Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [52]
After much laughter and applause and another round of drinks, Posy, Nico, and Fred retire to the library to get into costume for the first syllable of their word (CATASTROPHE). Nico and Fred, now in shirtsleeves, are fitted with colorful sashes and black rubber boots (Posy calls them “Wellies”) and breadknife daggers. They represent pirates and will soon pretend to lash her (as a cabin boy) with an improvised clothesline CAT o’nine tails.
“What’s that noise outside? It sounds like a car.” In the white sailor-boy blouse she has just pulled on over her long pleated red silk dress, Posy runs to the window and pushes aside the heavy velvet curtain. “Oh, my God. It’s Jimbo. Quick, upstairs, everybody—and don’t forget your proper clothes.” She flings open the library doors and dashes across the hall to the drawing room.
“William, it’s Jimbo, get upstairs as fast as you can, he’s just putting the car away. All of you, come on.” Ignoring their questions and exclamations, Posy herds her guests up the crimson-carpeted staircase and along a hall lined with heavy gilt-framed eighteenth-century portraits.
“Now,” she declares, checking to make sure that none of them are visible from below through the banisters. “William, dearest, you go straight out by the back stairs and down to the boathouse, the key’s in the stone urn under the ivy. Look out when you pass the stables, in case Jimbo’s still there. Rosemary, and Edwin, oh Christ—” She takes in Rosemary’s naughty schoolgirl outfit and Edwin’s dowager tweeds. “All right, both of you; get dressed as fast as you can and then come down to the drawing room. I’m counting on you to keep Jimbo occupied for at least five minutes while I change the sheets and tidy up. Fred, and Nico, you’ve got to help too, darlings, this is a crisis. I want you to pack everything in William’s room into his bag, all his clothes and books, every single thing you find. If you’re not sure it’s his, put it in anyhow. Right, everyone? Let’s go.”
Fred hears a door opening below and steps in the hall, then a weary, peremptory male voice. “Hallo? Is anybody still up?”
“Jimbo!” Posy cries. She drags the sailorboy blouse over her head, stuffs it into an antique oak chest, and runs down the stairs. “Darling, how lovely! I didn’t expect you till Monday.”
“I sent a cable this morning from Ankara.”
“It never came. Never mind, darling. Did you drive all the way from Gatwick? You must be simply exhausted. Come into the drawing room and I’ll fix you a lovely strong whisky. I’ve got a few people here for the weekend, but most of them have gone to bed. Rosemary’s still up, though, I think, and Edwin Francis. I’ll go tell them you’re here in a moment, but first I want to know all about—” Her words fade.
“Remarkable,” Edwin says sotto voce, shaking his head under the tweed matron’s hat. “Did you ever see such natural authority, such military decision, such a grasp of strategic essentials? Hereditary, of course,” he adds. “The Army blood . . . Poor Posy, really, all those Empire-building genes wasted on this sad century. She should have lived a hundred years ago—”
“Edwin, do go on, before Jimbo sees you like that,” Rosemary whispers, giggling.
“—and been a man, of course. Very well. But I must say, I hope Jimbo has the sense to take her into partnership as soon as the babies are safely in school.”
“Okay, let’s get started,” Fred says to Nico a few moments later, lifting William’s worn leather Gladstone bag onto the bed. “I’ll do the closet, and you can empty the drawers.” He opens the wardrobe door and begins sliding clothes off hangers. “Lucky there isn’t much.”
But when he turns around with a load over his arm Nico is still standing in the middle of the Turkey carpet. In his open-necked white shirt and black rubber boots, with Posy’s red fringed scarf knotted around his waist, he looks as if he were playing pirates; his expression is theatrically