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  “We could do with a pop-singer group, like Councillor Perse said.”

  “The Scouts and Guides will have to come into it.”

  “What about the Red Cross and St John Ambulance?”

  “There’s the Fire-fighting Services and the Civil Defence.”

  “Where do we put the Mayor and Mayoress? They’ll have to be part of the procession.”

  “If we have the Scouts and the Guides, we ought to have the Church Lads’ Brigade and the Girls’ Life Brigade, else there won’t half be a shine.”

  “There’s the Salvation Army. They’ve got a decent sort of band. We could stick them somewhere in the middle of the procession. They can always be relied on for a bit of liveliness.”

  “They’d sing, and that might steal the show.”

  “What about amusements?”

  “Amusements?” said the chairman, plunging in.

  “Yes, you know. In the park. Roundabouts and swings and a coconut shy and hoopla, and that. Put up a marquee and have a bingo session.”

  “Put two gondolas on the lake and let ’em breed,” quoted Councillor Perse sardonically. “I’ll tell you what,” he said aloud. “If we’re really going ahead with this thing, we shall need a pageant-master, otherwise everything will be chaos.”

  “And who do you propose?” demanded the chairman. “And how much lolly will they want? We got to think of the rate-payers, you know.”

  “I suggest we ask Mrs Kitty Trevelyan-Twigg. She’ll probably do it for next to nothing—possibly for nothing at all—if we give her a bit of publicity.”

  “Mrs Kitty Trevelyan-Twigg? But she writes in Vogue !”exclaimed Councillor Mrs Skifforth. “How on earth could we get her?”

  “She happens to be my aunt,” said young Mr Perse modestly.

  CHAPTER TWO

  So Does an Inner Circle

  “Home Tooke was of an eccentric turn of mind.”

  « ^ »

  The friendly silence of the breakfast table was broken suddenly by Laura.

  “Old Kitty has bought it,” she observed, with a chuckle. “Some nephew or other has been and gone and let her in for becoming responsible for overseeing an historical pageant at some place I’ve never heard of, but which has just been made into a borough. Either the local council or the nephew must be mad. Historical pageant my foot! Why, I remember, at College, old Kitty thinking Robert the Bruce was a professional boxer. Said she thought they must have said Robert the Bruise. Anyway, she wants me to go along and support her. The revels take place next week.”

  She handed to her employer the letter she had just finished reading. Dame Beatrice put aside her own correspondence and bent an appreciative eye on Kitty’s masterpiece, which she proceeded to read aloud.

  “Dear Dog,” ran the letter, “this is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. Now that the Spring fashions are over—and heaven send we can all please ourselves and don’t have to wear them unless we really want to, in which case you can include me out—and no more debs and their hair-do’s-my life is but the dust beneath the chariot wheels until the autumn. So a silly young nephew of mine has let me in for vetting and generally overseeing a sort of historical pageant and jamboree at a place he lives in called Brayne, although certain in my own mind that neither he nor it has one, or they wouldn’t have chosen me to be the pageant-master.”

  “She dishes up today’s Higher Thought there,” observed Laura.

  “Anyway,” continued Dame Beatrice, “we kick off on May seventh in honour of the town being made into a borough—although why I don’t know, it being quite a dim sort of rather small, depressing, riverside place really—and also the Feast of St Lawrence, who seems to have been a local clergyman at some time or other—anyway, the parish church is named after him.”

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Laura. “You’d never think old Kitty had been baptised and confirmed in the Church of England!”

  “By their works ye shall know them,” said Dame Beatrice, “and our dear Mrs Trevelyan-Twigg’s works are invariably selfless and inspired.”

  “Inspired is about right,” agreed Laura, grinning. “Remember at College when she burgled somebody’s hat-box? Well, I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m inclined to go along and see this great sight—viz., why the bush, meaning Kitty, is not burned. Old Kitty will get away with it all right; heaven alone knows how, but she will. If ever there was one of God’s creatures who knew how to land on her feet…”

  “Where is this town, now, apparently, elevated to the status of borough?” asked Dame Beatrice.

  “I haven’t the foggiest, as I say, but I’ll look it up as soon as we’ve finished breakfast.”

  She did this, and was able to announce that Brayne was on the Thames, not many miles from London, and on the right bank as you looked upstream; that it had a population of twenty thousand two hundred and one; had been a market town since the early Middle Ages and had since branched out to include a gasworks, a waterworks, a bypass road and a good many factories.

  “It certainly does not sound the most attractive place in the world,” commented Dame Beatrice, “but go and support Mrs Trevelyan-Twigg, by all means. I shall remove myself for a week to Carey’s pig-farm, so you had better take a week’s vacation, too.”

  “Many thanks. I’ll let old Kitty know that I’m at her disposal, then, and see whether I can cadge a week’s board and lodging at her expense at her London flat. I see she writes from there, so presumably she isn’t tied to this Brayne place morning, noon and night.”

  Kitty, as Laura had anticipated, made her more than welcome and showed her over the seven-roomed flat, a recent extravagance as the family also had a house in Sussex. Laura admired the new domicile.

  “Pretty plushy,” she pronounced. “Now what’s all this about the borough jamboree and the Feast of St Lawrence? Incidentally, just to keep the record straight, St Lawrence was not a previous incumbent of the parish of Brayne, but a deacon of the early Church who became a martyr. He lived in Rome or Carthage, I believe, in the time of the Emperor Valerian—viz., to wit, somewhere half-way into the third century, if my memory serves me. He died a revolting death on a gridiron.”

  “Good heavens, Dog!” cried the astounded Kitty. “How on earth do you know all that?”

  Laura waved a shapely hand.

  “Not to deceive you,” she replied, “Mrs Croc. did a learned paper (for some psychiatry mob who publish such things) on the psychology of martyrs, both Christian and otherwise. I was given the stuff to type. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Oh,” said Kitty, obviously relieved. “So that’s it. I thought at first you were beginning to get softening of the brain. Well, sit down and we’ll have a drink while I slip you the dope about the pageant. Lunch is in half-an-hour, if that’s all right.”

  “Good! I’m starving!”

  “Well, against the sub-committee’s supposedly better judgment,” Kitty went on, “I’ve decided to cram the whole thing into one single day. They wanted, if you please, six days of junketing, beginning with two days of market and fair. At such times, it seems, all the local yobs went around clobbering people over the head and getting girls into trouble. In fact, so far as I can make out, murder was about the most respectable crime committed. Well, I wasn’t having anything to do with any of that. “I wish no part in your sinned against and sinning,” I said. “Besides, I can’t spare the time.” You don’t blame me, Dog, do you?”

  “Assuredly not. “One crowded hour of glorious life” is my motto, and always has been.”

  “I knew you’d agree. So, between us, the special subcommittee and I have boiled it down to this: nine-thirty ack emma sharp, procession of floats moves off from the Butts en route for Squire’s Acre.”

  “The Butts? Squire’s Acre?”

  “That’s all right. After lunch I’ll take you along and show you. Pageant disperses at eleven, when pubs open. Can’t bear to keep them after that—the men, I mean. They wouldn�
��t stay, anyhow. Half-past twelve, official lunch at The Hat With Feather, two o’clock onwards a fun-fair in the local park, also other festivities in the Hall grounds.”

  “Festivities?”

  “So-called, Dog. Have another drink. Cigarette? It’s to be the usual sort of thing, and nothing on earth to do with me, thank goodness, although I shall have to show up. The primary schools will do maypole dances…”

  “In the plural?”

  “Of course. Five primary schools means five maypoles. I thought you were trained to teach?”

  “Oh, yes, I see. No mixing of the breeds, as combined rehearsals too difficult to arrange.”

  “Yes. Well, then, the Grammar School and the County Secondary Boys’ School are giving a trampoline display and will be doing stunts on the portable apparatus—buck, box and horse—and the girls are putting on Modern Dance and Free Activities.”

  “All the usual sort of stuff, as you say.”

  “You can’t beat it, Dog, if you want to bring along the parents. Then the pony club are holding a short gymkhana, to be followed by a display of dressage by Joan of Arc, Charles II and Dick Turpin.”

  “Dressage? Who are the experts?”

  “The people who are lending us the grounds of Squire’s Acre. We’ve got to butter them up because of that, so, as they suggested this dressage thing, I had to agree, although personally I find all this well-schooled horse business rather boring, and probably the result of cruelty to animals anyway.”

  “What else goes on?”

  “In the evening we really go to town. There’s to be an all-ticket show in the Town Hall. We’re hiring the Tossington Tots—repulsive little so-and-so’s!—and a couple of fairly low-life comedians whose stuff, I don’t mind wagering, will have to be vetted before it’s fit for human consumption. Then there’s a formation dance team who won’t need pay (because they’re amateurs) but who’ll have to be lushed up, needless to say, and then we’re to have a ballet from people nobody’s ever heard of, and we finish off with the combined choirs of the Grammar School and the County Secondaries, all of whom will have to be browsed and sluiced, to borrow from your favourite author, and a contribution made to their School Funds.”

  “Quite a jamboree, take it for all in all.”

  “Yes. Oh, and the drama club are giving us a scene or two from The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

  “And what are the drama club like?” Laura enquired, interested.

  “Awful! I could act the lot of them off the stage,” said Kitty modestly. Lunch was served and they were joined by Kitty’s husband.

  “Hullo, Laura darling,” he said. “Glad you could come along. I suppose Kitty has told you all about this pageant she’s mixed herself up in?”

  “I think I’ve grasped the main points,” said Laura.

  “I’m very pleased to think that she will have your support. You may be instrumental in persuading the spectators not to lynch her when the show’s over. By the way, love,” he added, turning to his wife, “if you’ve a rehearsal this evening, I’m taking Laura out to dinner.”

  “I’ve nothing but a few telephone calls to make, so you can add me to the party,” said Kitty.

  “Good thing I booked a table for four, then.”

  “Four? Who else is coming?”

  “Young Julian Perse, our nevvy, of course.”

  Kitty shuddered.

  “He’s the one who let me in for this pageant thing,” she confided to Laura. “I’ve cut him out of my will. Anyway, I’ve had my revenge. He wanted to be Henry VIII with all six wives, but I made the sub-committee put him in a car, like the Mayor and Mayoress and all the other Councillors.”

  “But how cruel!” said Laura, with a leer which would have done credit to her formidable employer.

  “Well, he is a Councillor,” retorted Kitty, “so he can go by car like the other Councillors. What’s the matter with that? So, in revenge, he’s not going to show up at the Town Hall in the evening—though I don’t really think it’s revenge.”

  “He may think himself lucky in the end,” said Laura, not knowing with what authority she spoke.

  Dinner was gay and amusing and, allowing (as Laura tactfully did) for a certain amount of youthful arrogance and cocksureness on his part, young Mr Perse acquitted himself with distinction and proved to be a pleasant addition to the party. He took to Laura immediately, made himself extremely charming to her in a discreetly flirtatious manner, gently teased his aunt, talked seriously and well to his uncle, and when dinner was over offered to run Laura round Brayne in his car, so that she could see what she was letting herself in for. This offer was flatly turned down by Kitty, who objected to the project on the grounds that she wanted Laura all in one piece for the next day’s rehearsals.

  “Of course, lots of people won’t be able to turn up for the afternoon stint because they’ll be at work,” she explained to Laura, when, young Mr Perse having been sent back to Brayne, the others had returned from the restaurant to the flat, “but so long as two or three in each party know the drill, it ought to be all right, I should think. Anyway, the schools have all promised that we can have the children, so that’s quite something, isn’t it?”

  The schools were as good as their word. At two o’clock in the afternoon the youngest members of the pageant were brought in motor coaches to Colonel Batty-Faudrey’s grounds, but as it was a troublesome and expensive business to transport five maypoles with their attendant ribbons (added to the fact that the Colonel was not anxious to have his beautiful lawn torn up more than once), the children were merely given their places and were told to “dance round teacher”, which they solemnly proceeded to do.

  The Colonel and his wife came out to oversee the revels and keep an eye on the turf. All went well, however. Each small child was in plimsolls, so were the older boys. The older girls went one better and performed their dances and their exercises barefoot. Kitty introduced Laura to the Batty-Faudrey couple, and the four stood watching from a paved enclosure just outside the garden door of the house. Giles Faudrey, Mr Perse’s bete noire, did not watch the rehearsal.

  “Well, that went off all right,” said Kitty, after she had thanked the teachers—a gesture which appeared to surprise them—and had seen the motor coaches drive off. “Now for Toc H. Three of them promised to turn up. One’s got an early-closing day, another’s a road-sweeper and said he could “look in as part of the job”, and the third one runs a bingo hall and it’s his free afternoon. So that’s all right, so long as there’s no trouble about the armour.”

  “The armour?”

  “Oh, Dog, you know how men fuss when you want them to dress up!”

  “Oh, ah, yes. They’re to be Crusaders, I think you said. What about the Mounties?”

  “The Colonel has stuck his feet in about the pony club. They’ve got to perform in his paddock. It’s an awful bore, because you know how an audience stampedes if it has to move from one place to another. Still, he’s willing to do the dressage show in the paddock, too, so it will only mean one upset, thank goodness.”

  The three Crusaders arrived separately and at intervals. None of them had tried on the armour. Kitty showed them where their float would finish up and seemed relieved when they took themselves off. Nobody else turned up at all.

  “Oh, well,” said Kitty philosophically, “I shall just have to tell them on the day, that’s all. It doesn’t really matter. The pony club can’t do any harm in the paddock, the dressage people can do their own rehearsing, and the rest, being more or less disciplined and under control, must just go where they’re told. We’ve ordered half-a-dozen policemen to keep the lorries off the lawn, so there shouldn’t be any difficulty there. It’s this evening I’m really looking forward to, when we rehearse at the Town Hall. Under cover and with chairs to sit on, thank goodness!”

  “Oh, The Merry Wives. Yes, of course.”

  “In costume, with lighting and prompter, if all goes as arranged, but you know what some of these amateur compan
ies can be like. I’d had other plans for this one, as a matter of fact. I wanted them to do the death-bed of Edward III.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “I was going to pinch for myself the fat part of Alice Perrers.”

  “Alice Perrers? Never heard of her.”

  “Oh, Dog! And you took Advanced History at college!”

  “It didn’t include anybody called Alice Perrers. What did she do?”

  “She was the king’s mistress and she winkled the rings off his fingers as he lay dying. Anyway, the company kicked up rough, so I had to abandon the idea. That’s the worst of amateurs. You’ve no hold over them, you see. Then I tried Shelley. He went to some sort of prep. school in the neighbourhood of Brayne before he was pushed off to Eton. I’d chosen the most beautiful little boy for Shelley—all golden hair and far-away grey eyes…”

  “Blimey! I bet he was a thug!”

  “Well, actually, I had to sack him because he did bite one of the other kids whose father happens to be on the Council, and, of course, I must admit he had one of those hoarse, foggy, dock-side voices, with only one vowel-sound, like they all have in Brayne, but he would have looked a dream all togged up in a Fauntleroy suit.”

  “Did Shelley wear a Fauntleroy suit?”

  “Oh, Dog, how on earth should I know? Anyway, it would have made this kid look like a late Victorian angel, and I was dead set on the idea. I’d even written the script for him, and also for Edward III.”

  “Hard cheese, to use an outmoded expression. So we’re left with The Merry Wives. How much are they giving us?”

  “A lot less than they wanted to. “By the time we’ve had the Tossington Tots, the two cross-talk merchants, the formation team, the ballet and the combined choirs,” I said to them, “you’ll get about twenty minutes, take it or leave it.” There was a lot of argument, of course, but I stuck to my guns, so now they’re giving us Falstaff in the laundry basket, and then him as the fat woman of Brentford, and that sort of low gag, and that’s about all. They don’t love me much. Besides, I’ve had to bowdlerise some of the script.”