‘So it would appear, sir.’
Back in Berkeley Mansions, I left Jeeves to unpack and make sure that young Thomas had left no bucket of water poised above the bedroom door while I went down to the Drones for a late lunch.
The members would not take kindly to my giving away too much about the premises, but for the sake of a spot of atmosphere I should probably have a go at the broad outline. The place combines the impressive with what you might call the homely. About half Carrara must have gone into making the marble staircase that fills the hall; on a lower floor are courts for squash racquets and a swimming pool. The first-floor bar is where the lads mostly foregather amid oil portraits of former Drones, including a handful of princelings and Cabinet ministers. The main browsing and sluicing is done in the Morning Room, which is a little over twenty-two yards long – a sporting distance at which to try to hit the raised pie on the sideboard with bread rolls bunged from the far end. Then there is the smaller Queen Bee saloon and a card room, where fortunes have been won and lost. Above that are rumoured to be bedrooms for country members.
When I got to the club, the luncheon service was over, but you can always get a plate of kedgeree or a shepherd’s pie and a glass of something in the lower bar – a wood-panelled nook that brings to mind the nineteenth hole at a Highland golf course.
This was where I headed on arrival, and was lucky enough to find Boko Fittleworth in conversation with Freddie Oaker. These are two of a handful of Drones professional writers, Boko penning what you’d call wholesome popular fiction – adventures with a bit of uplift for the masses, and Freddie churning out appalling ‘true love’ mush for the women’s weekly magazines under the name of ‘Alicia Seymour’. What really binds these men of letters is a shared interest in the folding stuff: who of their acquaintance has sold most copies or which publisher is said to ante up the juiciest sum.
They were finishing a decanter of the club claret, in which they kindly included me, before moving on to coffee and a cigar.
‘I’ve heard good things about Pearson Lane,’ said Freddie. ‘They bid the most enormous sum for Sir Edward Grey’s memoirs.’
‘Smith and Durrant still have the deepest pockets,’ said Boko. ‘And they’ve got this new girl working there on the fiction side. They say she’s got the mind of Jane Austen and the looks of Clara Bow.’
‘Are you sure it’s that way about?’ said Freddie.
‘Absolutely. She’s a first-class popsy by all accounts, and a good egg with it, but don’t get your hopes up, old man. She’s marching up the aisle with one of their authors. Chap called Venables.’
‘The “By” man?’
‘Yes. By Handcart to Hell and so forth.’
‘Well, I suppose he’s a catch of sorts.’
‘How’s young Nobby?’ I asked Boko, in an effort to ease the conversation on to a less awkward track – Nobby being Zenobia Hopwood, the blue-eyed little half-portion to whom he was engaged to be married. ‘Have you named the day yet?’
‘Nobby and I are set on a Christmas wedding, but her guardian’s trying to put the kibosh on it.’
Nobby’s guardian, the old lags will need no reminding but new readers need to be told, is England’s premier masochist: he models himself on the Greek fellow who was chained to a rock where a bird of prey dropped in daily to breakfast on his liver – though that might have been light relief compared to hitching yourself to my Aunt Agatha, which was the fate this poor, demented Worplesdon had selected of his own free will.
‘The kibosh from the guardian, or the guardian’s wife, Boko?’ I queried.
‘A bit of both, since you ask. I spent the weekend with them at Steeple Bumpleigh. I sometimes have the impression that your aunt doesn’t think much of me, Bertie.’
‘Did you say you spent the weekend with her?’
‘Yes. We had a few practical details to talk over.’
‘At Steeple Bumpleigh?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the Worplesdons were there?’
‘I’d hardly go and stay if they weren’t.’
‘At Bumpleigh Hall?’
‘That’s where they live, Bertie.’
‘And young Thomas?’
‘Yes. Why is this so surprising, old man? I know you’ve never been engaged yourself for more than forty-eight hours, but if you had, you’d know that buttering up the in-laws is part of the process. And believe me the Worplesdons take a fair bit of butter. Think of the United Dairies depot at Melksham.’
‘Well,’ I said, massaging the lemon a fair bit as I did so, ‘it’s just that I went off to Dorsetshire so Aunt Agatha could have the run of my digs for a few days over the weekend. Now you say she was in Essex. So—’