Nothing Serious (3 page)

Why,
then, should he not get Valerie on the ‘phone, ask her out for a bite of
supper, and having lushed her up as far as his modest resources would permit
plead with her to forgive and forget?

Bingo
is a chap who knows a ball of fire when he sees one, and that this idea was a
ball of fire he had no doubts whatever. He sped to the telephone booth,
established communication, and a few minutes later the deal had been clinched.
The girl checked up immediately on his proposition of a slab of supper, and
suggested Mario’s popular restaurant as the
mise en scène.

“Okay,
Valerie, old crumpet,” said Bingo, infinitely relieved. “Eleven-fifteen at
Mario’s then.”

So far
so good. A smooth bit of work. But it did not take Bingo long to realise that
before the revels could begin there was one rather tricky hurdle to be
surmounted. Nannie Byles, like the night, had a thousand eyes, and some pretty
adroit manoeuvring would be required if he was to get out of the house without
her spotting him. He had no desire to be called upon to explain to Mrs Bingo on
her return what he had been doing oozing off the premises in the soup and fish
at half-past ten p.m. The statement that he had been on his way to give Valerie
Twistleton a morsel of supper in her absence would, he felt, not go any too well.

Thinking
quick, he saw the policy to pursue. Immediately upon arrived he touched the
bell and desired the parlourmaid to inform La Byles that he would be glad of a
word with her. And when the latter hove alongside, she found him lying on the
sofa, a limp, interesting figure.

“Oh,
Nannie,” he said, speaking faintly, “I think I had better not come and hobnob
with Algernon Aubrey to-night. I have a strange all-overish feeling,
accompanied by floating spots before the eyes, and it may be catching. Explain
the circumstances to him, give him my best and say I shall hope to see him
to-morrow.

I,
meanwhile, will be popping straight up to bed and turning in.” Well, of course,
the Byles wanted to ‘phone Mrs Bingo and summon medical aid and all that, but
he managed to head her off and they eventually settled for a basin of gruel and
a hot-water bottle. When these had been delivered at the bedside, Bingo said,
still speaking faintly, that he didn’t want to be disturbed again as his aim
was to get a refreshing sleep.

After
that everything was pretty smooth. At about ten-thirty he got up, hopped out of
the window, eased himself down the water-pipe, was fortunate enough after
waiting a short while at the garden gate to grab a passing taxi, and precisely
at eleven-fifteen he alighted at the door of Mario’s. And a few minutes later
along blew Valerie Twistleton looking charming in some soft, clinging substance
which revealed the slender lines of her figure, and the show was on.

Since
the days when he had kissed her under the mistletoe at the Wilkinson’s
Christmas party there had come to exist between Bingo and this girl one of
those calm, platonic friendships which so often occur when the blood has cooled
and passion waned. Their relations now were such that he would be able to talk
to her like a kindly elder brother. And as soon as he had headed her off from
ordering champagne by persuading her that this wine is better avoided, causing
as it does acidity and often culminating in spots, it was like a kindly elder
brother that he jolly well intended to talk to her.

On his
way to the restaurant he had debated whether to lead up to the subject of
Horace by easy stages, but when they were seated at their table with a bottle
of sound and inexpensive hock between them he decided to skip preliminaries and
snap straight into the agenda.

“Well,
I met your future bread-winner at the Drones this morning,” he said. “We might
drink a toast to him, what, with a hey nonny nonny and a hot cha-cha. Horace
Davenport,” said Bingo, raising his glass.

A quick
frown disfigured Valerie Twistleton’s delicate brow. The state of Bingo’s
finances had precluded the serving of oysters, but had these been on the bill
of fare you would have supposed from her expression and manner that the girl
had bitten into a bad one.

“Don’t
mention that sub-human gargoyle’s name in my presence,” she replied with
considerable evidence of feeling.

“And
don’t allude to him as my future bread-winner. The wedding is off. I am through
with Horace Pendlebury-by-golly-Davenport, and if he trips on a banana skin and
breaks his bally neck, it will be all right with me.”

Bingo
nodded. With subtle skill he had got the conversation just where he wanted it.

“Yes,
he rather gave me to understand that there had been a certain modicum of rift-within-the-lute-ing,
but he did not go into details. What seemed to be the trouble?”

A
brooding look came into Valerie Twistleton’s eyes. She gnashed her teeth
slightly.

“I’ll
tell you,” she said. “He had come round to our house and we were in the drawing-room
chatting of this and that, and I happened to ask him to lie down on the floor
and let Cyril, my cocker spaniel, nibble his nose, which the little angel
loves. He said he wouldn’t, and I said, ‘Oh, come on. Be a sport’, and he said ‘No,
he was blowed if he was going to be a stooge for a cocker spaniel’. It ended
with my digging out his letters and presents and handing them to him, together
with the ring and his hat.”

Bingo t’ck-t’ck-t’ck-ed,
and the girl asked him what he was t’ck-t’ck-t’ck-ing about.

“Wasn’t
I right?” she demanded passionately. “Wasn’t I ethically justified?”

Bingo
started to be the kindly elder brother.

“We
must always strive,” he urged, “to look at these things from the other chap’s
point of view. Horace’s, you must remember, is a sensitive, high strung
nature. Many sensitive, high strung natures dislike being the supporting cast
for cocker spaniels. Consider for a moment what his position would have been
had he agreed to your proposal. The spaniel would have hogged all the comedy, leaving
him to all intents and purposes painted on the back drop. Not a pleasant
situation for a proud man.”

If
Valerie Twistleton had been a shade less pretty, one would say that she
snorted.

“As if
that was the trouble! Do you think I can’t read between the lines? He just
grabbed at that spaniel sequence as a pretext for severing diplomatic
relations. Obviously what has happened is that he has gone and fallen in love
with another girl and has been dying for an excuse to get rid of me. I wish you
wouldn’t laugh like a pie-eyed hyæna.”

Bingo
explained that his reason for laughing like a pie-eyed hyæna was that he had
been tickled by an amusing coincidence. Horace Davenport, he said, had made
precisely the same charge against her.

“His
view is that your affections are engaged elsewhere and that your giving him the
bum’s rush on account of his civil disobedience
in re
the cocker
spaniel was simply a subterfuge. I happened to jot down his words, if you would
care to hear them. ‘I maintain,’ said Horace, ‘that no girl would have handed a
man his hat for a trifle as mere as that, unless she had already decided to
hitch on elsewhere and was looking out for a chance of giving him the gate’.”

The
girl stared, wide-eyed.

“He
must be crazy. ‘Decided to hitch on elsewhere’, forsooth. If I live a million
years, I shall never love anyone but Horace. From the very moment we met I knew
he was what the doctor had ordered. I don’t chop and change. When I give my
heart, it stays given. But he’s not like me. He is a flitting butterfly and a
two-timing Casanova. I’m sure there’s another girl.”

“Your
view, then, is that he is tickled pink to be freed from his obligations?”

“Yes,
it is.”

“Then
why,” said Bingo, whipping the ace of trumps from his sleeve, “was he looking
this morning when I met him at the Drones like a living corpse out of Edgar
Allan Poe?”

Valerie
Twistleton started.

“Was he?”

“You
bet he was. And talking about his heart being broken. Have you ever seen those ‘before
taking’ pictures in the patent medicine advertisements?”

“Yes.”

“Horace,”
said Bingo. “He looked like a stretcher case in the last stages of lumbago,
leprosy, galloping consumption and the botts.”

He
paused, and noted that a misty film had dimmed the incandescence of his
companion’s eyes. Valerie Twistleton’s lips were trembling, and the bit of
chicken which she had been raising to her mouth fell from her listless fork.

“The
poor old slob,” she murmured.

Bingo
saw that the moment had come to sew up the contract. Striking while the iron is
hot is, I believe, the expression.

“Then
you will forgive him?”

“Of
course.”

“All
will be as it was before?”

“If
anything, more so.”

“Fine,”
said Bingo. “I’ll go and call him up and tell him. No doubt he will be round
here with his foot in his hand within ten minutes of getting the glad news.”

He had
sprung to his feet and was about to dash to the telephone but the girl stopped
him.

“No,”
she said.

Bingo
goggled.

“No?”
he repeated. “How do you mean, no?”

She
explained.

“He
must have at least a couple of days in which to brood and yearn. So that the
lesson can sink in, if you see what I mean. What one aims at is to get it
firmly into his nut that he can’t go chucking his weight about whenever he
feels like it. I love him more than words can tell, but we must have discipline.”

Bingo
was now stepping around like a cat on hot bricks. His agony was, as you may
imagine, considerable.

“But
the Darts tournament is to-morrow morning.”

“What
Darts tournament?”

“The
Drones Club’s annual fixture. For a Horace with his mind at rest it is a
sitter, but for a heartbroken Horace not a hope. If you don’t believe me, let
me quote his own words. ‘You can’t aim darts when your heart is broken,’ he
said, and I wish you could have heard the pain and anguish in his voice. ‘My
eyes will be so dim with unshed tears’, he said, ‘that I doubt if I’ll be able
to get a single double’.”

“Well,
what does a potty Darts tournament matter?”

And
Bingo was just drawing a deep breath before starting into explain to her in
moving words just how much this Darts tournament mattered to him, when the top
of his head suddenly came off and shot up to the ceiling.

That is
to say, he felt as if it had done so. For at this moment there came to his
ears, speaking loudly and authoritatively from the direction of the door, a voice.

“Don’t
talk to me, young man,” it was saying. “I keep telling you that Master Richard
is in here somewhere, and I insist on seeing him. He has a nasty feverish cold
and I have brought him his woolly muffler.”

And
there on the threshold stood Nannie Byles. She was holding in her hand a woolly
muffler bearing the colours of the Drones Club and looking in an unfriendly way
at some sort of assistant head waiter who was endeavouring to bar her progress
into the restaurant.

I don’t
know if you ever came across a play of Shakespeare’s called Macbeth? If you
did, you may remember that this bird Macbeth bumps off another bird named
Banquo and gives a big dinner to celebrate, and picture his embarrassment when
about the first of the gay throng to show up is Banquo’s ghost, all merry and
bright, covered in blood. It gave him a pretty nasty start, Shakespeare does
not attempt to conceal.

But it
was nothing to the start Bingo got on observing Nannie Byles in his midst. He
felt as if he had been lolling in the electric chair at Sing-Sing and some
practical joker had suddenly turned on the juice. How the dickens she had
tracked him here he was at a loss to imagine. It could scarcely have been by
the sense of smell, and yet there didn’t seem any other explanation.

However,
he didn’t waste much time musing on that. This, he perceived, was a moment for
rapid action. There was a door just behind where he had been sitting, which
from the fact that waiters had been going in and out he took to be the entrance
to the service quarters. To press a couple of quid into Valerie Twistleton’s
hand to pay the bill with and leave her flat and do a swan dive backwards and
shoot through this emergency exit and slip a friendly native half a crown to
show him the way to the street was with him the work of an instant.

Five
minutes later he was in a taxi, bowling off to The Nook, Wimbledon Common.
Forty minutes later he was shinning up the water-pipe. Ten minutes later, clad
in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, he was at the telephone trying to get Horace.

But
Horace’s number was the silent tomb. The girl at the exchange said she had rung
and rung and rung, and Bingo said well, ring and ring and ring again. So she
rang and rang and rang again, but there was still no answer, and eventually
Bingo had to give it up and go to bed.

But it
was by no means immediately that he fell into a dreamless sleep. The irony of
the thing was like ants in the pants, causing him to toss restlessly on the
pillow.