Lady Constance’s animosity had waned considerably as this explanation proceeded. She still felt that she should have been consulted before additions were made to the castle’s guest list, but on the whole she approved of what had been done. The incidents of that disturbed night had shaken her. She had never been under the illusion that Clarence’s was a keen mind, but not till then had he given so substantial a cause for anxiety to his nearest and dearest. Psychiatric treatment was unquestionably called for. Whatever it might do to him, it could scarcely fail to be an improvement. The only doubt that lingered with her was whether this Mr. Halliday was sufficiently mature to undertake the task of penetrating to his subconscious and bringing to the surface the contents of its hidden depths.
‘He’s very young,’ she said dubiously.
The Duke’s attention was engaged once more with the photograph of Lady Constance’s husband.
‘Funny-shaped head Schoonmaker’s got. Like a Spanish onion.’
It was a statement which at any other time Lady Constance would have contested hotly, but her mind was on Sir Roderick Glossop’s junior partner.
‘He’s very young,’ she repeated.
‘I wouldn’t call Schoonmaker young. Depends of course what you mean by young.’
‘I was speaking of this Mr. Halliday. I was saying he was very young.’
‘Of course he’s young. Why wouldn’t he be? If a man’s a junior partner, how can he help being junior?’ said the Duke, taking, as so few women were able to, the reasonable view.
Extraordinary, he was thinking, how mingling with those Yanks had sapped Connie’s intellect. She didn’t seem able nowadays to understand the simplest thing.
2
For perhaps two or possibly three minutes after they had left Lady Constance’s boudoir Gally and John preserved an unbroken silence. Gally was plunged again in thoughts of how cleverly he had grappled with the various problems which had confronted him, a feat possible only to one trained in the hard school of the Pelican Club, while John was in the grip of the peculiar numbed sensation, so like that caused by repeated blows on the head from a blunt instrument, which came to all but the strongest who met Lady Constance for the first time when she was feeling frosty. It was as though he had been for an extended period shut up in a frigidaire with the first Queen Elizabeth.
‘I think you came through that well, Johnny,’ said Gally at length. ‘Just the right blend of amiability and reserve. It is not every man who can come through the ordeal of being introduced to Connie with such elan and aplomb. It leads me to hope that when you come up against La Gilpin, she will be less than the dust beneath your chariot wheels. Too bad she’s away, but she ought to be with us in an hour or so.’
‘By which time I may have started to recover.’
‘Yes, I could see that, however little you showed it, you found Connie overpowering. Long association has made me immune, but she does take the stuffing out of most people. Somebody wrote a story years ago entitled The Bird With The Difficult Eye, and I have always thought the author must have had Connie in mind. She takes after my late father, a man who could open an oyster at sixty paces with a single glance. But you mustn’t let her sap your nerve, for you’ll need all you have for the coming get-together with that popsy of yours.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t—’
‘I am a plain man. I call a popsy a popsy. How were you thinking of playing the scene of reunion, by the way, always taking into consideration the fact that she, too, will have a difficult eye? Her mood when we were discussing you the other day was not sunny. You will need to pick your words carefully. I would advise the tender reminiscent note, what you might call the Auld Lang Syne touch. Remind her of those long sunlit afternoons when you floated down the river in your punt or canoe, just she and you, the world far away, no sound breaking the summer stillness except the little ripples whispering like fairy bugles among the rushes.’
‘We didn’t float.’
‘Didn’t you ever go on the river?’
‘No.’
Gally was surprised. He said that in his day you always took a spin with the popsy in a punt or canoe, with a bite to eat afterwards at Skindles. It was the first step towards a fusion of souls.
‘Then where did you plan your future?’
‘We didn’t plan it anywhere. I asked her to marry me and she said she would, and that was that. We hadn’t any time to plan futures. It all happened quite suddenly in a taxi.’
‘But you must have seen something of her before then?’
‘At parties and so on.’
‘But not in canoes on long sunlit afternoons?’
‘No.’
‘Disappointing. When was your first meeting?’
‘One morning in her shop.’
‘She runs a shop?’
‘She used to. It didn’t pay.’
‘What sort of shop?’
‘Flower.’
‘And you went in to buy long-stemmed roses?’
‘No, I went in because I had seen her through the window.’
‘Love at first sight?’
‘It was at my end.’
‘What happened then?’
‘We got talking. It turned out that I had been at Oxford with her brother.’
‘And then?’
‘We met again somewhere.’
‘And went on talking about her brother?’
‘Among other things.’
‘And after that?’
‘Some lunches.’
‘Many?’
‘No. She always seemed to be booked up. She was very popular. Whenever I met her, there was always a gang of Freddies, Algies and Claudes from the Brigade of Guards frisking round her. That’s why asking her to marry me seemed such a long shot. I didn’t think I had a hope. After all, who am I?’
‘You are my godson,’ said Gally with dignity, ‘and furthermore you have a golf handicap of six. Dash it all, Johnny, Linda Gilpin isn’t the Queen of Sheba.’
‘Yes, she is.’
‘Or Helen of Troy.’
‘Yes, she is, and also Cleopatra. You ought to know. You’ve met her.’
A sidelong glance at his godson told Gally that these words had not been lightly spoken. There was a soul’s-awakening look on John’s face that emphasized their sincerity. It left no doubt that Linda Gilpin was the girl he wanted and that he was prepared to accept no just-as-good substitute, and it was an attitude Gally understood. He had felt the same himself about Dolly Henderson. Nevertheless, he considered it his duty as a godfather to assume, if only halfheartedly, the role of devil’s advocate. He had taken an immediate liking to Linda, but he was not blind to the fact that in making her his wedded wife Johnny would be running up against something hot. She was no Ben Bolt’s Alice, who would weep with delight when he gave her a smile and tremble with fear at his frown. She was a girl of spirit, and any husband rash enough to frown at her would very shortly know that he had been in a fight.
This he proceeded to point out to John in well-chosen words.
‘I agree,’ he said, ‘that she is a personable wench and has what it takes, but looks aren’t everything. The conversation I had with her when we were going to see the yew alley left me with the conviction that she was anything but meek and insipid. Admittedly the proceedings in the case of Clutterbuck versus Frisby had stirred her up very considerably, but she reminded me of a girl I knew in the old days who once wound up an argument we were having by spiking me in the leg with a hat pin. She recalled to my memory a poem I read in my youth, the protagonist of which was a young costermonger who took his donah to Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday. The expedition started out well, but when it came on to rain and the ham sandwiches got wet, the gentler side of her nature went into abeyance, and this is how he expresses himself. “There is some girls wot cry, says I, while some don’t shed a tear, but just has tempers and when they has ‘em, reaches a point in their sawcassum wot only a dorg could bear to hear. Thus unto Nancy by and by
, says I”. Linda Gilpin seemed to me very much the Nancy type. Are you prepared to face a married life into which tempers and sawcassum are bound to enter?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t feel like calling the whole thing off?’
‘No.’
‘Taking to the hills while escape is still possible?’
‘No.’
‘Then,’ said Gally, gladly abandoning the functions of devil’s advocate, ‘we know how we stand, and I may say that I agree with you wholeheartedly. My acquaintance with Linda Gilpin has not been a long one, but I have seen enough of her to know that she is what the doctor ordered. Good Lord, what does an occasional bit of sawcassum matter? It prevents married life from becoming stodgy. What we must do now is think of a good approach for you to make. The approach is everything. There are dozens to choose from. There was a chap at the Pelican who pretended to commit suicide when the girl turned him down. He swallowed an aspirin tablet and fell back with a choking cry. The trouble was that after they had worked on him with the stomach pump and he went back to the girl, she simply refused him again, and all that weary work wasted. Still, it was an idea. Something on those lines might be worth trying. It strikes you favourably?’
‘No.’
‘Then how about having an accident? If she sees you lying on the floor, spouting blood all over the carpet, there’ll soon be an end to her sales resistance. I knew a man who won his bride by getting hit over the head with a stone tobacco jar, the sort with the college arms on them which you buy when you’re a freshman at the University. Clarence has a stone tobacco jar, and Beach would bean you with it if you slipped him a couple of quid. Indeed, if you played your cards right, he would probably do it for nothing. How about it? No? You’re a hard man to help, Johnny. Finnicky is the word that springs to the lips. There seems no way of pleasing you.’
They walked on in silence, John’s a thoughtful, Gally’s a wounded silence. But it was never the latter’s habit to leave a story unfinished.
‘There was rather an odd conclusion to that romance I was speaking of,’ he said as they came in view of the lake. ‘I should have mentioned that the suicide chap’s girl was the hat check girl at Oddenino’s, and he had left his hat with her before putting on his act. You know how at many restaurants the O.C. in charge of hats sticks a slip of paper with a description of the customer in each lid to assist identification, the idea being that they’ll feel complimented at being remembered, which they wouldn’t be if they just got a ticket. Mine, for instance, would probably have been something like “Slim, distinguished, wearing eyeglass”. Well, as I say, this fellow had handed over the headgear, and when they had finished working on him with the stomach pump and he went back to the girl and proposed again and she refused him once more, he thought he might at least save something from the wreck by getting his hat, so he asked for it in a heartbroken sort of way and she gave it to him and he tottered off still heartbroken. His distress was not longlived. He found the girl had forgotten to take out the slip, and it read “Face that would stop a clock”. He was so indignant that his love died instantaneously and he lived happily ever after.’
John had not given this human drama the attention it deserved. He was staring at the lake with the intensity of Tennyson’s bold Sir Bedivere, suddenly conscious of how warm and sticky the sultry summer afternoon had rendered him. He pointed emotionally.
‘Could I have a swim before dinner?’ he asked, and Gally said he could if he did not take too long over it.
‘You’ll find trunks, towels and what not in the bath house. My brother Clarence takes a dip every morning, but whether from motives of health or in order to dilute the scent of the pig sty is not known. I shall be in the hammock on the front lawn when you want me.’
He strolled off—slim, distinguished, wearing eyeglass, as the hat check girl at Oddenino’s would have said, and a few minutes later John was in the water, revelling in its thereapeutic properties with a gusto which Lord Emsworth could not have surpassed when taking his morning dip, and Linda Gilpin, returning from her visit to the old school and hurrying to the lake for a quick bathe before dressing for dinner, saw him, stood transfixed, and blinked several times as if to assure herself that she had really seen what she thought she had seen. Then, coming to life, she shot off in the direction of the house. It was her intention to find Gally and take up with him the matter of John’s arrival, for her woman’s intuition told her that if barristers she particularly disliked wormed their way into Blandings Castle, it must be he who had engineered the outrage.
She boiled with justifiable fury, but she was resolved, when she saw Gally, to be very calm and cool and dignified, making it clear to him that though she had been surprised to see John Halliday, his presence at the castle was a thing of supreme indifference to her. To suppose that it mattered to her one way or another was absurd.
Such were her meditations. They were suddenly interrupted. Over lawn and pasture there came stealing a metallic but musical sound, soft in its early stages, then soaring to a majestic crescendo.
Beach was beating the dressing-for-dinner gong.
3
Beach replaced the gong stick with the quiet glow of satisfaction which this part of his duties always gave him. He loved to hear the music swell to the sound of a great Amen and die away in a pianissimo like the last distant murmur of a passing thunderstorm. It had taken him some years to bring his art to its present state of perfection. At the outset of his career he had been a mere crude banger, but today he was prepared to match his virtuosity against any butler in England. Gally, complimenting him once on a masterly performance, had ventured the opinion that it was the large dorsal muscles that did it. Beach himself attributed his success to wrist work and the follow through.
Usually when he had completed his task a restful silence ensued, but this evening the quiet of the hall was broken by a sudden clattering suggestive of coals being delivered down a coal chute. This was caused by Howard Chesney, who, hurrying from upper regions in quest of a mislaid cigarette case, had slipped and made a rapid descent of the last few stairs. He staggered across the floor, clutched at the table on which the papers and magazines were kept, seized it as he was about to fall and stood looking dazed but thankful that he had been spared a worse disaster.
He found Beach at his side. It was Beach’s normal practice, when he encountered Howard Chesney, to freeze him with a glance and pass on his way, but Howard’s unexpected impersonation of a Gadarene swine rounding into the straight seemed to call for verbal comment. With just the right touch of reserve in his manner, to make it clear that this momentary unbending must not be taken as implying any promise of future camaraderie, he said:
‘I trust you have sustained no injury, sir.’
Howard had already assured himself of this by passing his hands rapidly over his person as policemen had sometimes done to him in his native land. Frisking himself, as one might say. Incredible as it would have seemed to him a moment ago, there appeared to be no broken bones.
‘No, I’m okay,’ he replied bravely. ‘I managed to catch hold of the table. Those stairs are slippery.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why do they keep them that way?’
‘I could not say, sir. I was not consulted in the matter,’ said Beach austerely. He was willing to sympathize, but not to chat. He made a stately exit, and Howard Chesney after a brief search found his cigarette case. As he did so, Linda came hurrying in from outside. He would gladly have engaged her in conversation, for it was always his policy to talk as much as possible to girls with blue eyes, chestnut hair and graceful figures, but she flitted by and he was obliged to do the next best thing and light a cigarette. He was crushing this out in an ashtray, when Vanessa came down the stairs.
‘Hi there, Mr. Chesney,’ she said. ‘Just the man I wanted to see.’
Vanessa, it will be recalled, had resolved to devote her time to a study in depth of Howard Chesney, with a view to ascertaining whet
her his moral code was as low as a first glance had told her it was. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s a crook,’ she had said to Wilbur Trout, ‘but I’ll have to be certain before I start anything.’ She had now satisfied herself that it was even lower, and it was with bright confidence that she was now planning to enlist his services.
‘Have you seen Wilbur Trout?’ she asked, and as she spoke Wilbur appeared from the direction of the billiard room, where he had been practising solitary cannons. ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said. ‘I hoped you would be along. We’re going to have a board meeting.’
‘A what?’
It was Wilbur who said this. He was staring at her and thinking how particularly attractive she looked. Vanessa liked to dress for dinner in good time, and when she dressed for dinner she always presented a spectacle that took the eye.
‘A spot of plotting I should have said, but board meeting sounds better. Come over here where we shan’t be heard.’
She led the way to a corner of the hall the only occupant of which was a suit of armour. Thinking it improbable that anyone would be lurking inside this, she resumed.
‘It’s about that picture, Willie. I’ve got an idea that looks good. Simple, too. It’s always best to keep things simple if you can,’ she said, and Wilbur agreed with her. Get too clever, he said, and you were sunk. This had been borne in upon him, he said, when thinking up stories to tell his wives.
‘But as Mr. Chesney comes into it,’ said Vanessa, ‘the first thing to do is to sound him on how he feels about doing a little lawbreaking with no risks attached. Have you any prejudices in that direction, Mr. Chesney?’
Howard Chesney was a cautious man.
‘Well, that depends,’ he said.
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