In imitation of Wodehouse VI

 Continued from the previous chapter

Just then the door bell rang. I jumped from the sofa like an athlete and straightened my tie as Jeeves went to answer the door. I was bracing myself for the doe-eyes stained with tears.

Angela, in a fetching sleeveless dress and a little felt cap, swept in with a flashing smile and quite a few shopping bags.

‘Hullo cousin of mine!’ she gave the slightly nonplussed Wooster two affectionate pecks on the cheeks and then laughed as she cleaned up a lipstick mark with her handkerchief.

‘I say!’ I said, as she handed her hat and bags to Jeeves, ‘you are looking well dear Angela! Did you do something with your hair?’

‘Yes, I had it permed just this morning. Do you like it?’ She turned her head this way and that to show me the new do. I must say that Angela, who was always a charming girl, looked even more dazzling than usual.

‘You look just like Angela Baddeley.’

‘Oh stop it you!’ She laughed like a warbling rivulet and linked her arms in mine and we sat down on the sofa for our catch up.

Much to my delight, Angela seemed to be in top spirits. We drank some Darjeeling and talked of Angela Baddeley plays and musicals. She showed me some dresses she had bought and gave me a silk tie with a rather avant-garde blue and red pattern as a present. She’s here till Friday, visiting friends and shopping for a present for her father, my Uncle Tom Travers, who is having a birthday. I’ll be going too, and will offer her and her many bags of London goods the cousin-ly drive.

Thus we happily moved to the dining table when Jeeves announced that all is ready and continued the pleasant conversation.

Jeeves’s cooking was praised by the both of us and we worked through the courses like champion eaters. When Jeeves brought the dessert, and topped up the glasses, Angela and I found ourselves in a little bubble of companionable silence while we appreciated the sumptuous cake.

‘I must say, Angela, that I’m particularly happy to see you in such high spirits.’ I said as we dug in. ‘I had thought your visit was going to be about Tuppy!’

My spoon, filled with cake, stopped midway to the Wooster mouth as I caught sight of Angela’s face. Her eyelids narrowed and the soft, warm hazel eyes suddenly took on a cold gleam that looked like icebergs honing in on the Titanic.

‘Funny you should raise the topic Bertie.’ She said softly and somewhat sibilantly, sending a chill up my spine. She decided then to take a long sip of dessert wine, a half smile playing on her lips. My spoon still hovered mid-action when she continued.

‘I want your help Bertie.’ She locked me in a conspiratorial gaze.

‘How do you mean?’ I said after relocating my larynx from the sudden change in temperature.

‘I’ve had it up to here with Tuppy, Bertie. I have been more than tolerant of his wandering gaze. You of all people know that. But I’ve had it. And I want revenge.’

‘Angela! I…’

‘No, listen Bertie. Let me tell you the latest. A girl friend of mine saw Tuppy, arms linked with a blonde, perusing Regent Street, laughing like a drain, last Sunday. And I had asked him to go out that very day with me to a matinee and he refused, saying that he had an important business engagement.’ Angela stabbed her cake with the spoon slowly, probably like Medea if she had heard that her husband was perusing Regent Street with some blonde Greek princess.

‘Before I heard this juicy bit of news, I saw Tuppy and asked him how the important business meeting went. Guess what he said?’ She didn’t give me a chance to reply, but her eyes gleaned like sharp obsidian. ‘He lied right to my face, saying that it went well and that there might be a good business opportunity in the works. Without batting an eyelid.’

‘Maybe your friend mistook another man for Tuppy.’ I rallied. Tuppy is one of those shortish, widish, sandy-haired types that’s a penny a dozen in London.

‘No, this friend of mine knows Tuppy up close. I’ve introduced them before.’

She might have spat out ‘Judas’ rather than ‘Tuppy’.

‘But what if the woman was the business partner he was meeting with? Some of these entrepreneur types are pretty young.’

‘Linking arms? In Regent Street? With shopping?’

She got me there. I cursed Tuppy to myself. The absolute fathead!

‘Have you confronted him? Give him a chance to explain himself?’ I rallied desperately.

Angela took another slow sip of her wine, the light reflecting off of the tawny liquid lighting up her brows. She looked like a female Professor Moriarty.

‘My darling Bertie, that will ruin the surprise.’ she looked at me full in the eye. I felt like a vice is tightening around me. She put down her glass and leaned forward towards me.

‘I need your help to teach him a lesson he will not forget for the rest of his life.’

Each word was spoken with the gravity of a mountain range.

‘The rest of his life?’

‘The rest of his life.’

‘Do you mean putting a hole in his hot water bottle while he slept or goading him outside in his pyjamas and locking him out for the night, that sort of thing?’ I knew in my heart of hearts that Angela’s desires are wandering in darker places, but I clutched to hope like a drowning man to a straw.

Angela smiled a smile a tolerant teacher might give to a not particularly bright pupil who is nonetheless trying.

‘No, Bertie, I wasn’t thinking of your usual Drones Club antics. I want something more unpleasant. Bertie, have you heard of strychnine?’

I jerked like a startled horse, sending the bit of coffee cake I had been holding aloft all this time flying through the air like a projectile from a catapult. Jeeves happened to have come out of the kitchen and was hovering behind me and he adroitly dodged the incoming dessert with his usual alacrity by a neat side step. No doubt due to his waltz training.

‘Sorry Jeeves!’ I laughed nervously, hoping he didn’t hear Angela mentioning strychnine. Jeeves nodded benignly and went after the escaped cake with a paper towel like a bloodhound.

‘Angela!’ I whispered urgently, ‘You cannot possibly be thinking that! He’ll be like Mrs Inglethorp!’

‘Who’s that?’ Angela looked taken aback for the first time since the topic of Tuppy came up. I pressed this slight opening.

‘She’s the victim in Agatha Christie’s novel, killed by strychnine! You’ll be a murderess and locked up or hanged!’

‘I’m not going to kill him Bertie!’ Angela rolled her eyes. ‘Athletes take it as a stimulant. Thomas Hicks won the marathon in ’04 with strychnine injections.’

I was agog, was Ms Christie talking clap-trap?

‘In small doses, some think that strychnine can act like a stimulant, rather like strong coffee, sir.’ Jeeves’s voice arrived from behind with the bit of useful information, like a train that’s always on time, before the man himself floated off again with the little piece of cake wrapped like an origami in his paper towel, leaving us with: ‘Although it is my understanding that the latest medical consensus states that even small doses may do more harm than good.’

‘You see Angela?’ I hissed urgently to the cousin, hoping Jeeves didn’t hear why the topic of strychnine came up, ‘Dash the idea from your mind! Strychnine indeed! What foolishness! What silliness! What foolhardiness is this?’ I had a film of sweat forming on the brow as I pictured me and Angela in the gallows for the murder of one Hildebrand ‘Tuppy’ Glossop. And Jeeves’s words was like a lifesaver; but in my relief perhaps I took it up too strongly. I might even have tutted once or twice.

Angela looked at me silently, then cast her eyes downwards, and two bead of tears began to emerge alarmingly in her eyes.

‘I knew you’d take his side Bertie. You’d choose your pal before your own cousin.’ Her voice shook with emotions and it shook Bertrand too, to the core. Since we were little tykes, playing among the woods and dales, I could never refuse Angela anything once she unleashed the tear ducts. She didn’t do it often, but that was the power of it – I knew when she did she was really injured, and then I’m completely flustered.

‘Angela! You don’t mean it! How could I put Tuppy ahead of you, my own flesh and blood?’

‘But you won’t even help me now, when he has hurt me so deeply. You know how tolerant I have been about Tuppy’s flirtations. How I have been patient and lenient time and time again. You yourself have helped us get back together, only for him to wound me yet again. Where is your chivalry Bertie? Why won’t you stand up for me and punish this philanderer like he deserves?’ Her accusations came in gushes through her soft sobs like bullets and her words struck me in the heart.

I have, with the help of Jeeves, brought Angela and Tuppy together after their tiffs before. She is right in saying that I’m morally responsible for her new grievance now. If only Jeeves’s plan wasn’t so damn successful last time! But how could I, or even Jeeves, have known Tuppy, the damn idiot, would be so damned idiotic?

By now two streams of tears have made their way down Angela’s cherubic cheeks, shining reminders of my culpability. Every man deserving the name of ‘gentleman’ who had seen her melancholic visage would have immediately drawn their sword to avenge her honour.

‘Please, Angela!’ I said as I handed her my handkerchief, ‘don’t cry.’

She dabbed her eyes and looked at me through eyelashes bedewed with tears: ‘Well Bertie? Will you help me?’

I drained my glass, sighed and replied: ‘What exactly is your plan?’

Angela broke into a smile and grabbed my hand. ‘Oh Bertie! I knew I could count on you!’ She exclaimed.

While happy to see her smile like the spring sunshine, somewhere in the cockles of my heart I felt a lock click shut.

Just then, Jeeves materialised, with the box of Debauve and Gallais chocolates. It was certainly the psychological moment, but I fear it was too late for Bertram.

To chapter VII