‘As you say, Jeeves. He must be awfully pleased to think that someone’s still spouting his stuff.’
So saying, I tooled off to the hall, grabbed a couple of newspapers, delivered them to the corner room and went on my merry way.
The only incident of note in the morning was the arrival of a repair man from the telephone company. Hoad was back in his place to shove round the luncheon plates, leaving me to hobnob with the excellent Mrs Tilman in the kitchen. All seemed to be purring along nicely towards the triumphant enactment of Plan B.
The appointed hour found me secreted in a rhododendron. This tree or shrub makes an admirable hiding place, especially when in full flower, as it was now. You can insert the person without risk of injury and at once become invisible; the genus had given top-notch accommodation to early experiments with tobacco by most of my school friends.
Woody poled up a few minutes early and sat on the bench, leafing through a book someone seemed to have left behind. The path was covered with a fine pea-shingle and gave ample warning of approaching footsteps. I had chosen the spot for this reason, and sure enough a girlish footfall was soon heard, followed by Georgiana’s fond hello.
‘Shall we have a trial run?’ said Woody.
‘Right ho. Shall we be sitting or standing?’
‘Sitting’s better. Then it looks as though as we’ve been having a serious heart-to-heart.’
‘All right,’ said Georgiana. ‘You sit there, so Ambo gets a good view of you as she comes round the corner. Then I’ll stroke your arm like this.’
‘You’d better talk a lot of rot at the same time.’
‘Right ho. Oh, Woody, I don’t know how to tell you this. My heart is yours, you dashing sportsman. I love your broody eyes and your noble nose and your charm and modesty—’
‘Steady on, Georgie.’
‘Am I overacting? I have a tendency to.’
‘Well, I suppose we have to send a clear message.’
‘So perhaps I ought to kiss you. I lean in like this and plant a smacker on your lips.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. Don’t let’s spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar.’
Meanwhile, deep in the concealing rhododendron, the feelings in the Wooster bosom were decidedly mixed. I was aware of a nasty tightening in the pit of the stomach, and it was all I could do not to leap out of the bally bush and tell them to put a sock in it.
‘But then I rebuff you sternly,’ said Woody. ‘I push you away and say, “My heart is only for Amelia. So cut out the funny stuff.”’
‘Ssh. I can hear her coming.’
Georgiana took closer order on the bench. ‘Oh, Woody, you handsome cricketer, you Apollo of the bat and ball, let me wrap you in my arms.’
The footsteps came closer and Georgiana began to lay it on with a trowel.
‘Let me stroke your hair, you little spring chicken. I adore you, Woody, you heavenly creature. Let me kiss those gorgeous lips again. Hold me closer, please.’
It was hard to make out through the twigs and branches exactly what had gone wrong, or when. But I can say for certain that it took no more than a second for the lovers to spring apart when they saw that the new arrival was not Amelia but a harassed-looking Rupert Venables.
MY SERVICES WERE required neither at dinner nor after it, so I seemed to be in for a solitary evening. By the time the ‘quality’ put on the nosebag at eight, I could contain my restlessness no longer and set off for the village. I dined once more at the Hare and Hounds, where the landlord’s mind was still clearly on the cricket as he shoved a pint of ale across the bar.
‘Best use both hands on that. Shall I carry ’im to the table for you?’
Then, when he came over a few minutes later to take my order: ‘We got some nice duck pâté. I know you be fond of a duck, young man.’
I was about to remonstrate when I remembered it was mine host’s bony finger that had cut down Sidney Venables at the wicket and sent him packing. The fellow couldn’t be all bad, I told myself.
A great deal seemed to have happened since my last steak and kidney in the same window seat, and not much of it came under the heading of good news. I had escaped playing host to Aunt Agatha and the blighter Thomas in London, though a part of me – not the largest part, I suppose – felt ashamed of what my late father might have thought of my giving his sister the miss in baulk. The only other item in the credit column was having successfully misled our hosts as to our identity, and my aching back prevented me from taking much pleasure in this minor triumph.
The real business of the trip – the attempt to reunite the sundered hearts of my oldest friend and his beloved – had been an utter washout: a fiasco, a lulu, a damp squib from start to finish. I had tried my best to play Woody out of trouble and give him a decent shot at the green; I had left the poor chap playing five off the tee.
I didn’t like to think what the repercussions of the failed Plan B might be. Venables didn’t seem by nature a hothead, but no one likes to see his fiancée kissing another bloke. It would take all the oratory of Gray’s Inn and the charm of Bedford Square to persuade the tireless traveller that things were not as they appeared.
The time had come to sound the retreat, and it was with considerable relief that I stuffed the spare clothes and washbag into Jeeves’s modest holdall the next morning. I said my goodbyes to my fellow scullions, and in the case of Mrs Tilman and Mrs Padgett, they were fond ones.
‘I’m sure we’ll see you again soon, Mr W,’ said Mrs Tilman.
‘’Appen I’ll make another of them pies Miss Georgiana took you,’ said Mrs Padgett.
‘I hope so. Toodle-pip,’ I said – to the obvious amusement of these two good-humoured domestics.
Remembering not to cross Bicknell’s mighty palm with silver, I collected Lord Etringham’s cases and stowed them in the back of the two-seater.
The dogs barked, but the caravan moved on. Vishnu Venables and his memsahib were collected by a driver in what looked like a hearse; Dame Judith was to take the train after lunch. Jeeves started the engine and we were about to escape when Sir Henry ran alongside and thrust a newspaper through the window.
‘By the way, Etringham, I thought you’d like a copy of the Melbury Courier. It’s just arrived. The report of the game’s not up to much, but it’s got a splendid picture of the team.’
With a crunch of gravel, we were gone. There was much to say, but I wanted to put a fair bit of distance between ourselves and Melbury Hall. As soon as we agreed the coast was well and truly clear, we swapped hats and places.
‘So, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘what was the aftermath of Plan B like? How did young Venables take it?’
‘Mr Venables made an early departure, sir. He left before dinner.’
‘He must have driven past me in the Hare and Hounds.’
‘Very likely, sir. He is expected back on Saturday for the Midsummer Festival, where he is to read some of his poems.’
‘He’s a poet, too, is he?’
‘Light verse, I gather, sir, of a pastoral nature.’
‘I wonder how that’ll go down with the lads from the Red Lion.’
‘I understand the verses have brevity on their side.’
‘Unlike the travelogues.’
‘An unkind observation, sir.’
‘But not an unfair one, Jeeves. Golly, I felt as though I’d walked to Peking on my own two feet. Perhaps that could be his follow-up. By Shanks’s Pony to Shanghai. Anyway, he didn’t at once break off the engagement?’
‘No, sir. I gather Mr Venables was greatly disturbed by the turn of events, but did not wish to be seen to lose face, as I believe the expression is. I understand he has given Miss Meadowes two days in which to offer an explanation of herself.’
‘Stern stuff, eh? And what about Woody?’
‘Relations between the two gentlemen were not of the most cordial before the incident. Mr Venables is conscious of a sense of inferiority. He believes Mr Beeching’s athletic accomplishments and ease of manner show him
in an unfavourable light.’
‘That’s hardly Woody’s fault.’
‘Certainly not, sir. But it is conceivable that Mr Venables’s natural unease could work to the advantage of all concerned.’
‘You mean he’ll think twice before making an ass of himself.’
‘Exactly, sir. Though if he concludes that he has already been humiliated beyond repair …’
‘You mean …’
‘I gathered from Miss Meadowes that his return is far from guaranteed.’
‘Then bang goes Hickory Hot Boy, Jeeves. In come the blackboards, the chalk and the cupboardful of canes.’
‘So it would appear, sir.’
Back in Berkeley Mansions, I left Jeeves to unpack and make sure that young Thomas had left no bucket of water poised above the bedroom door while I went down to the Drones for a late lunch.
The members would not take kindly to my giving away too much about the premises, but for the sake of a spot of atmosphere I should probably have a go at the broad outline. The place combines the impressive with what you might call the homely. About half Carrara must have gone into making the marble staircase that fills the hall; on a lower floor are courts for squash racquets and a swimming pool. The first-floor bar is where the lads mostly foregather amid oil portraits of former Drones, including a handful of princelings and Cabinet ministers. The main browsing and sluicing is done in the Morning Room, which is a little over twenty-two yards long – a sporting distance at which to try to hit the raised pie on the sideboard with bread rolls bunged from the far end. Then there is the smaller Queen Bee saloon and a card room, where fortunes have been won and lost. Above that are rumoured to be bedrooms for country members.
When I got to the club, the luncheon service was over, but you can always get a plate of kedgeree or a shepherd’s pie and a glass of something in the lower bar – a wood-panelled nook that brings to mind the nineteenth hole at a Highland golf course.
This was where I headed on arrival, and was lucky enough to find Boko Fittleworth in conversation with Freddie Oaker. These are two of a handful of Drones professional writers, Boko penning what you’d call wholesome popular fiction – adventures with a bit of uplift for the masses, and Freddie churning out appalling ‘true love’ mush for the women’s weekly magazines under the name of ‘Alicia Seymour’. What really binds these men of letters is a shared interest in the folding stuff: who of their acquaintance has sold most copies or which publisher is said to ante up the juiciest sum.
They were finishing a decanter of the club claret, in which they kindly included me, before moving on to coffee and a cigar.
‘I’ve heard good things about Pearson Lane,’ said Freddie. ‘They bid the most enormous sum for Sir Edward Grey’s memoirs.’
‘Smith and Durrant still have the deepest pockets,’ said Boko. ‘And they’ve got this new girl working there on the fiction side. They say she’s got the mind of Jane Austen and the looks of Clara Bow.’
‘Are you sure it’s that way about?’ said Freddie.
‘Absolutely. She’s a first-class popsy by all accounts, and a good egg with it, but don’t get your hopes up, old man. She’s marching up the aisle with one of their authors. Chap called Venables.’
‘The “By” man?’
‘Yes. By Handcart to Hell and so forth.’
‘Well, I suppose he’s a catch of sorts.’
‘How’s young Nobby?’ I asked Boko, in an effort to ease the conversation on to a less awkward track – Nobby being Zenobia Hopwood, the blue-eyed little half-portion to whom he was engaged to be married. ‘Have you named the day yet?’
‘Nobby and I are set on a Christmas wedding, but her guardian’s trying to put the kibosh on it.’
Nobby’s guardian, the old lags will need no reminding but new readers need to be told, is England’s premier masochist: he models himself on the Greek fellow who was chained to a rock where a bird of prey dropped in daily to breakfast on his liver – though that might have been light relief compared to hitching yourself to my Aunt Agatha, which was the fate this poor, demented Worplesdon had selected of his own free will.
‘The kibosh from the guardian, or the guardian’s wife, Boko?’ I queried.
‘A bit of both, since you ask. I spent the weekend with them at Steeple Bumpleigh. I sometimes have the impression that your aunt doesn’t think much of me, Bertie.’
‘Did you say you spent the weekend with her?’
‘Yes. We had a few practical details to talk over.’
‘At Steeple Bumpleigh?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the Worplesdons were there?’
‘I’d hardly go and stay if they weren’t.’
‘At Bumpleigh Hall?’
‘That’s where they live, Bertie.’
‘And young Thomas?’
‘Yes. Why is this so surprising, old man? I know you’ve never been engaged yourself for more than forty-eight hours, but if you had, you’d know that buttering up the in-laws is part of the process. And believe me the Worplesdons take a fair bit of butter. Think of the United Dairies depot at Melksham.’
‘Well,’ I said, massaging the lemon a fair bit as I did so, ‘it’s just that I went off to Dorsetshire so Aunt Agatha could have the run of my digs for a few days over the weekend. Now you say she was in Essex. So—’
‘The old girl must have changed her mind,’ interrupted Freddie Oaker, who had not been much gripped by the above exchange. ‘No great mystery. Anyone fancy a frame of snooker pool?’
It was a pensive Bertram who strolled through Berkeley Square an hour or so later. From the day I had returned from my spring holiday on the Côte d’Azur I’d felt a bit like the sidekick in one of those detective stories – the fellow who’s always one step behind the famous sleuth and whose function is to ask questions on behalf of the dimmer class of reader. It was almost as though some master criminal was orchestrating something in which I was a hapless pawn – if a pawn can be orchestrated. But perhaps you see what I’m driving at: a lurking sense that there were Forces at Work of which I Understood Little.
The first thing I wanted to do when back at the flat was to telephone Woody and find out how things stood. I didn’t fear the squashed nose or the broken rib so much as I had after Plan A came a cropper because in this second fiasco Georgiana was as much to blame as I was – and so was Woody himself, come to that. Also it was not the Beeching–Hackwood wedding plans that had suffered; it was the Meadowes–Venables team that had been laid a stymie.
After an update on that front, I would come to the Case of the Missing Aunt. I must have been pondering all this pretty deeply when the sound of a motor horn made me leap back on to the pavement from an ill-advised attempt to cross the road. What was nagging at the edge of the Wooster brain was an inkling that all these loose ends could in some odd way be tied together.
‘What ho, Jeeves,’ I called out on re-entering the domicile. ‘Any chance of a cupful of the fragrant Darjeeling?’
‘The kettle has just boiled, sir.’
‘Dashed odd thing,’ I said, as he set the tray down beside me. ‘I bumped into Boko Fittleworth at the Drones and he told me he had spent the weekend at Steeple Bumpleigh. With Aunt Agatha.’
‘Indeed, sir. It appears that her ladyship was waylaid. I could find no trace of her visit.’
‘Or of young Thomas?’
‘Still less, sir. One might have expected the young gentleman to have left a calling card, as it were.’
‘An apple-pie bed, a broken window or two. A plague of frogs.’
‘Indeed, sir.’
‘A murrain of cattle.’
‘Less likely in the—’
‘Stopping only at the slaughter of the firstborn. But why on earth didn’t did she let me know?’
‘I dare say her ladyship telephoned to apprise you of her change of plan, sir, but if you remember we left London with considerable despatch.’
I did remember. ‘Are you suggesting there
were panic stations, Jeeves?’
‘I recall more of an air of decisiveness on your part, sir: a sense that if it were done then ’twere well it were done quickly. Did Mr Fittleworth mention the building work at Bumpleigh Hall?’
‘No. And I forgot to ask. I hope nothing’s amiss.’
‘Would you like me to establish a connection by telephone so that you can speak to her ladyship yourself, sir?’
I swallowed some hot tea rather faster than I meant. As I sponged down the shirt front with a pocket handkerchief, I said: ‘I think not, Jeeves. In the circumstances, better just to let sleeping dogs lie, don’t you think?’
‘As you wish, sir. Will there be anything else?’
The next day, I met Woody for dinner at an oyster bar near Victoria Station, with sawdust on the floorboards – Woody’s choice, it being not far from his flat in Elizabeth Street. He had got there before me and instructed the barman in the making of two zonkers that stood ready on the table between us, winking up invitingly.
I had taken along the copy of the Melbury Courier to remind him of his triumph at the crease.
‘Gosh, what a crew!’ he said. ‘Who’s the shifty-looking one?’
‘Liddle,’ I said. ‘He was out on parole, as it were. Jeeves looks the part, doesn’t he?’
‘Gifted spinner,’ said Woody. ‘Bowling must run in the family. It says here Lord Etringham took two wickets, but I’m sure he had three.’
‘Sir Henry warned us the report wasn’t up to much.’
A waiter came alongside with a variety of shellfish. ‘I went to see Rupert Venables at lunchtime,’ said Woody. ‘That was brave.’
‘I thought it was the right thing to do. He took me to his club in Brook Street. He’s a rum cove.’
‘What did he say about Georgiana? Is he going to hand her the mitten?’
‘He was a bit … elusive. What do you make of Venables, Bertie?’
This was not a subject I was anxious to spend much time on, but I could see I had to have a stab at answering. ‘I’m sure he’s a solid enough fellow. And they have the old literary world in common.’
‘It’s funny,’ said Woody, digging into the brown shrimps, ‘I had the impression that he had … Well …’