The Girl in Blue (12 page)

It is
with regret, therefore, that the chronicler has to state that what had
activated Crispin’s iron stand was not exclusively the spirit of chivalry.
Operating almost equally with it had been the invigorating knowledge that after
Brotherly Love had gone through the formality of winning the two-thirty at Newmarket
he would have no need of the two hundred pounds which had so excited
Chippendale’s cupidity. He would be richer by more than a thousand.

Certain,
however, though he was that Brotherly Love would not fail him, he could not
help feeling a little nervous. Accidents, he knew, did happen. Horses strained
fetlocks or tripped over their feet, causing the most gilt-edged snips to come
unstuck. Jockeys bumped into a competitor and got themselves disqualified.
There was no end to the list of things that could go wrong.

His
watch told him that the race must have been over more than an hour ago, and he
chafed at the inconveniences of living in the country. In the old days in
London he would have had the result from the ticker at his club in a few
minutes. At Mellingham he would have to wait for the nine o’clock news on the
radio, for after what had occurred he could scarcely ring Willoughby on the
phone and ask for information.

Pacing
the library floor, he felt stifled. He felt that he must get away and out into the
open, even though this would involve looking at the lake, and he was making for
the door, when it flew open as if struck by one of those hurricanes off the
eastern coast of America which become so emotional on arriving at Cape
Hatteras, and Barney came in.

‘Still
in here?’ said Barney. ‘Don’t tell me Bill kept you on the phone all this
while. What did he want?’

It was
in the circumstances an awkward question, and the best reply Crispin could find
was that Bill had not wanted anything in particular.

‘Just
yakking, eh? Just a couple of old biddies swopping gossip over the garden
fence? Well, what I came for was to ask you if you’d care to come for a spin in
Colonel Norton-Smith’s car. He’s driving me over to Salisbury to see the
cathedral.’

The
programme she outlined had little appeal for Crispin. Of all his paying guests
Colonel Norton-Smith was the one whose society he least courted, and as for
cathedrals he had always been able to take them or leave them alone. He
condensed these sentiments into an ‘I don’t think I will, thanks’, and when
Barney urged him to be a sport, he said, ‘No, I think I won’t, thanks’, and she
went out with a genial ‘Suit yourself, but you’re missing the treat of a
lifetime’, to poke her head in at the door a moment later.

‘Oh, by
the way,’ she said, ‘you were smart not to have anything on that Brotherly Love
horse I was telling you about. Came in second. I’ve just had a telegram.’

She
disappeared again, and it seemed to Crispin that the library, hitherto static,
had suddenly begun to execute the once popular dance known as the Shimmy. If
the
Collected Sermons of Bishop Pontifex
(Oxford University Press, 1839)
had shot from their shelf and struck him on the occipital bone, he could
scarcely have gasped, gurgled and tottered more noticeably. The realization
that his hundred pounds, like so many hundred pounds of his youth, had gone
down the drain and that now he would be unable to fulfil his obligations to the
repairs people and rid himself of their man at Mellingham affected him with a
combination of epilepsy and ague. He was suffering, oddly enough, that very
sense of guilt and remorse which Bishop Pontifex on page eighty-three of his
monumental work warns his readers will always be the wages of sin.
Paraphrasing the Bishop, he says that if you sin, you will inevitably feel like
something the cat brought in, and that was how Crispin felt.

How
long it was before he recovered the ability to face the crisis and examine the
situation in depth he could not have said, but eventually something like
coherent thought returned to him and he bent his mind to a careful study of his
predicament, employing all his brain cells in an endeavour to find a way out of
it.

And in
due course he saw that there was such a way. It was not one of which the Chevalier
Bayard would have approved, but it looked good to Crispin. His views on how one
should behave towards women one respected and admired had undergone a radical
change.

He rang
the bell.

‘Chippendale,’
he said, when that blot on the local scene presented himself, ‘shut that door.’
Chippendale shut the door.

‘I have
been thinking over the suggestion you made just now, Chippendale, and I have
come to the conclusion that if you really are confident that by searching Mrs
Clayborne’s suite you will be able to secure my brother’s miniature— —’

‘It’s a
snip, chum.’

‘Then
do so at your earliest convenience,’ said Crispin.

CHAPTER TEN

For some considerable time
after he had heard the receiver replaced up at Mellingham Hall Willoughby sat motionless,
a brooding figure not unlike Rodin’s celebrated
Le Penseur.
He was
blaming himself for having wasted the price of a long-distance call on someone
as unlikely to be of any help to him as Crispin. He had always been fond of
Crispin, but he was not blind to the fact that in any sort of emergency he was
the weakest possible reed on which to lean. Even had he reacted favourably to
the recent S. O. S., nothing constructive would have been accomplished.
Crispin, as Barney had said, was amiable, sober, honest and kind to animals,
but as a recoverer of stolen miniatures he simply did not qualify. Not that one
could blame him for this. Some men have the knack of recovering stolen
miniatures, others not. It probably has something to do with the hormones.

For
such a task, Willoughby felt, you wanted someone younger, brighter and less
prone, when a situation called for decisive action, to stand about with his
mouth open and a glassy look in his eyes; someone, for instance, like Archie
Goodwin in the Nero Wolfe stories, one of which he had been reading on the
train, or, it suddenly occurred to him in a flash of inspiration, like his
nephew Gerald.

Willoughby,
though careful not to show it, for he believed in keeping Youth in its place,
had always had an admiration for Jerry, the natural admiration of a golfer
whose handicap is a shaky eighteen for one who is plus two and plays in amateur
championships. And while skill with driver and putter does not necessarily
guarantee proficiency in other directions, it at least implies a steady nerve
and the ability to concentrate on the job in hand, both of which qualities were
demanded by the delicate operation he was planning.

Men
like Willoughby make their decisions quickly. They do not sit humming and
hawing and telling themselves they must look at a thing from every angle.
Scarcely had the thought of Jerry entered his mind when he was on the telephone
again.

‘Jerry?’

‘Oh,
hullo, Uncle Bill.’

‘You
busy?’

‘No.’

‘Can
you come round here?’ To the office?’

‘No,
the house.’

‘All
fight.’

‘Well, hurry.’

Willoughby
did not have to wait long. Jerry lived in one of the streets off the King’s
Road, a short step from Chelsea Square, and a talk with his uncle was just what
at the moment he desired most, for it was his intention to put a quick end to
all this nonsense of trusts and trustees. He would demand his money from him
and thus become, if not financially equal to the girl he loved, at least a
reasonably respectable suitor at whom the world could not sneer.

Vera
Upshaw had pointed out how it could be done. Nothing could be simpler. You went
to your Uncle Bill and you said to him, very correct and dignified but icily
firm, ‘Uncle Bill, I would have you know that I have examined the original
indentures and I find that this trust is neither perpetual nor irrevocable but
can be terminated by mutual agreement, so wash the damn thing out fight away,
or I get a complaint and summons and have them served.’

Not
immediately, of course. You don’t walk into a man’s house and start crushing
him beneath the iron heel without so much as saying Hullo. Obviously there
would have to be a few preliminary
pourparlers
just to get things going,
Uncle Bill being a good old scout with whom your relations had always been of
the friendliest. So the first minutes of the meeting were taken up with a
certain amount of Did-you-have-a-good-time-at-Sandwich-ing and How-was-your-slice-ing,
and it was not till Willoughby had shown with a pair of tongs and a piece of
coal how he had sunk that long putt on the sixteenth that Jerry was able to
strike the business note.

‘About
that trust, Uncle Bill.’

‘Yes,
that’s what I wanted to see you about,’ said Willoughby, ‘I’m terminating it.
You’ll get the money next week’

Jerry
did not reel, but he certainly would have done so if he had not been sitting at
the moment in a deep arm chair. His emotions were rather similar to those of
Crispin when Willoughby had written the cheque for two hundred and three pounds
six shillings and fourpence without a word of protest, joy at the happy ending
competing with something that was almost disappointment that all the arguments
and reasonings which he had so carefully rehearsed would now not be needed.
Then, as in the case of Crispin, joy prevailed, and he expressed it with the
quick sharp snort of ecstasy with which he was accustomed to greet the falling
of his ball into the hole at the end of a thirty-foot putt. He found himself at
a loss for words, and as he struggled to express his gratification Willoughby
proceeded.

‘You
have probably been wondering why your father ever started the trust. Why didn’t
he let you have the stuff right away? Must have puzzled you, that.’

Jerry
admitted that it had perplexed him.

‘How
well up are you on his early history?’

‘I’ve
heard that he didn’t amount to much till he was thirty.’

‘It’s
what he did when he was twenty-two that concerns us. He married a cinema
usherette with a taste for drink This was before he married your mother.’

‘Are
you saying he was a bigamist?’

‘Certainly
not. After making his life extremely unpleasant for a couple of years his bride
handed in her dinner pail. And the experience gave him an obsession about early
marriages. He took the view that all men under the age of thirty are halfwits
and liable to charge into matrimony at the drop of a hat with the first tramp
they come across, and he wasn’t going to have that happen to you. So he formed
this trust, putting me in charge and giving me the power to slip you the cash
if I saw fit. Knowing that I wouldn’t see fit if I saw you trying to head for
the altar with somebody unsuitable, which of course is what happened. Vera
Upshaw might be all right for a particularly well-to-do millionaire, but not
for you. She wants a husband who will cover her with jewels and Rolls-Royces.
Given those, she might make a good wife, though I would hesitate to bet on it.
The engagement’s really off, is it?’

‘Yes,
thank God.’

‘You
feel as I do that it was a merciful release? Quite right. Always bear in mind
that however beautiful a girl may be, and I willingly stipulate that Vera Upshaw
is scenically in the top ten, it’s unwise to marry her if she has feet of clay.
I became aware of such feet in Dame Flora Faye twenty-five years ago, and Vera
is training on to be another Dame Flora Faye, and looks like making it. Did the
betrothal end with a bang or a whimper?’

‘I’d
call it more of a coo. Her mother rang me up and filled me in. What a lovely
voice she has.’

‘Very
musical. I remember it from the old days. What did she say?’

‘There
was a whole lot of it, but what it amounted to was that Vera had changed her
mind.’

‘Which,
translated from the Flora Faye, means that she has met someone with a lot more
money than you.

‘You
think so?’

‘I am
sure of it. It’s a repetition of what happened twenty-five years ago with her
mother and me. She doesn’t mention it in her
Theatre Memories
as told to
Reginald Tressilian, but at one time Flora and I were engaged. She chucked me
for Charlie Upshaw, who had just come into the Upshaw’s Diet Bread millions —
most of which she spent years ago.

A less
perspicacious nephew might have murmured sympathetically, ‘I see, I see. So
that is why you have never married’, and would probably have pressed his hand,
but Jerry knew that his uncle’s reason for remaining a bachelor was that he
thoroughly enjoyed being a bachelor, that if he ever found himself at the altar
rails it would be because he had been dragged there by wild horses, and that
every time he thought of Charlie Upshaw he felt profoundly grateful to him for
his kindly intervention. He contented himself with a word to the effect that
the guardian angels of twenty-five years ago seemed to have been as efficient
as those of today: and when Willoughby asked him what the hell he was talking
about he explained that the Willoughby guardian angel had saved him from a union
with Dame Flora Faye by producing Charlie Upshaw in the nick of time.