Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (2 page)

When I returned to the kitchen, I found that Mrs Tilman had laid a tray with all the fixings.

‘Oh dear, look at you, Mr Wilberforce. You didn’t put on your apron, did you? You’ve got polish on your shirt. Here. Let me.’

With a cloth, she removed most of a black smear from the affected area; and, with the coat re-buttoned, she seemed to think I was ready for action.

I turned to the waiting tray and attempted to raise it to a carrying position.

‘You’re all fingers and thumbs, aren’t you, dear? Nothing to be nervous of. Come on now, this way.’

So saying, the housekeeper waved me down the corridor towards the green baize door, which I was obliged to open with an undignified nudge from the rear end.

Things stayed on a fairly even keel as I crossed the main hall to the oak staircase and began my ascent. There was a square
half-landing before a shorter flight to the first floor. My destination was a corner room of dual aspect that overlooked the rose garden and the deer park. Most of the tea was still in the pot when I lowered the tray to the floor and knocked.

‘Come in,’ said a familiar voice.

I’ve seen the insides of a few country house bedrooms in my time, but I must say Lord Etringham had really landed seat-first in the butter. I found him sitting up in bed in a burgundy dressing gown with a light paisley pattern that I recognised as one of my own and reading a book whose title, if I remember right, was
The Critique of Pure Reason
by one Immanuel Kant.

‘Your tea, Lord Etringham,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Please be so good as to leave it by the bed,’ replied Jeeves – for it was he and no bona fide member of the aristocracy who reclined among the crisp linens of the four-poster.

‘I trust you slept well,’ I said, with a fair bit of topspin.

‘Exceedingly well, thank you, sir.’

But hold on a minute. I see I’ve done it again: set off like the electric hare at the local dog track while the paying customers have only the foggiest idea of what’s going on. Steady on, Wooster, they’re saying: no prize for finishing first. What’s this buttling business, and why the assumed names? Are we at some fancy-dress ball? Put us in the picture, pray, murky though it be …

Very well. Let me marshal my facts.

In the month of May, about four weeks before this hard kitchen labour, I had taken a spring break in the south of France. You know how it is. It seemed an age since the ten days in January I had spent at the Grand Hotel des Bains up in the Alps and the pace of life in the old metrop had become a trifle wearing. So I instructed Jeeves to book two rooms in a modest hotel or
pension
on the Promenade des Anglais and off we went one Friday night from Paris on the Train Bleu.

I envisaged a spartan regime of walking in the hills, a dip in the sea if warm enough, some good books and early nights with plenty of Vichy water for good measure. And so it was for a couple of days, until a misunderstanding of swing-door etiquette as I re-entered my hotel early one evening caused a fellow guest to go sprawling across the marble floor of the lobby. When I had helped her to reassemble her belongings, I found myself staring into the eyes of perhaps the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. It seemed only gallant to invite her into the Bar Croisette for something to restore the bruised tissues while I continued my apologising.

Georgiana Meadowes was the poor girl’s name. She worked for a publisher in London and had come south for a few days to labour away on the latest typescript from their best-selling performer. I had only the faintest idea of what this entailed, but held my end up with a few ‘indeed’s and ‘well I never’s.

‘Do you do a lot of this editing stuff on the Côte d’Azur?’ I asked.

She laughed – and it made the sound of a frisky brook going over the strings of a particularly well-tuned harp. ‘No, no, not
at all. I usually sit in the corner of a small office in Bedford Square working by electric light. But my boss is very understanding and he thought it would do me good – help clear my mind or something.’

We Woosters are pretty quick on the uptake, and from this short speech I deduced two things, viz.: one, that this G. Meadowes had a dilemma of a personal nature and, two, that her employer prized her services pretty highly. But one doesn’t pry – at least not on first acquaintance with a girl one has just sent an absolute purler on a marble surface, so I moved the subject on to that of dinner.

And so it was that a couple of hours later, bathed and changed, we found ourselves in a seaside restaurant ten minutes’ drive down the Croisette tête à tête over a pile of crustacea. After two nights of Vichy water, I thought it right to continue the restorative theme of the evening with a cocktail followed by a bottle of something chilled and white.

Those familiar with what I have heard Jeeves refer to as my
oeuvre
will know that over the years I have been fortunate enough to have hobnobbed with some prize specimens of the opposite sex – and to have been engaged to more of them than was probably wise. One does not bandy a woman’s name, though since the facts are in the public domain I fear the bandying has been done and it may therefore be permissible to mention Cora ‘Corky’ Pirbright and Zenobia ‘Nobby’ Hopwood as strong contenders for the podium in the race for most attractive prospect ever to pitch over the Wooster horizon. I should also mention Pauline Stoker, whose beauty so
maddened me that I proposed to her in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York. Even Madeline Bassett was no slouch as far as looks were concerned, though her admirers tended to dwindle in number pretty rapidly once she gave voice.

I can honestly say that where these paragons of their sex left off, Georgiana Meadowes began. One rather wondered whether she should be allowed out at all, such a hazard did she pose to male shipping. She was on the tall side, slim, with darkish hair in waves and eyes about as deep as the Bermuda Triangle. Her skin was pale, though frequent laughter caused variations of colour to play across it. The poor old wine waiter sloshed a good glass and a half on to the tablecloth and I noticed other fellows gathering and whispering behind their hands at the door to the kitchen. The girl herself seemed quite unaware of the havoc she was wreaking.

My task was to keep this vision entertained, and I pushed on manfully, even when it became clear that I was well out of my class – a selling-plater panting along upsides a Guineas winner. But the odd thing was that, although I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about half the time, it didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps this is what they mean by a light touch, but the long and short of it is by the time the coffee came we were the firmest of friends and had agreed to meet for luncheon the following day in the garden of the hotel, where she could take an hour off from her editing labours. It was a pretty elated Bertram who, twenty minutes later, went for a stroll on the seafront, looking up at a bucketful of stars and hearing the natter of tree frogs in the pines.

Jeeves, once I had put him in the picture, made himself scarce in the days that followed, taking off in the hired car with rod, net and line, a picnic lunch packed by the hotel and doubtless a bracing volume or two of Kant. This left the coast clear, as it were, for the young master, and I found myself reluctant to stray too far from the vicinity of our hotel. There was hardly anyone to be found in town, the French having, it seemed, very little interest in the beach or in bathing or in lawn tennis – or in anything at all very much beyond the preparation of a series of exquisite
plats
, beginning with the strong coffee and fresh croissant at nine-ish and giving the system small respite till roughly ten at night.

Once Jeeves had returned from his fishing, Georgiana and I set off in the car. On the second evening, she persuaded me to let her drive. ‘Go on, it can’t be that difficult. Please, Bertie. I’ve driven hundreds of cars before.’

To say she drove in the French fashion would be to cast a slur on that fine people. The pedestrians leapt like lemmings over the sea wall; the roadsters swerved into the dust; the goods lorries blew their claxons. But in all their evasive actions, you felt, there was a measure of respect: they recognised one of their own. The fifteen-minute journey was achieved in half that time, with only a minor scrape along the passenger door as we swept into the restaurant car park.

Despite being put together in the most streamlined fashion, Georgiana took a keen interest in matters of the table. ‘Perhaps we could just
share
a few langoustines, Bertie,’ she’d suggest after the main order had been bunged in. The days and the
evenings passed in a sort of rush, with the air blowing through the old open-top as we drove home, Wooster now firmly at the wheel, and the sound of Georgiana’s laughter playing over the drone of six cylinders in top gear.

On the night before her departure, she confided in me the nature of her problem. Meadowes
père
had been a surgeon of some repute, working in London but with a base in the Vale of Evesham, where Georgiana had passed a sunny childhood, mostly on the back of a pony or horse. A German U-boat had deprived her of both parents at the age of fourteen when it sank the RMS
Lusitania
, and though they had left her considerable means, it was held in a trust until she reached the age of thirty – a point still some years distant. Her uncle-cum-guardian, who had taken in the orphan girl and to whom she consequently felt an enormous debt, was now so strapped for cash that he was on the point of having to sell his family house, complete with substantial acreage. The one daughter had fallen for some handsome but penniless fellow, so the only solution was for Georgiana to marry a man with readily available means – and such a suitor had been found.

A proper tact had made her tell this story without actually naming any of the dramatis personae.

‘The problem is, Bertie, that I don’t love him,’ she said, spooning up the last of a strawberry meringue.

She was looking deep into my eyes as she spoke, which made it difficult for me to think of anything sensible to say.

‘Rather,’ I said.

‘But I owe my uncle so much. It would seem so ungrateful,
so … churlish not to help, when the house means everything to him. And how many married couples go on really loving one another anyway? Why not start off on a low flame?’

There was a wistful silence as I gazed into those fathomless eyes, glinting now with moisture.

I coughed and pulled myself together. ‘Do you think you could grow to love this fellow?’ I said.

‘I think so,’ she said, but with a sigh that came up from the soles of her evening pumps.

I took a deepish breath. ‘I lost my parents at a fairly young age, too, but happily the coffers were unlocked when I was twenty-one and still at Oxford.’

‘You were at Oxford?’

I thought there was an edge of surprise in her voice, but I let it pass.

‘Absolutely,’ I said.

Another pall, if that’s the word I want, seemed to descend. Then Georgiana stood up suddenly and said, ‘Come on, Bertie. Let’s not be gloomy. Let’s go to that café with the gypsy trio.’

I felt her take my hand in hers and, pausing only to bung a note on the bill, trotted off with her to the car.

Back at the hotel an hour or so later, we said goodnight, exchanged addresses and I wished her bon voyage. She kissed me lightly on the cheek and made off across the lobby, this time without being sent sprawling, and from outside I watched her disappear into the lift. A faint scent of lily of the valley hung in the air behind her.

Then I went across the road to the beach for a bedtime gasper. It was another pleasant evening, but I had the strangest feeling – something I had never known before, viz.: that someone had gone to the lighting fuse-box, found the one marked ‘Wooster, B.’ and yanked it from the wall.

Unused as I was to this sensation, I found it a relief when life in the metropolis resumed its merry course. May turned to June; Royal Ascot and Pongo Twistleton’s birthday do at the Drones were both within hailing distance, and I had little time to think of Bedford Square.

I was in bed one morning, easing myself into the day with a blend of Indian teas and turning over a tricky choice or two – Walton Heath or West Hill for the invigorating nine holes; the lemon-coloured socks or the maroon – when my eye fell on a notice in the Announcements page of
The Times
, and it was only a finely tuned instinct for self-preservation that prevented a cupful of boiling fluid making its way into the Wooster bedding.

‘Jeeves!’ I called – though I fancy ‘squawked’ may have been more the
mot juste
.

‘Sir?’ he said, materialising in the doorway.

‘Georgiana Meadowes is engaged.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘Yes, in-bally-deed, sir.’

‘A notable development, sir, though perhaps not entirely unforeseen.’

‘Come again.’

‘One feared the young lady might ultimately be unable to
resist the pressure exerted by a persistent suitor and a forceful guardian.’

I scratched the old bean with more than usual intent. ‘Sort of a pincer movement, you mean.’

‘I fear the military metaphor is an apt one, sir.’

I scratched again. ‘I’m not sure. I think it’s … What’s it called when you make someone feel a pill if they don’t do what you want them to do even if you know it’s not what they want to do?’

‘Moral blackmail, sir?’

‘That’s the chap. Moral blackmail. And this Venables. His surname seems to ring a bell. What do you know about him?’

‘He is an author of travel books, I believe, sir.’

‘I thought Baedeker had pretty well cornered that market.’

‘Mr Venables’s books are by way of a personal narrative, sir. The “By” series has enjoyed something of a
succès d’estime
.’

‘Did you say the “By” series, Jeeves?’

‘Yes, sir.
By Train to Timbuctoo
and
By Horse to the Hellespont
are among the more recent.’

‘And have you read these wretched tomes?’

‘I have not had occasion to do so, sir. Though I was able to send a copy of
By Sled to Siberia
to my aunt for her birthday.’