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 companies 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.”
“You’ve what?”
“Well, Shakespeare can be terribly coarse when he likes, Dog. Not at all a man to be trusted when there are teen-agers in the audience.”
“I shouldn’t think kids would understand Elizabethan bawdy, and, anyway, I don’t remember much of it in The Merry Wives.”
“As the mother of children of school age,” said Kitty primly, “I am not taking chances.”
“Are your offspring going to be present at the pageant, then?”
“No, thank goodness! I haven’t even told them we’re doing it. I shall send each of them a souvenir programme and a hamper of tuck, but only when everything is safely over.”
CHAPTER THREE
Town Hall Rehearsal
“…it would seem that there are good reasons for believing that Brentford was the scene of human activity at a very early period of civilisation.”
« ^ »
The Town Hall rehearsal, which took place at half-past seven that same evening, had both a comic and a sinister aspect. The Tossington Tots’ manageress had demanded what the special sub-committee agreed was an unnecessarily high fee for allowing her charges to attend the rehearsal, and there had been an acrimonious correspondence and some frenzied telephone calls before the chairman had given in to what he regarded (and said so, in very plain terms) as extortion. The Tots themselves seemed happy enough but their manageress was haughty and tight-lipped to begin with, and then proceeded to find fault with the dressing-room and to comment acidly upon the primitive nature of the pulley which operated the curtain.
Even Kitty’s sunny good-temper was sorely tried and, when the Tots had left the Town Hall, and Laura remarked with candour, that she “would have dotted that woman one,” Kitty was compelled to admit that to have done so would have relieved her feelings to quite an appreciable extent.
The cross-talk comedians did not turn up. They had promised to send a script to be submitted to, and vetted by, the special sub-committee, but this had not been received. The woman member was in agreement with Kitty, who said she was sure that some of the jokes would have to be toned down or, preferably, left out altogether, but, as the chairman pointed out, this was not the B.B.C. Home Service; it was only what people would be used to. Brayne, he insisted, was not a mealy-mouthed town, and people liked a bit of a laugh, the rest of the programme being, he thought, suitable only for the egg-heads.
The formation dance team turned up in what Kitty particularised as dribs and drabs, but finally all arrived. They condemned the stage as being much too small, divided their numbers into two sets of eight, re-arranged their routine and took up so much of the time that the chairman looked several times at his watch and muttered that the hall was only booked until ten o’clock and that the caretaker would want to lock up and go home to his supper. The ballet, who had become very restive, cried off. They knew the stage and the hall, they said, and could not put up with any more hanging about. Kitty apologised charmingly for the delay and thanked them for coming. Their ballet-mistress, who had been screaming at them in Italian in the dressing-room, at this looked extremely disdainful, and withdrew her troupe in haughty silence. Kitty made an unseemly grimace behind the massive, Moomin-like back.