Jeeves in the offing

'Yes,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'What's happened, young Herring?'

I think for a moment he was about to draw himself up with hauteur and say he would prefer, if we didn't mind, not to discuss his private affairs, but when he was half-way up he caught Aunt Dahlia's eye and returned to position one. Aunt Dahlia's eye, while not in the same class as that of my Aunt Agatha, who is known to devour her young and conduct human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, has lots of authority. He subsided into a chair and sat there looking filleted.

'Well, if you must know,' he said, 'she's broken the engagement.'

This didn't get us any farther. We had assumed as much. You don't go calling people rats if love still lingers.

'But it's only an hour or so,' I said, 'since I left her outside a hostelry called the �Fox and Goose�, and she had just been giving you a rave notice. What came unstuck? What did you do to the girl?'

'Oh, nothing.'

'Come, come!'

'Well, it was this way.'

There was a pause here while he said that he would give a hundred quid for a stiff whisky-and-soda, but as this would have involved all the delay of ringing for Pop Glossop and having it fetched from the lowest bin, Aunt Dahlia would have none of it. In lieu of the desired refreshment she offered him a cold crumpet, which he declined, and told him to get on with it.

'Where I went wrong,' he said, still speaking in that low, husky voice as if he had been a ghost suffering from catarrh, 'was in getting engaged to Phyllis Mills.'

'What?' I cried.

'What?' cried Aunt Dahlia.

'Egad!' I said.

'What on earth did you do that for?' said Aunt Dahlia.

He shifted uneasily in his chair, like a man troubled with ants in the pants. 'It seemed a good idea at the time,' he said. 'Bobbie had told me on the telephone that she never wanted to speak to me again in this world or the next, and Phyllis had been telling me that, while she shrank from Wilbert Cream because of his murky past, she found him so magnetic that she knew she wouldn't be able to refuse him if he proposed, and I had been commissioned to stop him proposing, so I thought the simplest thing to do was to get engaged to her myself. So we talked it over, and having reached a thorough understanding that it was simply a ruse and nothing binding on either side, we announced it to Cream.'

'Very shrewd,' said Aunt Dahlia. 'How did he take it?'

'He reeled.'

'Lot of reeling there's been in this business,' I said. 'You reeled, if you recollect, when you remembered you'd written that letter to Bobbie.'

'And I reeled again when she suddenly appeared from nowhere just as I was kissing Phyllis.'

I pursed the lips. Getting a bit French, this sequence, it seemed to me.

'There was no need for you to do that.'

'No need, perhaps, but I wanted to make it look natural to Cream.'

'Oh, I see. Driving it home, as it were?'

'That was the idea. Of course I wouldn't have done it if I'd known that Bobbie had changed her mind and wanted things to be as they were before that telephone conversation. But I didn't know. It's just one of life's little ironies. You get the same sort of thing in Thomas Hardy.'

I knew nothing of this T. Hardy of whom he spoke, but I saw what he meant. It was like what's always happening in the novels of suspense, where the girl goes around saying, 'Had I but known.'

'Didn't you explain?'

He gave me a pitying look.

'Have you ever tried explaining something to a red-haired girl who's madder than a wet hen?'

I took his point.

'What happened then?'

'Oh, she was very lady-like. Talked amiably of this and that till Phyllis had left us. Then she started in. She said she had raced here with a heart overflowing with love, longing to be in my arms, and a jolly surprise it was to find those arms squeezing the stuffing out of another and � Oh, well, a lot more along those lines. The trouble is, she's always been a bit squiggle-eyed about Phyllis, because in Switzerland she held the view that we were a shade too matey. Nothing in it, of course.'

'Just good friends?'

'Exactly.'

'Well, if you want to know what I think,' said Aunt Dahlia.

But we never did get around to knowing what she thought, for at this moment Phyllis came in.

13

Giving the wench the once-over as she entered, I found myself well able to understand why Bobbie on observing her entangled with Kipper had exploded with so loud a report. I'm not myself, of course, an idealistic girl in love with a member of the staff of the Thursday Review and never have been, but if I were I know I'd get the megrims somewhat severely if I caught him in a clinch with anyone as personable as this stepdaughter of Aubrey Upjohn, for though shaky on the IQ, physically she was a pipterino of the first water. Her eyes were considerably bluer than the skies above, she was wearing a simple summer dress which accentuated rather than hid the graceful outlines of her figure, if you know what I mean, and it was not surprising that Wilbert Cream, seeing her, should have lost no time in reaching for the book of poetry and making a bee line with her to the nearest leafy glade.

'Oh, Mrs Travers,' she said, spotting Aunt Dahlia, 'I've just been talking to Daddy on the telephone.'

This took the old ancestor's mind right off the tangled affairs of the Kipper-Bobbie axis, to which a moment before she had been according her best attention, and I didn't wonder. With the prize-giving at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, a function at which all that was bravest and fairest in the neighbourhood would be present, only two days away, she must have been getting pretty uneasy about the continued absence of the big shot slated to address the young scholars on ideals and life in the world outside. If you are on the board of governors of a school and have contracted to supply an orator for the great day of the year, you can be forgiven for feeling a trifle jumpy when you learn that the silver-tongued one has gadded off to the metropolis, leaving no word as to when he will be returning, if ever. For all she knew, Upjohn might have got the holiday spirit and be planning to remain burning up the boulevards indefinitely, and of course nothing gives a big beano a black eye more surely than the failure to show up of the principal speaker. So now she quite naturally blossomed like a rose in June and asked if the old son of a bachelor had mentioned anything about when he was coming back.

'He's coming back tonight. He says he hopes you haven't been worrying.'

A snort of about the calibre of an explosion in an ammunition dump escaped my late father's sister.

'Oh, does he? Well, I've a piece of news for him. I have been worrying. What's kept him in London so long?'

'He's been seeing his lawyer about this libel action he's bringing against the Thursday Review.'

I have often asked myself how many inches it was that Kipper leaped from his chair at these words. Sometimes I think it was ten, sometimes only six, but whichever it was he unquestionably came up from the padded seat like an athlete competing in the Sitting High Jump event. Scarface McColl couldn't have risen more nippily.

'Against the Thursday Review?' said Aunt Dahlia. 'That's your rag, isn't it, young Herring? What have they done to stir him up?'

'It's this book Daddy wrote about preparatory schools. He wrote a book about preparatory schools. Did you know he had written a book about preparatory schools?'

'Hadn't an inkling. Nobody tells me anything.'

'Well, he wrote this book about preparatory schools. It was about preparatory schools.'

'About preparatory schools, was it?'

'Yes, about preparatory schools.'

'Thank God we've got that straightened out at last. I had a feeling we should get somewhere if we dug long enough. And � ?'

'And the Thursday Review said something libellous about it, and Daddy's lawyer says the jury ought to give Daddy at least five thousand pounds. Because they libelled him. So he's been in London all this time seeing his lawyer. But he's coming back tonight. He'll be here for the prize-giving, and I've got his speech all typed out and ready for him. Oh, there's my precious Poppet,' said Phyllis, as a distant barking reached the ears. 'He's asking for his dinner, the sweet little angel. All right, darling, Mother's coming,' she fluted, and buzzed off on the errand of mercy.