Those familiar with what I have heard Jeeves refer to as my oeuvre will know that over the years I have been fortunate enough to have hobnobbed with some prize specimens of the opposite sex – and to have been engaged to more of them than was probably wise. One does not bandy a woman’s name, though since the facts are in the public domain I fear the bandying has been done and it may therefore be permissible to mention Cora ‘Corky’ Pirbright and Zenobia ‘Nobby’ Hopwood as strong contenders for the podium in the race for most attractive prospect ever to pitch over the Wooster horizon. I should also mention Pauline Stoker, whose beauty so maddened me that I proposed to her in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York. Even Madeline Bassett was no slouch as far as looks were concerned, though her admirers tended to dwindle in number pretty rapidly once she gave voice.
I can honestly say that where these paragons of their sex left off, Georgiana Meadowes began. One rather wondered whether she should be allowed out at all, such a hazard did she pose to male shipping. She was on the tall side, slim, with darkish hair in waves and eyes about as deep as the Bermuda Triangle. Her skin was pale, though frequent laughter caused variations of colour to play across it. The poor old wine waiter sloshed a good glass and a half on to the tablecloth and I noticed other fellows gathering and whispering behind their hands at the door to the kitchen. The girl herself seemed quite unaware of the havoc she was wreaking.
My task was to keep this vision entertained, and I pushed on manfully, even when it became clear that I was well out of my class – a selling-plater panting along upsides a Guineas winner. But the odd thing was that, although I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about half the time, it didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps this is what they mean by a light touch, but the long and short of it is by the time the coffee came we were the firmest of friends and had agreed to meet for luncheon the following day in the garden of the hotel, where she could take an hour off from her editing labours. It was a pretty elated Bertram who, twenty minutes later, went for a stroll on the seafront, looking up at a bucketful of stars and hearing the natter of tree frogs in the pines.
Jeeves, once I had put him in the picture, made himself scarce in the days that followed, taking off in the hired car with rod, net and line, a picnic lunch packed by the hotel and doubtless a bracing volume or two of Kant. This left the coast clear, as it were, for the young master, and I found myself reluctant to stray too far from the vicinity of our hotel. There was hardly anyone to be found in town, the French having, it seemed, very little interest in the beach or in bathing or in lawn tennis – or in anything at all very much beyond the preparation of a series of exquisite plats, beginning with the strong coffee and fresh croissant at nine-ish and giving the system small respite till roughly ten at night.
Once Jeeves had returned from his fishing, Georgiana and I set off in the car. On the second evening, she persuaded me to let her drive. ‘Go on, it can’t be that difficult. Please, Bertie. I’ve driven hundreds of cars before.’
To say she drove in the French fashion would be to cast a slur on that fine people. The pedestrians leapt like lemmings over the sea wall; the roadsters swerved into the dust; the goods lorries blew their claxons. But in all their evasive actions, you felt, there was a measure of respect: they recognised one of their own. The fifteen-minute journey was achieved in half that time, with only a minor scrape along the passenger door as we swept into the restaurant car park.
Despite being put together in the most streamlined fashion, Georgiana took a keen interest in matters of the table. ‘Perhaps we could just share a few langoustines, Bertie,’ she’d suggest after the main order had been bunged in. The days and the evenings passed in a sort of rush, with the air blowing through the old open-top as we drove home, Wooster now firmly at the wheel, and the sound of Georgiana’s laughter playing over the drone of six cylinders in top gear.
On the night before her departure, she confided in me the nature of her problem. Meadowes père had been a surgeon of some repute, working in London but with a base in the Vale of Evesham, where Georgiana had passed a sunny childhood, mostly on the back of a pony or horse. A German U-boat had deprived her of both parents at the age of fourteen when it sank the RMS Lusitania, and though they had left her considerable means, it was held in a trust until she reached the age of thirty – a point still some years distant. Her uncle-cum-guardian, who had taken in the orphan girl and to whom she consequently felt an enormous debt, was now so strapped for cash that he was on the point of having to sell his family house, complete with substantial acreage. The one daughter had fallen for some handsome but penniless fellow, so the only solution was for Georgiana to marry a man with readily available means – and such a suitor had been found.