A Pelican at Blandings (7 page)

'How do you mean?'

'You say you're in a spot. Why are you in a spot? Ask me,
you're sitting pretty. You're here, the picture's here, and all
you've got to do is swipe it.'

Wilbur's eyes widened. He uttered a low bronchial sound
like the croak of a bull frog. It is never easy for a man of slow
mind to assimilate a novel idea.

'Swipe it?' he said. 'Do you mean
swipe
it?'

'Sure. Why not? He as good as swiped it from you. You can
find out from the art gallery what he paid for it and reimburse
him, if that's the word.'

A gleam came into Wilbur's eyes, but it was only
momentary. He was able to recognize the suggestion as a good
one, but he knew that he was not the man to carry it out.

'I couldn't,' he said with something of the emphasis which
Lord Emsworth had employed while saying the same thing a
little earlier in the afternoon, and Vanessa reacted as she had
done on that occasion.

'Then I will,' she said, and Wilbur, like Lord Emsworth,
stared for a moment unbelievingly. In the days of their brief
engagement he had come to know Vanessa as a girl of
unconventional trend of thought, but she had never given him
a surprise of this magnitude.

'You really think you could do it?'

'Of course I can do it. It only wants thinking over. As a
matter of fact, I've got a glimmering of an idea already. I'm
only hesitating because it means bringing Chesney into it.'

'Who's Chesney?'

'Man who's staying at the castle. I'm pretty sure he's a crook,
but I'll have to be certain before I start anything. You don't
want to take chances with a thing of this kind.'

'You bet not.'

'I'll be able to tell when I've studied him a bit longer. I hope
he'll turn out to be what I think he is, for if there's one thing
that sticks out of this situation like a sore thumb, it is that His
Grace the Duke must not be allowed to pull quick ones on the
young and innocent and get away with it. And now,' said
Vanessa, 'let's dig that chauffeur out of the bar and be getting
along to the castle.'

Night had fallen when John got back to London. He found
Paddington still its refined and unruffled self, and his
forlorn aspect struck as discordant a note there as it had done
at the Emsworth Arms. Paddington porters like to see smiling
faces about them. They may feel pity for young men with
drawn brows and haggard eyes, but they prefer not to have to
associate with them, and this applies equally to guards, engine
drivers and the staff of the refreshment room. The whole
personnel of the station felt a sense of relief when he had
removed himself in a taxi and was on his way to Halsey Court
in the W.
I
. postal division, his London address.

His interview with Gally had deepened the despondency
with which he had set out on his journey to Shropshire. He
had been so certain that he would have received an invitation
to Blandings Castle, that essential preliminary to a reconciliation
with the girl whose gentle heart he had bruised with
all those 'Would it be fair to say's' and 'I suggest's' when
battling under the banner of G. G. Clutterbuck. Once at the
castle he would have been in a position to start pleading, and
by pleading he meant really pleading—omitting no word or act
that would lead to a peaceful settlement. Let him once get
Linda to the negotiating table, he had told himself, let her
once hear the tremolo in his voice and see the melting look in
his eyes, and all would have been well.

Gally's refusal to co-operate had come as a stunning blow,
dislocating his whole plan of campaign. Nor had Gally's
parting words done anything to raise his spirits. He had
spoken of playing on Linda as on a stringed instrument with
the confidence of a man who had been playing on girls as on
stringed instruments since early boyhood, but there was little
solace to be drawn from that. A third party can never accomplish
anything solid on these occasions. Delicate negotiations
between two sundered hearts cannot be conducted through an
agent; one needs the personal touch.

Halsey Court, when he reached it, set the seal on his
depression. It was a gloomy cul-de-sac full of prowling cats
and fluttering newspapers, almost its only merit being that
living there was cheap. Halsey Chambers, where he had had a
flat for the last two years, was a ramshackle building occupied
for the most part by young men trying to get along—
journalists like Jerry Shoesmith, at one time editor of that
seedy weekly paper
Society Spice,
and writers of novels of
suspense like Jeff Miller, the Rugger international. John had
inherited the latter's apartment when Jeff had married and
gone to live in New York, and with it Ma Balsam, the stout
motherly soul who had looked after him. She emerged from
the kitchen as he opened the front door, and he greeted her
with a 'Hullo, Ma' which he hoped did not sound too much
like a death rattle.

'Good evening, sir,' she said. 'So you're back. Did you have
a nice time in the country?'

John tightened his lips and held his breath and was thus
enabled to prevent the escape of the hollow laugh which had
tried to get out in response to this query. He had no wish to
reveal to this good woman that she was conversing with a
tortured soul, for let her find that this was the case and he
would be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of sympathy with which
at the moment he was incapable of coping. Ma Balsam when
in sympathetic vein could be stupefying.

'Very nice,' he said, having counted ten.

'Where was it you went?'

'Shropshire.'

'That's a long way.'

'Yes.'

'A good thing the weather kept up.'

'Yes.'

'So nasty if it comes on to rain when you're having a pleasure
trip in the country.'

'Yes.'

'Well,' said Ma Balsam, seeming to feel that what might be
called the pourparlers could now be considered completed, 'it's
a pity you weren't here, because that friend of yours, that Mr.
Ferguson, was trying to get you on the telephone all day.'

'I don't know any Ferguson.'

'Might have been Bostock. He's been to dinner here often.
Artistic-looking. High voice. Tortoiseshell-rimmed specs.'

'You don't mean Joe Bender?'

'That's the name. He's an artist or something.'

'He runs a picture gallery in Bond Street.'

'Well, he can't have been running it much today, because he
was on the buzzer all the time, asking for you. Very impatient
he was. Kept saying "For G's sake isn't he back yet?", and I had
to speak to him for using the expression "Oh, aitch!" when I
told him you wasn't. Last time he phoned, which wasn't more
than twenty minutes ago, he told me to get him the minute
you showed up. Like me to do it now?'

John weighed the question. His impulse was to answer it in
the negative. He was fond of Joe Bender and in normal
circumstances always enjoyed his company, but a man reeling
from a blow of the kind he had so recently received shrinks
from the society of even the closest of friends. Harrowing
though his thoughts were, tonight he wanted to be alone with
them.

Then his natural goodness of heart prevailed. Joe, he
reflected, would not have been telephoning so urgently unless
he were in some sort of trouble, and this being so he would
have to do the decent thing and let him come and cry on his
shoulder.

'Yes, do, Ma,' he said. 'I'm going to have a shower. If he
comes before I'm dressed, tell him to wait.'

When John reappeared, a good deal restored by his bath,
Joe Bender had arrived and was in conversation with Ma
Balsam, though conversation is not perhaps the right word for
what had been a monologue on her part, a series of grunts on
his. Like a good hostess, she drew John into their little circle.

'I've been telling Mister Who-is-it he doesn't look well,' she
said. 'Noticed it the minute he came in.'

Her eye had not deceived her. Joe Bender was looking
terrible. A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some
twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment
of having experienced at least that number of very hard
winters. He was even more haggard than John, so much so that
the latter, forgetting his own troubles, uttered a cry of concern.

'Good heavens, Joe! What's the matter?'

'Just what I was wondering,' said Ma Balsam. 'If you ask me,
he's coming down with something. He's got the same pasty
look Balsam had before he was stricken with whatever it was
and passed beyond the veil. Lost the use of his legs to begin
with,' she said as Joe Bender collapsed into a chair, 'and it
wasn't long after that that he came out in spots. We ought to
send for a doctor, Mister Who-is-it.'

'I don't want a doctor.'

'Then I'll go and heat you up a nice glass of hot milk,' said
Ma Balsam. She belonged to the school of thought which
holds that a nice glass of hot milk, while not baffling the death
angel altogether, can at least postpone the inevitable.

As the kitchen door closed behind her, Joe Bender heaved a
sigh of relief.

'I thought that woman would never go. Tell her I don't want
any damned milk.'

'Have a whisky and soda.'

'Yes, I'll do that. In fact, I shall need several.'

John went to the kitchen and came back successful, though
not without argument, in having countermanded the Ma
Balsam specific. 'He's liable to expire all over the floor,' she
warned, 'but have it your own way.'

'Now then,' he said. 'What's all this about?'

It is possible that had this meeting taken place earlier, Joe
Bender would have been in a frame of mind to break gently the
news he had come to impart, for he was a man of sensibility
who if compelled to give people shocks liked to do his best to
soften them. But a whole long day of ever-growing agitation
had sapped his morale. For an eternity, it seemed to him, he
had kept pent in what Shakespeare would have called his
stuffed bosom a secret calculated to stagger humanity or at
least that portion of humanity with the interests of the Bender
gallery at heart, and it came out with the abruptness of a cork
leaving a champagne bottle.

'That picture, John! It's a fake!'

It is also possible that if John had been less preoccupied with
his own tragedy, he would have grasped the import of these
words more readily. As it was, he merely stared.

'Picture? What picture?'

Joe Bender, too, stared. The eyes behind their tortoiseshell-rimmed
spectacles widened to their fullest capacity.

'What picture?' he echoed. He found it incredible that John
of all people should find it necessary to ask such a question.
There was only one picture in the world. 'The Robichaux. The
one we sold to the Duke. Don't you understand, dammit? It's
a fake. It's a forgery.'

He had no need to explain the situation further. John had
grasped it now, and it was as if Ma Balsam, not that she was
capable of such a thing, had crept up behind him and poured
a brimming beaker of ice water down his back. He would not
have thought such a thing possible, but he actually stopped
thinking of Linda Gilpin. It was an appreciable time before he
found speech, and when he did it was only to ask a fatuous
question.

'Are you sure?'

'Of course I'm sure. The real one had been vetted by
Mortimer Bayliss, who's about the best art critic in the world.
He said it was genuine, and when he says a picture's genuine,
that settles it.'

John was still far from understanding. He was clear as to
there being in circulation not one reclining nude from the
brush of the late Claude Robichaux, but two reclining nudes.
Beyond that he found himself in a fog, and he fell insensibly
into his professional manner when cross-examining a witness.

'Explain it from the beginning,' he said, only just refraining
from a 'Then will you kindly tell the jury'. 'Where did the one
you sold the Duke come from?'

'I bought it in Paris, from a couple of Rumanians who have
a small place near the Madeleine. I might have known,' said
Joe Bender bitterly. 'I ought to have asked myself "Bender, if
you were a forgery, where would you go?", and the answer
would have been "To a Rumanian art gallery".'

'And this other one, the genuine one?'

'My father had it before I took over the business. That's
what hurts so. It had been there all the time. I suppose Father
had been holding on to it, waiting for a rise in the market.'

'Then why—?'

'Because it had been sent to be cleaned. That's why I knew
nothing about it. It came back this morning. What on earth
are we going to do, John?'

'Explain to the Duke and give him the genuine one, I
suppose.'

'And have him spread the story everywhere that you can't
rely on anything you buy at the Bender Gallery because every
second thing they sell you is bound to be a forgery. We should
be ruined in a month, if not sooner. There's nothing so
vulnerable as a picture gallery. It lives on its reputation. That's
the last thing we must do. Fatal, absolutely fatal.'

'But we can't take his money under false pretences.'

'Of course not.'

'Then what?'

'We'll have to buy it back from him, probably for about
double what he paid us.'

'That's not a pleasant thought.'

'I don't like it myself.'

'And how do we explain our sudden switch from seller to
buyer?'

'I don't know.'

'He's bound to suspect a trap and put the price up even
higher than you said. I've been hearing a lot about the Duke of
Dunstable from my godfather, who has known him for years,
and one of the things I heard was that he always likes to get all
the money that's coming to him. We shan't have a penny left
after he's done with us. What we ought to do is smuggle the
forgery away and put the real picture in its place.'

'Yes?'

'Then everybody would be happy.'

'So they would. Smuggle the forgery away and put the real
picture in its place. Mind if I ask you something?'

'Go ahead.'

'How?'

John agreed that this was a good question, and there was a
silence of some duration. Joe Bender helped himself to another
whisky.

'Yes,' he said, 'that's what we must do, smuggle the forgery
away and put the real picture in its place. And we don't even
know where it is.'

'The Duke's got it.'

'And where's the Duke?'

'At Blandings Castle.'

'I hope he's having a wonderful time.'

'He's bound to have the picture with him.'

'And nothing simpler than to grab it. All we need is an
invitation to Blandings Castle.'

'My God!' cried John, so loudly that his voice penetrated to
Ma Balsamin the kitchen, causing her to shake her head sadly.
She felt that association with that Mister Who-is-it was
corrupting her employer.

Joe Bender was endeavouring to dry his trousers, on to
which the major portion of his whisky had fallen. That clarion
cry had startled him.

'Gally!' John shouted, and Ma Balsam shook her head
again. The expletive was new to her, but it sounded worse than
G or Aitch. 'Gally's at Blandings, too.'

'He is?' said Joe Bender. He had heard tales of Gally from
John, and the first time a faint light of hope flickered behind
his tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles. 'You mean—?'

'We can place the whole conduct of the thing in his hands
with the utmost confidence. It's the sort of job that's right up
his street. I'll go to Market Blandings first thing tomorrow and
give him full particulars.'

It was not, however, till the following afternoon that John was
at liberty to leave for Market Blandings. He had forgotten that
he had been briefed to appear in court in the morning on
behalf of Onapoulos and Onapoulos in their suit against the
Lincolnshire and Eastern Counties Glass Bottling Company,
and the sunlight was blotted still further from his life, when he
did so appear, by the fact that he lost his case, was rebuked by
the judge and harshly spoken to by both Onapouloses, who
held the view that it was only the incompetence of their
advocate that had prevented them winning by a wide margin.
When he caught the 2.33 train at Paddington, everybody there
winced at the sight of his haggard face. They thought he
looked even worse than when they had seen him last.