Nest of Vipers

‘We ought to connect it with the village, I suppose. We shall have to notify the Post Office if we change the name, but that should be a simple enough matter.’

‘And the inmates must be told, so that they can notify their correspondents – and that includes Miss Minnie.’

‘Yes, of course. How about presenting each flat with a packet of headed notepaper? Let’s give them a little surprise. People are tickled to death to be given things free of charge.’

The nearest village was called Polweston. After some thought, we discarded the first syllable and settled for Weston Pipers. (Piper, of course, is my own surname and I was rather flattered when Niobe suggested that we use it.) We notified the Post Office of the change and ordered the notepaper.

Again at Niobe’s suggestion, we had never numbered the apartments, as all letters came by way of the front door and it was my business – although actually, as her office opened off the hall, Niobe often made it hers – to put out the correspondence on a small table just to the left of the front door (to which all had keys) so that people could come and collect their letters at their convenience. The exception, of course, was Miss Minnie, whose correspondence, if any, was delivered through her own front door at The Lodge – or should have been, as I pointed out to Niobe.

The first news that there had been a printer’s error of some magnitude came from Constance Kent. The printer’s boy had delivered the packages by hand at midday on that particular morning. I had asked for the packets to be made up separately for each tenant, so when the boy arrived, as Niobe was on the telephone to one of our tradesmen, I set out the packages, each with a typed name on the cover, so that each tenant could pick up his or her own. I intended to put Miss Minnie’s through her letterbox later, as hers was addressed like the rest and so did not include the words The Lodge, although I assumed she would add those two words herself to the headed notepaper.

I had notified the tenants that there was to be a change of address with the arrival, sooner or later, of complimentary packets of notepaper, and apparently Constance Kent, who, when she was not visiting her publishers or her literary agent or had some other reason for going up to London, was always in residence, had seen the boy’s arrival. She was down the stairs and into the hall while I was still setting out the packages on the hall table.

‘Ah!’ she said, picking up the one with her name on it. ‘You didn’t say what the new address was to be. I should like to have seen proofs, but I suppose you didn’t bother to ask for any. You amateurs!’

She tore off the wrappings and uttered an incredulous yelp. ‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ she said; and burst into hysterical shrieks of laughter. ‘Oh, how absolutely priceless! The printer’s error to end all printers’ errors, and God knows how we suffer from those!’ She thrust the top sheet of her notepaper under my nose and I saw the heading. Nest of Vipers it said, in beautiful italic type.

Chapter Three

Departure of Miss Minnie

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(1)

OF course the whole consignment had to go back to the printers. I took it to them myself, with the intention of giving them a piece of my mind and insisting upon a replacement free of charge and, needless to say, free of errors. To my astonishment they produced a typed sheet which justified and completely absolved them.

‘Seems to me, Mr Piper,’ said the manager, ‘that one of your literary ladies or gents has been having a bit of a game with you. I’m afraid we’ll have to charge you for the work. The mistake is none of our making, as you can see for yourself. Here’s your order, sir, and here’s your signature.’

‘It’s a forgery! That isn’t my writing!’

‘We were not to know that, sir, were we?’

I took the notepaper back with me to Weston Pipers. Since I had to pay for it, it belonged to me, anyway.

Niobe said: ‘The address doesn’t take up much space at the top of each sheet. The guillotine will soon chop it off and we’ll keep all the notepaper for our own use, so it won’t be a dead loss and anyway I forgot to remind you to ask for envelopes to match. I’ll just type out the new address again and we’ll have cards printed for the tenants to send to their friends.’

‘I’ll have another firm do the job, and it won’t be a local one this time, I can tell you,’ I said, remembering the manager’s amusement.

‘Nest of Vipers, eh?’ he had chuckled. ‘Oh, well, sir, let’s hope the old saying won’t work out in this case.’

‘Old saying?’

‘That there’s many a true word spoken in jest, sir.’

Well, Constance Kent spread the story around and it became a tiresome joke for a bit. For my own satisfaction I put out one or two feelers in order to pin down the joker, but with no success. I put it squarely up to Billie Kennett and to Irelath Moore, to whose sense of humour I thought the altered address might well appeal, but both denied having perpetrated the jape. Irelath said that he wished he had thought of it. Billie said that she would have been delighted to have such an address on her notepaper, but had not the wit to think of anything so clever. I was forced to believe their denials and no clue so far has turned up to explain the substituted address.

The next contretemps was received with mixed feelings among our little group. It began with a conversation between Latimer Targe and Elysee Barnes. Owing to the nature of her work, that of a crime reporter for the county newspaper, Billie Kennett was out of the house most days and, owing to the nature of hers, Elysee spent some of the week in London attending fashion shows or studying the creations in the big London shops, and the rest of the week indoors sketching her cribs from what she had seen, writing up her copy (a word, for her, with a double meaning) and otherwise passing the time until Billie came home.

This meant that she was quite often alone in the apartment she shared with Billie and as, unlike Billie, she was a gregarious young woman, she would invite one or other of us to coffee or a drink or a stroll in the gardens with her. The two girls owned a car (Niobe had arranged for half a dozen well-screened lock-ups to be erected near the