Pigs Have Wings (6 page)

‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘From this moment you abstain from all alcoholic beverages.’

‘Sir!’

‘You heard. No more fuddling yourself in tap rooms. I want you keen, alert, up on your toes.’

George Cyril Wellbeloved swallowed painfully, like an ostrich swallowing a brass door-knob.

‘When you say alcoholic beverages, sir, you don’t mean beer?’

‘I do mean beer.’

‘No beer?’

‘No beer.’

‘No
beer
?’

‘Not a drop.’

George Cyril Wellbeloved opened his mouth, and for a moment it seemed as if burning words were about to proceed from it. Then, as though struck by a thought, he checked himself.

‘Very good, sir,’ he said meekly.

Sir Gregory gave him a keen glance.

‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking you’ll be able to sneak off on the sly and lower yourself to the level of the beasts of the field without my knowing it. Well, you won’t. I shall give strict orders to the landlords of the various public-houses in Market Blandings that you are not to be served, and as I am on the licensing board, I think these orders will be respected. What beats me,’ said Sir Gregory virtuously, ‘is why you fellers want to go about swilling and soaking. Look at me. I never touch the stuff. All right, that’s all. Push off.’

Droopingly, like a man on whose horizon there is no ray of light, George Cyril Wellbeloved, having given his employer one long, sad, reproachful look, left the room, taking some, but not all, of the pig smell with him. A few moments after the door had closed behind him, Lady Constance’s telephone call came through.

‘Matchingham 8–30?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sir Gregory?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is your blister still painful?’

‘Yes.’

‘I did tell you to prick it, didn’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘With a needle. Not a pin. Pins are poisonous. I think they are made of brass, though I must say they don’t
look
as if they were made of brass. But what I rang up about was this other trouble of yours. Gloria, you know. The dieting, you know. The exercises, you know.’

Sir Gregory said he knew.

‘All that sort of thing cannot be good for you at your age.’

Sir Gregory, who was touchy on the subject, would have liked to ask what she meant by the expression ‘your age’, but he was given no opportunity to do so. Like most female telephonists, Lady Constance was not easy to interrupt.

‘I couldn’t bear to think of you having to go through all that dieting and exercising, because I do think it is so dangerous for a man of your age. A man of your age needs plenty of nourishing food, and there is always the risk of straining yourself seriously. A distant connexion of ours, one of the Hampshire Wilberforces, started touching his toes before breakfast, and he had some sort of a fit. Well, I don’t know how I came to forget it when you were here this afternoon, but just after you had left, I suddenly remembered seeing an advertisement in the paper the other day of a new preparation someone had just invented for reducing the weight. Have you heard of it? Slimmo they call it, and it sounds excellent. Apparently it contains no noxious or habit-forming drugs and is endorsed by leading doctors, who are united in describing it as a safe and agreeable medium for getting rid of superfluous flesh. It seems to me that, if it is as good as they say, you would be able to do what Gloria wants without all that dieting and exercising which had such a bad effect on that distant connexion of ours. Rupert Wilberforce it was – a sort of second cousin I suppose you would have called him – he married one of the Devonshire Fairbairns. He was a man getting on in years – about your age – and when he found he was putting on weight, he allowed himself to be persuaded by a thoughtless friend to touch his toes fifty times before breakfast every morning. And on the third morning he did not come down to breakfast, and they went up to his room, and there he was writhing on the floor in dreadful agonies. His heart had run into his liver. Slimmo. It comes in the small bottles and the large economy size. I do wish you would try it. You can get it in Market Blandings, for, by an odd coincidence, the very day I read about it in the paper I saw some bottles in Bulstrode’s window, the chemist in the High Street. It’s curious how often that happens, isn’t it? I mean, seeing a thing and then seeing it again almost directly afterwards. Oh, Clarence! I was speaking to Clarence, Sir Gregory. He has just come in and is bleating about something. What
is
it, Clarence? You want what? He wants to use the telephone, Sir Gregory, so I must ring off. Good-bye. You won’t forget the name, will you. Slimmo. I suggest the large economy size.’

Sir Gregory removed his aching ear from the receiver and hung up.

For some moments after silence had come like a poultice to heal the blows of sound, all that occupied his mind was the thought of what pests the gentler sex were when they got hold of a telephone. The instrument seemed to go to their heads like a drug. Connie Keeble, for instance. Nice sensible woman when you talked to her face to face, never tried to collar the conversation and all that, but the moment she got on the telephone, it was gab, gab, gab, and all about nothing.

Then suddenly he was asking himself whether his late hostess’s spate of words had, after all, been so devoid of significance as in his haste he had supposed. Like most men trapped on the telephone by a woman, he had allowed his attention to wander a good deal during the recent monologue, but his subconscious self had apparently been drinking it in all the time, for now it brought up for his inspection the word Slimmo and then a whole lot of interesting stuff about what Slimmo was and what it did. And it was not long before it had put him completely abreast of the thing.

The idea of achieving his ends by means of an anti-fat specific had not previously occurred to Sir Gregory. But now that this alternative had presented itself, it became more attractive the longer he mused on it. The picture of himself, with a tankard of Slimmo at his elbow, sailing into the starchy foods with impunity intoxicated him.

There was but one obstacle in the way of this felicity. Briefly, in order to start filling the wassail bowl with Slimmo, you have first to get the bally stuff, and Sir Gregory, a sensitive man, shrank from going into a shop and asking for it. He feared the quick look of surprise, the furtive glance at the waist-line and the suppressed – or possibly not suppressed – giggle.

Then what to do?

‘Ha!’ said Sir Gregory, suddenly inspired.

He pressed the bell, and a few moments later Binstead, his butler, entered.

We have heard of Binstead before, it will be remembered. He was the effervescent sportsman who electrified the tap room of the Emsworth Arms by bounding in and offering five to one on his employer’s pig. It is interesting to meet him now in person.

Scrutinizing him, however, we find ourselves unimpressed. This Binstead was one of those young, sprightly butlers, encountering whom one feels that in the deepest and holiest sense they are not butlers at all, but merely glorified footmen. He had none of Beach’s measured majesty, but was slim and perky. He looked – though, to do him justice, he had never yet actually proceeded to that awful extreme – as if at any moment he might start turning cart-wheels or sliding down the banisters. And when we say that he was often to be found of an evening playing ha’penny nap with George Cyril Wellbeloved and similar social outcasts and allowing them to address him as ‘Herb’, we think we have said everything.

‘Sir?’ said this inadequate juvenile.

Sir Gregory coughed. Even now it was not going to be easy.

‘Er, Binstead,’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard of Slimmo?’

‘No, sir.’

‘It’s some sort of stuff you take. Kind of medicine, if you see what I mean, endorsed by leading doctors. A distant connexion of mine … one of the Hampshire Wilberforces … has asked me to get him some of it. I want you to telephone to Bulstrode in the High Street and tell him to send up half a dozen bottles.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Tell him the large economy size,’ said Sir Gregory.

There had been a grave, set look on the face of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood as he stumped away from the tea table on the terrace, and it was still there when, after considerable moody meditation in the grounds, he turned into the corridor that led to Beach’s pantry. In the battle of wills which had recently terminated he had not come off any too well. The trouble about talking to a sister like a Dutch uncle is that she is very apt to come right back at you and start talking to you like a Dutch aunt. This is what had happened to Gally at his interview with Lady Constance, and an immediate exchange of ideas with Shropshire’s shrewdest butler seemed to him essential.

Entering the pantry, he found only Penny there. Her letter finished, she had gone off, as she so often did, to sit at the feet of one whose society, ever since she had come to the castle, had been a constant inspiration to her. Right from the start of her visit to Blandings Castle, the younger daughter of Mr Donaldson of Donaldson’s Dog Joy had recognized in Sebastian Beach a soul-mate and a buddy.

In the butler’s absence she was endeavouring to fraternize with his bullfinch, a bird of deep reserves who lived in a cage on the table in the corner. So far, however, she had been unsuccessful in her efforts to find a formula.

‘Oh, hello, Gally,’ she said. ‘Listen, what do you say to a bullfinch?’

‘How are you, bullfinch?’

‘To make it whistle, I mean.’

‘Ah, there you take me into deep waters. But I didn’t come here to talk about bullfinches, whether whistling or strongly silent. Where’s Beach?’

‘Gone into Market Blandings. The chauffeur took him.’

‘Dash the man. What did he want to go gadding off to Market Blandings for?’

‘Why shouldn’t he go gadding off to Market Blandings? The poor guy’s got a right to see a little life now and then. He’ll be back soon.’

‘He should never have left his post.’

‘Why, what’s the matter?’

‘This pig situation.’

‘What pig situation would that be?’

Gally passed a careworn hand over his brow.

‘I’d forgotten you weren’t there when Clarence broke the big story. You had left to go and write to that young man of yours … Dale, Hale, Gale, whatever his name is.’

‘Vail.’

‘Oh, Vail.’

‘One of the Loamshire Vails. You must learn to call him Jerry. So what happened after I left?’

‘Clarence appeared, buffeted by the waves and leaking at every seam like the Wreck of the Hesperus. He had just been talking to that hell-hound.’

‘What hell-hound?’

‘Sir Gregory Parsloe.’

‘Oh yes, the character who keeps taking off his shoes. Who is Sir Gregory Parsloe?’

‘Good God! Don’t you know that?’

‘I’m a stranger in these parts.’

‘I’d better begin at the beginning.’

‘Much better.’

If there was one thing Gally prided himself on – and justly – it was his ability to tell a story. Step by step he unfolded his tale, omitting no detail however slight, and it was not long before Penny had as complete a grasp of the position of affairs as any raconteur could have wished. When, after stressing the blackness of Sir Gregory Parsloe’s soul in a striking passage, he introduced the Queen of Matchingham motif into his narrative and spoke of the guerrilla warfare which must now inevitably ensue, fraught with brooding peril not only to Lord Emsworth’s dreams and ambitions but to the bank balances of himself and Beach, she expressed her concern freely.

‘This Parsloe sounds a hot number.’

‘As hot as mustard. Always was. Remind me to tell you some time how he nobbled my dog Towser on the night of the rat contest. But you have not heard the worst. We now come to the Simmons menace.’

‘What’s that?’

‘In your ramblings about the grounds and messuages do you happen to have seen a large young female in trousers who looks like an all-in wrestler? That is Monica Simmons, Clarence’s pig girl. Her high mission is to look after the Empress. Until recently the latter’s custodian was a gnome-like but competent old buffer of the name of Pott. But he won a football pool and turned in his seal of office, upon which my sister Connie produced the above Simmons out of her hat and insisted on Clarence engaging her. When this Queen of Matchingham thing came up, Clarence and I agreed that it would be insanity to leave the Empress’s fortunes in the hands of a girl like that. Simmons must go, we decided, and as Clarence hadn’t the nerve to tackle Connie about it, I said I would. I’ve just been tackling her.’

‘With what result?’

‘None. She dug her feet in and put her ears back and generally carried on like a Grade A deaf adder. And what do you think?’

‘What?’

‘Clarence had told me that Connie’s interest in this Simmons was due to the fact that she, the Simmons, was tied up in some way with someone Connie wanted to oblige. Who do you suppose that someone is?’

‘Not Parsloe?’

‘None other. Parsloe himself. In person, not a picture. The girl is his cousin.’

‘Gosh!’

‘You may well say “Gosh!”. The peril would be ghastly enough if we were merely up against a Parsloe weaving his subtle schemes in his lair at Matchingham Hall. But Parsloe with a cousin in our very citadel, a cousin enjoying free access to the Empress, a cousin whose job it is to provide the Empress with her daily bread … Well, dash it, if you see what I mean.’

‘I certainly do see what you mean. Dash it is right.’

‘What simpler than for Parsloe to issue his orders to this minion and for the minion to carry them out?’

‘Easy as falling off a log.’

‘It’s an appalling state of things.’

‘Precipitates a grave crisis. What are you going to do?’

‘That’s what I came to see Beach about. We’ve got to have a staff conference. Ah, here he comes, thank goodness.’

Outside, there had become audible the booming sound of a bulky butler making good time along a stone-flagged corridor. The bullfinch, recognizing the tread of loved feet, burst into liquid song.