Sunset at Blandings (22 page)

If you
had asked Wodehouse how, exactly, he had seen the rooms, the gardens, the
trees, the woods and the landscapes in his mind, he would have shuffled his
feet modestly and changed the subject in order to prevent himself from
replying, testily, that he couldn’t be bothered with details unless they
affected his immediate plot and scenario. He could give Lord Emsworth five
sisters or ten. He could put a Gutenberg Bible in the Museum
(Something
Fresh)
and then, in all subsequent books, forget both the museum and its
bible.
[47]
He could put the Amber Drawing Room upstairs in one book and on the ground
floor (with french windows) in others. He could magic a deserted gamekeeper’s
cottage into the West Wood (6S) just when he needed it and without the son of
the house (Freddie) knowing even of its existence. He could have Lord Emsworth
looking out of the Library window and seeing Baxter going in at the front door
(Summer
Lightning).
He could have the evening sunlight shining on Baxter’s
spectacles when he was outside the window of the Writing Room (‘The Crime Wave
at Blandings’) . Accept that since so many rooms, in so many contexts, are
described as looking out onto the terrace, the terrace must go round three
sides of the house. Those last two data confound our positioning of the Library
and the Writing Room. And it is a wrench, for me, to have Baxter (always making
difficulties, this Baxter) pelting flower pots into Lord Emsworth’s bedroom
(Leave
it to Psmith)
from the eastern terrace. But we will accept objections only
from such critics as can make composite maps that elucidate more of the clues
overall than ours do.

We have
made a brave start. It is up to others, now, to find a more workable plan for
rooms, terraces and Shropshire sunshine. Wodehouse has left it to us, his
followers and fans, to map it all out if we wish and as we wish, and to make it
work as close to his clues as possible. Where it does work, it works like a
charm. Where it doesn’t, it’s artistic licence on his side and a problem on
ours, to be settled as best suits the probabilities. That Amber Drawing Room,
for example. It was first mentioned in the short story ‘The Go-Getter’, first
published in 1931, and it was specified as having french windows. After the
great dog-fight, the Rev. Beefy Bingham’s Bottles v. Lady Alcester’s airedale,
Beefy had ‘thrown Bottles out of the window’ — a thing he would never have
done, even to someone else’s dog, if the room had been upstairs. But in
Galahad
at Blandings
Huxley Wikworth and Lord Emsworth, separately, sneaked away
from tea in the Amber Drawing Room and went
downstairs
to the hall and
the open air. In
A Pelican at Blandings
(1969), the Amber Drawing Room
is safely back on the ground floor, and that’s where we have placed it. There
is another drawing-room on the first floor. There may be more than one. It was
out of an upstairs drawing-room window that Connie Keeble’s necklace dropped to
Eve’s feet on the terrace in
Leave it to Psmith.

The
Empress of Blandings is twice brought (or pushed or pulled) into the castle.
The first time
(Uncle Fred in the Springtime)
she goes through french
windows into the Garden Suite, to be lodged in the bathroom there. So the
Garden Suite is on the ground floor. The Duke of Dunstable is its resident
guest. The second time that the Empress makes her entrance, in
Full Moon,
Galahad
is in the Garden Suite and she goes in at the french windows again and—quite a
long journey as pigs go—up the main stairs to Veronica’s bedroom, the Red Room.
Wodehouse says there that the Red Room is ‘on the second floor’, which is
American for ‘first floor’ (the floor above the ground floor) . When the Duke
of Dunstable is in the Garden Suite we are told that the morning sunlight
shines into his bedroom. These are the sorts of snippets of evidence on which
our artist has worked.

Morning
sun comes from the east, so the Garden Suite is situated that end of the
castle. And it is ‘on the right side of a passage going off the hall’. It is
confusing that, though there is a Blue Room bedroom upstairs, the bedroom of
the Garden Suite is called the Blue Room. And there is a bedroom upstairs
called the Garden Room.

The
Picture Gallery and Portrait Gallery are a problem too. In
Heavy Weather
there
is a space upstairs referred to as ‘the combination drawing-room and picture
gallery in which Blandings Castle was wont to assemble before the evening meal’.
But a mere fifteen pages later Lady Julia steps out of this room through its
french windows to cool off on the terrace. Surely the great hail of the castle
rises at least two floors to its ceiling, if not higher, to a skylight in the
roof. We have put the Picture Gallery on the first floor, round the well of the
hall. There are certainly portraits elsewhere than in this gallery. When Lord
Emsworth, in
Something Fresh,
comes down the stairs and fires six shots
from his revolver into the hall, his sixth shot hits a life-size picture of his
maternal grandmother in the face (which looks like George Robey’s) and improves
it out of all knowledge. That portrait must have been hanging in the hall. It
is possible that there are two galleries, as we have them, the picture gallery
and
the portrait gallery. In which, then, did the Duke of Dunstable hang his
nude in
A Pelican at Blandings?
There is no doubt that it was upstairs.
In which gallery would the portrait of the Empress be now if his sisters have
not forced Lord Emsworth to keep it to himself in his study?

We
confess to uneasiness about the design of the stairway down into the hail.
Does it go straight up to the first-floor Portrait Gallery, or, as our artist
has limned it, right and left at a half-landing? If we are wrong, and if it is
the former, it makes much better sense of that cascade of bodies, the Duke of
Dunstable’s and Johnny Halliday’s, in
Galahad at Blandings.
Halliday had
been pushed on the first-floor landing by the mysterious (and largely unexplained)
Howard Chesney, and he had fallen onto the Duke in front of him, so that they
had both crashed down the slippery slope. It was a rather desperate ploy to get
(a) the Duke bedroom-bound with a twisted ankle, threatening to sue his host
and (b) Halliday rendered unconscious. Not for the first time in a Wodehouse
story is a hero rendered unconscious so that the angry heroine shall suddenly
come over all motherly, forgive him his sins and kiss him better. Here Linda
Gilpin, hitherto furious that her beloved Johnny had, as a barrister doing his
duty by his client, torn her, and her testimony, to pieces in the witness box
and made her look a prize fool, sees him unconscious and is soon showering
kisses on his upturned, though senseless, face.

It
would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the Duke and Johnny Halliday
to have bounced together over a half-landing and continued their precipitation
into the hall. But can you position the pillar in the gallery near which the
efficient Baxter kept his nightly watch
(Something Fresh)
if the stairs
are a single plane from hall to gallery? If we have got it wrong, perhaps under
a singleplane stairway is the recess where the telephone extension is and
where Lord Emsworth keeps the hats that he doesn’t want his sisters to give
away to jumble sales.

The two
ultimate challenges to our path-finding abilities inside the castle and out are
in the story ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’
(Lord Emsworth and Others)
and
in the novel
Pigs Have Wings.
In ‘The Crime Wave ‘from what windows, at
what ranges, with what type of airgun were those shots fired at Rupert Baxter
those several times? And where exactly was Baxter (a) when picking up that
cigarette end and (b) when astride his motor-bike? And where was Beach the
butler when Constance Keeble missed a sitter in his direction? Where was the
shrubbery in which Jane was crying her eyes out when she saw Lord Emsworth take
his shot from the Library window? Where was the seat on which Baxter was
sitting when he heard the confession to the crime? Some of your shrubberies and
terraces, and the seat itself, must be imagined, we think, behind walls that
cut off the view — for instance, the shrubbery in which Jane was crying must
have been behind that ruined curtain wall of the old keep, just west of the
solitary West Tower (17R).

And,
next test: from
Pigs Have Wings
plot on the map, ours or your own, the
hitherings and thitherings in the thefts and counter-thefts of pigs between
their own sties, alien sties, Sunnybrae and shrubberies. That’s a real twister.

On our
own map, the cottage (29N) in what is probably called the East Wood is where
McAllister, the head gardener, lives and where Aggie Donaldson was staying when
she ensnared the heart of lucky young Freddie. You can bet that in his little
patch of home garden McAllister grows prize hollyhocks and roses at Lord
Emsworth in the way those two Norfolk squires, Lord Bromborough and Sir Preston
Potter, Bart., grew moustaches at each other in the Mulliner story ‘Buried
Treasure’. It was in those water-meadows
(1
5Y) that Lord Emsworth
spotted Freddie and Aggie canoodling. It was in the park under those trees (23,
24U) that, in
Service with a Smile,
the Church lads pitched their tents
and George, Lord Emsworth’s grandson, photographed grandpa cutting the little
perishers’ guy ropes at dawn. It was thereabouts, too, that the tenants came
for the Bank Holiday binge (‘Lord Emsworth and the Girl-Friend’ in
Blandings
Castle).
The tea-tent, in which Lord Emsworth’s top hat was sent flying by
a crusty roll and his stiff collar wilted, was pitched there, too, to achieve
furnace heat under the blazing afternoon sun.

It was
to that bathing hut, which Galahad calls ‘bath house’ (19U), that the Rev. ‘Beefy’
Bingham dragged the unconscious ninth earl out of the lake. Under the alias of ‘Popjoy’
(the usual reason — to be near the girl he loved, who had been brought to the
castle to keep her away from him) he had surprised his host while bathing. Lord
Emsworth had gone for an early morning swim to cool his throbbing ankle,
twisted in a fall caused by this clumsy ‘Popjoy’ man. ‘Popjoy’ had recommended
an embrocation for the ankle, and it proved to be a liniment for horses, not
humans. Result: a night of agony and a dawn trip to the lake. So cooling and
therapeutic to the ankle were its waters that Lord Emsworth in mid-lake started
singing for happiness. ‘Popjoy’ heard him, thought he was drowning and calling
for help, and plunged in to his rescue. To prevent Lord Emsworth struggling, ‘Beefy’/’Popjoy’
knocked him out with a blow to the jaw as prescribed in all life-saving
manuals, and dragged him to shore. (‘Company for Gertrude’ in
Blandings
Castle).
The Rev. R. Bingham’s vicarage must be just behind the church at
Much Matchingham (27G) and his wife Gertrude is within easy call of her cousin Jane
Abercrombie (‘The Crime Wave at Blandings in
Lord Emsworth and Others)
in
the factor’s house (25M) . And if old Belford is still rector of Market Blandings
(22B) then, when his son and daughter-in-law Angela (‘Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey!’ in
Blandings
Castle)
are staying with him, that makes three Threepwood nieces, cousins
and ex-prisoners of the castle, now neighbours.

If you
can’t quite see the hammock for which Galahad and his sister Florence compete
in this novel, it’s hidden between the two cedars (25R) . It’s a long earshot
to the stables and garages whence, in
A Pelican at Blandings,
Galahad
could hear the harmonica-playing of Voules the chauffeur. But perhaps Voules
was a noisy executant and probably he had the breeze behind him. You can see
the pond in the kitchen garden (23N) which apparently Galahad as a boy couldn’t.
He fell into it and, according to one of his sisters, the pity of it was that
he was ever pulled out by that gardener. Beyond (24K), is the Empress’s new
sty, within squeal of the cottage of her caretaker and caterer (26L). And you
will notice that, in the paddock where she is housed, there are two other
fatties, white this time. It has long saddened us that Wodehouse, beyond
mentioning piggeries once (in the plural), never specified that the Empress had
any companionship of her own kind. Our sentimental artist has added a couple
and thus trebled the pig-man’s work for him.