Ice in the Bedroom (17 page)

'Extenuation. I know he can put up a kind of story in extenuation of his muttonheaded behaviour. The woman was undoubtedly wet.'

'You're going too fast for me. What woman?'

'The one who came to Peacehaven.'

'Friend of yours?'

'I know her slightly.'

'Ah!'

'Don't say "Ah!" in that soupy tone of voice. Only the other day I had to rebuke Sally for doing the same thing. That, of course,' said Freddie, heaving a sigh that seemed to come up from the soles of his clocked socks, 'was when she and I were on speaking terms.'

'Aren't you now?'

'Far from it. This morning I saw her in your garden and called to her, and she gave me the sort of look she would have given a leper she wasn't fond of, and streaked back into the house. It was hanging around, hoping to establish contact again, that made me late at the office. Mark you, I can understand her point of view. She was unquestionably wearing my pyjamas.'

'Sally?'

'No, the woman.

'The one you know slightly?'

'Yes.'

'Wearing your pyjamas?'

'The ones with the purple stripe.'

'H'm!'

Freddie raised a hand. Not even his cousin George, when on traffic duty, could have put more dignity into the gesture. On his face was a look rather similar to the one Sally had given him that morning in the garden.

'Don't say "H'm". It's as bad as "All!". I could explain the whole thing so easily, if she'd only let me have a word with her and not shoot off like a sprinter hoping to break the hundred yards record every time I open my mouth. This woman got caught in the rain and barged into Peacehaven for shelter. She met George, and he saw she was wet---‘

'The trained eye. Nothing escapes the police.'

‘---and told her to go up to my room and get into my pyjamas before she caught a nasty cold. He then went off to give his girl dinner, leaving her there, so when I got home, there I was, closeted with her.'

'And Sally came in?'

'Not immediately. She entered at the moment when I was giving the woman a helping hand with her knee. She had fallen and scraped it, and I was putting iodine on it,'

'On her knee?'

'Yes.'

'Her bare knee?'

'Well, would she have been clad in sheet armour at such a moment?'

‘H'm.'

Freddie repeated the George-like gesture which had resulted from her previous use of this monosyllable.

'Will you please not say "H'm"! The whole episode was pure to the last drop. Dash it, if a female has shaved about three inches of skin off her lower limbs and lockjaw is imminent unless prompt steps are taken through the proper channels, a fellow has to rally round with the iodine, hasn't he? You can't have women dying in awful agonies all over the sitting-room floor.'

'Something in that. But Sally got the wrong angle?'

'She appeared to misunderstand the position of affairs completely. I didn't see her at first, because I was bending over the flesh wound with my back turned, but I heard a sort of gasping yip and looked round, and there she was, goggling at me as if shocked to the core. For an instant there was silence, broken only by the sound of a voice saying, "Ouch!"---iodine stings like the dickens---and then Sally said, "Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you were alone," and exited left centre. And by the time I'd rallied from the shock and dashed after her, she was nowhere in sight. The whole thing's a pretty ghastly mess,' said Freddie, and frowned blackly again, this time at a peer of the realm who, as peers of the realm so often did, had dropped in at Barribault's for a quick one before lunch and was sitting at a table across the room.

Leila Yorke was frowning, too, but the crease in her brow was a thoughtful crease. She was weighing the evidence and sifting it. A stern expression came into her face. She tapped Freddie on the arm.

'Widgeon, look me in the eye.'

He looked her in the eye.

'And answer me one question. Do you intend to do right by our Nell, or are you regarding this innocent girl as the mere plaything of an idle hour, as Angela Fosdyke said to Bruce Tallentyre in my Heather o} the Hills when she found him kissing her sister Jasmine at the Hunt Ball. It would be interesting to know, for on your answer much depends.'

Freddie, being sunk in one of Barribault's settees, than which none in London are squashier and more yielding to the frame, was unable to draw himself to his full height, but he gave her a cold, dignified look which made quite a good substitute for that manoeuvre. His voice, when he spoke, shook a little.

'Are you asking me if I love Sally?'

‘I am.'

'Of course I do. I love her madly.'

'Satisfactory, as far as it goes. But one must bear in mind that you love every girl you meet.'

'Where did you hear that?'

'Sally told me. I had it straight from the horse's mouth.'

Freddie pounded the table passionately. Leila Yorke, a specialist at that sort of thing, liked his wrist work.

'Listen,' he said, speaking thickly. 'Sally's all wrong about that. She's judging me on past form, and there was a time, I admit, when I was a bit inclined to flit from flower to flower and sip, but I gave all that up when she came along. There's no one in the ruddy world for me but her. You know Cleopatra ?'

'By name.'

'And the Queen of Sheba?'

'Just to nod to.'

'Well, lump them both together, and what have you got? Something I wouldn't cross the road for, if there was a chance of being with Sally. And you ask me if I love her. Tchah!'

'What did you say?'

'When?'

'On the cue "ask me if I love her".'

'I said "Tchah!" meaning to imply that the question is absurd, loony, incompetent, immaterial and irrelevant, as Shoesmith would say. Love her? Of course I love her. If not, why do you suppose I'm going steadily off my rocker because she won't speak to me and looks at me as if I were something more than usually revolting she had found under a flat stone?'

Leila Yorke nodded. His simple eloquence had convinced her.

'Widgeon, I believe your story. Many women wouldn't, for if ever there was a narrative that exuded fishiness at every pore, this is it. But I've always been a pushover for tales of love. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to phone her and apprise her of the facts. I'll square you with her.'

'You think you can?'

'Leave it to me.'

'I absolutely can't tell you how grateful I am.'

'Don't give it a thought.'

'Do it now!'

'Not now. I want my lunch. And here comes our host,' said Leila Yorke, as the portly form of Rodney, Lord Blicester came through the swing door. 'I wonder if he's heard about Johnnie Shoesmith easing you off the pay-roll.'

Much of the light that had been illuminating Freddie's face faded away. The fact that he was in for a stormy interview with an uncle who on these occasions never minced his words had been temporarily erased from his mind. 'I expect so.'

'Well, chin up. He can't eat you.'

'He'll have a jolly good try,' said Freddie. He had a momentary illusion that the spinal cord running down his back had been replaced by some sort of jellied substance.

19

T
HERE
are lunches which are rollicking from start to finish, with gay shafts of wit flickering to and fro like lightning flashes, and others where the going is on the sticky side and a sense of oppression seems to weigh the revellers down like a London fog. The one presided over by Lord Blicester at the restaurant of Barribault's Hotel fell into the second class.

It was in no festive mood that he had come to Barribault's Hotel. Calling on Mr. Shoesmith earlier in the morning to enquire how that income tax thing was working out and informed by him that his nephew's services had been dispensed with, he had planned, on meeting Freddie, to speak his mind in no uncertain manner to that young blot on the London scene, and in the taxi on his way to the tryst had been rehearsing and polishing his lines, substituting here a stronger adjective, there a more forceful noun. The discovery that what he had been looking forward to as a
tête-à-tête
was going to be a threesome gave him an unpleasant feeling of being about to burst. No one was more alive than he to what is done and what is not done, and in the matter of pounding the stuffing out of an errant nephew when there are ladies present the book of etiquette, he knew, was rigid.

Throughout the meal, accordingly, his
obiter dicta
were few and his demeanour that of a volcano biding its time. And as Freddie appeared to be in a sort of trance and Leila Yorke's conversation was confined for the most part to comments on his increased weight since she had seen him last, coupled with recommendations of dietary systems which could not fail to cut him down to size, the thing was not a great social success.

But even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea, and when after the serving of coffee his fair guest left the table, saying that she had a telephone call to make, he prepared to relieve what Shakespeare would have called his stuff'd bosom of its pent-up contents. Fixing his nephew with a baneful eye, he said, 'Well, Frederick,' and Freddie said, 'Oh, hullo, Uncle Rodney,' as if noticing for the first time that his relative was among those present. His thoughts had been with Leila Yorke at the telephone. Observing the bright, encouraging smile she had given him as she left, he knew she would pitch it strong, but would she pitch it strong enough to overcome Sally's sales resistance? So much hung on the answer to this question that he was understandably pre-occupied.

Lord Blicester proceeded to arrest his attention. When moved, as he was now, he had an oratorical delivery not unlike that of a minor prophet of Old Testament days rebuking the sins of the people, and this he supplemented with appropriate gestures. The peer of the realm, who had finished his quick one and come into the restaurant and was lunching at a table across the way, became immediately aware, as he watched the drama with an interested eyeglass, that the thin feller over there was copping it properly from the fat feller, probably his uncle or something of that sort. His sympathies were with the thin feller. In his youth he, too, had known what it was to cop it from his elders. He belonged to a family whose senior members, when stirred, had never hesitated to dish it out.

It is one of the drawbacks to the historian's task that in recording dialogue between his characters he must select and abridge, giving merely the gist of their remarks and not a full stenographic transcript. It will be enough to say, therefore, that Lord Blicester, touching on his nephew's moral and spiritual defects, left nothing unspoken. The word 'wastrel' occurred with some frequency, as did the adjective 'hopeless'. By the time he had rounded into his peroration, the conclusion anyone hearing it would have come to was that it was a mystery how such a despicable member of the human family as Frederick Fotheringway Widgeon had even been allowed inside a respectable establishment like Barribault's Hotel.

The effect of this philippic on Freddie was to make him feel like somebody who had been caught in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. He wilted visibly, and was shrinking still further inside his well-cut flannel suit, when something occurred that stiffened his sinews, summoned up the blood and made him feel that it was about time he sat up and did a bit of talking back. Through the door of the restaurant two lunchers had entered and taken a table near the peer of the realm. One was Oofy Prosser, the other Soapy Molloy. They had been having an aperitif in Soapy's suite, and Oofy had just written out a cheque for a further block of Silver River stock, thanking Soapy with a good deal of effusiveness for letting him have it.

The sight of Soapy had an instant effect on Freddie's morale. The spate of injurious words proceeding from his uncle's lips had completely driven from his mind the thought that in a very short time he would be a rich man, on his way to Kenya to become still richer. It now came back to him, reminding him that there was absolutely no necessity for him to sit taking lip like this from an obese relation who instead of saying offensive things to his nearest and dearest would have been better employed having Turkish baths and going easy on the bread and potatoes. He felt his calm, strong self again, and in the way he drew himself erect in his chair there was something suggestive of a worm coming out after a heavy thunderstorm. He knew himself to be more than equal to the task of telling a dozen two-hundred-and-fifty-pound uncles where they got off.

'That's all right, Uncle Rodney,' he said briskly, 'and there is possibly much in what you say, but, be that as it may, you don't know the half of it.'

It would be erroneous to say that this defiant tone from one on whom he had been looking as less than the dust beneath his chariot wheels caused Lord Blicester to swell with indignation, for he had already swollen so far that a little more would have made him come apart at the seams. He had to content himself with glaring.

'I don't understand you.'

‘I’ll make it clear to the meanest intelligence…That is…Well, you know what I mean. Let me begin by asking you something. You're all steamed up about Shoesmith taking the high road and me the low road and our relations being severed and all that, but how would you like being a sort of glorified office-boy in a solicitor's firm?'

'The question does not arise.'

'Yes, it does, because I've jolly well arisen it. The answer is that you wouldn't like it a bit. Nor do I. I want to go to Kenya and become a Coffee King.'

'That nonsense again!'

'Not nonsense at all. Sound, practical move.'

'You said you needed three thousand pounds to put into the business. You won't get it from me.'

Freddie waved an airy hand. The peer of the realm, who was now eating
truite bleu,
paused in admiration with the fork at his lips. He had not thought the thin feller had it in him. Something seemed to have bucked the thin feller up, and good luck to him, felt the peer of the realm. He had just recognized Lord Blicester as a member of one of his clubs whose method of eating soup he disliked, and he was all for it if the thin feller was going to put him in his place.