Sunset at Blandings Read online

  ‘Quite a good deal. I have always found the truth an excellent thing to deviate from.’

  ‘What are you going to say to Mr. Duff?’

  ‘Hullo, Duff. Nice to see you again. Lovely weather, is it not. I shall then give him the works.’

  ‘I can hardly wait.’

  ‘You won’t have to, for here he comes, no doubt to report to Jimmy on the croquet lawn.’

  This was indeed Claude’s purpose, for in addition to being nervous he was conscientious and never shirked his duty, even when unpleasant. His employer, sometimes inclined to be irritable, always gave him the same uneasy feeling as affected him when meeting strange dogs, but he faced him bravely and hoped for the best.

  It was, however, without enjoyment that he was going to meet him now, and the sight of Gally, who at their previous encounter had proved so genial a companion, cheered him greatly. So when Gally said ‘Hullo, Duff Nice to see you again. Lovely weather, is it not?’ his response was the cordial response of one confident of having found a friend.

  ‘This is Miss Underwood, my niece,’ said Gally.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Claude.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Vicky.

  There was a pause. Claude tried to think of a bright remark, but was unable to find one. He regretted this, for Vicky had made a profound impression on him. He substituted a not very bright question.

  ‘Did you find Jeff all right?’

  ‘I did indeed.’

  ‘Good old Jeff. I wish I saw more of him.’

  ‘You will. And I should like a word with you before you meet him.’

  ‘Meet him?’

  ‘He’s here.’

  ‘What, at the castle?’

  ‘That very spot.’

  ‘That’s certainly a surprise. Is he here for long?’

  ‘He won’t be if the powers of darkness hear you calling him Jeff.[31] His true identity must be wrapped in a veil of secrecy. Smith is the name to which he answers.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I am about to brief you. This incognito stuff is to avoid him being given the bum’s rush by my brother Clarence.’

  ‘I still don’t …’

  ‘You will in a minute. Are you familiar with the facts about Jeff’s father?’

  ‘No. What about his father?’

  ‘I shall be coming to that in a moment, but first let me get quite clear as to the relations between you and Jeff. Did I gather correctly from what you were saying when we met at Eastbourne that you and he had been at school together?’

  ‘That’s right. Wrykyn.’

  ‘A most respectable establishment.’

  ‘We were in the same house. Our last two years we shared a study.’

  ‘So you were constantly in happy comradeship, now brewing tea and toasting sausages, anon out on the football field, rallying the forwards in the big game.’

  ‘I wasn’t in the football team. Jeff was.’

  ‘Or sitting side by side in the school chapel, listening to the chaplain’s short manly sermon. What I’m driving at is that, linked by a thousand memories of the dear old school, you wouldn’t dream of saying or doing anything to give Jeff a jab in the eye with a burned stick, thus causing him alarm and despondency and rendering his hopes and dreams null and void.’

  Claude could not quite follow all the ramifications of this, but he grasped the general import and replied that he could be relied on not to do anything damaging to Jeff’s hopes and dreams.

  ‘Good,’ said Gally, ‘then we can proceed. He is after the job of secretary[32] to my brother Clarence, and his position is a bit tricky. I don’t know if you had any difficulty in getting taken on in a similar capacity by Jimmy Piper?’

  ‘No, there wasn’t any trouble. My father worked it. He’s pretty influential, and he’s a great friend of Sir James.’

  ‘How different from Jeff’s father. He’s dead now, but in his lifetime he was a dishonest financier who ruined hundreds before skipping the country. He did my brother Clarence down for several thousands of the best and brightest, and Clarence is very bitter about it. Clarence, I must tell you, is a man of ungovernable passions, and did he discover that Jeff was the son of the man who got into his ribs for that substantial sum, there would be no question of engaging him as his secretary. He would probably bite him in the leg or throw an ormolu clock or something at him. His fury would be indescribable. That is why I beg you to remember on no account to call Jeff Jeff in his presence. Smith is the name. You understand?’

  ‘Oh, rather.’

  ‘Splendid. What a treat it is dealing with a man of your lightning intelligence. You don’t know what a relief it is to feel that we can rely on you. Remember. Not Jeff. Smith. Though as you are such old friends you might call him Smithy.’

  ‘At school we always called him Bingo.’

  ‘That will be capital. Well, I am glad it’s all straightened out, my dear Duff. You had now better be getting along and reporting to Jimmy. No doubt he will be delighted to see you.’

  Vicky had been listening to these exchanges with growing admiration. As Claude receded in the direction of the croquet lawn, she said:

  ‘At-a-boy, Gaily.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’

  ‘I see now what you mean by telling the tale.’

  ‘I was not at my best, I fear. One gets a bit rusty as the years go by. Still, it got over all right.’

  ‘Triumphantly.’

  ‘We shan’t have any more trouble with Claude Duff. So now there’s nothing on our minds.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘We are carefree. We sing tra la la.’

  ‘Would you go as far as that?’

  ‘Omitting perhaps the final la!’

  ‘Though I shall be too nervous to do much singing.’

  ‘Nonsense. Nothing to be nervous about.’

  ‘You really feel that?’

  ‘Certainly. I don’t say that when Jimmy told us Claude Duff had clocked in I didn’t feel a momentary twinge of uneasiness. But you saw how soon it passed off. What can possibly bung a spanner into our hopes and dreams now? It isn’t as if your stepmother was your Aunt Constance. Connie could detect rannygazoo by a sort of sixth sense and smell a rat when all other noses were baffled, but she was a woman in a thousand. Sherlock Holmes could have taken her correspondence course.’

  ‘What a comfort you are, Gally.’

  ‘So I have been told, though not by any of the female members of my family. What a lot of exercise Beach is taking this afternoon,’ said Gaily, changing the subject as the butler came out of the house and made his way towards them. ‘Hullo, Beach. Did you want to see me, or are you out for a country ramble?’

  Neither of these suggestions, it appeared, fitted the facts. It was duty that had called Beach to brave the ultra-violet rays of the sun.

  ‘I am taking his lordship a telegram that has just come over the telephone. It is from Mr. Frederick, saying that he is in England again and will be paying a visit to the castle as soon as his business interests permit.’

  Beach passed on, and Vicky, starting to express her pleasure at the prospect of seeing her Cousin Frederick again, found herself interrupted by a sharp barking sound from her Uncle Galahad, who, becoming coherent, added the words ‘Hell’s bells!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  Gally was in no mood to break things gently.

  ‘Do you realize,’ he said, his voice choked and his eyeglass once more adrift, ‘that we are plunged more deeply in the soup than ever? Freddie is a friend of Jeff’s and you know what a bubblehead Freddie is. The chances that lie won’t call Jeff Jeff in front of your stepmother are virtually nil.’

  ‘Oh, Gally.’

  ‘There is only one thing to do—go to London and intercept him and make him see that he must not come down here. I’ll pinch the Bentley[33] and start right away.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  JEFF meanwhile, conducted by Beach, had come to j
ourney’s end, but he was under no illusion that his pilgrimage was to terminate in lovers’ meeting. His emotions on finding himself closeted with Florence somewhat resembled those of a young lion tamer who, entering the lion’s cage, suddenly realizes that he has forgotten all he was taught by his correspondence school. A chill seemed to have fallen on the summer day, and he saw how right Gally had been in comparing his sister to the late Gorgon.

  Forbidding was the adjective a stylist like Gustave Flaubert would have applied to her aspect, putting it of course in French, as was his habit. She was an angular woman, and her bearing was so erect that one wondered why she did not fall over backwards. She had not actually swallowed some rigid object such as a poker, but she gave the impression of having done so, and Jeff was conscious of surprise that she should have succeeded in getting married to one so notoriously popular with the other sex as J. B. Underwood.[34] Perhaps, he felt, he had proposed to her because somebody betted he wouldn’t.

  Beach, having announced ‘Mr. Smith’ in a voice from which he did his best to keep the gentle pity he could not but feel for the nice young man he was leaving to face her ladyship in what was plainly one of her moods, withdrew, and Florence opened the conversation.

  Some women who at first sight intimidate the beholder set him at his ease with charm of manner. Florence was not one of these. Her ‘How do you do’, delivered from between clenched teeth, was in keeping with her appearance, and Jeff’s morale, already in the low brackets, slipped still lower. No trace remained of the airy confidence with which he had assured Gally that the Smiths knew what fear was only by hearsay. A worm confronted by a Plymouth Rock would have been more nonchalant.

  Florence came to the point without preamble.

  ‘I understand that you have come to paint a portrait of Lord Emsworth’s pig,’ she said, speaking as if the words soiled her lips.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jeff, only just checking himself from adding ‘ma’am’. It was difficult not to believe himself in the presence of Royalty.

  ‘It is a perfectly preposterous idea.’

  There seemed nothing to say in reply to this, so Jeff said nothing. Nobody knew better than himself that he was getting the loser’s end of these exchanges, but there seemed nothing he could do about it. He envied Gaily, who, he knew, would have taken this haughty woman in his stride.

  ‘Pigs!’ said Florence, making it clear that these animals did not stand high in her estimation, and while Jeff was continuing to say nothing the door opened and Lord Emsworth pottered in with his customary air of being a somnambulist looking for a dropped collar stud.

  ‘Florence,’ he bleated, ‘I’ve just had a telegram from Frederick. He says he’s in England again and is coming here.’

  There was no pleasure in his voice. Visits from his younger son seldom pleased him. Freddie was a vice-president of Donaldson’s Dog Joy of Long Island City, N.Y. and like all vice-presidents was inclined to talk shop. It is trying for a father who wants to talk about nothing but pigs to have a son in the home who wants to talk about nothing but dog-biscuits.

  ‘Oh?’ said Florence.

  ‘I thought you would like to know.’

  ‘I haven’t the slightest interest in Frederick’s movements.’

  ‘Then you ought to have.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re his aunt.’

  If Florence had been less carefully brought up, she would no doubt have said ‘So what?’ As it was, she chose her words more carefully.

  ‘I am not aware that there is a law, human or divine, which says that an aunt must enjoy the society of a nephew who confines his conversation exclusively to the subject of dog-biscuits.’

  ‘Noblesse oblige,’ said Lord Emsworth, remembering a good one, and Florence asked him what on earth noblesse had got to do with it. As Lord Emsworth was unable to find a reply to this, there was a momentary silence, during which Jeff decided that if there was going to be an argument about what was and what was not required behaviour for aunts, it was a good time to leave. He sidled out, and Lord Emsworth, seeing him for the first time, gazed after him in bewilderment, almost as if, like his pig man, he had been suddenly confronted by the White Lady of Blandings, who was supposed to make her rounds of the castle with her head under her arm, it having been chopped off by her husband in the Middle Ages.

  ‘Who was that?’ he asked, and Florence was obliged to soil her lips again.

  ‘Mr. Smith,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes. He’s come to paint the Empress.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘He’s a friend of Galahad’s.’

  ‘I do not consider that a great recommendation.’

  ‘Nice young fellow I thought he looked.’

  ‘He struck me as a criminal type. He’s probably known to the police.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Galahad said nothing about him being friends of theirs. Odd his disappearing like that. I must find him and take him to see the Empress.’

  ‘Are you really serious about putting that pig’s portrait in the portrait gallery?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘You will be the laughing—stock of the county.’

  Gally would have replied that a good laugh never hurt anybody, but Lord Emsworth was more tactful.

  ‘I don’t know why you say that. There will be a plaque, don’t you call them, at the side of the picture about her being three years in succession silver medallist in the Fat Pigs class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show, an unheard-of feat. People will be too impressed to laugh.’

  ‘A pig among your ancestors!’

  ‘Galahad says she will lend the gallery a tone. He says that at present it is like the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about Galahad. The mere mention of his name upsets me.’

  ‘I thought you were having one of your spells. You get them because you’re so energetic all the time. You ought to lie in the hammock in the afternoons with a book. Well, I can’t stay talking to you all day, I must be going and finding Smith,’ said Lord Emsworth.

  Jeff was in the corridor, warming up after his session with the Snow Queen. Lord Emsworth greeted him briskly. Already, brief though their acquaintance was, he had taken a great fancy to Jeff.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Mr. Smith. I am sorry my sister was having one of her spells when you arrived. She always has them when she starts thinking about putting the Empress’s portrait in the portrait gallery. It does something to her. It was the same with my sister Constance, now in America married to an American whose name I have forgotten. She, too, always had these spells when the matter of the Empress’s portrait came up. But you will be wanting to see her. Not Constance, the Empress. It is quite a short distance to her sty.’

  He led Jeff through the kitchen garden and into a meadow dappled with buttercups and daisies, making pleasant conversation the while.

  ‘Things,’ he said, ‘have settled down now that the Empress has retired and no longer competes in the Shropshire Agricultural Show, but when she was an active contestant one was never free from anxiety. There was a man living in a house near here who kept entering his pigs for the Fat Pigs event and was wholly without scruples. One always feared that he would kidnap the Empress or do her some mischief which would snatch victory from her grasp. He was a Baronet. Sir Gregory Parsloe.’

  Here he paused impressively, seeming to suggest that Jeff must know what baronets were like, and Jeff agreed that they wanted watching, and they reached the sty in perfect harmony.

  The Empress was having an in-between-meals snack, her invariable practice when not sleeping, and Jeff regarded her with awe.

  ‘I’ve never seen such a pig,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody has ever seen such a pig,’ said Lord Emsworth.

  ‘Good appetite.’

  ‘Excellent. You can’t imagine the bran mash she consumes daily.’

  ‘Well, nothing like keeping body and soul together.’

  ‘You would
think that anyone would be proud to paint her. And yet all these Royal Acadamecians refused.’

  ‘Incredible.’

  ‘In fact, my dear fellow, you are my last hope. If you fail me. I shall have to give up the whole thing.’

  ‘I won’t fail you,’ said Jeff.

  He spoke sincerely. The affection Lord Emsworth felt for him was mutual. Say what you might of the ninth Earl — his limpness, the way his trousers bagged at the knees and the superfluity of holes in his shooting jacket —he was essentially a lovable character and Jeff was resolved to do all that was within his power to make him happy. And if the Gorgon objected and had spells, let her have spells.

  CHAPTER TEN

  GALLY had no difficulty in finding Freddie. A man in London on an expense account generally tends to do himself well, and Freddie, when sent across the Atlantic by his father-in-law to promote the interests of the English branch of Donaldson’s Dog Joy, never watched the pennies. It was in a suite at the Ritz that the meeting between uncle and nephew took place. Freddie was having a late breakfast.

  Gally was surprised to see a cloud on his nephew’s brow, for normally Freddie was a cheerful young man, inclined perhaps, as his Aunt Florence had said, to confine his talk to the subject of dog-biscuits, but uniformly cheerful. His sunny smile, Gally had always understood, was one of the sights of Long Island City, but now it no longer split his face. It was with a moody fork that he pronged the kippered herring on his plate, and not even James Piper could have more closely resembled the Mona Lisa as he sipped coffee.

  Gally noted these symptoms with interest. His experienced eye told him that they were not due to a hangover, so it would seem that some business worry was causing this depression.

  ‘Something on your mind, I see,’ he said. ‘Is it that trade is not brisk?’

  ‘Trade is a pain in the neck,’ said Freddie, abandoning the kipper and going on to marmalade. ‘In England I mean, not in America. I have not a word of criticism of the American dog, whose appetite for biscuits remains the same as always. But the dogs over here … Old Donaldson will have a fit when I turn in my report.’