Sunset at Blandings Page 2

  ‘Sir James Piper is also a guest.’

  This final news item brought a further ray of sunshine to Gally’s mood. Only the fear of choking on Beach’s superb port prevented him uttering a glad cry.

  ‘Old Jimmy Piper!’ he said when he was at liberty to speak. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. I used to know him well. Sad how time ruins old friendships. What is he now? Prime Minister or something, isn’t he?’

  ‘Chancellor of the Exchequer, sir, I understand.’

  ‘He’s come on a lot since we were fellow members of the Pelican. I remember young Jimmy Piper used constantly to be chucked out of the old Gardenia.5 I suppose he’s had to give up all that sort of thing now. That’s the curse of getting to the top in politics. You lose your joie de vivre. I don’t suppose Jimmy has been thrown out of a restaurant for years. But mark you, Beach, he is more to be pitied than censured. Just as he was at his best a ghastly sister came to live with him and changed his whole outlook. That’s why we drifted apart. I looked him up one day, all agog for one of our customary frolics, and the sister was there and she froze me stiff. We could have met at his club, of course, in fact he asked me to lunch there, but when I found that his club was the Athenaeum, crawling, as you probably know, with bishops and no hope of anyone throwing bread at anyone, I bowed out. And I’ve not seen him since. The right thing to do, don’t you think? Making a clean cut of it. The surgeon’s knife. But it will be delightful seeing Jimmy again. I hope he hasn’t brought his sister with him.’

  ‘He has, Mr. Galahad.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Or, rather, Miss Piper is expected in a few days.’

  ‘Oh, my God! Does Clarence know?’

  ‘His lordship has been informed.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘He appeared somewhat disturbed.’

  ‘I don’t wonder. Blandings Castle seems to be filling up like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and a single guest gives him a sinking feeling. Where is he?’

  ‘At the Empress’s sty, I presume, Mr. Galahad.’

  ‘I must go to him immediately and do my best to console him. A pretty figure I should cut in the eyes of posterity if I were to sit here swilling port while my only brother was up to his collar stud in the Slough of Despond.’

  And so saying Gally leaped to the door.

  He had scarcely reached the outer air when a small but solid body flung itself into his arms with a squeal of welcome. Victoria (Vicky) Underwood was always glad to see her Uncle Galahad, and never more so than at a time when, as Beach had said, she was somewhat depressed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  UNCLES occasionally find their nephews trying and are inclined to compare them to their disadvantage with the young men they knew when they were young men, but it is a very rare uncle who is unable to fraternize with his nieces. And of all his many nieces Gally was fondest of Vicky. She was pretty, a girl whom it was a pleasure to take to race meetings and garden parties, and she had that animation which in his younger days he had found so attractive in music hall artistes and members of the personnel of the chorus.[12]

  This animation was missing now. After that tempestuous greeting she had relapsed into a melancholy which would have entitled her to step straight into one of those sombre plays they put on for one performance on Sunday afternoons, and no questions asked. Gally gazed at her, concerned. Beach, that shrewd diagnostician, had been right, he felt, though his ‘somewhat depressed’ had been an understatement. Here was plainly a niece whose soul had been passed through the wringer, a niece who had drained the bitter cup and, what is more, had found a dead mouse at the bottom of it. Her demeanour reminded him of a girl he had once taken to Henley Regatta — at the moment when she had discovered that a beetle had fallen down the back of her summer sports wear.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass,’ said Gally irritably. ‘You’re obviously as down among the wines and spirits as Mariana at the moated grange.’

  ‘I’m all right, except that I wish I was dead.’

  ‘Were dead, surely,’ said Gally, who was a purist. ‘What do you want to be dead for? Great Scott!’ he exclaimed, suddenly enlightened. ‘Have you been jugged? Are you doing a stretch? Is that why you’re at Blandings?’

  The question did not display such amazing intuition as anyone unfamiliar with Blandings Castle might have supposed. All old English families have their traditions, and the one most rigorously observed in the family to which Vicky belonged ruled that if a young female member of it fell in love with the wrong man she was instantly shipped off to Blandings, there to remain until she came, as the expression was, to her senses.

  Young male members who fell in love with the wrong girls were sent to South Africa, as Gally had been thirty years ago. It was all rather unpleasant for the lovelorn juveniles, but better than if they had been living in the Middle Ages, when they would probably have had their heads cut off.

  Gally, taking for granted that the reply to his question would be in the affirmative, became reminiscent.

  ‘Lord love a duck,’ he said emotionally, ‘it seems only yesterday that they had me serving a term in the lowest dungeon below the castle moat because of Dolly Henderson.’[13]

  Feminine curiosity momentarily overcame Vicky’s depression. She knew vaguely that there had been some sort of trouble with Uncle Gally centuries ago, and she was glad to be about to get the facts.

  ‘Were you imprisoned at Blandings?’

  ‘With gyves upon my wrists.’

  ‘I thought you were sent to South Africa.’

  ‘Later, after I had been well gnawed by rats.’

  ‘Who was Dolly Henderson?’

  ‘Music halls. She sang at the old Oxford and the Tivoli.’

  ‘Tights?’

  ‘Pink. And she was the only woman I ever wanted to marry.’

  ‘Poor Gally.’

  ‘Yes, it was rather a nasty knock when my father bunged a spanner into the works. You never knew him, did you?’

  ‘I met him once when I was a very small child. He paralysed me.’

  ‘I don’t wonder. That voice, those bushy eyebrows. You must have thought you were seeing some sinister monster out of a fairy story.[14] Clarence is a great improvement as head of the family. If I told Clarence I wanted to marry somebody, there wouldn’t be any family curses and thumping of tables; he would just say “Capital, capital, capital”, and that would be that. But don’t let’s talk about me. Are you very much in love?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Jeff Bennison.’

  ‘Any money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Which of course makes your stepmother shudder at the sight of him.’

  ‘She’s never seen him.’

  ‘But she would shudder if she did. Lack of the stuff is always the rock on which the frail craft of love comes a stinker where Blandings Castle is concerned.’

  ‘And there’s another thing.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Jeff’s an artist.’

  Gally looked grave. To his sister Florence, he knew, an artist would be automatically suspect. La vie de Bohème, she would say to herself. Uninhibited goings-on at the Bohemian Ball. Nameless orgies in the old studio. Now more than ever he saw how grievously the cards were stacked against this young couple, and his heart went out to them.

  ‘He started as an architect, but his father lost all his money and he couldn’t carry on. So he tried to make a living painting, but you know how it is. Poor darling, he has had to take a job teaching drawing at a girls’ school.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Yes, I think that’s how he feels about it. Do you mind if I leave you now, Gally? I feel a flood of tears coming on.’

  ‘I am open at the moment to be cried in front of.’

  ‘No, I’d rather be alone.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was hoping I could do som
ething to cheer you up. But naturally at a time like this you don’t want an old gargoyle like me hanging around.’

  Gally proceeded on his way, brooding. He would have given much to have been able to do something to brighten life for the unfortunate girl, but no inspiration came beyond a vague determination to speak to his sister Florence like a Dutch uncle, and he was given the opportunity of doing this as he crossed the lawn which led to the Empress’s residence. Florence was there, reading a book in the hammock under the big cedar tree which he, though there was no actual ruling on the point, had always looked on as his own property. Many of his deepest thoughts had come to him when on its cushions, and it was with a sense of outrage that he drew up beside it. If people went about pinching one’s personal hammock, he felt, what were things coming to?

  ‘Comfortable?’ he said.

  Florence looked up from her book, expressing no pleasure at seeing him.

  ‘Oh, you’re back, Galahad? Did you enjoy yourself in London?’

  ‘Never mind about my enjoying myself in London,’ said Gally as sternly as any uncle that ever came out of Holland. ‘I’ve just been talking to Vicky.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She’s upset.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Crying buckets, poor child.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She tells me you object to this dream man of hers.’

  ‘I do. Very strongly.’

  ‘Although you’ve never seen him. Just because he’s short of money. As if everybody wasn’t nowadays except Clarence and you. Your late husband must have left you enough to sink a ship. Didn’t he leave Vicky any?’

  ‘He did. I’m the trustee for it.’

  ‘And sitting on it like a buzzard on a rock, I gather. What’s wrong with this fellow she wants to marry? Is he a criminal of some kind?’

  ‘Probably. His father was.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Didn’t she tell you his name?’

  ‘Jeff something.’

  ‘Bennison. His father was Arthur Bennison.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Have you never heard of Arthur Bennison? It was the great sensation years ago.’

  ‘I must have been out of England. What did he do? Murder somebody?’

  ‘No, just swindled all the people who had invested in his companies. My first husband was one of them. He left the country to avoid arrest and took refuge in one of those South American republics where they don’t have extradition. He died five years ago. So now perhaps you can see why I don’t want Victoria to marry his son.’

  Gally shook his head.

  ‘I don’t get it. Is that all you’ve got against him?’

  ‘Isn’t it enough?’

  ‘Not from where I sit. You might just as well refuse to associate with yourself because you had a father like ours.’

  ‘Father was a bully and a tyrant, but he didn’t swindle people.’

  ‘Probably because he didn’t think of it. As a matter of fact, you know perfectly well that swindling fathers have nothing to do with your objection to Vicky’s young man. What gashes you like a knife is his being short of cash. You’re a hard woman, Florence. What you need are a few quarts of the milk of human kindness. Look at the way you’re treating that husband of yours. Driving him out into the snow and bringing his clipped moustache in sorrow to the grave. Who do you think you are? La belle dame sans merci or something?’

  Florence picked up her book.

  ‘Oh, go away, Galahad. You’re impossible.’

  ‘Just off. I can’t bring you another cushion?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘I’ve heard it said that lying in a hammock is bad for the spine.’

  ‘Who did you hear it said by?’

  ‘A doctor at the Pelican Club.’

  ‘I suppose all members of the Pelican Club were half-witted.’

  Gally withdrew. He was thinking as he resumed his search for his brother Clarence that talking like a Dutch uncle to somebody was all right unless that somebody happened to be a Dutch aunt.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HE FOUND Lord Emsworth, as he had expected, drooping over the Empress’s sty like a wet sock and gazing at its occupant with a rapt expression.

  His devotion to the silver medallist had long been the occasion for adverse comment from his nearest and dearest. His severest critic, his sister Constance, was now in America, but there were others almost equally outspoken.

  ‘Old girl,’ his brother-in-law Colonel Wedge had said on one occasion to his wife Hermione, returning late at night from a visit to London, ‘we’ve got to face it, Clarence is dotty. Where do you think I found him just now? Down at the pig sty. I noticed something hanging over the rail and thought the pig man must have left his overalls there, and then it suddenly reared itself up and said “Ah, Egbert”. Gave me a nasty shock. Questioned as to what he was doing there at that time of night, he said he was listening to his pig.[15] And what, you will ask, was the pig doing? Singing? Reciting “Dangerous Dan McGrew”? Nothing of the kind. Just breathing.’

  Nor had Gally, fond though he was of his brother, abstained from criticism.

  ‘I have been closely associated with Clarence for more than half a century, and I know him from caviare to nuts,’ had been his verdict. ‘His I.Q. is about thirty points lower than that of a not too agile-minded jellyfish. Capital chap, though. One of the best.’

  As Gally approached, he peered at him with a puzzled look on his face, as if he knew he had seen him before somewhere, but could not think where. With an effort he identified him and gave him a brotherly nod.

  ‘Ah, Galahad.’

  ‘Ah to you, Clarence, with knobs on.’

  ‘You’re here, eh?’

  ‘Yes, right here.’

  ‘Someone told me you had gone to London.’

  ‘I’ve come back.’

  ‘Come back. I see. Come back, you mean. Yes, quite. What did you go to London for?’

  ‘Primarily to attend the Loyal Sons of Shropshire dinner. But I heard that a pal of mine was in a nursing home with a broken leg, so I stayed on to cheer him up.’

  ‘Nasty thing, a broken leg.’

  ‘Yes, it annoyed Stiffy a good deal.’

  ‘It was he who broke his leg?’

  ‘Yes. Friend of mine from the old Pelican days. Stiffy Bates.’

  ‘How did he break his leg?’

  ‘Getting off an omnibus.’

  ‘He should have taken a cab.’

  ‘Yes, he’ll know better next time.’

  They brooded in silence for a while their thoughts busy with the ill-starred Stuffy. Then Gaily, though nothing could be more enjoyable than this exchange of ideas on the subject of broken legs, felt that it was time for the condolences which he had come to deliver. Stiffy Bates night have his leg in plaster, but how much more in need of cheering up was a man who would shortly have Jimmy Piper’s sister Brenda staying with him.

  ‘And while I was cheering Stiffy up, I ran into Kevin and had to cheer him up too. I was busy for days.’

  ‘Who is Kevin?’

  ‘Come, come, Clarence, this is not worthy of your lightning brain. Kevin Moresby, Florence’s husband.’

  The words ‘Who is Florence?’ trembled on Lord Emsworth’s lips, but he was able to choke them back and substitute ‘And why did Kevin need cheering up?’

  ‘Because he and Florence are separated. She has cast him off like a used tube of toothpaste, and he doesn’t like it. I don’t know why,’ Gally added, for it was his private opinion that Kevin was in luck.

  ‘I never approved of that marriage,’ said Lord Emsworth.

  ‘It was entirely unexpected.’

  ‘Most.’

  It was about a year since Florence, left a widow by the death of J. B. Underwood, and inheriting from him several million dollars, had startled a good many people by marrying the very handsome but impoverished Kevin Moresby, referred to in the press as ‘the playwright’. Kevin w
as one of those dramatists who start when very young with a colossal hit and cannot repeat. His last seven plays had been failures, and Florence’s money had been a welcome windfall. It was easy to imagine what a blow their separation must have been to him.

  ‘Married her for her money, I’ve always thought,’ said Lord Emsworth.

  ‘The same idea occurred to me,’ said Gally.

  ‘This is grave news,’ he continued, ‘about Jimmy Piper’s sister.’

  ‘Who is Jimmy Piper?’

  ‘He’s staying here.’

  ‘Ah yes, I think I may have seen him. Has he a sister?’

  ‘Yes, and … Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Not to my recollection. What about her?’

  On the point of answering the question, Gally paused. His brother, he perceived, had completely forgotten what he had been told about the Brenda menace. It was his custom to forget in a matter of minutes anything said to him. It would not be humane, Gally felt, to spoil his day by refreshing his memory. Let him be happy while he could.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘Somebody told me something about her but it’s slipped my mind. The Empress looks as fit as ever,’ he added, to change the subject.

  ‘She is in wonderful health.’

  ‘Eating well?’

  ‘Magnificently. It’s too bad that I can’t get anyone to paint her portrait.[16] I did think it would be plain sailing when Connie went to America, but all the prominent artists I have approached have refused the commission.’

  To add a likeness of the Empress to those of his ancestors in the Blandings Castle portrait gallery had long been Lord Emsworth’s dream, and with the departure of his sister Constance, the spearhead of the movement in opposition to the scheme, his hopes had risen high. The difficulty was to find a suitable artist. All the leading Royal Academicians to whom he had applied had informed him rather stiffly that they did not paint pigs. They painted sheep in Scottish glens, children playing with kittens and puppies, still-life representations of oranges and bananas on plates, but not pigs.

  Gally had always approved of the idea, arguing that the Empress could not but lend tone to a gallery filled with the ugliest collection of thugs he had ever had the misfortune to see, comparable only to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. He made but one exception, the sixth Earl, who he said reminded him of a charming pea and thimble man with whom he had formed a friendship one afternoon at Hurst Park race course the year Billy Buttons won the Jubilee Cup.