The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 4: (Jeeves & Wooster): No.4 (26 page)

‘Five inmates in all.’

‘Five?’ I resumed my tongue-clicking. ‘Golly! Uncle Tom must be frothing at the mouth a bit,’ I said, for I knew the old buster’s distaste for guests in the home. Even a single weekender is sometimes enough to make him drain the bitter cup.

‘Tom’s not there. He’s gone to Harrogate with Cream.’

‘You mean lumbago.’

‘I don’t mean lumbago. I mean Cream. Homer Cream. Big American tycoon, who is visiting these shores. He suffers from ulcers, and his medicine man has ordered him to take the waters at Harrogate. Tom has gone with him to hold his hand and listen to him of an evening while he tells him how filthy the stuff tastes.’

‘Antagonistic.’

‘What?’

‘I mean altruistic. You are probably not familiar with the word, but it’s one I’ve heard Jeeves use. It’s what you say of a fellow who gives selfless service, not counting the cost.’

‘Selfless service, my foot! Tom’s in the middle of a very important business deal with Cream. If it goes through, he’ll make a packet free of income tax. So he’s sucking up to him like a Hollywood Yes-man.’

I gave an intelligent nod, though this of course was wasted on her because she couldn’t see me. I could readily understand my uncle-by-marriage’s mental processes. T. Portarlington Travers is a man who has accumulated the pieces of eight in sackfuls, but he is always more than willing to shove a bit extra away behind the brick in the fireplace, feeling – and rightly – that every little bit added to what you’ve got makes just a little bit more. And if there’s one thing that’s right up his street, it is not paying income tax. He grudges every penny the Government nicks him for.

‘That is why, when kissing me goodbye, he urged me with tears in his eyes to lush Mrs Cream and her son Willie up and treat them like royalty. So they’re at Brinkley, dug into the woodwork.’

‘Willie, did you say?’

‘Short for Wilbert.’

I mused. Willie Cream. The name seemed familiar somehow. I seemed to have heard it or seen it in the papers somewhere. But it eluded me.

‘Adela Cream writes mystery stories. Are you a fan of hers? No? Well, start boning up on them, directly you arrive, because every little helps. I’ve bought a complete set. They’re very good.’

‘I shall be delighted to run an eye over her material,’ I said, for I am what they call an a-something of novels of suspense. Aficionado, would that be it? ‘I can always do with another corpse or two. We have established, then, that among the inmates are this Mrs Cream and her son Wilbert. Who are the other three?’

‘Well, there’s Lady Wickham’s daughter Roberta.’

I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me.

‘What! Bobbie Wickham? Oh, my gosh!’

‘Why the agitation? Do you know her?’

‘You bet I know her.’

‘I begin to see. Is she one of the gaggle of girls you’ve been engaged to?’

‘Not actually, no. We were never engaged. But that was merely because she wouldn’t meet me half way.’

‘Turned you down, did she?’

‘Yes, thank goodness.’

‘Why thank goodness? She’s a one-girl beauty chorus.’

‘She doesn’t try the eyes, I agree.’

‘A pippin, if ever there was one.’

‘Very true, but is being a pippin everything? What price the soul?’

‘Isn’t her soul like mother makes?’

‘Far from it. Much below par. What I could tell you … But no, let it go. Painful subj.’

I had been about to mention fifty-seven or so of the reasons why the prudent operator, if he valued his peace of mind, deemed it best to stay well away from the red-headed menace under advisement, but realized that at a moment when I was wanting to get back to the marmalade it would occupy too much time. It will be enough to say that I had long since come out of the ether and was fully cognisant of the fact that in declining to fall in with my suggestion that we should start rounding up clergymen and bridesmaids, the beasel had rendered me a signal service, and I’ll tell you why.

Aunt Dahlia, describing this young blister as a one-girl beauty chorus, had called her shots perfectly correctly. Her outer crust was indeed of a nature to cause those beholding it to rock back on their heels with a startled whistle. But while equipped with eyes like twin stars, hair ruddier than the cherry, oomph,
espièglerie
and all the fixings, B. Wickham had also the disposition and general outlook on life of a ticking bomb. In her society you always had the uneasy feeling that something was likely to go off at any moment with a pop. You never knew what she was going to do next or into what murky depths of soup she would carelessly plunge you.

‘Miss Wickham, sir,’ Jeeves had once said to me warningly at the time when the fever was at its height, ‘lacks seriousness. She is volatile and frivolous. I would always hesitate to recommend as a life partner a young lady with quite such a vivid shade of red hair.’

His judgment was sound. I have already mentioned how with her subtle wiles this girl had induced me to sneak into Sir Roderick Glossop’s sleeping apartment and apply the darning needle to his hot-water bottle, and that was comparatively mild going for her. In a word, Roberta, daughter of the late Sir Cuthbert and Lady Wickham of Skeldings Hall, Herts, was pure dynamite and better kept at a distance by all those who aimed at leading the peaceful life. The prospect of being immured with her in the same house, with all the facilities a country house affords an enterprising girl for landing her nearest and dearest in the mulligatawny, made me singularly dubious about the shape of things to come.

And I was tottering under this blow when the old relative administered another, and it was a haymaker.

‘And there’s Aubrey Upjohn and his stepdaughter Phyllis Mills,’ she said. ‘That’s the lot. What’s the matter with you? Got asthma?’

I took her to be alluding to the sharp gasp which had escaped my lips, and I must confess that it had come out not unlike the last words of a dying duck. But I felt perfectly justified in gasping. A weaker man would have howled like a banshee. There floated into my mind something Kipper Herring had once said to me. ‘You know, Bertie,’ he had said, in philosophical mood, ‘we have much to be thankful for in this life of ours, you and I. However rough the going, there is one sustaining thought to which we can hold. The storm clouds may lower and the horizon grow dark, we may get a nail in our shoe and be caught in the rain without an umbrella, we may come down to breakfast and find that someone else has taken the brown egg, but at least we have the consolation of knowing that we shall never see Aubrey Gawd-help-us Upjohn again. Always remember this in times of despondency,’ he said, and I always had. And now here the bounder was, bobbing up right in my midst. Enough to make the stoutest-hearted go into his dying-duck routine.

‘Aubrey Upjohn?’ I quavered. ‘You mean
my
Aubrey Upjohn?’

‘That’s the one. Soon after you made your escape from his chain gang he married Jane Mills, a friend of mine with a colossal amount of money. She died, leaving a daughter. I’m the daughter’s godmother. Upjohn’s retired now and going in for politics. The hot tip is that the boys in the back room are going to run him as the Conservative candidate in the Market Snodsbury division at the next by-election. What a thrill it’ll be for you, meeting him again. Or does the prospect scare you?’

‘Certainly not. We Woosters are intrepid. But what on earth did you invite him to Brinkley for?’

‘I didn’t. I only wanted Phyllis, but he came along, too.’

‘You should have bunged him out.’

‘I hadn’t the heart to.’

‘Weak, very weak.’

‘Besides, I needed him in my business. He’s going to present the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. We’ve been caught short as usual, and somebody has got to make a speech on ideals and the great world outside to those blasted boys, so he fits in nicely. I believe he’s a very fine speaker. His only trouble is that he’s stymied unless he has his speech with him and can read it. Calls it referring to his notes. Phyllis told me that. She types the stuff for him.’

‘A thoroughly low trick,’ I said severely. ‘Even I, who have never soared above the Yeoman’s Wedding Song at a village concert, wouldn’t have the crust to face my public unless I’d taken the trouble to memorize the words, though actually with the Yeoman’s Wedding Song it is possible to get by quite comfortably by keeping singing “Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong, I hurry along”. In short …’

I would have spoken further, but at this point, after urging me to put a sock in it, and giving me a kindly word of warning not to step on any banana skins, she rang off.

I CAME AWAY
from the telephone on what practically amounted to leaden feet. Here, I was feeling, was a nice bit of box fruit. Bobbie Wickham, with her tendency to stir things up and with each new day to discover some new way of staggering civilization, would by herself have been bad enough. Add Aubrey Upjohn, and the mixture became too rich. I don’t know if Kipper, when I rejoined him, noticed that my brow was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, as I have heard Jeeves put it. Probably not, for he was tucking into toast and marmalade at the moment, but it was. As had happened so often in the past, I was conscious of an impending doom. Exactly what form this would take I was of course unable to say – it might be one thing or it might be another – but a voice seemed to whisper to me that somehow at some not distant date Bertram was slated to get it in the gizzard.

‘That was Aunt Dahlia, Kipper,’ I said.

‘Bless her jolly old heart,’ he responded. ‘One of the very best, and you can quote me as saying so. I shall never forget those happy days at Brinkley, and shall be glad at any time that suits her to cadge another invitation. Is she up in London?’

‘Till this afternoon.’

‘We fill her to the brim with rich foods, of course?’

‘No, she’s got a lunch date. She’s browsing with Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor. You don’t know him, do you?’

‘Only from hearing you speak of him. A tough egg, I gather.’

‘One of the toughest.’

‘He was the chap, wasn’t he, who found the twenty-four cats in your bedroom?’

‘Twenty-three,’ I corrected. I like to get things right. ‘They were not my cats. They had been deposited there by my cousins Claude and Eustace. But I found them difficult to explain. He’s a rather bad listener. I hope I shan’t find him at Brinkley, too.’

‘Are you going to Brinkley?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

‘You’ll enjoy that.’

‘Well, shall I? The point is a very moot one.’

‘You’re crazy. Think of Anatole. Those dinners of his! Is the name of the Peri who stood disconsolate at the gate of Eden familiar to you?’

‘I’ve heard Jeeves mention her.’

‘Well, that’s how I feel when I remember Anatole’s dinners. When I reflect that every night he’s dishing them up and I’m not there, I come within a very little of breaking down. What gives you the idea that you won’t enjoy yourself? Brinkley Court’s an earthly Paradise.’

‘In many respects, yes, but life there at the moment has its drawbacks. There’s far too much of that where-every-prospect-pleases-and-only-man-is-vile stuff buzzing around for my taste. Who do you think is staying at the old dosshouse? Aubrey Upjohn.’

It was plain that I had shaken him. His eyes widened, and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp.

‘Old Upjohn? You’re kidding.’

‘No, he’s there. Himself, not a picture. And it seems only yesterday that you were buoying me up by telling me I’d never have to see him again. The storm clouds may lower, you said, if you recollect …’

‘But how does he come to be at Brinkley?’

‘Precisely what I asked the aged relative, and she had an explanation that seems to cover the facts. Apparently after we took our eye off him he married a friend of hers, one Jane Mills, and acquired a stepdaughter, Phyllis Mills, whose godmother Aunt Dahlia is. The ancestor invited the Mills girl to Brinkley, and Upjohn came along for the ride.’

‘I see. I don’t wonder you’re trembling like a leaf.’

‘Not like a leaf, exactly, but … yes, I think you might describe me as trembling. One remembers that fishy eye of his.’

‘And the wide, bare upper lip. It won’t be pleasant having to gaze at those across the dinner table. Still, you’ll like Phyllis.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘We met out in Switzerland last Christmas. Slap her on the back, will you, and give her my regards. Nice girl, though goofy. She never told me she was related to Upjohn.’

‘She would naturally keep a thing like that dark.’

‘Yes, one sees that. Just as one would have tried to keep it dark if one had been mixed up in any way with Palmer the poisoner. What ghastly garbage that was he used to fling at us when we were serving our sentence at Malvern House. Remember the sausages on Sunday? And the boiled mutton with caper sauce?’

‘And the margarine. Recalling this last, it’s going to be a strain having to sit and watch him getting outside pounds of best country butter. Oh, Jeeves,’ I said, as he shimmered in to clear the table, ‘you never went to a preparatory school on the south coast of England, did you?’

‘No, sir, I was privately educated.’

‘Ah, then you wouldn’t understand. Mr. Herring and I were discussing our former prep-school beak, Aubrey Upjohn, M.A. By the way, Kipper, Aunt Dahlia was telling me something about him which I never knew before and which ought to expose him to the odium of all thinking men. You remember those powerful end-of-term addresses he used to make to us? Well, he couldn’t have made them if he hadn’t had the stuff all typed out in his grasp, so that he could read it. Without his notes, as he calls them, he’s a spent force. Revolting, that, Jeeves, don’t you think?’

‘Many orators are, I believe, similarly handicapped, sir.’

‘Too tolerant, Jeeves, far too tolerant. You must guard against this lax outlook. However, the reason I mention Upjohn to you is that he has come back into my life, or will be so coming in about two ticks. He’s staying at Brinkley, and I shall be going there tomorrow. That was Aunt Dahlia on the phone just now, and she demands my presence. Will you pack a few necessaries in a suitcase or so?’