Heavy Weather (19 page)

'My dear old man!' he began effusively.

Ronnie did not speak. He was practising cannons.

Chapter Ten

The passing of the storm had left the Hon. Galahad Threepwood at rather a loose end. He was not quite sure where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do. His favourite lawn, he knew, would be too wet to walk on, his favourite deck-chair too wet to sit in. The whole world out of doors, in fact, for all that the sun was shining so brightly, was much too moist and dripping to attract a man with his feline dislike of dampness.

After Beach had left him, he had remained for a while in the small library. Then, tiring of that, he had wandered aimlessly about the house, winding as many clocks as he could find. He was, and always had been, a great clock-winder. Eventually, he had drifted to the hall, and was now lounging on a settee there in the hope that, if he lounged long enough, somebody would come along with whom he might chat till it was time to dress for dinner. He always found this part of the evening a little depressing.

Up to the present, he had had no luck. Monty Bodkin had come downstairs, but after Beach's revelations he had no wish to do anything but glower sternly at Monty. Without attempting to drawn him into conversation, though he had just remembered a thirty-year-old Limerick which he would have liked to recite to someone, he watched him go into the billiard-room, where the opening door showed a glimpse of Ronnie practising cannons. Presently, he had come out again and gone upstairs, followed as before by that stern eye.

'Young toad!' muttered the Hon. Galahad severely. He was shocked at Monty, and disappointed in him. He wished he had never given him that tip on the Cesarewitch.

Soon after this, Pilbeam had appeared, smiled weakly, and gone into the smoking-room. Here, again, there was nothing for the Hon. Galahad to work on. He had no desire to tell Limericks to Pilbeam. Apart from the fact that
the fellow was conspiring with
his sister Constance to steal his manuscript, he did not like the detective. Brought up in a sterner school of hairdressing, he disapproved of these modern young men who went about with their fungoid growth in sticky ridges.

It began to look to him as if in the matter of society he had but two choices open. Clarence, who would have appreciated that Limerick once he could have been induced to bring his mind to bear upon it, was presumably down at the sty making eyes at that pig of his; and Sue, the person he really wanted to talk to, seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. As far as he could see, he was reduced to the alternatives of going into the billiard-room and joining Ronnie, and of stepping up to the drawing-room and having a word with his sister Constance, who at this hour would no doubt be taking tea there. He was just about to adopt this second course, for he rather wanted a straight talk with Constance about that Pilbeam matter, when Sue came in from the garden.

Immediately, the idea of tackling Connie left him. He could do that at his leisure, and he was in the mood now for something pleasanter than a brother-and-sister dog-fight. Sue's bright personality was just the tonic he needed at this lowering point in the day's progress. He would be unable to tell her the Limerick, it not being that sort of Limerick, but at any rate they could talk of this and that.

He called to her, and she came over to where he sat. It was dim in the hall, but it struck him that she was not looking quite herself. The elasticity seemed to have gone out of her walk, that jaunty suppleness which he had always admired so in Dolly. But possibly this was merely his imagination. He was always inclined to read a fictitious sombreness into things when the shadows began to creep over the world and it was still too early for a cocktail.

'Well, young woman.'

'Hullo,
Gally
.'

'What have you been doing with yourself?' 'I was walking on the terrace.' 'Get your feet wet?'

'I don't think so. Perhaps I had better go up and change my shoes, though.'

The Hon. Galahad would have none of this. He pulled her down
on to the settee beside him.

'Amuse me,' he said. 'I'm bored.' 'Poor
Gally
. I'm sorry.'

'This,' said the Hon. Galahad, 'is the hour of the day that searches a man out. It makes him examine his soul. And I don't want to examine my soul. I expect the thing looks like an old boot. So, as I say, amuse me, child. Sing to me. Dance before me. Ask me riddles.'

'I'm afraid . . .'

The Hon. Galahad gave her a sharp glance through his monocle. It was as he had suspected. This girl was not festive. 'Anything the matter?' 'Oh, no.' 'Sure?' 'Quite.' 'Cigarette?' 'No, thanks.'

' Shall I turn on the radio ? There may be a lecture on Newts.' 'No, don't.'

'There
is
something the matter?' 'There isn't, really.'

The Hon. Galahad frowned. Then a possible solution occurred to him.

‘I
suppose it's the heat.'

'It was hot, wasn't it. It's better now.'

'You're under the weather.'

'I am a little.'

'Thunderstorms often upset pe
ople. Are you afraid of thun
der?'
'Oh, no.'

'Lots of girls are. I knew one once who, whenever there was a thunderstorm, used to fling her arms round the neck of the nearest man, hugging and kissing him till it was all over. Purely nervous reaction, of course, but you should have seen the young fellows flocking round as soon as the sky began to get a little overcast. Gladys, her name was. Gladys Twistleton. Beautiful girl with large, melting eyes. Married a fellow in the Blues called Harringay. I'm told that the way he used to clear the drawing-room during the early years of their married life at the first suspicion of a rumble was a sight to be seen and remembered.'

The Hon. Galahad had brightened. Like all confirmed raconteurs, he took on new life when the anecdotes started to come

The Hon. Galahad swelled like a little turkey-cock. His monocle was now a perfect searchlight.

'Just off be damned!" he snorted. 'You sit down and listen to me. Just off, indeed! You can go off when I've finished talking to you, and not before.'

Ronnie abandoned the snooker theory. Plainly it did not cover the facts. His moroseness had become tinged with bewilderment. It was many years since he had beheld his good-natured relative in a mood like this. It seemed to bring back the tang of the brave old days of chimney-stacks and whangees. He could think of nothing in his recent conduct that could have caused so impressive an upheaval.

'Now, then,' said the Hon. Galahad, 'what's all this?' 'That's just what I was going to ask,' said Ronnie. 'What
is
all this?'

'Don't pretend you don't know.' 'But I don't know.'

'It's no good taking that attitude.' The Hon. Galahad jerked his thumb at the door. 'I've just been talking to young Sue out there.'

A thin coating of ice seemed to creep over Ronald Fish. 'Oh, yes?' he said politely. 'She's crying.'

'Oh, yes?' said Ronnie, still politely, but with those white-hot knives at work on his soul again. His mind was divided against itself. Part of it was pointing out passionately that it was ghastly to think of Sue in tears. The other part was raising its eyebrows and shooting its cuffs and observing with a sneer that it was blowed if it could sec what
she
had to cry about.

'Crying, I tell you! Crying her dashed eyes out!'

'Oh, yes?'

The Hon. Galahad Threepwood was himself an Old Etonian, and in his time had frequently had occasion to employ the Eton manner to the undoing of his fellow-men. There were grey-haired bookies and elderly card-sharps going about London to this day, who still felt an occasional twinge, as of an old wound, when they recalled the agony of seeing him stare at them as Ronnie was staring and of hearing him say 'Oh, yes?' as Ronnie was saying it now. But this did not make his nephew's attitude any the easier for him to endure. The whole point of the Eton manner, as of a shotgun, is that you have to be at the right end of it.

He brought his fist down on the billiard-table with a thump.

'So you're not interested, eh? You don't care? Well, let me tell you,' said the Hon. Galahad, once more maltreating the billiard-table, 'that I do care. That girl's mother was the only woman I ever loved, and I don't propose to have her daughter's happiness ruined by any sawn-off young half-portion with a face like a strawberry ice who takes the notion into his beastly turnip of a head to play fast and loose with her. Understand that!'

There were so many ramifications to this insult that Ronnie was compelled to take them in rotation.

‘I
can't help it if my face is like a strawberry ice,' he said, electing to begin with that one.

'It ought to be much more like a strawberry ice. You ought to be blushing yourself sick.'

'And when,' said Ronnie, feeling on safe ground here, 'you talk about sawn-off half-portions, may I point out that I'm about an inch taller than you are?'

'Rot!' said the Hon. Galahad, stung.

'I am.'

'You're certainly not.'

' Measure you against the wall,' insisted Ronnie.

'I'll do nothing of the sort. And what the devil,' demanded the Hon. Galahad, suddenly aware that the main issue of debate was becoming shelved, 'has that got to do with it? You may be a giraffe, for all I care. The point I am endeavouring to make is that you are breaking this girl's heart, and I'm not going to have it. She tells me your engagement is off.'

'Quite right.'

Once more the Hon. Galahad smote the green cloth. ' You'll smash that table,' said Ronnie.

There flashed into the Hon. Galahad's mind the story of how old Beefy Muspratt, with some assistance, actually had smashed a billiard-table in the year ninety-eight; and such is the urge to the raconteur's ruling passion that he almost stopped to tell it. Then he recovered himself.

'Curse the table!' he cried.
‘I
didn't come here to talk about tables. I came to tell you that, i
f you care to know what a calm,
unprejudiced observer thinks of you, you're an infernal young snob ... and a hound . ..' 'What!'

'... and a worm,' went on the Hon. Galahad, as pink himself now as any pink-faced nephew. 'Do you think
I
can't see what's happened ? If you want to know, Sue told me herself. Told me in so many words, out there in the hall just now. You're such a wambling, spineless, invertebrate jellyfish that you've let your mother talk you into breaking off this engagement. You've allowed her to persuade you that that poor child isn't good enough for you.'

'What!'

'As if Dolly Henderson's daughter wasn't good enough for the finest man in the kingdom - let alone a .. .'

On the brink of becoming a little personal again, the Hon. Galahad found himself interrupted. This time it was Ronnie who had thumped the table.

'Don't talk such absolute dashed nonsense!' thundered Ronnie. ' You don't suppose I broke off the engagement, do you ? Sue broke it off herself.'

'Yes, because she could see that you wanted to get out of it and, being the splendid girl she is, wasn't going to cheapen herself by hanging on to a man who was obviously dying to be rid of her.'

'Hike that! Dying to be rid of her! I.. . I... Why, damn it!' 'You aren't telling me you're still fond of her?' ' What do you mean, still ? And what do you mean, fond of her ? Fond of her! My God!' The Hon. Galahad was astounded.

'Then what on earth have you been going about for these last few days like a spavined frog? Treating her as if...'

His manner softened. He began to see daylight. He could not lay his hand gently on his nephew's shoulder, for they were at opposite sides of a regulation-sized billiard-table. But he infused a gentle hand-laying into his voice.

'I see it all! You were worrying about something else; is that it ? Or was it the heat ? Anyhow, for some reason you allowed yourself to be odd in your manner. My dear boy, when you get to my age you'll know better than to take chances like that. Never be odd in 156 your manner with a woman. Don't you realize that, even under the best of conditions, there's practically nothing that won't make a sensitive, highly strung girl break off her engagement? If she doesn't like her new hat... or if her stocking starts a ladder ... or if she comes down late to breakfast and finds all the scrambled eggs are finished. It's like servants giving notice. I had a man back in the nineties - Spatchett, his name was - who used to give me notice every time he backed a horse that didn't finish in the first three. Why, he gave me notice once purely and simply because his wife's sister had had a baby. I never paid any attention to it. I knew it was just a form of emotional expression. Where you or I would have lit a cigarette, Spatchett gave notice. And it's the same with women. No doubt Sue saw you brooding and assumed that love was dead. Well, this has certainly eased my mind, Ronnie, my dear boy. I'll go and explain things to her at once.'