Pigs Have Wings (22 page)

Even Mr Galahad had seemed moody, and Maudie, who might have done something to relieve the funereal atmosphere, had been over at Matchingham Hall. The only bright spot was the non-appearance of Lady Constance, who had caught Lord Emsworth’s cold and had taken her dinner in bed.

Beach helped himself to another glass of port, his third. It was pre-phylloxera, and should have had him dancing about the room, strewing roses from his hat, but it did not so much as bring a glow to his eye. For all the good it was doing him, it might have been sarsaparilla. And he was just wondering where he could turn for comfort, now that even port had failed him, when he saw that his solitude had been invaded. Gally was entering, and on his expressive face it seemed to Beach that there was a strange new light, as if hope had dawned.

Nor was he in error. Throughout the day and all through dinner Gally had been bringing a brain trained by years of mixing with the members of the Pelican Club to bear on the problems confronting his little group of serious thinkers. What Beach, watching him at the table, had mistaken for moodiness had in reality been deep thought. And now this deep thought had borne fruit.

‘Port?’ said Gally, eyeing the decanter. ‘You can give me some of that, and speedily. My God!’ he said, sipping. ‘It’s the old ’78. You certainly do yourself well, Beach, and who has a better right to? If I’ve said once that there’s nobody like you, I’ve said it a hundred times. Staunch and true are the adjectives I generally select when asked to draw a word-portrait of you. Beach, I tell people when they come inquiring about you, is a man who … well, how shall I describe him? Ah yes, I say, he is a man who, if offered an opportunity of doing a friend a good turn, will leap to the task, even if it involves going through fire and water. He –’

It would be incorrect to say that Beach had paled. His was a complexion, ruddier than the cherry, which did not readily lose its vermilion hue. But his jaw had fallen, and he was looking at his visitor rather in the manner of the lamb mentioned by the philosopher Schopenhauer when closeted with the butcher.

‘It … It isn’t anything else, is it, Mr Galahad?’ he faltered.

‘Eh?’

‘There is nothing further you wish me to do for you, sir?’

Gally laughed genially.

‘Good heavens, no. Not a thing. At least –’

‘Sir?’

‘It did, I admit, cross my mind that you might possibly care to kidnap George Cyril Wellbeloved and tie him up and force him to reveal where the Empress is hidden by sticking lighted matches between his toes. Would you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Merely a suggestion. You could keep him in the coal cellar.’

‘No, sir. I am sorry.’

‘Quite all right, my dear fellow. It was just a random thought that occurred to me while reading one of those gangster stories in the library before dinner. I had an idea that it might have appealed to you, but no. Well, we all have our likes and dislikes. Then we must think of something else, and I believe I have it. It’s true, is it, that Maudie is going to marry young Parsloe?’

‘Yes, sir. I had the information from her personal lips.’

‘And he loves her?’

‘She inferred as much from his attitude, sir.’

‘In that case, I should imagine that her lightest wish would be law to him.’

‘One assumes so, Mr Galahad.’

‘Then everything becomes quite simple. She must wheedle the blighter.’

‘Sir?’

‘You must take her aside, Beach, and persuade her to ask young Parsloe where the Empress is and use her feminine wiles till she has got the secret out of him. She can do it if she tries. Look at Samson and Delilah. Look at –’

Whatever further test cases Gally had been about to mention were wiped from his lips by the sudden ringing of the telephone, a strident instrument capable of silencing the stoutest talker. Beach, who had leaped in the air, returned to earth and took up the receiver.

‘Blandings Castle. Lord Emsworth’s butler spe … Oh, good evening, sir … Yes, sir … Very good, sir … Mr Vail, Mr Galahad,’ said Beach, aside. ‘He wishes me to inform Miss Donaldson that he has left the Emsworth Ar –’

It is not easy to break off in the middle of a single syllable word like ‘Arms’, but Beach had contrived to do so. Like a cloud across the moon, a look of horror and consternation was spreading itself over the acreage of his face.

Gally frowned.

‘Left the Emsworth Arms?’ he said sharply. A man who has taken the trouble to give the younger generation the benefit of his advice does not like to have that advice rejected. ‘Let me talk to him.’

Slowly Beach replaced the receiver.

‘The gentleman has rung off, sir.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

Beach tottered to the table, and reached out a feeble hand to his glass of port.

‘Yes, Mr Galahad. He has taken a furnished house.’

‘Eh? Where? What furnished house?’

Beach drained his glass. His eyes were round and bulging.

‘Sunnybrae, sir,’ he said in a low voice. ‘On the Shrewsbury road.’

THE PELICAN CLUB
trains its sons well. After he has been affiliated to that organization for a number of years, taking part week by week in its informal Saturday night get-togethers, a man’s moral fibre becomes toughened, and very little can happen to him that is capable of making him even raise his eyebrows. Gally, as he heard Beach utter those devastating words, did, it is true, give a slight start, but a member of the Athenaeum or the National Liberal would have shot six feet straight up in the air and bumped his head against the ceiling.

When he spoke, there was no suggestion of a quiver in his voice. The Club would have been proud of him.

‘Are you trying to be funny, Beach?’

‘No, sir, I assure you.’

‘You really mean it? Sunnybrae?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What on earth does he want to go to Sunnybrae for?’

‘I could not say, sir.’

‘But he’s on his way there?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And he when he gets there …’ Gally paused. He polished his monocle thoughtfully. ‘Things look sticky, Beach.’

‘Extremely glutinous, Mr Galahad. I fear the worst. The gentleman, on arriving at Sunnybrae, will find the pig in residence –’

‘And what will the harvest be?’

‘Precisely, sir.’

Gally nodded. He was a man who could face facts.

‘Yes, sticky is the word. No good trying to conceal it from ourselves that a crisis has arisen. Jerry Vail is an author, and you know as well as I do what authors are. Unbalanced. Unreliable. Fatheads, to a man. It was precisely because he was an author that I did not admit this Vail to our counsels in the matter of the Parsloe pig. Informed of the facts, he would have spread the story all over Shropshire. And he’ll be spreading it all over Shropshire now, if we don’t act like lightning. You agree?’

‘Yes, indeed, sir.’

‘Authors are like that. No reticence. No reserve. You or I, Beach, finding a pig in the kitchen of a furnished villa in which we had just hung up our hats, would keep calm and wait till the clouds rolled by. But not an author. The first thing this blighted Vail will do, unless nipped in the bud, will be to rush out and grab the nearest passer-by and say “Pardon me for addressing you, sir, but there appears to be a pig in my kitchen. Have you any suggestions?” And then what? I’ll tell you what. Doom, desolation, and despair. In next to no time the news will have reached Parsloe, stirring him up like a dose of salts and bringing him round to Sunnybrae with a whoop and a holler. We must hurry, Beach. Not an instant to lose. We must get the car out immediately and fly like the wind to the centre of the vortex, trusting that we shall not be too late. Come on, man, come on. Don’t just stand there. A second’s delay may be fatal.’

‘But I have to take the tray of beverages into the drawing-room at nine-thirty, Mr Galahad.’

‘The what?’

‘The tray of beverages, sir. For the ladies and gentlemen. Whisky and, for those who prefer it, barley-water.’

‘Give it a miss. Let ’em eat cake. Good heavens, is this a time to be thinking of whisky and babbling of barley-water? I never heard such nonsense.’

Beach stiffened a little. In his long and honourable years of office at Blandings Castle, allowing deduction for an annual holiday by the sea, he had taken the tray of beverages into the drawing-room at nine-thirty a matter of six thousand six hundred and sixty-nine times, and to have the voice of the Tempter urging him to play hooky and not bring the total to six thousand six hundred and seventy was enough to make any butler stiffen.

‘I fear I could not do that, Mr Galahad,’ he said, coldly. ‘Professional integrity constrains me to perform my allotted task. It is a matter of principle. I shall be happy to join you at Sunnybrae directly I am at liberty. I will borrow the chauffeur’s bicycle.’

Gally wasted no time in fruitless argument. You cannot reason with a butler whose motto is Service.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Come on as soon as you can, for who knows what stern work may lie before us this night!’

And with a crisp ‘You and your blasted trays of beverages!’ he hurried out, heading for the garage.

Jerry Vail’s sudden decision to move from the Emsworth Arms and start housekeeping for himself had been due to certain shortcomings in the general set-up of that in many respects admirable hostelry. The Emsworth Arms, like most inns in English country towns, specialized in beer, and when it came to providing its patrons with anything else was rather inclined to lose interest and let its attention wander.

Beds for instance. It did not worry much about beds. You could have one, if you wanted to, but Jerry, having inspected the specimen offered to him, shrank from the prospect of occupying it for an indefinite series of nights. If he had been an Indian fakir, accustomed from childhood to curling up on spikes, he could have wished for nothing better, but he was not an Indian fakir accustomed from childhood to curling up on spikes.

There was also the drawback that nowhere in the place was it possible for a man to write. The Emsworth Arms’ idea of a writing-room was an almost pitch dark cubby-hole with no paper, no pens, and in the ink-pot only a curious sediment that looked like something imported from the Florida Everglades. And when he discovered that in addition to these defects the room was much infested by commercial travellers, talking in loud voices about orders and expense accounts, it is not difficult to understand why the quiet evenfall found him in the offices of Caine and Cooper, house agents, High Street, Market Blandings, inquiring about houses.

He was delighted when Mr Lancelot Cooper, the firm’s junior partner, informed him that by a lucky chance there happened to be available a furnished villa ready for immediate occupancy, and he was still further pleased to learn that the residence in question had only recently been vacated by Admiral G. J. Biffen. Admiral Biffen, he told Mr Cooper, was a very old and valued friend of his, which would make any villa he had recently vacated seem like home, and the notorious tidiness of naval men gave assurance that everything would have been left in apple-pie order. Nice going, was his verdict, and Mr Cooper agreed with him.

‘You intend to remain long in these parts?’ he asked.

‘Till the sands of the desert grow cold, if necessary,’ said Jerry, thinking of Penny, and taking the keys he went off to the Emsworth Arms to pack and have a bite of dinner before settling in.

His new home, when he beheld it at about twenty minutes past nine, came at first glance as a disappointment. True, Mr Cooper had spoken of it throughout as a villa and the name Sunnybrae should have prepared him, but subconsciously Jerry had been picturing something with a thatched roof and honeysuckle and old Mister Moon climbing up over the trees, and it was disconcerting to find a red brick building which might have been transferred from the suburbs of London. Market Blandings itself was old and picturesque, but, as in other country towns, the speculative builder had had his way on the outskirts.

Still, it improved when you got inside. There was a cosy living-room, and in the corner of the living-room a good firm desk. And a good firm desk was what he particularly wanted, for in the intervals of sneaking up to Blandings Castle and meeting Penny among the rose bushes he planned to start composing what he was convinced was going to be his masterpiece.

The inspiration for it had hit him like a bullet the moment he had set eyes on Mr Lancelot Cooper. The junior partner of Caine and Cooper, though a man of blameless life, had one of those dark, saturnine faces which suggest a taste for the more sinister forms of crime, and on one cheek of that dark, saturnine face was a long scar. Actually it had been caused by the bursting of a gingerbeer bottle at a Y.M.C.A. picnic, but it gave the impression of being the outcome of battles with knives in the cellars of the underworld. And on top of all that he had been wearing lavender gloves.

It was those gloves that had set Jerry tingling. His trained mind saw them as the perfect box office touch. There is nothing so spine-chilling as a dressy assassin. All murderers make us shudder a bit, but when we encounter one who, when spilling human gore, spills it in lavender gloves, our backbone turns to ice. Mr Cooper, talking pleasantly of rent and clauses and deposits, had had no notion of it, but right from the start of their interview his client was seeing him as Lavender Joe, the man for whom the police had for years – vainly – been spreading a drag-net. Jerry had begun to jot down notes within two minutes of his departure from the Caine and Cooper offices, and he was still jotting down notes as he left the living-room and went upstairs to have a look at the bedroom.

The bedroom was all right. Quite a good bedroom, the bed springy to the touch. His spirits rose. A man, he felt, could be very happy and get through a lot of work in a place like this. He could see himself toiling far into the night, with nothing to disturb the flow.

Well, practically nothing. From the point of view of a writer who wanted peace and quiet so that he could concentrate on a goose-flesher about murderers in lavender gloves, Sunnybrae was nearly ideal. Its one small defect was that it appeared to be haunted.