by Simon Brett
Twinks had put her silk dress, silk stockings and cloche hat back on over her wet underwear, but Blotto’s tweed suit was soaked through. But he still agreed they should get out of Cairo as soon as possible. ‘Right,’ he said, grinning at Christabel, ‘England, here we come! Hoopeedoopee!’
‘But I can’t come with you,’ she said.
Blotto looked thunderstruck. Discreetly, Twinks gestured to Corky Froggett that they should melt away and leave the young couple to play this emotional scene on their own.
‘Can’t come with me?’ Blotto echoed blankly. ‘But hasn’t the time we’ve spent together over the last few days meant anything to you?’
‘Blotto, it’s meant more than I can ever say.’
‘Then what’s the chock in the cogwheel? We can go back to England, we can be together forever. You’ll love Tawcester Towers – best spoffing hunting in the world. We’ve got our own cricket ground too. And the Mater’ll come round to you in time. She’d rather I was with someone, you know, with a bit more dynastic value, but we’ll soften up the old fruitbat.’
Seeing the uncertainty still in Christabel’s eyes, Blotto hastened to add, ‘I’m not talking anything outside the rule book. I’m talking about twiddling the old reef knot in proper style. White wedding with three veg and all that rombooley.’
‘Are you asking me to marry you, Blotto?’
‘Of course I am, me old trout-tickler. You’re the finest piece of womanflesh I’ve ever encountered. And what puts the cherry on the muffin is that you keep reminding me of Mephistopheles.’
‘Who’s Mephistopheles?’
‘My horse. Finest hunter you’ll see this side of Vladivostok.’
‘Oh,’ said Christabel, perhaps a little taken aback. ‘But, Blotto, I can’t marry you.’
‘’Course you can. Easy as raspberries. Lots of places you can buy white dresses in good old Blighty, you know.’
‘I can’t marry you, Blotto, unless you’re prepared to live out here.’
‘Out here?’ His jaw dropped. ‘In Cairo? Abroad?’
‘Yes, Blotto.’
‘But why?’
‘Because my work is here.’
‘What, your archaeology?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Lots of archaeology in England. They keep digging up stuff. Saxon burial mounds, ships, hoards of gold coins. You said that’s how you got started, Christabel, finding a Saxon hoard of gold. It’ll all be tickey-tockey. You can’t move in England for archaeology.’
‘But, Blotto, I’m an Egyptologist.’
‘Yes, but it’s all the same kind of guff, isn’t it?’
‘No, Blotto, it isn’t.’
‘Well, we could . . .’ His noble brow furrowed as he tried to come up with a workable compromise. Then he beamed. ‘We could live at Tawcester Towers, and come out here for a holiday every few years. And then you could check out your mummies and scarabs and sarcophaguses and—’
‘I’m sorry, Blotto. That wouldn’t solve the problem. I love archaeology. It’s my life. Not just archaeology, but Egyptology. It’s my work.’
Blotto was confused. Rather in the way that he couldn’t understand why women should worry their pretty little heads about whether they had the vote or not, he couldn’t imagine a woman actually taking her work seriously.
But he listened to what Christabel said next. ‘Blotto, there is nothing I would like more in the world than to marry you . . .’
‘Well, then—’
Christabel raised a hand to silence him. ‘. . . but the only way it would work would be if you were prepared to live out here with me.’
‘Abroad?’ Blotto repeated despairingly. Of course, if she put it like that . . . well, there was no contest.
‘Oh, broken biscuits,’ said Blotto.
He was very subdued as they travelled back to Alexandria. He let Corky Froggett do all the driving, which was a measure of how reduced he was in spirit. Twinks tried to say things to cheer him up, to describe the delights they would be returning to at Tawcester Towers, but even she couldn’t lift him out of his slough of gloom.
In Alexandria, they took one of the ingots out of the Lagonda’s secret compartment and sold it to an avaricious but mercifully incurious dealer. That ensured that their lunching and the hotels in which they stayed as they travelled through Europe were of a higher standard than they would have been relying on Twinks’s baksheesh-diminished supply of sovereigns.
But even all those splendid meals didn’t raise Blotto’s spirits much.
At least the journey gave them opportunities to explain things. They had each only got partial elements of the saga of Alfred Sprockett and his consortium’s perfidy, and by a lot of talking they managed to piece together the whole story. Twinks even decided that it was time to tell Corky Froggett the explanation for all the strange afflictions that he had suffered.
‘Swipe me!’ he said, when she’d finished. ‘Plagues of Egypt? Whatever will it be next?’
‘Well, if Mr Snidely had seen his sabotage all the way through,’ Twinks replied, ‘next you would have had Hail, Locusts, Darkness and the Death of the Firstborn.’
‘Blimey O’Reilly!’
‘Incidentally,’ Twinks went on, ‘there’s one thing that I still can’t really understand . . .’
‘What’s that, milady?’
‘Well, most of the things they set up were fairly easily explained – substituting the blood for water, putting the frogs in the Lagonda, all that. What I can’t understand is how Mr Crouptickle and Mr Snidely managed to give you boils.’
‘They didn’t give me boils.’
Twinks was affronted. ‘But, Corky, every time I asked you about it, you said that you’d got boils.’
‘Yes, milady,’ the chauffeur replied. ‘I always have boils.’
Corky was not as low as Blotto on the return journey, but he was a bit disgruntled. He had been all the way to Cairo and never had got any dirty postcards.
33
Return to Tawcester Towers
It was late evening when the Lagonda arrived back at Tawcester Towers, so it was not until the following morning that Grimshaw apprised the Dowager Duchess of the prodigals’ return. Neither Blotto nor Twinks were surprised to receive summonses to meet their mother in the Blue Morning Room.
Staring them down from her throne-like chair, the Dowager Duchess’s features looked as unforgiving as ever.
‘So,’ she demanded, ‘am I to be granted any explanation for your appallingly thoughtless and disloyal behaviour – travelling to Egypt when I had expressly forbidden you from taking such a course? What have you to say for yourselves?’
‘Sorry?’ suggested Blotto meekly.
‘“Sorry”?’ repeated the Dowager Duchess. ‘I don’t think that “sorry” is adequate to this disgusting breach of etiquette and betrayal of the family honour. Honoria . . .’ things were really bad when Twinks got called Honoria ‘. . . having been blessed with a modicum more intelligence and judgement than your brother, do you have anything to say for yourself?’
‘All I have to say, Mater,’ Twinks began stoutly, ‘is that, putting aside for a moment the reasons why we went to Egypt against your express instructions . . . the fact is that we have returned from Egypt with all of the Tawcester Towers bullion which your man of business Mr Crouptickle claimed to have invested but had in fact stolen from you.’
‘Oh,’ said the Dowager Duchess. ‘Well, that’s all right then.’
And it was all right. Enough of the gold was sold to settle the estate’s outstanding bills. The local shopkeepers, their ardour no longer fanned by the ferocious rhetoric of Alfred Sprockett, soon realised what a good relationship they had with Tawcester Towers and continued their customary practice of overcharging the Lyminsters for everything. (And when the election actually arrived, Tawcestershire reverted to type and returned a Tory.)
Nor did the worldwide chain of Sprockett’s Hotels ever materialise. With all i
ts principal strategists at the bottom of the Nile, there was no one left to develop the brand.
Gratefully restored to Tawcester Towers, Corky Froggett resumed his assignations with the kitchen maid. He also bought a camera and with her help started producing his own dirty postcards.
Twinks went back to her customary routine of turning down proposals from ever richer and more handsome amorous swains. A little bored, she started translating Dante’s Inferno into hieroglyphs.
And Blotto, inevitably, spent a lot of time at the stables in intimate discourse with Mephistopheles. But now there was a new depth to their closeness. When he saw the hunter’s head from certain angles he couldn’t help thinking wistfully to himself of what might have been.
