“Oh, that will be Lucy.” David’s tone was full of relief. “I expect she wants her bath mat.”
He opened the window and laid in front of the fire a thick square of red towelling. Lucy hoisted herself over the sill and stalked forward onto the mat, where she carefully dried each flipper in turn. While she did so, she kept her head turned and her eyes trained on Blair; it seemed to David that there was something of definite malignity in the look she was directing at the visitor.
Blair felt this too. She paled. “I—I don’t go for swans much,” she said nervously. “Of course it’s too marvellously brilliant and amusing of you to keep one for a pet—we must get some shots for Fancy—but couldn’t it sit in the kitchen or somewhere?”
“Goodness, no. Lucy always sits with me. I wouldn’t for worlds hurt her feelings.”
“What about my feelings?” demanded Blair angrily. “Am I supposed to sit here with that bird staring at me?”
“Don’t stay if you don’t want to, of course,” David replied courteously. Lucy abetted him by choosing at this moment to move slowly towards Blair with outthrust neck, emitting a low but meaningful hiss which had a completely routing effect. Blair left precipitately, with many reproaches, and David was able to return to Act II, while Lucy settled on the arm of his chair and dangled a contented length of neck over his shoulder.
It became plain that as a chaperon Lucy was unrivalled. On several subsequent occasions she rescued David from similar predicaments, and once she dealt with a pair of burglars who had been tempted by the valuable collection of musical boxes, breaking the leg of one and stunning the other, with a neat right-and-left of her powerful wings, before David and Oglethorpe had even woken up. In fact, Lucy became almost as much of a celebrity as her temporary owner, and featured with him in many a double spread.
Two months passed peacefully and productively by. January, however, brought a severe cold spell, with concomitant power cuts and fuel shortages. David, hardened by years under the viaduct, hardly felt the weather, but Lucy and Oglethorpe both suffered acutely and caught colds with distressing frequency. Oglethorpe nevertheless continued to look after David solicitously, while his care for Lucy was touching; he made her gargle—a process by no means easy for swans—night and morning, fed her vitamin capsules by the handful, and, when necessary, helped her to inhale steaming turpentine, sitting with her under the towel to ensure her compliance. One evening, fancying she looked a little pink round the eyes, he went out in the snow to procure her some tincture of cinnamon, and this was his undoing; he caught a bad cold which turned to pneumonia, and the doctor insisted on his removal to hospital. He protested vehemently.
“Don’t worry, please don’t worry,” David exhorted him. “I’ll look after everything here; you just concentrate on getting better.”
“Miss Lucy—you’ll look after Miss Lucy?” begged Oglethorpe. “If anything happened to her I just don’t know what—” His voice broke, and he was obliged to turn his head away on the stretcher.
“I’ll do everything you did, I swear,” David assured him. “Vitamin C, black-currant purée, quinine, hotwater bottle, the lot.”
For a week all went well. Then, when the thermometer had shot down to twenty-six degrees, there was a forty-eight-hour power cut. The temperature in David’s flat gradually sank to an arctic low, frost glistened on the walls, the bath froze (Lucy’s outdoor pool had frozen long before). For the first day David managed to keep himself and Lucy warm by burning coal dust and branches stolen from Green Park, and filling hotwater bottles from kettles boiled on a spirit stove. On the second evening Lucy sneezed twice, and David noticed that she had begun to shiver. He filled an extra bottle and wrapped an eiderdown round her, but she shivered still, and he stared at her in worried perplexity. It was plain that she must not go through the night in such a state.
The solution he finally adopted seemed the only one possible. He piled all the bedding in the flat on his own bed, put all the hotwater bottles into it, administered an immense tot of brandy to Lucy and took one himself, then, grasping her firmly round her feathery middle, he wriggled into bed and went to sleep. It occurred to him drowsily in the middle of the night that he should have done this sooner; their combined warmth, and Lucy’s feathers, produced an almost tropical temperature under the layers of quilt and blanket.
When he woke next morning he looked beside him on the pillow expecting to see black beady eyes and an elegant red bill. Instead, to his astonished dismay, he found an unmistakably feminine profile: that of a fair-haired, distinguished woman whom, if he had been a student of television, he would have recognised as Louise Bonaventure.
She opened her eyes and regarded him sleepily.
“How do you do?” she said. “I’m your landlady.”
He pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “How did you get here?” he asked.
“It’s a long story.” Louise stretched luxuriously. Then she sat up and stepped briskly out of bed. “Let’s have some coffee first, shall we? Is the power on again? Yes, thank goodness. How delicious coffee smells—it must be a year since I tasted it. Oh, you want to know how I got here? I was the swan.”
“Lucy? My Lucy Snowe?”
Miss Bonaventure had the grace to look a little conscious. “I suppose I should apologise. You see, I’d collected a pair of Abominable Snowgeese in the mountains of Izbanistan, and the Imam found out, and was annoyed about it, said I had no right to—ridiculous of him, they aren’t at all rare, over there, common as starlings—so in revenge he purloined one of my pair, had me turned into a swan by his top lama, a very accomplished magician, and popped me into the crate instead. If it hadn’t been for Oglethorpe, who very intelligently put two and two together, I should have ended my life in the London zoo.”
“But what broke the spell?”
She blushed faintly. “It must have been the old Frog Prince solution. I hope you haven’t caught my cold?”
“Ought I to marry you?” David asked diffidently.
She gave him a somewhat baffling glance, but merely remarked, “There’s no obligation about it—except on my side. I really am extremely grateful to you, and you’ve been an admirable tenant.”
“Shall you want the flat back now?” David felt very confused, and instinctively kept the conversation on a businesslike level.
“Not immediately.” Miss Bonaventure’s fine eyes flashed. “First I shall fly to Izbanistan for another snowgoose. I’m not going to be downed by that old trickster of an Imam. But first let’s go to the hospital and visit Oglethorpe.”
Oglethorpe’s delight at the restoration of his mistress was touching to witness. Tears of joy stood in his eyes. “It makes me better just to see you, Miss Louise,” he kept declaring. “And you won’t go back to those unreliable foreign parts any more, will you, my dearie?”
“Only to get another snowgoose, Henry dear. I must have a pair.”
“Then I shall come too,” the old man declared. He overbore all objections, and insisted on her waiting until he was well enough to accompany her. Meanwhile she moved to the Curzon Hotel, but spent a good deal of time at the flat, where she and David maintained their pleasantly easy relationship.
Two weeks after the travellers had departed, David suddenly realised how bereft he was without them: no Oglethorpe to sing duets with of an evening, no sage advice as to ties and shirts, no imperturbable barricade against the outside world, and worst of all, no Lucy Snowe. Only now did he understand how much he had come to need her cool and silent presence. Without her he could hardly write.
He sent a cable to catch her at Elbruz: WILL YOU MARRY ME?
She replied, YES, OF COURSE, DUNDERHEAD, BUT MUST FIRST SECURE SPECIMEN. MEET ME HERE ON RETURN FROM IZBANISTAN.
Overjoyed, David booked a flight. All his urge to write had come back, and he was able to complete two acts on the thirty-hour trip. By the time he reached Elbruz, he calculated, her mission would be accomplished and they could get married at the British Embassy.
He reckoned without the Imam of Izbanistan.
When he reached the Taj Mahal hotel, the first person he saw was Oglethorpe, who looked travelworn and harassed.
“Oh, Mr. David, how glad I am to see you!”
“Is Miss Louise back?”
“Yes, she’s back, but—”
“Did you get the goose?”
“Yes, we got it, but—”
“What’s the trouble? She’s not hurt?”
“No, nothing like that, sir, but that old Imam’s been up to his magical tricks again.”
“Turned her into a swan? Well, we know how to deal with that now,” David said.