Uncle Dynamite (32 page)

Hermione
quivered. She had not supposed that there was to be an Act Two.

‘Curious
incident?’

‘It
took place shortly after breakfast. Lady Bostock, going to her room, heard movements
within, looked in the wardrobe and found Reginald Twistleton in it, crouching
on the floor. His explanation was that he had come to borrow her lipstick.’

Hermione
gripped her motor licence till the knuckles stood out white under the strain.
Act One had stirred her profoundly, but Act Two had topped it.

In
speaking of the dislike which high-principled girls have for vipers, we omitted
to mention that it becomes still more pronounced when they discover that they
use lipstick. That this erstwhile idol of hers should have feet of clay was
bad, but that in addition to those feet of clay he should have, at the other
end, a mouth that apparently needed touching up from time to time was the
pay-off. People still speak of the great market crash of 1929, asking you with
a shudder if you remember the way US Steel and Montgomery Ward hit the chutes
during the month of October: but in that celebrated devaluation of once
gilt-edged shares there was nothing comparable to the swift and dizzy descent
at this moment of Twistleton Preferred.

Hermione’s
teeth came together with a click.

‘I
shall have a talk with Reginald!’

‘I
should. I think you owe it to yourself to demand an explanation. One wonders if
Reginald Twistleton knows the difference between right and wrong.’

‘I’ll
tell him,’ said Hermione.

Lord
Ickenham watched her drive off, well content with the way she stepped on the gas.
He liked to see her hurrying to the tryst like that. The right spirit, he
considered. He climbed the five-barred gate at the side of the road and lowered
himself on to the scented grass beyond it. His eyes fixed on the cloudless sky,
he thought how pleasant it was to spread sweetness and light and how fortunate
he ought to reckon himself that he had been granted this afternoon such ample
opportunity of doing so. If for an instant a pang of pity passed through him as
he pictured the meeting between Pongo and this incandescent girl, he suppressed
it. Pongo — if he survived — would surely feel nothing but a tender gratitude
towards an uncle who had laboured so zealously on his behalf. A drowsiness
stole over him, and his eyelids closed in sleep.

Hermione,
meanwhile, had reached the house and come to a halt outside its front door with
a grinding of brakes and a churning of gravel. And she was about to enter, when
from the room to her left she heard her father’s voice.

‘GET
OUT!’ it was saying, and a moment later Constable Potter emerged, looking like
a policeman who has passed through the furnace. She went to the window.

‘Father,’
she said, ‘do you know where Reginald is?’

‘No.’

‘I want
to see him.’

‘Why?’
asked Sir Aylmer, as if feeling that such a desire was morbid.

‘I
intend,’ said Hermione, once more grinding her teeth, ‘to break off our
engagement. ‘A slender figure pacing the tennis lawn caught her eye. She
hastened towards it, little jets of flame shooting from her nostrils.

Down at the Bull’s Head,
the girl Myrtle, her conversation with her uncle concluded, had returned to her
post in the saloon bar. The gentleman was still at the counter, staring fixedly
at the empty tankard, but he was alone.

‘Hullo,’
she said disappointedly, for she had been hoping to hear more about
Brazil
, where might is right and the
strong man comes into his own. ‘Has Major Plank hopped it?’

The
gentleman nodded moodily. A shrewder observer than the barmaid would have
sensed that the subject of Major Plank was distasteful to him.

‘Did he
tell you about the puma? No? Well, it was very interesting. It was where he was
threading his way through this trackless forest, gathering Brazil nuts, when
all of a sudden what should come along but this puma. Pardon?’

The
gentleman, who beneath his breath had damned and blasted the puma, did not
repeat his observation, but asked for a pint of bitter.

‘Would
have upset me, I confess,’ proceeded the barmaid. ‘Yessir, I don’t mind saying
I’d have been scared stiff. Because pumas jump on the back of your neck and
chew you, which you can’t say is pleasant. But Major Plank’s what I might call
intrepid. He had his gun and his trusty native bearer —The gentleman repeated
his request for bitter in a voice so forceful that it compelled attention.
Haughtily, for his tone had offended her, the barmaid pulled the beer handle
and delivered the goods, and the gentleman, having drunk deeply, said ‘Ha!’ The
barmaid said nothing. She continued piqued.

But
pique is never enough to keep a barmaid silent for long. Presently, having in
the meantime polished a few glasses in a marked manner, she resumed the
conversation, this time selecting a topic less calculated to inflame the
passions.

‘Uncle
John’s in a rare old state.’

‘Whose
Uncle John?’

‘My
Uncle John. The landlord here. Did you hear him shouting just now?’

The
gentleman, mellowed by beer, indicated with an approach to amiability that Jno.
Humphrey’s agitation had not escaped his notice. Yes, he said, he had heard him
shouting just now.

‘So I
should think. You could have heard him at
Land’s End
. All of a doodah, he is. I must begin by telling you,’ said the
barmaid, falling easily into her stride, ‘that there’s a big fete coming on
here soon. It’s an annual fete, by which I mean that it comes on once a year.
And one of the things that happens at this annual fete is a bonny baby competition.
Pardon?’

The
gentleman said he had not spoken.

‘A
bonny baby competition,’ resumed the barmaid. ‘By which I mean a competition
for bonny babies. If you’ve got a bonny baby, I mean to say, you enter it in
this bonny baby competition, and if the judge thinks your bonny baby is a
bonnier baby than the other bonny babies, it gets the prize. If you see what I
mean?’

The
gentleman said he saw what she meant.

‘Well,
Uncle John had entered his little Wilfred and was fully expecting to cop. In
fact, he had as much as a hundred bottles of beer on him at eight to one with
sportsmen in the village. And now what happens?’

The
gentlemen said he couldn’t imagine.

‘Why,
Mr Brotherhood, the curate, goes and gets the measles, and the germs spread
hither and thither, and now there’s so many gone down with it that the Vicar
says it isn’t safe to have the bonny baby competition, so it’s off.’

She
paused, well satisfied with the reception of her tale. Her audience might have
been hard to grip with anecdotes of Major Plank among the pumas, but he had
responded admirably to this simpler narrative of English village life. Though
oddly, considering that the story was in its essence a tragic one, the emotion
under which he was labouring seemed to be joy. Quite a sunny look had come into
his eyes, as if weights had been removed from his mind.

‘Off,’
said the barmaid. ‘By which I mean that it won’t take place. So all bets are
null and void, as the expression is, and Uncle John won’t get his bottles of
beer.’

‘Too
bad,’ said the gentleman. ‘Can you direct me to Ashenden Manor?’

‘Straight
along, turning to the right as you leave the door.’

‘Thank
you,’ said the gentleman.

13

That Constable Potter,
having returned to his cottage and changed into a dry uniform should then have
proceeded without delay to Ashenden Manor to see Sir Aylmer Bostock was only
what might have been expected. Sir Aylmer was the chairman of the local bench
of magistrates, and he looked upon him as his natural protector. The waters of
the pond had scarcely closed over his head before he was saying to himself that
here was something to which the big chiefs attention would have to be drawn.

He was
unaware that in seeking an audience at this particular time he was doing
something virtually tantamount to stirring up a bilious tiger with a short
stick. No warning voice whispered in his ear. ‘Have a care, Potter!’ adding
that as the result of having been compelled to withdraw a suit for damages to
which he had been looking forward with bright anticipation for weeks his
superior’s soul was a bubbling maelstrom of black malignity and that he was
far more likely to bite a policeman in the leg than to listen patiently to his
tales of woe.

The
realization that this was so came, however, almost immediately: He had been
speaking for perhaps a minute when Sir Aylmer, interrupting him, put a
question.

‘Are
you tight, you bloodstained Potter?’ asked Sir Aylmer, regarding him with a
sort of frenzied loathing. When a man has come to his collection room to be
alone with his grief, to brood on the shattering of his hopes and to think how
sweet life might have been had he had one of those meek, old-fashioned
daughters who used to say ‘Yes, papa!’ the last thing he wants is policemen
clumping in with complicated stories. ‘What on earth are you talking about? I
can’t make head or tail of it.’

Constable
Potter was surprised. He was not conscious of having been obscure. It also came
as a shock to him to discover that he had misinterpreted the twitching of his
audience’s limbs and the red glare in that audience’s eye. He had been
attributing these phenomena to the natural horror of a good man who hears from
another good man of outrages committed on his, the second good man’s, person
and it seemed now that he had been mistaken.

‘It’s
with ref. to this aggravated assault, sir.’

‘What
aggravated assault?’

‘The
one I’m telling you about, sir. I was assaulted by the duck pond.’

The
suspicion that the speaker had been drinking grew in Sir Aylmer’s mind. Even
Reginald Twistleton at the height of one of his
midnight
orgies might have hesitated, he
felt, to make a statement like that.

‘By the
duck pond?’ he echoed, his eyes widening.

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘How
the devil can you be assaulted by a duck pond?’

Constable
Potter saw where the misunderstanding had arisen. The English language is full
of these pitfalls.

‘When I
said “by the duck pond”, I didn’t mean “by the duck pond”, I meant “by the duck
pond”. That is to say,’ proceeded Constable Potter, speaking just in time, ‘“near”
or “adjacent to”, in fact “on the edge
of’.
I was the victim of an
aggravated assault on the edge of the duck pond, sir. Somebody pushed me in.’

‘Pushed
you in?’

‘Pushed
me in, sir. Like as it might have been someone what had a grudge against me.’

‘Who
was it?’

‘A
scarlet woman, sir,’ said Constable Potter, becoming biblical. ‘Well, what I
mean to say, she was wearing a red jacket and a kind of red thingummy round her
head, like as it might have been a scarf.’

‘Was it
a scarf?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Then
why say “like as it might have been” one? I have had to speak before, from the
bench, of the idiotic, asinine way in which you blasted policemen give your
evidence. Did you see this woman?’

‘Yes
and no, sir.’

Sir
Aylmer closed his eyes. He seemed to be praying for strength.

‘What
do you mean, yes and no?’

‘I mean
to say, sir, that I didn’t actually see her, like as it might have been see. I
just caught sight of her for a moment as she legged it away, like as it might
have been a glimp.’

‘Do you
mean glimpse?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Then
say glimpse. And if you use that expression “like as it might have been” once
more, just once more, I’ll…. Could you identify this woman?’

‘Establish
her identity?’ said Constable Potter, gently corrective. ‘Yes, sir, if I could
apprehend her. But I don’t know where she is.’

‘Well,
I’ve not got her.’

‘No,
sir.’

‘Then
why come bothering me? What do you expect me to do?’

Broadly
speaking, Constable Potter expected Sir Aylmer to have the countryside scoured
and the ports watched, but before he could say so the latter had touched on
another aspect of the affair.

‘What
were you doing by the duck pond?’

‘Spitting
and thinking, sir. I generally pause there when on my beat, and I had just
paused this afternoon when the outrage occurred. I heard something behind me,
like as it might have been a footstep, and the next moment something pushed me
in the small of the back, like as if it might have been a hand —‘

‘GET
OUT!’ said Sir Aylmer.

Constable
Potter withdrew. Crossing the terrace, he made for the bushes on the other side
and there, lighting his pipe, stood spitting and thinking. And we make no
secret of the fact that his thoughts were bitter thoughts and his expectoration
disillusioned. Just as a boy’s best friend is his mother, so is a policeman’s prop
and stay the chairman of the local bench of magistrates. When skies are dark,
it is the thought of the chairman of the local bench of magistrates that brings
the sun smiling through, and it is to the chairman of the local bench of
magistrates that he feels he can always take his little troubles and be sure of
support and sympathy. Who ran to catch me when I fell and would some pretty
story tell and kiss the place to make it well? The chairman of the local bench
of magistrates. That is the policeman’s creed.