Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (23 page)

‘Perhaps you can play the duke, then,’ said Sir Henry.

‘Or maybe you might find room for a crosstalk routine?’ said Venables.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs V. ‘Sidney was famous in Chanamasala for his crosstalk acts. He’d make up the jokes on the day so they were nice and topical. People did love them.’

‘I’d need a straight man or feed,’ said Venables.

‘It’s rather late notice,’ said Major Holloway.

‘I’m sure we can manage something,’ said Sir Henry. ‘What about the rest of the programme?’

‘We have the Melbury Glee Club,’ said Holloway. ‘They’ll
be singing “’Twas a Shepherd and His Lass” and “The Ballad of Cranborne Chase”, accompanied by the vicar’s wife at the pianoforte. A schoolgirl from Kingston St Jude is doing a dramatic recitation and we’ve some conjuring tricks from my wife’s brother. Next we have a barbershop quartet from Puddletown, then there’ll be refreshments. After which the Melbury Tetchett string quartet – with my lady wife playing second fiddle – will give a short recital. Then there’ll be a
tableau vivant
from the Ladies’ Sewing Circle. And after that we come to the grand finale, which is your ensemble scene from Shakespeare.’

‘I thought young Venables was going to be reciting some of his verses,’ said Sir Henry.

‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to do that,’ said Rupert Venables.

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because I shan’t be here.’

‘“Shan’t be here”! But you’ve only just come back!’

‘I think in the circumstances it would ill become me to remain at the Hall, Sir Henry.’

‘Ill become you! What the devil are you talking about?’

The room was silent as it waited for young Venables to explain. ‘I regret to say that I am no longer engaged to be married to your niece, Sir Henry. I returned to Kingston St Giles to terminate the engagement in person.’

‘Oh, Roo!’ said Mrs Venables. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m telling you now, Ma,’ said Venables.

The silence came down again, a bit thicker this time. I looked at Georgiana, who was staring straight ahead, pale but unspeaking.

‘This is a fine pickle,’ said Lady Hackwood – an unfortunate choice of word, one couldn’t help feeling, since a proprietary pickle or relish was just what seemed to have gone missing.

Amelia began to sob. I shuffled about doing a bit of plate-clearing, hoping that some stage business might ease the tension.

Bicknell responded to his stricken master’s gesture and refilled his glass to the brim.

Rupert Venables glanced up and down the table with a look that you might, had you not known the circumstances, have taken for satisfaction.

‘I’m sorry that the news had to emerge in this way, Sir Henry,’ he said. ‘I had hoped for a chance to speak to you alone before dinner.’

‘And what about Georgie?’ said Amelia.

‘I’m all right, Ambo,’ said Georgiana in a very small voice.

At this point I was required on chicken fricassee duty in the kitchen. After a hectic few minutes to and fro, I settled into a steadier rhythm of touring with the broccoli dish – making sure to come in from the left-hand side. I couldn’t help noticing as I did so, the worrying shade of purple that Sir Henry’s face had taken on.

‘I wish you and your family the very best good fortune in the future,’ said Rupert Venables, ‘and I trust that in the circumstances …’

He tailed off as a noise like an exploding water main came from Sir Henry. ‘For heaven’s sake be quiet, you ridiculous young popinjay,’ said the baronet. ‘How dare you come into
my house, sir, make up to my niece then discard her in this impudent manner?’

Rupert Venables looked round the table for support. He smiled, a touch nervously. ‘I think I’ve explained, Sir Henry. Personal matters which it would be indelicate to reveal, have made it impossible for me to—’

‘To hell with your personal matters,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Georgiana’s father was my wife’s brother. He was as fine a man as ever drew breath, if somewhat overfond of port. I take my responsibility to his daughter very seriously. As for you, young man … You can pack your bag and leave my house. At once.’

One might at this point have expected either of the senior Venableses to stick in a word for the fruit of their loins or Lady H to offer a calming ‘there, there’ to her niece. But the next voice to be heard – a warmish baritone – belonged to P. Beeching.

‘Sir Henry, might I, with due respect, urge a moment’s calm on us all? The happiness of many is at stake. There is another engagement here that is not, if I may say so,
eiusdem generis
. And if—’

‘Don’t give me that Latin nonsense, Beeching. You’re not in the High Court now. And if you still think you’re going to marry my daughter, you’d better think again pretty smartly.’

Amelia let out a stricken cry and Georgiana began to sob silently. Lady Hackwood said, ‘Really, Henry!’

For all I could tell, Dame Judith Puxley might at this moment have put in her two bob’s worth, but all conversation
was brought to a sudden end by the sound of the front door bell ringing clangorously in the hall.

With heavy and suspicious tread, Bicknell left the dining room.

A cathedral hush came over the company. I stood like a dummy by the sideboard; I could think of no consolation except to tell myself that things could not possibly get worse.

How wrong I was.

The double door from the hall swung open and filled with butler.

Clearing his throat, Bicknell drew himself up to his fullest height and announced to one and all: ‘Lord Etringham.’

THE WOOSTERS ARE
generally acknowledged to be made of stern stuff. We did our bit in the Crusades and, I’m told, were spotted galloping into the French at Agincourt under a steady downpour of arrows. We don’t duck a challenge.

When the time comes for a strategic withdrawal, however, we withdraw alongside the best of them. I couldn’t see how anything helpful to the happiness of those near or dear to me could emerge in the next few minutes; and just as in the normal day there is a sense of
noblesse oblige
, so in my position of humble footman I could see no way to be of further service. I therefore exercised the historic right of the worker to down tools and call it a day.

I was into the kitchen, through the corridor, up the back stairs and inside my simple quarters – pausing only to gather up an unregarded bottle from the dresser – before you could say Burke and Debrett.

It was a flummoxed, wits-endish Wooster who, an hour later, became conscious of a polite knocking at the door. Wondering only what fresh curses might have been called down on my head, I went to open it.

Outside stood Mrs Tilman. To my surprise, the good woman was neither sobbing nor distraught; in fact she wore a benign, almost cheerful expression.

‘Mr Wooster,’ she said, ‘Sir Henry would like to see you in the library.’

‘Mr Woo-Woo-Wooster?’

‘You won’t remember me, sir. We met some years ago when I was chief housemaid at Sir Henry Dalgleish’s house in Berkshire. My name is Amy Charlton. I was married to Mr Tilman soon afterwards. He was Sir Henry’s butler.’

‘I’d like to say I remember, Mrs Tilman, but the truth is—’

‘It doesn’t matter, love. Everything’s been sorted out downstairs. Sir Henry knows who you are and who Mr Jeeves is.’

‘But isn’t he furious?’

‘Sir Henry is unpredictable, sir. It’s his nature. But he’s a kindly man underneath. He’s become fond of Mr Jeeves. If he takes to someone, he takes to them. His best friend for years was the chauffeur. It broke his heart when he had to let him go.’

‘And Lord Etringham? The real one?’

‘He’s an elderly gentleman, sir. Very mild-mannered. And he’s interested in history as well as fossils. He and Sir Henry seem to have taken a shine to each other already.’

This was all rather a turn-up for the book, of course, but I can’t pretend there was much of a spring in the step as I crossed
the mighty hall, as bidden, and for the first time entered the library under my own name.

Assembled in that bookish room were, reading from left to right: G. Meadowes, looking more spry, less like patience on a monument, as I’ve heard Jeeves put it, than she had an hour earlier; R. Jeeves, the valet lately known as Lord Etringham, inscrutable, yet visibly at ease; Sir H. Hackwood, foxy, animated; A. Hackwood, flushed and a-tremble; and a white-haired old cove with horn-rimmed glasses, barely five feet tall, with the fussy air of the White Rabbit from
Alice in Wonderland
.

‘Ah, Wooster. Glad to meet you properly,’ said Sir Henry, extending the hand of friendship from the cuff of his smoking jacket. ‘May I now introduce Lord Etringham?’

A second handshake followed. The ensuing explanations rambled over an hour or more, lubricated by the contents of that hospitable ottoman. The salient points, which were few, went as follows.

Lord Etringham (the bona fide one, not Jeeves) had for some time been treated for aggra-something by the well-known loony doctor, Sir Roderick Glossop. Progress was now so marked that he was proposing to join an expedition to Egypt with Howard Carter the following spring. As part of the limbering up, Sir Roderick encouraged his patient to travel in England – beginning with a trip on foot to the village post office and coming to a peak with a steam-train excursion to the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, some few miles from Melbury Hall. Lord E had planned to visit in August, but decided to come at once when an old friend in Sherborne sent him a copy of
the
Melbury Courier
with a photograph of a cricket team under which the caption revealed that his lordship was being impersonated by a stranger.

In the course of the peer’s story, Sir Henry established that Lord Etringham had booked into a modest bed and breakfast at Lyme Regis and insisted that he stay on at Melbury Hall, in the corner room that his namesake had previously occupied, using the house as a base for his expeditions. The nervous Lord E was obviously relieved to find himself enveloped in such a welcome rather than take pot luck with a seaside landlady. They had further discovered a shared interest in the Hundred Years War, though Lord Etringham drew the historical line at the Battle of Bosworth – later events, in his view, falling into the ‘modern’ period.

It was clear to me that not only had Sir Henry turned on the charm he generally kept hidden under a pretty all-obliterating bushel, but that Georgiana had also not been backward in dishing it out. If you had spent the best part of half a century in a draughty Westmorland house with only bits of old rock for company, it must have come as quite something to find yourself caught in the beam of that girl’s twin headlights as she discovered a sudden interest in geology. The old boy was clearly wondering whether the Pleistocene era was quite all it was cracked up to be when the modern day seemed to have so much more to offer.

‘So, Wooster, Bobby Etringham and I are friends already,’ Sir Henry concluded. ‘By the way, Bobby, you must feel free to take the car for your fossil-hunting.’

‘Most kind of you, Henry, but I have never learned to drive. My condition, you see …’ The old boy’s voice was reedy, and the words hard to distinguish.

‘Then Georgiana shall be your chauffeur!’

‘With pleasure, Uncle Henry. So long as I’m here.’

Well of course one couldn’t help but wonder how much excitement the old nerve-patient could take; but I thought it best not to throw a spanner in the works.

‘Sure you won’t have a glass of brandy, Bobby?’ said Sir Henry.

‘No, I really can’t. Roddy Glossop is absolutely strict on that point. The powders he has diagnosed must never be mixed with alcohol. He said I should fall asleep almost at once.’

There was the sound of a throat being cleared, and long experience made me glance in Jeeves’s direction.

‘Might I suggest, Sir Henry, that we leave you and Lord Etringham together? I’m sure that Mrs Tilman will have reor-ganised the sleeping arrangements by now.’

‘Good idea,’ said Georgiana. ‘Come on, Ambo.’

Sensing that wiser heads than mine were on to something, I shuffled off with the gang and left the peer and baronet alone. Jeeves accompanied me to my new quarters at the end of the corridor on the second floor, a small but charming room with a fine view over the lawns towards the tennis court – in so far as one could see past a giant wellingtonia. Mrs Tilman had done a sterling job in restoring all my clothes to chest and wardrobe.

‘Well, Jeeves,’ I said. ‘Business as usual, what?’

‘So it would appear, sir. I confess that I shall be happy to
resume my normal duties. I found myself suffering a degree of indigestion after so many of Mrs Padgett’s meals.’

‘And the bed a fraction soft, was it?’

‘I have long favoured a firmer mattress as being beneficial to the posture, sir.’

I glanced round the new arrangements. I felt I should sleep like a lamb.

‘Old Etringham’s a very forgiving chap, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘A most mild-mannered and agreeable gentleman, sir.’

‘A bachelor, is he?’

‘Yes, sir. He has no issue.’

‘So what happens to the Etringham fortune when he pops off?’

‘I did some research at the Junior Ganymede when we were in London and I believe he has favoured a number of educational trusts and charities, sir.’