‘Any news?’ was the general gambit of conversation in Riseholme. It could not have been bettered, for there always was news.
(Chapter 1)

What [Olga] had to know about with the utmost detail was exactly everything that had happened at Riseholme since she had left it a year ago. ‘Good heavens!’ she said. ‘To think that I once thought that it was a quiet back-watery place where I could rest and do nothing but study. But it’s a whirl! There’s always something wildly exciting going on. Oh, what fools people are not to take an interest in what they call little things!’
(Chapter 2)

Daisy came closer to the fence, with the light of inductive reasoning, which was much cultivated at Riseholme, veiling the fury of her eye.
(One example from hundreds of the relentlessly alert, obsessive teasing out of secrets which characterises all the inhabitants of Riseholme)

Lucia began to suspect a slight mystery, and she disliked mysteries, except when she made them herself.
(Chapter 5)

‘Too tarsome.’
(Georgie Pillson’s catchphrase)

Executive summary

Self-appointed ‘queen’ of the arty little village of Riseholme, Mrs Emmeline Lucas, who calls herself Lucia, departs the village to go and live in London, in the smart house left to her husband Philip by his rich old aunt. Here Lucia engages in a ferocious campaign of social climbing, ‘annexing’ everyone she’s introduced to, inviting them to daily lunches and dinners, hobnobbing, namedropping and ensuring all her activities are recorded by ‘Hermione’, author of the Society Diary of the Evening Gazette.

All of which leaves her ‘friends’ back in Riseholme – namely her devoted lieutenant, George ‘Georgie’ Pillson, and her frenemy, the ‘arch-gossip’ Daisy Quantock – resentful at being so quickly dropped and ignored, which prompts them to take revenge in a number of forms.

The second Lucia novel

This is the third of E.F. Benson’s popular ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels and the second one specifically about Lucia. Lucia, you will remember, is the pretentious name which the culture snob Mrs Emmeline Lucas gives herself (in the same way she calls her husband, Philip Lucas, Pepino) to impress the art-conscious and snobbish inhabitants of the little village of Riseholme.

Aunt Amy dies

The story opens with the news that Philip Lucas’s aunt, Miss Amy Lucas, aged 83, has passed away in a lunatic asylum which, in the gossip-hungry milieu of Riseholme, immediately sets scheming minds a-wondering whether Lucia will inherit anything, and if so how much, and what she will do with it!

Pepino inherits her house

After the usual delays and obfuscations and speculations by Riseholme’s inhabitants, it becomes clear that, yes, Pepino and Lucia have inherited the old aunt’s grand house at 25 Brompton Square, complete with music room and that, no, she’s not going to sell it immediately but is going to stay for a few weeks, to sort out the old lady’s things. Or that’s what she says.

Is Lucia going to move to London? (Yes)

Except that the investigations of Lucia’s loyal lieutenant, George Pillson, and fiercest rival, Daisy Quantock, suggest that Lucia might be going to stay in the capital for more than a few weeks. How do they know? Well, a long-time devotee of Mozart and Beethoven on the piano, Georgie discovers that Lucia has been practicing the hitherto unacceptably modern Stravinsky; a long-time enemy of the wireless, Lucia abruptly declares herself a big fan; a long-term critic of card games, Lucia is suddenly discovered reading an introduction to bridge; and a long-time critic of London itself, as a confused cultural wilderness:

‘I thought you hated London,’ [Georgie] said. ‘You’re always so glad to get back, you find it so common and garish’

When compared to the cultural depth of Riseholme –

‘How much we have learned at Riseholme, its lovely seriousness and its gaiety, its culture, its absorption in all that is worthy in art and literature, its old customs, its simplicity.’ (p.50)

– Lucia is suddenly and abruptly heard singing its praises. Yes, she’s off to London alright!

Enter Olga

In the first novel Lucia’s loyal supporter, Georgie Pillson, wavered in his devotion when the international opera star, Olga Bracely, moved to Riseholme and he fell head over heels in love with her. She was only resident for six months or so before she was called away on a big tour of America and beyond.

Now, at more or less the same time as Aunt Amy dies, Georgie gets a telegram announcing that Olga is back in England and is coming down to Riseholme and wants him to organise a lunch and dinner party so she can catch up on all the important gossip. She has barely arrived before Olga finds herself caught up in the Big Question of the Day, about whether Lucia is or is not moving to London.

But much more than that, when Georgie finally winkles the address of Aunt Amy’s house out of Lucia – 25 Brompton Square – Olga reveals that she too has taken a house in Brompton Square for the season: so Olga and Lucia will be neighbours!

Some explanatory quotations

Of George ‘Georgie’ Pillson:

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

Georgie’s analysis of Lucia’s strategy for taking London by storm:

Will-power, indomitable perseverance now, as always, was getting her just precisely what she had wanted: by it she had become Queen of Riseholme, and by it she was firmly climbing away in London.

Almost as soon as Lucia departs for London, Georgie misses her:

He like all the rest of Riseholme was beginning to miss her dreadfully. She aggravated and exasperated them: she was a hypocrite (all that pretence of not having read the Mozart duet, and desolation at Auntie’s death), a poseuse, a sham and a snob, but there was something about her that stirred you into violent though protesting activity, and though she might infuriate you, she prevented your being dull.

And when Georgie himself goes up to London, to see Olga perform at the opera house:

He felt he had been quite wrong in ever supposing that Lucia had changed. She was just precisely the same, translated into a larger sphere. She had expanded: strange though it seemed, she had only been in bud at Riseholme. ‘I wonder what she’ll do?’ thought Georgie as he settled himself into his stall.

In Lucia’s absence, Daisy Quantock and the Riseholme museum

While Lucia is away in London, Daisy Quantock pursues her spiritualism with ever-greater seriousness, buying a panchette and holding séances to which she invites Georgie. She claims to be in regular contact with someone named ‘Abfou’ who she takes to be an Egyptian spirit on ‘the other side’.

Daisy had sacked her part-time gardener, Simkinson, when she caught him puffing fags in the potting shed. She has a go at gardening herself and manages to dig up most of the seedlings and chop off the roots of the old mulberry tree, before the realises she has to humble herself and ask him back.

Anyway, her ineptness at gardening and weeding contrasts with her supposed expertise with a Ouija board, and leads to the quip that she ought to leave off ‘weeding’ in order to concentrate on ‘weedjing’.

It’s after one of these Ouija sessions, as Georgie and Daisy strain their abilities to decipher the mostly illegible scrawl produced by the board, that Daisy has a brainwave and decides the voice from ‘the other side’ has been telling them to set up the Riseholme Museum!

Daisy tells Georgie, who instantly gets the idea: everyone in the village has some historic junk or lumber, a bit of the abbey ruins or rotting old manuscripts – Colonel Boucher with his bits of Samian ware or Mrs Antrobus with an old bronze fibula she dug up once – which they can donate. The enterprise will be backed by Daisy’s husband, Robert, who has a shrewd financial brain (all his investments are in ‘Roumanian oils’ which are doing very well at the moment), and they’ll rent the old tithe barn off Mr Boucher to house it in.

A big appeal of the idea is that, as Daisy and Georgie gleefully agree, Lucia won’t be involved. If Lucia was still in Riseholme she would instantly co-opt the whole thing and within 24 hours be claiming it had all been her idea all along. No, next time the ex-Queen of Riseholme deigns to visit ‘her discarded kingdom’ she will be amazed to discover what a hive of cultural achievement it has become in her absence!

The museum, apart from the convenience of getting rid of interesting rubbish, was of a conspiratorial nature, a policy of revenge against Lucia for her desertion, and a demonstration of how wonderfully well and truly they all got on without her.

Cast

In Riseholme

• Mrs Emmeline Lucas aka Lucia – cultural leader of Riseholme, affects an Italian name – lives in The Hurst – cultivates everything Elizabethan including trying to revive a maypole – deployer of her well-known ‘silvery peal of laughter’ when it suits her – sometimes resented for her ‘her bullying monarchical ways’ (p.192)
• Philip Lucas aka Peppino
• Mrs Daisy Quantock – probably Lucia’s closest ‘friend’ and arch gossip – short-sighted but refuses to admit it – 52 years old
  • de Vere – her parlour-maid
  • Simkinson – her gardener, fired then hired again
• George ‘Georgie’ Pillson – Lucia’s loyal lieutenant – ‘devoted henchman to Lucia’ – fond of describing anything negative as ‘tarsome’, an aesthete with exquisite taste, wears a toupee, a sort of self-portrait of Benson – plays piano duets with Lucia – deaf but refuses to admit it – thinks of himself as ‘the young man of Riseholme’ although he’s now 48
  • Foljambe – Georgie’s parlourmaid
• Olga Bracely – the internationally renowned soprano opera singer George fell in love with when she briefly lived in Riseholme, at Old Place
• Mrs Antrobus – with her ear trumpet which is ‘like the trunk of a very short elephant, and she waved it about as if asking for a bun’
  • Piggy, her daughter 34
  • Goosey, her other daughter 35
• Mrs Boucher – in her bath chair
• Colonel Jacob Boucher – her husband, walks his bulldogs, except he’s given away the fiercest one to his brother
• Lady Ambermere – local aristocrat
  • meek Miss Lyall – her downtrodden companion
  • her dog, a ‘stertorous pug’
• Mr Rushbold – the vicar, noted for his immense collection of walking sticks (81 of them!) which he kindly donates to the Riseholme Museum (p.194)
• Mr Stratton – landlord of the Ambermere Arms

In London

• Mr Garroby-Ashton – MP for Riseholme
• Mrs Millicent Garroby-Ashton
• Aggie Sandeman – Lucia’s cousin who she used to stay with in London
• Adele Brixton – her friend, ‘a lean, intelligent American of large fortune who found she got on better without her husband’
• Signor Cortese – composer of ‘Lucretia’, the opera which Olga stars in
• Mrs Sophy Alingsby – London friend

Mrs. Alingsby was tall and weird and intense, dressed rather like a bird-of-paradise that had been out in a high gale, but very well connected. She had long straight hair which fell over her forehead, and sometimes got in her eyes, and she wore on her head a scarlet jockey-cap with an immense cameo in front of it. She hated all art that was earlier than 1923, and a considerable lot of what was later. In music, on the other hand, she was primitive, and thought Bach decadent: in literature her taste was for stories without a story, and poems without metre or meaning. But she had collected round her a group of interesting outlaws, of whom the men looked like women, and the women like nothing at all, and though nobody ever knew what they were talking about, they themselves were talked about. Lucia had been to a party of hers, where they all sat in a room with black walls, and listened to early Italian music on a spinet while a charcoal brazier on a blue hearth was fed with incense

• Stephen Merriall – effeminate, suspected of being the author of the anonymous ‘Hermione’ gossip column in the Evening Gazette and so cultivated by Lucia
• Hermione – gossip columnist for the Evening Gazette
• Princess Isabel –
• Lord ‘Tony’ Limpsfield –
• Marcia, the Duchess of Whitby
• Herbert Alton – the society caricaturist

Main events

So Lucia moves into the house in London. Here she sets about cultivating the best high society and takes to looking for her name to appear in the daily gossip column by ‘Hermione’ in the Evening Gazette. Here’s Daisy following her progress in the paper:

The Evening Gazette showed that [Lucia] was alive, painfully alive in fact, if Hermione could be trusted. She had been seen here, there and everywhere in London: Hermione had observed her chatting in the Park with friends, sitting with friends in her box at the opera, shopping in Bond Street, watching polo (why, she did not know a horse from a cow!) at Hurlingham, and even in a punt at Henley. She had been entertaining in her own house too: there had been dinner-parties and musical parties, and she had dined at so many houses that Daisy had added them all up, hoping to prove that she had spent more evenings than there had been evenings to spend, but to her great regret they came out exactly right. Now she was having her portrait painted by Sigismund [fictional modernist artist]…

But Lucia is galled when she discovers Georgie is attending the first night of Olga’s opera at Covent Garden, and especially when she isn’t invited to the ‘intimate’ post-performance party which Olga holds at the house she’s rented, much much smaller than Lucia’s grand one across the way.

1. The party from London irks Riseholme

A few weekends after Lucia’s departed for London, all Riseholme notices unusual activity at her empty house, the Hurst. This turns out to be preparatory to Lucia’s sweeping return but, instead of immediately going to see all her friends, she is taken up with preparations for a weekend party of her new London contacts. When they arrive the Londoners prove to be loud and pushy, and ridicule the new museum, thus alienating all her old friends. And Lucia’s failure to look them up, before the Londoners arrive, means that friends like Georgie, Daisy, Mrs Boucher and so on close ranks against her. Only at the end of the weekend party, does Lucia realise how badly she’s alienated the entire Riseholme community. They think:

She must be punished too, for her loathsome conduct in disregarding her old friends when she had her party from London, and be made to learn that her old friends were being much smarter than she was. (p.146)

The episode is highlighted by the way that Olga chooses the same weekend to come back to Riseholme and not only do Lucia’s former friends (Georgie, Daisy) cut Lucia’s belated invitations and spend their weekend socialising with Olga, but Olga has come with the Princess Isabel. Lucia is full of bootless envy that Georgie’s friends effortlessly trump her own, but puts the bravest face on the humiliation in a number of comic encounters.

2. Ongoing social climbing in London

• she gets Pepino to ring her when she’s hosting a luncheon for key people in society, and then elaborately pretends it’s royalty on the other end, and does a curtsey to the telephone receiver
• she asks the popular society caricaturist Herbert Alton if he can do her and include her in his upcoming gallery exhibition
• she schmoozes the movie star Marcelle Periscope
• she lets herself be seen accompanied by Stephen Merriall, specifically at the exhibition of Alton caricatures, just enough to trigger rumours that they’re having an affair – initially Merriall worries that she really does mean to seduce him until the penny drops and he realises it’s an utterly mercenary display designed to augment her social climbing – at which point he happily acquiesces with the plan
• she schmoozes the President of the Divorce Court in order to be on the inside track of the great divorce scandal of the year, Babs Shyton against her unbearable husband citing the dashing Lord Middlesex

3. The formation of the Luciaphils

Against the odds, a number of the established society types who Lucia’s brown-nosing decide they like her and they respect her straightforward, sharp elbowing social ascent. And so they create an informal society called the Luciaphils, devoted to sharing all the gossip about her latest doings (p.166).

Tony assumed the rapt expression of Luciaphils receiving intelligence.

They are:

• Marcia Whitby
• Lord Tony Limpsfield
• Adele Brixton

Actually, like all the other groups in the book, like the inhabitants of Riseholme, Benson gives the impression that he’s talking about multitudes but when he names names it always turns out to be just three or four characters.

4. Back to Riseholme

Lucia lobbies like crazy to get an invitation to the Duchess of Whitby’s ball, but Marcia has taken against her brazen social climbing. Lucia has a brainwave about how to outface this humiliation which is to claim that her doctor has ordered her to leave London and return to Riseholme for a rest cure. This get her off the hook of not being invited to Marcia’s ball, and will placate her upset friends in the village. Perfect!

So Lucia grandly returns with Pepino on their chauffeur-driven car to Riseholme and makes a concerted effort to visit everyone, invite everyone to lunch or dinner and conciliate everyone with the old talk and the old ways (Mozart piano duets with Georgie, enthusiastically taking up clock-golf with Daisy).

5. The Duchess of Whitby’s ball

She’s told all and sundry she’s going to have a quiet weekend when lo and behold the evening mail brings an invitation from Marcia Whitby to her ball which is happening this evening! Lucia goes into overdrive, drops everything, abandons her evening dinner plans, orders up the car and is being driven back to London at high speed. Farcically she has not one but two flat tyres which the chauffeur struggles to fix.

She arrives at the Duchess’s grand London house at midnight just as the grand assembly of guests is going down for dinner, and curtseys on the stairs no fewer than seven times to various members of royalty. The Duchess is absolutely furious because she only sent the invitation as a formality once she was absolutely certain that Lucia had gone back to Riseholme and there wasn’t the slightest chance of her saying yes. And then she said yes!

6. Adele’s country house party

Following the ball, comes the invitation to Adele, Lady Brixton’s country house weekend. This really is a glamorous affair, graced by the Prime Minister, by novelists and artists and performers, notably Mr Greatorex England’s only interpreter of Stravinsky, with a comic moment when she’s sitting at the piano struggling with the piece of Stravinsky she’s been trying to learn, and he comes in to silently listen to her murder it. But in this as all her other setbacks she overcomes with quick-thinking and brazening it out, to the admiration of the growing band of Luciaphiles.

At the end of the evening she has a little girl’s chinwag in Adele’s room with Marcie and Aggie, during which something almost serious happens: Lucia expresses her sense of what she lives for, and why she social climbs and pursues the famous and distinguished: it’s in order to expand her knowledge, her sense of life’s possibilities, and to live!

7. End of the affair with Stephen

Now as she set off for this weekend Pepino, back in Riseholm, was coming down with a cold. At the last minute the gossip columnist Stephen Merriall was invited and put into the now-vacant room next to Lucia’s. This leads to an unfortunate incident which is that after her lovely late-night girls’ chat, she stumbles into this room only to find Stephen standing in the middle of the room in his pyjamas. Nowadays there would be nothing to this and you can imagine how in any modern movie this would lead to sex. It’s bracing, then, to confront 1920s values for Stephen is not embarrassed, he is angry:

‘How dare you?’ said Stephen, so agitated that he could scarcely form the syllables.

It is perceived as an insult. Lucia realises her mistake and blunders back out only to hear Stephen bolt the door behind her. The point is that the charming flirtation she’d been carrying on with him in public relied on the unspoken agreement that it was an elaborate game. Now Stephen is left wondering whether Lucia meant to make it real i.e. to actually seduce him.

Next morning they are cold and distant to each other. But Lucia’s genius is that she never lets any event, even ones in which she seems to be totally humiliated, go to waste, go unexploited. And pondering the situation late into the night she realises that she and Stephen will now present to their audience the appearance of lovers who have had a falling-out! Brilliant! This is a brilliant extension of the taking-a-lover motif, and leaves the growing band of Luciaphiles in awe of her genius.

And there’s a comic side to it, because after Lucia left them the night before Marcia announced to Adele that she thought she might play a trick on Lucia, and try to ‘seduce’ her lover away from her – obviously not to actually take a lover, but purely to see how Lucia would respond. How she responds impresses everyone in on the stunt because Lucia is divinely indifferent having, as we’ve just seen, had a major rupture with Stephen. Awing her fans even more with her self control.

8. Pepino is ill

But at the height of her success on this long country house weekend with its galaxy of the distinguished and famous, Lucia gets a telegram that Pepino is seriously ill and so hurries to tell her host, Adele, that she really needs to go. And so she drives hurriedly back to Riseholme.

And it turns out to be for good. The last two chapters explain that Pepino had severe pneumonia and it will take him some time to recover. The stress and strain of London would be bad for him so he has to stay in Riseholme. And this prompts a comprehensive rethink of her life by Lucia. Fun though London has been, she decides it has nothing on being Queen of Riseholme and re-orients her life accordingly. She decides to reconquer Riseholme.

9. Golf arrives at Riseholme

In her absence Daisy Quantock has moved on from Ouija boards to golf. She practices in her back garden, persuades Georgie to join in. As it happens the tradesmen of Riseholme have just established a new golf club. Reading social history of the 1920s you learn that golf was one of the new healthy outdoor exercises of the era, along with tennis (‘Anyone for tennis?’). This is reflected in Agatha Christie’s 1923 novel The Murder on the Links. Here are some snippets from a Google search:

Golf was popular in the UK during the 1920s, marking a period of significant growth and expansion for the sport. This era, often referred to as ‘Golf’s Golden Age’, saw a surge in golf course construction and increased participation, fuelled by economic prosperity and the availability of leisure time.

Golf was a means for dominant social groups to reassert cultural authority in an elegant, aesthetically pleasing manner. Thus, golf (and other forms of recreation as well) were used as a way to soften the blow of the massive social changes happening in various communities.

Like other sports there was an extraordinary increase in the popularity of Golf in the 1920s. In the past, golf had been viewed as a sport exclusively for the upper class, but in the 1920s the game appealed to the middle class.

1. Golf had already featured heavily in the previous novel, Miss Mapp, set in Tilling. Now golf, the new craze, comes to Riseholme. Lucia realises this is the new thing, ‘the new stunt’, and sets about mastering it systematically. She has lessons, practices on the newly laid out Riseholme golf course. The comedy derives from the way that Daisy Quantock was the pioneer and takes it upon herself to boss around and instruct Georgie and other neophytes like Piggy and Goosie Antrobus, while herself remaining an abysmal player. All this leads up to the comic scene when Lucia casually invites Daisy to a round with her and, of course, effortlessly outclasses her.

At half past four Riseholme knew that Daisy had halved four holes and lost the other five. Her short reign as Queen of Golf had come to an end.

Moreover, by schmoozing the tradesmen who set the club up, Lucia manages to get herself not only onto the club committee but elected President. And explains to Georgie that the whole thing needs to be more organised, with proper competitions and maybe a cup, maybe two cups – the President’s Cup awarded by her, and the Lucas Cup. This is how she takes over everything.

2. At the same time Lucia moves to annex the Riseholme Museum. Lucia proves her worth by being the only one brave enough to go and tell Lady Ambermere to her face that the Museum does not want the revolting specimen of her dead, stuffed, ugly pug as a donation. Lucia takes it to the Hall and outfaces her ladyship’s scorn and threat to withdraw the loan of her priceless royal mittens – much to the admiration of the rest of the committee. After managing all those duchesses in London, a mere Lady has no terrors for brave Lucia!

3. Finally, Lucia revives Georgie’s interest in Ouija and planchettes and the alleged ancient Egyptian ‘on the other side’, Abfou, thus reinstating her loyal lieutenant and annexing yet another interest or topic.

Thus annexing and making herself mistress of these three areas of activity, Lucia makes herself rightful Queen of Riseholme again!

Georgie gave a gasp of admiration. It was but a month or two ago that all Riseholme rejoiced when Abfou called her a snob, and now here they all were again (with the exception of Daisy) going to her for help and guidance in all those employments and excitements in which Riseholme revelled. Golf-competitions and bridge tournament, and duets, and real séances, and deliverance from Lady Ambermere, and above all, the excitement supplied by her personality.

‘You’re too wonderful,’ he said, ‘indeed, I don’t know what we should do without you.’ (p.263)

Adorable

It’s the details, the adorable foibles of his characters, the way Benson persuades you of their existence and then amuses you with his pinpoint skewering of their affectations and hypocrisies, which makes the novels so exquisite and more-ish.

Her fingers strayed about the piano, and she paused. Then with the wistful expression Georgie knew so well, she played the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Georgie set his face also into the Beethoven-expression, and at the end gave the usual little sigh.

Inductive reasoning

The inhabitants of Riseholme spend a good deal of time trying to figure out each other’s mysterious behaviour, schemes and campaigns. Benson dwells on the phrase ‘inductive reasoning’ with light mockery of contemporary philosophy.

• Then Daisy came closer to the fence, with the light of inductive reasoning, which was much cultivated at Riseholme, veiling the fury of her eye.
• Now though Georgie was devoted to his Lucia, he was just as devoted to inductive reasoning, and Daisy Quantock was, with the exception of himself, far the most powerful logician in the place.
• Georgie’s head buzzed with inductive reasoning, as he hurried about on his vicariously hospitable errands.
• Riseholme was completely baffled; never had its powers of inductive reasoning been so nonplussed.
• It was then that Georgie had the flash of intuition that was for ever memorable. It soared above inductive reasoning.
• It required very little inductive reasoning to form the theory that Daisy had popped in to tell Georgie that Lucia had asked her to lunch, and that she had refused.
• Daisy gave a triumphant crow: inductive reasoning had led her to precisely the same point at precisely the same moment.

None of these instances use the phrase ‘inductive reasoning’ in quite its dictionary definition:

Inductive reasoning is a method of logical thinking where specific observations are used to form broader generalizations and conclusions. It’s a process of moving from specific instances to a general principle.

Wikipedia gives a different definition which is closer to the mark:

Inductive reasoning refers to a variety of methods of reasoning in which the conclusion of an argument is supported not with deductive certainty, but at best with some degree of probability.

The small number of important Riseholme inhabitants – in reality it’s just three: Lucia, Georgie and Daisy – are really engaged in a constant war of sussing out each other’s intentions, continually, non-stop, about everything, all day long. Here’s a rare example from Lucia’s husband, Pepino:

Though he knew himself to be incapable of following the swift and antic movements of Lucia’s mind, he was capable of putting two and two together.

It’s this process of trying to puzzle out each other’s motives, plans and strategies which – surprisingly – manages to fill entire novels.

Baby language

Lucia and Georgie have a long-established habit of dropping into baby language.

She lapsed into the baby-language which they sometimes spoke, varying it with easy Italian.

‘Ickle music, Georgie?’ she said. ‘And you must be kindy-kindy to me. No practice all these days. You brought Mozart? Which part is easiest? Lucia wants to take easiest part.’

‘Lucia shall take which ever part she likes,’ said Georgie who had had a good practise at both.

‘Treble then,’ said Lucia. ‘But oh, how diffy it looks! Hundreds of ickle notes. And me so stupid at reading! Come on then. You begin, Uno, due, tre.’

Comic riffs

George pays Lucia a visit to pay his condolences.

‘Georgie, dear,’ she said. ‘Good of you.’
Georgie held her hand a moment longer than was usual, and gave it a little extra pressure for the conveyance of sympathy. Lucia, to acknowledge that, pressed a little more, and Georgie tightened his grip again to show that he understood, until their respective finger-nails grew white with the conveyance and reception of sympathy. It was rather agonising, because a bit of skin on his little finger had got caught between two of the rings on his third finger, and he was glad when they quite understood each other.

Later, from his window, Georgie tells Daisy Quantock how much Pepino and Lucia have inherited and she gasps, ‘No!’

This simple word ‘No’ connoted a great deal in the Riseholme vernacular. It was used, of course, as a mere negative, without emphasis, and if you wanted to give weight to your negative you added ‘Certainly not.’ But when you used the word ‘No’ with emphasis, as Daisy had used it from her bedroom window to Georgie, it was not a negative at all, and its signification briefly put was ‘I never heard anything so marvellous, and it thrills me through and through. Please go on at once, and tell me a great deal more, and then let us talk it all over’.

Lucia invites Lady Brixton to lunch:

Lady Brixton was a lean, intelligent American of large fortune who found she got on better without her husband. But as Lord Brixton preferred living in America and she in England, satisfactory arrangements were easily made. Occasionally she had to go to see relatives in America, and he selected such periods for seeing relatives in England.
She explained the situation very good-naturedly to Lucia who rather rashly asked after her husband.
‘In fact,’ she said, ‘we blow kisses to each other from the decks of Atlantic liners going in opposite directions, if it’s calm, and if it’s rough, we’re sick into the same ocean.’

1920s slang

Posh slang, that is. Lady Brixton is being a bit catty about Lucia to Lord (Tony) Limpsfield but when she tells him that Lucia’s invited her to lunch, he gentlemanly responds:

‘Then it’s very unkind of you to crab her, Adele,’ said Tony.

We’ve seen ‘stunt’ being widely used in Agatha Christie. It was obviously very much a buzzword of the era, denoting clever scams or pranks or – as here – latest fads.

In her heart she utterly despised golf, but golf just now was the stunt, and she had to get hold of Riseholme again. (p.237)

Credit

‘Lucia in London’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1927. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

• Lucia in London 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)