Pigs Have Wings (8 page)

‘Why, hullo, Gloria. I haven’t heard from you for ages. What have you been doing with yourself?’

‘Just messing around. Playing a bit of tennis. Playing a bit of golf. Ridin’ a bit, swimmin’ a bit. Oh yes, and I’ve got engaged,’ said Miss Salt as an afterthought.

Jerry was delighted to hear the news.

‘Well, well. That’s the stuff. I like to see you young folks settling down. Who’s the other half of the sketch? Orlo the Ox, I presume?’

‘Who?’

‘I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else. My lord Vosper, I mean.’

There was a momentary silence. Then Gloria Salt spoke in an odd, metallic voice.

‘No, not my lord Vosper, thank you very much. I wouldn’t marry Orlo by golly Vosper to please a dying grandmother. If I found myself standing with that pill at the altar rails and the clergyman said to me “How about it, Gloria, old sport? Wilt thou, Gloria, take this Orlo?”, I would reply “Not in a million years, laddie, not to win a substantial wager. If you were suggesting that I might like to attend his funeral,” I would proceed, developing the theme, “that would be another matter, but if, as I think, the idea at the back of your mind is that I shall become his wedded wife, let me inform you, my dear old man of God, that I would rather be dead in a ditch.” Orlo Vosper, egad! I should jolly well say not.’

Jerry was concerned. Here was tragedy. Mystery, too. Like most of her circle, he had always supposed that it was only a matter of time before these twain sent out the wedding announcements. Affinities, they had seemed to be, always being ‘seen’ together at Cannes or ‘glimpsed’ together at Ascot or ‘noticed’ together playing in the mixed doubles at some seaside tennis tournament. To hear Gloria Salt talking in this acid strain about Orlo, Lord Vosper, was as surprising as if one had heard Swan knocking Edgar or Rodgers saying nasty things about Hammerstein.

‘But, good Lord, I always thought –’

‘I dare say you did. Nevertheless, the facts are as I have stated. I have returned Orlo Vosper to store and shall shortly – wind and weather permitting – become the bride of Sir Gregory Parsloe, Bart, of Matchingham Hall, Much Matchingham, in the county of Shropshire.’

‘But what happened?’

‘It’s too long to go into over the phone. I’ll tell you when we meet, which will be tonight. I want you to give me dinner at Mario’s.’

‘Tonight, did you say?’

‘Tonight. Are you getting deaf in your old age?’

Jerry was not deaf, but he was deeply agitated, and in the circumstances the toughest baa-lamb might have been excused for being so. This night of nights was earmarked for his dinner with Penny. He had been counting the minutes to that sacred reunion, scrutinizing his boiled shirts, sorting out his white ties, seeing to it that the patent leather shoes and the old top hat had the perfect gloss which such an occasion called for, and what he was thinking now was that, if you have been torn from the only girl that matters and have got an utterly unforeseen chance of having a bite to eat with her at the Savoy, of gazing into her eyes at the Savoy and holding her little hand at the Savoy, it is a pretty state of things when other girls, however old friends they may be, come muscling in, wanting to divert you to Mario’s.

‘But listen, old thing. I can’t possibly manage tonight. Won’t tomorrow do?’

‘No, it won’t. I’m leaving for the country tomorrow. I don’t want to see you just for the pleasure of your society, stupendous though that is. I want to do you a good turn. Do you remember telling me once that you were trying to raise two thousand pounds to buy in on some private loony-bin?’

The actual project for which Jerry required the sum mentioned was not, as we have seen, the securing of a share in the management of a home for the mentally unbalanced, but this was no moment for going into long explanations. He gasped, and the room flickered before his eyes.

‘You don’t mean –?’

‘Yes, I think I can put you in the way of getting it.’

‘Good Lord! Gloria, you’re a marvel. When pain and anguish rack the brow, a ministering angel thou. Let’s have full details.’

‘Tonight. It’s much too long to tell you now. Eight sharp at Mario’s. And I’m going to dress. Because if you aren’t dressed at Mario’s, they shove you up in the balcony, a thing my proud spirit would never endure. Have you a dickey and celluloid cuffs?’

‘But, Gloria, half a second –’

‘That’s all there is, there isn’t any more. Good-bye. I must rush. Got to see a man about a tennis racquet.’

For some time after the line had gone dead, an observer, had one been present in Flat Twenty-three, Prince of Wales Mansions, Battersea Park Road, would have been able to see what a young man standing at the crossroads looked like, for during that period Gerald Anstruther Vail sat wrestling with himself, torn this way and that, a living ganglion of conflicting emotions.

The thought of cancelling his dinner with Penny, of not seeing her after all, of not gazing into her eyes, of not holding her little hand, was about as unpleasing a thought as had ever entered his mind. It is not too much to say that it gashed the very fibres of his being.

On the other hand, if Gloria had meant what she said, if by conferring with her at Mario’s, there was really a chance of learning a method of getting his hooks on that two thousand, would it not be madness to pass it up?

Aeons later he decided that it would. The money was his passport to Paradise, and he knew Gloria Salt well enough to be aware that, though a girl of kind impulses, she was touchy. Spurn her, and she stayed spurned. To refuse to meet her at Mario’s and hear her plan for conjuring two thousand pounds out of thin air, which seemed to be what she had in mind, would mean pique, resentment and dudgeon. She would drop the subject entirely and decline to open it again.

Heavily, for the load on his heart weighed him down, he rose and began to turn the pages of the telephone book. Chez Lady Garland, whoever she might be, Penny had said she would be during her brief stay in the great city, and there was a Garland, Lady with a Grosvenor Square address among the G’s. He dialled the number, and hooked what sounded like a butler.

‘Could I speak to Miss Donaldson?’

He could not. Penny, it appeared, was out having a fit. A what? Oh, a fitting? Yes, I see. Any idea when she will be back? No, sir, I am unable to say. Would you care to leave a message, sir?

‘Yes. Will you tell Miss Donaldson that Mr Gerald Vail is terribly sorry but he will be unable to give her dinner tonight owing to a very important business matter that has come up.’

‘Business matter, sir?’

‘That’s right. A most important business matter.’

‘Very good, sir.’

And that was that. But oh, the agony of it. Replacing the receiver, Jerry slumped into a chair with a distinct illusion that mocking fiends were detaching large portions of his soul with red-hot pincers.

At Wiltshire House, Grosvenor Square, residence of Dora, relict of the late Sir Everard Garland,
K.C.B.
, Lady Constance Keeble was not feeling any too good herself. Jerry had made his call at the moment when Riggs, the butler, was bringing tea for herself and Lord Vosper, who had looked in hoping for buttered toast and a chat with Penny, and it had taken her attention right off the pleasures of the table.

‘Sinister’ was the word that flashed through Lady Constance’s mind. ‘Sir,’ Riggs had said, indicating that the mysterious caller was of the male sex, and she was at a loss to comprehend how – unless the girl had told him – any mysterious male could know that Penny was in London. And if she had told him, it implied an intimacy which froze her blood.

‘Who was that, Riggs?’

‘A Mr Gerald Vail, m’lady, regretting his inability to entertain Miss Donaldson at dinner tonight.’

Training tells. ‘Ladies never betray emotion, Connie dear,’ an early governess of Lady Constance’s had often impressed upon her, and the maxim had guided her through life. Where a woman less carefully schooled might have keeled over in her chair, possibly with a startled ‘Golly!’ she merely quivered a little.

‘I see. Thank you, Riggs.’

She picked up the cake with jam in the middle which had fallen from her nerveless fingers and ate it in a sort of trance. The discovery that, on the pretext of dining with her father’s old friend Mrs Bunbury, Penelope Donaldson had been planning to sneak off and revel with a young man who, from the fact that she had never mentioned his name, must be somebody quite impossible appalled her. It revealed the child as what her brother Galahad would have called a hornswoggling highbinder, and anyone who has anything to do with highbinders knows that that is the very worst sort.

It was with relief that she remembered that by tomorrow evening Penelope Donaldson would be safely back at Blandings Castle, well away from the Vail sphere of influence.

What a haven and refuge Blandings Castle was, to be sure, felt Lady Constance. It seemed to her to have everything. Bracing air, picturesque scenery, old world peace and – best of all – not a Vail to be seen for miles.

When girls like Gloria Salt, planning dinner with an old friend, say they are going to dress, they use the word in its deepest and fullest sense, meaning that they propose to extend themselves and that such of the populace as are sharing the
salle-à-manger
with them will be well advised to wear smoked glasses. Jerry, waiting in the lobby of Mario’s restaurant some three hours later, was momentarily stunned by what came floating in through the revolving door twenty minutes or so after the time appointed for the tryst. Owing to the fact that their meetings for some years had been confined to the golf links and the luncheon table, he had forgotten how spectacular this girl could be when arrayed for the evening meal.

Gloria Salt was tall and slim and the last word in languorous elegance. Though capable of pasting a golf ball two hundred yards and creating, when serving at tennis, the illusion that it was raining thunderbolts, her dark beauty made her look like a serpent of old Nile. A nervous host, encountering her on her way to dine, might have been excused for wondering whether to offer her a dry martini or an asp.

He would have been wrong in either case. She would have declined the asp, and she now declined Jerry’s suggestion of a cocktail.

‘Never touch ’em. Can’t keep fit if you put that foul stuff into you. That’s what I told my future lord and master,’ said Gloria, as they seated themselves at their table. ‘Lay off those pink gins, Greg, I said, avoid those whisky sours, and while you’re about it cut out the starchy foods and take regular daily exercises, because a girl who marries a man who looks like you do at moment of going to press is going to have an uneasy feeling that she’s committing bigamy.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘He laughed at the wit. The satire didn’t go so well.’

‘He is stout, this Parsloe?’

‘He certainly gets his pennyworth out of a weighing machine.’

Jerry was not unnaturally anxious to condense preliminaries to a minimum and come to the real business of the evening, but a host must be civil. He cannot plunge into business over the smoked salmon. He was, moreover, extremely curious to learn the inside story of the rift within the lute at which his guest had hinted – if hinted is the word – when speaking earlier in the day of Orlo, Lord Vosper. Jerry, who had known that handsomest ornament of the Peerage from boyhood days and was very fond of him, had been saddened by her tale of sundered hearts.

‘A bit of a change from the old Wasp,’ he ventured.

‘What old wasp?’

‘Boyish nickname for Vosper. I was at school with him.’

‘You were, were you? Borstal, I presume? Did you kick him?’

‘Of course I didn’t kick him. I loved him like a brother.’

‘The chance of a lifetime thrown away,’ said Miss Salt with bitterness. ‘If Orlo Vosper in his formative years had been thoroughly kicked twice a day, Sundays included, he might not have grown up the overbearing louse he has become.’

‘Would you call him an overbearing louse?’

‘I did. To his face.’

‘When was this?’

‘On the tennis court at Eastbourne, and again when entering the club house. I’d have done it in the dressing-room, too, only he wasn’t there. They separate the sexes. Of all the overbearing lice that ever overbore, I told him, you are the undisputed champion, and I gave him back his ring.’

‘Oh, you were engaged?’

‘Don’t rub it in. We all make mistakes.’

‘I didn’t see anything about it in the papers.’

‘We were going to announce it just before Wimbledon.’

‘What did he do to incur your displeasure?’

‘I’ll tell you. We were playing in the mixed doubles, and I admit that I may have been slightly off my game, but that was no reason why, after we had dropped the first set, he should have started barging into my half of the court, taking my shots for me as if I were some elderly aunt with arthritis in both legs who had learned tennis in the previous week at a correspondence school. “Mine!” he kept yelling. “Mine, mine!”, and where was Gloria? Crouching in a corner, looking at him with wide, admiring eyes and saying “My hero!”? No, sir. I told him that if he didn’t stop his damned poaching, I would brain him, if he had a brain. That held him for a while. After that, he kept himself to himself, as it were. But every time I missed a shot, and a girl with an emotional nature couldn’t be expected not to miss a few after an ordeal like that, he raised his eyebrows in a superior kind of way and gave a sort of nasty dry snigger and kept saying “Too bad, too bad.” And when it was over and we had lost – two six, three six – he said what a pity it all was and if only I had left it to him … Well, that was when we parted brass rags. Shortly afterwards I got engaged to Greg Parsloe.’

Jerry clicked his tongue, and when his guest inquired with some asperity why he was making that idiotic noise, and did he think he was riding in the Grand National and encouraging his horse to jump Becher’s Brook, explained that her story had distressed him. As, indeed, it had. Nobody likes to hear of these rifts between old friends. He had been devoted to Lord Vosper since the days when they had thrown inked darts at one another, while for Gloria Salt he felt that gentle affection which men feel for women who could have married them and didn’t.