Summer Moonshine (16 page)

I
T
has been well said of Baronets that, although you may defeat them temporarily, you cannot keep them down. That the reverse which he had sustained at the hands of Mr Bulpitt in their struggle over the body of Adrian Peake would leave Sir Buckstone Abbott permanently crushed, accordingly, was scarcely to be expected. Where a knight or an O.B.E. might have cracked under the humiliating experience of being driven from the field of battle, he merely became fuller of the belligerent feeling that something had got to be done about this Bulpitt blighter, and done immediately.

Brooding on his brother-in-law in bed that night, he saw that the root of the trouble lay in the fact that the latter was as artful as a barrel load of monkeys, and that where he, Sir Buckstone, had make his mistake was in trying to cope unaided with that snaky brain. What he needed, it was now clear to him, was the assistance and co-operation of other brains, equally serpentine, and by noon on the following day his plans were formed. He sought out his daughter Jane and instructed her to have her Widgeon Seven in readiness as soon as possible after lunch, to drive him over to Walsingford. It was his intention to catch the two-fifty-seven express there, and go to London to confer with his lawyers.

He had a solid faith in the acumen of the Messrs. Boles, Boles, Wickett, Widgery and Boles, of Lincoln's Inn Fields, and was rather hoping that they might tell him that it would be quite in order for him to slip a couple of sticks of dynamite under the houseboat
Mignonette
and blow the bally thing to blazes.

Soon after two, in consequence, Jane was in the stable yard, putting the finishing touches of perfection to her loved one. And she had just twiddled at a nut with her spanner – for like all girls with a proper sense of duty toward their cars, she was a confirmed nut twiddler – and was starting to tighten it again, with a view to leaving it exactly as it had been before she touched it, when a shadow falling upon the flagstones at her side informed her that she was no longer alone and, looking up, she perceived Joe. He was gazing down at her with an expression that was half indulgent, like that of an affectionate father watching his idiot child disport itself, and half worshipping, as of one regarding a goddess.

'So here you are, young Ginger.'

'Yes,' said Jane.

She spoke a little brusquely, for she always disliked to be interrupted when communing with her Widgeon. Moreover, from the very inception of their acquaintance, Joe Vanringham had revealed himself as a man who proposed early and often, and she could see by his face, on which the worshipping expression had now begun to predominate to a rather marked extent, that he was about to propose again. This she wished, if possible, to prevent.

'Busy?'

'Very.'

He lighted a cigarette and surveyed her lovingly.

'What a messy little creature you are, to be sure,' he said. 'I suppose you know you've got a spot of oil on the tip of your nose?'

'I can wash it off.'

'But think of the wear and tear. Why put it there in the first place? What are you doing?'

'Working.'

'To some specific end, or just mucking around?'

'If you really want to know, Buck is going up to London, and I am getting the car ready to take him to Walsingford.'

Joe whistled.

'Walsingford, the Forbidden City? Are you really going to try to get there? No wonder you're tuning up the engine. Well, take plenty of pemmican, and be sure of your water supply. It was owing to the water giving out that Doctor Livingstone failed to get to Walsingford in '66. It's a pity, though.'

'Why?'

'I was hoping that you might have been free this afternoon to help me with a statue or two. The fascination of your society has caused me to fall behind in my work of late. The day before yesterday, snatching a few moments before breakfast, I moustached up as far as the tenth plug-ugly from the end, but yesterday was a blank day. However, the job is progressing.'

'That's nice.'

'I thought you would be pleased. Yes, I'm getting along. Several of them – notably Marcus Aurelius and the god Jupiter – outsmarted me by being already whiskered to the eyebrows, but I have had good results with Julius Caesar and Apollo, and should welcome your critical opinion. And now,' said Joe, 'to a more tender and sentimental subject.'

'Oh, golly!'

'You spoke?'

'I said "Oh, golly!"' Jane rose and tucked the spanner away in its box. Are you really going to start that all over again?'

'I don't know what you mean by "start all over again". I've never stopped. Haven't you noticed how I keep on asking you to marry me? Every day. As regular as clockwork.'

'And haven't you noticed how, every time you do it, I tell you I'm engaged to someone else?'

'That has not escaped me, but I don't pay very much attention to it. In the manuscripts I used to read for dear old Busby, until our paths separated, the heroine was always engaged to someone else at the start. I wish I could have brought along a few of those manuscripts.'

'Good stuff?'

'Terrific. From a man steeped in their contents as I am, no method of ensnaring the female heart is hidden. I know just how it's done. I shall rescue you from a burning house, or from drowning, or from bulls, or from mad dogs, or from tramps, or from runaway horses. Or I might save your kitten.'

'I haven't a kitten.'

'A kitten shall be provided. I tell you, young Ginger—'

'Do. . . not . . . call me Ginger.'

'I tell you, young Jane, it is hopeless for you to try to escape me. You are as good as walking up the aisle already. You shake your head? Just you wait. A time will come – and shortly – when you will be doing so in order to dislodge the deposits of rice and confetti which have gathered in your lovely hair. If I were you, I'd cease to struggle.'

'Oh, I think I'll go on.'

'Just as you please, of course. But you're wasting your time. I feel that nothing is too good for you, and I intend that you shall
have the best of husbands. And, believe me, you're going to get a pippin. One of the nicest chaps I know – loving, devoted, rich, fascinating—'

'Whom did you ever fascinate?'

'Whom didn't I? I bowl them over in their thousands. Did you notice Mrs Folsom at dinner last night?'

'What about her?'

'The way she looked at me when I was doing that balancing trick with the nut crackers and the wineglass. Poor, foolish moth, I said to myself.'

'I noticed the way Buck looked at you. He values that set of wineglasses.'

'It would take more than broken glassware to queer me with Buck.'

'He does seem fond of you, certainly. I wonder why?'

'That could have been phrased more tactfully. Yes, he esteems me as highly as I esteem him. Dear old Buck, there is nothing he would like better than to have me as a son-in-law, bless him.'

'What makes you think that?'

'He told me so, when I approached him yesterday to ask his formal permission to pay my addresses to you.'

'You didn't!'

'I certainly did. I'm old-fashioned. I disapprove of the casual modern practice of letting the girl's father in on the thing only in the vestry after the ceremony. Buck would simply love to have me as a son-in-law. But how can this be managed while you persist in that extraordinary habit of yours of refusing me every time I propose? I think I will now have another pop. You may have changed your mind since I last spoke.'

'I haven't.'

'You will eventually. Shall I draw a little picture for you? It is the opening night of my new play The curtain has fallen to the accompaniment of thunderous applause. The whisper passes from mouth to mouth, "Another Vanringham success! How does the fellow do it?" There are insistent cries of "Author! Author!" and in response a well-knit figure steps on to the stage. This turns out to be me. I advance to the footlights and raise a hand for silence. A hush falls on the crowded house. I speak. "Ladies and gentlemen," I say, "I thank you, I thank you for this wonderful reception. I thank you one and all. But most of all I thank my wife, without whose never-failing sympathy, encouragement and advice, this play would never have been written."'

'Shifting the responsibility. A low trick.'

'"Ladies and gentlemen, I owe it all to the little woman!" Terrific applause, during which you take a shy bow from your box, and renewed salvoes as you coyly throw a rose at me. Doesn't that picture tempt you?'

'Not a bit. It would have to be something much more solid than a rose. And now do you think you could move your well-knit figure slightly to one side? I want to start the car.'

'What train is the boss catching?'

'The two-fifty-seven.'

'Then perhaps you had better be getting along. The spot of oil, by the way, has now extended to your left cheek.'

'Didn't your mother ever teach you not to make personal remarks?'

'Don't think I mind. I don't at all. I say to myself, "She is probably at this moment the grubbiest little object in Berkshire and will need thoroughly going over with soap and pumice stone, but she is the girl I love." All I meant was that you will
require a wash and brush up before starting. I should not care for my future wife to be seen driving through an important centre like Walsingford looking like something excavated from Tutankhamen's tomb. Permit me.'

He placed his hands under her arms and hoisted her gently into the driver's seat.

'You know, young Jane,' he said, getting in beside her, 'one of the things I like about you is that you are so slim, so slight, so slender, so – in a word – portable. If you had been Mae West, I couldn't have done that. You can drive me as far as the terrace. I think I will put in a quarter of an hour among the statues.'

There is nothing like creative work in fine weather for releasing the artist spirit from the bonds of earth and putting it in tune with the infinite, and it was not long before a perfect contentment began to envelop Joe Vanringham. By a happy chance, the next in the line of statues awaiting his intention was that of the Emperor Nero, whose smooth bulbous face afforded the maximum of scope to the pencil; and, inspired, he gave of his best.

As he worked, he mused on the differences which a few brief days can make in a man's fortunes. Less than a week ago, he reflected, his position regarding Walsingford Hall had been that of a peri at the gate of Paradise, outside looking in. And now here he was, an honoured guest, able to hobnob daily with Jane Abbott, that wonder girl in whose half-pint person were combined all the lovely qualities of woman of which he had so often dreamed beneath full moons or when the music of the wind came sighing through the pines, or, for the matter of that, when the band was playing 'Träumerei'.

As he started to attach a waxed end to Nero's moustache, he pondered on the strangeness of it all. How odd, he felt,
that he should have fallen in love in this fashion, absolutely at first sight, like the heroes of those manuscripts to which he had alluded in his conversation with Jane. It was a thing he had heard of fellows doing, even outside novels published at their authors' expense by Mortimer Busby, but he had never supposed that he would do it himself Too much sense, he had always maintained.

Yet here he was, level-headed old J. J. Vanringham, smacking into it with a whoop and a holler, just as if he had been his brother Tubby, who, from the age of fourteen onward, had been unable to see a girl on the distant horizon without wanting to send her violets and secure her telephone number.

Joe started. A shudder ran through him, as if he had been splashed with icy water. He stood motionless, gazing along the terrace. The Emperor Nero stared at him with sightless eyes, seeming to plead dumbly for the rest of his moustache, but he had no time to attend to emperors now. Thinking of Tubby and Tubby's tendency to love not wisely but too well had caused him to look at the spot beneath the cedar tree where the other should have been sitting, and, with a hideous shock to his nervous system, he saw that the spot was empty.

The chair was there. 'Murder at Bilbury Manor' was there. But not Tubby. He had vanished, and what Joe was asking himself was, 'Whither?'

It might be, of course, that the absentee had merely stepped into the house to replenish his cigarette-case or to look in the library for better and brighter mystery stories, and for a moment this thought eased Joe's agitation. Becoming slightly calmer, he scanned the terrace in the hope of finding someone who might have been an eyewitness of his brother's departure, and was glad to see that there was a clock-golfer clock-golfing on the putting
green over by the main gate, through which, if he had been mad enough to leave the grounds, Tubby would presumably have passed.

He hurried toward this sportsman, arriving in his rear as he shaped for a putt, and recognized in the seat of his bent plus-fours the bold green-and-crimson pattern affected by his fellow paying guest, Mr Everard Waugh-Bonner, a doddering old museum piece whom, until now, he had always been at some pains to avoid.

'Have you seen my brother?' he asked, in his concern rather more loudly than was necessary at so close a range.

Mr Waugh-Bonner combined a startled leap with the completion of his shot, and, having missed the hole by some three feet, turned, peering petulantly through a pair of those dark spectacles which add anything from ten to twenty years to their wearer's age.

'Hey?'

'My brother. Have you seen him?'

'You made me miss, shouting like that.'

'I'm sorry. But have you seen my brother?'

'I didn't even know,' said Mr Waugh-Bonner frankly, 'that you had a brother.'

Time was pressing, but Joe saw that if a perfect understanding was to be arrived at, he would have to start nearer the beginning.

'My name is Vanringham. My brother was sitting under the cedar.'

'Hey? Oh, you mean that young fellow? You his brother?'

'Yes. Have you seen him?'

'Of course I've seen him.'

'Where?'

'Sitting under the cedar,' said Mr Waugh-Bonner, with the manner of a man answering an easy one, and turned to address his ball.