II
At about eleven o’clock that morning Henry Bohun sat back in his swivel-chair, said “Ouch!” and sat forward again quickly.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” said John Cove, looking up from the study of a crossword puzzle. “When I shared this room with Eric Duxford it was my lot, as the junior, to sit in that chair.”
“What’s wrong with it?” said Henry, massaging his back.
“It is possessed,” said John, “by an active and malignant spirit, a sort of legal gremlin which leans out and pinches you when you are least expecting it.”
Henry upended the chair on his desk. “It’s the join in the back piece,” he announced. “The support’s worked loose. If I had a screwdriver I could fix it—”
“Sergeant Cockerill will have a screwdriver. He keeps things like that. Can you think of a town in Bessarabia in ten letters?”
“Not at the moment.”
When Henry came back he brought Sergeant Cockerill with him. The sergeant assessed the damage with an expert eye, grasped the back of the chair firmly in his right hand, picked up a screwdriver and gave some exploratory twists.
“Screw’s worked right loose. I’ll have to plug it first.”
“Azerbaijan,” said John.
“Take the chair away with you if you like,” said Henry. “I can use this spare one.”
“Where’s Mrs. Porter going to sit,” said John, “on your knee?”
“I’ll fix you up, sir. There’s a spare in the tea-room.” The sergeant picked up the swivel chair in one surprisingly muscular hand and departed.
“I’m afraid it can’t be Azerbaijan,” said John, “or we shall have to find a word beginning JV—”
“Anyway, I don’t believe Azerbaijan is in Bessarabia.”
“Delendum est. By the way, what’s wrong with the Chittering this morning?”
“I don’t know,” said Henry. “Now that you mention it, she did look a bit cool when I said good morning to her.”
“Cool! That’s an understatement. She’s behaving like the young lady in Handel’s aria. You know: where’er she walks cool gales shall fan the glade—”
“I believe she’s annoyed about something La Cornel said. She cast aspersions on the parentage of her dressing-case. Said that it wasn’t crocodile, or alternatively, if crocodile not Congo crocodile.”
“Girls, girls.”
“Upon which Miss Chittering cast counter-aspersions upon Miss Cornel’s fur coat—”
“What an awful thing it must be,” said John complacently, “to have a quarrelsome nature. I have always managed to look on the lighter side of these unfortunate differences which, we must face it, do crop up from time to time. I remember when I was expelled from Rugby at the age of seventeen… However, I won’t distract you, for I see you want to work.”
“I am getting things a bit more sorted out.” Henry picked up a letter. “I still can’t quite see what the Duke of Hampshire actually wants us to do.”
“Doesn’t he say? They do sometimes, if you read the letters right through. The gist of it’s usually in the ducal postscript.”
“It’s plain enough. He wants us to realise the securities in his marriage settlement and reinvest them in the construction of a Channel tunnel. We seem to have written a number of letters to him pointing out—”
“Oh, he’s quite mad,” said John. “I believe his grandfather got a red-hot tip from Disraeli and cleared a packet on the Suez Canal. Gave the family rather a fixe about short cuts and transportation stock.”
“Yes,” said Henry, “but what do I say to him?”
“Say you’re consulting the brokers and what are the prospects for the salmon fishing this summer.”
“All right,” said Henry doubtfully.
At least ten minutes were devoted to work before the door opened again. Henry saw that it was the man whom he had noticed sitting next to Anne Mildmay at the staff dinner.
“What do you want?” said John. “If you’ve come to borrow the Law List it’s not here. If you want your copy of Tristram and Coote, I’ve lent it to Bob.”
“Thought I’d drop in and say hello,” said the newcomer, ignoring this. “If John won’t introduce me, old fellow, I’d better do it myself. I’m Eric Duxford.” He clicked on a smile.
“Rise,” said John to Bohun, “fall forward on both knees, and knock your forehead seven times on the floor.”
“Very good of you to bother,” said Henry. “I gather that you used to share this room with John.”
“Yes,” said Duxford. “Yes, I did.” It did not need much discernment to see that Eric Duxford disliked John Cove perhaps even a shade more than John disliked him.
“We were a famous pair,” said John. “‘Blest pair of sirens, pledges of Heaven’s joy. Sphere-born harmonious brothers.’ Debenham and Freebody, Fortnum and Mason, Duxford and Cove… Inseparable—”
“Yes. Well, you must come and have lunch with me, Bohun; we’ll run up to my club.”
“It’s not an easy club to run up to,” said John, “since it occupies a basement in Fleet Street. The United Philatelists and Numismatists. It shares the premises with the P.P.P. or Pornographic Photographic Publications, and the S.S.S. or—”
“You mustn’t pay too much attention to Cove,” said Duxford coldly. “He suffers from a suppressed inferiority complex. That’s why he talks so much. Actually I belong to the Public Schools—”
“I’d love to have lunch with you some day,” said Henry hastily, forestalling a perfectly outrageous remark by John.
“Very good of you to bother.”
“Not at all,” said Duxford. “We must all muck in and help one another, eh? That’s what makes the world go round.”
“Well,” said John, when the door had closed on their visitor. “Now you’ve plumbed the depths. If you want to get out, the emergency hatch is under the pilot’s seat—”
“Oh, come on,” said Henry, “he isn’t as bad as that. A bit hearty.”
“You haven’t had to live with him yet,” said John. “If you had you wouldn’t be so tolerant. To start with, as you have appreciated, he is a line-shooter. There are line-shooters and line-shooters. Eric is the line-shooter. He is the man about whom the phrase was invented. He literally never stops shooting lines. Of course,” John grinned, “it’s a profession which is not devoid of danger. Sometimes it plunges him into deep waters. There was the time when he took the Town and Country Planning Act under his wing—you remember that it was rather the fashion in early ’48. He read a couple of very simple articles about it, and of course took the next opportunity of cornering an inoffensive stranger at lunch and giving him a dissertation on some of the finer points of the Act. Sheer bad luck that he should have happened to have picked on Megarry.”
“Oh, no!”
“Even funnier, in a quiet way, was the time when he took up golf—a chap must take exercise, you know, keeps a fellow fit, you know. One meets a lot of interesting chaps at the club too, doesn’t one? I think his handicap at this time was about thirty-six with the wind behind him… Well, who should he pick on to give a little lecture to on the mysteries of the game but La Cornel. Thanks to Providence I was in here when he started. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. She took it without batting an eyelid. ‘Yes, Mr. Duxford. No, Mr. Duxford. How interesting, Mr. Duxford. Now what was it you said you called that club with the curly end, Mr. Duxford?’ It was terrific… When she’d gone out I told him the joke.”
Seeing Henry looking a bit blank he added: “Didn’t you know? She’s terrifically hot. She reached the last four in the Women’s Open. She’d have gone to America with the British Women’s Team before the war if Abel hadn’t been stingy about letting her have the time off—”