The Beckoning Lady (14 page)

“You wicked little man.” Minnie shut the lid of the stove with a bang. “You bully and trick everybody into working for you.”

“I do resent that.” Tonker spoke without heat. “What happens when less intelligent people arrange a social gathering such as we are about to have on Saturday night? There is fuss, nerve-strain, hysteria, exhaustion, and a profusion of useless, hired servants who listen in to private conversations, pester the unwary guests for largesse, and secrete unfinished bottles in unlicensed receptacles. The way I do it no one is bored, no one is tired, there is enough to go round, and every man has the supreme satisfaction of looking after himself. Albert and Rupert have honoured me by accepting an invitation to the party, so they
shall have the honour of unearthing the glübalübali. It's not much to ask.”

“Remarkably little,” agreed Mr. Campion, who in common with all Tonker's friends had no illusions about him. “I shall sacrifice myself for the child, who should see the things while still of an age to appreciate them. What a riot that idea was, and how utterly insane! How did you arrive at it, Tonker?”

The sandy man laid down his fork and blew a kiss to his wife. He was beaming.

“Oh, fortuitously, you know,” he said airily. “I was mucking about, waiting to be demobbed. Wally was still in Germany, and we hadn't decided if to team up again. Minnie was broke—no one bought pictures during the war, and she'd lost that whole exhibition when the
Polchester
went down—and I thought I'd better get cracking. Alan Dell sent me a chap who had been making plastic windscreens for him. The contracts had been cancelled as the war ended, and he had tons of this stuff in sheets on his hands.”

“So you just looked at him and said, I know, let's make glübalübali?”

Tonker laughed. “It wasn't unlike that,” he admitted. “We were having a drink at The Howdah and there was a cabaret in the restaurant, which one can just see from the bar. I was trying to get from the oaf what
could
be made with his stuff. He said anything: stamp it out and bend it up, the bigger the better. Just then a fellow came on in the cabaret playing a sousaphone. I looked at it and thought what a nice thing it was, and how I'd like to have one, and what a pity it was it wasn't even bigger, and I said to my chap, could we make that? He screwed up his eyes and considered it and said, ‘We could make something that looked like that. It wouldn't play, of course.' So I said, give me a pencil, and the thing was born.”

“But I thought it had an arrangement of bladders in it?” said Mr. Campion.

“So it had, in the end.” Tonker was laughing again and
Minnie, despite her disapproval, was grinning. “Bokko and I thought of that. It had to make some sort of satisfactory noise, you see, and with some little man??uvring we got a scale. We sprayed the thing outside in various colours, but left the innards clear. It looked a bit crude, but not too crude, and we got Teddy Silkworm and his Band to put it over. I don't know why it was such a zinger, unless it was that it was very big and very cheap, and there hadn't been anything big and cheap for years and years. It appealed to the mood of the moment, and of course there was Bokko's inspired tune . . .”

“Yes indeed.” Mr. Campion spoke hastily. “Someone mentioned it this morning and I've been humming it all day. Tum-tee-tee, tum-tee-tum, on my glübalübalum. Good Lord Tonker, you say you've got six of these things?”

“Five. Leave one for the files.”

“I read somewhere that the Solomon Islanders are buying them in quantities. Is that true?”

Tonker shrugged his shoulders. “It may well be. It touches some deep human chord, old boy. I don't know what's happening to it now. We sold out at the peak of the boom and split the profits.” He scowled with sudden ferocity, but soon after began to laugh in the half-crest-fallen, half-villainous way typical of him. “I got seventeen thousand quid, kept two, and in a fine burst of careless generosity gave the rest to Minnie, who was broke, as I told you. Like the mug she is, the poor benighted gal paid all our debts with it, including all the arrears of income-tax, and so at a single stroke I sold her into bondage for the rest of her life. Didn't I, Minnie?”

His wife shut the stove with a bang. “Never mind,” she said. “I've forgiven you . . . almost.”

“I haven't.” Tonker's self-criticism was unusually sincere. “You see, my old and valued friend,” he continued, returning to Campion, “by an unfortunate oversight I had omitted to observe that, due to the increased business done in my absence by that notable band of brothers, the
Inland Revenue Department, the entire item when taken in conjunction with my own and Minnie's hard-won earnings in an exceptional year, amounted in total value to the splendid sum of six hundred and fifty-three pounds, two thousand of which I had already expended re-establishing myself in civilian life. Since we did not discover the damage for the best part of two years, you will readily understand that the gift, as a gift, was a failure. A donation, in fact, with all the charm of a financial time-bomb. Pure sulphuretted hydrogen. Minnie has never seen the full humour of it.”

“It was a stinker, all right,” said Minnie, obstinately unamused. “And now, Tonker, you've got to wash up.”

“Never.” He conveyed that they could carry him kicking and screaming to the sink before he would hear of it. “Listen. Someone outside.”

“Rubbish. That's a very old trick. Come on, Tonker, you're showing off. Rupert, show him how to do it. Come along, Tonker, or I'll tell about you and the poor wretched County Councillor.”

Since it was but a matter of four plates, three glasses and a mixing bowl, the operation was accomplished without much difficulty. Minnie washed, Mr. Campion wiped, and Rupert put away. Tonker dried one fork very carefully and showed Rupert how to turn it into a jew's harp.

When they had finished making a noise, and Minnie had rinsed her hands, she pulled open the drawer of the table and took out the local weekly newspaper.

“There you are,” she said, “it only came this evening. Read the worst.”

Her husband felt for his glasses and drew out his cigarette case with them. He handed it to Campion, who took one and examined it curiously before lighting it.

“Blue Zephyrs,” he observed. “Someone was talking of these today. How long have you been smoking them?”

“Ever since they announced that cigarettes were death.” Tonker did not look up from the paper. “I thought I'd commit suicide with a jewel-handled knife.' They get
them for me at the village shop here and at Herbert's in town. Why?”

“Nothing, except that it's odd.”

“Not so odd as this is.” Tonker was scowling at the page. “Local Government election result. Out on one of his great red ears, my poor chum is.” He lifted his face to Campion and gave him one of his seraphic smiles. “Sometimes, my old and valued friend, I wonder if I am entirely sane,” he said seriously. “Dear good chap and brilliant reasoner though I am, I sometimes try to help my pals in the silliest ways it is possible for the human mind to conceive.”

“The trouble with that particular idea,” announced Minnie, who was tidying up before going over to the studio, “is that you were so keen on making it work that you forgot what it was for.”

“What
was
it for?” Mr. Campion insisted. “I can hardly wait.”

Tonker's wheezing laugh, much ashamed but still secretly tickled, echoed hollowly among the whitewashed beams.

“It was . . . well, it was . . . sort of . . . it was
euthanasia
, Campion. Euthanasia by the County Council of the New Useless. That was the bit you couldn't leave out, kick it about as much as you liked. The Councillor ought to have seen it, silly fathead. He would have done if he hadn't gone straight from the lunch to the Council Meeting.”

Mr. Campion stood staring at his old friend.

“This wasn't put up in any seriousness by you, I take it?”

“No, no, of course not.” Tonker was not entirely convincing. “Old Ted Fenner, our solicitor, started it,” he explained cheerfully. “He came for lunch one day and depressed us both by telling us that ours was going to be the generation which would die of want and neglect because the young would be too overworked to look after us, and no one would have any money anyway. I started thinking round, as I always do when presented with a
problem, and I wondered what the blazes they
would
do with us, snarling and whining about the place. I thought, good Lord! they'll have to put us down, and I started working out in an idle fashion how they could sell the idea to us, because we shall still have a vote presumably.” He paused and grinned. “You have to be a teeny-weeny bit tight to put this idea over.”

“So I should hope.” Mr. Campion was shocked but entertained in spite of himself. “What exactly did you envisage, my little man?”

“A beautiful white van,” said Tonker promptly. “Very elegant, and very charming, with the County arms on it, done very modern in black—something really choice, by Ashley perhaps—and a nice jolly attendant who got out after a bit and sat with the driver while the carbon monoxide drifted slowly in.” He scratched his hair, which was the colour of a new jute doormat. “That was the mischief,” he went on. “I got this blessed van absolutely vivid in my mind and I sat next to this poor bloke I've been talking about at a luncheon at The Bull. I quite forgot he owned one of the last coachbuilding businesses in the East country. We had a good few drinks together and I couldn't think why he was lapping it up. I got him absolutely sold on the idea of the vehicle. He must have gone straight into the meeting, got up on his hind legs, and started talking about it with awful fuddled earnestness.”

Minnie stood leaning against the doorpost, her arm held high, her hand on the lintel.

“I see them all drawn by Daumier,” she remarked. “Solid, mountainous men, sitting very still like basking bulls, and just their eyes, little pools of shiny dark, slowly moving until they were all watching him quietly, thoughtfully, mercilessly. They'd all be fairly old themselves, you see.”

“
Ha-ow
, Councillor, would this here van of yours be
a-used
?” bellowed Tonker suddenly in very broad Suffolk, his dark blue eyes opened wide as full realisation descended upon him. “Oh Lord, what a black egg! What a shower
of bad taste! Silly Tonker. Silly drunken Tonker. Tonker disgraced. Let's take the bot and go in the studio.”

“I don't know.” Minnie sounded practical. “I find it rather comforting as an idea.”

Mr. Campion grinned at her. “On the principle that there'll always be a County Council, no doubt?” he suggested.

She flashed a smile at him. “No, I just felt that Tonker would be sure to think of
something.
Yet it's very unfortunate, because the neighbours are always asking what exactly it is that Tonker does, and this is the first of his ideas which will be threshed out by them in its entirety. There may have to be a few explanations.”

At this point Rupert, who had been listening to the conversation much as if it had taken place in French, took a long shot.

“Many happy reorientations,” he announced suddenly and brought the house down.

“THE ILLUMINATIONS,” SAID
Tonker to Amanda, as at last they all trooped into the studio, “are bang-on. We've always wanted them and couldn't manage it, somehow. What have you got? Miles of cable?”

“No.” There was a hint of triumph in the mechanic's voice which made her husband glance at her sharply. “No, just a dry battery . . . out of a big car. It'll last a long time.”

“Amanda.” Mr. Campion had become acutely aware that his wife was back in her home country where humours matched her own. “Where did you get it?”

Honey-coloured eyes, candid as Rupert's, met his own. “Scat has had it to charge up for someone. We're just borrowing it for the time being.”

He continued to look at her. “It's the S.S.S. man's battery, I suppose?”

“Well, he was the one who wanted the lights,” said Amanda. “Always see the right visitor pays. We're rather good at that in Pontisbright. As Scat says, he won't mind if he don't never know.”

“Now isn't that nice.” Minnie sounded pleased. “Just like the country.”

“Where everyone is his own Robin Goodfellow,” murmured Mr. Campion cheerfully. “What a shocker that fellow Smith is, Tonker.”

“Oh, a depressant.” The sandy man spoke with feeling. “Why did he call, Minnie? To quote us for the empties?”

“He wanted to bring six people to the party.”

“Indeed? Did you let him?”

“Wasn't that right?”

Tonker shrugged his shoulders. He was scarlet in the
face and the famous lightning temper, which had earned him his nickname, flared for an instant.

“I don't care,” he said bitterly. “Fill the place with curly-conked coyotes if you want to. It's your house. It only happens to be my party. He asked me the same thing a fortnight ago and I told him then that I was sorry, but the show was booked solid. But cancel all that if you want to. It only makes me look a fool.”

The attack was so unfair that everyone was a little startled, save Minnie, who sailed into battle with all guns, pennants flying.

“You miserable good-for-nothing, how you dare!” she thundered. “He's
your
friend.”

“That,” said Tonker through his teeth, “is an insult I shall never forgive. Did he bother to tell you what he was bringing to your half of my party?”

“Two people who make ball-bearings, man and wife.”

“They were the two I refused to have.” He was biting off his words and sounded so like his father, the Headmaster of Totham School in Mr. Campion's youth, that the phrase “Sandy in a bait” came back unbidden.