Chapter Thirty

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The Edible Possibles of Mrs. DaFarge and The Apparent Artlessness of Delphinium Bedroom-Slipper


Peveral Murkin and Ermentrude Pinkley and daff Maud Bunkum, much out of breath and glad to be recovered from the day’s unfortunate distractions, were sitting ‘round the large centre table in the refurbished, renamed and vastly improved Mrs. Eulilie DaFarge’s Tea Cosy & Espresso Bar (under new management, Mrs. DaFarge, proprietress, no cappuccini served after 10.30am). In front of them was an impressively gaudy pink Belique teapot in the shape of a seashell, and at each of the perfectly arranged place settings were matching plates and cups and saucers. “So much more inviting, don’t you think,” remarked Peveral Murkin, “than the chipped, cracked and mismatched Royal Doulton Mrs. Begonia Throttle was forever rescuing from charity shops.” “One doesn’t like to speak ill of the dead,” responded Ermentrude Pinkley, nodding her head, “but her thriftiness was extremely unattractive. One only has to sample one of Mrs. DaFarge’s scones to be struck by their quality.” “Yes,” added Daff Maud Bunkum, for good measure. “Cheapness made Begonia’s face shrivel up like a prune. Besides, when one ate her food, one never knew quite what it was one was eating.”

“Perfectly true,” remarked a fourth personality at the table (seated directly opposite Peveral Murkin). “When she cleared the tables, she used to take all the uneaten bits and pieces back to the kitchen. Flossie Dirigible, who was stepping out with Lairy Bogbug at the time, used to say Mrs. Throttle would cut away all the nibbled bits, glue the scones and cakes back together with flour and water paste and pink icing and serve them up the following day.”

“So they say, so they say,” countered Peveral Murkin sagely, “although to be fair to Mrs. Begonia Throttle (of Blessed Memory) one must take care to separate rumour from fact.”

“I suppose you’re right,” mused the occupant of the fourth chair, who looked very much like The Mud Monster, “but as Mrs. Throttle herself liked to say, ‘nobody believes the truth anyway, so why bother, and besides, rumour is much more fun’”

“If it hadn’t been for her scurrilous rags,” interjected the occupant of the fifth chair, referring to Mrs. Throttle’s stable of tabloids, “Oinka The Pig would still be selling faggots and mash from her stall in the flea market and be none the worse for wear.”

There was a startled silence, after which The Mud Monster looked directly at the fifth chair (whose occupant was so very small as to be practically invisible) and glowered. “I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure.”

Teeny tiny Libbedy Spider, who was that very small individual, blushed crimson and spluttered, “I didn’t mean to offend, honest I didn’t.”

“Then why did you say it?” scolded The Mud Monster.

“What I meant (only I couldn’t get the words out right) was that the publicity from Mrs. Throttle’s tabloids helped to increase Oinka’s fame. It made her a celebrity, only Begonia didn’t know when to stop, which is why Oinka eventually had a nervous breakdown and went into hiding.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” huffed The Mud Monster. “In any case, it’s none of your business.”

“That’s the whole point,” replied Libbedy. “What the tabloids were writing was none of anybody’s business, even if some of it was true.”

“None of it was true,” sighed The Mud Monster, “not even the items Oinka sold to Mrs. Throttle to support her family.”

“Ohhh?” said the other occupants of the table in unison, before falling silent and staring into space with embarrassed expressions.

Peveral Murkin picked up the teapot and refilled the cups, after which he took a fresh teacake and passed the plate to the right (after first offering a cake to Ermentrude Pinkley, who was seat on his left).

“I do miss her,” signed the fifth member of the party, “I really do. Mrs. Throttle, I mean. We all knew she could serve the same items over and over again for a month before giving up on them, but, you know, there was something special about her.”

“There most certainly was,” snapped Mrs. DaFarge, who happened to be passing the table on her way to the office. “It was called greed!” And with that, the new owner, carrying a large stack of ledgers, disappeared into the small office at the back.

“Mrs. Throttle kept her all her accounts in her head, she did,” sighed daff Maud, “she must have been impossibly intelligent.”

“Impossibly crooked, more like it,” interjected Ermentrude Pinkley. “From what I hear, she was bleeding the county dry.”

The five at the table sighed in unison and fell silent for a couple of minutes, after which they refilled their cups once again from Mrs. DaFarge’s gaudily delicate pink teapot, so reminiscent of the seaside, and ordered an exceptionally large plate of Battenburg cake.

***
Some distance away and dangling just below the topmost branch of a very, very tall and large tree, the evil twin wellingffomething-ffomething sisters, Muffin and Wambledy-Jane, were swinging in the afternoon breeze. Both had their eyes tightly closed against the possibility of seeing something unfulfilling, and both were screaming. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” they screamed, and then again, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Their plight was helped not at all by various factors which seemed, for whatever reason, to have ganged up against them.

The first of these were the two rapacious great orangy, hairy creatures (Miss Havering’s favourite Setters, named Bountiful and Brutus-Louise, respectively) who swung beneath them at the end long, leather leads which were attached (fortunately for them) to their harnesses and not their collars. These two creatures were even more fearful of great heights than the sisters, and although they did their best to howl in horror, the very horror of their circumstance had sealed their lower gums to their uppers, and the best they could do was emit a somewhat pathetic (although suitably well-intended) whine, something like “Whine whine whiiiiiiiiiiii.e.”

The other ends of their leads here clasped in the hands of what could be called an even more important (perhaps even the most important, though not necessarily) factor. Miss Havering. Miss Havering neither screamed nor whined, not even a little bit. Miss Havering, more than ever aware of her position as granddaughter of The General, was considering her options. Although it was not the first time she had sat on the topmost branch of a very, very tall and large tree, it was the first time she had been catapulted into that position by an errant phaeton. “All things considered,” she told herself somewhat severely, “it is far wiser to climb, and if we should ever return to this position in the future, we shall keep that in mind.”

Whilst she was considering possible courses of action, Miss Havering looked down to get her bearings. It was a very, very long way, and it seemed to her that the entire household was clustered around the tree, looking up and gesticulating wilding and speaking in unsuitably loud voices. “How very small and inconsequential they are,” she said to herself, “and how badly it reflects on us.” She took a small piece of barley sugar from one of her many pockets and popped it into her mouth, counting, as she did so, the small line-up of servants. “When The General was alive, there were so many more of them.”

Miss Havering looked down over her left shoulder and considered the state of The Big House. “Those chimneys want doing. And what is that monstrous white fuzzy thing on Grandpapa’s memorial spire? And why is everything such a dreadful ruin?”

She sighed heavily and sucked on the sweet. Looking down again, she noticed that several of the servants (which ones she could not say what with them being so very far away) were propping what appeared to be a very short ladder against the tree.

“What do they hope to gain by that?” she said, before extracting a silver flask of Auld Ram’s Fundament from another pocket and taking a swig. “If they have the time to play silly buggers with a ladder, then they have too much time on their hands.” And with that, she unhooked a tiny mother-of-pearl inlaid, silver bound ivory notepad and a silver pencil from her chatelaine. “One shall make a note of this for future reference: ‘servants bored; too much time on their hands; house is falling down; summon Sturdge’.”

Miss Havering replaced the pencil and notepad on their hooks and went into a reverie. Sturdge! Horrible, ugly, cruel, brutal Sturdge! The General’s batman and later his overseer. What a terrible, terrible man he was, and how wonderfully he ran the estate and farms. Like clockwork. Never any decay or waste while he was in charge. She sighed deeply and absentmindedly swung her legs back and forth. Back and forth, back and forth, a little girl on a swing, being pushed back and forth back and forth by the monstrous Sturdge (albeit a very tender, considerate monstrous Sturdge when it came to serving little girls). Miss Havering sighed once again and then a third time. Sturdge had never died, he was far too strong and terrible for that. Even when he had become embarrassing and horribly insane and The General had been forced to blow him up with black powder and beat his head in with an anvil, he had not succumbed. How tiresome it had been, sealing him up in a lead-lined slate and concrete sarcophagus, only to discover some ten years later he was stronger than ever (and even more horribly insane). The General revived him, of course, with a glass of his fourth-best brandy (not even proper Cognac or Armagnac, but a concoction distilled for the curing of temperance among the lesser clergy), whereupon Sturdge immediately beat fourteen undergardeners for partaking of dinner on the Sabbath, re-mortared twenty miles of wall, slaughtered twelve fat boars, butchered them, brined their heads for fromage de tête and cured three hundred pounds of bacon. He was preparing to train an army of three hundred farmers’ lads to protect the estate from possible invasion by the Moghul hoards when The General personally rendered him unconscious with a nude statue of Heracles and put him back into his sarcophagus.

“Our darling granddaughter,” General Lord Havering had said afterwards over the port and walnuts, “after we are gone, Sturdge will be thy vassal, at thy side at all times, prepared to do thy bidding at a moment’s notice. We have placed the key to his prison on thy chatelaine. Use him wisely.”

Many decades had come and gone since that fateful night, the night of The General’s own demise, and never once had Miss Havering availed herself of the batman’s services. “We have grown so frightfully ancient,” she said to herself, “but looking down from this vantage point, it is clear to us that our beloved house might not outlive us. We shall not allow it to crumble around us. It is time for Sturdge to put things right.” She swallowed the remains of her sweet and bellowed down at her servants. “You!” she roared, glaring down at her servants (the ones not yet yielding to the temptation of tea and one of Mrs. Beasley’s marmalade and bull’s pancreas tarts), “Stop dithering with that ladder. Tell Edders to strap himself into our climbing chair and to bring with him two of our stoutest and longest ropes!” Whereupon Mortimer and T’reasa, the only two remaining at the base of the tree, curtsied in the French manner and scuttled into the house. “Will you look at them!” sighed Miss Havering. “Not a single brain cell between them.” quickly adding, “At least they do not breed.”

While she waited for the servants to re-emerge from the house with her climbing chair and the required lengths of rope, Miss Havering cast her mind back to the several occasions on which she had scaled (in commemoration of the various jubilee years) The Matterhorn, Mount Everest, The Andes and Los Torres del Paine (the latter ascent made on her twenty-first birthday explorations of El Seno de Ultima Esperanza). Naturally on these endeavours the chair had been worn by the massively strong and dependable Sturdge, but with him being locked away in his sarcophagus and with the only key being safely secreted on her person, Edders would have to make do, and Miss Havering reminded herself that on this occasion she was only up a tree and not a cliff.

“Unless one is rendered a corpse by Edders (should he drop us fatally to the ground, he shall be dismissed without a reference) one shall celebrate our forthcoming anniversary in The Himalayas. Sturdge shall, of course, accompany us, and together (with our person strapped to his mighty back) we shall be the first lady of breeding to conquer twelve shimmering spires of an afternoon.”

While she was reliving past mountaineering triumphs and dreaming of those to come, Miss Havering’s legs started swinging back and forth again, back and forth, back and forth, even more vigorously, as though in gleeful anticipation of glories to come. So vigorous and reckless were her movements that, before she knew it, her two gumboots were cast off into the wind and sailed westward over the bog. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” screamed the startled and frightened Sisters Wellingffomething-ffomething, (who were, for the first time in years not necessarily evil and could, therefore, be spoken about in normal-seized print). “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee”, shrieked Muffin, while at the same time remembering to hold her skirts closed to avoid a scandal. “Wheeeeeeee!” echoed an elated (and possibly ecstatic) Wambledy-Jane, who not only was not modestly clasping her skirts to her person but was sailing with her arms outstretched and her face into the wind.

“What on earth are you doing?” shouted Muffin.

“Oh, Muffy,” replied her sister, “we are free!”

“On the contrary,” shouted Muffin, more than a little aggrieved at being called ‘Muffy’, “we are about to meet our maker!”

“How wonderful,” screeched Wambledy-Jane, elated.

Muffin looked at her sister sternly for a second, before being distracted by two rust-coloured leggy and furry objects sailing along beneath them. “Oh my,” she muttered to herself. “How very inconvenient!”

“Did you say something, Muffin?” yelled her sister, still oblivious to any impending doom.

“I said we are not alone,” replied her sister in an exasperated tone of voice.

“Of course we are not alone,” laughed Wambledy-Jane. “Old Mister Snort is nigh!”

Two seconds of complete and stunned silence followed, during which a flock of small birds, cross at finding two rather large and tattered rubber boots soaring along in their midst, glared at them severely and made uncalled for remarks.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeee!” shrieked Muffin, noticing that the ground was fast approaching, “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

“Ooooooooooof,” said Wambledy-Jane, as she tumbled head over heals and came to rest in a soft mound of earth.

“Oooooooooof,” echoed her sister, and then, “Owwwwwww!” as she landed bottom first in a bramble.

“Yelp! Yelp! Yelp!” screamed the two large, orangey, rapacious creatures, Miss Havering’s favourite setters, as they fell into a nearby bog pond with a splash and a thud.

The four of them cautiously examined their bruises while they caught their breaths and looked around, after which Muffin glowered at the two enormous and inconveniently muddy dogs. “Come, Bountiful! Come Brutus-Louise!” she barked, “Come here!”

The two dogs struggled out of the pond, shook themselves free of goo and trotted eagerly toward the spot where the boots had landed.

“Sit!” commanded Muffin, quickly adding, stay!”

***
The occupants of the large round centre table in Mrs. Eulilie DaFarge’s Tea Cosy & Espresso Bar (under new management, Mrs. DaFarge, proprietress, no cappuccini served after 10.30am and scones baked to order) had finished eating the last of the Battenburg.

Mrs. DaFarge happened to be surveying the proceedings from the door of her small office and recalled an earlier conversation with one of her nearest and dearest friends.

“Battenburg?” her friend had gasped in horror. “You serve Battenburg?”

“I know, I know! It’s dreadfully common but so are most of my customers,” a sighing Mrs. DaFarge had retorted to Missus Ridglet-Grassworm over dry sherry and tiny sandwiches at The Women’s Institute ‘Accommodating The Working Classes’ Committee Strategy Session earlier that day. “One simply is obliged to compromise, isn’t one?”

“But Eulilie, dear,” continued Missus Ridglet-Grassworm sadly before devouring another cress and pâte de cuisses de grenouille soldier, “you must remember your position! Fine Darjeeling from those dreadful shell cups? It is simply too much!”

“You must try to be more magnanimous, my dear Euphemia,” replied Mrs. DaFarge, “and take comfort in the fact I have not as yet hung the seventy-three Beswick ducks on the walls.”

“Oh, Eulilie,” sobbed Missus Ridglet-Grassworm. “What is the world coming to?”

“Baked beans on toast and mash, I expect,” said Mrs. DaFarge, sadly, “or immense plates of sausages and chips and tomato sauce,” adding bleakly, “or Kabobs at three in the morning and binge drinking.”

“Too, too horrible!” swooned Missus Ridglet-Grassworm, gulping down the last of the cucumber and dill on Melba toast squares.

“Never you mind, Euphemia,” chortled Mrs. DaFarge heartily, “and rest assured those dreadful cups will never darken the tannin of my best Darjeeling!”

“How very wonderful you are, Eulilie,” responded Missus Ridglet-Grassworm with a sigh. “I do not see how you manage it all, and at your age!”

***
Within twenty or so minutes, Muffin and Wambledy-Jane had extracted themselves from their muddy splodges and clambered aboard the setters, Muffin on the sleek Bountiful and the plumper Wambledy-Jane on the ancient, fat and doddering Brutus-Louise.

“This is better,” sighed Muffin, squoodging herself about and settling nicely in the middle of Bountiful’s strong, slender back.

“If mummy could only see us now,” beamed Wambledy-Jane. “She hadn’t stopped turning in her grave ever since that day Herself first used us so very poorly.

“Hmph!” replied her sister stoutly, “Mummy this! Mummy that! Please get it into your head that it was Mummy who was responsible for our plight!”

“How can you say that,” cried Wambledy-Jane, “It was Old Mister Snort who sold us into slavery. I shall never forget the sticker on our box until the day I die! ‘Used Ladies’ Gumboots, One Owner, £ -/ 2/6, slightly soiled’. Even thinking about it makes me go all strange.”

“You forgot the three farthings,” commented Muffin dryly.

“How could you?” wept Wambledy-Jane bitterly. “How could you even bear to remember… to remind… oh, oh, oh…” At which point the elderly plumpish and slightly scarred Wellington boot broke down in a flood of tears.

“There, there,” cooed her sister, thumping her on the back with her riding crop. “That is all in the past, my dear. We cannot go back, not any more.”

“You’re right,” snuffled Wambledy-Jane, “and I’m sorry for breaking down like that! It’s just that it was all so very cruel and unnecessary.”

“The past is a dark and murky realm, my dear sister,” said Muffin in a wise tone of voice. “It does not take kindly to visits from old acquaintances. Best to go forward, Wambledy-Jane, onward and upward.”

“But I can’t help thinking of her from time to time,” sighed Wambledy-Jane, “she was my daughter and had such a pretty smile and such beautiful hair.”

“Delphinium Bedroom-Slipper had very little smile to speak of, and even less hair,” said Muffin Wellingffomething-ffomething to herself. “She was a nasty, ungrateful little girl and deserved everything she got.”

“Did you say something, Muffin?” asked Wambledy-Jane, coming out of her reverie.

“Just clearing my throat, my dear sister, just clearing my throat,” replied Muffin wearily, adding in a commanding voice, “Walk on, dog, walk on!”

Copyright 2007 JA Weeks