Jeeves and the Wedding Bells(2)

When I returned to the kitchen, I found that Mrs Tilman had laid a tray with all the fixings.

‘Oh dear, look at you, Mr Wilberforce. You didn’t put on your apron, did you? You’ve got polish on your shirt. Here. Let me.’

With a cloth, she removed most of a black smear from the affected area; and, with the coat re-buttoned, she seemed to think I was ready for action.

I turned to the waiting tray and attempted to raise it to a carrying position.

‘You’re all fingers and thumbs, aren’t you, dear? Nothing to be nervous of. Come on now, this way.’

So saying, the housekeeper waved me down the corridor towards the green baize door, which I was obliged to open with an undignified nudge from the rear end.

Things stayed on a fairly even keel as I crossed the main hall to the oak staircase and began my ascent. There was a square half-landing before a shorter flight to the first floor. My destination was a corner room of dual aspect that overlooked the rose garden and the deer park. Most of the tea was still in the pot when I lowered the tray to the floor and knocked.

‘Come in,’ said a familiar voice.

I’ve seen the insides of a few country house bedrooms in my time, but I must say Lord Etringham had really landed seat-first in the butter. I found him sitting up in bed in a burgundy dressing gown with a light paisley pattern that I recognised as one of my own and reading a book whose title, if I remember right, was The Critique of Pure Reason by one Immanuel Kant.

‘Your tea, Lord Etringham,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Please be so good as to leave it by the bed,’ replied Jeeves – for it was he and no bona fide member of the aristocracy who reclined among the crisp linens of the four-poster.

‘I trust you slept well,’ I said, with a fair bit of topspin.

‘Exceedingly well, thank you, sir.’

But hold on a minute. I see I’ve done it again: set off like the electric hare at the local dog track while the paying customers have only the foggiest idea of what’s going on. Steady on, Wooster, they’re saying: no prize for finishing first. What’s this buttling business, and why the assumed names? Are we at some fancy-dress ball? Put us in the picture, pray, murky though it be …

Very well. Let me marshal my facts.

In the month of May, about four weeks before this hard kitchen labour, I had taken a spring break in the south of France. You know how it is. It seemed an age since the ten days in January I had spent at the Grand Hotel des Bains up in the Alps and the pace of life in the old metrop had become a trifle wearing. So I instructed Jeeves to book two rooms in a modest hotel or pension on the Promenade des Anglais and off we went one Friday night from Paris on the Train Bleu.

I envisaged a spartan regime of walking in the hills, a dip in the sea if warm enough, some good books and early nights with plenty of Vichy water for good measure. And so it was for a couple of days, until a misunderstanding of swing-door etiquette as I re-entered my hotel early one evening caused a fellow guest to go sprawling across the marble floor of the lobby. When I had helped her to reassemble her belongings, I found myself staring into the eyes of perhaps the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. It seemed only gallant to invite her into the Bar Croisette for something to restore the bruised tissues while I continued my apologising.

Georgiana Meadowes was the poor girl’s name. She worked for a publisher in London and had come south for a few days to labour away on the latest typescript from their best-selling performer. I had only the faintest idea of what this entailed, but held my end up with a few ‘indeed’s and ‘well I never’s.

‘Do you do a lot of this editing stuff on the Côte d’Azur?’ I asked.

She laughed – and it made the sound of a frisky brook going over the strings of a particularly well-tuned harp. ‘No, no, not at all. I usually sit in the corner of a small office in Bedford Square working by electric light. But my boss is very understanding and he thought it would do me good – help clear my mind or something.’

We Woosters are pretty quick on the uptake, and from this short speech I deduced two things, viz.: one, that this G. Meadowes had a dilemma of a personal nature and, two, that her employer prized her services pretty highly. But one doesn’t pry – at least not on first acquaintance with a girl one has just sent an absolute purler on a marble surface, so I moved the subject on to that of dinner.

And so it was that a couple of hours later, bathed and changed, we found ourselves in a seaside restaurant ten minutes’ drive down the Croisette tête à tête over a pile of crustacea. After two nights of Vichy water, I thought it right to continue the restorative theme of the evening with a cocktail followed by a bottle of something chilled and white.