like a father-to-be! Dr Dobbie’s car is seen parked outside Mallards! Not, really, very obscure indicators. Mr Wyse’s sister, married to an Italian count and so titled the Contessa and living in Italy, writes to Elizabeth with wise advice and nutritional honey.

Without ever officially announcing it, her pregnancy slowly makes Elizabeth the queen of their set and also, somehow, more youthful, compared to the childless 50-year-old, Lucia.

Except that she isn’t pregnant at all, and knows it. She never said as much, let out the dress because she was getting fatter. If Tilling people draw their own conclusions it’s none of her business, she contemptuously thinks.

Lucia’s housewarming lunch

So the deal is done, the documents are signed, and Mallards becomes Lucia’s home, while Elizabeth sadly packs up all her belongings and moves into Grebe, a quarter of a mile outside town.

Once Lucia has emptied, completely cleaned and redecorated Mallards, she holds a housewarming lunch. As she tours her beloved old house and sees how Lucia has gutted it and repainted and decorated everywhere, Elizabeth is appalled and upset (‘a searing experience’, my dear) – not least by the way the other Tillingites admire Lucia’s bright new design and deprecate the way it used to be, all dingy and dusty.

Anyway, Elizabeth decides to regain everyone’s attention by demonstrating that she is not pregnant by putting on a deliberate display of scampering up and down the stairs. Not by actually telling anyone, that would be too obvious and direct. Just giving a strong hint, which all the other characters go off and gossip about among themselves.

A bad smell and archaeology

The next exciting development is that Lucia and some of her guests, notably Georgie, notice a strong bad smell emanating from the bowels of the house, maybe because they were piles of lumber in the basement which Lucia has had cleared out and thrown away. There’s comedy when it turns out the man from the drainage company and the man from the gas company (who she contacts) are brothers, on jokey terms with each other. Their teams dig up the pipes, discover it’s gas, and fix the pipe.

But not before they’ve uncovered bits of terracotta and what looks like a pipe which could be described as a flue – which sets Lucia fantasising that maybe Mallards is built on the site of a Roman villa! She hires some workmen to extend the hole the gas men dug to become far wider, in the process digging up Elizabeth’s asparagus patch, much to the latter’s disgust.

Lucia becomes obsessed, moving all the guides about stocks and shares off her study table and replacing them with books about the Romans in Britain, borrowed from the London Library. From these books of archaeology she learns to label different levels of ‘the dig’ from A to D, optimistically hoping that level D will turn up the Roman remains.

On one level all the Mapp and Lucia novels consist of just two elements: 1) assemble the cast of middle-class gossipy ladies, and 2) deploy a series of fads and enthusiasms and describe the comic consequences as each one arrives, causes untold ructions among the cast, then is dropped in favour of the next one. As Major Flint accurately describes the result:

‘First it’s one thing and then it’s another, and then it’s something else.’

Or as the narrator later comments:

This haycock of inflammatory material would in the ordinary course of things soon have got dispersed or wet through or trodden into the ground, according to the Tilling use of disposing of past disturbances in order to leave the ground clear for future ones…

Anyway, Lucia’s fantasies about discovering a Roman villa, or even temple, are, of course, dashed. She is very excited by a fragment of tile with the letters S.P. stamped on it, fantasising that the whole tile would have spelled SPQR… until another similar tile is found, this time whole, with the word SPENSER spelled out and Georgie reluctantly reminds Lucia that Tilling’s local plumbers is Spenser and Son.

Elizabeth, furious at the way Lucia is queening everybody, has her own spiteful interpretation:

‘Lucia finds it difficult to grow old gracefully: that’s why she surrounds herself with mysteries, as I said to Benjy the other day. At that age nobody takes any further interest in her for herself, and so she invents Roman Forums to kindle it again. Must be in the limelight…’

And is given some very funny lines, ridiculing Lucia to Diva for finding the Parthenon in the gooseberry bushes, and so on. What kills the whole obsession is her disappointment over a piece of beautiful ancient glass which is dug up from the lower layers of the trench, ‘a piece of some glass vessel, ewer or bottle’ bearing the letters Apol! Surely these are short for Apollo, confirming her belief that the Roman building wasn’t just any old villa but a temple!

In her haste she has broadcast the importance of the dig and its findings far and wide and so is flattered when a journalist from the Hastings Chronicle turns up and interviews her. Unfortunately, on the Friday before the Saturday when the Chronicle comes out, throwing herself with renewed vigour into the work of beavering away with her trowel in the bottom of the trench, Lucia discovers the other part of the glass bottle she’d found and discovers it bears the letters inaris, making the whole word spell Apollinaris. I had to Google this to discover that ‘Apollinaris’ was a branded mineral water from Germany which was fashionable and popular between the wars. The relic she thought would prove she lived above a Roman temple and would make her one of the great archaeologists of the age, turns out to be an old mineral water bottle.

On the spot the entire fantasy collapses in ruins. She abandons it completely. She dashes off a telegram to the editor of the Hastings Chronicle telling him to cancel the feature they were planning and that the dig has been suspended, then tells her workmen to throw all the junk and lumber back into the hole and fill it in and tread it down. Finito!

But she hadn’t reckoned with newspaper printing schedules. Next morning she is horrified to wake up and discover the Chronicle has written her initial casual remarks to their journalist into an extensive and grand-standing interview. She is horrified to discover the dig blazoned on the hoarding of the town newsagents and when she goes in with a view to buying up the whole stock, discovers it has already sold out. She is rung up by other London newspapers and discovers that they’ve contacted a leading expert at the British Museum who wants to come down and assess the discoveries as soon as possible.

There’s nothing for it but to brazen it out in the true Queen Lucia way, turn down all offers, say the findings aren’t yet complete, and then go seek solace by sharing her woes with her old comrade-in-arms Georgie, who is his usual combination of warm sympathy and secret Schadenfreude. In the High Street she spins plausible lies to Diva and ‘quaint’ Irene, the lesbian painter who has a pash for Lucia, is always ready to defend her no matter what. And so she considers the whole thing, like everything that happens, in the mock heroic form of a military campaign:

Lucia walked pensively back to Mallards, not displeased with herself. Irene’s dinner-bell and her own lofty attitude would probably scotch Elizabeth for the present, and with Georgie as a deep-dyed accomplice and Diva as an ardent sympathiser, there was not much to fear from her.

Drunk at the Wyses’

Elizabeth’s ongoing resentment at being forced to move from her family home, with the added ludicrousness of the archaeology furore, means that the Wyses’s bridge party, planned for that evening, was always going to be a fraught affair. What makes it worse is Susan Wyse miscalculates and invites two guests too many with the result that:

1. There is not enough food or drink to go round, with the comedy result that Elizabeth gets a glass full of bubbles but no actual champagne, and the scraggy wing of the chicken instead of the tender breast, increasing her sense of outrage.
2. Bridge is played by 4 players, so 8 guests divide neatly into two games. But ten guests mean two guests have to be left out and there is a little fracas about who will be excluded from the evening’s entertainment. The guests draw cards for it, and the losers are the Major (who has helped himself to a few too many cocktails) and Lucia.

But the highlight of the night is Major Flint getting very drunk, sitting out the bridge in a spare room with Lucia, and injudiciously placing his hand on her knee as he tells her how unhappy old Elizabeth is, specially at being dislodged from her house with its window from which she could watch all the going-on of the town.

At which point Elizabeth, having finished one round of bridge, throws open the door and Benjy withdraws his hand like a shot but Elizabeth has seen it. Elizabeth decides he and she have had enough and storms out taking the humiliated Major. But on the walk back to Grebe with Elizabeth, he was drunk enough to stand in the street stopping traffic under the pretence of being a plain-clothes policeman… until a real policeman comes along, at which point the Major informs him that Mrs Lucas is a ‘stunner’ and starts singing ‘Queen of My Heart, till dragged off by Elizabeth. All of this is witnessed first-hand by the vicar on his way back from the church, who tells his wife, who the next morning tells everyone she meets in the High Street, so soon the story is all over the town.

Next day Elizabeth tells Diva about the hand-on-knee situation, which she gleefully repeats to all and sundry, the latest gossip about man-hungry Lucia!

Contessa Faraglione

Mr Wyse’s sister, English but married to an Italian count and so titled the Contessa Faraglione, makes a flying visit of two nights to her brother. This has the effect of pausing the narrative and allowing Benson to summarise all the comic incidents to date, as the Contessa is briefed about all the town gossip, and falls about in peals of laughter, hence her quote:

‘But you are all adorable,’ she cried. ‘There is no place like Tilling, and I shall come and live here for ever when my Cecco dies and I am dowager.’

The organ donation

So, after a few days during which social intercourse was completely paralysed, Lucia determined to change the currents of thought by digging a new channel for them.

And so the narrative moves onto the next episode. I think the Tilling church organ was already being repaired but Lucia, after having a play of it with Georgie operating the pedals, has a brainwave, and decides she can use some of the money she’s made from her wise investments by paying for a complete renovation of it.

And so she makes a grand donation, at first anonymously and then, when not enough people guess it’s from her, letting the veil of secrecy slip. But then she starts to have imperial fantasies. She points out to the vicar that the completion of the renovation will more or less coincide with the annual confirmation of the young folk of the parish by the Bishop. How about combining the two? Lucia would invite the Bishop, and other municipal worthies, to lunch at Mallards, then they could process in formal wear, to the church, conduct the service which would be accompanied by the brand new and sonorous organ!

And this is what happens. Lunch at Mallards with the Bishop (tres intime: just the Padre and his wife and the Bishop and his chaplain) goes well. The Mayor and Corporation join them for a formal procession to the church, all maces and scarlet robes. After the Bishop solemnly blesses the organ, Lucia has negotiated that she (on keys) and Georgie (on pedals) could perform her own transcription of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (her own favourite piece to perform on the piano) for organ before slipping with false modesty back into the congregation to be followed by the professional organist performing Falberg’s famous tone-poem ‘Storm at Sea’.

This is helped, in a comic mock heroic kind of way, by the advent of an actual storm, with the sky clouding over, then lightning and thunder at all the right moments right above the church, then the storm moves on and the piece finishes and the service ends, and everyone is invited back to Mallards. The sun has come out and quickly dries off the rainshower and Lucia’s garden party for the Bishop and Mayor and Corporation and all her friends and many other Tillingites is a triumph!

What’s more, having grasped how to handle the press, Lucia has invited a reporter from the Hastings Chronicle and happily gives him a tour of her home, shows a few choice finds from the archaeological dig (some broken teracotta pots which she claims are antique ‘Samian ware’) and is rewarded by an extensive feature in the paper which makes Elizabeth Mapp even more furiously jealous.

Meeting everyone next day in the High Street, Lucia instantly senses that her friends are jealous and backbiting, so she goes out of her way to flatter each of them in turn. What an expert she is!

August moves

August comes and the inhabitants, as is their tradition, all rent out their houses at a profit and move to smaller habitations for the duration. Airbnb 90 years ago. Elizabeth and Benji-boy move to a small bungalow close to the sea, close to one moved into by the vicar and Evie.

The plague of munificences

Lucia embarks on an impressive campaign of charitable donations. She confides in Georgie that her year of investments has made her some £8,000 or profit, a very tidy sum in those days. Having donated a £1,000 to the church organ, she now sets about other donations, aiming to become a sort of ‘fairy godmother’ to dear little Tilling. These include paying for a new operating theatre at the local hospital, paying for a new roller for the Tilling Cricket Club. In return she collects a clutch of prestige positions. She is co-opted onto the board of the local hospital. She is made a member of the Church Council. She is elected President of the Tilling Cricket Club and then, when she donates money to have the entire pitch dug up and returfed, of the local Football Club too, which (improbably) uses the same pitch during the winter.

The sports involvements trigger straightforward comedy because neither she nor Georgie know the difference between a bat and a ball or have any idea about football. But they learn quickly enough. He rivals (Diva, Evie and mostly Elizabeth) seethe with jealousy. She becomes infuriated that the Hastings Chronicle publishes a string of articles all with headlines starting ‘Munificent Gift by Mrs Lucas of Mallards House…’ before going on to give the details of yet another generous donation. Elizabeth mocks the way the house which was always ‘Mallards’ to her has been transformed into ‘Mallards House‘. It’ll be Mallards Palace before you know it, she mocks.

Flooding: Lucia to the rescue

September brings unusually intense storms, the sea walls are breached and the cottage rented by Elizabeth and Major Flint is flooded under a foot of water. The nearby residence of the vicar is a foot or two higher up so they go round there to eat but it isn’t a long-term solution. But as soon as she hears about it, Lucia rides to the rescue. She has Grosvenor (her maid) ring up the Mapp-Flints and invite them to come and stay in their old house. Gnashing her teeth, Elizabeth is forced to accept, which gives Lucia the opportunity to play the gracious lady of the manor, handing over spare bedrooms to the couple.

Next day there are renewed floods and this time it’s the vicar who is rendered temporarily homeless. Georgie kindly offers to take the vicar in at Mallards Cottage while Lucia rearranges her rooms, again, so as to find a spare room for the vicar’s wife, mousey little Evie. Elizabeth is all sweetness and politeness to Lucia’s face, but to Benjy confides how she loathes the way she is playing Lady Bountiful.

But worse is to come because while she is there, Lucia takes a call from the Mayor who pops round and says a member of the council has had to take sick leave and so would she consent to be co-opted onto the town council, without requiring an election. Lucia is all modesty but of course says yes.

Lucia’s rise, Lucia’s progress, feels like it can barely get any higher.

Wedding bells?

During the fortnight of the unexpected guests, Lucia insists that both Georgie and the vicar take dinner at her house, along with Elizabeth and the Major, so they get used to spending dinner and the evening together. After a fortnight the floods recede and the guests return to their rented bungalows, but Georgie continues the habit of coming for dinner and then spending every evening in companionable silence, as he does his embroidery and Lucia quietly reads her classics.

After a while the same thought dawns on both of them. This is really quite friendly and companionable. Lucia reflects that her position in the town would be strengthened if she had a spouse to back her up. The thought of taking that role swells Georgie’s sense of importance. Yes. Should they get married? And so, one quiet evening, after making a couple of failed attempts, Georgie finally clears his throat and asks:

‘Lucia, I’ve got something I must say, and I hope you won’t mind. Has it ever occurred to you that–well–that we might marry?’

Now a couple of books earlier in the series, a misunderstanding about matrimony had arisen between the pair, to both of their horror and embarrassment. But now… now Lucia calmly accepts the conversational gambit but points out there are a number of things they’ll have to consider first. Then Georgie leaves to go back to his place (Mallards Cottage, right next door) and the issue is parked for the night. I.e. there is no panic, no rush, no anxiety.

They have a businesslike meeting at which both agree the trickiest issues are 1) what to do with Georgie’s beloved possessions and 2) how to reconcile the positions and relative dominance of their two servants, Grosvenor and Foljambe. Oh and Lucia insists on no public caresses and kisses which make Mapp and Major Flint so embarrassing. (Nobody mentions sex, of course, and they will sleep in separate bedrooms. It would be nice to think it was to be an utterly chaste companionable marriage.)

At first Lucia conceives of the wedding itself as being as private as possible like Charlotte Bronte’s who didn’t even tell her own family she was getting married. But Georgie soon persuades her that she owes it to her public position as the Leading Citizen of Tilling to put on a good show, to invite the Bishop to preside and have a grand wedding party. And so it is.

The ceremony was magnificent, with cope and corporation and plenty of that astonishing tuba on the organ. Then followed the reception in the garden-room and the buffet in the dining-room, during which bride and bridegroom vanished, and appeared again in their go-away clothes, a brown Lucia with winter-dessert in her hat, and a bright mustard-coloured Georgie.

Elizabeth not only seethes with resentment but makes a series of wild speculations about where they’re going on their honeymoon. But as Lucia and Georgie climb into her car after the party is over, nobody knows that they are heading… back to Riseholme, their original home, setting of the first 3 Lucia novels, and site of so many victories.

La vita nuova

The wedding must have happened in September/October time. The narrative jumps to May of the next year. On a lovely morning Lucia and Georgie promenade round the town. They listen to the sound of the organ she had restored playing over the town. They admire the new steps she has had put in from the church down to the road, along with the neat handrail. These steps pass the terrace of almond trees she paid to have planted. They bump into Elizabeth who can’t help being ‘crabby’ about the almond trees which she insists look shrivelled. The happy couple ignore her and Georgie reflects that Lucia’s diary for the rest of the day include going to see Tilling play cricket on the new pitch she paid for, then she has a class of girl-guides in the garden-room at half-past four, followed by a meeting of the Governors of the Hospital at six, then at 7.30 she presides at the annual dinner of the cricket club. She has surely reached the acme of social success.

But no. Because that evening she knocks and enters Georgie’s room to tell him that the Corporation has met (in her absence) and nominated her Mayor of Tilling! The novel ends beautifully on the evening of the Saturday after she’s made her decision to accept, on the evening when of a dinner and bridge party to which she’s invited le tout Tilling, in a scene where she calls Georgie into her bedroom and displays an impressive array of hats, asking him which one she should wear on the many formal occasions when she won’t wear the full mayoral uniform and headdress. And together the happy couple make a happy choice.

Lucia’s progress is complete.

Wagner references

The novel contains a steady trickle of references to Wagner and his operas, just enough to be funny in the mock heroic way of comparing the trivialities of Tilling life with the epic gestures of Wagner’s gods and heroes.

• When Lucia blows through an organ pipe, ‘A lovely tone,’ she said. ‘It reminds one of the last act of Tristan, does it not, where the shepherd-boy goes on playing the cor anglais for ever and ever.’
• Lucia was standing in the trench with half of her figure below ground level, like Erda in Wagner’s justly famous opera. If only Georgie had not dyed his beard, he might have been Wotan.
• Lucia took a couple of turns up and down the garden-room. She waved her arms like Brünnhilde awakening on the mountain-top.

Credit

‘Lucia’s Progress’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1935. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

• Lucia’s Progress on Planet Gutenberg
• The E.F. Benson Society

Mapp and Lucia reviews

• Queen Lucia (1920)
• Miss Mapp (1922)
• Lucia in London (1927)
• The Male Impersonator (1929: short story)
• Mapp and Lucia (1931)
• Lucia’s Progress (1935)
• Trouble for Lucia (1939)