Mrs. Pelham Knows Something

It is a truth not widely enough acknowledged that there is no rivalry on earth quite so pitiless as the rivalry over a Victoria sponge. Tilly had judged the competition herself, years back, before her knees had opinions about marquees, and she had never forgotten it. The fruit cake people were a placid lot. The novelty bakers were eccentrics and knew it and bore one another no malice. But the Victoria sponge — the plain, perfect, impossible Victoria sponge, where there was nowhere to hide, no icing to cover a sin, only sponge and jam and the merciless honesty of a good crumb — the Victoria sponge brought out something in people. And in Lower Pibbleton, for eleven years running, the something it had brought out had been concentrated almost entirely in the person of Mrs. Audrey Pelham. Mrs. Pelham had won the Victoria sponge category for eleven consecutive years. It was the central fact of her life, more central than her late husband, considerably more central than her son in Canada. And this year, everyone in the village knew, Mrs. Pelham had a rival. The rival was new. The rival had moved into the old Tranter cottage eighteen months ago, and her name was Davina Croft, and she was younger and brisker than Mrs. Pelham and she had, fatally, let it be known at the Women's Institute that she had once worked "in a professional kitchen, in London." Lower Pibbleton had not forgiven the word professional, and Mrs. Pelham had not forgiven any of it, and the two of them had spent eighteen months being exquisitely polite to each other in a way that had made every coffee morning since feel like the calm before something. Tilly found Mrs. Pelham sitting on a folding chair near the bunting, very upright, holding a paper plate on which sat — Tilly noted it — a slice of someone else's cake, untouched. "A dreadful thing, Audrey," said Tilly, lowering herself onto the next chair. "Dreadful," agreed Mrs. Pelham. Her voice was steady. Her hands, Tilly observed, were not; the paper plate trembled very slightly, a small continuous quiver, like a leaf that could not settle. "You'll have known Cuthbert Albemarle a long while," Tilly said. "He judged the sponge most years, didn't he." "Most years." A pause. "He had a good palate. He was fair." Another pause, and then, in a different voice, lower, the words coming out as if they had been pressing at the door for some time: "He came to see me. Cuthbert did. On Thursday. He came to the house." Mrs. Pelham looked down at the trembling plate. "He'd heard something. About this year's competition. About — an arrangement. He said he meant to speak about it today, in the tent, before the judging. Publicly." She stopped. Tilly sat very still, in the manner of a woman who has learned that the most useful thing one can do with a confession is to give it room. "What sort of arrangement, Audrey?" But Mrs. Pelham had heard her own voice arrive at the edge of something, and had stepped back from it. She set the paper plate down on the grass with enormous care, as though it were the only thing in the afternoon she could still control, and she folded her unsteady hands in her lap, and she said, in the flat bright tone of the Women's Institute, "I'm sure I don't know, Tilly. It's all been such a shock. Such a dreadful shock." She would say no more. But she had said a great deal — Thursday, an arrangement, a thing Cuthbert Albemarle had meant to announce publicly, in this tent, today, and had died before he could. And as Tilly Marsh got up from the folding chair, her knees registering a formal complaint, she found that her afternoon had quietly rearranged itself. She had come into the marquee believing she was looking for whoever wanted to win. She saw now that she might, in fact, be looking for whoever could not afford to lose.