'You don't understand.'
'Nor does B. Farringdon.'
'I'm in a hell of a jam.'
Johnny Pearce quivered as he spoke, and passed a feverish pen over his brow. The sternness of Lord Ickenham's demeanour softened a little. It had become evident to him that he was the godfather of a toad beneath the harrow, and one has to make allowances for toads so situated.
'Tell me the whole story in your own words, omitting no detail, however slight,' he said. 'Why can't you get married? You haven't got some incurable disease, have you?'
'That's just it. I have.'
'Good heavens! What?'
'Nannie Bruce.'
It seemed to Lord Ickenham that the toad raising a haggard face to his was a toad who spoke in riddles, and he said so.
'What on earth do you mean?'
'Have you ever had a faithful old nurse who stuck to you like a limpet?'
'Never. My personal attendants generally left at the end of the first month, glad to see the last of me. They let me go and presently called the rest of the watch together and thanked God they were rid of a knave. But what have faithful old nurses got to do with it? I don't follow you.'
'It's perfectly simple. Nannie Bruce has been here for twenty-five years – damn it, it's nearer twenty-seven – and she has become the boss of the show. She runs the place. Well, do you suppose that, if I get married, she's going to step meekly down and hand over to my wife? Not a hope.'
'Nonsense.'
'It isn't nonsense. You saw her in action just now. A perfectly good cook melting away like snow on a mountain side, and why? Because Nannie will insist on butting in all the time and criticizing. And it would be the same with Bunny. Nannie would make life impossible for her in a million ways. I'd call her high-spirited, wouldn't you?'
'Nannie?'
'Bunny.'
'Oh, Bunny. Yes, very high-spirited.'
'Well, then. Is she going to enjoy being interfered with and ordered around, told not to do it that way, do it this way, treated as a sort of half-witted underling? And her sniff. You know the way she sniffs.'
'Bunny?'
'Nannie.'
'Oh, Nannie. Yes, she does sniff.'
'And that hissing noise she makes, like a wet thumb drawn across the top of a hot stove. It would drive a young bride potty. And there's another thing,' said Johnny, vigorously plying the pen. 'Do you realize that every single discreditable episode in my past is filed away in Nannie's memory? She could and would tell Bunny things about me which in time would be bound to sap her love. How long could a wife go on looking on her husband as a king among men after hearing an eye-witness's account of his getting jerked before a tribunal and fined three week's pocket money for throwing rocks at the kitchen window or a blow-by-blow description of the time he was sick at his birthday party through eating too much almond cake? In about two ticks I should sink to the level of a fifth-rate power. Yes, I know. You're going to say why don't I get rid of her?'
'Exactly,' said Lord Ickenham, who was. It seemed to his alert mind the logical solution.
'How can I? I can't throw her out on her—'
'Please, Johnny! There are gentlemen present'
'Ear.'
'Oh – ear. Sorry. But couldn't you pension her off?'
'What with?'
'Surely she would not want a fortune. A couple of quid or so a week
'I know exactly what she wants. Five hundred pounds.'
'In a lump sum?'
'Cash down.'
'It seems unusual. I should have thought a weekly dole
A sort of frozen calm descended on Johnny Pearce, the calm of despair.
'Let me tell you my story, omitting, as you say, no detail, however slight. I did offer her a weekly dole.'
And she refused?'
'No, she accepted. That was when I felt justified in proposing to Bunny. I ought to have told you, by the way, that she's engaged to the policeman.'
'Bunny?'
'Nannie.'
'Oh, Nannie. What policeman would that be?'
'The one in the village. There's only one. His name's McMurdo.'
'Short-sighted chap?'
'Not that I know of. Why?'
'I was only thinking that it would be very difficult to be attracted to Nannie Bruce while seeing her steadily and seeing her whole. However, that is neither here nor there. Policemen are paid to take these risks. Proceed with your narrative.'
'Where was I?'
'You had just offered her a weekly sum, and she had accepted it. Which sounds to me like the happy ending, though obviously for some reason it was not. What came unstuck?'
'McMurdo won a football pool last winter. Five hundred pounds.'
'And why was that a disaster?' asked Lord Ickenham, for his godson had made this announcement in a hollow voice and was looking as if his was the head upon which all the ends of the world had come. 'I could do with winning a football pool myself Wasn't Nannie pleased?'
'No, she wasn't. Her pride was touched, and she said she wasn't going to marry any man who had five hundred quid salted away unless she had the same amount herself. She said her aunt Emily had no money and married a man with a goodish bit of it and he treated her like an orphan child. She had to go to him for everything. If she wanted a new hat, he'd say hadn't he bought her a hat only five or six years ago and get off nasty cracks about women who seemed to think they'd married into the Rothschild family. None of that for her, Nannie said.'
'But, dash it, my dear Johnny, the two cases are entirely different. Musing on Emily, one draws in the breath sharply and drops a silent tear, but Nannie, with a weekly income, wouldn't be in her position at all. She would be able to make whatever kind of splash seemed fit to her. Didn't you point that out to the fatheaded woman?'
'Of course I did, but do you think it's possible to make Nannie see reason, once her mind's made up? Either she had five hundred pounds, or all bets were off. That was final. And that's how matters stand today,' said Johnny.
He dug the pen into Inspector Jervis's latest bit of dialogue once more and resumed.
'I thought I saw a way of straightening things out. It meant taking a chance, but it was no moment for prudence and caution. Did you read that last book of mine, Inspector Jervis at Bay?'
'Well, what with one thing and another, trying to catch up with my Proust and Kafka and all that—'
'Don't apologize. The British Isles are stiff with people who didn't read it. You see them on every side. But there were enough who did to enable me to make a hundred and eleven pounds six and threepence out of it.'
'Nice going.'
'So I took the hundred and put it on an outsider in the Derby. Ballymore.'
'My unhappy lad! Beaten by Moke the Second after a photo finish.'
'Yes, if it had had a longer nose, my troubles would have been at an end.'
'And you have no other means of raising that five hundred?'
'Not that I can see.'
'How about the furniture?'
'I've come to the end of the things I'm allowed to sell. All the rest are heirlooms, except the fake walnut cabinet, of course, Great-Uncle Walter's gift to Hammer Hall.'
'That eyesore!'
'I can sell that without getting slapped into gaol. I'm putting it up for auction soon. It might fetch a fiver.'
'From somebody astigmatic.'
'But, as you are about to point out, that would still leave me short four hundred and ninety-five. Oh, hell! Have you ever robbed a bank, Uncle Fred?'
'Not that I can recall. Why?'
'I was just thinking that that might be the simplest way out. But, with my luck, if I bust the Bank of England, I'd find they hadn't got five hundred quid in the safe. Still, there's always one consolation.'
'What's that?'
'It'll be all the same in a hundred years. And now, if you don't mind buzzing off and leaving me, I'll be getting back to Inspector Jervis.'
'Yes, it's time that I was moving. Th
e Big Chief said I was on no account to fail to go and pay my respects to Beefy Bastable, and I want to have a chat with my old friend Albert Peasemarch. Lots of thread-picking-up to be done. I shall be back in an hour or so and shall then be wholly at your disposal.'
'Not that there's a damn thing you can do.'
'It is always rash to say that about an Ickenham. We are not easily baffled. I agree that your problem undoubtedly presents certain features of interest, but I am confident that after turning it over in my mind I shall be able to find a formula.'
'You and your formulas!'
All right, me and my formulas. But wait. That is all I say – wait.'
And with a wave of the hand and a kindly warning to his godson not to take any wooden nickels, Lord Ickenham tilted his hat slightly to one side and set off across the park to Hammer Lodge.
CHAPTER 9
There was a thoughtful frown on Lord Ickenham's brow and a pensive look in his eye as he skirted the lake, on the other side of which the grounds of Hammer Lodge lay. A cow was paddling in the shallows, and normally he would have paused to throw a bit of stick at it, but now he hurried on, too preoccupied to do the civil thing.
He was concerned about Johnny. His story would have made it plain to a far less intelligent godfather that the lad was in a spot. He was not on intimate terms with Nannie Bruce, but he was sufficiently acquainted with her personality to recognize the impossibility, once her mind was made up, of persuading her to change it. If Nannie Bruce wanted five hundred pounds cash down, she would get five hundred pounds cash down, or no wedding bells for Officer McMurdo. And as Johnny did not possess five hundred pounds, the situation had all the earmarks of an impasse. It is not too much to say that, though his hat was on the side of his head and his walk as jaunty as ever, Lord Ickenham, as he rang the front door bell of Hammer Lodge and was admitted by his friend Albert Peasemarch, was mourning in spirit.
Butlers come in three sizes – the large, the small, and the medium. Albert Peasemarch was one of the smalls. Short and somewhat overweight for his height, he had a round, moonlike face, in which were set, like currants in a suet dumpling, two brown eyes. A captious critic, seeing, as captious critics do, only the dark side, would have commented on the entire absence from these eyes of anything like a gleam of human intelligence: but to anyone non-captious this would have been amply compensated for by their kindliness and honesty. His circle of friends, while passing him over when they wanted someone to explain the Einstein Theory to them, knew that, if they were in trouble, they could rely on his help. True, this help almost invariably made things worse than they had been, for if there was a way of getting everything muddled up, he got it, but his intentions were excellent and his heart in the right place.
His face, usually disciplined to a professional impassivity, melted into a smile of welcome as he recognized the visitor.
'Oh, good evening, m'lord.'
'Hullo, Bert. You're looking very roguish. Is the old folk at home?'
'Sir Raymond is in his study, m'lord, but a gentleman is with him at the moment – a Mr Carlisle.'
'I know the chap you mean. He's probably trying to sell him a ruby ring. Well, then, if the big shot is tied up in conference, we've nice time for a spot of port in your pantry, and very agreeable it will be after a hot and dirty journey. You haven't run short of port?'
'Oh, no, m'lord. If you will step this way, m'lord.'
'California, as you might say, here I come. This,' said Lord Ickenham some moments later, 'is the real stuff. The poet probably had it in mind when he spoke of the port of heaven. "If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port of heaven an' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago." Sir Henry Newbolt. Drake's Drum. Are you familiar with Drake's Drum? But of course you are. What am I thinking of? I've heard you sing it a dozen times round the old camp fire in our Home Guard days.'
'I was always rather partial to Drake's Drum, m'lord.'
'And how you belted the stuffing out of it! It was like hearing a Siberian wolf-hound in full cry after a Siberian wolf. I remember thinking at the time how odd it is that small men nearly always have loud, deep voices. I believe midgets invariably sing bass. Very strange. Nature's law of compensation, no doubt.'
'Very possibly, m'lord.'
Lord Ickenham, who had been about to sip, lowered his glass with a reproachful shake of the head.
'Now listen, Bert. This "M'lord" stuff. I've been meaning to speak to you about it. I'm a Lord, yes, no argument about that, but you don't have to keep rubbing it in all the time. It's no good kidding ourselves. We know what lords are. Anachronistic parasites on the body of the state, is the kindest thing you can say of them. Well, a sensitive man doesn't like to be reminded every half second that he is one of the untouchables, liable at any moment to be strung up on a lamp post or to have his blood flowing in streams down Park Lane. Couldn't you substitute something matier and less wounding to my feelings?'
'I could hardly call your lordship "Ickenham".'
'I was thinking of "Freddie".'
'Oh, no, m'lord.'
'Then how about "old man" or "cully"?'
'Certainly not, m'lord. If your lordship would not object to "Mr I"?'
'The ideal solution. Well, Bert, how are things in the home now? Not much improvement, I gather from your letters. Our mutual friend still a little terse with the flesh and blood, eh?'
'It is not for me to criticize Sir Raymond.'
'Don't come the heavy butler over me, Bert. This meeting is tiled. You may speak freely.'
'Then I must say that I consider that he treats Madam very badly, indeed.'
'Bellows at her?'
'Almost daily, Mr I.'
'They will bring their court manner into private life, these barristers. I was in court once and heard Beefy cross-examining a meek little man who looked like Bill the Lizard in Alice in Wonderland. I forget what the actual words were, but the fellow piped up with some perfectly harmless remark, and Beefy fixed him with a glittering eye and thundered "Come, come, sir, don't attempt to browbeat me!" And he's still like that in the home, is he?'
'More so now than ever before. Madam is distressed because Mr Cosmo has written this book there is so much talk about. She disapproves of its moral tone. This makes her cry a good deal.'
And he ticks her off?'
'Most violently. Her tears appear to exasperate him. I sometimes feel I can't bear it any longer.'
'Why don't you hand in your portfolio?'
And leave her? I couldn't.'
Lord Ickenham looked at him keenly. His host's face, usually, like Oily Carlisle's, an expressionless mask, was working with an odd violence that made him seem much more the Home Guardsman of years ago than the butler of today.
'Hullo!' he said. 'What's this?'
Albert Peasemarch remained for a moment in the process of what is commonly known as struggling for utterance. Finding speech at length, he said in a low, hoarse voice very different from the one he employed when rendering Drake's Drum:
'I love her, Mr I.'
It always took a great deal to surprise Lord Ickenham. Where another man, hearing this cry from the heart, might have leaped in his chair and upset his glass of port, he merely directed at the speaker a look full of sympathy and understanding. His personal feeling that loving Phoebe Wisdom was a thing beyond the scope of the most determined Romeo he concealed. It could, apparently, be done.
'My poor old Bert,' he said. 'Tell me all. When did you feel this coming on?'
A dreamy look came into Albert Peasemarch's eye, the look of one who tenderly relives the past.
'It was our rheumatism that first brought us together,' he said, his voice trembling a little.
Lord Ickenham cocked an enquiring eyebrow.
'I'm not sure I quite got that. Rheumatism, did you say?'
'Madam suffers from it in the left shoulder, and I have it in the right leg, and we fell into the habit of discussing it. Every morning Madam would say "And ho
w is your rheumatism, Peasemarch?" and I would tell her, and I would say "How is your rheumatism, madam?" and she would tell me. And so it went on.'
'I see. Swapping gossip from the lazar house. Yes, I understand. Naturally, if you tell a woman day after day about the funny burning feeling in your right leg, and she tells you about the curious shooting sensation in her left shoulder, it forms a bond.'
'And then last winter
'Yes—?'
A reverent note crept into Albert Peasemarch's voice. 'Last winter I had influenza. Madam nursed me throughout my illness.'
'Smoothed your pillow? Brought you cooling drinks?'
And read Agatha Christie to me. And something came right over me, Mr I, and I knew that it was love.'
Lord Ickenham was silent for some moments, sipping his port and turning this revelation over in his mind. It still puzzled him that anyone could have had the divine spark touched off in him by Phoebe Wisdom. In a vague way, though he knew her to be more than a decade younger than himself, he had always regarded her as many years his senior. She looked, he considered, about eighty. But presumably she did not look eighty to Albert Peasemarch, and, even if she did, a woman who for years had kept house for Beefy Bastable was surely entitled to look a hundred.
His heart went out to Albert Peasemarch. Dashed unpleasant it must be, he was feeling, for a butler to fall in love with the chatelaine of the establishment. Having to say 'Yes, madam,' 'Very good, madam,' 'The carriage waits, madam' and all that sort of thing, when every fibre of his being was urging him to tell her that she was the tree on which the fruit of his life hung and that for her sake he would pluck the stars from the sky, or whatever it is that butlers say when moved by the fire within. A state of affairs, Lord Ickenham thought, which would give him personally the pip. He resolved to do all that in him lay – and on these occasions there was always quite a lot that in him lay – to push the thing along and bring sweetness and light into these two at present sundered lives.