Pigs Have Wings (4 page)

Gally gazed at her in amazement. Her childish optimism gave him a pang.

‘With Connie keeping her fishy eye on you? Not a hope.’

‘Oh yes, because there’s an old friend of Father’s in London, and Father would never forgive me if I didn’t take this opportunity of slapping her on the back and saying hello. So I shall dine with her.’

‘And she will bring your young man along?’

‘Well, between us girls, Gally, she doesn’t really exist. I’m like the poet in Shakespeare, I’m giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Did you ever see
The Importance Of Being Earnest
?’

‘Don’t wander from the point.’

‘I’m not wandering from the point. Do you remember Bunbury, the friend the hero invented? This is his mother, Mrs Bunbury. You can always arrange these things with a little tact. Well, I must be going in. I’ve got to write to Jerry.’

‘But if you’re seeing him tomorrow –’

‘Really, Gally, for an experienced man, you seem to know very little about these things. I shall read him the letter over the dinner table, and he will read me the one he’s probably writing now. I sent him a telegram this morning, saying I was coming up and staying the night with Lady Garland – your sister Dora, in case you’ve forgotten – and telling him to meet me at the Savoy at eight.’

Penny hurried away, walking on the light feet of love, and Gally, whose youth had been passed in a world where girls, except when working behind bars or doing
entrechats
at the Alhambra, had been less resourceful, gave himself up to meditation on the spirit and enterprise of their present-day successors. There was no question that the current younger generation knew how to handle those little problems with which the growing girl is so often confronted. This was particularly so, it appeared, if their formative years had been passed in the United States of Northern America.

Having reached the conclusion that the advice of an elderly greybeard counselling prudence and look-before-you-leap-ing would be something of a drug on the market where the younger daughter of Mr Donaldson of Donaldson’s Dog Joy was concerned, he was resuming his study of the Empress, when a bleating noise in his rear caused him to turn. Lord Emsworth was approaching, on his face that dying duck look which was so often there in times of stress. Something, it was plain to him, had occurred to upset poor old Clarence.

His intuition had not deceived him. Poor old Clarence was patently all of a doodah. Eyeing him as he tottered up, Gally was reminded of his old friend Fruity Biffen on the occasion when that ill-starred sportsman had gone into Tattersall’s ring at Hurst Park wearing a long Assyrian beard in order to avoid identification by the half-dozen bookmakers there to whom he owed money, and then the beard had fallen off. The same visible emotion.

‘Strike me pink, Clarence,’ he exclaimed, ‘you look like something out of a Russian novel. What’s on your mind? And what have you done with Parsloe? Did you murder him, and are you worried because you don’t know how to get rid of the body?’

Lord Emsworth found speech.

‘I left him in the morning-room, putting on his shoes. Galahad, an appalling thing has happened. I hardly know how to tell you. Let me begin,’ said Lord Emsworth, groping his way to the rail of the sty and drooping over it like a wet sock, ‘by saying that Sir Gregory Parsloe is nothing short of a rogue and a swindler.’

‘We all knew that. Get on.’

‘Don’t bustle me.’

‘Well, I want to hear what all the agitation’s about. When last seen, you were on your way to the house to confront this bulging Baronet. Right. You reached the house, found him in the morning-room with his shoes off, gave him a cold look and said stiffly: “To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?”, to which Parsloe, twiddling his toes, replied … what? To what
were
you indebted for the honour of his visit?’

Lord Emsworth became a little calmer. His eyes were resting on the Empress, and he seemed to draw strength from her massive stolidity.

‘Do you ever have presentiments, Galahad?’

‘Don’t ramble, Clarence.’

‘I am not rambling,’ said Lord Emsworth peevishly. ‘I am telling you that I had one the moment I entered the morning-room and saw Parsloe sitting there. Something seemed to whisper to me that the man was preparing an unpleasant surprise for me. There was a nasty smirk on his face, and I didn’t like the sinister way he said “Good afternoon, Emsworth.” And his next words told me that my presentiment had been right. From an inside pocket he produced a photograph and said: “Cast an eye on this, old cock.”’

‘A photograph? What of?’

Lord Emsworth was obliged to fortify himself with another look at the Empress, who was now at about her fifty-fourth thousandth calorie.

‘Galahad,’ he said, sinking his voice almost to a whisper, ‘it was the photograph of an enormous pig! He thrust it under my nose with an evil leer and said: “Emsworth, old cocky-wax, meet the winner of this year’s Fat Pig medal at the Shropshire Agricultural Show.” His very words.’

Gally found himself unable to follow this. It seemed to him that he was in the presence of an elder brother who spoke in riddles.

‘You mean it was a photograph of Pride of Matchingham?’

‘No, no, no. God bless my soul, no. This animal would make two of Pride of Matchingham. Don’t you understand? This is a new pig. He imported it a day or two ago from a farm in Kent. Queen of Matchingham, he calls it. Galahad,’ said Lord Emsworth, his voice vibrating with emotion, ‘with this Queen of Matchingham in the field, Empress of Blandings will have to strain every nerve to repeat her triumphs of the last two years.’

‘You don’t mean it’s fatter than the Empress?’ said Gally, cocking an eye at the stable’s nominee and marvelling that such a thing could be possible.

Lord Emsworth looked shocked.

‘I would not say that. No, no, I certainly would not say that. But the contest will now become a desperately close one. It may be a matter of ounces.’

Gally whistled. He was fully alive at last to the gravity of the situation. Apart from his fondness for old Clarence and a natural brotherly distaste for seeing him in the depths, the thing touched him financially. As he had told Penny, he was not a rich man, but, like Beach, he had his mite on the Empress and it appeared now that there was a grave peril that his modest investment would go down the drain.

‘So that’s why Binstead was going about the place with his five to one! He knew something. But is this hornswoggling high-binder allowed to import pigs? I thought the competition was purely for native sons?’

‘There has always been an unwritten law to that effect, a gentleman’s agreement, but Parsloe informs me that there exists no actual rule. Naturally the possibility of such a thing happening never occurred to those who drew up the conditions governing these contests. It’s abominable!’

‘Monstrous,’ agreed Gally with all the warmth of a man who, having slapped down his cash on what he supposed to be a sure thing, finds the sure thing in danger of coming unstuck.

‘And the ghastliest part of it all is that, faced with this hideous menace, I am forced to rely on the services of that Simmons girl to prepare the Empress for the struggle.’

A stern look came into Gally’s face. A jellied eel seller who had seen it would have picked up his jellied eels and sought refuge in flight, like one who fears to be struck by lightning.

‘Simmons must go!’ he said.

Lord Emsworth blinked.

‘But Connie –’

‘Connie be blowed! We can’t afford to humour Connie’s whims at a time like this. Leave Connie to me. I’ll see that she ceases to bung spanners into the machinery by loading you up with incompetent pig girls when there are a thousand irreproachable pig men who will spring to the task of fattening the Empress for the big day. And while I’m about it, I’ll have a word with young Parsloe and warn him that anything in the nature of funny business on his part will not be tolerated for an instant. For don’t overlook that aspect of the matter, Clarence. Parsloe, with this new pig under his belt, is certain to get ideas into his head. Unless sternly notified that his every move will be met with ruthless reprisals, he will leave no stone unturned and no avenue unexplored to nobble the Empress.’

‘Good heavens, Galahad!’

‘But don’t worry. I have the situation well in hand. My first task is to put the fear of God into Connie. Where is she? At this time of day, poisoning her system with tea, I suppose. Right. I’ll go and talk to her like a Dutch uncle.’

Lord Emsworth drew a deep breath.

‘You’re such a comfort, Galahad.’

‘I try to be, Clarence, I try to be,’ said Gally.

He screwed the monocle more firmly into his eye, and set off on his mission, resolution on his every feature. Lord Emsworth watched him out of sight with a thrill of admiration. How a man about to talk to Connie like a Dutch uncle could be looking like that, he was unable to understand.

But Galahad was Galahad.

UP AT THE
castle, Sir Gregory Parsloe, having put on his shoes, was standing at the window of the morning-room, looking out.

If you like your baronets slender and willowy, you would not have cared much for Sir Gregory Parsloe. He was a large, stout man in the middle fifties who resembled in appearance one of those florid bucks of the old Regency days. Like Beach, he had long lost that streamlined look, and the fact that, just as you could have made two pretty good butlers out of Beach, so could you have made two quite adequate baronets out of Sir Gregory was due to the change in his financial position since the days when, as Gally had put it, he had knocked about London without a bean in his pocket.

A man with a fondness for the fleshpots and a weakness for wines and spirits who, after many lean years, suddenly inherits a great deal of money and an extensive cellar finds himself faced with temptations which it is hard to resist. Arrived in the land of milk and honey, his disposition is to square his elbows and let himself go till his eyes bubble. He remembers the days when he often did not know where his next chump chop was coming from, and settles down to make up leeway. This is what had happened to Sir Gregory Parsloe. Only an iron will could have saved him from accumulating excess weight in large quantities, and he had not an iron will. Day by day in every way he had got fatter and fatter.

Outside the morning-room window the terrace shimmered in the afternoon sun, but at the farther end of it a spreading tree cast its shade, and in this cool retreat a tea-table had been set up. Presiding over it sat Lady Constance Keeble, reading a letter, and an imperative urge to join her came over Sir Gregory. After his gruelling three-mile hike, a cup of tea was what he most needed.

As he made for the terrace, limping a little, for he had a blister on his right foot, it might have been supposed that his thoughts would have been on the impending refreshment, but they were not. A week or two ago he had become engaged to be married, and he was thinking of Gloria Salt, his betrothed. And if anyone is feeling that this was rather pretty and touching of him, we must reluctantly add that he was thinking of her bitterly and coming very near to regretting that mad moment when, swept off his feet by her radiant beauty, he had said to her ‘I say, old girl – er – how about it, eh, what?’ It would be too much perhaps to say that the scales had fallen from his eyes as regarded Gloria Salt, but unquestionably he had had revealed to him in the past few days certain aspects of her character and outlook which had materially diminished her charm.

Sighting him on the horizon, Lady Constance put down the letter she was reading, one of a number which had come for her by the afternoon post, and greeted him with a bright smile. Unlike her brothers Clarence and Galahad, she was fond of this man.

‘Why, Sir Gregory,’ she said, beaming hospitably, ‘how nice to see you. I didn’t hear your car drive up.’

Sir Gregory explained that he had walked from Matchingham Hall, and Lady Constance twittered with amazement at the feat.

‘Good gracious. Aren’t you exhausted?’

‘Shan’t be sorry to rest for a bit. Got a blister on my right foot.’

‘Oh, dear. When you get home, you must prick it.’

‘Yes.’

‘With a needle.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not a pin. Well, sit down and I’ll give you a cup of tea. Won’t you have a muffin?’

Sir Gregory took the muffin, gave it a long, strange, sad look, sighed and put it down on his plate. Lady Constance picked up her letter.

‘From Gloria,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ said Sir Gregory in a rather guarded manner, like one who has not quite made up his mind about Gloria.

‘She says she will be motoring here the day after tomorrow, and it’s all right about the secretary.’

‘Eh?’

‘For Clarence. You remember you said you would ring her up and ask her to get a secretary for Clarence before she left London.’

‘Oh, yes. And she’s getting one? That’s good.’

It was a piece of news which would have lowered Lord Emsworth’s already low spirits, had he been present to hear it. Connie was always encouraging ghastly spectacled young men with knobbly foreheads and a knowledge of shorthand to infest the castle and make life a burden to him, but there had been such a long interval since the departure of the latest of these that he was hoping the disease had run its course.

‘She says she knows just the man.’

This again would have shaken Lord Emsworth to his foundations. The last thing he wanted on the premises was anyone who could be described as just the man, with all that phrase implied of fussing him and bothering him, and wanting him to sign things and do things.

‘Clarence is so helpless without someone to look after his affairs. He gets vaguer every day. It was sweet of Gloria to bother. What a delightful girl she is.’

‘Ah,’ said Sir Gregory, again in that odd, guarded manner.

‘I do admire those athletic girls. So wholesome. Has she been winning any tennis tournaments lately?’

Sir Gregory did not reply. His eyes were on the muffin, as it swam in butter before him, and once more he heaved that heavy sigh. Following his gaze, Lady Constance uttered a concerned cry. The hostess in her had been piqued.