Bachelors Anonymous (8 page)

‘He
burned my breakfast cereal, and I threw it at him.’

‘Ah,
that would account for his peevishness. Many people dislike having breakfast
cereal thrown at them. I for one.’

‘And
who are you?’

‘My
name is Joseph Pickering. You, I take it, are Mr Llewellyn. I was sent here by
Nichols, Erridge, Trubshaw and Nichols. They said you wanted to see me. Which,’
said Joe, ‘you are now doing.’ A complete change had come over the stout householder.
No longer glaring, he reached for Joe’s hand and shook it.

‘Oh,
that’s who you are, is it? Glad to meet you, Pickering.’

‘Nice
of you to say so.’

‘I like
the look of you. You give me the impression of being just the steady
level-headed man I require.’

‘That’s
good.’

‘Couldn’t
be better. Sit down and I’ll fill you in.’ It was almost with jauntiness that
Joe accepted the invitation. The tremors which had oppressed him at the
beginning of this interview had vanished as completely as had the recent
Bosher, and he saw now that Mr Llewellyn was simply one of those lovable
characters who readily explode but whose explosions, owing to their hearts
being in the right place, are sound and fury signifying nothing. He had met
them before, and he knew the type. They huffed and they puffed, but you just
sat tight and waited till they blew over. As for throwing porridge at the
breakfast table, that was a mere mannerism, easily overlooked by anyone
broad-minded. He anticipated a happy association with his future employer.

At this
point he noticed that his future employer was looking at him with an odd
closeness.

‘Hey!’ said
Mr Llewellyn.

‘Yes?’
said Joe.

‘I’ve
seen you before.’

‘Really?’

‘Where
were you on the night of October the fifteenth?’

Joe
winced. It was a night of which he did not care to be reminded, the night on
which the comedy
Cousin Angela
had breathed its last.

‘I was
at the Regal Theatre.’

‘In
front?’

‘Talking
to the stage-doorkeeper—’

‘I
thought so. You’re the fellow who gave me the bum’s rush when I wanted to knock
the stage-door guy’s block off. You attached yourself to the seat of my pants
and slung me out.’

It was
a severe shock to Joe, and had he not been sitting he would probably have
reeled. His opalescent dreams of nestling into the position of Mr Llewellyn’s
right-hand man, no move made on the other’s part without consulting him and a
princely salary coming in every Friday, expired with a low gurgle. He was not
unintelligent, and he knew that in this world a young man has the choice
between two forms of self-expression when dealing with an elder whose patronage
he is seeking. He can so ingratiate himself with him as to become his trusted
confidant, or he can take him by the seat of the trousers and throw him out of
stage doors. He cannot do both.

To his
astonishment he saw only benevolence in his companion’s gaze. If Mr Llewellyn
was not looking at him like a fond father at a favourite son, he told himself
that he knew less about fond fathers and the way they scrutinised favourite
sons than he had supposed.

‘Pickering,’
said Mr Llewellyn, ‘you little know what a signal service you were doing me
when you acted as I have described. Your treatment of the script was just what
was needed to make it box office.’

It
seemed to Joe, though his grasp on the gist was necessarily insecure, that the
thing to do was to smirk in a modest but self-satisfied way, as if, while
gratified to think that he had been of service to Mr Llewellyn, he had only
done what any man would have done. He did so, and Mr Llewellyn continued,
‘Critics would call it a coincidence that you happened to be on the right spot
at just the right moment, not that critics matter a damn. They all said that my
Two Hearts in Mozambique
was a bust, and it grossed twenty million. How
did you come to be at the stage door that night?’

‘It was
the last night of my play. I had been saying goodbye to the company.

‘You
wrote that play?’

‘Yes.’

‘I saw
it three times. Kind of cute I thought it.’

A gush
of affection for this discerning man swept through Joe. The mild liking he had
been feeling for him almost from the outset of these exchanges became
intensified. Anybody who attributed kind of cuteness to
Cousin Angela
was
a kindred soul.

‘Oh,
did you?’ he said, beaming.

‘With a
little fixing it might make a good picture. I don’t say great, I don’t even say
colossal, I just say good. It flopped, yes, but the practised eye like mine can
see possibilities in the worst stage flop. We must talk about it later.
Meanwhile I’ll tell you why you did me such a signal service.’

‘Oh,
do,’ said Joe.

Mr
Llewellyn mused awhile.

‘The
essential thing for you to get into your nut,’ he said, having clarified his
thoughts, ‘is that I am a man whom women find it impossible to resist.’

Joe
said, tactfully, that he was not surprised to hear it. He had, he said,
surmised as much the moment they met. Something in Mr Llewellyn’s eyes he
thought it was.

‘There’s
something dominant about you. Like Napoleon.’

‘Was he
dominant?’

‘Oh,
very dominant.’

‘That’s
how it’s always been with me. The only exception was a school marm I knew when
I was a young man in Wales. She refused to marry me until I had got a thorough
grounding, as she called it, in English literature. Shakespeare, you know, and
all those.’

‘School
teachers tend to bring shop into their love lives.’

‘Yes,
the wise man avoids them. But apart from her my batting average has been pretty
darned good. Do you know how many times I have been married?’

‘I
couldn’t tell you.’

‘Five.’

‘I’d
call that good going.’

‘Remarkable
going. I have this unfortunate tendency to propose to them. There always comes
a moment when I can’t think of anything to say to keep the conversation from
conking out, so I ask them to marry me.’

‘Which
of course they are eager to do.’

‘Naturally.’

‘I see
your difficulty.’

‘The
problem is how to stop me proposing.’

‘That’s
what you might call the nub.’

‘And
that’s where you come in.’

‘I
don’t understand.’

‘You
will. When I left Hollywood this time, my lawyer came to see me off. He had
seen me through all my five divorces, and he was worried to think that at any
moment he might be called on to see me through a sixth. He told me something I
hadn’t known before, which was that he belonged to a little group calling themselves
Bachelors Anonymous and run on the same lines as Alcoholics Anonymous. If you
follow me.’

‘Yes, I
follow you. When a member of Alcoholics Anonymous feels the impulse to have a
drink, he collects the other members and they talk him out of it.’

‘Exactly.
And when a member of Bachelors Anonymous feels the impulse to propose to a
woman, he collects the other members and they talk him out of
that.’

‘Ingenious.’

‘Very
ingenious. But where I’m concerned there’s a catch.’

‘I’m
sorry to hear that. What is it?’

‘I’m in
England, and there’s no branch of Bachelors Anonymous in England. So what my
friend advised me to do was to go to a lawyers’ firm he recommended and get
them to supply me with a sensible level-headed individual who would take the
place of Bachelors Anonymous’s fellow members. Do you still follow me?’

‘Like a
bloodhound. You show signs of being about to ask someone to marry you, and this
sensible level-headed individual tells you not to be a silly ass.’

‘Precisely.
No doubt he would put it even stronger and keep on putting it till he saw that
he had convinced me and that the peril was past.’

‘He
would be able to tell that he had convinced you when he noticed that the
dominant look had faded from your eyes.’

‘So he
would. I might have known that you were the man I wanted by the promptitude
with which you acted that night at the theatre. You heard the stage-doorkeeper
say I was waiting for Miss Dalrymple, and with your swift intuition you
guessed that it was my intention to take her to supper. You knew how dangerous
that would be, so you threw me out. It was raining, and you took it for granted
that I would fall into a puddle. I did. I was soaked to the skin. Merely
pausing to send Miss Dalrymple a telegram saying I had been called away on
business, I went home to bed.’

‘You
were well out of it.’

‘I was,
and entirely owing to you. You’re a one-man Bachelors Anonymous. You knew Miss
Dalrymple, and it appalled you to think that I might be going to marry her.’

‘No one
marries Miss Dalrymple except over my dead body.’

‘A very
proper sentiment. Pickering, you’re hired, and you will take up your duties
immediately. You will move in here, of course. We will talk salary later, but I
can tell you that it will be substantial. But for you I should now be an
engaged man, and I’ve only just got rid of Grayce. Grayce,’ said Mr Llewellyn,
becoming reminiscent, ‘was probably my all-time low in the way of wives, though
many would say that it was a near thing between her and Bernadine Friganza.
When I married her, she was known as the Empress of Stormy Emotion, and believe
me the title was well-earned. In a single picture,
Passion in Paris,
she
used up three directors, two assistant directors and a script girl, and her
stormy emotion spilled over into the home.’

‘She
sounds rather like Vera Dalrymple.’

‘And
you saved me. How can I ever thank you, Pickering? What does Shakespeare say
about a friend in need?’

‘Probably
something good.’

‘I
ought to know. When I was under the spell of that school marm, I absorbed
Shakespeare till my eyes bubbled, though not knowing what the hell he was
talking about half the time. Odd way of expressing himself he had. Take that
bit where … My God! ‘said Mr Llewellyn, breaking off.

‘Now
what?’

‘I’ve
just remembered that in that telegram I asked Vera Dalrymple to lunch today at
Barribault’s grill room.’

A sharp
spasm of agony passed through Joe, causing him to feel as if some unseen animal
had bitten him in a tender spot. The words ‘Barribault’s grill room ‘could not
be spoken in his presence without taking their toll.

‘But
it’s all right,’ said Mr Llewellyn, unexpectedly brightening. ‘This makes a
neat end to the whole unfortunate episode. A woman will overlook a man standing
her up once, but not two days running. She’ll be as mad as a wet hen and will
write me off as a wash-out. What Shakespeare would call a consummation
devoutly to be wished. Very satisfactory. Most satisfactory.’

His
complacency offended Joe. He addressed himself to the task of wiping that
silly smile off his face.

‘How
long have you known Miss Dalrymple?’ he inquired.

‘A
couple of weeks. Why?’

‘Because
you seem to have got an erroneous grasp of her personality. You appear to think
she will accept your abrupt disappearance from her life as just one of those
things, perhaps dropping a silent tear but taking no further steps. Have you
considered the possibility of her calling on you and setting about you with her
umbrella? She may not be my dream girl, but she is a fine upstanding woman,
fully capable of beating the tar out of you before you could say “Hullo there,
good afternoon, lovely day, is it not.” It is a point to which I think you
should give some attention.’

If he
had expected to freeze Mr Llewellyn’s blood and make his eyes like stars start
from their spheres, as the motion picture magnate’s school marm would have put
it, he was disappointed. Mr Llewellyn remained calm, even smug.

‘Naturally,’
he said, ‘I had not overlooked that possibility. But when you come to know me
better, Pickering, you will realise that I have all the qualities of a great
general. I look ahead, I form my plans. I develop my strategy. See that door?’

Joe saw
the door.

‘If
Miss Dalrymple happens to drop in, I shall nip through it, leaving you to deal
with her. And let me say, Pickering, that I place her in your hands with the
utmost confidence that you will be able to wipe her off my visiting list. Ah,’
said Mr Llewellyn as the door bell rang, ‘this may or may not be the broad we
have in mind, but a good general never takes chances, so, for the moment,
goodbye.’

And he
disappeared through the door like a diving duck, while Joe proceeded to follow
his instructions with something of the emotions of a young lion-tamer about to
enter the lion’s cage and nervously conscious that he has only got as far as
lesson three of the correspondence course which has been teaching him
lion-taming. His relations with Miss Dalrymple had never been cordial, and
there was every reason to suppose that he would find her now in an even less
amiable mood than usual.