The Girl in Blue (24 page)

‘Well,
lots of luck, my dream girl. You have Mother’s best wishes.’

‘Thank
you, Mother.’

‘But
don’t think that I approve. I disapprove heartily. I don’t like that
ginger-headed pipsqueak.’

‘That’s
all right, Mother dear. You don’t have to.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1

In
the study Chippendale was showing unmistakeable signs of wishing to
be elsewhere. He fidgeted. He licked his lips and stood now on one leg, now on
the other. Sherlock Holmes, had he been present, would have deduced that, with
ten pounds in his pocket and definite instructions from Jerry West to spend it
in revelry, he was thinking of the Goose and Gander and the wines and spirits
which its landlord Mr Hibbs was licensed to sell, and as usual he would have
been right.

But
though athirst, he did not forget his manners. It was with his customary
courtesy that he addressed Barney.

‘Would
there be anything further, madam?’

‘Nothing
that occurs to me at the moment. Got a date?’

‘In a
sense, madam. Mr West was anxious that I should go to the pub and drink his
health.’

Then
don’t let me keep you. Thank you, madam.’

‘Give
my love to the boys in the back room.’

‘I will
indeed, madam.’

A
silence followed his departure. Homer broke it. ‘That’s a very peculiar butler,’
he said.

‘As a
matter of fact, he’s only a synthetic butler. He’s really a broker’s man. Crips
has been having a little trouble with the people who do the repairs, and they
sent him down to watch over their interests. But Crips is mailing them a cheque
tonight, so we shall be losing him shortly.’

‘Oh?’
said Homer. This revelation did not seem to have interested him greatly. He had
the air of a man whose mind is on other things. ‘Well, he’s given me an idea.’

‘That’s
good.’

‘What
he was saying about going and drinking at the Goose and Gander. Do you suppose
they would have champagne there?’

‘I
shouldn’t think so.’

Then I
shall have to do what I can with whisky. You see, said Homer, seeming to feel
that if you cannot confide in a sister, in whom can you confide, ‘I love Vera
Upshaw and I have the most extraordinary difficulty in telling her so. Whenever
we are alone together, I find myself talking the merest trivialities. It cannot
go on. I must break the spell somehow, and, as I say, that fellow has given me
an idea. It has occurred to me that a judicious intake of alcoholic stimulant
might do it. It’s worth trying, anyway,’ said Homer, and he was out of the room
at a speed that rivalled Chippendale’s.

He left
Barney staring after him with bulging eyes and drooping jaw, and it was thus
that Crispin, entering at this moment, found her. What with his betrothal and
Brotherly Love’s victory at a hundred to eight, he had been feeling that
everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but the sight
of the woman he loved apparently on the verge of having a fit of some kind
lowered his high spirits by several degrees, and he uttered a bleat of concern.

‘Hullo!
I say! Is something wrong, darling? You look like a startled codfish. Suits
you, of course. Very becoming. But it gives me the idea that something has
happened to upset you. What’s the matter, my angel?’

‘I’ve
had a shock.’

‘Too
bad. But it was bound to come. You can’t shove policemen into brooks and not
get what they call a delayed reaction. It’ll pass off. What you need is a
drink.’

A
strong shudder shook Barney.

‘Don’t
mention that word to me! Homer’s gone off to the Goose and Gander to get
pie-eyed.’

‘Has
he, by Jove? Who’s Homer?’

‘My
brother.’

‘Of
course, yes. I know the chap you mean. He was in here just now, wasn’t he? Fellow
with horn-rimmed spectacles and a mouse in his bedroom. Why is he going to get
pie-eyed?’

‘To
give him nerve to propose to Vera Upshaw.’ Crispin understood now. As a
preliminary to both his breach of promise cases he had had to fortify himself
in this manner before being able to express himself.

‘Well,
that’s all right,’ he said consolingly, relieved that nothing worse had been
responsible for his loved one’s agitation, ‘Nothing wrong with working himself
up, is there?’

‘Of
course there is. She’s a designing Delilah.’

‘Why do
you say that? She’s probably a very nice girl.’

‘She
isn’t! She’s a vampire. I spotted it as soon as I saw her. She’s after him for
his money. She deliberately followed him down here so as to entrap him.’

‘Well,
you may be right, but even so, aren’t you overlooking something?’

‘What
do you mean?’

‘She’s
bound to refuse him. I wouldn’t for the world say anything derogatory about any
brother of yours, but let’s face it, Homer… Odd name, that. I wonder why they
gave it him. The fact is, parents are apt to lose their heads at the font.
Chippendale was telling me about a fellow who got labelled Chingachgook. And
look at me, Crispin, and I wouldn’t like this to go any further, but I was also
christened Lancelot and Gawain, my mother being fond of Tennyson. But where was
I? Oh, yes. I was about to say that Homer, while a sterling chap and full of
good stories about mice and all that, isn’t an oil painting. You couldn’t call
him the answer to a maiden’s prayer.

‘But he
makes a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. There isn’t a hope that she’ll
refuse him.’

Crispin
saw her point. He appreciated the seriousness of the situation. He mused awhile
and was rewarded with an idea.

‘Do you
know what I think you ought to do?’

‘What?’

‘Go to
the Goose and Gander and reason with him.’

‘Oh,
Crips, what a help you are!’

‘Always
glad to lend a hand. Shall I come with you?’

‘No.
Thanks for the kind offer, but what I have to say to Homer is for his ears
alone.’

One of
the advantages a sister has when arguing with a brother is that she is under no
obligation to be tactful. If she wishes to tell him that he is an idiot and
ought to have his head examined, she can do so and, going further, can add that
it is a thousand pities that no-one ever thought of smothering him with a
pillow in his formative years. Barney did both these things almost immediately
after she had entered the saloon bar of the Goose and Gander, and Homer,
sipping whisky, said that he did not know what she was talking about.

More
than thirty years had passed since in their mutual nursery Barney had settled a
dispute with her brother by beating him over the head with a doll which was her
constant companion, but she would gladly have done it now, had she had a doll
with her. Her thoughts strayed for a moment to a heavy ash tray which was lying
on the table, but wiser counsels prevailed, and she confined herself to words.

‘You do
too know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about you and this gold-digging
Vera of yours.’

It is
not easy for a man drinking whisky and already not far from the Plimsoll line
to achieve dignity, but Homer made a fair approach to it.

‘I must
ask you not to speak of Miss Upshaw like that,’ he said, stiffening visibly. ‘You
are merely being absurd. She is incapable of sordid thoughts about money. She
is a rare soul who lives on the spiritual plane. One senses it in every line
she writes. Read her
Daffodil Days.
Read her
Morning’s At Seven.’

Barney
indulged in a brief commination service in which both the works he had named
featured largely. She would not, she said, read either of them on a bet.

‘Intensely
spiritual,’ said Homer, now speaking rather thickly and experiencing some
difficulty in pronouncing the words. ‘Ethereal. Refined. Graceful. Light. Dainty.
You might say Elfin.’

‘All
right, I’ll take your word for it, but you can’t go by that. Half the heels in
New York write like angels. Oh, why is it,’ said Barney, becoming emotional, ‘that
you and I are such abysmal saps? It’s like some sort of family curse. It seems
only yesterday that you were warning me against marrying Wally Clayborne, and I
wouldn’t listen. I didn’t ask myself why a man like Wally, handsome, dynamic
and the pet of the sporting set, should want to marry a girl whose only charm
was her money. I just fell for him with a dub thud. How clear and sensible you
were then, and now here you are, all tangled up yourself with a female Wally
Clayborne. It’s the old business of snakes and rabbits.’

‘I beg
your pardon?’

‘It
seems to be a natural law that every rabbit should go out of its class and fall
under the spell of a snake. You’re a rabbit, I was a rabbit. I was hypnotized
by Wally, who, I admit, had everything, including the moral code of a tom cat,
and now you’ve let this Vera Upshaw hypnotize you. Of course she’ll marry you
if you ask her, but what will there be in it for you? Do you think you’ll be
able to hold her any more than I was able to hold Wally? She’ll be off around
the corner, having affairs, before she’s digested the wedding cake.’

Homer rose,
his dignity impaired by a momentary hiccup. A burst of song from the public bar
next door drowned his opening words, compelling him to repeat them.

‘I will
listen to no more of this,’ he said austerely.

That’s
your privilege,’ said Barney. A gallant fighter, she knew when she was beaten.

‘I am
going back to the house.’

‘All
keyed up? All ready to put your fat head in the snake’s mouth? Well, I won’t
come with you. I shall go next door and meet the boys. That singing sounds
promising.’

It was
with a brother’s love for a sister at its lowest ebb that Homer started on his
way back to the Hall. Resentment of the subversive stuff to which they had been
compelled to listen had turned his ears pink, and his eyes glowed militantly behind
their spectacles. Never in his life, he told himself, had he heard such
pernicious nonsense as had proceeded from the lips of one whom he had always
regarded as fairly well-balanced. Sisters, he supposed, tended to be critical
of the objects of their brothers’ affections, but to sully a woman like Vera
Upshaw with foul innuendos was unpardonable. Even a sister, looking into those
dear candid eyes, should have been able to detect the pure white soul that lay
beyond them. All that stuff about going around the corner and having affairs. Nauseating.

Not
that it had had any effect on his great love. More than ever he yearned to see
Vera Upshaw and pour out his heart to her, and the next moment he was given the
opportunity of doing so. He had come to the gate and was about to pass through,
and there she was, just beyond it. She was linked in a close embrace with a
ginger-headed young man in whom he recognized his host’s nephew Gerald West,
and as he stared dumbfounded she kissed him. And when we say kissed, we use the
word in its most exact meaning. It was the sort of kiss which in the days
before Hollywood adopted the slogan of Anything Goes would never have been
permitted on the silver screen. The Philadelphia censors would have insisted on
its being cut by a great many feet.

Homer
drew back. He had the odd feeling that somebody had poured a brimming bucket of
iced water over him.

Many
men in a similar situation would have found their love, seeming so
indestructible till then, expiring with a pop, leaving them convinced that they
had been vouchsafed a merciful warning and would do well to make a sharp
revision of their matrimonial plans. Homer was one of them. It was as though he
had made an abrupt recovery from a particularly severe fever. All molten
passion a brief moment earlier, he was his calm, cool, collected self again.
Homer, the great lover, had vanished without a trace, and in his place stood J.
Homer Pyle of Pyle, Wisbeach and Hollister, the corporation lawyer on whom
no-one had been able to slip a fast one in the last fifteen years.

The
only thing that marred his sense of well-being was the thought that his sister
Bernadette was now in a position to say ‘I told you so’.

How
long he remained there, weighing the sweet against the bitter, he could not
have said, but he was still doing this when he perceived an expensive-looking
car coming through the gate with Willoughby in the back seat. He sprang into
the road and hailed it.

‘Hi,
Scrope. Just a minute, Scrope. Want to speak to you, Scrope.’

‘Yes?’
said Willoughby. He spoke grumpily. He had by no means forgiven Homer for his
officiousness in the matter of
The Girl in Blue.
The last thing he
desired was to have to interrupt his journey in order to chat with a man
capable of putting miniatures in middle drawers.

Homer
advanced to the car and clutched it in a firm grip, as if to arrest its
progress in the-event of it taking it into its head to start again.