Uncle Dynamite (5 page)

‘Probably
the usual young pest with brilliantined hair and a giggle,’ said Sir Aylmer
morosely, refusing to look for the silver lining and try to find the sunny side
of life. ‘It’s bad enough having William around. Add Reginald, and existence
will become a hell.’

His
words reminded Lady Bostock that there was a topic on which an affectionate
aunt ought to have touched earlier.

‘William
has arrived, then?’

‘Yes.
Oh, yes, he’s arrived.’

‘I hope
the reception went off well. Such a good idea, I thought, when you told me
about it. How surprised he must have been. It’s so fortunate that he should
have come back in good time for the fete. He is always so useful, looking after
the sports. Where is he?’

‘I
don’t know. Dead, I hope ….’

‘
Aylmer
! What do you mean?’

Sir
Aylmer had not snorted since his wife’s return and now it was as if all the
snorts he might have been snorting had coalesced into one stupendous burst of
sound. It was surprising that Pongo, at the moment driving in through the main
gates, did not hear it and think one of his tyres had gone.

‘I’ll
tell you what I mean. Do you know what that young hound did? Didn’t get out at
Ashenden Oakshott. Remained skulking in the train, went on to Bishop’s Ickenham
and turned up hours later in a car belonging to Lord Ickenham, stewed to the
gills.’

One
hastens to protest that this was a complete mis-statement, attributable solely
to prejudice and bitterness of spirit. Considering that he had arrived there
reeling beneath the blow of the discovery that the girl he loved was betrothed
to another, Bill Oakshott had comported himself at Lord Ickenham’s residence
with the most exemplary abstemiousness. In a situation where many men would
have started lowering the stuff by the pailful, this splendid young fellow had
exercised an iron self-control. One fairly quick, followed by another rather
slower, and he had been through.

It is
true that on encountering his uncle his manner had been such as to give rise to
misunderstanding, but something of this kind is bound to happen when a nervous
young man meets an incandescent senior, of whom he has always stood in awe,
knowing that it is he who has brought him to the boil. In such circumstances
the face inevitably becomes suffused and the limbs start twitching, even if the
subject is a lifelong abstainer.

So much
for this monstrous charge.

Lady
Bostock made that clicking noise, like a wet finger touching hot iron, which
women use as a substitute for the masculine ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’

‘A car
belonging to Lord Ickenham?’

‘Yes.’

‘But
how did he come to be in a car belonging to Lord Ickenham?’

‘They
appear to have met on the train.

‘Oh, I
see. I was wondering, because we don’t know him.’

‘I used
to, forty years ago. We were at school together. Haven’t seen him since, thank
God. He’s a lunatic.’

‘I have
always heard that he was very eccentric.’ Lady Bostock paused, listening.
‘Hark. There’s a car driving up. It must be Reginald. You had better go down.’

‘I
won’t go down,’ said Sir Aylmer explosively. ‘Blast Reginald. Let him cool his
heels for a bit. I’m going to finish telling you about William.’

‘Yes,
dear. Do, dear. He does seem to have behaved most oddly. Had he any
explanation?’

‘Oh, he
had his story all ready, trust him for that. Said he went to sleep and woke up
to find himself at Bishop’s Ickenham. I didn’t swallow a word of it. What
happened, obviously, was that on seeing the preparations made for his reception
he lost his nerve and remained in the train, the young toad, leaving me to get
the Vicar, his wife, a Silver Band, ten Boy Scouts and fourteen members of the
Infants’ Bible Class back to their homes without any of them starting a riot.
And let me tell you it was a very near thing once or twice. Those Bible Class
infants were in ugly mood.’

‘It
must have been dreadfully disappointing for you all.’

‘That’s
not the worst of it. It has probably lost me hundreds of votes.’

‘Oh,
but, dear, why? It wasn’t your fault.’

‘What
does that matter? People don’t reason. The news of a fiasco like that flies all
over the country. One man tells another. It gets about that I have been placed
in a ridiculous position, and the voters lose confidence in me. And nothing to
be done about it. That is the bitter thought. You can’t put a fellow of
William’s age and size across your knee and get at him with the back of a
hairbrush…. COME IN.’

There
had been a knock on the door. It was followed by the entry of Jane, the
parlourmaid.

‘Your
ladyship is wanted on the telephone, m’lady,’ said Jane, who believed in
respect to the titled. ‘It’s the Vicar, m’lady.’

‘Thank
you, Jane. I will come at once.’

‘And
I,’ said Sir Aylmer with a weary snort, ‘had better go and welcome this blasted
Reginald, I suppose.’

‘You
won’t forget about Hermione?’

‘No, I
won’t forget about Hermione,’ said Sir Aylmer moodily. He did not waver in his
view that his daughter’s future husband was bound to be a deleterious slab of
damnation like all other young men nowadays, but if Hermione desired it he was
prepared to coo to him like a turtle dove; or as nearly like a turtle dove as
was within the scope of one whose vocal delivery was always rather reminiscent
of a bad-tempered toastmaster.

He made
his way to the drawing-room, and finding it empty was for a moment baffled. But
ex-Governors are quick-thinking men, trained to deal with emergencies. When an
ex-Governor, seeking a Twistleton, arrives in the drawing-room where that
Twistleton ought to be and finds no Twistleton there, he does not stand
twiddling his thumbs and wondering what to do. He inflates his lungs and
shouts.

‘REGINALD!’
thundered Sir Aylmer.

It
seemed to him, as the echoes died away, that he could hear the sound of
movements in the collection room across the hall. He went thither, and poked
his head in.

It was
as he had suspected. Something, presumably of a Twistletonian nature, was
standing there. He crossed the threshold, and these two representatives of the
older and the younger generation were enabled to see each other steadily and
see each other whole.

On both
sides the reaction to the scrutiny was unfavourable. Pongo, gazing apprehensively
at the rugged face with its top dressing of moustache, was thinking that this
Bostock, so far from being the kindly Dickens character of his dreams, was
without exception the hardest old gumboil he had ever encountered in a career
by no means free from gumboils of varying hardness: while Sir Aylmer, drinking
Pongo in from his lemon-coloured hair to his clocked socks and suede shoes, was
feeling how right he had been in anticipating that his future son-in-law would
be a pot of cyanide and a deleterious young slab of damnation. He could see at
a glance that he was both.

However,
he had come there grimly resolved to coo like a turtle dove, so he cooed.

‘Oh,
there you are. Reginald Twistleton?’

‘That’s
right. Twistleton, Reginald.’

‘H’ar
yer?’ roared Sir Aylmer like a lion which had just received an ounce of small
shot in the rear quarters while slaking its thirst at a water hole, though, if
questioned, he would have insisted that he was still cooing. ‘Glad to see yer,
Reginald. My wife will be down in a moment. What you doing in here?’

‘I was
having a look at these — er — objects.’

‘My
collection of African curios. It’s priceless.’

‘Really?
How priceless!’

‘You
won’t find many collections like that. Took me ten years to get it together.
You interested in African curios?’

‘Oh,
rather. I love ‘em.’

The
right note had been struck. A sort of writhing movement behind his moustache showed
that Sir Aylmer was smiling, and in another moment who knows what beautiful
friendship might not have begun to blossom. Unfortunately, however, before the
burgeoning process could set in, Sir Aylmer’s eye fell on the remains of the
what-not and the smile vanished from his face like breath off a razor blade, to
be replaced by a scowl of such malignity that Pongo had the illusion that his
interior organs were being scooped out with a spade or trowel.

‘Gorbl …!‘
he cried, apparently calling on some tribal god. ‘How the…. What the…. Did
you
do that?’

‘Er,
yes,’ said Pongo, standing on one leg. ‘Frightfully sorry.’

Sir
Aylmer, not without some justice, asked what was the use of being sorry, and
Pongo, following his reasoning, said Yes, he saw what he meant, supplementing
the words with a nervous giggle.

Many
people do not like nervous giggles. Sir Aylmer was one of them. On several
occasions in the old days he had had to mention this to his aides-de-camp. Not
even the thought of his daughter Hermione could restrain him from bestowing on
Pongo a second scowl, compared with which its predecessor had been full of
loving kindness. He lowered himself to the ground, and, crouched on all fours
over the remains like Marius among the ruins of
Carthage
, began to mutter beneath his breath about young fools and clumsy
idiots. Pongo could not catch his remarks in their entirety, but he heard
enough to give him the general idea.

He
gulped pallidly. A sticky moisture had begun to bedew his brow, as if he had
entered the hot room of some Turkish bath of the soul. Governesses in his
childhood and schoolmasters in his riper years had sometimes spoken slightingly
of his I.Q., but he was intelligent enough to realize that on this visit of
his, where it was so vital for him to make a smash hit with Hermione’s parents,
he had got off to a poor start.

It was
as Sir Aylmer rose and began to say that the what-not had been the very gem and
pearl of his collection and that he wouldn’t have parted with it for a hundred
pounds, no, not if the intending purchaser had gone on his bended knees to add
emphasis to the offer, that there was a whirring sound without, indicating that
some solid body was passing down the hall at a high rate of m.p.h. The next
moment, Lady Bostock entered, moving tempestuously.

From
Lady Bostock’s aspect only Sherlock Holmes, perhaps, would have been able to
deduce that she had just heard from the Vicar over the telephone that the
curate was down with measles, but even Doctor Watson could have seen that her
soul had in some way been badly jolted. So moved was she that, though a
polished hostess, she paid no attention to Pongo, who was now standing on the
other leg.

‘
Aylmer
!’

‘Well?’

‘
Aylmer
…. The Vicar….‘

‘WELL?’

‘The
Vicar says Mr Brotherhood has got measles. He wants us to go and see him at
once.’

‘Who
the devil’s Mr Brotherhood?’

‘The
curate. You know Mr Brotherhood, the curate. That nice young man with the
pimples. He has gone and got measles, and I was relying on him to judge the
babies.’

‘What
babies?’

‘The
bonny babies. At the fete.’

A word
about this fete. It was the high spot of Ashenden Oakshott’s social year, when all
that was bravest and fairest in the village assembled in the Manor grounds and
made various kinds of whoopee. Races were run, country dances danced, bonny
babies judged in order of merit in the big tent and tea and buns consumed in
almost incredible quantities. Picture a blend of the
Derby
and a garden party at
Buckingham
Palace
, add
Belshazzar’s Feast, and you have the Ashenden Oakshott Fete.

One can
readily appreciate, therefore, Lady Bostock’s concern at the disaster which had
occurred. A lady of the manor, with an important fete coming along and the
curate in bed with measles, is in the distressing position of an impresario
whose star fails him a couple of days before the big production or a general
whose crack regiment gets lumbago on the eve of battle.

‘It’s
terrible. Dreadful. I can’t think who I can get to take his place.’

Sir
Aylmer, who believed in having a thorough understanding about these things at
the earliest possible moment, said he was dashed if he was going to do it, and
Lady Bostock said No, no, dear, she wouldn’t dream of asking him.

‘But I
must find somebody.’ Lady Bostock’s eye, rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven
to earth, from earth to heaven, picked on Pongo, now back on the leg he had
started with, and she stared at him dazedly, like one seeing unpleasant things
in a dream. ‘Are you Reginald?’ she said distractedly.

The
emotional scene, following upon his chat with Sir Aylmer about what-nots, had
left Pongo in a condition of such mental turmoil that for an instant he was not
quite sure. Reginald? Was he Reginald? Was Reginald a likely thing for anyone
to be? … Why, yes, of course. The woman was perfectly correct.