11

‘Gaston, how sweet of you to come.’

It was a few hours later, and Lucy Squiffington was greeting me in a room that looked like a combined effort by the Antique Dealers’ Fair and Chelsea Flower Show.

‘And here,’ she added, indicating the chap in the baggy tweed suit on the sofa, seeing how many times he could twist his right leg round his left, ‘is George.’

‘Dear old Squiffy!’ I cried.

He hadn’t changed a bit. He was still a tall thin fellow with big glasses, hair like the stuffing in an Army mattress, and all his joints apparently held together with elastic bands. Squiffy had always gone about looking as though an arm or a leg were likely to drop off at any moment, and if it had he would never remember where he’d left it, being pretty absent-minded as well.

Naturally, we all three had a jolly good giggle about the dear old days at Whortleton. I couldn’t stop that warm intragastric feeling coming back every time I took another look at Lucy, even though I kept reminding myself that I was present merely as the Squiffingtons’ professional adviser. And I had to admit that poor old Squiffy himself was in something of a state. He’d always been a restless sort of bird, writhing about as though he’d just put on a new pair of woollen combs. Now the poor fellow was as jumpy as a plate of snap-crackle-pop when you pour the milk on.

‘Bashing atomic physics from nine to five must be no end of a strain,’ I suggested, feeling for a diagnosis over the teacups.

‘It’s all most frightfully secret, of course,’ said Squiffy, reaching for the cake. A greedy beggar he’d been at school, I remembered.

‘Perhaps you’d explain the quantum theory to me when you have a moment? I’m afraid my own knowledge of physics pretty well ended on Archimedes’ bath night.’

‘The quantum theory?’ mumbled Squiffy through the cake. ‘I’m not at all certain that isn’t on the secret list.’

‘But surely, George!’ complained Lucy. ‘Must you always behave like an oyster with laryngitis? You could at least tell us where you’re stationed.’

‘More than my life’s worth. Top security. Yes, indeed! A lot of people would like to find out in – in – you-know-where.’

‘I suppose you must know the famous Sir James?’ I hazarded.

‘Oh, Jimmy? Yes, very well. Jolly good boss, too. Saw him only yesterday.’

‘Remarkable how quickly he’s recovered from that bad car smash.’

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’

‘Considering it happened only last Saturday.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Squiffy.

‘Out in Australia,’ I went on.

‘You mean that Sir James?’ asked Squiffy crossly. ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’

‘I don’t think we’re being kind to George’s nerves, Gaston.’

‘Let’s stop talking shop,’ said Squiffy, trying to pout and eat cake at the same time.

Lucy patted my hand on the sofa. ‘Gaston will tell us absolutely everything that happened since that awful nanny with the moustache bundled me into the train at Whortleton.’

I sat back to oblige, but I’d hardly opened my mouth before a chap in a white jacket opened the door and announced, ‘Mr Basil Beauchamp.’

‘Basil Beauchamp!’ I jumped up. ‘Oh no! You don’t mean the actor?’

‘Of course,’ smiled Lucy. ‘Quite an honour, isn’t it? Show Mr Beauchamp straight up.’

I said nothing. For the second time this bounder Basil was blighting my life, another second and he bounced in, all teeth and carnation.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I asked at once,

‘Good lord, Grim,’ returned Basil, the number of teeth on view diminishing quickly. ‘But what on earth are you doing here?’

‘What, you two know each other?’ asked Lucy, looking surprised.

‘Know each other? Why Basil and I have been pals for years and years. Haven’t we, Basil? When I was a medical student we used to share the same digs,’ I explained.

‘La Vie de Bohème,’ said Basil quickly. ‘Those carefree prentice days.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Yes, Dr Grimsdyke and I were indeed once en garçon in the same atelier. One leads that sort of life while one is waiting for managements to discover one. I believe Dr Grimsdyke still expresses his gratitude for my tempering his own youthful excesses. It was I who kept your nose to the midnight oil, eh, dear chappie? I say, what gorgeous gladioli,’ said Basil, burying his nose in them and changing the subject.

I felt my blood pressure leaving the launching-pad. The chap was nothing but a ruddy liar. Basil Beauchamp (pronounced Beecham) might now be the famous actor, with a biscuit-coloured Rolls, his face on the sides of all the buses, and a rather messy dish named after him in one of the posh West End restaurants. But in the days he rented the room next to mine his only audience was the landlady’s daughter, who lashed him up with ham and cocoa in the kitchen when Mum was out, while he gave her Great Love Scenes from the Classics. And he’d have shifted to even tougher lodgings if I hadn’t raised a few bob every quarter to repay those informal loans made to him by the local Gas Board, once he found how to fiddle the lock on his meter. That was why Basil never liked swapping jolly reminiscences when I bumped into him from time to time, particularly as I’d overheard everything the landlady had to say when she discovered where all that ham was going.

‘But how wonderful that you should be old cronies.’ Lucy gave another smile. ‘Because Basil and I are very, very close friends indeed.’

‘Oh, are you?’

‘Don’t you think I’m a tremendously lucky girl, Gaston?’

‘Lucky? Oh, yes. Of course.’

Basil, who was still in the gladioli, seemed to think so too.

‘That’s still absolutely off the record you understand,’ he added quickly in my direction.

‘Yet another of the afternoon’s secrets,’ Lucy laughed.

‘Those ghastly gossip columns!’ remarked Basil, shuddering.

‘But Gaston would surely never breathe a word to the papers,’ declared Lucy.

‘H’m,’ said Basil,

‘You see, Basil’s divorce isn’t quite tied up yet. That’s one of the reasons I went to New York. Dear Basil was kept here with his latest film, of course.’

‘Yes, I heard you’d been unloaded – been separated,’ I told him.

Before his starring days Basil had been taken on the household strength of some frightfully rich American woman in the capacity of husband, for which there happened to be a vacancy at the time, though I think he was relieved to find later it was only a temporary job to go with her season in London.

‘You must tell me about those dreary lawyers in the car, my sweet,’ said Basil, seeming anxious to have Lucy elsewhere.

‘Of course, darling. Basil’s taking me to the dress rehearsal of a charity matinée we’ve been organizing for months, and I’m absolutely thrilled.’ Lucy collected her bag and gloves. ‘There’s nothing quite so exciting as the stage, is there?’

‘Come along, my angel,’ urged Basil, giving me a bit of a glance. ‘Those poor players will be strutting and fretting, you know. Do remind me, dear chappie, to send you a couple of free seats, won’t you?’

Another moment and they’d left me alone with Squiffy, still eating.

‘Grim, old man,’ said Squiffy.

I made no reply. The interview had left me wallowing in a wave of nausea, particularly with the noise Squiffy was making over his cake.

‘Grim, old man.’ Squiffy started to choke, indicating that he wanted to say something urgently. ‘I’ve some pretty dashed important news to tell you.’

‘Yes?’ I wondered what it was Lucy put behind the ears to make her smell so nice.

‘But it’s a dead secret.’

‘Not another?’

‘I mean, this is a real one.’ Squiffy scooped up the crumbs. ‘I’ve absolutely got to spill the beans to someone and I know I can confide in you, Grim. Do you remember how you kept quiet at school, when I slipped the Head’s tea-party that plate of hair-cream sandwiches? Besides, doctors have to keep secrets, don’t they, or they get hauled up before the medical beaks? I’m afraid this is going to be a bit of a shock,’ he went on. ‘But – well, I’m not really an important scientist.’

‘No?’

‘I’m a scientist, of course. Well, sort of…oh, dear!’

He got up and started striding about, arms and legs in all directions.

‘It’s my old man’s fault,’ he declared.

I helped myself to another cup of tea.

‘You know what he’s like, Grim?’

‘A bit of a tough egg, he struck me.’

I hadn’t seen Pa Squiffington since I buried him in the sand at Whortleton. Though I’d often thought of the old boy while looking for the racing news in the paper and spotting the item headed ‘City Notes’, which generally says something like, ‘There was much calling for money in Lombard Street today.’ There goes poor old Pa Squiffington, I told myself, up and down the gutter hollering at the open windows, buttonholing chaps in top-hats, trying to touch the copper directing the traffic, ending up on the doorstep with his bowler hung out hopefully.

I gathered Squiffingtons Bank wasn’t one of the common sort with a counter downstairs, where they take the cash from all comers. According to Squiffy, who’d often prowled the corridors optimistically, they never handled the vulgar stuff at all. Financial wizards – if it was a nice morning and they’d holed all their putts on Saturday – simply told their secretaries to send it round a million. And if Pa Squiffington never saw it being unpacked, Squiffy certainly didn’t see it at all. His father was one of those lean athletic executives, whose idea of a rip-roaring evening, I remembered from Whortleton, was a game of chess and a chocolate biscuit with his Horlicks.

‘You know the old man wanted me to be a doctor,’ Squiffy went on, absently cutting another piece of cake, ‘The great-grandad who founded the bank – that’s the one over the fireplace with the face like the underdone steak with side-whiskers – was the son of a doctor in Canada, who got no end of a name stalking about in blizzards patching up people eaten by bears. I was obviously a frightful duffer at business – you remember at school I could never work out what those tedious chaps A, B, and C owed each other after those rather shifty deals in compound interest. But for some reason the medical schools didn’t agree with the old man, so he packed me off to Canada for a year or two. When I came back he announced that I should be a scientist, science being all the thing.’

‘They’re even teaching it these days at Eton.’

‘I think Dad already saw me stepping up for the Nobel Prize,’ Squiffy went on. ‘But of course one has to make a start somewhere, and after going round a few universities I was finally enrolled up at Mireborough – oddly enough, just after the old man had donated a new boathouse. They were pretty tough towards me at Mireborough, with their northern independence and all that,’ he added morosely. ‘Even after the old man had donated a new library – he rather fancies himself as a pocket Rockefeller, you know. And as he’d recently donated a new chemistry laboratory I really can’t see why they made such a fuss just because I burnt the old one down.’

Squiffy sprawled in his chair.

‘It was the practical exam, and I don’t know what went wrong, quite. They shouldn’t set such damn fool questions, I suppose. The Fire Brigade had hardly cleared up before they told me it would be cheaper for the University all round if I left. Luckily, the old man had just set off for Karachi, but I had to find a job – he never donates anything to me, of course. A bit tricky it was, too, as I wasn’t even a BSc (Mire.). Luckily, a fellow in my year tipped me for one in the middle of Dorset.’

‘Not meddling with the Government’s atoms?’ I asked nervously, feeling that next time Squiffy blew anything up he’d do it properly.

‘Actually, I’m a stinks beak in a prepper,’ he confessed. ‘A miserable hole it is, too. The Head’s got the outlook of an undertaker with an overdraft – charges for test-tubes and chemicals, and probably for use of force of gravity as well. But that’s only half the trouble.’

He paused, and having finished all the cake started on his nails.

‘You see, Grim – Good lord, is that the time? Squiffy jumped up. ‘I’ll miss my train, and there’ll be the most almighty row if I’m late. What do you think of that fellow Beauchamp?’ he added, bolting for the door. ‘In my opinion he’s a bit of a stinker.’

‘Yes, he’s a hit of a stinker in my opinion, too.’

‘Not at all the sort of fellow I’d like to see Lucy fixed up with,’ Squiffy continued, disappearing.

‘Not at all the sort of fellow I’d like to see her fixed up with, either,’ I agreed.

Though why, I asked, finding myself alone among the remains of the tea and the gladioli, should I worry what fellow Lucy got herself fixed up with? I didn’t care a rap if she was a very, very close friend of every male performer in Shaftesbury Avenue and Bertram Mills’ Circus. I was, I told myself, no more concerned with the affair than if I were watching Basil canoodling with his leading lady beyond the footlights. I swallowed the last of my tea and left. After all, I was perfectly happily engaged, to quite the nicest girl in the world.