Service with a Smile (17 page)

Lord
Tilbury frowned. There were only a few survivors of the old days who addressed
him thus. Even in the distant past he had found the name distasteful, and now
that he had become a man of distinction, it jarred upon him even more
gratingly. In addition to frowning, he also swelled a good deal. He was a
short, stout man who swelled readily when annoyed.

‘Lord
Tilbury speaking,’ he said curtly, emphasizing the first two words. ‘Well?’

‘What?’
roared the Duke. He was a little deaf in the right ear.

‘Well?’

‘Speak
up, Stinker. Don’t mumble.’

Lord
Tilbury raised his voice to an almost Duke-like pitch.

‘I said
“Well?”.’

‘Well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Damn
silly thing to say,’ said the Duke and Lord Tilbury’s frown deepened.

‘What
is it, Dunstable?’

‘Eh?’

‘What
is
it?’

‘What
is what?’

‘What
do you want?’ Lord Tilbury rasped, the band gripping the receiver about to
crash it back on its cradle.’

‘It’s
not what I want,’ bellowed the Duke. ‘It’s what you want. I’ve got that pig.’

‘What!’

‘What?’

Lord
Tilbury did not reply. He had stiffened in his chair and presented the
appearance of somebody in a fairy story who had had a spell cast upon him by
the local wizard. His silence offended the Duke, never a patient man.

‘Are
you there, Stinker?’ he roared, and Lord Tilbury thought for a moment that his
ear drum had gone.

‘Yes,
yes, yes,’ he said, removing the receiver for a moment in order to massage his
ear.

‘Then
why the devil don’t you utter?’

‘I was
overcome.’

‘What?’

‘I
could hardly believe it. You have really persuaded Emsworth to sell you
Empress of Blandings?’

‘We
came to an arrangement. Is that offer of yours still open?’

‘Of
course, of course.’

‘Two
thousand, cash down?’

‘Certainly.’

‘What?’

‘I said
certainly.’

‘Then
you’d better come here and collect the animal.’

‘I will.
I’ll —’

Lord
Tilbury paused. He was thinking of all the correspondence he should have been
dictating to Millicent Rigby. Could he neglect this? Then he saw the solution.
He could take Millicent Rigby with him. He pressed a bell. His secretary
entered.

‘Where
do you live, Miss Rigby?’

‘Shepherd
Market, Lord Tilbury.’

‘Take a
taxi, go and pack some things for the night, and come back here. We’re driving
down to Shropshire.’ He spoke into the telephone. ‘Are you there, Dunstable?’

Something
not unlike an explosion in an ammunition dump made itself heard at the other
end of the line.

‘Are
you
there, blast your gizzard? What’s the matter? Can’t get a word out of you.’

‘I was
speaking to my secretary.’

‘Well,
don’t. Do you realize what these trunk calls cost?’

‘I’m
sorry. I am motoring down immediately. Where can I see you? I don’t want to
come to the castle.’

‘Put up
at the Emsworth Arms in Market Blandings. I’ll meet you there.’

‘I’ll
be waiting for you.’

‘What?’

‘I said
I’ll be waiting for you.’

‘What?’

Lord Tilbury
gritted his teeth. He was feeling hot and exhausted. That was the effect the
other’s telephone technique often had on people.

2

Lavender Briggs had caught
the 12.30 train at Paddington. It set her down on the platform of Market Blandings
station shortly after four.

The day
was warm and the journey had been stuffy and somewhat exhausting, but her mood
was one of quiet contentment. She had enjoyed every minute of her visit to the
metropolis. She had deposited the Duke’s cheque. She had dined with a group of
earnest friends at the Crushed Pansy, the restaurant with a soul, and at the
conclusion of the meal they had all gone on to the opening performance at the
Flaming Youth Group Centre of one of those avant-garde plays which bring the
scent of boiling cabbage across the footlights and in which the little man in
the bowler hat turns out to be God. And she was confident that when she saw him
the Reverend Cuthbert Bailey would have made up his mind, rather than be
unmasked, to lend his services to the purloining of Lord Emsworth’s pig. It
seemed to her that a cup of tea was indicated by way of celebration, and she
made her way to the Emsworth Arms. There were other hostelries in Market Blandings
— one does not forget the Goose and Gander, the Jolly Cricketers, the Wheatsheaf,
the Waggoner’s Rest, the Beetle and Wedge and the Stitch in Time — but the Emsworth
Arms was the only one where a lady could get a refined cup of tea with buttered
toast and fancy cakes. Those other establishments catered more to the George
Cyril Wellbeloved type of client and were content to say it with beer.

At the Emsworth
Arms, moreover, you could have your refreshment served to you in the large
garden which was one of the features of Market Blandings. Dotted about with
rustic tables, it ran all the way down to the river, and there were few of the
rustic tables that did not enjoy the shade of a spreading tree or a clump of
bushes. The one Lavender Briggs selected was screened from view by a green mass
of foliage, and she had chosen it because she wanted complete privacy in which
to meditate on the very satisfactory state of her affairs. Elsewhere in the
garden one’s thoughts were apt to be interrupted by family groups presided
over by flushed mothers telling Wilfred to stop teasing Katie or Percival to
leave off making faces at Jane.

She had
finished the cakes and the buttered toast and was sipping her third cup of tea,
when from the other side of the bushes, where she had noticed a rustic table
similar to her own, a voice spoke. All it said was ‘Two beers’, but at the
sound of it she stiffened in her chair, some sixth sense telling her that if
she listened, she might hear something of interest. For it was the Duke’s voice
that had shattered the afternoon stillness, and there was only one thing that
could have brought the Duke to Market Blandings, the desire for a conference
with the mystery man who was prepared to go as high as two thousand pounds to
acquire Lord Emsworth’s peerless pig.

A
moment later a second voice spoke, and if Lavender Briggs had stiffened before,
she stiffened doubly now. The words it had said were negligible, something
about the warmth of the day, but they were enough to enable her to recognize
the speaker as her former employer, Lord Tilbury of the Mammoth Publishing
Company. She had taken too much dictation from those august lips in the past to
allow of any misconception.

Rigid
in her chair, she set herself to listen with, in the Duke’s powerful phrase,
her ears sticking up.

3

Conversation on the other
side of the bushes was for awhile desultory. With a waiter expected back at any
moment with beer, two men who have serious matters to discuss do not immediately
plumb the deeps, but confine themselves to small talk. Lord Tilbury said once
more that the day was warm, and the Duke agreed. The Duke said he supposed it
had been even warmer in London, and Lord Tilbury said Yes, much warmer. The
Duke said it wasn’t the heat he minded so much as the humidity, and Lord
Tilbury confessed that it was the humidity that troubled him also. Then the
beer arrived, and the Duke flung himself on it with a grunt. He must have
abandoned rather noticeably the gentlemanly restraint which one likes to see in
Dukes when drinking beer, for Lord Tilbury said:

‘You
seem thirsty. Did you walk from the castle?’

‘No,
got a lift. Bit of luck. It’s a warm day.’

‘Yes,
very warm.’

‘Humid,
too.’

‘Very
humid.’

‘It’s
the humidity I don’t like.’

‘I don’t
like the humidity either.’

Silence
followed these intellectual exchanges. It was broken by a loud chuckle from the
Duke.

‘Eh?’ said
Lord Tilbury.

‘What?’
said the Duke. ‘Speak up, Stinker.’

‘I was
merely wondering what it was that was amusing you,’ said Lord Tilbury frostily.
‘And I wish you wouldn’t call me Stinker. Somebody might hear.’

‘Let them.’

‘What
the devil are you giggling about?’ demanded Lord Tilbury, as a second chuckle
followed the first. He had never been fond of the Duke of Dunstable, and he
felt that having to put up with his society, after a fatiguing journey from
London, was a heavy price to pay even for Empress of Blandings.

The
Duke was not a man who made a practice of disclosing his private affairs to
every dashed Tom, Dick and Harry, and at another time and under different
conditions would have been blowed if he was going to let himself be pumped by
Stinker Pyke, or Lord Tilbury, as he now called himself. He mistrusted these
newspaper fellers. You told them something in the strictest confidence, and
the next thing you knew it was spread all over the gossip page with a six-inch
headline at the top and probably a photograph of you, looking like someone the
police were anxious to question in connexion with, the Dover Street
smash-and-grab raid.

But he
was now fairly full of the Emsworth Arms beer, and, as everybody who has tried
it knows, there is something about the home-brewed beer purveyed by G. Ovens,
landlord of the Emsworth Arms, that has a mellowing effect. What G. Ovens put
into it is a secret between him and his Maker, but it acts like magic on the
most reticent. With a pint of this elixir sloshing about inside him, it seemed
to the Duke that it would be churlish not to share his happiness with a
sympathetic crony.

‘Just
put one over on a blasted female,’ he said.

‘Lady
Constance?’ said Lord Tilbury, jumping to what suggested itself to him as the
obvious conclusion. His visit to Blandings Castle had been a brief one, but it
had enabled him to become well acquainted with his hostess.

‘No,
not Connie. Connie’s all right. Potty, but a good enough soul. This was Emsworth’s
secretary, a frightful woman of the ghastly name of Briggs. Lavender Briggs,’
said the Duke, as if that made it worse.

Something
stirred at the back of Lord Tilbury’s mind.

‘Lavender
Briggs? I had a secretary named Briggs, and I seem to have a recollection of
hearing someone address her as Lavender.’

‘Beastly
name.’.

‘And
quite unsuited to a woman of her appearance, if it’s the same woman. Is she
(all and ungainly?’

‘Very.’

‘With
harlequin glasses?’

‘If
that’s what you call them.’

‘Large
feet?’

‘Enormous.’

‘Hair
like seaweed?’

‘Just
like seaweed. And talks rot all the time about dusty answers.’

‘I
never heard her do that, but from your description it must be the same woman. I
sacked her.’

‘You
couldn’t have done better.’

‘She
had a way of looking at me as if I were some kind of worm, and I frequently
caught her sniffing. Well, I wasn’t going to put up with that sort of thing.
She was an excellent secre
tary
 as far as her work was concerned, but I
told her she had to go. So she is with Emsworth now? He has my sympathy. But you
were saying that you had — ah — put one over on her. How was that?’

‘It’s a
long story. She tried to get five hundred pounds out of me.’

Lord
Tilbury seemed for a moment bewildered. Then’ he understood. He was a
quick-witted man.

‘Breach
of promise, eh? Odd that you should have been attracted by a hideous woman like
Lavender Briggs. Her glasses alone, one would have thought … However, there
is no accounting for these sudden infatuations, though one would have expected
a man of your age to have had more sense. No fool like an old fool, as they
say. Well, if she could prove this breach of promise — had letters and so forth
— I think you got off cheap, and it should be a valuable lesson to you.’

There
is just this one thing more to be said about G. Ovens’ home-brewed beer. If you
want to preserve that mellow fondness for all mankind which it imparts, you
have to go on drinking it. The Duke, having had only a single pint, was unable
to retain the feeling that Lord Tilbury was a staunch friend from whom he could
have no secrets. He was conscious of a vivid dislike for him, and couldn’t
imagine why a gracious sovereign had bestowed a barony on a man like that.
Lavender Briggs, leaning forward, alert not to miss a word, nearly fell out of
her chair, so loud was the snort that rang through the garden. When the Duke of
Dunstable snorted, he held back nothing but gave it all he had.