(Scene 4 Part 1 - The Kensington Gore Ladies Croquet Club)
Kensington Gardens on a morning bright with summer. Of all the places on which the sun never sets this is the most golden. Radiance lingers longest here.
With gritted teeth gumption, Mrs Frederick Eynsford-Hill urged her bicycle in an arc across the lawn. Even on grass mown, watered and rolled over the centuries pedalling was hard work. She had almost to stand up in the stirrups to gain any traction at all.
‘Hold on,’’ she called. Her voice, unlikely as it may have been at that moment, was viola stroked by moonlight. Turning she struck out hard towards the tasselled croquet hoop, whirling her mallet overhead as she did. She had perfected the knack of keeping gears and crinolines unsnarled for everyday locomotion but her recent invention of bicycle croquet was altogether more demanding.
Looking up at her target, she shouted, ‘Have you moved the bloody hoop, Ally?’ She corrected the line of her front wheel just enough for the rubber tire to connect with her wild swing. At once she dislodged the tire from the wheel, snapped the mallet and lost control of the bicycle. She twisted into the path of the oncoming Miss Alice Lutwidge, herself hard pedalling to put on speed and holding her mallet outstretched for balance. Each making a final effort to remain in control by pushing harder down on the pedals, they brought both bicycles in a tangled heap of ironmongery on the grass.
Bonnets askew, in rumpled gowns and corsetry, the two women burst into laughter.
‘I did tell you it wasn’t going to work, didn’t I?’ said Alice.
‘Well, perhaps, we just need wider wheels or something like that. And for you to look where you’re going, too, Ally!’
Then the sun was blocked out and they looked up into the smiling face of Miss Gwendolyn Darling, framed in a broad brimmed hat.
‘You’d have been better off with the flamingos you had in the story, Alice,’ she said. ‘At least they could have kept their heads out of the wheels.’ And that started them laughing again. The laughter subsided towards panting giggles on the arrival of a fourth cyclist, Mrs Vivie Raffles. One hand on the handlebars and another holding her parasol raised, she made it all look rather easy. Dismounting, she took from the pannier a Gladstone bag.
‘Well, ladies, I’m so glad to see that we’re all having such fun on this lovely morning. But I come bearing a puzzlement for us all that will certainly offer a distraction. It may well turn out to be something altogether more sinister that will lend itself to entertainments unimaginable.’ She posed like a conjuror announcing a new trick.
‘Oh tell us immediately,’ said Alice, ‘please. You must!’
‘Yes do, please,’ said Eliza Eynsford-Hill, disentangling herself from her machine, ‘anything at all that will give me a chance to abandon my bicycle while retaining my dignity.’
‘Well, it is a show rather than a tell, said Vivie Raffles and we need to do it somewhere very private. Let’s go up to the club room. Now shush’, she said, ‘all explanations will be forthcoming in but a few minutes.’
There was hardly any traffic on Kensington Gore, just a couple of hansom cabs, a horse drawn bus, a delivery cart or two and some of the new motor cars that were being seen in ever increasing numbers in that part of London. The women crossed quickly, walking their bicycles. They paused for a moment for a Wolesley and a Daimler that looked to have to been speeding at least at twenty miles an hour. Then they weaved their way on across the Gore. Alice gazed for a moment after the passing cars.
‘Oh Alice,’ said Gwendolyn, noticing her, ‘they’re just mechanised hooligans not knights of yore.’
‘’The rozzers will have you for racing,’ Eliza shouted after them, laughing.
‘Eliza, you really shouldn’t scream like that in public, it does draw attention,’ said Vivie Raffles.
‘I’m an actress; we have a certain licence.’
‘You can stand over on the steps of the Albert Memorial and sign autographs for all I care,’ said, Vivie, ‘but please try to remember we have good reasons not to be overly conspicuous’.
‘You could offer a kiss with every autograph,’ said Gwendolyn, ‘a queue would be guaranteed.’
‘Right as far as Harrods, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Alice, putting on her most innocent face. ‘Your notices are excellent they say. And since it unaccountably pops into my head, how is Mr Rassendyll?’
‘Soon all the bicycle manufactures will have turned to motor cars,’ said Eliza, ignoring them, ‘think of the noise.’
You’ve just turned against automobiles because no one would take you on the Paris to Madrid run’, said Gwendolyn, who rather liked the American sound of “automobile”.
Eliza nudged Alice as they reached the curb, ‘the thing with the flamingos and all,’ she said, ‘that was just a story wasn’t it?’
‘Well it must have been of course but it was all so long ago. Sometimes it’s hard to keep everything straight in my head – some things that seem real could not have been, obviously, but then others improbably might be. I try my hardest not think about it, really, but then sometimes it all enters my head like a remembered dream. Then there are so many questions. I should have asked him more before he died, I expect. But then I didn’t and now it is too late.’
‘Vivie says it was really all about Mrs Hargreaves, the cricketer’s wife,’ said Eliza.
Sidelong, Alice Lutwidge gave Mrs Eynsford-Hill a curtly raised eyebrow.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘Mrs Hargreaves grew up and became sensible.’ Whereas I am playing silly bicycle games with you,’ she smiled. ‘You can make up your own mind on the whole subject.’
The four women were now at the entrance to the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences, dedicated in love by Queen Victoria to her consort, Albert. In the foyer there was a small door. It was inconspicuous – the sort of door that, in the everyday world, guarded a cupboard of mops, brooms and buckets. But the key that Vivie Raffles produced didn’t look as if it was meant to fit a humble lock. The locksmith that made it had evidently been much concerned to ensure that replication was a fiendishly difficult task and the intricacies of its cut said as much. The ladies waited, looking over their shoulders to make sure that no one passing was taking any special interest in them. The key was turned, the door opened onto a small oak panelled room with no windows or any other door. The four entered, still wheeling their bicycles, and closed the door behind them. The key was used again in a hidden lock set inside one of the panels – and with a bump and jerk the room began its ascent.
‘Your father was a bit erm... unusual, they say. I’m only saying what is widely spoken of,’ Eliza continued in her conversation with Alice.
‘Well, he was my guardian. I called him my father and still do out of respect and he was really a good father to me, Eliza. And, well yes, I mean practically obviously he was a bit out of the usual run of things that you’d expect,’ said Alice, ‘but not in a bad way, truly. Mind you I sometimes had a creepy feeling that one day he would take me into a dark room, shuttered off from sunlight, and try to teach me arithmetic.’
‘It does all come down to numbers in the end,’ said Vivie Raffles. ‘In any of my ventures you just have to look a bit further than the plush velvet and gilded mirrors and there will be a small room and in this room will be a safe and in that safe will be a ledger packed with numbers. If we’re lucky some cash too, of course.’
‘For me also, in a way, said, Eliza Eynsford-Hill. There is no art without box office. No laughter, no tears and certainly no applause without the chink of shillings.’ She bowed extravagantly.
‘And in the wake of swashbuckling pirates - have at you, Liza!’ Gwendolyn mimed a cutlass thrust, ‘come the tea clippers’.
‘Not tea, this minute, Wendy,’ said Eliza firmly; ‘there shall be a cork popped for the richly deserved toasting of commerce just as soon as we have heard Vivie’s thrilling secret.’
Another bump and the oak panelled room had arrived at its destination.
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