Sunset at Blandings (2 page)

‘Let it
wait. You don’t know who else will be at Blandings do you?’

‘No,
Florence didn’t say.’

‘I was
wondering if Gally would be there.’

‘Who?’

‘Galahad
Threepwood.’

‘I
sincerely hope not,’ said Brenda.

Like
the majority of his sisters, she thoroughly disapproved of Lord Emsworth’s
younger brother.

‘Do you
see anything of Galahad Threepwood nowadays?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Haven’t
seen him for years. We were great friends in the old days.’

The
snort which proceeded from Brenda might not have been a snort of the calibre of
those which her brother had emitted, but it was definitely a sniff. The subject
of the old days was one normally avoided by both of them— on his part from
caution, on hers because the mere thought of those days revolted her. She
preferred not to be reminded that there had been a time, before she took charge
of him, when James had moved in a most undesirable circle — a member in fact
of the Pelican Club
[5]
to which Galahad Threepwood had belonged.

‘I
believe he has a prison record,’ she said.

Sir
James hastened to correct this hasty statement.

‘No, he
was always given the option of a fine.’

‘You
are keeping the car waiting,’ said Brenda coldly.

CHAPTER
TWO

JNO ROBINSON’S taxi,
[6]
which meets all the trains at
Market Blandings, drew up with a screeching of brakes at the great door of
Blandings Castle, and a dapper little man of the type one automatically
associates in one’s mind with white bowler hats and race glasses bumping
against the left hip alighted with the agile abandon of a cat on hot bricks.
This was Lord Emsworth’s brother Galahad, and he moved briskly at all times
because he always felt so well. He was too elderly to be rejoicing in his
youth, but he gave the impression of rejoicing in something.

A niece
of his had once commented on this.

‘It
really is an extraordinary thing,’ she had said, ‘that anyone who has had such
a good time as he has can be so frightfully healthy. Everywhere you look you
see men leading model lives and pegging out in their prime, but good old Uncle
Gally, who apparently never went to bed till he was fifty, is still breezing
along as fit and rosy as ever.’

Galahad
Threepwood was the only genuinely distinguished member of the family of which
Lord Emsworth was the head. Lord Emsworth himself had once won a first prize
for pumpkins at the Shropshire Agricultural Show, and his Berkshire sow,
Empress of Blandings, had three times been awarded the silver medal for
fatness, but you could not say that he had really risen to eminence in the
public life of England. But Gally had made a name for himself. There were men
in London — bookmakers, skittle sharps, jellied eel sellers on race courses,
and men like that—who would not have known whom you were referring to if you
had mentioned Einstein, but they all knew Gally. He had been, till that
institution passed beyond the veil, a man at whom the old Pelican Club pointed
with pride, and had known more policemen by their first names than any man in
the metropolis.
[7]

After
paying and tipping Jno Robinson and enquiring after his wife, family and
rheumatism, for in addition to being fit and rosy he had a heart which was not
only of gold but in the right place, he made his way to the butler’s pantry,
eager after his absence in London to get in touch with Sebastian Beach, for
eighteen years the castle’s major domo. He and Beach had been firm friends
since, as he put it, they were kids of forty.

Beach
welcomed him with respectful fervour and produced port for which after his long
train journey he was pining, and for a while all was quiet except for the
butler’s bullfinch,
[8]
crooning meditatively to itself in its cage on the window sill. The sort of
port you got in Beach’s pantry if you were as old a friend as Gally was did not
immediately encourage conversation, but had to be sipped in reverent silence.
Eventually Gaily spoke. Having uttered an enthusiastic ‘Woof!’ in appreciation
of the elixir, he said:

‘Well,
Beach, let’s have all the news. How’s Clarence?’

‘His
lordship is in good health, Mr. Galahad.’

‘And
the Empress?’

‘Extremely
robust.’

‘Clarence
still hanging on her lightest word?’

‘His
lordship’s affection has suffered no diminution.’

‘Of
course it wouldn’t have. I keep forgetting that it’s only a week since I was
here.’
[9]

‘Was it
agreeable in London, sir?’

‘Not
very. Have you ever noticed, Beach, how your views change as the years go by?’
[10]
There was a time when you had
to employ wild horses to drag me from London, and they had to spit on their
hands and make a special effort. And now I can’t stand the place. Gone to the
dogs since they did away with hansom cabs and spats. Do you realize that not a
single leg in London has got a spat on it today?’

‘Very
sad, sir.’

‘A
tragedy. Except for an occasional binge like the annual dinner of the Loyal
Sons of Shropshire, which was what took me up there this time, I have shaken
the dust of London from my feet. I shall settle down at Blandings and grow a
long white beard. The great thing about Blandings is that it never changes.
When you come back to it after a temporary absence, you don’t find they’ve
built on a red-brick annexe to the left wing and pulled down a couple of the
battlements. A spot more of the true and blushful, Beach.’

‘Certainly,
Mr. Galahad.’

‘Of
course one sees new faces. Pig men come and go. The boy who cleans the knives
and boots is not always the same. Dogs die and maids marry. And, arising from
that, who was the girl I passed on my way through the hall? She reminded me of
someone I knew in the old days who used to dive off roofs into tanks of water.
Daredevil Esmeralda she called herself. She subsequently married a man in the
hay, corn and feed business. Who is this girl? Blue eyes and brown hair. She’s
new to me.’

‘That
would be her ladyship’s maid, Marilyn Poole, Mr. Galahad.’

‘Ladyship?
What ladyship?’

‘Lady
Diana,’
[11]
sir.’

Galahad,
who had started and stiffened at the word ‘ladyship’, drew a relieved breath.
He was very fond of his sister Diana, the only one of his many sisters with
whom he was on cordial terms. When he had left the castle, it had been a purely
male establishment, Lord Emsworth and himself its only occupants; and though he
would have preferred it to remain so, if it was only Diana who had muscled in,
he had no complaints to make. It might so easily have been Hermione or Dora or
Julia or Florence.

‘So
Lady Diana’s here, is she?’ he said.

‘Yes,
sir. She arrived shortly after Lady Florence.’

Gally’s
monocle fell from his eye.

‘You
aren’t telling me
Florence
is here?’ he quavered.

‘Yes,
Mr. Galahad. Also her stepdaughter, Miss Victoria Underwood.’

Gaily
was a resilient man. His monocle might have become detached from the parent eye
at the news that Blandings Castle housed his sister Florence, but this further
piece of information did much to restore his customary euphoria. Florence,
widow of the wealthy J. B. Underwood, the American millionaire, might be a
depressant, but his niece Vicky’s company he always enjoyed.

‘How
was she?’ he asked.

‘Her
ladyship seemed much as usual.’

‘Not
Lady Florence. Vicky.’

‘Somewhat
depressed, I thought.’

‘I must
cheer her up.’

‘Sir
James Piper is also a guest.’

This
final news item brought a further ray of sunshine to Gally’s mood. Only the
fear of choking on Beach’s superb port prevented him uttering a glad cry.

‘Old
Jimmy Piper!’ he said when he was at liberty to speak. ‘I haven’t seen him for
years. I used to know him well. Sad how time ruins old friendships. What is he
now? Prime Minister or something, isn’t he?’

‘Chancellor
of the Exchequer, sir, I understand.’

‘He’s
come on a lot since we were fellow members of the Pelican. I remember young
Jimmy Piper used constantly to be chucked out of the old Gardenia.
5
I suppose he’s had to give up all that sort of
thing now. That’s the curse of getting to the top in politics. You lose your
joie
de vivre.
I don’t suppose Jimmy has been thrown out of a restaurant for
years. But mark you, Beach, he is more to be pitied than censured. Just as he
was at his best a ghastly sister came to live with him and changed his whole
outlook. That’s why we drifted apart. I looked him up one day, all agog for one
of our customary frolics, and the sister was there and she froze me stiff. We
could have met at his club, of course, in fact he asked me to lunch there, but
when I found that his club was the Athenaeum, crawling, as you probably know,
with bishops and no hope of anyone throwing bread at anyone, I bowed out. And I’ve
not seen him since. The right thing to do, don’t you think? Making a clean cut
of it. The surgeon’s knife. But it will be delightful seeing Jimmy again. I
hope he hasn’t brought his sister with him.’

‘He
has, Mr. Galahad.’

‘What!’

‘Or,
rather, Miss Piper is expected in a few days.’

‘Oh, my
God! Does Clarence know?’

‘His
lordship has been informed.’

‘How
did he take it?’

‘He
appeared somewhat disturbed.’

‘I don’t
wonder. Blandings Castle seems to be filling up like the Black Hole of
Calcutta, and a single guest gives him a sinking feeling. Where is he?’

‘At the
Empress’s sty, I presume, Mr. Galahad.’

‘I must
go to him immediately and do my best to console him. A pretty figure I should
cut in the eyes of posterity if I were to sit here swilling port while my only
brother was up to his collar stud in the Slough of Despond.’

And so
saying Gally leaped to the door.

He had
scarcely reached the outer air when a small but solid body flung itself into
his arms with a squeal of welcome. Victoria (Vicky) Underwood was always glad
to see her Uncle Galahad, and never more so than at a time when, as Beach had
said, she was somewhat depressed.

CHAPTER
THREE

UNCLES occasionally find
their nephews trying and are inclined to compare them to their disadvantage
with the young men they knew when they were young men, but it is a very rare
uncle who is unable to fraternize with his nieces. And of all his many nieces
Gally was fondest of Vicky. She was pretty, a girl whom it was a pleasure to
take to race meetings and garden parties, and she had that animation which in
his younger days he had found so attractive in music hall artistes and members
of the personnel of the chorus.
[12]

This
animation was missing now. After that tempestuous greeting she had relapsed
into a melancholy which would have entitled her to step straight into one of
those sombre plays they put on for one performance on Sunday afternoons, and
no questions asked. Gally gazed at her, concerned. Beach, that shrewd
diagnostician, had been right, he felt, though his ‘somewhat depressed’ had
been an understatement. Here was plainly a niece whose soul had been passed
through the wringer, a niece who had drained the bitter cup and, what is more,
had found a dead mouse at the bottom of it. Her demeanour reminded him of a
girl he had once taken to Henley Regatta — at the moment when she had
discovered that a beetle had fallen down the back of her summer sports wear.

‘What
on earth’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t
be an ass,’ said Gally irritably. ‘You’re obviously as down among the wines and
spirits as Mariana at the moated grange.’

‘I’m
all right, except that I wish I was dead.’

‘Were
dead, surely,’ said Gally, who was a purist. ‘What do you want to be dead for?
Great Scott!’ he exclaimed, suddenly enlightened. ‘Have you been jugged? Are
you doing a stretch? Is that why you’re at Blandings?’

The
question did not display such amazing intuition as anyone unfamiliar with
Blandings Castle might have supposed. All old English families have their
traditions, and the one most rigorously observed in the family to which Vicky
belonged ruled that if a young female member of it fell in love with the wrong
man she was instantly shipped off to Blandings, there to remain until she came,
as the expression was, to her senses.