by Simon Brett
No, it was just a coincidence. Very classy, though, thought Blotto, for a girl like Dolly to organise her transport so well.
Delightful creature, he mused. Absolute breathsapper, and a rather fruity brainbox too. For a moment, Blotto allowed his imagination off the leash. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could get away from all of the Araminta fffrench-Wyndeaus of this world? They were so affected, so unreal. But teamed up with someone of Dolly Diller’s earthy appeal, the prospect of marriage lost much of its ghastliness.
Why shouldn’t he and Dolly have a future together? Someone like her would bring a bit of life into the dank corridors of Tawcester Towers. He fantasised about introducing her to Mephistopheles, having her watching from the Pavilion when he led out the estate cricket team. He imagined . . .
But suddenly the image of the Dowager Duchess appeared in his mind, instantly to eclipse all of his hopes and dreams.
Still, he could continue to enjoy Dolly Diller’s company, at least till he was inescapably manacled to Araminta fffrench-Wyndeau.
It struck Blotto that the thing he really liked about Dolly, apart from her looks and her brain, was her level of interest in him. He’d never met a woman who had asked him so many questions.
9
Twinks Undercover
It was a happy accident that, just after saying his fond farewell to Dolly Diller, Blotto was in the hotel lobby, just at the moment Twinks stormed in. Long familiarity, from the nursery onward, with her facial expressions, told him that his sister was not a happy hedgehog.
It was only when they were up in her suite, drinking Room Service cocoa (rather in the way they might in her boudoir back at Tawcester Towers), that he dared ask what had put lumps in her custard.
‘A man!’ she replied. ‘A fumacious man!’
‘Has somebody been making improper advances to you, sis? Because, if they have, I’ll get my spoffing cricket bat and I’ll beat the stencher to within a—’
‘No, no. Nothing to do with improper advances. Anyway, I can deal with them, as easy as swatting a mozzy. No, what I came up against this evening was blind, self-centred arrogance.’
‘Toad-in-the-hole!’ said Blotto. ‘May I ask who the lump of toadspawn in question is?’
‘Jack Carmichael.’
‘Oh, the triller and tapster from Light and Frothy.’
‘You’re bong on the nose there, Blotters.’
‘But I thought you thought he was the lark’s larynx. Supposed to be catnip for the fillies, I’d heard.’
‘Yes, his looks come straight off Mount Olympus.’
‘He’s craggy, you mean?’ asked Blotto, who, despite the efforts of the beaks at Eton, had limited knowledge of Greek mythology.
‘No, I mean he’s as tasty as a dish of strawberries. If I only had to look at him, I’d be rolling on camomile lawns. The trouble is, I had to listen to him. And the only subj of his conv is himself.’
‘Tough Gorgonzola, old fishcake.’
‘I’m afraid Jack Carmichael turned out to be proof of the old saying: “All that glisters is not gold.”’
‘Surely, Twinks me old cough lozenge, you mean “glitters”?’
‘No. “Glisters”. That’s how it is in the original.’
‘And what’s this “original” when it’s got its spats on?’
‘It’s The Merchant of Venice.’
‘Spoffing typical of this day and age, isn’t it? Merchants going around making up quotations. You’ll have solicitors doing it next. I blame Socialism.’
‘No, Blotters. The Merchant of Venice is a play. By Shakespeare.’
‘Oh.’ Blotto had certainly heard of Shakespeare. It’s hard to get through an English education at any level without having heard of Shakespeare. And if you went to Eton, you were practically force-fed the stuff. ‘So, what you’re saying, Twinks me old carpet-beater, is that Shakespeare couldn’t spell?’
‘Not exactly, Blotto me old fish-gutter. Spelling was different in those days.’
‘No, spelling’s spelling, and it’s either right or wrong.’ He was quoting one of his old beaks at Eton, who took a less than liberal attitude to Blotto’s approximate approach to the matter. ‘There’s no two ways about it. Shakespeare wrote “glisters”, and it should have been “glitters”.’
‘As I say, spelling was different back then. I mean, Shakespeare spelled his own name in a number of different ways.’
‘The poor droplet couldn’t spell his own name? Well, I’ll be snickered. But I’ve been able to spell mine, from a very early age. And mine’s very difficult, because it’s got a “y” and a silent “x” in it.’
Blotto was hugely gratified. It was not often that he had the sensation of feeling intellectually superior to anyone. And being intellectually superior to Shakespeare . . . well, that really was the panda’s panties.
‘Anyway, I don’t want to think any more about that slimer Jack Carmichael. How did you spend your evening, Blotters?’
‘Oh, just ate here in the Grill.’ This edited version of events came to him quite instinctively. He didn’t often keep things from Twinks. She could usually intuit what he’d been up to, anyway. But, for some reason, he didn’t at that moment want to share with her his special feelings for Dolly Diller.
‘Anyway,’ said his sister, ‘the one thing I did get out of that self-obsessed blunderhead was what the next step should be in our investigation.’
‘Toad-in-the-hole!’ said Blotto enthusiastically. ‘Is it going to involve me, doing doughty deeds with my cricket bat?’
‘No,’ replied Twinks, disappointingly in the circumstances.
Blotto and Twinks were both exceptionally good-looking, but their given quota of brains had not been fairly divided. Though Blotto was enviably strong, brave and a demon on the cricket or the hunting field, that was probably the extent of his accomplishments. He certainly had demonstrated no aptitude for the performing skills in which his sister excelled. She played piano to international concert standard, and her skills on the dance floor were yet another talent which reduced heavy-footed scions of aristocratic houses to incoherent adoration.
She had also, unbeknownst even to her brother, over the years built up a wide repertory of voices which she could take on at a moment’s notice. This had started with her love of foreign languages. The intellectual achievement of reading and writing them was not sufficient for her ambitious nature, so she also prided herself on being able to speak fluent, perfectly accented French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Turkish, Greek (Ancient and Modern), Hebrew, Mandarin, Xhosa, Yoruba, Ashanti, Urdu, Gujarati and most other dialects of the Indian subcontinent (though, by her own confession, her spoken Sanskrit was a bit rough).
But Twinks hadn’t limited her voice-learning to foreign languages. She had also perfected most of the regional speech patterns of the British Isles. Needless to say, she didn’t restrict herself to such broad generalisations as Scottish, Welsh and Irish. She had mastered the nuances between individual regions. She knew how few fricative consonants an Aberdonian would share with a Glaswegian: she could differentiate Llandovery and Llandrindod Wells; she would never get her Kilkenny mixed up with her Cork. And she would never slip on the treacherous vowels of Londonderry and Newcastle.
So, to decide which accent she required for the job in hand was a matter of moments.
Deciding how she should be dressed for the occasion was another matter entirely. Twinks had a very shrewd estimate of her own considerable skills, but always knew when outside support was needed. And, in this case, she was in no doubt that she had to go the next morning to her favourite couturier, Madame Clothilde of Mayfair.
It was always Madame Clothilde whose advice Twinks would seek on the appropriate apparel for a Hunt Ball, a Coronation or a royal funeral, but the dressmaker had other useful, but less publicly acknowledged, skills. During what Blotto always referred to as ‘the recent dust-up in Frogland’ (also known as ‘the War to End All Wars’), she
, as a young French citizen, had achieved remarkable feats of daring behind enemy lines. For these exploits, Clothilde Degazeuze had always been in disguise, totally transforming her teenage self into German civilians, German troopers and German top brass, to sabotage in various ways their military endeavours. Such was her fame for convincing transformations, that some believed it was Clothilde Degazeuze, in disguise, who started the rumours about the Angels of Mons.
In all of her guises, she was working on behalf of France and its allies, with the aim of destroying German munitions and morale. The high spot, at Verdun in 1916, was her impersonation of Kaiser Wilhelm II, when she told his senior officers, in perfect German, that they ‘might as well give up because there was no way they had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.’
None of Clothilde Degazeuze’s exploits was ever chronicled. The level of secrecy in such operations was so tight that nobody would refer to them, even under torture. And when she opened her exclusive couturier business as Madame Clothilde of Mayfair, no one – except a few superbrains like Twinks – knew anything of her heroic shape-shifting history.
Corky Froggett brought the Lagonda to a serene stop outside the South Audley Street showroom. ‘Oooh, I meant to ask you something,’ said Twinks.
‘Yes, milady?’
‘Did you fetch Blotto’s cricket bat from Tawcester Towers?’
‘Safely in the dickie of the Lag, milady.’
‘Splendissimo,’ she said as she disembarked. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be.’
‘That is of no consequence, milady. Spend a week in there, and I will still be out here waiting on your pleasure.’ If Corky couldn’t lay down his life (or at least make that life extraordinarily uncomfortable) for the young master, he was more than happy to make similar sacrifices for the young mistress.
‘A couple of hours should be the top of the column,’ said Twinks airily. She had, earlier in the morning, tried to contact Pierre Labouze through the Pocket Theatre, but, as Jack Carmichael had predicted, drawn a blank. Which was why she was going down the Madame Clothilde of Mayfair route.
The reinvented, London-based Clothilde Degazeuze recognised that her own sartorial style was going to be the best advertisement for her business and dressed accordingly. As her countrymen said, she fitted her skin, and never looked less than one hundred per cent chic. That morning’s mid-thigh-length number was spangled with parallel fringes of white crystal and jet, worn over sleek black silk stockings. Round her short blonde hair was tied a black bandeau supporting an improbably tall black ostrich feather. Long strings of jet beads swung from her neck. Her face was white, her eyes heavily kohled, and her lips a slash of red.
Some of her dumpier clients might have been daunted by her elegance. England breeds a kind of Home Counties woman with a low centre of gravity who, generally speaking, looks better on horseback. Since most of them are married to men of small intellect but large wallets, they made up a lot of Madame Clothilde of Mayfair’s clientele, and they could be a little awestruck by the perfection of the couturier, and of her equally immaculate subordinates.
But such a problem did not, of course, arise that morning. Clothilde never contemplated going into competition with Twinks in the beauty stakes. She knew she’d lose.
Madame Clothilde and her subordinates twittered around, making much of the new arrival. Twinks was a great favourite in the showroom. In part, this was because she brought them more custom than any amount of advertisement could have achieved. Though Twinks herself would never have been so vulgar as to mention where she bought her clothes, somehow the word got out, at all of the Hunt Balls, Coronations or royal funerals she attended, that she had been dressed by Madame Clothilde of Mayfair.
This had a doubly commercial benefit for the couturier. Unattached young women at such events, dazzled by Twinks’s elegance and her effect on men (unattached or otherwise), beat a path to the South Audley Street address.
And young men, who had fallen for Twinks like sets of skittles, accepting that their dreams could never be realised and settling for Home Counties women with low centres of gravity who, generally speaking, looked better on horseback, sent their wives to the same destination in the forlorn hope that the magic of Madame Clothilde’s scissors might make them less dumpy and more like the Twinks of their husbands’ imaginings.
So Blotto’s sister was always welcome in South Audley Street.
But this particular morning, as the entire staff of the couturier gathered around her, Twinks said, ‘It is not for me, Madame Clothilde.’
The encoded message was understood. At once the proprietress ordered her staff to look after the showroom, and led her customer to the basement, which was the venue for her more private transactions.
‘So, who is the character?’ asked Madame Clothilde.
‘A beggar. A street entertainer.’
‘Ooh, la la! And you will be playing the part yourself?’
‘Tickey-Tockey.’
‘Formidable! Is she une jeune fille or an old crone?’
‘My own age. I do not wish to disguise . . . my looks.’ A woman more egotistical or less confident than Twinks would have said, ‘my natural beauty.’
‘Vraiment? I will see what I can find.’
Every space on the room’s walls, except for the door by which they’d entered, was filled with fitted cupboards. There was a large central table, a few gilded chairs and a selection of tall cheval glasses. Clearly Madame Clothilde knew the cupboard’s contents as well as she knew her own face in the mirror. Within moments, she had assembled a selection of garments and shoes on the table.
‘I think what we should concentrate on,’ she announced, ‘is à la mode d’Eliza Doolittle.’
Pygmalion having been mentioned so recently, Twinks knew precisely what she was talking about. ‘As in the play by that ageing enfant terrible, George Bernard Shaw?’
‘Exactement. Eliza Doolittle is a flower-seller.’
‘Tickey-Tockey. My character, though, will be trying to collect money for her singing and dancing.’
‘Singing and dancing – sacrebleu! I cannot imagine the opinionated Mr Shaw allowing those into one of his long-winded plays.’
‘You are right, Madame Clothilde. It will never happen. The day we hear that Pygmalion has had songs and dances added to it, we will know that the entire world has gone to the bonkers-doctor.’
Both women chuckled at the incongruity of the idea.
‘Anyway, with your character and Eliza Doolittle, c’est la même chose,’ Madame Clothilde assured her. ‘The look will work for both.’ She picked up some skirts from the table. ‘And I think it is important that both are respectable characters. Mais évidemment, you are poor, but your ensemble is not of rags. You wear vêtements which are old, mais oui, but they have been patched and darned many times. This skirt, I think, will be right for you.’
It was made of much-repaired blue flannel, and ankle-length.
‘So far as the look goes,’ said Twinks, ‘it’s absolutely the nun’s nightie. But I think I need to show a smidgeonette more leg when I’m dancing.’
Madame Clothilde understood instantly. And produced a skirt of similar dilapidation, whose hem would reveal Twinks’s wonderful pins. ‘Now, above the waist, I think a blouse, perhaps with loose sleeves, so that they will swirl as you dance.’ She unearthed a garment which matched the description. ‘Also patched and frayed, comme ça.’
Twinks was already stripping down to her elegant silk underwear to try on her new ensemble.
‘And, peut-être, on top of that, a kind of boléro . . . ?’
‘Nothing too tight round the arms – again for the dancing.’
‘Très bien. This one, I think.’ A loose jacket of dark red, whose velvet had been worn away in places. ‘Et maintenant, it is just the hat . . .’ She produced a battered black straw boater, which Twinks placed, jauntily askew, over her perfect blonde bob. ‘And the shoes . . .’
This proved a little more dif
ficult. The pumps and Mary Janes that Twinks usually wore were not robust enough for the kind of dancing she had in mind. Eventually, they ended up with a very scuffed pair of Victorian button boots with good hard soles. To add the final touch, one of Madame Clothilde’s elegant acolytes was summoned and instructed to nail metal strips to the underside of the boots. For the tap dancing.
‘And now, the moment critique . . . or the décision critique . . . What will you wear on your legs? A poor street entertainer could not afford silk stockings. She would wear stockings of laine – wool, perhaps? Or, more likely, none at all . . . ?’
Twinks was faced with a dilemma. Authenticity was what she was after, and she knew that Madame Clothilde was a stickler for consistent accuracy in her disguises. But Twinks was also fully aware of the value of her glorious legs. For them to be displayed in anything other than silk stockings would blunt the impact of two of her most valuable weapons.
A compromise was reached. In spite of Madame Clothilde’s reservations, it was agreed that Twinks’s legs would be displayed in silk, but a couple of holes and visible darns in the material would show that she was wearing cast-offs or hand-me-downs.
Fully dressed now in the whole ensemble, with the distressed stockings and the tap-toed button boots, Twinks was keen to view the effect in one of the cheval glass mirrors, but Madame Clothilde had one more final touch to add. ‘The visage . . . and the hands . . . they are too soft and clean. They belong to an aristo . . . not to someone who lives on the streets.’
The couturier rooted around in one of her cupboards and produced an array of small glass pots of the kind that might contain cold cream. ‘We have a selection here,’ she said, as she checked the labels. ‘“Sewers of Paris” . . . non, merci. The make-up, I should point out, reproduces not only the relevant look, but also the relevant odeur. And the Sewers of Paris . . .’ She wrinkled her elegant nose and read on from other pots. ‘“Sewers of London” . . . non again. “Thames Mud” . . . je ne crois pas . . . “Tottenham Stables” . . . ? Not a ladylike parfum, I think. Ah.’ She held up one of the pots in triumph. ‘“London Smoke”! This will be parfait.’
