Pigs Have Wings (16 page)

‘And she knows you?’

‘Of course she knows me. I looked after her for a year or more.’

‘So if you went and snitched her, she wouldn’t make a fuss about it?’

‘Coo!’ said George Cyril, stunned as the brilliancy of the idea hit him. He had known all along, he told himself, that good old Herb would be equal to the emergency.

‘She would let you take her?’

‘Like a lamb,’ said George Cyril. ‘Without so much as a grunt.’

Binstead was now the big executive, the man who gets things done.

‘Then come along,’ he said. ‘We can sneak the car from the garage. We’ll load her in at the back.’

George Cyril Wellbeloved expelled a deep breath. The outlook was still a little dark, but one major point had been established. When on the morrow Sir Gregory Parsloe came to the sty for his morning visit of inspection, he was going to find a pig in it.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
dawned bright and clear. The skies were blue, the birds twittered, all Nature smiled. But Nature’s example was not followed by Lord Emsworth. Apart from the galling necessity of having to put on a stiff collar and a top hat and make the early start of which he had spoken, he had caught a cold. Sneezes and snuffles punctuated the unmanly complaints with which he damped all spirits at the breakfast table. Even the thought of having Maudie at his side seemed to do little to alleviate his gloom.

They got him off eventually, though Lady Constance had to exercise the full force of her personality to stop him going down to take a last farewell of the Empress, and Gally was restoring himself with a cigar on the terrace, when he observed Lord Vosper approaching. It seemed to be Lord Vosper’s wish to have speech with him.

And this was odd, for their relations had never been intimate. There was little in the characters of the two that could serve as a common meeting-ground. Orlo Vosper, who was an earnest young man with political ambitions, given, when not slamming them back over the net, to reading white papers and studying social conditions, thought Gally frivolous; and Gally thought Orlo Vosper, as he thought most of his juniors in these degenerate days, a bit of a poop and not at all the sort of fellow he would have cared to take into the old Pelican Club.

But though a man one would have hesitated to introduce to Fruity Biffen, Plug Basham and the rest of the boys at the Pelican, Orlo Vosper belonged to the human race, and all members of the human race were to Gally a potential audience for his stories. It was possible, he felt, that the young man had not heard the one about the duke, the bottle of champagne and the female contortionist, so he welcomed him now with a cordial wave of his cigar.

‘Nice day,’ he said. ‘Going to be hotter than ever. Well, we got old Clarence off.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Never an easy task. Launching Clarence on one of these expeditions is like launching a battleship. I sometimes feel we ought to break a bottle of champagne over his head. Arising from that, have you heard the one about the duke, the bottle of champagne and the female contortionist?’

‘No,’ said Lord Vosper. ‘Have you any smelling salts on you?’

Gally blinked. He found himself unable to follow the other’s train of thought.

‘Smelling salts?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gally. ‘I seem to have come out without mine this morning. Careless. What do you want smelling salts for?’

‘I understand one uses them when women have hysterics.’

‘Hysterics?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Who’s having hysterics?’

‘That large girl in the trousers. Looks after the pigs.’

‘Simmons?’

‘Is that the name?’

‘Monica Simmons, the pride of Roedean. Is she having hysterics?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why is she having hysterics?’

Lord Vosper seemed glad that his companion had put that question.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s what I asked myself. And, what’s more, I asked her. I happened to be down in the vicinity of the pig bin just now and found her there, and it seemed to me rather peculiar that she should be laughing and crying and wringing her hands and all that, so I put it to her straight. “Is something the matter?” I said.’

‘Came right to the point, didn’t you? And was there?’

‘Yes, as I had suspected from the outset, there was. She was a bit incoherent at first, gasping and gurgling and calling on the name of her Maker and so forth, but the gist gradually emerged. She had had a bereavement. It appears that that pig of Lord Emsworth’s, the one they call the Empress, is missing.’

At any other moment Gally would have said ‘On how many cylinders?’, for he liked his joke of a morning, but these devastating words put whimsical comedy out of the question. It was as though he had been hit over the head with a blunt instrument. He stood yammering speechlessly, and Lord Vosper thought his emotion did him credit.

‘Bad show, what?’ he said. ‘One needs smelling salts.’

Gally spoke in a low, grating voice.

‘You mean the Empress isn’t there? She’s gone?’

‘That’s right. Gone with the wind. Or so this Simmons tells me. According to the Simmons, her room was empty and her bed had not been slept in. The pig’s bed, I mean, not the Simmons’s. I know nothing of the Simmons’s bed. For all I’ve heard to the contrary, it was slept in like billy-o. The point I am making –’

He would have proceeded to elucidate the matter further, rendering it clear to the meanest intelligence, but it would have meant soliloquizing, for Gally had left him. His dapper form was flashing along the terrace, and now it disappeared from view, moving rapidly.

‘Odd,’ thought Lord Vosper. ‘Most extraordinary.’

He went off to see if Lady Constance had smelling salts. He was convinced that in some way smelling salts ought to enter into the thing.

Over at Matchingham Hall, Sir Gregory Parsloe was in his study doing
The Times
crossword puzzle, his brow wrinkled as he tried to think what a word in three letters, beginning with E and signifying a large Australian bird, could possibly be. He liked crossword puzzles, but was not very expert at them. Anything more abstruse than the Sun God Ra generally had him baffled.

To those who recall his overnight anguish, it may seem odd that this jilted lover should have been occupying himself with large Australian birds on the morning after the shattering of his romance. But British Baronets, like British pig men, are resilient. They rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things and are quick to discern the silver lining in the clouds. A night’s sleep had done wonders for the Squire of Matchingham. We left him a broken man. We find him now mended, in fact practically as good as new.

When a man of Sir Gregory’s age and temperament is informed by his prospective bride shortly before the date fixed for their union that she has made other plans and that there will be no wedding bells for him, he is naturally annoyed, but his chagrin is never so deep or so enduring as would be that of someone like Romeo in similar circumstances. Passion, as it is understood by the Romeos, seldom touches the Sir Gregory Parsloes of this world. What passes for love with them is really not much more than a tepid preference. The poet Berlin, seeking material for another ‘What’ll I do?’ would have had to go elsewhere for inspiration, if he had come looking for it from Sir Gregory Parsloe.

Sir Gregory was mildly fond of Gloria Salt, and had been on the whole rather attracted by the idea of marrying her, but it had not taken him long to see that there was a lot to be said in favour of the celibate life. What was enabling him to bear his loss with such fortitude was the realization that, now that she had gone and broken off the dashed engagement, there was no longer any need for all that bally dieting and exercising nonsense. Once more he was the master of his fate, the captain of his soul, and if he felt like widening his waistline, could jolly well widen it, and no kick coming from any quarter. For days he had been yearning for beer with an almost Wellbelovedian intensity, and he was now in a position to yield to the craving. A tankard stood beside him at this very moment, and in the manner in which he raised it to his lips there was something gay and swashbuckling. A woman is only a woman, he seemed to be saying, but a frothing pint is a drink.

And so, even more so, are two frothing pints. He pressed the bell, and Binstead appeared.

‘Hey!’ said Sir Gregory. ‘Another of those.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Hey!’ said Sir Gregory, when a few minutes later the butler returned with the life-giving fluid. He had just remembered something. ‘Where did you put that Slimmo stuff?’ he asked.

‘I placed it in the store-room cupboard, sir. Should I fetch a bottle, sir?’

‘No. I don’t want … I’ve heard from my distant connexion, and he doesn’t want the stuff. Pour it down the sink.’

‘Or should I return it to the chemist, sir? He would possibly be willing to refund the money.’

‘All right. Do that, if you like. If you can get anything out of him, you can keep it.’

‘Thank you very much, sir,’ said Binstead. There might not be much in the transaction, but there ought to be something. And every little bit added to what you’ve got makes just a little bit more.

It was now approaching the hour when it was Sir Gregory’s custom to go and pay his respects to Queen of Matchingham, and as he had finished his beer and saw no prospect of ever solving the mystery of that large Australian bird, he rose, lit a fresh cigar with a debonair flourish and made his way to the sty.

The first thing he beheld on arrival was George Cyril Wellbeloved propped up against a tree, obviously in the grip of one of those hangovers that mark epochs, the sort of hangover you tell your grandchildren about when they come clustering round your knee. He looked like the things you find in dust-bins, which are passed over with a disdainful jerk of the head by the discriminating alley cat, and so repellent was his aspect that after a brief ‘Good morning’ – and even that caused the pig man to quiver like a smitten blancmange – Sir Gregory averted his gaze and transferred it to the occupant of the sty.

And as he did so, he suddenly stiffened, blinked, gasped, dropped his cigar and stood staring.

‘What?’ he stammered. ‘What? What? What?’

The next moment, it seemed to George Cyril Wellbeloved that the end of the world had come and Judgement Day set in with unusual severity. Actually, it was only his employer shouting his name, but that was the illusion it created.

‘Sir?’ he whispered feebly, clutching his temples, through which some practical joker was driving white-hot spikes.

‘Come here!’ bellowed Sir Gregory.

George Cyril obeyed his master’s voice, but reluctantly. Sir Gregory, he had not failed to observe, in addition to being yellow in colour and flickering at the edges, was looking like a touchy tribal god who, dissatisfied with the day’s human sacrifice, is preparing to say it with thunderbolts. He feared the shape of things to come.

‘What’s all this?’ the employer roared.

‘Sir?’

‘What’s been going on here?’

‘Sir?’

‘Don’t stand there bleating like a sheep, you loathsome excrescence. You know perfectly well what I mean, blister your insides. Where’s my pig? This isn’t my pig. What’s become of Queen of Matchingham, and what’s this damned animal doing here? You’ve removed my pig and substituted a blasted changeling.’

Except for Lord Emsworth, on whose capabilities in that direction we have already touched, there was not in all Shropshire – and probably not in Herefordshire and South Wales – a more gifted exponent of stout denial than George Cyril Wellbeloved, and in this moment of peril a special effort might have been expected from him. But, in order to deny with the adequate measure of stoutness, a man has to be feeling at the top of his form, and we have been strangely remiss if we have left our public with the impression that George Cyril was at the top of his. He was but a shadow of his former self, his once alert brain a mere mass of inert porridge.

‘WELL?’

George Cyril Wellbeloved cracked beneath the strain. One last futile attempt to find an explanation that would cover the facts, at the same time leaving him with an unsullied reputation, and he was telling all, omitting no detail however slight.

It went considerably better than he had anticipated. True, his audience punctuated the narrative by calling him a number of derogatory names, but he was not torn limb from limb, as at one point had seemed likely. Encouraged, he became fluent, and the story went better than ever. As he told of his journey to Blandings Castle and the theft of the Empress, something like a faint smile of approval seemed to flicker across his employer’s face.

And, indeed, Sir Gregory was not ill pleased. He began to see daylight. It seemed to him that the position of affairs was somewhat similar to that which would have prevailed in the Male-mute saloon if Dangerous Dan McGrew and one of his friends had got the drop on each other simultaneously. And on such occasions compromise and bargaining become possible. Moreover, if he now dispatched this pig man of his to scout around in the grounds of Blandings Castle, it might be possible to ascertain where the hellhounds of the opposition had hidden the Queen. That knowledge acquired, what simpler than to send an expeditionary force to the rescue?

A few minutes later, accordingly, George Cyril Wellbeloved, relieved to find himself still in one piece, was bicycling once more along the old familiar road, while Sir Gregory went to the garage to get out his car. It was his intention to beard Lord Emsworth and that old image, his brother Galahad, in their lair, and tell them one or two things about the facts of life.

‘Lord Emsworth in?’ he asked, having reached journey’s end.

Beach was courtly, but distant.

‘His lordship has gone to Wolverhampton, sir.’

‘Where’s Mr Threepwood?’

‘Mr Galahad is also absent.’

‘H’m,’ said Sir Gregory, wondering what to do for the best, and as he spoke Lady Constance came through the hall.

‘Why, good morning, Sir Gregory,’ said Lady Constance. ‘Have you come to see Clarence?’