by Simon Brett
‘Course I do. Give me half an hour on the blower and I’ll have five more of my mates from the halls here by lunchtime tomorrow. Wodjer want – two more ladies and three gents?’
‘That, I believe, would meet my requirements. And they are all of the same competence as yourself?’
‘If you didn’t know, you’d never tell ’em apart from the real thing. You’d think every one of them’d been born with a golden spoon in his mush.’
‘Very well, Harvey. Rather than request elucidation of the meaning of the word “mush”, I will rely on you to get on with making the necessary arrangements.’ There followed a seismic clearing of the aristocratic throat. ‘And now perhaps we should discuss the sordid business of reimbursement.’
The negotiations were ferocious and protracted. Harvey had honed her skills on skinflint theatre managers, but the Dowager Duchess too showed – for someone in whose presence money was never mentioned – a surprising aptitude for horse-trading.
Eventually an agreement was reached. ‘It is a considerably larger sum than I was anticipating paying,’ said the Dowager Duchess. This was not difficult; she had anticipated paying nothing. And indeed, if she’d had any more money to pay Harvey and her troupe of travelling players, the necessity for the subterfuge would not have arisen. ‘But I am prepared to part with such a large sum only on one condition.’
‘And what’s that, Your Grace?’ asked Harvey suspiciously. She was very pleased with the deal that had just been negotiated, and didn’t want to see it in any way diluted.
‘The condition, Harvey, is that neither you nor any of your associates ever dares to mention this transaction to another living soul.’
Harvey’s suspicion lifted. ‘Don’t you worry about that, Your Grace. We’ll all be schtum and mum. We’ll keep as quiet about it as a butler slipping into bed.’ And if Harvey didn’t know about that simile, then nobody did.
‘All of these clothes are wrong,’ announced the Dowager Duchess as she inspected the costume parade of counterfeit aristocrats the following evening.
Harvey, dressed in an off-the-shoulder knee-length evening gown with beaded overdress, swung her strings of pearls angrily as she took issue with her employer. ‘I can assure you they are absolutely kosher, Your Grace. They was bought from the best costumiers in London, what pride themselves on getting every detail right. What we’re wearing’s toff’s schmutter, no two ways about that.’
‘It is not the garments themselves that are wrong. It is the fact that they all look brand new. No self-respecting personage of my breeding would be seen dead in something that looks new. And those gentlemen in their tweed suits and evening wear . . . I see no sign of elbow patches, frayed cuffs or silk reveres turning a little green with age. No, a genuine aristocrat would spot this assemblage as leadpenny straight away.’
‘We are not dealing with genuine aristocrats, though,’ her daughter pointed out. ‘Only Americans.’
‘That’s not the point, Twinks,’ riposted the Dowager Duchess. ‘I wouldn’t feel at ease surrounded by people in brand new clothes.’
Twinks did not pursue the argument further, but made the sensible suggestion that their new guests could be adequately costumed from the wardrobes of herself, her mother, her two brothers and the late Duke. The changes were duly made, and the procession of iffy aristocrats was reassembled. They looked distinctly scruffier and therefore much more like the real thing. This time they passed the Dowager Duchess’s scrutiny.
Next she auditioned their voices and, though always ready to criticize, she found there was little she could fault. What one or two of the actors said was rather too polite for genuine members of the upper classes, but she put them right on that and soon all of them were speaking with authentic aristocratic rudeness. ‘Also talk loudly,’ she advised. ‘It would never occur to someone of my breeding that there was anyone else in the room.’
Only an hour or so later the Dowager Duchess pronounced herself satisfied. Names and identities had been established, with a lot of help from Twinks, who had provided each of the counterfeit peers with convincing histories. As a result, amidst the dukes, earls and minor baronets, the room now contained two dowager duchesses. The genuine one was seated beside a leadpenny one, the Dowager Duchess of Framlington, formerly known as Harvey. (The story that Twinks had provided for her was that her husband the Duke of Framlington had lost his life in the latest big dust-up with the Boche, having made the uncharacteristic mistake of being close to his men when they went over the top.)
‘I think we’ve done rather well, don’t you?’ pronounced the chatelaine of Tawcester Towers to her disguised housemaid.
‘Of why you should imagine that I have any interest in what you think I have no perception,’ replied the Dowager Duchess of Framlington frostily.
‘Very good, very good,’ said the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester.
And something very like a beam slowly crackled across her craggy features.
Twinks couldn’t find her brother in the house, but she had a pretty good idea where he might be. At times of stress, Blotto’s two immediate resources were cricket and hunting. Well, there wasn’t any cricket planned till the weekend, and the hunting season was almost over. But if he couldn’t actually hunt, he could still commune with his hunter Mephistopheles. Blotto was probably closer to the horse than to anything else in his life, other than his cricket bat. Certainly closer to Mephistopheles than he was to any human being, with the possible exception of Twinks.
She heard her brother’s voice as she approached the stable block and lingered a moment before revealing herself, to hear what Blotto was saying. His voice was uncharacteristically doomy.
‘It really is the flea’s armpit, Mephistopheles,’ he was complaining. ‘The mater’s once again got me entered for the Matrimonial Stakes and there’s no way I’m going to save my chitterlings this time. I’m in the deepest gluepot ever – right up to the neck, glue lapping round the old chin, don’t you know.’
Mephistopheles let out a whinny of deep sympathy.
‘And what’s really put lumps in my custard is that the filly the mater’s lined up for me is a spoffing American! Which means I’m going to be packed off to America like some remittance man and never allowed to pongle my way back to Blighty. I’ll probably have to leave you here, Mephistopheles.’ His voice broke as the enormity hit him. ‘Couldn’t risk taking a fine specimen like you over the Pond. Yankees don’t do any proper hunting, not as we’d recognize it. And their national game is spoffing rounders! If they got their hands on you, they’d probably get you cavorting around in some Wild West show as quick as a lizard’s lick, with some Indian chief doing trick shooting off your back. Oh, it’s all so murdey. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this vinegared off in my entire puff.’
Mephistopheles snorted further sympathy and, rather than listen to more of her brother’s mournful litany, Twinks entered the stable.
‘Listen, Blotto, me old brass bedstead, pull off your worry-boots. I’ve got an idea that’ll really bisect the bull’s eye!’
‘To get me out of this matrimonial treacle tin?’
‘Hope so. Certainly worth having a bong at it. Listen, you know the mater and I have been drilling Harvey and her theatricals on their country house etiquette . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’ve been providing the poor droplets with personal histories . . .’
‘Sorry, not on the same page . . .’
‘I’ve been setting them up with backgrounds, when their peerages started, where their country seats are, where they went to school and all that rombooley . . .’
‘Ah. I read your semaphore.’
‘Well, Blotto, I have invented a duke for you.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘One of these actor johnnies is not bad looking. Not as tasty a slice of redcurrant cheesecake as you are, obviously, but then who is?’ Her brother blushed. He was always terribly embarrassed if anyone mentioned his looks. ‘Anyw
ay, his name’s Briscoe Daubeney-Vere – or at least that’s what he calls himself. A lot of these actor johnnies change their names. But what I’ve done with Briscoe Daubeney-Vere’s personal history is: I’ve bumped him up the peerage a bit. He’s now the Duke of Godalming, so everything should be jollissimo, shouldn’t it?’
‘Sorry, Twinks, you’ve lost me again.’
‘Listen, Luther P. Chapstick III is coming to Tawcester Towers this weekend because he wants a cheap steerage ticket into the British aristocracy. His daughter Mary’s being lined up to breed with you . . .’
‘Which is a total candle-snuffer,’ said Blotto, reminded of his ghastly fate.
‘But suppose, when the fair Americanette comes here, she meets the handsome young Duke of Godalming? You’re just the younger son of a duke, Blotters, not the whole clangdumble. She marries you, she doesn’t get to become a duchess, does she? Don’t you think there’s at least an each-way punt that Mary Chapstick – and her father – are going to be more interested in the Duke of Godalming than they are in you?’
‘But surely this Daubeney-Vere pineapple isn’t a real duke?’
‘He knows that. You know that. The mater knows that. I know that. But the Chapsticks don’t know it, do they?’
As Blotto took a firm hold on the lifeline his sister had thrown him, a beam irradiated his handsome features and he cried, ‘By Denzil, Twinks, you know you really are the lark’s larynx!’
6
An Impromptu Dance
Though Blotto never expected to find in a woman the purity of line he saw in Mephistopheles or in his cricket bat, he couldn’t deny that Mary Chapstick was astonishingly pretty. She was built on more generous lines than his sister, and her bobbed hair was nearly black. She was dressed in the height of fashion – London’s couturiers must have been under siege in the days before her visit to Tawcester Towers – and the current style showed her bare arms and stockinged legs to advantage. The extensive strings of pearls looped around her neck suggested that she came from one of those families where money was not a problem (though breeding clearly was).
That such a creature could be the daughter of Luther P. Chapstick III suggested, by the law of averages, that his long-divorced wife must have been a being of extraordinary beauty. Where the daughter was sylphlike, the father was gross. Where her features were small and refined, his looked as though his face had been put too near a fire and melted. Whereas Mary Chapstick brought to mind images of a gazelle, her father’s nearest equivalent in the animal kingdom would have been a warthog.
But, as became clear at dinner on the Friday, the first evening of their stay, Luther P. Chapstick III’s table manners did not aspire to warthog standards. It was as if the delivery of each course acted as a starting pistol for a new race, and nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of his finishing before the other guests had even started. And if such haste led inevitably to splattering of food and drink over his chin and evening wear . . . well, that was just the price that had to be paid.
Had he been at a table surrounded by genuine aristocrats, this might have been noticed less. There are plenty of peers of the realm over a certain age for whom untidy eating is a way of life. Indeed, in some circles – notably the House of Lords – to add to the general fraying and aging of their garments, souvenirs of dinners past on lapels and waistcoats are considered de rigueur. But though their borrowed clothes might have sported such gastronomic badges of honour, the decorous way in which the counterfeit aristocrats gathered round the Tawcester Towers dining table that first evening addressed their food only served to show up the messiness of Luther P. Chapstick III’s eating.
His breathing, too, echoed that of a warthog. Perhaps some malformation of his throat – or maybe just a lifetime of barking orders to underlings – had left the meat-packing magnate with a propensity to growl and grunt and snort with every breath that he took.
Twinks had had some input into the Dowager Duchess’s seating plan and on the placement cards Luther P. Chapstick III had been seated next to the Dowager Duchess of Framlington. Harvey gloried in her new role and was unashamedly overt in her eyelash-fluttering come-ons to the guest at her side. Luther P. Chapstick III clearly had no objection to being treated in this way. In fact, his enjoyment of Harvey’s behaviour was as strong as Grimshaw’s aggravation at it. The butler could not step out of his subservient role to reprimand the provocative housemaid, but those who knew him very well – like Harvey herself – could detect in the smallest flicker of an eyebrow the intensity of his fury. That did not, however, deter the Dowager Duchess of Framlington. Indeed, it seemed to spur her on to a greater openness of flirtation.
Twinks’s placement had placed Mary Chapstick between the Duke of Godalming (known to his intimates until the previous day as Briscoe Daubeney-Vere) and her brother. Blotto had pleaded to be put as far away from his proposed bride as possible but, though Twinks had some sway with her mother, the Dowager Duchess was never likely to have accepted that suggestion. But at least her positioning enabled Mary Chapstick to compare the witty volubility of the Duke of Godalming with the tongue-tied incoherence of Devereux Lyminster. Blotto saw the point of his sister’s plan and played the tongue-tied incoherence card for all he was worth.
‘Er . . . dinner,’ he’d said when the ladies were all seated and his own chair had been pushed in.
‘Yes, dinner,’ Mary Chapstick had agreed.
‘Um . . . Er . . . Best meal of the day . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Erm . . . Uh . . . Though lunch isn’t bad . . .’
‘True.’
‘Mm . . . Well . . . Hmm . . . Though there’s a lot to be said for a good breakfast.’
‘Oh, you’re so right.’
‘Mmm . . . Do you like cricket?’
‘What, you mean the cute little insect that hops about on the hearth?’
‘Hmmm . . .’
Having shot his conversational bolt, Blotto was content to spend the rest of the meal in silence, avoiding stern looks from his mother encouraging him to make more effort. Meanwhile, Mary Chapstick listened to the daring deeds of the charming Duke of Godalming (all remembered from aristocratic parts he had played on a variety of stages). She seemed, to Blotto’s mind, to be falling under the spell of the young duke in an extremely satisfying way.
And Luther P. Chapstick III was falling further under the spell of the seductive Dowager Duchess of Framlington. And Grimshaw was seething inwardly.
Twinks was struck by the fact that the standard of conversation that evening was rather better than that normally experienced at Tawcester Towers dinner parties. The counterfeit aristocrats, all quoting from plays they had been in, provided much wittier dialogue than she had ever heard their genuine counterparts come up with.
She particularly enjoyed one exchange between the two dowager duchesses. Her mother was pontificating about ‘the Tawcester family tradition’, when she was interrupted by the Dowager Duchess of Framlington, who said, ‘Of course, when you speak of “family tradition”, you refer to a fairly recent family tradition.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ demanded the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester, to whom interruption was a novel experience.
‘Well, the Tawcester peerage only dates from the twelfth century, doesn’t it?’ The question was asked with a supercilious smile. ‘Whereas my family, the Framlingtons, came over with the Conqueror.’
The baleful look that the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester focused on her upstart housemaid showed that Grimshaw wasn’t the only one Harvey’s behaviour was causing to seethe inwardly.
It was Twinks’s suggestion before the ladies withdrew that, after the gentlemen had enjoyed their port, brandy and cigars, the younger members of the house party should reassemble in the Pink Drawing Room for informal dancing to music from the gramophone. Part of the aim was to demonstrate to the Chapsticks how jolly life at a Tawcester Towers house party could be, but that was not her only motive. In her conversations with Briscoe Daub
eney-Vere about the background they were inventing for him, the actor had revealed that much of his work had been as a song-and-dance-man in operettas and revues.
Twinks saw this as a clincher. She loved her brother dearly, and was proud of his many skills, but she knew that dancing was not among them. The moment music started to play, Blotto instantly developed more left feet than the customary allocation. Though a dancing instructor had come to Tawcester Towers to train them from an early age, while Twinks was soon as accomplished on the dance floor as she was in every other arena, her brother had made as little progress as a cockroach in custard.
So, thought Twinks, Blotto having proved an empty revolver on the conversational front, all that was needed was for Mary Chapstick to witness the comparative dancing skills of the two young men for her to have no choice but to fall into the arms of the dashing, witty and light-footed Duke of Godalming. Then her brother would be saved from a lifetime’s exile in the forbidding vastness of America.
Twinks’s plan looked as if it was going to work. Once male and female guests were together again in the Pink Drawing Room, the Dowager Duchess had played into her daughter’s hands by insisting that Blotto should have the first dance with Mary Chapstick. Vindictively, but for her brother’s own good, Twinks adjusted the gramophone’s horn, wound the mechanism up, and slipped from its paper sleeve a record of the Charleston. Though Blotto might almost have passed muster dancing a waltz, the Charleston was guaranteed to make him move like a giraffe with a wooden leg.
And so it proved. While he could handle a cricket bat or Mephistopheles with perfect balance and precision, on the dance floor all Blotto’s coordination deserted him. Had the other guests present been real aristocrats, they would have laughed at his assault on the Charleston. He was only saved from total ridicule by the fact that they were actors playing parts, who, mistakenly, believed that members of the British upper classes were nice to each other.
