This Private Plot (19 page)

“It's the one about the duck who goes into the library.”

“Heard it. Anyway, it's not a duck, it's a chicken. Susie's right, you can't tell jokes.”

“Then I'm going to the toilet,” Geoffrey muttered.

“Careful, that's how Elvis Presley died,” Susie shouted after him. She chuckled. “Hey, is that another example of your MindSpam, Ollie?” she asked, reaching for her drink.

“Yes, and for once, it's true. A lot of people died on the toilet. Elvis. George II. Lenny Bruce. Catherine the Great, it is thought.”

“Oh, but I'd heard…”

“No. On the toilet.”

Susie seemed disappointed. “Have you figured out why people remember these things?” she asked.

Oliver settled back in his chair. “I think the goal is to know as little as possible about as much as possible. And that extrapolates to knowing one fact about every conceivable topic. Russian history? Catherine the Great's demise. The Inuit peoples of the Arctic regions? Lots of words for snow. Marine biology? The shark has to keep moving forward or it will die. Egyptology? Ancient Egyptian mummifiers would use a metal pick to pull the deceased's brains out through his nostrils.”

“Ew!”

“Ew, maybe. But everyone wants to tell you about it. A lot of MindSpam seems to be about death, and not just deaths on the toilet. Everyone remembers—and wants to tell you—that Mama Cass choked on a ham sandwich. That Sweden has the highest suicide rate. That Walt Disney's head is cryogenically preserved somewhere in California. None of this is true, incidentally.”

“Truth seems to be an irrelevance.”

“Thus runs the world away.”

“Geoffrey's taking a while,” Effie commented, tuning in late to the conversation. She had been thinking about the phone call and Mallard's crisp instruction to make sure no harm came to Oliver.

There was a wail of feedback from the performance room in the rear of the pub and a smattering of applause. Like many rock singers, the landlord never believed that a microphone could pick up his voice unless it was pressed against his uvula, so they could hear his fuzzy introduction from where they were sitting.

“Now we have a new lad here to entertain us, so give him a chance, ladies and gentlemen, give him a chance. He says his name is Geoffrey Angelhair, like the pasta I suppose, if you like that foreign muck.”

He stopped. “Wine?” the voice resumed. “You say you want some wine? Don't blame you, mate, we've a tough crowd in tonight.” A longer pause, then, “Okay, I'm sorry, people, he now says his name is Angelwine. Wish he'd make his mind up. Hey, let's see if you whine after hearing him, eh? Ha, ha, he's not the only one with the jokes this evening. Once again, give it up for Jerry Angelwine.”

Oliver, Effie, and Susie jumped up from the table, but by the time they'd squeezed through the partition into the rear bar, all the chairs had been taken, and Geoffrey was into his routine.

“…said the frog,” he was concluding, and beamed around the room, meeting total silence, apart from the odd, embarrassed titter. His smile faded, and he felt in several of his jacket pockets until he brought out his deck of beermats, which he looked through swiftly.

“Ah, I see. It should have been a chicken, not a duck. My fault.” He shuffled the beermats again. “Ah, here's the Superman joke, you'll like this one. My boss told me it. There's this rooftop bar in Manhattan, which is apparently just like Synne only with skyscrapers.” He paused, noticing the stillness. “I told Oliver that wasn't funny,” he mumbled. “Okay, there are these two men…”

“Oliver,” whispered Susie, “can't you get him off the stage? He's going to be totally humiliated. That's my job.”

Oliver shrugged helplessly as Geoffrey blundered on.

“So the second guy jumps over the parapet too, falls hundreds of feet and splat!”

He slapped his hands together for the sound effect, forgetting he was holding his beermat collection. Many made it to the side wall before they stopped rolling. The audience began to laugh.

“Never mind. Where were we? Anyway, that's when the barman turns to the first guy and says, only I can't do the accent, ‘You know, when you get drunk, Superman, you can be a real arsehole.' ‘Asshole,' I mean.” He paused, pleased that the joke was getting a better reception than the first. A thought seemed to strike him.

“That would probably have been funnier if I hadn't already told you it was about Superman.” He bent over and picked up the nearest beermat. “‘Rocket to the sun'?” he read. “Ah yes, I remember. There were these…” He stopped suddenly, motionless, his mouth poised to issue the first syllable of the next word.

“Oh no,” said Oliver.

“What now?” asked Susie.

“Geoffrey's just remembered that this joke requires an ethnic group notoriously less intelligent than your own. Several years of corporate sensitivity training have just kicked in, and he doesn't know what to do.”

But Geoffrey had seen his friends at the rear of the room, and a glimmer of inspiration seemed to strike him. “I have this friend called Oliver,” he began again. “And he's really stupid.”

“He's on his own,” said Oliver.

“How stupid is he?” an audience member chanted. Geoffrey was still a little slow to react.

“Erm, well, I was just going to tell you how stupid he is. He told me the other day he was going to build a rocket to go to the moon. I mean the sun. The sun. So I said, isn't that dangerous? Aren't you worried you're going to, you know, burn up? Because the sun is hot, you understand, and in reality you couldn't possibly…Right. Well. But Oliver said, ‘No, it'll be okay, because I'm going to travel by night.'” Before the audience could react, he rapidly corrected himself. “By day,” I mean.”

He relaxed, enjoying the polite, largely uncomprehending laughter. Then a look of consternation came to his avian features, and he shot back to the microphone. “No, I was right the first time, it was by night.”

The flashes of merriment continued, partly genuine as some members of the audience decoded the humor buried beneath the stumbles, partly sadistic at Geoffrey's expense, and partly knowing, from some avant-garde types who thought they were witnessing ironic performance art.

“That was quite amusing, actually,” said Susie.

“Amusing?” snapped Oliver. “There aren't too many Olivers in this village—they'll know he means me.”

She prodded him in the back. “Oh, lighten up, Swithin. It's just a bit of fun.”

“And then there's my friend, Susie,” Geoffrey picked up. “What a slapper!”

“We're leaving,” said Susie instantly. She grabbed Effie's hand and began to push her way out of the bar. Oliver followed, hearing Geoffrey's voice all the way.

“Eyes you could drown in and a nose you could ski off. She told me just now that the Eskimos have thirty-seven words for snow. Which is odd, because Susie doesn't have even one word for ‘no'! The closest she gets to it is ‘Wait till the choir's gone past the end of the pew.…'”

Chapter Twenty-three

Friday evening (continued)

“So, Oliver, I hear you got into another fight today.”

Oliver stirred his lentil soup moodily, without looking up. Two pints of bitter before dinner hadn't been a good move.

“I'd rather not talk about it, Aunt Phoebe,” he muttered.

“No, dear, this is your mother speaking.”

This time he looked. Chloe and Phoebe were flanking the brigadier at the far end of the dining room table—all three staring at him. Effie was the only other diner that evening: Susie had rushed tearfully to her bedroom when they arrived back from the pub, Geoffrey was missing, and Toby was working late at the dig, as he'd informed Oliver and Effie that afternoon when they finally reached Holy Trinity and passed on his empty shoulder bag.

“What's that?” grunted the brigadier. “Young Oliver got into a scrap again?”

“I heard it from Wendy Bennet.” Chloe seemed to be addressing the brigadier and her sister, but her eyes never left Oliver's face. “Oliver took a swing at that friend of Toby's, Eric Normal or whatever his name is. Slimy piece of work.”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that about Oliver,” protested Phoebe.

Chloe smiled. “Wendy says Eric bit his tongue badly and can't use it. A step in the right direction, I'd say, but for some reason, Wendy seemed to think it a disadvantage.”

Oliver glanced up again and caught the twinkle in his mother's expression.
Was there nothing this woman didn't know about the seedy underbelly of the Cotswolds?

“Good show, old chap,” said his father, beaming down the table. He wiped his mouth on his napkin. “Sounds like you're getting a reputation as a man to be reckoned with, eh?”

That could be the first time the brigadier had ever called him a man. “It was just a passing moment, Father,” Oliver said. Effie contributed nothing.

“Always thought you'd make a useful boxer,” the brigadier continued. “Let's see, you'd probably be in the middleweight class now, but with a bit of training, we might get you up to light heavyweight. When your mother met me, I was regimental champion, welterweight. Remember that, old girl?”

“I certainly remember some bobbing and weaving from those early days, dear,” Chloe remarked, passing a small pot of caviar to the brigadier.

After dinner, Oliver and Effie found themselves alone in the sitting room. Effie subsided onto a sofa and kicked off her sandals. She had changed out of her short skirt before the meeting in the pub, and was now back in the thin cotton dress that had found its way onto Oliver's erotic top ten list on the previous afternoon.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Effie looked up, ice-blue eyes like a winter night. She nodded. “Tim was right,” she said. “I should have left this case to Simon Culpepper.”

“Then are
we
okay?” he asked anxiously, after a pause, sitting beside her. If he still hoped to turn his teenage bedroom into a love nest, there were only two nights left, and tomorrow was the Theydon Bois Thespian's
Hamlet
, so how much of a buzzkill would that be?

She leaned her head against his neck. Her curls tickled, smelling faintly of apple-scented shampoo.

“Yes, of course, we're okay, you silly pillock,” she said. “And in spite of everything, you've hooked Tim. You know—the rendezvous with the vampire tomorrow morning? Although it may be a solo jaunt for Tim if I don't get to bed fairly soon.” She yawned.

Uh-oh.

“Since we're going to bed,” he began, reaching for her hand.

The door was flung open abruptly, and Geoffrey half stumbled into the room.

“Not quite the segue I was aiming for,” Oliver complained, as his friend hurried past them and dropped onto an armchair.

“Women!” Geoffrey exclaimed, folding his arms crossly.

“I'll explain what they are later,” said Oliver. “First, where the hell have you been for the last three hours?”

“In the pub. They wouldn't let me go. Kept making me tell more jokes.” He smirked, despite his bad mood, in a way that made Oliver want to grab his nose and pull hard. “Apparently, my performance was a huge hit.”

“How? You were messing up every time.”

“That's just it. They said it made it funnier. They thought it was my gimmick.” He pointed at Oliver. “You may laugh…”

“I sincerely doubt it.”

“…but they've asked me back next week.”

“Good for you, Geoff,” Effie remarked, with an admonitory stare at Oliver. “Then why are you so peeved with my sex?”

Sex
, Oliver thought mormally.

Geoffrey lifted a throw cushion onto his lap and punched it. “It's the Beamish creature. Chloe said she'd gone straight to her room when she came in, so I went up and knocked on the door, to give her the news. Susie told me to do something that's basically impossible unless you're a well-endowed and limber hermaphrodite.”

“Well, dear, what did you expect? You identified her in your act as a slut. The poor thing was mortified.”

“But she
is
a strumpet,” Geoffrey exclaimed, reaching for another throw cushion to hit, only to discover it was a cat. “We've always joked about Susie's flexible morals. I thought she'd be flattered, as if she were a Muse, or something.” He smiled again. “You should have been there—I did ten minutes of jokes about her cleavage alone. Comedy gold.”

“You don't know much about women, do you, Geoff?” Oliver commented, shaking his head. Effie also tried to say something, but Oliver could only make out the odd words “kettle” and “black” through her laughter.

“Of course I don't,” Geoffrey confirmed. “Nobody does.” He turned to Effie, who was catching her breath. “I mean, I did twenty more minutes of Stupid Oliver jokes after you'd gone, and it brought the house down—you don't see Ollie getting all huffy about it.”

“You did what?” Oliver asked.

“Never mind that for now,” Effie cut in. “Susie's upset, and you need to make it right. So tomorrow morning—”

“No,” Oliver interrupted, striding up to Geoffrey and pulling him to his feet by his lapels. “Not tomorrow morning. Now. Geoffrey Angelwine, you go back up to Susie's room and apologize for your malicious mockery. You identify yourself as the most abject item crawling between heaven and earth. You beg her forgiveness and ask what you can do to make it up to her. Don't botch the words up. Is that clear?”

“Yes, but—”

“I haven't finished. Then, you'll listen to her. You won't interrupt. Even if her wild and whirling words last till breakfast. You won't leap into the conversation with witticisms or off-color remarks, not even if she says something that reminds you of a Susie's cleavage joke.”

“Don't worry, I'm not to touch that one.”

“Good.”

“But I might give the other one a quick—”

“Geoffrey!” Oliver snapped. “Don't. Even if you work out how many Susie's cleavages it takes to change a lightbulb. Even if you know why Susie's cleavage did cross the road. Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, why are you still here?” Without waiting for an answer, Oliver propelled Geoffrey toward the door. A second or two later, they heard his slow footsteps going up the stairs.

“Swithin,” Effie purred, stepping toward Oliver, “your machismo is showing. I want you.”

“This isn't one of those wind-ups like the proposal business the other day, is it?”

“Does this answer your question?” She slid a hand behind his neck and kissed him very firmly, twice.

“No,” he gasped. She chuckled and broke away.

“No, you're right, it was a wind-up. But I feel like taking pity on you anyway.”

She picked up her sandals and led him to the door.

Five minutes later, he hurried back from the bathroom with washed hands and freshly minted breath, but stopped in his bedroom doorway, heart thumping. The light was off in the room, and Effie was looking out of the window, her shadowy figure a dim collage of grayish-blue and silvery skin in the faint moonlight. She had waited for him before undressing, he noted gratefully. So would she now lift the dress up and over her head in one swift, practiced move, raising and spreading her untamed ringlets like a Japanese fan? Or would she slip off the shoulder straps, reach back and unzip the bodice, and then let the material cascade around her to the floor, stripped by the attractive power of the very planet itself? (And in either case, had she taken off her underwear first?) His heart continued its loud, rhythmic tattoo, almost as if the sound was truly perceptible in the room.

“I thought I heard something,” Effie said quietly, without turning around. Oliver caught a faint shriek in the distance.

“There it is again,” she said.

“If it's that bloody vixen, I'm going to campaign to bring back fox hunting,” Oliver muttered, stepping over to her and beginning to kiss her bare shoulders.

“I don't think it's coming from outside,” she answered, ignoring his attentions. “And can you hear a sort of banging?”

So it wasn't just his circulatory system. He paused and listened. The regular, percussive beat seemed to be coming from the ceiling, and there were more vocalizations, louder, more frequent, and clearly human. Dear Lord, was someone being attacked again, this time inside the house? It sounded like Susie's voice, and her screams were gaining in volume and intensity. Had Geoffrey snapped? There were words, a phrase shouted over and over. Was it “Help me?” Something “me,” anyway.

“Oh, my God!” Oliver exclaimed. “They're…”

Effie burst into laughter. “It sounds as if your advice worked,” she said, switching on the bedside lamp. “I think you can say they've reached a rapprochement.” She gathered the top cover from Oliver's bed and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

Effie paused and glanced up at the ceiling. “I'm not staying here with that soundtrack.”

“It's not our fault. We shouldn't be driven out of our own room because someone else beat us to the nookie.”

“Then you go upstairs and tell them to stop,” she replied, yawning one more time. “I'm going to sleep on the couch downstairs. If you come with me, I'll share the duvet.”

“Okay, but does this mean we aren't… ?”

She stopped and looked at him tenderly. “I'm afraid so, darling. The public rooms of your parents' home are off-limits to the four-footed frolic by sheer definition.”

“But when Geoff and Susie are finished…?”

“Who knows when that will be?” she said, with another wary glance upwards. “I have to get up early. Besides, if the walls of the Chateau Swithin are that thin, I'd prefer to wait until we get back to London.”

Oliver stood still, dejected, glaring at his still-unnotched headboard. It certainly sounded as if Geoffrey and Susie's first close encounter was going to be a long one. Geoff may have been a novice in the art of love, but he'd put himself in the hands, arms, and presumably other body parts of an expert.

“Thank you, Geoff,” he grunted—or something fairly close phonetically—and followed Effie out of the room.