My Uncle Oswald(12)

“Why, you naughty boy! I don’t believe it!”

I was still on the sofa. She was standing above me. Her big red mouth was open and she was beginning to pant. “You do understand I would never have mentioned it if Charles hadn’t been . . . sort of past it, don’t you?”

“Of course I understand,” I said, wriggling a bit. “I understand very well. I am full of sympathy. I don’t blame you in the least.”

“You really mean that?”

“Of course.”

“Oh, you gorgeous boy!” she cried and she came at me like a tigress.

There is nothing particularly illuminating to report about the barney that followed, except perhaps to mention that her ladyship astounded me with her sofa work. Up until then, I had always regarded the sofa as a rotten romping ground, though heaven knows I had been forced to use it often enough with the London débutantes while the parents were snoring away upstairs. The sofa to me was a beastly uncomfortable thing, surrounded on three sides by padded walls and with a horizontal area that was so narrow one was continually rolling off it onto the floor. But Lady Makepiece was a sofa wizard. For her, the sofa was a kind of gymnastic horse upon which one vaulted and bounced and flipped and rolled and achieved the most remarkable contortions.

“Were you ever a gym teacher?” I asked her.

“Shut up and concentrate,” she said, rolling me around like a lump of puff-pastry.

It was lucky for me I was young and pliable, otherwise I’m quite sure I would have suffered a fracture. And that got me thinking about poor old Sir Charles and what he must have gone through in his time. Small wonder he had chosen to go into mothballs. But just wait, I thought, until he swallows the old Blister Beetle! Then it’ll be her that starts blowing the whistle for time out, not him.

Lady Makepiece was a quick-change artist. A couple of minutes after our little caper had ended, there she was, seated at her small Louis Quinze desk, looking as wellgroomed and as unruffled as when I had first met her. The steam had gone out of her now, and she had the sleepy contented expression of a boa constrictor that has just swallowed a live rat. “Look here,” she said, studying a piece of paper. “Tomorrow we’re giving a rather grand dinner party because it’s Mafeking Day.”

“But Mafeking was relieved twelve years ago,” I said.

“We still celebrate it,” she said. “What I’m saying is that Admiral Joubert has dropped out. He’s reviewing his fleet in the Mediterranean. How would you like to take his place?”

I only just stopped myself from shouting hooray. It was exactly what I wanted. “I would be honoured,” I said.

“Most of the government ministers will be there,” she said. “And all the senior ambassadors. Do you have a white tie?”

“I do,” I said. In those days, one never travelled anywhere without taking full evening dress, even at my age.

“Good,” she said, writing my name on the guest list. “Eight o’clock tomorrow evening, then. Good afternoon, my little man. It was nice meeting you.” Already she had gone back to studying the guest list, so I found my own way out.





4





THE NEXT EVENING, sharp at eight o’clock, I presented myself at the embassy. I was fully rigged up in white tie and tails. A tail-coat, in those days, had a deep pocket on the inside of each tail, and in these pockets I had secreted a total of twelve small boxes, each with a single pill inside. The embassy was a blaze of lights, and carriages were rolling up at the gates from all directions. Uniformed flunkeys were everywhere. I marched in and joined the receiving line.

“Dear boy,” said Lady Makepiece. “I’m so glad you could come. Charles, this is Oswald Cornelius, William’s son.”

Sir Charles Makepiece was a tiny little fellow with a full head of elegant white hair. His skin was the colour of biscuits, and there was an unhealthy powdery look about it, as though it had been lightly dusted over with brown sugar. The entire face, from forehead to chin, was crisscrossed with deep hair-line cracks, and this, together with the powdery, biscuity skin, made him look like a terracotta bust that was beginning to crumble. “So you are William’s boy, are you?” he said, shaking my hand. “How are you making out in Paris? Anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

I moved on into the glittering crowd. I seemed to be the only male present who was not smothered in decorations and ribbons. We stood around drinking champagne. Then we went in to dinner. It was quite a sight, that diningroom. About one hundred guests were seated on either side of a table as long as two cricket pitches. Small place cards told us where to sit. I was between two incredibly ugly old females. One was the wife of the Bulgarian ambassador and the other was an aunt of the King of Spain. I concentrated on the food, which was superb. I still remember the large truffle, as big as a golf ball, baked in white wine in a little earthenware pot with the lid on. And the way in which the poached turbot was so superlatively undercooked, with the centre almost raw but still very hot. (The English and the Americans invariably overcook their fish.) And then the wines! They were something to remember, those wines!