Uncle Dynamite (23 page)

‘Gar!’
he exclaimed, once more calling on one of those tribal gods. ‘I thought you
told me you were a teetotaller.’

‘Eh?’

‘Teetotaller.’

‘Oh,
yes, that’s right.’

‘How
the devil can you be a teetotaller, if you sit swigging whisky all the time?’

‘Medicinal.’

‘What?’

‘I take
a drop occasionally for my health,’ said Pongo. ‘Doctor’s orders.’

There
are moments in life when, after offering frank and manly explanations of our
actions, we are compelled to pause and wonder if they have got by. This was one
of them. And it was while Pongo was anxiously scrutinizing his host’s face and
trying, without much success, to read in its rugged features an expression of
childlike trust that Lady Bostock entered the room.

There
are critics to whom it will seem one of those strained coincidences which are
so inartistic that on this troubled night no fewer than six of the residents of
Ashenden Manor should have been seized independently of each other with the
idea of going to the drawing-room in order to establish contact with the
decanter placed there earlier in the evening by Jane, the parlourmaid, while
others will see in the thing that inevitability which was such a feature of the
best Greek tragedy. Aeschylus once said to Euripides ‘You can’t beat
inevitability,’ and Euripides said he had often thought so, too.

Be that
as it may, it was the decanter which had brought Lady Bostock to the spot.
Finding a difficulty in getting to sleep after the recent strain upon her
nerves, she had thought that a weak whisky and water might prove the specific
which she needed.

She,
too, was surprised on discovering that she had boon companions.

‘
Aylmer
!’ she said. ‘You here? And
Reginald?’ The glass in Pongo’s hand attracted her attention, producing
reactions identical with those of her husband. ‘I thought you were a
teetotaller, Reginald.’

Sir
Aylmer snorted. A most unpleasant, cynical snort, a sort of nasal ‘Oh, yeah.’

‘He
takes a drop occasionally for his health.’

‘Oh,
yes?’

‘Yes,’
said Sir Aylmer. ‘Medicinal. Doctor’s orders.’

His
intonation was so extremely disagreeable, suggesting as it did contempt,
disgust and that revolted loathing which temperate men feel when confronted
with the world’s drink-sodden wrecks, that Pongo, though his sitting high jump
had caused him to spill practically all the contents of his glass and he would
much have liked to refill it, felt that this was not the moment. Stronger than
his desire for one for the road was the passionate wish to be somewhere where
Sir Aylmer and Lady Bostock were not.

‘Well —
er — good night,’ he mumbled.

‘You’re
leaving us?’ said Sir Aylmer grimly.

‘Er —
yes. Good night.’

‘Good
night,’ said Sir Aylmer.

‘Good
night,’ said Lady Bostock.

There
was an expression of concern on her face as the door closed. She looked like a
horse that is worried about the quality of its oats.

‘Oh,
dear,’ she said. ‘I do hope Reginald is not a drinker.’ A thought occurred to
her, and she brightened. ‘But, of course, I was forgetting. He isn’t Reginald,
is he? He’s just somebody pretending to be Reginald.’

Sir
Aylmer, though reluctant to present himself in the light of one who had been in
error, felt obliged to put her abreast of his latest findings.

‘Yes,
he’s Reginald. I’ve been into that matter, and it now seems pretty well established
that he’s Reginald all right. Apparently, at those Dog Races where Potter arrested
him, he gave a false name and address.’

‘That
does not sound very nice.

‘It was
not very nice. It wasn’t nice at all. It was disgraceful and it throws a
blinding light on the true character of Reginald Twistleton. Shows you what
sort of a fellow he is. And as to him being a drinker, of course he’s a
drinker. You can tell it by those shifty eyes and that weak giggle. I knew
there was something wrong with the young toad the first time I saw him.
Dipsomaniac is written all over him. No doubt he had been absorbing the stuff
like a sponge whenever our backs were turned. I don’t suppose he has drawn a
sober breath since he came here. God help Hermione, married to a chap like
that. He’ll be seeing pink snakes on the honeymoon. Orange spiders,’ said Sir
Aylmer, allowing his imagination free rein. ‘Gamboge elephants. Purple
penguins.’

It is
never difficult to touch a mother’s heart with this sort of thing. Lady Bostock
uttered a stricken neigh.

‘Hermione
must be warned!’

‘Exactly
what I was about to suggest myself. You’d better write to her.’

‘I’ll
go and see her.’

‘Very
well, go and see her.’

‘Tomorrow
morning!’

‘The
sooner, the better. Well, if you’re going to
London
in the morning, you’d better go to bed and get some sleep. Can’t
imagine why you aren’t there now.’

‘I came
down to get a weak whisky. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘I came
to get a strong whisky. I couldn’t sleep, either. How the devil can anyone be
expected to sleep in a house where fools are incessantly breaking in on you,
saying they’re somnambulists, and policemen ring door-bells all the time? Did
you get those women to bed?’

‘Yes,
dear. They kept giving their notices all the way upstairs.’

‘Curse
them. Say when, Emily.’

‘When.
0 dear, 0 dear, 0 dear.’

‘What’s
the matter now?’

‘I was
only thinking of Reginald,’ said Lady Bostock. ‘I wonder if the gold cure would
do any good.’

Unaware
of the exact nature of what was being said about him by the parents of the girl
he loved, but suspecting that his case might have come upon the agenda paper
after his withdrawal, Pongo had tottered up the stairs to his room. While not
in tip-top form, he found himself enjoying the novel sensation of being
separated for a while from members of the human race, a race for which the
events of the night had caused him to acquire a rather marked distaste. ‘Alone
at last,’ he was saying to himself, as he opened the door.

A
moment later he saw that he had been too optimistic. Seated on the bed was his
Uncle Frederick, enjoying a mild cigar, and in the armchair, clad in a flowered
dressing-gown, a girl at the sight of whom his heart, already, as we have seen,
on several occasions tonight compelled to rival the feverish mobility of a
one-armed paperhanger with the hives, executed a leap and a bound surpassing
all previous efforts by a wide margin.

‘Ah,
Pongo,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Come along in. Here’s Sally. We climbed up the
water pipe.’

It was not immediately
that Pongo found himself able to speak. Strong emotion often has the effect of
tying the vocal cords into a reefer knot, and he was in the grip of not one
strong emotion, but two.

As
always when confronted with some new manifestation of his uncle’s activities,
he was filled with a nameless fear, saying to himself, as so often in similar
circumstances, ‘What will the harvest be?’: and in addition to this nameless
fear he was experiencing the embarrassment which cannot but come to a young man
of sensibility when he encounters unexpectedly a former fiancée from whom he
has severed relations in a scene marked on both sides by raised voices and
harsh words.

Fortunately
women handle these situations more adroitly than the uncouth male. In Sally’s
demeanour there was no suggestion that she found in this meeting any cause for
discomfort. Her eyes, bright and beautiful as he had always remembered them,
shone with a friendly light. Her voice, when she spoke, was cordial. And she
accompanied her words with a dazzling smile.

‘Hullo,
Pongo.’

‘Hullo,
Sally.’

‘It’s
nice to see you again.’

‘What
ho.’

‘You
look very well.’

‘Oh,
rather,’ said Pongo.

He
spoke absently, for he was distrait. What with going to New York to attend to
his financial interests and getting engaged to Hermione Bostock and all the
other excitements of what had recently been a full life, he had rather allowed
the peculiar properties of Sally’s smile to fade from his mind, and getting it
between the eyes like this had had a shaking effect, inducing a feeling
somewhat similar to that which must have come to Lord Ickenham’s friend Bream
Rockmeteller in the course of those distant Fourth of July celebrations.

Sally’s
smile ….

That
smile of Sally’s …

Yes, he
had forgotten just what it could do to your system, suddenly flashing out at
you like the lights of a village pub seen through rain and darkness at the end
of a ten-mile hike and transporting you into a world of cosiness and joy and
laughter. He blinked, and not even his great love for Hermione Bostock could
keep him from experiencing a momentary twinge of nostalgia, a swift pang of
that self-reproach which comes to a man conscious of having been on a good
thing and of having omitted to push it along.

The
weakness passed. He thought — hard — of Hermione Bostock, and it did the trick.
It was a Reginald Twistleton who was himself again, a strong, firm Reginald
Twistleton with not a chink in his armour, who now put the question which he
would have put a good deal earlier but for the mental upheaval which we have
just been analysing.

‘What’s
all this?’ he asked, and Constable Potter himself, addressing a suspicious
loiterer, could not have spoken in a colder, more level voice. ‘What’s the
idea, Uncle Fred?’

‘The
idea?’

‘What’s
Sally doing here?’

‘Seeking
sanctuary.’

‘In my
room?’

‘Just
for the time being, till we can make other arrangements.’

Pongo
placed a hand on either side of his head to shore it up. That old, familiar sensation
that it was coming unstuck had swept over him.

‘Oh,
God!’

‘Why do
you say “Oh, God!” my boy? What seems to you to be the difficulty?’

‘How
the dickens can she stay in my room?’

‘Why
not? You will have a shakedown in mine. I can’t offer you a bed, but you
remember that very comfortable chaise-longue.’

‘I
don’t mean that. I mean, well, dash it, what about people coming in?’

‘Where?’

‘Here.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow
morning.’

‘Nobody
will come in tomorrow morning except the housemaid. And before nightfall I hope
to get the poor child safely away. She tells me she stowed the car in the local
garage. I shall take it out and drive over to Ickenham first thing, and bring
her back some of my wife’s reach-me-downs. She will then be free to go where
she lists. A word,’ said Lord Ickenham thoughtfully, ‘which I have never been
able to understand. Why lists? How do lists come into it? However, that is
neither here nor there. Getting back to what you were saying, nobody is going
to muscle in except the housemaid, and all that is needed, therefore, is to
square the housemaid. I wonder if you have ever reflected that if only he could
square the housemaid, every visitor at a country house would be able to take in
paying guests and make a good deal of money.’

‘And
how are you going to square the housemaid?’

‘Odd
how when one keeps repeating that it sounds like one of those forgotten sports
of the past. Squaring the housemaid. One can picture William the Conqueror
being rather good at it. My dear Pongo, have no uneasiness. The housemaid is
already squared. Perhaps I had better tell you the story from the beginning. It
won’t bore you, Sally?’

‘Not at
all, Uncle Fred.’

‘Capital.
Well, when I left you, Pongo, I started to make a systematic search of the
grounds, exploring every avenue and leaving no stone unturned. I was
handicapped by having no bloodhounds, another thing which one ought always to
bring with one to a country house, but eventually I located Sally in the
potting shed, watering the geraniums with her tears.’

‘I
wasn’t,’ said Sally indignantly, and Lord Ickenham rose, kissed the top of her
head paternally and returned to the bed.

‘I was
only making a good story of it, my dear. Actually, your attitude was heroic. I
was proud of you. She laughed, Pongo, when she heard my voice. Laughed
heartily.’

‘I wish
I could.’

‘Can’t
you? Not at this happy ending?’

‘What
do you mean, happy ending?’

‘Well,
it looks like a happy ending to me. I see Sally as a little storm-tossed boat
that has put into harbour after the dickens of a gruelling from the winds and
waves, and can now take it easy for a bit. Where was I, Sally?’

‘Potting
shed.’

‘That’s
right. I found her in the potting shed. I draped her in the dressing-gown, and
we crept out into the night. Did you ever hear of Chingachgook?’