“This will be different, I promise! Please? Oh please?” Maude put on her best angelic face, looking up at the Professors, who were, at the moment, looking rather stern and unyielding.
“But Maudie dear, the documentary ended up being scrapped it was so bad. I think a reality show would just end in tears.” Professor De Busque reached out to retie an uncharacteristically bedraggled ribbon on one of Maude’s plaits.
“Darling, why are you in such a state over this, hm?” Professor P’ohlig raised an arched eyebrow at their young charge. “Don’t you think the whole thing a bit, well, silly?”
Maude pursed her mouth shut for a moment, then looked over her shoulder to make sure a certain postman hadn’t slipped in while she wasn’t looking. She pulled a much folded advertisement from her pocket and laid it out on the table, a gift from the estate of Anne Brontë. The desk was made from a curious combination of wood pulp and Anne’s actual original manuscripts. There wasn’t much else to do with her original manuscripts. (It wasn’t a particularly well-run estate.)
Emily balanced a sturdy pair of pince-nez on her nose, previously owned by the Spanish writer Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas. The heaviness of the frame only served to accentuate the delicacy of that little nose. “Reality TV Contest,” she read, “Have your house filmed for a week, compete in team-building tasks, and let the public decide the outcome of various competitions. At the end of the week, one contestant wins...a genuine velocipede. Oh.”
Now it was clear. Maude nibbled her lip. For as long as they had known Mr. Periwinkle, he had longed for a real, antique velocipede bicycle. And for as long as they had known Maude, she had longed to buy him one. But the editors kept coming up with all sorts of fiddly edits for her child-bride memoir, and no one could seem to tell her when publication would be. Molly and Emily gave each other the sort of knowing looks that would have made the Dashwood girls proud, and relented.
“Oh thank you thank you thank you!” Maude squealed, clapping her hands. But then she grew very serious for a moment. “Now, not a word to Mr. Periwinkle as to the real reason. We’ll just tell him we’re doing a....”
“...social experiment?” Molly said weakly, remembering the last social experiment they’d conducted, which involved everyone inviting a new friend to tea. No one had liked anyone else’s friends, and as a result, no one’s new friends lasted very long.
“We’ll say we need the publicity, since we ended up not getting any from the documentary,” Emily posited, chewing on the end of a pencil that had belonged to Charles Schultz. “And that we need some team-building exercises, I suppose.”
“And we must try to arrange it so Mr. Periwinkle wins,” Maude said, “And if he doesn’t, whoever does will give him the velocipede anyway.”
At that moment, Mr. Periwinkle rang the bell and came in anyway. Molly snatched the piece of paper off the desk and crumpled it into her mouth.
“Hallo, everyone,” he said in his usual jovial, yet slightly out of breath manner. “My goodness, that hill seems hard to climb every time. If only one had some sort of contraption so one didn’t have to walk,” He huffed himself onto his barstool, a special favorite of Hemingway’s from Harry’s Bar in Venice, and began to sort the morning’s mail. The girls suppressed smiles, and Molly went off to write down the details on the flyer before the ink began to run.
***
“Well so far I am not liking this at all,” Emily complained to the camera as she watched another box of books being carried out of the office. “Be careful with that young man, do you know how much a first edition of Fitzgerald goes for at auction these days?!”
The first rule the reality show producers had made was that the books would all be moved out for the week. The girls gritted their teeth and nodded, but to actually watch such a thing in progress was almost more than they could bear. Molly had already run after several moving men to bestow parting pats and kisses on some of the boxes.
It was the third day, and it wasn’t going too, too awfully. Yet. The girls felt they were spending an inordinate amount of time perfecting their makeup in the mornings, and would frequently flee to the bathroom for a little privacy. (Also, Mr. Periwinkle had installed a secret bookshelf behind the water tank in case of emergency.)
The cameras weren’t so bad this time, there were no interviewers, and they mostly just forgot about them after a few anxious hours of surreptitious peeping during work, just to make sure they were really on.
It was the games they didn’t like. Every morning when Mr. Periwinkle arrived, he would have all sort of packages and envelopes full of instructions. An obstacle course had been set up in the backyard which had to be run through several times a day, whenever a gong sounded. Maude consistently won, being the smallest and nimblest, and Mr. Periwinkle consistently lost, being the opposite of such. Molly frequently ended up bloodying a knee or elbow attempting a shortcut which always proved even longer, and Emily often ended up wandering off the course entirely, having spied a pretty flower or butterfly.
Sometimes music would start playing in the house, and they were meant to dance in a manner appropriate to the style of music. However, no one knew anything besides ballroom dances, so it was generally a jolly sort of game.
They had to eat funny foods, and have pie-eating contests (Mr. Periwinkle got ever so sick), and wear themed outfits for prizes. This was the best one, as everyone at Poppycock was quite used to themed outfits.
And then there were the question cards.
Every night they sat in a circle in front of the fire and had to ask each other questions from cards. At first they were fun: “Who would be the most likely to attempt to steal a painting from the Louvre?” (Molly) “Who would most likely forget to go on their own honeymoon if a new book had arrived?” (Emily) But then they turned a bit more personal than Poppycock would have liked. “Who drinks rather too much gin?” (Mr. Periwinkle) “Who drinks rather too much sherry?” (Mr. Periwinkle) “Who does the least amount of work at Poppycock?” (Maudie, but she was the youngest, although the question didn’t take that into account.)
The questions started to have longer and longer pauses before they were answered, and sniffy looks began to be bandied about. There were hurt feelings, and one or two smallish tears that everyone pretended they hadn’t seen.
By the last day though, it had reached fever pitch. No one at Poppycock was really speaking to each other anymore, apart from some overly polite asking for the salt to passed and such, and some thinly veiled remarks about one another’s shortcomings as exposed in the previous days’ questions.
It was with anxious trepidation that they all sat down for the final round before the winner was announced. The questions though, they were relieved to find, were quite innocuous this time. “Who is Molly’s favorite dead actor?” (Guillaume Depardieu) “What occupation would Emily most like to have?” (None) “What would Maude like to be when she grows up?” (Very rich indeed) “What is Mr. Periwinkle’s favorite beverage?” (What have you got?)
And then Maude picked the last question. “Oh, now this one everyone has to answer--” She stopped and her face went absolutely white. “It says....it says, which member of Poppycock isn’t necessary?”
There was a deathly silence and no one looked at anyone for a long, long moment. Everyone was intensely aware of the red light of the camera, trained on their little group. No one knew what to do. That is, until Mr. Periwinkle stood up defiantly.
“We’re ALL necessary, and that’s that! We won’t answer this question, and we don’t care if we don’t win any prizes at all!”
Maudie jumped up and tugged at Mr. Periwinkle’s sleeve. “Oh, no, we can’t do that, Mr. Periwinkle! Say it’s me, won’t you? Just say it’s me! I know I’m too little and I don’t help enough.”
“No!” shouted Emily. “It’s me, it’s definitely me! I’m always going off into a daydream! I’m useless!”
“Hold on!” Molly piped up. “How about me? I work myself into a fuss over something and then I’m rubbish for days on end! How could it be anyone but me?”
Mr. Periwinkle was most confused at this sudden violent lack of self-esteem, and looked bewildered from one to the other. “But girls, aren’t we all necessary?”
Maude burst into tears and shouted, “Just say it’s one of us, Mr. Periwinkle, and we can win you the lovely velocipede!”
Mr. Periwinkle gasped. “Velocipede? The prize is a velocipede?”
Emily nodded sadly. “It was Maude’s idea when she saw the contest.”
Molly slumped back to the floor. “But I suppose now we won’t get it after all since we wouldn’t answer their rotten question.” It was a very blue evening for everyone, and they decided to repair immediately to their rooms where the cameras couldn’t see their misery.
But Mr. Periwinkle had a little sunbeam inside as he drifted off that night, knowing how much he was loved.
***
Molly was wrong. The producers were so impressed that they bought velocipedes for everyone. Usually when they did this show, a minimum of two household members ended up with grave injuries. But Poppycock proved that each of the four was indeed necessary, and the next afternoon, after a champagne cream tea, they all rode off into a dazzling autumn sunset and everything was lovely, even if it did drizzle a tiny bit on and off.
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