‘Mrs. McCorkadale in, dear?’ he asked, and having been responded to in the affirmative he left me, and I headed for home. I ought, of course, to have carried on along River Row, taking the odd numbers while Jeeves attended to the even, but I didn’t feel in the vein. I was uneasy. You might say, if you happened to know the word, that the prognostications of a human wart like Bingley deserved little credence, but he had spoken with such conviction, so like someone who has heard something, that I couldn’t pass them off with a light laugh.
Brooding tensely, I reached the old homestead and found the ancestor lying on a chaise longue, doing the Observer crossword puzzle.
CHAPTER Nine
There was a time when this worthy housewife, tackling the Observer crossword puzzle, would snort and tear her hair and fill the air with strange oaths picked up from cronies on the hunting field, but consistent inability to solve more than about an eighth of the clues has brought a sort of dull resignation and today she merely sits and stares at it, knowing that however much she licks the end of her pencil little or no business will result.
As I came in, I heard her mutter, soliloquising like someone in Shakespeare, ‘Measured tread of saint round St. Paul’s, for God’s sake’, seeming to indicate that she had come up against a hot one, and I think it was a relief to her to become aware that her favourite nephew was at her side and that she could conscientiously abandon her distasteful task, for she looked up and greeted me cheerily. She wears tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles for reading which make her look like a fish in an aquarium. She peered at me through these.
‘Hullo, my bounding Bertie.’
‘Good morning, old ancestor.’
‘Up already?’
‘I have been up some time.’
‘Then why aren’t you out canvassing? And why are you looking like something the cat brought in?’
I winced. I had not intended to disclose the recent past, but with an aunt’s perception she had somehow spotted that in some manner I had passed through the furnace and she would go on probing and questioning till I came clean. Any capable aunt can give Scotland Yard inspectors strokes and bisques in the matter of interrogating a suspect, and I knew that all attempts at concealment would be fruitless. Or is it bootless? I would have to check with Jeeves.
‘I am looking like something the cat brought in because I am feeling like something the c b in,’ I said.
‘Aged relative, I have a strange story to relate. Do you know a local blister of the name of Mrs. McCorkadale?’
‘Who lives in River Row?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘She’s a barrister.’
‘She looks it.’
‘You’ve met her? ‘
‘I’ve met her.’
‘She’s Ginger’s opponent in this election.’
‘I know. Is Mr. McCorkadale still alive?’
‘Died years ago. He got run over by a municipal tram.’
‘I don’t blame him. I’d have done the same myself in his place. It’s the only course to pursue when you’re married to a woman like that.’
‘How did you meet her?’
‘I called on her to urge her to vote for Ginger,’ I said, and in a few broken words I related my strange story. It went well. In fact, it went like a breeze. Myself, I was unable to see anything humorous in it, but there was no doubt about it entertaining the blood relation. She guffawed more liberally than I had ever heard a woman guffaw. If there had been an aisle, she would have rolled in it. I couldn’t help feeling how ironical it was that, having failed so often to be well received when telling a funny story, I should have aroused such gales of mirth with one that was so essentially tragic.
While she was still giving her impersonation of a hyena which has just heard a good one from another hyena, Spode came in, choosing the wrong moment as usual. One never wants to see Spode, but least of all when someone is having a hearty laugh at your expense.
‘I’m looking for the notes for my speech tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Hullo, what’s the joke?’