Dance and Skylark (23 page)

“She doesn't approve of Americans,” said Stephen. “She'll probably snap your head off.”

“That's just the way I like it,” said Polly simply. “Give me a dame with spirit every time. My little Red schoolteacher in Thessaly——”

Just then, as Stephen was wondering what excuse he could find for the introduction, Sir Almeric bore down upon Miss Foulkes. Possibly he hadn't noticed her, for his tall grey steeplechaser was throwing its head about and trying to break into a trot, while Sir Almeric reined it in with hands as light as a sailor's on the sheet. More likely, however, he thought that the Communist rat deserved to be taught a lesson and rode his horse at her deliberately. White-faced, trembling, and obviously terrified of horses, Miss Foulkes stood her ground, defying the Fascist Beast with her frail banner. The horse was almost on top of her when Polly stretched out his arm, caught her firmly by the waist, and lifted her out of its way almost as casually as a man would pluck a flower.

“Seems the Knights around these parts ain't got much chivalry,” said Polly, so loudly that Sir Almeric turned and glared at him.

Stephen seized his opportunity.

“Miss Foulkes,” he said, “this is Mr, Gabrielides, a friend of mine from America.”

Miss Foulkes wore the expression which a good Communist should who is saved from the brutalities of British Fascism only to find herself in the arms of Uncle Sam. She detached her waist from Polly's grasp, and asserted her independence by taking two steps backwards.

“Glad to meet you, Miss Foulkes,” said Polly gaily.

“How do you do?” said Miss Foulkes, in a tone which implied that she was far from glad. She took a very small handkerchief out of her mackintosh pocket and wiped off some foam which had fallen from the horse's mouth on to her forehead.

“You sure got guts,” said Polly, “standing there all alone with that banner.”

“This is a free country,” replied Miss Foulkes surprisingly, for she frequently asserted the opposite. “Unlike some other nations I could name, we do not yet throw our political opponents into prison. I suppose,” she added deliberately, “that you've come over here to buy us up with your almighty dollars?”

Polly grinned.

“Well, I don't exactly know about that, but I do want to buy six zebras if you know where I can find them.”

“Six
zebras?”

“Yeah. And I'm open to buy some balloons too, if you could make them in the shape of a duck-billed platypus.”

Miss Foulkes gazed at him wide-eyed but without resentment; clearly he was no longer to be blamed for being an American, but to be pitied for being mad. She
therefore made no protest when he took her in the friendliest way by her thin, knobbly elbow and drew her confidentially towards him.

“See here,” he said, “I got a circus in Louisiana; five elephants, two lions, a grizzly bear called Theodore Roosevelt, forty-eight piebald horses, ten clowns, some performing fleas, six strip-tease dancers, and the only duck-billed platypus in America. I thought maybe I could advertise my circus with balloons like Mr. Tasker did his Pageant. So I'm asking whether your factory could make me a balloon in the shape of a duck-billed platypus, see?”

“We could make a balloon in the shape of anything,” said Miss Foulkes. “It's just a matter of the shape of the formas. Unless it had a very long thin tail.”

“Well, that's fine! It has a very short, fat tail. And how much would it cost, d'you reckon, to make a balloon like that, supposing I ordered a hundred thousand?”

“Twelve and six a gross,” replied Miss Foulkes promptly, quoting
verbatim
from the stock letter which she typed almost every day. “Two and a half per cent discount for cash on delivery. There would be a small extra charge for the special forma, and, of course, an additional charge for anything fancy, such as a squeak.”

“Duck-billed platypuses don't squeak.”

“Don't they?” she said gravely, looking up at Polly who towered immensely above her. Equally gravely he shook his head; and suddenly there flickered about Miss Foulkes' thin little mouth the shadow of a smile. Stephen had never seen her smile before, and it transformed her. He had the impression of a tight-budded flower opening to the
sun. While he was watching this phenomenon, he became aware of another. Polly was saying “No, lady, there ain't no squeak in platypuses,” when he began to search his pockets frantically for a handkerchief. Long before he found one he was shaken by a huge and explosive sneeze. It was followed rapidly by a second and a third, and Miss Foulkes kindly proffered her tiny piece of pale-blue lawn. Speechless with sneezing, Polly shook his head; and indeed if he had put Miss Foulkes' handkerchief to his nose it would have been like placing a car's windscreen in the path of an armour-piercing shell. Finding his own handkerchief at last, he shook it in the air to open it, displaying about two square yards of bright yellow silk decorated with a design representing the Dance of the Seven Veils. With the aid of this flag of truce, as it seemed when he waved it, he smothered the next sneeze and achieved a moment's respite, during which he had time to gasp:

“Hay fever. It's a Nailergy,” before the next paroxysm overtook him and shook his enormous frame as if he were a great oak defying the equinoctial gales.

Miss Foulkes stared up at him with the astonishment of one who gazes for the first time upon Niagara, Vesuvius or the Victoria Falls.

Next Morning was Sunday, and the Mayor and Corporation in their robes of office processed from the Town Hall to the Abbey beneath a cloudless sky. The Vicar preached his Festival Sermon on a text from Ecclesiastes: “A pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.” Having endured this discourse on meteorology, which lasted for three-quarters of an hour, Stephen went back to his office, where he found Faith trying to get “Trunks” on the telephone.

“What's the trouble now?” he asked her.

“Prevalence of donkeys. They broke out of their paddock in the night and ate
all
the flowers in the Pleasure Gardens! Isn't it awful! And they've been grazing on the snapdragons in the Vicar's border; and they've eaten down all the Bishop delphiniums and the Russell lupins
to the quick
, his wife says. But I thought we might as well turn it to good account and get some pub. out of it; and it'll make a good story for the
Daily Mirror”

Stephen had promised to meet Polly at the Red Lion where he was putting up, so he left Faith to her telephoning and made his way up the street. He got to the Red Lion ten minutes before opening time, but Florrie was already tidying up the bar, so he went in and sat down to wait for the stroke of twelve.

“You can have a pint now if you like,” said Florrie surprisingly, for the Red Lion, under the management of Old Screwnose, was usually very strict about Licensing Hours.

“Is that all right?” said Stephen. “What about Mr. Hawker?”

“To tell the truth, he's not very well. He isn't up yet,” Florrie said. “And it's all the fault of that American friend of yours. By the way, he left a message for you; he's gone to the factory to see about buying some balloons. A nice mess he got me into last night,” she added.

“Goodness, what's he been up to now?”

“You may well ask. He came back at half-past eleven, just as I was finishing washing up, and before I knew where I was he'd started mixing drinks behind the counter. I should never have allowed it, Mr. Tasker; but you must admit he has a way with him.”

“He has indeed.”

“He concocted something he called a snakebite cocktail. There was rum and gin and goodness knows what else in it; but it was mostly whisky. I had a little one myself, just to be friendly, and it fairly made my head go round! Then we got talking about circuses and animals, my first husband having been in the lion-taming profession, as you know. So I had another of those snakebites; but your Mr. Polly-something, he had about half a dozen; and then, Mr. Tasker, he started singing.”

“He would,” said Stephen, remembering VE-day in Greece.

“I should never have allowed it; I don't know what come over us, except that he has such a way with him. And although they were in a foreign language, I could tell they were improper songs, from the expression on his face. Well, before long, of course, down comes Mr. Hawker in his dressing-gown. He pokes his little whiskers round the door, just like a weasel, you know, and there was Mr. Polly swinging his long legs as he sat on the counter, and there was I—well, I must tell you the truth—I'd got the giggles, Mr. Tasker; just like a schoolgirl, I was, laughing till the tears ran down my face.”

“So Mr. Hawker wasn't very pleased?”

“He carried on about the police, and the place being respectable—you couldn't blame him, Mr. Tasker, I'm not blaming him at all—and then, all of a sudden I come over swimmy, owing to that snakebite, and I had to leave the room. Just then Mr. Hawker was saying it was a shame the way we'd woken him up, he being under the weather and all, and your friend was telling him that if he was under the weather he ought to have a drop of snakebite to put him on top of the world again. ‘Even if you was bitten by a rattlesnake,' he was saying, ‘this stuff would fix you in no time.' But I never thought he'd allow himself to be persuaded, him being a teetotaller as you might say from the cradle.”

“And did he?”

Florrie nodded her head gravely.

“Nobody could have done it but your friend.
Nobody
. But when I came back, Mr. Tasker—as soon as the swim-miness had gone—believe it or not, they was
both
singing.
They was sitting on the bar like two birds on a perch and they was singing:

“‘
Here's to the good old snakebite, Put it down, put it down!'

They was, Mr. Tasker. Yes, they was.” She nodded her head again and went on:

“But of course, it couldn't last. As soon as Mr. Hawker began to twiddle his thumbs I guessed what was coming. None of my husbands was what you'd call moderate men, Mr. Tasker; so whenever I sees a gentleman with his eyes half-shut, and his chin on his chest, and his hands clasped across his stomach,
and
his thumbs twiddling, I know that I shan't get any more sense out of him till morning. Your friend was singing away, and I don't suppose he even noticed; but Mr. Hawker slid off the counter like a sack of potatoes into my arms, and I—” finished Florrie with pardonable pride— “
I
carried him up to bed.”

It was a splendid picture which rose up in Stephen's mind, of Florrie's broad back rippling like the withers of a great Percheron mare of Normandy as she lifted up the little man and enveloped him within her strong arms and generous bosom. She would know the way to do it; for had she not carried to bed the lion-tamer and the astrologer and the punisher of whisky, those fabulous immoderate husbands of hers?

But just then, as Florrie took a deep breath and prepared to continue her story, the porter came in to tell Stephen that he was wanted on the telephone. He went into the
stuffy little box in the hall on the walls of which somebody —perhaps Mr. Oxford—had scribbled the names of innumerable race-horses, and heard Faith's voice saying:

“The Mayor wants you in the office, please. There's an awful crisis on.”

“What is it?”

“Mr. Gurney—” She broke off suddenly, there was a scrabbling sound, and instead of her clear young voice a throaty whisper filled the telephone-box. It could belong to none but Councillor Noakes.

“Walls have ears.”

Dame Joanna's statue was still draped in readiness for its unveiling at the end of the week, for it had been deemed indecorous to associate this solemn ceremony with the choosing of the Beauty Queens. Amorphous in its draperies, it appeared to be almost headless, like a piece of sculpture by Mr. Henry Moore. Portentous, brooding, it looked across the river from the Pleasure Gardens towards the grandstands on the Bloody Meadow with an air that was curiously and indefinably sinister; and well it might.

“If that ain't jest too bad,” said Polly. “And you're telling me that there never was no such dame as this Joanna?”

“There never was,” said Stephen, still awe-stricken by the revelation.

“Well, if that ain't jest too bad.”

It was Monday morning, and the sun beamed its blessing upon the festive town, the flags and the roses, the purple loosestrife on the river-bank, the Bloody Meadow bedecked already with the favours of Lancaster and York. Forecasts more reliable than the Vicar's promised a week of fine
weather. But all was overshadowed, darkened, blighted, by yesterday's shocking discovery. As the Mayor had pathetically said: “It somehow spoils everything.” He seemed to have shrunk and withered, so that he looked even more unimportant than usual, and his kindly face wore an expression of hopeless bewilderment. “If we unveil her,” he had sighed, “we lay ourselves open to ridicule; but if we do not unveil her, people will want to know why. We are in a cleft stick, Stephen.” As for Councillor Noakes, he seemed capable of no positive action at all, but strode up and down in Stephen's office like a caged animal, exclaiming in hollow tones: “Figures of fun. That's what we shall be. Figures of fun, laughing stocks, butts, to the end of our days.” It was mainly to escape from him that Stephen had sought out Polly in the Pleasure Gardens, where with the aid of some of the grandstand carpenters he was building an improvised bridge over the narrow neck of the river just below the mill-pool. Stephen called him up the bank and confided in him the appalling problem of Dame Joanna.

A professor on holiday had started the trouble. The voice-pipe in Mr. Runcorn's office, wailing like a bird of doom, had announced him late on Saturday afternoon. He was something of a specialist, he said, in Middle English literature. He was therefore interested in Dame Joanna, and he proceeded to ask some awkward questions about the local poetess. When he had departed Mr. Runcorn sighed deeply and put through a telephone call to the Bodleian. Its Librarian promised to make inquiries and on Sunday morning he rang up the Mayor. He disclaimed the
possession of any manuscripts by Dame Joanna. He had never heard of such a poet. Mr. Gurney, in fact, had invented her.