Any Other Business

The Fernleigh Residents’ Association met on the second Tuesday of every month, whether or not anything had occurred, and Mr Pring, our chairman, secretly preferred the months in which nothing had, since they left so much more room for procedure.

He opened, as he always opened, by thanking us warmly for our attendance, as though we had journeyed from distant counties rather than the four adjoining houses. Then, with the reluctance of a man forced to interrupt his own thanks, he came to the grave matter of the Henderson wall.

“It has been brought to my attention,” he said, which was Mr Pring’s chosen method of announcing an opinion he wished to disown, “that the wall now stands a full three inches higher than the covenant permits.”

Three inches. He let the figure settle over the room with all the gravity of a coastline being quietly redrawn.

“Brought to your attention by whom?” enquired Mrs Fellowes, who attended chiefly for the pleasure of watching Mr Pring decline to answer questions.

“The source,” he replied, “is not material.”

“How reassuring,” she murmured. “I should so hate to think it was material and anonymous.”

I have long admired the ease with which Mrs Fellowes can pay a man a compliment that leaves him bleeding gently, without his ever quite locating the wound.

Mr Pring proposed a subcommittee. Mr Pring always proposed a subcommittee; it was his standing answer to mortality itself. This one would measure the wall, consult the covenant, and report in the fullness of time. By that point, he appeared to hope, either the wall, or the Hendersons, or possibly Mr Pring, would have moved on to a better place.

“Might we not,” I ventured, “simply ask Mr Henderson to take three inches off it?”

The suggestion was received with the polite horror ordinarily reserved for a guest who proposes walking to a destination the committee has already resolved to reach by car.

“That,” said Mr Pring, with the patience of a man explaining tides to a child, “would be to prejudge the finding of a subcommittee we have not, as yet, appointed.”

“Of course,” I said. “Forgive me. I forget how much can depend upon doing things in the correct order.”

He received this as agreement, which was, in fact, the entire secret of surviving Mr Pring. He heard consent in any sentence delivered without a raised voice, and so one could tell him very nearly anything at all, provided one remembered to smile while doing it.

“Then we are agreed,” he beamed. “Mrs Fellowes, might I count on you for the subcommittee?”

“No, Mr Pring. I believe the matter is safest in the hands of its most concerned citizen.”

So the subcommittee was appointed, and it consisted, in the end, of Mr Pring. The wall, at the time of writing, remains three inches too tall; the Hendersons remain in blissful ignorance of their notoriety; and Fernleigh, I am delighted to report, has never in living memory been more perfectly at peace.