Plum Pie (12 page)

"And now," he said, "that lunch of which I was speaking. The Ritz is handy."

It was perhaps tactless of me, but when we had seated ourselves and he had ordered spaciously, I started to probe the mystery of this affluence of his. It occurred to me that he might have gone to live again with his aunt, the wealthy novelist Miss Julia Ukridge, and I asked him if this was so. He said it was not.

"Then where did you get all that money?"

"Honest work, laddie, or anyway I thought it was honest when I took it on. The pay was good. Ten pounds a week and no expenses, for of course Percy attended to the household bills. Everything I got was velvet."

"Who was Percy?"

"My employer, and the job with which he entrusted me was selling antique furniture. It came about through my meeting Stout, my aunt's butler, in a pub, and the advice I would give to every young man starting life is Always go into pubs, for you never know whether there won't be someone there who can do you a bit of good. For some minutes after entering the place I had been using all my eloquence and persuasiveness to induce Flossie, the barmaid, to chalk ray refreshment up on the slate, my finances at the time being at a rather low ebb. It wasn't easy. I had to extend all my powers. But I won through at last, and I was returning to my seat with a well-filled flagon, when a bloke accosted me and with some surprise I saw it was my Aunt Julia's major domo.

"Hullo," I said. "Why aren't you buttling?"

It appeared that he no longer held office. Aunt Julia had given him the sack. This occasioned me no astonishment, for she is a confirmed sacker. You will probably recall that she has bunged me out of the home not once but many times. So I just said "Tough luck" or something to that effect, and we chatted of this and that. He asked me where I was living now, and I told him, and after a pleasant quarter of an hour we parted, he to go and see his brother, or that's where he said he was going, I to trickle round to the Foreign Office and try to touch George Tupper for a couple of quid, which I was fortunately able 10 do, he luckily happening to be in amiable mood. Sometime when you approach Tuppy for a small loan you find him all agitated because mysterious veiled women have been pinching his secret treaties, and on such occasions it is difficult bend him to your will.

With this addition to my resources I was in a position to pay my landlady the trifling sum I owed her, so when she looked in on me that night as I sat smoking my pipe and wishing I could somehow accumulate a bit of working capital I met her eye without a tremor.

But she had not come to talk finance. She said there was a gentleman downstairs who wanted to see me, and I confess this gave me pause. What with the present worldwide shortage of money—affecting us all these days—I had been compelled to let one or two bills run up, and this might well be some creditor whom it would have been embarrassing to meet.

"What sort of man is he?" I asked, and she said he was husky in the voice, which didn't get me much further, and when she added that she had told him I was in, I said she had better send him up, and a few moments later in came a bloke who might have been Stout's brother. Which was as it should have been, for that was what he turned out to be.

"Evening," he said, and I could see why Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was had described him as husky. His voice was hoarse and muffled. Laryngitis or something, I thought.

"Name of Stout," he proceeded. "I think you know my brother Horace."

"Good Lord! " I said. "Is his name Horace?"

"That's right. And mine's Percy."

"Are you a butler, too?"

"Silver ring bookie. Or was."

"You've retired?"

"For a while. Lost my voice calling the odds. And that brings me to what I've come about."

It was a strange story he had to relate. It seemed that a client of his had let his obligations pile up—a thing I've often wished bookies would let me do—till he owed this Percy a pretty considerable sum, and finally he had settled by handing over a lot of antique furniture. The stuff being no good to Percy, he was anxious to dispose of it if the price was right, and the way to make the price right, he felt, was to enlist the services of someone of persuasive eloquence—someone with the gift of the gab was the way he put it—to sell it for him. Because of course he couldn't do it himself, his bronchial cords having turned blue on him. And his brother Horace, having heard me in action, was convinced that they need seek no further. Any man, Horace said, who could persuade Flossie to give credit for two pints of mild and bitter was the man for Percy. He knew Flossie to be a girl of steel and iron, adamant to the most impassioned pleas, and he said that if he hadn't heard it with his own ears, he wouldn't have believed it possible.

So how about it, Percy asked.

Well, you know me, Corky. First and foremost the levelheaded man of business. What, I enquired, was there in it for me, and he said he would give me a commission. I said that I would prefer a salary, and when he suggested five pounds a week with board and lodging thrown in, it was all I could do to keep from jumping at it, for, as I told you, my financial position was not good. But I managed to sneer loftily, and in the end I got him up to ten.

"You say board and lodging," I said. "Where do I board and lodge?"

That, he said, was the most attractive part of the assignment. He wasn't going to take a shop in the metropolis but planned to exhibit his wares in a cottage equipped with honeysuckle, roses and all the fittings down in Kent. One followed his train of thought. Motorists would be passing to and fro in droves and the betting was that at least some of them, seeing the notice on the front gate 'Antique furniture for sale. Genuine period. Guaranteed', would stop off and buy. My Aunt Julia is an aficionada of old furniture and I knew that she had often picked up some good stuff at these wayside emporia. The thing looked to me like a snip, and he said he thought so, too. For mark you, Corky, though you and I wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch with the average antique, there are squads of half-wits who value them highly—showing, I often say, that it takes all sorts to make a world. I told myself that this was going to be good. I slapped him on the back. He slapped me on the back. I shook his hand. He shook my hand. And—what made the whole thing a real love feast—he slipped me an advance of five quid. And the following afternoon found me at Rosemary Cottage in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells, all eagerness to get my nose down to it.

My rosy expectations were fulfilled. For solid comfort there is nothing to beat a jolly bachelor establishment. Women have their merits, of course, but if you are to live the good life, you don't want them around the home. They are always telling you to wipe your boots and they don't like you dining in your shirt sleeves. At Rosemary Cottage we were hampered by none of these restrictions. Liberty Hall about sums it up.

We were a happy little community. Percy had a fund of good stories garnered from his years on the turf, while Horace, though less effervescent as a conversationalist, played the harmonica with considerable skill, a thing I didn't know butlers ever did. The other member of our group was a substantial character named Erb, who was attached to Percy in the capacity of what is called a minder. In case the term is new to you, it meant that if you owed Percy a fiver on the two o'clock at Plumpton and didn't brass up pretty quick, you got Erb on the back of your neck. He was one of those strong silent men who don't speak till they're spoken to, and not often then, but he was fortunately able to play a fair game of Bridge, so we had a four for after supper. Erb was vice-president in charge of the cooking, and I never wish to bite better pork chops than the ones he used to serve up. They melted in the mouth.

Yes, it was an idyllic life, and we lived it to the full. The only thing that cast a shadow was the fact that business might have been brisker. I sold a few of the ghastly objects, but twice I let promising prospects get away from me, and this made me uneasy. I didn't want to get Percy thinking that in entrusting the selling end of the business to me he might have picked the wrong man. With a colossal sum like ten quid a week at stake it behoved me to do some quick thinking, and it wasn't long before I spotted where the trouble lay. My patter lacked the professional note.

You know how it is when you're buying old furniture. You expect the fellow who's selling it to weigh in with a lot of abstruse stuff which doesn't mean a damn thing to you but which you know ought to be there. It's much the same as when you're buying a car. If you aren't handed plenty of applesauce about springs and cam shafts and differential gears and sprockets, you suspect a trap and tell the chap you'll think it over and let him know.

And fortunately I was in a position to correct this flaw in my technique without difficulty. Aunt Julia had shelves of books about old furniture which I could borrow and bone up on, thus acquiring the necessary double-talk, so next morning I set out for The Cedars, Wimbledon Common, full of zeal and the will to win.

I was sorry to be informed by Horace's successor on my arrival that she was in bed with a nasty cold, but he took my name up and came back to say that she could give me five minutes—not longer, because she was expecting the doctor. So I went up and found her sniffing eucalyptus and sneezing a good deal, plainly in rather poor shape. But her sufferings had not impaired her spirit, for the first thing she said to me was that she wouldn't give me a penny, and I was pained to see that that matter of the ormulu clock still rankled. What ormulu clock? Oh, just one which, needing a bit of capital at the time, I pinched from one of the spare rooms, little thinking that its absence would ever be noticed. I hastened to disabuse her of the idea that I had come in the hope of making a touch, and the strain that had threatened to mar the conversation became eased.

"Though I did come to borrow something, Aunt Julia," I said. "Do you mind if I take two or three books of yours about antique furniture? I'll return them shortly."

She sneezed sceptically.

"Or pawn them," she said. "Since when have you been interested in antique furniture?"

"I'm selling it."

"You're
selling
it?" she exclaimed like an echo in the Swiss mountains. "Do you mean you are working in a shop?"

"Well, not exactly a shop. We conduct our business at a cottage—Rosemary Cottage, to be exact—on the roadside not far from Tunbridge Wells. In this way we catch the motoring trade. The actual selling is in my hands and so far I've done pretty well, but I have not been altogether satisfied with my work. I feel I need more technical stuff, and last night it occurred to me that if I read a few of your books I'd be able to make my sales talk more convincing. So if you will allow me to take a selection from your library---"

She sneezed again, but this time more amiably. She said that if I was really doing some genuine work, she would certainly be delighted to help me, adding in rather poor taste, I thought, that it was about time I stopped messing about and wasting my life as I had been doing. I could have told her, of course, that there is not a moment of the day, except possibly when relaxing over a mild and bitter at the pub, when I am not pondering some vast scheme which will bring me wealth and power, but it didn't seem humane to argue with a woman suffering from a nasty cold.

"Tomorrow, if I am well enough," she said, "I will come and see your stock myself."

"Will you really? That'll be fine."

"Or perhaps the day after tomorrow. But it's an extraordinary coincidence that you should be selling antique furniture, because---"

"Yes, it was odd that I should have happened to run into Stout."

"Stout? You mean my butler?"

"Your late butler. He gave me to understand that you had sacked him."

She sneezed grimly.

"I certainly did. Let me tell you what happened."

"No, let me tell you what happened," I said, and I related the circumstances of my meeting with Horace, prudently changing the pub to a milk bar. "I had been having an argument with a fellow at the next table," I concluded, "and my eloquence so impressed him that he asked me if I would come down to Rosemary Cottage and sell this antique furniture. He has a brother who recently acquired a lot of it."

"What!"

She sat up in bed, her eyes, though watery, flashing with all the old fire. It was plain that she was about to say something of significance, but before she could speak the door opened and the medicine man appeared, and thinking they were best alone I pushed off and got the books and legged it for the great open spaces.

There was a telephone booth at the end of the road, and I went to it and rang up Percy. These long distance calls run into money, but I felt that he ought to have the good news without delay, no matter what the expense.

It was Horace who answered the phone, and I slipped him the tidings of great joy.

"I've just been seeing my aunt," I said.

"Oh?" he said.

"She's got a nasty cold," I said.

"Ah," he said, and I seemed to detect a note of gratification in his voice, as if he was thinking well of Heaven for having given her a sharp lesson which would teach her to be more careful in future how she went about giving good men the sack.

"But she thinks she'll be all right tomorrow," I said, "and the moment the sniffles have ceased and the temperature has returned to normal she's coming down here to inspect our stock. I don't need to tell you what this means. Next to her novels what she loves most in this world is old furniture. It is to her what catnip is to a cat. Confront her with some chair on which nobody could sit with any comfort, and provided it was made by Chippendale, if I've got the name right, the sky's the limit. She's quite likely to buy everything we've got, paying a prince's ransom for each article. I've been with her to sales and with my own eyes have observed her flinging the cash about like a drunken sailor. I know what you're thinking, of course. You feel that after what has passed between you it will be painful for you to meet her again, but you must clench your teeth and stick it like a man. We're all working for the good of the show, so ... Hullo? Hullo? Are you there?"