Sunset at Blandings (9 page)

Gally
could make nothing of the question. It bewildered him.

‘Didn’t
Vicky tell you he was planning to come here?’ A spasm of pain contorted Jeff’s
face as if he were discovering too late that he had swallowed a bad oyster.
His voice, when he replied, trembled.

‘Vicky
isn’t speaking to me.’

‘What
do you mean, she isn’t speaking to you? Got tonsillitis or something?’

‘We’ve
quarrelled.’

It was
the last thing Gally was expecting, and he felt as a general might feel if his
whole plan of campaign had been ruined by some eccentricity on the part of his
troops. He had taken it for granted that, whatever else might go wrong, the
love of his two clients could be relied on to remain unchanged.

‘Quarrelled?’
he gasped.

‘Yes.’

‘One of
those lovers’ tiffs?’

‘Rather
more than that, I’m afraid.’

‘Big-time
stuff?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your
fault, of course?’

‘I
suppose so. She wanted me to elope with her, and I wouldn’t.’

‘Why
not?’

‘Because
it would have meant letting Lord Emsworth down. He told me himself I was his
last hope of getting the Empress painted. And another thing. What on earth
would we have lived on? Unless Freddie sells that strip of mine. Did he say
anything about that, by the way?’

Gally
was grateful for the question. He had been wondering how to break the bad news.

‘I’m
afraid he did, my boy.’

That
word ‘afraid’ could have only one meaning. Jeff gave a momentary quiver, and
his mouth tightened, but he spoke calmly.

‘Nothing
doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘About
what I expected. It was very good of Freddie to bother himself with the job.’

His
courageous bearing under the shattering blow increased Gally’s already
favourable opinion of Jeff. At Jeff’s age he, like all Pelicans, had accepted
impecuniosity as the natural way of life. If you had the stuff, you spent it;
if you hadn’t, you borrowed it. He had sometimes been best man at weddings
where the proceedings were held up while the groom, short by fourteen shillings
of the sum required of him, fumbled feverishly in his pockets, his only comment
‘Well, this is a nice bit of box fruit, if you like.’

But
Jeff, he knew, was different from the young Galahad. Jeff took life seriously.
And very proper, too, the reformed Galahad felt.

‘The
future doesn’t look rosy,’ he said.

‘Not
excessively,’ said Jeff.

‘It’s
the old story — where’s the money coming from?’

‘That’s
it in a nutshell.’

‘Isn’t
there anything you can do?’

‘I’m a
pretty good architect, but what good is that when I can’t get commissions?’

‘True.
But first things first. We can’t have you at outs with Vicky. I shall now
proceed to sweeten her.’

‘Fine,
if you can do it. How do you propose to?’

‘I
shall tell her the tale,’ said Gally.

Vicky
was at the piano in the smaller drawing-room, playing old English folk songs,
as girls will when their love life has gone awry. Gally’s face was stern and
his eye austere as he approached her. He was not pleased with her behaviour.
Life, he considered, was difficult enough without girls giving excellent young
men the pink slip and going off and playing old English folk songs.

‘I’ve
just been talking to Jeff,’ he said, wasting no time with polite preliminaries.
‘And don’t sit there playing the piano at me,’ he added, for this was what
Vicky was continuing to do. ‘He tells me you won’t speak to him. Nice
goings-on, I must say. He comes here, braving all the perils of Blandings
Castle to be with you, and you give him the push. I can’t follow your mental
processes. Of course the fact of the matter is that you would now give anything
if you could recall those cruel words.’

‘What
cruel words?’

‘You
know damn well what cruel words.’

‘Must
we discuss this?’

‘It’s
what I came here to do.’

‘You’re
wasting your time.’

‘Oh,
don’t be a little idiot.’

‘Thank
you,’ said Vicky, and she played a few bars of an old English folk song in a
marked manner.

It
occurred to Gally that he was allowing exasperation to interfere with his
technique. Instead of telling the tale he was letting this tête-à-tête
degenerate into a vulgar brawl. He hastened to repair his blunder.

‘I’m
sorry I called you an idiot.’

‘Don’t
mention it.’

‘I was
not myself.’

‘Who
were you?’

Sticky
going, Gally felt, extremely sticky going. The tale he told would have to be a
good one. And fortunately his brain, working well, had come up with a pippin.

‘The
fact is,’ he said, ignoring the question, which would not have been easy to
answer, ‘this unfortunate affair has woken old memories. There was a similar
tragedy in my own life. Two loving hearts sundered owing to a foolish quarrel,
and nothing to be done about it because we were both too proud to make the
first move. It happened when I was a very young man and sadly lacking in sense.
I loved a girl. I won’t tell you her name. I will call her Deirdre.’

‘I’ve
often wondered how that name was spelled,’ said Vicky meditatively. ‘I suppose
you start off with a capital D and then just trust to luck. Was she beautiful?’

‘Beautiful
indeed. Lovely chestnut hair, a superb figure and large melting eyes, in colour
half way between a rook’s egg and a bill stamp.
[36]
I loved her passionately, and
it was my dearest wish to call her mine. But it was not to be.’

‘Why
wasn’t it?’

‘Because
of my unfortunate sense of humour. She was the daughter of a bishop, very
strict in her views.’

‘And
you told her one of your Pelican Club limericks?’

‘No,
not that. But I took her to dinner at a fashionable restaurant and thinking to
amuse her I marched round the table with a soup plate on my head and a stick of
celery in my hand, giving what I thought was a droll impersonation of a trooper
of the Blues on guard at Whitehall. It was a little thing I had often done on
Saturday nights at the Pelican to great applause, but she was deeply offended.’

‘She
thought you were blotto?’

‘She
did. And she swept out and married an underwriter at Lloyd’s. I could have
explained, but I was too proud.’

‘Her
cruel words had been too cruel?’

‘Exactly.’

‘How
very sad.’

‘I thought
you would think so.’

‘Though
it would be a lot sadder if you hadn’t told me that Dolly Henderson was the
only woman you had ever wanted to marry. Deirdre must have slipped your memory.’

It was
not easy to disconcert Gaily. Not only his sisters Constance, Hermione and
Florence, but dozens of bookmakers, policemen, three-card men and jellied eel
sellers had tried to do it through the years and failed, but these simple words
of Vicky’s succeeded in doing so. As he stood polishing his eyeglass, for once
in his life unable to speak, she continued her remarks.

‘You
certainly have nerve, Gally. The idea of trying to tell
me
the tale. One
smiles.’

Gally
was resilient. Not for him the shamefaced blush a the sheepish twiddling of the
fingers. Recovering quickly from what had been an unpleasant shock, he spoke in
a voice very different from his former melting tones.

‘Oh,
one does, does one?’ he said. ‘Well, one won’t smile long. Listen to me, and I’m
not telling the tale now. Jeff refused to sit in on your chuckleheaded idea of
eloping for a very good reason.’

‘He
said he had to stay on and paint a pig.’

‘That
wasn’t his only reason. He also didn’t want to have to see you starving in the
gutter. He had no job and no prospects and he knew that you had a good appetite
and needed three squares a day.’
[37]

‘How
absolutely absurd. I’ve all sorts of money.’

‘Held
in trust for you by your stepmother.’

‘She’d
have given it to me.’

‘Want
to bet?’

‘Anyway
we’d have got along somehow. There are a hundred things Jeff could have done.’

‘Name
three. I can only think of two—robbing a bank and stealing the Crown Jewels.
The trouble with you, young Victoria, is that you’re like all girls, you don’t
look ahead. You want something, and you go for it like a monkey after a banana.
The more prudent male counts the cost.’

‘When
have you ever counted the cost?’

‘Not
often, I admit. But I’m not a prudent male. Jeff’s different.’

There
was a pause. Gally’s voice had lacked the Sarah Bernhardt note which had come
into it when he had been telling the tale, but his words, even without that
added attraction, were such as to give food for thought, and they had made
Vicky look pensive. She played a bar or two with an abstracted air.

‘I’ve
thought of something,’ she said suddenly.

‘That’s
good. What?’

‘There
wouldn’t be any need for us to starve in gutters. Freddie will sell that thing
of Jeff’s at any moment and we’ll be all right even if I can’t get my money.
They pay millions for these comic strips in America, and they go on for ever.
And when you’re tired of doing the work yourself you hand it over to someone
else and get paid just the same. Look at some of them. About as old as
Blandings Castle, and I’ll bet the fellows who started them have been dead for
centuries.’

Gally
saw that the time had come to acquaint this optimistic girl with the facts of
life.

‘I was
about to touch on the J. Bennison comic strip,’ he said. ‘Don’t expect a large
annual income from it. Freddie tells me he has tried every possible market and
nobody wants it. However promising an architect Jeff may have been, he
apparently isn’t good at comic strips. Don’t blame him. Many illustrious
artists would have had the same trouble. Michelangelo, Tintoretto and Holbein
are names that spring to the mind.’

Gally’s
prediction that it would not be long before his niece ceased to smile was
fulfilled with a promptitude which should have gratified him. If a bomb had
exploded in the smaller drawing-room, scattering old English folk songs left
and right, she could not have reacted more instantaneously. The haughtiness
which had been so distasteful to her uncle fell from her like a garment.

‘Oh,
Gally!’ she cried, her voice breaking and her attractive eyes widening to their
fullest extent. ‘Oh, the poor darling angel, he must be feeling
awful.’

‘He is,’
said Gally, holding the view that this softer mood should be encouraged. ‘His
reception of the news was pitiful to see. It knocked him flatter than a Dover
sole. He reminded me of Blinky Bender, an old pal of mine at the Pelican, the
time when he won sixty pounds on the fourth at Newmarket and suddenly realized
that in order to collect the money he would have to go past five other bookies
in whose debt he was. You had better run along and console him.’

‘I
will.’

‘Making
it clear that all is forgiven and forgotten and that you are sweethearts still,’
said Gally, and he went off to get a glass of port in Beach’s pantry.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

JEFF had gone to his room
after dinner and changed into a sweater and flannel trousers. There was a full
moon, and it was his intention to sit on the terrace in its rays.
[38]
Not that he expected anything
curative to come of this. He did not share Gally’s confidence that telling the
tale to Vicky would pick up the pieces of a shattered world and glue them
together as good as new. He was aware that in his time Gally with his silver
eloquence had played on hardened turf commissioners as on so many stringed
instruments, but he could not but feel that the gifted man was faced now with a
task beyond even his great powers. Those cruel words to which Gally had alluded
in his conversation with Vicky were still green in Jeff’s memory, and it was
difficult to imagine a tale, however in the Sarah Bernhardt manner it might be
told, persuading their speaker to consider them unsaid.

A knock
on the door interrupted his sombre meditations, the diffident knock of one not
sure of his welcome, and Lord Emsworth entered looking like a refugee from a
three-alarm fire. He had removed the dress clothes which his sister Florence
compelled him to don for dinner and put on the familiar baggy trousers and
tattered shooting coat which few tramps would not have been too fastidious to
appear in in public.

‘Ah,
Mr. Smith,’ he said, ‘I hope I am not disturbing you.’