But when you see him in the coffee room of an English country inn, thousands of miles from his natural habitat, you may be excused for harbouring a momentary suspicion that this is not the man in the flesh but rather his wraith or phantasm looking in, as wraiths and phantasms will, to pass the time of day.
‘Eek!’ Mrs Spottsworth exclaimed, visibly shaken. Since interesting herself in psychical research, she had often wished to see a ghost, but one likes to pick one’s time and place for that sort of thing. One does not want spectres muscling in when one is enjoying a refreshing gin and tonic.
To the captain, owing to the dimness of the light in the Goose and Gherkin’s coffee room, Mrs Spottsworth, until she spoke, had been simply a vague female figure having one for the road. On catching sight of her, he had automatically twirled his moustache, his invariable practice when he observed anything female in the offing, but he had in no sense drunk her in. Bending his gaze upon her now, he quivered all over like a nervous young hippopotamus finding itself face to face with its first White Hunter.
‘Well, fry me in butter!’ he ejaculated. He stood staring at her. ‘Mrs Spottsworth! Well, simmer me in prune juice! Last person in the world I’d have dreamed of seeing. I thought you were in America.’
Mrs Spottsworth had recovered her poise.
‘I flew over for a visit a week ago,’ she said.
‘Oh, I see. That explains it. What made it seem odd, finding you here, was that I remember you told me you lived in California or one of those places.’
‘Yes, I have a home in Pasadena. In Carmel, too, and one in New York and another in Florida and another up in Maine.’
‘Making five in all?’
‘Six. I was forgetting the one in Oregon.’
‘Six?’ The captain seemed thoughtful. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘it’s nice to have a roof over your head, of course.’
‘Yes. But one gets tired of places after a while. One yearns for something new. I’m thinking of buying this house I’m on my way to now, Rowcester Abbey. I met Lord Rowcester’s sister in New York on her way back from Jamaica, and she said her brother might be willing to sell. But what are you doing in England, Captain? I couldn’t believe my eyes at first.’
‘Oh, I thought I’d take a look at the old country, dear lady. Long time since I had a holiday, and you know the old proverb – all work and no play makes Jack a peh-bah pom bahoo. Amazing the way things have changed since I was here last. No idle rich, if you know what I mean. Everybody working. Everybody got a job of some kind.’
‘Yes, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Lord Rowcester’s sister, Lady Carmoyle, tells me her husband, Sir Roderick Carmoyle, is a floorwalker at Harrige’s. And he’s a tenth baronet or something.’
‘Amazing, what? Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar won’t believe me when I tell them.’
‘Who?’
‘Couple of pals of mine out in Kuala Lumpur. They’ll be astounded. But I like it,’ said the captain stoutly. ‘It’s the right spirit. The straight bat.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A cricket term, dear lady. At cricket you’ve got to play with a straight bat, or … or, let’s face it, you don’t play with a straight bat, if you see what I mean.’
‘I suppose so. But do sit down, won’t you?’
‘Thanks, if I may, but only for a minute. I’m chasing a foe of the human species.’
In Captain Biggar’s manner, as he sat down, a shrewd observer would have noted a trace of embarrassment, and might have attributed this to the fact that the last time he and Mrs Spottsworth had seen each other he had been sorting out what was left of her husband with a view to shipping it to Nairobi. But it was not the memory of that awkward moment that was causing his diffidence. Its roots lay deeper than that.
He loved this woman. He had loved her from the very moment she had come into his life. How well he remembered that moment. The camp among the acacia trees. The boulder-strewn cliff. The boulder-filled stream. Old Simba the lion roaring in the distance, old Tembo the elephant doing this and that in the bimbo or tall grass, and A.B. Spottsworth driving up in the car with a vision in jodhpurs at his side. ‘My wife,’ A.B. Spottsworth had said, indicating the combination of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy by whom he was accompanied, and as he replied ‘Ah, the memsahib’ and greeted her with a civil ‘Kraiyu ti ny ma pay’, it was as if a powerful electric shock had passed through Captain Biggar. This, he felt, was It.
Naturally, being a white man, he had not told his love, but it had burned steadily within him ever since, a strong, silent passion of such a calibre that sometimes, as he sat listening to the hyaenas and gazing at the snows of Kilimanjaro, it had brought him within an ace of writing poetry.
And here she was again, looking lovelier than ever. It seemed to Captain Biggar that somebody in the vicinity was beating a bass drum. But it was only the thumping of his heart.
His last words had left Mrs Spottsworth fogged.
‘Chasing a foe of the human species?’ she queried.
‘A blighter of a bookie. A cad of the lowest order with a soul as black as his fingernails. I’ve been after him for hours. And I’d have caught him,’ said the captain, moodily sipping beer, ‘if something hadn’t gone wrong with my bally car. They’re fixing it now at that garage down the road.’
‘But why were you chasing this bookmaker?’ asked Mrs Spottsworth. It seemed to her a frivolous way for a strong man to be passing his time.
Captain Biggar’s face darkened. Her question had touched an exposed nerve.
‘The low hound did the dirty on me. Seemed straight enough, too. Chap with a walrus moustache and a patch over his left eye. Honest Patch Perkins, he called himself. “Back your fancy and fear nothing, my noble sportsman,” he said. “If you don’t speculate, you can’t accumulate,” he said. “Walk up, walk up. Roll, bowl or pitch. Ladies half-way and no bad nuts returned,” he said. So I put my double on with him.’
‘Your double?’
‘A double, dear lady, is when you back a horse in one race and if it wins, put the proceeds on another horse in another race.’
‘Oh, what we call a parlay in America.’
‘Well, you can readily see that if both bounders pull it off, you pouch a princely sum. I’ve got in with a pretty knowledgeable crowd since I came to London, and they recommended as a good double for today Lucy Glitters and Whistler’s Mother.’
The name struck a chord.
‘The waiter was telling me that Whistler’s Mother won.’
‘So did Lucy Glitters in the previous race. I had a fiver on her at a hundred to six and all to come on Whistler’s Mother for the Oaks. She ambled past the winning post at –’
‘Thirty-three to one, the waiter was saying. My goodness! You certainly cleaned up, didn’t you!’
Captain Biggar finished his beer. If it is possible to drink beer like an overwrought soul, he did so.
‘I certainly ought to have cleaned up,’ he said, with a heavy frown. ‘There was the colossal sum of three thousand pounds two shillings and sixpence owing to me, plus my original fiver which I had handed to the fellow’s clerk, a chap in a check suit and another walrus moustache. And what happened? This inky-hearted bookie welshed on me. He legged it in his car with me after him. I’ve been pursuing him, winding and twisting through the country roads, for what seems an eternity. And just as I was on the point of grappling with him, my car broke down. But I’ll have the scoundrel! I’ll catch the louse! And when I do, I propose to scoop out his insides with my bare hands and twist his head off and make him swallow it. After which –’
Captain Biggar broke off. It had suddenly come to him that he was monopolizing the conversation. After all, of what interest could these daydreams of his be to this woman?
‘But let’s not talk about me any more,’ he said. ‘Dull subject. How have you been all these years, dear lady? Pretty fit, I hope? You look right in the pink. And how’s your husband? Oh, sorry!’
‘Not
at all. You mean, have I married again? No, I have not married again, though Clifton and Alexis keep advising me to. They are sweet about it. So broad-minded and considerate.’
‘Clifton? Alexis?’
‘Mr Bessemer and Mr Spottsworth, my two previous husbands. I get them on the ouija board from time to time. I suppose,’ said Mrs Spottsworth, laughing a little self-consciously, ‘you think it’s odd of me to believe in things like the ouija board?’
‘Odd?’
‘So many of my friends in America call all that sort of thing poppycock.’
Captain Biggar snorted militantly.
‘I’d like to be there to talk to them! I’d astonish their weak intellects. No, dear lady, I’ve seen too many strange things in my time, living as I have done in the shadow-lands of mystery, to think anything odd. I have seen barefooted pilgrims treading the path of Ahura-Mazda over burning coals. I’ve seen ropes tossed in the air and small boys shinning up them in swarms. I’ve met fakirs who slept on beds of spikes.’
‘Really?’
‘I assure you. And think of it, insomnia practically unknown. So you don’t catch me laughing at people because they believe in ouija boards.’
Mrs Spottsworth gazed at him tenderly. She was thinking how sympathetic and understanding he was.
‘I am intensely interested in psychical research. I am proud to be one of the little band of devoted seekers who are striving to pierce the veil. I am hoping to be vouchsafed some enthralling spiritual manifestation at this Rowcester Abbey where I’m going. It is one of the oldest houses in England, they tell me.’
‘Then you ought to flush a spectre or two,’ agreed Captain Biggar. ‘They collect in gangs in these old English country houses. How about another gin and tonic?’
‘No, I must be getting along. Pomona’s in the car, and she hates being left alone.’
‘You couldn’t stay and have one more quick one?’
‘I fear not. I must be on my way. I can’t tell you how delightful it has been, meeting you again, Captain.’
‘Just made my day, meeting you, dear lady,’ said Captain Biggar, speaking hoarsely, for he was deeply moved. They were out in the open now, and he was able to get a clearer view of her as she stood beside her car bathed in the sunset glow. How lovely she was, he felt, how wonderful, how … Come, come, Biggar, he said to himself gruffly, this won’t do, old chap. Play the game, Biggar, play the game, old boy!
‘Won’t you come and see me when I get back to London, Captain? I shall be at the Savoy.’
‘Charmed, dear lady, charmed,’ said Captain Biggar. But he did not mean it.
For what would be the use? What would it profit him to renew their acquaintance? Just twisting the knife in the wound, that’s what he would be doing. Better, far better, to bite the bullet and wash the whole thing out here and now. A humble hunter with scarcely a bob to his name couldn’t go mixing with wealthy widows. It was the kind of thing he had so often heard Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar denouncing in the old Anglo-Malay Club at Kuala Lumpur. ‘Chap’s nothing but a bally fortune-hunter, old boy,’ they would say, discussing over the gin pahits some acquaintance who had made a rich marriage. ‘Simply a blighted gigolo, old boy, nothing more. Can’t do that sort of thing, old chap, what? Not cricket, old boy.’
And they were right. It couldn’t be done. Damn it all, a feller had his code. ‘Meh nee pan kong bahn rotfai’ about summed it up.
Stiffening his upper lip, Captain Biggar went down the road to see how his car was getting on.
2
* * *
ROWCESTER ABBEY – PRONOUNCED Roaster – was about ten miles from the Goose and Gherkin. It stood – such portions of it as had not fallen down – just beyond Southmolton in the midst of smiling country. Though if you had asked William Egerton Bamfylde Ossingham Belfry, ninth Earl of Rowcester, its proprietor, what the English countryside had to smile about these days, he would have been unable to tell you. Its architecture was thirteenth-century, fifteenth-century and Tudor, its dilapidation twentieth-century post-World War Two.
To reach the abbey you turned off the main road and approached by a mile-long drive thickly encrusted with picturesque weeds and made your way up stone steps, chipped in spots, to a massive front door which badly needed a lick of paint. And this was what Bill Rowcester’s sister Monica and her husband, Sir Roderick (‘Rory’) Carmoyle, had done at just about the hour when Mrs Spottsworth and Captain Biggar were starting to pick up the threads at their recent reunion.
Monica, usually addressed as Moke, was small and vivacious, her husband large and stolid. There was something about his aspect and deportment that suggested a more than ordinarily placid buffalo chewing a cud and taking in its surroundings very slowly and methodically, refusing to be hurried. It was thus that, as they stood on the front steps, he took in Rowcester Abbey.
‘Moke,’ he said at length, having completed his scrutiny, ‘I’ll tell you something which you may or may not see fit to release to the press. This bally place looks mouldier every time I see it.’
Monica was quick to defend her childhood home.
‘It might be a lot worse.’
Rory considered this, chewing his cud for a while in silence.
‘How?’ he asked.
‘I know it needs doing up, but where’s the money to come from? Poor old Bill can’t afford to run a castle on a cottage income.’
‘Why doesn’t he get a job like the rest of us?’
‘You needn’t stick on side just because you’re in trade, you old counterjumper.’
‘Everybody’s doing it, I mean to say. Nowadays the House of Lords is practically empty except on evenings and bank holidays.’
‘We Rowcesters aren’t easy to place. The Rowcester men have all been lilies of the field. Why, Uncle George didn’t even put on his own boots.’
‘Whose boots did he put on?’ asked Rory, interested.
‘Ah, that’s what we’d all like to know. Of course, Bill’s big mistake was letting that American woman get away from him.’
‘What American woman would that be?’
‘It was just after you and I got married. A Mrs Bessemer. A widow. He met her in Cannes one summer. Fabulously rich and, according to Bill, unimaginably beautiful. It seemed promising for a time, but it didn’t come to anything. I suppose someone cut him out. Of course, he was plain Mr Belfry then, not my lord Rowcester, which may have made a difference.’
Rory shook his head.
‘It wouldn’t be that. I was plain Mr Carmoyle when I met you and look at the way I snaffled you in the teeth of the pick of the County.’
‘But then think what you were like in those days. A flick of the finger, a broken heart. And you’re not so bad now, either,’ added Monica fondly. ‘Something of the old magic remains.’
‘True,’ said Rory placidly. ‘In a dim light I still cast a spell. But the trouble with Bill was, I imagine, that he lacked drive … the sort of drive you see so much of at Harrige’s. The will to win, I suppose you might call it. Napoleon had it. I have it, Bill hasn’t. Oh, well, there it is,’ said Rory philosophically. He resumed his study of Rowcester Abbey. ‘You know what this house wants?’ he proceeded. ‘An atom bomb, dropped carefully on the roof of the main banqueting hall.’
‘It would help, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would be the making of the old place. Put it right in no time. Still, atom bombs cost money, so I suppose that’s out of the question. What you ought to do is use your influence with Bill to persuade him to buy a lot of paraffin and some shavings and save the morning papers and lay in plenty of matches and wait till some moonless night and give the joint the works. He’d feel a different man, once the old ruin was nicely ablaze.’
Monica looked mysterious.
‘I can do better than that.’
Rory shook his head.
‘No. Arson. It’s the only way. You can’t beat good old arson. Those fellows down in the east end go in for it a lot. They touch a m
atch to the shop, and it’s like a week at the seaside to them.’
‘What would you say if I told you I was hoping to sell the house?’
Rory stared, amazed. He had a high opinion of his wife’s resourcefulness, but he felt that she was attempting the impossible.
‘Sell it? I don’t believe you could give it away. I happen to know Bill offered it for a song to one of these charitable societies as a Home for Reclaimed Juvenile Delinquents, and they simply sneered at him. Probably thought it would give the Delinquents rheumatism. Very damp house, this.’
‘It is a bit moist.’
‘Water comes through the walls in heaping handfuls. I suppose because it’s so close to the river. I remember saying to Bill once, “Bill,” I said, “I’ll tell you something about your home surroundings. In the summer the river is at the bottom of your garden, and in the winter your garden is at the bottom of the river.” Amused the old boy quite a bit. He thought it clever.’
Monica regarded her husband with that cold, wifely eye which married men learn to dread.
‘Very clever,’ she said frostily. ‘Extremely droll. And I suppose the first thing you’ll do is make a crack like that to Mrs Spottsworth.’
‘Eh?’ It stole slowly into Rory’s mind that a name had been mentioned that was strange to him. ‘Who’s Mrs Spottsworth?’
‘The woman I’m hoping to sell the house to. American. Very rich. I met her when I was passing through New York on my way home. She owns dozens of houses in America, but she’s got a craving to have something old and picturesque in England.’
‘Romantic, eh?’
‘Dripping with romance. Well, when she told me that – we were sitting next to each other at a women’s lunch – I immediately thought of Bill and the abbey, of course, and started giving her a sales talk. She seemed interested. After all, the abbey is chock full of historical associations.’
The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 3: The Mating Season / Ring for Jeeves / Very Good, Jeeves Page 2