‘Ah, yes, the Ladies’ Guild,’ said Clarice, taking up the cue, as Dame Beatrice had intended that she should. ‘That’s just it. Caxton is being obstructive, so we wondered whether – your profession, you know – your power over the mind…’
‘Caxton is being obstructive? But, dear Mrs Blaine, I am a psychiatrist, not a necromancer or a medium for spirits; neither have I any personal experience of the ouija board.’
Clarice Blaine stared and then half-heartedly laughed, uncertain whether the remarks were made seriously or not.
‘No, no. You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Our Caxton is not the real Caxton, of course. He happens to bear the same name, that’s all. It was his name and, of course, the date, which gave me the idea for the Ladies’ Guild pageant.’
‘He calls himself William Caxton?’
‘That is his name. What makes it so interesting is that, in an amateur way, he also is a printer.’
‘Yes, these bizarre occupations do seem to run in families,’ said Dame Beatrice absently, her thoughts busy with A.C. Swinburne, T.E. Lawrence and now W. Caxton and R. Crashaw. She recollected herself. ‘Will you take another cup of tea? And do help yourself to the cakes.’
‘Thank you, yes, another cup, if you please, and, do you know, in spite of my doctor’s orders, I believe I will have another of these delicious morsels. Well, as I was saying, it seemed such a good idea to have a Caxton pageant, but, of course, we need Caxton himself to lead it. Can you believe, though, that he refuses, absolutely refuses to have anything to do with it? Well, as I said to him, how can we have a Caxton pageant without Caxton?’
‘You could get someone to impersonate him, could you not?’
‘Oh, but, Dame Beatrice, what an anticlimax when we could get the real man,’
‘But, dear Mrs Blaine, your Caxton is not the real man.’
‘He must be a lineal descendant. You said yourself that these things run in families.’
‘So I did. I should be interested to meet your William Caxton.’
‘And compel him to do his duty and lead our pageant? How delighted I am to hear you say so! Well, that is the first of my tiresome requests got out of the way. The last time I called on him he showed me the door, but he will find that I am not to be deterred by a mere exhibition of ill-manners. I shall beard him again in the person of someone…’ she looked with satisfaction at Dame Beatrice’s sharp black eyes, claw-hands and beaky little mouth – ‘someone whom he will find impossible to withstand.’
‘Well, I promise nothing. However, in so good a cause as the Caxton pageant,’ said Dame Beatrice, with a crocodile grin, ‘I shall do my best to persuade this young man. Is he young?’
‘In his thirties, I would say.’
‘To a centenarian like myself that must seem young.’ Mrs Blaine’s large and arrogant face wore an expression to which it was unaccustomed, an expression of doubt and perplexity. She essayed what she hoped was a light laugh and decided to change the subject.
‘We come now,’ she said, as she had said so often when taking the chair at her Ladies’ Guild, ‘to an equally important but totally different matter.’ Her face changed its expression to one with which Hamilton Haynings would have been uneasily familiar. ‘It concerns my second request and is a matter of extreme urgency and considerable delicacy. Dame Beatrice, the Caxton Festival cannot produce The Beggar’s Opera.’
‘I thought Dr Denbigh was producing it,’ said Dame Beatrice innocently.
‘You do not grasp my meaning. Neither I nor the Ladies’ Guild can countenance the production of such a piece in Chardle. It is not only vulgar, it is immoral.’
‘Dear me! What could poor John Gay have been thinking of to write such a thing?’
‘I can tell you what he was thinking of. He was thinking of the criminal classes. He was thinking of thieves and highwaymen; of the receivers of stolen goods; of pickpockets and prostitutes; of illegitimate children and of co-habitation outside the sanctity of marriage. The piece has not one single uplifting or ennobling theme or thought. It is disgracefully improper. My son, a child of sixteen years, has been given the part of Filch, a pickpocket, and words cannot express the horror I felt when, upon glancing through the copy of the words with which, at my request, Dr Denbigh had supplied me, my eye lighted upon one of the speeches which my son will be required to make. I am fully and disapprovingly aware, Dame Beatrice, that we live in a decadent and so-called permissive age, but surely…’
‘I am convinced that you need have no fear,’ said Dame Beatrice, as words appeared, for once in her masterful career, to fail Mrs Blaine. ‘I am familiar with the text of The Beggar’s Opera and I have no doubt that Dr Denbigh will sufficiently expurgate the text to make it acceptable to the Ladies’ Guild and the other unsullied minds of Chardle. Sir Nigel Playfair himself thought it better not to include those lines in your son’s speech to which I think you refer.’
‘I am relieved to hear it, but that does not alter the fact that this profligate piece extols and approves the drunken skylarkings of…’
‘Pimps, trulls and trollops?’
‘You appear to take the matter light-heartedly, Dame Beatrice!’
‘Surely that is the way John Gay intended it to be taken?’
‘But the characters he depicts! I repeat – highwaymen, pickpockets, receivers of stolen goods! Every man in it, including the prison authorities, is an infamous scoundrel. As for the so-called “ladies of the town”, in other words the drabs of Drury Lane…’
‘Lewkner’s Lane,’ amended Dame Beatrice solemnly. ‘In fact, we are told that some of the ladies came from as far away as Hockley-in-the-Hole. Macheath must have had great charm and, “although the bank hath stopped payment”, to have been generously free with his money.’
‘You appear to be extremely familiar with the text, Dame Beatrice,’ said poor Clarice, striving vainly, although valiantly, to keep disapproval out of her voice, ‘but perhaps you have used it as an exercise in the psychology of human depravity. The frailty of human nature…’
‘Particularly the frailty of women, to whom the author gives, in the person of Mrs Peachum (to be played, to her great delight, by Laura) some excellent advice. May I quote?’
‘Please do,’ said Mrs Blaine stiffly, ‘if you see any point in doing so.’
‘She says,’ continued Dame Beatrice in her beautiful voice, ‘ “Yes, indeed, the sex is frail. But the first time a woman is frail she should be somewhat nice, methinks, for then or never is the time to make her fortune.” So pleasant to have the word “nice” correctly used, don’t you think? The speech of the eighteenth century was so eminently superior to our present-day slipshod methods of using and misusing the language.’
‘I am not aware of being slipshod or of misusing the language,’ said Clarice, ‘and I still think the piece is utterly unsuitable for public performance in Chardle.’
‘You are of Jeeves’s opinion, perhaps, that “what pleases the London public is not always so acceptable to the rural mind. The metropolitan touch sometimes proves a trifle too exotic for the provinces”. May I ask whether you are alone in your disapproval of the piece?’
‘Unfortunately, this appears to be so.’
‘Then I suppose there is nothing to be done but to accept the democratic principle that the wishes of the majority must be respected.’
‘Democracy is the most inefficient form of government ever invented!’ snorted Clarice angrily.