Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie Read Free

Sixteen characters in search of an author.
    Paul Fotheringay sat in his Ebury Street lodgings looking at the presentation copies of his book,
Crazy Capers
, which had just arrived by post. He thought of the lonely evening ahead of him and wondered whether he should telephone to some of his friends, but decided that it would be of little use. They would all be doing things by now. He also thought of the wonderful energy of other people, of how they not only had the energy to do things all day but also to make arrangements and plans for these things which they did. It was as much as he could manage to do the things, he knew that he would never be able to make the plans as well. He continued sitting alone.
    Walter Monteath was playing bridge with three people all much richer than himself. He was playing for more than he could afford to lose and was winning steadily.
    Sally Monteath was trying on a dress for which, unless a miracle happened, she would never be able to pay. She looked very pretty in it.
    Marcella Bracket was ringing up a young man and hinting, rather broadly, that he should take her out that evening.
    Amabelle Fortescue was arranging her dinner table. She wondered whether to put a divorced husband next to his first wife, and decided that it would be a good plan; they always got on famously with each other now that this was no longer a necessary or even a desirable state of things.
    Jerome Field slept in his office.
    Miss Monteath, nameless as yet, slept in her pram.
    Bobby Bobbin, at Eton, was writing a note to an older boy.
    Philadelphia Bobbin sat in her mother’s drawing-room and looked at the fire. She hoped that death would prove less dull and boring than life.
    Lady Bobbin tramped Gloucestershire mud and cursed the foot and mouth disease which had stopped the hunting that beautiful, open winter.
    ‘I loved thee in life too little, I loved thee in death too well,’ sang Lord Leamington Spa at a concert in aid of the Jollier Villages Movement. Later on he sang ‘Fearful the death of the diver must be’, and for an encore, ‘Under the deodar’. Lady Leamington Spa agreed with the chairwoman of the movement that her husband had a charming voice. ‘Our son is musical like his father,’ she said proudly.
    Squibby Almanack, the said son, sat with the three fair and slightly bald young men who were his friends at a Bach concert, in Bond Street.
    Major Stanworth drove his Morris Cowley along the high road between Oxford and Cheltenham. He was on his way to the preparatory school where his little boy was having mumps rather badly.
    Michael Lewes was sending out invitations for a garden party at H.B.M. Residency, Cairo. He thanked heaven several times aloud that he was leaving the diplomatic service for good at Christmas.
    The Duchess of St. Neots was talking scandal with an old friend. Any single one of the things she said would have been sufficient to involve her in an action for criminal libel. Her daughter by a former marriage, Miss Héloïse Potts, was listening from an alcove where she very much hoped to remain undiscovered.
    Sixteen characters in search of an author.

1
    There is a certain room in the Tate Gallery which, in these unregenerate days, is used more as a passage-way towards the French pictures collected by Sir Joseph Duveen than as an objective in itself. There must be many lovers of painting who have hurried through it countless times and who would be unable to name or even to describe a single one of the flowerings of Victorian culture which hang there, so thoroughly does the human mind reject those impressions for which it has no use.
    Indeed Paul Fotheringay, until, on the second day of November, he found himself sitting in this room, had been unaware of its very existence. He now observed that it was mostly hung with large and unpleasant works of the ‘Every picture tells a story’ school, interspersed with some rather inferior examples of pre-Raphaelitism and a few careful drawings by