‘How long did you say it was since you had met him?’
‘Forty-two years come Lammas Eve. Why?’
‘I was only wondering why you hadn’t run across him. Living so close, I mean.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you, Bill Oakshott. It is my settled policy to steer pretty clear of the neighbours. You have probably noticed yourself that the British Gawd-help-us seems to flourish particularly luxuriantly in the rural districts. My wife tries to drag me to routs and revels from time to time, but I toss my curls at her and refuse to stir. I often think that the ideal life would be to have plenty of tobacco and be cut by the County. And as regards your uncle, I look back across the years at Mugsy, the boy, and I see nothing that encourages me to fraternize with Mugsy, the man.’
‘Something in that.’
‘Not an elfin personality, Mugsy’s. I’m afraid Pongo doesn’t realize what he’s up against in taking on such a father-in-law. It’s his daughter Hermione that he’s gone and got engaged to, and I see a sticky future ahead of the unhappy lad. Ah, here we are,’ said Lord Ickenham, as the train slowed down. ‘Let’s go and get that drink. It’s just possible that we may find Pongo at the old shack. He rang me up this morning, saying he was coming to spend the night. He is about to visit Ashenden Manor, to show the old folks what they’ve got.’
He hopped nimbly on to the platform, prattling gaily, quite unaware that he had to all intents and purposes just struck an estimable young man behind the ear with a sock full of wet sand. The short, quick, gulping grunt, like that of a bulldog kicked in the ribs while eating a mutton chop, which had escaped Bill Oakshott on the cue ‘got engaged to’, he had mistaken for a hiccough.
2
The summer afternoon had mellowed into twilight and Bill Oakshott had long since taken his bruised heart off the premises before Pongo Twistleton fetched up at the home of his ancestors. One of those mysterious breakdowns which affect two-seater cars had delayed him on the road. He arrived just in time to dress for dinner, and the hour of eight found him seated opposite his uncle in the oak-panelled dining-room, restoring his tissues after a trying day.
Lord Ickenham, delighted to see him, was a gay and effervescent host, but during the meal the presence of a hovering butler made conversation of a really intimate nature impossible, and the talk confined itself to matters of general interest. Pongo spoke of New York, whence he had recently returned from a visit connected with the winding up of his godfather’s estate, and Lord Ickenham mentioned that Lady Ickenham was on her way to Trinidad to attend the wedding of the daughter of an old friend. Lord Ickenham alluded to his meeting with Pongo’s former crony, Bill Oakshott, and Pongo, though confessing that he remembered Bill only imperfectly — ‘Beefy stripling with a pink face, unless I’m thinking of someone else’ — said that he looked forward to renewing their old friendship when he hit Ashenden Manor.
They also touched on such topics as the weather, dogs, two-seater cars (their treatment in sickness and in health), the foreign policy of the Government, the chances of Jujube for the Goodwood Cup, and what you would do — this subject arising from Pongo’s recent literary studies — if you found a dead body in your bath one morning with nothing on but pince-nez and a pair of spats.
It was only when the coffee had been served and the cigars lighted that Lord Ickenham prepared to become more expansive.
‘Now we’re nice and cosy,’ he said contentedly. ‘What a relief it always is when the butler pops off. It makes you realize the full meaning of that beautiful line in the hymn book — “Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away.” Not that I actually love Coggs. A distant affection, rather, tempered with awe. Well, Pongo, I’m extraordinarily glad you blew in. I was wanting a quiet chat with you about your plans and what not.’
‘Ah,’ said Pongo.
He spoke reservedly. He was a slender, personable young man with lemon-coloured hair and an attractive face, and on this face a close observer would have noted at the moment an austere, wary look, such as might have appeared on that of St Anthony just before the temptations began. He had a strong suspicion that now that they were alone together, it was going to be necessary for him to be very firm with this uncle of his and to maintain an iron front against his insidious wiles.
Watching the head of the family closely during dinner, he had not failed to detect in his eyes, while he was speaking of his wife’s voyage to the West Indies, a lurking gleam such as one might discern in the eye of a small boy who has been left alone in the house and knows where the key of the jam cupboard is. He had seen that gleam before, and it had always heralded trouble of a major kind. Noticeable even as early as the soup course, it had become, as its proprietor puffed at his cigar, more marked than ever, and Pongo waited coldly for him to proceed.
‘How long are you proposing to inflict yourself on these Bostocks of yours?’
‘About a week.’
‘And after that?’
‘Back to London, I suppose.’
‘Good,’ said Lord Ickenham heartily. ‘That was what I wanted to know. That was what I wished to ascertain. You will return to London. Excellent. I will join you there, and we will have one of our pleasant and instructive afternoons.’
Pongo stiffened. He did not actually say ‘Ha!’ but the exclamation was implicit in the keen glance which he shot across the table. His suspicions had been correct. His wife’s loving surveillance having been temporarily removed, Frederick Altamont Cornwallis, fifth Earl of Ickenham, was planning to be out and about again.
‘You ask me,’ a thoughtful Crumpet had once said in the smoking-room of the Drones Club, ‘why it is that at the mention of his Uncle Fred’s name Pongo Twistleton blenches to the core and calls for a couple of quick ones. I will tell you. It is because this uncle is pure dynamite. Every time he is in Pongo’s midst, with the sap running strongly in his veins, he subjects the unfortunate young egg to some soul-testing experience, luring him out into the open and there, right in the public eye, proceeding to step high, wide and plentiful. For though well stricken in years the old blister becomes on these occasions as young as he feels, which seems to be about twenty-two. I don’t know if you happen to know what the word “excesses” means, but those are what he invariably commits, when on the loose. Get Pongo to tell you some time about that day they had together at the Dog Races.’
It was a critique of which, had he heard it, Lord Ickenham would have been the first to admit the essential justice. From boyhood up his had always been a gay and happy disposition, and in the evening of his life he still retained, together with a juvenile waistline, the bright enthusiasms and the fresh, unspoiled mental outlook of a slightly inebriated undergraduate. He had enjoyed a number of exceedingly agreeable outings in his nephew’s society in the course of the last few years, and was pleasantly conscious of having stepped on these occasions as high, wide and plentiful as a man could wish, particularly during that day at the Dog Races. Though there, he had always maintained, a wiser policeman would have been content with a mere reprimand.
‘As you are aware, if you were not asleep while I was talking at dinner,’ he said, resuming his remarks, ‘your aunt has left me for a few weeks and, as you can well imagine, I am suffering agonies. I feel like one of those fellows in the early nineteenth-century poems who used to go about losing dear gazelles. Still —‘
‘Now listen,’ said Pongo.
‘Still, in practically every cloud wrack the knowledgeable eye, if it peers closely enough, can detect some sort of a silver lining, however small, and the horror of my predicament is to a certain extent mitigated by the thought that I now become a mobile force again. Your aunt is the dearest woman in the world, and nobody could be fonder of her than I am, but I sometimes find her presence … what is the word I want … restrictive. She holds, as you know, peculiar views on the subject of my running around loose in London, as she puts it, and this prevents me fulfilling myself. It is a pity. Living in a rural morgue like Bishop’s Ickenham all the
time, one gets rusty and out of touch with modern thought. I don’t suppose these days I could tell you the name of a single chucker-out in the whole of the West End area, and I used to know them all. That is why —‘
‘Now listen.’
‘That is why the fact of her having packed a toothbrush and popped off to Trinidad, though it blots the sunshine from my life, is not an unrelieved tragedy. Existence may have become for me an arid waste, but let us not forget that I can now be up and doing with a heart for any fate. Notify me when you return to London, and I will be with you with my hair in a braid. Bless my soul, how young I’m feeling these days! It must be the weather.’
Pongo knocked the ash off his cigar and took a sip of brandy. There was a cold, stern look on his face.
‘Now listen, Uncle Fred,’ he said, and his voice was like music to the ears of the Recording Angel, who felt that this was going to be good. ‘All that stuff is out.’
‘Out?’
‘Right out. You don’t get me to the Dog Races again.’
‘I did not specify the Dog Races. Though they provide an admirable means of studying the soul of the people.’
‘Or on any other frightful binge of yours. Get thou behind me, about sums it up. If you come to see me in London, you will get lunch at my flat and afterwards a good book. Nothing more.’
Lord Ickenham sighed, and was silent for a space. He was musing on the curse of wealth. In the old days, when Pongo had been an impecunious young fellow reading for the Bar and attempting at intervals to get into an uncle’s ribs for an occasional much-needed flyer, nobody could have been a more sympathetic companion along the primrose path. But coming into money seemed to have changed him completely. The old, old story, felt Lord Ickenham.
‘Oh, very well,’ he said. ‘If that is how you feel —‘
‘It is,’ Pongo assured him. ‘Make a note of it on your cuff. And it’s no good saying “Ichabod”, because I intend to stick to my position with iron resolution. My standing with Hermione is none too secure as it is — she looks askance at my belonging to the Drones — and the faintest breath of scandal would dish me properly. And most unfortunately she knows all about you.’
‘My life is an open book.’
‘She has heard what a loony you are, and she seems to think it may be hereditary. “I hope you are not like your uncle,” she keeps saying, with a sort of brooding look in her eye.’
‘You must have misunderstood her. “I hope you are like your uncle,” she probably said. Or “Do try, darling, to be more like your uncle.”‘
‘Consequently I shall have to watch my step like a ruddy hawk. Let her get the slightest suspicion into her nut that I am not one hundred per cent steady and serious, and bim will go my chances of putting on the spongebag trousers and walking down the aisle with her.’
‘Then you would not consider the idea of my coming to Ashenden as your valet, and seeing what innocent fun we could whack out of the deception?’
‘My God!’
‘Merely a suggestion. And it couldn’t be done, anyway. It would involve shaving off my moustache, to which I am greatly attached. When a man has neither chick nor child, he gets very fond of a moustache. So she’s that sort of girl, is she?’
‘What do you mean, that sort of girl?’
‘Noble-minded. High-principled. A credit to British womanhood.’
‘Oh, rather. Yes, she’s terrific. Must be seen to be believed.’
‘I look forward to seeing her.’
‘I have a photograph here, if you would care to take a dekko,’ said Pongo, producing one of cabinet size from his breast pocket like a conjurer extracting a rabbit from a top hat.
Lord Ickenham took the photograph, and studied it for some moments.
‘A striking face.’
‘Don’t miss the eyes.’
‘I’ve got ‘em.’
‘The nose, also.’
‘I’ve got that, too. She looks intelligent. ‘‘And how. Writes novels.’
‘Good God!’
A monstrous suspicion had germinated in Pongo’s mind.
‘Don’t you like her?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ said Lord Ickenham, feeling his way carefully. ‘I can see she’s a remarkable girl, but I wouldn’t say she was the wife for you.’
‘Why not?’
‘In my opinion you will be giving away too much weight. Have you studied these features? That chin is a determined chin. Those eyes are flashing eyes.’
‘What’s the matter with flashing eyes?’
‘Dashed unpleasant things to have about the home. To cope with flashing eyes, you have to be a man of steel and ginger. Are you a man of steel and ginger? No. You’re like me, a gentle coffee-caddie.’
‘A how much?’
‘By a coffee-caddie I mean a man — and there is no higher type — whose instinct it is to carry his wife’s breakfast up to her room on a tray each morning and bill and coo with her as she wades into it. And what the coffee-caddie needs is not a female novelist with a firm chin and flashing eyes, but a jolly little soul who, when he bills, will herself bill like billy-o, and who will be right there with bells on when he starts to coo. The advice I give to every young man starting out to seek a life partner is to find a girl whom he can tickle. Can you see yourself tickling Hermione Bostock? She would draw herself to her full height and say “Sir!” The ideal wife for you, of course, would have been Sally Painter.’
At the mention of this name, as so often happens when names from the dead past bob up in conversation, Pongo’s face became mask-like and a thin coating of ice seemed to form around him. A more sensitive man than Lord Ickenham would have sent for his winter woollies.
‘Does Coggs suffer from bunions?’ he said distantly. ‘I thought he was walking as if he had trouble with his feet.’
‘Ever since she came to England,’ proceeded Lord Ickenham, refusing to be lured from the subject into realms of speculation, however fascinating, ‘I have always hoped that you and Sally would eventually form a merger. And came a day when you apprised me that the thing was on. And then, dammit,’ he went on, raising his voice a little in his emotion, ‘came another day when you apprised me that it was off. And why, having succeeded in getting engaged to a girl like Sally Painter, you were mad enough to sever relations, is more than I can understand. It was all your fault, I suppose?’
Pongo had intended to maintain a frigid silence until the distasteful subject should have blown over, but this unjust charge shook him out of his proud reserve.
‘It wasn’t anything of the bally kind. Perhaps you will allow me to place the facts before you.’
‘I wish you would. It’s about time someone did. I could get nothing out of Sally.’
‘You’ve seen her, then?’
‘She came down here with Otis a couple of weeks ago and left one of her busts in my charge. I don’t know why. That’s it, over there in the corner.’
Pongo gave the bust a brief and uninterested glance.
‘And she didn’t place the facts before you?’
‘She said the engagement was off, which I knew already, but nothing more. ‘‘Oh? Well,’ said Pongo, breathing heavily through the nostrils as he viewed the body of the dead past, ‘what happened was this. Just because I wouldn’t do something she wanted me to do, she called me a lily-livered poltroon.’
‘She probably meant it as a compliment. A lily liver must be very pretty. ‘‘High words ensued. I said so-and-so, and she said such-and-such. And later that evening ring, letters and all the fixings were returned by district messenger boy.’
‘A mere lovers’ tiff. I should have thought you would have made it up next day.’
‘Well, we jolly well didn’t. As a matter of fact, that lily-livered sequence was simply what put the lid on it. We had been getting in each other’s hair for some time before that and there was bound to be a smash-up sooner or later.’
‘What were the principal subject
s of disagreement?’
‘For one thing, that damned brother of hers. He makes me sick.’
‘Otis isn’t everybody’s money, I admit. He’s a publisher now, Sally tells me. I suppose he will make as big a mess of that as he did of his antique shop. Did you tell her he made you sick?’
‘Yes. She got a bit steamed up about it. And then there was more trouble because I wanted her to chuck being a sculptress.’
‘Why didn’t you like her being a sculptress?’
‘I hated her mixing with all that seedy crowd in Chelsea. Bounders with beards,’ said Pongo, with an austere shudder. ‘I’ve been in her studio sometimes, and the blighters were crawling out of the woodwork in hundreds, bearded to the eyebrows.’
Lord Ickenham drew thoughtfully at his cigar.
‘I was mistaken in saying that you were not a man of steel and ginger. You appear to have thrown your weight about like a sheikh.’
‘Well, she threw her weight about with me. She was always trying to boss me.’
‘Girls do. Especially American girls. I know, because I married one. It’s part of their charm.’
‘Well, there’s a limit.’
‘And with you that was reached — how? You had started to tell me. What was it she wanted you to do?’
‘Take some jewellery with me when I went to New York and smuggle it through the customs.’
‘Bless her heart, what an enterprising little soul she is. But since when has Sally possessed jewellery?’
‘It wasn’t for her, it was for one of her rich American pals, a girl named Alice something. This ass of a female had been loading herself with the stuff in and around Bond Street and didn’t like the idea of paying duty on it when she got back to New York, and Sally wanted me to run it through for her.’