Uncle Dynamite (12 page)

‘I wish
you would call him Mugsy. It’s friendlier.’

‘I
won’t call him Mugsy. I shall say I came to see Sir Aylmer, bringing the bust
with me, in the hope that I could persuade him to relent and accept it after
all.’

‘Loathsome.’

‘I may
even cry a little.’

‘Revolting.
Where’s your pride?’

‘The
worst that can happen is that he will show me to the door and dismiss me with a
cold gesture.’

‘And
then,’ said Lord Ickenham, brightening, ‘we will start all over again, this
time putting the affair in older and wiser hands than yours. Well, all right.
On that understanding I don’t mind you trying your way. I don’t like it. It’s
tame. It degrades me to the position of a super supporting a star, and you get
all the fun. Still, carry on if you must. I shall stay here and sulk.’

He lit
a cigar, and watched her as she walked up the drive. At the point where it
curved out of sight, she turned and waved her hand, and he waved back, filled
with a not unmanly emotion. Good old Sally, he was feeling. What a girl!

Lord
Ickenham was a man with many friends in the United States where he had spent
twenty years of his life, and of all these friends the one of whom he had been
fondest was the late George Painter, that amiable and impecunious artist with
whom he had shared so many of the joys and sorrows of an agreeably chequered
youth. He had loved George, and he loved his daughter Sally.

Sally
was just the sort of girl that appealed to him most, the sort America seems to
turn out in thousands, gay, grave and adventurous, enjoying life with an almost
Ickenhamian relish and resolutely refusing to allow its little difficulties to
daunt her spirit.

How
admirably, for instance, after the first shock, she had reacted to that
unquestionably nasty wallop he had handed her in the lobby of Barribault’s
Hotel. No tears, no wringing of the hands, no profitless reproaches and
recriminations. In the best and deepest sense of the words, a pippin of a girl.
And why Pongo had let her go, simply from some finnicky objection to being
disembowelled by
New York
port
officials, baffled Lord Ickenham. It was one of the things that make a man who
is getting on in years despair of the younger generation.

Time
marched on. He looked at his watch. About now, he felt, she would be nearing
the front door; about now, doing the quick glide through the hall and the rapid
substitution of bust for bust. It would not be long before he saw her again, no
doubt threading her way cautiously through the bushes that fringed the drive. He
kept a keen eye riveted on those, but when she did appear she was walking in
full view, and the first thing that attracted his attention was the fact that
her hands were empty. At some point in her progress to and from the house, it
would seem, she and her precious burden had parted company.

He
could make nothing of this. His eyebrows rose in a silent query. Her face, he
saw, was grave. It wore a strained look.

As she
reached the car, however, her normal gaiety of disposition seemed to assert
itself. She broke into a gurgling laugh, and his eyebrows rose again.

‘We are
amused?’

‘Well,
it was funny,’ said Sally. ‘I can’t help laughing, though the absolutely
rock-bottom worst has happened, Uncle Fred. We really are up against it now.
You’ll never guess.’

‘I shan’t
try. Tell me.’

Sally
leaned against the side of the car. Her face had become grave once more.

‘I must
have a cigarette first.’

‘Nerves
vibrating?’

‘I’m
shattered.’

She
smoked in silence for a moment.

‘Ready?’

‘Waiting.’

‘Very
well, then, here it comes. When I got to the house, I found the front door
open, which seemed to me about as big a piece of luck as I could want —’

‘Always
mistrust too much luck at the outset of any enterprise,’ said Lord Ickenham
judicially. ‘It’s simply part of Fate’s con game. But I mustn’t interrupt you.
Go on.’

‘I
looked carefully over both shoulders. Nobody seemed to be about. I listened. I
couldn’t hear anybody in the hall. Everything was silent. So I sneaked in.’

‘Quite.’

‘And
tiptoed across the hall.’

‘You
couldn’t have done better.’

‘And
put the bust…. Shall I call it Bust A, to distinguish it from Bust B?’

‘By all
means.’

‘You’ve
got them clear? Bust A was the one I was toting, and Bust B the one with poor
Alice
’s jewels in it.’

‘Exactly.’

Sally
drew at her cigarette. Her manner was absent, as if she were reliving an
episode which had affected her deeply. She came to herself with something of
the air of a sleeper awakening.

‘Where
was I?’

‘Tiptoeing
across the hall.’

‘Yes,
of course. Sorry to be so goofy.’

‘Quite
all right, my child.’

‘I
tiptoed across the hall and shifted Bust B from its stand and put Bust A in its
place and gathered up Bust B and started to come away … fairly quickly. No
sense in hanging around, I mean.’

‘None
whatever. Never outstay your welcome.’

‘And
just as I got to the door of the room where Sir Aylmer keeps his collection of
African curios, out came Lady Bostock from the drawing-room.’

‘Dramatic.’

‘I’ll
say it was dramatic. The memory of that moment is going to haunt me for the
rest of my life. I don’t suppose I shall sleep again for months and months and
months.’

‘We all
sleep too much.’

‘She
said “Who’s that?”‘

‘And
you, I suppose, said “Me,” meaning that it was you.’

‘I
hadn’t time to say anything, because she suddenly leaped forward with a sort of
pitying cluck —‘

‘A
what?’

‘A
cluck. Of pity. Like a nice hen. She really is a good sort, Uncle Fred. I had
never realized it before. When I was down here, doing the bust, she always
seemed stiff and distant. But it was just her manner. She has a heart of gold.’

‘A neat
phrase, that. I must remember it. In what way did she exhibit this golden
heart?’

‘Why,
by swooping down on me and grabbing the bust and saying in a hoarse whisper
that she knew exactly why I had brought it and that she was terribly sorry for
me and had begged Sir Aylmer to change his mind, but he wouldn’t, so she would
keep the bust and send me a cheque secretly and everything would be all right.
And then she went into the collection room and locked it up in a cupboard,
hurriedly, like a murderer concealing the body. And then she hustled me out.
She didn’t actually say “Fly!” but it amounted to that. And it all happened so
quickly that there wasn’t a thing I could do.’

‘And
there the bust is?’

‘Yes.
Locked up in a cupboard in Sir Aylmer’s collection room with all
Alice
’s jewels in it. Tie that for a
disaster, Uncle Fred.’

All
through the narrative, Lord Ickenham had been reviving like a watered flower.

His
air, as it reached its culminating point, was that of one hearing tidings of
great joy. ‘Disaster?’ he said exuberantly. ‘What do you mean, disaster? This
is the most admirable thing that could have happened. I now have something I
can get my teeth into. It is no longer a question merely of effecting an entry
into the house, but of getting myself established there. And if there is one
thing I enjoy more than another, it is getting established in other people’s
houses. It brings the roses to my cheeks and tones up my whole system. Here is
the immediate procedure, as I see it. You will drive on to Ickenham, which will
serve us as a base, and I will take my suitcase and put up at the local inn and
weave my subtle schemes. Expect sensational results shortly.’

‘You
are really going to establish yourself at the house?’

‘I am.’

‘And I
still mustn’t say “How?”‘

‘You
certainly must not. You just leave everything to me, confident that I shall act
for the best, as always. But you look grave, my child. I hope not from any lack
of faith in my vision and enterprise?’

‘I was
thinking of Pongo. What will he do, when you suddenly appear?’

‘I
should imagine he will get the start of his young life and skip like the high
hills. And an excellent thing, too. Pongo is a chap who wants taking out of
himself.’

The car
drove off, and Lord Ickenham hoisted his suitcase and set off for the village.
He was just wishing that he had thought of asking Sally to drop him at the inn,
for it was a heavy suitcase, when something large and tomato-coloured loomed up
before him, and he recognized Bill Oakshott.

In Bill Oakshott’s
demeanour, as he approached, there was the suggestion of a somnambulist who, in
addition to having blisters on both feet, is wrestling with an unpleasant
nightmare. The scene through which he had recently passed, following so swiftly
upon his election as judge of the Bonny Babies contest, had shaken to its
foundations a system already weakened by the knowledge that Hermione Bostock
loved another, and that other a libertine who kissed housemaids on doorsteps.
In response to Lord Ickenham’s whoop of welcome he stared dully, like a dying
halibut.

‘Oh,
hullo, Lord Ickenham,’ he said.

‘Well,
well, well!’ cried the fifth earl buoyantly. The hour or two which he had spent
with this massive youth had left him with a strong appreciation of his sterling
worth, and he was delighted to see him again. ‘Well, well well, well, well!
Bill Oakshott in person. Well met by moonlight, proud Oakshott.’

‘Eh?’

‘Adaptation
of Shakespearian quotation. But let it go. It is not of the slightest importance.
And how is every little thing with you, Bill Oakshott? Fine?’

‘Well,
to be absolutely accurate,’ said Bill, ‘no.‘

Lord
Ickenham raised his eyebrows.

‘Not
fine?’

‘No.
Bloody awful.’

‘My
dear chap, you surprise and shock me. I should have thought you would have been
so glad to get back from a ghastly country like
Brazil
that life would have been roses, roses all the way. What’s wrong?’

With
his affairs in such disorder, Bill was in need of all the sympathy he could
get. He decided to withhold nothing from this cordial and well-disposed old
buster. It would not have taken much to make him sob on Lord Ickenham’s chest.

‘Well,
to start with,’ he said, touching on the most recent of the spiritual brickbats
which had assailed his soul, ‘my uncle’s gone off his onion.

Lord
Ickenham pursed his lips.

‘Nuts?’

‘Completely
nuts.’

‘Indeed?
That must jar you a good deal. Nothing spoils the quiet home atmosphere more
than a goofy uncle on the premises. When did this tragedy occur?’

‘Just
now.’

‘It
came on suddenly?’

‘Like a
flash.’

‘What
caused it?’

‘Pongo.’

Lord
Ickenham seemed at a loss.

‘You
aren’t telling me that a single day of Pongo has been enough to set a host
sticking straws in his hair? If it had been two weeks…. What were the
symptoms?’

‘Well,
he gibbered a good bit, and now he’s driven over to your place to get a photograph
of Pongo.’

‘Why?’

‘To
find out what he looks like.’

‘Can’t
he see what he looks like?’

‘He
doesn’t believe Pongo is Pongo.’

‘But
doesn’t Pongo admit it?’

‘He
thinks he’s an impostor.’

‘Why?’

‘I
don’t know. I tell you he’s potty. I was out on the terrace and I heard him
yelling for me, and I went to the study, and he said Hadn’t I known Pongo when
he was a kid? And I said Yes. And he said How did I know after all these years
that this was the same chap and he was absolutely convinced that Pongo wasn’t
Pongo, and the only way to settle it was to drive to your place and get a
photograph of him.’

Lord
Ickenham shook his head.

‘A
fruitless quest. A man like myself, refined, sensitive, with a love for the
rare and the beautiful, does not surround himself with photographs of Pongo. I
could do him a nude Venus, if he would like one. Yes, it certainly looks as
though you were right, Bill Oakshott, and that Mugsy’s brain has come unstuck;
the result, no doubt, of some sunstroke in the days when he was the curse of
Africa. I’m not surprised that you are worried. The only thing I can suggest is
that you give him plenty of aspirins, humour him in conversation and keep him
away from razors, dinner knives and other sharp instruments. But apart from
this everything is pretty smooth?’