Uncle Dynamite (3 page)

It was
a critique of which, had he heard it, Lord Ickenham would have been the first
to admit the essential justice. From boyhood up his had always been a gay and
happy disposition, and in the evening of his life he still retained, together
with a juvenile waistline, the bright enthusiasms and the fresh, unspoiled
mental outlook of a slightly inebriated undergraduate. He had enjoyed a number
of exceedingly agreeable outings in his nephew’s society in the course of the
last few years, and was pleasantly conscious of having stepped on these
occasions as high, wide and plentiful as a man could wish, particularly during
that day at the Dog Races. Though there, he had always maintained, a wiser
policeman would have been content with a mere reprimand.

‘As you
are aware, if you were not asleep while I was talking at dinner,’ he said,
resuming his remarks, ‘your aunt has left me for a few weeks and, as you can
well imagine, I am suffering agonies. I feel like one of those fellows in the
early nineteenth-century poems who used to go about losing dear gazelles.
Still —‘

‘Now
listen,’ said Pongo.

‘Still,
in practically every cloud wrack the knowledgeable eye, if it peers closely
enough, can detect some sort of a silver lining, however small, and the horror
of my predicament is to a certain extent mitigated by the thought that I now
become a mobile force again. Your aunt is the dearest woman in the world, and
nobody could be fonder of her than I am, but I sometimes find her presence … what
is the word I want … restrictive. She holds, as you know, peculiar views on
the subject of my running around loose in London, as she puts it, and this
prevents me fulfilling myself. It is a pity. Living in a rural morgue like
Bishop’s Ickenham all the time, one gets rusty and out of touch with modern
thought. I don’t suppose these days I could tell you the name of a single
chucker-out in the whole of the
West End
area, and I used to know them all. That is why —‘

‘Now
listen.’

‘That
is why the fact of her having packed a toothbrush and popped off to Trinidad,
though it blots the sunshine from my life, is not an unrelieved tragedy.
Existence may have become for me an arid waste, but let us not forget that I
can now be up and doing with a heart for any fate. Notify me when you return to
London, and I will be with you with my hair in a braid. Bless my soul, how
young I’m feeling these days! It must be the weather.’

Pongo
knocked the ash off his cigar and took a sip of brandy. There was a cold, stern
look on his face.

‘Now
listen, Uncle Fred,’ he said, and his voice was like music to the ears of the
Recording Angel, who felt that this was going to be good. ‘All that stuff is
out.’

‘Out?’

‘Right
out. You don’t get me to the Dog Races again.’

‘I did
not specify the Dog Races. Though they provide an admirable means of studying
the soul of the people.’

‘Or on
any other frightful binge of yours. Get thou behind me, about sums it up. If
you come to see me in
London
,
you will get lunch at my flat and afterwards a good book. Nothing more.’

Lord
Ickenham sighed, and was silent for a space. He was musing on the curse of
wealth. In the old days, when Pongo had been an impecunious young fellow
reading for the Bar and attempting at intervals to get into an uncle’s ribs for
an occasional much-needed flyer, nobody could have been a more sympathetic
companion along the primrose path. But coming into money seemed to have changed
him completely. The old, old story, felt Lord Ickenham.

‘Oh,
very well,’ he said. ‘If that is how you feel —‘

‘It
is,’ Pongo assured him. ‘Make a note of it on your cuff. And it’s no good
saying “Ichabod”, because I intend to stick to my position with iron
resolution. My standing with Hermione is none too secure as it is — she looks
askance at my belonging to the Drones — and the faintest breath of scandal
would dish me properly. And most unfortunately she knows all about you.’

‘My
life is an open book.’

‘She
has heard what a loony you are, and she seems to think it may be hereditary. “I
hope you are not like your uncle,” she keeps saying, with a sort of brooding
look in her eye.’

‘You
must have misunderstood her. “I hope you
are
like your uncle,” she
probably said. Or “Do try, darling, to be more like your uncle.”‘

‘Consequently
I shall have to watch my step like a ruddy hawk. Let her get the slightest
suspicion into her nut that I am not one hundred per cent steady and serious,
and bim will go my chances of putting on the spongebag trousers and walking
down the aisle with her.’

‘Then
you would not consider the idea of my coming to Ashenden as your valet, and
seeing what innocent fun we could whack out of the deception?’

‘My
God!’

‘Merely
a suggestion. And it couldn’t be done, anyway. It would involve shaving off my
moustache, to which I am greatly attached. When a man has neither chick nor
child, he gets very fond of a moustache. So she’s that sort of girl, is she?’

‘What
do you mean, that sort of girl?’

‘Noble-minded.
High-principled. A credit to British womanhood.’

‘Oh,
rather. Yes, she’s terrific. Must be seen to be believed.’

‘I look
forward to seeing her.’

‘I have
a photograph here, if you would care to take a dekko,’ said Pongo, producing
one of cabinet size from his breast pocket like a conjurer extracting a rabbit
from a top hat.

Lord
Ickenham took the photograph, and studied it for some moments.

‘A
striking face.’

‘Don’t
miss the eyes.’

‘I’ve
got ‘em.’

‘The
nose, also.’

‘I’ve
got that, too. She looks intelligent. ‘‘And how. Writes novels.’

‘Good
God!’

A
monstrous suspicion had germinated in Pongo’s mind.

‘Don’t
you like her?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Well,
I’ll tell you,’ said Lord Ickenham, feeling his way carefully. ‘I can see she’s
a remarkable girl, but I wouldn’t say she was the wife for you.’

‘Why
not?’

‘In my
opinion you will be giving away too much weight. Have you studied these
features? That chin is a determined chin. Those eyes are flashing eyes.’

‘What’s
the matter with flashing eyes?’

‘Dashed
unpleasant things to have about the home. To cope with flashing eyes, you have
to be a man of steel and ginger. Are you a man of steel and ginger? No. You’re
like me, a gentle coffee-caddie.’

‘A how
much?’

‘By a
coffee-caddie I mean a man — and there is no higher type — whose instinct it is
to carry his wife’s breakfast up to her room on a tray each morning and bill
and coo with her as she wades into it. And what the coffee-caddie needs is not
a female novelist with a firm chin and flashing eyes, but a jolly little soul
who, when he bills, will herself bill like billy-o, and who will be right there
with bells on when he starts to coo. The advice I give to every young man
starting out to seek a life partner is to find a girl whom he can tickle. Can
you see yourself tickling Hermione Bostock? She would draw herself to her full
height and say “Sir!” The ideal wife for you, of course, would have been Sally
Painter.’

At the
mention of this name, as so often happens when names from the dead past bob up
in conversation, Pongo’s face became mask-like and a thin coating of ice seemed
to form around him. A more sensitive man than Lord Ickenham would have sent for
his winter woollies.

‘Does
Coggs suffer from bunions?’ he said distantly. ‘I thought he was walking as if
he had trouble with his feet.’

‘Ever
since she came to
England
,’
proceeded Lord Ickenham, refusing to be lured from the subject into realms of
speculation, however fascinating, ‘I have always hoped that you and Sally would
eventually form a merger. And came a day when you apprised me that the thing
was on. And then, dammit,’ he went on, raising his voice a little in his
emotion, ‘came another day when you apprised me that it was off. And why,
having succeeded in getting engaged to a girl like Sally Painter, you were mad
enough to sever relations, is more than I can understand. It was all your
fault, I suppose?’

Pongo
had intended to maintain a frigid silence until the distasteful subject should
have blown over, but this unjust charge shook him out of his proud reserve.

‘It
wasn’t anything of the bally kind. Perhaps you will allow me to place the facts
before you.’

‘I wish
you would. It’s about time someone did. I could get nothing out of Sally.’

‘You’ve
seen her, then?’

‘She
came down here with Otis a couple of weeks ago and left one of her busts in my
charge. I don’t know why. That’s it, over there in the corner.’

Pongo
gave the bust a brief and uninterested glance.

‘And
she didn’t place the facts before you?’

‘She
said the engagement was off, which I knew already, but nothing more. ‘‘Oh?
Well,’ said Pongo, breathing heavily through the nostrils as he viewed the body
of the dead past, ‘what happened was this. Just because I wouldn’t do something
she wanted me to do, she called me a lily-livered poltroon.’

‘She
probably meant it as a compliment. A lily liver must be very pretty. ‘‘High
words ensued. I said so-and-so, and she said such-and-such. And later that
evening ring, letters and all the fixings were returned by district messenger
boy.’

‘A mere
lovers’ tiff. I should have thought you would have made it up next day.’

‘Well,
we jolly well didn’t. As a matter of fact, that lily-livered sequence was
simply what put the lid on it. We had been getting in each other’s hair for
some time before that and there was bound to be a smash-up sooner or later.’

‘What
were the principal subjects of disagreement?’

‘For
one thing, that damned brother of hers. He makes me sick.’

‘Otis
isn’t everybody’s money, I admit. He’s a publisher now, Sally tells me. I
suppose he will make as big a mess of that as he did of his antique shop. Did
you tell her he made you sick?’

‘Yes.
She got a bit steamed up about it. And then there was more trouble because I
wanted her to chuck being a sculptress.’

‘Why
didn’t you like her being a sculptress?’

‘I
hated her mixing with all that seedy crowd in
Chelsea
. Bounders with beards,’ said Pongo, with an austere shudder. ‘I’ve
been in her studio sometimes, and the blighters were crawling out of the
woodwork in hundreds, bearded to the eyebrows.’

Lord
Ickenham drew thoughtfully at his cigar.

‘I was
mistaken in saying that you were not a man of steel and ginger. You appear to
have thrown your weight about like a sheikh.’

‘Well,
she threw her weight about with me. She was always trying to boss me.’

‘Girls
do. Especially American girls. I know, because I married one. It’s part of
their charm.’

‘Well,
there’s a limit.’

‘And
with you that was reached — how? You had started to tell me. What was it she
wanted you to do?’

‘Take
some jewellery with me when I went to
New York
and smuggle it through the customs.’

‘Bless
her heart, what an enterprising little soul she is. But since when has Sally
possessed jewellery?’

‘It
wasn’t for her, it was for one of her rich American pals, a girl named
Alice
something. This ass of a female had
been loading herself with the stuff in and around Bond Street and didn’t like
the idea of paying duty on it when she got back to New York, and Sally wanted
me to run it through for her.’

‘A
kindly thought.’

‘A
fatheaded thought. And so I told her. A nice chump I should have looked, being
disembowelled by port officials.’

Lord
Ickenham sighed.

‘I see.
Well, I’m sorry. A wealthy husband like you would have come in very handy for
Sally. I’m afraid that girl is on the rocks.’

Pongo’s
lower jaw dropped a notch. Love might be dead, but he had a feeling heart.

‘Oh, I
say!’

‘I
don’t believe she gets enough to eat.’

‘What
rot!’

‘It
isn’t rot. She seemed thin to me, and I didn’t like the way she tucked into the
lamb and green peas, as if she hadn’t had a square meal for weeks. There can’t
be a fortune in sculping, if that’s the right verb. Who the dickens buys clay
busts?’

‘Oh,
that’s all right,’ said Pongo, relieved. ‘She doesn’t depend on her sculping.
She’s got a little bit of money an aunt in
Kansas City
left her.’

‘I
know. But I’m wondering whether something hasn’t gone wrong with that sheet
anchor. It’s two years since she came to
London
to join Otis. He may have wheedled it out of her. A chap like Otis
can do a lot in two years.’