Au Reservoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

rang for Foljambe to fetch her hat, gloves and shopping basket.
    A few minutes later she was in the High Street. A small knot of Tillingites was already formed and loitering casually in front of Twistevant’s. So, she thought grimly, the story had already been spread. Well, she was equal to the challenge.
    ‘Good morning, good morning,’ she called merrily as she approached. Major Flint, Mr Wyse and the Reverend Kenneth Bartlett (known universally as the Padre) raised their hats respectfully.
    ‘Any news?’ asked Diva Plaistow, with what in a less transparent person might almost have passed for guile.
    ‘Oh, nothing really, just a call from Georgie, who’s enjoying himself up in town. He rang me yesterday evening to tell me he was going out to dinner with Noël Coward and John Gielgud. I had suggested it to Noël too, of course, once I knew my Georgino was going to be up in town, but I was so glad they managed it. Nice of them to include Olga, as well. I’m sure that’s the main reason Georgie arranged it, poor lamb. He is so fond of her, you know.’
    The group gazed at her blankly, and none more so than Diva.
    ‘So it was all Georgie’s idea?’ she asked lamely.
    ‘Mine actually, dear,’ Lucia said with another of those silvery little laughs for which she was justly famous. ‘I would have gone too myself, of course, but as you know I decided to go to darling Riseholme instead, and now I’m so frightfully busy here in Tilling with all my committees. How you all work me so!’
    Elizabeth Mapp-Flint was, however, made of sterner stuff than Diva Plaistow.
    ‘So,’ she said with her usual heavy irony, ‘Georgie, who lives in Tilling and has never met these two actors before, arranges to introduce them to a fellow performer who lives in London and attends show business parties every night of the week?’
    ‘Something like that, yes,’ Lucia replied airily. ‘Of course, I’m sure it’s always possible that she might have been on nodding terms with them already, but dinner, a chance to exchange ideas, discuss the opera and so forth – oh, yes, that sounds so like Georgino. Why I recognised his hand in it at once.’
    Mapp appeared unconvinced.
    ‘But of course, he had already called and told me all about it in advance, so I knew anyway,’ Lucia concluded with a winning smile.
    ‘I say, how thrilling,’ enthused Diva. ‘To think of our own Mr Georgie dining with such famous people!’
    ‘Famous perhaps,’ commented Mapp, who still fondly believed that her Thursday afternoon visits to the Plaza Cinema in Hastings when she was supposed to be changing her book at Boots’ lending library remained a closely guarded secret, ‘but hardly royal.’
    ‘No indeed,’ Mr Wyse agreed, with a bow out over the marshes in the direction of Grebe, where the Mapp-Flints lived. ‘We must not forget that Major and Mrs Mapp-Flint have entertained a Maharajah, no less.’
    ‘An honour to us all, ye ken,’ the Padre concurred rather warily. The Maharajah was still a bone of contention between Mapp and Lucia, the latter having gone so far as to doubt His Royal Highness’s existence when the former failed to produce him on cue for tea at Mallards.
    ‘Yes, of course, Padre,’ Lucia said firmly. ‘An honour indeed. Such a shame, Elizabeth, that you were not able to entice him over to Mallards. Why, you could have shown him where you used to live.’
    Mr Wyse winced. It was still a sore point with the Mapp-Flints that they had been unable to afford to continue living in Mallards after Mapp’s experiments on the stock exchange proved rather less fruitful than Lucia’s, and thus had been forced to exchange Mallards for Grebe (a house then occupied by Lucia and Georgie which, though a fine, stylish residence, was on the marshes and prone to flooding) together with what everyone except Elizabeth considered a very generous sum of money.
    ‘So kind, Lulu dear,’ countered Mapp, ‘how very like you. Unfortunately he had