Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford
Sister Wordsworth now made a cheerful reappearance, having just seen the Princess out to her car. She said that everything had gone off perfectly. Sister Turnbull’s patient, it seemed, had come through her dangerous and unusual experience as easily as if she had been twenty instead of sixty (twin boys, Neville and Nevile, after the Blue Book), and was now with all the other patients enjoying a nice cup of tea in the canteen. The Princess had been charming and had amazed everybody, royal persons always being assumed to be half-witted, deaf and dumb until they have given practical proof to the contrary, by asking quite intelligent questions. The Admiral had winked at several of the nurses, and had been bluff, honest-to-God, hearty and all other things that are expected of seafaring men. In the short, everybody had been pleased and put into a satisfied frame of mind and the Post rang with the rather loud chatter which is induced by great relief from strain. Sophia, joining with the others, almost forgot her nightmare experiences in the museum.
When the time came for her to go home, however, she felt that she really could not face the terrors of the black-out and walk, as she generally did. She was feeling frightened again, and the idea of masked men waiting to boo out at her from behind sandbags was too unnerving. So she telephoned for a taxi. As she got into it, she wondered whether she really ought to go straight to Scotland Yard before going home. After some hesitation she decided that she felt too tired and dirty. Dinner and especially a bath were necessary before she could undertake such an expedition; besides, it was quite possible that she might even persuade some fatherly inspector to go and see her, in comfort, at Granby Gate, which would be much nicer.
She took a whisky and soda to her bedroom, undressed slowly before the fire, and wrapped herself in her dressing-gown; then she sat for a time sipping the whisky. She felt very much restored, and presently went to turn on her bath. Sitting on the edge of it was Heatherley.
Sophia huddled into her dressing-gown, paralysed with terror. She had a remote feeling of thankfulness that she had put on the dressing-gown; as her bathroom led out of her bedroom and had no other entrance she very often did not. Heatherley had an extremely disagreeable, not to say alarming expression on his face, and she was far too much unnerved to reproach him for being in her bathroom, or indeed to say anything.
He stood up and barked at her, and any doubts left in her mind as to his being a German were removed.
‘You were seen this afternoon, coming out of the Hospital Museum. What were you doing there?’
Sophia felt like a rabbit with a snake. ‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said. ‘I always think those Siamese twins are rather little duckies, don’t you?’
She saw that this had teased Heatherley and it occurred to her that he did not know about her finding the King of Song. She rather supposed that if he had even guessed at such a thing, she would by now be going for a swim down the drain. ‘Pull yourself together, you’re descended from Charles II, aren’t you?’ Sophia was enough of a snob to feel that this equivocal connexion put her on a superior footing to Heatherley whether he was American or German, neither country having, as far as she could remember, existed in Charles II’s day. ‘Now do you agree,’ she babbled on, playing for time, ‘that Charles II was far the most fascinating of all our Kings?’
‘I’m afraid I have not come here to discuss Charles II. I have come to inform you upon two subjects. First, you should know that I am not, as you supposed, a counter-spy.’
‘Hun or Yank?’ asked Sophia. A spasm of intense rage crossed Heatherley’s face. She was beginning positively to enjoy the interview.
‘I am the head of the German espionage system in this country. My name is Otto von Eiweiss. Florence is Truda von Eiweiss, my wife. Heil Hitler.’
‘Your wife!’ said Sophia, ‘goodness me, all this time I’ve been thinking you fancied her!’
‘Secondly,’ went on Heth, taking no notice of her but trembling with anger, ‘Truda and I think you know too much. We think you have been prying into affairs which do not concern you. We also think that you might soon begin to prattle of these affairs to your friends, who, although they all belong to that decadent class which we National Socialists most despise, might in their turn (purely by accident, of course, they are too soft and stupid to have any purpose in life) harm us with their talk. So, in order to make certain that none of this shall happen, we have taken your bulldog, Millicent, into protective custody, as we have noticed that in your unnatural English way you seem to love her more than anything else. In three days’ time, if you behave exactly as we tell you, she will be back once more under your eiderdown, but otherwise——’
‘Quilt,’ Sophia corrected him mechanically. She despised the word eiderdown. Then, suddenly, realizing what he meant, ‘My bulldog, Millicent – Milly? You fearful brute,’ and she forgot all about Charles II and what fun it was to tease Heth, and went for him tooth and nail.
Heatherley warded off her bites and scratches with humiliating ease, and twisting one of her arms in schoolboy fashion, he continued, ‘Now, be quite quiet, and listen to me.’
‘Ow, this hurts; let me go.’
‘Are you going to be quiet? Good. Now I shall continue our little chat. The bulldog, Millicent, as I was just remarking, is in protective custody.’
‘Where?’
‘I shall not divulge.’
‘Has she had her dinner at six?’
‘If her dinner-time is punctually at six she most probably has. She was removed from your house at six-thirty precisely.’
‘Oh! Where is she, please?’
‘It is no concern of yours where she is.’
‘You brutish hun, of course it is a concern of mine. In this weather. She will catch cold, she will get bronchitis. These dogs have frightfully weak chests. Savage – kaffir – fuzzy-wuzzy – you——’
‘To call me all these things will not advance the cause of Millicent, very far from it. She is now in my power, and you had better be nice to me.’ Heatherley leant towards her with a horrible leer.
‘I shall tell Florence about you coming into my bathroom when I have nearly nothing on,’ she said. This shot appeared to have gone home. Heatherley looked quite disconcerted.
‘The bulldog,’ he said, after a pause, ‘will be returned to you in perfect condition so long as you have been obedient to us and stuck not only to the letter but also to the spirit of our instructions. Otherwise, I regret to inform you that not only will she be vivisected for several hours and then put, as Greta was put, still alive, into the main drain, but that, long before you can act, you also will have ceased to live.’
‘Devil. I must say I shouldn’t care to be you, after you are dead. Would you like to hear what will happen to you? Well, you’ll lie on a gridiron to eternity and baste – do you hear me, BASTE.’
‘Instead of abusing me, and threatening me with the out-worn superstitions of a decadent religion, it will be better for you to listen to what I have to say.
‘For the next three days and nights either Florence, or Gustav, whom you know as Winthrop, or I myself will be watching you like lynxes; you will never be out of the sight of one or other. Florence will take night duty and sleep in your room. Gustav and I will take turns by day. If you make the smallest sign to anybody, or convey any message to the outside world, we shall know it, and within half an hour the bulldog Millicent will be wishing she had never been born.’
‘How do you mean Florence will sleep in my room? There’s only one bed.’
‘It is a very large one. You can take the choice between sharing it with Florence and having another bed made up in your room.’
‘Ugh!’ Sophia shuddered. Then she rang the bell, and feeling uncommonly foolish, went into her bedroom, where she told Elsie that she had been suffering from nightmares, and that Miss Turnbull had very kindly consented to sleep in her room.
‘Oh, and Elsie, tell Mrs Round that I have taken Milly to the vet, to be wormed, will you? She’ll be about three days.’
‘Yes, m
When Elsie had gone, Heatherley came out of the bathroom and said, ‘One last word. I warn you that you had better act in good faith. It will not avail you to do such things as, for instance, write notes in invisible ink on match-boxes, for we shall act on the very smallest suspicion. Your telephone here is cut; please do not have it mended. It will be the safest from your point of view, and that of your bulldog, if you were to see nobody at all except the personnel at the Post. Of them, I may tell you that ninety per cent are members of my corps, and will assist in keeping you under observation. Miss Wordsworth received last night in an omnibus a piqure that will incapacitate her for a week at least.’
‘I see, you are white slavers as well as everything else.’
‘Mr Stone, as you are aware, has gone away on holiday. You will sit alone in the office, and either Gustav or myself will often sit there with you. When you think you are quite alone, one of us will be watching you through a rent in the hessian.’
Sophia lay awake all night. Florence did not, it is true, snore so loudly or so incessantly as Milly, nor was her face so near to Sophia’s as Milly’s generally became during the course of a night. What she did was to give an occasional rather sinister little ‘honk’ which was far more disturbing. But in any case Sophia would probably have lost her sleep. There seemed to be no way out of the quandary in which she found herself, look at it how she would. Even supposing that she was anxious to sacrifice Milly to the common good, which she was not, very, it seemed to her that she would only have time to give one hysterical shout before she was herself overpowered, gagged, and put down the drain, or, if in the street, liquidated in some other way. Then her secret, like Scudder’s, would die with her, for it was too late now to begin keeping a black notebook. The prospect was discouraging.
She turned about miserably racking her brains until she was called, when the sight of Florence sitting up in bed, and disposing of an enormous breakfast, quite put her off her own. For a moment she forgot her troubles in the fascination of seeing how Florence fixed herself into the stays, but with so many so much weightier affairs on her mind, Sophia hardly got the best advantage from this experience. For one thing she was tortured by wondering who would give Milly her morning run and whether she would do all she should. If she was being kept, like the old gentleman, underneath the Post, there was unlikely to be such a thing as a bit of grass for her, unless some kind of subterranean weed grew beside the main drain. Then there was the question of food.
She had sent Florence to Coventry. Florence, she considered, having lived with her all these months and accepted her fur cape, only to repay by kidnapping Milly, had proved herself to be outside the pale, what Lord Haw-haw calls ‘not public school’. Sophia would not and could not speak to her, so she would have to discuss Milly’s diet-sheet with Heatherley, and meanwhile she decided that she would take a dinner for her in a parcel when she went to the Post.
She and Florence spent a dismal morning together in Harrods, where, whenever Sophia saw somebody she knew, Florence threatened her with the barrel of a gun which she kept in her bag; after this they went off, still in silence and rather early, to the Post. Sophia was clutching a damp parcel of minced meat which she deposited in the Labour Ward when they arrived, and hoped for the best. She thought it was a gesture rather like that made by primitive Greek peasants who are supposed to put out, in some sacred spot, little offerings of food for the god Pan.
Heatherley’s predictions were correct. Sister Wordsworth was off duty, ill. Mr Stone was away on a week’s holiday, and Sophia sat alone in the office. Heatherley and Winthrop took it in turns to watch over her, and the first thing she saw when she came in was a dreadful, unwinking, pale blue eye pressed against a tear in the sacking. There was nothing to be done, nothing whatever. She felt quite sick, and the hours dragged away slowly. Even Macaulay’s History of England held no more charms for her, the landing of the Prince of Orange among the rude fisher-folk of Torquay with a background of ghostly future villas was a painted scene which could not have much interest for one who sat on such a powder-barrel as she did. The question uppermost in her mind now was ‘What is going to happen on Friday?’ but the more she thought, the less she could form an opinion. Perhaps it was only that on that day Florence and her corps of spies were leaving the country; she felt, however, that it was something far more sinister. The assasination of some public man, for instance; although it was difficult to think of any public man whose assassination would not greatly advance the Allied cause, and the same objection, multiplied by about twelve hundred, would, of course, apply to blowing up the Houses of Parliament. In Sophia’s opinion, this would no longer even be an aesthetic disaster, since they had been subjected to the modish barbarism of pickling.
That evening Fred dined with her, a long-standing engagement. She was told that she could choose which of her three chaperons should attend her on this occasion, and chose Heatherley. He was the one she hated the most, because she was quite certain it was he who had thought of abducting Milly, and she hoped to be able to tease him by talking about Germany with Fred and at him. Unfortunately this did not work out very well. A Fred racked with ideals, and in the grip of Federal Union, was quite a different cup of tea from the old, happy-go-lucky Fred who used to join with her in blasting abroad, its food, its manners, its languages, its scenery, and the horrible time one had getting there.
‘I can’t see eye to eye with you, my dear Sophia,’ he said pompously, when she thought she had worked him up to better things. ‘I think of all foreigners, even Germans, in quite a different light now. To me they are our brothers in Union. Whatever happens, don’t you see, we must finish the war with a great glow of love in our hearts – the punishment we are giving them should be quite in the spirit of “this hurts me more than it does you”.’
Heatherley gave a loathsome snigger.
‘I beg your pardon? Of course, Mr Egg, as you come from the United States of America, you can tell us all about Federal Union from experience, I am sure you must think highly of it?’
‘It works very badly over there, and would be quite useless in Europe. In Europe you have one Power so far in advance of all the rest that ethical sense as well as common sense would put the other countries in complete submission to its dictates.’
‘Yes, that’s what I always say,’ said Sophia, ‘but, of course, it will be an awful bore having to rule over those fiendish foreigners, and I rather doubt if we can be bothered. Perhaps we could make the French do it for us.’
Heatherley smiled in a superior way. He seemed far too comfortable to please Sophia and she greatly feared that his plans, whatever they were, must be maturing satisfactorily for him. She made no attempt to communicate in any way with Fred, knowing that, quite alone and uninterrupted, it would have taken her a good hour to explain the whole matter to him. Fred liked to get to the bottom of things, to ask a hundred questions and to write a great deal in his notebook; his particular temperament rendered such devices as tapping on his leg in Morse Code (even had Sophia been sufficiently expert to do so) much worse than useless. She very wisely left the whole thing alone.
The evening was not a great success. Fred asked where Milly was, and when told about the vet, reminded Sophia that she and Abbie had been wormed together less than two months before. He went on to tell her what a strain it was on a dog’s inside, asking what evidence she had of Milly’s worms, until poor Sophia could have screamed. Then they listened to the King of Song, but he was not really much in form. At the end of his programme, however, there was a drop of comfort for Sophia when he sang, very distinctly, ‘Milly is my darling, my darling, my darling, Milly is my darling, the young bow wow dear,’ after which she heard, or thought she heard, a rumbling snore. If Milly was with the old gentleman that would be nice for both of them, and especially, of course, for the old gentleman. At last Fred took his leave, after which Heatherley escorted Sophia, who was by now very sleepy
This was the end of the first day.
14
The next morning Sophia, having enjoyed from sheer exhaustion, an excellent night’s rest, awoke feeling more resolute. She had often heard that the Germans are the stupidest people in the world; when she remembered this and also the fact that, until she had found out that they were spies, she had always looked upon Florence, Heatherley and Winthrop as being the greatest bores she knew, it seemed to her that it should be possible to outwit Truda, Otto and Gustav, even if they were three to one against her. She stayed in bed until it was time to go to St. Anne’s, thinking very hard.
Clearly the first thing to be done was to write out a concise report of her situation, and this she must keep handy in case she had an opportunity, unobserved, of giving it to some reliable person. Hatred of Heatherley, even more than fear, lent her courage and cunning, and when she had been at the Post a little while, she put down her handkerchief over a stump of pencil on the table. Presently she picked up both handkerchief and pencil and went off to the lavatory, the only place where she could be out of sight of the unholy trinity, one of whose members followed her to its very door. Here she wrote, very quickly, on her handkerchief, ‘Spies. Milly and Ivor King imprisoned below Post. Tell police but act carefully. I am watched. No joke.’ She had to waste valuable space and time in saying ‘no joke’ because she knew that if this missive should happen to reach any of her friends they would be sure to think it was one and act accordingly. The trouble now was to think of somebody to give it to, as, although she felt certain that Heatherley was bluffing when he said that nearly all the nurses were his fellow-spies, she did not know any of them well enough, now that Sister Wordsworth was away, to be positive beyond doubt of their integrity. She thought that if, by the next day, nothing else had turned up, she would, as a last resort, give the handkerchief to one of them; meanwhile she hoped for luck.