Pigs Have Wings (18 page)

‘Stop there, will you. I want to see Sir Gregory Parsloe about something.’

‘Shall I wait, ma’am?’

‘No, don’t wait. I don’t know how long I shall be,’ said Maudie, feeling that hours – nay days – might well elapse before she had finished saying to Tubby Parsloe all the good things which had been accumulating inside her through the years. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and when a woman scorned starts talking, she likes to take plenty of time. She does not want to have to be watching the clock all the while.

The car slowed down and slid to a halt outside massive iron gates flanked by stone posts with heraldic animals on top of them. Beyond the gates were opulent-looking grounds and at the end of the long driveway a home of England so stately that Maudie drew her breath in with a quick ‘Coo!’ of awe. Tubby, it was plain, had struck it rich and come a long way since the old Criterion days when he used to plead with her to chalk the price of his modest refreshment up on the slate, explaining that credit was the life-blood of Commerce, without which the marts of trade could have no elasticity.

‘This’ll do,’ she said. ‘Drop me here.’

Sir Gregory Parsloe had just sat down at the dinner table when the door bell rang. He had had three excellent cocktails and was looking forward with bright anticipation to a meal of the sort that sticks to the ribs and brings beads of perspiration to the forehead. He had ordered it specially that morning, taking no little trouble over his selections. Some men, when jilted, take to drink. Sir Gregory was taking to food. Freed from the thrall of Gloria Salt, he intended to make up for past privations.

Ambrosia Chiffon Pie is the stuff you make with whipped cream, white of egg, powdered sugar, seeded grapes, sponge cake, shredded coconut and orange gelatin, and it had been planned by the backsliding Baronet as the final supreme gesture of independence. A man who has been ordered by his fiancée to diet and defiantly tucks into Ambrosia Chiffon Pie has formally cast off the shackles.

He had unfastened the lower buttons of his waistcoat and was in the act of squeezing lemon juice over his smoked salmon, when the hubbub at the front door broke out. It was caused by Maudie demanding to see Sir Gregory Parsloe immediately and Binstead explaining – politely at first, then, as the argument grew more heated, in a loud and hostile voice – that Sir Gregory was at dinner and could not be disturbed. And the latter was about to intervene in the debate with a stentorian ‘What the devil’s all that noise going on out there?’ when the door flew open and Maudie burst in, with Binstead fluttering in her wake.

The butler had given up the unequal struggle. He knew when he was licked.

‘Mrs Stubbs,’ he announced aloofly, and went off, washing his hands of the whole unpleasant affair and leaving his employer to deal with the situation as he thought best.

Sir Gregory stood staring, the smoked salmon frozen on its fork. It is always disconcerting when an unexpected guest arrives at dinner time, and particularly so when such a guest is a spectre from the dead past. The historic instance, of course, of this sort of thing is the occasion when the ghost of Banquo dropped in to take pot luck with Macbeth. It gave Macbeth a start, and it was plain from Sir Gregory’s demeanour that he also had had one.

‘What? What? What? What? What?’ he gasped, for he was a confirmed what-whatter in times of emotion.

Maudie’s blue eyes were burning with a dangerous light.

‘So there you are!’ she said, having given her teeth a little click. ‘I wonder you can look me in the face, Tubby Parsloe.’

Sir Gregory blinked.

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you.’

It occurred to Sir Gregory that another go at the smoked salmon might do something to fortify a brain which was feeling as if a charge of trinitrotoluol had been touched off under it. Fish, he had heard or read somewhere, was good for the brain. He took a fork-full, hoping for the best, but nothing happened. His mind still whirled. Probably smoked salmon was not the right sort of fish.

Maudie, having achieved the meeting for which she had been waiting for ten years, wasted no time beating about the bush. She got down to the
res
without preamble.

‘A nice thing that was you did to me, Tubby Parsloe,’ she said, speaking like the voice of conscience.

‘Eh?’

‘Leaving me waiting at the church like that!’

Once more Sir Gregory had to fight down a suspicion that his mind was darkening.

‘
I
left
you
waiting at the church? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Don’t try that stuff on me. Did you or did you not write me a letter ten years ago telling me to come and get married at St Saviour’s, Pimlico, at two o’clock sharp on June the seventh?’

‘June the what?’

‘You heard.’

‘I did nothing of the sort. You’re crazy.’

Maudie laughed a hard, bitter laugh. She had been expecting some such attitude as this. Trust Tubby Parsloe to try to wriggle out of it. Fortunately she had come armed to the teeth with indisputable evidence, and she now produced it from her bag.

‘You didn’t, eh? Well, here’s the letter. I kept it all these years in case I ever ran into you. Here you are. Look for yourself.’

Sir Gregory studied the document dazedly.

‘Is that your handwriting?’

‘Yes, that’s my handwriting.’

‘Well, read what it says.’

‘“Darling Maudie –”’

‘Not that. Over the page.’

Sir Gregory turned the page.

‘There you are. “Two o’clock sharp, June seven”.’

Sir Gregory uttered a cry.

‘You’re cock-eyed, old girl.’

‘How do you mean, I’m cock-eyed?’

‘That’s not a seven.’

‘What’s not a seven?’

‘That thing there.’

‘Why isn’t it a seven?’

‘Because it’s a four. June 4, as plain as a pikestaff. Anyone who could take it for a … Lord love a duck! You don’t mean you went to that church on June the seventh?’

‘Certainly I went to that church on June the seventh.’

With a hollow groan Sir Gregory took another fork-full of smoked salmon. A blinding light had shone upon him, and he realized how unjustified had been those hard thoughts he had been thinking about this woman all these years. He had supposed that she had betrayed him with a cold, mocking callousness which had shaken his faith in the female sex to its foundations. He saw now that what had happened had been one of those unfortunate misunderstandings which are so apt to sunder hearts, the sort of thing Thomas Hardy used to write about.

‘I was there on June the fourth,’ he said.

‘What!’

Sir Gregory nodded sombrely. He was not a man of great sensibility, but he could appreciate the terrific drama of the thing.

‘In a top hat,’ he went on, his voice trembling, ‘and, what’s more, a top hat which I had had pressed or blocked or whatever they call it and in addition had rubbed with stout to make it glossy. And when you didn’t show up and after about a couple of hours it suddenly struck me that you weren’t going to show up, I took that hat off and jumped on it. I was dashed annoyed about the whole business. I mean to say, when a man tells a girl to meet a fellow at two o’clock sharp on June the fourth at St Saviour’s, Pimlico, and marry him and so on, and he gets there and there isn’t a sign of her, can a chap be blamed for feeling a bit upset? Well, as I was saying, I jumped on the hat, reducing it to a mere wreck of its former self, and went off to Paris on one of the tickets I’d bought for the honeymoon. I was luckily able to get a refund on the other. I had quite a good time in Paris, I remember. Missed you, of course,’ said Sir Gregory gallantly.

Maudie was staring, round-eyed, the tip of her nose wiggling.

‘Is that true?’

‘Of course it’s true. Dash it all, you don’t suppose I could make up a story like that on the spur of the moment? You don’t think I’m a ruddy novelist or something, do you?’

This was so reasonable that Maudie’s last doubts were resolved. She gulped, her eyes wet with unshed tears, and when he offered her a piece of smoked salmon, waved it away with a broken cry.

‘Oh, Tubby! How awful!’

‘Yes. Unfortunate, the whole thing.’

‘I thought you had blown in the honeymoon money at the races.’

‘Well, I did venture a portion of it at Sandown Park, as a matter of fact, now you mention it, but by great good luck I picked a winner. Bounding Bertie in the two-thirty at twenty to one. What a beauty! I won a hundred quid. That is what enabled me to buy that hat. The money came in handy in Paris, too. Very expensive city, Paris. Never believe anyone who tells you living’s cheap there. They soak you at every turn. Though, mark you, the food’s worth it, the way they cook it over there.’

There was a silence. Maudie, like Gloria Salt, was thinking of what might have been, and Sir Gregory, his mind back in the days of his solitary honeymoon, was trying to remember the name of that little restaurant behind the Madeleine, where he had had the most amazingly good dinner one night. The first time, he recalled, that he had ever tasted bouillabaisse.

Binstead, who had spent the last ten minutes panting feebly in his pantry, for Acts of God like Maudie had never before come bursting into his placid life and he was feeling somewhat unnerved, had at last succeeded in restoring his aplomb sufficiently to enable him to resume his butlerine duties. He now entered, bearing a tureen, and Sir Gregory was recalled with a start to a sense of his obligations as a host.

‘What ho, the soup!’ he said, welcoming it with a bright smile. ‘I say, now you’re here, you’ll stay and have a bite of dinner, old girl, what? Eh? Got to be getting along? Don’t be silly. You can’t turn up after all these years and just say “Hullo, there” and dash off like a ruddy jack rabbit. We’ve got to have a long talk about all sorts of things. My chauffeur can take you back to wherever you’re staying. Where are you staying, by the way, and how on earth do you happen to be in these parts? You could have knocked me down with a toothpick when you suddenly popped up out of a clear sky like that. Mrs Stubbs and I are old friends, Binstead.’

‘Indeed, Sir Gregory?’

‘Knew each other years and years ago.’

‘Is that so, Sir Gregory?’

‘You didn’t tell me where you were hanging out, Maudie.’

‘I’m at Blandings Castle.’

‘How the devil did you get there?’

‘Gally Threepwood invited me.’

Sir Gregory puffed his cheeks out austerely.

‘That gumboil!’

‘Why, Tubby, he’s nice.’

‘Nice, my foot! He’s a louse in human shape. Well, come along and sit down,’ said Sir Gregory, abandoning the distasteful subject. ‘There’s a Hungarian goulash due at any moment which I think you’ll appreciate, and I stake my all on the Ambrosia Chiffon Pie. It’s made of whipped cream, white of egg, powdered sugar, seeded grapes, sponge cake, shredded coconut, and orange gelatin, and I shall be vastly surprised if it doesn’t melt in the mouth.’

The presence of Binstead, hovering in the background with his large ears pricked up, obviously hoping to hear something worth including in his Memoirs, prevented anything in the nature of intimate exchanges during the meal. But when he had served the coffee and retired, Sir Gregory, heaving a sentimental sigh, struck the tender note.

‘Dashed good, that goulash,’ he said. ‘It isn’t every cook in this country who knows how to prepare it. The paprika has to be judged to a nicety, and there are other subtleties into which I need not go at the moment. Which reminds me. I wonder, old girl, if you remember me standing you dinner one evening years ago – or, rather, you standing me, as it turned out, because I was compelled to stick you with the bill – at a little place in Soho where they dished up a perfectly astounding Hungarian goulash?’

‘I remember. It was in the spring.’

‘Yes. A lovely spring evening, with a gentle breeze blowing from the west, the twilight falling, and a new moon glimmering in the sky. And we went to this restaurant and there was the goulash.’

‘You had three helpings.’

‘And you the same, if memory serves me aright. With a jam omelette to follow. That’s what I always admired about you, Maudie, you never went in for this dieting nonsense. You enjoyed your food, and when you had had it, you reached out for more, and to hell with what it did to your hips. Too many girls nowadays are mad about athletics and keeping themselves fit and all that, and if you ask me, they’re a worse menace to the peaceful life of the countryside than botts, glanders, and foot-and-mouth disease. An example of this type of feminine pestilence that springs to the mind is my late fiancée, Gloria Salt. Physical fitness was her gospel, and she spread disaster and desolation on every side like a sower going forth sowing.’

‘Aren’t you still engaged to Miss Salt?’

‘Not any more. She sent me round a note last night telling me to go and boil my head. And a very good thing, too. I should never have asked her to marry me. A rash act. One does these foolish things.’

‘Didn’t you love her?’

‘Don’t be silly. Of course I didn’t love her. There was some slight feeling of attraction, possibly, due to her lissom figure, but you couldn’t call it love, not by a jugful. I’ve never loved anyone but you, Maudie.’

‘Oh, Tubby!’

‘You ought to know that. I told you often enough.’

‘But that was years ago.’

‘Years don’t make any difference when a fellow really bestows his bally heart. Yes, dash it, I love you, old girl. I fought against it, mark you. Thinking you had let me down, I tried to blot your image from my mind, if you follow what I mean. But when you came in at that door, looking as beautiful as ever, I knew it was no good struggling any longer. My goose was cooked. It was just as though I had been taken back to the old days and was leaning against your bar, gazing into your eyes, while you poured the whisky and uncorked the small soda.’